In Boston, Massachusetts, Brigham and Women’s hospital can be found at 75 Francis Street. Less than a mile away, the residence of Frumie Burns sits at 75 Francis Street in the town of Brookline. As you might imagine, this has often resulted in confusion.

Once an anxious young couple came to the door and said that they were looking for the fertility clinic. Shouldn’t they have asked if they were at the hospital first? Since when do you ring the doorbell to enter a clinic? Wasn’t my professional attire of cut-offs, a tee shirt and flip flops another hint that they were in the wrong place? Another time an elderly gentleman handed me his paperwork for a colonoscopy before even saying hello.

I think in that situation one is obligated to perform the colonoscopy. Just use whatever’s at hand.

In recent years, however, the bigger issue has been the many, many food deliveries coming to the wrong place. The local wildlife has no doubt appreciated when they were left without even ringing the doorbell.

Burns’s piece about her experiences was shared with me by friend-of-the-site Oliver Y., and it’s since come up in multiple conversations I’ve had with others. Now, I recommend it to you.

Following in the footsteps of Pope Leo XIV, Brian Phillips recently collected some of the most grating problems with modern technology. I agreed with nearly all of them, but none more so than #30.

30. I just unsubscribed from your email updates because I receive too many emails from you. You do not need to send me an additional email confirming my cancellation.

Over at my day job, the unsubscribe flow for our mailing list is built to do the job with one click and zero additional emails.

As you can see, we do offer a resubscribe option, which mostly just pokes fun at the idea that such a thing could be useful.

Boy has the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got a bridge to sell you give to you for the low, low cost of dismantling it and re-assembling it in a new location of your choosing. Two, actually!

Do you want to get haunted? Because baking sourdough bread with yeast from the guts of a 5,000-year-old frozen mummy is how you get haunted.

After newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton made the laughable claim that CBS’s editor in chief Bari Weiss “loves 60 Minutes”, correspondent Scott Pelley had strong words:

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

He’s not wrong.

The Enhanced Games are a rather gross pseudo-Olympics where athletes are permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Amusingly, at the inaugural event last month, clean athletes competing alongside those taking PEDs won several events. Enhanced Group, the company behind this grotesquerie, nevertheless helps to sell plenty of peptides, testosterone, and other drugs. I’m not sure they made a very convincing sales pitch.

On the internet, one can attempt to make whatever connection one dreams of. There are women seeking men, men seeking women, aromantics seeking aromantics, and so much more. I suppose there are probably not hermits seeking anything. But thanks to friend-of-the-site Daniel J., I now know that in Stoneham, Massachusetts, we recently had police seeking owner of creepy puppet. You can probably see why:

Thanks, I hate it.
[Photo credit: Stoneham Police Department]

It appears that this horror show is apparently a modified version of a massive “Bobby Strings” animatronic puppet.¹ Not long after posting about this, police did indeed hear from the puppet’s previous owner, who had attempted to throw it out.

[The owner] speculated someone fished it out of the trash and left it on a neighbor’s lawn, possibly as a prank.

Sure, maybe. But more likely, the puppet fished itself out and is out for blood.

Footnotes:

1. That page includes a video of one of Bobby’s six different routines, which I’ve also archived for you. ↩︎

Back in March, Joe Mazzulla had some unkind words for the NBA’s “Coach of the Year” award, referring to it as “stupid”. That remark came despite his being a frontrunner for the award. Sure enough, this week, he won it.

Though his manner is brusque, his reasoning is sound:

[Mazzulla] thinks it should be more of a “coaching staff of the year” than a “coach of the year” award, and that is a noble approach. He repeated that during Tuesday night’s announcement of his win, beginning his remarks on NBC by thanking those who made it possible.

“The long nights, the trips, game plans, the video guys that are clipping up the film and coding it, the assistants who are putting in the game plan, I think there’s so much that goes into winning one game,” Mazzulla said. “It starts with the players, but it goes to our staff. I feel bad that they’re not here — but forever indebted to the guys that we have that give up time with their families and their time to give us a chance to win every day.”

Congratulations to Mazzulla, and all the Celtics staff, on winning this stupid award.

Previously in Joe Mazzulla: Inspiring Words