There are frequent flyer programs, and there are frequent flyer programs…

As anyone who knew my husband for more than, oh, 30 seconds, can attest, Jim was a frequent flyer savant. Or obsessive. Or junky. All would apply. And he stuck with it to the end. At one point, when we were meeting with his surgeon maybe 6 months before Jim’s death, Jim went on a major rattle  about how to acquire lots of frequent flyer miles without actually having to fly anywhere. (The magic is all in the credit cards.) He stopped for a breath and I – sitting there with my list of questions – stepped in and said (pleasantly and with humorous tone, even though I was thinking stick a sock in it), “Oh, Chris has better things to do with his time than hear about frequent flyer miles.” Of course, what I was really saying was I have better things to do with my time. Anyway, Chris waved me off and said, “No. This is really interesting.”

When I’m waiting for a doctor and they’re running late, I always remind myself that, if I were the patient, I would want my doctor to spend the extra time with me. Now that I know that the doctor may, in fact, be listening to a patient blab on about frequent flyer miles, I’m not quite as understanding.

Nonetheless, having been (and continue to be) the beneficiary of Jim’s magnificent obsession, I’m grateful for his diligence, which is, among other things, flying me and my sister Trish to Tucson in January, where my sister Kath and her husband will be renting a place in the sun.

Jim accrued miles through a number of programs, but Aeroflot wasn’t one of them.
We never flew Aeroflot.

We would see their planes on the tarmac at Shannon, which was a refueling stop for them. And at 6 a.m. in the Budapest Airport, we sat next to a group of Russian men who downed a liter of vodka while they waited for their Aeroflot flight. We agreed that, if we were flying back to Russia, we would be downing a liter of vodka, too. Instead, we were on Lufthansa heading to Frankfurt.

But if you are an Aeroflot regular, you’d better watch out.

Seems that they recently instituted a new regulation. If you trash talk them on social media, they can take back your frequent flyer miles and cancel your airline-related credit card
Aeroflot’s chief executive, Vitaly Savelev, responded to criticism with these words:

“People who are insulting on social media should understand they have to be held accountable.” (Source: thebell.io via a retweet of Francis Fukuyama by – I think – Michael McFaul. Got that?)

Held accountable? Huh? Something must be lost in translation…
I don’t think that running Aeroflot puts you in quite the same league as the petrogarch/oligarchs. But it’s a pretty big deal.

Historically, the airline was not just the bridge connecting Russia with the West, but also a cover for Russian intelligence — and former employees of the company have told The Bell that the company is still closely tied to the security services. Until 2009, the company was led by the son-in-law of Russia’s former president, Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Savelyev, has known Putin since the mid 1990s. Private airlines have a hard time in Russia and after each bankruptcy Aeroflot picks up the best routes. Since 2014, its market share has grown from 37% to 47%.

Friend of Putin. Well, say no more! What a swell airline Aeroflot is! The fellow who runs it must be a genius!

But I guess having your card canceled and rewards miles revoked is better than getting Skripaled with a nerve agent, or stabbed with a plutonium tipped umbrella. Still, it does seem unduly harsh.

If I do ever fly on Aeroflot, remind me not to blog about it.

This blogpost is CONDEMNED by the Legion of Decency

I’m always interested in reading about interesting jobs. And the one that was held by about-to-retire Joan Graves for 30 years was of particular interest to me. Graves was a movie-rater. Not a critic, mind you, but someone who decided whether a film was G, PG, PG-13, R or – horror of horrors -  NC-17.

The article/interview in the NY Times on Graves’ career was full of good little tidbits. For instance, in 1969 there were 101 films with a G rating; in 2017, there were 11. In Graves’ view, filmmakers prefer a PG rating to a G rating, as it means more box office. She believes that filmmakers started throwing in a stray ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ into their G movies in order to get the preferable PG stamp.

Another tidbit is that Harvey Weinstein is a pain in the butt. Now that did not come as much of a revelation. Yet to find out that, when he wasn’t harassing women, he found time to regularly get up in the ratings group’s grill is something of an affirmation of his overall nastiness.

What reading about Graves’ time spent rating movies – she estimates that she saw 12,500 during her tenure – really did was prompt me to think about the rating system that was the bane of my movie-going existence as a kid: the Catholic Legion of Decency.

Each week, The Catholic Free Press (Worcester’s diocesan rag) published the Legion’s ratings of the movies playing in Worcester.

And it was thanks to the Legion of Decency – a tribe of censorious little prudes if ever – that I wasn’t able to go with my friends to see West Side Story when it came to town in 1962. I could listen to the album all I wanted, and that I did, mooning over all that glorious music, playing the LP over and over whenever I could grab an hour when someone else wasn’t monopolizing the Webcor stereo in the family room, or, worse, watching something on TV.

While my mother was a watchdog on the movie front, by seventh grade, I could take anything out of the adult section of the library and read it. Not that I was reading anything racy, but it was okay to read To Kill a Mockingbird. (I just looked it up and saw that the movie came out in 1962. I’m pretty sure that I went to see it, but surely a movie with a rape in it wasn’t rated A-1. If I could see Mockingbird, what was the big deal with West Side Story? Was it the hinted at idea that Maria and Tony did “it” without benefit of clergy? They were, after all, a couple of Catholic young folks, Maria being Puerto Rican and Tony being Polish. Anyway, I wasn’t much of a moviegoer but remember the keen disappointment and resentment I felt when I couldn’t go to see West Side Story. The only other movies I remember seeing in 1962 were The Music Man and The Castaways.)

I can’t remember whether West Side Story was rated A-II (suitable for adults and adolescents), A-III (suitable for adults only), or A-IV (suitable for adults with reservations). Since my sister Kath (at 14), was an adolescent in 1962, and I (age 12) wasn’t, I’m guessing it was A-II.

Anyway, I tried to fact-check the rating by googling ‘west side story legion of decency’, and the top response was a very funny blog post written by none other than my cousin Ellen, who was a fellow-12 year old forbidden by her mother, my Aunt Mary, from seeing it as well. (Did they collude when they sent letters to each other? Phone calls were holidays-only, other than the exception made for a death or similarly life-shattering incident.) Ellen thinks that the movie was an A-III or even a B. She may be right about A-III.

My sister was a freshman in high school in 1962, and the movie-restriction reins were definitely loosened in high school.

When I was in high school, I went to arty-movies like Bunny Lake Is Missing and Séance on a Wet Afternoon – at least I thought they were arty, the Beatles movies (which surely the Legion of Decency would have objected to!), and movies full of sex and violence (c.f., Goldfinger).

I looked through the list of movies condemned by the Legion of Decency, and saw that I actually saw a couple of C-rated movies while still in high school – The Pawnbroker and Blowup. These were mortal sin movies, so my mother’s guard must surely have been down. My father was ill off and on throughout my high school and college years. (He died of kidney disease when I was a senior in college.) So maybe she was preoccupied with other things and didn’t bother to ask when I told her that I was going to the movies with my friend Marie.

While in college, I find from the list that I saw a number of C movies. Not that I would have given a rat’s ass what the Legion of Decency had to say by then. The C-rated includes Rosemary’s Baby, which Ellen saw on her first date with her future husband Mike. It also includes Last Tango in Paris, which I actually saw in Paris (and didn’t like all that much). And the movie Billy Jack, which should be condemned on aesthetic grounds alone!

I have no idea whether the Legion of Decency still exists. Need to know basis only, I guess…

Share the road? Share the sidewalk?

A few years ago, a company began offering Segway tours of Boston. Those Segways took over the sidewalks – and I do mean take over: it was definitely a matter of caveat ambler. Nothing like sharing our narrow sidewalk space with a bunch of nervous rubberneckers tootling around on a motorized, stand-up version of a manual lawnmower.Then the city stepped in and reminded the tour company that Segways are vehicles and, thus, they belong on the street. Victory was ours, the righteous pedestrians. Yay!

The victory was sweet, but short.

All of a sudden there were rent-a-bikes all over the place. And, for whatever reason, those hopping on and off those rent-a-bikes feel that they belong on the sidewalks. S

Sorry, but bicycles – other than those pedaled by those under the age of 11 – don’t belong on the sidewalks anymore than Segways do.

And now, this:

If you haven’t paying attention to the shared electric scooter craze sweeping the globe, this might be a good time to start. A fleet may be headed to the Boston area this spring as part of a pilot program, and if experience in other cities where they’ve landed is a guide, we may be in for a whole new breed of aggressive and erratic drivers. (Source: Boston Globe)

I’ve had a few of the electric scooter-heads zip by me, mostly when I’m crossing the Boston Common. They’re sneaky little bastards, those scooters. You don’t hear them until they’re right on your heels. Wheee!

On the upside:

The scooters are an efficient way through traffic-choked cities.

