25 Dying Professions: Part Three

Here are the final entrants on Work and Money’s list of the 25 most dying-est professions in The States.

18. Jeweler – there are actually two definitions of “jeweler” (thanks, Merriam-Webster). One definition covers those who make or repair jewelry, the other covers those who sell jewelry. The reason the article gives for the projected decline in the need for jewelers is that more and more of it is produced overseas, rather than in Rhode Island, where it used to be made. That wouldn’t seem to impact the job fortunes of those who sell jewelry. Assuming they’re also on the downward slide, I’ll chalk it up to ordering jewels on the Internet. Me? Most of my jewelry – self-purchased or a gift – is artsy stuff that comes from the sorts of stores that sell artsy stuff. Which doesn’t include shops that sell jewelry, watches, silverware and china  - those anniversary gift stores I seldom find myself in – and that I can’t imagine a millennial in, other than – maybe – to look at engagement rings. 

19. Textile machine workers – I watched with my very own eyes the textile industry go South. When I was a kid, we went during the summer to mill outlet stores in Ware and/or Fall River to buy tee-shirts. And then they were no more. They were in South Carolina. Now they’re not even there. They’re in Vietnam an Bangladesh. So I’m surprised that there are enough textile machine workers left to forecast a decline for.

20. Furniture finishers – these are the folks who either repair broken chairs and tables, or who work in furniture production. We used to have a lot of the latter in Massachusetts, too. Before they moved to North Carolina. Now, a lot of that work is automated – or moved across some pond or another. As for those who repair broken chairs and tables. How Little House in the Prairie. Nowadays, when people break furniture, they toss it out and head to IKEA for something new (and for some Swedish meatballs, of course). But my question is: how often does furniture get broken? Unless you have 10 little monkeys, jumping on the bed – i.e., rambunctious kiddoes – you probably don’t break a lot of furniture. Even when I was growing up, we weren’t much by way of furniture breakers. The only piece of furniture I remember breaking was the leg of a bed in the girls bedroom. Having read about Hanukah in Highlights Magazine at the office of our dentist – who was Jewish – we decided one evening to celebrate our very own Festival of No Lights. This entailed turning off the lights and leaping from one twin bed to the other. The result was a broken leg on one of those beds. Mine, I believe. And my parents didn’t bring in any furniture finisher. My father pulled out his Blue Jacket’s Manual (his Navy handbook from WWII) and shored up the broken bed leg with it. (Aside to my sister Trish: the festival was before your time, but that’s why what eventually became your bed was propped up by a Blue Jacket’s Manual.)

21. Door-to-door salespeople, you will not be surprised to learn, are a thing of the past. Our neighborhood wasn’t the kind of area that attracted, say, Bible or vaccum cleaner salesmen, but I do remember the Fuller Brush Man, and the tiny samples of lilac toilet water he used to leave behind – samples that my mother gave to us to use as perfume. The other group I remember going door-to-door were Jehovah Witnesses. They were either trying to find converts, or find people willing to put them up in their homes when they converged on Worcester for a full-immersion baptism ceremony in Coes Pond. The JW’s – a sect considered pretty anti-Catholic -  didn’t have a ton of luck in a neighborhood that was about 99.99% Catholic, but they tried. In this day and age, opening your door to a door-to-door salesman (or a Jehovah Witness) is gloriously out of the realm of possibility. But if you want to be a non-door-to-door salesman, fortune is smiling on you: healthy growth over the next decade.

22. Print binding and finishing services – increased automation and decreased demand are finishing off this profession. Let’s face it, today you can self-publish your whatever, on demand, with quick turnaround. No need to seek out a bookbinder to turn you into an author. This does have me wondering on thing: do universities sill require PhD candidates to submit bound versions of their dissertation. I remember taking copies of the typescript of my husband’s thesis to a bookbinder on Brattle Street, a hop, skip and a jump from Harvard. They were doing quite a brisk business, as I recall. Just googled and there’s no dissertation binder there. So maybe you just have to submit a digital version of your thesis, something that didn’t exist back in the day.

23. Detective – what with all the spyware out there, and DNA databanks that let amateur private eyes track down murderers, a lot of the shoe leather work associated with detectives is going away. My big question: what’s going to happen to the mystery novel?

24. Routine Architect –  oh, there’ll still be demand for the Frank Lloyd Wrights and the Frank Gehrys to create arty, masterwork buildings. But the folks who focus on smaller, less glamorous projects, are running into a problem with the DIY-ers who want to design on their own. Or who want to buy plans designed by real architects online. They get the benefit of a professional’s eye, but for a lot less than hiring someone one-on-one.

25. Primary Care Physician – I’m old enough to remember doctors making house calls. Those were the days… Anyway, there’s still going to be a need for PCP’s – I know I’d hate like hell if something happened to mine – but we’re all going to be doing more self-diagnosis with kits that tell us if we have a strep throat. And more self-monitoring with wearables that check our vitals. So our primaries will focus on higher level tasks like “addressing human factors that produce better wellness outcomes: counseling for obesity and addiction, performance coaching, or addressing urgent conditions.” Performance coaching? From a physician? Oh, no…

Bottom line: sorry to break it to you, but if you’ve had your heart set on one of these jobs, you might want to set your heart somewhere else. (I hear there’s a growing need for home health aides.)

25 Dying Professions: Part Two

Thinking of a career change? Just starting out?

Me neither.

Still, I found the list of 25 Dying Professions that was published on Work and Money quite interesting. Yesterday, I meandered through the first 8 professions on the list. Here’s the next tranche.

9. Financial planners – One more job being replaced by software and – gulp – robo advisors. Are these robo advisors like the virtual economist clone that UBS developed to brief their clients, a story that caught my eye last month and that I posted about in Will The Real Daniel Kalt Please Stand Up? I’m guessing that they’re not as slick as robotic Herr Kalt. Probably just some weird voice-response app. Mostly, of course, those with wealth will get to meet with actual humans if they want, while everyone else – in an era where full time employment is chancier, retirement plans are non-existent, and “they” are taking potshots at Social Security – will be working with software and robo advisors. In other words, those most in need of the human element won’t have any access to it. Time to add financial literacy to the high school curriculum.

10. Floral designer – I know that every grocery store pretty much sells flowers these days. And, in truth, most of the times I buy flowers, it’s a bunch from Roche Brothers, where I shop. Sometimes it’s a pre-fab mixed bouquet. Sometimes it’s a bunch of tulips or sunflowers or daffodils. Sometimes I do some kind of a mix-and-match. And I know that a lot of flowers are ordered online. (Side note: I’ve had very mixed results when going this route, including pricey dead flowers in something that looked like an ash urn, delivered to my cousin the day after her brother died.) But, oh boo-hoo that floral designer as a profession is tumbling arse over teakettle into oblivion. On a more positive note, floral design skills are transferable to merchandise display and interior design. Mostly, though, oh boo-hoo.

11. Postal worker -  People are getting e-bills. People are sending e-cards and e-invitations. People are writing e-mails. What they aren’t doing is putting a stamp on anything. So there’s a lot less mail being delivered. Thus, we don’t need all those postal workers. Personally while I’m still a hold out when it comes to greeting cards, I’ve converted most of my correspondence to the e-version. On one hand, that’s too bad. Who doesn’t like getting a real piece of mail? A thank you note. A wedding invitation. A birthday card. On the other hand, I’m more apt to send someone I don’t see that often a chatty email than I ever would be to send them a letter-letter. I do make up for it to some degree by sending a ton of greeting cards: Christmas cards, St. Patrick’s Day cards, cards-for-every-holiday to my nieces, birthday cards to everyone I know, sympathy cards (at this age, I keep a few on hand). But I’ll very much feel bad if they cut back on mail delivery, if they close my little local PO, if there are no more mail men (and women) pounding the pavement. I won’t go postal, but I’ll feel bad.

12. Photo processor – Remember dropping off rolls of films at the drug store? Remember those kiosks in the parking lot of the malls? They weren’t dodo-birded by Polaroid cameras. Those suckers really didn’t produce very high quality instant pictures. If people wanted nice pictures, they used their Kodak Brownie or their high end Leica and had their little bright yellow rolls of film to drop off. You’d get back an envelope that contained your pictures and your wonderful negatives that you’d hang onto for when you wanted reprints. And then all of a sudden everyone had a reasonably good camera right there in their pocket. And everyone became their own photographer. Or did they? Well, with digital photography, the photo processor profession is bidding us adieu. But over the next 10 years, they’re predicting that demand for professional photographers to take portraits or do commercial shoots will increase by over 150,000. Guess all those amateur photographers are taking a second look at the kabillion pics they’ve shot with their iPhone and are realizing that they actually do want a decent picture of their kids and dogs.

13. Data entry clerk – Sounds like the person who sat at the roll-top desk next to Bartleby the Scrivener. Every piece of information imaginable is out there/in there in digital form, but a good heap of it is data we enter ourselves, filling in online forms, etc. Sorry if you had your heart set on being a data entry clerk.

14. Telephone Switchboard Operators – Hello, Central! Sure, thanks to technology, it’s in steep decline as a profession. But who knew there were any of them left? I’m trying to think of the last time I called a company and actually had a human pick up the phone.

