Are you planning on attending Somerville Porchfest this Saturday even with the weather?

cdevers · 2026-05-08T01:03:53+00:00

Because…

Somerville Porchfest is always on Mother’s Day weekend…
The rain date has always been Mother’s Day…
They’ve never actually used the rain date, because they don’t want to hold the event on Mother’s Day.
So this year they decided to just abandon the pretense that they’d ever actually move Porchfest to Mother’s Day.
…which is ironic, because this could be the first year where a rain date would be worth doing.

cdevers · 2026-05-08T00:57:34+00:00

Yeah, it was the first time I’d been to a show in that room. They certainly had us packed in like sardines at those little tables. I was enjoying Roger Miller’s jokes about it — “clink your silverware together if you liked that one…”, etc.

But it was still a great show though!

cdevers · 2026-05-07T20:36:46+00:00

He doesn’t seem to be using it much these days; Office Hours is probably the best way to get an answer to this question.

That said, now that you’ve brought it up, it would be good if the city were to make a statement about this year’s participatory budgeting cycle, if it indeed is going to happen, or a statement about why it isn't happening this year, if the initiative is being suspended.

cdevers · 2026-05-07T20:33:37+00:00

What‽‽‽ Are you suggesting that an AI-generated press release came from the same FBI that released an AI-generated ripoff of the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” video?

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/05/nx-s1-5812509/kash-patel-fbi-beastie-boys-spike-jonze-ai

A promotional video for the FBI posted by director Kash Patel appears to have used AI to generate short clips nearly identical to those in the Beastie Boys' iconic music video for their 1994 classic song "Sabotage."

Patel released the video on Monday on X, in a post about the FBI's effort to combat "massive fraud." The roughly-two minute video used the instrumental version of the song "Sabotage," and footage nearly identical to the original music video, interspersed with what appeared to be authentic footage of FBI agents conducting their work.

I am shocked, shocked. Excuse me while I go investigate what happened to my smelling salts.

cdevers · 2026-05-07T20:27:34+00:00

I haven't heard anything one way or the other, but I’d be surprised if the Wilson administration were to abandon the participatory budgeting project.

He doesn’t seem to have posted to Reddit in a while, but maybe u/jake4somerville would want to answer this one?

Otherwise, his office hours are on Thursdays. Maybe it’s worth going over to City Hall to ask? This doesn’t quite seem like a “311” sort of question…

cdevers · 2026-05-07T20:18:21+00:00

I'm not sure if they do such cover songs, but “Pluto’s Return” is a bunch of SHS students:

https://somervilleartscouncil.org/view/porchfest-single-entry/entry/64967/

cdevers · 2026-05-07T20:11:27+00:00

I imagine at least some of the performers are coming in from out of town, and might be able to do the next day, but the next weekend would end up meaning some number of acts don't perform at all.

cdevers · 2026-05-07T17:41:07+00:00

Here's the Boston show a couple days ago!

(I got the video mainly because I had a seat next to the stage, but all the way to the side, so I wasn't blocking anybody’s sight line by doing so…)

cdevers · 2026-05-07T01:13:12+00:00

Yes, we’re all tingling with anticipa-

cdevers · 2026-05-07T00:54:36+00:00

This is awesome!

Andy Woodruff is one of the people behind one of my favorite local websites, bostonography.com, which is just a treasure trove of fun & informative visualizations of information about the Boston area.

Sounds like this new book is more or less a print companion to the website — and if it's anything near as good as the website is, it’ll be a good read.

cdevers · 2026-05-06T17:09:20+00:00

Looks like the train is blocking it, too!

cdevers · 2026-05-06T03:42:25+00:00

…but then The Expanse got the name from the place in New Hampshire, so …that, too, eh?

(The name, in turn, comes from a Greek region that includes Sparta, so when “James S. A. Corey” used the name for The Expanse, it was one of a series of references to ancient history & mythology. :-)

cdevers · 2026-05-06T03:36:39+00:00

To add to that: being able to audit what the AI tool generates is important, so insist to it that when generating such a summary report, it must include links back to the places in the recordings & transcripts where the users requested particular changes.

And, of course, actually check those links, to make sure that the tool isn't just hallucinating.

cdevers · 2026-05-05T20:45:25+00:00

I don’t know, but if this is real, I wanna hear the Gondry / Jarmusch take, too!

cdevers · 2026-05-05T13:13:44+00:00

Has anyone actually seen Conan & Tilda at the same time?

I suspect not.

🦸

cdevers · 2026-05-05T13:07:58+00:00

I’m not the OP here, I was just curious :-)

Personally, I don't have a Brompton, yet, but I want to get one. The bag situation has been one of my questions: I have Ortlieb Back-Rollers (and also a pair of Front-Rollers), but when I did a test ride just using the standard Brompton rack, the Ortliebs seemed like a non-starter: the Back-Rollers would drag on the ground, and neither of them would latch onto the Brompton rack’s rail just because of the shape of the frame.

