Blindsided

Friday. Snow is faintly falling.

In an impressive piece of hard hitting journalism, Boston.com ferrets out the best places to cry in the Boston area. There’s even a map. They put a marker on the entire town of Hanover with no explanation. Weird. But then again, so is this entire premise.

There are more problems with the Massachusetts vaccine website. It crashed under load on the day vaccines were opened up to everyone over 65. The state used PrepMod software to set up the site. Hiawatha Bray reports that the company blamed the breakdown on “a sudden and unprecedented surge in traffic to the site.” Meanwhile, a woman who set up a similar website from her kitchen, for free, said her site didn’t crash because she designed it to work off an Internet cloud-based system that has ample capacity for traffic spikes. “Our site is doing just fine, which is great and to be expected, We had, like, thousands of requests per minute.”

Bad news: the Brotherhood of Thieves, on Nantucket, is closing. They lost their lease, so even if they do manage a comeback, it won’t be in the same location.

Perseverance rover made it to Mars. There were some tense moments. Then applause.

And Kalashnikov, maker of the of the AK-47, is releasing a new gun. It has wi-fi and bluetooth and can pair with your phone. Just what we needed.

An empty chair

Ah, Saturday. Avast, ye scurvy bilge rats.

Well, it’s official. Just having a smartphone in your pocket makes you stupid.

Sad news overnight about Ruth Bader Ginsburg‘s passing. The politics around who will replace her on the court is about to become insane, 2020-style.

Speaking about 2020-style politics, there’s this in New Hampshire.

Nantucket in the 1970s was an interesting place. The Chicken Box and Prestons. Mitchell’s Books, The Hub. Beach parties just like the one in Jaws. Star Wars at the Dreamland Theater and those curly fries at The Brotherhood. You might see Fred Rogers or one of the Stillers in the checkout line at the Finast. But one fixture on the island was a little scary: Madaket Millie. We were warned not to get too close. Stan Grossfeld managed to make friends with her, though. Here’s an old article he wrote about Millie that recently resurfaced.

And the challenge of fighting large, distributed fires on the West Coast is exposing gaps in firefighting technology. It might be time for an upgrade from paper maps and pencils.