15. Farmers and Ranchers – Once again, automation is replacing workers. We’ll still be eating. It’s just that there won’t be that many Old MacDonalds growing our corn and strawberries; there won’t be that many Marlboro Men riding the range looking for dogies to brand. It’s easy to get a little sentimental, a little weepy, about the demise of such elemental professions. But in real life, I’m a city girl. How many farmers and ranchers have I actually known in my life? My mother’s parents were farmers in the Old World, and they had some friends or cousins or something who had a farm in Wisconsin that we visited once when we were kids. What I remember about that excursion was that it was blazing hot and they were tarring the road that took us there. That the farmhouse was peculiarly divided, so that to get from the living room to the kitchen, you had to walk outside. (Must have been nice in the winter. Good thing it doesn’t get cold in Wisconsin.) And they served us some really nasty lemonade, nasty thanks to the well water that they had they had an extremely strong mineral taste of some sort. My husband’s aunt and uncle were tobacco farmers who converted their farm to a golf course before I met Jim. But they still had friends and relatives who still farmed tobacco, so I got to meet a few of them over the years. But have I ever really known any farmers or ranchers? Errrr, no.

16. Fast Food Cook – These jobs going away is not good news for those with less than a high school education. But going away they are. “Fast food is increasingly becoming an automated industry. The chains have found it cheaper to prepare food off site and simply have employees reheat it in their stores. Tat was unthinkable in most fast food businesses even a decade ago, but food technology has advanced to the point where the microwaved version doesn’t lack the flavor of the cooked-on-site version.” Maybe so, but pre-fab burger reheated in a microwave doesn’t sound nearly as appealing as a burger flipped on a grill.

17. Newspaper Reporter – Okay. This is the the only job on the list of 25 that I actually wouldn’t have minded having. Make that “the career I most likely would have pursued if I had it to do over, and if, when I had it to do over, I was gutsier than when I had it to do the first time around.”

Tomorrow we’ll cover the remainder of the soon-to-be-defunct professions out there.

25 Dying Professions: Part One

Despite the fact that I’m not looking for a profession, and thus in no need of insight into which ones are going south opportunity-wise, I’m always interested in the prognosis for different job categories. Thus, I was delighted to stumble across an article on Work & Money entitled “25 Dying Professions You Should Avoid.” Here’s part one of my take on the roundup:

1. Travel Agent: This one has been on the list since, like, forever, a profession that’s been circling the drain since the first bulletin board for airfare comparisons went live. There used to be a travel agency on Beacon Hill, and I remember going in there to book flights. Can’t remember where we were going, but it must have been in 1976 that we went in to talk to a travel agent who explained to us that the best fare she had available was something called the BN – the Bicentennial Nightly. There’s some good news for those who’ve been dreaming about a career as a travel agent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics “predicts an increase in the need for people who are experts in specific destinations or particular types of travelers. That could include corporate, luxury, study abroad or travelers over 55.” Whatever the outlook, I’m here to tell you that it is actually easier to have someone else do your trip planning. I know this not because I’ve talked to a travel agent since the advent of the Internet, but because my late husband took care of all the details for our trips. Now that I’ve got to do all the looking around and picking and choosing on my own, all I can say is WHAT A DRAG.
2. Mortgage Banker: This profession was nearly wiped out during the Great Recession of ought-eight, with the nail put in the coffin by the likes of Quicken and Rocket Mortgage. When you can get your $$$ on a smartphone, why go into a boring office and talk to someone? I suspect that many mortgage bankers weren’t worth a damn. Still, I’d advise the smartphone mortgagees to read the fine print, even if the font is 2 pitch on their smartphone.
3. Bookkeeper:  QuickBooks et al. apps are the stake in the heart of the old green-eye-shade profession of bookkeeper. Even the name is quaint. I suspect there’ll still be some demand for this role, as there are folks out there who really don’t want anything to do with DIY. Of course these bookkeepers of the futures will be using QuickBooks et al., so there just won’t be much demand for them.
4. Lawyer: Seriously folks, some of my best friends are lawyers. But I don’t think anyone other than third-tier law school professors and ambulance chaser wannabes will regret the decline of this profession. Again, it’s technology that’s resting the case on this line of work. Discovery – which used to involve legal profession newbies poring over voluminous piles of documents – is now done through AI-driven search. Which doesn’t take any people. The “president” is apparently not aware of technology, as witnessed by his tweet saying that it would be impossible for the witch-hunters to sift through Hillary’s 30,000 emails in quick order. Must not be aware of keyword search, natural language processing, etc.
5. Broadcaster (DJ): Ah, I came of age in the age of the great local DJ. In Worcester, WORC was the station of choice, and Dick “The Derby” Smith was the top jock. “The Derby” may or may not have been the first DJ in the States to play the Beatles, but Worcester was the market where some new songs were tried out. (I remember being excited when “Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain” had the honor of being introduced in Worcester.) As I grew more sophisticated (ahem) and got a better radio (turquoise plastic), my allegiance shifted to Boston’s WBZ, where I was a fan of Juicy Brucie Bradley, Jefferson Kaye, and Dick Summer. Today, there’s just not the demand for DJ’s on the local radio scene, but there is for party DJ’s. So someone will be spinning those platters.
6. Middle Manager: According to this list, middle managers are little more than paper pushers, whose work is “increasingly being done by enterprise software like Oracle and Salesforce.” Organizations have certainly been flattened over the last couple of decades, but – perhaps because at times in my career I was one – I can defend the role of middle manager as a lot more than paper pusher. How about defender of your team from nonsense from above, explainer of – but not apologist for – executive decisions, mentor, coach, advisor, shrink, problem solver, facilitator, person who actually has a clue about what’s going on in the organization and the market, and, of yeah, keeper of their day job as an individual contributor. All hail, middle managers!
7. Casino Cashier: I’ve been to casinos a few times in my life and on one glorious occasion won $200 at the slots in Reno. But I’m not much of a gambler, so was unaware that quarter slots have mostly been replaced by credit cards, which makes it more difficult to limit yourself to just bringing your roll of quarters and calling it a day when you’ve lost the $10. And with it came automated payouts, which replaces the cashiers. The good news is that, with so many states glomming on to casinos as a revenue panacea, there’s higher demand for dealers at the tables. Baby will always need a new pair of shoes…
8. IT Guys: With so many applications that used to be on your PC or on the local server now living out there on the cloud, there’s less need for the IT guy who “sneaker-netted” over to your office when nothing was working. IMHO, it’s not just the cloud. The apps themselves, and the PC’s, are more – to use one of my least favorite tech descriptors – robust. Word doesn’t die in the middle of your writing a twenty page document you haven’t saved. And when was the last time you saw the blue screen of death? Still, the cloud and better software and hardware quality in general won’t eliminate the need for IT guys. It’s just that smaller companies may not need their own full time guys, and will outsource the function.

Tomorrow, we’ll work our way further down the list.

 

 

your

No fu like a tofu

Last year, a survey round that nearly 40% of all Americans are “pursuing a more plant-based diet.”

I suppose you could say that I’m one of them. While I more often than not order meat or fish when I’m out to eat, I’m probably 75% vegetarian in-house. Sure, in the last couple of weeks I’ve made myself a BLT, and sesame chicken for a picnic on Spectacle Island I went on with a couple of friends. (Highly recommended, by the way, both the chicken – one of my standbys – and a visit to Spectacle. Among other wonderful things, there were wild blackberry bushes all over the place, with a lot of ripe blackberries on them. Yum.) Meanwhile, I just ate a tuna sandwich. But mostly what I’m eating chez moi is meatless.

It’s also tofu-less.

Maybe tofu’s improved over the years, but whenever I’ve had it, no matter how gussied up it is, I’ve found it bland, the consistency weird. Protein? Make mine peanut butter. Or a handful of nuts or seeds. So Hodo can’t count on me to grow their business. I’ll be taking a pass on their “best-selling Thai curry nuggets.” Lucky for Hodo, they have plenty of fans:

On an average day, Hodo goes through 30,000 pounds of American soybeans to produce 40,000 pounds of organic soy-based products ranging from plain firm tofu to fully cooked, ready-to-eat meals of flavored tofu cubes. The products are sold across the country, from gourmet markets in San Francisco to health food stores in Brooklyn. Hodo is used by the salad chain Sweetgreen and the Michelin-starred State Bird Provisions in San Francisco. In a June Nielsen data report produced for Whole Foods Market Inc., Hodo was cited as one of the fastest-­growing companies in the plant-based protein category, which includes competitors such as Sweet Earth Foods, Wildwood, and Tofurky. Hodo’s current revenue is $15 million, with year-over-year sales growth of 35.9 percaent. (Source: Bloomberg)

All part of the “lifestyle ­statement as more consumers focus on the environmental impact and health risks of eating too much meat.”

Much of the attention is going to “engineered vegetarian and vegan products.” Ah, vegans. I could become a vegetarian with few regrets. But vegan? I like milk and honey in my tea. When nothing else comes to mind, dinner is an omelet – or, going lazier, scrambled eggs. And I am never in a billion years going to give up ice cream. (I’m with the late, great Anthony Bourdain on vegans: the vegetarians’ Hezbollah-like splinter-faction.)

Tofu is considered old-fashioned, tied to oh-wower tie-dyed set, eaten while waiting to depart the old commune in a VW bus with the peace sign on it, headed to a Grateful Dead concert. The tofu will of course, have been served on hand-thrown terracotta plates, resting on macramé placemats.

