Seltzer boys*

Over the last couple of years, I’ve become something of a seltzer kind of gal. I was generally drinking a (small) can of Diet Coke each day, when I came to realization that there really isn’t anything in Diet Coke that’s good for you. And likely stuff in it that’s not good for you. So I started drinking more water. (I keep three bottles – old wine bottles – in full of tap water in my fridge. The one to the right, I have been known to guzzle directly out of, so anyone bothering to look in my kitchen on a hot day has likely seen me guzzling what looks to be white wine, directly from the bottle, while standing there with the fridge door open.)

But once I went cold turkey on Diet Coke, I found myself missing having something fizzy. So I started stocking seltzer. Specifically, Polar Raspberry Lime and LaCroix Orange.

The LaCroix, which comes in an 8-pack, is actually easier to lug from the store than is the 12-pack of Polar. But Polar brings out the Worcester girl, the locavore, in me, so I’d rather have Worcester’s own Polar. Which means backpacking the 12-pack in every couple of weeks (preferably Raspberry Lime, but if the Roche Bros are out, I’ll go with the Cranberry Lime or Grapefruit).

I go to the grocery store a few times a week, so it’s not that big a deal to devote one of those trips to a soda-lug and whatever I can carry in my tote bags. But it’s admittedly a (literal) drag to schlepp a 12-pack of soda home.

Apparently I’m not the only shopper-without-a-car who doesn’t like the lug. So entrepreneurs Garth Goldwater and George Mayorga (who make their living developing apps for companies) have come up with a solution to this “problem.”

One day, Mayorga, a self-proclaimed seltzer fanatic, was walking back to his office from the grocery store schlepping cases of the bubbly beverage in his arms, after the pair had depleted their supply.

Suddenly, annoyance set in.

“I was on the phone with Garth and I had four cases of seltzer in my hand,” he said. “And I was just telling him how much of a pain it was to do that.”

He figured others have experienced the same predicament. So they came up with a plan: Eliminate the hassle of trying to muscle boxes of seltzer around, or the frustration of running out, by launching a “milkman”-style delivery service for the fizzy drinks. (Source: Boston Globe)

Well, this isn’t quite as useless an idea as the one from a few years ago: delivering rolls of quarters to folks who needed them for the laundromat. (Not surprisingly, Washboard, which I wrote about in Washboard Abs(urd), folded.) But I can’t for the life of me see why someone who wanted their soda delivered wouldn’t just get it delivered by the delivery wing of their grocery stores.

Anyway, their new company, Ultra Seltzer, is now a thing. And I’ve got to say that, when it comes to seltzer, they’ve got good taste. They carry all of my fav flavs. Still…

The service is $15 per month, and Ultra Seltzer doesn’t charge customers until the seltzer is actually dropped at a person’s doorstep.

Well, that’s all well and good. But, ummm… If I ordered three six-dollar 12-packs a month, each would bear an additional five-dollar tariff from the service fee. That’s a lot of overhead. Even when your sodas are being delivered by a guy wearing a white milkman uniform of yore. (IRL, our milkmen when I was growing up didn’t wear white. They wore striped bibbed overalls. And they didn’t wear caps, either.The guys who pumped gas did, but not the milkmen. But when milkmen of yore are represented, they’re in white.

Of course, the zany concept, which the duo admits was somewhere between a joke and a fantasy job, already has its critics.

No surprise there. What’s more surprising is that there are some folks who’ve already signed on.

Heather McCormack was an early adopter. She saw the query Goldwater and Mayorga posted on Reddit and was immediately intrigued.

“A lot of the Reddit board was roasting them and saying it wasn’t plausible. But there was also a contingent that said, ‘This is exactly what I’ve always wanted. Please and thank you,’” she said. “There’s a dedicated community out there that’s really into seltzer — not just casually into seltzer — and I think there’s enough of those people in the Boston area alone to make it work.”

Sally Schofield also decided to take a chance on it.

The 32-year-old Boston resident lives on the fifth floor of her apartment building and doesn’t have a car. As a “seltzer enthusiast,” she loathes lugging cases of the drink upstairs every time she makes a trip to the grocery store.

“I don’t usually sign up for these type of bourgeois services,” she said, but “there are certain inconveniences that are worth paying to get rid of.”

Who knows? It’s not like I’m any good at figuring out what’s going to take off and what’s not. When Twitter started out, I figured it would be used by celebrities to communicate with there fans. And that was about it. Today, Twitter is my first news source of the day.

Anyway, just thinking about this as a viable business makes my head hurt.

Think I’ll go break open a can of Polar Raspberry Lime.

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*Seltzer Boys is an illusion that will be obscure to anyone who wasn’t around in the early 1960’s listening to parody-singer Allan Sherman. His song “Seltzer Boy” was a take off on “Water Boy.”

The old gray mares

I’m not working much. But at 69, I’m still working.

To be clear, I’m only working a few hours a week or so, so I’m not making much of a living by still working. But it pays for travel, charitable and political donations, gifts. So why not? The longer I can put off fully tapping my retirement, the better.

That said, maybe this is the year I’ll finally pack it in. And I will if the work drifts off into nothingness, which it may well do as I do absolutely nothing to sustain my freelance employment. If something comes in over my transom, I decide in the moment whether to take it. Since I like the people who’ve hired me over the years, I mostly say ‘yes’. But if something/someone entirely new comes in, the answer is likely ‘meh.’

Perhaps if I’d had a more scintillating career, something I was more – gag – passionate about, I’d still want to have both oars in the water.

As it stands, the freelance work I do is writing, which is something I really enjoy doing. And, unlike the writing I do for my 100% non-monetized blog, and the short stories I write for my creative writing group, writing marketing copy for tech companies actually pays okay.

Although I’m not still working-working, I do have admiration for the women of a certain age, who are still hanging in there.

I think that Nancy Pelosi – at 78, an even older and grayer mare than I – does a great job.

Elizabeth Warren is my senator, and I’ve proudly voted for her twice.  She turns 70 this June, and is running for president.

As an aside on aging politicians, much as I like and admire E. Warren (and Hillary, for that matter), I really don’t want to have a president in her or his 70’s next time around - I’m looking at you, Joe Biden; and it goes without saying, if I could bear looking at him, I’d be looking at Trump, too. However, I do say stay in the Senate for a while longer, Liz.

But in truth, I wouldn’t mind seeing Nancy P give up her gavel in a couple of years (and take Steny Hoyer et al. with her).

I know this is ageist, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Silent Generation (born roughly 1925-1945) and the Baby Boomers have sufficiently f’d things up on the political front that it’s time to step the f aside and let Gen X f things up.

On the non-political front, Meryl Streep is a fellow 49-er, turning 70 this year. I’ll watch anything she appears in, and hope she keeps making movies forever.

I like Glenn Close, too. And at 71 she just won the best actress Golden Globe.

Joyce Carol Oates – one of my all time favorite authors – is still writing, and tweeting, at 80.

I’m delighted that, come March, Susan Zirinsky, at the age of 67, will be in charge of CBS News.

And, of course, there is the queen of them all, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She turns 86 in March. Live long and prosper, RBG.

It’s not just my imagination that there are a lot more older women out there doing stuff.

There are more women over 50 in this country today than at any other point in history, according to data from the United States Census Bureau. Those women are healthier, are working longer and have more income than previous generations.

That is creating modest but real progress in their visibility and stature. (Source: NY Times)

Of course, we do live longer.

In 2016, the average life span of women in the United States was 81.1, compared with men’s 76.1. Nearly a third of women aged 65 to 69 are now working, up from 15 percent in the late 1980s, according to recent analyses by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. Some 18 percent of women aged 70 to 74 work, up from 8 percent.

And, thus, we are working longer. Admittedly, in many cases, it’s because women need to. Still, plenty of us are doing so because we derive some pleasure or benefit

It’s not one big rose garden for older women, of course.

There are a ton of us, but when it comes to Hollywood there are a lot more starring roles for aging actors like Clint Eastwood and Liam Neeson than there are for the Streeps and Closes.

And there aren’t a lot of us in mega corporate positions, because there weren’t that many of us there to begin with.

Plus aging continues to impact the degree to which women are (mis)treated and (de)valued more than it does men.

There is a joke often repeated among women of a certain age: You can walk into a grocery store and shoplift whatever you want, because nobody will notice that you’re even there.

Well, I hadn’t thought of that benefit, but I won’t be testing it out any time soon. My shoplifting fear is that at some point I’ll be in an autopilot fugue state and get nabbed by security while walking out of CVS with a tube of Crest.

Anyway, this old gray mare is kinda-sorta hoping that, even if I didn’t have such a wonderfully high-powered, interesting, creative and magnificent career, there’s some sort of work for me as long as I want some sort of work.

I may not be Nancy Pelosi or Meryl Streep, but, hey (hay?), I’m not quite ready to be put out to pasture.

Chicken!

I don’t cook or eat a ton of meat, but when I do, 95% of the time, it’s chicken. I like other meats just fine, too. I like steak. I like hamburger. I like lamb chops. I like pork chops. I like ham. I like bacon. I like veal. Etc.

All that said, I could pretty easily become a vegetarian.

But I would miss bacon. And I would miss hamburger. And I would miss chicken.

While I’m writing this post, I’m thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner. And what I’m going to have for dinner is the leftover roast chicken and mushroom risotto that I doggy-bagged out of Toscano’s last night. My mouth is watering.

Tomorrow night? I’m planning on popping a frozen chicken pot pie in the oven and getting a few meals out of it.

My mouth is watering because I’m not letting myself think about poultry farms and chicken factories, and congratulate myself that, when I do buy chicken it’s 100% organic and humanely raised. Supposedly.

Anyway, I’m not the only chicken lover out there.

In the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, pork and beef consumption has remained unchanged since 1990. Chicken consumption has grown by 70%.

Humans gobble so many chickens that the birds now count for 23bn of the 30bn land animals living on farms. According to a recent paper by Carys Bennett at the University of Leicester and colleagues, the total mass of farmed chickens exceeds that of all other birds on the planet combined. (Source: The Economist)

Over the years, chicken has gotten both cheaper and bigger.

This is courtesy of an American competition from the 1940’s, in which farmers were encouraged to produce the “Chicken of Tomorrow.” Farmers apparently like a good competition, and chickens have been growing like Topsy for decades now. Thus we have made the journey from the scrawny pullet, good mainly for soup-making, to today’s robust, big-breasted bird that’s the size of a small turkey.

A study of chickens showed that, in 1957, the average 56 day old chicken weighed 0.9kg. By 1978, that bird had doubled in size. And in 2005, it weighed in at 4.2kg. (C.f., small turkey.)

This doesn’t come for free. Fattened up chickens are typically fattened up in close quarters. Not being able to move around means they have to consume less chickenfeed in order to get their weight up. Not to mention the antibiotics that are poured into the chickens, which are, at close quarters, more susceptible to a number of chicken-type diseases.  (Coop cough?)

People also like chicken because eating it is reputedly healthier than eating other types of meat. So there’s that benefit…

While the OECD countries are big chicken-eaters, as incomes rise in poor countries, folks start looking for foods that are finger lickin’ good.

There are regional differences in chicken preferences, however.

The west likes white; Asia and Africa go for dark.

These preferences are reflected in local prices: in America breasts are 88% more expensive than legs; in Indonesia they are 12% cheaper. Differences in the price of chicken feet are even starker. The thought of eating talons is abhorrent to many Westerners, but they often feature in Cantonese recipes. China now imports 300,000 tonnes of “phoenix claws” every year.

Talons, huh?

Years ago, my husband and I went to a restaurant in Chinatown that was frequented by a lot of Chinese folks, thus we knew that the food was more authentic than not. Anyway, there was something on the menu that caught my eye, and I asked the waiter about it.

His response – complete with a wave-off gesture – was, “Oh, no. For Chinese people only.”

He didn’t have to tell us twice. I’m guessing it was phoenix claws.

The global chicken-industrial complex is rife with issues.

Chicken has been a flashpoint in trade negotiations. China imposed tariffs on American birds in 2010 and then banned all imports in 2015, shortly after an outbreak of avian flu. Industry observers are pessimistic the ban will be lifted, much to the dismay of American farmers who would love to be paid more for the 20bn chicken feet they produce every year, which currently become animal feed.

Then there was the EU’s ban on chlorinated American chicken way back in 1997.

Arguments over chlorinated chickens also proved a big stumbling block in negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a now-failed trade deal between America and the EU. Some Britons fear that if they leave the EU any trade deal signed with America would require them to accept imports of such chickens.

Chlorinated chicken sure sounds ghastly. Fortunately, Bell & Evans, my chicken of choice, is not chlorinated. The only chlorination that gets near my chickens is the bleachy Lysol I use to spray the sink and counters after I cut chicken up. (I pour boiling water over the cutting board.)

By the way, chicken obesity is also a problem.

Those big-breasted chickens-as-turkeys?

Broilers have breast muscles which are too big for their bones to support, leading to lameness. In Colchester the chickens are so unresponsive to humans that they resemble zombies.

I don’t know how much difference it makes if a chicken headed for slaughter is lame, but it doesn’t seem all that fair for the free range, pumped up chickens to be stumbling around while they are living the life.

Indeed, modern chickens have become so big that their muscles prevent them from getting on top of each other to mate (meaning they have to be starved before they are able to consider romance).

Okay, that is TMI.

Time to take the same posture toward chicken that I take towards veal. If I think about veal, I won’t eat it. From here on out, I’m not going to be doing any thinking about chickens, either.

Enough already

Last Wednesday, I said good-bye to the cold, the icy sidewalks, and the snow-mounds sprayed with dog pee, and headed to Tucson, where my sister Kath and my brother-in-law Rick had rented an escape house for a couple of weeks.

Even though, until last week, we’ve had a pretty gentle winter, it was still good to get away to a place where it’s warm and sunny, and where the only ice is in your drink.

But the real benefit of this getaway was that, for the five days I was gone, I was free of the 24/7 bombardment that is the build up to the Super Bowl.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy, in a non-rabid fan kind of way, that the New England Patriots (and our Tom) are once again heading there, with luck to make up for the debacle that was last year’s defeat.

I don’t lose any sleep when the Pats lose, but I’m a homer. It’s exciting when your team makes the playoffs, and, along with all the other citizens of Patriots Nation – even us half-hearted ones - I was glued to the TV having heart palpitations watching the AFC Championship Game, which the Patriots won in overtime a week ago yesterday.

If the Pats had lost, there were have been a day or two of ‘what went wrong’ coverage. Are the Pats too old? Has our Tom lost it? Is Gronk retiring? And then there would have been the usual occasional news about the upcoming Super Bowl which, without “us” in it, becomes something of a Who Cares Bowl.

But the Pats won, and let the floodgates open on Stupor Bowl coverage.

Morning, noon and night on the local news stations. Headlines in the local papers. The conversation everywhere. More TB12 shirts and Pats knit pom-pom hats on the locals’ backs and heads. Signs of support in shop windows.

This is all kind of fun the first, say, five or six times it happens to your team. But this is the ninth appearance the Patriots will be making in Super Bowl since 2002 when they Won. It. All. for the first time.

You want to read and hear about the team. But not incessantly.

Since the wondrous year of 2002, the Pats have earned themselves four additional Super Bowl rings (and squandered chances to pick up another three).  A few teams have been there two or three times. But with the Patriots, we’re talking dynasty here.

But enough is enough.

Admittedly, there are some good story lines.

The LA Rams (the team playing the Pats in next Sunday’s game) have the youngest coach in the league; the Pats, the second oldest.

Last fall, the Red Sox beat the LA Dodgers to win the World Series. Historically (but not so much lately) the Celtics and the LA Lakers have had quite the rivalry. So the Beat LA theme is a reasonably interesting one. (The Beat LA chant has a good backstory. In 1982, the Celtics were at the old Boston Garden playing the Sixers in the seventh game of the Eastern Division NBA Championship series. Whoever won was going to take on the LA Lakers for the NBA title. Late in the game, when it became apparent that the Celtics were going to lose, the Garden crowd burst into an overwhelming chant of Beat LA. We might not have liked the Sixers, but we really hated the Lakers.)

And the when will Brady really start to deteriorate never gets old, even as Tom does – at least on paper.

But, seriously, how much is there to say that hasn’t been said a kabillion times before?

I don’t care that Tom Brady doesn’t eat nightshades, that actress Bridget Moynihan is a Baby Mama to one of his sons, that his wife Gisele Bundchen makes more money than he does.

And how many times and ways can you state was is pretty damned obvious to even the most casual of football fans, even those of us who do not worship at the altar of TB12: Tom Brady really and truly is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time).

I find Bill Belichick’s monosyllable, grim-faced responses to reporters’ questions as predictable and boring as the questions. Pure and simple, performance art, schtick.

I don’t want to hear about Gronk’s brothers, Julian Edelman’s beard, or Patrick Chung’s background (as interesting as it is that he’s the Chinese-Jamaican son of a reggae singer).

Let’s all agree that the refereeing is god-awful, and that refs should probably be replaced by technology, and then stop pissing and moaning about it.  

Sure, there’ll be a few crumbs of airtime, of newspaper column inches, of online pixels allocated for things I might find more compelling: traumatic brain injury, and whatever-happened-to-taking-a-knee-during-the-anthem. Even some more in depth psychoanalysis of why the New England Patriots (and New England as a whole) are so near-universally despised.

And although I’m not enough of a fan to care, people who follow the sport closely do like to learn about matchups between the Pats and the Rams, especially since they’re a team that the Pats haven’t played in a while.

But there is just not enough that is newsworthy to satisfy the wide and hungry maw that is 24/7 pre-Super Bowl coverage. So that maw gets filled with the boring and the repetitive. And if you live in Boston, and you plan on turning on your TV or picking up a newspaper (physical or virtual) during the run-up to the Big Game, there is no escaping it.

I’m sure if I were a fan living in one of the cities that hadn’t played in many/any Super Bowls, I’d be delighted with all the focus on it. But I’m not. I’m just another Masshole sports fan living through the Golden Age of New England Sports. (Since 2002: 5 Super Bowl wins, 4 World Series wins, plus one NBA Title and one Stanley Cup win.)

Don’t get me wrong. The wins – while never as exciting as, say, the Red Sox beating the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and going on to win their first World Series in 86 years – really never do get old. I don’t go to all of them, but I generally try to get a glimpse of every duck boat parade. (Doesn’t require much effort, as they pass by a few minutes walk from my home.)

Since 2002 on up to next week’s game, when the Pats won their first SB, there have been 18 other cities represented in the big game. And then there are the cities that have teams that have never made it. I’m quite sure that most of the fans in those cities would relish the opportunity to go through two solid weeks of hyper-hoopla. So it probably sounds privileged and snotty to sit here saying ‘basta.’

But the damn 24/7 coverage sure does get old. And I’m just as happy that I was away for a slug of it. Guess I’ll have to hunker down and figure out how to ignore it for the remainder of this week.ed

Three coins in a fountain

As anyone who’s ever been a tourist in Rome can tell you, the Trevi Fountain is a tourist magnet. Each year, tourists make their wishes and collectively toss about $1.7M dollars worth of change into it. I’m actually amazed that tourists can get close enough to it to land their change in the drink. If you try to get near the Fountain on a weekend evening, well, it’s a mob scene. You’ve got to have a pretty good arm to get your coins in there. On the other hand, if millions of tourists check out the Trevi annually, and all they toss in is $1.7M, maybe most of the coin tosses miss. Surely, millions of tourists can do better than $1.7M.

Anyway, seven years ago, when I was last in Rome – which makes it sounds like I frequent the Eternal City; I’ve been there three times – I had my nieces in tow. During our time there, we beat a couple of paths to the Trevi Fountain. (The apartment we had for the week was just off the Spanish steps, a few minutes walk away.) Frankly, it was exciting to see the crowds there. And, of course, the very best thing about Rome is turning a corner and coming across yet another ornate fountain or church, or – better yet – something built 2,000 years ago (even if it’s in partial ruin). I think we managed to scoot the girls through the crowd to toss some small change in the water.

The Trevi fountain has been in the news of late because, after letting Caritas, a Catholic charity that works with the poor and homeless, keep the change for years, the City of Rome started wishing for some of that money for themselves. 

Reversing a practice that started in 2001, [Rome’s Mayor Virginia] Raggi decided that the loose change retrieved from the fountain will be spent in maintaining Rome's cultural assets and infrastructure. (Source: Al Jazeera)

I’m all in favor of “maintaining Rome’s cultural assets and infrastructure,” but sucking the money out of the coffers of a charity that works with the poor and homeless seems like a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The new deal was supposed to go into effect on April 1st. This head’s up gave Caritas time to jump into some Catholic action, using social media and their cadre of 5,000 volunteers, to put pressure on Raggi and Rome’s city council.

There was, of course, some pushback in the other direction. There’s a pretty strong streak of anti-clericalism in Italy.

The latest decision has evoked mixed reactions, with many also questioning why the church should have exclusive rights over the money.

On the other hand, it was Pope Clement XII who commissioned the Trevi Fountain, so I guess the Church has some historic claim to it.

After a few weeks of “confusion and consternation,” Mayor Raggi backed off.

In fact, Caritas will be getting the loot from the Trevi, and from any other Roman fountains where people toss coins.

Mayor Raggi now says that:

…it was all a misunderstanding. The city needs to ensure an accurate count of the money, so instead of having Caritas volunteers sort and count the coins, the city will entrust that to ACEA, the city utility responsible for cleaning and maintaining the famous fountain…

ACEA counting the money will bring "order and transparency" to the process, she said, and expanding the collection to other fountains will bring more money to Caritas. (Source: NCR Online)

This is a nice enough little face-saver, but is it just me, or isn’t it just as likely that Caritas volunteers can be trusted to collect and count the coins as the ACEA professionals. (If I were Caritas, I might want to request that the ability to put in observers to watch the money counters. But maybe that’s just the Bostonian in me, used to all those stories about guys who collected the change from the city’s parking meters bringing home an extra $100K a year in quarters. When they broke up a ring of these fellows, I remember the wife of one of them quoted as saying she thought nothing about paying for her groceries in quarters, and thought her husband was “just a good provider.” Today, Boston’s meters are no longer coin-op, so these opportunities for a little larceny are gone.)

Looks like Rome will have to get it’s antiquity-preserving funds elsewhere. I hope they can do so, as I’d hate to see this beautiful city of ruins go to ruin. But it’s also important to make sure that the needy are taken care of, and Rome has plenty of them.

Although tossing a coin in the Trevi is supposed to guarantee that you’ll get back to Rome, I don’t know if I’ll ever visit there again. But if I do, I’ll make sure to toss an entire Euro coin in – assuming the Euro still exists – as long as I know it’s going to Caritas.

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A tip of the Pink Slip capello (that’s hat for you non-Italian speakers - which makes it sounds like I speak Italian, which I don’t) to my cousin MB’s partner Dan, who does speak Italian, and  who reads the Italian papers online, for pointing this story my way.

Meanwhile, this may be the first time in the history of the blogosphere that Al Jazeera and the National Catholic Reporter are quoted in the same post.

Thank God for the google!

You can run but you can’t hide

On New Year’s Eve, there was a stabbing and robbery in the Boston Public Garden, which is just outside my front door. I wasn’t home that night, but my niece and one of her friends were staying at my place. So, shudder, shudder.

Anyway, a few days after the incident, the Boston Police Department released some pictures of a person of interest taken from surveillance cameras in the area. A couple of days later, a suspect was arrested and charged.

The article I saw didn’t say whether the cops found the robber/stabber because someone dimed him, but I’m guessing that might be the case based on the surveillance photo.

Increasingly, pics snapped and videos shot by surveillance cameras, and even by the man (or woman) in the street, are used to help solve crimes – the one upside of the creepiness of having all those surveillance cameras out there. Spies are everywhere, but sometimes that’s a good thing.

Bad guys are also getting nabbed through the tracking devices that are just about subcutaneously embedded in all of us these days.

In a recent case in England,

A British runner, sous chef, and underworld hitman was sentenced to life behind bars for the murder of two other Manchester-area gangsters this week — all due to data found on his Garmin Forerunner, according to the BBC. (Source: The Verge)

Runner, sous chef and underworld hitman. That’s quite a c.v. It also sounds like the lead-in to a bad joke: a runner, a sous chef, and an underworld hitman walk into a bar…

Anyway, here’s how Mark “Iceman” Fellows got found out:

He was under suspicion for the murders of crime boss Paul “Mr. Big” Massey and the murder, three years later, of Massey’s right hand man, John Kinsella.

Somewhere along the line Manchester police looked carefully at a picture of Fellows running a 10K and saw that he was wearing a GPS smartwatch. They searched his home and found it.

That GPS smartwatch, a Garmin Forerunner, turned out to be the circumstantial smoking gun.

Through the data the watch had acquired, the police were able to determine that Fellows had been observing Massey’s home in the months leading up to the murders, and plotting his getaway route.

There are other examples of smart tech helping put someone away for a crime.

Last October, heart rate data from a Fitbit was used to charge a California man with the murder of his stepdaughter.

Data found on smart speakers have also been used by authorities as evidence. Last November, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to hand over recordings from an Echo smart speaker. The judge believed that the device, along with any data from paired smartphones, could help prove that the alleged killer, Dean Smoronk, was at the home at the time of the murder.

There’ve also been discussions of using toll road transponder data to pinpoint where someone is at any given time – data that can theoretically used in criminal cases, and in more personal circumstances like divorce cases.

In the 1960’s, there was a popular TV show called “The Fugitive.” (In the 1990’s it was made into a movie starring Harrison Ford.) The plot was that a man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife manages to escape when the train carrying him to death row derails. The fugitive, Dr. Richard Kimble, then goes on a multiple-season quest looking for “the one-armed man”, a man that Kimble had seen running from the scene of the crime.

During his time on the lam, Kimble roamed around the country (mostly in Southern California, but sometimes further afield) hunting down his nemesis. Occasionally, Kimble was recognized, but he always lived to appear in another episode.

Nowadays, Richard Kimble wouldn’t last a full season. Surveillance cameras and facial recognition would have found him out. Google Street View would have filmed him somewhere or other. Someone would have filmed him (and/or the one-armed man) with his smartphone and posted it on Instagram in real time.

Meanwhile, let’s all be careful about we say around Alexa or Echo.

Ain’t technology grand?

