Their music, their music!!!!
They can save us from the unsafety people at Park Street and the other evils that lurk in Downtown Crossing:

Really, this just couldn’t be any cuter if it tried to be:

In my other life as an English teacher (not as the managing editor and art director of Wrong Side of the Camera) I have a student named Jalal who is perfect example of the use of interlanguage. His way of speaking, which I termed “Jalalish” traverses a spectrum between his first language and his second language. For those of you who have a more Skinner-esque view of the world, his language contains many bad language habits that he must be broken of.

Translation:
Jalal speaks his own language. One day in class he spoke for over half an hour on how Boston is not a safe city based on the fact that he backpack, which he actually left somewhere got stolen. During his whole speech, he kept saying “Boston not safety city, Boston not safety.”

You know Jalal, you are right. Boston not safety. Actually it is full of dangerous characters like these:

A man once told me that when my Charlie card got stuck and I missed my train on the orange line, but its true. She who hesitates is really lost.

Case in point: the following photos. I was being rushed along when I took these photos, but I got them anyway:

Nah, just kidding. I don’t feel like doing any philosophical musings tonight. I’ll just tell a little story and then we’ll roll out with the photos.

So I saw a celebrity today, Mr. Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy Fallon, for those of you who don’t know, is the host of the current Tonight Show. He’s also a quite funny comic and from what I saw today, a really regular nice guy who seems really enjoy the attention he gets. He was so mobbed by the crowd that I wondered what he thought of going from being a regular guy to someone who needs a police escort to cross a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was in town, Cambridge to be exact, to get an award from the Harvard Lampoon, the part of Harvard that is fond of giving awards to celebrities and then parading them through Cambridge in some kind of strange or comical way. Mr. Fallon was supposed to be paraded through on the back of some kind of Roman chariot, when in actuality he was in the back of a carriage that did not look very Roman.

Before the festivities, Mr. Fallon ducked into the Hong Kong restaurant on Mass Ave. I was amazed by the number of people taking his photo because not at least because he was going to be outside in a slow moving vehicle momentarily being taken through the town.

If you don’t mind the risk of being trampled by a horse and getting a bit manhandled by a Boston police officer, you too can see Mr. Fallon, up close and personal.

Here he is actually pointing at me:

And the rest of them. I know he looks like he is wearing a salad on his head:

I mean this art is not trash but it was made from trash and part of it was in a trash heap so I guess I was photographing trash.

Whenever I’m in Jamaica Plain, I see this giant pile of trash that has been fashioned into some kind of art. Sometimes the art is in a more trash like format, sometimes not. Unbelievably (I mean not unbelievably) I have tried to photograph the trash multiple times and the results were never what I wanted. The trash looked like a trash heap. No transcendence, I guess.

But this time, it actually worked out. The trash looked less trash like. Actually, it was these really cool art pieces that had all kinds of incongruous words on them. Somebody studied their SAT flash cards, I guess before making the drawings. I should have boosted one. Well, for next time I guess:

I needed the proper movie accompaniment to write this entry. You can’t write an entry about basketball without watching The Other Dream Team and/or Winning Time, the 30 for 30 about Reggie Miller, Patrick Ewing and a diminutive New York filmmaker named Spike Lee.

Anyway, a long introduction to take us into the where and when of this entry and the photos that will follow. I went to my first Celtics game last night and they played against the New York Knicks. I didn’t even realize it was the Knicks basically until I got there.

I grew up in New York and actually did like the Knicks a lot, especially during the aforementioned Reggie Miller/Patrick Ewing era. I was in high school when that whole thing was playing out and the Garden and the Knicks were big news back then. The Knicks though in New York were always in the news anyway. I particularly remember when Bill Bradley was running for president and Robert Reich said “we knew each other from when we played on the Knicks together.”

Anyway, the Knicks I saw play last night were not the Knicks of yesteryear. Overall, I was expecting a really heavy, physical game and it wasn’t that at all. They played pretty well obviously. They are professional basketball players, so why wouldn’t they, but the play was just less heavy and physical than I expected. Too many years of watching all kinds of finals and big games and there was just a pre-season home opener.

Of course the game was in TD Garden, a venue I have a love-hate relationship with. Love because I’ve been down on the floor in that place and gotten to go on the great tour they give of them. Hate because going to events there makes me want to scream. No backpacks, an arena that is too big to watch anything and the ticket prices are ridiculous.

Either way, I love basketball either way. Let’s Go (miniature) Celtics:

But its fine. They seem to be nice fellows:

Well, the Paper Cranes are my nickname for my now beloved Providence Bruins. A year ago, when the opportunities for us to start going to games, I was excited because I do love hockey, but now that we’ve been going for a while, I have really started to like the team and the atmosphere at the games. It does feel like a small community, a family and generally a nice place to come for a good night of hockey.

And my Cranes delivered. The game was jam packed with excitement from beginning to end. Goals scored, gloves off, sticks thrown.

Let’s Go, Paper Cranes!!!!!

In the words of New York socialite and major league fashion plate Nan Kempner, “I go to the opening of an envelope.” Obviously, I don’t have Ms. Kempner’s social connections or money, but I do go to every single event in existence in Boston.

Today I went to see a circus sized envelope at TD Garden. It was an excellent show, obviously. With this first image, I like to joke that this is what my average day at work looks like:

The only difference between that image and my everyday existence is that I’m usually drinking a cup of coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Obviously, everything else is the same.

I didn’t bring my big camera with me because the security at TD Garden is so absolutely awful and I thought they were going to take my camera away from me anyway before I entered. They don’t allow backpacks at TD Garden and then don’t provide lockers or a coat check or something. You have to pay $10 to a guy in a liquor store to store your stuff. REALLY?

Anyway, I took my little digital camera and thought maybe I could do something with the fake tilt shift setting, but then I got some more stuff too that doesn’t look quite so mini. The results are sort of weirder looking than usual, but I like them: