🪑 It’s almost space saver season

It's Thursday, Boston.

🧁 It’s also National Cupcake Day. To celebrate, here’s Boston magazine’s recs for where to find the best cupcakes in the city. It’s also National Cat-Herder Day, so if you’re good at that kind of thing, congrats!

👀 What’s on tap today:

• Pot prices plummet

• Tom Brady getting sued

• The Pallas Cat

Up first…

WEATHER

It’s almost space saver season

While Sunday’s snowfall may have been a little underwhelming, take it as a sign that it’s time to get real about the winter months ahead. And with the snowy storm season upon us, here are four things the City of Boston wants you to remember as we head into the winter:

1. Don’t be a jerk with your space savers. 

Whether it’s a chair, a stool, or an old Amazon box, space savers must be removed within 48 hours after a snow emergency has been lifted. And don’t even think about putting them out in the South End or Bay Village where they’re banned.

If you don’t know where to put your car during a snow emergency, discounted parking is available at some parking lots and garages for Boston residents. You can find the list of garages here.

2. Put your trash and recycling bins in FRONT of the snowbanks.

Crews have a tough time reaching trash barrels and recycling bins if they’re behind snowbanks, so make sure they’re in a cleared area on the curb for collection. Otherwise, it might not be collected and you’ll have a stinky sidewalk.

3. Stop shoveling your driveway’s snow into the street.

Removal of snow or ice from a private property to the street or sidewalk is not only prohibited but can result in up to a $150 fine. Not worth it. 

4. Clear your sidewalks ASAP.

Once it stops snowing, property owners have three hours to fully clear snow, sleet, and ice from sidewalks and curb ramps surrounding the property (or three hours after sunrise if the snow ends overnight). The cleared path must be at least 42 inches wide to accommodate wheelchairs and strollers. 

While the city can be a little loosey goosey with the enforcement of the three-hour rule, they ultimately just want people — especially youth and seniors — to be able to get around safely.

For all your other winter-related questions, make sure to check out this page on the city’s website, which covers everything from plowing to parking maps.

CITY

Quick & Dirty Headlines

🥦 Recreational pot has never been cheaper in Mass. The average price of a gram of flower was $7.76 in October, a record low. While November’s average increased slightly to $8.04 a gram, it’s still technically cheaper than the average footlong Subway sandwich. These strikingly low numbers may be good news for consumers, but they have small business owners worried. As prices fall, so does revenue, which some suspect may lead to cultivators cutting corners on quality to save money, or even worse, closing up shop for good.

😤 Class-action suit filed against Tom Brady and other celebs by their (former) fans. Lifelong Pats fan Michael Livieratos invested $30,000 in FTX after seeing Tom Brady endorse the cryptocurrency trading platform in a commercial. But then FTX filed for bankruptcy, vaporizing $10 billion in assets, including all the money Livieratos had on the platform. He’s now a plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit seeking to hold Brady and other celebrity FTX endorsers responsible for luring him into a bad deal.

🤖 Can ChatGPT write The Boston Globe? A Globe journalist fed the chat bot powered by artificial intelligence a series of Boston-related prompts, including requests to write newspaper articles based on entirely fictional events, and the results were good. Almost too good. In case you haven’t tried it yet, you can essentially assign ChatGPT a writing prompt and it will spit it out the assignment for you in a matter of minutes.

12 DAYS OF THE B-SIDE

Cozy spots in Boston

🎿 Hunker down at a Ski Lodge pop up at Publico. The Lodge is open Thursdays through Sundays from 4 p.m. until close.

🌿 Take in the warmth of the courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The poinsettias are in for the season and will give you holiday cheer along with a break from the chill. | Adult admission is $20.

🛖 Chow down in a yurt at the Bowery Bar. Reservations for the festive private spaces start at $100 per party and vary by time of day. You can get up to eight people in there, so going splitsies on a cozy yurt will take down that bill. 

🥣 Warm up with a bowl of corn and crab chowder at Hunter’s Kitchen & Bar, a hunting-lodge themed comfort food bar in Southie. 

☕️ Sip on a winter latte from Jaho. Their creative festive flavors include the Cindy Lou Who latte, flavored with shortbread and maple, or a Rudy’s Red Velvet latte, which tastes like marshmallow and red velvet.

ONE LAST THING

Boston’s most searched of 2022

Google released its Year in Search, revealing that Bostonians were obsessed with both Pickleball and Dirty Shirleys in 2022.

According to Google’s data, we searched “pickleball near me” more than any other city, aside from Philadelphia. Our top-searched recipe was the Dirty Shirley. The Pallas Cat, a Central Asian feline, was our top-searched animal (weird). And “gas prices” was Boston’s top “near me” search of the year, also topping the list for national “near me” search trends. 

An eclectic array of curiosities.

🍸 Thanks for reading! Boston Chefs released their list of favorite seasonal cocktails around the city, and Buttermilk and Bourbon’s Yuletide Sour looks like a winner to me.

💃 Keep up with other B-Side tomfoolery on IG, TikTok, and Twitter @BostonBSide. Send comments and suggestions to [email protected].