09.03.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 1:34 am by Nick
Today, a few of us tested a little experiment where we rigged some devices with hanging markers attached to strings, that would swing around and draw on pieces of suspended paper on the subway with all the sudden starts and stops.
We started at Davis, got off at Park, then took the Green line to Kenmore (the Boylston curve made for some great artwork). It was pretty cool. The T is a good artist.
And here’s what the subway “drew” with simple dangling magic markers:
Move over, Jackson Pollock. You’d need a third rail to make this kind of art.
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08.24.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 10:54 pm by Nick
Seems as though the cops can’t follow their own laws. This evening, while waiting for the 1 Bus at Hynes, I saw two cops walk by, laughing jovially. Fine. I can handle that. Humor is a benefit in any job.
But then one of them branched off, and crossed Mass Ave. right at the T. stop, halfway between Boylston and Newbury, not even giving a care to the traffic, which had to stop for him. Damn, I wish I had my camera at that moment.
I personally could give a rat’s ass if people jaywalk if it doesn’t interfere with traffic flow, but seeing that I was busted last year at the exact same place for jaywalking (when traffic was stopped), and seeing a cop do the exact same thing, slowing traffic, it just kind of got to me.
Can a cop be cited in a Citizen’s Arrest? That would have been so cool.
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08.23.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 2:35 pm by Nick
Okay, I am all for accessibility on the T, but today I got on the Red Line at Harvard, where a guy in an huge SUV-style electric wheelchair entered before me. I could have cared less, but he stopped right in the entrance, and after the door attempting to close twice, I literally had to climb over the railing to get to one of the many available seats in a wide open train. LITERALLY. Climbed over the railing.
As I did this, almost falling (because climbing over the railing onto the seats of a now-moving train made me stumble), the wheelchair-bound dude yelled at me: “What’s the matter with you, kid? Are you on drugs?” No joke.
Yes, wheelchair dude. You caught me red-handed. Directly before I had to find an alternative way to get on the train due to your blocking the entrance, I did several lines of coke, dropped some tabs of LSD, shot up some heroin, smoked a few spliffs, ate some peyote, and indulged in some crystal meth.
However, I guess that should have helped to negate my frustration at having to CLIMB into the train, at a time when there was plenty of room inside the train for your m’f-ing HUGE ASS wheelchair that would make an 18-wheeler blush in embarrasment.
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08.20.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 11:50 pm by Nick
…I sincerely am rooting for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, to take the AL East, and maybe even the World Series. That pretty much flies in the face of my (non-pink hat) allegience to the boys at Fenway to which I’ve pledged for twenty-five years, but come on. Any team who stands second-to-last in terms of payroll in both leagues, but can still put together a team that’s on top in the standings, over the first- and fourth-payroll ranked teams (in their division, no less) by 4 1/2 games, is pretty cool, especially down the home stretch.
Fenway’s going to be sold out for years after our victories in 04 and 07. Tropicana Field is going to be nearly empty until they start to impress, and jeepers, have they done that this season. And for a team that pays its players three times less than the Sox.
I’m not saying I want the Sox to lose, I’m saying that it would be neat if the Devil Rays clinched.
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08.16.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 8:33 am by Nick
So we’re hosting a water gun fight today. More than 500 people have registered for this chance to relive childhood memories of backyard fun in a city too strung up for most people to be silly.
Apparently, some people, as usual, just aren’t reasonable, and find some excuse to freak out over nothing.
According to this Globe article,
“Water guns’ ties to real guns troubles Nancy Robinson, director of Citizens for Safety, a Boston gun violence prevention coalition, though her group does not have a formal position on squirt guns.
“They can easily be mistaken for a real gun because it’s so prevalent for young people to have guns [?!! -.ed],” Robinson said. “If kids didn’t have access to real guns, there’d be no risk of a police officer seeing a squirt gun and thinking it’s a real gun.”
In May, a Boston police officer wounded a 23-year-old man on Boston Common after he allegedly held up a toy pellet gun made to look like a semiautomatic handgun. The man, Shawn Craig of Boston, was shot in the arm, police said.”
Um, Ms. Robinson, I think it’s pretty obvious when you see 500+ people shooting each other playfully with brightly colored waterguns that it’s not a large gang shooting real bullets. Talk about paranoia.
If you want to irk her even more, there’s another water gun fight later this month; I’m not sure if it’s open to the public or not, but check them out.
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08.13.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 11:41 pm by Nick
So I’m waiting for a trolley at Park Street this evening, and see one of the strangest ads across the tracks at the designated B line portion. It’s one of the ubiquitous posters promoting the Sharks and Rays exhibit at the Aquarium. Only this one was composed of a photo of the famous Ducklings sculpture in the Public Garden, with the requisite ”Sharks and Rays” logo plastered beneath.
Now, I love the Aquarium dearly, and I likewise dearly love Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack, but…can someone explain how ducklings relate to sharks and rays?!
First of all, ducks are primarily freshwater birds. And while there is occasionally a shark sighting in an estuarine part of a river, rarely, if ever, would the two species meet.
Second, rays are generally tropical animals; we don’t have them up here, outside of an aquarium setting (there are some freshwater ray species in Asia, but the Public Garden ducklings are mallards, not Peking Duck). Rays and sharks do have local cold-water cousins, skates, but again, they’re salt water animals, so…ducklings?
