B.I.C.: West Boylston Street

So the city repaved West Boylston Street a couple of weeks ago--wait, I should clarify: they re-paved MOST of West Boylston Street, leaving anywhere from about a foot to a few feet between the street and the curbs unpaved.

I figured they'd be coming back and paving out to the curbs sometime afterwards, but so far there's been no activity whatsoever. It's been morbidly entertaining to see people practically bottoming out their cars if they have to turn onto a side street or into the parking lots of one of the various businesses on West Boylston Street.

 

What the hell, City of Worcester? What's the thinking, here? "Eh, after a few years of heavy use, everything'll even out eventually!"

 This is certainly one of the biggest and most involved "Bump Installations" I've seen in quite some time. I can only imagine what Jeff would have had to say about it.

Something tells me she's CRAY-ZEE...

Of all the kind words written after Jeff's passing by the Worcester press and especially by the members of the local blogosphere, I was perhaps most pleased with the lack of any "contribution" by InCity Times publisher and ranter-in-chief Rosalie Tirella.  I figured she was busy with one of her typical projects: using to ICT website to liveblog the saga of her deadbeat neighbor allegedly trying to steal her boyfriend by flashing him, cut-n-pasting press releases from groups like PETA for publication in her newspaper, yelling at passing clouds, etc. 

Unfortunately, she decided to weigh in on the continuation of Jeff's Worcester Blogroll project by Nicole Apostola and Mike Benedetti yesterday with one of her patented grammatically atrocious screeds, the lowlight of which was her attempting to assess my mother's mental state due to her having committed the terrible sin of doing something nice for people Rosalie doesn't like.  Since my mother shouldn't have to lower herself by responding to this garbage, I thought I'd take one for the team and send Rosalie a message:

Rosalie,

I'm Jeff Barnard's stepson, and I only just became aware of your recent posting on the InCity Times site.  I wanted to try and clear up a few points for you:

- The Worcester Blogroll that was taken over by Mike and Nicole is an entirely separate entity from Jeff's blog, WormtownTaxi, which will be staying up "as is" for the foreseeable future.

- As Jeff's illness progressed the Blogroll was essentially mothballed, much to his dismay; by its nature, it requires constant updating, which he simply did not feel up to doing.

- My mother freely offered to turn the Blogroll over to Mike and Nicole after I passed along a message inquiring as to its status, as she had no interest in maintaining the site.

- No money was ever spent on or made from the Blogroll; it is simply a collection of links to local content on a Blogger site, which costs nothing to set up.

Finally, I'd like to take issue with the general tone of your post and especially with the title/headline, which I found to be particularly crass; regardless of your feelings towards Mike and Nicole and any previous dealings you've had with them, my mother has been through quite a lot in the past few months and does not deserve to have someone making assumptions in print (digital or otherwise) about her feelings, motivations, state of mind, etc.  If you ever feel the need to write anything else about my family, please feel free to contact me as opposed to simply making things up and misspelling everyone's names.
 
--S.

Since Rosalie seems to enjoy embarrassing herself in public, I assume any response will also end up being posted on the ICT site; if not, I’ll be sure to follow up here.

Jeff Memorial

Thanks to everyone who came to the memorial last night. This is a picture of a table full of Jeff memorabilia, including the key to the city that he received from Mayor O'Brien last month, as well as the cellphone that he used to take most of the pictures on Wormtown Taxi.

Jeff

When my mother met and married Jeff, I was just entering that Dumb Surly Teenager phase that everyone goes through at one time or another.  My own father having been more-or-less absent throughout my childhood, Jeff became my first consistently present male authority figure at a time when hormones and an overdeveloped sense of self-importance were driving me to rebel against authority in general and parental figures in particular.  As difficult as it can be to become part of a pre-existing family unit, I think Jeff managed it as well as anyone could have done.

Jeff had a passion for knowledge, an acute awareness of the world around him in matters both local and global, and a healthy skepticism of anyone who claimed to have all the answers.  All these things--along with his disarming humor and inimitable writing style--made him a fixture in the Worcester blogging scene.  It was heartening to see so many of his fellow local writers rally around him during his illness, and I know it meant a lot to him as well.

