It depends on what "the" is

I may have discovered why half-hour TV series are doing so poorly in the ratings: People who still read listings in the newspaper don't know they're on. The Boston Sunday Globe's TV Week section uses only grids with tiny boxes to list prime-time shows, and from it I learn that the CW network is airing The tonight at 9:30, right after Girl. (The Globe's Web site uses up a lot of computer ink to tell me the names are actually The Game and Girlfriends.) Last night I could have watched En on HBO, Ballers on BET, or S. on Comedy Central, but the best Sunday lineup was on the Home and Garden network, which aired What, House, De, Kitch, Deco, Deco, Mis, Mis, Dime, and Dime in the afternoon and the equally compelling roster of Log Homes (that one's an hour), Boug, Whats, If, and What at night. Because the show is padded enough to fill 1 hour and 45 minutes' worth of grid squares, the Globe does have room for the complete title of Dancing With the Stars.

Signs of Davis Square: I'm spitting mad

The "Dental" is fine, and the use of black rather than pearly white letters is droll. But that "Arts" bothers me. I don't really want a creative dentist, and certainly not one with an artistic temperament. ("You Crest-eating Philistine! I'm trying to make a statement about the futility of belief, and you just want to eat corn on the cob!") The smeary red lettering doesn't help matters. Does Peter Lorre work as a hygienist here?

The Sopranos: Soft landing

At my day job, we often refer to a story about a elected official who once found it necessary to publicly disagree with another elected official, but not after privately warning his colleague, "Sorry, but I'm going to have to dump a bucket of shit on your head." Was David Chase giving a similar warning to fans of The Sopranos last night, via the scene of Vito Jr. defecating in the shower at his school's locker room? (For those of you not lucky enough to get HBO, we saw the splashdown but not, thank God, the entry into the atmosphere.) I think the scene was a message for someone, but I don't know whether he means that everyone is going to be disappointed with how the series ends, or just the viewers who want maximum bloodshed. I'm OK with the latter.

Emma's on top

As promised, here are the most popular girls' names by state in 2005 (Boys' names are here.) Massachusetts isn't such an outlier in this category: We have the same favorite, Emma, as does the US as a whole. It is surprising, though, that we line up with Idaho and Utah rather than New Jersey and New York; there can't be too many instances of this happening. Olivia is big in Connecticut and Rhode Island, perhaps because of Italian-American influence. And Madison seems to be popular in the Appalachias, at least the southern half from West Virginia to Mississippi.

Don't take a camera to Filene's Basement

I got a nice spring jacket for $40 yesterday at Filene's Basement, but I almost destroyed a $300 digital camera doing it. The problem was the mirror. You see, I put a lot of effort into appearing as if I don't give a damn how I look. I'm not talking about bad personal hygiene or wearing raglike clothes; both of those things attract too much attention. The effect I'm going for is that of someone who hasn't tried to look fashionable, and thus hasn't failed at trying to look fashionable. This can be tricky to pull off. For instance, yesterday I saw a lot of shiny, dark blue windbreakers in the Basement, the kind that someone of my dad's generation might wear. Perfect for blending into the background — or were they too perfect? I noticed the Italian labels and had the awful thought that my wearing such a jacket might be taken as a attempt at a retro look or, even worse, irony. So I narrowed my search down to two "micro suede" jackets, one dark green and the other brown. But I didn't want to be seen looking at myself in the mirror and betraying how much thought I was giving to this. So I spent a lot of time fingering jackets until I saw that no one was hanging around the mirror. Then I sprinted over, pulled off the leather jacket I was wearing, and slung it over the horizontal metal rod on a rack of pants. I tried on one of the suede jackets, and because I was looking around to see if I was being watched, I didn't notice my leather jacket sliding off the rod. It was only when I heard it crash to the floor that I remembered that my digital camera and my cell phone were in the pockets. The camera now has an ugly gap across the top and one side, as if the stitches on the head of Frankenstein's monster has popped open. It still works if I snap everything back in place, but the gap reappears after a few seconds. My phone was OK, but it was already dented from the time some coins went through a hole in the pocket of the same leather coat and I thought it was a good idea to turn the jacket upside down and shake everything out. It's probably a good thing that I don't have to take care of an infant.