Okay, as long as they stay in the road with the other traffic.

Such is their promise, that two big players in the scooter game — Bird and Lime — are each valued at more than $1 billion, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Oh, those unicorns…

On the downside,  the rent-a-scooters coming to town are of the dockless variety. (The rent-a-bikes in Boston, on the other hand, have to be docked.) The fear here is that folks will just drop them wherever they feel like, including in the middle of sidewalks, on handicap ramps, in doorways. Although there are reports that jerks are leaving scooters strewn all over the place, I don’t know how reasonable a fear this is. I’m sure there are occasional a-holes – aren’t there always? – but I’m sure that most people will leave the bikes out of harm’s way: leaning up against a fence or a tree. (I am prepared to be proven wrong here.)

A bigger downside: lots of accidents, which are:

…so frequent that personal injury law firms are now chasing scooters.

Ambulance chaser, meet scooter chaser. And I’m guessing that they’re also chasing scooter victims, as, surely, there will be scooter victims.

I hope not to be one of them, and will be on the lookout. Segway riders in Boston are generally on tours, being lead by a guide. And they don’t tend to go that fast – just fast enough, it seems, to stay upright and balanced.

Cars are, of course, a menace, but, while I’m a jaywalker, I’m a head’s up, eye contact jaywalker.

I’ve always felt that there was a non-zero possibility that I’d be hit by someone – generally, I will have to say, a morbidly obese someone – going too darned fast in their sit-down mobility scooter.

But my biggest fear as a pedestrian has long been the bicyclist. Far too many, in my experience, have no problem riding the wrong way down a one-way street, taking to the sidewalk when it’s more convenient, and ignoring red lights because, hey, it’s a pain in the neck to stop. (A close friend of a friend was struck many years ago by a bicycle messenger running a red light. He suffered tremendous physical and neurological damage and made nowhere near a full comeback.)

If scooters, however, take off, I do believe that scooter drivers will supplant the bicyclists as the number one enemy of the pedestrian. While there are all kinds of bicyclists who give their fellow cyclists a bad name, most are really just folks trying to commute in a healthful and environmentally friendly manner. Most look like nerds.

Scooter-ists, I suspect, will be less nerd and more bro. And there is no doubt in my mind that they’ll be rampaging down the sidewalks.

As I said, caveat amblers.

Spoiler alert: Romeo and Juliet both die

Bad enough that literature (or history or sociology or whatever) professors feel obligated to provide trigger warnings, so that students can avoid reading about topics that make them feel uncomfortable, situations that are going to cause them stress. Maybe colleges should instead set up an entirely anodyne curriculum for a survey course that will satisfying a humanities checklist item. I can’t think of any books that would qualify for Nice Novels 101, but I’m sure there are some nice-y-nice ones out there. Nice lady meets nice man. They do nice things. They have a nice house. They have nice kids. And nice neighbors. Come to think of it, all that niceness might well trigger someone.

But someone who can’t read about unpleasant topics maybe just has to accept that they can’t major in any area that might involve sex, violence, sexual violence, racism, sexism, ageism, looksism, etc. They maybe need to look at STEM concentrations.

Anyway, I thought all this was bad enough. But trigger warnings at the theater?

The Denver Center Theater Company staged “Vietgone”, a comedy that takes place during the Vietnam War. They’ve posted a sign outside the theater door that warns patrons about what they’re about to see.

“Please be advised,” it cautioned, in capital letters. “This production contains: Strobe lighting effects. Sudden loud noises. Theatrical fog/haze. Scenes of violence. Adult language. Sexual situations. Adult humor and content.” (Source: NY Times)

Okay. I can see a notice about strobe lighting. A theatergoer might not expect strobe lights, and I believe that this can have a rather nasty impact on someone with epilepsy. But sexual situations? Adult language? Adult humor and content? For crying out loud. Read a review, already, so that you can avoid anything saltier than The Music Man.

“This production may trigger an adverse reaction,” Baltimore Center Stage  said of “Wasted” a play about the aftermath of an alcohol-fueled sexual encounter.

Shouldn’t the play’s title be enough of a tipoff that something unpleasant, a must-avoid for certain folks, is going on here? Find a high school that’s putting on Our Town. No, wait. Didn’t Thornton Wilder slip a suicide in there?

In Sarasota, Fla., Asolo Repertory Theater not only disclosed “potentially disturbing, realistically depicted gun violence” in “Gloria” which depicts a workplace shooting, but also included plot particulars in a spoiler section on its website.

Want a play about the workplace? Is Pajama Game too racy? “Steam Heat” is kind of a sexy-ish tune. Maybe Deskset would work?

Philadelphia’s Interact Theater Company went one step further: In addition to warning that “Sensitive Guys” dealt with sexual assault, the company designated a “safe space” in the lobby and invited representatives of Women Organized Against Rape to talk to patrons upset by the material.

Even though I never hang on for post-show discussions,I’m all for having a conversation about what’s gone on in play. But a “safe space” for theatergoers?Just don’t go.

Even theatrical war horses are not exempt: For its recent production of “Oklahoma”, St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn handed out a black card when patrons picked up their tickets, warning of gunshots as well as “moments of darkness and violence” and offering guidance for those who feel compelled to walk out.

Well, call me a Girl Who Can’t Say No, but offering guidance for those who can’t take Poor Jud being dead. Just say no to this sort of nonsense. It’s a Scandal! It’s an Outrage!

Really, going to the theater is mostly about being entertained. But it’s often about being challenged, provoked, as well. Scary things, nasty things, confusing things, things that make you think.  Or feel a bit uncomfortable. Theater happens.

But those who have come of age in the trigger warning era apparently want them.

“People who have grown up with warnings now expect them,” said Becky Witmer, the managing director of ACT Theater in Seattle.

And less you think this is purely the province of companies in liberal, PC enclaves, the marketing director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival said that:

…some audience members had even walked out of “Annie” because Daddy Warbucks said “damn.”

Hand me my fainting salts, please.

If you’re going to warn your potential patrons, I like the Dallas Theater Center’s approach to Hair.

“WARNING,” it announced on its website. “This production will include hippies cursing, smoking pot, getting naked, mocking societal conventions, meditating, taking LSD, flaunting their sexuality, celebrating their race, creating a happening, singing and dancing. Also, there will be audience participation. Consider yourself warned.”

Sounds good to me!

But reading about Hair does trigger a memory.

I never saw it, but I’m from that era. And I did have the album, which I played all the time.

At my house, we pretty much shared records, and my sister Trish, who’s 10 years younger than I am, also liked to listen to Hair.

At some point, it occurred to my mother that there might be something on there that wasn’t especially appropriate for a 9 year old. So she asked me and my friend Marie if there was anything objectionable on the album. Without missing a beat, Marie told her, “masturbation can be fun,” which is, indeed, part of the lyrics to the song “Sodomy.” I suspect that was it for Trish and Hair. Marie and I didn’t hang around to find out. We just got in her father’s car and headed to Friendly’s, singing songs from Hair as we rode through the streets of Worcester.

Consider yourself warned.

This really isn’t helpful

Christopher Blair is a pretty funny guy. From his little house in the woods of Maine, he comes up with crazy little fake news headlines – headlines that rival this all time classic National Enquirer beaut:

Famed psychic’s head explodes!

Of course, conspiracy minded folks are no longer interested in stuff about famed psychics they’ve never actually heard of. No, they want infowar-style info – fake info about the real people they hate. They want to know about the pedo ring that Hillary Clinton ran out of a D.C. pizza parlor. About Sasha and Malia becoming Isis brides. About George Soros drinking the blood of Christian children.

In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55. (Source: WaPo)

And, as Blair has said, “The more extreme we become, the more people believe it.”

Blair launched America’s Last Line in 2016 as a joke to share with his liberal friends. But then those who aren’t in on the joke found their way there. 6 million of them each month. And even though his site is clearly labeled – “Entertainment Website”, “Nothing on this page is real. Not a bit of it.” – a lot of those 6 million folks take it for real. And they share, and share, and share, egged on by Blair’s “traitors” and “lock them up” exhortations. All this has translated into a full-time job for Blair, earning him as much as $15K per month.

Among the credulous is Shirley Chapian, a 76 year old retiree who lives in a trailer in the Nevada desert. Chapian spends much of her day consuming, commenting on, and sharing stories that strikes this coastal elite as pure cra. Such as:

“Iowa Farmer Claims Bill Clinton had Sex with Cow during ‘Cocaine Party.’ ”

Now there’s a headline that could make a famed psychic’s head explode!

One of Blair’s headlines also managed to capture Chapian’s attention.

It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats — or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them — had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day, and this time she decided to click ‘like’ and leave a comment.

“Well, they never did have any class,” she wrote.

