Peep o’ the morning to you…

As so often in the past, my Easter-related post will be devoted to Peeps. After all, in my book, it isn’t Easter until I’ve bitten the head off of a fresh, classic yellow Peep.

For years, the Washington Post’s Peeps Diorama contest was an excellent source of Peeps content. But, alas, last year they decided not to run the contest. Fortunately, the Washington City Paper has taken up the slack.

I have put zero thought into what I would have done if I were to enter a Peeps diorama contest, so I probably shouldn’t criticize, but the Top Ten didn’t seem especially inspired to me (even if the executions were generally good).

The winner was “Night at the Speepeasy.”

This picture doesn’t do it justice, but if you click through to the article, you can see two hapless cops out front, completely unaware of what’s going on behind that innocent looking door.

The runner up, “Cherry Blossom Peep Up Bar,” which depicts – in Peep terms – an actual pop-up bar in the DC area.

Although I don’t get the reference, I like this one because it’s beautiful – well, if anything based on Peeps an actually be beautiful – and, although I’ve never seen them, I’m a sucker for cherry blossoms.

My favorite was “Peeper Curry is Awed by Marshmallow Obama at the National Peeptrait Gallery.”

For those unfamiliar with the absolutely adorbs picture on which this one is based, here you go:

(The little girl’s name is Parker Curry.)

Meanwhile, Peeps Diorama contests have apparently become a thing. There are contests in Minneapolis. Nantucket. Racine. Olympia, Washington. Lake Worth, Florida. And a whole bunch of other places, including Bedford, Mass. So if I’m feeling creative next year, I have a place to go.

Anyway, Happy Easter to all, and to all a Peepnight.

And Happy April Fools Day, if that’s your thing.

Tourist in Ireland Part Four: Talking in Tongues

Many years ago, before one of my trips to Ireland, I decided to teach myself some Irish.

It is, of course, something of a colossal waste of time to try to learn a language
that is brutally difficult, not to mention spoken by so few people. Nevertheless, 
she persisted. Faugh a ballagh! (Irish battle cry that means clear the way.)

I was able to bleat out a respectable go raibh maith agat - thank you - to the Irish
Aer Lingus check-in person at Logan. She was neither amused nor impressed. Well,
póg mo thóin. That would be kiss my ass.

I didn’t really want apple pie, out there in a restaurant in the Irish speaking 
Connemara. But it was the only food stuff I remembered from my tape. So píóg úll 
it was.

The waiter sweetly said, “I know you’re trying to order something darlin’, but I don’t 
know what it is.”

I went back and listened to my tape. I had indeed pronounced apple pie correctly. 
What up?

Even by foreign language standards, Irish is a pretty darned foreign language. 
With Germanic and Romance language, we’re used to the rhythms, and even some 
of the words that have made their way into English. When we hear someone
speaking German, we know it’s German. And may even catch a word or two. 
Ditto with French. Spanish. Etc. With little effort, most of us can learn please/thank y
ou/where’s the toilet/how much. We can make ourselves understood, even if we
can’t comprehend much when people respond.

But with Irish, there are so few hooks for your ear to latch on to. I’ve been in 
Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas) and I can be listening to ultra-Irish looking folks
conversing and still I struggle to recognize the language they’re speaking as Irish. 
Often the only word I can pick out is agus, which means and. Ah, agus, Irish.

After the apple pie incident, I pretty much gave up on my Irish. Other than one 
sentence that kept floating around in my head. Ba mhaith liom dul ag siopadóireacht.
I want to go shopping.

Towards the end of the trip where I tried talking in tongues, we spent a couple of 
days in Dublin.

Once cab driver, a man a bit older than us, told us that, while students now learn
Irish in school, this wasn’t the case when he was growing up. So he’d made it his
business to learn his native tongue.

So many great sayings, he told us. Like níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

Ah, I said, There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace.

How do you know that, he asked?

My response: I apparently learned off the same tapes you did. Which turned out to
be the case, It also turned that Irish is tough enough t learn, but there are all sorts
of regional variations. Which is why my apple pie order was Greek to the Connemara
waiter. The tape I learned from was, I believe, Irish in the purish King's English. 
(Chieftain's Irish?)  The Dublin cabby as the only one in the country I'd understood.
On the last week's trip, my sister and I were in a bookstore, picking up some greeting
cards.  Trish handed me one and there it was. Nil aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

How did you know, I asked. After all, Trish hadn’t wasted any of her precious time 
trying to learn Irish.

Well, duh. The translation was on the back of the card.

Anyway, I won’t be cracking the Irish books or tapes any time soon.

If I’m going to learn another language, I’m thinking French.

Au revoir, Irish.

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Sorry this looks so awful. Can't figure out what's going on with this particular post. 

Tourist in Ireland, Part Three: Galway Girls

While I do have some ancestral ties to the Province of Connacht, I don’t have any direct connection to Galway. Yet the city of Galway is one of my favorite places on earth. It’s not very large – roughly 75,000 people – and there aren’t a ton of grand tourist things to do in the city itself. No Guinness tour. No Kilmainham Gaol. No wonderful walks to lovely parks. (No stable where my great-grandfather worked.)

Sure, there are things worthwhile in the environs: Connemara (Ireland’s remote, Irish-speaking, and wild(ish) west; the Aran Islands.

But mostly what’s great about Galway is its tremendous energy and vitality. It’s a college town. And a tourist town. It has terrific restaurants – a big change over the 30 years I’ve been coming there – and, not surprisingly, terrific pubs. And it all you’re looking to buy are sweaters, scarves, caps, tourist stuff, and Claddagh rings, it’s not a bad place to shop. (We had lunch one day with an Irish friend – a middle-aged woman with a demanding professional life – and she told us that she does all her clothing shopping online or in Dublin. The non-tourist oriented shopping is pretty much a department store that is mired in the 1950’s; a Brown-Thomas (which replaced the beloved Moon’s) that seems to specialize in thousand dollar handbags; and a few designer-ish places hidden away on side streets.)

Whatever Galway’s deficits, I can’t imagine a trip to Ireland without going there. So after a couple of days in Dublin, we headed west to Galway, where the plan was to meet up with my niece Molly (who had spent a semester in Galway last year) and her friend Emilie.

The loose plan was to go to the restaurants and pubs that Molly wanted to revisit – an excellent plan.

Our first night, we had some of the best pizza on earth at Dough Bros, after which we popped over to the King’s Head for a pint (or two) and a music session. Non-trad, but a reasonably good duo.

The next day, I had a good catch-up lunch with friends at the Galway Country Club in Salthill. Pretty good fish-and-chips, and a gorgeous view, even if the weather was pretty nasty. On a clear, sunny day, it must be spectacular.

After lunch, I met up with the Galway girls at Cupan Tae for afternoon tea and cake. Cupan is sweet and charming. Even though I went with my go-to (Irish Breakfast) the tea selection is wonderful, and everyone’s tea is delivered in mismatched pots and drunk from mismatched cups and saucers. Nice place to get in out of drecky weather.

Dinner that night was at the King’s Head Bistro. Very nice, but I miss the Old Malt House, an old standby that my husband I would frequent on our visits. After that, we headed out to another old standby: An Pucan, a pub that has music of some sort every evening. Sometimes their sessions are traditional. Other times a mix of pop and Irish-y sing-alongs like “Dirty Old Town,” “Black Velvet Band,” and “Galway Girl” (Steve Earle, not Ed Sheeran).

When we walked in, the first song the duo du jour played was “Horse With No Name.” As is fairly well known in my family, I am firm in my belief that “Horse With No Name” is the worst song ever written. It went downhill from there. I was considering an Irish exit, but everyone was willing to go. So we departed en masse. Destination: King’s Head, where an excellent instrumental duo was performing traditional tunes. Yay!

Our last day was given over in part to the new Galway. Lunch at Dela, a cool and trendy spot where my veggie wrap was greatly enhanced by the side of bacon my sister had ordered. And where the conversation among me, Trish, and my Irish friend Michelle largely revolved around – whether you’re in Ireland or the US – in the workplace, a woman’s voice is like a dog whistle. Only certain ears are capable of hearing it. Michelle is about 25 years younger than I am; Trish is 10 years younger. Sad that some things don’t ever seem to change.

Evening drinks at Seven, where the evening drink was something called a Gin Bramble (gin, Chambord, simple syrup, lemon, and crushed ice). That was followed by dinner at Caprice, another cool and trendy spot.