Not so many Jacobs in the Deep South

I love making maps, so expect a lot more of these, but I'll start with a simple one: baby names. Each year, the Social Security Administration reports the most popular baby names in each state, and I've color-coded the results for 2005, the last year available. The most striking thing about the map is that Jacob, the most popular name in the US, does not rank first in any of the 11 states of the Confederacy. Oddly, it ranks first in almost all of the states bordering the Confederacy: Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Was there a notorious Civil War general from the North named Jacob? Massachusetts, as is often the case, stands alone from the rest of America in putting Matthew in first place. I can't think of why Anthony is more popular in Nevada than anywhere else. Tony Bennett, maybe? I'll do girls' names soon.

The Netflix ratings: Favorite TV series in Bay State cities

I'm addicted to the "local favorites" lists on Netflix's Web site. I don't know how scientific they are, but they do show some interesting patterns. I looked for the highest ranked TV series in every Bay State town on the site, and here's what jumped out at me. The terrorism thriller 24 is especially popular away from Boston (the city where a terrorist attack seems most likely to occur), ranking highly in Chelmsford, Fall River, Springfield, Taunton, and Worcester. HBO's The Wire, which is concerned with drugs rather than dirty bombs, is tops in central Boston, Roslindale, Milton, Somerville, and Waltham. And The Sopranos seems to appeal more to towns where one might find Tony's McMansion than in cities where Satriale's Pork Store might fit in. It's big in East Falmouth, Holden, Lexington, Plymouth, and Webster. Is Berkshire County a hotbed of monarchists? For whatever reason, the miniseries Elizabeth I is a hot item in Great Barrington, Pittsfield, and Williamstown. And are wannabe actors concentrated north of the Hub? The Hollywood comedy Entourage is being queued up in Charlestown, Medford, and Salem. Other pairings: Battlestar Galactica rules in Allston, people are snuggling up to the British sitcom Coupling in Jamaica Plain, the western Deadwood is rounding up viewers in Arlington (hopefully not because it mirrors town government), and the college soap opera Felicity is popular in Cambridge. House, MD has a foothold in Haverhill (better get sick elsewhere), Prime Suspect is slaying them in Belmont (it's always the quiet suburbs with a taste for horrific crime), and Six Feet Under is the perfect fit for angst-ridden Amherst. Finally, The West Wing lulls Baby Boomer liberals to sleep in Greenfield.

The Sopranos: "Poor Jun!"

A couple of weeks ago I asked for more tragic characters on television. This week's episode of The Sopranos gave us pathos instead. Uncle Junior completed his journey from The Godfather to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Paulie Walnuts became a tiresome old man who won't shut up about the past. ("'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation," says Tony when he's had enough.) A lot of Sopranos fans are feeling sorry for Uncle Jun and Paulie, if the message boards on Television Without Pity are any indication. Both characters are killers who show absolutely no grasp of morality, but because they are so infantile, it's difficult to hate them, especially for those of us who have spent eight years being entertained by them on TV. As much as I'm enjoying the final season, it is making me realize how much of a cheat The Sopranos is. Creator David Chase is a great innovator of the TV series format, and he took a big risk in building a show around a protagonist who behaves so despicably. The problem is that Tony Soprano, and almost all of the main characters, were so compellingly monstrous in the first few episodes that they couldn't go any lower. Yes, several of them have shown signs of redemption (Tony feeling bad when Ralphie killed a stripper, Christopher going through rehab) only to revert to their old ways, but that's not tragic. It's a sitcom convention -- like Sam Malone gaining respect for women and then sliding back to sexism over the course of one episode of Cheers. I hadn't realized this before, but one plot is glaringly absent during the eight seasons of The Sopranos. Unless I've missed something, no one has lost his or her moral compass during the course of the series. OK, wife Carmela and daughter Meadow have become less naive and more complicit in Tony's gangster activities, but they didn't have far to fall, and Chase really had no other option here. (Too much was going on around them for Carmela and Meadow to plausibly remain clueless.) A few "civilians" have been caught in the Sopranos' web, like the screenwriter played by Tim Daly, but in all cases that I can think of, they've been weak personalities gone astray because of gambling or drug addiction. Has anyone willingly crossed over to the dark world of Tony Soprano because of greed, revenge, or a thirst for power? The same problem plagues The Riches, which is nonetheless watchable because of Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. In the pilot episode, we first see Izzard's character picking pockets and stealing from purses at a high-school reunion, which he was able to attend by stealing someone else's identity. Since then, he's lied and stolen many times, but we're always able to forgive him because he's reverting to his old ways. We know that, as long as The Riches is on the air, he is never going to be worse than he was in the first episode. And that takes most of the mystery out of storytelling.

