Shades - crazy shades - of Willy Wonka!

This is such a crazy story - just chocked full of intrigue, greed, naivite, pissiness, selfishness, poor communications, and a golden prize. So kinda sorta straight out of Willy Wonka.

This fall, a NH video game designer came up with a treasure hunt in which hunters would follow cryptic clues and scour around looking for a solid gold statue worth $25K. But the solid gold statue wasn't the big deal prize. The statue contained a decoding mechanism to access a far more lucrative prize — a bitcoin wallet worth $87,600."

$87,600? Now you're talking.

Anyway, Dan Leonard is a local meteorologist who works for the Weather Company. He thought he could use weather data to pinpoint the location of the solid gold statue. And he was right. 

The initial map that the designers posted covered pretty much the entirety of the northeast, but each day they zoomed in, getting closer and closer to the prize location. In addition to aerial photos of the statue in its hiding place, players (who had paid a $20 entry fee) saw the real-time temperature in the area. 

Leonard began analyzing the temperature data, cloud cover, and sunlight on the forest floor, narrowing the location down to a few square miles. He then added in analysis of the types of trees in the area. Bingo! Or whatever seekers of solid gold statues shout when they solve a mystery.

Anyway, Leonard got there first and on his way out of the forest, he met with some other treasure hunters. He brandished his trophy and - naturally - folks took pics and posted them. Ooops. The decoding info for the bitcoin trove was out there in the big wide world. 

Luckily, the game's designer, Jason Rohrer, hadn't yet put the $87,600 in the bitcoin account. Phew. Rather than just give Leonard the money, Rohrer decided to keep things interesting and devised yet another treasure hunt that would lead to a jar of real gold coins. But this second hunt was set up so that Leonard would be the only one who could find the prize.

One might ask - this one did, anyway - why they didn't just give Leonard the money. But the mind of a gamer, I guess. (Or maybe they were just punishing Leonard for being dumb enough to hold up his solid gold statue in such a way that he revealed the code to access the bitcoin.)

In any event, the new hunt was on.

This one involved a puzzle that Leonard would need to solve. Other players could play as well, but the secret words Leonard was given pretty much guaranteed that he'd be the winner.

At this point it got a bit convoluted.

A fellow player, Chris Passmore, asked Leonard if he could use some help. 

Passmore, 39, who lives in southern New Hampshire, had followed a strategy similar to Leonard’s in the initial treasure hunt and reached out to chat about it. The two men built a rapport and Passmore suggested they team up to solve the new puzzle.

“The approach at the time was, ‘Hey, whatever I can do to maybe help you out, it’d be cool just to be part of the winning team and be part of your story,” Passmore recalled. (Source: Boston Globe)

Other players also contacted Leonard and asked if he wanted an assist, but Passmore passed the trust test. So after strategzing with him for a few days, Leonard gave Passmore the secret code words  - boulder, barrel, anger, piano - in hopes that Passmore would help crack the code. 

And here's where things took a definite hinky, human nature-y turn.

Passmore decided that he and some fellow gaming buddies had been spending so much time helping Leonard out that they deserved a cut. Not the smartest thing in the world to wait until the treasure hunt was nearing its end to talk turkey, but fair enough to want some reward beyond it being it being "cool just to be part of the winning team and be part of [Leonard's] story."

For his part, Leonard said he'd been planning on cutting Passmore et al in. But when it came to getting things in writing, the fellows couldn't come to terms. Not surprising, since Passmore was asking for 65%. Hmmmm. That sounds a bit excess. Almost blackmaily, given that at this point Leonard suspected that Passmore was nearing the find.

And then Passmore et al. cracked the code. The jar of golden coins was a mere 20 minutes from his home. When Leonard figured out that Team Passmore was closing in, he asked the gaming (Discord) community for some help, and he soon had the location coordinates in hand.

Alas, Leonard had his jacket on and one foot out the door when his wife stopped him. Too late (10 p.m.), too dark, too dangerous, too much money at stake. So Leonard "and his wife turned on the livestream, assuming Passmore would eventually arrive and take the gold." Which he did. 