Another soon to be lost art: tying your shoes

I recently ordered a pair of comfy shoes. This is not actually a point of departure, as most of my shoes are comfy shoes. 99.99% of the time, I’m wearing sneakers. High end, comfy sneakers, with lots of support. But sneakers nonetheless. There’s no comparison between the sneakers I wear now and the P.F. Flyers of my childhood, which were flimsy, thin-soled canvas shoes with no support. But I digress. The comfy shoes I bought recently featured velcro straps.

I didn’t much think of it at the time, but there is one way to look at these shoes – a way I mostly choose to ignore – that screams old lady shoes. (Or shoes for little kids too little to master tying their shoelaces.) If they’d been white, I might have noticed this right away. Or if they’d been billed as orthopedic. But it was only after I wore them a few times that I had my hmmmm moment.

My velcro strap shoes are comfy, but they’re not as supporty as shoes with laces (like my high-end, comfy sneakers) that tie.

I do wear them when I need something a bit less sporty than my Asics or Brooks, but don’t need a dressier, less comfy leather shoe. But I don’t wear them all that much. I suspect they’ll still be around and in still decent shape when the day comes when I start opting for velcro strap old lady shoes.

By that point, however, velcro strap shoes will likely be way far out of date.

By that point, we’ll probably all be wearing self-lacing, app-controlled sneakers.

They’re not widely available as yet, but if you want a pair of $350 sneakers that are Bluetooth-enabled, then Nike’s Adapt BB is your man. Or will be once they hit the market in mid-February.

The Adapt BB — the BB stands for “basketball” — build on Nike’s decades-long dream to create an auto-lacing smart shoe that adapts to wearers’ feet. The company wants to fundamentally change footwear and, of course, sell more shoes.

Imagine: your feet swell during a basketball game because you’ve been running back and forth on the court, and your sneakers detect your blood pressure. Instead of reaching down and untying your laces, the shoes loosen automatically. Never again will you have to fuss around with your laces because, guess what, your shoes already know what you want to do. .”(Source: The Verge)

As someone with a hard-to-fit foot, there is something moderately compelling about this vision. I put on a shoe (no doubt a comfy sneaker of the future) and it detects that I have flat feet, a narrow width, and a truly skinny ankle. Sounds good to me, in a weird sort of way. But that dream shoe is not quite here yet. For Nike:

“That is the broader vision, or the biggest dream, that the product becomes so synergistic to your body. It just knows almost kind of what you’re thinking,” says Eric Avar, VP & creative director at Nike Innovation. “It’s a natural extension of your body.”

I really don’t need my shoes to know what I’m thinking. Historically, when I’ve been thinking about my shoes, those thoughts have been along the lines of “these are killing me,” “when can I kick these suckers off,” or “damn, I’m getting a blister” – problems that go away, for the most part, when you’re wearing comfy, supporty shoes. Those comfy-supporties are pretty much a natural extension of my body, and I don’t need an app telling them what to do.

Oh, sure, sometimes the shoe laces come untied, and I have to find a low wall or step to prop my foot on to tie them back up. But do I really need an app for that?

Anyway, the know-what-you’re-thinking app is a ways away:

This imaginary, all-knowing shoe doesn’t exist yet. Instead, the Adapt BB represent the next step in that dream product journey. This is the shoe that’ll make self-lacing technology available to more people and get them used to the idea of an app-controlled shoe.

While the truly smart shoe may be in the future, in the here an now, the Adapt BB is what’s on offer:

They forgo anything that resembles a lace, and they ship with Bluetooth connectivity so wearers can tighten and loosen their shoes from their phone. They can even choose the color the sneakers emit when in tightening mode.

It seems to me that the time you need to fuss with an app to tighten or loosen your sneakers could just as easily be spent tightening or loosening your laces. And for the life of me, I can’t imagine wanting my sneakers to emit light “when in tightening mode.” Huh?

Anyway, among the techy aspects to the Adapt BB are the components that make up the “lace engine”:

…a microcontroller, 505mAh battery, gyroscope, accelerometer, Bluetooth module, motor, lights, pressure sensor, capacitive touch sensor, temperature sensor, and wireless charging coil.

Yes, you do need to charge the Adapt BB.

Sounds like an awful lot of technology chasing a not particular terrible problem and yielding no appreciate benefits.

But you have to have a “now” before you can have a future “then” and I’m pretty sure that smart-shoes will be a thing.

One thing I enjoy and value about technology is when it’s put to assistive uses. It’s pretty easy to see that self-regulating sneakers could really help people who could use the assist. For now, however, the Adapt BB is just another head scratcher that has me wondering why there’s an app for that. Call me old school, but I still think everyone who’s physically able to should learn to tie their own damned shoelaces. (Most of the time we should be just saying no to velcro.)

Dueling bikinis

Not that I’ll ever be in the market for one, but these little denim and crocheted bikinis are plenty cute. Not that I’d pay a couple hundred bucks for a bathing suit. Not that I’d put on a bikini, unless I were young and slender enough to wear one, neither condition is likely to ever be the case.  Not all that comfortable looking, either. And I’m thinking that the combination of denim (for the triangles) and yarn (for the trim and straps) precludes ever jumping into the water for a dunk and cool off. But plenty cute.

The one on the right – or is it the left – is a Kiini, sold by Ipek Irgit’s company, Kiini, and – at least according to her copyright application, and to the various lawsuits Irgit has launched – her very own invention.

The one on the left – or is it the right – is the creation of Maria Solange Ferrarini, a Brazilian street artist who’s been selling denim-crocheted bikinis on the beach in Bahia for years. Make that a couple of decades.

Anyway, a few years back, Irgit – recently returned from a vacation to Brazil, when she’d spent some time on the Bahian beaches – was jobless, aimless, and hanging out:

…on the beach on Long Island, wearing a handmade-looking bikini with crochet and exposed elastic straps, trying to figure out what to do and who to be…

On the Montauk sand, Ms. Irgit was playing paddle ball with a friend, the restaurateur Serge Becker, when he complimented her striking bikini. As Ms. Irgit would later put it, this was the spark that motivated her to start a business. Why not create more of these distinctive bathing suits? Why not become a bikini-maker? (Source: NY Times)

So like any good wannabe entrepreneur who knew a reasonably good idea when she heard one, Ms. Irgit decided to run with the idea. Next thing you know, they were being manufactured in China for about $29 each, and selling in the States for $285.

At first, sales languished. Then the Kiini got an Instagram plug from a model, and it took off. It was featured on Vogue.com and getting shout-outs in The Sunday Times of London’s style mag and in People. The Kiini was for sale at Barney’s.

Inevitably, imitators emerged and Irgit’s lawyer suggested she copyright her design, which she did. Copyright in hand, Irgit became increasingly inflamed by her imitators.

“My biggest challenge right now is the copiers around the world. People say I should be flattered but I despise all of them. It just shows a very ugly face of humanity to me.”

Well, there’s a very ugly face of humanity. And then there’s a very ugly face of humanity.

Irgit first went after Victoria’s Secret, suiting them for copyright infringement. That suit was settled. She then took on Neiman Marcus and two swimwear companies. Her suit:

…accused them of unfair competition, misleading consumers about the origin of the swimsuits and violating Kiini’s “trade dress.” In lay terms, Kiini was saying that any consumer in the world who saw a crocheted-and-exposed-elastic bikini would assume it was a Kiini.

Fast forward, and the crochet has begun to unravel. Despite Irgit’s claims that she was the mother of the Kiini invention, it became increasingly clear that the idea originated with Ferrarini.

There was Irgit’s recent Brazilian beach vacation. There was Becker’s recall that Irgit had told him that she’d gotten the bikini there. There was a pre-Kiini picture of some Ferrarini-bikini-wearing British celeb that appeared in the Daily Mail before Irgit “invented” the Kiini.

And then there’s what seems to be the smoking gun: a picture that Irgit used as the “specs” for the Chinese manufacturers of “her” Kiini.

On the elastic [of the bikini bottom], in marker, was a phone number, the words “Trancoso, B.A.” and the signature of Solange Ferrarini.

Hmmmm.

Irgit has withdrawn her suit. Neiman Marcus and other retailers are selling crocheted bikinis labeled as “inspired by Solange Ferrarini”. And Ferrarini is receiving compensation. (By the way, an attorney involved on the anti-Kiini side of the dueling bikinis situation had worked on behalf of the Trump University plaintiffs. So he knows a fraud when he sees one.)

Despite folding on her bathing suit suit, Irgit is hanging tight to her own evolving version of how the Kiini came about. According to her creation myth, she came up with the idea as a child in Turkey, and her mother and grandmother made them for her. (Is it just me, or does crocheting a bikini sound like an odd thing for a Turkish grandmother to be doing for her 10 year old granddaughter 30 years or so ago…)

The bikini she was wearing on the fateful day when Becker admired it? Despite Becker’s recall that she told him she’d gotten the bikini in Brazil, Irgit maintains that she made it all by her lonesome.

