What a head has Hedda

June 25, 2010

Hedda Gabler, that is. Tonight I went to see Theatre Inconnu‘s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. The play is long and it’s past 11:30p.m. now – I won’t even pretend that I’ll come in under the midnight wire with a thorough blog entry about this play or any other topic today. I’ll venture this, […]

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Hypericum, Hyperion

June 24, 2010

File this under “Strange things we remember”: tonight is St-Jean-Baptiste-Day, aka Midsummer Eve, aka a great huge party with torches and open fires in Montreal where I lived many years ago. Zoom in on a great throng of us trudging up Mount Royal, two “Anglo chicks” mixed in with the locals. The girls have a […]

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Simple geography, crumpled folds

June 23, 2010

Here I go, worrying about how we’d fare in a real West Coast earthquake, and then a couple of days after I leave the “back East” region, what does the Northeast do? They go and have a headline-making quake. Oh the irony… The strongest quake I’ve ever felt was in my apartment in Brookline – […]

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Job markets

June 22, 2010

On June 20, the local paper (Times-Colonist) published a fascinating letter-to-the-editor by Reed Kirkpatrick, Connections everything in this job market. Kirkpatrick’s letter was a rebuttal to an earlier June 13 article by Maclean Kay, Rooting for the promised labour shortage. Kay’s somewhat rambling article eventually focused on a recent prediction about a coming labor shortage, […]

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Tree amenity

June 21, 2010

I spent the past week in Boston and noticed that most streets – whether in Boston, Brookline, or Cambridge (the three municipalities I spent time in) – were either relatively tree-less or had undersized trees. While there are many streets that have some trees, and while there are some neighborhoods that approach leafy-ness, I’ll go […]

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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

June 20, 2010

Is the Worst Already True, the BP Well Now Unstoppable? | Mother Jones Frightening post that quotes extensively from a forum where oil engineers and geologists post their analyses of the Gulf oil disaster. One forumer, dougr, posts an especially grim picture. Excerpt: QUOTE I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system […]

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Street music

June 19, 2010

Last day in Boston, spent most around Harvard Square in Cambridge. Came across some interesting street buskers – varied, different, fresh. (For each group, click on the image to go to Youtube clip I shot.) First up, two young guys (age 17), the drummer (unfortunately obscured in my little film clip) banging rather well on […]

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Exceptional, or just top-heavy?

June 18, 2010

This afternoon I went to see Headgear: The Natural History of Horns and Antlers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Interesting exhibition – I was enjoying myself until I wandered into one of the other sections, a special exhibit called Climate Change: Our Global Experiment. I learned a couple of things – for example, […]

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In Boston, where jail is “Liberty”

June 17, 2010

Tonight I saw a most impressive example of adaptive re-use in built form: the former Charles Street Jail, next to MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital) on the banks of the River Charles, turned into a stunning luxury hotel (the Liberty) that looks for all the world like a Jeunesse dorée hotspot. Here’s a link to the […]

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Not a wrap

June 16, 2010

This is not a Christo-wrapped art work, it’s a botched development project: . ^ A photo I took today: the back of Vornado’s stalled project in Boston’s Downtown Crossing (wrote about it earlier, here). Stunningly ugly, isn’t it? Not like a wrapped Reichstag at all. Just goes to show that there’s art, and then there’s […]

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