Yeah, about that.
Medford
"Moderate" delays on the Orange Line due to signal issues at Oak Grove, the MBTA reports.
NBC Boston reports on the tense standoff between the axman and police - who eventually got him to surrender peacefully - in the Medford parking lot of the disco station, which tends not to play much horrorcore.
Smoochacha, who works in the same building, reports: Read more.
Gordon Edes photographed a guy collecting signatures in Washington Square Park in Manhattan for some candidate with a sign reading "Let's stop making Red Sox fans NYC mayor!"
Although the current mayor of New York, Bill De Blasio, was born in Manhattan, he grew up in Cambridge (and went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin with Patrick Ewing). And the guy before him, Mike Bloomberg, is a Medford boy.
Paul Schlichtman wonders what he's supposed to do at the intersection of routes 16 and 38 in Medford.
The Chicken & Rice Guys say Boston public-health inspections of their facilities have shown no E. coli and that their Medford restaurant will re-open tomorrow.
The Downtown Crossing store could re-open tomorrow as well, after an ISD inspection in the morning; in fact, ISD Commissioner William Christopher vows to buy the first meal at 11 a.m., assuming the inspection goes OK. Read more.
The Globe reports the $1 billion in federal funding is safe.
What decade is it supposed to be running again?
Prevailing sentiment in progressive haunts is “2016, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Between a stressful election season, acts of terror, and the crisis in Syria, many of us will be glad to see the calendar page turn on Sunday night. Still, to every cloud there is a silver lining, and at least when it comes to tackling climate change in the US, Massachusetts was a bright spot amidst the clouds of 2016.
BU Today reports a BU researcher has ripped the covers off Medford's claim to be home to "Jingle Bells," discovering that the guy who wrote the song couldn't have done so in a local tavern in 1850 since he was in California that year looking for gold. She couldn't say for certain where he did write it, but says some evidence points to a boarding house across the river in Boston, near the Old State House, where he'd moved after failing in the California gold rush and from which he would eventually flee - after orchestrating the song for blackface performers in a minstrel show in a Washington Street theater - abandoning his children and taking up arms for the Confederacy, for which he wrote fight songs.
Sophy Tuttle has quite the tale of what happened on her normally sedate Medford side street this morning when a drunken college student, on learning Tuttle's downstairs neighbor had packed three dozen chickens, a number of geese and ducks and an undetermined number of pigs in a trailer parked in the street, got a hammer and whacked the trailer open (all the while screaming "I know what I'm doing, my girlfriend goes to Tufts!"), releasing all the birds into the street (the pigs just stayed where they were):
I was woken up at 4:30 to the cops banging on our door screaming "Are these your f*%$ing chickens?!?!" "Get the F*%^ out here and get them!". My neighbor runs out and starts screaming at the kid. My next door neighbors and the farmer and his wife now spend the next 2 hours chasing chickens and ducks allll over my neighborhood, all while screaming like it's not 5am. While the kid is sitting in cuffs on my porch, the cop says "are you a college student?", to which the moron replies, "yea, I go to college". The cop replies, "that's why then. All you college kids are f*&%ing idiots". My roommates and I are standing on the porch, watching about 5 seasoned police officers chase chickens on a suburban street at 5 am and trying not to laugh, because, you know, they have guns.
The Tufts Daily reports Tufts has seen nine mumps cases since Oct. 28 and that other colleges in the area are also reporting cases of the contagious disease. Harvard, Tufts and BU had mumps outbreaks this past spring.
Tufts Daily reports on the action by members of the Tufts chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi after the national told them they couldn't accept a transgender person.
US Rep. Mike Capuano reports the Federal Transit Administration has given tentative OK to the state's plans for cheaper stations and other reductions along the proposed Green Line extension from Lechmere into Somerville and Medford - but with a caveat that has to be addressed by year's end, or $1 billion in federal money could disappear and get spent in some other state: Read more.
UPDATE: Union president says it was just a joke, apologizes.
Today was the Haines Square Fall Festival in Medford and some members of the Medford Police Patrolmen's Association joined the festivities by "arresting" somebody in a Hillary outfit and palling around with a Trump pretender.
The union thought the photos were so funny they posted them to their Facebook page - until some gloomy Gusses started complaining about fairness and impartiality on the part of an armed constabulary, and so the union took down the photos.
Unlike in more enlightened precincts, it seems voters in Medford don't get a little oval "I VOTED!" sticker when they vote.
Kristen Cantu wants to change that and has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $600, which she estimates would be enough to buy stickers for every registered voter in town. Read more.
State Police report that around 5:40 a.m., troopers found a man lying on Rte. 16 near Wellington Circle with life-threatening injuries.
He was rushed to Mass. General, where he was pronounced dead.
State Police say they do not yet even have a description of the vehicle whose driver hit the man, then kept on going.