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Me and Big Awkward on Commonwealth Avenue

April 9th, 2009 Josh Berthume 2 comments

In the fall of 1997, I started college at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I would ultimately end up attending Berklee for just three semesters. I left after the first two semesters when my hands went bad, and went back for one more semester in 2004 for one last ill-advised grab at living the dream and becoming a film scorer. During the first year I lived in Boston, it became my home and I made great friends of the people I lived with. Even these days, 12 years later, I have the rhythm of that city in my bones more than any other I’ve been to. Some nights when I lie in bed I still feel the thrum of the T.

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Categories: Boston, Music, Short Stories, Long Odds Tags:

10. Something’s Happened

July 31st, 2008 Josh Berthume No comments

Written in 2001. This is not strictly non-fiction, but almost everything is true? The geography may also be a little skewed.

I stopped in New London on my way from Boston to New Haven once. If I remember correctly, I could see the whole town from the top of the hill, looking down into the bay. It was October, right when New England does what it does best, and it was a cool sunny day.

I remember thinking that New London seemed like it was entirely contained in a crater which tilted towards the sea. I’d been living in Boston for about three months and I hadn’t smelled the high tang of the Atlantic yet – and one of my clearest memories is the briny scent and the way the sun shone on the water when I got out of my car. The water looked blue. I’d seen blue ocean in movies before, but the Texas coast is always brown or green, and it never smelled like this – storied and old and serene, if you can dig it.
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Categories: Boston, Short Stories, Long Odds Tags:

More Dangerous Holiday Gift Ideas

March 29th, 2005 Josh Berthume No comments

This is another throwback that almost got published but then didn’t. The strong local Boston color lets you know who it was for.


Boston Winter Rental Kit
Price: $3,999
Description: Simulates the fun of trying to get out of your lease by finding new tenants for your apartment in Malden in winter.
Hazards: When you drop the price to avoid eating five month’s rent, becomes compatible with Stabbers! Orange Line Activity Set


Diagnosis Roulette

Price: $14.99
Description: Gaming fun for the whole family! Spin the wheel to find out what you have!
Hazards: You have health insurance, right?

I Can P(l)ay! – The Berklee Bachelor’s Degree Program
Price: $100,000
Description: Navigate your way through “higher education” at one of America’s “most prestigious music schools!” “Bachelor’s Degree Desktop Publishing” software included. Instruments, ability optional.
Hazards: Watch out for “Mean Ol’ Department of Education” and “Degree Plan Restructuring” cards. May make players unable to ever buy a house.

“Tricycle Man” Big Wheel
Price: $34.95
Description: Now your child can tool around the Back Bay on a big tricycle and honk to his / her heart’s content! Includes Jaunty Red Flag and Change Bucket!
Hazards: HOOOOONK! HONK! HONK!


Theo Epstein Internet Fantasy Baseball

Price: $9.95 / month
Description: Imagine that you just generally managed your way to breaking the Curse! The Sox Win It All! Now, manage your budget and player contracts on through the next year and try to bring it home again!
Hazards: If you fuck this up, you’re gonna get nailed to a tree.

Constitution Station
Price: $39.99
Tagline: A place to imagine the greatest of liberties.
Descriptions: Children can spend hours and hours dreaming up a land of free, or home of the brave and bringing it to life with included Independence Clay.
Hazards: May cause delusions of actual freedom for broads, queers, and minorities

The Great Cambridge Hipster Hunt
Price: $22.75
Description: Look at all these hipsters! They are sad, because all of those new, big, franchise businesses that opened in Harvard Square the last few years have closed down now! Give them something to really cry about! Includes Bat
Hazards: Sense of satisfaction from skullsmashing may become overwhelming.

ALCOR Ted Williams Deep Freeze
Tagline: Keeps your meat, Meat
Price: $111,000
Description: 9 foot long steel cylinder filled with liquid nitrogen keeps up to 300 lbs of meat frozen solid.
Hazards: Some settling with other contents may occur. Undead body of Ted Williams may animate, drink all the booze



Stabbers! – The Orange Line Activity Set

Price: $19.99
Description: Comes with Sweat Pants, Section 8 Certificate, Shiv
Hazards: Children may act like everyone else on the Orange Line.

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People with BMW’s get sad, too

December 2nd, 2004 Josh Berthume No comments

I’m walking to school after getting off the Orange Line today, a train which prompted me to invent this toy for the paper’s Holiday Dangerous Toys List:

Stabbers! – The Orange Line Activity Set
Price: $19.99
Tagline: “Any More Carnage and They’ll Have to Rename it the Red Line!”
Description: Comes with plastic train, sweat pants, shiv
Hazards: May cause children to act like everyone else on the Orange Line

and I see the guy handing out the Metros. I take one because he’s nice, even though I’ve already read today’s AP dispatch on the train. I grab a Dig outside the station and walk up Mass Ave. I see a brand new BMW parked on the street, and it has a book on the dash board.

The title is: “I wish I felt good some of the time: learning to cope”

I’m not going to give you the usual litany of reasons why we should eat the rich, especially since I’m planning on being rich now. But some things I’ve read about in the last few days make this and America’s normal obsession with unimportant bullshit even more silly than usual. Its easy to say but I can’t tell you how many people I know that are healthy, shod, clothed, sheltered, and HAVE TIVO, for God’s sake, and are still unhappy.

Well, via Tiny Revolution, I have news for them – Jews are now writing numbers on Palestinians!

When they started building the wall, the giant pink elephant in the Judeo living room was the camp, of course: during the Holocaust, Jews were held within walls, and wanted out. We all know that, so everyone sort of wondered what the hell was going on when they started walling themselves in. Now they’ve taken it a step further, and started writing ID numbers on Palestinians, either without a touch of irony or bathed in it.

So then, it should come as no surprise that, in a world where Iraq’s liberators shut off the water and power to a city with thousands of children in it, that a West Virginia man who won $315,000,000 got drunk and crashed his truk into a pylon. He had a pistol and $117,000 in cash on him. In January, the same guy assaulted the manager of a bar.

In this same world, Jason Gambini juices up for the long ball at the same time that the world’s leading supplier of cheap AIDS drugs is going to be legally forced to stop supplying them.

On a final note, I’d like both congratulate and console Sen. Ben Nelson (D – Nebraska) on fending off a potential party disaster by apparently not taking the job Karl Rove offered him a few weeks ago – Secretary of Agriculture. Nebraska’s Reuplican Governor Mike Johanns would have been choosing his replacement had Nelson gone up to The Show, tipping the GOP majority in the Senate even farther: instead, Johanns will be taking the Cabinet job himself. I sure hope the Democratic party is going to throw pantloads of money and support at Nelson for the mid-terms, because he’s going to need it: Bush carried Nebraska by 33 points.

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Categories: Boston, International Affairs Tags:

Many hats in the fire

November 11th, 2004 Josh Berthume No comments

Oh lordy, things have been getting busy. Final projects have started at school and the paper is getting ready for a big Holiday Shopping guide, in which characters from the Nativity tell you what to buy for, er, Christmas.

I’m writing as the Baby Jesus, and my topic is video games, so I’ve been playing a lot of those. Halo 2 has become a force to be reckoned with in my house. I spent far too long playing it today.

I will do a news roundup sometime tomorrow and then I will hit you with the hotness.

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