Some of my best friends are architects, so I get lots of flack for hating the hell out of Boston’s City Hall building. They like to cling to its significance as a shining example of Brutalist design. I like to point out that whatever design it is, its juts plain ugly… and barely functional. (Why, oh why, are the most popular and important city services located in the bowels of the building and nearly impossible to find for newcomers? Because the acid-trip-in-a-cement-mixer layout of hallways, staircases and overhangs makes going from one point of the building to any other point a task that requires an iPhone with GPS functionality.)

Now the traveling masses have spoken, according to the Boston Globe.

A survey by Virtual Tourist has declared City Hall to be one of the 10 ugliest buildings or monuments on the planet. You can see some discussion on the topic here.

Any time that they want to tear that monstrosity down would be just fine with me.

With development not slowing down at all over here in Beijing, as it is back home in Boston and the rest of the US (the Chinese recently announced an almost $600 billion stimulus package that will focus on further infrastructure development), it was interesting to see this piece in last Saturday’s Globe about the last great period of vast infrastructure construction back home and who was the driving force behind it.

James Michael Curley.

Probably best known as the inspiration for “The Last Hurrah” and the Bosstones’ tune “The Rascal King,” much has been said about his life and career. It was one that exhibited the absolute best and worst of public life. But what is less known was his unquenchable thirst to make Boston a better, more livable, city.

Agree or disagree with some of the things that he did or said, “in the end, they knew his name…”

With the Presidential race finally over (I’ll have some Beijing-centric wrap up on that soon), political junkies like me have little to follow except for the recount in Minnesota and process stories about Obama’s transition, so it was with nostalgic glee that I caught this column in today’s Boston Globe about the 1983 race for Mayor of Boston.

This is the first political event that I remember being aware of as a kid. I wasn’t around for the start of busing in Boston but I remember the racial troubles that were palpable throughout the city in the years that followed. The mayoral race between Mel King and Ray Flynn took place amidst an ocean of racial undercurrents, yet these two leaders strove to keep those debates -and problems arising from them- contained.

One of my earliest memories is from Election Day that year. I can remember walking to the Edward Everett School where I attended kindergarten that morning and seeing all of the people holding signs and handing out leaflets as people walked into the polling station that was in the basement there. Just before I got onto the school grounds, a bus drove by. It was filled with black kids and was on its way to a white neighborhood to drop them at a school that had been forcibly integrated just a few years prior.

What I remember was the entire busload of black kids all pushed up against one side of the bus, with half of them hanging out of the windows, yelling: “MEL KING!! MEL KING!!”

Now these kids couldn’t vote, but they were swept up in what was happening at the time: White Boston was in a race to beat back an insurgent Black Boston. It was truly the first racial electoral battle of Boston’s modern age. Previous battles had been fought between the Brahmins and the Irish in the late 19th and early 20th century, but now it was different.

Whites “won,” but they elected a guy who was pro-desegregation and who worked hard to keep the progress of race relations in the city on track. One generation later, Boston is a “majority-minority” city with far fewer racial troubles to speak of, and who voted overwhelmingly to elect America’s first black president. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Damn, I love my hometown.

So I watched the debate this morning (that’s “last night” for all of you folks in the US). No knockout blows and Biden looked like he was really holding back against Palin. He never really attacked her- which makes sense because his job is just to attack McCain. Unfortunately, because he had so many opportunities to ridicule Palin’s non-answers and her folksy ramblings, his failure to put her away goes as a negative in my book.

Of course, the strategy of “let her hang herself while I look more presidential than she can ever hope to be” didn’t necessarily fail. At least according to this CNN poll.

I guess that the idea of somebody as unqualified as Gov. Palin even running for Vice President is so offensive to me that I want the floor wiped with her at every opportunity. I mean, look at what our last unqualified candidate got us into.

On to other things…

Last night also saw the Ig Nobel Award ceremonies at Harvard University. These are so much fun and I love to attend them. An organization called The Annals of Improbable Research puts on this parody of the Nobel Prizes every October to highlight scientific research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”

Past winners have included:

1991 - Biology: Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation, for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinao Choise, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobel laureates and Olympians.

1996 - Art: Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, MA for his “ornamentally evolutionary” invention, the plastic pink flamingo.

2001 - Astrophysics: Dr. Jack Van Impe & Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all of the technical requirements for the location of Hell.

2006 - Acoustics: D. Lynn Halpern of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University, Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University and James Hillenbrand of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard.

The ceremony is always fun and includes presentations by actual Nobel Prize winners. A lecture series usually follows during the weekend where winner have a chance to explain their research. What started as a way to critisize bad science has turned into a notable event within the scientific community and the number of people submitting their work for consideration has jumped from none to over 10,000 per year. Scientists, it seems, are almost as eager to get this prize -which has no financial reward- as they are the Nobel Prize itself.

Anyway, this is just another one of the events taking place in Boston during this, my favorite time of year in the city. Attending funky, genre-bending music festivals is all well and good, but sometimes I just want to watch the Sox beat the Angles at The Good Life, go apple picking and head on over to Harvard for some good clean scientific fun.

Those of you who don’t live in my home neighborhood of Dorchester in Boston probably won’t have occasion to see me on the front page of this week’s Dorchester Reporter. Not to worry! Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can link you straight over there. (Though I would recommend you driving down to Gerard’s in Adam’s Village for some dinner and to pick up a copy in the adjoining convenience store. You know, for posterity.)

To read the piece that I wrote, click here. To see a .PDF file of the paper with my ugly mug on the front page, click here. (Thanks, Mr. Editor, for choosing the picture of me drinking a beer at 9:30am to go there. I’m sure that Nana will love that one!)

