“You try to be helpful and that’s all you can do,” Karen said. “It’s interesting how people reacted. People react in different ways.”

She thinks the owners of the black and white cat have moved away.

Do you have a Nice Shot? Take aim, explain why (and where) you chose your target and send it along to photography@cambridgeday.com.

“Inner World” by Somerville artist Pauline B. Lim and “Urban Sprawl 2” by Boston artist Josh Falk are two works available through a Central Square startup called turningart.com.

“Julia,” by Bradford artist Chris Lovely, “Kitchen Aid Mixer” by New York artist Alicia Purdy and “She Will Cut You” by Malden artist Paige Wallis display the variety of the carefully curated website.

Turningart.com, a startup based in Central Square, could be the next Netflix.

But having opened to the public only in the past couple of weeks, it has already served its purpose for founder Jason Gracilieri.

“It started with me trying to solve a problem I had, which was a bunch of empty walls,” said Gracilieri, a serial entrepreneur who confronted that common problem when he moved recently. He found the answer in a familiar business model — letting people pay a flat fee to borrow works of art on a rotating basis. In this case, the works of art are actual works of art, prints that arrive in a tube and slide easily into a provided frame.

Over time, as monthly fees as low as $9.99 add up in a turningart.com member’s “piggy bank,” borrowers can turn into collectors and buy the original of the print that appealed to them most. If people jump right into buying canvases, that’s all right too.

The idea first occurred to Gracilieri almost three years ago, around the time he moved to Somerville from San Diego. (He’s a Reading, Mass., native.) But other ideas took precedence, and it took another move to remind him of the problem and its solution.

“I was really kind of done with things like Ikea prints, and I didn’t have the money or wasn’t ready to make a decision on which piece of art to buy,” he said. “And my walls were empty because I was stuck.”

The walls actually stayed empty while Gracilieri and his wife, art gallery director Julie Gracilieri, launched the site, starting with artist friends and drawing in works from across the country as word spread. There’s now about 35 artists represented in the online gallery, most in the Northeast.

“We’re still recruiting, because we want to be very selective. We hand-select our artists; this is not a free-for-all,” Jason Gracilieri said. “But now we’re also getting requests from artists.”

Test subscriptions, including the founder’s own, began only about four months ago, also with friends who agreed to serve as aesthetic and aspirational guinea pigs.

Easy to experiment

Cambridgeport resident Jason Whaley is one of those friends, already an owner of some art who still credited the site not only for its distinct “curated” sensibility — prints by the next Thomas Kincade are not available on turningart.com — but as “an easy, inexpensive way to get to know local artists without having to lay out a bunch of money on original artwork and without having to go to a gallery and feel like an idiot.”

Whaley isn’t one. He’s a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and a strategy consultant for businesses. But he prefers browsing a website to the intimidation he feels browsing in galleries.

“I’ve been to a few galleries where they talk about one current artist with reference to another current artist, neither of whom I’ve ever heard of. They’re trying to say ‘A is like B, except they are influenced by C.’ I have just no idea what they’re talking about, and I kind of give them a blank stare and they say, ‘Oh, you don’t know doing, I see I’ll have to dumb this down,’” Whaley said.

Turningart.com makes the whole process easy, he said, including swapping out works in the frame sent when users sign up. Although he initially put off dealing with the process for about two weeks, “when I finally sat down and did it, it took me less than a minute.”

The first piece of art he hung was controversial — in his home. He’s a fan of funky, angular, urban landscapes, and his wife prefers more abstract and colorful compositions, Whaley said, and the first piece of art that arrived leaned to his tastes. Two months later, though, the work was gone and replaced by another. (Subscribers can also choose one- or three-month rotations.)

“I’ve been able to experiment,” Whaley said.

Starving artists

The idea also draws applause from artists such as Pauline B. Lim, who works out of Somerville’s Brickbottom building and was introduced to turningart.com by a fellow artist. “It’s an excellent concept,” Lim said. “Because he’s basing it on something like Netflix, which is very popular, it seems like if it’s managed well, it should be popular too. It’s low-stakes, which is really good. It’s aimed I think at emerging collectors, people who may not have ever invested in art before. It’s great for just filling up your walls with images if you need stuff for your walls. And you’re not risking much. And that the money you do put in goes into a kitty you get to use for a real purchase of art, that’s pretty awesome.”

