Triunfo | Cheap Dates . 1

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Boston's pretty pricey and cheap dates are hard to come by. But love, or lust, can't be contemplated, much less consumated, on an empty stomach. Those are not the growls we want to hear when getting it on. Plus, as Bernard Shaw said, "Our truest love is that for food." So we'll cut right to the chase in our Cheap Dates series and go out to dinner, starting with one of both the cheapest and best.

Triunfo is a tiny hole in the wall Mexican cantina on the downtown edge of SOWA in the South End. It seats maybe six at the counter in the front window. It does, however, appear to be expanding into an adjacent storefront. Meanwhile, plan on takeout - pleasant Ringold Park is a block away across Washington Street. And they do deliver.

The standout bargain here is the Steak Taco for $2.75, a crispy tortilla stuffed with grilled steak, cheese, salsa, hot peppers, lettuce and sour cream. There are nine other tacos ranging from the humble bean at $1.50 up to the high end salmon, shrimp or swordfish for $3.25.

The 75 item menu offers all the other Mexican staples - burritos, quesadillas, fajitas and enchiladas. Dinners run about $10 for a grilled steak up to $14 for grilled swordfish. The salads are all about $5.

Triunfo Mexican Food. 147 East Berkeley St., by the corner of Harrison Ave. Boston, MA 02118. T - Silverline, East Berkeley stop. Phone: 617-542-8499. Fax: 617-542-8497. All major credit cards accepted. Hours: Monday - Sunday, 10am - 11pm. Delivery is available, including late nights on Thursday through Saturday. Stars: * * * * *.

Hotel Lobby, Dehli | Twitpic . 6

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Twitpic: exjetsguy.
Name: Richard Oliver.
Location: San Antonio, Texas.
Web: mySA.
Bio: Senior Writer, San Antonio Express-News.
Comment: Here is the view of the hotel lobby from our 17th-floor interior balcony. Breathtaking.
Photo location: Dehli, India.

Twitpic is our current favorite picked from the public timeline of Twitpic, the new site hosting images for Twitter.

Skip | Boston News-Letter . 1

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Everybody and your mamma, as Skip reportedly put it, has an opinion about the Henry Louis Gates incident. From the get go, then the president, to his later regret, on down, everyone's been mouthing off in the heat of the moment. Let me wade in the water with my 2 cents.

Basic training. You - black or white - do not cuss out a cop. Skip, freshly back in the PRC from China where no doubt anything goes, forgot his basic training. I had a very similar thing happen to an employee of mine and the outcome was totally different. Why? He kept his cool. And in a possibly far more dangerous situation.

Josiah, an African-Bahamian, was doing a job for me in tony, all-white Beacon Hill. He was standing on a fire escape using a caulking gun to weatherproof a window. Similar to the Gates case, a white neighbor evidently looked out her window and called the cops saying that there was a black man with a gun breaking into the house across the street.

The cops came screaming in from both ends of Brimmer Street, jumped out with guns drawn and yelled, "Put the gun down motherfucker!" Jo put down the caulking gun, then respectfully talked to the cops, explained what he was up to, showed some ID, they all had a laugh and the incident was over. End of story. He used his basic training.

Now there's a lot that's screwed up around this country and plenty to get mad at, especially the exploding prison-industrial complex and black incarceration, but in general I would say it's not the Cambridge or Boston police. They usually aren't the most pleasant people, but look at what they have to deal with and the danger they face day in and day out on these city streets. So remember - or quickly learn - your basic training. Always talk calmly and politely to the police. They're just doing their jobs, usually the best that they know how and want to live another day to go home to their kids ... just like you.

Image ... Obama lost his cool too. Alex Brandon/Associated Press.

Antiques Row | Cityscape . 1

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Another antique shop gone, one more down - Christopher Anthony's at the corner of Chestnut and River Streets. A fairly large one too, made up of two conjoined shop spaces. Gone and won't be back - passed down in the family, repopened under new owners or taken over by a former employee. When they go now they're gone. Antiques are dead.

