Dirac Angestun Gesept

The American Repertory Theater (at Zero Arrow Street, near Harvard) is running Charlie Victor Romeo for a few more days.

It’s a 90-minute play based on cockpit voice recorder transcripts from accidents, but it is definitely not just for the aviation enthusiast. (The cast, writers, and director have had no aviation experience at all.) The set is minimal, but the acting is wonderful and the sound design…oh, the sound design. Each of the six accidents is introduced by a simple text slide, giving the flight, aircraft, date, number of people aboard, and cause. At the end of each, another slide gives the aftermath: survivors (if any) and casualties.

After the show, there’s time to discuss the play with the cast and creators; you should stick around for it if you’re curious about how they interpreted it, why they chose those accidents, or anything like that. The audience questions tonight ranged from discussion with a former pilot to questions from people without aviation experience, but all enjoyed it.

Had I seen it sooner, I’d have blogged it sooner. As it is, it’s only showing through Sunday. If you’re staying in town, or if you can go Thursday even if you’re headed for Wiscon, I highly recommend going if at all possible.

The Guardian has a great article on the emergency services’ reactions to the July 7th bombings in London.

Michael Collinson, an off-duty nurse, recalls stepping into the road near Russell Square station, some minutes after the bombs went off, and commandeering a passing delivery truck, telling the astonished driver it was needed for ferrying medical supplies. A firefighter speeding past Tavistock Square half an hour later, on his way to King’s Cross, recalls seeing the destroyed No 30 bus and thinking it must have gone under a low bridge. And PC Tony Asquith, stretchering commuters through the acrid smoke and heat of the Piccadilly line tunnels, remembers an injured man so shocked that he couldn’t stop talking about his wedding ring, and how upset his wife would be that, in the chaos, it had slipped off and vanished.

Highly recommended.

This weekend, a group of ships from the NATO STANAVFORLANT (Standing Naval Force Atlantic) are in Boston at the Charlestown Navy Yard (near the USS Constitution), and today they were mostly open for visitors.

The information we’d had from a USENET post turned out to be a bit off reality; the ships didn’t open for the afternoon until 1400, but it wasn’t a huge hardship to hang around and see what else was going on. The bonus was that the post had only listed one ship as being open, which was an underestimate…five of the ships listed as being currently in STANAVFORLANT were there (the German FGS Spessart was not in evidence) and as it turned out all of them were open to some extent, though in one case that was a minimal extent.

We first visited the flagship of the group, the HNLMS Jacob van Heemskerck (F 812) of the Royal Netherlands Navy (class ship of its frigate class), and the German Bremen-class frigate FGS Niedersachsen (F208), which was moored outboard of the van Heemskerck and is notable for having saluted the USS Doyle on Sept. 11, 2003. Both ships had their main decks open for visitors, with explanatory signs added in English and helpful crewmembers explaining things as well.

We then moved over to the other mooring, where the USS Simpson (FFG 56, Oliver Hazard Perry class); the Spanish SPS Navarra (F 85, Santa Maria class; the Santa Maria is the Spanish variant of the Perry-class) which intercepted the unflagged freighter So San carrying North Korean weapons to Yemen; and the Canadian Halifax-class HMCS Ville de Québec (FFH 332) were moored.

The Simpson was not offering tours, but did allow access through to the Navarra; there, tours of the main deck, the helo deck and the SH-60 parked there, the upper deck, and the bridge were given by members of the ship’s company. Unfortunately, even two years of high school Spanish, useful as it is for travel (”por favor”, “gracias”, and “¿donde está el baño?”) didn’t give me useful vocabulary words for “anti-submarine warfare”, “close-in weapons system”, or “surface to air missile”. Still, it was an enjoyable experience, as we got to see much more of the ship than we had expected to; it was reminiscent of an airside bus tour of Munich airport we once took, which was conducted entirely in German and was therefore an exercise in putting stories together around the few words we did recognize.