It may also be an idea that comes at a good time — meaning it comes along at an awful time economically, when many artists are suffering.

Gracilieri

“These past couple of years have probably been the worst ever in my entire career as an artist in terms of sales,” said Lim, a 1988 graduate of Harvard with an extensive list of showings and residencies from Newbury Street and New York City to Morocco and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “All the galleries I used to show with are all down the tubes or bouncing checks or having a really terrible time also.”

Her hope is that if the site takes off, the model changes to include more compensation for artists. They now get a percentage of the proceeds if an original work is sold, and Lim would prefer also getting residuals — even a penny each — for the prints that go out.

“Imagine if this thing is really giant,” she said of the site. “What if there are a million people out there with my print on their walls? Even if I got 1 million pennies, that would be pretty awesome.”

Gracilieri isn’t there yet. He’s been through three startups, including a social networking site for high schoolers, and so far he and a staff of five are focused on the basics at turningart.com: adding work to the site and getting customer testimonials, and some publicity, for it.

If he were to dream a little, he said, it would be nice to someday turn his little offices into an actual gallery showing what’s online.

“It could be cool to have a nice big place for customers to come in,” he said. “I can envision a massive wall of rotating art space.”

Of course, he’d still have to decide what to put up.

The Community Charter School of Cambridge in Kendall Square says it’s facing a 30 percent increase in enrollment for the school year starting Sept. 1. (Photo: tutorsforall.org)

A surge in enrollment has Community Charter School of Cambridge searching for extra classroom space. Faculty and staff at the tuition-free college prep school say it is a good problem to have.

“We will be creative about classroom space,” said Paula Evans, the school’s head. “I’m confident we will figure it out before students arrive for their first day of school on Sept. 1.”

More than 350 students have registered for the Kendall Square school this fall, which had 270 last year, said Justin T. Martin, the school’s chief communications officer and, until summer, public information and communications officer for Cambridge’s public schools. Additional faculty have been hired for the public charter school’s coming year, including a full-time art teacher, and an Advanced Placement calculus course has been added to help meet demand.

That 30 percent growth outpaces what’s facing the Cambridge public school district, which saw 187 students added to the last fiscal year’s 5,950 students, or a 3 percent surge, and expects a 2 percent rate of growth in every fiscal year through 2015 except for 2014, when a 2 percent decrease is predicted.

In testimony to the School Committee throughout the year, parents said they moved to Cambridge to take advantage of its public schools; the charter school’s surge can be traced to a similar set of factors, including what officials called strong middle school program, high test scores, college placement and the number of alumni succeeding at the college level.

“I think that this last factor is most significant,” Evans said. “We are building a track record now. We’re entering our sixth year. We have graduated two senior classes, and our graduates aren’t just getting in to college, they are staying there and succeeding.” The school teaches kids in seventh through 12th grade.

Students apply to the school from throughout the commonwealth and are admitted by blind lottery. Cambridge residents have priority, but there are also students from surrounding communities, including Somerville, Arlington, Boston, Brighton, Brookline and Newton. Students from as far away as Belmont, Milton and Waltham are enrolled.

Recent graduates have earned admission to Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Dartmouth, Johnson & Wales, Providence College, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Cornell, Holy Cross, Swarthmore, Temple, Wheaton and many other notable institutions, Martin said. (The public high school, Cambridge Rindge & Latin, has a similarly high graduation rate — averaged out by the district to about 92 percent of students heading off to two- or four-year institutions, with a large number attending top schools. This year, 16 graduates were admitted to Harvard.)

For information about Community Charter School of Cambridge, call (617) 354-0047 or go to ccscambridge.org.

This post includes significant amounts of information from a press release.

June’s issue of Bizarre magazine, of London, has a capsule review touting the band Humanwine as well as a larger feature on Amanda Palmer.

