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Showing posts from February, 2013

Unscientific ranking of major mass transit systems

I'm a big geek and have always loved subways, trains and the like. To the point that, if I'm traveling, I feel like riding the subway in a given city is somehow a "more real" experience of the city than many other things. It's how the proletariat gets around. Trains are an equalizer... the rich sit next to the poor and get the same place at the same time, subject to the same delays. Tonight, taking the San Francisco Bay Area's BART back to the Easy Bay from San Fran, I marveled at the Transbay Tube, a nearly 4-mile tunnel under San Francisco Bay that has dutifully withstood seismic events of all manner since 1974. The BART is a great system, but I've been fortunate enough to travel all over the place and had a hop on the local transit system in many places. As such, here's a completely biased, unscientific ranking of the world's best transit systems that I've managed to come across. By the way... Boston is disqualified from making this list

Time to Save the Grammys

I've always been into music, but I'd judge 7th grade as being the year that I really started to CARE about music. That was the year that a girl in my middle school, after hearing me talk about my love of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, sent me home with a tape of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine . Few moments are as defining. Not only because it got me into that band, but more that it was the moment that really got me to explore music. From that moment, I have had a constant hunger for new music. Before I started typing this blog, I was on Amazon listening to samples of an album I may just download today. That moment back in 7th grade was the moment the Grammy Awards started to piss me off. Before I had a real understanding of the music business (read: before I realized this was basically a way for people to get rich off of artists, who may or may not get rich), I used to vent about the INJUSTICE of the Grammys. How they rewarded shitty music when there was justsomuchbetterstu