Superbowls, World Series', Stanley Cups, and snowfall records. We are truly a title city. There will be no parade. #titletown #bosnow
— Mayor Marty Walsh (@marty_walsh) March 16, 2015
One hundred eight point six inches, just over nine feet, almost all of it in just the last six weeks. (Average annual total, from back in the days when that meant something, is “just” 43 inches.) And of course we might yet add a few more inches to this year’s total — although we’re all praying there won’t be another April Fool’s Day Blizzard!
Also, this happened — and it’s almost as surprising, plus a lot easier to live with. Per the Boston Globe:
History marched through South Boston on Sunday as gay organizations took their place for the first time in the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. Joining them in front of hundreds of thousands of green-clad revelers was Mayor Martin J. Walsh, the first Boston chief executive to walk the route in two decades…
The former mayor, Thomas M. Menino, had consistently boycotted the parade because its organizers from the South Boston Allied War Veterans, backed by a US Supreme Court ruling, refused to allow gay groups to participate. But on Sunday, politicians were a major, can’t-miss part of the festivities.
Governor Charlie Baker and Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito were among them. So were US Senator Edward J. Markey and Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a South Boston native. Much of the City Council was present, as well as state Representative Nick Collins, also of South Boston, and state Senator Linda Dorcena Forry of Dorchester.
Markey, making his first appearance in the parade, grinned broadly as he walked down West Broadway on a route that had been reduced because of the heavy snowfall that crippled the crowded neighborhood and the region this winter…
In addition to the LGBT veterans’ group, parade organizers this year approved a request to march from Boston Pride, a gay rights group that holds its own parade in June.
The Massachusetts State Council of the Knights of Columbus withdrew from the celebration because the event had “become politicized and divisive,” its leaders said. The Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Harvard announced that its band would not march because OUTVETS had been invited.
However, once the parade began moving up West Broadway and into the heart of South Boston, concerns over divisiveness seemed as distant as a day without snowbanks. The gay groups received respectful and sometimes enthusiastic applause, including shout-outs for US Representative Seth Moulton, a Marine veteran of Iraq who marched with OUTVETS.
“Gay rights are the civil rights fight of our generation,” Moulton told the Globe last week…
***********
We live in hope. Apart from small victories, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
NotMax
Playing it by ear, sure and begorrah.
Mike J
I don’t understand why Wold Series is possessive in that sentence, and since the sox finished 25 games out
with the worst record in baseball[1] last year, it doesn’t make sense to bring it up at all.This year, however, will be different. This year is the next year we were waiting for. At least I hope so after they spent $60 million on one Cuban.
[1] I could have sworn the Sox were the stinkiest. The Twins, Rangers, and Diamondbacks were all worse. They couldn’t even win at losing.
PurpleGirl
@Mike J: Because more and more people do not know how to properly use apostrophes any more and use them inconsistently.
PurpleGirl
Old NY saying: Winter isn’t over in NY until it snows on Easter in April. Here’s hoping it doesn’t happen this year.
Schlemazel
Those poor GLBT folk, having to openly admit they are IRISH!
I do hope the area is spared more snow though. WE got none to speak of out here on the frozen tundra so it looks like a big fire season. The national forest service has already positioned two tanker planes in expecttion of buzy days ahead.
@Mike J:
You know the Twins are going to be great this year, they spent a bunch of money to reobtain Tory Hunter, now 40 years old. Looks like a 5th season of 90+ losses
Betty Cracker
I binge-watched the entire season of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” this weekend. (I’ve been sad — needed cheering up!) Now I’ve got that damned theme song stuck in my head…
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: I have had a guitar solo stuck in my head the last week, can’t figure out what song it’s from.
I’m off later today to Fry’s Burbank(yes, it’s a real computer store) to get a power supply for my old computer. I replaced the processor and it has started twice, but won’t now. It had this problem last year.
Betty Cracker
@BillinGlendaleCA: I’m going to have to break down and get someone to come straighten my laptop out. It’s a good machine when it’s up and running, but it takes forever to boot up, and it won’t hibernate or sleep without crashing. Drives me crazy.
Joel
Here’s what an 1140-inch season looks like.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: It is spring, time for a cleaning. One thing that vastly increased the speed of my desktops is adding a ssd(solid state drive). I just converted my 10 year old laptop/tablet convertible to Linux.
OzarkHillbilly
@PurpleGirl: Heh. I used to have no problem, but the stupidity is contagious and now I have to think about it every time.
