Entries tagged with people

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people

sad tidings

I have just learned that eftychia (Daphne) has passed unexpectedly, way too soon.

I met Daphne at an SF con, probably Darkover, about 35 years ago. She was already a capable musician then and was an outstanding one later in Homespun Ceilidh Band. We enjoyed playing together for some balls at cons, and she was often on the Pennsic bandstand when I was more active there. She encouraged others, drew shy musicians in, and had a welcoming smile. In all of these places, it was obvious that making music was her happy place. I know she struggled with chronic pain, but when she was making music, that all seemed to fade away.

I haven't seen her since before the pandemic, alas. I had been looking forward to catching up with her at Pennsic this year. I am reminded that sometimes when we say "next time" there isn't going to be one. The world is a little darker and more dissonant tonight. :-(

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Pennsic

I'm home from Pennsic. Brief notes in the form of bullet points:

My good friend Yaakov HaMizrachi was elevated to the Order of the Laurel! Yay! The Laurel is the SCA's highest award (peerage) for arts and sciences. He's also now known (additionally) as Yaakov HaMagid, Yaakov the Storyteller. The ceremony felt like a reunion of old friends, and it was a nice touch that they had his son chant the scroll (in Hebrew).
The part of Atlantian court that I attended (because of the previous) was very well-done and engaging. I don't live there, I don't know most of those people, and yet I was not bored. They moved things along without it feeling rushed, and everybody speaking from the stage could be heard clearly. They also mixed it up, instead of doing all recipients of one award and then moving on to the next. Sprinkling the peerages throughout the court works well and, really, it's not a big deal for order members to get up more than once in an evening. (Also, if peerage ceremonies are burdensomely long -- theirs weren't; ours sometimes are -- it's nice to be able to sit down between them.)
I don't think I've ever heard "we're ahead of schedule; let's take a 10-minute break" in the middle of court before, though. I wonder if someone on the stage had an urgent need?
They elevated another bard to the Laurel, and that one sang his oath of fealty. While he was doing so I wondered if the king would respond in song -- and he did. That he used the same melody suggests some advance coordination (beyond "we're singing"), I wonder which of them wrote the king's words.
I had long, enjoyable conversations with both Yaakov and Baron Steffan. I miss the deep email conversations I used to have with both of them, before the great fragmenting of the digital-communication world (some to email, some to blogs/LJ/DW, some to Facebook, some to Google+, some to Twitter, some to places I don't even know about). It's harder to track and stay in touch with people than it used to be.
No I am still not going to start using Facebook. It's frustrating that by declining to do so I miss more and more stuff, but I'm not ready to let yet another thing compete to be the center of my online life. Also, Facebook in particular is icky in some important ways.
SCA local group, that means you too. Plans for a baronial party at Pennsic were, as far as I can tell, announced only on Facebook. (I've checked my email back to the beginning of April, so no I didn't just forget.) And thus I did not bring a contribution for your pot-luck. I do not feel guilty about that.
The Debatable Choir performance went very well. I conducted a quartet singing Sicut Cervus (by Palestrina), which I think went well. Two of the four singers had not previously done a "one voice to a part" song with the choir, and I'm proud of them for stepping up and doing a great job. I hope we got a recording.
I went to a fascinating class on medieval Jewish astrology (taught by Yaakov in persona). I've seen zodiacs in ancient (and modern) Jewish art and in synagogues, and a part of me always wondered how this isn't forbidden. It turns out that astrology is more of an "inclination", a yetzer, than a hard-and-fast truth -- there are stories in the talmud where astrology predicted something bad but the person, through good deeds, avoided the bad outcome. Also, in case you're wondering (like I did, so I asked), the zodiac signs get some solar smoothing, so if there's a leap-month (Adar Bet) there's not a 13th sign in those years.
Our camp has two wooden buildings (besides the house on the trailer, I mean), which we wanted to sell this year because we're making a new kitchen trailer that will replace both of them. We succeeded in selling the larger one (yay!). Maybe we'll be able to sell the other next year. (We'll set it up and use it for something else, because potential buyers would want to see it set up.)
Overall the weather was good. There were big storms on the first Friday ("quick, grab snacks and alcohol and head for the house!" is our camp's rallying cry), but only occasional rain after that and it wasn't sweltering-hot, which makes a huge difference.
The last headcount I saw was around 10,500.

