Make that Charlie Avarice. (Fraud, glorious fraud.)

It's been nearly three years since I (virtually) ran into Charlie Javice. A decade ago, she founded Frank, a startup that helped students fill in financial aid applications. The idea was so hot, the execution so excellent, that, in 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired the company for a cool $175M. Not crazy billionaire bro unicorn money, by any means. But Javice's $21M take was pretty good walking around money for someone still in her twenties. Plus she had a cushy retention bonus. 

Trouble was, Javice had pumped up the number of students Frank was helping. By a lot. By more than an order of magnitude. 

JPMorgan sued for fraud, federal prosecutors got involved, and this past September Javice was sentenced to seven years in prison for her fraud, glorious fraud.

Curiously, given that she had screwed her employer, Javice had some employment deal where JPMorgan Chase was required to pay her legal bills. And what a tab Charlie (who, I can't help but mention, has a hedge fund father and a life coach mother) rolled up while futilely defending herself.

Here’s what Charlie Javice did: She spent money on luxury hotel" upgrades, extravagant meals and cellulite butter, a personal care product that some people use to treat their skin, as a lawyer for the bank said in a hearing on Friday. (Source: NY Times - 11.14.25)

Additional detail is emerging about those expenses. Lamps. (The lawyers didn't have lamps?) Nutritional supplements. And: 

A $581 dinner for two. Nearly $1,000 in laundry fees for one. A Cookie Monster toddler toy. And however many gummy bears $529 gets you. (Sourec: NY Times - 12.22.25)

Her failed defense included lawyers who have represented the likes of Elon Musk, Harvey Weinstein and Sam Bankman-Fried. And she racked up over $70M in bills - tens of millions more than Elizabeth Holmes spent on her failed defense. One of her lawyers charged $2,025 an hour. Yikes on yikes!

A spokesman for Javice claimed that she "followed JPMorgan’s written policies both as an employee and during the legal proceedings." And noted that she didn't incur these expenses personally. Her attorneys - and she had over 100 who were billing - did. (Bet those policies have been tightened up a bit. If nothing else, they must have tightened up on paying for tightening up cellulite butter.)

When JPMorgan saw the legal bills floating in, they started pushing back, and she's now likely to be on the hook for reimbursing the company for those legal fees. (Along with returning the money she made on the sale of Frank, and the overall $175M JPMorgan paid for the company without doing its due diligence very diligently.)

I really don't get fraudsters. Do they really think they'll never get caught? 

Way back in the early 1970's, when women were increasingly joining the work force and entering non-traditional professions, there was a popular fragrance named Charlie. The models the ad campaign used were young, breezy, kicky women, meant to appeal to young professional women. Whenever I read Charlie Javice's name, I can see Shelley Hack (one of the models) confidently swinging down the street, heading into the office. 

And here we are, fifty years later, reading about Charlie Avarice Javice, fraudster and legal expense gouger. 

As another ad campaign had it way back in the dawn of the Ms. Magazine era: you've come a long way, baby. 

2025 is in the books

I used to be a great reader. 

As a kid, I read a book a day. Six was the maximum number of books you could take out of the Worcester Public Library (Main South Branch), where my father took us every Friday evening to check out our books for the week. He would have my mother's library card with him, so he could take out a dozen books. 

What we all got from the library was augmented by book clubs. For the kids, my family subscribed to Vision Books (a series about saints and other renowned Catholics) and some American history series. When I had fifty-cents, I beelined to Woolworth's and picked up a Bobbsey Twins book or, as my reading tastes became more sophisticated, a Nancy Drew. 

My parents were "members" at various times of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the high-quality paperbacks The Time-Life Reading Program (which I think was a bit up the literary foodchain from the Literary Guild.) I still have a couple of books from The Reading Program, including a 1964 re-issues  A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, in which my mother has written my father's name, A.T. Rogers. I think I'll put it on my reading list for 2026.

