Thank you as well to Rayburn Music for its generous loan of musical instruments to enhance the instrument petting zoo at the conclusion of the concert, and to state Sen. Pat Jehlen for her narration of the story.

Now in its 36th season, the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra is a community music organization that provides a welcoming environment for players and audiences through outstanding concerts, events and social action.

Artistry and Community in Concert.

Rachel Spiller, co-founder and board member

Bicycles in the Hubway rental program wait for riders outside South Station in Boston. Hubway is to arrive in Cambridge in the spring, with helmet-dispensing machines and a safety brochure. (Photo: John Dalton)

When 20 bike rental stations arrive in the spring, the City Council expects them to be accompanied by HelmetHub machines — helmet dispensers designed by a dozen Massachusetts Institute of Technology students — and a reminder of the rules of the road.

The councillors said so Monday in an 8-1 vote that may well have been unanimous but for Craig Kelley’s continued dismay over a possibly outsized priority being put on bicycle safety and rules enforcement. Recent council candidates James Williamson said during the night’s public comment period that the helmet dispensers should dispense a brochure with the bicycling rules of Cambridge. Councillor Minka vanBeuzekom offered a version of his idea (that the city “prepare a brochure on the rules of the road for dispensing with the helmets”) as an amendment to Henrietta Davis’ order seeking installation of the machines.

“I continue to be just amazed at how focused we are that someone renting a bicycle needs to study [the rules],” Kelley said. “I rented a car from Enterprise in Central Square the other day and they just looked at my license and sent me on my merry way … we’re not making anyone who rents a car acknowledge that they know it’s dangerous to text and drive. I get hit by cars probably once every two months, and I’m really getting tired of everyone looking at the rental program as a menace.”

The program, called Hubway (with naming rights going to New Balance, the Boston maker of athletic gear), debuted in Boston in July with 60 stations and 600 bikes. It was expected to make it to Cambridge in the fall, but the rollout there and in Somerville, which is expected to get eight rental stations, was delayed to spring. The system offers memberships for $85 a year, $12 for three days and $5 for a day; members get unlimited half-hour rides, with higher fees for longer trips.

The solar-powered dispensers have been described as costing $8 per helmet, with a partial refund if a helmet is returned.

Bicycle renters have to sign a form saying they understand the rules of the road. The council’s vote means those rules should be also available in brochure form, even if they’re not dispensed with helmets, so riders can brush up before pedaling away.

Tops in reported crashes

Bicycle safety and legal riding have been topics for months, thanks in part to Williamson’s campaigning and the city’s preparations for the coming of Hubway. Early in January VanBeuzekom noted Cambridge’s rankings among the state’s top 200 crash locations in an August report by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. The report is limited — it tracks only reported, geocoded crashes between 2002-09 — but puts Cambridge in the top 10 multiple times for pedestrian and bicycle incidents.

The dramatic number of bicycle crashes is likely a natural result of what’s been called a 150 percent surge in bicycle use since 2002, to the extent that Cambridge was named the seventh-best bike city in the country by the League of American Bicyclists last year. By league figures, bicycle commuters make up 8.5 percent of the overall population.

Cambridge contributes two of the state’s top 10 pedestrian crash clusters (No. 3, with 94 crashes, is Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; No. 6 is Elm Street from Davis Square nearly to Porter Square, and as such shares its 38 crashes with Somerville) and essentially is the list of top 10 bicycle crash clusters: It takes every slot but Nos. 7 and 8.

The No. 1 spot, shared with Somerville, is where Kirkland and Cambridge streets meet Beacon and Hampshire streets; the No. 2 spot is on Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; the No. 3 spot is again with Somerville, at Massachusetts Avenue around Porter Square; the No. 4 spot is down Massachusetts Avenue toward MIT; the No. 5 spot is southeast of Harvard Square starting from where Massachusetts Avenue meets Mount Auburn Street; No. 6 extends from Norris Street along Massachusetts Avenue and across Route 16 into Arlington; No. 9 is on Massachusetts Avenue where it meets Memorial Drive; and No. 10 is on Broadway above Central Square. The number of crashes ranges from 106 crashes reported at the top spot to 22 at the No. 10 spot.

