What are your feelings on Boston?

@mfladd I was going to write “My feelings? It’s more than a feeling”.

@PantHeist Isn’t that true in any city (and also as a metaphor for life in general)?

@belowi except in chicago, and tulsa, which are two cities ive have the pleasure of driving in where they are laid out in a lovely grid system, and dont have new york levels of traffic. Hell, the only bad part of driving in tulsa is that youre in oklahoma.

@belowi I like the life in general thing, but as far as driving goes no- most cities I tend to get around just fine.

@PantHeist And for some of those wrong turns, you get to pay a toll. Even if it’s the fifth time you made that same wrong turn. Until you stop behind a pizza place and ask a delivery driver how to get to where you’re going.

@walarney yep. I remember one trip where I ended up going across a toll bridge twice- I didn’t want to cross it once.

@belowi no its especially true in Boston because the streets are shaped liked a plate of cooked spaghetti.

@PantHeist How did you manage to cross the Tobin Bridge twice?! You didn’t notice you were leaving the city and heading very much into the suburbs?

@jbartus haha I have no idea what bridge it was, it seemed like it was within the city though (just went over other streets). Went over it the first time because I didn’t know it was coming until it was too late to change lanes where the road split in 3 directions, second time because I had no idea how to get back where I was before.

@PantHeist were you on U.S. 1? It’s pretty much the only tolled crossing I can think of unless you misspoke and meant a tunnel.

@jbartus Honestly, I don’t remember- it was 3 years ago. I lived in NH at the time and was driving some people from Boston to DC for a job on task rabbit. Didn’t really make any money after the cost of the hotel, but it was a free trip.

@jwilloughby (add 1 more ring)

@mfladd who’s that?

@thismyusername A cast member from Queer Eye for The Straight Guy?

@thismyusername The G.O.A.T.

@mfladd I’ve been waiting for that to come up here. The ultimate scapeGOAT.

@mfladd oh @mikibell looks different than I thought.

@thismyusername @mfladd @mikibell

Company training will do that to a person.

@mfladd Looks like he scored big at Liberace’s yard sale.

@ninjaemilee My wife is from the area, and I have to agree. It just doesn’t get much better than a Kelly’s roast beef sammich and a frappe by the ocean

@guyfromhawthorn

@guyfromhawthorn as a native I have to say that Kelly’s is somewhat overrated but quite delicious nonetheless.

@jqubed Weird, the only thing I understood in your post was “I hate the Yankees”. The rest of it was wicked confusing.

@jqubed As a Yankees fan that spent 24 years in the Boston area, I’ve come to love the hate for my team. Thanks again and feel free to spew your vitriol towards the Yankees whenever the mood strikes.

@katbyter

@Raider The explanation for this that I’ve heard is that because it’s such an old city, it wasn’t really planned out very well. Kinda like London. New York was planned with a grid in mind.

@ninjaemilee And there is that much less neat jumble at the southern tip of Manhattan

@ninjaemilee Yeah, I’ve heard it was because it grew organically rather than really getting planned out ahead of time.

@PantHeist
How and why Boston was set up.

The Calf-Path
Sam Foss

I.

One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;

But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.

II.

But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day,
By a lone dog that passed that way;

And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,

And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.

And from that day, o’er hill and glade.
Through those old woods a path was made.

III.

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about,

And uttered words of righteous wrath,
Because 'twas such a crooked path;

But still they followed—do not laugh—
The first migrations of that calf,

And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.

IV.

This forest path became a lane,
that bent and turned and turned again;

This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load

Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.

And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

V.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;

And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare.

And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;

And men two centuries and a half,
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

VI.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed the zigzag calf about

And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.

A Hundred thousand men were led,
By one calf near three centuries dead.

They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;

For thus such reverence is lent,
To well established precedent.

VII.

A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;

For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun,
To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.

But how the wise old wood gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.

Ah, many things this tale might teach—
But I am not ordained to preach.

@Pixy Power and water still work in my Vault, so screw that.

@curtw4 lies, modern is for tourists who don’t know any better

@elizadeath That’s funny, because Mike’s is for the tourists. Signed - A guy who’s mom’s family grew up in the North End across from Sacred Haht (yup) and we know real food and where the REAL locals go.

@mwish Yup. I know it’s not as good, but I’m a Bova’s guy. Tough to beat 24/7 pastries.

