so much for the solar

The city of Boston is going green. Well, greenish.

After putting in extra-large curbside trash cans with solar-powered trash compactors, the city added solar-powered parking meters. No more do you have to dig around under your seat for quarters. These machines take those dreaded dollar coins - you know, the bulky gold coins that roll out of the Charlie Card machine en masse after you buy one ride on the T with a $20. If you've only nickels and dimes to spare, too bad. It's a solar-powered parking meter, not a CoinStar machine or a wishing well. But these meters do take plastic.

And it seems by green, the city is more focused on getting the green than going green. Gone are the days of getting some free time from the previous parker - each of these meters serves half a block's worth of cars. Instead of the meters displaying the time remaining for each corresponding parking spot, these babies spit out a sticky note with the expiration time printed on it. Yep, a "green" machine that uses hundreds of sticky notes a day. Sticky notes that inevitably end up in the trash. Well, maybe if people are nice they go from car window to secret communal stash of extra meter time to different car window to solar-powered trash can. But it's still a bunch of rubbish in the end.

FURTHER THOUGHTS (21 NOV 2006 | 11:30 PM): Nevermind about the plastic. The Boston Globe reported today that you can't use credit for the meters in any increment of 15 minutes (or 25 cents) - you can only use credit to pay for two full hours (that's $2). But there's hope yet. The news hook was that mandatory minimum payments actually violate the terms of several credit card companies.

a series of unrelated events

These are old but kind of funny, and I haven't posted in forever. Theoretically I might have developed any one of a longer form, but I'm lazy and if it hasn't happened yet, it ain't gonna.

• Nothing says responsible employee like running into your boss on the train the morning after a night of drinking. Especially when you still smell like a combination of alcohol and cigarettes and are only on the train because you crashed at a friend's place and got up early so you could go home and make yourself presentable before you saw anyone from work. Also, it's even funnier when you only work two days a week, and you've clearly chosen to get blasted on one of the few work nights.

• Homeless guys panhandling will do remarkably better if they tailor their pitches to the types of people who are passing by. Therefore, asking for donations to assist with the research and development of alcohol consumption while in Downtown Crossing should yield good returns. Or at least smiles.

• Sometimes a trucker who wants to drive through a road that's blocked off with a sawhorse will stop his truck in the intersection, get out and move the barricade so he can pass through. What's better is when he drives ten feet further, stops again and moves the sawhorse back into the middle of the road behind his truck. This is especially funny when the sawhorse was put there as a joke in the first place.

• "Indoor voices" are underrated. You may learn this the hard way, when you hear someone laughing in the alley below your window after you blurt out something to the effect of, "Yeah, I'm annoyed. I'm horny and I've always fucked you everytime you wanted to be fucked." Of course, if you've said this at normal decibel levels, it makes you wonder what else people in the alley or neighboring apartments have heard. And you thought paying more in rent to have a studio provided some semblance of privacy.

• It's weird when someone wakes up angry at you because of something "you" did to him in his dream. Don't worry, he'll get over it, once he makes you promise not do in real life what you did in the dream (even though it is unlikely in real life that you would have a threesome with him and his roommate and then go fool around with just his roommate after he's fallen asleep).

• When a car full of strangers honks at you while you're crossing the street and then someone shouts something to you out the window, you'll be happy when instead of asking for directions the driver says, "You're beautiful, that's all," and the woman in the passenger seat next to him says, "You're sexy." Still, you will not have a threesome with these people, because the light turned green before you could say anything more than "thanks."