We looked in a Taaffe’s Bar, but it was too crowded so, back to King’s Head for one of the most peculiar musical performances I’ve ever witnessed.

We were hoping that the music would start at 10 p.m., and settled in at 9 with excellent seats on the second floor, overlooking the place where the performers would perform. At 9:15, the drummer and sound guy appeared. A half an hour later the keyboard guy showed up. Another half-hour or so and the guitar and bass player blew in.

All the while, the sound guy fiddled, and the musicians futzed around, occasionally disappearing.

A bit before 11, a guy showed up in what appeared to be hospital pj’s. Something that Jack Nicholson would have worn in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This turned out to be the lead singer and main guitarist.

But what was up with the pj’s?

The lead guy was jumping all over the place, setting up, occasionally babbling something into his mike that as difficult to interpret. I caught the word “Watusi”, but little else. He then reached into his kit bag and pulled out what appeared to be the sort of cap worn by Muslims. The cap was pale blue cotton, and matched the kurta pj’s.

He then screeched into the mike that his name was Hassan, followed by a crack about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. WTF? Here’s an Irish guy (name on the band’s website: Jack; the band is billed as a wedding band) dressed in Muslim garb making a bad Holocaust joke. At least that’s what I think he was doing.

A man standing near our table – he sounded Spanish – looked perplexed and asked me if the fellow as a comedian. I answered that I wasn’t sure.

Hassan/Jack then screeched some more incomprehensible garble, and then started in on – wait for it – Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Which might have been okay if everyone in the band wasn’t so over-amped that our pints were shaking off the table. This was followed by more jumping around and screaming into the mike, followed by a song. Something by ELO. Something by Clash. Hassan/Jack mentioned New Jersey and up came Bon Jovi’s “Hold On To What You’ve Got.”

I can honestly say it was as close to sheer torture as any performance I’ve ever experienced, but we hung in, curious about what would happen next.

One peculiar thing was that, for all the sound guy’s prepping and sound-checking, when anyone other than Hassan/Jack took the vocal lead, their mike was cut off.

I will observe that, unlike the other lads, who were quaffing down pints, Hassan/Jack appeared to be drinking water. So perhaps he was a Muslim convert. Just very odd that the only mention he made was a decidedly off crack about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. As I said, WTF.

I didn’t like loud music when I was young, and it certainly hasn’t aged well.

Anyway, Hassan/Jack eventually wore us down, and that was it for the Galway Girls.

The next morning, a Polish fellow who runs a limo service delivered us to Shannon for the trip home.

If it sounds like all we did in Galway was eat and drink, well, that would be close. We also shopped a bit. (I got a very nice blue-green Irish knit cardigan and a dark pink baby sweater for a recent arrival. A baby with the throw-back name of Trish.) And I got to catch up with friends.

I don’t really have a bucket list, but if I had one, spending an extended period of time in Ireland would be one it. And the extended period of time would mostly be spent in Galway, going native.

Slan!

Tourist in Ireland, Part Two: “I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride”

On Monday morning, after an almost full Irish breakfast (no black pudding) at a Latvian-run B&B, we decamped to Dublin on the train from Belfast. The platform at Dundalk was pretty crowded for a late morning Monday, but it was a long weekend, what with Monday March 19th the day on which the St. Patrick’s Day holiday was observed. My sister and I were the American tourists, trying to maneuver our oversized roller bags down the narrow aisle to the other end of the car where the baggage storage area was. Back at our seats, we found that a) the configuration was different than what we’d signed up for online, and b) someone was sitting in one of our reserved seats. Thanks to another American –  a businessman who’d been visiting a friend in Belfast -  who changed seats on the crowded train so we could sit together (and, while he was at it, hefted our smaller bags onto the storage space above our seats), we finally settled in for the hour long ride into Dublin. Then a short hop to our hotel, The Westbury, right in the middle of everything.

The Black Stuff

Our mission for the afternoon was the Guinness tour, so that we could learn all about the black stuff.

It was a crisp but sunny day, so we decided to walk out to the Guinness Storehouse, which, we were told by the person at the Westbury desk, would take about 20-25 minutes.

I know that the Irish are fast walkers, but, even though Trish was a bit under the weather at this point, we’re no slouches when it comes to shank’s mare, either. Twenty minutes into our hike, we stuck our heads in at a tourist office, where we were assured it was about a 20 minute walk from that point. Twenty minutes later, when we asked a woman on the street, we were told we had another 40 minutes to go. That was about right.

In any case, we did make it in time for the tour time we had signed up for. Not that it mattered, as they really didn’t check tickets. Meanwhile, in signing up, they asked if you were a senior, so I clicked that box. Only to find out that there was no discount for seniors. So i gave away a key personal tidbit, and got nothing in return. Boo!

The Guinness Storehouse, where the tour takes place, was packed. It was, after all, a holiday, and holiday-ers, many still seemingly reveling from St. Patrick’s Day itself. Many wearing those hideous “Irish” hats, which I don’t believe were ever worn by St. Patrick. Nor by any Irishman in the history of mankind. Other than the loud-mouthed Irish college students at the Guinness tour. (And, it almost goes without saying, the loud-mouthed American college students on the tour.)

The tour is not given in the factory, but in the Guinness Storehouse, which has a quite modern, interesting, and somewhat Disney-fied telling of the making of Guinness.

We got halfway through, when we took a break. As I mentioned, Trish was a bit under the weather, and the crowds were just overwhelming.

We got a soda – I know, heresy! – and a bag of truly awful Guinness-flavored chips. (I hadn’t realized they were Guinness-flavored when I picked them up. Almost as bad as the infamous Irish Tay-To scampi-flavored chips. Ugh!)

At this point, we decided to cut the tour short, foregoing the “free” pint that we were entitled to. Alas! Guinness (in Ireland) is pretty much the only beer I drink, and I’m guessing that this close to the holy ground where it’s produced, it was a pretty good pint.

Anyway, we cabbed back to the Westbury, too tired for the long walk back.

“I write it out in a verse…”

On the next day’s agenda was a tour of Kilmainham Gaol, where a number of those involved in The Easter Rebellion of 1916 were shot by a firing squad. Unfortunately, Trish was still unwell and opted for a lie-in, while I went out to Kilmainham.

I had toured Kilmainham Gaol some 25 or 30 years back, when it was mostly the building and a few b&w pictures on the wall.

Today, it is one of the most impressive historic museums I’ve been to. And the tour was excellent.

In it, I learned a lot about approaches to imprisonment over the centuries, and about Irish history that I hadn’t really appreciated in the past.

The Gaol was used to punish men, women, and children, under completely ghastly and brutal conditions (up until the 20th century, when conditions ticked up a bit). Many of those thrown in this particularly terrible and overcrowded hoosegow were people who were starving during the Great Famine of the 1840’s. They (often very young children) were jailed for stealing something as small as a loaf of bread or a clutch of onions. One of those jailed was Anne Murphy, who’d stolen turnips. For that offense, she was sentenced to a month. How hungry would you be to steal turnips? And how close to death by starvation would you have to be that a month in a typhus-ridden and (literally) lousy jail was preferable to trying to survive on the outside?

The museum display (that image above is from a slide show) included mug shots from some of those jailed in the mid-19th century. The prison system was taking advantage of the new photography technology, but wanted to save money. So each prisoner was photographed next to a mirror, so that full-face and profile could be captured in one picture. Which I found pretty interesting.

The early history of Kilmainham was very well delivered, but the main historic interest is the role that the jail played in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion. This uprising, which took place in the midst of the first world war, was aimed at freeing Ireland from British control and occupation. Fourteen of those involved in the uprising – including Thomas MacDonagh, John MacBride, James Connolly, and Patrick Pearse, the four names mentioned in Yeats poem “Easter 1916” – were shot for their role.

This was a formative event, as it pretty much turned public opinion away from the British and towards the rebels, which resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. Many Irish citizens had initially been opposed to the uprising, especially given the timing in the midst of a war that many of their young men were fighting in. But then they started thinking things through. When their sons were taken prison of war by the Germans, they were sent to camps, not shot. So why the blood lust to kill the rebels, who considered themselves Irish soldiers? Especially when one of those rebels, James Connolly, was already dying from his wounds, and had to be strapped into a chair so he could be shot at.

As Yeats had it:

Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The cells where the 14 martyrs spent their last days were all marked on the tour, and there were a number of artifacts related to these men, and to other nationalist leaders.

Kilmainham Gaol was also used during the Irish Civil War, in which those who supported the treaty that had created the Republic of Ireland, at the expense of surrendering six counties to the creation of Northern Ireland, battled those who opposed it. (If you saw the movie Michael Collins, this was Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) vs. Eamon DeValera (Alan Rickman).

Michael Collins was one of the few nationalist leaders who was never imprisoned at Kilmainham. But it’s hard to talk about the history of Ireland without Collins factoring in, so there are some of his artifacts on display, including the scapular he was wearing when he was killed during the Irish Civil War. (My father wore the same scapular – the Sacred Heart badge with red crocheted edging – but, of course, he wasn’t an assassinated Irish rebel…)

Anyway, it was a wonderful museum, and I’m sorry my sister missed it. I like Dublin, but it’s not first on my must-return list. It’s a big, bustling, lively cosmopolitan city, that even feels a bit like the one I live in. But I would recommend the Kilmainham Gaol tour to anyone going to Ireland. It definitely makes a stop in Dublin worthwhile.

I walked halfway back to the hotel before giving up and haling a cab. (And, yes, a guard at Kilmainham assured me that it was only a 20 minute walk back to the Westbury. Since the jail was beyond the Guinness Storehouse, I knew this wasn’t true, but I thought I’d go some of the distance on foot.)

Other than the tours and a couple of run outs for tea, scones, and meds for my sister, that was about it for Dublin.

On to Galway.

Tourist in Ireland, Part One: “If Ireland was so great…”

Forty-five years ago this May, I visited Ireland for the first time. That was during a 5 month hitchhike and hostel tour of Europe during which we hit a lot of countries. In rough order of appearance, that lot was: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Yugoslavia (as it then was), Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain.

On my return home, I said that there were three places that I was absolutely certain I would return to: Paris, Yugoslavia (as it then was), and Ireland.

I haven’t (yet) been back to Yugoslavia (as it then was), but I really would like to see Dubrovnik again. Paris? Been back a handful of times. As for Ireland, I took me until 1985 to make a return trip, but since then I’ve been to Ireland a number of times, and I’d place that number between 15 and 20. Last week’s trip was my fifth since 2011.

This one was more impromptu than the others, less planned a year in advance.

My niece and a friend were spending spring break visiting a classmate student-abroading in England, and Molly wanted to also scoot over to Galway, where she’d spent a semester last year, for a few days. So she asked me and her mother if we wanted to meet up with her in Galway. We did.

Trish and I decided to make a week out of it, and we pre-tacked on a couple of days in Dublin and a “Roots” visit to ancestral turf in Ballymascanlon, Co. Louth.

My grandmother Mary (Trainor) Rogers was famously known for saying “If Ireland was so great, we all wouldn’t have had to come over here.” Nanny, of course, had never set toe in Ireland. Her parents, Bridget and Matthew Trainor, however, had shipped out in the 1870’s, leaving like millions of others, because Ireland, in fact, wasn’t so great. So they left for Amerikay.

Bridget and Matthew were from the village of Ballymascanlon, a village on the outskirts of the town of Dundalk.

There is a high-end hotel there, the Ballymascanlon House, a fancy resort and golf course. Out there in the middle of nowhere. We decided that we didn’t want to get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, so we stayed in a very nice B&B (as it turns out, run by a Latvian mother-daughter combo) in Dundalk, and schlepped out to Ballyma to the fancy-arse hotel for Sunday lunch. (When we walked through the door of the House, Trish noted that it was probably the first time that any member of our family had walked in through the front door.)

The countryside in that area, the Cooley Peninsula, is gorgeous territory. And the Ballymascanlon House, which was built up around one of those Anglo-Irish rich-folk manses, has beautiful grounds. And on those beautiful grounds are the stables where, I believe, young Matthew Trainor worked at one point as a stable boy

I think this is the case, but the only people who might know for sure, the last of my father’s first cousins, both died within the last couple of years. And Ellen and Ned took whatever the story is to their graves in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, nearby the graves of Matthew and Bridget (not to mention my parents and grandmother).

The stable boy story makes sense: poor kid from a large Catholic farm family in the village.

So stable boy ‘tis.

Thus, after a quite nice old-school Anglo-Irish three course lunch at Ballymascanlon House, Trish and I went out to see the stables, shown here.

We were told that the stable buildings are now used for storage. If so, Ballyma House is missing a tep. These would make really cool timeshares. Or golf condos. Or whatever.

Anyway, it was interesting and a bit moving to see where my great-grandfather had/may have worked. (On an earlier trip to Ireland, I’d visited the church (a beautifully restored 13th century Cistercian Abbey) and cemetery in Ballintubber, Co. Mayo, where another great, Margaret (Joyce) Rogers hailed from. It was similarly interesting and a bit moving to see all those Joyce headstones and know that I was related, however distantly, to everyone six-feet under them.

There was one other thing to do on the Ballymascanlon House grounds, and that was the Proleek Dolmen, an ancient portal tomb. It was a bleak. cold, windy, damp day – when we’d landed in Dublin that morning, there were near-blizzard conditions, and we’d cabbed out to Dundalk amid swirling snow squalls – and we had to trudge along ice-encrusted, muddy paths to get there, but the Proleek Dolmen was worth the trudge. (Did Matthew Trainor trudge by when he headed home after work in the stables?)

Louth is a border county, and at times we were quite near the border with Northern Ireland. Thanks to the EU, that border is now open. It’s not clear how Brexit will impact this. (One cab driver speculated that if the hard border goes back up, The Troubles between Unionists – those wanting to stay part of the UK – and Nationalists – who want the six northern counties to become part of a unified Republic of Ireland – will return. Hope not, but speaking of The Troubles, in Dundalk, we passed the local constituent office of Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin, who until recently represented the area in the Oireachtas (the lower house of the Irish Parliament).

Along the way to/from Ballymascanlon House, we saw plenty of signs for Newry, which is in Northern Ireland.

Newry factored into Nanny’s stories, as it was there that her father, Matthew Trainor, went to market to vend whatever the Trainor family grew or raised. And “the black Protestants would throw rocks at him and his wagon because he was a Catholic.” Note that “black” has nothing to do with skin color, and was just the modifier for Protestant to underscore how dreadful the Catholics found them. (Later in the week, in Galway, I had lunch with some Irish friends (my age) and mentioned the terms. Michael confirmed that this was how Protestants were frequently referred to when he was growing up.)

I’ve never been to Northern Ireland.

Probably worth a look on my next trip to Ireland. Cooley Peninsula and Derry, maybe?

When we got back to the B&B, it was pretty miserable out, and we were pretty tired, so we never got around to exploring the treasures of Dundalk. Typical provincial not-much-to-see-here town, I’m guessing. Still and all, a good place to stop on the way to trod in the steps where my long-gone great-grandfather, Matthew Trainor the stable boy, may (or may not) have trod.

On to Dublin!

Open door policy? Not such a good idea…

A couple weeks ago, five tourists were killed in a helicopter crash in the East River in Manhattan. (The pilot survived.) This wasn’t just a fly-over, it was something called an open-door tour, a tour that enables tourists to take pictures and get more of a bird’s eye view of what’s out there. And it was the open-door-ness of the tour that resulted in those deaths,because these types of helicopter rides use a different method of strapping someone into their seats than do regular old closed-door rides:

The five people who died when their helicopter lost power and had to put down in the East River were tethered to the craft by ropes attached to harnesses so they wouldn’t fall out through the open doors. They drowned after the helicopter rolled over and sank. Divers had to cut out the bodies, according to the New York Fire Department….

The passenger harnesses, which differ from traditional aviation seat belts, attached people from the rear and would have been difficult to remove in an emergency, said Eric Adams, a professional photographer who took a flight by the same company on the same night as the accident. The passengers were given knives to cut the ropes in an emergency, though training on how to use them was limited, Adams wrote in an account for an online publication called The Drive. (Source: Bloomberg)

The passengers were given knives to cut the ropes in an emergency, though training on how to use them was limited.

Think about that for a moment. You come in from out of town, you want to take that breathtaking sky-eye tour of Manhattan, and they issue you a knife to cut yourself free if the needs arises.