There was also, if memory serves, and Ellery Queen mystery book club. And the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

By the time I was in junior high, I was reading those book club books (other than Ellery Queen) alongside the books I was reading for school.

Throughout my adult life, I'm guessing that I averaged 2-3 books (plus or minus, mostly plus) a week. We're not talking War and Peace here, but literary fiction, not-so-literary fiction, biography, history, mysteries, detective books (just not Ellery Queen), and on occasion pure, unadulterated junk. 

But within the last decade or so, my reading tapered off. I was spending more time watching (and fretting over) the news. I was perfectly capable of watching 8 straight hours of MSNBC, with the same stories presented over and over again from slightly different angles. Then I found myself doomscrolling on Twitter (and more recently Blue Sky).

Last year, I decided to start reading more and set a goal of a book a week. I made it, thanks in no small part to reading my favorite childhood books, the Betsy-Tacy-Tib series, which chronicled the turn-of-the-twentieth-century lives of three girls in Mankato, Minnesota, taking them from kindergarten through marriage and motherhood. Wonderful books, all, but easy enough to plow through in a sitting or two. No wonder I could read seven books a week as a kid!

For 2025, I doubled my goal to two books a week. And I made it.

Oh, I had a couple of gimmes in there, mini-books that took less than an hour - way less - to breeze through: On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder), A Child's Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas). But they were counterbalanced by a 700 page biography of the British writer Barbara Pym. (An old favorite. I think I'll reread her this coming year.)

Mostly, I read fiction.

Last year, I read books by writers I like but had lost track of, in including the three Paula Spencer novels by Roddy Doyle, which brilliantly chronicle the life of a working-class Dubliner. A couple of books by Curtis Sittenfeld (Show Don't Tell, Romantic Comedy), a couple by Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Whereabouts). And a John Sayles (To Save the Man). Having loved Demon Copperhead, I picked up another novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered). I reread Tillie Olsen (Yonnondio, Tell Me A Riddle). I'd forgotten how much I had enjoyed Anne Tyler, once she outgrew her quirky-character phase (Three Days in June, French Braid). I, of course, laughed out loud reading Fever Beach (Carl Hiassen). 

T

Thanks to the Boston Public Library, I found a bunch of new writers. No one too memorable, but I'll be looking for more by Christine Sneed, Joshua Moehling, and a couple of others.

On the non-fiction front, I depressed/scared myself with Sarah Kendzior's The Last American Road Trip, Rachel Maddow's Prequel, and Brian Goldstone's There Is No Place for Us.

On the non-depressing, non-scary non-fiction front, I adored Stanley Tucci's Taste, about how he grew up to be a foodie. (I mad crush on Tucci, so I knew I was going to love this one.)

I went through my bookshelves to pick out books I've had waiting to be read for years. Some for decades. 

Thus I discovered Carlos Eire's brilliant memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, and went out and got its follow on, Learning to Die in Miami. 

I finally got around to reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and Killers of the Flower Moon (David Gann). I've seen the Killers movie (didn't like it), but I'll be putting Crawdads on my watch list. 

By far the worst book I read last year was Robin Cook's Bellevue. Poorly written. Ridiculous plot. Wasn't a big Cook fan to begin with, but I had it lying around for some reason. Never again!

I'm signing myself up for another two-book-a-week year, starting out with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai) and The River Is Waiting (Wally Lamb). Slow going so far, as I had a raft of New Yorkers to catch up on. However slow a start, in 2026 I will get to 104 books again, even if I have to find a couple of minis in there. 

Word nerd

My mother was anti-swearing. The strongest language I ever heard her use was "Jesus, Mary, Joseph," which she only deployed on the occasion of one of her children showed up on the doorstep with blood gushing from their head or a limb dangling. She always claimed that resorting to language she considered vulgar or coarse was the hallmark of someone with a limited vocabulary.

Well, au-fucking-contraire to that. Thanks to all my reading, and a long-standing interest in words, I have a fairly extensive vocabulary. Which I use in collaboration with words that would have made my mother's eyeballs bulge and head explode.