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling’s musical and visual obsession with the television show “The Prisoner” has won a spot in a Time top 10 list. (Photo: Kelly Davidson)

Time, in its online The Top 10 Everything of 2011, gives local band Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling the No. 6 spot for “Top 10 Creative Videos” for a music video that is also a scene-by-scene re-creation of the opening of the cult television spy show “The Prisoner.”

The two-person band — husband and wife Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola — did not take years to track down sets and props on a lark; Cacciola and Epstein are obsessed with “The Prisoner” and their two albums and live shows are virtually all homage to it, with Cacciola screaming hoarsely and pounding drums and Epstein teetering around the stage in a tussle with an abused bass. (They also do a terrific cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan.”) Even the band’s name is taken from an episode of the the show.

The video was at 24,604 hits on YouTube as of late Thursday, a figure sure to surge since the Time posting, but it is already a well-traveled clip. In September, four months after its posting, Cacciola and Epstein said fans of “The Prisoner”from around the world had expressed awe at their accomplishment.

The video’s director, Theodore Cormey, wouldn’t tell Time the cost of the video, saying only: “I’ve know independent features made for less than for these three minutes.”

(The video, for the band’s song, “Episode 1: The Arrival,” is actually 4 minutes, 28 seconds long if you include the surprisingly entertaining credits that roll for about 33 percent of the total running length.)

A worker prepares 196 Elm St., in Davis Square, to become the bricks-and-mortar location of Knucklebones, a provider and seller of athletic services and goods. The grand opening is Monday.

Knucklebones, a provider and seller of athletic services and goods, has its “epicenter” grand opening Monday in Davis Square (at 196 Elm St. North, the very edge of Cambridge’s border with Somerville), taking over half the space emptied by the Caning Shoppe when it moved to Somerville’s Wilson Square over the summer.

To celebrate, the site is open for free play from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for children age six month to 6 years, according to an announcement from Mitch Zeisler, who founded Knucklebones in 2004, and the rest of the 11-person team.

“Come by and meet the KB team, register for upcoming classes, find out more about our retail and, of course, play with the coolest and most unique athletically inclined products around,” the announcement says.

The team has mostly traveled to clients to host custom events such as birthdays, but its “Knucklebones Epicenter of Athletic Services” allows it to bring in — as part of what Zeisler describes as the site’s first stage — play groups, programs, private events and field trips, as well as roll out a retail catalog with athletic equipment and backyard games.

Stage 2, projected to come by Jan. 1, will be the filling of the Elm Street space with a full retail store, and the final stage is to bring in athletes, writers, chefs, educators and health professionals to talk about healthy living. (The grand opening was originally announced for October.)

Also coming to the area is Michaels, the Irving, Texas-based art supply chain with 1,054 sites throughout Northern America. Founded in 1984, the chain expanded quickly and went public but was taken private again in 2006 with a purchase by Bain Capital Partners LLC and The Blackstone Group. Michaels also owns the Aaron Brothers and Artistree chains.

It fills the massive underground space left empty when Burlington Coat Factory left the Gravestar Inc.-owned Porter Square Shopping Center in June 2008 and could steal some of the lower-end shoppers from the Paper Source at 1810 Massachusetts Ave., only 0.2 miles and some five minutes’ walk away.

So far there is only a temporary sign over the Michaels site indicating the store is on the way — but the sign also says the store is hiring and leads potential employees to the store website.

Thanks to Ron Newman for reminders on these developments.

Five questions. We just want to ask you five questions — or, rather, get five recommendations of things to read, listen to, watch, eat and buy from people who live, work or otherwise spend time in Cambridge. First up is Marian Schmidt, a Hampshire College grad now working as a researcher at Harvard.

Read: “Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys,” by Rob Dunn (HarperCollins, 2009). “It’s a portrait of biology. People view the world as human-dominated, so Dunn breaks it down into all the living things and their part in it. It’s a new portrait of life — recommended to me by a friend’s grandfather.”