Breast-feeding, book-browsing, and nacho-scarfing

I'm sympathetic to the needs of mothers and infants, and I think that Americans are ridiculously prudish about these things, but one detail nagged me about this story by Jessica Van Sack in the Boston Herald:

A Hingham mom says the manager of a South Weymouth iParty store brought her to tears by scolding her for breast-feeding her infant in the shop where children might see. “He stood over me and said you can’t do that here,” Dr. Melissa Tracy recalled of the party-pooper manager. “I’ve never felt that badly before.” Tracy, 40, a cardiologist practicing in Brockton, was shopping on Friday for her daughter Isabella’s 4th birthday party when she said 2-month-old Tristan got hungry and began to cry. “Rather than let him become hysterical, I sat down on the floor and breast-fed him,” Tracy said.

The floor? Maybe there were no chairs or benches anywhere nearby, but I hope she looked for one. There are already far too many people claiming floor space in stores these days. Bookstores are the worst, and I'm losing any guilt I had about ordering from Amazon.com. (They don't need a hyperlink from me.) It used to be just college kids, but now I see people as old as me (!) sitting in the aisles -- usually reading but occasionally talking on the phone. They take great offense if your foot gets too close, or if you try to read the titles behind their heads. Pervert! Whatever happened to personal space? Once I was at the Harvard Bookstore (they do merit a link), and there was an unusually tall guy with a ridiculously wide coffee-table book sitting on the narrow steps to the basement. He didn't move an inch but just let out an exasperated sigh as I tried to get by him; the sigh was even louder when I didn't see anything I wanted and had the nerve to go back upstairs. Look, I know that there are books all over the place in a bookstore, but sometimes I want a particular one. I'm not the one who stocked it where you want to rest your backside. Why don't you go to the manager and complain that another customer is harrassing you? While you're gone, I'll just grab my book, thank you. In a related sitting-vs.-standing rant, last night on the Orange Line I was forced to stand next to a big guy who leaned against the doors and polished off a huge paper plate of nachos and melted cheese. I like comfort food as much as anyone, but isn't it best enjoyed when you're comfortable? I'll eat or drink just about anything if I'm relaxing with friends and they're jeopardizing their health as much as I am, but nothing tastes good on the T. Maybe he was part of a Clockwork Orange-type experiment, causing his brain to associate cheese with a hot, crowded train that keeps making sudden stops between stations.

Je plonge dans la piscine

Trying to move beyond baby steps (étapes de bébé) in speaking French, last night I attended a conversation group at the Ritz-Carlton bar called Jer-Ne. (Is it intentional that the name sounds like journée, French for a day's wages?) But I still felt like a little boy, if not a bébé, as I thought of my childhood visits to my grand-pères in Maine, when I couldn't decipher anything other than oui, non, and chocolat. This feeling only got stronger when I was talking to a very friendly and patient older man in the group and I blurted out, "J'aime lire des bandes desinées," or "I like to read comic books!" (Well, I do. Especially Charlie Brown and Lucy psychiatre.) I probably didn't seem any more mature when I excitedly talked about right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, a candidate in this weekend's election for president of France. I'm no fascist; it was just that his name was the easiest to remember and pronounce (at least, more so than Nicolas Sarkozy). Midway through the meeting, our organizer announced in French that the next meeting would be in a private room of another restaurant, so that there'd be less noise to compete with. As I said good-bye, I told the organizer that I very much liked the idea of une petite salle sans bruit (small room without noise), and she responded, slowly and carefully, that I was in luck because the next meeting would be in just such a place -- apparently assuming, with good reason, that I hadn't understood a word of her previous announcement. I thought about saying, "But I understood you the first time!", but I couldn't come up with the words.

