Coffee break: yet another enraged ex-employee with a gun…

We’re in New York City, our first getaway since my husband’s cancer surgery in May.

We won’t be doing much – as much walking around as Jim is up for, mostly in the area we’re staying in, the Upper West Side.

So we may not actually end up near the Empire State Building.

But we surely will see it.

And we will be thinking of the killing there last week, of Steve Ercolino, who was shot just outside his office building, in the shadow of the Empire  State Building, by a former colleague who’d had issues with Ercolino, and who apparently blamed him for the loss of his job and the downward spiral of his life.

Our sympathies naturally (and appropriately) lie with Steve Ercolino. Whatever he was in the office – whether it was Mr. Mellow, fun to work with, go with the flow or tough guy, Type A, obnoxious jerk – he did not deserve to be gunned down by Jeffrey Johnson, on what Ercolino probably thought was just going to be another routine day at the office. Until he spotted his nemesis pointing a gun at him. So his last seconds on earth were knowing that the co-worker who had once threatened him, with whom he had scuffled on the elevator at work, and against whom Ercolino had reportedly taken out a protection order, was making good on his threat. And didn’t just shoot him once, but added a coup de grace to the head. Sad, just sad, for Ercolino’s family, colleagues, and friends.

With candor that I suspect he will come to regret:

A  former coworker described Ercolino has someone who was “very hard working” with a “strong personality.”

“He’s just very opinionated,” said Nicholas D’Aurizio, a designer at the company. “Really great at what he did. He just wasn’t the easiest person to be working with.”

“I’m not surprised at all because of the personality of the victim.” (Source: WNYC News Blog.)

D’Aurizio, apparently, didn’t get the word that you’re not supposed to say anything even vaguely bad about the victim, let alone something that almost sounds a bit blame-the-victim-ish.

In any case, even if Steve Ercolino was abrasive, a dick, at work, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a loving son, terrific brother, cool uncle, and fun friend to those that knew him in “real life.” And it sure doesn’t mean that he deserved in any way, shape, or form to die this way.

This is, however, a cautionary tale in these our times when people are so strung out, so alienated, so stressed, so despairing, that they snap. And, unfortunately, so many of those who snap seem to have a gun in their hand when they do it.

Jeffrey Johnson – who was shot and killed by the police as he calmly walked away from murdering Ercolino - was 58 years old. A loner, living with his cat and supposedly spending his days doing “best artist in 8th grade” illustrations of voluptuous blondes, Mustangs,and fighter planes. Unemployed for a year. With no expectations that he would ever work again, at least doing what he wanted to do.

It’s easy to imagine Johnson’s working himself, day by day, into a frenzy over his prospects, the dimming of his days, and turning Steve Ercolino – the younger, better looking, more successful guy who probably did get the girl and drive the Mustang, and with whom he’d wrangled at work – into the root cause of all of his myriad problems. Especially if your brains a bit jangled to begin with, it’s easier to blame someone else than to look inward: maybe I’ve lost my knack, maybe the styles have changed, maybe I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life if this ain’t it…

Most of us aren’t psychologists, trained to identify fellow workers who may be volatile and dangerous, capable of ‘going postal’. And even if we do spot the ‘warning signs’, what are most of us equipped to do about it?

It sounds like Steve Ercolino was clued in enough to get some kind of restraining order against Johnson. Was there no one at this company – and I would not in a million years expect that someone to be the VP of sales – who might have been able to help figure out how to ameliorate, rather than aggravate, a bad situation between two employees. It may still have ended in Johnson’s being let go, but maybe under circumstances where he could have viewed his loss of employment as something that “happened,” rather than something that was caused by a particular person.

But it also sounds from my sundry readings that designers are routinely treated like crap in the high-pressure fashion industry. (And employees in pretty much every industry risk running into a-hole, bullying bosses, even if it’s not the industry norm.) So maybe Jeffrey Johnson was just in the wrong business, in the wrong company. The perfect storm for a deeply wounded and mentally unhealthy individual.

If someone had been a tiny bit nicer to Jeffrey Johnson, if someone had reached out to him, if someone had even had a glimmer of the mental state he was in, might this tragedy have ended in something other than a hail of bullets?

You really do need to be careful out there. Humans are fragile, some more so than others, and need to be handled with care.

Meanwhile, the Ercolino family’s left with pulling themselves together, trying to reconcile their son’s stepping out for breakfast and ending up dead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other sources: NY Times, Newsday, DNA Info, NY Post

Banned in Foxboro

I’ve never been to a Patriots’ game. And I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I would attend one. (Actually, that’s not quite true: if I had seats in Bob Kraft’s protected-from-the-elements luxury box, and a room in whatever upscale hotel abuts the Playing Field of Champions, I would consider attending a game.) But, having gone to a Springsteen concert at Gillette Stadium a few years back, I fully understand the complete and utter horror of getting out of the parking lot and onto Route 1 (built, I believe, in 1920’s when only 5% of the population owned a car, and they were all flivvers), only to sit in traffic for an additional hour as you wend your way to a real highway.

There are actually people who tailgate after events at Gillette to avoid the ghastly danse macabre to get out of the parking lot. Talk about No Exit.

I also understand that there are folks who live in the vicinity who have to carefully plan their Pats-at-Home-Sundays – either leaving home early and returning home late, or just hunkering down and hoping that they don’t run out of milk or go into labor.

To make up for some of the trouble that game-day traffic brings on them, some of the locals have been running impromptu parking lots in their driveways and/or on their lawns.

But the Town of Foxboro is now banning the practice.

Not everyone is lauding this move:

“We are carrying a lot of burden for the town’s benefit,” said [local farm owner Nancy] Lawton, who does not sell spaces but lets friends use her driveway for the games. “I think they deserve a little money for their trouble. I think it’s their right.” (Source: Boston.com)

On the other side:

“It’s been a growing issue because of the high volume of traffic,” said Edward O’Leary, the town’s police chief. “We had to do something.”

I’m sure it’s annoying if the folks next door are causing a lot of commotion and crapping up the neighborhood, but how much worse is it than the general crapping up caused by football traffic?

It strikes me that this would have been better settled if each block decided whether they wanted to allow paid parking or not. But maybe that just wasn’t feasible. (Maybe good old fashioned, neighborly moral suasion and/or the spirit of one-for-all-and-all-for-one  just doesn’t work.)

Meanwhile, how are they going to stop someone from letting friends and family park in their driveway? Or people from claiming that the person who just slipped them two tens and a fiver is actually long lost Cousin Zeke, who’s parking for “free”? Will they have to post a cop on every corner, refusing entry to anyone who can’t prove they live there? What if you’re trying to have company come over that day – nothing to do with a Pats game? Would you have to produce a list of those who would be waved in?

Sounds like a ban might be as big a pain in the butt as allowing the hawkers to earn a few extra bucks.

I live on the other end of the block where the Cheers bar is located. On the night of the final episode, Jay Leno (I think – but maybe it was David Letterman) ran his show from the street out front.  Our block was cordoned off, and only ticket holders, and those who could prove residency, could get in. It was, needless to say, a complete cluster. We had a friend visiting, and had to provide his name and a description to the security folks so that they’d let him in. Then we caught some kids trying to break into the back entrance to our building. Apparently, they thought if they could get over the gate, it would be not much of deal to bust down the back door and make there way out the front entrance, eluding the police. And getting to see the cast of Cheers yucking it up with Leno. (Or Letterman.) So I do understand that it can be unpleasant to live near a popular venue.

On the other hand, with the possible exception of Nancy Lawton, whose family farm has probably been in Foxboro since before Paul Revere’s ride, I suspect that most of the people who live in the environs of Gillette Stadium moved in knowing full well that they were living close to a place that hosts regular football games, as well as occasional concerts.  Which means that, on game day or show time, they’re going to be annoyed and inconvenienced whether or not the guy next door is stuffing cars into his driveway or not.

Without actually thinking about it too much one way or the other, I’m not quite sure which side I come down on.

But if I threw a coin in the air to decide, I come down on letting those running a parking lot for the day continue to do so. (Even though I suspect that 99.99% do NOT report the parking fees they collect as income.)

Why should Bob Kraft – who married money, and used that running start to lever a lot more of it – make all the dough? On top of the colossal amount that people know doubt pay for tickets, they have to pay another $40 to park in the Gillette parking lot.

So let’s make a stand for the little guy with the flag, waving strangers into his driveway and charging them $25 to park there, and making their post-game getaway a tiny bit easier.

But, hey, I don’t live there.

And unless I’m sitting in Bob Kraft’s box, I doubt that I’ll even make it down there for a game.

Pop, pop, Tootsie Pop, Dad.

Just when you think that there are no goofball, mom-and-pop outfits left – especially those that are household words (other than the few, the proud, the pink slipped companies I’ve blogged about over the years: the peeps who make peeps and Zippo lighters) – when up pops an article in the WSJ on Tootsie Roll Industries.

First off, I have to say that I do NOT like that “Tootsie Roll Industries” name. Come on, industries???? They make Tootsie Rolls, Sugar Daddys, and Junior Mints? How industrial is that?

I know, I know, candy is an industry, and I’m being something of a heavy metal industry bigot here. But how much more happy-making the company name would be if it were Tootsie Roll Candymakers, or Tootsie Roll Confections. Fortunately, they make up for it a bit with their URL, which is just plain tootsie.