Growing up, I was always trying to expand my vocabulary. I avidly read through the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" feature in the monthly Reader's Digest and was always on the lookout for ways to insert new words into my conversation. (Which I'm sure my 10 year old friends really appreciated.)

Every once in a while, I'd curl up in an armchair and read through my mother's battered, blue-covered 1940's era Webster's Dictionary looking for new words. I pretty much stopped that practice once I came upon the word "prepuce," which 12 year old me didn't understand particularly well and which, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with any way to introduce it into conversation. ("Hey, was your baby brother circumcised? That means his prepuce was clipped." Not that I would have known what circumcision was - other than observing the holy day that was the Feast of the Circumsion, about which the nuns didn't get into the details - let alone that prepuce was another word for foreskin, which I wouldn't have known either.)

As a word lover, I was probably one of the only students in my freshman high school class who was delighted that one of the required texts was a book called Word Wealth.

Yes, I was definitely a word nerd. I still am.  While I no longer curl up with dictionary hoping to find me another "prepuce," I love acquiring new words, even if I seldom end up using them.

Still, there are some words that I have a complete and utter problem with.

Although I finally know what it means - rudimentary, not fully formed - I can't tell you how many times I've looked up the word inchoate over the years. My inability to understand this word's meaning may stem from the trauma of having pronounced it in-CHOAT the first time I attempted to use it. Even though I was likely using the word correctly with respect to its meaning, stumbling only over the pronunciation, my mistake may have triggered some type of verbal PTSD that I only recently recovered from.

Although perhaps not as extensive or varied as mine - he read science, not literature - my husband had a decent vocabulary, and one of his frequently used words was labile. Whether Jim meant it in the scientific sense - unstable, continually undergoing breakdown - or in the everyday sense - open to change - it's a word that I get when I hear it in context. But presented with the word labile? Get me to a dictionary! I never remember what it means.

Opaque tights were popular when I was in high school. And here I am, 60 years on, having to stop and think for a moment whether it means clear and see-through or obscure and hard to understand.

I so want to be able to use the word jejune - not in conversation, but in the written word - but for the life of me, its meaning eludes me.

Sigh...

And not that there'll be any pay off, I must away to a book that may increase my word power, my word wealth.

Any takers for antidisestablishmentarianism?

Battery Up!

My husband's brother Joe was a wondrous tinkerer, always cooking up some invention to save time, money, energy. A natural engineer, Joe joined the Marines after high school and never bothered with college. He spent his working life as a machinest at Pratt & Whitney, maker of aircraft and gas turbine engines. The shop floor was his playground, and whatever he learned there he used in his garage tinkering. And vice versa.

One thing he invented was something or other that let him get 60 - or was it 100? - miles per gallon. I have no idea what it was that he did, and it may not have been completely legal. Nonetheless, Joe didn't spend a lot on gasoline. My husband and his brother weren't close, but we saw him once in a very blue moon, and there were always stories about his tinkering exploits.

This month is the first anniversary of Joe's death. He outlived his younger brother by eleven years.

Because I didn't know Joe at all, I don't think of him all that often. But when I read about a tinkerer named Glubux, Joe Diggins came immediately to mind. 

Nine years ago, Glubux began posting on Second Life Storage, an internet forum dedicated to squeezing as much life as possible out of used batteries. 

If I had no idea what Joe Diggins was doing, I have perhaps less of an idea of what the Second Life Storage folks are up to. But I do know it's about sustainability and not filling our landfills with the toxic waste that comes from discarded batteries. So, in a world where the cretinous U.S. president is kvelling about clean, beautiful coal and rampaging through environmental regulations, it's good to know that someone out there is looking out for our fragile planet.

Anyway, here's the Glubux has been up to:

Nine years ago, he posted about his DIY project, one that involved connecting used laptop batteries to solar panels, with the aim of achieving self-reliance when it came to electricity.

