Fungible Convictions

I received a little last-minute gift yesterday: two center-ice tickets to the season opener for the Boston Bruins. While the Bruins played pretty terribly against my once-favorite team the Washington Capitals, it was really something to be about a dozen rows back from the glass, watching Tim Thomas and Donny Beaupre Jose Theodore make great saves and, though Boston hates him, Alex Ovechkin make every other player look like a midget-leaguer in comparison.

Because the game stunk for the Bruins so much—an ugly 4-1 loss—the highlights were elsewhere. Such as seeing Patriots beloved linebacker Junior Seau ride the Zamboni:

Or hearing Rene Rencourt sing the national anthem:

One thing I have to say is that the fans in North Station after the game were just completely awful people. As my friend RJ and I slowly made our way to the Green Line, a Bruins fan shoved an older man to the ground just because he was wearing an Ovechkin jersey—and didn’t just shove him but walked off so that no one knew who did it. The gentleman on the ground needed a minute to get up, during which the woman with him, also wearing a Capitals jersey, yelled for the “asshole” to show himself. The men behind me muttered to each other that they would help but she wasn’t attractive enough to justify the effort. The whole thing reflected so badly on the fans and the city.

My three local Hyatt hotels laid off every housekeeper on August 31st. Citing tough economics, Hyatt said it was financially necessary to lay off the workers and replace them with temporary employees who will be paid half as much and will be offered no benefits.

I’m a capitalist. And I understand the necessity of lowering operating costs, even when it means layoffs.

But Hyatt in this case deserves a boycott because they lied to their workers. Hyatt told its workers it would be bringing in temporary staff to help cover shifts holidays and vacations. Hyatt had its $15/hr workers train these new $8/hr workers—and when the training was done, Hyatt fired the old housekeeping staff.

So I ask my family, most of whom are business people or travel for work, to insist that their companies not patronize Hyatt. Because it’s one thing to cut costs; it’s something else—it’s sadism—to lie to their employees, fire them with no warning, and help create hundreds of uninsured, both the temps and the newly unemployed:

Williams, a single mother of a 13-year-old with asthma, stocked up on medication before her insurance runs out at the end of the month. Last week, the former Hyatt Regency Boston housekeeper also had to cancel an airline ticket she’d bought the day before she was laid off to go see her father in Barbados. She hasn’t seen him since 2005, and isn’t sure when she’ll see him again.

It’s spring break at MIT, so my bosses suggested this would be a good time to take a few days off. I’m making the most of this “staycation” so far—getting up with Lindsay at our regular time, and after driving her to work, heading back to Simon’s Coffeehouse for a couple hours of reading (finally) The Good Soldier Švejk.

Yesterday, following Simon’s, I headed downtown for lunch with my friend/fmr Houghton Mifflin coworker Walter at an old favorite haunt, Flash’s. After getting all the necessary dirt on my old industry, I then went to catch up with friends at Emerson College. All-in-all, a great time—except for when my old writing center boss at Emerson, who happens to be my Orthodox godfather, asked in front of strangers “How ya feeling? In remission?” First, he and others need to understand that with Hodgkin’s, you actually get to use the word “cured,” which I am. Second, why ask that in front of the Emerson undergrad you’re in the middle of counseling? Meh, anyway…

Today I followed up reading at Simon’s by taking Gatsby to Fresh Pond. Lately she had been a little aggressive with other dogs, and we’re not sure why. I think it has to do with the confines of sidewalks, because at obedience class and in houses/apartments, she’s fine. And Fresh Pond today was no different. She sniffed butts or ignored dogs altogether—not an ounce of aggression or nerves to be found. She also walked 99% with a loose leash, while in our neighborhood—especially on Mass. Ave.—it’s 50/50 that she’ll start pulling ahead, particularly when other dogs are approaching.

Happy to say that the walk around Fresh Pond left her exhausted, which is good prep for obedience class tonight: she’ll be focused on treats and not excited enough to care about the other dogs.

And lord, has there ever been a dog with whom it’s so easy to illustrate exhaustion?

Tomorrow, day three of days off, Lindsay is taking a well-deserved day off too. We’re planning on lunch at a small, amazing Polish restaurant in South Boston—I took Lindsay there years ago after her GRE and we never forgot how great it was. And after that we’ll head over to check out the Boston Art Deco Show at the Cyclorama.

A lot of people have been asking—now that the end of chemo is just a few weeks away—how my memory is doing. I’d be asking the same thing in their position, but I’ve learned over the last months that memory comes in different forms. Not short-term versus long-term, which is how my doctors even talk about it. I’m thinking about a memory for facts, for events, for names and faces, for locations. My memory has returned to something near normal for facts and events. But for names and locations—not so much.

