TheBostonian

Wow!

The CharlieCard can work from inside your wallet. You can just tap your wallet against the sensor and DING. I sure hope knowledge of this spreads.

This thread's full of artists I haven't heard of. If only I had time to explore them. I've been listening a lot these last few days to: Sufjan Stevens: Illinoise Joanna Newsom: Ys

More media: Boston Magazine The Improper Bostonian Stuff at Night The Metro Boston Common The Christian Science Monitor -- though it is more national/international than just Boston

A coworker of mine recently bought a small single family in Auburn, just outside Worcester, for under $200k. She drives to work about 10 miles outside Boston, about an hour each way and never in rush hour. One of the reasons it is cheap is that it is damn close to the highway with the noise and ugliness that comes with it. A friend bought a large house in Fitchburg for $180k a couple years ago. It was cheap partly because of the crappy neighborhood. He has driven and taken the commuter rail into Boston regularly during some periods for work. Southern New Hampshire might work, but you'll of course have a long commute during rush hour. If you can drive before or after the congested hours you will be in a better position.

MIT.

I lived briefly in an apartment building on Winter Hill, Somerville. It was at a loud auto intersection and was annoyingly noisy when the windows were open. And there was a courtyard where sounds easily carried. But with the windows closed the outside noise was minimal. But there was virtually no noise from my fellow tenants. Someone would have to slam something in the apartment above me before I heard it. This was an older building and I don't think there there was anything very unique about it. There are probably many others like it in the area. Don't give up looking for what you want.

What does "turnto" mean in turnto10, your NBC affiliate? Is it "Turn to ten"?

"If the 40-mile Baltimore-Washington Maglev Demonstration Project is successful, it likely would be extended north to Boston and south to Charlotte, invigorating travel and economy of the Eastern Seaboard and diverting about 20% of air travel to the Maglev mode." That would be nice.

My educated guess would be Albany. It looks pretty, but more like the Back Bay than Beacon Hill.

Welcome, ZDM.

Weird parellels in Boston. Somerville, MA is getting light rail after a fight. We also have a Charlestown (think: battle of Bunker Hill).

Your comments were provocative and heartfelt. I meant that I expected some people to respond with stong opinions of their own. I stayed up all night, in preparation for my upcoming overnight shifts. I resent other people going to sleep at night.

1) You will surely get crap soon enough for your post, just not from me. 2) Sleep is for suckers. 3) I think at Melrose High we had some multiculturalism assemblies which were bogus in my opinion. I think diversity rocks, but not when forced. If you want real divserity in Melrose, you have to cross the border into Malden and get on the Orange Line.

Oh! Did I open this can of worms? I appreciate your thoughts on this, but I don't really have much to add since I don't know much about these issues. Though one of my favorite things about urban areas is the incredible diversity that isn't found in other places outside cities. I look around my classrooms or my workplace and I am often a minority, surrounded by people from every corner of the earth, and I love it because I secretly want to be more cosmopolitan than I really am. As far as growing up in a white suburb, I partly blame the interstate highway system for breaking up our country along racial lines. I resent a bunch of stuff about where I grew up.

I find that some people think Boston is a wonderful city, and by "Boston" they mean only downtown and the Back Bay. Maybe it is like the way trouists see all of NY without leaving Manhatton. Oh, well. I never left the center of London except to go to the airport. Look at the definition of ghetto: http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dic...=ghetto&x=0&y=0 1 : a quarter of a city in which Jews were formerly required to live 2 : a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure 3 a : an isolated group <a geriatric ghetto> b : a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity <stuck in daytime TV's ghetto> Chinatown and the North End might be called ghettos, though probably not because of "social, legal or economic pressure"? I don't see anything wrong with the voluntary concentration of an ethnic group in an urban area. Is "ghetto" just synonomous with crime because black ghettos are typically high crime?

Newton is not technically part of Boston as, say, Charlestown and JP are. But it is an inner suburb and is so much a part of Boston that a school called Boston College can be located there.

Assuming that auto traffic is only going to get worse in time, I predict that the public demand for rail will increase. I suggest that regardless of policy makers' lack of commitment to rail transit, you must make sure that old rail rights of way are maintained. Losing RsOW would make future projects more costly and thus more difficult to set in motion.

I'm delighted to see these buildings popping up in Cambridge. You can see Frank Gehry's buildings from all over the world and across the US by doing a google image search on his name.

"Thought I'd throw some pics I took today into here, even though my camera sucks and I know nothing about photography." I do really like how the first picture is composed. A picture of a skyline framed with large buildings. Very good. It captures the feeling of being in a city and surrounded by such buildings.