Yesterday, I linked to Eric's account of his son's admission to Children's Hospital. You just have to read today's conclusion - what they went through after the full-body X-rays will just take your breath away (fortunately, the story does have a happy ending).

Usually, when a delivery truck gets really dirty/grimy/salt-encrusted, you can count on somebody to write "WASH ME" in the muck. Ho, hum. This morning, Ramon photographed a truck with FREE TIBET in the grime, by Alewife.

Attention, Somerville and Cambridge residents:
After at least 2-3 postponements of the hearing on the proposal of the Green Line extension into Somerville due to inclement weather, a hearing on the above-mentioned proposal is scheduled for Monday, March 14th, at 6:30 p. m., at the Somerville High School Auditorium. This hearing is important, and as many people are urged to attend as possible. This extension would be beneficial in more ways than one, in that it would ease traffic james that are rampant in Union Square, reduce pollution, and also really stimulate businesses and jobs in the Union Square area. Just my two cents.

Apparently, Boston is deeply in need of salvation and the kids from Harding University are hardly the only ones hoping to spread the Gospel among us non-believers.

A member of Restoration House Ministries went on a 908-mile bike ride to raise funds to plant a church for the "the six hundred thousand people who live there to hear about our Redeemer:"

... Would you please keep the city of Boston and the church plant in your prayers? Satan has a strong grip in Boston and the need for consistent prayer is necessary. ...

The Rev. Steven Hathaway might agree - he is trying to plant a church in Boston:

In Metropolitan Boston there are literally thousands of people who do not have the opportunity to sit under the teachings of the Word of God.

Be sure to watch his video, which discusses the "spirtual slavery which has gripped the people of greater Boston" and how we've become "spiritually, a barren wasteland," because there is only one fundamentialist church for every 200,000 residents. The video concludes with a listing of those barren towns without a fundamentalist church, such as Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, Somerville, Arlington, Lexington, Revere and Salem.

And we're not just talking rush-hour traffic jams. Is it strictly coincidence that the project's cost has increased exactly 6.66-fold? Or that it replaces a road that once pointed to heaven? Or that one of the architects of Russia's current economic system is from Harvard, which is near the Big Dig? This guy thinks not.

Our report this morning comes from Newton, where Jo hears a bird chirping outside her bedroom:

... You may now resume preparing to purchase all the bread and milk in a 100 mile vicinity, renting a stack of movies and dreading another weekend snowed in the house.

Boston Church Plant is a Weblog by students at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, who are moving to the Boston area next summer to start a church. On the profile page, the students explain why they chose Boston. Says one:

... Last spring break (03) Taylor, Meg, and I went on a campaign to the Boston area. This got me hooked. I was so amazed by the lack of Christianity there that I knew church planting was what I wanted to do. ...

Another student, a Massachusetts resident, says:

... The culture, history, and scenery are just some of the things I love about Massachusetts; but the people here are definitely starved of the Truth of God's Word. ...

Pete's been a writer for 10 years, but decided this year he wanted to learn his father's snowplow business. He reports on the Tuesday/Wednesday storm:

Can de-icing spray, um, burn off skin? This thought crossed my mind at about 5 a.m. as I doused my eyes with water from my Naglene drinking bottle, hoping I was OK. The good people at Carrier air conditioners failed once again to leave the back metal gates open so we could plow the loading docks. So, in absolutely frigid winds that cut through me like meat hooks, I climbed out of the truck to undo the shitty fence chain. It was frozen solid, of course, so I trudged back to the truck for the yellow spray can of de-icer. But as I squirted into the frozen padlock keyhole, a gust blew the wet chemical right back at me. ...

You'd think if there was one Newbury Comics store that might want to maintain a Jewish-music section, it'd be the one in Newton. But Ari discovers the store has gotten rid of it:

... I headed straight for the International Music section. There didn't appear to be a Jewish music section any more. I scouted the rest of the store. Nope. Not their, either. I coralled a staffperson who headed straight for the International music area and was similarly stumped. We looked up some common titles in the local store inventory. Nope. All out of stock. ...

Charley on the MTA takes his first ride on the above-ground part of the Silver Line, a.k.a. "bus rapid transit." His reaction:

• It's a bus.
• Not "rapid" at all.
• Barely "transit" at all, actually. ...

Earlier: Lipstick on a pig

Carpundit reads about six state reps who didn't pay state income taxes and concludes:

... these legislators who skipped the filing of their state tax returns are criminals who should be impeached and, if lawyers, disbarred. There is no excuse. ...