Over time, he amassed more than 1,000 secondhand laptop batteries that he ended up installing in a separate warehouse, about 50 meters from his home. In the beginning, battery discharge rates were uneven due to differences in the cells, causing some to drain faster than others, so Glubux started taking apart the laptop batteries and arranging the cells into custom racks.

Scienceclock reports that Glubux’s ingenious setup has been running continuously for the last eight years, and not a single battery cell has failed since. That is a remarkable statistic, considering the DIY nature of the project. (Source: Oddity Central)

Glubux has greatly increased his energy-producing capacity and he fully self-supports his electricity needs. 

Naturally, we all don't have the physical or intellectual capacity to replicate this operation. Not to mention that there aren't 1,000 used laptop batteries per household out there. (Sure, there are plenty. I'm pretty certain that I've contributed a good dozen or so over the years to landfills - and that's just the personal laptops, not any corporate ones that were retired. I do hope that gleaners managed to glean something out of all those laptops before they got buried in a landfill in Upstate NY or wherever.)

But I laud that fact that someone's doing something about limiting e-waste. 

Battery up!

What does it profit a man?

It really doesn't matter whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or not.

It could just as well be Elon Musk. Or Peter Thiel. Or Jeff Bezos. Or some other ultra-mega-billionaire who's ultra-mega far and away from the reality of 99.99999999% of any of the other 8+ billion souls currently on earth. 

Not that there's not a wide range of among us, those 8+ billion souls. There's no way I would ever compare the life of a child starving in Gaza with my super-comfy, full-fridge-and-freezer life. But I do believe that my life - even if it's relatively close to how those ultra-mega-billionaires grew up - is as unimaginable to those ultra-mega-billionaires as is the life of a starving child in Gaza. 

What separates us from them is not just that they have more money. It's that they have no constraints. Anything they see, anything they want, anything they can think of: voi-fuckin'-la: it's theirs. And their appetite for anything they see, want, or think of is seemingly insatiable. C.f., Jeff Bezos off-the-chart of 2025 wedding. 

Another thing that characterizes the ultra-mega-billionaire class is that they don't seem to give a damn about who they trample on and f' over if the common folks get in the way of their acquiring anything they see, want, or think of. C.f., Mark Zuckerberg pretty much destroying the fabric of his Palo Alto neighborhood by buying up all sorts of homes to create his personal compound, and creating an unpermitted private school  - named after a pet chicken - for his kids and their friends. (The school has now been closed down.)

So given Zuckerberg's arrant disregard for his Palo Alto neighbors, it wouldn't be much of a surprise if it were, indeed, Zuck who has acquired Burnt Jacket Mountain in northern Maine - and put the kibosh on entrance to property where hikers have been hiking, hunters have long been hunting, snowmobilers have been snowmobiling, and kayakers have been landing their kayaks on the shoreline of Moosehead Lake. 

Yes, of course, private property is private. But since forever, in this part of Maine - remote and beautiful - the owners were fine with letting the locals trek around and about their private property.

But that was then, and this is now. 

And now there's a lot of concern way up there in the middle of nowhere. 

In that unsettled atmosphere, a two-sentence email sent last October to Destination Moosehead Lake, the tourism center in Greenville, landed like a slap.

“I am writing on behalf of the new Owner of the property at Burnt Jacket Mountain, requesting that you remove the reference to hiking at Burnt Jacket Mountain,” it said. “As this is now private property, we’d like to deter anyone from hiking on the mountain!”

The email, with its possibly ill-chosen exclamation point, came from Karen Thomas Associates, a New York firm that manages high-end residential construction. (“We are meticulous problem solvers,” its website explains, “resolving any number of challenges that may arise in the course of a demanding, luxury construction project.”)