Where it’s most pronounced is my sense of direction. I used to think of sense of direction as, yeah, a sense. But it’s really about memory, about being able to call an intersection to mind, or a neighborhood layout, or a storefront that somehow gets associated with all the metadata of the roads and stores around it. I prided myself on being able to get anywhere in the places I’ve lived—Boston, the D.C. area, Winston-Salem. I was the person others asked for short-cuts, who guided cab drivers my first night in a new city. But when I was in D.C. over Christmas, I couldn’t remember how to get anywhere, not even in the direct vicinity of my dad’s house. The mental map of the area I had grown up in had faded, and I had no idea how to get to the very bar my friends and I had been meeting at every trip home for six years.

In response, I did what I’ve been doing a lot lately: finding a technological crutch. In this case, I fired up Flickr and started placing a backlog of photos on a map so that I could remember those intersections, those neighborhood layouts, those storefronts, with some help.

It had a great side-effect. It reminded me of how many things about Boston I love and how much fun I’ve had over the last five-and-a-half years.

There was my first job out of grad school, at Houghton Mifflin, where I made some of my best friends in Boston and had the chance to be in Back Bay five days (and a few nights) a week:

Related, there’s the Houghton Mifflin corporate box, tickets to which the execs would give away several times a year in a free raffle (I won twice):

There’s my introduction to Orthodox Christianity and my confirmation—and the public worship on Good Friday when my entire church walks through/blocks the middle of Central Square, confusing the heck out of every driver who’s never seen it before:

And I met my fiancee in Boston, while she was living up the street from the North End’s Purity Cheese Shop, a front business for a long-time reputed mob underboss. (Her Italian landlady, by the way, is the most remarkable Bostonian I’ve ever met. Nancy was single-handedly responsible for making sure the North End wasn’t crushed under the weight of the Big Dig.):

Having photos and a map as a memory aid—it’s just another thing that I can be thankful for.

New York Times:

BOSTON, Feb. 1 — Two men charged in connection with placing electronic advertisements for a cartoon around Boston, sending the city into a panic when people feared they were bombs, pleaded not guilty today, responding to the charges with grins and buffoon-like comments.

The Times called Berdovsky and Stevens buffoons because they responded to reporters’ questions with non-answers. Give the two some credit: they called out reporters’ bullshit. Journalists repeatedly asked for Berdovsky’s and Stevens’ comments on the case after the two (and their lawyer) had repeatedly said they would not comment on the case.

Press: What do you think about the case?

Defendants: On the advice of our lawyer, we won’t comment on the case.

Press: What do you think about the case?

Defendants: We won’t comment on the case. Pretty much the furthest thing from the case would be 1970′s haircuts. We can comment on those.

Press: But what do you think about the case?

And they get called the buffoons?

It’s a damn good thing nobody died yesterday. With the way the media and city officials are calling for prison terms—for nothing done wrong—we’re a fatality away from reliving parts of Boston’s Sacco-Vanzetti trials.

Again, totally embarrassed of my town and especially of my mayor. From Daily Kos in a post called “Morons in Boston”:

Let’s get a few facts straight on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force sign fiasco:

1. Attorney General Martha Coakley needs to shut up and stop using the word “hoax.” There was no hoax. Hoax implies Turner Networks and the ATHF people were trying to defraud or confuse people as to what they were doing. Hoax implies they were trying to make their signs look like bombs. They weren’t. They made Lite-Brite signs of a cartoon character giving the finger.

2. It bears repeating again that Turner, and especially Berdovsky, did absolutely nothing illegal. The devices were not bombs. They did not look like bombs. They were all placed in public spaces and caused no obstruction to traffic or commerce. At most, Berdovsky is guilty of littering or illegal flyering.

3. The “devices” were placed in ten cities, and have been there for over two weeks. No other city managed to freak out and commit an entire platoon of police officers to scaring their own city claiming they might be bombs. No other mayor agreed to talk to Fox News with any statement beyond “no comment” when spending the day asking if this was a “terrorist dry run.”

4. There is nothing, not a single thing, remotely suggesting that Turner or the guerilla marketing firm they hired intended to cause a public disturbance. Many have claimed the signs were “like saying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Wrong. This was like taping a picture of a fire to the wall of a theater and someone freaked out and called the fire department.

5. The FCC can’t pull a private cable network’s license, Mayor Hyperbole McFuckwit.

More on the Aqua Team Hunger Force case/overreaction:

In a news conference, Rich told reporters he had advised his clients not to discuss the incident. Stevens and Berdovsky took the podium and said they were taking questions only about haircuts in the 1970s.

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, “We’re taking it very seriously.” Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.

Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, “That’s not a hair question. I’m sorry.”