Hodo-founder Minh Tsai is looking to turn the image of tofu around. For starters, Tsai ain’t no hippie. He’s a Columbia MBA who left a career in finance to focus on the tofuing of America, pursuing the Holy Grail of tofu: organic product that actually tastes good. He started out producing small lots that he sold in a local farmers market, but quickly decided to scale up. They’re still scaling, bringing on new capacity that will nearly double Hodo’s daily poundage.

Soon they’ll be selling their products, including “regionally flavored tofu cubes including Moroccan spice and Mediterranean harissa”, at Whole Foods throughout the country.

I like Moroccan spice. I like harissa. And there’s a Whole just a hop, skip and a jump away. But what do you do with tofu cubes?

For starters, I guess, stop calling them tofu cubes. Tofu – see above – “has baggage.” Plant-based is the state of the art term. So Tsai is rebranding.

So if I have a change of heart and stomach w.r.t. to tofu by any other name, I’ll be looking for Hodo harissa-flavored plant-based cubes.

The question remains: what would I do with them?

Maybe someone else in the nearly 40 percent “pursuing plant-based” can clue me in.

Ich spreche kein deutsche

At some point or other, in the quasi-distant future, my sisters, niece Molly and I are planning on a trip to Germany. Planning, actually, is too strong a term. More like we’re beginning to socialize the idea. And part of the socializing is learning ein bisschen Deutsch. Which we’re all doing, more or less, through a free online language app called Duolingo.

I’ve been doing my five minutes a day on Duolingo for 10 weeks now. While the app claims to be a science-based way to learn a language, my gut sense is nein.

Part of the problem is that German is not quite as logical as one might think it would be. How can it be that sie means she. And they. And, if you capitalize it, you. You distinguish one from the other by the conjugation of the verb they’re attached to, and/or by the a lot of sentences. But after 10 weeks with Duolingo, I’m still struggling a bit around the edges. When I see a sentence in German, I can translate it. But if I’m asked to come up with “I’m reading”, it doesn’t come all that naturally. Mostly I can come up with it – ich lese, by the way – but there’s usually a bit of a pause that I don’t think would be there if I had actually seen the conjugation written out in full. Which is the way I learned Spanish, Latin, and French. So 55 years on, I still remember amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. But struggle with ich lese, du liest, er/sie liest, wir lesen, ihr lest, sie lesen.  It would be less confusing if conjugations were consistent. They’re not. Sometimes the verbs for you/he/she are the same, sometimes they’re not. Thankfully, we and they are – so far – the same. But I’m sure there are exceptions. And this is just the present tense. Oy!

Anyway, I have ordered a beginner German book and, before we take our trip, I’m just going to hit the books and learn this stuff the old fashioned way.

I’m also a bit confused by the genders of nouns. Oh, sometimes the logic is clear. Junge/boy is masculine. But madchen/girl is neuter. Huh? I guess the convention is that words that use the diminutive (-chen) are neuter.

Then there are nouns that seemingly wouldn’t have a gender, but do. I mean, if I were going to assign a gender to apple (apfel), I’d make it feminine – Eve, and all that. But apfel is masculine. Newspaper, however, is feminine. This matters, because the articles that go with a noun are gendered. They pretty much tell you not to overthink things, and just memorize each now with the nominative article attached to it. So, der apfel (the apple), die zeitung (the newspaper), das brot (the bread).

Apfel, zeitung und brot are among the few nouns I’ve acquired with Duolingo, 10 weeks in. I’ve also got man, woman, child, boy, girl, water, milk, and book. Seems pretty skimpy after all this time. Especially since I knew these – and a handful of others picked up through old war movies and osmosis – already.

Sure, as vocabulary goes, these nouns are all pretty useful, although I do question the importance of learning the word newspaper in this day and age. Not quite whippersnapper or blunderbuss, but, surely, it would be better to learn the word for smartphone, no? (Handily, it’s smartphone.)

I know, I know. English is impossible if you didn’t grow up speaking English. All those homonyms – poor, pour, pore; bore, boor, boar – and all those differing pronunciations – tough, bough, through. (Good thing I memorized my phonics in second grade: aw, ow, oo.)

I have learned a few German words – tired, finished, strong – and phrases – how’s it going, good morning, I’m sorry, please, thanks – and, one that will likely prove quite useful, ich habe keine ahnung. Which means I have no idea.

Duolingo uses gamifcation. You get praise and acquire points as you go along. And I do like getting through a 5 minute lesson without making any mistakes. But I do end up with plenty of them. About half of these are goofy little lack of attention errors. I hear something in German and I type the words I hear in English, when they’re asking for it to be in German. Then there was “Hallo, Duo” which I couldn’t translate. Yes, I got that hallo is hello, but what the heck is Duo?

Ecce – as we say in Latin – Duo, the Duolingo icon/mascot:

Auf wiedersehen, Duo.

My mother’s first language – her mamaloshen – was German, so you’d think I’d know a bit more than I do. But she immigrated as a toddler. And my German-speaking relatives were in Chicago, and we only saw them once a year. Not that all of them – other than the displaced persons that my grandparents sponsored – didn’t speak English. So most of the German I picked up was English with a German accent. (No problem understanding Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes.) Sometimes what I thought was Grandma English was, in fact, Grandma Deutsch. As in “go by your mommy” which I always thought was her mistaken way of saying “go with your mommy.” When she was actually saying “go bei your mommy,” bei being German for with.

My mother had a few German words that she’d throw in. Ach du lieber strohsack – oh my dear mattress, kind of a gosh darn expression. Lausbub (rascal), which as kids we heard as “lousepoop.” And she would quote my grandfather in saying that men wanted wives who were “huebsch und stark” – pretty and strong. This actually came in handy the other morning with Duolingo, when they introduced two new words in a matching exercise that contained mostly words they’d already drummed in – enough with the zeitung. And there I was left with traurig and stark, sad and strong. Bing, bing, bing, if stark is strong, then traurig must be sad.

Anyway, I’ll be keeping on with Duolingo for a while. But I’m guessing that the most useful sentence I’ll bring to Germany with me is “ich spreche kein deutsche.” Of course, on the face of it, it’s not true. If you can say I speak no German in German, you’re obviously speaking some German. But other than stark, zeitung, and a bit more, I doubt I’ll have much to say.

Ach du lieber strohsack!

I’m in big trouble now

What with the Manafort verdict, the Michael Cohen plea, and the whole unindicted co-conspirator thang, it’s been a pretty big week, legal-wise. These were all pretty big deals, so I’m somewhat reluctant to insert my own more modest, less publicized brush with the law, but here goes.

The other day, I had an exceedingly important message on my landline answering machine. Landline. Answering machine. How retro. How old school. But, frankly, it’s nice to have a phone that collects all those political robo-calls and asks for donations. Plus, I believe I’ve had the same phone number for over 40 years, and I feel something of a sentimental attachment to it. And, of course, it’s good to have a place where folks who are looking out for my good can get a hold of me and let me know that I’m in big trouble.

Unfortunately, the message starts in mid-stream. This might be due to technical difficulties on the caller’s side. Or it may be a way to capture my attention.

Anyway, the truncated message started innocuously enough:

…there which will get expired in next 24 working hours.

But I was thinking, ‘huh, just what is it that’s getting expired.’ Then I learned that, apparently, I’ve been up to no good.

…And once it get expired after that you will be taken under custody by the local police.

Sure, I jaywalk, but that doesn’t get you taken into custody. Or does it?

Maybe the authoritarian police state has begun, and I just didn’t notice because it’s not all that in force in Massachusetts. But maybe the thought – and blog – police have figured out that I’m not exactly a fan of the incumbent pretender to the throne. Maybe they’re coming for me. Well, it’s not that I’d exactly welcome it, but, as a paranoid liberal, I’ve kind of been expecting it for the past, oh, 50 years or so.

As there are four serious allegations pressed on your name at the moment, we request that you get back to us so that we can discuss about this case before taking legal action against you.

Four serious allegations pressed on my name?

I haven’t been to confession since I was in high school, but I used to know how to make an examination of conscience. Turns out, it’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget how. So I wracked and wracked and wracked my brain, examined and examined and examined my conscience, and couldn’t come up with much beyond jaywalking.

Both my parents are gone, so the historic standards – lied to my mother, talked back to my father – don’t work anymore. And sure, I do fight with my brothers and sisters on occasion. Minor squabbles. Nothing that anyone would consider a venial sin, let alone a mortal one.

But is it a sin to make a political donation to someone outside my district? It’s not like a pretended to live in Texas when I scooted $50 Beto O’Rourke’s way. Or faked a Wisconsin address to toss $50 to the Iron Stache. Still, if there’s four serious allegations, I have made at least four modest political donations over the last month or so for candidates that I can’t vote for.

Fortunately, they gave me the number to call to clear all this up – 61934997644 – and they even repeated it for me. And then, anticipating my compliance with their request that I contact them to clear up these allegations, the voice said “thank you.”