Beyond the Navarra was the Ville de Québec, which like the Jacob van Heemskerck and Niedersachsen was allowing main deck access, plus the ability to climb to the bridge deck for a look through the windows and the chance to visit the helo hangar with its Sikorsky Sea King and talk to the helo crew (one of whom is on an exchange from the United Kingdom). This ship was the first on the scene of the Swissair 111 crash.

We finished our visit there, having enjoyed the afternoon immensely, and headed home.

(The ships previously visited Baltimore and I believe are headed for Halifax next.)

The Auto & Technik Museum Sinsheim, in Germany, was already on my list of places to visit due to the combination of a Concorde (hey, plenty of museums got one after service ended, but it’s still one I haven’t seen yet), the Soviet Tu-144 (not so easy to find in museums), and various other neat things.

Now they’ve gone one step further.

They’re getting the remaining Soviet “Buran” shuttle (article in German). Sadly, this is not the one that actually flew in space (that one was destroyed in a hangar collapse). I don’t know how long it’ll take for them to get it to Sinsheim and put it on display, but…dang, I really want to go visit once it’s done.

(First noticed at BoingBoing, but that was just a pointer to a picture gallery. I guessed it was Sinsheim, and was able to find the full Der Speigel article with a little searching.)

The MBTA is helpfully shutting down portions of not one but two lines over Labor Day weekend.

From Friday (Sept. 3) at 9pm through Monday (Sept. 6), there will be bus shuttles replacing portions of both Red Line and Blue Line service, in addition to three previously-existing and ongoing disruptions: Lechmere service replacement on the Green Line, the closure of Savin Hill station, and the Orange Line signal work.

The Red Line will be closed between Park Street and Kendall/MIT from Friday 9pm until the end of service Monday (which really means early Tuesday morning). Shuttle buses will be available at Park Street, Central, and Kendall/MIT.

The Blue Line will be closed between Wonderland and Maverick from Friday 9pm until “Monday evening”. (I’d treat that as “until the end of service” myself.) Shuttle buses will be available. Massport shuttles should be running to Maverick for airport service.

These may be important notes to folks coming to town for Noreascon Four (Worldcon).

The Boston Globe has finally discovered that MBTA announcements and electronic message boards don’t work.

They’re often actively broken or wrong, too, not just disconnected:

At Back Bay station, an electronic message board flashes the word ”Rebooting,” replaced a few moments later with meaningless red dashes. At the commuter rail station in Natick, an electronic sign displays the incorrect time so often, passengers simply ignore it.

Of course, anyone who actually uses the system could have told them that they’ve been like this for years and years, if not for the entire history of the system.

Perhaps tomorrow’s Globe will tell us that water is wet.

BoingBoing recently had a pointer to Ewan’s quest to hit every Zone 1 stop on the London Underground.

This reminded me of the best publisher of books on the Tube and other rail and metro systems, Capital Transport. They have several books done in cooperation with London’s Transport Museum and most of their catalogue is available at the LT Museum Store.

My favorite of their books is Metro Maps of the World, which has maps of all the world’s major urban transit systems, with notes on their history and a frontispiece showing the systems laid out as if they were stations on the London Underground.

There was also a poster of this map available from the LT Museum Shop itself, though it doesn’t seem to be on their web store; I don’t know if it’s still available; I can’t find the book there either, at the moment.

UPDATE: Guardian review of the book, found via a link from Going Underground’s blog.

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is having a grand opening of the new south concourse on Saturday.

There are some interesting articles about aspects of the new terminal, including a neat 90-foot-long glass art piece and the P-I’s overview of the new terminal. The latter notes that Sea-Tac started out as a Quonset hut in an open field in 1947…hey, sounds like Logan 2000!

In smaller construction news, planning for a new playground near where I grew up continues.

The P-I’s Robert Jamieson has an interesting column in today’s paper on the roving homeless camp and how it came to Bothell.

Last but not least, some South Sound businesses are being helped onto the World Wide Web. Anyone for almond butter toffee salmon jerky?

(And, yes, these are regional articles and not Seattle-centric…but the title pun was too good to miss.)