Irgit, meanwhile, is facing a suit of her own, in a federal court in California “citing unfair business practices and asking for a public apology.”

While it’s not all that clear what’s going to happen with all this:

…the allegations are notable to other experts in intellectual property law. “The role of truth in our judicial system is central,” said Jeanne M. Heffernan, a partner in the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. “Here you have a woman who appears to have taken the I.P. of someone else and registered it as her own — and then, it seems, had the audacity to sue an industry over something she did not create and may have stolen. If true, it’s breathtaking. I would think Victoria’s Secret would want to take a second look at their settlement.”

Irgit is frothing about those coming after her, characterizing them with words such as “bully” and “scumbag.”

“What do they tell their children at the dinner table about how they make money?” Ms. Irgit wrote, saying she imagined them as film characters like Dr. Evil, from “Austin Powers,” and Maleficent, from “Sleeping Beauty,” attaching .gifs of them to illustrate her point.

Sounds like an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bit of projection to me.

I hope both Ms. Irgit and Ms. Ferrarini get what’s coming to them.

MLK still lies a spinning in his grave

Last year, I observed Martin Luther King Day with a post entitled MLK is spinning in his grave, and it’s pretty clear that the good doctor remains spinning.

Oh, there’ve been a few positives along the way – there’s now a more diverse Congress.

But, but, but…

Attempts to suppress the African American vote continue apace. After all, they tend to vote for, you know… And while Stacy Abrams (Georgia) and Andrew Gillum (Florida) may have lost their gubernatorial races fair and square, there were major elements of racism directed against them both during election season.

Then there’s the Steve King situation, in which Iowa’s darling of a Congressman was stripped of his committee assignments and given a tut-tut vote of disapproval by Congress for his support for white nationalism, etc. Yet he remains in Congress and, in truth, his comments and thinking are no worse than those of Trump (especially when channeling Stephen Miller) and many other members of his party.

Then there were all those barbequing while black, hanging out at the pool while black, selling lemonade while black, asking for directions while black, going door-to-door as a candidate while black, and in the worst case (a fatal one), opening the door of your apartment while black and getting shot by a cop who for some reason thinks it’s her apartment.

Nah, I don’t imagine that, if you’re an African American things seem to be getting any better, racism-wise.

Let’s hope that that, while “the arc of the moral universe is long…it bends toward justice”, and that we’ll someday start taking a more honest approach to the clear and present danger of American racism.

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned 90 last week. Chances are pretty good that, if he had lived, he’d be dead already. So he might well have missed some of the nastier things that have happened over the last few years. You know, since Barack Obama made America more racist.

Anyway, I’m sure that the good doctor had a pretty clear-eyed view of our country. But despite that clear-eyed view, I believe he was optimistic that little African American children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Not there yet, not by a long shot. I’m guessing that there are plenty of days when MLK is a spinning in his grave.

Hope nothing happens today that makes him spin more.

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There’s some weirdness going on with the app I use to write my posts. I don’t think the hyperlink to last year’s MLK Day post embedded above works. So if you’re interested, here it is:

http://pinkslipblog.blogspot.com/2018/01/mlk-is-spinning-in-his-grave.html

Mondo Kondo

I have not yet given into the temptation to start watching the new Netflix series, Tidying up with Marie Kondo. I’m still getting caught up with Bosch, deciding what to do about Mrs. Maisel (my personal jury is still out), and figuring out whether to embark on Succession.

By I have watched her mesmerizing video on how to fold a t-shirt so that it can be stored standing up, and I can see that it would very easy to get sucked in.

I will actually be applying a modified version of her t-shirt folding process to the t-shirt folding I do when I volunteer in the clothing distribution center at St. Francis House.  Most of what we give out is donated (gently used). But underwear – despite the fact that we do occasionally received used undies, which get immediately tossed out in pre-sort – is all new. When we get a delivery, we fold the t-shirts before we stock our t-shirt drawers.

I’m okay folding the smaller sizes, but when I’m working on the XXXL’s and above, my folding technique is ‘nil. A dozen XXXL t-shirts, no two of my folds are alike. Next time I’m in clothing, I’ll try a modified version of the Kondo method. Our t-shirts do not have to stand on edge, and we prefer them with the front facing out, so we can check the size in the collar before we bring it out to a guest.

Not that I particularly need to join Mondo Kondo.

I’m sure by Marie Kondo’s standards, my condo looks like something out of an episode of Hoarders. But while I admittedly have a lot of stuff around, other than the desk in my office, my home is not especially cluttered. I figured out a long time ago that if you’re relatively neat – no dirty coffee cups and old newspapers strewn around – your place will look clean. So I’m pretty neat.

Which is not to say that I don’t need to tackle my desk. Or go through my junk drawers, dressers, and closets. I did this 3 years ago when I reno’d my condo, and I’ve pretty much held fast on accumulation of more stuff. And I don’t agree with Kondo that you should have no more than 35 books around. Come on! But I could still lighten the load. With luck, we’ll have a couple of snow days when I’ll feel like sorting through things between naps.

Plus I’m entering the age of de-acquisition. When my mother was about the age I am now, you couldn’t leave Worcester carrying something or other that she was trying to get rid of. Thus I came into possession of the cool yellow plate painted with all the fruit on it (hangs in the kitchen), and the charming water colors that an artist friend gave her as an engagement present (they’re in my bedroom).

I do find Marie Kondo’s creation/epiphany story pretty interesting. That is, if Wikipedia is to be trusted. (Which, of course, it is.)

She said she experienced a breakthrough in organizing one day, "I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realized my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying." (Source: Wikipedia)

Well, if I were unconscious for a couple of hours, my first thought would have been to get me to the MGH ER. But whatever. I do like her idea of finding the stuff you want to keep and tossing the rest. Not that I’ll necessarily do it. But I did tell myself that the ornaments that haven’t made it on to the Christmas tree for the last couple of years are going to go this year. The ones that are on the tree are the ones that make me happy.

Anyway, The Boston Globe had an article about Kondo the other day, and interviewed some locals who have become her followers. 

I was particularly intrigued by one fellow:

In Somerville, Kondo’s show has helped T Lawrence-Simon, a professional circus performer and instructor, part with 300 pairs of underpants (a collection amassed while working for a men’s underwear blog). (Source: Boston Globe)

I don’t know whether to be more slack-jawed at the thought of having 300 pairs of underpants, or at the thought that there’s a men’s underwear blog.

Having too much stuff around is, of course, a genuine problem for a lot of folks. And feeling compelled to keep acquiring more things we don’t need is an even bigger problem. Think of all those storage units out there, full of things people haven’t needed and/or used for years.

Think of how easy it is to walk into Home Goods, and how difficult it is to walk out without having picked up a little something or other. The other day, I went in to pick up a pillar candle for my fireplace. Apparently when I swapped out the candy-striped Christmas candle I failed to replace it with the neutral cream-colored candle that’s now I’m guessing packed away in my crawl space with my decorations. So, arguably, I need the new candle to occupy the now-vacant candle holder.

Anyway, while in Home Goods, I was tempted to pick up a charming little blue bowl that caught my eye. Now, I need a charming little blue bowl like I need a life-sized stuffed lowland gorilla. But there I was, almost but not quite buying it.

It’s even easier to cruise around on Amazon and pick stuff up. Most of what I buy is replacement merchandise, practical in nature. But damned if I don’t have three different versions of black suede lace up booties. I think I’m set for life on that front.

Globe writer Beth Teitell pretty much summed up the American consumer dilemma:

Should we worry there is something broken about a society that spends half its time demanding same-day delivery and the remaining time watching a Netflix original series about people getting rid of stuff they probably couldn’t wait to get?

Or should we just renew our Amazon Prime subscriptions and wait for the spark of joy?

Sigh…

Don’t cry, honey…

In naming me Maureen, my parents covered a couple of bases. There was my grandmother, Mary Trainor Rogers. (Maureen is the Irish diminutive of Mary.) Mary was my mother’s middle name. And my aunt (my mother’s sister) was a Mary.

In truth, it was my aunt Mary Wolf Dineen for whom I was named. Mary was my godmother, and I guess I’ll have to say that she fell down on the job of making sure that I remained a Catholic rather than convert to atheism. But that was the only job she ever fell down on in her life.

Smart, tough, resilient, strong, stubborn…Mary died on Tuesday at the age of 93.

Until a couple of years ago, Mary was living on her own – volunteering, going out to lunch with her girl friends, voraciously reading, doing her crossword puzzles, watching her Cubbies. Then she had a few health setbacks, including macular degeneration, and she moved into assisted living. Last fall, the health setbacks were worse and Mary ended up spending the last couple of months of her life in a skilled nursing facility. These months were hard on Mary (and her kids). She had a few falls. She was mostly wheelchair bound. She was anxious and depressed. The good news was that she never lost her marbles. That was the bad news, too, as she remained fully with it. (A few weeks ago, my cousin Ellen worked a crossword puzzle with her mother, giving Mary the clues and having Mary provide the answers for Ellen to fill in. Now, Ellen is a reader, a writer, and a former teacher. Ellen knows a lot of words. But one that she wasn’t familiar with, her mother sure knew. “How do you know that?” Ellen asked her. Mary’s answer: “I just do.”)