Except that the white woman in the picture was the dear departed Hope Hicks, not Chelsea Clinton. And the black woman in the picture was the dear departed Omarosa, not Michelle Obama. I didn’t see the picture, but I suspect that, whatever was going on in the minds of Hope Hicks and Omarosa, neither one of them was actually giving the finger.

Sorry, Christopher Blair. Maybe you can get a job writing for Stephen Colbert or someone. Maybe you can write for The New Yorker. But by putting your material out there, no matter how fun your inventions are, you’re pouring fuel on the fire.

But Blair and his fans take it one step further.

Rather than just commenting on a comment, and gently pointing out that a story is fake, they go on the attack, calling those gullible gulled folks “taters”, “stupid,” “moron,” “trailer trash.” They try to bait them into making racist comments – which probably isn’t all that difficult – in hopes of getting them banned from Facebook. (On the brighter side, he has been successful in getting FB to 86 a couple of dozen “new” sites that have grabbed Blair’s content – minus the disclaimers that they’re BS – and republish it.)

But the Shirley Chapians of the world fight back at those attacking them as moronic trailer trash. In Shirley’s world, those attackers are “nasty liberals.”

She’s got a point.

Let the believers like Alex Jones put out this nonsense. We don’t need my liberal fellow travelers adding to the heap of misinformation out there, entrapping ever more dupes into spreading utter (and dangerous) nonsense. And it’s really not helpful to then go after them as morons and idiots. I don’t really think this approach works convincing them that they’re wrong. True believers are true believers, even when presented with the truly believable truth.

Humorous as Blair’s imaginings are, they’re not really helpful – at least not in this day and age.

I don’t do Black Friday madness, either

It’s Black Friday. Yawn.

I won’t be lining up at Walmart. I won’t be standing in line to buy a big screen TV. Or even the new laptop I so desperately need. (A story for another day, but after 3.5 years, my trusty Surface Pro is a-failing. I believe there’s some little hardware failure thing going on, such that it can’t reliably access or maintain an Internet connection. I will be at the Microsoft Store first thing on Monday, when everyone else is shopped out, to get my replacement. With luck, I’ll have enough connectively over the weekend to do a bit of research on my options. Sure, I can use my phone – which, by the way, is also a nag heading for the glue factory – but I’d prefer to use an actual computer with more screen real estate.)

On Friday, if I’m walking by, I may stick my head into a card store and see if Thanksgiving cards are on sale. I prefer my holiday cards half-price, thank you. Other than that, I’m pretty meh on Black Friday.

Anyway, most of my shopping is done. Just a few things left, but especially with an early Thanksgiving, I’ve got plenty of time remaining until panic sets in.

Dunham’s, a family owned and run department store, in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania a country town with an economy driven by diary farming and fracking, doesn’t do Black Friday madness, either.

I have to say it was something of a delight to read about Dunham’s:

At a time of rapid innovation, when giant retailers are competing on speed and convenience with features like two-day shipping and curbside pickup, many department stores symbolize obsolescence and decline. Yet Dunham’s, a store with a limited assortment of furniture, housewares and clothing, often at higher prices, has managed to compete in its own way with Amazon and the Walmart supercenter, which is only 12 miles away and sells just about everything.

The Dunham family, now in its fourth generation as retailers, has created a niche with shoppers who feel left behind by e-commerce, or choose to opt out of it.

“My customer, the little old lady, is being forgotten,” Ann Dunham Rawson said. (Source: NY Times)

Unlike me, Dunham’s little old ladies don’t have computers, tablets, or smartphones. Like me, however, I’m guessing that Dunham’s little old lady grew up shopping at department stores.

The leading department store in Worcester was Denholm’s. There was also a Filene’s, but Filene’s was just clothing, shoes and cosmetics. (And the fabulous, but not quite as fabulous as Boston’s, Filene’s basement.) There were a couple of other department stores – Barnard’s and R.H. White’s – but Denholm’s was the biggy. Clothing, shoes, cosmetics, furniture, toys, gifts, housewares, bedding, appliances…And the best decorations at Christmas. When we went down city (Worcester for downtown), we shopped at Denholm’s.

Worcester was and is more than 50 times larger than Wellsboro, PA, so I’m guessing that Denholm’s carried a lot more inventory with a lot more variety than Dunham’s. Still, a department store is a department store. And while I rarely shop one – other than for an occasional foray to Macy’s – I still sort of miss them.

Dunham’s definitely caters to its base.

When large retailers cut back on an older women’s clothing line, known for polyester pants with elastic waistbands and shortened cuffs, Dunham’s expanded its offerings.

Wish they’d named names here. Having had a little old lady for a mother, I’m guessing that we’re talking Alfred Dunner here.

“My customer, the little old lady, is being forgotten,” said Nancy Dunham’s daughter Ann Dunham Rawson. “Other companies don’t think that type clothing is much fun.”

Well, that clothing really isn’t much fun. But it’s practical – easier when you’ve got arthritis to just pull up your poly pants than fumble with a button and a zipper. Plus those little old ladies are dying out, and the future cadre of little old ladies in the wings – me and my cronies – aren’t interested in short-legged pull-on polyester pants. Plus we’re online shoppers.

Dunham’s has no immediate plans for offering online shopping.

So you have to wonder how much longer the store will last.

They do have a few things going for them. They’re the only place for miles around where you can buy Starbuck’s coffee. And the people who shop there love the way they’re treated. Which is apparently quite well.

“I hope people want to keep interacting with each other in brick and mortar stores,” Nancy Dunham said. “It’s one way we learn from one another. It frightens me to think of a world without it.”

I still do plenty of shopping in brick and mortar stores. But I do plenty more online. I do like in person shopping. I like interacting with someone rather than something. But the world without it doesn’t frighten me. Which is not to say I don’t/won’t mourn the passing of department stores.

Good luck to Dunham’s.

Sigh.

Thankful for last year’s Thanksgiving Day post

As I said in last year’s Thanksgiving Day post, this is pretty much a broken-record holiday, as my sentiments don’t change much from year to year.

So if you want to know how I feel about Thanksgiving, you can find it here.

Oddly, I see that in last year’s post, I had just had an MRI on my right ankle (which revealed nothing major). Mechanical difficulties seems to come hand in hand – make that occasionally wonky hand in occasionally wonky hand – with aging. And so, last week I had an MRI on my stubbornly frozen shoulder which hasn’t managed to get back to normal despite a ton of PT, five months of weekly acupuncture, and daily exercises. Whatever that MRI finds, I’m knocking on wood – and heaving up plenty of thanks to parts and spirits unknown - that all I have at this point in my life are a couple of mechanical difficulties.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Down on ye olde Plimoth Plantation

I am not a big fan of costumed interpreters.

Last year, my sister Trish and I went to Cooperstown, NY. We’re both baseball kind of gals, so the main draw was the Hall of Fame. But we also wanted to take in the Farmers Museum, an interesting little reconstructed village, vintage early-mid 1800’s. We were there at a non-busy time of year, and just wanted to spend a little time meandering around and sticking our heads in to the various houses and shops. Each time we looked in and saw a costumed interpreter, we backed out. Engaging with someone pretending to be an 1820’s schoolmarm or shopkeeper? No, thanks.

This not wanting to engage with someone in period garb does not hold 100% of the time. When, on the same trip, we toured Washington Irving’s home in Sleepy Hollow, we really enjoyed the docents or interpreters or whatever they were called. They were extremely pleasant and informative. Maybe it worked because they weren’t pretending to be contemporaries of Irving. Just (amateur, I think) historians who wanted to share their knowledge about Irving, his life, his home, his family, his work. It was fascinating.

That brings me to Plimoth Plantation.

What with this being Thanksgiving week, there’s a lot of attention being paid to this museum, which is yet another reconstructed village – this one dating back even further than the Farmers Museum or the Washington Irving house. They’re all about the early days of the pilgrims in Massachusetts, i.e., the 17th century.

The wooden structures alone are sufficient to convey the horror of living in ye particular olde days. Dark, drafty, cold, smoky. Uncomfortable furniture. Bad food. No plumbing. Ill health. And the overall no-fun, piety on steroids life of the pilgrims.

Life back then was nasty and brutish and, if you  were among the fortunate ones, short.

I didn’t need a costumed interpreter to tell me that.

I’ve only been to Plimoth Plantation once, a dozen years back, when my sister Kath and I took our nieces.

Frankly, we all found the “authenticity” of the interpreters off-putting and embarrassing. Of course, I don’t even like the authenticity of Plimoth vs. Plymouth. But I really find the interpreters’ presence is subtractive rather than additive. Part of this is just personal preference. I’d rather read something on a placard, or converse with humans in contemporary English, then pretend I’m having a convo with someone from the wayback.