With my fear of heights, I wouldn’t have gotten into an open-door whirlybird flight to begin with. But, if I were the open-door whirlybird type to begin with, what would I have made of being issued a knife? Even with concerns about being able to cut my harness during an upside-down, head-under-water emergency, I probably wouldn’t have cut my losses and walked away. I’m sure I would have made some Crocodile Dundee joke. (“This is a knoife.”) And said to myself, how likely is it that the sort of accident that would require me to wield that knife will happen in real life. Sure, it’s a bit more dangerous that a trolley tour, or a horse and carriage jaunt around Central Park, but it’s gotta be safe. Safe enough. Doesn’t it?

The question to me is what obligation is the tour provider under to provide information on the risk, on how difficult it will be to cut yourself loose under tremendous stress? Is there any obligation, or is just caveat emptor. Use your common sense. No tourist guts, no tourist glory..

A friend of mine was on a jury in a trial in which someone was suing a roller rink because they’d broken their ankle. Well, if you don’t want to break your ankle, stay off roller skates.

Still, it does seem pretty reckless to operate this kind of a tour.

In fact, the Helicopter Association International:

…the leading trade group for helicopter operators has, for at least two years, urged a halt to open-door tours such as the one March 11 that ended in the death of five people in the East River off Manhattan…

“We just believe that helicopter tours should be flown with doors closed,” [HAI spokesman Dan] Sweet said. “HAI wants to create the safest possible flight for the public.”

But,  of course, doors-open flights are can be marketed as more interesting, more edgy, more out there than boring old closed-door tours.

Oddly enough:

The government standards governing their operations can be less stringent than for traditional tour flights, according to a person familiar with the practice. U.S. aviation regulations exempt operations including crop dusting, fire fighting and “aerial photography or survey.”

Not surprising, the parents of one victim are suing the company that ran the flight, and the pilot, citing negligence. The family is being represented by a “helicopter crash attorney.” The suit maintains that, if this had been a “normal” closed-door flight, with “normal” seat belts, the victim would have been able to easily unbuckle himself and swum to safety. The helicopter crash attorney had this to say:

“You would have to be Houdini to escape in that situation. It was truly a death trap for him to be hanging upside down in frigid water temperature tightly harnessed with the release inaccessible in the back and no advance training.” (Source: Washington Post)

Amazing that there’s an attorney that specializes in helicopter crashes. That tells me all I need to know. about getting into a helicopter tour.

In any case,

The deaths have led to scrutiny over open-door helicopter tours that experts say allow even novice riders to board helicopters without proper training.

And that scrutiny appears to have moved the Federal Aviation Administration to ground “open-doors” (or “doors-off”) helicopter flights. I suspect they’ll stop categorizing them alongside crop-dusting and aerial fire-fighting.

It really does sound like the right thing to do to ban these sorts of tourist death-traps . So good for the FAA.

Amazing how fast they acted after the accident. With similar speed,within days after a French bulldog died on a United Airline flight after a flight attendant forced its owners to stow him in the overhead bin, a US Senator had pulled a bill together to forbid this practice. After all, he said, “Pets are family.”

Indeed they are. And family is family, too. So good that there’ll more scrutiny given to really dangerous helicopter flights.

What’s really amazing, however, is that we still can’t get any decent gun legislation passed, or even a reasonable discussion going, even after the recent deaths at Parkland. High school kids are people, too, Senator. Maybe if the school had been attacked by crop dusters…

Blood Unicorn

A few years back, Elizabeth Holmes topped the list of the wealthiest self-made American women. The blood-testing startup she founded, Theranos, was worth billions. As was Holmes. And then it turned out that the girl-genius’ invention didn’t quite work as claimed, and the value of her company plummeted from $9B to less than one-tenth that amount. The new value of her company was, in fact, just about on the money ($800M vs. $724M) with the amount that had been invested in it by “smart money” hoping that there was a unicorn in all that blood.

For a while there, Holmes was a real golden girl, running around getting all sorts of super press, which helped pump her company’s valuation sky high. She was, it appears, quite an excellent bullshitter. She may well have believed her own BS, but BS she did. But as has been pointed out, there’s nothing illegal about lying to the press. Unfortunately for Holmes, it is illegal to lie to potential investors.

To back up a minute: Theranos had supposedly developed a blood-testing device that was supposed to be able to take a finger prick’s worth of blood and perform hundreds of tests on it. Immediately. This would, of course, revolutionize blood sampling. No more vials taken out of the best vein in your left arm. No more waiting for the blood to be sent out to a lab and wait some more for the results. You could just go into Walgreen’s – where Theranos had a big deal going – and get the job done on the spot.

Too bad it didn’t work.

Which didn’t stop Holmes from pretending it did. She used earlier versions of her product, devices from other companies, and even sent samples out the old-fashioned way to external labs, to fake up an elaborate “show and tell” that was light on the actual “show,” but pretty heavy on the “tell.”

Meanwhile Theranos and Holmes were going around giving interviews about how revolutionary their technology was, without ever mentioning that it didn't work and they didn't use it. This got them a lot of favorable press and a $9 billion valuation, which went on for a while until the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou reported in 2015 that the product didn’t work and that Theranos was lying about using it, after which Theranos fairly quickly collapsed. (Source: Bloomberg)

That’s when Holmes fell off of her perch on the self-made rich lady list.

But just because the company was a fraud didn’t mean that fraud had been committed.

It becomes fraud in the legal sense if you use those lies to get money. Theranos, in parallel with being a massive fraud, was also raising a lot of money… If you are going around lying publicly about your technology while also raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, that certainly suggests that you were defrauding those investors. But it's not a certainty. Theranos wasn't a public company; it raised all that money in negotiated private fundraising rounds where investors received disclosure documents and had the opportunity to conduct due diligence.

Could be that, as Bloomberg writer Matt Levine so wonderfully and facetiously speculates, while Holmes was going around self- and company-aggrandizing, she was making it quite clear to her investors that – heh, heh – the technology behind the talking points wasn’t exactly – heh, heh – what it was supposed to be. Investors would then have a better idea of the risks they were taking. 

But no, no, that's not what happened at all. Instead the Securities and Exchange Commission today brought fraud charges against Holmes, Theranos and its former president, Sunny Balwani, and its complaint alleges pretty strongly that the investors were just as bamboozled as everybody else. In fact, Theranos made direct use of its positive press to raise money: It "sent investors a binder of background materials," which included "articles and profiles about Theranos, including the 2013 and 2014 articles from The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Fortune that were written after Holmes provided them with interviews" and that included her misleading claims about the state of Theranos's technology.

Theranos also faked up demos. And forecasted revenues that were orders upon orders of magnitude more than the revenues that were actually realized. I’m quite familiar with those miracle-occurs-here hockey stick forecasts, in which all of a sudden low, sluggish revenues go sky-high the next year. But nothing along the lines of what Theranos tried to pull off: forecasting $100M for one year when in actuality the revenues for that year amounted to $100K. Nobody with one shred of intelligence and/or sanity and/or integrity can be off by that much, no matter how loonily optimistic.

The SEC has weighed in and declared that real, honest to goodness (dishonest to badness?) fraud had taken place.

Theranos and Holmes settled with the SEC without admitting or denying the allegations; Balwani will apparently fight the accusations. Holmes agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty to the SEC, "return" 18.9 million Theranos shares to the company and relinquish her super-voting control, and be barred from serving as a public-company director or officer for 10 years.

$500K seems pretty featherweight, given that the bamboozlement amounted to nearly $800M. Apples and oranges, but Martha Stewart went to prison for 5 months for what amounted to some relatively penny ante insider trading. Like Elizabeth Holmes, Martha Stewart is a pretty blonde. The difference? Martha Stewart was in her sixties when she was issued her orange jumpsuit and sent up the river; Holmes is in her thirties. Hmmmm. Just hmmmm.

Anyway, I really can’t imagine, pretty blonde or not, that Elizabeth Holmes has to worry about “serving as a public-company director or officer for 10 years.” Really, who in their right mind…

Meanwhile, as Levine points out in his article, bad enough that Elizabeth Holmes was defrauding her investors. Theranos was “performing a lot of fake blood tests.”

The Wall Street Journal has reported on the “trail of agonized patients” who got blood-test results from Theranos that turned out to be wrong, and Theranos ultimately “voided” two years of results from its machines because they were not sufficiently accurate.

Bullshitting the press. Defrauding investors. Building a “trail of agonized patients.”

