I frequently wonder if I will ever wander that far away from home.  Last weekend, I went to Harvard stadium to watch a hell of a great football game.

Last Sunday I went to visit a Japanese school in Boston called Showa Women’s Institute.  It was about four miles away from where I live.  It turned out to be a thoroughly pleasant afternoon at the school.  The school had a very quiet, very peaceful atmosphere and I enjoyed being there.  It is a school that educates female Japanese students in English.  They had a little festival going on with performances.  It certainly was nicer than any school I had ever attended.  We went by school bus, so I feel like no matter what, I will never get off of the school bus.

Let’s have a look see at what is going on at the Showa School on Sunday (click to make the images bigger, of course):

Yale is down at the half.  Looks like they won’t win THE GAME.  And Handsome Dan got all dressed up for this.  Boy he looks disappointed:

Confession time.  I did not attend Harvard.  I have no connection to Harvard, other than traipsing through the campus and visiting the school’s thoroughly excellent museums.  I have never set foot in a Harvard lecture hall.  I have met Harvard graduates and if I play my cards right, I might one day work there.  Somehow though, I feel a great affection for the school.

The Harvard-Yale game comes around every two years and since I first attended, I really did fall in love with the whole tradition. The whole thing is unabashed fun.  The fans are maddening and hilarious at the same time.  A couple of guys dressed up like old style Ivy League football fans with giant fur coats and knitted sweaters.  Did I mention that drank out of flasks the entire time?  Sitting behind me was whose great grandfather, grandfather and father had attended Harvard.  Whenever people say things like that around me, I always think “while my grandfather was leaving the Russian steppe.”  But anyway, those guys were pretty nice.

Next to me there were two people speaking Swedish, a guy and a girl.  I kind of understand Swedish.  Kind of.  I got the feeling the guy was trying to impress the girl but the girl wasn’t having it so he left her.  But then she got angry at him.

The funniest fan was a woman who was trying to rouse the crowd in a “let’s go Harvard” cheer that went nowhere.  She kept doing it and I started to feel sorry for her.  Harvard was winning the game at point.

Be cool and stay smooth, Tommy Lee Jones said in one of my favorite movies “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.”  And the boys on the field at THE GAME always do that.  (Click on the photos to make them bigger):

Like when you are at Bunker Hill Community College, pretending to do school work, but actually surfing the internet.  Then you look up and you see these alien looking lights and boom, inspiration:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Six years ago, I went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.  There is an entry about it on this blog if you go back about 1000 entries.  Don’t actually do that, but it is in the entries for 2008.  It is probably about my amazement that I actually went to a baseball game.  Little did I know that I would one day find myself worshipping a god called David Ortiz.  But whatever.  Another entry entirely.

So after my first visit, I decided to come to Fenway Park for a tour in 2009.  Again, a place I thought I would visit once or twice.

Well, I have now visited Fenway Park for different reasons at different times probably fifty times.  I have to admit, I love every visit.  The ballpark is kind of small and has a lot of funny features.

Yesterday I participated in the Spartan Race in Fenway Park, where you had to run up and down the stairs in Fenway and climb up nets and ropes and walls.  I thought about those first visits and thought about incredibly unbelievable it would have been to me five years ago that I would be running around the stadium during Spartan Race kinds of things.  With booming music going in the background too, that made it just that much better.

I wanted to do Spartan for two reasons.  Number one, I wanted to have a trifecta of obstacle races for 2014 — Warrior Dash, Tough Mudder and Spartan.  Number two, I wanted to get to go on the actual field where the Red Sox play and I wanted to touch the Green Monster.  Boston, what have you done to me?  When I moved here, my biggest ambition in life was to meet Karl Lagerfeld and have my photography in the pages of Vanity Fair.  Now my biggest wish is to touch a scoreboard.

Well, anyway, touch that scoreboard I did and I got some shots from on the actual Red Sox field.  Again, my priorities in life seem to have changed.

Also, a blog note.  I decided to start doing galleries up here for more than two photos so that people can see the entire photo on their screen.  And to get more hits.  I’m all about those numbers, so do be so kind as to click on the photo to enlarge it if you see it in a postage sized format.

Let’s go … Green Monster!!!:

I love the MIT Museum (or the MIT Robot Museum as I call it) because it always reminds me of some kind of science fiction workshop.  See what I mean:

I’ve frequently thought of what I would do as an alternate career.  I love my job and really wouldn’t consider doing anything else right now, but if the right opportunity came along, I might consider changing what I did.

What is it exactly that I would do?  I’d photograph sports for a living.  I’d photograph games and also talk to the athletes.

I recently attended two games of the Providence Bruins, the minor league hockey affiliate of the Boston Bruins, based on Providence, Rhode Island.  The games were incredible fun, even more fun than the New York Ranger games I attended in the Gretzky/Messier days.  The arena in Providence (New England-ally called the Dunkin Donuts Center) is small and you get a close up look at the players.  You can really see everything in the faces of the players.  You can see how much they enjoy playing, but you can also see the frustration and the exhaustion in their faces.  They seem to play rather endless schedules, criss crossing Canada and the United States.  Some of the players on the teams are teenagers and many more older.

I spotted the name “Henrik Samuelsson” on the roster of the Portland Pirates, who played against the Providence Bruins on Friday of last week.  Samuelsson I guess is a common enough name, but a known one in the world of hockey.  It crossed my mind that this might be the son of the legendary New York Rangers bruiser Ulf Samuelsson (perfect name for a hockey player if there ever was one).  It turned out my hunch was right.

I guess I should throw in a few photography notes here on how these pictures were taken.  I used Rick to photograph these.  Chumlee stayed home and the old man rests eternally on the table in my living room.  Too bad Rick is here only for special occasions because the pictures are exceptional from that camera.  I used a zoom lens, obviously to shoot them.  I tried to focus on keeping it dynamic but then again, I had to focus on the puck.  There are two sets from two different sets of seats.  One set is shot through the boards and a net.  That was not fun.  It was like trying to photograph a hockey game through a straw.  But it worked.  I got a lot of shots I liked.

Let’s Go Providence Bruins:

Recipe for the Salem Halloween cocktail:

Four religious zealots

One guy dressed like Shark-nado

A Zombie

Lord Voldemort/Ghostbusters Combination Plate

One headless man

And what puts the fizz in all that?  This:

 

Sorry guys:

The original is back and here to stay: