As it becomes more likely that the use of handheld gadgets while driving will be banned, the Globe tossed out a thought worth debating--if drivers are still allowed to use headsets, will they drive better? Or is the mere act of talking the problem? Noah Bierman talked to an MIT engineer who said, "Conversations are the problem, not the phone." A Virginia Tech researcher added that the act of trying to dial was also distracting.......

--16-year-old Carlos Sierra was shot to death in Dorchester last night. At this time, the BPD is still searching for a motive. Police say a gray Honda was spotted leaving the scene. His family told the Globe that he was shot 13 times, and they feel he was targeted. [Boston Herald, Boston Globe] --Eight of 10 women in Massachusetts who are trying to get away from domestic violence can't find a space in shelters because......

--A parking rage incident turned so ugly in Chelsea early this morning that a man was shot in the stomach. The Chelsea police chief said the whole mess started solely because one parked car was "touching" another parked car. And this is what happens when people with anger-management issues have guns. [Boston Globe] --In a drug-related shooting, an innocent 68-year-old man was shot in the back in Roxbury after trying to defend his apartment building......

BC was hoping for results similar to, or better than, the last time they saw Virginia Tech. That was the game back in October when the Hokies outplayed the Eagles for about 90% of the game, until Matt Ryan led an improbable comeback to keep BC's ACC title (and, at the time, national title hopes) alive. Well, so much for that. Virginia Tech outplayed BC for most of the game, including the last few minutes,......

As tempting as it would have been for the Bruins to come out swinging last night, playing back the Flyers for Patrice Bergeron's concussion, that's not how they roll. And they needed the two points even more than they needed the visceral satisfaction of seeing the Flyers laid out like the wounded soldiers in Gone With the Wind. The 6-3 shellacking wasn't exactly a tea party, though. Defenseman Andrew Alberts left the game after a......

Any objective observer would agree that last night's game was a game the Celtics honestly didn't deserve to win. They didn't shoot well, they looked tired after the Laker game, and they were facing a Bobcat team that may have no identity whatsoever, but played with spunk and energy the whole time. Things looked especially dismal down two with five seconds to go. Paul Pierce missed a game-tying shot, and Charlotte got the rebound. Boston......

The story about a Boston priest getting arrested for stalking Conan O'Brien keeps getting weirder, if that's possible. Reverend David Ajemian, 46, who attended Milton and Harvard and who was a local priest, was nabbed trying to get into an O'Brien taping. The Smoking Gun has documents that show Ajemian may be even stranger than previously thought. Letters indicate that Ajemian was mad at John McEnroe as well, and he claimed that McEnroe assaulted them......

A somewhat abbreviated Redux, since we're preparing for our live-blog of NFL Armageddon this afternoon. Let's start with the bad and end on a high note. First, the Bruins. They went to Ottawa last night to play the Senators, who are 11-1 and running away with the Northeast Division. So now the Bruins know how it feels to play any of the other teams from Boston. It was close, and the B's even led at......

If what they say is true, and Curt Schilling truly pitched his last game as a member of the Boston Red Sox last night... Let there be no mistake. The dividing line between the Sox' Era of Perpetual Failure and the current Golden Years can easily be geotagged; it's somewhere between Theo Epstein's Thanksgiving dinner in Arizona and the first time Curt posted on the SOSH message board. Somewhere in that stretch, the Red Sox......

"That's not the way we drew it up," said Colorado manager Clint Hurdle. "Obviously we have to change our game plan," added Todd Helton. "You can't make any mistakes," chimed in shellshocked starting pitcher Jeff Francis. If you're Colorado, what else can you say? The team that charged through September and most of October, and held Arizona to eight total runs in their mockery of an NLCS, looked like they hadn't played baseball in eight......

--Beauty and the Geek: John, the MIT student Bostonist thinks is most likely to get some, received a "booty dance" from one of the beauties and admitted, "I didn’t know where to look." Romance was also on the minds of the other local contestants. Girl geek Nicole admitted that she had a crush on one of the boy geeks. Somerville LARPer Dave said of her revelation in his confessional, "I have to admit, my curiosity......

Update: A commenter let us know that MIT is paying $6,000 to help clean up the boat. Pretty much everyone and their mom knows that MIT has a yearly tradition of dropping sodium off the Longfellow Bridge into the Charles. It was only logical that, when some volunteers cleaning up the Charles got burned by sodium, someone would put two and two together and look at MIT. But a recent article in The Tech argues......

No lead is safe against the Yankees. In case 100 years of bitter history hadn't taught you that, the fiasco on Friday night illustrated the need to jump on them, as soon as possible, and stay there. These guys have more lives than horror-movie villains. The Sox apparently remembered that lesson sometime between Friday night and Saturday afternoon, as they used a Josh Beckett masterpiece and a barrage of timely hitting to rout the Yanks,......

Sherman Alexie will read Thursday, June 7, at 6:00 PM at the Brattle Theatre. Tickets are $2 and available at Porter Square Books. Now - this event is sold out - but do what you gotta do. Novelist, poet, blogger, and serious NBA fan Sherman Alexie's latest book went straight to paperback. That's not a big deal, but it became a big deal to Alexie when Jenny Shank, a reviewer, wondered if the book went......