I’m guessing that the next time Elizabeth Holmes decides to become rich and famous, she’s going to have a harder time getting rich or famous. Can’t get blood out of a stone. Or out of a Holmesian unicorn. Sometimes a myth is just a myth.

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Earlier post on Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos.

All out of guac? Oh, no…

When it comes to pushing my shopping cart around the grocery store, unless something is insanely expensive, I don’t pay all that much attention to prices. I know enough not to pay $10 for a bag of cherries, even if I want them. But mostly I’m not all that price conscious. Lucky me.

So I haven’t noticed that avocados have gotten more expensive.

I like avocados. I use them on salads. I put them on sandwiches – an especially goody-good sammie is avocado, tomato, sprouts, and cheese, open faced, toasted. Yummers. Sometimes I mash an avocado up in a baked potato and call it a day. Extra points if there’s a slice or two of bacon to add to it.

I will admit that I don’t make guacamole from scratch, even though it’s simple enough to do. (I know this because I have observed my sisters making it.) I just buy the tubs as needed.

I’ve also been known to stick toothpicks into the side of an avocado pit, suspend it in a juice glass full of water, and watch it grow. I may have ended up with an avocado plant out of it at one point – back in the day when I had macrame hangers for my plants – but mostly once there are a few leaves, that’s about where my interest ebbs and out it goes. Fun while it lasted…(I like it because it reminds me of putting the top of a carrot in a pudding cup full of water until it ferns up, which my mother let us do when we were kids.)

Any way you look at it, I’m a avocado-er, one of the Americans contributing to the avocado on it’s way to becoming our nation’s favorite fruit.

I suspect that, like most Americans, I don’t consider the avocado a fruit. Sure, it’s got a pit. Just like a peach or a plum. Still, it seems more veggie than fruit, which is how we all pretty much treat it. Sort of like a tomato, when you think of it.

Our per capita consumption was seven pounds in 2016 – up from one pound in 1989. I’m more than doing my bit towards making America a great consumer of avocados. As of 2016, we were up to gross domestic consumption of 2.3 billion pounds.

Avocado was not something – fruit or vegetable – that I was aware of as a kid. They weren’t on our table, and I don’t imagine the were in the fridges at any of my friends’ homes, either. The sum total of our avocado awareness was that some people had kitchen appliances that were avocado green. Not that I knew any of them, but even before the advent of HG-TV, I knew that avocado, alongside harvest gold, was a thing.

When my friends started getting married, we didn’t get them fridges or stoves, of course. But I’m pretty sure I bought at least one avocado-colored fondue pot as a shower gift. I had some kitchen implements – a spatula, an egg beater, a stirring spoon – with a plastic avocado handle.

In my memory, avocado as an accent color was out there before people started eating much by way of avocado.

I did have some avocado awareness. When I was in college, I worked in a student grill that served a sandwich called a Bacon-Avi. And the California Burger had avocado on it. So I can date my knowledge of avocado as an edible to my sophomore year. But avocado still wasn’t a big deal.

Then, all of a sudden, there were margaritas, and chips and salsa, and guacamole. Cobb Salads appeared out of nowhere. And they included avocado.

Fast forward a decade or two or four even, and there it is: almost our favorite fruit.

America’s enthusiasm for avocados may be dented, however, by soaring prices. The wholesale price for a case of 48 avocados peaked at $83.75 in September, up from $34.45 a year before, according to the American Restaurant Association. Some restaurants were forced to add a surcharge on guacamole, or temporarily to scrap it from their menus altogether. Others swallowed the bill. Chipotle, a Mexican-themed restaurant chain, said that “historically high avocado costs” were a big reason why it posted disappointing financial results last year.

Supply shortfalls, brought about by droughts, storms and wildfires in California, Chile and Mexico, help to explain the jump. Production in California dropped by 44% in 2017. Harvests in Mexico that year were off by 20%. Labour strikes in the country further reduced supply. (Source: The Economist)

We’re not the only ones getting in the avocado act. China’s going avocado crazy, and they’ve made trade deals with Chile and Mexico to forge trade deals that – catch this – eliminate tariffs on their avocados.

Maybe we need a trade war – I hear they’re fun and easy to win – that will get us to step out avocado supply.

Not so fast, I guess.

Raising production will be tricky. This is because avocados are a fussy plant to grow, says Mary Lu Arpaia of the University of California, Riverside. Salinity levels need to be just right, the slope of the terrain not too steep and temperatures stable. Erratic weather conditions can easily kill the crop.

Damn!

I don’t want to live in a world without avocado. All out of guac? Oh, no.

Wonder if I impale the pit of the avocado currently residing in my fridge, put it in a water glass, and encourage it a bit – I can even play Mozart to it if needs be – I can figure out how to grow some avocados in my kitchen.

Not so sweet news at Necco

The New England Confectionery Company used to be located on Mass Ave in Cambridge, and when you got anywhere near it, you got a whiff of that wonderful sicky-sweet candy smell.

In the early aughts, Necco moved out to Revere, just north of Boston, but they still kept making Necco Wafers, Sweethearts, Sky Bars, Candy Buttons, Mary Janes and Squirrel Nuts. Childhood standbys – even those Candy Buttons which were half-paper.

Even with the annual Valentine’s Day sales goose that Necco gets for Sweethearts, those little candy hearts with the message on them, Necco is ailing/failing. Unless they find a buyer in the next couple of months, they may have to layoff most of their workforce: 395 mostly worker bees, with a few execs thrown in for good measure:

Employees who could be affected include cooks, hard candy makers, truck operators, various machine operators and attendants, and administrative positions — including the chief financial officer and chief executive. (Source: Boston Globe)

Necco Wafers have been around since 1847. In truth, sometimes when you bite into a Necco wafer the feeling you get is that your roll might have been one of the first ones to roll off the line. Still, it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Even though, once I stopped playing Mass and using white Necco wafers for communion – and that would have been 60 years back – I have probably averaged one Necco wafer a year. And that’s a wafer, not a roll.

And a world without Sweethearts. Sigh. I just like the idea of them. So much so that, when some young friends had a baby on February 13th and invited me over to MGH to meet her on Valentine’s Day, I stopped by the pricey kids’ store on Charles Street and bought an absolutely adorbs little two piece outfit decorated with Sweethearts.

And I will sorely and surely miss my annual Mary Jane and Squirrel Nut, purchased (only if they’re fresh!) at Brookfield Orchards when my sister Trish and I make our annual apple run and load up on penny candy. I guess I’ll be okay as long as Happy Apple still stocks Boston Baked Beans and maple sugar candy (that wonderful New England invitation to a diabetic coma).

Ah, it’s so hard when these little blasts from the past fade away.

All may not be lost.

Necco chief executive Michael] McGee stated in the March 6 notice that the company “has been in ongoing negotiations with potential buyers to allow for its continued operations,” but that if a sale is not completed or if the company opts for layoffs, employees could be terminated as soon as 60 days from the date of the notice.

I worked at a couple of places that, because of the volume of jobs impacted, had to stick with this 60 day layoff notice. And it was always hell. Everyone would pretend to work – which is possible in a white collar professional environment in ways that it most decidedly would not be in a candy factory – but spent most of our time speculating about who was going to get the axe. Certain product lines? Certain departments? People hired after x? People hired before y? People at or above a certain level? People at or below a certain level?

We would make black-humor jokes. And tell layoff horror stories, including the one about the guy who had a heart attack and died the day before Layoff Day. At his desk. And, yes, he had been on the list.

Those who felt most vulnerable would update their resumes.

Those who knew people who knew people would try to glean whatever stray bit of inside scoop they could, even if they were sworn to secrecy and couldn’t share it.

Those were the days. Days that I don’t miss at all.

In high tech, whether we were staying (this round anyway) or going, most of us were pretty sure we’d find comparable work somewhere else. Not so likely this will happen in candy land. Cooks, hard candy makers…Not a lot of jobs like that around.

“We deeply regret and understand the uncertainty this action may cause our valued employees,” McGee said in the letter.

Not as much as those cooks and hard candy makers…

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Nearly a decade ago, I did a post on Necco’s quality control guy (and, of course, on my Necco memories).

Oh, goody, the Winklevoss twins are back!