David agrees with Bill Galvin that rules adopted by the Democratic State Committee last night to make it harder for candidates to get on statewide primary ballots and to shrink the number of delegates to the state convention are a power grab by party hacks:

.. Tightening that rule will only make it harder for "outsider" candidates to compete, and will thereby shut out more voices who want to shake the party out of its "business as usual" mindset. ...

SCO understands the need to reduce the overall convention delegate count - 6,257 is a lot for a small state - but is annoyed that among those exempt from cuts are un-elected party officials:

... [T]aking away spots from people elected in local caucuses -- the people on the ground actually doing the footwork to build the party -- and giving them to unelected party officials really ticks me off. ...

This is apparently a Watertown tradition in which every single student converges for a concert:

I've come to an uneasy piece with BANDORAMA(!). Outside of hearing the fourth and fifth graders play the same pieces for the past three years ("D major scale in a round" and "Hot Cross Buns - in 2 parts etc) it's really the epitome of bittersweet. I watched my oldest daughter giggle next to her friend in the gymnasium as the "little kids" sawed away on their various instruments. "But, you know, Dad," she told me later, "That...ummm...used to be me."

The good news is that the swelling at the back of Eric's son's head probably isn't serious. The bad news is what the family had to go through when he was admitted to Children's yesterday - a battery of X-rays to prove he was not abused:

... The full body xray was not one xray, as we had assumed, but almost 20 of Hayes' various parts. Hayes screamed, puked (the spinning head exorcist type puke) and I cried. It was awful. I have never felt less self worth in my life. Jen and I were pissed. No, that's not quite right. We were fuming. Why did Hayes need to be subjected to all this excess harmful radiation in his fomative months? To prove we had not abused him. So instead of us abusing him, the hospital did a bit of abusement. Fucking ridiculous. ...

Harold is tired of the overuse of "ghetto" as an adjective:

... Now groups that are outside of hip-hop, but still consume it ravenously, (i.e. uppity black folk, Asians, and whites), in effort to "be down," chime in using it as means to say "inferior," "inappropriate," "unacceptable," "uncouth," and a host of other negatives. Often they employ it to describe stuff they do too, like showing up late to work, but laughingly assign to riff-raff, like the "lower economic blacks" Bill Cosby was talking about. The word has been co-opted and morphed to the point that ghetto people now use it to distinguish themselves from one another. But what else is new? Definitely not black folks trying to pick and sort themselves for approval by YT, or the mainstream seizing something marginalized blacks conceived to make light of their situation and utilizing it against them. ...

Jimmy Jam the flying squirrel has returned.

A surreal scene on the VFW Parkway in West Roxbury.

Fondofelves discusses the challenge of getting her mother out of the hospital and into a rehab center.

Eric discusses the challenge of getting his newborn into the hospital for an MRI to figure out the cause of a mysterious swelling in the back of his head before the end of the month:

... Jen held her ground with the coordinator, let her speak her piece, then asked if she had spoken with our docs this morning. No, she said, but was going to call them after speaking with Jen, and the neurologist was making his diagnosis from the paper he had in front of him. Jen asked her to please call them, because they seemed to think that this required more urgent attention. She agreed. ...

For the past several weeks, I've been noticing bleachy marks on a lot of my clothes. Not as substantial as if I had spilled bleach on them, but more like as if I'd rubbed against residue from a cleaning or hygiene product that had some bleaching properties. I purposely don't buy any cleaning products with bleach in them, because I'm kind of clumsy and absent-minded. I also mostly use natural hygiene products. This was happening to a lot of my clothes though, so I was pretty sure it had to be something I was using at home. I checked everything for chemical names I know to be bleaching, and didn't find anything. So a few more weeks passed, and a few more things came to have strange light spots on them.

Last week, I noticed that my purple bathrobe had some magentaish areas on it. I finally got some clue as to the culprit when I noticed solid magenta splotches, one inside each armpit. So I rubbed a bit of deodorant (I've been using peach-scented Soft N Dri, which was a freebie, for the past month or so) inside one of the pockets. An hour later, it was bright magenta where I'd done this.

I can understand that some facial cleansers and things bleach fabric, and these usually come with some sort of a warning. But deodorant? It's like pretty much impossible not to get any rubbed on your clothes. And it absolutely doesn't need to bleach fabric in order to be effective. I think Soft N Dri needs to send me a new wardrobe.