@mwish shush ya face

@kreader1260 it’s called being a fan.

@jbartus …Baloney…Other fans in other cities do not act the way they do in New England. Pats, Celt, and Sox fans in other cities do not act that way. Yankee fans in Boston act that way though

@sanspoint Cambridge is so nice! I visited last fall and really loved it.

@sabryan2525 You’re seriously getting yourself worked up over a meh writeup? It’s called cherry-picking stats and it’s done for comedic effect. Here, look at this - it will make you feel better.

@Kevin All relative. Was pretty cheap moving from San Francisco.

@huja my wife got a job at a biotech and we decided that unless she gets a 250k a year job we’d move there.

So instead she got a 100k job in Indianapolis.

@elementxero 47th in commute and 47th in road quality. Meh.

@sligett But there is the expectation to exercise your middle finger rather regularly, especially if you see NY plates or a Yankees bumper sticker

@sligett auhhh, yah as long as you like driving in circles…

@StrangerDanger I can’t believe it took that long for someone to mention the band.

@Pavlov

It had to be you …

@Pavlov Golf clap… <x2>

@Pavlov
PS. Wasn’t me.

@brianebel OR they move there from all over the world and the locals are like “wow I’m so impressed you got a degree and you are from Minnesota, when are you moving back btw?”

@brianebel To be fair, it looks like a great place to go to school.

@huja well from where I lived I could take a ferry over to the airport and then an airport bus… rather liked that since I missed all sorts of traffic and streets that people were parked on during rush two hours.

@smilingjack That’s because it’s eeeeeeasy.

@f00l So . . . not fan of The Hub?

@f00l Boston’s ice cream game is on point. J.P. Licks on Newberry got many of my hard-earned dollars.

@huja
What is the Hub? I was last in Boston something like 3 decades ago.

I remember really liking Legal Seafood. And there were a couple of other restaurants, if their names will come to me …

@f00l “The Hub” is an old nickname for Boston.

@huja It’s depicted on the logo of the Boston Bruins.

@huja
No. I like Boston. Fun place.

The driving was a challenge, but I know how to weave and accelerate.

The biggest bitch was parking. But any Bost-Wash city has that prob. Parking is easier in Boston than Manhattan.

As for creeps following one around - that happened in Washington and New York also. I just found a way to vanish. Taxi, bank, whatever.

@huja
Can’t remember the name of the ice cream place, think it may have been in Somerville? Or nearby?

So good that when Boston was shut down in a blizzard, people would ski or snowshoe to get there.

I think it was the first place to fold stuff like crushed Heath Bars into ice cream?

@f00l Steve’s?

@margot
@huja
Steve’s sounds right. I think.

There was also this great restaurant. Called Bel Canto, or something like that. Whatever the name was, it was Italian for “beautiful voice” or “beautiful song” or something similar.

@apLundell but we have the Boston Cream Pie! And Boston Creme Doughnuts! And Brown Bread! And Baked Beans! And a famous Tea Party!

Also the Parker House Roll is named after the hotel in Boston.

@jbartus don’t forget the chowdah.

@apLundell Oh, woah, woah, WOAH. The Philly Cheesesteak isn’t named after Philly. It was invented in Philly. And you can’t get a decent one outside of the city. In fact, the further you get from Philly, the worse the steaks get, exponentially. The bread is wrong, the way they cut the meat is wrong, the cheese is wrong, the condiments are wrong.

Nobody from Philly calls it a Philly Cheesesteak, let alone a “Philly”. It’s a steak, or a cheesesteak. And fuck Pat’s and their bullshit ordering system. None of this “wit” crap, let alone “wit whiz”. (And fuck Geno’s on general principle.) You wanna cheesesteak, you get it with American or Provolone (the choice of connoisseurs).

Sorry, but I am a Philadelphian by birth. We don’t have good sports teams, we live in the shadow of NYC and DC. This is all we have.

@apLundell I like using television DMAs (PDF). It doesn’t actually measure people, but households with a television, but I still find it a useful way to compare size between one area and another. Boston currently sits at #9, very close behind Houston. The problem with metro areas is they still sometimes split areas up and exclude suburbs that greatly contribute to the area. Where I live in the Triangle, Raleigh and Durham have been separated as statistical metro areas, even though it’s very common to live in one and work in the other, or go eat and entertain in either. The TV DMA gives a more accurate picture of the area’s size.