The cult of Trader Joe's

A Los Angeles paper chronicles that city's salivation over the prospect of the "popular low-priced" Trader Joe's grocery chain moving downtown. The idea is just as popular in Boston neighborhoods in the early stages of gentrification. In South Boston, a community group charged with coming up with a way to improve Dorchester Avenue said, in a draft report, "Too many fast food and sub shops" and "Need more service-oriented businesses (e.g., Trader Joe's)." In Roslindale, "There was considerable interest in building a Trader Joe's," according to the minutes of a meeting by the Neighborhood Strategic Plan there. Unfortunately, Trader Joe's is a business and not a nonprofit group. It will probably set up shop in a neighborhood in which an independent grocer of an organic bent has already demonstrated success. Like, perhaps, Foodies in the already-upscale South End? After all, Starbucks didn't move into that neighborhood until Francesca's and the Garden of Eden had been there for years.

Late for work

I was running late this morning, and as I walked to my subway stop I started to worry about what my boss would say. Of course, I'm talking about this person. Fortunately, he let me off with a warning. "I was expecting to see you before now" was all he said, but I wasn't fooled by his evil grin. He's not going to forget this.

What if I want to press flowers while self-medicating?

Four-way intersections and a "diverse mixture of businesses" make a neighborhood perfect for walking, according to this study by the Rand Corp. I don't know what mix of businesses they find ideal, but you can make up your own and see how close a zip code comes to matching it at the Census Bureau site. Beware that it takes a lot of patience. I tested it by looking for zip codes in New England that have at least three businesses in each of these five categories: groceries, liquor stores, bookstores and news dealers, drugstores, and florists. Then I eliminated the zip codes that also had at least three dealers of automotive parts, as an attempt to weed out malls. By this highly arbitrary criteria, I came up with eight "diverse" zip codes in the region: Hartford, CT 06040 Andover, MA 01810 Beverly, MA 01915 Newburyport, MA 01950 Boston (Back Bay), MA 02116 Cambridge, MA 02138 Newport, RI 02906 Providence, RI 02906 A few dozen other places failed to make the cut because they didn't have enough bookstores or florists. I may have to refine my criteria and report back. So what makes a perfect walkable neighborhood? Does it need "pet supplies," "bowling centers," or "meat markets"?

Jolly ranch houses

Slate.com's Witold Rybczynski has a fascinating history of the ranch house here. He notes that the style accounted for about 90 percent of new homes circa 1950 but are almost never built today. As a kid growing up in a farmhouse (the farm itself had been chopped up into dozens of lots long before my family got there), I found the ranch houses of various friends and relatives tres chic. Thanks to the open floor plans, I could simultaneously watch TV and inspect the contents of an open refrigerator! The best feature of a typical ranch house was the huge, uncurtained picture window. On a cold winter's night, a 10-year-old boy could hurl a snowball smack into the middle of it and watch the startled faces of the grown-ups who had gathered in the living room to nurse highballs and trade mildly dirty jokes. At the time, of course, I didn't realize how much this might have seemed like the bony white finger of God pointing accusingly at the naked inhabitants of the Garden of Eden. But now I understand why prim windows with shades are back in fashion.

What are you, tone deaf?

Take the test here. I scored an 80.6, which is the second-best category ("very good," below "exceptional"). So how come my signature song at parties is "I've Grown Accostumed to Her Face," in the style of that great crooner Rex Harrison?

