Ambulance. Photo by John Keith.

Turlach MacDonagh wonders: Why were happy green people carrying a big log down Beacon Street in Brookline this morning?

Protest outside Longy School of Music this morning.

The venerable Longy School of Music, which merged with Bard College in New York last year, told parents this week that programs for children - and adults not seeking degrees - no longer fit its new mission of becoming a world-class "institution for advanced musical study." So, school President Karen Zorn wrote parents, they'll have to find new places to send their kids for the sort of programs the school has long offered.

In a letter to parents, Zorn said the school would work with them to find alternate programs.

Parents, who say the decision came as a complete surprise to them, protested outside the Harvard Square conservatory this morning. One Jamaica Plain mother tells UHub:

What they offer simply can't be replicated by private instruction or at other local institutions - otherwise we might be studying elsewhere. For example we live in JP but take our 12 year old daughter there for a chorus ensemble every weekend, because the hassle is worth the great experience she is having.

A completely abandoned Beacon Park railyard, shot from the air. Harvard is now free to just let it moulder for another 50 years.

Go to the front of the outbound Orange Line station at Chinatown and you'll see these mysterious tunnel entrances just past the end of the station, where the tracks curve on the way to Tufts Medical Center.

What strange wonders lie on the other side of this gateway?

Not much, alas. It's a few hundred feet of tunnel left over from when the Orange Line ran above ground south of Chinatown station, back before 1987, when the station was called Essex Street.