I am happy that he and my mother found each other and had so many wonderful years together, and I was especially proud that he considered me his son.  I will miss him more than I can say.

How Trashy

No, I'm not talking about the ongoing Tiger Woods saga. I stopped over at the Greendale Mall to do some X-Mas browsing and while I didn't take the bus home, I did walk up the stairway that leads to the pickup point for the inbound bus.

This area was always somewhat messy back when I worked at the mall about 5 years ago, but it has gotten WAY out of hand in a relatively short amount of time.

Seriously, this is what awaits anyone taking the bus from the only shopping mall that remains within the city limits? I don't recall the area around the malls in Auburn or Marlborough looking anywhere near this awful. Of course, the Worcester RTA hasn't serviced the Solomon Pond Mall for quite a while.

Can you imagine the shitstorm that would erupt if the super-fancy Shoppes at Blackstone Valley in Millbury had a layer of trash surrounding their stop for the RTA service they finally managed to get last year? I'm not sure if it's the RTA or the city that is responsible for cleaning up this mess, but I will make it a point to find out in the next couple of days.

Urge to rant...rising...

I haven't blogged in months and months, but I just saw something that really made me shake my head. With everything that's going on in the world right now, what's the number one story on CNN's website at the moment?


Whether or not some golf asshole fighting with his wife had something to do with a car accident where no one was seriously hurt. Way to stay distracted by meaningless bullshit, everybody!

On a more local note, can someone tell the person that comes up with the Worcester T&G website's poll questions to stop making at least one of the possible answers have something to do with being broke? I understand that times are tough and financial woes are on everyone's mind, but it's really getting ridiculous. Today's poll question has not one, but TWO examples of this:


And of course those answers are the two highest vote-getters, because there's nothing the average Worcesterite loves to do more than complain. Not that this trait is confined to Worcester, or even New England...

Mitsuharu Misawa, 1962-2009

Misawa was one of the few wrestlers I could point to and say, "This man embodies what makes pro wrestling so compelling to me." In an industry that often relies on silly gimmicks and freak acts, here was a man who went out and used his incredible athleticism to tell compelling stories in the ring--stories that transcended language and culture and won him fans around the world. He was the stoic yet charismatic standard-bearer of a generation of wrestlers from the All-Japan promotion who worked a style that merged the tough, realistic work of the 70's with the flashy, high-risk action that dominated the 80's and 90's. Sadly, it was also a style that proved to be his undoing. Years of crippling injuries left him unable to maintain a healthy physique and as he grew more and more immobile, he seemed to fall back on his ability to absorb tremendous amounts of punishment. After destroying his knees with top-rope splashes and dives to the floor, he moved on to doling out gruesome elbow strikes and taking dangerous high-impact drops directly on his head. When I heard that he had died in the ring after a backdrop suplex, my mind flashed back to the hundreds of times I had seen him land hard on his neck and shoulders from that maneuver. Although it pains me to say such a thing, it was strangely appropriate for his death to come while performing in the ring. It's certainly preferable to the now all-too-familiar cliche of wrestlers being found dead in hotel rooms from some lethal pharmaceutical cocktail.

Perhaps it is naive to think that Misawa's passing will lead to a re-examination of the punishing style that forces many wrestlers in Japan to retire early and nearly crippled. After all, it is likely that very thing--the allure of seeing real injuries during a display of "fake" fighting--that keeps the crowds coming back night after night. Here in America, the demand for incredibly over-muscled stars along with the grueling road schedule, leads far too many wrestlers to risk their health with steroids, human growth hormone, and copious amounts of painkillers. It was likely a combination of all of these factors--along with mental issues that went undiagnosed for far too long--that led Chris Benoit to commit the deplorable acts that he did. Like the Benoit tragedy, Misawa's death is yet another reminder of why my enthusiasm for pro wrestling has diminished in recent years. Unlike comic book heroes, the trials and tribulations of these larger-than-life characters exact a horrible price on the men and women who portray them.