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.