The Downtown Boston BID spotted this bird downtown today and wondered what it was.

We're hardly bird experts up here at the UHub mountain fastness, but we're pretty sure that's a woodcock - which is known to walk like an Egyptian:

Cybah reports the culinary hole left by the closing of the Summer Street Subway is being filled by a Taco Bell.

Boston currently has just one Taco Bell, even if barely: On VFW Parkway in West Roxbury, just up from the Dedham line (it shares space with Boston's only Long John Silver's).

Yet another federal judge has told the owner of the remains of a three decker at 97 Mt. Ida Rd. to leave the federal courts out of his dispute over the state sanitary code, under which the city has been trying to have the building fixed or razed since it was heavily damaged in a 2011 fire.

In an order last week, US District Court Judge Nathaniel Gorton rejected James Dickey's request for a temporary restraining order to stop a receiver - appointed by state housing court - to clean up the property so he can determine whether it can be repaired or saved. Gorton's order came two weeks after another federal judge, William Young, denied Dickey's request for temporary restraining order because there was no emergency that needed immediate attention. Gorton did tell Dickey he could come back to federal court - but only after he has exhausted all of his options in state court.

Federal judges have told Dickey several times in recent years they are not going to get involved in a dispute over state health regulations - but Dickey keeps filing lawsuits and motions in federal court.

Dickey, who lives in Sudbury, now alleges city officials and state housing-court judges are conspiring against blacks by condemning property in minority neighborhoods and selling it off. City officials, and now the receiver appointed by housing court, retort that's not true, but that even if it were, Dickey could not sue over it because he is white.

On Oct. 12, a judge in Eastern Housing Court in Boston rejected Dickey's demand to fire the receiver and denied his request to argue on behalf of the LLC he set up to own the property, against which the city has brought its actions, because state law requires LLCs to be represented in court by actual lawyers, and Dickey, who is not a lawyer, has always represented himself.

The receiver has borrowed $20,000 to clean up the property and take other actions to get it ready for sale at auction. If the receiver does sell the property, he would subtract his costs from the auction price.

However, the whole case could now be headed to the Supreme Judicial Court, acording to the court docket.

On March 23, 1963, Arthur Fiedler and his wife Ellen visited with Werner von Braun at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL.

Von Braun had briefly lived near Fiedler, although the Pops conductor didn't know it at the time. In September 1945, the military shipped von Braun and some other Nazi rocket scientists to an Army fort on Long Island, as part of a secret program to learn the secrets of the V2 by basically ignoring the Nazi stuff and letting the scientists get American citizenship.

Also not that far away at the time: Tom Lehrer, getting his BA in mathematics at Harvard. Lehrer later wrote and performed a ditty about von Braun: