From the New York Times, on how triple-decker houses in New England have been hit with unusually high foreclosure rates:

Boston, home to roughly 15,000 three-deckers, is taking a different approach. It has not demolished any abandoned three-deckers because city officials want to preserve as many affordable housing units as possible, said Evelyn Friedman, chief and director of the Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development.

Modern zoning laws, Ms. Friedman said, would never allow three units on such small lots.

“If we have four three-deckers on 12,000 square feet and could only get two on that amount of land now,” Ms. Friedman said, “we are losing six units. So it’s very important to us to sustain them.”

Or you could, you know, change the zoning laws, you know?

Click to make bigger and more adorable!

Didn’t I promise occasional cat-blogging on this thing? Hoagie has fallen head over heels in love with a pair of clogs that Amber bought on the Internet, and spends an inordinate amount of time lying on top of them and rubbing her face against them, as shown here. She also occasionally attempts to cram her entire head inside one of the shoes, but she usually realizes how ludicrous this looks and stops before I have time to grab a camera.

She is the only cat I’ve ever owned who is at all sentimental about objects — she loves her toys and will drag them all over the house, and, back when Amber’s hair was long enough to require hair-scrunchies, would occasionally grab those off the dresser and stash them in odd places. This is the first time she’s ever gotten hot and heavy with a pair of shoes, though. I presume the previous owner treated them with catnip oil for some reason.

One of my favorite vague-air-of-menace Baltimore spots is right around the corner from me: the alleyway behind the Waverly Library that leads into the the back entrance to the always wonderful Thai Restaurant. (Yes, my favorite Thai restaurant is named “Thai Restaurant,” although it comes up on my credit card bills as the more impressive-sounding “Royal Thai.”) As you walk across the crumbling asphalt, you get the vague feeling that this is where you might be led to be killed execution style, though it quickly becomes clear that you’re just in a narrow parking lot leading to the restaurant’s back door.

On the rear of one of the buildings that abut this alleyway is one of my favorite bits of Baltimore graffiti. This is what it looked like last fall (click to enlarge):

Where is the love, indeed? A somewhat more emo-philosophical sentiment than one usually expects from spray-painted verbiage on the side of a building. A couple weeks ago, though, I noticed that it had been embellished (again, click for bigness):

You’ll notice that the graffiti has in fact received a little love, with the word “love” being embellished and a cute dandelion being added. This is what I like about Baltimore: even the blight is kind of quirky, and people are willing to find — and embellish — the beauty in the rough.

This is a picture of me at an entirely different event, but at least it gives you a chance to see what I look like holding a microphone.

There’s been a trend of having live events in which people get on stage and tell true stories about their lives. One of the most famous versions is New York City’s The Moth, though Baltimore’s iteration has fewer Malcolm Gladwells and Ethan Hawkes and more, uh, Josh Fruhlingers. I’ve been to plenty of Stoops, and while there are occasional local celebrities (at the last one I saw, the mayor of Baltimore told a story about how her little brother shat on her one Christmas, no lie), mostly they are just regular folks who have moving/hilarious anecdotes to tell. Plus, there are musical interludes from Caleb Stine and the Brakemen, who are the coolest!

One of the great things about this event is that audience members get to participate: if you want to tell a story, you can put your name in a hat before the show starts, and three names are drawn after intermission for quick three-minute stories. A few years ago I actually was one of these audience storytellers, when the topic was “living together”; here’s my contribution, recorded for posterity.

This time I’ll be talking for twice as long, about my failure on Jeopardy! The other six storytellers are also really great and hilarious too. Now, here’s the awkward part; tickets are actually sold out, at least in theory. I’ve been told that they do hold some tickets back for day-of sales, though, so if you’re Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, I encourage you to stop by and try to get some. The show is at Center Stage at 700 N. Calvert St. in Baltimore. And if you miss it, I promise to post my audio here. Doors open at 7 pm for cocktails and live music — if you don’t have tickets, showing up early is your only hope!

I'd marry this train, if it weren't against God's law

So, TRAINS! Hells yeah! One thing that I do for “fun” is check in every once in awhile on new public transit projects in the pipeline, because I’m a huge public transit dork, both by necessity (I don’t drive, so I actually take public transit more than most people in this country) and by choice (I love geeking out about things generally, and big machines and infrastructure projects in particular). One of these projects that seems farther along than most is SMART (can I tell you how much I hate cutesy acronyms?), which is a rail line that will be running through Sonoma and Marin counties in California. It’s sort of halfway between a light rail line (not that “light rail” has any sort of meaning outside of marketing fluff) and a commuter rail line — diesel trains, mostly single track, half-hour headways, passing through various mid-sized population centers, etc. Perhaps closer to an old-school interurban than anything else, though interurbans were generally electric, I think.

But! Here’s the exciting part. The SMART folks have are using DMU trains on the line — which is to say trains that are diesel powered all-one-vehicle thingies, rather than a locomotive with no passenger facilities pulling passenger cars with no engines. There aren’t very many DMUs in use in the US right now, but they could be huge, very quickly, because they make it super-easy to turn existing freight or disused rail lines into passenger rail transit of some sort, because all you need to do is buy the vehicles and whip up some basic stations.

Sadly, like most things that are awesome, DMUs are made by foreigners, but there are a number of foreign companies that make them, and SMART appears to have asked most of them to send in their proposals for the kind of vehicles they’d deliver if they got the contract. In the surprisingly transparent decision that prompted this post, SMART slapped all of these proposals up on their Website — or at least PDFs of their PowerPoint presentations, which had all the hot train pictures, anyway. Check ‘em out!

