Kendall Square

Megan checks out Kika Tapas in Kendall Square and vows to return:

A dish you can't go wrong with is the queso de cabra montanes (baked goat cheese in tomato basil sauce). We slathered the sauce and cheese on fresh bread. It made for a rich, comforting combination (and reminded us of when we were roommates, living about a block away from Dali, where we'd get this small plate often).

Cambridge Day reports Google's Kendall Square landlord wants to give the search company more room by building atop a parking garage that now features a rooftop garden. Landlord proposed replacing the lost skypark with a new, larger park elsewhere, but Cantabrigians were outraged and the city council put at least a temporary hold on the whole thing.

Street Fight interviews Mike Conley, director of marketing at Sebastians Cafe, which now has 2,200 people signed up for its phone-based payment and loyalty programs - customers use their phones rather than old-fashioned cash or credit cards to pay for lunch. Naturally, the chain started with its Kendall Square location first.

It's just an easier, great way to pay. I forgot my wallet one day, going into a meeting, and I was like: "Oh, crap. I can't pay for food. Oh, wait a minute. I have my phone. I have LevelUp." It's interesting that everyone is starting to realize how this is a very usable tool for payments.

A Harvard manTransit Police have made an arrest for a November incident in which a guy allegedly poked a woman's crotch with a finger as their Red Line train pulled into Kendall Square.

Bradley J. Spencer, 36, was arrested Friday, Transit Police report.

The Globe reports that Spencer, is a Harvard grad student and teaching fellow. His CV.

Transit Police report the victim, despite being shocked by the assault, managed to take his photo with her cell phone before they both got off the train at Park Street.

Innocent, etc.

MBTA Transit Police say they're looking for a 40ish guy for an indecent attack on an inbound Red Line train pulling into Kendall station on Monday.

According to police, the man intentionally poked a female passenger in the crotch with his finger - and then stayed on the train until Park Street - during the morning commute.

He's described as 6 feet, 185 lbs., wearing a gray tweed sport coat, a blue collared shirt, and a red and gold "college type" ring. If he looks familiar, contact Det. T.J. Leonard at 617-222-1052 or the Criminal Investigations Unit at 617-222-1050. The photo was taken by a passenger in the car.

MassDOT reports a truck got stuck under the Longfellow on Memorial Drive around 6:00 a.m., shutting the road, of course. And not just any truck: A big-ass truck.

Welina Farah reviews the weekly Venture Cafe at the Cambridge Innovation Center, which serves as a sort of welcome party for Kendall Square's technopreneurs:

The overall feel of the Café is one that puts a kind of nervous college student walking into a room full of established women and men doing what she one day aspires to do- at ease. I look forward to the next time I have a chance to attend Venture Café.

Forget Wall Street and Whole Foods - this is important: A group of users of Google Reader are planning "a wake" outside Google's Cambridge offices at 5:30 p.m.

We'll be mourning together outside the closest Google office, in Cambridge, near Kendall Square, where perhaps a Google employee or two will briefly notice our useless grief.

Bring flowers or signs or memes or eulogies. Wear black if you can.

Google Reader is a service that lets you organize and read headline feeds from Web sites.

Joe spotted this plate on Binney Street near Kendall Square last night (so anyone know a sultanette attending MIT?).

Compare to this plate from Guam, once spotted at the Burlington Mall.

The Friendly Toast is for sale as the owner gets ready to move to Detroit, with which she and her husband have fallen in love.

Jess Riley reports a turkey and her seven poults (that's babies to you) have taken up residence in front of 55 Broadway in Kendall Square. Kendall Square, you grizzled turkey veterans may recall, was home to Mr. Gobbles, back in the day when turkeys were still an unusual sight inside 128.

Copyright Jess Riley.

The MBTA posted this video from the re-dedication of the Kendall Band at the Kendall Square Red Line stop today.

Outside the Novartis building at 100 Technology Square, shortly before 10:30 a.m., Amy Pritchard tweets. Mike Munsell took this photo of the robot shortly before 10:26, when he tweeted:

BOOOOOOMMMMM

UPDATE: Wicked Local Cambridge reports the box contained laboratory materials sent to the wrong address.