I must say, I do spend quite a bit of time contemplating The Big Questions. Sometimes, the questions are one-shots:

Why did the a-hole in the SUV, turning on a red light from the second outer lane on Arlington (not from the lane that comes with the right hand turn arrow, which at the moment of offense had a red light) into a crosswalk with a walk sign on Comm Ave – you know, the woman staring fixedly into the smartphone she was holding up – give me the stink-eye when I yelled at her for almost hitting me. I am a practiced jaywalker, so I know enough to look when I’m doing anything pedestrian-y, even if what I’m doing is 100% legal and 100% MY right-of-way. So, that’s the kind of one-shot Big Question I tend to ponder

Then there are the semi-recurring questions, as in:

Who the f bags up a dog poop and leaves it on the front steps of a building that’s not even theirs, especially when there’s a trash can less than 5 seconds walk away. (Variation on a theme: Starbucks cup, beer can, pizza box…) I know I live on a well-traveled main drag, but still, that trash can is seconds away. It’s your trash. How about you dispose of it, not me.

Not to mention the really Big Questions, the Mega Philosophical Questions:

Why? Why me? What for? How?

I also have a somewhat unique Big Question category, and that is Big Questions related to the Winklevoss twins:

Why? Why them? What for? How?

Would the idea of these guys be so amusing if they had a name like Gates or Buffett or Sergei Brin, rather than a name like Winklevoss?

Okay. You can’t help what your name is. And more than once I’ve wished for a surname a bit less boring than Rogers. But Winklevoss? This is just a funny name. A winkle. Sounds like a tiny little something-or-other. Like a tiny little sea snail. Oh, that’s because it is. Or, in an alternative meaning: extract or obtain something with difficulty. "I swore I wasn't going to tell her, but she winkled it all out of me.”

And that voss part? Low German for fox.

So a Winklevoss is a foxy little sea snail? Or someone who extracted a fox with difficulty?

Anyway, Winklevoss is something of a smile-on-the-face name, no?

Then there’s the fact that they always appear in tandem, leading to the question:

Would this connected at the hip thing seem less weird if they were regular old brothers, rather than twins?

There are, of course, other questions about the Winklevoss, and you may be asking the biggest of them all.

Who are they?

As those who saw The Social Network, the movie about Facebook, know, the Winklevoss twins were the prepped out fellows who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. They sued Zuckerberg and ended up with $65 million, which is several orders of magnitude removed from Zuckerberg’s wealth, which is $75 billion. In the movie, their big scene is when they go whinging off to the office of the president of Harvard to complain about their not-so-prepped out classmate who ripped them off. (As I recall, the president of Harvard just about laughed in their twin faces. He may even have called them douches. But that may have just been a thought cloud.)

That was then, and $65 million is only relative chump change, so the Winklevoss brothers (a.k.a, the Winklevi) have been able to eke out a modest existence as venture capitalists. And, hoping not to get screwed out of the big payday again, some of their venturing capitalism has focused on the bitcoin world. Because if an online platform where most of the users share pictures of their grandkids or run contests for the next flavor of Dorito turns into $75 billion, how much might a big old tulip-bulb of a disruptor like bitcoin be worth some day.

Seemingly (at least according to Wikpedia), bitcoin has yet to deliver the success of their dreams (and Zuckerberg’s living reality). Their dabbling has been a decidedly mixed bag (emphasis mine):

The twins' company, Math-Based Asset Services LLC, filed to register a bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund called Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust in 2013. The fund was denied in March 2017.

In 2013, the twins led a $1.5 million in seed funding of BitInstant, a bitcoin payment processor. However, in January 2014,Charlie Shrem, CEO of BitInstant, was arrested and charged with money laundering related to the Silk Road online black market investigation. The brothers said they were passive investors in the company.

In 2014, the twins launched Winkdex, a financial index that tracks the price of bitcoin. The index uses data from seven exchanges, weighed based on the daily trading volume of each exchange.

In March 2014, it was announced that the twins had purchased seats on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic shuttle using the profits they had made from bitcoin

In October 2015, Gemini, the twins' Bitcoin exchange, received approval to launch from the New York State Department of Financial Services. The exchange is targeted at both first-time users and professional traders.

And now they’re looking to:

…create the Virtual Commodity Association, a self-regulatory organization meant to police digital-currency markets and custodians. The non-profit group would aim to develop industry standards, promote transparency and work with regulators including the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to prevent fraud. (Source: Bloomberg)

God knows that mondo bitcoin could use some regulating. And a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner, Brian Quintenz, has given the Winklevi a shout out:

“I congratulate Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss on their energetic leadership and thoughtful approach in outlining a virtual commodity self-regulatory organization (SRO) concept,” he said.

I’m sure I’m piling on here, especially given that I’m sure there have been plenty of times when my name has been coupled with a sib, and our last name used just once. But “Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss” sounds like they should be a married couple, not two professionals in business together. Wouldn’t Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss be a more serious way to refer to them?

But I’m sure that I’m being a complete and utter nitpicker here. Leading to the Big Question:

Why am I such a nitpicker?

And, of course, a final Big Question:

Will the bitcoin market, as currently constituted, explode or implode before the Winklevoss twins have the opportunity to regulate it?

So many deep thoughts, so little time…

“A Little Bit of Heaven…”

I have been at this blogging thing for a good long time. Long enough to have accumulated eleven posts that talk about St. Patrick’s Day, which all blather on about being an Irish American, what’s going on in Ireland, or whatever pops into my mind as this day approaches

What’s popping into my mind on this, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, is that, tomorrow evening. I’ll be leaving on a jet plane. And not just any old jet plane. An Aer Lingus jet plane. Heading for Ireland.

It will be an odd little trip.

One evening in the town my great-grandparents Trainor hailed from. A couple of nights in Dublin. A couple of nights in Galway.

I will no doubt be doing a post or two on the trip, but those won’t show up for another week or so. Next week’s Pink Slip schedule is stacked already.

So today I’m packing. And charging my Kindle. Making sure I have everything that needs to be printed out printed out. Making notes to myself to remember to pack my laptop.

I will be drinking a cup of Barry’s Tea. The better to wash down a slab of soda bread slathered with Kerry Gold Butter.

But, since I have so many oldies but goodies that cover St. Patrick’s Day and American Irish-ism, I won’t be spending any time coming up with a new angle on the day.

They’re all pretty good, but I think my fave is You Say Potato, which also includes the recipe for the world’s best Irish soda bread.

2017: Faith & Begorrah

2016: Kiss Me, I’m Half Irish

2015: The Wearin’ O The Green

2014: St. Patricks’ Day 2014

2013: The Ides of St. Patrick’s Day”

2012: Answering Ireland’s CallI

2011: St. Patrick’s Day 2011

2010: St. Paddy’s Day No More We’ll Keep.

2009: Irish Eyes Not So Smiling These Days.

2008: You Say Po-tay-to, I say Po-tah-to. Who’s Irish and Who’s Not.

2007: Kiss Me, I’m Irish.

I’ve titled this piece “A Little Bit of Heaven”, not because I believe Ireland is a little bit of heaven. I love Ireland, but if there is a heaven, it’s hard to believe it gets as much rain as Ireland. But when my father was growing up, he and his sibs and cousins all had a party piece that they were required to perform when called upon. My father’s was “A Little Bit of Heaven.”

Here, for your listening pleasure, “A Little Bit of Heaven”.

Not my father’s voice, by the way.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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Just in case that link doesn’t work – and I’m thinking it won’t – here’s the bare-naked URL:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACpt3Q6Ke34

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Famous Volcano Has Strange Effect On Women

I like to think of myself as someone who pays absolutely no attention to ads, but this is absolutely not true. I may not respond to them, but I do pay plenty of attention. Ads are always catching my eye. Or my ear. Or both.

In the former category was a full-page ad that appeared in a recent Economist.

Their ads are generally low-key and/or highbrow. Quarter page b&w or full-page 4-color for an upscale business or for someone to direct the railway system in some Indian state. And then there was one with this headline:

Famous Volcano Has Strange Effect On Women

And this subhead:

Man and nature collaborate to create a glamorous green ring guaranteed to rock her world!

Well, mark me down as someone who wouldn’t mind at all if man and nature were to collaborate to rock my world, but I’m afraid the Spirit Lake Helenite Ring doesn’t have a strange effect on me:

Okay, it’s only $99 – and they throw a pair of stud earrings in for
“FREE” (EXCLUSIVE). But this deal definitely doesn’t grab me in the least. 