It’s unlikely anyone could miss the piece about Amanda Palmer in this week’s Phoenix — she’s the cover story, and she’s pictured clutching her naked breasts — but it’s just as unlikely many have seen Palmer in Bizarre magazine. The London-based magazine, which celebrates the “alt.community,” boasts of its social network and dating site and features lots of photos of odd things and flirty women, is said to have a circulation of less than 30,000, and only a fraction make it to these shores.

While the Phoenix writes about Palmer’s return to Cambridge to oversee “Cabaret” at the American Repertory Theater, the June magazine story is all about Evelyn Evelyn, the conjoined musician sisters Palmer’s performed since 2007 with Jason Webley. It’s a big deal; the story and photos for the ex-Dresden Dolls star, ex-Harvard Square living statue run to eight pages.

Tucked away in the back, though, in music reviews by keyboardist Joe Black, is a paragraph raving about Humanwine, the “punk vaudeville duo” who perform most in Cambridge, Somerville and Boston, whom “You’ll love … if you like the Dresden Dolls.”

“All of their surreal carnival songs are stories about conflict and resolution set in a fictional place called Vinland, and their brooding voices swim on top of catchy melodies as they get on their soapbox to question politics, censorship and mistrust via theatrical performances.”

Palmer’s “Cabaret” starts Aug. 31. Humanwine performed Saturday at Club Passim in Harvard Square but hasn’t posted dates for upcoming shows.

Books are unpacked and shelves stocked in April 2008 as McIntyre & Moore Booksellers moves to Porter Square. The store recently closed its upstairs discount annex. (Photo: Sushiesque)

Window shopping is all you can do at The McIntyre & Moore Booksellers Annex in Porter Square. The space closed quietly at the end of June, taking another 6,000 used volumes off the streets of Cambridge — a historically book-loving city that is already losing 100,000 titles from the closing of Rodney’s in Central Square.

The windows at the 1971 Massachusetts Ave. annex still reveal a few books and tables, and store co-founder and co-owner Dan Moore said Tuesday that the space wasn’t taken from him and Mike McIntyre by a longer-term lease. They simply hadn’t been selling many books there and hadn’t really been trying very hard.

“We were kind of working at cross-purposes with ourselves,” Moore said, since the pair hadn’t even been restocking.

Since the downstairs space that remains stocks about 45,000 volumes, the co-owners were able to approach the closing upstairs casually. In a way, the decision almost came down to “we didn’t want to pay for air conditioning in the hot months.”

“One day we just decided, okay, we’re not opening today,” he said.

The academically oriented used bookstore opened in Harvard Square in 1983, staying for 15 years, then moved to Somerville’s Davis Square for a decade. It moved back to Cambridge in April 2008, losing about half its space by taking over what was once the Bookcellar Café, another seller of used books, and later Unicorn Books & Spiritual Resource Center. The space had been lacking a permanent tenant for about two years.

The annex — in the same building, but diagonally to the basement space and not connected inside by stairs — was used for selling books at an extreme discount (the store website still advertises closing prices of $1 for hardcovers, 50 cents for trade paperbacks and 25 cents for pocket paperbacks), and toward the end of its time the owners were setting some of the stock outside to be taken for free. Annex books were “pretty picked over toward the end,” down to a third of normal stock, Moore said. What remains will probably be donated instead of added to what’s downstairs.

Rodney’s, the two-story bookstore at 698 Massachusetts Ave., is meanwhile down by about half its stock, according to workers there Tuesday, although it may be hard to tell the massive, ongoing 50 percent-off sale has had that much of an effect. “There’s a whole basement and warehouse to empty,” manager Jay Phillips said.

Rodney’s is still likely to be around through the end of the year. Like the McIntyre & Moore annex, there’s no date by which owner Shaw Taylor has to be out.

There’s also the possibility of Rodney’s moving if the right place can be found, worker Silas Lohrenz said. But the Central Square superstore will be a thing of the past, with most of the blame going to the economy.

Moore also sees the economy and the Internet as hurting bricks-and-mortar bookstores, where people can come in and browse, running the risk of buying more than they should — or would in a controlled, specific online search.

“It’s not only Cambridge, it’s everywhere,” Moore said. “But you’d think Cambridge would be a place that wants to sustain a bookstore.”

McIntyre & Moore Booksellers has also cut back its hours slightly, to noon to 6 p.m. Sundays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. the rest of the week.

