Resurrection Mary Sunshine

When I was a sophomore in high school, I paid a visit to a book liquidation warehouse that briefly occupied a back corner of the East Woburn industrial park on Washington Street. Any hopes I had concerning stacks of beautiful and cheap books were quickly dashed upon stepping inside the place.

I'm hardly retail manager material, but even so I have to question the logic of renting a few thousand square feet of space for the purpose of shifting dozens of pallets of programming guides for the TI-99/4A and hundreds of copies of the 1968 edition of the Kelley Blue Book. I ended up leaving with just two remotely interesting items plucked from the dollar bin (though I've since regretted not picking up the coffee table book about The Spinners I saw there).

One of the books was an "encylopedia of modern wars" so unashamedly Anglocentric that it dedicated sixteen column inches to the Great Franco-Anglo Slapfight of August 17, 1662 while summarizing the American Civil War as "The North fought the South over slavery and the North won." The other book was the 1974 edition of The Hitchhiker's Field Manual, subtitled "The Complete Guide to Hassle-Free Thumb-Tripping in North America."

The title and publication date say it all -- the book is a handy source of freak-friendly information on thumbing it (which is to transporation what Russian Roulette is to gun safety) across Nixonian America, full of such nuggets of practical wisdom as "beware of rednecks with axe handles" and "don't try to bribe an Idaho state trooper with a dime bag."

The manual also features a detailed state-by-state breakdown of hitcher-friendly and hitcher-adverse locales. (Berkeley = Good, Alabamba = Bad.) It was this cryptic passage from the entry covering Massachusetts that convinced me to purchase the book:

Freaks Beware!

Divided by a Common Language

It sounds perfectly clear to me, so the problem must reside with you rhotic-dependent types.

Mail order malaise!

Ye Olde Standby

It had to happen eventually, and present circumstances being what they are, it might as well be now.

The Classics

Train in Vain

Something important was lost when the MBTA got new trains for for the Red Line. While the robo-announcer's voice is always chipper and intelligible and courtesously reminds you to remember your belongings when exiting the car, I miss the personal touch that a real, weary human voice (amplified by the tinny PA system) provided.

Consider this my tribute to the world that was.

All aboard!

(My wife claims that the automated turnstile didn't double charge her Charlie Card during her last inbound trip from Quincy Center, so my info may be out of date. The last time I rode south of the Dot, it was to have a root canal procedure done, and the less I think back on that experience, the better.)

Waxing Poetic

The Bay State has a rich poetic tradition, from Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.

All are wonderful in their individual ways, but there is one piece of verse concerning this fabled region that stands above all others. It speaks to my soul as few works are able to, perfectly capturing a the essence of a place both geographically and spiritually familiar to me.

Here's an excerpt...

Modern Poetry

...though it pales in comparison to the complete genuine article that no person of culture should be without.

Non-rhotic Geography

The lion's share of local news personalities, with the exception of sportscasters or muckraking political commentators looking to maintain a populist veneer, adopt at least some form of the (depressingly bland) General American accent. R's roll off their tongues with practiced ease and their use of glottal stops and low vowels has been willfully suppressed.

Blood will tell, however, and what has been bred in the Bay State will come out whenever city and town names need be enunciated. It's the easiest way to tell the natives from the out-of-towners, as the former can't help pronouncing "Worcester" as "WOOS-TAH" and the latter strain mightily to keep from saying "WUR-CEST-ER." It's a trivial thing even among my list of petty irritations, but whenever I hear local place names rendered in accent-neutral Nebraskanese, I get a sensation similar to the feeling you get when you bite down on a piece of tinfoil.

"Woe-burn," my ass.

As a modest way of remedying the problem, I present this brief lesson in geographical pronunciation. Newscasters take note.

"Heading out from Boston, you will find Somerville, Revere, Everett, and Medford."

"Gloucester, Danvers, and Peabody are on the North Shore."

"Down on the South Coast, you can visit Dartmouth, New Bedford, and Fall River." (It's also where Comrade Thirdmate is currently berthed.)

"In the northwestern suburbs, one can find Billerica, Haverhill, Winchester, and most importantly, Woburn."