Steeplejack (phone)
@BillinGlendaleCA:
What SSD did you get? I need to do that on my little Lenovo.
Lee Rudolph
My car was stolen, from where it was parked across the street from my office in Worcester, MA, a few days before the April Fools blizzard. It seemed to be gone for good, so after tooling around in an insurance-company-paid-for Enterprise rental car for nearly a month, we finally settled on a new car. The morning before we were due to pay for it and pick it up, at about 6 AM, the phone rang. It was the police in Webster, MA (home of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg) reporting that my car had just reappeared in a parking lot behind a mini-mall from under the 3+ feet of snow that the blizzard had dumped in Central MA. I picked it up, but we didn’t keep it. The thieves left behind an empty bottle of mineral water, and took nothing but the radio, an old Blaupunkt originally from a 1960 VW bug, that had been transferred from car to car for 20 years.
Hawes
You may live in hope, but you also live in Massachusetts. I’m trying to imagine the same receptions for LGBT groups in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Birmingham.
Hal
@Betty Cracker: I’ve purposely held off on the last two episodes because then my only option is to repeat watch it. Not that that’s bad. Now I just have to get pinot noir out of my head.
Mustang Bobby
Taking a sick day to get over the last vestiges of the nagging cough I picked up from someone in the office last week and was aggravated by traveling almost 700 miles (round trip) for the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance car show up near Jacksonville.
I saw some incredible cars, though, and the trip was worth it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack (phone): I think it was a Samsung Evo. I know it was a Samsung.
Matt
Because doing anything *besides* what the bigots-cuz-Jeebus crowd at the charitable arm of the right-wing lobbying organization / tax shelter / criminal conspiracy to molest children and obstruct justice want is clearly “politicizing” things, amirite?
raven
@Mustang Bobby: Did you see that “new” 64 Stang?
Baud
@Matt:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Inclusive is divisive.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Have you experienced this problem? My tablet PC does seem to go into sleep mode. It loks like it’s asleep, but sometimes when I wake it up, the battery has gone way down.
Karen S.
@Matt:
Years ago, my dad called the Knights of Columbus “the Catholic KKK.” He’s generally not given to hyperbole, but he’s a black man who grew up in Missouri during Jim Crow days and who moved to Chicago, perhaps the most segregated big city in the U.S., in the 1950s, so he probably knows what he’s talking about.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Not so much on my tablet, I have an Unbranded(that’s what it’s called) from Best Buy. My android phone will sometimes do that, a process will go bat crap crazy.
Betty Cracker
@Hal: Listen to Tom Beren-JAR!
ThresherK
@Betty Cracker: Is it a Dell? And do you know certainly it’s crashing, or do you get the power and disk drive lights working, yet no helpful beeps or display?
I’ve fixed a couple of Dell laptops which wouldn’t come back to the monitor on after sleep, hard-drive “spindown” (after idle) or closing the lid, and it was related to a setting for the internal / external video display. Had to actually hook up an external monitor to be sure, then change the setting.
Mustang Bobby
@raven: Yes. They can call it a replica of a 1964-1/2, but it has the side trim, grille, and dashboard of a 1966 model.
The list price is $125,000. Without too much work you can find a real 1966 Mustang restored to AACA show winner condition for about $100,000 less.
JPL
@Matt: Bigots for Christ!
skwerlhugger
Boston wins the title at overreacting and being obsessed with themselves. After the city-wide convulsion of panic and fear at the time, front page stories in the Sunday Globe about any conceivable aspect of the Marathon bombing were regular features for the last two years. Now we have the trial of a dumbshit kid. It reminds me of those little insecure yappy dogs that indignantly bark for hours after they get the shit scared out of them by something. No one seems to notice that the event would qualify as a pretty ordinary day in Baghdad. Fire away…
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Maybe windows 10 will fix the problem.
Betty Cracker
@ThresherK: It’s a Samsung Series 7 Chronos running Windows 7, and it has refused to sleep or hibernate since I bought it a few years back. If I shut it down every time, it boots back up normally (albeit slowly — it takes a ridiculously long time to boot up). But if I put it in hibernation or sleep mode via the button or close the lid, it won’t come back on unless I hit the start button, at which point it brings up the BSOD and I have to restart it from that, which takes even longer.
I spent an absurd amount of time chatting with Samsung customer service to try to fix it and have visited all sorts of tech pages trying to figure it out, to no avail. I’ve sorta learned to live with it because I can’t be without it for more than a day or two due to work.