I’m sure it will cost me a few bucks. But, after all, if I have money to burn to support candidates that aren’t in my district, I can pony up the dough to clear up those four serious allegations. I’ll put the call back on my to-do list. I realize that they did give me some wrong info, as whatever was set to expire in 24 hours obviously didn’t expire in 24 hours. But I’m sure they’re spot-on with respect to those allegations. I mean, why would they call me if there wasn’t something to it…

Guess I should hang onto my landline. It just might be the only way I can stay out of big trouble.

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Okay, okay. These scammers – who sound like they’re speaking English as a third language – are clearly scammers. But if I were, say, an undocumented worker. Or someone without much education, without any financial (or intellectual) wherewithal, someone who might have an ancient outstanding warrant floating around out there… Maybe I’d get sucked into calling that number and sending those rotters some money I didn’t have. Creeps!

Apartments Designed for Living–now there’s an idea!

The other evening, I was walking through the hip and happen’ Boston Ink Block, and I noticed this sign on an apartment building:

Now, when I was young, I lived in a few pretty crappy places.

In my first apartment, my senior year in college, we had a major cleanup when we moved in, including throwing out a raft of empty whiskey bottles from underneath the claw foot tub. It goes without saying that the claw foot tub required quite the scrub.

The building also featured a pit-of-hell trash system. You threw your trash down an asbestos-lined chute that I believed went directly into the maw of the furnace. Now this can’t possibly be true – or can it? – but it sure seemed that way. One of the neighbors on our floor either didn’t understand the plot – throw your trash down the chute – or was too scared to open the door. Anyway, they’d leave their open trash in seeping brown paper sacks on the floor of the tiny little room that contained the trash chute. As I recall, they ate a ton of chicken – this is the pre-boneless skinless era. Yuck.

I did a couple of stints in cheapo, poorly constructed “modern” apartment buildings. All these decades on, I can still conjure the shag rug smell right into my nostrils. Yuck.

I had an apartment that in the early 1900’s served as immigrant housing in Boston’s West End. The West End is largely gone, but “my” building stood until a decade or so back, when Mass General hoovered it up and tore it down. One of the swell features of this was some of those left-over turn of the century immigrants shouting their heads off all day. One little old Italian lady was perpetually yelling what sounded like “io”, the Italian word for I. There was also a tenant named Chiang Kai Shok – not to be confused with Chiang Kai Shek – who also made a fair amount of noise. The lady with the Manx cats didn’t make a lot of noise, but she let those cats roam the halls.

There was an old timey toilet – with the raised tank and the pull chain flusher – a tiny little bathtub you couldn’t sit it. And no sink in the bathroom. You had to use the kitchen sink.

My flat looked out on a gas station that abutted – and I do mean abutted – the apartment building out back. A fellow whose window opened onto the roof of the gas station regularly let his two Doberman Pinschers out to crap on the gas station roof. Yuck. I only lasted one summer there.

From that place, I upgraded to a much smaller but much nicer apartment on Beacon Hill proper. In the kitchen, there was a dumbwaiter that we used to send our trash down to the live-in super to dispose of. My adjoining neighbor and I both used the same dumbwaiter, and if we both opened the dumbwaiter door at the same time, we were staring into each other’s eyeballs and kitchens. My dumbwaiter neighbor was a very, very old man whose nickname was Babby. Babby had a companion (what we’d now call a home health aide), an older woman but younger than Babby. She sat with him most days. Anyway, Babby and his aide (I can picture her but can’t remember her name) much enjoyed opening their dumbwaiter door to listen in on what was happening in my single gal apartment. It was great sport to tiptoe into the kitchen and yank the door open so that I could catch the eavesdropping/spying. (I was the only person under the age of 60 – which seemed pretty old to me way back then - living in the building. Another neighbor once told me that Babby had told him that he’d overhead “tickling” noises coming from my apartment.)

All of these places had distinct downsides and flaws, but I can still say with great certainty that each and every one of these apartments was an APARTMENT DESIGNED FOR LIVING.

Seriously, is there any other kind???

My sister Trish suggested that deathtraps aren’t designed for living. But they’re not exactly designed for death, are they? They just end up that way, a by-product of shoddy build.

Anyway, as a long-time marketer, I’m sure I’ve written plenty of things that are pretty darned dumb and pretty darned obvious. Still, nothing quite like this.

Sure, the Ink Block is a cool area. There’s a Whole Food right across the street, and the ability to just run across the way to pick up some Ben & Jerry’s or a pre-fab meal makes for some mighty fine living. Still…

I’m assuming that the apartments all have bathrooms, kitchens, and a closet or two. Heat. AC. Running water. Other than that, what – pray tell – does designed for living mean?

Millennial resort? Sounds good to me.

The Boston real estate market is insane. Every day there’s some new story about a tiny house, a miniscule condo, going for a small fortune. Dumps in soon-to-be-glammed-up neighborhoods are snatched up (for exceedingly big bucks) and torn down. A building on my block that used to house 8 apartments is being converted to a single family. When the jack hammering is over, the finish work done, the place will be worth about $20M. Meanwhile, I recently had an Uber driver whose main job is installing custom kitchens. He had just finished up work on a project for a kitchen in the neighboring town of Brookline that cost $600K. For the kitchen.

High-rise “luxury” (some real luxury, some faux luxe) buildings are going up on every plot of land available, anywhere around here. Affordable housing is nearly impossible to find. (Affordable equals anything where a studio goes for less that $2.5K a month.) Whenever a building that includes set asides for low- and moderate-income residents is announced, the developers are flooded with folks who want to get in on the lottery for one of the units.

And as more and more suburban tech companies move in town, and more and more tech, biotech, and every other cool stuff businesses want to be located downtown – not in a boring, stuffy suburb – the demand for housing zooms.

So many of the buildings going up are aimed at the young tech folks who want to live near where they work. Then there are the young fin-serv folks who have even more money to spend on housing than the techies. 

One hot Boston property is the Ink Block complex. Located in what was (and to large extent remains) an ugly, industrial, highway bordering wasteland, the Ink Block may still be a bit on the ugly side. But it’s become an it place. There’s a nearby arts district, new boîtes that are too cool for the likes of me, and a truly excellent Whole Foods.

The Ink Block is getting a new building:

It will be a 14-story tower featuring 250 “co-living” units — micro apartments in a high-service building loaded with amenities — which its developer described as a “millennial resort.” (Source: Boston Globe)

For starters, a lot of the micro apartments in the “millennial resort” will truly be micro apartments: the size of a hotel room - under 400 square feet.

As someone who spent her childhood fantasizing about living in an apartment the size of a very small bathroom  - I had it all worked out in my head: the bed folded down over the bathtub - this actually doesn’t sound all that bad to me. I lived for a number of years in a studio apartment and much enjoyed it. I had a miniscule kitchen, a slightly less miniscule bathroom, an alcove office, a miniscule foyer that was separated from the main room by a door, and not bad closet space. (Of course, back in those days, I had a lot less stuff to store.) I loved that apartment. While these days, I’d strongly prefer having a separate bedroom, I do know for a fact that I can live comfortably in 400 square feet, plus or minus.

But it’s not the size that makes this new Ink Block building a “millenial resort.” This place will be:

…a cross between a fancy college dorm and the super-luxe condo buildings, but aimed mainly at 20-somethings too busy to spend much time in their homes. (Source: a different article from the Boston Globe)

Just the idea of a “fancy college dorm” makes me smile. I went to college in the era of the minimalist college dorm room, something akin to what might be offered to a white-collar criminal in a minimum security setting.

The new Ink Block units will include housekeeping, including linens and towels, if you want. (I wouldn’t want…) Some will “come with furniture, custom-built.” And there will be social activities organized by a live-in “community manager.” Everyone will have their own bathroom and kitchen, but there will be communal hang out spaces. And things to do, should one so desire.

Sounds to me a lot like the congregant living situations that the oldsters are currently occupying, but will soon give way to the invasion of the Baby Boomers.

And it sounds pretty good to me. Micro-unit in the Ink Block here I come? Maybe not. But there’s probably something a lot like this in my future. I’m already planning my space…

Even better than silk purse from a sow’s ear

Cotton comes from cotton balls. Wool comes from sheep. (Baa…) Leather comes from cattle/cows, mostly. But also from horses, alligators, and – as we have recently learned, thanks to Manafort Trial One – ostrich. And silk, well, that comes from silk worms.

But it also comes from spiders, and spider silk, as a fabric, is something of a miracle: stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar. It’s “extremely soft and strong, and it could make long-lasting, lightweight and desirable clothes.”

Because of its marvelous properties, and because natural born spider silk would be sort of difficult to cultivate and harvest, scientists have been trying for years to develop artificial spider silk.

Welcome to the world of biomaterials, where entrepreneurs with Ph.D.s in chemistry can order up DNA, grow yeast in small containers, and create lab-made versions of proteins in nature, such as the dragline silk of a giant spider known technically as argiope bruehnicci. One advantage of the lab-grown silk is that it can theoretically be altered into whatever consumers might need it to be—strong and soft and stretchy. While other spider-silk researchers have focused on military and medical applications, Bolt Threads is looking to use the material to make better clothing. The global fashion industry, at roughly $2.5 trillion, is giant and terrible for the environment: Low-cost synthetic fibers like polyester are polluting the oceans, and even natural fabrics like cotton require large tracts of land and chemicals to produce. Spider silk, by contrast, as a bio-material, is sustainable.(Source: Forbes)

Over the years, there have been a couple of products that use some sort of artificial spider silk. North Face had a parka; Adidas had a shoe. Bolt is hoping to be the company that makes the fabric that enables the commercial breakthrough.

