Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

So many links have piled up on my Third World Watch here in Boston that I’m not sure how I’ll get through them all.

The road to May perdition all started when the Boston Globe published explicit pornography as news. World Net Daily found the Internet pron source of the alleged photos of GI’s raping Arab prisoners. The Globe had to apologize, though no heads rolled and they didn’t admit the real source of the images. Ironically, the Boston Herald rejected the photos as unsubstantiated and highly suspicious. (For those of you playing the home game, that’s like the New York Times falling for a scam that the New York Post sees right through.)

After all that the onset of gay marriage, complete with an ongoing flap between the governor and certain cities over marrying non-Massachusetts residents, was a drop in the bucket.

Then there was the title scandal, in which a couple of letter carriers stopped delivering mail to a JP housing project for fear of their lives. Service has been restored - much more quickly, the article mentions, than in Fall River where part of the city was cut off for weeks for similar reasons.

Now I hear that I may get carded for taking the T. My civil liberty to travel more slowly by streetcar than on foot without ID is about to be infringed. I can hear the conversation now:

“What do you mean, you’re going to South Station? You’re on a bus bound for Cambridge.”

“Really, officer, it’s the fastest way. The Green Line is no way to get downtown. If I catch the Red Line in Harvard Square–”

“I’m going to need to see some ID, ma’am.”

“Will my Shaw’s card do?” I wave the little keychain tag at the officer’s high-tech terrorist detection system.

“No. Can I see your license?”

“I tried to renew it, but the line at the DMV was three days long and then they asked for my social security card which I lost back in ‘93…”

“Mass liquor ID?”

“The line at the DMV was three days long–”

“Passport?”

“Do I need one to visit Cambridge?”

The officer sighs and moves on, before I get the chance to offer him my CVS Extra Value card.

And last but not least, the reason why I had to Boston-blog today: the power goes out tomorrow for three weeks. Initial warnings of this upcoming event came by automatic dialer and were phrased in terms of two half-hour outtages one weekend morning - I had to listen to the voicemail several times through before I figured out they meant the electricity (rather than phone, gas, water, or sewage). Since then, much scarier warnings have been posted all over the building. I admit, they don’t explicitly predict 3 weeks without electricity, but they’re phrased in such a way that if the power does go out for the entire 3 weeks, they can say we were warned.

It’s not the hardship it sounds, because we’re not allowed to have air conditioners anyway. If thing go awry, as they so oft do here in the third world, I may have to eat half a gallon of ice cream in one sitting - a hardship for which I’m well-prepared.

Fortunately, with WordPress I can blog ahead of time and it will publish my entries on its own. You may not even notice the interruption of blogging services.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 23rd, 2004 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Boston. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.