Passmore took a few days, but then posted a video online showing off the bottle full of coins. 

The players who had participated in the game and followed it closely were up in arms. Passmore was savaged, and even received a few threats. He had a change of heart. He didn't want to seem greedy. He didn't want people pissed off. And he certainly didn't want his family threatened. 

Although technically he had the rights to it, Passmore called the game designers and told them he would forfeit the gold. It would go to Leonard. 

“After four or five days of playing the villain, being the tough guy, and bragging about the gold he had taken, Chris essentially told us that what he had done was against his personal values,” Rohrer said. “He’d been trying to justify it to himself but that cognitive dissonance was friction in his soul and he was just at his breaking point.”

The men made the hand off in person. 

“It felt good to have a happy ending,” Passmore said.

Leonard hasn’t shared any of the bounty with Passmore, but he’s considering it.

“I still might, maybe someday,” he said

Note to Dan Leonard: Yes, Passmore was a dick to claim the prize after saying he was partnering with you for the glory, but he really doesn't sound like a terrible guy. And you weren't at your peak brightness when you gave him those four secret code words out without having a deal in place. 

Live and learn for both of you.

And it might be nice in the spirit of the season to tuck a few bucks in a Christmas card and mail it off to him. 

Think four little words. 

Get this boulder off of your shoulder. Passmore had you over a barrel and decided to give up, give in. How about giving up your anger? Maybe tuck enough in that card so that Chris Passmore could buy himself a nice little piano.

Happy Gaming to All, and to All a Good Night!

Oh, those crypto bros. (Let them eat bananas.)

Last month, at auction, Sotheby sold a work of conceptual art (entitled Comedian) by "artist" Maurizio Cattelan. The work was a banana, duct-taped to the wall with classic gray Duck Tape. The price? A cool $6.2M. (Actual winning bid: $5.2M, but what with fees, etc...)

Well, congratulations to Maurizio Cattelan on his big pay day. I'd say he's really putting the "con" in conceptual art, that's for sure.

The lucky auction winer was crypto bro Jusin Sun. And a week later, he ate the banana. Because you just don't let a $6.2M banana rot on the wall, do you?

“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun, who was born in China, said after getting his first taste. “It’s really quite good.”

Sun said he felt “disbelief” in the first 10 seconds after he won the bid, before realising “this could become something big”. In the 10 seconds after that, he decided he would eat the banana.

“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” he said on Friday... 

On Friday, Sun compared conceptual art such as Comedian to NFT (non-fungible token) art and decentralised blockchain technology. “Most of its objects and ideas exist as (intellectual property) and on the internet, as opposed to something physical,” he said.

Sun also this week disclosed a $30m investment in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency project backed by the US president-elect, Donald Trump. (Source: The Guardian)

Oh, why oh why oh why oh am I not surprised that the banana on the wall is but a mere one degree of separation from Donald Trump. Bet we'll be seeing a lot more of this over the next four years.

Oh and a further no surprise surprise:

Sun was last year charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission with offering and selling unregistered securities in relation to his crypto project Tron. The case is ongoing.

Could there be a pardon in Sun's future? 

Anyway, this bananaa concept has been around for a few years, having first appeared in 2019 at Art Basel's Miami outpost, where several versions of it sold in the $120K-150K range, before yet another conceptual artist ripped it off the wall and ate it. 

If the $6.2M price sounds more than a tad bit steep, it does include instructions on how to replace the banana when it starts to rot. Which seems a lot like the "recipe" for Pudding in a Cloud which was featured in a Cool Whip TV ad of yore. In case you're wondering, Pudding in a Cloud is a plop of pudding in a bowl full of Cool Whip.

But wait, there's more! Sun also has the rights to recreate the artwork by duct-taping any banana to a wall and calling it Comedian."

The ur source for the $6.2M billion banana was a fruit stand in Manhattan, where it was sold to the artist - for a buck - by 74-year-old fruit stall worker Shah Alam, who makes a cool $12 an hour. When informed of the auction price, Alam was downright flabbergasted. So flabbergasted, he didn't even try to monetize his moment in the conceptual art sun to snap a selfie of himself and turn it into an NFT or something.

