It is perhaps telling that the hands-down most intense scene in the new Marvel series Daredevil is one in which the secondary protagonist -- Karen, an ordinary woman -- and the secondary antagonist -- Wesley, a man with access to power, but not powerful himself -- confront one another across a table. The series itself is bloated with fighty mcfight ( Read more... )

HMart has come to the Boston area! Famous for its pushing of banana milk, a concept I find repulsive, it is actually a grocery store well stocked with Korean and Japanese foodstuffs as well as the sorts of western-style groceries one hits up the 7-Eleven for when one is desperate. Anyway, they carry watercress, which you will never find in most ( Read more... )

Good news! By this evening my commute no longer involved standing in traffic for 45 minutes waiting for a bus that wasn't full, while it's 5F out ( Read more... )

It is sunset. I am walking home with Stuff from the T, because I have not dug out the car I use from last Tuesday, and anyway its battery is pining for the fjords. Two houses side by side in front of me (both multi-family), each with a person on the stoop. The nearer woman, with some kind of silver crutch, looks sour. The farther is a young man, ( Read more... )

Hizzoner Forever, Tom "Mumbles" Menino, died today, age 71, and less than a year out of the mayoralty. He did not quite die in harness, but that is only because he stepped aside to ensure an orderly succession. I first came to know him when I moved into Hyde Park 13 years ago, which was his neighborhood, and when the medians began to sprout proper ( Read more... )

Various things are happening. It is all a little much, capped with a homeowners' association meeting tonight about which I did not know till... tonight. But whatever, I attended it, and the obvious disorganization of the legacy chair was such that I basically took over running it so that it would end before kingdom come. Nobody seemed to mind, ( Read more... )

So hey, Storrow Drive at night in a downpour: not as much fun as you'd think.

(Storrow Drive is functionally a highway, only without things like breakdown lanes or wide turns or, you know, absence of sudden plunge into doom!! to go under an overpass, etc. Also, road surface and angling is terrible for giant puddles under local flooding conditions ( Read more... )

It's been ages since I posted! (I still do read, I promise.) Sorry about that ( Read more... )

I didn't see the whole thing of it, but caught the last hour or so of The Town (read: my town, or anyway my-town-adjacent) on cable the other day. I was relieved to discover that no, Jon Hamm was not required to put on an accent for the role (Jeremy Renner did okay, a little marbley but not ludicrous; and Ben Affleck, who directed, is local). I ( Read more... )