How it comes out
I only go through Davis Square once a week, but when I do, I try to look out for flyers and signs -- tacked or taped to poles, glued to walls, anywhere else people can put them. The home-printed sign, usually on a standard sheet of office paper, is the pulse of an urban neighborhood. These are still where the action is. You want local news? Go look at some telephone poles.
For a couple of weeks now there had been signs in various places about Orange Cat. Orange Cat, who apparently had no other name, needed a new home; his owners couldn't keep him any longer (I forget why).
Yesterday, when coming back from lunch -- that's when I walk through Davis Square -- I saw that all the signs about Orange Cat had been taken down. But they weren't just gone. Each one had been replaced with a small, handwritten note, informing us that Orange Cat has found a new home and thanking us all.
Now, I call that really considerate, I do.
There are eight million stories in the naked city, and most of them are probably pretty interesting stories ... but we, the passers-by, colliding with these stories only by chance, rarely ever get more than a glimpse of them.
Yes, eight million. That's the original quote. It comes from the line at the end of each episode of the TV series "Naked City," and it's eight million because that was about the population of New York City at the time.
The other day I learned that in naval situations there is a distinction between "collide" (two moving vessels) and "allide" (moving vessel and stationary object). Apparently it makes a big difference in maritime law. I had never heard "allide" before. However, I think all of us wandering through each other's stories qualify as moving vessels, so "collide" seems correct here.
I had to manually take down a web page this morning; emeritus faculty who had died. The thing about emeritus faculty is that we want to keep showing them on our site even though they're no longer actively there, so I set them with no expiration date, which means "until we end it." But that means we often have no word on how and when to end it. It only happened in this case that someone noticed the man had been dead for a while and felt correctly that it would be better to take his page down. His story had ended, but no one had come along to tell us the ending.
I worry about that a lot these days. I worry about it for you, I worry about it for me. We all have more friends in the computer than we do in the real world, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it does make it a lot more likely that when our stories do come to an end, there will be people who never get to learn how it came out.
23 April 2026