--The BPD released a statement about a series of eight armed robberies in the South End and Downtown that have a clear pattern. They've robbed a Lindt Chocolate Shop, Ben & Jerry's, Emack and Boulios, Bon Bon, the gift shop at New England Medical Center, Truly Jorg's Patisserie, Papyrus, and Vitamin Shoppe. Perhaps they hit up the Vitamin Shoppe because they realized their robbery diet was on the unhealthy side. Despite their fondness for candy......

Text messages aren't just our favorite way to vote Sanjaya off of American Idol, they're also the quickest way to get in touch, no matter where we are. The mobile is always close at hand (and usually in the pocket) if we're at a concert, in class, or even in the cube toiling away on our TPS reports a text message won't likely go ignored for long. A number of US colleges and universities have......

We're a little late with this one, but we had to mention this incident from Emmanuel College. What took place wasn't a crime, but it will forever be marked in the Annals of Poor Taste. An adjunct professor at Emmanuel College re-enacted the Virginia Tech massacre in class – using dry-erase markers. He did it to make the pro-gun point that the Virginia Tech shooter could have been stopped if another student had a gun,......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

The body of an MIT student who went missing washed up on Scusset Beach and was discovered on Friday. Authorities had a "difficult time identifying the body," but it was that of Daniel Barclay, who had been missing from MIT since April 8. According to the MIT Tech, an autopsy was performed, and the DA for the Cape said "there were no obvious signs of trauma on the body." The MIT Tech reported that he......

--The guy who threatened another Virginia Tech because he got dumped has been arraigned. Andrew Rosenblum must stay at his parents' home in Needham, and he has to wear a GPS monitoring device. BU and Wheelock College, the school that the recipients of his threatening e-mail attended, have banned him from their campuses. His lawyer called him an "immature young man." Indeed. Rosenblum is getting attention not just because he did something incredibly stupid. He......

--At Stonehill College in Easton, a student found five empty shotgun-shell boxes in a parking lot. Given the rampage at Virginia Tech, people got nervous. However, Stonehill College waited four hours before telling students what to do. The school met with Easton Police before evacuating a dorm, but one student shot back, "It doesn't take four hours to consult with Easton Police." --Andrew Rosenblum, the part-time BU student who threatened an ex-girlfriend is now facing......

As expected, local universities are evaluating their own security response mechanisms in the hopes of avoiding a rampage similar to what happened at Virginia Tech. Boston police didn't wait around - they held a meeting with representatives from local universities one day after the shootings. (Look on the bright side of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force embarrassment - we already know that the BPD and local law enforcement are fast.) WHDH reports, "The group focused......

The nation is still reeling from the massacre that left, according to DCist, 33 people dead at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. Local news reported this morning that one of the people killed was a student from Saugus named Ross Alameddine. Many people are still puzzled about what exactly happened between the first shooting, which happened in a dormitory, and the second shooting, which happened in a classroom building. An inordinate amount of time -......

Ecomagination ads pepper the broadcast of Meet the Press on Sunday mornings. We though that GE just was pulling the wool over our eyes and pretending to actually undertake environmentally endeavors. With surprise we learn that they're bankrolling a $25,000 grant award to some innovative MIT undergrads. The group of students submitted a proposal to the Ecomagination Challenge to fuel the MIT SafeRide and Tech Shuttles with biodiesel fuel made from the fryers in the......

Day One is in the books, and sixteen teams have been given their handshakes and Certificates of Participation. Among them is Duke, who failed the reach the second round for the first time since '96. Since Duke-hate is second to only Yankee-hate in the land, that's going to make a lot of people happy. B.C. represented well in Round One, sending Texas Tech and mercurial coach Bobby Knight back to Lubbock with an 84-75 win.......

Today is the big day for the Boston College Eagles as they play tenth-seeded Texas Tech in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Even if they're a little down, even if they lost Sean Williams, they can take Texas Tech. We'd love nothing more to see Bobby Knight silenced, just for a moment. To motivate you to root against Mr. Crazymaker himself and his Texas team, here's Bobby Knight's top soundbites. The "game faces"......

We're eagerly waiting to see how our local NCAA matchups shake out. Boston College takes on Texas Tech and Bobby Knight tomorrow, and Holy Cross faces off against Southern Illinois on Friday. In the other big college basketball tournament, the NIT, the UMass Minutemen defeated Alabama in overtime 89 to 87. They'll advance into the next round to play West Virginia. So let's not forget the NIT in the face of March Madness. Speaking of,......

The brackets are here. Get it, and hide it from your boss! On second thought, your boss probably has one, too. The No. 1 seeds are Florida, North Carolina, Kansas, and Ohio State. Boston College is a seventh seed and will play against 10th seeded Texas Tech. At least they know what they'll be getting into with coach/professional nutter Bobby Knight. The Patriots buying frenzy continues, and they may have acquired a player who will......

No, it's not actually Mary Anne digging the new Apple Store in Back Bay. It's unlikely that there will be a steam shovel converted to a boiler heating the new Apple venue on Boylston St, but it would make a great tale. Tech Superpowers has a web cam set up backing up to the 815 Boylston property that will open as the new glass encased Apple Store this fall, from which you can watch......

This past September something innovative happened in Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum launched a webcast. It wasn't just any webcast, it was a creative commons licensed release of concerts performed as part of the long standing museum concert series. It's allowed users world wide to take in a little classical music culture by downloading the file and playing it on their iPod, in the windows media center or whatever MP3 compatible device they choose.......