Open until 2am, huh? I lived in Boston for 4 years and I was lucky to find anything that was open past midnight on a weeknight except the diner next to South Station. Most businesses have to purchase permits to stay open past a certain hour and there are only a certain number of permits per district. Trying to purchase special permits to allow different hours for just one week would be cumbersome at best, a logistical and costly nightmare at worst.

Boston has been gearing up for the convention forever and there's been nothing but talk about how good it would be for the city, especially with the huge, ongoing cost of the Big Dig (which might make town look like a "mess" to you, but consider the mess for regular commuters who have to find a way through town - without 93 or North Station - on top of the usual commuting nightmare). Boston is an expensive place to live in - much less visit - so have a little understanding for those who are (maybe not as) graciously (as you would like) welcoming you and your fellow delegates into their hometown.

It's not your fault. There's a reason they're called Massholes.

-- The pained Hub City suffered severe fractures of its radiuses and by-ways hit with 'security' battiness. It's a nicer town in its long lore than it is in its present people, yet even the people are kindly spirited in a philosophic, reserved sort of way. Until federal nationalists come build Gitmo cages downtown to stifle detractors of homeland thuggery, confined for soap-boxing and put on display like the paupered and unchurched miscreatants locked in stocks long long ago, same old same old, for public spectacle on Boston Common and town greens to the north and south across the granite-ground states. Colonial dunking stools today were the equivalent of trying to find a bathroom and have scarlet-enough ID around your neck to get there in the convention hall. Intrusive mocking friction at every moving step made Orwellian reverse-speak out of the name Fleet Center. Central squares, circles, tunnels, bridges and hills were turniquetted for 'terrorizing security.' Black helicopters. Robojacks. Dissent-proof black humvees. And 'secured' communications links. Who welcomes tourism terrorism? Any town with security enforcement brought down so hard is going to be full of locals trying to re-get their breath and stand up from the knee-capping. Hit by Patriot Act'ers in Patriarca guise -- New England's branch clan of the Sopranos at work.

And all the gruel of it was as necessary as the dirty tricks political forgeries wrapped around Democrat Edmund Muskie's campaign in New England '72, which is to say the clampdown on Boston was not real necessary at all -- it was a Republican, I mean Homeyland dirty trick on the Bay State of Paul Revere. He got stockaded to end his communication, too. Too late. (Like believing the Iraq WMD-Tooth Fairy story and lying down to sleep, and dying before you wake. What a dirty trick.)

Or too early. Boston is empty -- it's summer. There's only a half million people there. The paying customers left in June and aren't expected back, half a million strong, before college scholarships are deposited in September. It's the only city-size college town.

Jesse, there's some opportunity in being there during the off-season. Rent a hybrid car (call Click and Clack for the discount deal) and tour the colonial sites around Concord and Lexington. If you drive west almost to the Hudson, there's Sturbridge Village to compare potentially with Fort Clatsop and Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and the Oregon Garden, (perhaps going out the Mass Pike a sidestop to get glib suggestions and terse directions from my college daughter, but I don't say where -- one. more. year.) Or, for the full Hood-to-coast parallel effect, drive east out the Cape and eat clam strips. Jesse, you may not come back. (In town find a cabbie who can get you to the No Name restaurant at the docks. No Name because it has no sign. Wherever, politely decline the blue crabs and bite your tongue off before you say 'dungeness' or ''quilliyup'. No sense riling the locals, their well and run-off waters got fouled under the heat and they're in spitting mood.)

Oh, you'll be back. You'll have to, you'll be broke from the sales tax, if you're not hustled by a swan boat shill. And when you whirl into Oregon you may notice you're not in a swing state anymore. The place is turning Dem blue, and Kerry's running ten points ahead, officially. More, if you poll around yourself. We're getting the red out The paper sent their two Leo op-edists to beantown like a birthday gag, with cards saying write if they want another year's work. One got a people story each day, one wired the FAUX News teleprompter script from the uplink truck, three times -- on Friday he's down to his last strike.

The 'Oregon delegation' was a hit all week. Seemingly media darlings for all the mentions we heard. Except Liars Larson couldn't 'get' any to mention, apparently ignorant that Boston politics is only a flipped coin's width from Portland's. Where politics' future appeared foretold by Big Eddie Schultz, live from Boston, when he announced his Demo audience in the Portland market has beaten the ratings pants off the noon-hour liar net in the radio air. You can return from a Boston swan boat to a Portland swan song -- you know him, you hate him, see him run along, your bane and mine: Mr. Snipe Pipes the Swedish nutball. Takes his angry red, gets out. To an Idaho panhandle cabin, I'm thinking.

So the coast is clearing out home in the pacific zone. Now get on back, time's a'wasting and there are elections to steamroll.

(brett, there's a extremely high tide coming in -- please be under it.)

That must have been "Massachusettsian", 'cause I couldn't understand a word he said. My loss, I'm sure.