With the exception of the kids, all of the people pictured below not only went to my high school - Saint Francis Prep - but they're all a year younger than me. Apparently they participated in a segment on CBS' morning show to surprise anchor Julie Chen for her b-day.

I think I recognize two red-hairish women to the left - the fourth woman from the left wearing the gray dress and black/white shoes, and the woman in black to her right (peeking out from behind the Asian woman). But I can't say for sure. My class was actually significantly more diverse than this picture indicates, but I have a feeling the students of color tend not to, er, cling to Saint Francis Prep the way the more emblematic Irish and Italian graduates might and missed the memo about Julie Chen's b-day. Saint Francis could graduate a million black, Latino, Filipino and Indian kids and it would still be imagined as an essentially Irish and Italian school. I remember hearing somewhere that our school lost more people in 9/11 than any high school in the city (owing to the large number of cops and firemen it's produced over the years) but that may be because Mychal Judge, the NYCFD Chaplain who died in the North Tower went to Prep.

from boing boing:

Over at MobHappy, Russell Buckley comments on a news story about an elderly gentlemen who for years has called his late wife's Verizon voicemail just to hear her voice. During a system change though, the message was lost. Apparently though, Verizon heard about the sad situation, found a back-up of the old greeting, and restored it.

The first few years after he died, I would call my father's old number every 2 or 3 months, letting it ring a few times before hanging up. The number had been reassigned to new people, who I liked to imagine wondered what the quarterly prank call from Boston was about. (This was circa 2004 or so, Cambridge days.) I never left a message, don't think I ever held the line long enough for anyone to pick it up. I can't say for sure what I thought I was doing. There was no ghostly recorded voice on the other end, and I harbored no supernatural fantasies about Dad himself answering. My father was a strict materialist and good with electronics, and I figure that he'd find a way call me directly should he find himself inhabiting the phone system.