New music

Last week, amidst other shopping, I stopped in Newbury Comics and picked up "14:59" by Sugar Ray. This is the album that has the songs you probably actively recognize as Sugar Ray's, Every Morning and Someday. Listening to them side-by-side, one realizes that they really are the same song (similar style, exact same tempo). The album actually has a fairly nice variety of music on it, though; a lot of it seems to have a rap influence, which surprisingly works pretty well. Live & Direct, from what I can tell, dropped a rapper on top of a fairly straightforward rock song. I'm actually fairly happy with this CD.

I also got Guster's "Lost and Gone Forever"; yeah, it's very beige music, but at least it's quality beige, and it comes up regularly in xmms, so I should probably actually pay money for it. Meanwhile, I have even more duplicate titles: "Falls Apart" by both Stabbing Westward and Sugar Ray, "Catapult" by Counting Crows and R.E.M., "Fly" by Moxy Fruvous and Veruca Salt.

More Camberford arcana

So the T was unfriendly on the way home, and I just missed the bus connection at Sullivan. In spite of it being neither horribly cold, raining, nor snowing, I walked home from there anyways. And got distracted behind the Assembly Square Mall.

I've wondered for a bit what my neighborhood looked like, say, around 1950. Before 93 got put in and levelled a block along Mystic Ave. And there's some confusion around how actually various bits of road went. Observations:

• There's a block of McGrath Highway north of 93. It ends at Middlesex Ave., and dead-ends into the mall.
  
• There's Middlesex Ave. both south and north of the Mystic River; you could hypothetically label the section of 28 between Wellington Circle and the mall as Middlesex Ave. and have a continuous road. (But, there's not Mystic Ave. south of 93.)
  
• There's a block of Fellsway West between Broadway and Mystic Ave. in Somerville. Then 28 north of 93 is just plain Fellsway, until it splits into Fellsway West and Fellsway East again further north in Medford.
  
• A manhole cover on Middlesex Ave. just behind the mall says "Sewer, 1895" on it; the courthouse at Middlesex Ave. and the Fellsway is dated 1967. Most of the development in the triangle bounded by Mystic Ave., Middlesex Ave., and the Fellsway looks 1950's or newer. Ten Hills was built around 1915.
  

My current hypothesis is this: Middlesex Ave. was built first, going north from Mystic Ave. (then Middlesex Turnpike?) through Medford. Some time later, the Fellsway was built; probably the southern terminus of the Fellsway was initially Wellington Circle. I think Msgr. McGrath Highway was built a little before 93, but not too much before. (The section immediately north of the "trapezoid bridge" certainly looks like it plowed through an existing neighborhood, which was in style in the 1950's.) It connected to Middlesex Ave. There was some development around there. Then 93 got built and plowed through a block of Ten Hills; at that point, the current "Fellsway" between 93 and Wellington Circle was also built, giving us the modern road configuration.