Even without me in it, the Reporter is a great newspaper. They’ve been doing a great job covering my home for a long, long time now. You might want to read them from time to time.

Scott LaPierre of the Boston Globe did a fun video blog about how random Chinese people tend to not know too much about Boston. Mention Harvard, The Celtics or MIT and eyes tend to brighten, but when you push for geographic specificity there are usualy blank stares.

I wish that I could say that I disagreed with him. Only 1 Chinese person has recognized that I am from Boston by my Red Sox jersey & t-shirts, though a couple of people knew that my Patriots jersey had to do with American Football. (One guy, presumably a New Yorker, actually started chanting “18-1! 18-1!” at me on the Olympic Green on Saturday. I shouted back ”Shove it up your ass, Johnny!” much to the confusion and delight of the Chinese around us.) Most Japanese & Taiwanese know where I am from due to their baseball fanaticism and I’ll find out tomorrow if the same holds true for Koreans and Cubans.

As much as we arrogant, self-important Bostonians hate to hear this, our city is only marginally-known in this part of the globe. I am to change that.

This is all very new for me. Since I have lived in Boston all of my life, I have never had to go through the ordeal of packing up my life and moving it somewhere else. (Going from Savin Hill to Neponset doesn’t count because that’s just down Morrissey Boulevard.) Furthermore, while I’ve known people who have come and gone into my life, I have never faced the prospect of saying goodbye to everyone and everything that I hold dear. That’s why the last 2 days were so fun/exhilarating/sad/scary for me.

On Friday I spent one last evening in the embrace of an old friend, Fenway Park, watching my beloved Red Sox. I worked in the stands of the ballpark for 9 seasons as a vendor (’91-’99) and while I was a Baseball/Sox fan before then, those seasons spent huffing it up and down through the rows, cheering for the team and interacting with fans, changed my ordinary fandom into what I like to call a “Field of Dreams” devotion to the game, the team and the ballpark itself. So every visit is special for me and Friday was no exception; it was an amazing night that saw the end of the Manny Ramirez era and the coming of Jason Bay. The welcome that the crowd gave Bay on his first day was astounding. When the lineup was announced (before the TV cameras were on), he was one of only 2 players warming up on the field and he looked absolutely stunned when the entire stadium erupted with a thunderous, sustained 90-second standing ovation. He got the same treatment when he came up to bat in the second inning. It was very affirming to see once again just what Boston baseball fandom is all about.

For all of the affection that I have for Fenway, the Red Sox and the game of Baseball, the thing that I will treasure the most from Friday is that I got to spend it with my new dear friend Alisa. Meeting her is one of the best things that has happened to me in years and parting from her so soon after making our connection is one of the saddest things about my move. I don’t know what I’ll do without her…

Thank the gods for Skype!

As for day #2, I held my last hurrah at my favorite bar, The Good Life. As the song goes, it’s nice to go somewhere where everybody knows your name. The owners and staff are all great people and I consider them friends. It was a night of 80s dancing (my favorite kind) and the crowd is always great there. Among them were my best bud Bry, along with several new friends that I have made this summer via CouchSurfing. They are all awesome and they have convinced me that CouchSurfing is one of the best online communities since it has it’s roots in -and facilitates- real-world connections and cultural exchange. The biggest benefit of making friends with Surfers? They are very apt to visit you no matter where you are. All of them are welcome at my place in Beijing!

My next days will be spent going through the detritus of my life, sorting out what can come with me, what must be left behind, what can be saved and what will be given away. Its all downhill from here.

I can’t run a Bostonian-centric website without speaking up about my beloved Red Sox (and Patriots and Celtics) from time to time. So don’t be surprised when I occasionally use this space to rant or rave about something that has happened back home… And yesterday’s “something” is just impossible to ignore.

In what I think will go down as the most disastrous move in his career, team General Manager Theo Epstein pulled the trigger on his second My-Balls-Are-in-A-Vise move in 4 years by sending future 1st ballot Hall-of-Famer Manny Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers AND top prospects Craig Hansen and Brandon Moss to the Pittsburgh Pirates for… wait for it… Jason Bay?!?

O.K. He was rookie of the year in the NL 4 years ago; and, yes, he has been consistent with his bat since then (.281 AVG., .373 OBP, .515 SLG) and he can hit for power (22 HRs this year, 142 HRs total). He will also be a defensive upgrade in Left Field (though not as much as is popularly assumed-I have always maintained that Manny was vastly underrated in the outfield). Basically, his numbers this year are a wash with Manny’s and the Sox see him as somebody who can be quietly consistent in the “Lower Manny” range, while Manny himself is seen as getting older with power numbers that have been starting to decline in the past 2 years. Add in all of his grousing and clubhouse disruptions and you can see why they wanted to ship him out of town ASAP, especially since there was no way in hell that they team was going to pick up his option contract extension next year and shell out another $20 million for more of the same.

No, my problem does not lie with losing Manny. My problem is with the tactics.

In addition to sending Manny to the Dodgers (with the agreement that they also will NOT pick up his contract option next year), the Sox are paying his salary in full for the rest of the season. The Dodgers get him for free this season. They could have achieved the same effect if they just sent him to the minor leagues.

Say goodbye to any payoff hopes for the Sox this season… And you can pretty much guarantee that the Yankees will be more than happy to pay Manny the $25 million/year over 4 years that he will be asking for next year.

I am actually looking forward to not being able to pay too much attention to baseball over the next few weeks while I am engrossed in the Olympics.

Manny packing his bags