That said, I’d be fine if they threw in a couple of words from the olden days. Who doesn’t want to know that people didn’t say something was backward, they said “arsy varsy”? Now, that’s a term I wouldn’t mind see make a comeback.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, Plimoth Plantation is in the news this week. I have some sympathy for the journalists. I mean, there are only so many times when the journalist stuck with writing up the annual article is going to want to cover corn, midden piles, and terms like “arsy varsy.” So this year’s edition of the Boston Globe’s  ‘what up at Plimoth Plantation?’article deals with labor unrest.

I don’t think we’re supposed to say things like “the natives are restless” anymore. So I won’t. But some of the employees are.

“Turmoil,” corrects Peter Follansbee, a former employee who left in frustration in 2014 after 20 years as a craftsman at the plantation, “would be tame.”

In the aftermath of a bitter movement to unionize, some plantation workers — mainly the actors who assume 17th-century personas and inhabit the re-created village like Pilgrims of yore — say they are being overworked and bullied, and they fear management is slowly undoing the living museum’s greatness.

One of their concerns is that there are fewer interpreters there than there used to be. I am sympathetic to workers rights, etc., and I get that the job of interpreter, as a steady job, was probably a real prize for actors. But in my book, fewer interpreters would be a good thing. And if I have no patience with interpreters, I can only imagine what the school kids who are the mainstay of visits to PP must feel. Kids would have no patience with a geezer like me asking questions about what was taught in school or how to make rose hip jelly – which I would do if I knew the answers weren’t going to come back at me with ‘good morrow, my good woman, ye are most curious about our lives’ language. Let alone with someone playacting as if they still lived in 1621 and could well recall the moment they stepped toe onto Plymouth Plimoth Rock.

I know absolutely nothing about current pedagogy, but I’m guessing there are better ways to reach today’s kids than through interpreters.

Anyway, some employees are obviously disgruntled, while management seems to be gruntling along just fine.

In an interview, Plimoth spokeswoman Kate Sheehan rejected the notion of a museum in crisis.

The plantation sits in a strong position, she said, though she declined to comment on specific issues, saying the museum has put the labor dispute behind it.

(The labor dispute involved union organizing, union trashing and harassment, a narrow win for the organizes and a subsequent vote among employees to de-unionize. There’s another attempt afoot to unionize the workforce. Sounds more 1920’s than 1620’s, but you can’t stay in persona 24/7. Anyway, I do wish the employees luck.)

Several current and former employees said they believe the roots of the dispute and the current unhappiness lie ultimately in a feeling among some workers that management is attempting to strip the plantation of what has long made it unique — its devotion to “living history.”

The site’s actors, or “interpreters,” have long strived to ensure that every detail of the 17th-century village — from the type of wood used to build houses to the vocabulary employed when addressing visitors — is true to the time. Many study the period on their own, and some have even traveled abroad to learn more about the era they’re reconstructing.

So some employees bristled at changes they feel threaten that authenticity, including modern information placards inside the Colonial homes and the presence of managerial staff dressed in T-shirts and nametags walking the Colonial village.

Okay. I’m all for those modern information placards, which I would find useful. And managerial staff with nametags? Why not?

I have a pretty good imagination, and I can imagine pretty good just how grim life must have been back in that day. Some guy in a T-shirt and nametag isn’t going to detract from that. And someone pretending that Plimoth Plantation is actually their lied experience isn’t going to add to it.

Just sayin’…(Or forsooth sayeth me.)

Cultivating Leicester

Today, two pot shops are scheduled to open in Massachusetts, which will make our fair Commonwealth the only state east of the Mississippi that has recreational MJ emporia.

One of the locations makes perfect sense. Northampton is lefty, hippy-ish, social-justice-y. In 2016, in a state where Clinton beat Trump 60.8% to 33.5%, Northampton gave Clinton 80.3% of its votes, with a paltry 11.7 going Trump’s way. (It almost goes without saying that Northampton voters gave more than double the percentage of votes to Stein than did the state as a whole – 3.9% vs. 1.5%.)

In Leicester, on the other hand, Clinton way underperformed her state average. She came in at 40.3% while Trump took 50.1% of the votes. (Stein got 1.3% in Leicester.) Attitudinally, this makes little old Leicester an unlikely location for a pot shop (and more likely to believe that Reefer Madness was a documentary).

Leicester is variously described as a “small wooded suburb of Worcester”, a “former mill town,” and a rural backwater “dotted with dairy and vegetable farms.”

It is also the final resting place for many of my family members, including my parents, my sister, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncles, one set of great-grandparents, an assortment of great aunts and uncles, and a bunch of my father’s first and second cousins. Not to mention that, kitty-corner to her grave, the family who lived in the third floor flat of my grandmother’s decker is buried. (My grandfather predeceased my grandmother by 55 years. He’s buried in his home town of Barre, Massachusetts. Nanny was a Leicester girl and wanted nothing to do with godforsaken Barre.)

I grew up in Worcester, but Leicester was right next door.We took the Cherry Valley bus, Cherry Valley being one of the villages of Leicester. It sounds lovely, but when they call Leicester a “former mill town,” they’ve got Cherry Valley in mind. There was Duffy’s Mill, where when he was a kid – from 6th grade through high school, I believe – my rather worked after school as a candy butcher, selling candy and sandwiches to the Irish mill girls who couldn’t leave their machines to grab something to eat. At some point, he was promoted to bobbin boy, which was more lucrative. He became an expert at identifying the best (knot-free) bobbins and provided them to the girls who tipped the best. My father acquired this job after his father died, and he got it through pull: his Uncle Joe was a foreman. I think my great-grandfather, Matthew Trainor, had also been a foreman at Duffy’s, which is probably how Joe got his job. Matthew and Bridget Trainor had settled in Cherry Valley after the immigrated from Ireland. It was in Cherry Valley that they raised their family.

Another mill that I recall had the intriguing name of Elfskin. I always wondered what exactly it was that they produced there…

Anyway, Leicester was familiar territory.

We went swimming at the little beach at the Castle Dairy on Lake Sargent.

We got ice cream cones at the Cherry Bowl.

We ate 10 for a dollar hotdogs at Hot Dog Annie’s.

I spent a miserable week at Brownie and Girl Scout Fly Up day camp at Leicester Junior College.

At the age of four, I tripped and fell coming out of a packy on Route 9 in Leicester where my father had gone to buy his monthly case of beer. Forever after, when our family passed this site, as we did frequently on our “spins” out to the Cherry Bowl for ice cream, someone was sure to announce “that’s the place where Maureen fell.” (I think that Leicester was also the town where “the monkey stole the cookie from Kathleen”, an incident that occurred before anyone other than Kathleen was born, yet still held a major position in family lore. I.e., when we drove back, someone was sure to announce…)

And now Leicester will be home to a store that will be far rarer than the packy where I fell, and far more popular than the spot where that nasty monkey stole Kath’s cookie.

And Leicester is all prepared for what’s heading their way.

The police chief has readied traffic details as part of a “special operations plan.” Overflow parking has been set aside at a garden nursery. Buses have been rented to shuttle buyers to the shop. And a food truck will feed the hungry masses waiting in line for their first legal high.

…The closest event Police Chief James J. Hurley can compare it to is Black Friday at the local Walmart, which draws 1,700 bargain hunters every year. But at least Walmart, unlike Cultivate, the local marijuana shop, has a massive parking lot, he said.

…“We’re either going to get everyone in the state who wants marijuana coming here, or it’s going to be half the state that wants marijuana coming here,” Hurley said, as he prepared to go over final details of the opening with a private security firm hired by Cultivate. “Either way you look at it, we’re going to have a crowd.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Local restaurants are looking to cash in, hoping that shoppers come (or go) with a case of the munchies. The Parks and Recreation Committee hopes that some of the pot-related revenues will help them improve the town’s playgrounds. Some residents, however, fear that Cultivate, which has already been running a medicinal MJ dispensary, will attract the wrong crowd. (Perhaps they fear Jill Stein voters?)

Some locals are more neutral towards Leicester’s becoming a pot-town.

At Wayside Floral, a candy-colored shop with a pressed tin ceiling, there were more shrugs than enthusiasm for recreational pot. Christine Anderson, the owner of the shop, said she didn’t expect marijuana sales to help her business, or change the town much at all.

“People will come and go,” she said. “No different than when Walmart opened.”

Well, I’m guessing it’s going to be bit different than when the Walmart opened.

Anyway, with Cultivate’s recreational pot shop opening, these are heady times for Leicester.

Here’s a real feel good story. (Not!)

Ah, the holiday season is upon us, and with it come not just the aisles of CVS full of bags of Christmas-themed M&Ms, Kisses, Reeses etc., but the columns of newspapers, the TV news, and social media full of feel good stories. Tear-jerking. Heart-warming. Wallet-opening

This ain’t one of them.

Last year, just about this time, a New Jersey couple put the word out on GoFundMe to raise some coin for a down on his luck person who had helped them out when they were in need.