So far, not much has come of their work.

…since its launch nine years ago [Bolt] has produced and sold just a tiny number of ties and hats from its lab-grown spider silk, which it calls Microsilk.

But they’re expecting to do $10M in business this year, mostly to an entity they acquired that makes sweaters and canvas bags. And they also sold a few of their ties (50 produced and sold for $314); and a few of those hats, a hybrid of spider silk and wool, that they produced in limited addition (100) and sold (and sold out) for $198. Cute enough:

Next year they’re looking to really begin making it. Which will be good news for the investors who’ve ploughed $213M into Bolt. So far, in addition to a few ties and sweaters, this has produced a valuation of over $700M. Not yet a unicorn, but perhaps on its way.

In the early days, they [the Bolt founders/scientists] studied actual spiders, seeking to understand their genomics and the material properties of their different types of silk. For a time, they had an office full of giant golden orb weaver spiders spinning webs off hula hoops they’d bought in San Francisco’s Mission District one afternoon. But from the beginning, they knew they’d need to come up with a lab-based process of creating spider silk. Unlike silkworms, spiders can’t be farmed, because they are territorial and cannibalistic.

Golden orb weaver spiders. Hula hoops. Cannibalistic.

Man, sometimes I really and truly envy scientists…

When the company was in its early stages, they:

…contacted Lillian Whipple, an elderly weaver known for working with special threads, and asked her to make something out of Bolt Threads’ spider silk. She wove a small swatch. Later, she created miniature kimonos of silkworm silk, little pieces of art the company now displays, framed, in its office in homage to that history.

Elderly weaver. Miniature kimonos.

Man, sometimes I really and truly envy scientists…

There have been setbacks along the way. One version they came up with “looked like a sick animal.” (Huh?) They had another trial that, like the Wicked Witch, melted. Another “shrank by roughly 40%.”

Which reminds me of a story my mother told.

During WWII, synthetic fibers came into use, and my mother bought a rayon (I think) dress. Caught in a sudden summer shower, her dress shrunk a few inches from knee-length to well above. Good thing my mother had great legs, but I think her garter belt was showing. Unless this was one of the days when she’d gone stocking-less and had drawn a “seam” up the back of her legs using an eyebrow pencil, which is what gals did back in the day when stockings were a) seamed; b) scarce. There was a war on!

Bolt has a lot of famous names floating around it. Peter Thiel is one of the company’s investors. Patagonia wants to work with them, if they can scale up their operations. Stella McCartney has designed some one-offs using Bolt spider silk and is planning on using it in next year’s line.

Bolt is also working on a faux leather made out of mushrooms.

Man, sometimes I really and truly envy scientists…

Go, Bolt Threads!

Worcester makes the big league! (Sorta.)

Last Friday brought the good sporting news that the Red Sox AAA minor league team, the Pawtucket (RI) Red Sox (a.k.a., the PawSox) would be exiting the state of Rhode Island and jaunting up Route 146 to Worcester.

A new stadium will be built in the downtown-ish area, in Kelley Square which is part of what is now called the Canal District. The ballpark will be called Polar Park after (and big-buck sponsored by) Worcester’s own Polar Soda. So I’m guessing the mascot will be a polar bear which, given Worcester’s winter weather, sounds about right. Conveniently, the existing PawSox mascots are also polar bears.

The ballpark site is the old Wyman-Gordon factory which, when Worcester was an industrial city, built parts for aircraft engines. The company, having decamped to suburban Grafton, is still around, but it’s now owned by an outfit in Texas. Kelley Square itself is pretty well known as a traffic nightmare: the convergence of a bunch of heavily-trafficked streets all crossing willy-nilly, alongside a couple of highway off/on ramps, without benefit of traffic lights or even a rotary. Maneuvering through Kelley Square – named (I looked it up) for some poor bastard, Cornelius Kelley, who had the ill luck to die at Verdun a few weeks before WWI ended – was where you earned your driver’s chops when I was a kid, and nothing has changed. Perhaps Polar Park will bring with it some drivability-improvements.

The team – but of course – will be called the WooSox, after one of Worcester’s nicknames: The Woo. (Other nicknames: Worm Town and, more sedately, The Heart of the Commonwealth and, step aside Rome, The City of Seven Hills. I do hope the polar bear mascot wears a heart on its sleeve. Or something.)

Way back in the day, Worcester had a team called the Coal Heavers. But that was well before my time – as were coal heavers. I believe Casey Stengel, who, in my childhood was the ancient manager of the NY Yankees, had played for them.

A few years back, Worcester had an unaffiliated minor league team, the Tornadoes, named – quite peculiarly – for the 1953 tornado that destroyed a good swath of the city and took nearly 100 lives, including, as it turned out, the grandparents of one of my high school classmates. Strange name for a team. Kind of like the Johnstown Floods or the New Orleans Katrinas, no? Anyway, I always meant to get out to The Woo to see the Tornadoes play, but never got around to it. I always meant to get down to Pawtucket to see the PawSox play, too, for that matter. Oh, well. When the WooSox arrive in a couple of years, I will definitely make an occasional visit. And will no doubt buy some gear.

The good citizens of the Heart of the Commonwealth are mostly welcoming this news, the main exception being the owners of the Worcester Bravehearts, which is part of a college summer league (similar to the Cape Cod League). They’re concerned that the arrival of the pros will cause the collapse of their fan base.

But while most Worcester-ites welcome the news, the comment section in the Boston Globe article on the move is full of Bostonians and near-Bostonians – such nasty coastal elites! - sneering about what a dump Worcester is. (The commenters have apparently never been to Pawtucket, Rhode Island.) Commenters are also taking the opportunity to crap on PawSox Chair Larry Lucchino, who’s the former CEO of the Boston Red Sox; rail against taxpayers funding sports stadiums (I’m with them there); and make fun of Rhode Island for having invested in former Red Sox Curt Schilling’s failure of a gaming company.

Sadly, ardent Red Sox fan Stephen King tweeted “Say it ain’t so” when he heard the news. I like and admire Stephen King, but what up with someone who lives in Bangor, Maine, looking down his nose at Worcester???

I love the idea of the Red Sox AAA team coming to Worcester. Not exactly the big leagues but, then again, Worcester ain’t exactly the big leagues either.

But it has heart. It has grit. It has a charming small-town boosterism about it. And it has Polar Soda. And Table Talk Pies, which I assume will be the Official Pie of the WooSox. 

Can’t wait to take the train out to The Woo to catch a game.

Can’t wait to hear that first cry of “play ball.”

Woo-hoo!

Don’t bogart that market opportunity

Massachusetts has more or less legalized pot. I say more or less because, in 2016 – perhaps suspecting that the rest of the country might not share our overwhelming support for Hillary Clinton, and anticipating that we might need a little help getting through the next four years – the good citizens of The Commonwealth voted to legalize marijuana.

Reefer madness has not yet ensued. In fact, the recreational (vs. medical) dispensaries have not yet opened. I’m not sure why that is. Following the progress of Massachusetts splendor with the grass has not been all that high (ho-ho) on my watch list. Nonetheless, at some point after the doors do open, I’m sure I’ll do a small buy and try. For old time’s sake. (Until then, I won’t be holding my breath: it took nearly 8 years after we voted to okay medical marijuana to see the first dispensaries open.)

But medical MJ is legal, and 420 Suites is all set up to accommodate those in need of an ounce or two for health reasons. And, of course, they’ll be more than ready to assist their guests once the non-medical dispensaries – will they be called Head Shops, or something else? – open.

What is 420 Suites? It’s a short-term rental business that has about 200 pot-themed furnished flats in Boston and surrounds.

Chocolate on your pillow? That’s so pre-legalization — try a lozenge infused with the cannabis compound CBD instead. Tiny bottles of shampoo? More like tiny bottles of hemp-infused shampoo. A book of coupons to local restaurants on the desk? Replace “local restaurants” with “local dispensary” and you’re starting to get the idea…

In addition to a basket of cannabis-themed gifts, the company will offer chauffeured transportation to and from its rental units — in the Back Bay, Fenway, downtown, Longwood, and East Boston — and the Revolutionary Clinics medical marijuana dispensary in Somerville. Guests get discounts, help registering as a medical marijuana patient, and educational materials about various cannabis products.

There are even plans to offer in-suite massages with infused lotions. (Source: Boston Globe)

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), despite 420 Suites’ motto – Stay Lit - you can’t actually light up a joint in most of its apartments. And even with recreational pot-smoking legalized in Massachusetts, it remains illegal to smoke in public. (I will note that this prohibition doesn’t seem to actually prevent anyone in the city of Boston from doing so. I’ve gotten contact highs just walking down the street.) So the focus will be on edibles and items like those infused lotions. That and facilitating the medical marijuana process for medical tourists.

And, of course, being well prepared for those recreational facilities to open. After all, only a few states have generalized pot legality, so let the tourism begin! Sure, two of the other New England states – Vermont (did you have any doubt?) and Maine – have also legalized pot. But that is it for East of the Rockies. Nothing between us and Colorado. Then wide open spaces until you get to Nevada and the West Coast states.

