When her trolley at Ashmont yesterday pulled up lame and then the dispatchers wouldn't let the next trolley roll into the station for some time, Cowbark refused to grumble and foot-stomp like everybody else:

Me? I was happy reading my magazine, and then put it away for a bit to take some photos. You know this is significant because I was also standing in the freezing cold and I still wasn't complaining!

The Globe reports homicide investigators are on scene on Judson Street. If it turns out to be murder, it would be Boston's first of the new year.

Whalehead King calls it the total number of pizzas made at Charlie's Pizza on Dorchester Avenue.

For the third year in a row, major crime in Boston decreased, according to statistics from the Boston Police Department.

Major crimes (attacks, robberies, break-ins and auto theft, basically) decreased 8.4% across the city in 2008. Murders in Area B (Roxbury and part of Dorchester) dropped dramatically, from 43 to 22, while car thefts and attempted car thefts were down 30% across the city.

However, murders doubled in Area C (the rest of Dorchester and South Boston), increasing from 11 to 22. And the number of people who got shot in Boston remained about the same - 323 people suffered gunshot wounds last year, compared to 325 in 2007. Also, the number of robberies and attempted robberies increased 7% citywide (although it dropped slightly in Jamaica Plain, Roslindale and West Roxbury).

2007 vs. 2006 numbers | 2006 vs. 2005 numbers

The Globe reports an 18-year-old male was stabbed around 3 p.m. today outside Jeremiah Burke High School.

The Herald runs down the gun-related charges now facing Isaac Thornton following an incident early Saturday at Dublin House on Stoughton Street.

Innocent, etc.

The Globe reports how a couple of Tuttle Street residents used a ladder to save a couple of residents trapped on the third floor by a fire at 56 Tuttle St. this morning. That's the same floor of the same building where Daniel Yakovleff was murdered this past January.

Nat Hentoff, who grew up on the Roxbury/Dorchester line, went to Boston Latin and got excommunicated by three rabbis in Tewksbury, has just been let go by the Village Voice after writing about politics and jazz there for 50 years.

Excerpt from Boston Boy, Hentoff's memoir of growing up in Jewish Boston:

... Eating a huge salami sandwich very slowly, I sit in the middle of the morning on our porch, which overlooks Warren Street, around the corner from Howland. Warren Street is the main route to our shul, our synagogue, a block away. It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day of fasting, the day on which God marks down the fate of every Jew for the year ahead. Some of the Jews who look up at the slovenly, munching boy on the porch shake their heads in disgust. I stare at them, taking another bite. One old man, with a white beard almost as long as our rabbi's, shakes his fist at me. Another old man spits. ...

That's how Larry Davidson describes C.F. Donovan's in Savin Hill:

... Try the Savin Hill scallops ("Jumbo Sea Scallops sauteed with sage butter, served over baby spinach and garlic mashed potatoes"), the French onion soup, the prime rib, the onion rings, the chicken bella boca, the grilled asparagus, and the burgers. ...

The Hartford Courant walks with Daniel Yakovleff's father along the new nature path in Ashford, CT named for Yakovleff, murdered earlier this year in Dorchester:

... Yakovleff pointed out that mosses have some of the prettiest flowers if you look really hard for the tiny blooms. Even with a windchill factor below zero, Yakovleff said he didn't feel cold. "Something else was keeping me warm," he said of the memories of his son.

Via Sam Baltrusis.