Listen to: The Tallest Man on Earth, also known as Swedish songwriter Kristian Matsson, has two studio albums and two EPs. “He’s kind of folkie, kind of indie rock — he’s very relaxing. He sounds like a modern Bob Dylan.”

Watch: TED.com, an online branch of the Technology, Entertainment and Design idea-sharing conferences, was recommended to Marian by her mother after she saw a video by neuroscientist  Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered a stroke and, uniquely, “understood what was happening — scientifically — and gave a whole recap of the experience” from the inside. “It’s just totally amazing people presenting on such mind-blowing things.”

Eat: Masala, an Indian and Nepali restaurant at 1127 Broadway, Teele Square, Somerville, the former location of Tip Top Thai. “They have $3 margaritas and the food is way better than all the other Indian places I’ve been here.” Key dish: the Navraltan Korma, a combination of nine vegetables in a mild cream sauce with almonds and cashews.

Buy: “The No. 1 place I like shopping here is Paper Source,” the stationery and craft store, at 1810 Massachusetts Ave., Porter Square, “for seasonal crafting. They even sell little crafting kits.”

Send us your own five recommendations and your best big photo at editor@cambridgeday.com.

In a proposed redistricting, almost all communities in Massachusetts are represented by a single person in Congress. Cambridge, though, would be carved into two districts.

Only hours after his reelection, city councillor Leland Cheung was back at work Wednesday, raising the alarm about a congressional redistricting that would carve Cambridge in two — a central chunk being represented by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey as the 5th Congressional District and parts in North Cambridge and closer to the river being represented by U.S. Rep. Mike Capuano as the 7th Congressional District.

The map was released Monday by state lawmakers’ Special Joint Committee on Redistricting of the Massachusetts General Court. But things are moving fast.

“We only have until tomorrow for the public to comment,” Cheung said. “This undoubtedly hurts our standing in Congress because we’d go from being one-seventh of a district to one-fourteenth.”

Capuano represents all of Cambridge at the moment in the 8th Congressional District — a structure in place for seven decades that allows the interests of Cambridge, Somerville and Boston to be handled as one. A change in population reflected in recent census figures brought on the redistricting.

“Parts of Cambridge will be represented by someone who also needs to balance the needs of Revere, Chelsea and other urban areas, and other parts of Cambridge will be represented by someone who also needs to balance the needs of Southborough and other suburban areas,” said Susana Segat in her CCTV blog.

Cheung noted that “Capuano has his district office in Cambridge for a reason” and said “residents need to know to weigh in.”

By passing around tips from Daniel Schlozman, chairman of Cambridge’s Democratic City Committee, Cheung is trying to ensure that. With the deadline of 2 p.m. Thursday, people are urged to tell lawmakers they want Cambridge kept whole in the 7th Congressional District by:

Contacting Mike Moran, House chairman of the Joint Redistricting Committee, at at (617) 722-2460 or michael.moran@mahouse.gov.

Contacting Stan Rosenberg, Senate chairman of the Joint Redistricting Committee, at (617) 722-1532 or stan.rosenberg@masenate.gov.

Supplying written testimony to the Joint Redistricting Committee at malegislature.gov/District/Contact.

Schlozman can be reached at daschloz@gmail.com or (617) 519-8555.

Cheung has a strong track record of taking on tough issues, has been a vocal proponent of housing and education and has made improving relationships between the city and its university community a priority, Almquist said. He is also a member of the Young Democrats.

“All of the incumbents face a large field of challengers, but Cheung has to buck the city’s tradition of not re-electing the lowest vote getter from the previous election,” she said.

The group is also helping re-elect Sam Seidel and Denise Simmons — Seidel for his commitment to protecting the environment and programs for young people and Simmons for launching the Mayor’s Girls Leadership Program while mayor in 2007-09 and generally focusing on education and youth programs throughout her career in public service.

Also endorsed: council candidate Matt Nelson.

“These candidates represent the new face of politics in Cambridge,” Almquist said (a little curiously, since Seidel was elected in 2007 and Simmons is in her fifth term). “All four candidates have strong records of reaching out into the community, talking with previously marginalized constituent groups and making changes that help move Cambridge in a better direction.”