Never fear, Justin Sun's coming to the rescue. He's promised to buy 100,000 bananas from Alam's stand and pass them out around the world as “a celebration of the beautiful connection between everyday life and art."

Not as if a purchase of this magnitude just might overwhelm Alam and his stand. It's the gesture, the artsy, concepty gesture that matters. 

But why not just give Alam $100K, make his day, and get a feel-good NY Post story out of it?

There is so very much wrong with this story, but let's start with the obvious: spending $6.2M on something as frivolous as this - when the auction wasn't to benefit a charity - is obscene.  Imagine how much good $6.2M would do if it went to Habitat for Humanity to build housing for the poor? Or to St. Jude's Hospital, which treats kiddos with cancer for free? Or to a fund that supports starving artists?

Crypto, NFT art, duct-taped bananas? We're teetering on the brink of the abyss of absurdity. Sure, rich people are entitled to do whatever they want to do with their money, even if that money is crypto. But there will come a moment of reckoning when normal people are going to wake up and, maybe, at least, start demanding that the hyper rich start paying a bit more in taxes so that some of their money is directed towards the common good. So that normal people can more readily afford healthcare, and housing, and a banana splilt or two. It's going to be tax the bastards or roll out the tumbrels, I'm afraid. 

Eating a $6.2M banana sure doesn't help the case of the uber-wealthy.

This is terrifying

A couple of years ago, some members of the Patriot Front - a white nationalist group - spent their Saturday sturming around downtown Boston. I wasn't aware until they had passed through, but they came pretty close to where I live

If I'd known, I like to think that I would have gone out to boo and yell at them. 

But would I have?

Would I have started the booing or yelling at, or waited until someone braver than I began? Would I have just stood on the sidelines, shaking my head in disgust, giving them a malevolent stare?

Would I have had my very own Barbara Frietchie* moment. Shoot if you must, this old grey head, but spare your country's flag, she said. Maybe even goaded one of those masked, cowardly a-holes into shoving me. Haha! Assault on the elderly! FELONY CONVICTION! JAIL TIME!

Or would I have just stayed home, grinding my teeth and wondering whether this bunch was just a few stray racist morons or the tip of a neo-Nazi iceberg?

A couple of times, over the last two years, members of NSC-131 (The National Socialist Club of New England) have demonstrated at the home of our governor, Maura Healey. The demonstrations were anti-immigrant in nature - this unsavory crew has also shown up at hotels housing immigrants - but I'm sure screaming at Maura Healey has special meaning for them, as she's both a liberal and a lesbian. (NSC-131 has also shown up outside drag queen story hours.)

In the course of my day, I don't meet many neo-Nazis. Or maybe I do. Who knows who's behind that mask of hate? Maybe it's someone I've spoken with in tech support, someone who delivered a package to my building, someone I sat beside on the subway. 

The only neo-Nazi I know that I've met was someone I encountered at the homeless shelter where I volunteer. He was checking in, and he asked if I noticed anything special about his birthday. (When we scan a guest's ID, we can see their date of birth.) His b-day was 04.20, which I knew to be a day on which all things cannabis are celebratead. So I mentioned that, and he shook his head. No, he told me, something else. I knew what that something else was: Hitler's birthday.

He told me that it was very special to him that he and Der Fuhrer had their birthdays in common, as he was a great admirer.

I redirected the conversation - did he want a yellow or blue poncho - and that was that.

I haven't seen him again, but it was unsettling to have had this sort of close encounter with someone who identified with Nazism.

Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of Nazism going around these days. 

A recent NY Times article chronicled incidents in Waterloo, Iowa. In Columbus, Ohio. In Nashville, Tennessee. 

Flash displays of hate and white power are happening more frequently in the United States, a trend that experts say is a reaction to changing demographics, political turmoil and social catalysts. More than 750 such incidents have taken place since 2020, according to the Anti-Defamation League, with more than half of them occurring in the last 18 months.

