Our Jeweler on the Lam

When I proposed to Pam, I had already gotten a ring at Alpha Omega Jewelers in Cambridge. It was a small shop in Harvard Square, family run, with not spectacularly high or low prices. In the years since then, we used them for not only our wedding rings, but other bits of jewelry.

So, I was not without a fair amount of shock when I read this headline on the web site boston.com:
Alpha Omega liquidation sale set to start tomorrow

What was even more shocking was why they were liquidating our old family jeweler:

The investment consortium that bought the assets of Alpha Omega Jewelers in a bankruptcy court-approved sale said that the liquidation sale of the chain’s inventory will begin at its four stores tomorrow.

Everything must be sold before Ross-Simons, a Rhode Island-based chain, assumes the leases of Alpha Omega stores at Natick Collection and the Prudential Center in Boston, and items will be discounted to ensure fast sales, the consortium said.

The chain’s other two stores are located in Harvard Square and at the Burlington Mall.

According to stories in the Globe data base, Alpha Omega Jewelers filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code last month. The filing came after owner Raman Handa unexpectedly left the country with his wife, son, and daughter, prompting the company’s bank to seize Alpha Omega assets and temporarily close its stores just before Christmas.

That’s right, they were going bankrupt because the owner fled the country with his family. Suddenly my mind filled with all the plots of Jewel heists, with the thieves heading for Mexico, having deposited some of their misbegotten wealth in a Swiss Bank Account…

And to think I was served by Mr. or Mrs. Handa (I never learned their names, nor do I remember them particularly well), who might have been planning their disappearances for years!

Or perhaps it was something less glamorous and far more depressing, like mounting debts and “a threat to himself or a member of his family”.

You Can Take the Boy out of Fenway…

…but you can’t take Fenway out of the boy.

This evening, Pam and I ate hot dogs, drank beer and watched the Boston Red Sox utterly dominate the Colorado Rockies in a wicked first game of the 2007 World Series. It was curious to see the Sox not only do so well, but do so well in so many ways. They finished off with a score of 13 to 1, tying the record of 13 doubles in a world series game. But it wasn’t only the hitting. They pulled off a beautiful double play, and pitcher Josh Beckett only allowed 6 hits. The Rockies, on the other hand, went through 5 pitchers.

Old habits do die hard, though. All the way up to a score of 7 to 1, Pam kept saying ‘They could still screw it up! Don’t let yourself be fooled!” It’s also hard to get used to seeing our old Boston team as the favourite, and clearly not the underdog. That said, it is fun to see them win handily, even if we aren’t within a stone’s throw of the Green Monster any more.

Go Sox!

A Walk on the Beach and A Strange Sign in Front of MIT

A Cold but Sunny Stroll
We took a walk on Kitsilano Beach today. After all, we couldn’t let this sunshine go to waste. However, the wind had other ideas. It was very chilly, reminding us that despite the fact that it is spring and all of the trees are blooming (and the city is showing some of its most gorgeous aspects), it’s still early spring, and we are, after all, in Canada, not Fort Lauderdale or Puerto Vallarta. I did bring the camera, though, and we even documented another brush with a Bald Eagle. The large bird even roosted for quite a while on a boat (called ‘Free to Roam’, of all things) in the False Creek Marina, where crows seemed to treat it with no respect whatsoever.

Interesting Items Back on Mass. Ave.
I sometimes read the blog infosthetics (meaning Information Aesthetics) for my other blog, drucker.ca, because I often deal with some of the same issues and subjects (visualization, information architecture, infographics, etc.)

A couple of days ago, however, they made note of a very odd piece of performance art that’s located at a spot that I often went by for about 15 years. It seems in front of MIT Building 1 (the one with the columns out front), on Mass Ave. in Cambridge, an artist named Leonardo Bonanni posted something that looked like a bus schedule. Except it’s not a bus schedule: It’s a “framed piece of paper listing the latest results on untimely deaths/suicides at MIT university.”

It looks like Mr. Bonanni has been busy. He’s a 1st Year PhD Student in the Tangible Media Group at the Media Lab, and was recently a finalist for the Kendall Square Interactive Design Competition, which appears to have been sponsored by Lyme Properties, the developer who build many of the Biotech Powerhouses that now dominate so much of East Cambridge.