As the story goes, Kate McClure, the female half of the couple, ran out of gas in Philadelphia and was stranded. A kindly homeless fellow,Johnny Bobbitt Jr. - I’m wondering if he’s any relation to the John Wayne Bobbitt, made famous in the early 1990’s when his wife Lorena took the kitchen shears to his private parts – stepped in and, with the only money he had, a twenty-dollar bill, bought gas for poor Kate. Then Kate and her boyfriend, Mike D’Amico, decided to do what they could to repay Johnny. They went public with their tale and raised $400K on GoFundMe to help Johnny restart his life.

Things began to unravel when Johnny decided to sue Kate and Mike, claiming that he hadn’t gotten as much money as he felt he deserved. Kate and Mike had given him some, but were dipping their own beaks. No fair! It was Johnny, after all, who was the hero of the story, the one who was the reason for all those folks opening their wallet to give Johnny a new life. And here were Kate and Mike using some of the dough to fund their regular old life. (Well, not exactly their regular old life. More like their fantasy life.)

I’m a regular giver to GoFundMe. I never give much – mostly $25 – but I’m a sucker for the cute puppy who needs surgery; the widow whose husband was killed by a drunk driver while heading to the hospital where she’d just given birth; the kid who will be able to see if only the family can raise $11K for some special glasses.

But this wasn’t one of of the good causes that this me decided to help go fund.

Turns out the story was One. Big. Fat. Lie.

There was no gas-less damsel in distress. No kindly homeless fellow willing to give up his only cash to help her out. No do-gooder couple who decided to go public with this charming story and turn the kindly homeless fellow’s life around.

Nope.

Just a couple of not-so-do-gooders who’d met up with a fellow fellow with larceny in his heart who concocted the get-rich-quick scheme.

All three have been charged with theft by deception and conspiracy to commit theft by deception. McClure and D’Amico surrendered and were released Wednesday; Bobbitt was arrested in Philadelphia and awaits extradition to New Jersey. (Source: WLOX)

Authorities believe that, if Johnny hadn’t sued Kate and Mike for “his share of the money” the trio might have gotten away with it. By the point that Johnny lawyered up, Kate and Mike had spent most of the money on trips and other luxuries (c.f., BMW) they couldn’t have afforded without relying on the kindness of strangers.

At first, the sympathy went Johnny’s way. Poor homeless guy, scammed by the couple.

GoFundMe stepped in and promised to make things good for him.

Then it was discovered that Johnny was in cahoots with Kate and Mike.

Now GoFundMe’s making good for those who donated, refunding the money they contributed. (Thankfully, I am not among the refundees.) And the trio are each facing up to 10 years in jail.

At least in jail they won’t have to worry about gas money,and they’ll all know where their next meal is coming from, where they’re going to spend the night.

Still, based on the homeless folks I know, they’d be happier homeless than in jail.

Anyway, Happy Holidays to Johnny, Kate and Mike!

And, especially this time of year, caveat donor.

I really didn’t need another reason to despise Facebook

Ya know, I never liked Facebook from the get go. I don’t lead a particularly interesting life, and, while I’m plenty fine with sharing my opinions and observations (as witnessed by my decade+ years as a blogger), I have no need to share the not particularly interesting details of my not particularly interesting life.

I didn’t like hearing from people I knew in the wayback who really didn’t want to reconnect. They just wanted to add to their roster of “friends”. I didn’t like seeing the frothing nonsense posted by some farthest of the far right relations. (Yes, even I have some of them.) I’ve always been something of a privacy buff, and FB just gave me the willies, privacy-wise. I didn’t particularly like Mark Z. even before I saw The Social Network. Sure, the Winklevoss twins almost make Mark seem like a nice guy. Almost.

Maybe if I’d had cute kids and grandkids I’d have jumped on this platform like a trampoline. But I don’t. So I didn’t.

I do like looking at the cute kids and grandkids of my friends and families. Other than that.

But I was ticked off enough about Facebook’s behavior with respect to election interference/Russian trolling to consider quitting FB, even though all I am is a watcher, not an active participant. A number of my friends (largely techie males) did exit stage left. I stayed put. I don’t look at it as often as I used to. But I stayed put. Facebook wasn’t that bad. And I really do like looking at those cute kid and grandkid pictures. So I stayed put.

And Facebook gave me cover by making at least some of the right noises about doing a better job to rid their world of fake news, trollers, Russian interference, etc. (All the while, of course, maintaining that they’re just providing the pencil and paper. They can’t possibly be held responsible for conspiracy theorizing, hate speech, racism, bullying, lies and other toxic content.)

And. Now. This.

As it turns out, while Mark Zuckerberg was on his phony-ish but at least lip service-y mea culpa tour, his right hand woman, Sheryl Sandberg:

…has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic. (Source: NY Times)

Nothing like playing the George Soros card – which is really a trifecta: foreign born, liberal, Jewish -  but it’s sure not what you’d expect from a company that’s chock full of Silicon (nominal) liberals.

But those Silicon (nominal) liberals didn’t want to appear to be Silicon (nominal) liberals. Bad for business! Conservatives and extreme right wingers consume adds on social media, too. And they might be put off if FB, say, decided that they didn’t want their oh so neutral platform used to, say, destroy faith in democratic institutions, undermine our electoral process, and generally wreak great havoc.

So they downplayed how bad Russian efforts had been. And, worse, went after their perceived opponents in a thoroughly tawdry way. Etc. (Playing the Soros card: FFS!)

I have a lot of techie stuff on my plate that I just plain don’t want to deal with.

My phone battery is nearly played out, so I need a new phone. I’m hoping it lasts until after the holidays. And then I’ll have to deal with it.

My Surface Pro – from roughly the same vintage as my phone (somewhere between three and four years old) – is becoming a bit balky, especially with respect to holding on to an Internet connection. So I need a new Surface Pro. I’m hoping mine lasts until after the holidays. And then I’ll have to deal with it.

Getting off of Facebook would be, of course, a lot easier and a lot less costly than getting a new phone and//or laptop. But doing so will take up psychic space that I don’t feel like allocating to it just now. So I won’t be looking at all those cute kids and grandkids. And come the first of the year, I plan on leaning out and quitting Facebook in a delayed huff.

They won’t miss me. And I’ll miss all those cute kids and grandkids.

But I didn’t need another reason to despise Facebook, and now I’ve got one.

Of helipads and billionaires

On my first trip to New York City, I spent a week in glamorous Long Island City, in Queens. I was a senior in high school and was there in “The City” with my friend Kathy, whose career gal Aunt Mary worked for Pan Am and lived in Queens. Queens is not very exciting, but it was a great urban experience. The area where Aunt Mary lived was very dense and concrete – nary a tree to be seen, lots of little mom and pop shops with their fruit displays spilling out onto the sidewalk. Each day, we went hurtling into Manhattan to see the sights – Statue of Liberty, The Rockettes. Naturally, we took the subway. It’s been 50 years, but I think we took the N or the Q. Or was it the 7? I also think this was pre-graffiti, so no “Chico 158” all over the cars. I loved every minute of that trip – love at first sight with NYC; to this day, whenever I get near The City, it’s always a matter of ‘be still my heart’. But that initial trip didn’t instill in me the desire to live in Long Island City.

Jeff Bezos probably doesn’t want to live there, either. But he is planning on building one of his two new Amazon HQ’s there.

Boston was on the short list, but we’ve had to settle for a smaller Amazon outpost. I’m just as happy. We already have enough well-paid young techies driving up housing costs and driving out middle- and working-class natives.

Meanwhile, there’s some griping that by giving the nod to Long Island City, and the weird and sterile Crystal City in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC (where I’ve been a couple of times on business), the rich areas are getting richer. (The same griping would have occurred if Boston had been tapped, or most of the other cities that made it to the Amazon shortlist.) The gripers argue that at least one of these HQ’s should have gone to a lesser-known town in a flyover state so that they would have the opportunity to upskill their workforce, build up IP, forget about coal mining and join the 21st century, etc. The counter-argument, of course, is that communities with less of a developed tech network just didn’t have the employee pool to meet Amazon’s needs.

But NYC, over the past decade or so, has become something of a tech mecca to rival Silicon Valley and Boston. They’ve certainly got the chops to support Amazon’s workforce needs. And, let’s face it, most twenty-somethings would rather live in New York than in, say, Columbus Ohio which, like Boston, was on the shortlist. (I will note that pretty much every place on the Amazon shortlist was at least in a metro area where the cool kids want to hang. And that includes Columbus. It’s just that Columbus is no New York. But Long Island City is no New York, either. Nor is Crystal City.)

