Month: February 2004

Grey Tuesday

A musician named DJ Danger Mouse took two albums — The Beatles White album and Jay-Z’s Black Album — and mixed them together, resulting in The Grey Album. I’m not a hip-hop fan, and I get uncomfortable when my speakers start shouting “nigga,” so I normally wouldn’t be interested in something like this. Except that DJ Danger Mouse is not being allowed to sell his record because the Beatles’ people (EMI) won’t allow him to infringe on their copyright. Jay-Z specifically released a vocals-only version of his album so that people could do exactly this, but EMI is living in some sort of rhetorical hole where artistic creations and variations based on their “properties” are somehow dangerous.

In honor of the right to create new culture based on existing culture, 40 years old and otherwise, today has been declared Grey Tuesday, and sites across the web are posting The Grey Album in protest of EMI’s pigheaded actions.

I downloaded the entire album off of Limewire in about five minutes. I’ve removed the local version, I don’t have the bandwidth to keep it up for any period of time.

Ooooo scary

Char and I were coming home on the T yesterday on the redline going southbound. The train had just passed the Charles/MGH stop and was at Park Street. A voice came on the loudspeaker and said “the next stop will be Charles/MGH.” This of course makes no sense, since we just came from there.

The stop after Park is Downtown Crossing, and that’s where we were going to transfer to the Orange Line to get home. There’s an underground concourse that connects Park Street and Downtown Crossing, so we decided to get off the train and walk underground to the station.

Unfortunately, there were a bunch of police and fire officials at the underground concourse, and they told us we should walk to Downtown above ground. I asked if the station was closed too, or just the concourse. The policeman said yeah, the station’s still open.

At this point I was thinking a water main had busted and flooded the tunnel. The concourse might be flooded, making underground travel to Downtown impossible (or at least very wet).

When we got to Downtown (now above ground), there were more fire trucks, and more police cars. We tried to go into the station from one entrance, and the firefighter there said to use the other entrance. We used the other entrance, and _finally_ someone told us that, in fact, the whole station was closed after all. It’s amazing how poor the communication between these guys was over a mere 500 feet.

We ended up walking to Chinatown and taking the train from there.

Today I found this in the paper:

qdoba update!

Well thank goodness my site is the highest rated result for “boston qdoba” on google. I got an email today from an alert reader who found my site and says:

we seem to be in the same boat because I,too, am searching for a qdoba competitor and anna’s just doesn’t cut it! A few days ago I was in the Copley mall and low and behold, there is a qdoba actually coming to the mall! Word has it that there are three of them coming to boston soon…just thought you might be interested….hope you enjoy it!

This is great news, and I will no longer have to pine for burritos I can’t have. I never mentioned this, but when Char visited me for Thanksgiving she actually brought a Qdoba burrito on the plane from wisconsin so that I could have one in Massachusetts. It was totally unexpected, and even nuked it was delicious. She’s a great gal.