Entry tags:

people,
sca

memories of Countess Aidan

I met Countess Aidan ni Leir when I became Chronicler for the East Kingdom. I'd been active in the SCA for some years by then, including having been chronicler for my local barony for four years. Our barony was, at the time, somewhat isolated from the main body of the East: aside from Pennsic the bigwigs didn't come here much, and I hadn't been to much of the rest of the kingdom then. I was an experienced writer, editor, and publisher, but working at the kingdom level with its attendant quirks and politics was new. So becoming a kingdom officer had something of a feel of a kid from hicks-ville moving to the big city.

My predecessors in the job helped guide me, and there were people in the local group with more kingdom-level experience. But regular contact with the Kingdom Seneschal was especially helpful. That seneschal was Countess Aidan.

Adian had been royalty (hence the title) and had worked with royalty for years, and from her I learned how to handle them. I knew that just because a guy has a crown on his head doesn't mean what he's saying is reasonable, but that guy with the crown could also fire me. And sometimes the other kingdom officers had unreasonable expectations; I remember one officer who sent something like ten pages of advice for the space-constrained "laws and policies" issue, who didn't take kindly to my saying that that was really too much and I'd need him to cut that down to just the part that was actually, you know, laws and policies, and I was expecting more like a page or two, not ten. Aidan taught me some useful things about diplomacy -- but also about when to wield the stick and just say "no" -- clearly and politely, in a way that would survive escalation.

One of my funniest memories of Aidan is a conversation we had, oh, maybe two years into my stint as chronicler. This was an actual phone call, not email (email still wasn't ubiquitous then, though she had it), so I remember her tone of voice too. I was talking about the accumulation of different kinds of paperwork -- reports from the local groups, my quarterly reports, stuff from other officers that wasn't newsletter submissions, minutes from board meetings, correspondence of lots of different types -- and how I was having trouble organizing it usefully. Did she have any advice? She said the way she handled that kind of stuff was to make one big pile, and every now and then stick a marker in with the month and year. If you ever actually needed any of that stuff that was probably good enough, but... she left the sentence incomplete.

I in fact didn't need the vast majority of that stuff (though there were expectations of keeping records). I tried to neaten it up some before passing the office on to my successor. I also passed on the advice.

At the time Aidan lived in New York. Several years ago she moved to my barony so I got to see her more, though not as much as I now realize I wish I had. Aidan was friendly (yet did not suffer fools), highly competent, and fun to be around. I'll miss her.

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the Internet is made of people

Yesterday we got word that one of my fellow Stack Exchange moderators (not on a site I moderate, but a different one) had died. I didn't know him well, but we had talked in our moderator-only chat room intermittently, we'd read each others' posts, and I felt like I'd gotten to know him some. It seems like that was mutual. The last conversation we had started with him telling me he respects me "a heck of a lot" (that's mutual) and ended with plans for him to come to Mi Yodeya with a question he was forming. And now he's gone. We found out because somebody -- we don't know who -- updated his profile, and investigation showed it not to be a cruel prank.

I've been on the net a long time, and I still manage to be surprised by how much I grieve people who I may have only known as names and gravatars. But they are still people, people who shared their thoughts and knowledge and aspirations, people I got to know, and online communities -- the ones that are really communities, not drive-bys and transient places to post comments and stuff like that -- cause us to form connections that are every bit as real as those we form with the people we see, speak with, hug. It blows my mind.

And as we grow more and more connected, and frankly as I get older and have online friendships that stretch from years to decades, I know there's going to be more and more of this. Affable Geek wasn't the first in my digital life by far, he won't be the last, and we knew each other only casually, and yet his passing still touches me deeply. I still expect to see his digital face pop up on the network, but it won't any more.

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bread and torah

This past Shabbat we had as visitors the two rabbis from Bread and Torah. He's a baker; she's a soferet (scribe) who is currently writing her first sefer torah (torah scroll). They led a variety of interesting activities -- challah-baking Friday afternoon, a couple text-study sessions, and some parchment-making and more baking Saturday night.

Question: How many deer do you think go into a torah scroll? (Picture on the linked page.) I'll come back to this at the end of this entry.