Municipal elections are Tuesday in Cambridge and 52 other Massachusetts communities. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Significant portions of this post were taken from a press release.

Many issues facing Cambridge are the same issues facing the rest of my district. In particular, the Alewife River is part of the Mystic River Watershed; I’ve been working on pollution and flooding throughout the watershed for many years. The Green Line Extension to Somerville and Medford begins in Cambridge. Above all, we share important values on issues including the environment, access to public transportation, affordable housing, economic development and social justice.

While under the proposed district I would only officially represent about a third of Cambridge residents, I will be a committed advocate for the entire city. Over the last few years, Sen. Sal DiDomenico and I have forged a strong partnership to serve the people of Somerville and we will continue that partnership along with Sen. Anthony Petruccelli on behalf of the people of Cambridge. I look forward to meeting with many Cambridge residents and getting to know the community better.

If you would like to talk to me about redistricting or any other issue do not hesitate to contact me at Patricia.Jehlen@masenate.gov or (617) 722-1582.

Sincerely,

Patricia D. Jehlen, state senator

Mary Bichner of Box Five plans an October tour of the five U.S. cities Edgar Allen Poe called home. The events, with guest bands and Poe-inspired songs, begins Oct. 5 in Somerville. (Photo: Teri Rambo)

Happy death day, Edgar Allen Poe.

That isn’t until Oct. 7, but the weeks of warning gave classical-meets-pop ensemble Box Five time to line up dates and bands for a multi-city tour of the East Coast celebrating the acclaimed American author’s life and works. And it gives fans of Box Five, of its various guest performers and of Poe himself time to get their schedules in order.

From Oct. 5-15, starting with Boston, Box Five will assemble a concert in every U.S. city Poe called home — moving on to New York (Oct. 6), Baltimore (Oct. 13), Richmond, Va., (Oct. 15) and Philadelphia (Oct. 16) — and invite local and nationally touring ensembles to perform new, specially composed musical works inspired by the author’s short stories and poems in addition to their regular repertoire.

At the end of each concert, the ensembles will collaborate on a sewn-together musical performance of one of Poe’s most famous poems, “The Raven,” Box Five leader Mary Bichner said Sunday, with each act setting three to six of the stanzas to music and perform them.

The Poe-inspired works, especially the “The Raven” as performed by a multitude of bands, could have a life beyond this tour, said Bichner, envisioning putting the performances together for at least an EP.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Poe since I was a teenager,” she said, praising his beautiful phrasing, word choice and rigorous attention to unique rhyming structures — a writer able to be moving and impressive technically at the same time. “Among poets, it’s a little bit of a cliché to like Poe, but he’s a cool guy. I really like his stuff.”

He also gets a bad rap as simply being spooky, Bichner said, although by touring in a month dominated by Halloween she’s at least a little complicit in making the connection.

But she can’t be blamed for Poe dying in October, nor for taking advantage of the sunken-galleon set that will be onstage for another production when Box Five and friends have their premiere performance at The Somerville Theatre. It just means the songs she’s writing for the Somerville performance — the first being setting his “To Helen” to original music — will have a nautical theme.

Box Five combines Mozart-inspired chord progressions with bratty Brit rock hooks into a musical succotash they like to call “classipop” (“And they look darn adorable while doing so,” Bichner said). An intriguing angle for connoisseurs: Bichner has perfect pitch and synesthesia, meaning she literally hears color and sees sound, which she said adds “a rainbow of nuance” to the  band’s intricate musical landscape. She’s also able to add impeccable accents (German is a favorite) to the invariably witty patter she gives between songs.

Taking part in the 8 p.m. Oct. 5 show at the historic Somerville Theatre with Box Five will be What Time Is It Mr. Fox?, Why Are Those Girls SO LOUD it’s cos we’re jewish, Molly Zenobia and Alexandra Day. Special guest appearances by performance artists Karin Webb and Jill Gibson of Axe to Ice Productions are also planned.

Tickets are $11 for this all-ages show are available at the box office of the Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square, Somerville, between 4 and 8 p.m. daily or by visiting the theater website. For information, click here.