5000 hours of television I don’t regret watching

Not counting the occasional movie, I spend about one hour a day watching television, usually choosing one program on “live” TV or on a DVD. Assuming that average has held over my entire lifetime (I know I watched more than that as a kid, but I also watched less when I was a young adult, excluding the time spent in bars with TVs on), that’s about 15,000 hours of television from the time I had enough of a vocabulary to understand I Love Lucy. I’ll guess that a third of that time was spent on news programs, talk shows, and awards shows and other specials, though that share has dwindled down to almost nothing. Getting any kind of information from television is horribly inefficient compared with the Internet, newspapers, books, and even radio. And since I spend most of my working day reading, researching, and talking about current events (and much of my nights and weekends reading nonfiction), I have no appetite for CNN or the History Channel. My guess is another third of my TV-watching time has been devoted to entertainment programs that don’t really satisfy. Some are series that I’ll sample once, or even a dozen times, before concluding they’re not worth following. Others are shows that are past their peak but I’ve gotten in the habit of watching. And there are times when I’ll watch something out of politeness to people I’m spending time with, especially since I’ve undoubtedly inflicted my TV preferences on many people over the years. What’s left is listed here, in more or less chronological order of original airdates: 5,000 hours, including commercials, of fictional television that I don’t consider a waste of time. I’m going to offer reasons for each of the series on the list, but I’ll take expressions of disbelief over the choices at any time.

The Riches: not so rich

I’m still watching The Riches, but I’m beginning to pray that the truth comes out about the titular characters, a family of grifters who have stolen the identities of an upper-class couple conveniently killed in a car crash. Eddie Izzard is good, Minnie Driver is great, and Margo Martindale is fabulous as a pill-popping neighbor, but I’m already tired of seeing the Riches barely elude discovery — by the authorities, by their employers, and by the band of “Travelers” they used to belong to. Last night, one daughter was arrested for possession of pot, and it briefly seemed as if the police would uncover everything, but a well-placed bribe negated the plot development. Two of the other Travelers have discovered what’s up, but I fully expect a freak accident to take care of one or both of them. And with every close call, the already-implausible plot becomes a little more inconceivable. I don’t want years of this. I’d rather see the family arrested, or go running back to the Travelers, or turn on each other. Maybe this is all frustration that comes from seeing Tony repeatedly survive attempts on his life on The Sopranos, and the castaways repeatedly failing to get off the island on Lost, and the crew of Rescue Me never meeting anyone outside the firehouse who isn’t a psycho or an asshole. By contrast, I have to give Big Love credit for last year’s season finale, in which the polygamous protagonists are unmasked in humiliating fashion. Most shows would have dragged out their attempts at secrecy for several years.

Tikka at Tamarind

I finally got to Tamarind Bay, the Indian restaurant in Harvard Square that replaced a Mexican restaurant where, I think it’s now legally safe to say, I got quite sick from a serving of refried beans. Indian food has replaced Mexican as my cuisine of choice when dining out, partly because it’s not heavy on meat and because its flavors are packed into small portions. But this goes against everything in my gastronomic heritage. I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family, and my Irish-American father liked “boiled dinners” of ham, potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. (I’d pour about a gallon of vinegar over everything on my plate so that the food tasted like something.) On the rare occasions when we dined out, my favorite meal was the fried fisherman’s platter, and I felt shortchanged if the plate wasn’t so overflowing that French fries and breaded clam strips tumbled onto the floor as soon as the waitress put the plate down. That’s why I glared at the waiter the first time I had Indian food, in college, and he presented me with a serving dish of chicken saag hardly bigger than my hand. That must be the spinach, I thought, but when is he going to bring the chicken? (Still, that was less embarrassing than the first time I had sushi and I blithely picked up an entire glob of wasabi and popped it in my mouth.) It took me a few years to appreciate Indian restaurants as a great way to have a leisurely meal with friends without filling up on meat or pasta. Almost as healthy as French restaurants, where about 20 minutes of eating is stretched out over three hours of sitting. So what was good at Tamarind Bay? The tawa paneer (cottage cheese grilled with spring onions and homemade spices) was a tasty appetizer, and the lazeez tikka masala (chicken garnished with capsicum, onions, and tomatoes) was a satisfying entrée. (Capsicum is a kind of pepper defined in my dictionary as a “condiment and intestinal stimulant.”) The mojito was also good, but I declined to sample the after-dinner spices near the exit after I saw someone stifle a sneeze with his hand and then use the same hand to dig around in the open bowl.

