![I have no idea why the made-of-straw furniture is sitting outside the auditorium building. I assume they were part of some conscious plan, meant to illustrate something noble and productive. But in any case, they weren't here during my student years...
There's another photo of Kresge later in this set, taken from a different angle -- and that will be the more appropriate place to tell the tale of the ill-fated Sunkist Orange hack...
***********************
It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave.
"Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve."
When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room.
Welcome to MIT.
I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.)
Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details...
I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit.
But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept.
But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them all in this Flickr set; the photos were taken at sunset one evening, and dawn the following morning. But they'll give you an idea of what it was like, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... and what it's still like today.](/Other/MIT/i-54FB7V6/0/Ti/MIT%20%20028-Ti.jpg "I have no idea why the made-of-straw furniture is sitting outside the auditorium building. I assume they were part of some conscious plan, meant to illustrate something noble and productive. But in any case, they weren't here during my student years...
There's another photo of Kresge later in this set, taken from a different angle -- and that will be the more appropriate place to tell the tale of the ill-fated Sunkist Orange hack...
***********************
It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave.
"Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve."
When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room.
Welcome to MIT.
I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.)
Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details...
I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit.
But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept.
But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them all in this Flickr set; the photos were taken at sunset one evening, and dawn the following morning. But they'll give you an idea of what it was like, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... and what it's still like today.")
30.01.13 - Storm Coming
It was an afternoon of big showers and strong winds. I thought I'd found a nice gap between storms for walking the dog, but I was wrong. We got caught in one big one, and almost got blown off the hill, but we did just beat this guy back home. This is quite a while after sunset, but the clouds were still being illuminated by the sun because they went so high.
When we got home we found that the wind had demolished our plastic greenhouse though, and I now have a major rebuilidng job for today!
It was an afternoon of big showers and strong winds. I thought I'd found a nice gap between storms for walking the dog, but I was wrong. We got caught in one big one, and almost got blown off the hill, but we did just beat this guy back home. This is quite a while after sunset, but the clouds were still being illuminated by the sun because they went so high.
When we got home we found that the wind had demolished our plastic greenhouse though, and I now have a major rebuilidng job for today!
30.01.13 - Storm Coming
It was an afternoon of big showers and strong winds. I thought I'd found a nice gap between storms for walking the dog, but I was wrong. We got caught in one big one, and almost got blown off the hill, but we did just beat this guy back home. This is quite a while after sunset, but the clouds were still being illuminated by the sun because they went so high.
When we got home we found that the wind had demolished our plastic greenhouse though, and I now have a major rebuilidng job for today!
It was an afternoon of big showers and strong winds. I thought I'd found a nice gap between storms for walking the dog, but I was wrong. We got caught in one big one, and almost got blown off the hill, but we did just beat this guy back home. This is quite a while after sunset, but the clouds were still being illuminated by the sun because they went so high.
When we got home we found that the wind had demolished our plastic greenhouse though, and I now have a major rebuilidng job for today!
See photo in original gallery.