Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 1100

Tonight around 1:45 a.m., Boston will be the closest it’s been to Mars in 60,000 years. A good rule of thumb: If you want to see Mars when it’s closest to your hometown, be outside around 1 o’clock Wednesday morning. Look south and up. –Close Encounters with Mars, NASA

Technically, we won’t be in periareon (a neologism analogous to perihelion, the closest point to the sun) because Earth is not a satellite of Mars the way, say, Phobos is. But it makes a cool entry title. (It was that or Mars Attacks!)

If you’re having a Mars Party in Boston, leave a comment. Otherwise, I’ll be looking south from the roof at home.

Word Count: 305

My excuse for not writing is that Veronica and I spent the day wandering up and down the Green Line with Mom. Afterwards the cold weather put me in a strange mood. I made lots of rugs, and my characters argued too much. They would have been at each other’s throats if I’d kept going.

There are two new drabbles up on the Stargate page.

Word count: 605

I was visiting the cult at Kenmore Square and there were all these book trucks out on the sidewalk by the Kenmore T entrance, in front of that weird replacement for the buildings that burned down. I bought a few hardcovers. If you’re passing through, Commonwealth Books is worth a look. It’s your basic college town used bookstore, the college being BU. I don’t know what happened to the Boylston location - this one is at 526 Comm Ave.

I saw the new Apple Store at Chestnut Hill recently and drooled over the 12″ PowerBooks. Rumor has it new PowerBooks will be out next week. I’m still looking for the PowerBook at the end of the rainbow.

Seema has been spotted in Boston, mainly shopping at CVS and Buck-a-Book, and travelling by antique el and elevator. Speaking of which, I was sad to hear that the last stretch of el (that is, the elevated Green Line tracks between North Station and Lechmere) is coming down and being replaced by a tunnel sometime this year or next. I suppose if they’re burying the rat’s nest of highways out there in the Big Dig, the el would stick out like a sore thumb afterwards.

I’ve always found the North Station/Science Park area an asphalt wasteland so I can’t really complain, but then again the el is cute and harmless and it seems a shame to tear it down. Maybe it’s blocking some bigwig’s view of the Zakim Bridge.

Transit joke of the day: Fly the Honest Skies from the rec.humor.funny newsgroup

Regarding yesterday’s Breda follies, Liz says, You know, I cannot make heads or tails of that post. Liz lives in Australia, where (one assumes) it is the natural behavior of trains to travel on the left-hand side of the tracks. Not so here! (Somebody please tell the MBTA.)

I’ve decided to devote a new entry to Liz’s pointed questions. Real Bostonians may wish to move on now to, say, Bad Transit or the Green Line forum at Railroad.net, in order to see the T discussed with the proper level of obscurity, sarcasm, jargon and expletives. (Real Bostonians are the ones who give directions according to places that no longer exist, such as the Star Market on Comm Ave in Allston, the Arborway stop on the E line, or the entire A line.)

Liz asks, Is there a Boston Public Transport for Dummies book out there?
While there is a Boston for Dummies which can help you locate the tourist hotspots, a full understanding of the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, abbreviated T) can be achieved only through immersion and the purchase of the indispensible Arrow Metro Boston Transit Map.

Liz also asks, What is a Breda train, and how is it different from your average electric train?
More than five long, tragic years ago, the MBTA decided to buy 100 new trolleys from Breda of Italy to run on the Green Line. These trains are variously known as Breda trains, type 8 trains, or just the new Green Line trains. They have low floors to meet the insane requirements of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). You can see a nice photo of one here.

A caterpillar roll, by the way, is a sushi roll in the shape of a caterpillar, with avocado slices for fuzz, octopus suckers for eyes, and little orange antennae.

And what the heck is wrong with Boston trains, anyway?

For the past five long, tragic years, the MBTA has been trying to put the Breda trains into service on the Green Line. The early history of Breda follies has been recorded by Jonathan Belcher and Scott Moore. Over the years, both snow (didn’t anyone think to tell the Italians that it snows here?) and derailments have kept the Breda trains out of service. Every spring they show their shiny faces, derail themselves spectacularly, and go back to the garage. Extensive work was done on the tracks to make the city fit the train, instead of sending out to that nice Japanese company Kinki Sharyo (I’m not making it up) for trains that work, and still the Breda trains won’t run on the tracks.

Yes, the Bredas still derail, but the MBTA is running them this summer anyway. It’s relatively difficult to get news about Breda problems unless you’re on the train when an incident happens. The Metro did report the Hynes derailment; I was surprised to read about it because usually only those T incidents ending in death or dismemberment make the news. (A hint to the population of the South Shore: the wooden ties with long steel rods laid across them are train tracks, not pedestrian walkways or parking lots.)

If you think all this sound ludicrous, like a story of patronage and graft out of old Sicily or some third-world country instead of the day-to-day business of the oldest and fourth-largest public transit system in the US, then let me tell you about the Big Dig…

Memory has scarcely dimmed of the Breda train derailment at the Hynes stop on the Green Line a week ago, during which busses ran between Kenmore and Copley all evening, and especially unlucky riders like yours truly got to ride into Kenmore the British way - that is, running inbound on the outbound track. After an experience like that, you assume you’re safe from the new trains for a while.