Shabbat afternoon, after services and lunch and a study session, I was talking with Rabbi Motzkin about parchment-making. She makes her own parchment, starting from deer skins, because most suppliers of kosher parchment are Orthodox and hold that women can't write torah scrolls, and she won't begin a holy project like that by misleading a seller. I said I've taken a couple informal classes on parchment-making but never started as far back as the fresh deer skin. (The workshop she would be leading that night involved soaking, scraping, and stretching a piece that had already had significant work done on it -- same as what I've experienced.) We got to talking; I said I'm not a very good calligrapher and I came at this through illumination (painting). She asked in what context and I said there was this group that studies the middle ages and renaissance.

She paused, and then asked if the person I'd learned about parchment from was Aengus MacBain.

Why yes, I said. Before I could ask the obvious question, she said that she'd found him online and they'd corresponded quite a bit; she considers him one of her teachers but hasn't met him. (I said "he lives nearby, if you want to try to rectify that on this trip", but their schedule was pretty full.)

Small world -- she's never been in the SCA and only knows about it through a parchment-maker she found online, and I'm not a soferet but know a little about it through the SCA. :-)

So back to the number of deer in a torah scroll. My estimate was way off, even though I read from these scrolls fairly regularly so should have an idea of the number of seams. I'd been thinking probably 25 or 30. Her answer: 60 to 80.

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nifty gift

Some time ago a friend asked me when my birthday is because he had the "perfect" gift for me. (We don't normally send gifts to each other, but this was an exception.) I'd forgotten all about that until a package arrived recently.

It contained a very nice, hefty flashlight with a good solid grip. That was a little puzzling, but there was more amidst the packing peanuts. The package also contained a copy of the book Defensive Tactics with Flashlights, apparently written for police officers. This looks like a fascinating read (I'm not very far through it yet), and it tickles that "hand-weapon" interest that goes back to my SCA fighting days. As a pedestrian I've sometimes found myself contemplating the defensive properties of umbrellas, too. (And, I learned from Google, "flashlight tactics" is apparently a thing. I had no idea.)

Then I turned the flashlight on and was surprised by a blue beam. A very powerful blue beam (LED). Looking more closely: ultra-blue. That is, it's a "black light". Why is that interesting? Because I see into the UV spectrum, so that light does more for me than for others.

I'm impressed by my friend's ability to combine odd bits of trivia about me in this way. Nifty!

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an unusual shabbat

I used to think that henceforth I would only ever go to a church service for weddings, funerals, or educational historical recreations. But I failed to consider one other case, and now add ordination to that list. My friend M (who can identify himself if he wants, or not) was ordained this weekend as a Roman Catholic priest, and I was pleased to accept his invitation to the ceremony.

I am in awe of M, who gave up another career to enter the seminary several years ago. I couldn't really see the other three new priests clearly, but I think he was not the only one of that approximate age. I'm not saying it isn't noteworthy to do something like this right out of college, but making a profound change later in life strikes a particular chord with me. So seeing M achieve this, and seeing the joy and solemnity and sacredness all mingled together in the room, was pretty special.

The service was held at St. Paul's, a huge cathedral in Oakland. (It surely seats several thousand, but I couldn't tell more specifically.) They had a diocese choir, which was able to fill the place, and brass and percussion and of course organ. The pulpit is large, and good thing -- I think there were at least 75 people involved in this service (though not all at once, mostly).

I am not fluent in the high-church Roman Catholic mass (Wikipedia helped some), but this appeared to be most of a mass with a substantial ceremony occupying the center portion. During the ordination ceremony Bishop Zubick (the local bishop) spoke individually (but publicly) to each of the new priests, adding a personal touch that showed that he knows them. (I understand that when he came to Pittsburgh he declined the usual bishoply residence and asked for an apartment at the seminary instead.) Two of the four are returning to their school in Rome for graduate studies in the fall; the other two (including M) begin local assignments in a couple weeks. These assignments were given out during the ceremony; I had assumed that the priests knew in advance where they were being sent, but it turned out they learned when we did. I guess it reinforces that pledge they had each made to serve the church and the bishop no matter what. (It didn't actually say "no matter what", but there were words of some gravity.)

The mechanics of running this service were interesting. It was very smooth, and while most religious services are not on this scale, there's stuff to learn here for people running smaller ones. I'm going to talk about that first, and then I'll go into the geeking (for those who are still reading :-) ).

( service mechanics )

( geeking )

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people,
sca

RIP Caitlin

I met Caitlin sometime in the late 80s or early 90s when I was traveling a lot in the East Kingdom. She was graceful and kind and more than competent, and I always enjoyed conversations with her. I wish I had had more chances to sit and chat with her; it was always time well spent. The world is a little darker without

msmemory in it.

