Boston: Comfortably Warm
By Jim Rue
Boston is unseasonably warm for June, much less early March. While it rains buckets back in Southern California where I live, I enjoy Boston temperatures with a highly unlikely daytime temperature in the eighties.
As soon as the business day is over, I drive the mile to Cambridge across the dirty water in the Charles River. I take my jacket with me to be prudent, but don't ever have to use it. I park and, very aware that I am walking in the footsteps of world famous, glorious computer geeks, I find my way to M.I.T. and to the building profiled in 'The Media Lab' by Nicolas Negroponte. There I wander the halls until the building closes for the day.
The Media Lab was involved in the most advanced areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D modeling and natural language speech recognition for a while, as well as the use of computers in architecture and design, art and fashion, and general playtime.
The Media Lab
While the work they conduct at the MIT Media Lab is serious and high-minded, the building is Santa's toyshop for the students who go there. The cost of admission is high. If you have to ask how high, your grades aren't good enough. If your grades are perfect, a scholarship may get you started, if you have a friend with connections who can get you an interview.
One five-inch hologram hanging in an office window depicts a single stargazer lily in a vase. It is a parallax view, meaning that the view changes as you walk by, but also if you stand on tiptoe and look down from above. If you bend down and look up at the image from below eye level, the label on the bottom of the vase may be seen. This five-inch photograph occupies more than a gigabyte of hard drive storage space.
As the lab building closes for the day, it occurs to me that I have not seen Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, strongly recommended to me by a friend. I missed the science museum by the river too. I make up for it with a very good Italian dinner at Bertucci's in Cambridge before crossing the bridge back to Boston Massachusetts. The waitress is very friendly and volunteers some pithy remarks about her clientele from MIT.
The Insanity of Boston Streets
Rattling up and down streets as I try to return from MIT, it takes me two frustrating hours to retrace my steps across the bridge from Cambridge. The streets of Boston are famously circuitous and very confusing. What sort of city has four streets in a row, all marked one-way going in the same direction? I encounter the situation more than once. Maybe they were the same streets. I don't know.
I learn later that the streets of Boston Ma are built on cattle and deer paths. I remember visiting Boston with my parents, vacationing as a small child. We got to within two blocks of Old Ironsides. We could see the masts! But we never got there because my dad got so lost on Boston streets that we eventually found ourselves at the city limits and gave up.
A Lucky Break
The buildings here are stately and ancient, bearing such historic names as Nathaniel Hall and Paul Revere. The shops and restaurants are small and local, disassociated from our nation of Fortune 500 chains. Local pubs and clubs elevate colorful fiends and heroes, just like back home. But here in Boston it is not uncommon for a person to own one storefront café all his or her life. Local pride is strong.
Boston is a beautiful town, more like San Francisco than any other that comes to mind. The mid-eighties temperatures in March don't hurt either. Everyone who can get away is out on the streets until late in the evening, celebrating an early spring in Boston in shorts and shirtsleeves. It turns out to be more like Indian Winter. After three days the heat wave disappears as abruptly as it arrived. As I drive out of town the temperature plummets thirty degrees.