A while is approximately one week. This morning I waited, and waited, and waited some more for a train. When one finally came, it was a whopper. It was four cars long and looked like a huge caterpillar roll coming up over the hill, with shiny Breda-train headlights for eyes. The first two cars were a Breda train, and the second two were a real train, the kind that stays on the tracks and goes faster than five miles an hour.

Four cars is two times too long for a train, and the illusion that the Breda train (which under normal circumstances can barely pull its own weight without derailing) was actually towing the real train was quite odd. It pulled up to my stop and the next one simultaneously and then disconnected itself in the middle. The rear end rolled back to my stop and let us all on.

Then the truth came out - as she was grumbling about the useless Breda trains that ought to be taken out of service and sent back to Europe, the driver admitted to having pushed the Breda train over the hill to my stop and was not sanguine about our chances of getting past it, now that it was occupying the stop in front of us.

In the end, the Breda train did manage to turn around and switch to the outbound track. Whether it made any farther progress there, either outbound or Brit-style, is beyond me.

That ought to be the end of the story, but, ironically, farther along the line there was a woman on one of those little personal power-scooters which seem to have replaced wheelchairs among the handicapped jet-set. (The irony, for those of you playing the home ADA game, is that the dysfunctional Breda trains were meant to be handicapped-accessible.) So, after a year of walking around the clunky metal wheelchair lifts on extremely narrow T street platforms, I got to see one in action. I would have been more excited about it if I hadn’t already been nearly half an hour late due to the aforementioned Breda follies.

Those lifts aren’t powered, so a T guy had to crank the woman and scooter up to floor level with a push-pedal. She would have been better off riding her scooter downtown, especially since the train onto which she was so laboriously loaded was rerouted at Park Street station and everyone had to get off. Park Street, by the way, is still a disaster area with large chunks of the inbound platform boarded up. The ground level is being raised to almost, but not quite, meet the floors of the Breda trains.

Of course, a Breda train would have to make it all the way to Park Street for the floors to not-quite-meet and for this perpetual construction to qualify as anything more than just another Boston boondoggle. I’m not holding my breath (except when passing through Hynes or going inbound on the outbound track at Kenmore).

You can’t get a Massachusetts state income tax form in this town for love or money. Believe me, I looked. I know the budget is tight, but not printing the tax forms is cutting off the state’s nose to spite its face. If they think this is going to get me to Telefile, they’re out of their minds.

So I printed out the non-Teleforms from the Dept. of Revenue site, and it turns out the state owes me ten big smackers. That’s nothing compared to what I owe the feds, but it’s nice to know that the state will be compensating me for the time I wasted hunting for tax forms today.

On the up side, while I was at the main library of the city of Boston (the capital of the state of Massachusetts), which had no Mass tax forms, I picked up a how-to-write-sci-fi book I hadn’t seen before and a copy of Weird Al’s Running with Scissors CD. Yes, there is a SECRET FILE on the Weird Al CD. I was hoping it was the “The Saga Begins” video, but instead it’s some interview or other.

Cool link of the day: City Creator

This was the last weekend for the Impressions of Light exhibit at the MFA, and though we both hate Impressionists, my lovely sister Veronica and I were there with a slightly sniffly mom. It began with the muddy tones of the Barbizon School, moved on to some overwrought sketches, a section of photographs that didn’t seem to have much to do with impressions, and, of course, the Pink and Blurry section. I admit, I’m a senseless cad, but all Impressionism says to me is Pink and Blurry. Veronica claims Monet only did it because he was going blind.

Veronica also claims that I can go back sometime this month and get into the museum with my ticket stub from today. I hope it’s true, because I need to wash my brain out with some good Dutch Masters. I abhor pink.

It’s snowed twice already this week, so the rain, even in torrents, is a nice change of pace.

I just thought I’d blog for a minute, and maybe I’ll get over this sudden (or really, not so sudden) urge to quit my job.

No, it’s not going away.

It’s still not going away.

In fact, it’s sounding better every minute.

Cool icons of the day: Entries in this year’s pixelpalooza

I’d been wondering whether the slowness of the new Green Line trains was all in my mind, but this morniing cured me of any doubts. I watched an all-new train creep through a major intersection, and then, instead of turning around and heading for the nearest bus stop, I climbed on board. I measure the first half of my commute in Metro time - if I finish the Metro while the train is still above ground, that means something is amiss, or I’m on a new train.

The conductor was feeling chatty. He admitted that the trains were slower - you get where you’re going, it just takes longer to get there - and even explained the technical difficulties. Apparently there is no “play to the wheels” of the new trains. He also mentioned something about the old trains wearing the tracks down in certain ways, but I was too far away to follow the exposition very well. In any event, it explains the derailments. I suspect they happen at curves in the track. That also explains why every new train I’ve gone inbound on has gone out of service at Park Street instead of making the last stop at Government Center. The Government Center station is one big curve, and these things wouldn’t squeak going around it, they’d derail.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

PS: I forgot to mention that the fast old trains catch up to the slow new trains, so the new ones then have to go express. The chatty conductor had to walk down the train to the “cheap seats in the back” to tell us we were going express to BU East (not to be confused with going any faster). Either there is no intercom at all beyond the annoying automated stop announcements, or the intercom was broken. The even more annoying piercing beep beep beep beep that goes off whenever the train doors close was, unfortunately, in fine working order.