This apartment owner at Concord Avenue and Beacon Street in Somerville — just outside Cambridge’s Inman Square —doesn’t fool around. Well, maybe a little. Although this dire sign seen July 30 warns this is “Private property” where “Hunting, fishing, trapping, trespassing for any purpose is strictly forbidden” and that “violators will be prosecuted,” a look at the property shows something less than pristine wilderness. The poster of the sign is better off letting trespassing hunters, fishers or trappers keep anything they can catch.

Do you have a Nice Shot? Take aim, explain why (and where) you chose your target and send it along to photography@cambridgeday.com.

A scene from “Sex and the City” repurposed in the video art of Cambridge’s Elisa Kreisinger.

The online magazine Salon caught onto The Queer Carrie Project by a 23-year-old Cambridge artist Elisa Kreisinger, the self-described “pop culture pirate and Fair Use(r).” But that’s just the start of a sudden burst of attention to creative work originating in the Cambridge area.

A post Tuesday by Tracy Clark-Flory cited the video-repurposing work on Kreisinger’s “ingenious website that just might revive my love for the show [“Sex and the City”] — or at least make it tolerable — for the next five minutes.”

The project takes “Sex and the City” episodes and edits them to give Carrie’s exploits a lesbian focus. As described by Kreisinger on YouTube, where she posts work:

Each season of the original SATC will be remixed … The queering of on-screen relationships are especially important for LGBTQ fans and allies who have so few options of characters to identify with in popular culture.

Kreisinger’s work in video, which led her to the spring’s South by Southwest festival, was also featured in The Boston Globe in March.

Only two days earlier Salon lauded the memoir “Let’s Take the Long Way Home” by Cambridge resident Gail Caldwell, a staff writer and critic at the Globe for more than 20 years. The book recalls Caldwell’s friendship with Caroline Knapp, the writer and columnist for the Boston Phoenix, who died of lung cancer in 2002.

Salon’s Laura Miller says Caldwell is “serene, wry and meditative, rather than raw,” and sums up:

“Let’s Take the Long Way Home” is a slender and beautiful book, and if Caldwell’s language occasionally fogs up with immaterialities, she never stoops to tear-jerking or sentiment. Which is not to say she won’t make you cry. It might be something as simple as her first-page description of love’s tempo that does it: “For years,” she writes, “we had played the easy daily game of catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and return.” Anyone who’s ever had that and lost it — or can imagine what it might feel like to lose it — will recognize how precious it is. The losing isn’t the exceptional part of this story; everyone loses something, sooner or later. The wonder lies in finding it in the first place.

Caldwell is at Harvard Book Store on Aug. 12 and at Porter Square Books on Sept. 14.

Finally, Salon wanders a little farther, meaning all the way to Somerville in 2007, in another Tuesday post, this one about Jeff Deck and the start of his efforts to correct the nation’s typographical errors. One at a time. (Deck now lives in Portsmouth, N.H.; it was a typo near his apartment that launched the crusade.)

Thomas Rogers has posted an extensive interview in advance of this month’s release of Deck’s book (written with Benjamin Herson) of “The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time.” Here is the authors’ blog, TEAL, or the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

The first meeting of the Design Working Group for the green line extension project is Monday in Medford.

The first meeting of the Design Working Group for the green line extension project is Monday, project manager Katherine Fichter announced.

The schedule for the meeting — to be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at 51 Winthrop St., Medford — includes a project update on design status and scheduling, an outline of how station design workshops will go and a schedule for Design Working Group meetings.

There will be public comment at the end of the meeting, Fichter said Tuesday.

The green line extension project moves the Lechmere stop to the North Point development side of Monsignor O’Brien Highway; adds a one-stop spur to Union Square in Somerville, roughly where Prospect Street and Webster Avenue meet; and lengthens the line through Somerville into Medford, including to Brickbottom, Gilman Square, Lowell Street, Ball Square, College Avenue and finally to Route 16, to a site near the Starbucks, Whole Foods Market and U-Haul depot. Officially, all but the outermost stop are to be built by October 2015.

Some design elements — correcting flaws in previous stations — are already set, Massachusetts Department of Transportation planners have said.

