I take the T home from Kendall Sq. most days, inbound across the Charles. Quite often when one gets on the the train around 5, it rockets out of Kendall, only to stop on the bridge, because the driver hasn't bothered to call ahead to see if Charles/MGH is clear.

I'm not surprised that that happened last week after the storms and the big power outage at JFK/UMass. What was absolutely stupendous was the train pulled into Charles/MGH, stopping... six feet from the where it needed to. For five minutes! Didn't open the doors. No possible explanation as to what possibly was in the way of that final distance. No, I didn't get the car#.

I left, not bothering to take a chance on the crawl towards Park St. Hopped in a cab downstairs and zipped along up to Kenmore...

For the past month or so, Jon's noticed a panhandler by the Store 24 on Beacon Street in Brookline. Today, he gives him a buck and decides to ask him some questions:

As tonight was quite mild, I thought I'd give him some time along with some change. How long does it take to collect a buck? I asked him. Twenty minutes, he told me. I said, alright, you've got my time for twenty minutes.

So I asked him where he lived (in a "halfway house" the street from me), where/if he worked (3 odd jobs today). This information isn't of any use to the greater Internet, as it is to my Griggs Park and Washington St. neighbors, to whom I sent some more details. I told them I wasn't pleading a special case; I was just sharing information. ...

Carol and Steve and Steve's videocam go shopping at the West Roxbury Roche Bros. - despite Carol's initial hesitancy at bringing the camera along:

Like a supermarket, like they always see?

Carpundit explains why the Patriots parade made him grumpy enough not to take photos:

... I almost got run over going to the T this morning because of the stupid crowd barricades that they weren't smart enough to leave open at the crosswalks for the morning commuters, and I'm being deafened by the idiots yelling at passing cars on Cambridge Street hours before the parade even starts two miles away, and I simply don't understand the mentality of someone whose best use of today is to appear at City Hall Plaza at 6AM, strip off his shirt, and start screaming, and there are like 50 of them within screaming distance of me, and it depresses me about the state of humankind and makes me question why I toil in a public-service job when that's the public I'm serving. ...

He also doesn't understand the parents who let their teens show up drunk enough to vomit on Boylston Street.