Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

So I foolishly went to Brookline Village this morning around 9am to run errands, thinking it’s past rush hour and the D line is fast so I can’t possibly miss my connection downtown. It’s not like two trees were going to fall on the D line in the space of a week, was it? Was it?

Well, somehow I’m always around for these things. I strolled down to the Brookline Village stop, but it was crawling with T workers. Any time you see a live T worker (as opposed to a CharlieCard machine) these days it’s a bad sign. The more T workers, the worse the situation is going to be.

I kept strolling towards the station though, because although there were two trains parked on the outbound track, the inbound track was clear and I was headed inbound. A T worker swiftly disabused me of my illusions of mass transit. He said there was a police action at Beaconsfield (two stops outbound) and the D line would be out of service for an hour. Go catch a bus to the C line, he added.

I was tempted to wait around and see if an inbound train came anyway, because T workers don’t necessarily know when the trains run or where the busses stop (even if they’re driving them at the time). This one seemed to think the 60 goes to the C line, when it actually goes to Kenmore. In fact, the comments at Bad Transit reveal that at least one inbound train in fact did come through Brookline Village, but at that point every police siren in Brookline was wailing its way Beaconsfield-ward and I figured the D line was really out of commission for the time being.

Fortunately I have a clue and I not only know which bus really goes to the C line but also which one is most likely to show up long after rush hour. I was already hosed as far as making my connection downtown went—the T stops for no man—but I gave it a shot anyway.

There were some very confused folks right behind me (perhaps refugees from the parked trains) as I was walking to the 66 stop who later tried to explain to the bus driver about the police action at Beaconsfield and that they’d already paid (quite a bit—the D line costs more than the regular subway, never mind a bus). He said he hadn’t heard about it, but he let them on the bus for free anyway. I asked the driver to announce the Coolidge Corner stop for them, since they didn’t seem to know the C line from the commuter rail. In that helpful MBTA way, he didn’t, but they managed to follow the more clueful commuters off the bus. The last I saw of them they were headed for the outbound platform; I certainly hope they meant to go outbound.

Of course I missed my connection (the legendary bus to the ‘burbs that runs once every hour and a half) and hours later when I finally got to work we speculated in vain about the police action. I googled it tonight, and according to the Brookline TAB it was a “bogus bomb scare” reported by a guy who thought his luggage was vibrating. I’m sure it was, along with everything else on the train, until he brought all D line service to a screeching halt for half the morning. (The article says it happened at 10am but I heard the sirens and got turned away from Brookline Village at 9:45 already. Some BadTransitters report even earlier times.)

I wonder how many more major incidents the D line will have this month—or this week.

I was on the D line Thursday, but I managed to avoid being hit by the tree. I didn’t even hear about it until my mother asked me whether I was hit by the tree. I did hear about the drunken college student who hit a pole at Warren Street on the B line, left his two passengers in the burning car—which later exploded, fortunately after some non-drunken person or persons had rescued the passengers—and thus took the B line out for a while this weekend. Of course this is all hearsay from reading the ever-informative Metro this morning, so my details may be off. In particular, I’m not certain that the car exploded.

This morning we were moving in fits and starts from the time the train went underground until we reached Government Center. I was late for my bus, but fortunately my bus was late as well.

Free the keys! The Dvorak Zine is a handy introduction to the One True Keyboard Layout. Your wrists will thank you…

I feel like I should provide content. Here’s a cool video game preview from YouTube:

Spore is a Sim Everything game—from amoeba to galactic conquest to fanfic. Read more about it from the NYT.

The Sudoku Variant of the Day is Hanidoku, which I discovered at Michael Mepham’s Daily Sudoku site. Hanidoku uses a hex-based board instead of a grid. As a longtime sudoku variant addict, I thought I’d start with the Moderate example, but it turned out to be pretty hard for a beginner.

There’s a whole site devoted to Hanidoku already with a daily HaniDoku, hints, and free Hanidoku software. You can also find some quick hints in this discussion thread.

I can’t resist blogging about weird new sudoku variants and the perpetual accident that is the T, so the blog is back. The website is also back at the ficml.org domain, although some links may be broken.

More news to follow at a more decent hour.

As of this post, the blog is officially petrified. I don’t have WordPress running here at freeshell.org; instead I have static copies of all the pages up for future reference. Future news will be posted in my LiveJournal, I suppose: jemimap.livejournal.com.

I was doing a database backup in order to upgrade WordPress to the latest and greatest when I saw that my hosting service will be closing up shop on July 31st. So instead of upgrading, I closed all comments to keep the spammers at bay for the interim.

Where will I go? What will I do?

I haven’t been blogging much lately, so I may just close down the blog and slink back to freeshell.org, my former host. They have some PHP support now, or so I hear (but not a free database for WordPress).

Sudoku Online now has a color version of their Jigsaw Sudoku of the Day. They also have a version with candidates, which is to say, the numbers 1 through 9 cluttering up the empty squares, and some examples of Jigsaw Samurai Sudoku.

Miss Snark is damn mad about a scam artist scamming an ISP into taking down a list of scam artists. Jim Hines recommends a google-bombing in response, so here’s the appropriate link to the scam artist from SFWA’s Top Twenty list: Barbara Bauer.

All’s fair in love and snark…

Update: Follow the fun with the Barbara Bauer Technorati tag.