Charles Street has, or had, always been Boston's Antiques Row. In the 90's over 40 antique shops lined the street at the foot of Beacon Hill and adjacent River Street. Now the fingers of one hand or fewer will do. Many of their names escape memory.

Russell Alberts (many were named for their owners) was always a favorite - an impeccable, courtly, affable gentleman specializing in high-end Asian antiques and art, dealing with major collectors and museums, who really know his stuff and always had great windows in his shop at the corner of Revere Street.

Marika was the doyenne of the street, became one of the few dynastic successions - and one of the few that just keep going, on the corner opposite Alberts, seemingly with the same stuff in the window that I saw decades ago.

Image ... Paul Revere (in drag), I assume.

... To be continued.

Hawks on the Wing . 5 | Bird News

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Coupling completed and the nest built, the female lays a clutch of 2 - 3 eggs (more unusually, 1, 4 or 5). As with most birds clutch size is related to the current feeding conditions - more eggs are laid when food is abundant and fewer in lean times. The eggs are about 2.5-inches long, white or bluish-white and spotted with brown or unmarked.

Brooding, or incubating, begins after the first egg is laid rather than when the clutch is complete. This strategy allows the eggs to hatch asynchronously in the order that they they were laid. Incubation habits differ among bird species, but in most hawks both males and females seem to share the brooding duties equally as they do nest building.

Almost all birds brood, generally by sitting on their eggs, whose shells are specially designed to bear the weight of the parent's body without breaking, often with some support from the raised side of the nest. When brooding a bird transfers its body heat to the eggs to develop the embryo. Birds are warm blooded animals, of course, with normal temperatures of 104° F (they have to run hotter than us because they're smaller). Some heat is lost in the transfer, so it turns out that the ideal avian incubation temperature is actually around the human norm of 98.6° F. But feathers make the bird, so how is this heat transfer accomplished with all that high R-factor insulation in the way?

Just before brooding most birds develop a brood patch, a temporarily featherless area of bare skin lined with swollen blood vessels on the abdomen which will come in contact with the eggs. Hawks, both male and female, have one large patch, other species may have several strategically placed patches. In hawks the patch develops naturally before brooding due to hormonal changes. Other species such as ducks and geese pluck out the feathers to make the patch and use them to line their nests. In addition to brooding, the eggs are turned frequently to assure even development of the embryo.

Incubation takes about a month and the eggs hatch out in 30 to 35 days, one after the other following their 'laying order'. Red-tails are born with no means to walk or fly, covered in down, with eyes wide open and must be constantly fed by their parents. Following the lore of falconry, for which Red-tails are often the current raptor of choice, the young before they fledge - fly and leave the nest - are called eyasses. They quickly resemble cute little ruthless, hook-billed killers, which will soon be their instinctual career path.

Bird species vary widely in their stage of development at birth. The spectrum spans from the precocial to the altricial. Precocial species are, well, precocious - competent from birth, to various degrees. Altricial young take time to develop competence.

Image ... Red-tail with a pigeon.

Number Detective . 17 | Kid'scape

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Hey kids! I'm the Number Detective and my numero uno job is to track down numbers all over the city and find out what they're up to.

My first find wasn't an easy number and even sort of hard to see ... 17. It was above the side entrance of a church off Hanover Street in Boston's North End.

Here are three possible ways of seeing seventeen ...
17 = 3+3+3+3+3+2 ...  +  +  +  +  + .
17 = 4+4+4+4+1 ...  +  +  +  + .
17 = 5+5+5+2 ...  +  +  + .

Fun facts
Seventeen is the seventh prime number. A prime is a number which can only be divided by one and itself. The first seven prime numbers are 2, 3, 5 7, 11, 13 and 17 (1 is not prime since it only has one divisor, itself). It's also the result of adding the first four primes together, 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 17. For some mysterious reason, 17 is also considered to be the least random number, that is the most likely to be picked as a number chosen at random. We chose it by chance as our first number.

Vampires in Boston | Oh snap! . 3

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There is, or maybe was, an odd funky store, actually more like a rambling, dusty two storey warehouse, in the North End that sold classic movie posters. This was how the wall outside the store looked one day. Oh Snap! is our scrapbook of casual, amusing snapshots.