When Ellen and I spoke the other night, we reminisced a bit about the summer vacations we spent at The Lake, my grandmother’s summer house about 50 miles outside Chicago, in what was then farm country but is now suburban.

Every other year, we trekked from Worcester to Chicago for two weeks, and a week of our vacation was spent at The Lake, along with my Aunt Mary and Uncle Ted, and their five kids – Ellen, Tim, Mary Pat, Mike and Laura, who were roughly the same ages (plus or minus) as the five Rogers kids. Ellen and I shared a birth year, as did Mike and my brother Rick. (In fact, Richard’s name was going to be Michael, but Mike Dineen showed up in June, and Rick Rogers didn’t make his debut until November, so he ended up with Michael as his middle name.) Also on board were my Aunt Kay and Uncle Bob, the tail-enders of the Wolf family, who were more like slightly older cousins than an aunt and uncle. My Uncle Jack and Aunt Donna, and their daughter Mary Lou, also made an appearance or two when we were out at The Lake. And, of course, there was my grandmother, presiding over all, working her garden so that there would always be wax beans for us to gag on at supper.

Anyway, time at The Lake was magical. The lake itself was shallow and mucky, more of a pond than a lake. But we swam in it nonetheless, or lolled around on big old inner tubes. We made hollyhock ladies and opened the stained-glass windows of the little lighthouse my grandfather had installed in the back yard. We played rummy and crazy eights. We explored the cornfield across the road and the duck farm down the way. We walked to the Piggly Wiggly to pick up whatever item was needed, or to Elmer’s, a creepy bar that sold milk and bread.

While the Rogers and Dineen kids were having fun, my mother and Mary were slaving away, taking care of their families, only without the conveniences they had in their real homes. There was no hot water. The washer was an ancient wringer one. There was always at least one kid in diapers. The refrigerator was an icebox.

No vacation for those two.

Why didn’t the two of them take the opportunity to go out to lunch? Go shopping in the nearby town of Libertyville? Take in a movie?

Not in their DNA, I guess. They were used to working. So that’s how they spent their vacation. While, of course, catching up with each other.

Like my mother, Mary was a secretary. Like my mother, when she went back to work, Mary worked at a university. Like my mother, Mary (widowed at 60) volunteered in her retirement. They liked books, and puzzles, and corny music like Lawrence Welk.

Both sisters were baseball fans. While my mother’s prime allegiance switched to the Red Sox when she married and moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, Mary remained a lifelong Cubs fan.

One of the high points of her life was winning the Cubs Way of Life fan contest in 2010. Part of her prize was getting to throw out the first pitch at a game.

The last time I saw Mary was at her 90th birthday celebration, four years ago this spring. If someone had said at that point that she was in her late seventies, you wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. Sturdy, vital, with it…

Wish she hadn’t had to suffer so in her last couple of months of her life.

Back in 1960, when we were heading home to Worcester, Aunt Mary saw us off on the train. She lived on the far South Side of Chicago, so it was a schlepp in, but I’m sure she wanted to see my mother one more time, and to help our family (which at that point included a 1 year old) get settled on the train. Did she schlepp all the way to my grandmother’s house on the North Side to drive us to the Union Station? I don’t recall. But I clearly remember her seeing us right into the train car.

When I gave her a hug in the little vestibule where two cars connect, I teared up.

“Don’t cry, honey, we’ll see you again.”

She was right, of course, but as us kids got older, we no longer made those biennial trips to Chicago. Seeing my Aunt Mary was no longer the regular event it had been.

I’ve been crying off and on since I got the word on Tuesday.

I don’t believe in the afterlife, but there are times when I wish I did.

Mary Wolf Dineen (1925-2019)

For some reason, I was unable to embed a picture of my Aunt Mary – here, at Wrigley Field on her big day as the Cubs Way of Life winner in 2010. – in my post on her.

I was also unable to embed a link to the video of her throwing out the first pitch. (The name on Mary's shirt, Herm, was my Uncle Ted’s nickname for her; her number 25 is her year of birth.)

Let's see if this works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKfca9qBHMo

How ‘bout them cowgirls?

I came of television-watching in the great era of the Western. There were the Saturday morning kiddy shows like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Range Rider, The Lone Ranger, Annie Oakley, The Cisco Kid, Fury... And there were more grownup shows too numerous to count: Gunsmoke, Maverick, The Rifleman, Wells Fargo, Wyatt Earp, Wanted Dead or Alive, Have Gun Will Travel, Tombstone Territory, Texas Rangers, Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Wagon Train, Bonanza, Big Valley, High Chaparral, Laramie, Branded…

An awful lot of romanticizing went into glorifying the Old West. And an awful lot of the scripts were notable for their absence of women.

Annie Oakley and The Big Valley were the only shows I remember where female characters had the lead. Other than Miss Kitty, the saloon keeper on Gunsmoke; Milly, who ran the general store on The Rifleman, and one or two others, women were, for the most part, just passing through, generally on their way to their grave. (Ben Cartwright on Bonanza was a widower three times over. If any of his boys got anywhere near a woman, it was generally a death sentence for that lil’ ol’ gal. On the Roy Rogers Show, Roy’s real-life wife – Dale Evans – had a regular role. Not as his wife, but as the proprietor of the local cafe and hotel.)

Despite the absence of role models, dead or alive, I grew up fantasizing about living out West, and the West to some extent continues to capture my imagination. (Albeit a tiny bit of it.)

I must, of course, edit this imagination to eliminate the outhouses, the hygiene challenges (M and F), the casual gun violence (“…just a flesh wound…”), the boredom, the cold, the heat, the danger, the backbreaking pre-dawn, post-dusk work, the bar fights, the spittoons…

Not to mention that the only horse I’ve ever sat was on a merry-go-round. And the fact that I’m a city girl born and bread, a city girl by baptism and desire.

Yet when I play George Strait, which I am inclined to do every once in a while, I lustily sing along with “How ‘Bout Them Cowgirls.”)

But realistically, riding, roping and branding dogies aren’t on my bucket list.

And when it comes to cowgirls, the truth is that I’d rather see than be one.

Thus I was quite delighted to read in The New York Times the other day that “Female Ranchers Are Reclaiming the American West.”

Hundreds of years before John Wayne and Gary Cooper gave us a Hollywood version of the American West, with men as the brute, weather-beaten stewards of the land, female ranchers roamed the frontier. They were the indigenous, Navajo, Cheyenne and other tribes, and Spanish-Mexican rancheras, who tended and tamed vast fields, traversed rugged landscapes with their dogs, hunted, and raised livestock.

The descendants of European settlers brought with them ideas about the roles of men and women, and for decades, family farms and ranches were handed down to men. Now, as mechanization and technology transform the ranching industry, making the job of cowboy less about physical strength — though female ranchers have that in spades — and more about business, animal husbandry and the environment, women have reclaimed their connection to the land.

I’m a bit disappointed that most of the cowgirls, errrr, cow-women, pictured in the article are wearing baseball caps and not cowboy hats. But I guess I should be heartened by the fact that, if I do decide to add riding the range – or driving the range in a pickup – and mending fences to my bucket list, I have some of the requisite clothing, namely baseball caps and jeans. And I also know how to drive a stick shift, so there’s that. (I didn’t see the gearshifts in any of the pickups the cow-women were driving, but I’m pretty sure that the automatic transmission is for city slickers and wusses.)

Anyway, as of 2012, “14 percent of the nation’s 2.1 million farms had a female proprietor.” And a ranch is just a farm with horses and cattle, right?

This is nowhere near the percentage of, say, doctors who are women. Under 35, it’s 60:40 female to male. Still, it’s better than it was in the old days of 1950’s and 1960’s TV.

Caitlyn Taussig is pretty enough to be a model, but she:

…helps run the [family] ranch with a cadre of cowgirls, including her mother and sister. They only really rely on men on the days when they have to brand the Angus Cross cattle. “We just sort of treat each other differently,” Ms. Taussig said shortly after a cow kicked a gate that split open her forehead. She got six stitches and was back at work that afternoon. “There’s less ego.”

And there’s more environmental awareness:

Women are leading the trend of sustainable ranching and raising grass-fed breeds of cattle in humane, ecological ways.

If I ever decide to resurrect my interest in cowgirl-ing, I will be sure to sign up for the

… New Cowgirl Camp, a five-day course that trains women in animal husbandry, ranch management, financial planning, ecological monitoring and regenerative grazing. Ms. [Beth] Robinette recoils at the gaudy, country-pop version of the overly feminized cowgirl, and calls her program a “rhinestone-free zone.”