Anyway, Tootsie’s been around for a good long time, well over 100 years, and they haven’t rested on their laurels. Over the years, they’ve built out their brand by buying up the companies that made Dots and Black Crows (now called Crows for some PC reason I don’t quite understand), Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies, wax lips, and Charleston Chews. (For those who take trains out of North Station, now you know why the Charleston Chew factory is derelict.)

When I look through the Tootsie portfolio, I’m wondering whether they might not be in collusion with the dental industry.

It can’t just be my imagination. Tootsie really does seem to specialize in filling-loosen-ers. All they’d need to do would be to add Bonomo Turkish Taffy, Frenchies, Bit O’Honey and Squirrel Nuts, and they’d about have the cavity-refilling niche zipped up.

Although I do like Tootsie Pops, I’m not the biggest fan in the world of the eponymous Tootsie Roll. If they’re completely fresh, that’s one thing, but they do have a habit of drying up – especially those mini-ones. The waxed wrapping sticks when you try to peel it off, the those desiccated little suckers are hard to get down.

So I have my doubts about “105 year old Minnie Larson of Muskegon, MI,” who, according to the Tootsie site:

…says the secret to long life is "peace and quiet, a single life, and an endless supply of Tootsie Rolls."

Maybe they grow teeth stronger up in Muskegon, MI. Or maybe because of its proximity to Tootsie HQ in Chicago the Tootsie Rolls are fresher. But I have my doubts about any 105 year old who’s still chomping down on Tootsie Rolls. On the other hand, Minnie doesn’t actually say that she eats them. Just that she relies on an endless supply. Maybe she does something else with them, up there in Muskegon, in all that peace and quiet. Maybe she’s living in a log cabin made of shellacked Tootsie Rolls. Maybe she uses them for craft projects. Maybe she uses them in jello-molds. Which may explain why she’s single.

Anyway, at 105, Minnie Larson is not all that much older than Tootsie’s CEO, 90 year old Melvin Gordon, one of the country’s oldest and most reclusive CEOs:

The 116-year-old company, run by one of America's oldest CEOs, has become increasingly secretive over the years, severing nearly all of its connections to the outside world. Tootsie Roll shuns journalists, refuses to hold quarterly earnings calls, and issues crookedly-scanned PDFs for its earnings releases. The last securities industry analyst to maintain coverage of the company stopped last year because it was too hard to get information.

Melvin runs the company with his wife Ellen, at 80 a mere broth of a girl. (Ellen was the connection for Melvin: her father ran the business.) The Gordons – with all that old time candies on their roster – clearly value things old. The non-Gordon board members range in age from 65-74.

Mr. Gordon likes to joke with visitors about the Tootsie Roll's robust shelf-life, and he and his wife have worked hard to ensure that the company stays out of the clutches of competitors.

As noted above, that robust shelf-life is really nothing to brag about. I suspect that many a tooth’s been broken, many a filling removed, by some unsuspecting purchaser conned by the robust shelf-life, without considering the cost of that robust shelf-life.

On the other hand, the Gordons appear to have rather robust shelf-life themselves, and are considered in fine fettle. And why not hang on as long as you can?

The Gordons control the company, primarily through their majority ownership of its powerful class B stock, each share of which is worth 10 votes to common stock's one vote….With their control of Tootsie Roll comes perks. Mr. and Mrs. Gordon each get an official salary of $999,000 a year, which the company says is a cap on executive salaries for tax reasons. The pair together received total compensation of $7.6 million last year. That includes bonuses as well as $1.2 million the company spends annually for the Gordons' use of a company plane to visit factories and to commute between their home in Massachusetts and their Chicago apartment, which the company pays $10,000 a month to rent.

As with the Tootsie Roll, however, the Gordons’ shelf-life is not infinite. Nonetheless, they don’t seem to have a succession plan – their offspring apparently don’t want to run Tootsie – so there are investors who’d like to have a go at it, and it’s unlikely to remain stand-alone once the elder Gordons are gone.

While profits of the half-billion dollar company are down, the company is consistently profitable and, at around 8%, last year’s profit was not completely pathetic, either. Plus Tootsie’s sitting on $67M in cash.

That’s yummy enough that someone is going to want to take a bite out of Tootsie. And roll in into some mega conglomerate.

I hate to see these quirky little family companies die out, but so it goes.  As long as the new owners keep pumping out Junior Mints, I’m happy.  At my age, the rest of their wares are pretty much off-limits.

Restoration: Cecilia Giménez’s not so dab hand.

Well, I always maintain that Pink Slip doesn’t do politics or religion. But, as my sister Trish will tell me, you don’t need to be Nate Silver to figure out my politics, or the Pope to figure out my religion (or lack there-of).*

But this post is not really  - 0r not totally - about religion. It’s about art. And restoration. And self-delusion. Followed by self-realization.

Ecce Homo, which depicts Christ just before his crucifixion, was not exactly what anyone would classify as great art. But it had been on the wall of a church in Spain for over one hundred years, and, apparently, the parishioners liked it.

One of them, 80 year old Cecilia Giménez, was so upset about its deterioration that she decided to try her hand at restoration.

That’s before on the left and after on the right, by the way.

There’s quite a swirl forming around this.

I’ve read that when Giménez’ work was discovered, some authorities suspected vandalism. Then they claimed that Giménez was acting on her own, with no permission/authority to do her, ahem, touch up. And that they are considering legal action against her.

But Ms. Giménez later defended herself, saying she could not understand the uproar because she had worked in broad daylight and had tried to salvage the fresco with the approval of the local clergy. “The priest knew it,” she told Spanish TV. “I’ve never tried to do anything hidden.” (Source: NY Times.)

I’ve also read that Ms. Giménez had a moment of epiphany, and outed herself to her town’s cultural affairs director.

Whatever the story is, it came out when descendants of the artist, Elías Garcia Martínez, started making plans to restore the work. Only to find they were a tad too late.

Some folks are carrying on as if Giménez had defaced a Velasquez, a Goya, an El Greco, rather than painted over a decidedly pedestrian example of the Cloyingly Sentimental, Saccharine to the Nth Degree, School of Religious Art.

You don’t even have to be someone who stuffed her St. Joseph Missal with holy cards to recognize it. Every saint, male and female alike, looked exactly the same: pale, insipid, and – if I may – holier than thou.

You could only tell who was who from the clues: lamb = St. Agnes; wheel = St. Catherine; lily and/or miter bend = St. Joseph’s. Sometimes the color scheme was the hint. If he’s wearing green, it’s St. Jude (young, beardless) or St. Patrick (old, bearded, wearing a mitre but not carrying a miter bend).

Only in the world of Cloyingly Sentimental, Saccharine to the Nth Degree, School of  Religious Art would St. Francis of Assisi, an ethereal mystic, look exactly like St. Francis Xavier, who was rugged enough to have traveled all over Asia, building dozens of churches and baptizing hundreds of thousands of pagans. The only difference: Francis A has a tonsure and a bird in hand; Francis X has a full head of hair and is carrying a crucifix.

If you question my judgment of the art of Elías Garcia Martínez as being unduly harsh, I give you Exhibit B, a prime example of the Cloyingly Sentimental, Saccharine to the Nth Degree, School of  Religious Art. (Note to cousin MB: this Madonna is eerily reminiscent of Blinky-Eye Jesus, is it not?) Anyway, my point is that Cecilia Giménez wasn’t desecrating a great work of art, albeit it was no doubt something that gave comfort to pious worshippers, among whom Ms. Giménez could no doubt be counted.

Everyone can’t be an artistic genius, of course, so the comparison is unfair, but ecce a work of religious art by another (quasi) Spaniard, El Greco. No mooning piety here, my friends.  Just someone who actually looks like a human being: pained, frightened, wondering ‘what next’ and ‘why me’. And remarkably virile, I might add. (Although with the hands of a pianist, not a carpenter.) Which is in sharp contrast to Ecce Homo.

Well, if Elías Garcia Martínez  is no El Greco, neither is Cecilia Giménez. Although I’ve got to say that, if I cover over the mal-formed mouth, there’s something to like about her Christus: he’s actually making eye contact, rather than staring off into space. And am I the only one who sees a touch of Modigliani here?

Anyway, I certainly don’t think that Ms. Giménez should be prosecuted. By gunking over a piece of bad art, she may have done the world a favor. But I do think that her brief career as an art restorer has come to a screeching halt.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*You are perhaps familiar with the local expression ‘baptized a Catholic, but born a Democrat.’

And a tip of the painter’s beret to my sister Trish, who pointed this story out to me, with the comment “reminds me of those ads that used to be in the back of Parade magazine - are you an artist?” My sister Kath’s take on this: “She turned JC into a yeti.”

Restoration: Cecilia Giménez’s not so dab hand.

Well, I always maintain that Pink Slip doesn’t do politics or religion. But, as my sister Trish will tell me, you don’t need to be Nate Silver to figure out my politics, or the Pope to figure out my religion (or lack there-of).*

But this post is not really  - 0r not totally - about religion. It’s about art. And restoration. And self-delusion. Followed by self-realization.

Ecce Homo, which depicts Christ just before his crucifixion, was not exactly what anyone would classify as great art. But it had been on the wall of a church in Spain for over one hundred years, and, apparently, the parishioners liked it.

One of them, 80 year old Cecilia Giménez, was so upset about its deterioration that she decided to try her hand at restoration.

That’s before on the left and after on the right, by the way.

There’s quite a swirl forming around this.

I’ve read that when Giménez’ work was discovered, some authorities suspected vandalism. Then they claimed that Giménez was acting on her own, with no permission/authority to do her, ahem, touch up. And that they are considering legal action against her.