• Ansaldo Breda (Italians; I think I rode some of their older DMUs in Sicily, they were loud and squeaky)
• Bombardier (Canadians; is it really necessary to put pictures of your damn planes in the presentation? SMART is not buying an air force)
• CAF (Spanish)
• Nippon Sharyo (Japanese; pictured below; FRA compliant, which is HOTT, more on which in a moment)
• Siemens (German)
• Stadler (also German; PowerPoint slide about fire safety awesomely includes picture of an actual flaming train interior)

DMUs are actually really common outside North America on exactly the kind of mid-level service they want to build in the North Bay, but the tricky thing about using them here is that there are all kinds of regulations put in place by the Federal Railroad Administration that says to make trains more crash-safe, which the bulk of those foreign DMUs don’t meet. (Said regulations involve making trains much heavier and more expensive.) You’re allowed to run non-FRA compliant trains so long as they won’t ever co-exist on tracks with FRA-compliant trains — the DMU setups in south Jersey and San Diego County do this. There was one American company that made FRA-compliant DMUs, Colorado Railcar; it spent years pimping itself as the future of transit, finally got a real client, Portland’s Westside Express Service, then promptly went bankrupt while in the process of building the trains for Portland. (The Portland transit agency actually had to take control of the shell of the company just to get the three — three! — railcars it had bought.)

But! The cool kids from Japan, Nippon Sharyo, offer in their proposal to deliver FRA-compliant trains, because why not?

Coming to a real railway near you?

I imagine their bet is that more folks will be wanting these soon enough — not least Amtrak, which might find them more efficient to run on lower-patronage routes. (Rumor has it Amtrak has been pressuring Vermont to use them for its Amtrak line.) Sure, high-speed rail is sexy, but these could improve rail coverage on the existing network, which has its points.

Do you live in Baltimore, or somewhere Baltimore-ish? What are you doing this Saturday afternoon? What’s that? Something boring and non-hula-hoop related? Well, we’ll fix that!

Fluid Movement, Baltimore’s #1 performance art group of random delight, is putting on its fourth annual Hoola-Hoop-A-Thon this Saturday, May 23, at St. John’s Church in Charles Village (2640 St. Paul St.). Fun starts at 1 p.m., but be there by 12:30 if you want to compete.

Oh, yes: it’s a competition! You will be judged in endurance (there’s a time cut-off; it’s not some endless Depression-style torture session for the amusement of the swells), travel (i.e. how far and fast you can walk/run while hooping), freestyle verve, and “challenge rounds” (I have no idea what this means, but it sounds scary/awesome). And one of the referees will be my lovely wife (pictured above)!

It should be pretty obvious at this point that this is going to be awesome and you should come. And bring your kids! (I was telling our new next-door neighbors about this and I mentioned that there were lots of kids there and then I felt weird for mentioning this. Would it be more appropriate to say “Feel free to bring gown-ups?”) You can bring your own hoop, rent or buy hoops there, or just watch the hypnotic, rhythmic twirling. $5 admission fee, or $10 to compete. There will be food, as well!

Zut alors! I am in space!

So the European Space Agency (yeah, they have one!) is holding tryouts for astronauts! They’ll pick the first Euro-spacepersons since 1992(!). When this was announced, apparently reporters were badgering the ESA spokesdrone with questions like “From which of the countries that fund your agency will the space-men come?” and “Will some of the space-men be ladies?”, because she kept repeating over and over again that “excellence” was the only criteria for selection.

Here’s the thing, though: there will be four space-persons picked, out of 8,400 applicants. That’s like 0.04 percent. I’m pretty sure that there will be more than four totally excellent people in the pool; it’s not like you’ll be able to stick them all into some kind of excellence-quantifying machine and rank them by EQ (excellent quotient). So, you know what? I think that, once you’ve got the pool winnowed down to the, say, two or three dozen excellentest folks who come out of this process, it’s totally legitimate to start making decisions based on, say, making sure the governments who pay your bills are not pissed off, or on not continuing to exclude women from macho jobs.

Sure, fewer people went to the Preakness this year, what with the decline in interest in horse racing and Pimlico’s banning of outside beverages, but at least smaller crowds mean less work for the cleanup crews!

Also, note that one of the clean-up guys is wearing a shirt advertising a bail bondsman. Baltimore is classy!

Well, in some ways the seeds were planted while I was working on one of the blogs-for-hire I write, for ITworld.com. It started earlier this month, when I wondered if rumors that Mac laptops would soon be available with high-speed cellular modems built in were really such a good idea, since they’d require people who probably already have a cell phone to shell out for another monthly fee on their wireless bill. As events transpired over the next week, the post I’d already written put me in the frame of mind to to muse (hopefully) interestingly about the coming end of flat-fee broadband data and why wireless networks are already in trouble.

What struck me writing this series of posts was that, while all three could stand alone, each helped me think more cogently about the next. I realized that just the process of having a stream of discrete posts was an aid to synthesis, a help to getting at bigger themes. It occurred to me that it would be nice to have a place where I could do that for all the disparate thoughts I have — both those that end up on my (very different) blogs and those that right now just sort of rattle around my own head and then die. I’m thinking that if I can make that larger synthesis with some of these ideas, I can spin them off into other writing projects (not blogs, I dearly hope).

Of course, this blog will also be the personal blog I didn’t have before, where I can plug the various things I do (like, say, interesting posts on my Mac blog — SEE WHAT I DID THERE?), announce exciting Josh Fruhlinger-related events, share my uninformed political ideas, blather on about local and national entertainment of which I am fond, and, of course, post pictures of my cat. Sometimes, I hope, it will be funnier than this post. I can’t promise to update on a daily schedule, so you’ll probably want subscribe to the RSS feed. I hope you’ll stick around.