I find I have no other words right now, other than those about the unfairness of it all.

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weekend round-up

( gaming )

( SCA afternoon )

( cookout )

And tonight, to celebrate Dani's birthday, we went out to Casbah for dinner, where we learned that sitting on their (enclosed) patio during a thunderstorm still poses challenges, primarily acoustic. (But also some dampness because it's not completely enclosed; we ended up asking to move to another table partway through the meal.)

One of Casbah's standard appetizers is a cheese plate. The specific cheeses vary, but you can always get an assortment. Tonight all three of the cheeses we got were clear winners. Dani wrote the names down, though we've tried in the past to find cheeses we've eaten there and it's never worked out so far. Maybe this time will be different, but I'm not holding my breath.

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people,
sca

Marian of Edwinstowe

Marian of Edwinstowe, more recently known as Old Marian, died last night. Marian had long been a fixture in the SCA when I joined. I met her at my first Pennsic, where she and Johan ran the Sated Tyger Inn, which was selling tasty period food long before most people were trying to cook such. That inn closed, and some years later she (and Chiron and maybe others) founded the Battlefield Bakery, where she continued the tradition.

I didn't know her especially well but I visited her bakery every Pennsic and, during the years I travelled a lot in the East Kingdom, I encountered and spoke with her quite a bit. She was gracious and friendly and always had time to spare for me and countless other nobodies (as I was at the time). I always enjoyed talking with her.

I remember when she resigned all of her awards. She made a point of telling the orders a year in advance -- so, she said, that there could be no question of whether she had done this because of some snit or disliked royalty. This was typical of the care she showed for others' feelings.

I regret that I did not get to know her well. Even so I will miss her, and her friends and family will miss her a thousand times more. The society is a poorer place today.

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Yom Kippur wrap-up

( Read more... )

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random bits

( Read more... )

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people,
sca: barony

baruch dayan ha-emet

Damn damn damn.

During Pennsic we learned that the reason Baron Len and Baroness Anna were absent (he was baron when I joined the SCA and she soon joined him on the thrones) was that she was in the hospital with a mysterious malady. Later in the week we learned that it had been diagnosed as pneumonia. She was in the hospital, being treated. That's supposed to be treatable these days. (She was not extremely old or in very poor health.)

In the last week there have been a couple messages on the baronial mailing list saying "still in ICU, still no visitors allowed". (I was watching this go by while out of town.) And today we got the message no one wanted to have to see.

What's especially sad about this to me is that, about a year and a half ago, Len fell ill with something mysterious. She was there for him and helped him recover once he got a diagnosis. Things were getting better. And now, after all this, she was stricken.

Len and Anna welcomed me into the SCA when I was a clueless college student, and taught me grace and maturity and how to live in society. If I learned a tenth of it, I count myself lucky.

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weekend

( assorted )

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Pennsic prep (mostly)

Sunday was a planned work day for my Pennsic camp -- specifically some house repairs. Last year we replaced several sections of siding that had gotten mushy because we didn't know from day one that caulk is important. There were some sections we didn't get to last year, so we attacked those this time. Dani and I had done a scouting mission and several camp members had gotten together two weeks ago to prime and paint plywood, so this "should" have been easy. That noise you hear is heavenly laughter. :-)

When we did that scouting mission (a month or so ago) there were lots of wasps or hornets swarming around. (I was disinclined to get close enough to armed insects to determine which these were.) We've had nests before, so I brought up some chemical weapons this time -- and we found nothing. Ok, we found an occupied bird's nest (they can stay until Pennsic), but no wasp/hornet nests at all. That's great, but a little mystifying.

First lesson learned: a power inverter works better if you have the cables -- or, failing that, if the cables are not in a car at a gaming convention in Columbus. Oops. We were so careful to make sure I had the box before Dani left for Origins; it didn't occur to either of us that the full-looking box was not actually full. Fortunately, alaricmacconnal is handy with copper wire, which he was able to pick up on his way up to Cooper's Lake.

Second lesson learned: the circular saw really is too big for the power inverter (I think the person who thought it worked last year was mis-remembering), but a jig saw is good enough to make straight cuts in plywood. (A lesson we learned last year is that you can't really measure for the replacement piece until you've removed the old piece, which means cutting on site.)

