A Boston marathon of random thoughts

* I have been to Boston several times in my life, though not in the past five years. I had an ex whose family lived near there. I loved the mass transit in the region.

* My very good friend Karen used to live in Somerville, which is just north of the Cambridge, part of the area where a lot of the activity on Friday took place. Her sister, who I have known for decades, still lives in that section, and I was wondering how much she had directly affected by the shutdown.

* I won $17,600 on JEOPARDY! in Boston in 1998, with friends Karen and Judy, and Judy’s son Max in the audience.

* Some talking head wondered if the bombing in Boston would make Americans more sensitive to the ravages of war that take place in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. My guess is no.

* A lot of bad info from CNN, who had reporter a bomber had been captured on April 17, then awkwardly walked back its own story on air later that afternoon.

* Amy’s poem Boston Meltdown reminded me why I stopped watching ABC News; it was the cult of personalty – “Diane Sawyer’s my friend!” – which rankles me.

* Some news analyst referred to the M.I.T. cop who was shot and killed as

Drop a Flag on that Barkeep

When I went to that conference I mentioned, there was some free time on the first two evenings. So I went to the bar to get a glass of wine. Somehow neither of the bartender’s saw me initially, and I waited a bit longer than I should have, but eventually got served.

This sent me to a flashback to June 14, 1991. My Significant Other and I were in Boston to visit her mother and her brother. For reasons too complicated to describe here, we couldn’t stay at their house, but had to stay at a hotel.

Since we were in town, we decided to see if, somehow, there were tickets to that night’s Red Sox-California Angels game. We seriously doubted it; Roger Clemens, the Red Sox ace hurler was on the mound against the one-handed pitching phenom Jim Abbott. Somehow, there were not only seats available, but we got to sit right behind home plate!

The game itself,

My Favorite Years QUESTION

Possibly around the time I was writing about nostalgia, the Wife and I were talking about the favorite years in our lives.

I picked 1969, the year I turned 16, and my parents let me have a huge party. I had a girlfriend, I got elected president of the student government, which made me an irritant to the new principal, and I was figuring out who I was politically, especially compared to the transitional 1968. Music was great that year, too.

Then there was 1978, the year I worked at the Schenectady Arts Council, got a girlfriend, and finally stopped my nomadic existence.

1984 was the year

30 Day Challenge: Day 26-A Picture From One Of The Greatest Days Of Your Life

Hey, nothing in the instructions said it had to be a picture of me!

Above is a picture of Alex Trebek , host of a game show called High Rollers, which I would occasionally watch 30+ years ago. But more to the point, he has been the host of the game show JEOPARDY! since 1984.

To be honest, I’m not sure if that picture of him is from the day I was on JEOPARDY! But it WAS from one of the programs that was filmed in Boston, and the two weeks of programming in Boston was filmed over a two-day period, five shows per day, so I have a 50% chance of it being from the day I was taping, though not necessarily the episodes.