New Cowgirl Camp is already accepting applications for it’s August 2019 session. It’s held at Robinette’s Lazy R Ranch, and as a Lazy R myself, that sounds pretty comfy. Or did until I read the hazard list and the info on waivers and indemnity. Here’s the non-exhaustive list of the perils of ranch camping:

Chemicals
Cold and sun/heat
Dust and pollen
Electricity
Hand tools
Highway traffic
Lifting
Livestock handling
Machinery and equipment
Mud
Noise
Ponds
Slips, trips, and falls
Small critters that can sting or bite
Tractors
Wells

Some of this, even us city girls got covered: cold, sun/heat, noise. And slips, trips, and falls – as I’m repeatedly reminded by ads for stairlifts on TV – are the major hazard for the elderly, a demographic which includes potential cowgirls like me. Small critters? Well, these mean streets hold plenty of rats. And I have a bunch of hand tools, even a drill that I mostly know how to use.

Anyway, nice to see that there’s a sisterhood of cowgirls out there, handling live stock and mud with aplomb. Yee haw!

 

The Great Molasses Flood

The Boston waterfront is so hot these days – with insane corporate, residential, restaurant, and everything else growth throughout the harbor area – it’s sometimes hard to remember that this same waterfront was, in recent memory, pretty dumpy.

When I first came to Boston, fifty years ago, the waterfront was fish piers, rickety buildings, ratty warehouses and factories. There were a couple of “good” restaurants – Jimmy’s and Anthony’s – and a fun, actually good one, No Name, a hole in the wall on one of the fish piers. No Name is the only one of these three that’s still standing. I haven’t been there in decades, but it has swanked up a bit.  

As, of course, has the entire waterfront.

But even further back in time, the waterfront was even more industrial, and part of that industrial landscape was the Purity Distilling Company’s 50 foot tank on Commercial Street. Commercial is one of the main drags of the waterfront. The street wraps around the North End, then – as now – an Italian neighborhood. (The North End hasn’t changed as radically as has the waterfront during my tenure in Boston. While it has yuppified in recent years, it still has some decent Italian restaurants, some very entertaining nominally religious street festivals each summer, and a handful of excellent cafes where you can get espresso and cannoli, play Dean Martin on the jukebox, and rub shoulders not just with tourists and suburbanites but with authentic Italian immigrants as well.)

The Purity tank, just there on the edge of the North End, was built in 1915, in plenty of time to be used in munitions production for World War I. Molasses was in demand “because it could be converted to industrial alcohol, a critical ingredient in the manufacture of munitions.”

…in [Purity’s] haste to construct the tank — in a precinct populated, not coincidentally, by poor Italian immigrants powerless to prevent such a thing  from being shoehorned into their neighborhood — the company’s profit-hungry bosses dispensed with tests that would have revealed the structure’s lethal flaws. (Source: Boston Globe)

From the get go, it was apparent that the tank leaked. The kids of those poor Italian immigrants scraped molasses gunk off the sides of the suppurating tank to make themselves a treat.

Purity knew about the leaks, but rather than inspect and correct the faulty tank, they painted the tank brown so that the leaks would be less apparent.

And then, on January 15, 1919, the:

…towering steel tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses suddenly ruptured, releasing a torrent of syrup that strangled and destroyed everything in its path in a matter of minutes

A 15-foot wave of molasses raced — yes, raced — through Boston’s North End. But what sounds like a B movie directed by Roger Corman is no joke: Twenty-one people died and dozens more were badly injured. Unsuspecting men, women, and children were smothered — asphyxiated, really — by a tsunami of viscous brown syrup, and when the bodies were finally recovered, the Suffolk County medical examiner said they looked “as though covered in heavy oil skins . . . eyes and ears, mouths and noses filled.”

The recovery was hindered when the temperature plummeted – this was, after all, January - and:

…the dead became entombed in the hardened sugar, forcing frantic workers to use saws and chisels to clear wreckage and retrieve bodies.

Inevitably, Purity Distilling’s owner, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, was sued. Predictably, the company attempted:

…to blame Italian anarchists for the disaster, claiming that radicals had bombed the tank. But the judge wasn’t buying it. The accident, he ruled, was the result of shoddy design and construction — the same type of brittle steel had been used on the Titanic, which sank seven years before the flood — and USIA was ordered to pay about $630,000 in settlements.

Pretty paltry, those payouts. $630K in 1919 translates into roughly $9.5M in 2019. Not exactly a lot of money, given the number of victims.

In the aftermath of the flood, Boston enacted new building standards. Thus progress is forged…

But for all the changes in Boston’s waterfront over the last 100 years, the story of the exploding molasses tank has so many elements that are, alas, timeless: companies ignoring safety standards to save money, especially when those impacted by catastrophic failures are nothing but poor immigrants; undervaluing the lives of those poor immigrant; and blaming immigrant radicals for something that was a company’s own doing.

How do you say plus ca change in Italian?

Lob-stah Trap (Aw, shucks…)

When I was growing up, I wouldn’t touch lobster. Not that it was on offer all that often Chez Rogers. But once a year, come a summer Friday afternoon, there would be lobsters scrabbling around the bathtub, awaiting their fate. Which was my mother tossing them, one by one, into a vat of boiling water.

On Friday nights, my grandmother and Uncle Charlie came to dinner. And sometimes my aunt, uncle and (older) cousins came out from Newton. I suppose they all ate lobsters. My sister Kath, who was a lot more sophisticated an eater than I was as a kid, probably had one. But me? Nope. On lobster night, I opted for a tuna salad sandwich or something else that was meatless-for-Friday.

I don’t remember when I figured out that lobster was actually pretty damned delicious.

I do know that by the time I was waitressing at the Union Oyster House (summer of 1970), I was – along with every other waitress – grabbing little pieces of lobster sauté from plates that were sitting there under the heat lights, waiting to be picked up and delivered to the patron who’d ordered them. Those plates went out so depleted, I’m sure that folks must have complained about the meager portions. But there’s really nothing like a piece of fresh lobster drowning in drawn butter.

Most people didn’t order the lobster sauté, however. If they wanted a lobster, they ordered it BO (boiled) or BR (broiled and involving bread crumbs). Mostly BO.

At least half of those who ordered lobster BO didn’t have a clue how to eat it, so I became quite an expert at demonstrating how to open up a lobster and get at the meat: twirl the tail and thrust the meat through; crack the claws; twirl off the legs and tell people to suck the meat out; ignore the tomalley…or not. (We usually spotted and removed the tomalley – the slimy green stuff; lobster liver? - but sometimes it snuck through. I seem to remember that they used  the tomalley in the bar, serving it on crackers. I seem to remember Louis, the head bartender, being pissed off if we didn’t deliver enough tomalley to him.)

Anyway, I could open up a lobster and extract the meat blindfolded. And, to me, there’s really no other way to eat lobster, other than BO with drawn butter. That is, other than on a lobster roll (best on a hot dog roll), which is how I’m more likely to have lobster these days. Which I do a couple of times a year, generally when I’m on the Cape.

I’ve cooked lobsters at home a couple of times, but the garbage is pretty messy and smelly. I do still have a full collection – my mother’s – of lobster crackers (same as a nut cracker), lobster forks and lobster picks (if you find it crude to suck the meat out of the legs, shove it through with a pick).

Even when they know how, most people don’t want to bother with having to open their own lobster. My husband was one of them. He loved lobster, but he’d either order Lazy Man’s Lobster or I’d take care of the lobster for him. And I guess as I drift more and more into the lobster roll camp, I’m another one of those who’d just as soon not go through all the contortions required to eat a lobster BO.

But I would never order a lobster roll in a place like, say, McDonald’s. When I get a lobster roll it’s always at a place that’s using fresh lobster.

However many restaurants, especially in non-lobster parts of the country, use processed lobster. and 6 million pounds of it comes from Shucks Maine Lobster.

The shucking at Shucks is backbreaking, ill-paid, smelly work, done largely by (surprise, surprise) immigrants

Workers pick meat from the claws, legs, and tails of the lobster. The meat will be rapidly frozen withes nitrogen, which extends its shelf live, and the tails are composted. (Source: Boston Globe).

But before the shucking commences, those little critters need to be dead. Thus:

The first order of business is feeding the lobsters into a large cylinder that Hathaway calls the “Big Mother Shucker.” The 16-foot-tall, 80,000-pound machine uses a relatively new technology in the industry called high-pressure processing…

The advantages include slaughtering the lobsters in about six seconds. [Owner Johnny] Hathaway says it is “the only humane way to kill lobsters.”

No more giant vats (or big soup pots on my mother’s stove) of boiling water, BO-ing those little guys. And good thing that lobsters aren’t particularly sentient – that’s true, isn’t it? – because I don’t imagine that the Big Mother Shucker is all that much more humane than tossing a lobster into the insta-death pot.

More important for the business, the machine helps shuck the raw meat from the shell.