The ad also contains this gobbledygook:

Your Offer Code: SLR520-02. You must use this insider offer code to get our special price.

Special price only for customers using the offer code versus the price on Sauer.com without your offer code.

Of course, the price on the website – $478 – has all kind of red-letter notices that, if you use the online offer code, the ring and studs cost only $99. So…

Okay, it’s not in the same league as an email from a Nigerian prince,
but I really would like to know whether anyone in the history of Helenite (the manmade gemstone made from Mount St. Helen’s ash) ever paid that $478 for this jewelry. I’m guessing no.  And I’m also guessing that there aren’t a lot of Economist readers who took advantage of this fantastic offer, unless there are some teenage boy readers out there who fell for the “strange effect on women” headline and ordered one for the teenage girl of their dreams. Or for Dear Old Mom.

The other ad that caught my eye, and my ear, is the one that educates us about PD. It shows the zipper area of a pair of jeans, partially unzipped, and asks:

If you’re curved below the belt…

Well, if you are curved in your nether regions, you might well have PD, which stands for Peyronie’s Disease, which I’m quite sure is no laughing matter. Not familiar with PD? It’s basically curvature of the penis, and if your penis curves like a scimitar, it apparently can be painful. The pharma company running the ad presumably has a drug the helps with PD, but it’s not mentioned.

Unlike the ad for the Spirit Lake Helenite Ring, the PD ad does have a strange effect on this woman. And that effect is to think need-to-know-basis, and to wish it out of my hearing and sight.

For crying out loud – which is how we used to say ‘for fuck’s sake’ in the quaint old days before we had ads for PD and ED – I was just getting over being bombarded by ads for ED. I’ve pretty much become inured to them to the point where I don’t even know if the Viva Viagra and Cialis in the bathtubs ads are still running. I’m guessing that if they are still on the air, they’re airing on the same network where I’m seeing an occasional PD ad, which is MSNBC, which presumably appeals to the demographic that would be concerned with both PD and ED.

Maybe it’s like the ads for Frebreeze that talk about being noseblind. I no longer notice the ED ads. Thankfully.

Anyway, I remember when it was a big deal to have ads on TV for “feminine” products like tampons. Guess this was one area in which grrrllll power was ahead of the curve. (Note: curve curve, not penile curve) We’ve come a long way, baby.

Speaking of which, there’s also an ad that considers the ladies for the Book of the Month Club – and who knew that Book of the Month (which I grew up with, and subscribed to on my own as a young adult) still existed? In this ad, women are raving about getting their monthly book, and those listening to them think they’re talking about getting their periods. The ad belabors the point, but it’s pretty funny. At least the first time around.

As it turns out, Book of the Month is remaking itself by aiming at women in their 20’s and 30’s. (Interesting article on BOMC on Wapo can be found here.)

Guess us old gals will have to stick with Amazon and Kindle.

And maybe I should turn off MSNBC (and put down The Economist) and pick up a good book for a change. Think of it: AD FREE!

Young Blood

Bill Faloon – not to be confused with granfalloon – has spent his career on the life and death or, rather on the death and life-after-death and/or what, me die? continuum. At one point, he was a mortician. Then he apparently started thinking that there were better things to do with dead bodies than embalm and dust-to-dust them, and got involved in cryogenics. I don’t think he was the one who froze Ted Williams head, but that’s what we’re talking about.

Somewhere along the line, he co-founded the Church of Perpetual Life (“fellowship for longevity enthusiasts”), no relation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But, when you think about it, is there anything more perpetually indulgent that trying to live forever?

Faloon is also the co-founded of an outfit called the Life Extension Foundation, which sells vitamins and supplements that promise to extend your life. And, coming soon, blood, which he was flogging at a recent symposium on staving off death which attendees paid $195 a piece to attend:

“Take that initiative,” Faloon urged his audience of about 120 people who had flown in from as far as California, Scotland, and Spain. How? Paying to participate in a soon-to-launch clinical trial testing transfusions of young blood “offers the greatest potential for everyone in this room to add a lot of healthy years to their life,” Faloon said. “Not only do you get to potentially live longer … but you’re going to be healthier. And some of the chronic problems you have now may disappear.” (Source: StatNews)

I don’t know if I necessarily want to live all that much longer than I might be actuarially entitled to, but if some of those chronic problems could potentially disappear…No more frozish shoulder, no more gimpy right ankle.

And then I read that participating in the trial could cost $285K.

So maybe I’ll stick with PT for that frozish gimpy stuff. Especially when I saw what a real scientist, as opposed to a mortician turned cryo-guy-o turned live forever huckster,has to say:

“It just reeks of snake oil,” said Michael Conboy, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s collaborated on studies sewing old and young mice together and transfusing blood between them. “There’s no evidence in my mind that it’s going to work.”

Which is not to say that there aren’t folks betting that there’s life in them there pills.

Google has a “secretive anti-aging spinout, called Calico.” And Celuarity, a spinout of biotech biggie Celgene, just raised 250-large (that’s a quarter of a billion dollars) to build a “biorefinery” that’s going to use placentas “to delay the aging process.” (This made me ask myself how Barbara Hershey is holding up. After all, didn’t she oh-so-famously eat the placenta after the birth of her child with Kung Fu man David Carradine? Turns out that didn’t happen:

After Free was born, she revealed they had planned to eat the afterbirth (“It’s very nutritious”) but buried it instead beneath an apricot tree “so he can eat the fruit nurtured by our own bodies.” (Source: People)

Whatever the impact of the fruit of the placenta had on little Free, true to his name, at age 9 Free renamed himself Tom. Meanwhile, David Carradine died of autoerotic asphyxiation in Thailand in 2009. Sorry about that triple ewwwww bit of info.)

Anyway, if you want to take a chance on the young blood, you’ll be working with Dr. Dipnarine Maharaj.

The study, which he describes as a Phase 1/Phase 2 trial, is a first-in-human test, which means that it is designed to evaluate only whether the experimental therapy is safe. But in his remarks at the symposium, Maharaj didn’t hesitate to make bold promises about what the treatment could do to ameliorate the frailty that results from getting older.

“We’re saying that we will defy aging,” Maharaj told the crowd at one point. “We believe that this could benefit everyone who is here,” he declared at another moment. (Source: back to StatNews)

Well, we do know that, at $285K to take part, Dr. Maharaj will benefit from it. (The number of participants is capped at 30, so the total take would be $8.5M. Faloon has no stake.)

There didn’t appear to be many takers at the symposium, but hope is springing eternal when you’re a fringe scientist. Or billionaire libertarian eccentric Peter Thiel, who’s supposedly interested in the young blood approach.

According to the article, no one has as yet signed up for the trial. That includes Faloon. He seems more wedded to the cryogenic thang:

When flying, Faloon used to lug a thermally insulated helmet in his carry-on bag that he’d put on during takeoffs and landings. The idea was that, in the event the plane crashed and burned, his head could still be salvaged and frozen. But he no longer takes his helmet on flights, he said, in part because he’s not sure it will actually work.

The helmet, not the cyrogenics.

All I can say is, with us Boomers having little interest in going gentle into that good night, we’re going to be hearing about a lot more of these ideas. Some of them (most of them, no doubt) are crackpot. But some of them (one of them) might work.

Maybe I’ll change my mind at some point, but as of this point in time, thanks but no thanks. Happy to stick with old blood that’s coursing through my veins, even if it does nothing for the gimpy ankle.

Burn, baby burn. Flood, baby, flood. Just don’t ask us to pay for it.

Today, we’re having a major-league Nor’easter. As of this writing (Monday evening), we’re looking at over a foot of snow in Boston proper – and 2 feet-plus in some areas. Fortunately, while we’re looking at blizzard conditions (high winds, included), we’re not in some bad juju, high astronomical moondance sitch. So our coastal areas are not supposed to get flooded out. Or not flooded at out as badly as they were in the storm a couple of weeks back, when waves were roguing over two-story shorefront houses on the South Shore and Boston’s Aquarium T-station entrance was surrounded by sandbags.

Every winter we have at least one storm where we watch homes and clam shacks on Boston’s North and South Shores get taken out by Mother Nature. Front yards that used to stretch putting-greenly down to the water’s edge, conjuring up images of Kennedy family touch football games at Hyannisport (or my family’s more sedate – ahem – croquet tournaments in West Dennis), are now kaput. Instead of front yards, there are boulders and chunks of concrete flush up against the front steps, hoping to keep the bays at bay.