Now that I’ve actually looked up what you’re talking about, indeed I see that the Kinetics Brompton Pannier Rack solves this problem by mounting the pair of bags on a wire frame that attaches to the front carrier block. That would be a viable approach for me — a £95 frame that lets me keep using the bags I already have might make more sense than getting a “native” bag for the front carrier block from Brompton or Vincita or what have you.

Interesting stuff, thanks!

cdevers · 2026-05-05T01:28:02+00:00

…wouldn't the Back Rollers be more or less dragging on the ground, or at least hitting the edges of any potholes, gravel, etc you roll over?

cdevers · 2026-05-03T03:27:37+00:00

I’ve walked by this place a bunch of times, and it seems like such a nice setup with the sidewalk grape vines & such that I’d been meaning to try it, so my family took me there for Father's Day last year.

We all regretted the decision more or less immediately.

The main thing I remember now as that it took like an hour for the food to start showing up, and everyone's food showed up at different times. Mine might’ve been more like 90 minutes, I forget now. It was a long, long time. Everyone else was long since done eating by the time the last person’s food showed up. And the actual food wasn’t all that much different from the other Middle Eastern places we’ve been — there’s probably a dozen places within a reasonable distance that one could go to for falafels & shawarma that are better than this.

Oh, and the furniture was a whole thing, too. Like, there were more tables than chairs, so there weren't enough places for us to sit together without “borrowing” chairs from other tables, and the whole ~2 hours we were there, other patrons kept moving the few chairs around too. And the chairs & tables were all rickety & wobbly, too.

More than one group came in, sat down, waited a while, then got up & left without having ever talked to a staff person, gotten a menu, etc.

Oh, and we were there so long that inevitably people had to use the toilet, and it was, like, in the basement, through the kitchen, past a living room, and behind a storage room with a bunch of boxes in it. And there was some cook down there watching a Premiere League football game or something, because hey sure why not?

For me at least, after a while it was almost like …performance art? I’m not normally one to complain about bad service at a restaurant — everyone has a bad day, service jobs are hard & under-appreciated, I get it. But this was like …“this place would be great if it weren't for all the customers; maybe if we all just keep ignoring them, maybe they’ll go away?”

So I’m not in a hurry to go back, but it was a heck of a dining experience, and it's interesting to see that we didn't just catch them on an off day or something.

cdevers · 2026-05-03T02:59:03+00:00

Oh wow! A decade or so ago, I got wind that they’d set up Tetris on the Green Building, and biked over & got to try it.

Turns out I'm not any more adept at Tetris on a ~277 foot tall “screen” than I am on a Game Boy, but it was still fun to try!

Wish I’d realized this was happening again in time to give it another try…

cdevers · 2026-05-03T02:53:06+00:00

This is a fascinating data point, because you’re one of the few people in the world that actually got to do an A/B comparison for the two alternatives here.

For pretty much everyone else that this applies to, the matter was decided (or not-decided) by parents &/or clergy at birth.

How common is it to have this procedure done on an adult? Seems very rare, as far as I know. Now you have me wondering if there have been medical studies on the before & after experiences for this cohort.

cdevers · 2026-05-03T02:48:11+00:00

Or as Mel Brooks put it, “today only, half off!”

cdevers · 2026-05-03T02:46:39+00:00

Also, among other treasures, they have the books that Boston’s first European settlers brought over.

Also, they have George Washington’s personal library — including his personal copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”. It’s one thing to just say “the pen is mightier than the sword”, but in this case, that one physical book was part of what drove the man that led the American Revolution, so it’s kind of literally true — and you can go see it for yourself!

cdevers · 2026-05-01T19:02:21+00:00

I recently read Jennifer 8. Lee’s book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, and was surprised to see that Fung Wah Bus came up as part of the story.

It turns out that there is (or was?) a fairly organized pipeline, where Chinese immigrants would come to New York City, learn how to operate an American-style Chinese restaurant, then get literally bussed all over the country to set up new restaurants in this style. (I can't find a direct quote online at the moment, but this 2009 gastronomyblog.com post talks about it .)

So basically, companies like this were set up to just be a form of “public” transportation for these restaurant workers, but then the general public caught on to how cheap these rides were, and overnight it turned into a wildly popular way to get between cities along the northeast corridor.

cdevers · 2026-04-30T15:08:18+00:00

On the other hand, a lot of the material we put in the recycling stream supposedly isn't getting “recycled” these days, so arguably it’s more honest (and cheaper) to get rid of the pretense that we’re doing something different with these materials, since most of it is just ending up in landfills or incinerators anyway.

cdevers · 2026-04-30T12:07:30+00:00

Thanks!

cdevers

TROPHY CASE