Tragically, TV shows haven't caught up with novels

Has there ever been a protagonist in a TV series who becomes less likeable and more flawed by the end of the series? I’m not sure that The Sopranos qualifies. More and more about Tony Soprano has been revealed over the past eight years, and little of it has been good, but the character itself has not changed much. There’s a stronger case that Carmela and Meadow Soprano have lost the small sense of morality that they once exhibited, but they don’t exactly count as examples of Shakespearean downfall (yet). Miniseries are another matter, since most are based on novels and none have to worry about keeping characters going for years (to milk a show’s popularity) while not allowing them to change much (because change threatens a show’s popularity). But if television is going to rise to the same level as film, theater, and novels as a form of storytelling — and I think it eventually will — it has to give us a few tragic endings. The biggest flaw about The West Wing, and the reason it ceased to be interesting after a year or so, is that creator Aaron Sorkin refused to give any of the main characters an irreversible bad decision. This was a show set at the highest level of government, yet no one was corrupted by power! Will Lost turn Locke into a madman? Will House turn its protagonist into a complete misanthrope (instead of someone pretending to be an ass because he’s avoiding intimacy)? Someday there will be a long-running series with the awful downward spiral of Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The Conversation, or The Blue Angel, but I think we’re still a few years off.

Where’s everyone going?

The rise of e-mail came just in time. My friends have changed residences so much over the past few years that I no longer bother to maintain an address book. The restlessness of my social circle got me wondering about the most frequent destinations for moving vans, and the Census Bureau has a detailed, if belated answer. If you have the patience, you can download charts that estimate every move from one county to another between 1995 and 2000. I’ve summarized the highlights below. Top 10 population shifts between counties, 1995-2000 Below are the biggest shifts of people from one county to another. Almost all of the shifts were from major urban areas to more suburban counties, and once-booming Los Angeles County was, by far, the biggest exporter of people (though there seems to have been some backwash from Orange County). 1. Los Angeles County, CA, to Orange County, CA: 146,044 2. Los Angeles County, CA, to San Bernardino County, CA: 135,657 3. Miami-Dade County, FL, to Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), FL: 89,915 4. Cook County (Chicago), IL, to DuPage County, IL: 80,286 5. Baltimore city, MD, to Baltimore County, MD: 77,991 6. Orange County, CA, to Los Angeles County, CA: 77,760 7. St. Louis city, MO, to St. Louis County, MO: 76,154 8. Los Angeles County, CA, to Riverside County, CA: 74,919 9. Kings County (Brooklyn), NY, to Queens County, NY: 63,603 10. Queens County, NY, to Nassau County (western Long Island), NY: 61,802 Top 10 population shifts between counties in different states, 1995-2000 The biggest migrations across state lines were, again, mostly from urban to suburban areas. But my own state’s Essex County, which includes Salem and Cape Ann, was the only example in the top 10 of a mostly suburban county exporting people to a more suburban county. 1. Los Angeles County, CA, to Clark County (Las Vegas), NV: 55,857 2. Washington, DC, to Prince George’s County, MD: 38,754 3. Los Angeles County, CA, to Maricopa County (Phoenix), AZ: 32,598 4. Cook County (Chicago), IL, to Lake County (Gary), IN: 23,396 5. Washington, DC, to Montgomery County, MD: 18,448 6. Cook County (Chicago), IL, to Maricopa County (Phoenix), AZ: 17,057 7. Prince George’s County, MD, to Washington, DC: 14,771 8. Jackson County (Kansas City), MO, to Johnson County, KS: 14,220 9. Multnomah County (Portland), OR, to Clark County (Vancouver), WA: 13,475 10. Essex County, MA, to Rockingham County, NH: 12,994 Top 15 population shifts between counties in non-bordering states, 1995-2000 Finally, here are the biggest long-distance shifts, between counties in states that don’t touch. New York and Chicago seem to have a give-and-take relationship with Los Angeles, even if they still lose more people than they gain in the deal. Otherwise, all the big shifts are to counties in the South and West. 1. Cook County (Chicago), IL, to Maricopa County (Phoenix), AZ: 17,057 2. New York County (Manhattan), NY, to Los Angeles County, CA: 12,965 3. Los Angeles County, CA, to King County (Seattle), WA: 12,575 4. Cook County (Chicago), IL, to Los Angeles County, CA: 12,270 5. Los Angeles County, CA, to Cook County (Chicago), IL: 11,292 6. Queens County, NY, to Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), FL: 10,460 7. Cook County (Chicago), IL, to Clark County (Las Vegas), NV: 9.963 8. Los Angeles County, CA, to Dallas County, TX: 9,824 9. Los Angeles County, CA, to Harris County (Houston), TX: 9,852 10. Kings County (Brooklyn), NY, to Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), FL: 9.053 11. Nassau County (western Long Island), NY, to Palm Beach County, FL: 8,859 12. Los Angeles County, CA, to New York County (Manhattan), NY: 8,446 13. King County (Seattle), WA, to Maricopa County (Phoenix), AZ: 7,906 14. Honolulu County, HI, to San Diego County, CA: 7,757 15. Honolulu County, HI, to Clark County (Las Vegas), NV: 7,738 Florida is an interesting case in that migrants from the same area tend to settle together. So people from Queens and Brooklyn dominated the Fort Lauderdale area, but ex-Long Islanders were more likely to end up around Palm Beach. And the Gulf Coast counties that include St. Petersburg, Tampa, and Sarasota got more residents from Chicago than from New York.