And Plum Island, which is attached to Newburyport by a causeway, is more and more in danger of moving from a semi-detached island to a fully-detached island.

We get the storm scenes every year – always during the winter, and often during the summer after a hurricane or even a really bad rain storm – but they’re getting more frequent and more severe – in part because the storms are more frequent and more severe, and in part because there are more permanent homes along the coastline. What used to be a clam shack and a few flimsy, non-winterized summer houses are now a bistro and a lot of year-round structures.

And, of course, every time there’s a storm, we hear that the folks who got flooded out will retrench, and rebuild.

And they can do so because, even if it’s god-awful expensive, folks have insurance. Plus the cities, towns, and the state all pitch in to add infrastructure improvements like seawalls and reduning the dunes by trucking in sand.

Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, although they do have mudslides aplenty, they’re not so much worried about flooding as they are about fire.

Which means that when we’re not watching local television to see clam shacks floating out to sea, we can switch to national television to see neighborhoods where one side of a street burnt to the slab, while across the way, the houses are all intact.

But those burnt to a crisp buildings are going to be rebuilt just as surely as those Massachusetts houses that turned into boathouses on their way to being smashed to smithereens are going to get rebuilt, too.

Way out west, like it is here, the problem is worsening weather and development and redevelopment in places that shouldn’t have been developed to begin with. And sure shouldn’t be redeveloped after they’re leveled. Because it’s going to happen again.

As climate change creates warmer, drier conditions, which increase the risk of fire, California has a chance to rethink how it deals with the problem. Instead, after the state’s worst fire season on record, policymakers appear set to make the same decisions that put homeowners at risk in the first place. Driven by the demands of displaced residents, a housing shortage, and a thriving economy, local officials are issuing permits to rebuild without updating building codes. They’re even exempting residents from zoning rules so they can build bigger homes.

State officials have proposed shielding people in fire-prone areas from increased insurance premiums—potentially at the expense of homeowners elsewhere in California—in an effort to encourage them to remain in areas certain to burn again. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) spent a record $700 million on fire suppression from July to January, yet last year Governor Jerry Brown suspended the fee that people in fire-prone areas once paid to help offset those costs.

Critics warn that those decisions, however well-intentioned, create perverse incentives that favor the short-term interests of homeowners at the edge of the wilderness—leaving them vulnerable to the next fire while pushing the full cost of risky building decisions onto state and federal taxpayers, firefighters, and insurance companies. “The moral hazard being created is absolutely enormous,” says Ian Adams, a policy analyst at the R Street Institute, which advocates using market signals to address climate risk. “If you want to rebuild in an area where there’s a good chance your home is going to burn down again, go for it. But I don’t want to be subsidizing you.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Well, I never thought I’d be agreeing with the R Street Institute – and I’ll no doubt be eating my sodden words when the Charles River backs up into my bedroom and the value of my condo plummets – but I’m all for “go for it.”

Let insurance compensate for the first destruction for those who’ve owned a place for a while, but after that, one strike and you’re out. Or at least on your own. As for new construction in places that are statistically likely to burn or flood, how about non-subsidized insurance? If you want to build on the flood plain, have at it – and have at that $$$ insurance policy.

I feel terrible for those who lose their homes to natural disasters, especially those who’ve lived in their homes from way back in time, before they realized that they were living in peril. But we gotta start facing some facts here. It’s going to get worse. We may have to abandon some areas so that they can go back to nature and serve as the fire brakes and flood prevention zones that they were intended to be.

Swaggy baggy 2018

In all my non-excitement over last week’s Academy Awards – Frances McDormand did something about women, Bonnie and Clyde made up for last year’s Best Picture announcement fail, the movie about the woman and the fishlike creature won, and I do believe the only film I saw last year in a movie theater was Lady Bird  - I nearly lost sight of an ultra important aspect of the Oscars: what’s in the swag bag?

As you are no doubt well aware, each year the main nominees (directing and acting) get swag bags full of all sorts of goodies. So even if you don’t get a statue, you get something to show for your troubles. (Sorry Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Greta Gerwig: I thought Lady Bird was great, but nary a one of your won anything. At least you didn’t go home completely empty-handed.)

The point, of course is marketing. After all, the folks that get the swag bags are likely to have enough $$$ to afford all these goodies on their own. Maybe they should randomly draw a few names from the lesser nominees – Best Use of a Weird Voice in an Animated Short – and put a smile on a few faces that could use the loot.

Anyway, the swag bag is worth over $100K, and this year’s edition has in it:

A 12-Night Trip to Zanzibar and Tanzania
For two. Because who wants to go on a lux trip with private meals and private safari guide all on their lonesome? One thing I’m wondering: is there just one trip that all the winners take at once, or can they go on a truly private version – or semi-private with their SO? I mean do Frances McDormand and her husband the Coen brother want to hob-nob with Daniel Day-Lewis? Does Timothée Chalamet want to hang with Meryl Streep? Not that I really need to know the answer. For all I know, they all give their bag contents to their personal assistants or letter carriers.

A Week’s Worth of Spa Treatments
After doing a bit of shoveling last week, and with a still semifreddo shoulder going on, a 90-minute deep-tissue massage at the Golden Door sounds pretty darned good, even if the Golden Door sounds like a strip joint or porn film. But that’s just me thinking about the Golden Banana (“Boston’s premier strip club) and/or about the classic 1970’s porn flick, Behind the Green Door. Not that I saw it, but I do not believe it garnered any Academy Award nominations.

23andMe DNA Testing Kit
Seriously, at $99, I’m pretty sure that most folks can afford this one. But I am a sucker for this sort of thing, and love those shows that trace down the ancestry of Hollywood types, who all turn out to be the bastard great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of Bonnie Prince Charlie, or have a distant relation who did the calligraphy on the Declaration of Independence. Watching these shows, I was always wondering why all these celebs had claim-to-fame antecedents, while us nobodies went back generation upon generation of non-entities. How could this be? Then I read that they cherry pick the actors who have something interesting in their background. I.e., they run down dozens of boring histories before coming up with someone related to Custer’s bugler. Oh. (Duh.) Anyway, if the swag bag recipients spit in the vial, I’m sure that some show or another will be contacting them if their DNA turns up that they’re related to Amelia Earhart or Julius Caesar.

A Six-Night Trip in Hawaii
We had a nasty frigid snap, and a couple of awful storms, but this winter – unless you live on the South Shore of Boston and had rogue waves washing over your two-story house – wasn’t all that bad. Nonetheless, a trip to Hawaii sounds not so bad this time of year. The rack rate for the one BR “luxury” villa is $500/night, by the way. Which sounds sort of low rent for the average Hollywood glamour puss. But which works for me.

 

Ten Personal Training Sessions

Theoretically, this sounds good. But then I think about someone whose website says “Welcome to a Better You,” which is what personal trainer Alexis Seletzky’s does. There is no doubt a better me lurking out there somewhere. Nonetheless, thanks, but no thanks.

 

A Stay at a Luxurious Greek Resort
One measly night a $460/night resort – yet another luxury villa, only this one’s in Greece, not Hawaii. If I’m going to drag all that way for a one-night stand, I think I’ll stop off at Lake Como and chill with George, Amal and the twins.

Color-Changing Lipstick
We’re getting closer to the bottom of the swag bag barrel here. This lipstick is only worth $22. But what, pray tell, is  color-changing lipstick? I rarely wear lipstick – too much trouble to figure out what to do with that thin upper lip – but I can’t imagine wanting the color to change. Is it chameleon-like? Does it assume the color of whatever you’re wearing?

Okay, okay. I broke down and googled. It’s like a mood ring. Only for your lips. So it adjusts to your body chemistry to create the perfect hue. But apparently does nothing for a thin upper lip.

Other highlights
Hard to believe that My Magic Mud toothpaste is a highlight, but for $20 a tube, I guess it should be. And “hundreds of dollars worth of Le Cèline false eyelashes”? Maybe I’ll cede mine to my personal trainer. Or leave them in the bed-stand drawer at George and Amal’s.

And then there’s “access to a new dating app called “NeverMissed” before it launches.” Is it just me, or wouldn’t celebrities tend to avoid dating apps? But what do I know about dating apps or celebrities”

Sweet 68 and never been missed.

No wonder my personal swag bag is running on empty.

Source of Swaggy Baggy info: Money/Time