National experts describe a familiar pattern: Small groups of mostly masked men chant and wave swastika or white power flags in public and yell racial slurs at targets as varied as immigrants, Black people, Jews and L.G.B.T.Q. people. They unfurl offensive banners over highways or post racist fliers in communities. The demonstrations are typically captured on video and ricochet across social media to large audiences.

Propaganda incidents are also on the rise. Such occurrences - "which include distribution of racist, antisemitic and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. fliers, banners, graffiti and posters" grew by 12 percent between 2022 and 2023. And those are just the incidents that are known. The number of hate groups rose by a similar percentage (14) over the same peiod. It's not anybody's imagination: there are lot more of these groups out there. And it's terrifying. 

I don't want neo-Nazis marching around my neighborhood, or anyone else's. 

And I draw cold comfort from the knowledge that right wing (white wing) extremist groups are popping up throughout Europe. England, Italy, France, Germany. Even Ireland. Shortly after I was there a year ago, anti-immigrant riots broke out in Dublin, right around the corner from where we had stayed. 

No, as awful as things could get, I don't see the US plummeting into some neo-Nazi maelstrom. I don't see an Auschwitz. I don't see Zyklon B. But I do see a lot of blameless people being hassled and worse - folks guilty of nothing other than being gay, trans, Jewish, Muslim, Haitian, Somali, feminist, or anything other than cis white straight male.

There've been Nazis here before. 

George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was frequently in the news during my childhood, spewing his anti-Semitic and anti-Black vitriol. 

David Duke of the KKK was inspired by Rockwell. So was white-nationalist, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

So even thought they've been in our midsts for quite a while, I just don't like having any of them around. 

My mother was a German-American, the daughter of immigrants and an immigrant (as a toddler) herself. Her father, my Grandpa Wolf, was no raging liberal. A small businessman, once he started voting, it was Repulican straight ticket all the way. My mother on the other hand...She used to say that, in 1940 and in 1944, when she went to the polls with my grandfather to vote, the two would joke about canceling each other's votes out. 

But Grandpa Wolf had no truck with Nazis.

My mother recalls him telling her that certain folks he knew or knew of in the Chicago German-American community were members of the American Nazi Bund. They were idiots, malcontents, anti-American, people to be avoided. 

Jake Wolf was right about these people being awful. The question is whether it's better to avoid or confront them. 

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*Barbara Frietchie was a Union supporter who, in the early days of the Civil War, allegedly confronted the Confederate soldiers who were invading her town in Maryland, refusing to let them take her flag down. The incident was turned into a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, which was memorized by me in the fifth grade. (Those were the days!) 

Why indepedent investigative journalism matters. (The case for Pro Publica.)

Frankly, I'm scared. 

I'm scared that our frail and beleaguered "mainstream" press, already cowed into normalizing Trump & Co. and presenting both sides as equivalent in their awfulness, will fully collapse over the next few years. 

So let's equate Joe Biden's pardoning his son as the legal and moral equivalent of, say, Trump's pardoning a bunch of rightwing zealots who trashed the Capitol Building and beat up a bunch of cops. (Not to mention all the press real estate given over to hapless schmo Hunter Biden while virtually ignoring the far more insidious potential for a depraved Pete Hegseth or a maniacal Kash Patel to gain enormous power. These two make RFK, Jr. look like a just slightly madcap nominee.)

When the Trump DOJ puts Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, et. hundreds of als. on trial on trumped up charges of something or other - the word traitor is thrown around an awful lot these days - will anybody be surprised if the press just kinds of shrugs. What do you expect? The Democrats came after poor Rudy Guiliani.

Not that everyone in the press has fallen down on the job. It's just that the work of the exposers, the truth tellers, seems to get buried pretty darned fast.

Anyway, this post is really not about my gut-churning expectations for Trump 2.0. It's about the importance of a free press. And, in this case, an independent investigative press  like Pro Publica that takes on topics like the rightwing money flowing into the black robe pockets of our illustrious Supreme Court Justices. Or last year's exposé, also thanks to Pro Publica, of Home Vestors.