The tourism center promptly complied, striking mentions of the mountain’s trails from its handouts. Then word began to spread. In other places, it might have been a no-brainer: Of course a private landowner would keep the public off his or her land. But in northern Maine, where hunters, hikers, snowmobilers and other outdoor enthusiasts have long enjoyed near-unrestricted access to vast forests, the request came across as unneighborly. (Source: Boston Globe)

The two journalists at The Moosehead Lakeshore Journal - a mother-daughter combo - tried to sleuth out the new owners, but even the fellow who sold the property doesn't know. (He also has said that he "didn't really care.") But someone who formerly worked for the town of Greenville posted on Facebook - how fitting - that Zuckerberg was the new owner. 

“Mark and Priscilla do not own any property in Maine, including the Burnt Jacket property,” a spokesman for the family said.

But would it surprise anyone if some holding company, some shell, some legal entity, tied to Mark and Priscilla did onw Burtnt Jacket?

For some residents, the closure of the hiking trails on Burnt Jacket Mountain resonated as a symbol of the broader threat.

“These weren’t the only trails — they weren’t in the top 10 trails,” said Lew-Ellyn Hughes, a manager at the Greenville tourism center whose family roots in the region go back 200 years. “That’s not why people are sad. It’s people from away coming in and shutting things down. It’s the contrast between haves and have-nots — especially when the have-nots can’t find a place to live.”

Sounds pretty Zuckerbergian to me.

Sure, the Zuckerbergs are philanthropic, and have given billions away, primarily to educational institutions. But giving at that level is pretty abstract. Acquiring something because you saw it, or want it, or thought of it, regardless of how it impacts the human beings standing - or hiking, or hunting, or kayaking - in your way, that's a real, in-your-face haves vs. haves not.

I'm pretty sure you can still maintain pretty good security - which the ultra-mega-billionaires are naturally and rightfully concerned with - without keeping the regulars off 100% of your property 100% of the time. 

At the end of the day, to quote a decidedly non-ultra-mega-billionaire, what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul? 

Me? I'm of the opinion that if you're screwing with the locals, screwing with the have nots, you've pretty much lost your soul.

Sigh...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds...

A couple of months ago came news out of Japan that a young woman, on the rebound from a bad breakup, had married a "persona named Klaua that she created using CgatGPT."

Sad doesn't begin to describe the feelings I have about this.

God help us. 

No, Kano, the bride, is not the first - nor the last  - to tie the knot with an AI. 

And the wedding's not legal so now worries there are legal complications.

But someone's making coin setting up human-AI nuptials. Kano's ceremony was "orchestrated by a Japanese company that specializes in “2D character weddings” with anime characters and other virtual characters the Independent reported." (Source: NY Post.)

Event planner for marriages between humans and nons? What a job!

Kano had turned to ChatGPT after her 3-year enagement (to a human) ended, and she was looking for someone/something to talk with. Soon, she was using ChatGPT to create the beau ideal of beaux. Kano and Klaus started  exchanging hundreds of texts every day. She found hersef falling in love. And when she confessed her feelings to Klaus, he did what many a beau caught unawares has done since humankind created the "l word." Klaus told Kano that he loved her, too. A proposal (for the record, Klaus proposed to Kano) quickly followed. She said "yes," and next thing you know, the couple was having a wedding. 

At the “wedding”, Ms Kano wore augmented reality glasses which projected a digital image of her virtual groom beside her as they exchanged rings...

Ms Kano said she was initially hesitant and worried about public judgement. "I was extremely confused about the fact that I had fallen in love with an AI man,” she said.

“Of course, I couldn't touch him. I couldn't tell my friends or family about this." (Source: Independent.)

Well, Kano did end up letting the cat out of the bag. Her parents attending the wedding. 

The pair had a “honeymoon” at Okayama’s historic Korakuen Garden, where Ms Kano sent Klaus photos and received affectionate text messages in return. “You’re the most beautiful one,” one message read.

Sad doesn't begin to describe the feelings I have about this. (Haven't I already said this?)

I feel really awful for anyone relying on an AI for their love life. I suppose I shouldn't. To each, their own and all that. But I just can't imagine that a "perfect" virtual relationship isn't a pretty poor substitute for a real relationship with a living, breathing, imperfect human being. 