ThresherK
@Betty Cracker: I know nothing about the Samsungs, sorry.
My use of hibernation on my Dell w/Win7 is via the menu only, and I rarely trust “sleep” to conserve the battery while not plugged in.
Best of luck.
Iowa Old Lady
@skwerlhugger: I actually kind of agree only I’d extend the self obsession to the entire east coast from DC on up. This winter has been exceptionally bad for them. I do see that. But usually they get a snow storm like we get regularly and it’s national news. And Cuomo as a presidential possibility? No one around here has the faintest idea who he is. It’s a function of the MSM being headquartered there, I think, and it distorts the national news.
Germy Schoemangler
@Iowa Old Lady: “And Cuomo as a presidential possibility? No one around here has the faintest idea who he is.”
He is leaning heavily on public school teachers. He wants more charter schools. He is in the middle of a bitter feud with the teachers union.
He’s worked closely in the past with Chris Christie, making secret pacts and non-aggression agreements.
He is loathed by people on both sides of the political divide.
raven
@Iowa Old Lady: And breathless accounts of spectacular basketball in Iowa are swell. And then there is the stupid focus on Iowa and their moronic election impact. Distort indeed.
PurpleGirl
@Iowa Old Lady: Ask any NY Democrat and you’ll likely find someone who voted for Cuomo the first time because the Rethuglican was a true crazy (Carl Paladino) and voted the second time for Cuomo because, hell “I’m a Democrat and I never vote Rethugican”. I can defend the first vote but am unhappy that the NYS Democratic Party can’t develop better candidates. And after his years in office, I came to dislike Mario Cuomo and so, I don’t like political families either.
Penus
@Mike J: Thank you! Also, “Super Bowl” is two words. Maybe he hit a character limit, but if he hadn’t used that superfluous apostrophe…
boatboy_srq
@BillinGlendaleCA: Samsung is making some excellent SSDs. The 850 series (PRO and EVO both) are using some pretty sophisticated tech – MBTF numbers are crazy. Prices are decent too: a new 250 GB 850 EVO for my laptop will cost less than the 120 GB Kingston I put in my netbook and run more than twice as fast.
“Have become”? After umpteen years of denying LGBT folks participation? They’re just noticing this now? Humph.
delk
Off to my orthopedic surgeon to see how my fractured spine is doing. Thankfully it is warm out.
Gex
God, how I loathe the “up is down” thinking that is Catholicism on this topic. Divisive, you see, is allowing everyone to participate. Not divisive would apparently be literally dividing people into groups of those allowed and those not allowed.
Even thinking what they think, they should see that their phrasing makes them look stupid.
Iowa Old Lady
@raven: I can’t speak for the coverage of Iowa basketball because I never see it, but the coverage of the caucuses is ridiculous. It matters, because it’s an early indicator but it doesn’t matter as much as the hysterical coverage suggests.
But I gotta say, the funniest part of the coverage is that the reporters are always horrified by the weather.
Also, don’t any of the them know that the Straw Poll is a Republican fund raiser? They pay people to go to that thing and vote for them.
Iowa Old Lady
@raven: @PurpleGirl: WP just ate my comment. I can’t speak for sport coverage because I don’t see it, but the coverage of the caucuses is, indeed, over the top. And don’t get me started on the preposterous Straw Poll.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Betty Cracker: Both Vista and 7 have always had sleep/hibernate issues. I’m chasing down something similar today. You wouldn’t happen to have a note of what codes your BSOD shows, would you? Never know what I might trip over while looking for my issue.
Roger Moore
@Matt:
Nothing says inclusive and apolitical like a giant “Fags get out” sign.
Origuy
I’ve had trouble with hibernation failing recently on my HP. A lot of stuff gets written to the disk in a very short time while shutting down. In my case, I’m pretty sure the failures are due to heat problems.
Chuckles
Odd to conflate victories against other cities/regions with victories against yourself. 108 inches is a helluva lotta snow, and it may be a record among major cities (if one considers Buffalo 2nd-rate these days), but it’s not quite average in the UP of Michigan: http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Michigan/annual-snowfall.php
That’s some New York-level solipsism there, Boston, good job!
Tree With Water
One marker in this particular struggle for human rights is the near total absence nowadays of swish jokes about San francisco. For a good twenty years after Anita Bryant declared her love of orange juice and hatred of gay Americans, snide cracks about the city by cheap laugh comics and politicians abounded. And that’s no longer the case.