You've probably seen the ads. Mostly it's some pleasant, smiley local-ish folks talking about how Home Vestors of America are the country's Number 1 housesellers, they've been in business more than 20 years, and that they buy ugly - and unugly - houses for cash. Quickly. 

The pleasant, smiley local-ish franchisers aren't trying to raise your anxiety. On the contrary, they're pleasantly and smile-ily telling you that they'll buy you out without your having to repair the leaky roof, get rid of the rat infested junkpile out back, or do anything. Other than sign on the dotted line.

Although the pleasant, smiley localish We Buy Ugly House franchisees aren't trying to raise your anxiety, they know that you're plenty anxious. And they know you're desperate and need to get your hands on some cash. Quick. 

So what if the offer is lowball - 50-75 percent of market value - you get the cash quickly. 

And sometimes, just sometimes, those pleasant, smiley local-ish have been known - I know, you will find this hard to believe - to prey on the elderly.

In one case, Cory Evans, an LA-based franchisee, convinced an 82 year old widow suffering from dementia to accept a lowball offer on her house while she was on her way into assisted living. She'd seen the number on a TV ad and gave the Ugly House people a call. Evans quickly swept in and sussed out the situation. Nice little well-maintained home, in reasonably good shape, no mortgage - all the easier for someone to accept a lower-than-low ball offer since they have nothing to pay off. Casanova was sold.

But Casanova was incapable of engaging in a complex negotiation. Although she was once a skilled bookkeeper and president of the local women’s club, dementia now carved into her short-term memory: A recent neurological assessment had found the 82-year-old was unable to say what year it was or name the city she was in. She routinely mistook her adult son for his uncle. (Source: Pro Publica)

Casanova's son David quickly learned that his mother had entered into an agreement and called Evans to cancel the sale. Evans claimed that he'd seen no evidence of dementia and told David Casanova no way. The two duked it out, and, after a protracted battle, David beat the Goliath of Home Vestors. 

After the fight for Corrine Casanova’s house was over, David sold it for $510,000 — $235,000 more than Evans had tried to pay for it. David said he did none of the repairs Evans had insisted, under oath, were necessary.

And, of course, the more repairs Corrinne Casanova thought she was facing, the more eager she had been to sell.

Meanwhile, Corrinne didn't get all that long to enjoy her time in assisted living. She died just 19 days after Cory Evans screwed her out of her house. 

Of course, not all of the pleasant, smiley local-ish franchisee are corrupt and rotten to the core.

But a ProPublica investigation — based on court documents, property records, company training materials and interviews with 48 former franchise owners and dozens of homeowners who have sold to its franchises — found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling.

One franchisee claimed that they were trained to lie. 

How effective is Pro Publica? Well, based on the exposé, Home Vestors has put in some reforms. Sellers now have a three-day change-of-heart escape clause, and some policies, practices, and training methods have changed. 

As for Cory Evans, he "pleaded guilty to two felony counts of attempted grand theft of real property." He didn't do any jail time, but was removed as an owner from his franchise. Alas, the franchise itself wasn't terminated, and Evans' brothers continue to own it. Home Vestors could have kicked the bums out entirely, but their franchise is one of their highest earners, so...

Anyway, yay, Pro Publica! (I just made a donation.)

And if you didn't think I was going to bring this back to Trump, I got news for you.

Hopefully, they don't fully succeed, but the new Project 2025 regime is itching to dismantle our country's regulatory apparatus. God knows all those regulations could use a trim, but these guys are absolutist free market gung ho-ers. So we can look for consumer protections to weaken across the boards. Which means we're going to need independent investigative journalists like the folks at Pro Publica around. I'm pretty certain that they're going to matter more than ever over the next few years.

What a terrific hobby!

My family didn't do a lot of traveling when I was a growing up.

Summer vacation meant a) going to Chicago, or b) renting a cottage (owned by Mae and Nemo, friends of my parents) on the Cape, or c) day trips.

The only one of these options that required overnight accommodation was a) going to Chicago if the mode of transportation was driving vs. the train. 