420 Suites, by the way, is named after Weed Day, which is April 20th. The provenance of how 4/20 became associated with marijuana is unclear, which is somehow fitting. Unfortunately, the date is shared with Hitler’s birthday. So 4/20 resonates with hippies, hipsters, and the alt-right. Swell!

In any case, the company is “positioning itself to dominate the coming recreational market, the advent of which should make it far easier to connect visitors with pot.”

Until then, 420 Suites will have to content themselves with the medical crowd.

…we are the first Vacation Rental company to form partnerships with local dispensaries that allow Medical Marijuana Card holders a safe, curated experience in an effective and educational format. (Source: 420 Suites)

Love that word “curated”. How is it that these words that are never used in regular old normal person conversation all of a sudden pop up everywhere? Sort of like how, all of a sudden, Caesar salad achieved menu ubiquity a couple of decades ago.

I can imagine that the folks at 420 Suites are eagerly looking forward to the recreational market taking off. More fun, less social service. I’m aware that there are plenty of people with not much by way of “need” who manage to get a hold of a Medical Marijuana Card. But medical MJ is also used by folks with some pretty dreadful conditions.Catering to people who are ill is good and noble, but it’s not exactly in the fun zone. (Imagine living in one of those prudie states – and there are 20 of them – that don’t allow someone with MS, or enduring some ghastly chemo protocol to look for a little bit of relief?)

Anyway, 420 Suites is going to be ready, set, go when those recreational pot shops are open for business. This is one market opportunity they’re not going to let anyone else bogart.

As if I needed another reason to stay out of Dubai

I am not exactly a stay-at-home, but I’m not the world’s most adventurous traveler, either.

I’m happy to have seen most of these United States, and before I kick the old bucket, I would like to fill in the missing pieces: North Dakota, Alaska, Kentucky and Tennessee. (I might be able to claim Kentucky, as I did have a business trip to Cincinnati, and their airport is in Kentucky. Now, I don’t count time in airport as a visit to a state. Thus, having a layover in Memphis doesn’t allow me to check off Tennessee. But to get from Cincinnati Airport to the city of Cincinnati, one is on the ground and outside the terminal in Kentucky. So KY is a maybe.)

I’d like to see more of Canada than the little I’ve seen. The Maritimes are on my list of “must see”. And I wouldn’t mind taking in Quebec City.

I’m a Europhile, so virtually all of my overseas travel has been thataway. I’ve been most places I care to go, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Portugal, Iceland, and Finland at some point. Maybe the Baltics. But I’ve been through most of Western/Middle Europe – and, yes, that includes Liechtenstein – and enough of Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia when it was still Yugoslavia) to call it a day. Plus I’ve been to Turkey, and have no desire to return.

And speaking of no desire, although I wouldn’t mind seeing Vietnam, I have mostly no desire to go to any place hot. Which leaves out a good swath of the globe.

I have no desire to go any place dangerous. And no desire to go any place where women are treated like crap. These sorts of places mostly intersect with “hot”, so I’m good to do without. Not very adventurous, but good with my decision.

Anyway, part of my No Go Zone is obviously the Mideast, a trifecta of hot, dangerous, and women treated like crap. Thus, Dubai, for all its glories – like indoor skiing when it’s 120 degrees out, the tallest (over half a mile!) building in the world, fancy-arse malls – is not a place I was ever going to want to go. (That said, I do have a couple of cousins who’ve been and who enjoyed it. Just not for me.)

But after a read about the woman who was arrested (and, with her four year old daughter, detained) after imbibing a complimentary glass of wine on Air Emirates, my decision to keep Dubai off the bucket list was reinforced.

On July 13, Ms. [Ellie] Holman, a Swedish citizen living in Britain with her family, flew from London with her daughter for a five-day holiday in the Gulf. But when she got off the plane in Dubai, an immigration officer questioned her visa and demanded to know if she had consumed alcohol.

Holman admitted she had been served a complimentary glass of wine aboard the Emirates flight. Holman said she did not know that it was considered an offense to film the encounter, nor did she understand that it was illegal to have consumed alcohol in Dubai (the wine on the plane.) She was reportedly subjected to a blood alcohol test, and had a reading of 0.04 (half the 0.08 BAC where one is considered ‘impaired’ for driving in the US). She and her daughter were immediately taken into custody and had their passports and phones confiscated. (Source: Forbes)

The story may have been more complicated that wine breath. The woman – a Swedish dentist who lives in England – supposedly had an expired passport. (Who in god’s name leaves the country with an expired passport????) But she was able to whip out another passport that was still good… There was some back and forth and Holman found herself detained.

She said guards tried to rip out her hair extensions.

Anything but that!

Her partner, the girl’s father, could not locate them for more than a day. When he did, he immediately flew to the UAE and brought their daughter home.

Holman was released from her cell but required to stay in the United Arab Emirates for almost a month to face charges which could have put her in jail for a year. She spent more than $40,000, her family’s savings, on legal help to fight the charges. After questions from journalists and a firestorm of publicity from British and Australian news outlets, the government chose to release her. She was finally able to fly home last weekend.

Dubai officials make no mention of any problem with the free/not free glass of wine Holman had. But their statement:

…noted that after a ”legal claim was issued against Ms. Holman with charges of profanity and photographing a government official at the border crossing.”

A charge of profanity?

I might be able to pass up the free glass of wine. My goal on long flights is to minimize trips to the toilet, so I always think twice before having a drink-drink or a cup of tea when on a plane. But being detained for a month in part because of use of profanity???

I’m staying the f out of Dubai, thank you.

That’s it. I’m staying indoors, reading.

In the late 1990’s, the company I had long worked for upped-stakes and moved from Cambridge to the ‘burbs. This was bad enough in and of itself. The ‘burbs? Public transpo – as if!- meant subway-bus-and-hike. Lunch options? Say good-bye to Charlie Cheddar’s superb Greek salads. Say hello (and gag) to the Rainforest Cafe.

We were also moving from an all-private-office environment to an all-cubicle layout.

But the least-welcomed aspect of the move was the fact that the security system was now electronic. Sure, we still had Lena, our adored mother-to-all receptionist, but if you wanted to take the shortcut back from a trip to the restroom, you could swipe your ID at the nearest door. At first, most of us were so appalled by this incredible invasion of privacy that we continued to march around and exit and enter via the reception area. But after a while… If they wanted to record our jaunts to the loo, well, let ‘em.

After that, well, every place I worked had electronic security badges. That was just the way work worked.

And then there was the CVS card that I suppose entitles you to swell deals and super coupons, if you ever use them, but it’s mostly to spy on what type of toothpaste you buy. Sometimes to thwart them I refuse to use my card. And – worse – use cash. Double whammy on them!

Slowly, inexorably, privacy diminished.

Google and Bing hang onto every site we’ve ever visited, every search we’ve ever searched, however idly. Somewhere, out there in the cloud, something’s keeping track of my visits to the O’Connor Brothers Funeral Parlor obituary page, which I check on periodically to see who in the old ‘hood died. Something knows when I toss in the name of the sexiest boy in eighth grade to see where he’s at. (Okay. He had been held back a couple of times, so he was 16 to everyone else’s 13 or 14. So he was the only sexy boy in eighth grade. And, yes, I did find an article from a decade or so back. He’s an ex-con managing an SRO building.)

Then there are all those purchases, leaving us susceptible to all those further purchase suggestions.

And GPS keeping an eye on wherever we are. To add insult to that invasion injury, the other day I glanced at a headline that said that, even if you turn location off, “it” can still find you.

Not to mention Fitbit noting every step you take.

Slowly, inexorably, privacy diminishes.

Every time a crime’s committed, the immediate impulse is to ask whether there are security cameras that captured the moment.

Even when it’s for our own good, the vaunted security we all worry about – MS-13: coming for YOU! – nothing is private anymore.

That glance I made at the headline on location tracking? Turns out at some point, my laptop (traitor!) will no doubt be detecting that flicker of the old eyeball. It may not be here quite yet, but it’s coming:

When you’re browsing a website and the mouse cursor disappears, it might be a computer glitch — or it might be a deliberate test to find out who you are.

The way you press, scroll and type on a phone screen or keyboard can be as unique as your fingerprints or facial features. To fight fraud, a growing number of banks and merchants are tracking visitors’ physical movements as they use websites and apps.

Some use the technology only to weed out automated attacks and suspicious transactions, but others are going significantly further, amassing tens of millions of profiles that can identify customers by how they touch, hold and tap their devices. (Source: NY Times)

This is all well and good if it prevents some no goodnik from syphoning out my 401K or ordering two pairs of the same sneaker from Zappo. (Wait. That was me.) But:

Privacy advocates view the biometric tools as potentially troubling, partly because few companies disclose to users when and how their taps and swipes are being tracked.

Potentially troubling, I’d say.

“What we have seen across the board with technology is that the more data that’s collected by companies, the more they will try to find uses for that data,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s a very small leap from using this to detect fraud to using this to learn very private information about you.”

What sort of data are they capturing? How hard we press keys; which fingers we use to tap: the rhythm of our keystrokes; how we maneuver the mouse; how we type numbers in; etc.