Enabling this was Friday’s granting of a state Environmental Protection Agency certificate to the extension by Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian A. Bowles. It essentially gives approval to what’s now being described as a “nearly $1 billion” project. (A recent state cost estimate put the extension project at about $932 million without a Route 16 stop.)

T passengers at Kendall Square in Cambridge, as at many area subway station, are on opposite platforms depending whether they’re headed inbound or outbound. They often have to pay a second time if they enter the wrong platform. (Photo: Marc Levy)

Design of the seven T stations to be built as part of the green line extension project doesn’t formally begin until fall, but there is one part of the plans that is certain: The stations will have central platforms on a single level, ensuring riders don’t have to leave and pay again if they realize they were headed in the wrong direction.

There are several stations where confused or distracted riders — including tourists or recent arrivals from other countries, groups Boston and Cambridge attract in large numbers — could find themselves having to pay a second time to correct going the wrong way, with Central and Kendall squares being prominent examples in Cambridge.

“All those stations were built a century ago. Certainly all the stations that have opened since World War II include that feature,” said Scott Hamwey, a planner with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, referring to the ability to switch directions without paying again. “Although that would not be true if you were disabled.”

There is design work being done to address the problem with reconstruction at stations such as Orient Heights on the blue line, but other kinds of solutions would be necessary at stations such as Copley Square on the green line, which isn’t deep enough to have a mezzanine level, Hamwey said.

The green line extension project moves the Lechmere stop to the North Point development side of Monsignor O’Brien Highway; adds a one-stop spur to Union Square in Somerville, roughly where Prospect Street and Webster Avenue meet; and lengthens the line through Somerville into Medford, including to Brickbottom, Gilman Square, Lowell Street, Ball Square, College Avenue and finally to Route 16, to a site near the Starbucks, Whole Foods Market and U-Haul depot. Officially, all but the outermost stop are to be built by October 2015.

Open to ideas

At Central, riders who pay to enter the platform for a train headed the wrong direction can be given a free ticket to get in the other side. The ticket is only good for a few minutes — just long enough to cross Massachusetts Avenue and get down to the opposite platform. But staffing levels at the station often leave one of the two platforms without an attendant who can issue a short-term ticket.

Hamwey said the department was open to hearing ideas for a technological solutions; he got a pitch for machines, one on each platform well inside the gates accepting Charlie Cards and passes, that would issue the short-term tickets. Similar outside solutions have been successful, he said, using as an example smartphone “apps” made by private developers that show how close a bus or subway car is to arriving at a station.

“We’re looking to expand that. It’s a pretty exciting development,” he said. “You have a way not to enter the subway station until you know a train is near.”

The innovation is worthless to people who don’t have smartphones or that app, he acknowledged, but there was potential for a grant proposal on the Fairmount commuter rail line (going from South Station to the southwest, including through Franklin Park, Dorchester, Mattapan and Hyde Park) that could bring train arrival announcements to LED signs outside stations.

Further questions on staffing, technology and design priorities at T stations were deferred by Hamwey to the department’s Joshua Robin, but messages left this week for Robin weren’t returned.

Jeffrey B. Mullan, the state’s transportation secretary and chief executive, blames the time “the state spent negotiating with the community and investigating alternative locations for a 24-hour, 11-acre service yard for Green Line trains,” writes the Globe’s Eric Moskowitz. Further, Mullan:

said supporters should not see this as a lack of commitment to the Green Line or a sign of financial woes. “This is, if not our top priority, one of our top priorities in the transportation world,’’ he said. “It is a good project, it is a worthy project, and it’s one that we’re committed to.’’

The full story is here.

In addition to moving the Lechmere station closer to the North Point development, the $954 million project was to include a one-stop spur to Union Square in Somerville, roughly where Prospect Street and Webster Avenue meet, and several stops in Medford, including to Brickbottom, Gilman Square, Lowell Street, Ball Square, College Avenue and finally to Route 16, to a site near the Starbucks, Whole Foods Market and U-Haul depot. Officially, all but the outermost stop were to be built by Dec. 31, 2014, and the decision to move the Route 16 stop to a second phase — because it’s not paid for in the first — has drawn much criticism.