Third lesson learned: rain is wet. :-) Ok, we already knew that, and we knew we were gambling some on the weather. We got rained on twice, but each time only lasted about 15-20 minutes and people were smart enough to come down from the big metal ladder. :-) A bigger storm rolled in as we were finishing, so we got to drive home in that.

We've had some impressive storms in the last few days. I don't think we got the predicted hail this afternoon, but on both Saturday and Sunday there were some pretty fierce winds and impressive light shows.

After I got home (and cleaned up) Sunday night I was able to visit with college friends from Seattle for a couple hours. I'm not certain they had had their first kid when last I saw them, and they were in town this weekend to drop him off at CMU's pre-college program. Wow -- been a long time. It was good to catch up some (though it was incomplete).

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people,
sca

pegged him

SCA friends, both serious researchers, just got back from their month-long honeymoon in Scandinavia. One of them works at my company, so yesterday he was chatting with folks about the trip. When I joined the conversation, another coworker said to me "ask him how many pictures he took".

Wait, I said, let me try to guess first. I asked the coworker how many museums he went to, and he said "one or sometimes two a day", but they lost a couple days to travel. So, I said, average of one museum a day for 30 days? He said that was about right, and volunteered that almost all of them allowed photography. We had already established that he was using a digital camera, not film.

Ok, I said. I'm going to estimate that you took between 250 and 500 pictures per museum, probably closer to the former. (The other coworker's eyes get big.) So, I continued, if I take the conservative number for now, that's 7500. I'm guessing you took a few picturs of scenery and stuff but not a lot (other coworker looks startled), and I did start with a conservative estimate. So, let's say between 9000 and 10,000 pictures total (other coworker's jaw drops). How'd I do?

He's not sure, but he knows it's at least 9000 and he thinks not as many as 10,000. :-) The other coworker asked "how did you do that?!". I said "you just have to know him". (Besides, I showed my work.)

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Pennsic

( long )

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in transit

I'm writing this from LaGuardia, where it's past the official boarding time and the plane isn't here yet. I suspect we'll be late.

Last night after Shabbat magid came to visit and went to JP Lick's for conversation and ice cream. (This seems to be canonical; I've gone for ice cream and conversation several times this week.) We sat at a table outside (the weather was good, not too hot nor sticky) until an employee kicked us out and we noticed that it was 12:30. Oops. :-) I don't mind; I hope magid didn't have any early-morning plans.

Several times over the week when classmates have asked me what I was planning to do that night (or what I'd done the previous night), I've said things like "have dinner with friends". People have commented on my having local friends as if it's unusual; they always want to ask where I know them from. Usually I've said something vague like "college" (technically true of some of my SCA friends, though we didn't necessarily attend the same schools) or "mailing lists". In the age of the internet, is this still that unusual? While it's not true that I know someone in every city, the last several times I've taken a trip, I've had a connection to at least one person on the other end -- even though that hasn't been the purpose of the trip. But, all that said, I found I wasn't ready to broach the SCA or LiveJournal with my classmates.

To continue the theme, when we finished up today around 12:30, I gambled and called goldsquare (who I'd failed to connect with earlier in the week). I had a 4:00 flight and was calling from Newton, so this was dicey and boiled down to "are you free right now?". Which he and his sweetie were, and we had time to have a bite in Brookline before they kindly dropped me off at the airport. I enjoyed meeting her and catching up with both of them. (Though I hadn't met her, I felt like I knew her at least a little via goldsquare's writing.)

6:04 and my 6:15 flight is just starting to board. More later.

Later: left 45 minutes late, arrived on time. Either they pad the schedule drastically or we caught one heck of a tailwind. :-)

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other notes

The Tanakh I brought with me (JPS Hebrew-English, the larger of the editions I've seen) is the perfect size for supporting my iBook on the dorm desk (to get the screen closer to my eyes and the keys up a little). This feels almost, but not quite, sacreligious. :-)

Thursday night about half of the students (and one of the faculty members) went out for dinner. I had hoped everyone would come, but most of the students are local and thus have other obligations (spouses, kids, etc). It was a nice dinner with those who did make it.