But Ms. Giménez later defended herself, saying she could not understand the uproar because she had worked in broad daylight and had tried to salvage the fresco with the approval of the local clergy. “The priest knew it,” she told Spanish TV. “I’ve never tried to do anything hidden.” (Source: NY Times.)

I’ve also read that Ms. Giménez had a moment of epiphany, and outed herself to her town’s cultural affairs director.

Whatever the story is, it came out when descendants of the artist, Elías Garcia Martínez, started making plans to restore the work. Only to find they were a tad too late.

Some folks are carrying on as if Giménez had defaced a Velasquez, a Goya, an El Greco, rather than painted over a decidedly pedestrian example of the Cloyingly Sentimental, Saccharine to the Nth Degree, School of Religious Art.

You don’t even have to be someone who stuffed her St. Joseph Missal with holy cards to recognize it. Every saint, male and female alike, looked exactly the same: pale, insipid, and – if I may – holier than thou.

You could only tell who was who from the clues: lamb = St. Agnes; wheel = St. Catherine; lily and/or miter bend = St. Joseph’s. Sometimes the color scheme was the hint. If he’s wearing green, it’s St. Jude (young, beardless) or St. Patrick (old, bearded, wearing a mitre but not carrying a miter bend).

Only in the world of Cloyingly Sentimental, Saccharine to the Nth Degree, School of  Religious Art would St. Francis of Assisi, an ethereal mystic, look exactly like St. Francis Xavier, who was rugged enough to have traveled all over Asia, building dozens of churches and baptizing hundreds of thousands of pagans. The only difference: Francis A has a tonsure and a bird in hand; Francis X has a full head of hair and is carrying a crucifix.

If you question my judgment of the art of Elías Garcia Martínez as being unduly harsh, I give you Exhibit B, a prime example of the Cloyingly Sentimental, Saccharine to the Nth Degree, School of  Religious Art. (Note to cousin MB: this Madonna is eerily reminiscent of Blinky-Eye Jesus, is it not?) Anyway, my point is that Cecilia Giménez wasn’t desecrating a great work of art, albeit it was no doubt something that gave comfort to pious worshippers, among whom Ms. Giménez could no doubt be counted.

Everyone can’t be an artistic genius, of course, so the comparison is unfair, but ecce a work of religious art by another (quasi) Spaniard, El Greco. No mooning piety here, my friends.  Just someone who actually looks like a human being: pained, frightened, wondering ‘what next’ and ‘why me’. And remarkably virile, I might add. (Although with the hands of a pianist, not a carpenter.) Which is in sharp contrast to Ecce Homo.

Well, if Elías Garcia Martínez  is no El Greco, neither is Cecilia Giménez. Although I’ve got to say that, if I cover over the mal-formed mouth, there’s something to like about her Christus: he’s actually making eye contact, rather than staring off into space. And am I the only one who sees a touch of Modigliani here?

Anyway, I certainly don’t think that Ms. Giménez should be prosecuted. By gunking over a piece of bad art, she may have done the world a favor. But I do think that her brief career as an art restorer has come to a screeching halt.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*You are perhaps familiar with the local expression ‘baptized a Catholic, but born a Democrat.’

And a tip of the painter’s beret to my sister Trish, who pointed this story out to me, with the comment “reminds me of those ads that used to be in the back of Parade magazine - are you an artist?” My sister Kath’s take on this: “She turned JC into a yeti.”

Am I Blue? Worcester Airport tries again

When I was growing up, a frequent destination for the ‘spins’ my father was always taking us on was Worcester Airport, where we went to see – in my father’s words – “the Piper Cubs come in.”

Even in its heyday, my hometown’s airport was not exactly a transpo hub.

I do believe I flew into Worcester Airport on one occasion, but I have no recall of it.

After my grandfather died, my parents – with their four year old and almost two year old in tow - went out to Chicago for his funeral. I have no idea how they/we got there – unless my sister Kath remembers, I’ll have to consult with my Aunt Mary – but my father may have driven pell-mell out old Route 9 (this was before the construction of the interstate highway system). Or they/we may have taken the train. Or they/we could have somehow flown there from Worcester Airport. This would have been highly unusual. We went to Chicago every other year for vacation – on the off-years, some delegation of Chicago came to us – but it was always by car or train.

I do, however, know that after the funeral my father had to get back to work, while my mother stayed on with her family. And I do know that, when she did head home to Worcester, she flew.

One of my mother’s classic stories was being at LaGuardia Airport, and having to take a bus to Idlewild*that would be JFK to those of you who don’t remember where you were when JFK was shot –to catch her flight to Worcester. The bus stop was apparently not very convenient to the terminal, and she had quite the struggle getting two little ones,and a couple of heavy 1950’s suitcases – no roller-bags or lightweights in that era, when a piece of luggage outweighed its contents – across some heavily trafficked roadway to reach it. (All of this compounded, of course, by her just having lost her father, who died quite suddenly while still in his early fifties. And, oh, yeah, she was pregnant with my brother Tom, too.) Fortunately, some nice man – our hero – came to her rescue, schlepping the bags while my mother schlepped the kids. And we made it home to Worcester.

That trip was, in fact, the only time I was ever on an airplane until 1973, when I flew from Logan to Heathrow. (Never all that mechanical, I couldn’t figure out how to use the seat belt.)

Anyway, over the years, Worcester’s Airport remained kind of a pokey little puppy. Airlines – think Piedmont – occasionally flew in and out. My mother made occasional forays in and out of Worcester via plane. But it never seemed to make all that much sense for the Heart of the Commonwealth to have all that much of an airport. Anyone who wanted get out of town – and, admittedly, there are plenty of them - could fly out of Boston, Providence, Manchester, or Hartford. That Worcester Airport is not close to any highway – it’s nestled in a combo wooded-residential area – plus was on a hill that’s fog-shrouded half the time, didn’t exactly lend itself to Worcester’s becoming an air hub.

One of the wooded, residential areas the airport was nestled in, by the way, was the one I grew up in. Our ‘hood was curious in that it was very densely packed and urban if you looked in one direction, and complete country if you looked in the other. No gradual suburban drop off for us. Turn left out the door and there’s Morris Market, Sol’s Maincrest Pharmacy, Vic the blind barber, the Paree Beauty Salon, Teddy the tailor, and all the other little commercial outfits (including the double-wide three decker that sold cemetery monuments from its front yard). But if you turned right, ah, wilderness: Hendy’s (Henderson’s Pond), the crazy old lady farm, and The Airport Woods. Woods that stretched from our backyard, right up to the runway. We’d sometimes take walks: destination Worcester Airport, where we would get a soda (which we would have called a tonic) or a candy bar from the hoppin’ vending machine.

A while back, there was a movement to run a connector from the turnpike to the airport that would have cut right through my old neighborhood. I’m sure that “they” thought this would be easy-peasy, since the neighborhood isn’t at all posh, and the houses that would have been torn down weren’t worth all that much.

Of course, “they” didn’t know who they were f-ing with: a bunch of Main South, “Holy Angels” pig-heads who had always lived on Grand View (which was neither grand, nor had a view), and who planned to always live on Grand View. So there.

Anyway, Worcester Airport has languished for years.

A few years ago, The Banshees (sister-cousin girl gang) had a winter weekend getaway to Worcester. Since there was no place to shop, we drove up to Worcester Airport. Talk about a ghost town. There was a young woman manning a rental car desk, and that was about it. (It was so desolate, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen an axe-murderer swing through.) Not even a Piper Cub in sight.

But every once in a while, some half-baked airline sets up some service. The last one, I believe, went bankrupt, and Worcester has been without commercial service since last winter.

But last week I saw this bit of news:

The chief executive of JetBlue Airways is paying another visit to Worcester Wednesday, as the city of Worcester and the Massachusetts Port Authority continue to woo the low-cost carrier, hoping to convince the airline to serve Worcester Regional Airport.  (Source: Boston.com)

Well, there’s nothing half baked about Jet Blue. And Worcester, which never, ever, ever lacks for boosterism – surely, you’ve heard that “we’ve” been an All American City. More than once. So there. – held a luncheon for David Barger, attended by the local poobahs:

…Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray…Worcester mayor Joseph Petty, Kevin O’Sullivan, the president of Worcester-based Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, and other college administrators, business executives, and civic leaders from Central Massachusetts.

Worcester not having commercial flights is just such an itch that “our” poohbahs just have to keep scratching.

I hope they get Jet Blue, or someone, anyone, to fly there. If only because I have now decided to add flying in or out of Worcester to my bucket list. That trip back from my grandfather’s funeral in Chicago just doesn’t count. I want to look out the window and see Our Lady of the Angels, Hendy’s, and the place that sells the grave markers.

Hope for a fog-free day.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
*Or vice-versa.

What $1M will get you in Ocklawaha, Florida

Looking for a little getaway place in Ocklawaha, Florida?

This unprepossessing place, on the shores of Lake Weir, is on the market.

The 2,016-square-foot, two-story home has four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Spread across 9½ acres, the estate includes 340 feet of waterfront on Lake Weir. Aside from updates to the kitchen, the home and its furnishings are unchanged [since] 1935. (Source: WSJ Online.)

It may not look like all that much. And that lack of updating since 1935 (January 16, 1935 to be precise) will certainly give pause to anyone who watches HGN regularly. (What, no en suite? No open floor plan?) As will, no doubt, the $1M minimum asking price.

But that’s a lot of acreage that could be developed, if and when central Florida real estate creeps back.