Brilliant.

Some good news for the defendants:

Judge Paul K. Leary told Grossman that, according to law, the suspects must intend to create a panic to be charged with placing hoax devices.

It appears the suspects had no such intent, the judge said, but the question should be discussed in a later hearing.

CNN

I’m embarrassed for my city tonight. Police overreact to a set of Lite-Brites set up around town, and now, because they can’t tell a bomb from a Lite-Brite, a 27-year-old man is under arrest for placing the devices and may be charged with a felony that carries a five-year prison sentence. If you missed it, here’s what the devices looked like:

They feature a character from a Cartoon Network show, and the devices were part of a unorthodox advertising campaign typical of CN’s “Adult Swim” cartoon series. The devices were in place for more than two weeks in more than ten cities without complaint. Then today, Boston police utterly freak out and shut down the city.

The stupidity involved is overwhelming. Gov. Patrick called it an unfunny “hoax”—it was never a hoax…no one ever claimed the devices were bombs. The local news has been going further, calling the devices a stunt that was threat to public safety—it was never a stunt…it was a very small-scale, low-budget reminder to a TV show’s core fans. There was no hope or intention that this would generate widespread attention.

The only threat here is the reaction of law enforcement in shutting down the city for something so patently harmless. What happens if, say, a guitarist drops a distortion pedal on the subway and passengers trample each other in panic? Should the guitarist be arrested? Or if the Boston Islamic Society leases a billboard that reads “Happy New Year” in Arabic and blocks are cordoned off because people think it’s a terrorist message? Should the Islamic Society be held responsible for public stupidity?

Think that’s unlikely? Heck, it already happened. A passenger was barred from a JetBlue flight last August because his t-shirt—reading “We will not be silent” in both English and Arabic—made other passengers uncomfortable.

Is this what we want of our society? To be so scared—or to so allow our police to be our proxy scaredycats—that we irrationally reduce the amount of public space we feel safe in to nill? To let a real terrorist know that all you have to do to destroy a local economy is duct tape some batteries together in public once a week? To be so pathetically cautious that we can shut down our own city just because of some Lite-Brites?

Update: Wonkette captures it better…

Stoners, Media Conglomerate Responsible for Boston Bomb Hoax

A cartoon watched only by college students who smoke marijuana set off a huge terrorism scare in Boston, a city still reeling from the Patriots’ loss at the hands of al-Qaeda. Suspicious objects were found planted across the city in a mysterious and ominous pattern, leading to the calling in of bomb squads, the shutdown of train stations, and the closing of the Charles River to traffic.

The objects were all, as filthy hackey-sack-playing Wonkette readers surely know, Mooninites from the Cartoon Network program Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They were all Time Warner billboards, in other words, in what has been the most embarrassing response by a city to a nerdy cult tv show since Minneapolis called in the National Guard to fight the robot menace posed by Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The “Parmesan Don” Carmen “the Big Cheese” DiNunzio was arrested this weekend on charges of running an illegal gaming operation. The implication in the news is that those are the charges they could get him on.

The arrest is a little bittersweet, though. First because Bostonians like to think the days of the mob are over (a lot of condo development in the North End depends on as much), and this confirms that it isn’t (although this video of DiNunzio’s arrest makes you wonder if an inability to keep one’s pants up spells trouble for the mob). But second because DiNunzio and the employees of his cheese shop…

…watched out for my girlfriend the three years she lived across the street.

There are several examples, the most extreme of which is when a sex offender escaped police custody and unwisely looked to take refuge in my girlfriend’s section of the North End. The police, it was rumored, knew they needn’t look for him.

But my favorite instance is from the day my girlfriend moved out: her influential landlady asked the cheese shop to leave open the (public) parking space they always blocked off. Otherwise we would have had to park the U-Haul several blocks away, and one of us would always have to stay behind to watch the stuff—and this on a day we would have to drive ten hours. The cheese shop kindly obliged. And not only that, but DiNunzio himself sat outside and watched the truck for us, telling us not to worry. It was easy to see him as a good neighbor.

Now he’s in holding, awaiting trial. He’s already done time—four years I think in the 80′s—so he could go away for a while. Which means if you’re looking for parking on Endicott Street, you should have one more option.

I managed to take a number of pictures at the Boston Marathon on Monday, of which my favorite by far is this one. Yes, that’s a marathoner; and, yes, that a Miller Lite.

Here’s the rest of the Boston Marathon photoset.

A hearty congratulations to Courtney and the rest of the Tufts Presidential Challenge team.

Tomorrow folks will be hanging out with Jonathan Foer in Allston. I’ll just link to the info since it seems they don’t want a terribly large crowd. Thanks to the Weekly Dig for hosting.