I remember two driving trips.

My main memory of the one when I was four was starting out at dawn, with my sister and I stretched out on the back seat, covered with a pink blanket to catch vomit if either of us got carsick. I don't recall whether either of us got carsick, but it was certainly a possibility. I remember we stopped for our lunch break, eating in a little park near Syracuse, where we got to play on the swings, which were sit-in swings, rather than the sit-on swings I was used to. So exotic! I also liked the name "Syracuse," which also stuck with me. 

I have no memory of where we stayed, but I'm guessing some little road side motel, maybe with cabins.

This would have been in 1954, before the interstate highway system was built. My father - the one and only driver, as my mother didn't get her license until I was in high school - would have taken Route 9 and equivalents all the way, and the trip may well have involved two overnights in some roadside "motor lodge."

In 1963, "we"  - where "we" was my father, and the Big Three (me, my sister Kath, and my brother Tom) -  drove to Chicago, while my mother flew with the Little Two (Rick and Trish). We stayed at a Holiday Inn in one diretion, and a Howard Johnson in the other. One of the stops was in Erie, Pennsylvnia, the other in Ashtabula, Ohio. I don't recall which was which.

I found the experience ultra exciting. Eating in a restaurant! Cheese Danish! Motel with pool! Those little soaps in the bathroom! It was just beyond. 

I've done a ton of travel since back in the day, but, alas, it rarely involved "the motor lodges and small mom-and-pop hotels that once dotted roadside America." Instead, it was almost all camping and hosteling (young folk travel) and hotels or VRBO-types in big cities (grown up business and pleasure travel). When my friend Joyce and I drove cross country, we stayed at a couple of "motor lodges" when we just felt we needed to have a roof over our heads, rather than a tent fly. This seldom happened, but over the course of a couple of months it did occur once or twice. 

My husband and I used to spend a long weekend in Perkin's Cove (Ogunquit), Maine every year, and stayed at the Riverside Motel, which was kind of nondescript, but location, location, location...It was right on an active lobster fishing cove, and the cove was small but had quite a few very good restaurants. One thing I do remember is that the Riverside served a continental breakfast, with OJ provided in tiny white ruffled cups not much larger than a thimble. The place is still in business, but it's now swanked up and reworked as Auberge on the Cove. (Now on my bucket list, btw.)

But E. Hussa did stay in plenty of those roadside America spots "during bucolic childhood summers spent in New England" a few decades ago. 

She described one motel in particular, the American Motor Lodge in Sturbridge, as her childhood happy place. Her family visited OId Sturbridge Village and stayed at the 55-room inn on Route 20 (touted as just 1,000 yards from the Massachusetts Turnpike!). They swam in the indoor heated pool and enjoyed meals in the restaurant.

“One day, we were driving through Sturbridge, maybe 15 years ago, and I realized, ‘Oh my God, the American Motor Lodge is abandoned.’ This place that was the source of so many great memories was gone. It had an impact on me,” Hussa said. “That’s when I really started seeing it. There are so many abandoned old motels. I realized this is something that I could actually research and document in some way.” (Source: Boston Globe)

And so E. Hussa went about that research and documenting, which turned into her website, Dead Motels USA, which she started in 2018. And which is just a treasure trove of wonder. Just awesome. What right-minded kid of the 1950's wouldn't have wanted to spend a night or two in the Teddy Bear Motel in Cherokee, NC. Nobody I ever knew, that's for sure. 

Or a motel with a pool shaped like a cowboy boot, a heart, a kitty cat? (Hard pass on the one with the clown-shaped pool.)

She has expanded her reach with an Instagram account which now has almost 200,000 followers. She also does dead and abandoned drive-in restaurants, and an occasional abandoned gas station. Bet she adds drive-in movie theaters at some point...

E. Hussa wants to retain her anonymity. 

She's not looking to make a profit from her work. It’s simply an all-consuming hobby. She also rarely grants interviews, preferring that her website and Instagram account tell the sad stories of the rise and decline of the roadside inn.

