Alewife Train is Now Arriving

A few months ago I complained that the text version of the MBTA train arrival announcements include a not-needed-for-text "attention passengers" which delayed the key information to the second screen. I'm happy to report that they've fixed it!

Alewife train is now arriving

While the vocal announcement is still "Attention passengers, the next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving", the text version is the simple "Alewife train is now arriving". They've only fixed it for the second of the two announcements, when the train is arriving instead of when it's approaching, but it's still great!

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June and Mulberries

Around here the Juneberries and Mulberries are ripe.

The berries are delicious, but a lot of people don't know that they're safe to eat.

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Looking Back On Ads

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Talking about ads online I would often get a response that as someone working in ads I was bound to support my employment. I'm now a year out from working in ads and very unlikely to return to the industry: with the economic bias removed but still knowing the industry reasonably well, what do I think of it all now?

My overall views haven't changed very much. I still think the only serious options are paywalls ("pay with your money") and ads ("pay with your attention"), and in the case of the web the value of moving fluidly from site to site pushes strongly for ads. And for sites that are supported by ads it's worth working to make them, to the extent possible, not-bad for visitors and lucrative for the site.

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TryContra Events

I've been maintaining a spreadsheet of contra dance events for a while. With the end of the Dance Gypsy, and ContraDanceLinks going stale, however, people asked if I could convert this into something more usable. So! Here's trycontra.com/events:

Initially it shows you all the events that it knows about. These are dance weekends, camps, festivals, etc which have a bunch of contra dancing. You can limit to just one state if you want:

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Bringing Little Kids to Contra Dances

Julia and I brought Lily to a contra dance for the first time when she was just a couple weeks old, and have continued bringing her (and now her younger siblings) occasionally as they've gotten older. A friend asked if I could write up something about the logistics of this, so here goes!

Babies are generally pretty happy if they're right up next to you and moving, so dancing can work very well. We had good success with stretchy wraps (ex: Boba) and soft structured front-carriers (ex: an Ergobaby when worn on the front). I don't have any contra pictures, probably because if one of us was wearing Lily we were probably dancing together not taking pictures, but here's Julia wearing Anna in a wrap for international dancing at NEFFA:

Wearing a baby, especially a small one, we would dance a bit differently. Moving slower from the extra weight, but also more carefully and deliberately because of the increased vulnerability. We'd keep our arms a bit higher than usual to reduce the risk that a stray elbow might make it through to the baby. Other people aren't necessarily going to notice the baby, and space that would normally be vacant can need a bit of guarding.

This also gets into why, unlike front-carries, back-carries aren't a good fit: the baby is less protected. For example, if you're swinging (spinning with another dancer) a baby in a front-carry is moving slowly and is inside, while one in a back-carry is moving very quickly on the outside. And frame backpack carriers really don't work: they're not designed for this kind of spinning and babies can fall out. You're also likely less aware of where someone on your back is, since you can't see them or how they relate to the dancers around you.

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Contra Mask Status

As we get into summer and covid levels continue to fall, a lot of contra dances are rethinking their approaches to masking. At this point contra dances are the only places I go that require masks, though they're also the closest I get to large numbers of people.

Prompted by an initial search Harris shared with me, I used TryContra to get a list of all 39 New England dances and manually checked their mask rules. I found a bit under half of dances require them (sheet):

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