Mass. Trip '10, day FIVE
Jun. 7th, 2010 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyesetzPenzey’s Spice Shop in Arlington. $100 for a year’s supply of spices. (Actually a bit more, since our kitchen still has a few bits of spice left over from our last visit in 2008.) The total bill was higher than Wifey had originally planned to spend. When she showed me the receipt, I exclaimed “Only 59¢ sales tax? I guess we’re not in Canada!” The store clerk was apologetic and explained that only the empty glass spice jars were taxable. Obviously, I enjoy pretending to be rich and not having to care about the bill. And really, $100 isn’t going to make a lot of difference when paying down my $100,000+ mortgage.
Science museum. Perhaps I’m partial for having grown up in the area, but I think the Boston Museum of Science is the standard by which all other science museums should be measured. Lots of buttons and levers and clanging balls and sizzling 700,000-volt lightning generators! The only problem with it is that it is located in Boston. There was some construction going on at the entrance to its parking garage, so we pulled forward to ask the cop if things were okay. He said they were, but then we had to go around the block to get back to the entrance. But you can’t “go around the block” in Boston because the streets are not parallel, so we ended up driving out to Cambridge and then back into Boston, passing by both the hotel where the Company 𝔾 conference was being held and the Boston Public Library, where I had spent a lot of time back in high school because it was more easily accesssible by mass transit than the library for my own city of Newton.
The subway entrance next to the library has been closed for years. Apparently the infinitesimal risk of terrorist attack is far more important than the convenience of library patrons. When I was in high school, my Russian teacher liked to say that the goal of American libraries was to distribute information *to* the public, while the goal of Soviet libraries was to protect information *from* the public. But I guess we’re not that different after all.
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Date: 2010-06-07 05:08 pm (UTC)I only got the choice between French, Spanish and Latin, IIRC.
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Date: 2010-06-07 07:19 pm (UTC)Of course. It was the Cold War. During WWII, my father studied German in an American high school. Nowadays I would expect to see more Arabic offered in US schools.
I only got the choice between French, Spanish and Latin, IIRC.
There is something to be said for local control of school curricula. I am entirely unclear on the extent to which local boards in Ontario have *any* control over what their schools teach. Could Wilmot township cater to local tastes by deciding to offer Mennonite German instead of Berliner Hochdeutsch? Methinks not.