And, after all, you’re buying history here.

Because this cottage was the site of the 1935 shootout between Ma Barker and the remnants of her gang, and J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men.

Ma Barker lost.

The house wasn’t Barker Gang property. It was a vacation rental by owner, the owner being Carson Bradford, who’d built the place in 1930. It’s been in the family all these years, but none of his descendants are interested in keeping/using the place. (The thought of vintage bathrooms – chain pull flush on the toilets, perhaps – and shrinky-dink little double beds with leaden mattresses on squeaky springs: ugh!)

Sotheby’s is handling the sale:

"There's unbelievable interest around the world in crime memorabilia. People have never seen a property where everything is intact from the time of the event," said Roger Soderstrom, a broker for Stirling Sotheby's. "We think the buyer could be someone who has a passion for crime memorabilia and who wants to build their own house (on the property) and keep this as a collector's house. It could be a bed-and-breakfast. You could have weddings there.'' (Source: UPI.)

Apparently, while the blood was cleaned up, there are still bullet scars. (Such fun!) So who wouldn’t want to stay at a B&B where a couple of America’s Most Wanted were taken down by G-Men with Tommy guns? (Didn’t they have tear gas in those days?)

And as for a wedding location…

Think of the fun themes: Men in 1930’s garb (including fedoras). Mini Tommy guns as favors. The mother of the bride could go as Ma Barker. Depression glass on the tables.

Maybe you could get all your guests to dress up as their favorite criminals. Bonnie and Clyde, anyone?

Maybe you could really get into the swing of things and register for 1930’s level wedding gifts. None of this Cuisinart nonsense. No $300 place settings. No 600 thread sheets.

You could sign up for an egg-beater. A linen tea-towel. A butter dish.

Or to keep in the Barker spirit – they were, after all, bank robbers – you could request all cash. As long as it was in small denomination, unmarked bills.

There’s actually some controversy about whether Ma Barker was really the tough broad, criminal mastermind that J. Edgar Hoover portrayed her as. Plenty of evidence points to her being just a plain old doting mom who happened to have raised a gang of criminals (all four of her sons were cons), and who liked to travel with her mama’s boys.

Anyway, bids are being accepted through Oct. 5.

Me, even if I actually wanted to have lakefront property in Ocklawaha, Florida, I would be taking a pass on this one.

A bit too eerie for my liking.

And $1M? Top of the world, Ma!

Here’s an honest-to-goodness money-maker.

It wouldn’t occur to me to pay for something that cost, say, $2.39, with anything other than cash (or a Dunkin’ Donuts cash card). But I see “young folks” whipping out there debit cards to buy candy bars and lattes all the time. So I keep thinking that cold, hard cash is going to be yet another thing that goes buggy-whip in my lifetime. (Will panhandlers have to get themselves set up with some sort of card swipe machine in order to stem?)

On the one hand, it’s probably more convenient not to have to worry about having cash on hand. Take it from someone who remembers the pre-ATM era, there were times on weekends when you’d worry about running out. So you’d make a trip to the grocery store – whether you needed to or not – and use your check-cashing privileges to get $50 over the grocery tab. This was, of course, at a time when $50 could actually tide you over for while. (These days, I don’t even bother with $100 transactions at the ATM.)

On the other hand, if you’re spending cash that’s actually in and on hand, you do have a pretty good idea of how your supply is dwindling. Sure, you can always summons up your balance, but I’m thinking that it’s easier to lose track if you’re swiping your debit (or, heaven forbid, credit) card for every little transaction.

Yet there is, blessedly, still a demand for cash, so that us old fogeys can still keep some in our wallets and under our mattresses, even if there are no newspapers, and few books, to spend it on anymore.

A British outfit called De La Rue, “the world’s largest commercial banknote printer”, “involved in the production of one in five of the world’s banknotes“ benefits nicely from this demand.

It was De La Rue that got the new currency contract for Iraq in 2003, when legal tender no longer bore the mustachioed likeness of Saddam Hussein. This was no trivial matter. Iraq needed 1.75 billion new bills, and they needed them within two months. So De La Rue went into overdrive to make the deadline, and

…chartered 27 Boeing 747s to deliver the freshly printed banknotes. (Source: The Economist.)

De La Rue also produced the currency for South Sudan, when it gained its independence last year. (Now that’s probably a country that doesn’t have a lot of debit cards in it.)

And while I may think that demand for cash is down,

Low interest rates have cut the opportunity cost of holding cash. With banks looking wobbly, many prefer to keep their money stuffed in the mattress, creating extra demand for banknotes.

So bad is good for De La Rue.

What would really be good for their business, of course, is the dissolution of the Euro.

However lousy that would be for the rest of the world, all those countries scurrying around to regenerate a national currency.

Wheeeee…….

Greece may need drachma – probably by the boatful if they end up with hyperinflation.

Once Greece is gone, baby, gone from the Euro zone, the Cypriots may need to get their pound back. The Portuguese their escudo. The Spanish their peseta. The Irish their punt.

While the Euro is vastly more convenient, currency was more interesting when each country had their own.

It was always entertaining to see whose mug made it on to the banknotes – and to see whether you’d even heard of them. (Most Europeans probably haven’t heard of Andrew Jackson or Alexander Hamilton, either.)

In truth, I can’t remember anyone depicted on any country’s currency, other than our own. And, of course, The Queen on British currency. (Still there: they never went on the Euro.)

I think that Irish punt may have had W.B. Yeats and/or G.B. Shaw, but I’m not entirely sure. Grace O’Malley? Queen Medb? Maybe. I remember the coins, however: lovely deer, salmon, harps.

While multi-Euro currencies were interesting, it was also a drag to have to convert and reconvert when you moved across borders. We probably average one European trip a year, mostly hitting one country, but sometimes more per trip. Euros are mighty useful for these treks. And, since we’re always planning another overseas trip, we just hang on to Euros from one trip to the next. No need to ask whether we’ll ever get back to Italy again in our lives.

Anyway, although they’re protected by being diversified – they also print passports and create holograms for credit cards - I’m sure that De La Rue is kinda-sorta hoping that the Euro goes down. Bet they’re watching every move Angela Merkel makes, dreaming about cranking out all that new folding green (or red or blue), figuring out how many planes they’ll need to charter to deliver the not so goods to Athens.

Until we go entirely cashless, it must be fun to be an honest to goodness money maker.

Bring out your ashtrays, your finials, your tongs. That is, if you “found” them at the Waldorf-Astoria before 1960.

A few months back, the Waldorf-Astoria initiated an amnesty program in hopes of getting some of the items that light-fingered guests have packed in their valises between 1893 and 1960. Among that goods that have found their way out:

…flatware, plates, bowls, creamers, coffee cups;…monogrammed napkins, towels, bathrobes;  ashtrays, mirrors, wooden hangers, and lampshade finials molded into the shape of the Waldorf’s crest; etched Scotch tumblers, ice buckets, tongs, side-armed coffee-pots; table-top bells that once summoned bell-hops; autographed pictures of Herbert Hoover and Cole Porter and Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, of little Anderson Cooper and his mother Gloria Vanderbilt;…silver soup tureens, brass candlesticks, huge copper room keys, glass bottles that once held relish prepared by the Waldorf’s erstwhile maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky, progenitor of the Waldorf salad. Etc. (Source: The New Yorker – subscriber content.)

If you’re wondering what a “side-armed coffee-pot” is – as I was – here’s a picture found on eBay of a side-armed Waldorf-Astoria tea-pot that’s for sale on eBay for $149.99. That’s where a lot of Waldorf-Astoria goodies reside (at least temporarily), including plenty of demitasse spoons, serving platters, a decanter, and a set containing 54 pieces of flatware. (Now that valise must have weighed heavy when it left the prem. Not to mention jangled, unless all those forks, knives, and spoons were wrapped in a W-A towel. Why not: hung for a sheep as a lamb…)

Not all the stuff on eBay was necessarily acquired through five-finger discount.  There’s one very cool Waldorf-Astoria patrolmen’s badge for sale for $100. How cool is that: a hotel had enough cops to issue numbered badges that ran into the 600’s. (Too bad it wasn’t Badge 714…)

Matt Zolbe, the Waldorf’s marketing director, sees all sorts of Waldorfian stuff for sale on eBay all the time, but doesn’t want to start paying folks off for things that are rightly the Waldorf’s to begin with. (Sort of like dealing with terrorists and kidnappers.)

While plenty of the purloined items that the Waldorf hopes to retrieve were in plentiful supply – like hangers, ashtrays, and demitasse spoons - some of the things that went missing are one-offs.

I’m assuming that the picture of Anderson and Gloria is on that one-off list, but there’s also “a mural of an Asian emperor addressing his subjects” which someone cut out of its frame in a public dining room and walked off with; and a two-foot tall bespoke silver trimmed crystal vase commissioned for the hotel’s 20th anniversary in 1913. The “owner” had it appraised for $30K and is willing to sell it back to the Waldorf…

I’ve stayed at the Waldorf a number of times, but never before 1960. (I don’t think I was in any hotel before 1960.) For the times I did stay there, I have nothing to show for it.

Other than an occasional wooden hanger I might have ripped off, back in the day before so many hotels started using the kind that you can’t make off with unless you dismantle the entire closet, I’ve never actually taken stuff from hotels. Other than the mini-shampoos and the cute little jam and ketchup jars that come with room service.

Maybe stuff was just cooler – and more monogrammed – in the olden days, but there’s never really been much in a hotel room that I found much worth stealing, even if I were so inclined.

