TheBostonian
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Posts posted by TheBostonian
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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.
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Has anyone boarded an inbound Green Line train at an above ground station in the past week? The new CharlieTicket readers and fare collection machine is SO *$&%!@&^% slow. I know they want people to start using the CharlieCard, but that's just not very realistic considering the large college population that pays cash.
The machines take at least 3-4 times as long per passenger to operate and it has slowed my evening inbound trip by 20 minutes!!!!!!
Worst idea, ever.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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What does "turnto" mean in turnto10, your NBC affiliate? Is it "Turn to ten"?
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"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.
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Beacon Hill in Boston or Albany, NY?
My educated guess would be Albany. It looks pretty, but more like the Back Bay than Beacon Hill.
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Welcome, ZDM.
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Weird parellels in Boston. Somerville, MA is getting light rail after a fight. We also have a Charlestown (think: battle of Bunker Hill).
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uhh, why whill i get crap? and by the way thanks for calling me a sucker for sleeping at 2:30 am. uh...i dont even know how to respond to this. haha, whatever i guess. can you be more clear next time you post to me thanks.
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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.
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hey thanks, i thouht i was going to get crap from everyone for writing so much about that...but dont worry, no one really knows anything more than anyone else about this stuff...it is all a matter of opinion and experience. i love diversity too. i am from a small city, but certain areas are extremely diverse. statistically speaking, portland is not very diverse, but they must be inaccurate because i can take a stroll and see people from all over the world in 2 blocks and i love it. they have so many experiences to share and stories to tell. my gf is filipino, my nephew is cuban/black, and i may be living with a sudanese student at school. life couldnt be any more bland than growing up without diversity. but dont resent the place you grew up, just appreciate the fact that it didnt mold your perception about other people in a negative way...theres nothing wrong with undiverse communities as long as you learn to appreciate diversity when you happen to bump into it along the way, in my opinion. what am i odign up so late, i gotta go to sleep.
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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.
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a few things:
one: china towns form for social and eocnomic reasons. the chinese that emmigrate from china to america live in these places because it is the only social network they can hook into when they speak limited english. and economically speaking, america craps on anyone not white protestant or straight. that means just about every chinese person that comes here who cannot speak perfect english, has no established family, and isnt wearing a business suit. and the concentration of chinese (for example) or blacks or latinos etc, is far from voluntary. the way this country operates forces them together for survival. i dont mean to go on and on, but i started college as a sociology minor and took some pretty interesting race and ethnicity courses on this stuff. chinese women work 20 hours a day sewing for under the table minimun wages and below, just like they do in china, here in america too. if certain communities were completely coluntary orgainzations based on race, like most of upperclass white suburbs, than i would see nothign wrong with it...but when other races arent able to choose where to live, and then get crammed into the situations they do in places like boston...it sucks for them.
two: you asked if ghetto was synonymous with crime because black ghettos were typically high crime. i cant answer this but i can offer my opinion. ghettos are poor places in cities...poverty is the direct result of low education (most of the time)...poorly educated people that are economically needy tend to break the law more often than highly educated well off members of society. black people fall into the class of poorly educated and are therefore economically needy more than white people do. this is not because they are stupid, harder to teach, more animalistic or any of that bull crap that people usually try to caim. the simple fact is that they have been systematically screwed since the founding of america. so much so that, even though there are no biological differences between whites and blacks (to keep it simple ill leave out the other major races) there is a mathematical sorrelation between being black and being poor. statistically, if you are black then you are more likely to be poor. now if there are no real differences between blacks and whites this can mean only one thing: the black people have been surpressed for so long that they themselves start to not realize it anymroe and white people say: well this is america and anyone can have anything they want as long as they work hard for it" . if you ask me, this is a lie. i am white and i am far better off than the kids i grew up with who are black, latino, and asian. most of them dont stand a chance in america. cant speak english? get out or learn it is what they are told. then in school they try to teach them ESL classes, and they dont have enought teachers to speak the dozens of languages necessary. they are screwed. black kids are the worst off, if you ask me, because they have such a negative reputaion. and for what? building this country economically? serving in our military loyally? trying to make it like the rest of us? I admire black people more than just about any race on the face of the planet because they take so much SH*T in their lives and still manage to survive. affirmative action is the best thing whites can do to make up for what has happened in the past, regardless if we were directly connected to any of it or not, whites whouls realize that they are in the position to do something, and not just sit around complaining about thugs and lazy beotchs and this and that (i hear it all the time and it makes me sick). i have a black nephew (well, half white) and he is going to be okay. you know why? because he is going to be raised in white society. probably go to private school, the whole nine yards..most arent so fortunate. and everyone talks about racism being over. it is not. i hear so many ignorant statements it isnt funny. and they go both ways...but i have to admit, the jokes black people tell about whites are hilarious and true. the ones white people tell are cruel and usually not accurate. osrry for this post, you can ask me to remove it if it is too off topic for anyone. but something really needs to change int his country if we really want to progress.
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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.
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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?
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BC for all intents and purposes is not in Boston at all, it's in Newton (it is technically in Boston, but barely).
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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.
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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.
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yea thoose look great, Boston looks like an awesome city, a place that warrents a vist from myself
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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.
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"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.
Providence/RI Photo of the day - by Garris
in Rhode Island
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Wow!