sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Arlington’s beloved Paul Schlichtman writes:

I had to go to Malden yesterday, and faced with the depressing  task of dealing with the agenda of the School Committee Budget  Subcommittee, I decided (in the spirit of prior suggestions surrounding Jim Marzilli’s coupons) that the total lack of fat and sweetness in the school budget required some sort of counteraction.  After about 30 minutes in a line that can only be described as a party environment, I got two dozen KK doughnuts and the subsequent school committee deliberations were a little less grim.

They pulled a doughnut right off the line as you approached the order takers.  It was hot, sweet, wonderful, everything I remembered from last year’s California KK visit.  The one leftover doughnut that made its way home last night had about 20 seconds in the microwave before eating, brought back that hot and fluffy feel.

I must point out that in most microwaves, 20 seconds is *far* too long to reheat a glazed KK donut.  8 or 10s on high is just right.

Another (here’s the last one) ancient civs update from fair Harvard: deciphering Inca khipu.  Harvard anthro is wicked cool.  I don’t want to wait for a book to come out with details, I want to track Urton down…

I was at MacLean Hospital last week, and they have a magnificent campus for inpatient mental health… my goodness.  The funding crunch taking place within their glorious buildings on their beautiful property seemed wildly out of place.  But I want to talk about the way asylums deal with communication barriers, over time and without the obstacles of rancor or the possibility of misunderstandings being (depending on the context) considered active/intentional/partisan.

Well, I’ve clearly been futzing around too much with this blog today.  TLN no longer shows up on the Berkman hosted-blog list.  Maybe someone was put out by my name change and the recent activity?  Afraid of uni-longevity?  Upset with my characterizations of our presidential non-candidates?  [Monday update: still invisible]  Now you’ll have to remember the URL. 
      Anyway, it’s definitely a sign to get outside, rain and all.  As a kid in Houston I was scared of RUSes on days like today, but here I think it’s safe. I’ve been avoiding the real work I have to do, and my connection’s been flaky… let’s hope for a nice WiFi-enabled bookstore to spend the afternoon.
      If you’re looking for actual content, try the newly-updated stories, or the fleshed-out Clark info.

Ancient chinese wisdom holds with the extreme importance of names.  Modern propagandists would agree, if with less enthusiasm… political candidates sometimes rename themselves for this reason.   I always have trouble naming images, sites, books; most of the names I have for private items aren’t words at all — perhaps I haven’t the poetry to create the overlapping meanings I want from everyday phrases.  In any case, Dave refuses to pronounce Omnipresent Longevity and I’m left contemplating names again.  For now.  [speaking of which, there’s an old caption contest that was never resolved…]

There was dancing in the Cambridge streets yesterday night.  (Mass Ave, in fact, in front of Cambridge City Hall.) Wow!  People of all ages; kids running everywhere; the kind of unspoiled cross-generational fun cities do best. There were 20-somethings breakdancing on the grass in front of city hall, kids running everywhere, people from the senior center across the street boogieing to ’50s songs… and a great selection of music from decades past. 

With a little more effort (this event was amazingly under-advertised and -reported), a live band and better light-techs — perhaps even extending an invitation to and sharing costs with a few surrounding townships — they could easily extend the social diversity to match the age diversity, cordon off a couple more blocks of Mass Ave (they didn’t use half of the blocks they *did* cordon off), and make this yearly event a night of city-wide excitement on a scale normally found only in, say, New Orleans.