One time, we did come home from a hotel stay in Portland, Maine, with a pillow. We had gone up to L.L. Bean and done a lot of shopping, and had tons of stuff in our room. So we used one of those carts to put all our luggage and shopping bags on. Somehow, a pillow made its way onto the cart. The bellboy packed the trunk, and it wasn’t until we got home and unpacked that we noticed that we had a pillow with us. (You’d think that bellboy would have noticed and said something, but maybe he thought it was ours.) Anyway, the pillow was nothing special, and we didn’t bother to return it: too much trouble, and probably not worth much more than the cost of shipping it back to them. It eventually went the way of all pillows.)

I do remember, years ago, going to a party at a colleague’s house, where she had a very funky, art deco-ish drink cart. At some point during the 1930’s, her parents had drunkenly wheeled off with it from their hotel. But that was, I believe, from the St. Regis, not the Waldorf. (Just checked on eBay: it’s not there.)

Not that I’m so 100% honest that I’ve never taken anything.

When I worked for Durgin-Park (famous old Boston tourist spot), I lifted a crudely and cheaply framed placard that was hanging in the waitress cloak room, that read:

 If you work for a man, in heavens name work for him!If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents. I think if I worked for a man I would work for him. I would not work for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him. I would give an undivided service or none. If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. Elbert Hubbard (Source: QuotationsBook.com)

This bromide was particularly inapt. When I worked at Durgin-Park, the owner was a viciously mean, borderline insane, drunk-as-a-skunk lout who made everyone’s life miserable. No way anyone but the most supreme toady would “speak well of him”.

I may have the placard around somewhere; maybe not. (If I do come across it, I’ll drop it off at Durgin if they’ll let me see whether the waitress cloak room has been updated since 1973. At that point, it hadn’t been touched since 1873…)

I must confess, as well, to having taken a plaque that was a bit more valuable than the words of Elbert Hubbard from the Union Oyster House, another venerable Boston establishment where I waitressed while in college. The plaque was some sort of oil painting with a haute-relief of a sailing ship on it. I can’t remember what my motivation was for lifting it off the wall of the booth one evening. Bad tip night? A near miss stepping on a rat? (When I worked there, the place was crawling with them. Screaming when one ran across your feet was a firing offense.) Parting gift?

Anyway, I passed it on, and I believe it still hangs somewhere. Just not in a booth at Union Oyster House.

But hotel pilfering? Not me.

So I’ve nothing to contribute to the Waldorf amnesty program.

Apparently I’m not the only one.

To date, the amnesty program hasn’t yielded much. A young woman who works in sales at the Waldorf surrendered a sterling salad fork her grandparents had cadged on their honeymoon in 1949. (Ah, romance.)

O, obit. (They ain’t kidding about the high cost of dying.)

There was an article on boston.com the other day on folks who are taking part in the “latest trend in dying: the self-written obituary.”

Having done all they can to dictate exactly how their funerals will go — down to playlists, menus, and off-beat hearses — baby boomers, and some members of the Silent Generation, are now taking control over the story of their lives.

O, obit. Why not?

Who wants a boring old obituary with “just the facts”? And, let’s face it, most of us aren’t born great, haven’t achieved greatness, and will die waiting for greatness to be thrust upon us. Which means that there’s no behind the scenes NY Times obituary writer with a file chock-a-block full of bits about our lives, just waiting for the word so he can truck it out to commemorate us.

But I must say that, while I won’t be granted a free, this is news, death notice, I also don’t want anyone paying to publish my obituary, either. (Talk about the ultimate in vanity press.)

Which is not to say that I don’t want to have a final word or two.

So maybe one of these days I’ll get around to pulling together something or other for someone or other to read at my funeral, errrrr, the celebration of my life. (I believe I’ve already made it clear that a smidge of my ashes should be strewn in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Leicester, Massachusetts, where I’ll be with four generations of Rogers-Trainors; another smidge tossed in Galway Bay; and a final soupçon left in Fenway Park. (On this final destination for my final destination: if the Red Sox continue their pathetic ways, please spit in the ashes, muddy up a baseball, and hurl it at someone. But please don’t let my brother Rick be the one to do the hurling, as he’s likely to actually hit a player.)

And if I’m still blogging -  if blogging, indeed, still exists – I should leave a final entry, a ghost-post as it were, with instructions on how to publish it. (Hey, it’s free!)

As a writer of sorts, I won’t have any problem pulling together my swan song, but for those looking for a place to start, there’s Susan Soper’s ObitKit, who’s dying to help folks “put the fun in funeral.”

Actually, no one of Irish descent, who grew up poring over the Irish Sports Pages (i.e., the obituaries), needs to be told how to put the fun in funeral. Why, even at the funeral of my well-beloved Aunt Margaret, whose sudden death (okay, she was 85) devastated those of us who loved her, a number of us blew whistles as we got in our cars for the procession from her church in West Newton to her burial in Leicester. (To anyone curious about funeral processions that process for 50 miles, the cars do stay together on the Mass Pike, but they go the speed limit, resuming funeral pace when off the Pike.) You may ask what we were doing with whistles at a funeral. Well, we didn’t ask the funeral parlor where Margaret was waked to have baskets full of glow-in-the-dark whistles (with the funeral parlor’s name and address embossed on them) in the ladies room, did we? I mean, if they didn’t want us to take them, they wouldn’t have been there. And what good’s a whistle if you don’t go and blow on it?

As for owning your own obit:

Statistics on the number of seniors working to meet the ultimate deadline are hard to come by, but obituary-writing courses are being offered on-line and in workshops, and informal obit-writing sessions are popping up at book club meetings and girlfriend reunions.

Why discuss Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies, when it’s so much more enjoyable to work with that most scintillating and engrossing of topics: me, myself, and, of course, I.

Auto-obituary writers should not let themselves get too carried away.

The [Boston] Globe charges $10 a line for a death notice, which is about 35-40 characters, plus an $18.50 fee to put the notice on Legacy.com for one year. At the New York Times, a death notice costs $55 per line, which runs about 28 characters, and the paper’s Legacy.com fee is $55.

The Globe is a regular bargain, but when you do the math, even things there can get pretty pricey. A 500 word story-de-moi would translate into 2,000 – 2,500 characters. Let’s go with the lower end of the range here. At 40 characters per line, that’s 50 lines. So your death notice would cost you, well, not you-you, but someone who knew you-you well enough to get your obituary into the paper, would have to fork over $500 – plus extra for that year on Legacy.com. So obituary writers had best make sure that they put aside a few bucks if they want to make sure that they get published. (As opposed to having your grieving relict say, “$500 bucks to get this load of crap in the obituary section? No way. I’ll just mimeo copies and hand them out at the funeral.”)

The Times, as befits the country’s Paper of Record, is far costlier: 5.5 times per line – and that’s for a shorter line.

Even if you got your story down to a tweet, for five 28 character lines (hitting the tweet 140 max), you’d (again, not you-you) would be set back $275. And that’s for a tweet.

With this self-obituary-ing craze, the high cost of dying  seems to have gotten a bit higher.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My sister Trish sent the link to this article to me, so a doff of the shroud to her.

And just to see what you could pack into 140 characters (this is 135),  here’s my death tweet:

Daughter, sister, wife, aunt, cousin, friend, colleague. Worcester girl. Red Sox fan. Loved Ireland. Pretty darned funny. A reader. Should have been a writer.

This is subject to change, of course. If the Red Sox keep going the way they’re going…

Scott Tucker–one of them, anyway–is paying for spam. (Hope he’s getting his money’s worth.)

About one-third of the comments that appear on Pink Slip are spam. Once in a blue moon, if they are especially ridiculous, I let them through, but mostly I mark ‘em as spam and get rid of ‘em.

As I did with this one:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Does anyone actually own a Snuggie?":

Excellent beat ! I would like to apprentice at the same time as you amend your web site, how can i subscribe for a blog web site?

Well, agreed, Pink Slip does have excellent beat! But I’m not taking on any apprentices at present, even though I really should amend my web site.

The account aided me a appropriate deal. I were a little bit acquainted of this your broadcast provided vivid clear idea scott a. tucker dancing

Well, it didn’t provide me a clear idea. What, pray tell, is Scott A. Tucker dancing?

Then there was this part of the comment which included a couple of links to various Scott Tucker sites. (I have removed the links; don’t want these spammers getting credit for anything.)

http://www.castroledgerankings.com/driver/scott-tucker
scott tucker amg
http://scotttuckermodernart.blogspot.com/
scott tucker kansas city star
My web page - scott tucker

That Castro Oil ranking of auto racer Scott Tucker revealed him to be 133 in the world, by the way. (We’re Number 133! We’re Number 133!) The other was to Scott Tucker, artist and performer. Could this be one and the same guy? If so, what a polymath!

I found Scott Tucker, racing driver, on wikipedia. While he didn’t appear to be the arting and performing Scott Tucker, he had quite a checkered history that went beyond his recent checkered flag exploits.

In 1991 Tucker was convicted of felony mail fraud and making false statements to a bank and imprisoned for a year. Tucker is currently involved with the private-equity firm Westfund as well as the payday loan company AMG Services. In 2006 Tucker began his interest in motorsports, first participating in the Ferrari Challenge series.

On April 2, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission filed charges against AMG Services. The charges revolve around excessive fees and interest charged to borrowers, in addition to loan terms not being fully disclosed at the time loans are initiated. Tucker was specifically charged in addition to the firm itself.