“It’s just more fun for me to separate my real life from this almost fantasy hobby,” she said. “And nobody ever has to know who I am.”

There's a coffee table book in there somewhere, but so far she just hasn't "felt moved or compelled to do it. So, maybe in the future."

And I wouldn't be moved or compelled to buy it. I'm happy just to comb through her website and come across gems like this Niagara Falls Hilton honeymoon suite from the 1970s. 

Wouldn't you wish you could honeymoon there? (Okay, with a different groom, wearing a different robe, but still...)

Anyway, what a terrific hobby!  Hey, E. Hussa, a grateful nation thanks you!

Here's to good old beer

My father wasn't much of a drinker, but mostly he drank beer. Ruppert Knickerbocker beer. He may have averaged one a night, after supper, in the summer. A beer after mowing the lawn, a beer while listening to a ball game on the radio, a beer while playing poker with his buddies (which included, at one point, a parish priest). When friends came over to play cards on weekends, everyone drank "highballs," but for my father, his regular brew was a brew.  Did he go through a case of beer a month? Probably not even that. But he liked to have a beer, and one of the treats of my childhood was taking a sip of Dad's beer. That and looking for the Knickerbocker Man in the bottom of the can. 

Another fun remembrance of my childhood is joining hands with the other kids and doing the Knickerbocker Beer chant and stomp. (Knickerbocker Beer! Knickerbocker Beer! We've got the rhythm in our feet! Boom, boom, boom!) I actually could find no reference online to the Knickerbocker Beer chant, but there are plenty to a wholesome nursery school game called Dr. Knickerbocker. Has Dr. Knickerbocker replaced Knickerbocker Beer, beer being considered too unseemly for small children to be chanting and stomping about? Or was Knickerbocker Beer a regional variation on the more kid-friendly Dr. Knickerbocker theme? 

My final childhood attachment to beer came in the fourth grade. On Halloween that year, we were asked to come someone "from early American history." Most of the girls, for lack of anything else, came as Betsy Ross, Sacagawea, or a generic Pilgrim lady. But I decided to go bold, choosing Peter Stuyvesant, mostly because he had a peg leg. I fixed up a swell costume - some cast-off football pants from my cousin Robert, a white shirt, a bandoleer made of a wide red belt of my mother's, and, for the crowning touch, a peg leg made out of a beer bottle.

Alas, the peg leg splintered when I limped around on it, and I had to make something out of a paper towel roll, which kept collapsing. So the effect wasn't all that great. Still, it beat Betsy Ross.

Despite these early encounters with beer, I never became a beer drinker. I didn't drink in either high school or college, when beer would have been the bev of choice. When I started drinking in my twenties, I mostly drank mixed drinks or wine, with an occasional beer.

Today, my beer consumption is pretty much limited to a Guinness or two when I'm in Ireland. 

Still, I was intrigued by a piece I saw a few weeks ago that talked about a beer that was available at a recent climate summit, where the delegation from Signapore gave out "free beer made from recycled toilet water."

A hoppy pilsner called NEWBrew that comes in pastel cans decorated with solar panels, rain clouds and cityscapes, the beer is part of a collaboration between a Singaporean company called Brewerkz and the country’s national water agency. The project is designed to draw attention to, and normalize, Singapore’s water reclamation efforts.

An island country at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore has no major natural freshwater sources of its own. It collects rainfall, imports water from its northern neighbor, Malaysia, removes salt from seawater, and uses filtration systems and ultraviolet light to make wastewater drinkable again. (Source: NY Times)

Wastewater? Gulp! Or, rather, not gulp. Not me, anyway.  And yes, I know, a lot of folks, when criticizing a beer, say that 'it tastes like piss.' Now they may really have a point. 

But water scarcity is a serious problem, getting worse as the world warms up. And if wastewater can be put to good use - as beer, as soda, as water-water (for imbibing or for crop-watering) - then so be it. 

Personally, I'd rather see it go to the crops, but if it's going to make it into a beer can, I'd be happy to hoist a can to my father's memory. 