Music makes the feet go faster

Superstar violinist Joshua Bell plays in a Washington, DC, subway station and hardly anyone pays attention. I’d like to think that I would have stopped to hear him, but I also like to think that I would have saved Kitty Genovese’s life. From the Washington Post, complete with video (though I don’t know how long it will be available for free).

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something. A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened. Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

Bada-Boardwalk!

Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos raised a few important questions. First, have any fictional characters ever completed a game of Monopoly? You knew there was going to be trouble even before Carmela caught Tony “kiting” a $500 bill from the bank. Then there was the inevitable argument over whether fines levied by Chance and Community Chest cards should go into a pot to be won by whichever player lands on Free Parking. When I was seven or eight, I shared Bobby Bacala’s view that “the Parker Brothers” forbid this practice in the rulebook, and that it added too much of an element of luck to what was supposed to be a game of skill. Maybe we’re meant to think that Bobby has the mind of a 7-year-old who puts a little too much stock in the rules. I eventually figured out that the Free Parking “kitty” served a vital purpose: It gave losing players hope (almost always false) that they could turn their fortunes around with one roll of the dice, and it (sometimes) kept them from quitting the game before it formally ended. (By “them,” I mean my sister.) There were few things more frustrating to a little kid than running up a huge lead in Monopoly only to have the remaining opponent “forfeit” instead of doing the honorable thing — wasting an hour or so on a Saturday afternoon slowly going broke and listening to you gloat. Another Sopranos question: Is the show going to imitate the “Eunice” sketches of The Carol Burnett Show and put its characters through such classic party games as Charades, Yahtzee, and Sorry!? Will we find out that Livia cooked Tony’s pet rabbit when he was a little boy, the same way that Mama made a “chicken” dinner out of Eunice’s beloved Fluffy?

Put…ze cookies…BACK!

Dear Shaw’s Supermarket: You caught me. I put a bag of Paul Newman chocolate-chip cookies in my shopping basket while I was in that weird aisle near the front of your vast store in the Back Bay. (Health Foods? Organic Items? Expensive Stuff for College-Educated Liberals with Glass-Front Kitchen Cabinets?) Then, a couple of acres away, I found the house brand of chocolate-chip cookies, which are just as good but a lot cheaper, in that weird Island of Less Attractively Packaged Products near the wine section. Afraid that a detour back to Newman Land would cause me to miss the last train home to Somerville, I just put the pricier cookies on the shelf next to the house brand. That’s when one of your employees — whose job seemed to be putting items on the right shelves — yelled, “Hey! You COULD put those back where you found them!” Sorry. But maybe if you put similar items in the same time zone, my comparison shopping wouldn’t be such a hardship on your staff. So where’s your ice cream?