The wiki categories he’s listed under include both “24 Hours of LeMans Drivers” and “American Fraudsters”. No mention of “Artist” or “Performer.”

On closer inspection of the other Scott Tucker, I found that he was much younger than Scott Tucker, American Fraudster and 24 Hours of Le Mans Driver, and was, indeed, a Texas-based artist and performer. (He’s a member of a “neo-psychedelic band.”) He’s also a movie buff, who’s faves include:

La Dolce Vita, The Great Gatsby, Blow Up (sic), Dead Poets Society, Honey and Clover, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Casa Blanca (sic)

Which one would not expect on the fave list of Scott Tucker, 24 Hours of Le Mans Driver. (Maybe Steve McQueen’s LeMans…)

And gratuitous note to Scott Tucker, artist and performer. It’s Blowup (or Blow-Up) and Casablanca.  Sheesh…

Minor spelling glitches aside, Scott Tucker, artist and performer, has plenty to say for himself:

James Joyce, and even Rod Sterling have all been figures in his work. Tucker believes Western Society lives in a fantastic sort of material chaos only upheld due to a lack of personal objective consciousness.

I double dog dare you to deconstruct that!

“The world of technology has changed our social and moral landscape onto a zoo. My work combines elements of mass consumption, sex appeal, terror, and nostalgia; all four exist together in an orgy we call pop culture. As an artist, I feel it is my duty to illustrate their sociological effects in my work.” Scott Tucker (Source: a site called theartmenu.com)

Ah, the orgy we call pop culture…

But Scott Tucker, artist, performer, and zoo landscaper, is also Scott Tucker, Jr., who’s son of Scott Tucker, Sr. (no relation to American Fraudster/24 Hours of LeMans Scott Tucker), who’s the founder and jefe of Artworks, which:

…is a world class faux finish and specialty mural company started 30 years ago by artist Scott Tucker Sr.

Which, if you’re in the market, produces stuff like this:

Someone in Boston is, apparently, in the market:

Within the next two weeks we will be flying out to bid a massive project in Boston that will most likely fill our entire fall schedule.

Go for it, Scott Tucker, Jr. and Scott Tucker, Sr.

But, if it’s you and not the American Fraudster paying for someone who’s paying for someone whose command of English ain’t so hot to do your search engine optimization for you, you’re at least somewhat wasting your money. If you waste enough of it, there’s always the other Scott Tucker for a pay day loan.

And if it’s Scott Tucker, Number 133 in the Castro Oil rankings, who’s hired these nincompoops to do SEO, well, I guess it’s not true that it takes a fraudster to catch a fraudster.

It’s a modest psychopathic wine, but it does have some global ambition

A Philadelphia couple came in for a bit of a shock in Italy recently when they stopped into a shop in Garda, Italy, and saw wine with Hitler’s face on it on the shelves. Not something that most decent folks would want to see displayed, but in this case, matters were made worse. The wife of the couple is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and had grandparents and an aunt murdered at Auschwitz. (Source: Huffington Post.)

I’m actually not surprised.

When in Rome this past April, we saw a number of souvenir stands selling Il Duce fridge magnets and other Benito Mussolini paraphernalia.

And, in fact, the Lunardelli winery that offers wine with Hitler on the label – in dozens of different versions, including one with the cover of Mein Kampf on it – also sells Mussolini wine. I strolled around the site a bit and also found a combo Adolf-Benito version. As well as one sporting a coy picture of Eva Braun, and others featuring Goering, Himmler, and Hess.

Why let good taste and common decency get in the way of wringing a buck out of someone lacking in good taste and common decency?

It’s axiomatic (or almost) that if someone’s willing to buy it, then someone should be able and willing to sell it. (I say almost axiomatic  because there is, after all, kiddie porn and snuff which, while they do have an audience and represent a “market” of buyers, should really and truly have no sellers.)

So  there shouldn’t be a law against selling Fuehrer wein. And there shouldn’t need to be a law – other than the implicit rules of taste and decency. And apparently there isn’t a law:

Prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia spoke with news agency ANSA, saying the "only crime that could be currently attributable to this is that of apologising for fascism ... At this point, though, it would be opportune to invent the crime of human stupidity."

I actually disagree with Schinaia here. This isn’t a “crime of human stupidity.” It’s a crime of being willing to go pretty darned low to make money.

The owner of the supermarket that sold the wine defended its sale, saying it was a part of history, "like Che Guevara."

It is certainly true that both Adolf Hitler and Che Guevara are, indeed, part of history. And both wore facial hair. But beyond that, there really isn’t a whole lot the two had in common. And whether you worshipped at Che Guevara’s altar, or thought he was the devil incarnate, Che did not bear a good portion of the responsibility for World War II, nor was he responsible for the deaths of millions who weren’t collateral damage from the war itself, but were victims of genocide, singled out specifically for their religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Thus, while lack of decency and taste should never be a surprise, it was still pretty surprising to read that:

Last month, a woman told European gay news site Pink News that she was ejected from a London gay bar when she objected to a bottle of wine adorned with the image of Adolf Hitler.

Have we become such hip, jaded, cool, raised-eye ironists that someone stocking the shelves in a gay bar would think that this was a good thing to do?

Hitler wine, by the way, has been around since the 1990’s. A decade ago, vintner Lunardelli noted that Hitler was his “bestseller, moving more than 30,000 bottles a year.

And it’s not just Hitler wine in Italy.

Sales of wine and schnapps with Adolf Hitler on the label are increasing all over Austria.

An Austrian website was selling bottles with portraits of Hitler and the swastika. The site offered sales of spirits in “nostalgic bottles of former historical greats.”

The man selling the wine and schnapps was identified only as Roland M. Legal officials say he was motivated by profit, not ideology. (Source: Weekly World News.)

Profit, Profit,  Über Ideology.

That makes it better. I think…

Other uses of the Hitler “brand” include a “Nazi-themed” clothing line that was withdrawn last year by a Hong-Kong clothing company.

Asia is apparently a hot-bed when it comes to the use of Nazi imagery, which figures, I guess, since there aren’t a lot of relatives of Holocaust victims floating around to object. According to Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League:

“They [Asians] don’t really have a concept of Hitler. I’ve seen a lot of really bizarre things [in Asia] — like [advertisements for] ‘German pianos at Jewish prices.’ It’s bizarre. There’s a bar named after Hitler.”

This all raises a lot of questions around when, where and how it’s okay to start commercializing rather than demonizing horror shows like Hitler and Mussolini.

Personally, I think it should wait a few generations, when there are no longer any actual and once- or twice-removed victims to be horrified by a commercial use of their victimizer images. Thus, I’d wait a few more decades before going to town with a line of Hitler anythings.

Meanwhile, it you want to have tasteless wine, that’s probably tasteless in both respects, there’s always Vlad the Impaler and Genghis Kahn to grace your labels. Nobody around to remember those bad boys!

I think it’s absolutely okay to make fun of Hitler and Mussolini. Along with ignominy, it’s exactly what they deserve. (I love The Producers.) But using the name and image to turn a profit by encouraging those with no sense and/or taste, or – how ghastly that would be – those who are genuinely nostalgic for the good old days of fascism. A pox on their vineyards!

Poor little rich kids (tweet, tweet)

All you slobs out there probably think that it’s pretty darned easy being ultra-wealthy.

Well, let me tell you…

Even when you get beyond the fact that so many of the clearly envious great unwashed are clamoring for them to pay their so-called “fair share” of taxes, there’s the day to day problems associated with being a job creator for those faceless, thankless minions in China and India for whom jobs are being created. And the even more pedestrian issue of finding good help-around-the-house(s)  who won’t go yapping (on their blogs, in their tweets, to the National Enquirer, in tell-all books) about you and your private, personal, wealth and job creating lives at the first chance. (You know, one good thing about the illegals. Not only do they work cheap, but a lot of them don’t speak English. I’m telling you, it just gets harder and harder for the rich.)

Then there’s coping with the hangers-on who probably just pretend to like you in hopes that you’ll give them a used tiara, or something.

In truth, being wealthy may remove a teensie-weensie bit of anxiety about whether you’re going to be eating cat food in your old age and/or sleeping over a heating grate. And it may enable you to buy a raft of swell stuff without fumbling around trying to find the price tag without making it obvious to the sales person that you’re fumbling around trying to find the sales tag.

Come on, who wouldn’t want an iPad in every room, in every home? Who wouldn’t want 2,000 thread count sheets? And cashmere dust rags?

But big money can also buy you big trouble. And some of that big trouble’s social-media related. Especially when your poor little kids are using it.

Take the situation that the children of Michael Dell have found themselves in.

Alexa, a recent high school grad, went and posted a picture of her 15 year old brother Zachary on this tremendously interesting and relevant Tumblr site called the Rich Kids of Instagram. (Seriously, as an aside, you should absolutely go and wander through RKOI. You will regret that you ever doubted for a New York minute that it isn’t difficult being the scion of someone who’s well to do enough to allow you to take private helicopter rides around San Tropez. Truly, you will stop channeling your inner Robespierre and start feeling a whole yacht-load of sympathy for those poor rich folks.)

Anyway, the picture of Zachary that Alexa posted on RKOI – now, alas, taken down – was of young Master Dell scarfing down a lush buffet while seated in the family jet, heading for a no-doubt well-earned vacation on Fiji.