Here's to good old beer...Drink it down, drink it down, drink it down!

Yeah, but how's its bedside manner

My husband and I used to love watching House, a show in which an eccentric, obnoxious, brilliant doctor - Gregory House (played by the terrific Hugh Laurie) -  sat around with a squad of younger colleagues he was mentoring and put their collective genius minds to the task of solving thorny diagnoses. 

We watched it throughout its long, eight-year run, right up 'til the final episode (which was terrible: the worst in the series), which we saw while Jim was hospitalized after surgery following a devastating, although not especially thorny to figure out, cancer diagnosis. 

Anyway, we always got a kick out of watching the genius that was Greg House at work.

The show went off the air in 2012, well before AI chatbots were playing doctor, and I wonder what genius Dr. House would have thought of using ChatGPT. I suspect he would have scorned it, and likely have pitted himself against it to prove that he was more brilliant. This being TV, and all.

But in real life, ChatGPT is apparently faring somewhat better than real life doctors in diagnosing complex cases. 

In an experiment, 50 doctors (residents and attendings from large healthcare systems) were presented with 6 case histories to diagnose. Half the doctors were given a ChatGPT resource to assist them, the others just stuck to conventional diagnostic info and methods. The doctors using the chatbot received an average score of 76% accuracy; the doctors without the AI assist had an average score of 90% accuracy.

So, no clear win for AI? 

Not so fast.

Dr. ChatGPT, operating on their own, earned a score of 90%.

So why didn't the doctors using AI perform better than the non-AI docs? Seems like doctors, who base their diagnoses not just on book learning but on intuition and experience as well, didn't trust AI when its diagnosis ran counter to their intuition and experience. They just didn't like having their judgement challenged. (Why am I not surprised.)

I don't expect that AI is going to replace real doctors anytime soon, but I think that doctors, once they get the hang of it, are going to get along just fine with their ChatGPT colleagues.

After all, there's just so much information/data out there, you just can't expect a doctor - even a House-ian genius type - to keep up with it all. Let alone a kindly old gaffer like Marcus Welby, MD, who was used to diagnosing appendicitis and heart murmurs in the cosy little office attached to his house back in the 1970's. After all, back in that day, there were fewer diagnostic options to choose from. I bet Marcus Welby never even heard of plaque psoriasis or Peyronie's Disease. 

How could your primary care doctor possibly stay on top of all there is to know about every possible disease out there? 

Even specialists must be hard put to stay up with what's happening in their far narrower fields.

Certainly, within my lifetime - which, realistically, ain't going to be all that long - doctors are going to be deploying AI assistants, rather than the likes of Marcus Welby's hip and happening sidekick, Dr. Steve Kiley. 

And I'm all for it.

A few years ago, a friend from the gym came down with something that, for lack of a more technical description, was exceedingly weird and rare.

The initial diagnosis was insect bite that happened in Peru, where he and his family were climbing Machu Pichu.

After time in the hospital in Peru, my friend came home and saw doctors at Mass General, Dana Farber, and the Mayo Clinic. No one could figure it out. Until finally someone did: an obscure blood cancer that was rarely encountered. 

I don't know whether an earlier diagnosis would have helped any. Survival rate is very dim for this form of cancer. But, sadly my friend - a fit, vigorous, healthy guy in his mid 50's (and truly one of the nicest men I've ever known) - died about a year after he first became ill. Maybe an earlier diagnosis, which I'm guessing that ChatGPT, with its ability to ingest an endless amount of information, would have figured things out before the human experts did.

Anyway, I'm not the biggest AI fan out there, but, in the medical case, bring it. Just bring it along with a human, not on its AI own. 

When it comes to hearing the diagnosis, I want kindly, warm-hearted, hand-holding Marcus Welby. Or even the acerbic Dr. House. I want a human to deliver the news, to tell me what's next. Sure, I'm going to run back home and start googling furiously - with the initial blob of info that comes back to me coming straight out of AI. But I really do want humans involved in my care.

I want bedside manner, dammit, not just beyond-human capacity intelligence. 

Source: NY Times