Here’s a video of his proposal.

Kind of cool. Looks like the receiver of the very public cell phone text message on a huge text crawl was in a room at the Marriot, as far as I can tell from the animation. Many other projects of his are hosted by the Media Lab’s site.

It’s too bad that our paths never crossed while I was living so close by. I would have liked to met him.

So You Want to Vote to Change the Massachusetts Constitution?

Back in Boston, Governor-elect Deval Patrick this morning called on legislators to skip taking a vote on an amendment that could ban gay marriages in Massachusetts.

“I believe that adults should be free to choose whom they wish to love and to marry,” Mr. Patrick said. “… Never in the long history of our model Constitution have we used the initiative petition to restrict freedom. We ought not start now.”

Nevertheless, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage survived a second vote in the afternoon afternoon after 62 lawmakers moved to advance the initiative to the next legislative session, ensuring that the battle over same-sex weddings will continue for at least another year.

A friend of mine back in Boston, Michael Femia, has a great blog called Bunko Squad. Today he masterfully skewered the political discourse in a Poll of his own that suggests:

If there is a public vote on same-sex marriage, what should we vote on next?

__ Banning Divorce

__ 3-Child-Per-Couple Minimum

__ Black People Eating At Lunch Counters

__ Women Need Husband’s Permission to Drive

__ Abolish Child Labor Laws Down to Age 4

__ End Tax Exemption for Politically-Active Religion

Good one, Michael.

If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

Oddly enough, some of the biggest changes we felt moving to Vancouver from Boston were the weather.

First it was the weather patterns themselves. Boston’s weather was mercurial – not in terms of moving the mercury of the thermometer around a lot (although it did, to a degree), but in the true sense of the word. The days were changeable, constantly varying, unpredictable. The old joke went: If you don’t like the weather in Boston, wait 5 minutes. Vancouver introduced us to the meteorological equivalent of the long now. Is today sunny and pleasant? Then that’s how it will be outside, for a couple of weeks. Is it dark and rainy? Then expect the same for the rest of the month. Weather here doesn’t really change here; it slowly morphs from one steady state to another. If climate could be say, musical styles, then Boston weather was Miles Davis doing be-bop. Vancouver weather is Bruckner, or perhaps Philip Glass.

The second change was, of course, the different winters. In Boston, December through March was snowy, cold, and dark, with occasional invigorating, bright white days. Here, it is milder, rarely getting below freezing for more than a dozen hours, but accompanied by nearly constant rain and darkness. I thought that the latter might bring back my Seasonal Affective Disorder, which (I now know in retrospect) doomed much of the time I lived in Rochester, New York years ago to endless depression. Fortunately, I seem to have avoided a relapse, at least this year. (We’ll have to see about next year).

The third big difference has been this week. It’s not really the weather, but peoples’ reaction to it. For a few days now, the temperature has been in the mid to upper 20′s (Centigrade – that would be high 70s to low 80s in Fahrenheit). Everyone I’ve talked to here has been acting as if it was an oven out there. In Boston, these days would be the relief, not the punishment. The low humidity as well as cool breezes off the ocean make for utterly pleasant days, but to talk to some in my office or neighbors, you’d think we’re spending a week in Hades. I’ve been accused of being a bit fussy about temperature (Pam insists on the ‘Mind over Matter’), but sometimes I wonder if anyone here (except those from back East, of course), really knows what hot truly is.

True, there is less air conditioning here, although Pam and I both experience it at work. Here at home, we face north, and get no direct sun, so we no longer experience the sieges we used to have when we’d get one of those Boston heat waves (and our poor air conditioner couldn’t get the cold air to the top floor, where we tried to sleep.) I have no doubts whatsoever that Global Warming will be in effect for the rest of my life, regardless of any changes in the use of fossil fuels or other activities that might turn things around some day. If this was a hot summer, and the next decades will make them hotter still, I’m glad that I’ve at least moved northward. Who knows, in 20 years, the new temperate zone that we move to for retirement may be the Nunavut Territory.