Anyone with a bit of curiosity could see that Alexa had posted the picture on Instagram and pointed to it via her Twitter account. On that same Twitter account, Alexa happily detailed her every move, including the exact days she would arrive in, say, New York, and where she was shopping. She also put up such things as her high school graduation dinner invitation that foretold where (time, date, location) Michael Dell and his wife would be in a couple of weeks’ time. (Source: Business Week.)

Which would not be that big a deal – my sister Trish updates her FB when we’re sitting in the bleachers at Fenway Park (this year, given how crapoid the team is, there’s nothing going on on the field that’s all that riveting) - if, unlike my sister Trish, Michael Dell wasn’t spending:

…about $2.7 million a year for the security protection of his family, according to Dell regulatory filings.

Which, I guess, must mean that $2.7 million worth of security is part of his compensation package. But it also means that Dell is paying $50K a week for security. Which seems to translate into quite a few reasonably well paid, round the clock security folks watching out for Dell, his beloved, and his possessions.  $2.7 million a year in security!  Presumably, if you’re paying it, you’re needing it. Now that, my friends, underscores the point that a life of financial ease is not necessarily a life of personal ease.

Given the security outlay,

…you can imagine how pleased [Dell] must have been to see his children’s jaunt to Fiji detailed on a catchy website and his daughter providing an online diary of her life, replete with GPS locations dished out by her cell phone.

Alas, Alexa’s Twitter account has been shuttered. Dell is mum on whether it was because of security concerns, but the speculation is that security’s the reason.

Jason Thorsett, a manager at a bodyguard company, figures that Dell’s security team went bonkers when they saw the Dells’ locations being given away.

“I’m sure they called the dad and shut it down,” he says. “It’s innocent on the kids’ behalf, but social networking has become the bane of our existence. They undo a lot of hard work on Facebook and Twitter.”

All those 140 character bread-crumb trails leading kidnappers to their targets.

“Twitter is the worst because it’s so instantaneous,” Thorsett says. “You get that GPS location of exactly where you are. It’s just insane.”

What did I tell you?

It is SO not easy being ultra-wealthy.

Twenty-years out…

Michael Kinsley had an interesting post over on Bloomberg the other day on predictions about what might change, in terms of moral (and other) perceptions and behaviors, over the next 20 years.

The list of things that Kinsley and his readers came up with pretty predictably included attitudes towards gay marriage, climate change, and eating meat. But readers also suggested a few less sweeping but perhaps more interesting ideas about what might happen a couple of decades out

No more lawns, one came up with.

This is an interesting one, and a two-fer, as it hits at both environmentalism (leeching all that water that could be used more productively elsewhere, and oh, those chemicals leaching into the leeched-out aquifer), plus the scarcity of time to hover around your lawn. (Hey, I have to be inside, online reading about two-headed kittens and missing birth certificates.)

While I realize that they are unnatural, fussy, and water-wasting, I actually like the look of a nice green lawn, and would hate for them to die out entirely.  Lawn care was, more or less, a hobby of my father’s, especially the front lawn, which was mowed by hand mower (power mower for the larger, less pampered back yard) and only by my father.  The front lawn also had a higher-end watering system: flat hoses with tiny holes in them that sprayed a fine mist, vs. the whirling sprinklers out back. I don’t remember ever seeing any crab grass out front, but weeds and dandelions (front and back) were anathema to my father. Watching my father as he went on lawn patrol, I learned that a screw driver could and should be used to rout out dandelions.

As the result of my father’s care, the front lawn was a green velvet carpet. Nothing felt better than barefooting on a summer night in the aftermath of a watering.

So, while I recognize that green lawns are something of an environmental disaster (not to mention a time synch) I have a certain fondness for them.

But, hey, I don’t have a personal dog in this hunt, as I live in a downtown area where personal lawns don’t exist. If you want to see grass, you go to the Public Garden or Boston Common.

Still, I think the best route here would to encourage lawns to fade away in places – like the sandy parts of Cape Cod and most of Arizona – where there isn’t enough water to support a lawn without going to extremes. But maybe we can let them survive in the environs where water is (for now, anyway) in abundant supply. But about those chemicals…

Another Kinsley reader predicted that high-heeled shoes would be a thing of the past, like whale-bone corsets.

Despite the fact that high heeled shoes are hazardous to foot health, I wouldn’t bet on this one.

As long as high heels are considered sexy, sweet young things who want to catch a man’s eye are going to be forcing their feet into them and stumbling around.

Since I am no longer a sweet young thing, high heels are not my worry.

That said, I did slip up recently and order a pair of nearly 3 inch heels to wear to an upcoming wedding. What was I thinking?  I tried them on and, while they looked good when I was standing still, when walking I could do no more than totter around, leaning so far forward to keep my balance that I looked like Groucho Marx.  Zapped them babies back to Zappo’s. I’ll have to go with one or my more sensible alternatives, two of which, thankfully, are not entirely clunky.

One Kinsley respondent forecast that private car ownership might be illegal twenty years out. Given where and how most people live in this country, I would have to characterize this as wishful thinking, even if most people become telecommuters. But I’m certainly a poster child for how to live carless.

The key has always been living in a city with walkable neighborhoods and good public transportation, but the emergence of Zipcar has certainly aided this cause. (Zip is an entirely automated, short term rental car service that garages cars in convenient city locations.) Although my preference is always to take public transpo, if I need a car for a short hop, I do Zip. In the past year, I’ve used Zip to pick up my Christmas tree; get my niece home from her commuting-challenged suburban high school; meet with clients; have dinner with friends; and fetch a coleus, impatiens, and mulch to spruce up our front “garden.” (Too bad the impatiens, which was a bit water logged to begin with, got doused by a major thunder-boomer shortly after I planted them. Should have lasted through October, but sadly all gone…)

Great as Zipcar is, I don’t think I’ll see death to car ownership in my lifetime.

Kinsley also published a comment from a reader that did not quite enter into the spirit of the futurama discussion:

Another says: “It could be that Mr. Kinsley will be completely discredited as a polemicist of any note whose ideas and questions for discussion will be forever ridiculed.” I wish I could predict that in 20 years, rudeness on the Internet will be considered just as impolite as rudeness to someone’s face. But I doubt it.

Which raises an issue that is a complete bugbear to me: nasty, mostly anonymous comments on news sites and blogs.

While I don’t get tons of comments, I have noted over the years that, when I am posting about something that’s in the news and somewhat controversial, I do attract more short-terms readers. And comments. Invariably, the ones that go on the attack tend to be unsigned. I can understand why someone might not want their full name attached to a comment, but to not even come up with a handle?

But the real problem is not the ad hominem attacks I occasionally draw. It’s the level of discourse (if that’s the right word) in the real public idea domain.

It’s, of course, no surprise that the greater the anonymity of the commenters, the far greater propensity of the comment to be negative, scurrilous, and cretinous. What is so surprising is that so many chose this (cowardly) approach.

Most commenters to articles that appear in The New York Times are “signed” with real names and are, thus, more like little (and sometimes not so little) letters to the editor, only with the ability to do point-counterpoint. I’m not saying that these comments are always devoid of negativity, but there is a general level of welcome civility in the tone and word choice, even when people disagree vehemently with the article or one of their fellow commenters. Just thinking about the comments to NYT articles makes me think I really should subscribe online, rather than just keep on cadging the 10 free articles a month I’m allotted.

Comments on boston.com (The Boston Globe online), on the other hand, use pen or, rather, screed names. Some use their real names, but most use a handle. I’d say that, depending on the topic, the comments to articles in the political-social realm are typically at least half (and this is multiple choice): racist, homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-Obama, and willing to characterize the “other side” as lacking in decency, patriotism, intelligence, and moral fiber. (In this universe, everyone’s a wingnut or a moonbat, and I will note that the local commentary seems to attract more wingnuts than moonbats.) Oh, yes, and as often as not off-topic.

So many of them froth on about how Massachusetts is the worst place in the world to live, that I find myself gathering rebuttal points (education, health, wealth, divorce rate, gun deaths…) that I want to just package up and put in a signed comment pointing out that this really is, cost of living aside, a pretty good place to live. (While grinding my teeth and really wanting to write, ‘If it’s so awful here, why don’t you just pack up and move to Mississippi. And don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out, you moron.)

With Kinsley, I have my doubts about whether commenters will become less rude over time.

Maybe it’s good to have the anonymous commenting world out there to drain some of the tension and venom out of “the system.”

Still, I wish that the Boston Globe would put in place a commenting system that was more like that of The New York Times, where, comparatively speaking and absolutely, civility, perspective and intelligence reign. If they wanted to preserve what they have now, boston.com could keep it in place. Just run the signed commentary in parallel. Signed commenters could post on either side, and those who wish or need for whatever reason to remain anonymous could register with their real name, but with the ability to post as pseudonymous commenter on the signed side. This would be like the letters to the editor used to have “name held on request.”

But let the frothing, mean-spirited, crazed and moronic venom spewers go at it in their own space.

I’m sure I’d be tempted to make an occasional foray over into the muck pit – it’s just way too alluring – but the world would be a better place if, when people made their points, they did so knowing that they their name was going to be associated with it.

The Student Loan Fiasco’s Getting Uglier…(Seemed like a good idea at the time to borrow that extra $10K)

I was fortunate to attend college at a time when it didn’t cost all that much. Even when I went to business school (1979-1981) at a high-end school (MIT), I don’t think tuition was more than $4K-$5K a year. I did borrow a bit of money for Sloan, as I had earlier for my one year of grad school at Columbia. The sum total of my borrowing was, maybe, $5 - 6K.

