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Fahrenheit 9/11 divx The first day of February was warm and coming back from Super Bowl snack-shopping, I shot some videos. Enjoy.

• Heaven Can Wait the movie

The Road to El Dorado movies

The Burning psp

Dan in Real Life video The JHB was known as the “Plywood Skyscraper” after having faulty glass windows that would pop out during it’s construction in the 1970s.

Police were left closing off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45 mph

Also interesting description of two 300-ton weights that sit on the 58th floor to damp swaying motions.

via wikipedia. Researched due to an article today about MIT suing Frank Gehry over the Stata Center.

I happen to be particularly fond of Puddingstone, the conglomerate rock found around Boston. It’s also the official rock of Massachusetts; specifically Roxbury Puddingstone.

College Road Trip ipod It’s a nifty looking rock, or rather a collection of different rocks within a sedimentary rock.

It also has some fantastical elements:

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a poem entitled The Dorchester Giant that describes Boston’s puddingstone being the result of the abandoned children of a giant flinging plum pudding about:

What are those lone ones doing now,
The wife and the children sad?
Oh, they are in a terrible rout,
Screaming, and throwing their pudding about,
Acting as they were mad.

They flung it over to Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;
They tumbled as thick as rain.

Puddingstone is also to be imbued with magical and protective powers. Herfordshire Puddingstone was used to cover the top of witch’s coffin to prevent her to escape in death.

Update: Here’s the whole poem:

The Dorchester Giant
By Oliver Wendell Holmes (1830)

There was a giant in time of old,
A mighty one was he;
He had a wife, but she was a scold,
So he kept her shut in his mammoth fold;
And he had children three.

It happened to be an election day,
And the giants were choosing a king;
The people were not democrats then,
They did not talk of the rights of men,
And all that sort of thing.

Then the giant took his children three,
And fastened them in the pen;
The children roared; quoth the giant, “Be still!”
And Dorchester Heights and Milton Hill
Rolled back the sound again.

Then he brought them a pudding stuffed with plums,
As big as the State-House dome;
Quoth he, “There’s something for you to eat;
So stop your mouths with your ‘lection treat,
And wait till your dad comes home.”

So the giant pulled him a chestnut stout,
And whittled the boughs away;
The boys and their mother set up a shout.
Said he, “You’re in, and you can’t get out,
Bellow as loud as you may.”

Off he went, and he growled a tune
As he strode the fields along
‘Tis said a buffalo fainted away,
And fell as cold as a lump of clay,
When he heard the giant’s song.

But whether the story’s true or not,
It isn’t for me to show;
There’s many a thing that’s twice as queer
In somebody’s lectures that we hear,
And those are true, you know.

. . . . . .

What are those lone ones doing now,
The wife and the children sad?
Oh, they are in a terrible rout,
Screaming, and throwing their pudding about,
Acting as they were mad.

They flung it over to Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;
They tumbled as thick as rain.

. . . . .

Giant and mammoth have passed away,
For ages have floated by;
The suet is hard as a marrow-bone,
And every plum is turned to a stone,
But there the puddings lie.

And if, some pleasant afternoon,
You’ll ask me out to ride,
The whole of the story I will tell,
And you shall see where the puddings fell,
And pay for the punch beside.

Spring came a lot earlier to Washington, DC than it did to New England, but the mercury is topping 80 today in Boston. Above, I’m at the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC last month. Below is the one of the multitudinous dandelions that have sprung up around UMass Boston.

Boston received its first real bout of inclement weather yesterday. Walking home after helping a friend put together a website for childhood leukemia patients, parents and survivors and in between helping push out a couple cars and not breaking my neck, I snapped these.

Click on the photos to see explanations of the wear marks

I purchased a new pair of jeans last weekend. In fact, I got the exact same brand (Carhart), style (relaxed-fit) and size (34-34) from the same store (Jones Department Store, “Jonesy’s” in Southie vernacular) at the same time of year (Novembrish) as I did last year. I also bought a new cap too. I don’t want it to seem like I don’t make progress in my life but the cap is identical too, to one I got last year (it matches my mittens) on the same expedition. Its progenitor was lost to the Boston Public Library one cold March morning.

Buying pants is always exciting for me; I never even owned a pair until I was 13–in San Diego one can get away with that. My mom likes to tell the story of my middle school principal saying to her after eighth grade promotion (for which I was en-panted), “I never thought I’d see the day with Ben in pants.”

In side note, it was pouring rain last Saturday when I went out to Southie to buy the jeans. Jonesies is far up on East Broadway; and while I caught the #9 bus there, I walked/swam back.