Yes, indeed, please do keep fraudsters out of my bank account. Alert my doctor if my mouse maneuvering looks like I’m stroking out. But puh-leeze keep the big data marketing folks out of my body, myself. I don’t know quite what they’d do with information on the rhythm of my typing, but I’m sure all those big data big brains are trying to figure it out. Maybe they’ll figure out that if I type a bit faster, I’ll order more stuff I don’t need. So they’ll manipulate my keyboard to go faster, faster, faster.

Talk about the invasion of the body snatchers.

I’m just glad I’ll be dead and gone before they crack the code on mindreading.  

At least I hope so.

Anyway, until further notice, I’ll be staying indoors, reading. And, oh yeah, wearing a tinfoil hat.

Fill ‘er up?

I am happily car free.

These days, I’m mostly Ubering, but when I have to drive (Zipcar or something-renta), I find that the biggest PITA is returning the car with a full tank. For Zipcar, you’re supposed to fill ‘er up if it gets to a quarter tank or lower. I have generally found that on those trips where I’m driving a total of fewer than 5 miles, I inherit a Zip that someone left with a teaspoon of gasoline over a quarter tank. Grrrrrr. So there I am, hunting around for a gas station, which is not an easy thing to do in downtown Boston. When I was a car owner, there were three gas stations a minute or so from where I live. They’re all gone, the real estate too valuable to be wasted on a lowly filling station. The nearest gas stations are now a couple of miles away, near Fenway Park. It’s not the end of the world to get there, but it’s a bit out of the way. And if there’s a game, it’s a no go. Off to Charlestown, which means sitting in traffic and crossing an always-clogged bridge.

Same sitch for the rare times I rent a car. I’ll be dipped if I’m going to pay Hertz $50 a gallon, or whatever the current outrage is. Off to the Fens!

When I was a regular driver, I didn’t so much mind getting gas. There were those three gas stations just down the street, after all. And for most of my car-driving years, there were still attendants to fill the tank, check the oil, and smear dirty water across your windshield for you. But as my driving days were going out, self-pump had taken hold. And I started to resent having to stand there in sleet, waiting for the damned tank to fill. And ending up with gasoline smell on my hands.

So, yeah, I get that having to stop for gas can be a drag.

(And I can only imagine that, if you live in a crowded city where you can’t just plug your car into an outlet on the side of your house, having an EV might be an even bigger pain in the butt-ski.)

At least with rental and Zipcars, you’re not responsible for washing them, which can be a colossal drag during a New England winter, when your car gets completely encrusted with salt and other road dreck. And where the minute your car is all bright and shiny, there’s another blizzard. I like the experience of going through the carwash, but I was always nervous about getting that left front tire aligned on the way in. So mixed emotions about trips to the car wash. But not something I miss.

Help is on the way for those who don’t want to be up close and personal when their tanks are guzzling gas, or spend their Saturdays at the carwash putting quarters in the vac machine. And that’s thanks to Yoshi and other mobile gas stations.

Yoshi brings complete car care directly to you! We anticipate your needs, provide services on your schedule, and deliver everything right to your vehicle. We’ll wash your car, change your oil, swap your wiper blades - and more! And of course, Yoshi will refuel your vehicle - just tell us where your car is parked and we’ll come to you. Yoshi handles the details, so you can keep moving.

You have to join Yoshi ($20/month), on top of which you of course pay for all the services you opt for. (One of the brands of gas they deliver is Mobil. So you can get mobile Mobil.)

One of Yoshi’s 17 locations is Boston.

Yoshi is banking on the idea that there are millions of people like [California Yoshi subscriber Whitney] Block all over the country: urban professionals whose demanding schedules and disposable income make them ideal candidates for outsourcing a chore that has been a feature of car ownership since the inception of the automobile. (Source: Wapo)

Here’s what Block has to say, and I don’t imagine there are many folks who’ll disagree with her sentiments:

“The more demanding my career has become, the more I’ve realized I don’t want my free time to be consumed by mundane tasks that I don’t want to be doing — and that includes going to the gas station to fill up,” she said.

“It’s not fun, it’s not stimulating and it’s not enjoyable,” she added. “If I can pay somebody to get it done for me, I will totally do that.”

When I starting reading this article on fuel delivery, the first thought that came to mind was a bit of a fear-factor that guys would be driving around town with tanks of gasoline in their cargo bed. Guess I’m not alone:

“Some of the [companies] are using 1,000-gallon tanks,” Greg Andersen, a division chief in the California state fire marshal’s office, told the Guardian newspaper. “If they’re going into the basement parking lot of a high-rise, that actually is a large concern.”

Yoshi field technicians deliver gas to parking garages and high-rise buildings when necessary. The company says its field techs are hazmat-certified and have not had a single spill in three years of operation.

I don’t care what Yoshi says about their field techs. What we now have is a plot device for an updated version of The Towering Inferno.

And there’s the old fashioned gas station, already in decline – it’s not just downtown Boston: the number of gas stations in the US has declined by about 25% over the past two decades – just sitting there, waiting to be disrupted…

Still, I think $240 a year is a lot to pay for someone gassing your car up. Personally, I’d rather tack on $5 a filler-up trip. But that’s just me. We’ll see where Yoshi and the other mobile gas stations end up.

I have yet to see a Yoshi truck making a delivery. But I’ll be on the lookout now. If only so I can keep my distance.

The gig economy hits the robots

I don’t usually watch general-purpose news. Too busy Trump-obsessing over on MSNBC. But I did see something a couple of weeks ago on an interesting company in Tennessee that is looking to be the Kelly Girl – errrrr, Kelly Services – of the wonderful world of robotics. For as little as $15 an hour, Hirebotics will put a robot on your shop floor. And they’re so much better than humans:

Our robots love to work! They want to work as many hours a day as you need them…One of the great benefits is there is no overtime, EVER! Work them as many hours a week as you want and you will always pay the same hourly rate regardless of how long the days get. Also, unlike traditional workers which tend to slow down the longer they work…the robots never slow down, no matter how long they work. They also don’t need breaks to go to the bathroom.

Perhaps it’s not intentional, but take a look at the language here.

Human qualities are attributed to the robots. They love to work. They want to work. They don’t take bathroom breaks. They don’t make overtime.

“Traditional workers,” on the other hand, have to pee occasionally. They only love OT when they get paid OT. They grouse. They piss. They moan. And those lousy trad workers  – a.k.a., humans – “which tend to slow down”, get tired. Note the “which”. Humans aren’t even given the courtesy of a “who”. They’re more objectified than the robots which, last time I looked, are still the objects here. Just not at Hirebotics.

There’s still a bit of John Henry (not the Red Sox owner; John Henry, the steel driving man) out there. But not for long.

In the very short term, a human can often beat us for speed, but they generally cannot sustain that rate all day like we can.

I guess we do need to acknowledge that, while John Henry did beat the steam-powered drill, he dropped dead shortly thereafter.

But w.r.t. the anthropomorphism, here we go again. A human is something presented as abstract. While we, the royal robot we, can work at breakneck speed all day. Although, of course, “we” have no necks to break. Another plus!

Anyway, as a business proposition, this sounds like a perfect, low-risk way to do an automation proof of concept and bring on temporary robots when you need them. And automation is coming whether the Luddites, or the folks concerned about what low-skill human workers are going to do for work in the future, like it or not.

I do find it mildly amusing, however, to think that while tons of human workers have been forced to participate in the gig economy, robots are getting gigged, too.

Meanwhile, I did check and there are other rent-a-robot outfits out there. But the first couple I looked at seem more focused on renting humanoid robots for entertainment and events.

Robo4Hire is UK company, with robots that are “show-stopping entertainers specifically designed to delight, amuse and amaze humans.”

As with the Hirebotics worker-bee robots, Robo4Hire’s robots are better than humans, what with humans and their human frailties.  Wy, they’re “refreshingly reliable after dinner speakers”:

Our robots are a spectacular alternative to the traditional after-dinner speaker.

For award ceremonies, corporate evenings or any other event that requires an entertaining speaker while the brandy is being passed, our robots bring an extra something that people will never forget.

I don’t spend a lot of time a dinners with speakers that aren’t for fundraising purposes. But there are big work event dinners in my past. The only speaker from any of these business dinners who I recall as worth his entertainment salt was the comedian Don Novello. He was hired to appear a corporate dinner as Father Guido Sarducci, a then-popular character from Saturday Night Live. What made this one fun was that the head of sales for the company did a mean Father Guido Sarducci imitation, and was in the process of doing it when the real Father Guido Sarducci walked in.

But, of course, not all business speakers are as entertaining and professional as Don Novello was. So there’s Robo4Hire:

Perhaps most importantly, our robots make sure your event is unforgettable in the best possible way: they won’t slur their words, stray into inappropriate territory or drift off into an awkward silence.

Our robots are refreshingly funny and reliably sober.  Exuberant, cheeky and bold, they will get your guests laughing for all the right reasons.

Well, this at least sounds like fun.

But, geez Louise, after-dinner speakers? Who – or is it which – workers aren’t going to be replaced?

So far, no robot bloggers, but it’s just a matter of time.

Looks like I’ll be needing a new gig sooner rather than later.

Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby

The walls of my home are covered with art. I have works by artists like my sister-in-law Betsey, the ex-wife of my friend George, outsider artists from St. Francis House. I also have prints from my travels. A couple of charming water colors, done by a friend of my mother as an engagement present. I novelty dishtowel I embroidered when I was seven. A print of the Miss Worcester (my home town) diner; a companion print of the Miss Bellows Fall (my husband’s home town) diner. A late 19th century poster. And other pieces that, over the years, I found interesting and struck my fancy.