In addition to lots of techie resources, and street cred (at least through proximity to Manhattan, Brooklyn and Hoboken) with the young folks, Long Island City also has transportation infrastructure that many cities lack. Sure, we keep hearing that the public transpo in NYC has become completely abysmal – I haven’t ridden it in years – but they do have good transportation bones. The N, the Q, the 7. (“The Bronx is up, the Battery’s down. The people ride in a hole in the ground.”)

But being on a subway line isn’t quite enough for the richest man in world history. That would be Jeff Bezos. He, apparently, doesn’t want to be a straphanger. Or even someone being squired around in a big black limo. And since Elon Musk’s fast-action tunnels aren’t yet on the horizon, that pretty much leave helicopters.

So in order for Amazonians to have access to the new site, they’re going to need a helipad, which New York – state or city or both, I’m not quite sure – has agreed to help Amazon out with.

A helipad, it seems, is:

…a rare thing for a company to have in New York: Rooftop helipads have been banned since 9/11, so even Manhattan’s high rollers have to make their way through the filthy streets to riverside helipads when they head for the airport or the Hamptons. (Source: Slate)

Filthy streets? Riverside helipads? Not for Jeff Bezos and the other Amazon big shots.

Of course, it goes without saying that, in order to get the Amazon deal, New York (and Virginia) “had” to offer up sweeteners. Amazon may be paying for their own helipad, but there’s plenty of tax incentives that went Amazon’s way, including the state “covering most of [Amazon’s] other construction costs,” and no taxes. The incentive package is supposedly in the multiple-billions of dollars. (Massachusetts and Boston weren’t willing to ante up anywhere near this much.) For their part, Amazon will be making ‘in lieu of taxes’ payments to help improve the neighborhood.

We know how well these deals work out. (Wisconsin went multi-billions crazy to woo Foxconn to their state The latest word is that some of the plum jobs are going to go to – wait for it – engineers imported from China.)

Meanwhile, Long Island City will be getting a helipad. Because the richest man in the history of mankind needs to get from point A to point B without having to hop a turnstile or twiddle his thumbs at a traffic light.

Maybe crime doesn’t pay, but it doesn’t always cost, either

I missed the news that Jeffrey Skilling, the erstwhile big mahoff at Enron – remember Enron? seems like a million years ago – was recently issued his get-out-of-jail card and moved to a halfway house in Houston. He’d been in the stir since 2006, where he had plenty of time to rue the day he left McKinsey, where he was a hot-shot consultant, to put theory into practice at Enron.

Skilling in a halfway house is quite a remove from the  days when Enron was the “it” company, the darling of Wall Street, and regular awarded the title “America’s Most Innovative Company.” Unfortunately, Enron’s innovation turned out to be mainly on the accounting side, which landed Skilling et al. in prison. And took down the hopes and dreams of employees et al., as Enron’s stock price plummeted from nearly $100 a share to zero.

For those who are particularly interested in white collar crime and punishment, the early 2000’s were heady days:

Soon after Enron collapsed, a rash of other corporate scandals came to light: Tyco, HealthSouth, WorldCom and others. They didn’t end well for those in charge. Dennis Kozlowski, Tyco’s former chief executive, served 10 years in prison. Richard Scrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth Corp., spent six years behind bars. And Bernie Ebbers, the former CEO of WorldCom, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He’s still there.(Source: Bloomberg)

(Let’s not forget the other Bernie – Madoff – but he wasn’t the CEO of large public company. He was jut the CEO of Ponzi Scheme, Inc. But he was a white collar crook who’s now a lifer.)

But the world has apparently moved on from tough sentences for fraudsters who cost thousands of folks their savings and their job. These days – and this is certainly disappointing news for those hoping that the long arm of New York State law catches up at some point with Don Jr. and Javanka – the sentences meted out to white collar criminals are no longer harshing the mellow the way they were when Sklling was a newbie con trying on his first orange jumpsuit for size.

Case in point with regards to the kinder, gentler sentences offered recently:

Gary Tanner and Andrew Davenport were executive scam artists (think price gouging and kickbacks) at Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Even though the prosecutors recommended relatively stiff sentences for both these fellows, the judge wasn’t in a hangin’ mood.

Instead, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska concluded that one year was enough — and even agreed to postpone their prison time until after the holidays! Her reasoning included “the men’s long histories of good deeds, hard work and devoted family lives before they hatched their plan,” as Bloomberg News put it.

Plus the two men were really, really sorry.

Plus Davenport has a heart condition.

For some reason, since the financial crisis, prosecutors have been less zealous about taking out the white collar bad guys, and to some extent “the government simply stopped charging executives criminality.” And they began substituting civil fines for time behind bars:

… even for the most egregious crimes. Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, was the classic example. As much as any single company, Countrywide helped bring on the financial crisis — by giving subprime mortgages to people they knew couldn’t afford the homes they were buying — yet no one from the company was ever prosecuted. Instead, a judge signed off on a $67.5 millionn settlement Mozilo reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s still a very rich man.

And in a variation-on-the-theme of Citizens United, prosecutors started charging companies rather than individuals. As they did with GM and its Mark of Excellence.

In 2014, General Motors Co. acknowledged installing ignition switches that a number of employees knew were faulty, causing at least 124 deaths and 275 serious injuries.

GM paid a $900 million fine, and several billion dollars to settle lawsuits — but none of the employees who knew about the ignition switch were ever charged with a crime. At a news conference in 2015, Preet Bharara, then New York’s top federal prosecutor, said that putting “into the stream of commerce a defective automobile that might kill people” was not a crime

Preet Bharara? Really? I’ll have to consider unfollowing him on Twitter…

And in much the same way that judges of the sober as a judge variety have been known to go easy on DUI offenders,

…judges, who are among society’s elites, tend to have more empathy for their fellow elites than for others who may stand before them for sentencing.

Thus, the poor fellow – make that poor black fellow – with a couple of joints in this pocket gets escorted up the river for 10+ years, while someone who swindled his clients out of a cool million is put on probation and ordered to pay those swindled clients back.

I’m all for prison reform. Maybe justice would have been served well enough if Jeffrey Skilling had gotten a somewhat lighter sentence. After all, Enron didn’t kill anyone, with the possible exception of Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, who had a heart attack and died a couple of months before he was scheduled for sentencing.

White collar crime is different than violent crime. It doesn’t make us afraid to walk down the street after dark; it doesn’t tend to kill.

But white collar crime can do great harm to hopes, dreams, fortunes, and families.

There’s got to be a middle ground between throw away the key and let them just walk. And I’ll bet you anything that, while he’s sitting in his halfway house, Jeff Skilling is kicking himself for having turned to crime a decade or so too early.

The Magic 8 Ball Declared Toy Hall of Fame Worthy

I much enjoy finding out which toys and games made the list of those inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.

This year the nods went to the Magic 8 Ball, Uno, and pinball.

While the Magic 8 Ball was introduced in the 1950’s, I don’t recall any direct experience it during my childhood. I have a vague memory of some boy bringing one in the day after Christmas vacation in fifth grade, when we were allowed to bring in something we’d gotten as a gift – the one and only “show and tell” of my grammar school years. (For the record, I brought in my Shirley Temple doll, as did my friend Bernadette. Only hers was the bigger version.)

The Magic 8 Ball was, however, much in presence during my business career when, every so often, in the face of management dithering, someone brought one in for use in a skit skewering the folks in charge. (My preferred make-a-decision-gag was the OUIJA Board. I relabeled on S.W.A.M.I. but I no longer remember what my clever acronym stood for. System Which Always Makes Intelligent decisions??? More directly, at one outfit I worked for, we came in one day to find a paper bag taped to the wall with the the message, “Punch your way out of this one, boys.”)

At any rate, the Magic 8 Ball is a lot of fun, even if it is pretty simpleminded and is only as good as the questions you ask it.

I grew up playing cards. By kindergarten, I was playing not just Go Fish, War, Concentration, Old Maid, and Slapjack, but Rummy. From there, on to Crazy Eights, Hearts, I Doubt It, Gin and Canasta (my all time favorite). I played with my friends (we tended to fixate; one summer all we played were raucous rounds of I Doubt It). And I played with my family (mostly Rummy, Canasta and something called Pokeno Royale, some type of combo of Poker and Keno). Cardplaying was a big summertime pastime, and a snowed in one as well. I also liked Solitaire: regular old, clock, and double.

I loved playing cards and would have loved Uno if it had been around. But it wasn’t. I got to know Uno when my husband and I lived upstairs from a family with two kids. Most days, the kids came up to hang out with us, and one of the things we did was play endless rounds of Uno. (I need to ask Sophia, who has two little guys of her own now, whether they play Uno.)

