They scream, ice cream

I n most places, the sound of an ice cream truck is a happy one -- that jaunty rendition of "Turkey in the Straw" or "The Entertainer" means cool refreshment is just around the corner.

But not in Somerville's Davis Square, where bloggers are at once pleased they finally have their own ice cream truck but also puzzled by the music it plays. Ezra Ball writes on his RealFake blog (where he also puts a video of the truck):

"On today's walk home, in our neighborhood, the World's Most Melancholy Ice Cream Truck was playing 'Send In The Clowns.' "

On Davis Square Live Journal , a writer who goes by Unbelman is a bit put off by the truck:

"I've been hearing it play 'Send in The Clowns' SO LOUDLY and it belches out a lot of exhaust. When I heard it, I went looking for what the source of the noise was. I smelled it before I saw it. And it looks so beat up. Lots of old and peeling - off stickers on the side."

After Hurricane Katrina, Boston put up blue "Evacuation Route" signs on major roads leading out of the city. A performance artist named Kanarinka is now running all of the routes with a backpack recorder so she can post the sounds of her breathing, which you can download at ikatun.com/evacuateboston , in case you don't know what somebody breathing into a microphone sounds like. She is also keeping track of how many breaths it will take her to run all the routes (she's estimating 154,000).

Out in Dedham, where several of the evacuation routes wind up, Brian Keaney got curious what Dedham police would do if tens of thousands of Bostonians suddenly showed up at the town line after a disaster. So he called the Dedham Police Department, where an officer told him they would block off side roads to keep Bostonians out of Dedham neighborhoods and encourage them to continue moving.

"Our strategy, I guess, is to make all these refugees Westwood's problem," he writes on MyDedham, referring to the next town over from Dedham.

A Roslindale blogger who goes by the name Rockbalancer found evidence recently that deer have made it back into Boston -- at least one, at any rate. She posted a photo of a deer leg she spotted in Stony Brook Reservation (where West Roxbury, Hyde Park , and Roslindale come together):

"There was no sign of the rest of the deer."

One of the ways Google makes money is by selling text ads that appear on blogs and forums. Advertisers pay every time somebody clicks on the ads.

Josh Ourisman of Somerville reports on his On the Other Hand that somebody at the Kerry Healey campaign seems to have forgotten to get Google to stop running her ads -- he noticed a Healey/Hillman ad in a forum discussion on Mitt Romney :

"I encourage everyone to follow the link. Maybe they'll get enough ad clicks that they'll actually notice it's still up."

Somerville poet Doug Holder thinks Boston City Councilor John Tobin's idea for a city poet laureate is a great one, and one he'd like to bring to Somerville. He's begun organizing local poets and arty types to try to convince the city to appoint one. On his Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene blog , he quotes some of the comments he's gotten, including this one from Bert Stern of Off the Grid Press :

" I think that Somerville poetry speaks clearly and humanely, and with a notion of folk poetry that has a long lineage. Somerville is witty and has guts, and is somewhat anti-Cambridge. I see it as a position of public responsibility."

Links to the complete posts, photos, and videos listed above can be found at universalhub.com/0513.html . Adam Gaffin can be contacted at adamg@gaffin.com.