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Everythingvalla remains OK on normally quiet Cambridge street

Cambridge Police report dispatching the bomb squad to Thingvalla Avenue around 4 p.m. on Saturday to investigate "a suspicious box on the sidewalk."

The box turned out to contain perishable food and appeared to be from a food pantry and so not a threat to anybody, the department reports.

All of which, of course, perhaps leads one to wonder why a street in Cambridge is named for the ancestral home of the Icelandic parliament, or Althing, which met there between 930 and 1798.

Thingvalla, along with the intersecting Ericsson (as in Leif) Street and the almost intersecting Norman (as in "Norsemen") and Norumbega (as in how the natives allegedly pronounced "Norway") streets commemorate a theory by 19th-century baking-powder inventor Eben Horsford that Vikings sailed up the Charles River, creating a settlement in Watertown and another in Weston.

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Comments

And very white.
Get on it Cambridge.

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Even Cambridge can't rename a street with $2M houses on it Daniel Ortega Way and keep a straight face.

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Doesn't this revolve around wacky Viking theories to counter Columbus' claim to fame and end up with a debate about whether he was "swarthy"?

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How white people were slaves, too.

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Is so very White Anglo-Saxon. It really needs a more diverse name.

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for 1-31 Never Forget

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I passed one of those foolish Moonenite signs every day for at least a week near Fort Hill on my way to work before all that hoo-ha happened. I barely paid attention to it, and it certainly didn't look like an IED. I used to think it was a Chicken Little type person jumping at shadows who called those things in as bombs on that fateful day, but with the passage of time I'm thinking it was somebody involved with the whole thing. The devices were up just a little too long before the hysteria started.

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possibly the fanciest and richest street in all of Cambridge, the police log reports:

A resident of Francis Avenue called to report that he had his motor vehicle stolen sometime overnight. He reported leaving the doors unlocked and the keys inside of the vehicle.

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