My experience with Pinball is limited. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t much of a thing in Worcester. Or, if it had been, it was available in sordid quarters that we didn’t frequent. (My brother-in-law, growing up in Philadelphia, was something of a pinball wizard, playing a mean pinball. So maybe it was a big city thing.) I did play it on occasion as an adult and, at arcades – when not playing Skee Ball or Wack-a-mole, I will gravitate toward a pinball machine rather than towards any sort of electronic game. I have observed that this is true of most arcade-goers of a certain age.  

The other nominated toys/games, this year’s runner up, are:

American Girl dolls, chalk, Chutes & Ladders, Fisher-Price Corn Popper, Masters of the Universe, sled, tic-tac-toe, Tickle Me Elmo, and Tudor Electric Football.

As a doll-loving child, I would have killed for an American Girl doll. But they didn’t exist, and it’s unlikely that I would have been given such a swank toy anyway. (C.f., smaller version of the Shirley Temple doll.) But I got to make up for it when my nieces were little, and I got to buy stuff for their Molly and Kit dolls. American Girl dolls are wholesome, well-made and pricey. And they have outfits and accessories to die for. (Or, in my case I guess, kill for. See above.) The biggest problem with them is that they come with books (a good thing) that provide too much of a detailed backstory (a bad thing). Better to let the kids come up with their own scenarios.

Chalk (for Hopscotch) was a staple of my childhood, as was playing Chutes and Ladders. (In addition to playing cards, kids in my era played a ton of board games.) And, ah, the Fisher-Price Corn Popper. After my personal time, but it came out in 1957, so my younger brother (1955) or younger sister (1959) may have had one. Surely, some kids I’ve known in my life have had one of these most excellent of classic toys. What’s not to like, unless you’re a mother with a migraine, about a toy that makes that glorious popping noise while some gleaming eyed child frenetically pushes it around?

Masters of the Universe? Not for me. But the sled. If there was snow on the ground, we were out sliding. I lived on a hill. Everyone who lived in Worcester lived on a hill. We went sledding, from the corner of our backyard, down through the Daigneaults’ hill and side yard, and out onto Winchester Ave. Somewhere along the line, we all became infatuated with Flying Saucers, but those Flexible Flyers were tried and true. I still remember the excitement of three kids on a sled, trusting someone with the steering, and the thrill of belly-flopping and hoping you wouldn’t run into something and end up with a bloody nose. One of the many downsides of climate change is that there’ll be less snow and fewer opportunities for sledding.

Tic-tac-toe? Yawn. But Tickle-Me-Elmo? A very fun toy. I don’t think my niece M had Tickle-Me, but i do believe she had Sleep-and-Snore Ernie, which would sometimes get itself off in the middle of the night and wake the family up.

I had to laugh when I saw Tudor Electronic Football on the list. What would today’s kids, so used to sophisticated electronics, make of plugging in the board, turning it on, and watch the tiny plastic football players – the quarter back with his tiny felt football in hand - judder up the field. Hah! If the Tudor makes it to the Hall of Fame, I hope it’s a throwback from the early 1960’s rather than some splosh modern game.

Anyway, the National Toy Hall of Fame is on my bucket list. Rochester, NY, ain’t that far. Someday…

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Source: Toy Hall of Fame press release. Here’s the full list of inductees since the beginning of time. And here’s my take on last year’s inductees – all excellent picks: Clue, paper airplanes, and the wiffle ball.

 

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The War to End All Wars

One hundred years ago yesterday – at the 11th hour or the 11th day of the 11th month – World War One ended. No one was calling it World War One, because no one was anticipating World War Two. It was, however, called the First World War because it was, well, the first war that involved most of the world.

Mostly it was called the Great War. Or the World War. Or, in the maternal branch of my family tree, Der Weltkrieg.

The total killed in Der Weltkrieg – all sides – is estimated to be roughly 16 million. Ten million of those were military personnel, and 12 percent of that number came from Austria. I’m guessing that this means the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which case, a couple of those killed were my great uncles.

My grandfather, Jacob Wolf, was from a German town, Neue Banat, which was in the far out, non-glamorous reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He came from a large family, mostly boys. I don’t know the details, but a bunch of them served, and they were on the frontlines, in the trenches. I don’t know the names of the brothers who died – Michael? Nick? – but Jake survived and decided he wasn’t going to wait around and see what was coming up next. So a few years after Der Weltkrieg, he got on the boat with my grandmother and my toddler mother and headed to America.

Fast forward, and didn’t one brutal, dumb, and brutally dumb war lead to another one.

By this point, Jake was an American citizen, naturalized, as were my grandmother and mother. He prospered in Chicago. A butcher by trade, he owned a successful grocery store, a bungalow in a very nice North Side neighborhood, rental apartments, and a second home (“The Country House”) on a lake about 50 miles outside of the city. He was a Republican – when my mother voted for the first time, she went to the polls with her father and, as she told us, proudly cancelled his vote out. And he was a baseball fan. (I apparently inherited my affinity for the game from both sides.)

By 1941, Jake had three more children – Amerikaners – two of them boys, too young for the war. (Jake and Magdalena rounded out their family in January 1945 with the arrival of my Aunt Kay.) But Jake also had two future sons-in-law, as yet unbeknownst to him or to the brides-to-be, who both spent the war in the Navy. That would be my father and my Uncle Ted (my Aunt Mary’s husband). Later, Jake’s boys were both in the service, my Uncle Jack in the Coast Guard – for some reason, this was a great source of amusement to those Navy men, my father and Ted, who kidded Jack about Hooligan’s Navy. Bob was in the Army.

During World War Two, Jake closely followed the war news. My mother recalled him reading the casualty lists of the Chicago boys killed or wounded, which were published in the newspaper. She recalled him reading the names out loud, crying as he did.

More than most, Jake Wolf knew what war was all about. He had seen the devastation up close and personal, had seen what it meant to parent to lose their boys. Jake knew.

On Veterans Day, we celebrate our vets. And so we should. So a shout out to those who served in our military – Navy, Army, Marines, Air Force, and – yes! – Hooligan’s Navy. But this year I’m adding Jake Wolf to the list.

He served in what was supposed to be the war to end all wars. That didn’t work out, but not through lack of desire on Jake’s part.

I didn’t know my grandfather. He died before my second birthday. But have a great picture of him, decked out in a Hawaiian shirt no less, holding me in the yard of The Country House.

Happy Veterans Day, Grandpa!

You gotta know when to fold ‘em, and Samsung does. (This looks like fun!)

I am never an early adopter.

My first cell phone looked like a WWII walkie-talkie. It was so old-school it was almost rotary. It was a hand-me-down from a colleague who was upgrading to a new-fangled flip phone. This was around 1998. I only used that phone for keep-it-in-the-car-for emergencies. After about a year, I got a flip phone.

I laughed at my boss when he got a Palm Pilot. Palm Pilot! We didn’t have LOL back in that day, but I was LOL-ing over the product’s name. It sounded like…. Well, never you mind what it sounded like to me. Anyway, after a not-so-long-while watching him use his Palm Pilot, I went and got one. From the point on, I couldn’t live with out it. Until everything you could do on a Palm Pilot, you could do on a smartphone. So I got a smartphone.

I swear to God that my husband and I purchased the very last fat-box TV for sale anywhere in the city of Boston. We liked the picture better than what was on the flat screens, and were afraid that if we hesitated too long we wouldn’t have be able to find a TV we liked. So we went ahead and got fat boy. How much longer did it take us to get a big old flat screen? Not all that long.

I’m trying to think of something I was an early adopter of. Maybe the New Beetle, which I bought the first year it came out. That may not strictly count, as the Beetle was such a throwback product. But when I first had my Beetle on the road, people would notice. I went to a party – mostly boomers – and everyone who knew how to drive stick lined up to take it for a spin around the block. And then those Beetles were everywhere. My one time in the vanguard. And it wasn’t about early tech adoption. It was about early nostalgia adoption.

Anyway, while I’m never in the first wave of adopters of anything, I’m never in the last wave either, preferring to catch a second or third wave.

So, no, I won’t be first in line for phone that has an “origami” fold-out screen that turns into a tablet.

We think of a smartphone screen as a rigid piece of glass that’s limited by the size of the device itself. But Samsung’s Infinity Flex Display folds, unfolds and refolds to pack up into a smaller form. (Source: WaPo)

Earlier this week, at its developers conference, Samsung offered a sneak peek of the smartphone-of-the-future, which is expected to be commercially available some time in 2019.

In an interview, the CEO of Samsung’s mobile division, DJ Koh, told me the folding phone is no gimmick. “In terms of productivity, always a bigger screen is better,” he said. “If we made a much bigger screen than the Note, then it would become a tablet. So why don’t we think about folding? We started from this simple idea three or four years ago.”

And now they have a prototype.  And now they need apps that work on it. But this tech is so cool, that shouldn’t be a problem. (Google has already signed up to do native Android for it.)

Folded up, the device has a screen on its front. When opened, the interior screen lays flat — with little hint of a crease — to show a widescreen version of whatever app had been previously running on the front.

