You just have to know how to listen and do a bit of research. Mike Ball profiles a couple of inventors buried there, including Richard Lufkin, inventor of the first vamp folding machine, which was revolutionary for its time.

Lawrence Jemmott, 21, of Dorchester, was arrested yesterday, Boston Police report.

Jemmott is charged with armed robbery, assault by means of a dangerous weapon (gun) and unlawful possession of a firearm in connection with holdups of the River Street Mini-Mart in Hyde Park and the J.P. Convenience Store last month. Previously arrested were Nazareth Perkins, 37, and Liquarry Jefferson, 28 (yes, the father of that little boy accidentally shot to death last year).

Oh, the horror, the horror that would descend on the area around Jamaica Pond if swimming were allowed. Because you just know kids everywhere would drop what they're doing and charter buses to take them to THE POND and those buses would idle all day long outside those expensive condos and that would be quite distressing enough but then, before the buses left, all those urchins would run wild through the streets, mugging everybody they see and throwing rocks through windows and setting fire to the mansions and breaking out their cans of spray paint and writing on everything.

Lyss wonders after reading the following in a Globe story today titled In real estate sales, not all cities are equal:

And communities in Boston's inner belt - including Somerville, Brookline, Newton, and Jamaica Plain - are also doing somewhat better than Cambridge, with their single-family home sales collectively down about 22 percent from the first five months of 2007, he said.

Sign at the lower busway at Forest Hills station.

That blue-green algae (which isn't really algae) can kill.

Toxic algae blooms!

Mark recounts decade after decade of various legal actions involving the pond (mainly related to people doing such dastardly things as taking ice out of it without the town of West Roxbury's consent - OK, granted, 8,000 tons of ice). He mentions that in 1856, the town of West Roxbury stationed a policeman on the shores in warm weather to stop people from swimming in the pond (back when it was still used as a drinking-water supply).

Jennifer Garrett, now a denizen of Seattle, reports her Boston dander was raised by a Kate Hepburn biography that referred to her old neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, as "a suburb of Boston:"

... I'm telling you, people, my head almost spun off right there at the break room table. Suburb, my ass. And if you can't get that right, how I am supposed to believe you when you intimate that Hepburn was a lesbian? Well, okay, the man probably does have a point there. ...

Mike Ball surveys some of the issues in the repeat race between incumbent state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and challenger Sonia Chang-Diaz.