What I don’t have on my walls are any stolen works of art by 20th century masters that are worth over a million bucks.

I did once have a piece of stolen – well, art isn’t the right word exactly – craft: an oddball haute relief of a sailing ship that either I or my roommate removed from the wall of a Boston tourist-trap restaurant when we waitressed there nearly 50 years ago. I can’t remember what prompted us to take it. Last night on the job? Rotten tips? Sick of battling rats? (Letting out a yelp if you spotted a rat when there were any customers in the house was a firing offense.)

In any case, we clipped that “art”, but it’s not on my walls. It hangs instead in my sister Kath’s dining room. A family conversation piece.

Oh, I suppose we should return it. Just drop it off with a note. Or bring it in. But maybe if we dropped it off, they’d offer us a free meal. It’s been nearly 50 years since I worked there (and last ate there – choosing what I ate very carefully), and I don’t imagine it’s the rat hole it was then. (At night, when we were cleaning up, the manager would on occasion whip out a handgun and shoot at the rat holes to keep the rats at bay. If rats scurried out while we were cleaning up, we could leave things and pick it up again in the morning. One time there was a sink clog in the kitchen. The dish boy reached in and plucked out a drowned rat.) Still…

Anyway, maybe this will all get cleared up posthumously. Kath and Rick have so much wonderful art, maybe no one will want the cornball carved sailing ship. Maybe someone will recognize it as the sort of “art” that covers the walls of ye olde Boston restaurant and feel compelled to return it.

Time will tell, and I’m not likely to be around for the telling.

But I’m not losing any sleep over it. I still feel guilty about writing a “you stink” note to my friend Susan and signing it Ginny W. That was when I was seven. But the purloined art? Meh… (The closest thing I found to it on eBay – and it was pretty damned close – goes for $28.)

I do have to wonder whether Jerry and Rita Alter lost any sleep over the purloined art that hung in their bedroom for many years.

Theirs wasn’t a $28 wood carved 3D picture of a sailing ship. It was a Willem de Kooning painting, “Woman-Ochre”, worth a cool $160M.

More than 30 years ago, that same painting disappeared the day after Thanksgiving from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.

And Wednesday, the Arizona Republic reported that a family photo had surfaced, showing that the day before the painting vanished, the couple was, in fact, in Tucson.

The next morning, a man and a woman would walk into the museum and then leave 15 minutes later. A security guard had unlocked the museum’s front door to let a staff member into the lobby…The couple followed. Since the museum was about to open for the day, the guard let them in.

The man walked up to the museum’s second floor while the woman struck up a conversation with the guard. A few minutes later, he came back downstairs, and the two abruptly left…

Sensing that something wasn’t right, the guard walked upstairs.  There, he saw an empty frame where de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” had hung.(Source: Washington Post)

There were no security cameras back in that day, but there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that points to Jerry and Rita, a couple of quiet, unassuming retired educators. Among the “points to” evidence is a story by Jerry from a self-published collection that tells the tale of a stolen emerald that only two pairs of eyes can gaze on. Hmmmm. (The de Kooning hung in such a way that it could only be seen by someone in the Alters’ bedroom when the door was closed. Hmmmm.)

Rita Alter outlived her husband by a few years, but when she died in 2017 and antiques dealer “spotted ‘a great, cool midcentury painting.’ They bought it, along with the rest of the Alters’ estate, for $2,000.”

‘A great, cool midcentury painting,’ I’d say.

It does remind me of a work of art owned by a friend.

Years ago, when visiting his cottage on the Cape, I was struck by a piece. It was not great, but there was something about it, and I kept coming back to it. I made a comment to my friend about how arresting the piece was. He laughed. He’d gotten it at a garage sale for a couple of bucks, and found out later that Edward Hopper had lived and worked there. It was no “Nighthawks”, no light house, no NY street scene. Still, there was something about it. (Haven’t thought of it in years. I’ll have to ask my friend if he ever got it evaluated. If not, he should find out when Antiques Roadshow is coming to town.)

Anyway, the Tucson antiques dealer put it up in his shop. It wasn’t there long:

…before the first person “came in and walked up to it and looked at it and said, ‘I think this is a real de Kooning,’…Then another customer said the same thing. And another.

At which point, the dealer awayed to the google and figured out he might well have the missing de Kooning on his hands and on his walls.

He called the museum, which came and collected it, and had it authenticated. Talk about jumping for joy.

The FBI is tracking things down, but, as I said, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests the Alters may have been responsible for the heist.

Everyone who knew them remembered them as “nice people.”

I guess I’m proof positive that “nice people” can pull off art thefts. But I’m wondering what Jerry and Rita Alter were thinking, what they were saying to each other, as they sat there in bed, looking at their $1.6M de Kooning.

Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.

Hmmmm. Do you think Cindy LaPorta’s career as an accountant has come to an end?

I haven’t been following the Paul Manafort trial all that closely.

Sure, I know all about the ostrich jacket and the $12K suits. All those houses. All that landscaping. All those wire transfers. His being flat broke until he saw an opportunity to make a few large ones and volunteered to work for free for the Trump campaign. (So much for hiring “the best people.” Or does it not count as a hire if they work for free?)

I know that the judge wants to move things along. And that the Manafort defense strategy appears to be blaming everything on Manafort’s underling, Rick Gates.

But I haven’t been hanging on every word uttered in court.

Still, I could not help but notice the truly pathetic testimony of one Cindy LaPorta, a CPA with the firm of Kositzka, Wicks and Company who helped Manafort cook his books so that he could get loans to sustain his ostrich jacket, $12K suit lifestyle. This was after Manafort’s bookkeeper wouldn’t go along with the con. Not so LaPorta (who was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony).

Cindy Laporta, said she went along with falsifying his tax records because she feared confronting her longtime client. (Source: Washington Post)

She knew better.

As the afternoon waned, prosecutor Uzo Asonye began pressing Manafort’s former accountant Cindy Laporta to detail financial arrangements that prosecutors allege Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, used to evade paying taxes, including classifying income from foreign companies as “loans” to themselves.

Laporta testified that she was suspicious of the loans, many of which were thinly documented.

“Did you have concerns about representation you received about these foreign loans?” Asonye asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you believe the representations about these foreign loans?”

“No,” she said.

She knew better.

“I could have refused to file the tax return,” which she said could lead to litigation with Manafort’s firm.

“I could have called Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates liars, but Mr. Manafort was a long-time client of the firm and I did not want to do that either,” she said.

Sometimes you just have to call a liar a liar. But I’m sure the pressure was on. There are a couple of questions swirling around in my head. Did she run the situation by any of her partners/colleagues? Maybe she did. Maybe they encouraged her to get along/go along. I’m also wondering just how much her firm knew about Manafort’s reputation. It could well be that people are just coming out of the woodwork now, but I do keep hearing that everyone in Washington “knew” that Manfort was dirty. What did her firm know and when did they know it? Lie down with dogs…

Asked if she regretted her actions, she agreed; “I very much regret it.” She said she was taking responsibility now.

I’ll bet she does regret it. Even if she dodges the criminal bullet, I can’t imagine she’s all that employable as a CPA any more. And I suspect her firm may not weather this storm, either. Didn’t their work for Enron topple the august accounting firm of Arthur Andersen?

LaPorta actually was kind of fingers-crossed that someone else – at the bank Manafort was trying to con – would notice that something wasn’t right, taking her off the hook:

Laporta said she forwarded the paperwork to Citizens Bank despite her apprehensions because she “honestly believed the bank would have to vet the document themselves” and that this meant she was legally “protected” from criminal liability.(Source: Daily Beast)

I don’t think that culpability-wise that it works that way. But what do I know? I was involved in plenty of gross stupidity over the course of my career, but nothing that involved the words “criminal liability.”

Cindy LaPorta…

I’m guessing she had a nice, well-paid job that she liked. A respected position in her community. (She was on a non-profit board.)

She’s now expunged from the Kositzka, Wicks website, but you can still get a few glimpses out there in google-world.

Get to Know Cindy at Work. Q. What do you love about your job? I love our team approach and collaboration in our commitment to entrepreneurs.

Where was that “team approach” when LaPorta most needed it? Or were those other team members in cahoots when it cam to turning a blind eye? And were Manafort and Co. considered entrepreneurs? They were certainly, ahem, enterprising.

Cindy Outside the Office. Q. Who has been most influential in your life? My parents, for their hard work and devotion to family.

Ouchie.

I actually feel a tiny bit sorry for Cindy LaPorta.

Sure, she was weak. And she did something that has to be against the ethics of her profession. But layered on her bad behavior is the fact that she had the ill-fortune to land smack-dab in the middle of a colossal scandal, a star witness in a trial that if it weren’t for the prominence of the defendant, would not be anything that we’d have heard word-one about.

Cindy LaPorta isn’t exactly an innocent bystander, but she sure is getting payback for a couple of rancid decisions in a very big, very public way. And I’m guessing that her career as a CPA has come to a screeching, very big, very public halt.

Bet she regrets the day that Paul Manafort darkened her door in one of his $12K Bijan suits.