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

An impromptu memorial grows in the heart of Somerville’s Davis Square in the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo: BostonTx)

Cambridge Day is part of a project called Voices of MainStreet — a weekly, nationwide Q&A in which editors at the money and lifestyle site MainStreet.com ask questions and bloggers answer them. For this entry, we took the option of talking about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and our reactions to it.

Right after 9/11 there were a couple of things that hit me pretty hard.

One was on the trip over the Charles River from Cambridge to my job at the Boston Herald. Every day I would stare hard at the Boston skyline as I approached, often until the T brought me among them — a set of buildings smaller and shorter and less impressive and meaningful than those of New York, which drew the misplaced zeal of madmen who used planes as bombs and office workers as targets.

I was being appreciative not just that my little skyline was intact, but for the life of my brother.

He’d woken me up Sept. 11. Since my workdays only started at 3 p.m., I slept disgracefully late, and it was his call that woke me up and his strange greeting that, well, really woke me up. He said something along the lines of: “I’m alive.”

See, he’d flown out of Boston that morning on the way to Las Vegas with of course a full tank of jet fuel at about the same time as the terrorists who hijacked airplanes with equally full tanks of jet fuel, the better to incinerate the innocent when their planes flew into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. What saved my brother was that the terrorists had trained to fly (but not land) on aircraft made by Boeing; he had flown out that morning on planes made by Airbus. His plane hadn’t been flown into a building or a field near Shanksville, Pa., but had landed as part of the national no-fly order and stranded him in Kansas City, which he made his way out of via an absurd road trip shared with a stranger who hadn’t been on the same plane but was now in the same boat.

His call compelled me to the television in the house we shared, where I saw that notorious footage for the first time — the billowing smoke, the falling people — and then to bolt for my clothes, our front door, the T, a taxi when mass transit bogged down and finally by foot for my newsroom when street traffic also got clogged by panicked people in clumsy cars, everyone watching the skies and also, if you remember, seeing each other for real for probably the first time.

By the time I reached the Herald, those assembled had already put out an extra edition about the attack. I wanted to help. I wanted to do something. But in fact I sat around being useless until 3 p.m., when my work hours started pretty much as usual and I did what pretty much amounted to the typical workday.

At the end of it, I rode home on the T toward the Cambridge skyline, which is even lower and less significant than that of Boston, when compared with Manhattan, and slept. And went to work the next day, appreciating the Boston skyline, and did the same the next day and the next and the next.

I also went the opposite direction, walking up into Somerville (which has an even less significant skyline than Cambridge, in fact, barely a skyline at all), and found people gathering nightly in the heart of Davis Square around a giant concrete and metal compass planted in the center of a traffic circle in 1983 to mark the area’s hundred-year history. They came and cried and sang and left candles and cards and notes and posters (of poems and thoughts and pleas) and even the occasional inevitable American flag night after night until the compass was covered completely, and then surrounded by more posters and printouts and paintings, growing and growing and being replenished and renewed and replaced until it felt like the memorial would never end.

This is the other thing that hit me hard.

I understood that those people needed to do something, just like I’d raced to the Herald to do something. To help when you couldn’t help.

Over time I started forgetting to stare hard at the Boston skyline and appreciate it still having everything in it, and over time the Davis Square memorial ebbed and was cleaned away, and now there’s a concrete and metal addition to the compass — a memorial to the memorial, essentially, by way of recognizing what happened Sept. 11, 2001, in the form of flattened, stylized twin towers that, unfortunately, aren’t reminiscent of the twin towers at all and fail to capture in the least the power and beauty of the simple, homespun, heartfelt items they replaced, the things that showed people’s hearts broke alone and healed when put together.

That’s the nature of things: The very special comes to seem normal after a while, especially when you fail to notice what made things special in the first place.

But for a while, the gleaming, mirrored John Hancock Building jutting into the sky over Boston was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and so was the junk people left uselessly on the ground in the center of a traffic circle. The one thing that never got old or wore off? Living with my brother in Cambridge, which I got to do because he lived through 9/11.