Soon you'll be able to get it on and bang a gong - again. Photo by the MBTA.

The MBTA reports some MIT students got up wicked early on Sunday to begin re-installing the tubular-bells part of Paul Matisse's aural sculpture at the Kendall Square T stop. When the work is done, riders will once again be able to play the the Kendall Band - bells, a large ring and a large metal sheet - through levers controlling gongs.

In addition to the bells, known as Pythagoras, the restoration work also includes the ring-based Kepler and the large metal sheet called Galileo. A re-opening ceremony is scheduled for 2 p.m. on April 30.

Like, say, this one, from Copley Square to Kendall Square, as described by Colleen Cunningham.

The Crimson reports Cambridge officials want to use some money from MIT to study ways to turn Kendall Square into a nighttime destination. The Tech has more, says the study area will actually stretch from Kendall Square to Central Square.

And for heaven's sake, nobody start yelling when exiting the station! Ana stays a safe distance away.

7:15 p.m. UPDATE: The MBTA reports the snow has been removed.

Copyright Ana. Posted in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.

This is not Tokyo at rush hour.

Danforth Nicholas took some photos of the platform at Harvard station around 7 p.m.:

The train I was on had to push another disabled train into the station. And then they both emptied onto the platform. Travel time Kendall to Harvard: about 45 minutes.

Photo used under this Creative Commons license.

So the city better be snappy with those permissions, Cambridge Day reports:

“We want to create this space as quickly as possible,” Owu said.

The Tech reports on MIT plans for the area around its campus, starting with construction of a new $100-million, five-story R&D facility at 298 Mass. Ave. next year and continuing with a decade-long effort to add up to 1 million square feet of office sapce and 100,000 square feet of retail to Kendall Square. A key part of the school's Kendall plans is to turn it into more of a destination location rather than a collection of random unconnected buildings, with much of the work focused on the area immediately around the T station.

MIT's president is inviting "city leadership" to her home for a chat on the plans. No word if an invite is going out to Councilor Ken Reeves, who recently called the guy in charge of all the planning "duplicitous and deceitful."

1:30 update: Scene cleared, full service resuming.

12:45 update: Red Line service restored between Park and Broadway. Busing continues between Park and Harvard.

Service is stopped in both directions as rescue crews extricate the body of the victim from underneath the inbound train.

Finn reports he was in the first car of the train:

The driver honked and yelled "No!" and then slammed on the brakes. Then we sat halfway in the station for 10 minutes. People on the platform were yelling, etc. They let us out manually and EMTs were already shouting and looking under the train with flashlights.

Some guy in England has filed the obligatory shareholder lawsuit over Oracle's proposed $1-billion takeover of Cambridge's Art Technology Group.

In his suit, filed this week in US District Court in Boston, Thomas Granados makes the obligatory arguments about how the deal screws ATG stockholders, and company directors should be ashamed of themselves.

Complete complaint.

The Globe today thunders against a Cambridge bylaw that lets companies advertise themselves on their buildings in Kendall Square. Setting aside for a moment the way the Globies ignore the fact that the astroturf effort to overturn the measure is one company's grudge against Microsoft (as Scott Kirsner noted in the Globe just the other day), they managed to pen this WTF statement:

[W]hile some signage is reasonable, the beauty of the Charles is in its quiet blend of green space and historical and modern structures.

So apparently nobody at the Globe has heard of the Citgo sign? And they think Kendall Square as seen from the river is a "quiet blend of green space and historical and modern structures" rather than a bustling collection of information-age buildings?

MBTA Transit Police tweet the man wanted for pulling a teen's top down on a Red Line train at Kendall Square turned himself in at Transit Police headquarters this morning.

The Globe identifies him as Joseph Joyce of Scituate.

He's scheduled for arraignment this morning in Cambridge District Court.

Wicked Local Cohassett reports Joyce is now also charged in connection with an incident at a Cohasset Stop & Shop in July 4, in which he allegedly lifted a woman's dress from behind in the frozen-food aisle.

Innocent, etc.

Wanted

The MBTA says these are photos of the guy charged with pulling a teenager's top down on the Red Line early yesterday.

The wanted poster.