Vanishing Davis

This weekend was beautiful so on Friday, when the sun was out and the sky was nice, I took pictures of two businesses on Highland Avenue whose physical presences will be just a memory to those of us who were there Back In The Day, whenever that Day is. One's already been closed and the other will be closing sometime next month.



R. J. Cody (something of a "Eweler", if you believe the large sign out front) had a combination jewelry and stationery store. I never went in, but I bet the atmosphere was always very quiet, as quiet as businesses running on inertia and borrowed time often tend to be. It's now closed and the windows have been papered up, but I believe there's work going on inside. For what, I don't know. I do hope whatever business takes over keeps and re-uses that nice 3D sign. The UPS store down the block a bit re-used their space's sign.



La Contessa is a lovely Italian pastry shop and one of the few places this side of the Charles where you could get a damn good cannoli, filled right before your very eyes, as well as those black-and-white cookies you can only get in Italian pastry shops. It's family-run and operated, with a blessing from Pope John Paul II hanging proudly on the wall. No, he didn't visit, but the Pope will send you a nice blessing if you know the right people and send the right contribution. But I bet if he had stopped in, JP2 would have enjoyed the cannoli. While Ron Newman reports the family has been rather sketchy with providing details, it doesn't look as if La Contessa will last past Mother's Day, so get your black-and-whites while you still can.

IHNTS, IJLS "muni wifi"

(parts of the following narrative have escaped from the Universal Hub for the benefit of those of you who may not visit UH to keep abreast of Boston goings-on. And if you don't have the time to read this, rest assured BostonNOW!!1 will probably co-opt this piece at some point next week when they think nobody's watching, so be sure to look for it on the floor of a subway train near you.)

A fun story of Internet Blowup came about this weekend when a nice blogger, who was not me for a change, wrote that he had used Boston's free municipal WiFi service in Quincy Market. There, he discovered that the free WiFi had gone and blocked Boing Boing, everybody's favorite source for DRM arguments and earwax stories. So instead of reading about how Cory Doctorow found yet another hilarious Unintentional Goatse picture involving two hands placed vaguely somewhere near an O-shaped object, our erstwhile WiFier got a very pretty notice informing him that the site had been blocked, with the official Seal of Boston, Thomas M. Menino Mayor, lovingly placed on the top of the whole thing.

Well! Anybody with two neurons in their head to bang together could easily draw the same conclusion that Boing Boing, Slashdot, and any number of digital reactionaries did: that BOSTON MAYOR THOMAS M. MENINO PERSONALLY BANNED BOING BOING BECAUSE IT MADE FUN OF HIM FOR THE WHOLE MOONINITE THING! Surely any other scenario besides this self-important theory of personal vendettin' could not be plausible!

Fortunately, one saner head prevailed, and that saner head belonged to Seth Finkelstein, who took a look at the blocking software that the muni wifi uses and discovered the real reason behind this whole froo-frah. Boing Boing had included a link to a Google search with the Safe Search feature disabled in the URL. The automated blocking software caught the portion of the URL that disables Safe Search, red flags went up, and hey presto Fanueil Hall is all the safer for it since nobody can be laptopping any prurient Google searches around here, no sir no how.

Kind of anti-climactic, don't you think? Isn't it more fun to imagine that, since the mayor's name was featured in the screenshot, he was the one who ordered the hit? Of course it is. I mean, can't you just see Menino in his office, all fired up and hopping mad, ( tapping at a keyboard? )

And that's how city politix is done, childrens.

and now OLD JOKE THEATER PRESENTS

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT ABBIE THE CAT #49

abbie the cat weighs 20 pounds

TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR MORE EXCITING COMEDY JOKES!