I’ve been consuming U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
nonstop since buying it last night. The final track, the audaciously
named “Yahweh,” caught my attention immediately. U2 is well-known not just as a rock band, but as a Christian
rock band, and quite possibly the only commercially successful
“liberal” Christian rock band. A song titled “Yahweh” is a [...]
I’m halfway through an essay in the latest New Yorker (the annual
“Cartoon Issue”) and couldn’t help but note yet another easy
dig at the perennial gimp of comic strips, the Family Circus:
Although “The Family Circus” was resolutely unfunny, its panels clearly
were based on some actual family’s life and were aimed at an audience
that recognized this life, [...]
I attended about an hour of the public hearing at Boston City Hall on the need for a bike czar in Boston. In addition to the usual suspects, representatives from Walk Boston
and Zipcar both testified in favor of creating this new position who
would fight for cyclists from “within the bureaucracy” (such an
appealing way to describe [...]
For as long as we’ve lived at our apartment, we’ve had irregular
power outages. Sometimes we get notices from NStar about planned
“service upgrades,” but about 90% of the time we don’t. Generally the
power goes out between the hours of 1 and 3 a 15-minute stretches.
The situation is quite annoying because it causes all the clocks to
reset, [...]
From the MassBike listserv:
Today, MassBike won a major victory for MBTA riders when
the agency announced its decision to increase bicycle access on the
subway.
The T’s new policy, which is effective immediately, will
allow bikes on the Red, Orange, and Blue Lines at all times except for
weekday morning rush hours (7:00—10:00 a.m.) and weekday evening rush
hours (4:00—7:00 p.m.).
Additionally, [...]
Every
winter Boston re-christens the splashing Frog Pond as an outdoor
skating rink. On the way home from work tonight I stumbled on the tail
end of this year’s opening ceremony, replete with skating butterflies
(?) and, of course, a frog. Apparently Mayor Menino was there, too,
though I think most of the kids were more excited to skate than
anything [...]
Nerds of the world unite: There’s no shame in proclaiming your love
of Dungeons & Dragons in a major American newspaper. Yeah, us
Gen-X’ers may be the powerless, weenie generation stuck between booms
and doomed to political irrelevance, but we’ve got our 12-sided die and Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the [...]
A new reason for me to love Arlo & Janis: Jimmy Johnson’s website. I don’t know how or why his syndicate allows him to post what will eventually add up to his entire ouvre, but as a consequence you really feel like you get to know Jimmy as a person and as an artist.
The commentary [...]
For the second time this year, the Boston Globe has dropped one or more comic strips on the Sunday comics page — specifically, Arlo & Janis
– to include a half-page color advertisement. Personally I am as in
favor of the Looney Toons DVDs as the next comics/animation aficionado,
but not at the expense of truly great comic [...]
In the hubbub of election day, I didn’t have time to comment on this interview in the Globe. Steve Greenlee’s questions weren’t as bad as Deborah Solomon’s,
but I still found the first half flippant and rude, and he wasted a lot of time
treating Breathed like a penguin fetishist or something. Still, one
really interesting thing he [...]