One evening, not far earlier than today, I was sitting upon Boston Common enjoying the last sloping rays of the day. As was my habit, I blissfully blocked out the city around me to better enjoy the feeble warmth of a setting sun.

Sometime in this I was taken unawares by a man I did not know. His face told of a race not estranged from these shores and his eyes shone with long familiarity to the world. He sat beside me and from his mouth came a string of words I willed myself to make sense of. He told me of something most wonderful, most horrible, and from which I am forever changed.

Boston is a city of gross extremes: poverty and wealth, light and dark, high and low: the crumbling triple-deckers of Roxbury and the affluent brownstones of the South End, the Irish enclaves and the Haitian Mass, the deep tunnels of the T and the airy heights of the JHB.

Boston has not always been this way.

Long before the first explorers, the vikings, conquistadors, traders, pilgrims stepped foot on these coasts, Native Americans, the Indians, roamed what were once three hills, the Tremont, of Boston. But to one tribe, the Massachusett, to whom this stranger called his ancestors, travel was not as it seemed to us. It was something different: faster, if time had reference; shorter, if distance had meaning; darker, but only to an unenlightened mind.

The Massachusett people were aware of certain trails that could connect a physical place with any another, directly and absolute. No, not trails: one trail that subsumed all forks; a true path: a Way. On this Way their people traveled and obtained a unity never equaled. But to speak of this in physical terms is a misdirection, a lie. The Way was the manifestation of an entire culture connected: an ethos, born and endured for eons; willed into the physical by a shared understanding: a Truth sustained.

Such a Way gave evidence upon the earth, in footprints and matted brush; to hide them would have been schizophrenic, a denial of reality. Until the foreigners and their foreign minds arrived.

There was once a Fork, a Path, an infinite fraction of the Way, that led between the Massachusett’s wintering grounds where now is Mattapan, and their summer rest at what we call Columbia Point. To traverse these locations was an instant to them, but a half-day’s journey to these new, strange colonists. A misunderstanding between such fundamentally different peoples led to a mistake, a tragedy that could never be repeated:

The Fork was crossed, pinned down, substantiated by the traversal of a different form: a Meeting House Road to which the laws, our laws, of space and time and distance obeyed. A market, Codman Square, was thrown up around an impossible unity, an unimaginable contract. Those that understood watched and learned and forevermore hid the Way.

But to hide such a thing as the Way was not simple. It was a culture, and to modify that was to modify a people, their world view, their psyche. To hold Truth in darkness became a mad and impossible task. The Way still appeared sometimes in form; in meandering cowpaths and stream beds; in trickery, jest, and passion to the foreigners who traveled them, improved them, paved and finished them. Concrete and asphalt roads and highways that never run straight, that never take travelers to their destination, that wind and meander in blessed lunacy. This was what was left of the Way. Almost.

Boston is a city of tunnels: the mundane of Copley Place and the scandalous of Old City Hall. The T cuts deep through Boston’s heart, but one Tunnel digs still deeper. As understanding of the Way receded from their people’s culture, deeper and farther out of sight did its Paths move physically; below prying eyes and beyond divergent minds.

Waiting and weakening below Boston’s blossoming new streets and conduits, the Way sat unused. Its owners and sustainers diminished and integrated, losing what they had once known in fullness.

For so long, this stranger said, he had been the last to hold this Secret, this Truth, dim and alive for this world. But, he said, that is no longer. It is yours now.

Somehow this, among all else, shocked me. I startled to my feet. Stumbling, running, falling, I struck the ground. Turning back I looked but he was gone. The grass, the light, gone. Only dirt, dark, moist and broken remained.

Even now I do not know what happened. Was it guilt for granting me his people’s last covenant? Mad awareness? What new direction has It taken?

I fear It waits for me. Storm drains groan as I pass and asphalt cracks spider and deepen in the streets. In the subway I see doors that never open and trains that never stop. The harbor churns; bubbles, enormous, burst from the deep.

I do not know if It stalks me out of malice or loneliness. I feel and try to empathize: I am aware of It but do not yet understand Its Paths, Its Corridors, Its Entrances.

I cannot travel the Way alone. So I share It with you.

I was passing through Somerville last night and in Powderhouse Square I ran across photographer-stranger Tia taking some large format photos.

Powder House Square was the focal point of 1774′s Powder Alarm during which British Soldiers took possession of potential militia firearms and supplies. The subsequent mobilization of militia forces “essentially provided a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Battle of Lexington and Concord seven months later.” (Wikipedia: Powder Alarm).

Despite the fact that one of these days the whole darn school is going crumble into Boston Harbor, serving at UMass Boston isn’t so bad; I have lots of opportunities to ride around the harbor in the university’s vessels.