Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

If it’s not one branch, it’s another. The B line was still broken at the end this morning, but as of now Bad Transit lists it as running on time. It took four days, but the sinkhole has apparently been filled. (Veronica heard that the sinkhole was caused by a water main break, but I hadn’t heard that one.) However,

There is in-and-outbound busing between Reservoir and Riverside on the D branch of the Green Line due to operational difficulties. Allow plenty of time for your ride. We apologize for the inconvenience.

According to my sources in Newton, the “operational difficulty” was two D-line trains crashing into each other in Newton Center this morning, with resulting injuries to passengers. How exactly this happened on a two-track train line is beyond me, but my sources speculate one of the trains rear-ended the other.

I bet at least one Breda train was involved.

[Update] The Metro reports that the B line problems were caused by a sewer line break.

I should blog now while the site is up. Like the B Line (on its third day out of commission), the website has been running less that smoothly lately. Maybe the spammers are getting it down, or maybe Potholes Attacked.

My sympathies to those of you distraught over the election results. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was as the electoral college swung back and forth all night. I just can’t get all riled up about these things like you young’uns. My greatest disappointment was that now I'’ll never find out what John Kerry’s plan was.

I’ll spare Jerie the wordcount updates, but I’ve kept to my NaNo schedule so far.

…not that it matters. The outcome of every Massachusetts election for the next 100 years was determined back in 1963. Most of the seats on my ballot weren’t even contested. It would be much easier for all the Democrats in the city if we still used the old lever voting machines, where just one flip votes the party line. Instead, the devout had to fill in a bunch of little ovals. (I didn’t bother voting for uncontested seats.)

In subway news, the end of the B line has been shut down for two days now. At first I thought it was the usual—a Breda train derailment or fallen power lines, but those things don’t take two days to fix. It turns out that a long-neglected sinkhole near the B line suddenly expanded to the tracks yesterday. It must be deep if they’re still filling it in.

It’s that time of year again. This year I’ll be writing a fanfic novel for NaNoWriMo. As Seema says, the stuff just writes itself. It hasn’t yet written my quota for the day, though…

SpaceWeather notes that Halloween is a cross-quarter date, one of the days that falls exactly between an equinox and a solstice. The other three are Groundhog Day (Candlemas or Imbolg), May Day (Beltane), and August 1st (Lammas).

The cross-quarter days establish offset seasons, sometimes called the solar seasons. Solar Winter starts today and ends, hog willing, on Groundhog Day, with the solstice in the middle. But in my experience, August 1st is still high summer. Halloween, while a chilly, wet day, is unlikely to produce snow, while the groundhog is frequently snowed in in his burrow come Groundhog Day. I’ll stick to the modern seasons.

I came across Jumsoft’s Process in the Apple downloads RSS feed. Process claims to be a “fresh face in the tired throng of outlining applications,” but I’m not tired of OmniOutliner yet, and as an outliner Process is mostly PR.

Process does look like a great organizer, though. If you want to organize a project and you have $25 to blow, Process may be for you. The 7-day shareware evaluation period wasn’t nearly long enough for me to take a chance on Process, not when I already have an OmniOutliner file set up for NaNoWriMo. I’d recommend that Jumsoft extend the evaluation period to the standard 30 days, and start advertising Process for what it is.

Via Boston Common: a bubbleheaded beach bunny at the LA Times thinks Bostonians are ugly.

We haven’t seen much of Boston in the World Series the last 80 years or so, so it’s shocking to see so many ugly people in one place.

The place is Fenway Park.

Some fans wore hats or scarves to cover their faces, I presume so they wouldn’t scare the children.

No, that would be because of something we call “autumn,” the season immediately preceding “winter.”

I’m the first to admit that I’m not beautiful enough to live in LA. I know because I’ve lived in Southern California and in Boston. Everyone but the Mexicans is gorgeous down there, but you can’t get a decent donut to save your life. The beautiful people don’t have to do any actual work, like, say, mowing their own lawns, growing their own food, or washing their own dishes, because they have their imported illegal underclass to do that. Nor do they need to be smart or sane or sober enough to come in out of the cold, since it never gets cold. You get the pretty faces, with about as much in the brainpan as Homo floresiensis.

If there were a Californian team that actually won anything, you wouldn’t find Bostonians writing articles about the Botoxed, wheat-grass chomping, silicon-enhanced stupidity of Californian fans. Despite the coastal location we’re normal people with a grasp of common human decency, not malicious plastic freaks who wouldn’t know a donut from a Cheerio.

I’ll take the ugly people and a Boston Creme any day of the week.

Via GNXP: hobbits have been unearthed on the island of Flores. Here are some links about them.

• Cave dig unearths world of the ‘Hobbit’ [Telegraph UK]
• A stranger from Flores [Nature]
• Little lady of Flores forces rethink of human evolution [Nature]
• The Flores find [Nature]

Update: There’s plenty of hobbit fun and puns on slashdot.

…for the inconvenience. I don’t know where the site has been for the past 24 hours. There’s a lunar eclipse going on, but I doubt that explains it.

The Red Sox are about to win the World Series for the first time since 1918. Priceless… I don’t know if I’m ready. The city has more cops than ever out on patrol, since we lost a college student over the pennant.

There’s a new Stargate story on the fic page as well as a few stray quotes and various unmarked updates to the Repository. Note the new LiveJournal icons page if you missed it earlier.