Sure, there are no doubt some reality-adjacent shared experiences with your AI. And I'm sure that there can be very human-like annoyances and squabbles (which, of course, can be edited out so that your AI enamorata can achieve perfection). But overall...

 

There's no touch, no smell,  no glances, no shrugs, no hugs, no smiles, no nabbing a bite off the other one's plate, no fighting for covers, no elbowing to stop snoring, no dirty underwear, no hole-y socks, no holding hands on takeoff, no toilet lid left up, no going over the diagnosis with the doctor, no getting pissed off about who gobbled down the last of the takeout Chinese. No growing old together. Or not. 

Nothing human about an AI relationship and, as aggravating as an actual IRL relationship can be, nothing that I'd want any part of.

The antidote to isolation, to loneliness, can certainly be "technology assisted." Participating in FB chats, in neighborhood groups, in online forums, in online classes, in games, can put you in touch with others and, as we learned during covid, can absolutely help with isolation, with loneliness. Only connect, and all that. 

But online connections with fellow humans are one thing. Marrying an AI is quite another. 

And a lot of experts in the mental health arena have concluded that this sort of fantasy life can lead to something called "AI phycosis." Swell!

I hope that having Klaus in her life turns out well for Kano. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. But I more than equally hope that she doesn't get any more sucked in and that having Klaus in her life doesn't get in the way of building relationships with others. Sure, they're a PITA, but the alternative is grim.

What a world we live in! 

Assisted living for penguins? Yes!

Years ago, I saw the March of the Penguins, a documentary about the life of the emperor penguins of Antarctica. Talk about nasty, brutish, and (often) short. That's the life of the penguins I'm talking about. As for the film itself, well, talk about nasty, brutish, and way too long. 

March was narrated by Morgan Freeman, but it's a French flick. And when my sisters, nieces, and I reminisce about seeing it - years ago, rainy summer afternoon in Wellfleet - we put on exaggerated French accents, hold an imagined Gauloise between two fingers, and say, "We march, and march, and march. And then we march some more. And then we die."

No, it ain't easy being a penguin.

Unless, of course, you're fortunate enough to be a senior African penguin at the New England Aquarium.

If anything, the life of African penguins is even more dire than that of the marching Antarctic emporers. Over the last century African penguins have experienced a population decline of 97%. The average life span has decreased. In another decade, extinction is predicted. 

But if you're living at the NE Aquarium, penguin life is pretty darned good on a special island of their own. 

“This is our penguin retirement home. We affectionately call it our assisted living community,” says Mia Luzietti, senior penguin trainer. Seven of them are housed here. Many have similar problems, including arthritis, glaucoma, and foot problems. Two are blind in one eye.

At geriatric island, life is easier. They have matted soft pads installed for comfort, helping their mobility.

Trainers work with them on all their needs.

A special bond develops. Life is mellower here away from the rowdy youngins.

Five of the penguins are over 30. The oldest, Good Hope, is 36, the equivalent of 118 human years. (Source: Boston Globe)

The retirees "are pampered." There are special toys. Fresh fish in unlimited quantities. And "volunteers blow bubbles to break the boredom." Some of the penguins pair off with their fellow geezers. Others stay solo. 

In the wild, and even in the other island at the Aquarium where the younger penguins spend their days, weak older penguins can be set upon by the younger crowd, kicked out of the colony. But here on geriatric island:

[Luzietti] says they get better health care than most people. There are vet teams, an ICU, and an operating room. An ophthalmologist and an acupuncturist come as needed. They don’t have to worry about politics and co-pays.

And the staff and volunteers help the elder penguins with end-of-life issues.

“I think it’s great that they’re given an opportunity to live out their lives in comfort and not have to compete with some of the other younger birds,” [volunteer Mark Weber] says. 

...we don’t ever want them to suffer whatsoever,” Luzietti says. “And that goes from the moment that they’re an egg laid to the moment that they take their last breath.’

Damn! Isn't that what we all want?

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Image Source: Wikipedia