Skip to main content

Some Springfield geography


 Suppose you happen to be in Springfield, Mass., driving west on Sumner in a pouring rain. You want to get to route 291 heading east. Why? Well, let us never mind that. 

You see Forest Park Ave. on your right. Should you turn there? Probably not. Drive a little further on Sumner.

But if you do turn right on Forest Part Ave., not all is lost. Follow it. It will lead you to Fort Pleasant Ave. Take a slight right there (the only alternative will be a hard left -- to be avoided.) 

Fort Pleasant will lead you shortly to the corner of Pine and Belmont. Take a slight left onto Belmont. In time you'll come to State Street on your right. You are now deep downtown.  Take that right. You'll pass Federal Street.  (DO NOT take Federal Street.) Soon after Federal, you will see a sign for St. James Street. Take THAT one.  That will lead you to route 291. 

Well ... so will lots of other routes. Let's examine one utterly at random. Suppose you took Federal Street. That will bring you to Taylor Street, and a large parking lot and convenience store attached to a Dunkin Donuts. (or just Dunkin as I think they call it now.)  Do not go in there and ask for directions. Nobody knows anything there. Just turn off of Taylor toward the left (downhill, and away from Dunkin'), stay to the right, and look for the signage to the highway.

You'll be all right. 

Enough purely hypothetical ramblings for today.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more