Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

When your radioactive materials go missing, instead of twiddling your thumbs wondering where they are, you really ought to come look for them in the most likely spot: check Boston first.

Two BU students were struck and killed in Allston by a passing commuter rail train late Tuesday night while strolling on the tracks. Headlines to the effect of “Train kills 2 BU students” or any mention of “tragedy” are exaggerated. “Terminal Stupidity Strikes Again” would be more like it.

Let me remind all residents of Eastern Massachusetts one more time: the wooden ties with long steel rods laid across them are train tracks. Trains run on them. If you are on the tracks when the train comes, you get squished. Surly T employees will have to scrape you off the rails, and that only makes them surlier.

Please save my tax dollars and T fare money and keep off the tracks. This public service announcement has been brought to you by the letter T.

This one is so very Boston I have to blog it: /. on how to take over a train station wirelessly–namely, South Station.

I looked out the window this morning and thought that’s not two inches of snow. It was, in fact, two inches of snow, but it wasn’t supposed to be snowing yet and the forecast of 2-4 inches was looking a bit inaccurate. In fact, the new forecast has 5-8 inches total.

Back when I lived in Connecticut, we had this one winter where it snowed every Wednesday and Sunday–not blizzards, but it added up. The drifts just got higher and higher, and the winter went on and on for a total of over 100 inches of snow. So 5 inches on Wednesday following a Sunday blizzard is ominous.

On the up side, the MBTA finally shoveled that half-foot of packed snow off the above-ground T stops, just in time for the new coat.

Bad news of the day: Fla. loses appeal in Terri Schiavo case

Reports vary, but we have about 2 feet of snow on the ground today. Though I live to mock the T, I have to admit it was the only thing moving in Boston yesterday morning. (Yes, I was out in the blizzard yesterday.) The Breda trains were coated with snow, but they turned out to be the little engines that could. The only problems they had involved opening doors blocked by snowdrifts on the unshoveled outdoor T stops.

The Red Line was not quite so obliging; it took me an hour and a half to get to work this morning, much of it spent waiting for a semi-disabled Red Line train that went out of service right after it deposited me in Cambridge.

Fluff of the day: The Chain, a Stargate fic about what happened to Captain Matheson.

It’s pretty and fluffy and white outside. By morning we should have at least a foot of snow, and be back down to the teens in temperature. The blizzard bit also starts tomorrow with winds up to 60 miles an hour and a total accumulation around two feet.

The only down-side is that it’s happening over the weekend. Why couldn’t we have a nice Thursday-Friday blizzard for a long ski weekend?

Both Drudge and NECN report that the FBI is looking for a dirty bomber in Boston. The bigwigs are hiding out in the bunker, but us plebes don’t have that option. If I fall behind on the blog, it may mean I’m busy glowing in the dark.

Fines are the price of parking in Boston, and now you can pay your fines with toys. Thanks to Seema for the link.

Kate Mulgrew’s one-woman show “Tea at Five” will be playing at the Shubert Theatre from Tuesday through December 19th. Tickets range from expensive to twice as expensive.

For some reason the heat in my building always breaks down on holidays. I got back to Boston post-turkey and it was ambient November in my apartment with no hot water, either. (It didn’t help that I’d left the windows cracked.) So I did what I usually do when the heat’s off on a cold winter night—I camped out in the kitchen and baked.

It turned out there were actual furnace guys in the basement fixing things, which was more than I’d hoped for. The hot water came on after a couple of hours, and the heat a bit after that. So NaNo continues without frozen fingers.