And it’s not that I’m not specifically bothered by the ad; I just don’t get it. Why not a photo of the gold dome of the state house? Why not a photo of the Samuel Adams statue in front of Faneuil Hall? Why not a photo of the Sox celebrating a comeback win at Fenway? Those have just about as much to do with sharks and rays as the Ducklings sculpture.
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08.11.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 5:39 am by Nick
Again, I’m not an Olympics guy, but I couldn’t get back to sleep this morning, so threw on the TV to watch the US Men’s swim team eke out a photo finish in a relay. Pretty f’ing cool, and a great race.
But what bugged me was the commentators, who, while the French swimmers stood proudly to accept their silver medals, opined that “Well, it seems like the French need to settle with second place.”
Ummm…this is the f**king Olympics. “Settling” for a silver medal hardly seems like the end-all-be-all to me. If I were a part of a relay team that included among the top eight athletes out of 6.6 billion people on our Blue Planet, I’d be pretty frickin’ psyched. I’d take an Olympic silver medal over battling insomnia in my apartment any day. Screw gold. In fact, I’d take a chocolate gold coin attached to a dental floss necklace draped around my neck, and be happy.
The French team was understandably dissapointed, but during the award ceremony they showed the class and pride of any athlete who is even lucky enough to have swam on the world’s greatest stage. They didn’t have to “settle” for silver, they got to be proud at their efforts.
In fact, even some of those teams who didn’t win medals still broke world records.
I just want the media for once to accept the fact that every single athlete is amazing it for making it as far as the Olympics, and a gold, silver, bronze medal, or no medal at all. Although it would be fun to make the media participate in the events themselves, thus getting their arses whipped by real athletes.
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08.09.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 3:45 pm by Nick
Master Carr and I delivered a free art tour recently in the alley in Central Square, of a mural on the wall containing artwork we may or may not have created.
Hint: it’s the latter. But pretending it was our work is so much fun.
And here’s the shocker: no one joined our tour. But it’s fun to make up information and deliver it to a brick wall and people who walk through, thinking we’re complete freaks (I suppose I shouldn’t argue with that). Stay tuned for more…
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07.31.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 9:57 pm by Nick
No worries, my friends! You can sleep well tonight, for the blue brass of the People’s Republic of Cambridge are continuing to patrol our streets for criminal behavior.
Yeah, it happened again. Drawing on the sidewalk with chalk, meeting new people, encouraging others to join? BUSTED!
This time, it was in Harvard Square, and I had the pleasure of a ten minute stint with one of the cops patrolling the area who detained me, and then with his chief, while they waited about 25 minutes for a T cop to show up, since I was drawing *GASP!* a smiley face in front of the station for commuters to see, and *GASP!* attempt to cheer them up from the prospect of another dull commute with probably multiple delays. In retrospect, it’s amusing, and quite apropos that the T cop took so long to get there.
What’s even more amusing is that when he did show up, he looked at my smiley face drawing and chuckled, and told me that it was funny. I don’t think the Cambridge po-po guy was expecting this reaction, as he seemed so eager to find an excuse to book me, since apparently I was one of the “punks” working with the kids who hang out outside the station (I don’t even know any of them, but let them draw with my chalk).
What’s really weird is that as I was being detained, I saw right nearby a guy chugging a Natty Light in plain view and a guy chugging a Heineken in plain view. And smelled the sweet aroma of our friend Mary Jane. What did Officer Anti-Punk do? Continue holding me for drawing a f*cking smiley face.
The T cop was wicked cool, and is the only reason I’m here typing instead of placing my fingerprints down at the station. But lesson learned: if you want to drink or smoke pot in public without getting stopped by the po-po, head to Harvard Square. Just don’t be the type of person who simply brings chalk and joy to random strangers. There’s no room for that in Cambridge. Go to Boston instead.
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07.19.08
Posted in Jiffywoob's Palace at 9:04 pm by Nick
Wow. I never knew I could have so much fun with bananas in a non-sexual way. Today, about 20 of us did that in, of all places, the new Apple store on Boylston. We used them as phones. Some of us tried to trade them in for newer fruity phones, some of us sat at workstations chatting away on our banana phones, and some of us had to talk louldy into our bananas because “the reception wasn’t good.”
The employees had their sense of humor crammed straight up their behinds…it didn’t take long before we got kicked out. What is the world coming to when we get kicked out of a store for having some fun?
We weren’t in any way causing a disturbance (in fact, one of the banana-bearing participants ended up helping a customer when no employees came to assist); rather, we were creating entertainment for the dozens waiting in line for their precious new I-Phones. I feel bad for the employees who had to kick us out, but damn, that was f’in ridiculous.
http://www.tbob.net/banana.wmv
When the employee noticed my hidden camera, I had to cover it with my banana (get your mind out of the gutter).
Although, if he had tried to abscond with my video tape, I would have bolted. In all fairness, he was quite polite, so I figure he had the Man breathing down his neck, and just had to comply with orders.
I’m glad I have no facial recognition in my video, because I wish him himself no ill will, but the fact that many of us were forced out by security shows how anal people can be.
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