School in those days, of course, was nothing near as fancy as it is now. When I went over to Sloan (MIT) during my 25th reunion year, I was astounded by how nice the facilities were, when compared to the rather minimal digs we had when I was there. (The student hangout between classes and for lunch was pretty much two large round tables in a sort of no man’s land on the floor that housed the administrative offices.)

And, hey, it was worth it.

But the average loan burden that a student graduates with is far in excess of $6K. It’s somewhere in the $30K range. And that’s the average.

I’m of mixed emotions here.

I do think it’s worth having some skin in the game to get an education, and borrowing to attend college is skin.

I also think that a liberal arts education is (or at least can be) worthwhile, even if it doesn’t translate into a brilliant and lucrative career. It’s actually kind of sad that, whether we like it or not, this sort of an education is turning into a luxury item that only a few will be able to afford. (The good news, of course, is that online education – and I’m not talking “I Am Phoenix” here – means that those who love learning can easily and cheaply become life-long learners. Real schools, good schools – MIT is one of them – have lots of course materials on line for free.)

On the other hand, it seems really and truly crazy to borrow a ton of money to major in, say, women’s studies or “communications” or 20th century film or Baltic languages at a third tier college where you’ll graduate with a degree that has limited value, and where you won’t have (gag, but I have to say it), built the sort of network that can help your find a decent job. Better you should major in something that has at least a vague chance of translating into a job where you’ll make enough to pay off those irksome and heavy-duty loans. Or find a less costly state school than the charming little private college you have your heart set on, without the pocketbook to follow your heart.

Especially when you consider that, unlike a mortgage on which you’re underwater, you can’t walk away from student loans. No bankruptcy. No no-can-do. No death do us part.

In fact, there’s now a new wrinkle to the student loan problem, and that’s that the parents who co-signed for their kids (or grandkids), or who directly took out loans for their kids (or grandkids), are finding that their Social Security is being tapped to make good on those loans.  Also being hit are some retirees who are paying off their own loans – including mid-life-change-of-career-back-to-school debt. (Source: Smart Money.)

According to government data, compiled by the Treasury Department at the request of SmartMoney.com, the federal government is withholding money from a rapidly growing number of Social Security recipients who have fallen behind on federal student loans. From January through August 6, the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees' Social Security checks on those grounds. That's nearly double the pace of the department's enforcement in 2011; it's up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6 cases in 2000.

The government can withhold up to 15%. Given that the average Baby Boomer has done a pretty abysmal job saving for retirement, and is heavily reliant on Social Security, having 15% clawed out is going to hurt.

Roughly 2.2 million student-loan debtors were 60 and older during the first quarter of 2012, and nearly 10% of their loans were 90 days or more past due, up from 6% during the first quarter of 2005, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This is going to be short-term ugly and long term worse.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Pink Slip’s been on the student debt hobby horse in the past. Early post on borrowing to go to law school. Another one on young folks who think Debt Is Cool, and yet another about a young woman who borrowed an extra $10K to live in a fancy-ass dorm.

Last night I took a walk in the dark, a swinging place called Palisades Park

Well, it’s always good to have it reinforced that, just as 60 is the new 40, and 70 is the new 50, adulthood is the new childhood.

Of course, we’ve pretty much known that for years.

When I was growing up, there was a pretty clear point of demarcation between dressing like a grownup and dressing like a kid. Grownups – which was pretty much everyone over the age of 21 -  dressed like extras on Perry Mason, or like June and Ward Cleaver or like Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower.  The men wore grey suits, ties, and fedoras; the women wore sheathes, stocking, high heels, a broach or pearls, and a hat.

Kids wore shorts, tee-shirts, and Keds (summer);  “school clothes” or “Sunday clothes” (the rest of the year). Except when they were out playing. Then they wore snowsuits and galoshes.

Even back then, of course, adults played, too. Women at play wore cotton skirts and blouses. Men wore high-waisted pants and polo shirts buttoned up to the neck. Even at a distance, you could spot the grownup men at the beach: they were the ones wearing black socks and beat up versions of their work shoes with their bathing trunks. Kids were barefoot. Or wore Keds.

Not these days!

The pan-age, pan-gender uniform at this point in time is shorts and tee-shirts (summer); jeans and sweaters (winter). Everyone wears sneakers, although probably something a lot pricier than Keds. Oh, yes, and everyone from infancy to dotage, male and female alike, has at least one baseball cap. (I’m embarrassed to admit how many I have. Off the top of my head: 4 variations on a Red Sox theme; one New England Revolution (MLS/soccer); a bespoke cap with Banshee* embroidered on it; one Black Dog cap (for when I sit for my dog nephew, Jack); one from Jack’s Country Store in Ocean Park, Washington; Obama 2008 (have to dust that one off); and an orange cap with a blue S on it that I got to wear to a Syracuse basketball game a few years back).

Yet another manifestation of the Peter Panning of society is apparently happening in the world of amusement parks.

As The Wall Street Journal reported the other day, the joyful world of the amusement park is now targeting the adult demographic.

Parks are responding with more adult-friendly offerings. Their goal is to entice grown-up fans—who don't have an early bedtime, curfew or school year—to spend more time, and hopefully more money, at the parks.
Some amusement parks are offering more nighttime events, concerts, dance parties and beer gardens. At least one chain's gift shops are selling more items for grown-ups such as home décor and jewelry. Some resorts attached to the parks have upgraded their spa menus and facilities. And parks are also upgrading their food offerings.

Although I wouldn’t want to be on a roller coaster sitting in fronts of someone who’d just gone a few rounds in the beer garden, why not?

Why should kids have all the fun?

Especially when you consider that amusement parks over the years have gone more upscale (with a commensurate uptick in prices), and are in general nicer venues. (Kids being capable of overlooking the tawdry in pursuit of fun more easily than at least some adults.)

Per capita guest spending ranged up to about $76 in 2011, including admission fees. The average general admission price for 71 U.S. parks is about $50, according to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions.)

Hey, $76 per capita is a night out.

And forget general inflation, those numbers are mind-boggling to me. I’m guessing that, in my entire childhood, the entire amount spent on annual trips to an amusement park for a family of 7 didn’t total $76. We just weren’t big spenders, and, frankly, there wasn’t all that much to big spend on in the amusement parks of my youth. Rides cost a quarter; you went on a couple (Tilt-a-Whirl, Merry-go-round); you went home.

The two that I had the most experience with were White City in Shrewsbury, just outside of Worcester, and Paragon Park, at Nantasket Beach.

White City was a seedy little nothing of an amusement park. It wasn’t a day-trip destination; it was an afternoon out when my mother’s friend Jane – who drove, while my mother didn’t – felt like hitting the road. So we’d pile into Jane’s two-tone green clunker and away we went.

At White City, I had what was my worst amusement park experience.

I fell in the barrel of fun (hah!), and was lying there in a heap in the middle while the barrel rolled around, on the verge of tears, when a nice “big boy” (i.e., someone a couple of years older than I) pulled me out. (I forgot to ask whether he was a parochial schooler or a pub, although, naturally, my assumption was that a nice boy would be a Catholic school student.) My last time in a barrel of fun, that’s for sure.

Paragon Park was part of our annual trip to the beach. After spending most of the day on the sand and in the water, we got to go on a couple of rides – never, alas, the Wild Mouse – before we bought our LeHage’s salt water taffy (“Oh, so good…”) and headed back to Worcester.

When the song “Palisades Park” was popular in the early sixties – the title of this post is the first line of that song – we used to substitute “Paragon” for “Palisades.” Which seemed fitting, given that the singer, Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, was a local boy. Of course, Boom Boom grew up on the North Shore of Boston, and Paragon Park was on the South Shore. Still, we knew that if life were fair, he would have been singing about Paragon Park, not Palisades Park in New Jersey. Both Parks are now, alas, closed, but Paragon Park outlived Palisades Park by more than a decade. (White City was long gone before either.  It was torn down to make way for a strip mall and movie theater.)
The seediest amusement park I went to as a kid was Whalom Park, in Lunenberg, Massachusetts, which was the kind of place that, say, the Junior Catholic Daughters of America, which was some kind of youth spinout of the Knights of Columbus, might go for a summer outing. Even as a kid completely enamored of amusement parks, Whalom seemed cruddy to me. Even cruddier than White City.

Perhaps my perception of Whalom is influenced by the fact that I was never there on a sunny day, while at Paragon Park, it was always sunny. (No way my father would have driven all the way from Worcester to Nantasket Beach – a two hour (minimum) trip -  unless there  was nary a cloud in the sky.)

In any case, despite its general aura of cruddiness, Whalom survived until 2000.
The only really nice amusement park I went to as a kid – and by then I was in late high school – was Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire, which was incredibly spruce and pleasant. I haven’t been there in years, but I remember that it barely seemed like an amusement park, it was that nice. There was nothing that was falling apart, nothing skeevy, and the people who worked there weren’t at all carney-bummish.

As a young adult, I also made it to Disneyland for the first time. A decade late, perhaps, but a wonderful experience. Well worth the money. And talk about clean…There was almost a staff member following every “guest” around with a dustpan and a broom. And, certainly, it was the most expensive amusement park I’d ever been to.

I haven’t had a lot of amusement park experiences as a grown up: A second trek to Disneyland.  A swing through Universal when I was at a user group a while back. A few treks to the Topsfield Fair – does that count? All enjoyable.

So, given the opportunity, while it’s not on my bucket list, I’d be happy to go to an amusement park, with or without a kid in tow.

“Fun for all ages,” indeed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Girl gang I’m a member of.