Car-free cities

I don’t have a car and don’t care to have one, so there aren’t many places in the U.S. where it’s feasible for me to live. But the group Bikes at Work has a database of all the places in the country where lots of people don’t drive to work. I expected New York to rank highly by this measure, but most of the places where people don’t start their day with road rage are small communities: military bases, college towns, and resorts such as Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Telluride, Colorado. They sound like nice places to live if you aren’t looking for a job and you like to meet new people who aren’t going to stick around for very long. So I looked for places with more than 30,000 residents and discovered these pace-setters in car-free living: Highest percentage of commutes made without a car (places with more than 30,000 people): 1. Hoboken, NJ (70%) 2. New York, NY (66%) 3. Cambridge, MA (56%) 4. State College, PA (53%) 5. Atlantic City, NJ (51%) 6. Jersey City, NJ (49%) 7. Washington, DC (48%) 8. Boston, MA (47%) 9. Union City, NJ (46%) 10. West New York, NJ (46%) Highest percentage of commutes made by public transit (places with more than 30,000 people): 1. Hoboken, NJ (59%) 2. New York, NY (54%) 3. Jersey City, NJ (40%) 4. Washington, DC (34%) 5. Union City, NJ (34%) Highest percentage of commutes made on foot (places with more than 30,000 people): 1. State College, PA (42%) 2. North Chicago, IL (29%) 3. Cambridge, MA (26%) 4. East Lansing, MI (22%) 5. Atlantic City, NJ (21%) Highest percentage of commutes made by bicycle (places with more than 30,000 people): 1. Davis, CA (15%) 2. Boulder, CO (7%) 3. Berkeley, CA (6%) 4. Urbana, IL (5%) 5. Cambridge, MA (4%) Highest percentage of households without a car (places with more than 30,000 people): 1. New York, NY (56%) 2. Atlantic City, NJ (50%) 3. Union City, NJ (46%) 4. Newark, NJ (44%) 5. West New York, NJ (43%)

Chinese, Italian, and Mexican food doesn't count

When dining out with friends, I avoid Chinese, Italian, and Mexican restaurants unless I have reason to believe they’re exceptional, or at least exceptionally authentic. It turns out that my rule is easier to follow in Massachusetts than in most states. There’s an “other” ethnic restaurant for every 8,517 people here. According to the Census Bureau, only Hawaii, California, and Virginia have a bigger assortment of interesting eateries, when adjusting for population size. I’m counting only restaurants that described themselves as “full-service” to the Census takers in 2002, so the Chacarero take-out window in Downtown Crossing presumably isn’t included — which means we achieved our high ranking even without the help of Chilean string bean/avocado/chicken sandwiches. The Census data also indicate that if you’re going to a fancy restaurant in Connecticut, it’s probably Italian. There are 707 Italian restaurants in the ill-named Nutmeg State, or one for every 5,000 people. New Jersey and New Hampshire rank second and third in this category, while Italian joints are scarcest in North Dakota. Chinese restaurants are most popular in Utah (473 of them, or one for every 5,400 people), followed by Alaska and New Hampshire. They don’t exist at all in Delaware; at least, no one will admit to the Census that they own one. Mexican restaurants are, not surprisingly all over New Mexico (377, or one for every 5,200 people), Idaho, and Oregon. They are rarest in New Jersey, which seems odd given the large Latino population there. Maybe some trattorias have been converted to taquerias during the past couple of years? Below are the leaders and laggards in providing options to those of us tired of hamburgers, pizza, sweet and sour sauce, parmesan cheese, and margaritas. You can see how all the states rank in all the categories here. Number of “other” ethnic restaurants (people per restaurant) 1. Hawaii: 269 (4,779) 2. California: 4,376 (8,331) 3. Virginia: 901 (8,483) 4. Massachusetts: 751 (8,571) 5. Colorado: 534 (8,901) 6. New York: 2,154 (8,963) 7. New Jersey: 970 (8,994) 8. Washington: 702 (9,111) 9. Nevada: 246 (10,144) 10. Florida: 1,730 (10,457) … 46. New Hampshire: 11 (119,536) 47. Kansas: 23 (120,177) 47. Mississippi: 12 (242,545) 48. West Virginia: 7 (259,781) 49. South Dakota: 2 (390,960) 50. North Dakota: 0 (population 635,867)