That's turning out to be a key difference between this program and my experience of Sh'liach K'hilah. In SK, no one was local: almost everyone stayed in the dorm on campus, the days started early in the morning and ended late at night, we were with each other most of that time, and there were basically no outside distractions. The group had a real chance to get cohesive. Here, two-thirds of the students disappear soon after classes end at 4 or 4:30, only a few of us are staying in the dorm, and while I'm enjoying my interactions with most of my classmates as individuals, the group isn't really gelling strongly. That's not better or worse, just different. On the plus side, it's giving me time to spend with local friends. :-)

After the dinner tonight I met up with siderea (yay!). We walked around the area near the Hynes T stop, including 15 minutes in the Boston Library (it was near closing time). It's a neat place -- a library with a strong secondary identity as a gallery. Tonight they had a nifty exhibit of miniature books (I mean really tiny; they used coins as size indicators in some cases). Some of the miniature books came with miniature magnifying glasses, which was a nice touch. Some of the books were a little larger and I could imagine one actually holding them and reading rather than just showing off. After we got kicked out of the library we walked around the area some and then spent a while sitting in a cafe talking geekery. :-)

Part of the T is out of service, so for the last few stops heading back to the school we got kicked off the train and transferred to a bus. For all that the trains do a good job of communicating upcoming stops, the bus I was on sucked. There was a banner-style digital sign up front that was dutifully scrolling date and time past us twice a minute. Once I saw a request that people give up seats to the elderly. But it was not used to name upcoming stops -- and since it was stopping at the T stops, not on every corner, that would not have been burdensome. It irked me because I had not memorized the map (hadn't anticipated the problem) and I would not recognize my stop at night from inside the bus. The bus was packed, so walking to the front to ask the driver wasn't going to happen. I had to ask other passengers (characteristically, most did not know what stops we were passing), which was frustrating. I wonder if this was a failure of the system or a failure of that particular driver.

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interlude: non-class stuff

First, thanks to "Mr. Fixer", as he is known on LJ, for calling and talking me through my emacs issues (on the Mac). It turns out that there are three ways to launch emacs (different emacses) on this machine; one I didn't know about and the other two were clashing over the .emacs file. For my own future reference: running emacs from an xterm works, and so does running from the Mac shell if I use the "-q" option to surpress the .emacs file. (Since the .emacs file is for a different version, with settings for fonts and colors that don't matter when running in a shell, that's fine.)

I discovered tonight (when trying to install a mouse driver hakamadare clued me in about) that I don't know the root password for my machine. Err, oops. I wonder how I can fix that. (Maybe I'm lucky and the person I got the machine from remembers.)

Wednesday night I joined Andrew and his family (sorry Andrew; I can never get the user name right on the first try), mabfan, and gnomi for dinner, conversation, and ice cream. I had a good time. How can you not, when in a single evening you can geek about halacha, science fiction, comics (that was mostly mabfan, TV, and music? :-) Mabfan or Andrew, please remind me of the name of that TV show you were so excited about getting on DVD?

Much time was spent trying to find a way, within halacha, for someone (I won't out you here) to read the new Harry Potter book on Shabbat. (Some of my suggestions were rejected because they would involve waiting until morning; apparently solutions that don't involve starting by quarter past midnight aren't interesting.) I hope you find a solution, but if not, I suspect a 22-hour delay isn't fatal... :-)

Erik (one of my cats) is staying with a friend while I'm here, and apparently he's very comfortable in her house. She can offer him avian theatre (we don't get many birds visible from cat-accessible windows), and he quickly established his place in the household. Good, as he'll be going back for Pennsic in a couple weeks. :-) I miss the cats, but knowing they're in good hands helps.

Never mind the academic stuff: I'm beginning to wonder if I would have the physical stamina to attend this school if I lived in this city. That's one steep hill! I'm staying in a dorm at the top of the hill for this program (so no biggie), but the houses up here are all in the multi-million-dollar range, so ordinary people don't live here. (Actually, I wonder about the people who live in some of the humongous houses up here. Are they insanely rich, or large families or other groups? Some of these places look like they'd easily be 10,000 square feet.)

There appear to be no vending machines on Hebrew College's campus. How odd.

I've had a few instances of an odd style of encounter here, and I wonder if it's a Boston thing or if I'm just unlucky. I have asked people on the street (or in the T) what should be simple questions (e.g. "which of these intersecting streets is Center?" when there's no sign), and people who seem to be from around here don't know. In the example I just gave, it was a group of students who'd just gotten off a city bus. On the T, I asked someone who seemed to be a regular T rider (based on overheard conversation) "does this train go to Government Center" (a big stop), she said she didn't know, and then she got on my train (after I got the answer elsewhere) and rode it past that stop. There have been a couple other cases, too. Is this a "don't wanna talk to strangers" thing, or what?