That interior screen is 7.3 inches, smaller than a tablet, but much easier to do work on (or have fun with) than the screen size of a current smartphone.

How’d they make the screen fold flat? Koh said Samsung has had bendable OLED screens for years, but they’ve been fixed behind glass. The folding phone’s interior screen uses a different kind of composite polymer transparent material that can withstand being opened or closed at least 300,000 times. We’ll have to see how it wears in real-world use.

Well if it lasts being opened and shut “at least 300,000 times”, that’s an open and shut case. Even if I opened it 100 times a day, it would still last me over 8 years. A lifetime! Especially when you factor in a) my age, and b) the fact that even someone who doesn’t lunge for every new tech bell and whistle – I tend to hang on to a phone or laptop for anywhere from 2 to 4 years – will be onto something new before this one dies on me. (When I replace depends on my current tolerance for the performance slowdown that comes as the apps get appier, and the batteries get funkier.)

But one of the reasons I never want to jump in to early on a new technology is that Version 1 generally has a ton of bugs in it. For those who thrive on acquiring the new and the shiny, these problems are just baked into early adoption. Me? I like to wait for the shakedown cruise to set sail and return before I’ll jump in on something.

In any case, I’m completely enamored at the idea of the folding phone and I’ll definitely be in one of the earlier of the adopter waves. (That is, unless it’s stupendously expensive.)

By the way, one of the things I like about this is that Samsung seems to have gotten a jump on Apple. Oh, I’m sure Apple’s working on something similar, but it’s yet to be seen. As one of the lone Android/Samsung phone users in my circle, I’m looking forward to showing mine off.

This one looks like fun!

The reinvented toilet market? Disrupters are everywhere

My husband’s Uncle Bill was born in 1910. He was raised on a tobacco farm in Western Mass that, during his childhood, lacked the comfort of indoor plumbing. When someone would start rhapsodizing about the good old days, Bill would immediately bring up frigid morning trips to the outhouse.

Worse than an outhouse, of course, is no outhouse. In my younger days, I did a bit of camping, so I’m quite familiar with relieving yourself in nature. It’s actually okay when the whether is perfect, it’s light out, and you’re able to be quick about it. If not…

Anyway, I definitely come down on the side of a clean toilet in a well-lit room.

As anyone who’s ever plumbed a bowl or changed the out the floating ball and chain gizmo in the tank can attest, the technology hasn’t changed all that much over the years.

Sure, there are those super-flush toilets that have all kinds of involved gear in them that cost a lot of money and a lot more money to repair. Then there are smart toilets that flush themselves. Special settings for Number 1 and Number 2. And heated seats. But basically it’s activate flush, waste out, water back in the ready.

I do remember the Clivus Multrum, a composting indoor toilet from Sweden. In the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, Abby Rockefeller of the Rockefeller family was a proponent and, I think, introduced them in the U.S. I was vaguely aware of this because my sister Kath was an acquaintance of Abby, who was a local feminist big-wig.

Can’t remember where, but I actually used a Clivus Multrum recently. It was weird, but I do take their word that this approach is more environmentally friendly than trad plumbing.

Abby Rockefeller isn’t the only philanthropist involved in toiletry.

Bill Gates, it seems, has turned his considerable brain and fortune to this necessity.

….he’s betting big that a reinvention of this most essential of conveniences can save a half million lives and deliver $200 billion-plus in savings.

The billionaire philanthropist, whose Bill & Ms neceselinda Gates Foundation spent $200 million over seven years funding sanitation research, showcased some 20 novel toilet and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertilizer.

“The technologies you’ll see here are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years,” Gates, 63, told the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday. (Source: Bloomberg)

The Reinvented Toilet Expo, huh? Sounds like that might have been a bit more interesting and worthwhile than most/all of the tech expos I participated in over the years.  (At one such expo, I was waiting for a cab and who walked by but Bill Gates. He was getting into a hired car. Maybe I should have asked if I could hitch a ride to O’Hare with him.)

I have next to no experience in countries mired in poverty and with poor plumbing.

But what I saw on a day-trip to Tijuana in 1972, open running sewers are pretty terrible. Offal/awful.

The world – in which 2.3 billion people live without access to basic sanitation -  needs alternatives to creating expensive infrastructure (sewers, piping, waste-treatment facilities). And Clivus Multrums are far too expensive.

So it’s a good thing that researchers and companies are reinventing the toilets.

“Our goal is to be at 5 cents a day of cost,” Gates said in a telephone interview before the exhibition. Small-scale waste treatment plants, called omni-processors, may be suited for uses beyond human waste management -- such as for managing effluent from intensive livestock production -- because of its low marginal running costs relative to the value of the fertilizer and clean water it produces, he said.

“I never imagined that I’d know so much about poop,” Gates said in remarks prepared for the Beijing event. “And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table.”

Fecal sludge? Bet it’s more interesting table convo than the glories of MultiPlan (Microsoft’s early spreadsheet) or fun with screen beans.

And so much better for the world.

Thank you, Bill Gates. The world may not be a better place thanks to Microsoft – the jury’s out on net-improvements to my life - but it will be if we can figure out how to reinvent sanitation so that our poor fragile planet can support billions more pee-ers and poopers.

Nice to know there’s an option out there

For years, I would kiddingly tell friends that, if needs be, I could always go back to waitressing.

But that’s not quite true.

It would be too hard on the back, too hard on the feet. Plus my tolerance for putting up with cooks, managers, bartenders and, oh yeah, customers would certainly have declined over the years.

So waitressing’s out, even though I have now achieved the age and heft that would make me right at home at Durgin-Park (if, in fact, they still specialize in old bags).

Then I think, hey, I could always get a job working as an admin – maybe at one of the local colleges or universities: one I could walk to. What a prize I would be for the professor or dean who lucked into having me as their admin: literate, numerate. I could edit their papers and figure out their budgets, slick up their Powerpoints and compose their emails.

But they’d probably prefer someone less skilled but chirpier.

Other possibilities?

Well, I couldn’t keep a straight face long enough to be a Walmart greeter.

Maybe I could be a receptionist. A dog walker. An Uber driver – days only, if I had a car. Ticket taker at a museum. I’m sure that if I were in need of a job, even at my advanced and advancing age, there’d be a few options out there.

When I’ve thought about looking for employment – which, in truth, I’m fortunate not to have to think seriously about – I’ve never actually considered becoming a fast food worker.

All the downside of being a waitress without the upside of tips.

But at least they’re hiring old geezers.

Restaurants are recruiting in senior centers and churches. They’re placing want ads on the website of AARP, an advocacy group for Americans over 50. Recruiters say older workers have soft skills—a friendly demeanor, punctuality—that their younger cohorts sometimes lack.

Two powerful trends are at work: a labor shortage amid the tightest job market in almost five decades, and the propensity for longer-living Americans to keep working—even part-time—to supplement often-meager retirement savings. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of working Americans aged 65 to 74 is expected to grow 4.5 percent, while those aged 16 to 24 is expected to shrink 1.4 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.(Source: Bloomberg)

McDonald’s, in fact, “plans to make senior citizens one hiring focus in the coming year.”

In addition to our “friendly demeanor” and “punctuality”, we’re good for something else: no one has to figure out career progression for us; no recruiter needs to ask “where do you see yourself in five years” of someone whose answer is “still upright, I hope.”

I don’t think I could hack fast food.

All that standing on your feet is pretty exhausting. Some days, when I come off of a volunteer shift at St. Francis House, I’m just beat. And that’s true whether it’s prepping food or dishing it out in the kitchen, sorting clothing donations or acting as the personal “shopper” for our guests, or signing folks up for showers and handing out towels and toothbrushes. Especially when it’s a long – four hour – shift.

A few years ago, when I first began volunteering, I signed up for six-hour stints in the kitchen. I did this over Christmas break, when they were in some need of volunteers to fill in for the college kids who’d gone home. Fortunately, I was smart enough not to sign up for back-to-back days. But after that first six-hour shift, I almost had to crawl home, a quarter-mile or so across the Boston Common.

By the time I arrived at my doorstep, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t decide what to do first: throw myself in the shower, throw my self into bed, or throw my smelly clothing into the washing machine.

This would be, I imagine, the daily experience working in fast food. And I’m plenty strong and healthy.

Other than the polyester, I suppose I’d get used to it, especially if I needed the money.

But when I think about jobs for us elders, I really hate to think about anyone having to work at McDonald’s. Oh, we’re living longer, and a lot of folks don’t have much by way of retirement reserves. And work is work, and money is money. So on my biennial trips to McD’s, I’ll be on the lookout for some fellow Boomer salting my fries. I will be kind. I will be patient. I will be friendly. And I just hope I never recognize anyone I know handing me my Big Mac.