Bean There, Done That

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS and scenes from a long weekend in the metro Boston area:

• The breathless coverage of Tom Brady's testimony in the Charlie Weis medical-malpractice trial seemed hard to top. Until it came out that Brady's former girlfriend, the actress Bridget Moynahan, is expecting his love child. Brady is a god in Boston, and his upcoming paternity cranked the celebrity/media engine into overdrive immediately -- not just on television but in the usually more measured print media, where the story was plastered on the Globe's front page, above the fold.
• How is it that I could drive 300 miles away from Philadelphia, turn on the radio, find a hockey game, and still hear the Flyers give up a goal?

• Don't tell anyone, but my father-in-law and I took the 5-year-old Duckpin bowling, and I beat her by just three pins. And, yes, I was trying.
• The Valentine's Day ice/snow mess that poked us here in Philadelphia took a harder swipe at Boston. The papers reported that the city was fining homeowners who hadn't cleared their sidewalks; more interesting, the stories the following day were about all of the various city-owned properties that hadn't been cleared.
• I still get a kick out of running into Harkey's Wine & Spirits for a six-pack of Harpoon and a bottle of shiraz and getting rung up by the player who was the first to be sent packing in the fourth season of Survivor.

Comments

[Tom Goodman]

Duckpins!!! In Boston?? Where they candlepins? Duckpins were the staple of my boyhood in Baltimore. In fact, the first tenpin lanes were opened by Johnny Unitas. Duckpins are much harder. The greats had averages in the low 100's and no spare was ever a gimme! Strikes? Dream on.

[Tom Durso]

I'm pretty sure they were Duckpins, TG, but I'm not exactly a bowling aficionado. (You'd be better off asking my dad!) In two games I picked up one spare ...

[Boston PopPop]

They are duckpins, those short squat menaces. The candlepins are shaped like, well, candles without wicks. (As validated by the bowler in the threesome who came in LAST, dead-last. To make matters worse, players receive three shots per frame at the little rascals). When we moved to Boston 20 years ago a local TV station carried candlepin bowling on Saturdays.