Leaving less for the workers to shuck, which is a good thing. Because lobster processing in Maine is a big and booming and business, and there’s not a ton of folks who want to do this sort of work. (In addition to immigrants, the other major source of labor is “recently released prisoners.”)

Just how dreadful this work is?

At Shucks, after the lobsters are killed, the teams of men and women work in cool, windowless rooms, where they spend hours hunched over metal tables, using butcher knives to hack through mounds of lobster parts. Others oversee machines that extract the meat by compressing smaller parts of the lobster.

Yep. Sounds pretty dreadful.

Meanwhile, if demand for lobster is high and business is booming, there’s a problem looming.

Water in the Gulf of Maine is warming up, and that’s not good news for lobsters that enjoy living in the Gulf of Maine and/or those who enjoy harvesting and/or eating lobster from the Gulf of Maine.

Anyway, I’m already looking forward to my first Cape lobster roll of the summer. Maybe this year, I’ll go retro and go for a lobster BO, too. Yum in advance!

For Louis Vuitton, it’s not a laughing matter

Well, yesterday it was Kohler’s new intelligent toilet, and today it’s a pocketbook that’s supposed to look like poop. (I say supposed because, while poop as Mr. Hankey Poo, as emojis, and now as pocketbooks is coiled, I do believe that coiled poop is more likely to be canine than human. On the other hand, coiled poop is cuter…) Anyway, I guess it’s scat week at Pink Slip.

Today’s voyage into the wonderful world of scatology addresses the contretemps that’s pitting MGA Entertainment vs. Louis Vuitton.

At the heart of the matter is MGA’s “Poopsie Pooey Puitton”.

MGA is preemptively suing Louis Vuitton’s parent company, luxury stable LVMH, to ensure it can keep making “Poopsie Pooey Puitton,” its slime-filled plastic purse. According to documents filed last week in Los Angeles federal court, Louis Vuitton has claimed the toy’s design is a trademark infringement because its design marks and name are similar to those of Louis Vuitton handbags. MGA argues not only is the toy obviously not a Louis Vuitton knockoff, but it was meant to slime the lifestyle of the ultrawealthy consumers who ascribe to the brand and thus should be protected as parody.

“Louis Vuitton and the LV Marks are associated with expensive, high-end, luxury products that evoke wealth and celebrity,” MGA’s counsel said in the complaint. “The use of the Pooey name and product in association with a product line of ‘magical unicorn poop’ is intended to criticize or comment upon the rich and famous, and the Louis Vuitton name, the LV marks, and on their conspicuous consumption.” (Source: Washington Post)

Well, making fun of conspicuous consumers in general, and celebrities in particular, never goes out of style. But ‘magical unicorn poop’ is something of an “it” toy, one of last year’s biggest success for MGA. So MGA, of course, decided to combine these two high concepts. MGA, by the way, has a long history of extremely tasteful toys. Remember the Bratz dolls????

Louis Vuitton takes guarding its trademarkspretty seriously. Wouldn’t want folks trading on its classic shit-brown, plastic-looking leather, tacky logo look and feel. Seriously, I have never understood the allure of Louis Vuitton, other than demonstrating that you’re willing to pay a lot of money for an ugly bag. (Or, in the case of knockoffs sold by street vendors in lower Manhattan, hoping that someone will think you’re better off than you are by paying not much money for a cheapo fake version of an ugly bag.)

But I don’t see what Louis Vuitton’s problem is. Seriously, is anyone going to mistake Louis Vuitton for Pooey Puitton? So why push the trademark button and play right into MGA’s hands. They get attention paid to their product, and Louis V comes off looking like a bully with no sense of humor.

In the past, Vuitton has failed to stop other companies from using their image and/or making fun of them.

They went after “a small Los Angeles handbag company that printed high-end handbag designs on canvas tote bags.” And they also sued a pet toy company that produced “Chewy Vuitton” chew toys that resembled LV purses. In both cases, LV lost.

"The furry little ‘Chewy Vuiton’ imitation, as something to be chewed by a dog, pokes fun at the elegance and expensiveness of a Louis Vuitton handbag, which must not be chewed by a dog,” Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote in his decision against LVMH.

(The MH stands for Moët Hennessy, in case you’re wondering.)

Personally, I don’t think the Pooey Puitton is all that clever a parody, or all that funny. That may just because I’m not an 8-year-old who wants to make magical unicorn poop. But in general, I don’t think scat humor is funny period. I find Mr. Hankey pretty revolting, and would find myself hard put to take a piece of cake shaped like the poop emoji.

So it is perhaps the case that LVMH, a French company, just doesn’t see much to laugh about when it comes to merde. Although the country that gave us Marcel Marceau, and that worshipped at the altar of M. Jerry Lewis, may not have all that much of a sense of humor about anything…

Anyway, pushing the trademark thang against MGA – which looks likely to resolve in their favor – seems a bit heavy-handed. Not to mention that it plays right into MGA’s magical unicorn poop covered hands.

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Meanwhile, having searched on poop emojis, etc., I can’t wait to see what ads are going to be popping up over the next couple of days…

A “fully immersive experience”

I always keep at least a half-opened eye on what’s happening at CES – the consumer technology show that takes place in Las Vegas each January. It’s a geek’s delight: a great combination of cool, interesting, breakthrough, useless, and weird. (Not that I can tell the breakthrough from the useless, the cool from the just plain weird…)

Anyone, Kohler – the plumbing folks – used the CES opportunity to promote their Numi 2.0 Intelligent Toilet.

Numi, Kohler’s most advanced intelligent toilet, offers exceptional water efficiency, personalized cleansing and dryer functions, a heated seat, and high-quality built-in speakers. The lighting features on Kohler’s flagship intelligent toilet have been upgraded from static colors to dynamic and interactive multi-colored ambient and surround lighting. Paired with the new speakers in the Numi toilet, these lighting and audio enhancements create a fully-immersive experience for homeowners. Amazon Alexa built into the product provides simple voice control of Numi’s features and access to tens of thousands of skills, as well as a seamless integration of voice control into the bathroom. (Source: Business Wire – Kohler press release)

Where to begin?

Oh, I know.

How about the price: $7,000 in white; $9,000 in black.

Then there’s the very notion of an intelligent toilet to begin with.

Personally, I don’t need my toilet to be all that intelligent. I just need it to work.

And I don’t need to tell Alexa to flush it. That I can do on my very own. Or – if it’s the middle of the night and all I did was pee – not.

But at least I can see why being able to get Alexa to flush a toilet has a purpose as assistive technology, although it seems that someone who needed help flushing likely needs other help getting on and off the pot.

But the other features?

…personalized cleansing and dryer functions, a heated seat, and high-quality built-in speakers.

Cleansing and dryer functions? This doubles as a high-tech bidet? Me, the thought of the same device that scoots my waste matter away would be used to also clean me up after. Ahh, no.

I like heated seats in cars, but it’s not as if one is traipsing out to an outhouse on a wintry night. Sure, if by some fluke, i.e., the man in your life leaves the seat up – which rarely if ever happens -  you end up sitting directly on the porcelain, the cold can be a startling experience. But that’s what regular old non-heated seats are for: to protect us from sitting directly on icy cold porcelain.

Maybe the Numi 2.0 can be programmed to always makes sure that the seat returns to its downright position, which would be a benefit.

One feature I really don’t get is built in speakers. I guess you need them to talk to Alexa. But do you need your toilet to play music for you? Music when you’re lolling in the tub I get. Music to empty your bladder and move your bowels by? Not so much.

I suppose you can also get Alexa to make a phone call for you, but I really don’t like the idea of having a conversation with someone who’s sitting on the pot. No thanks.

The lighting feature, however, is the one that I find the oddest and least useful.

Numi 1.0 had colors. But they were boring. Numi 2.0 is:

…upgraded from static colors to dynamic and interactive multi-colored ambient and surround lighting.

Whatever happened to catching up with your New Yorkers and humming to yourself? Reading light is key in a bathroom, but “multi-colored ambient surround lighting”? To get you in the mood? Mood for what, exactly? Guess it goes with the mood music you’ve summoned up.

Kohler does look like they’re having some fun with their super-toilet, touting it as “a fully immersive experience.”

This is the phrase that a lot of the coverage has picked up on. Because who wants their toilet to be a fully immersive experience? No one, that’s who.

Your bathtub, yep. But your toilet? Just the thought of being immersed in your toilet? Yuck!

Anyway, I’m guessing that Kohler was quite deliberate in their wording choice. Just any old intelligent toilet might not grab all that much attention. Not when everything’s gotten so damned smart: refrigerators that send you a text telling you to get milk, dryers that sense when the clothing is dry and stop the drying – or, in the case of the smarty-pants dryer in our laundry room, when the clothing is damp, leaving you with pants that the smarty-pants dryer thinks are done. Etc.

An intelligent toilet? Just another household intelligent something-or-other. Ho, hum.

However, if you can insert a few ridiculous words, well, we’ll all sit up and take notice. 

If it weren’t for that “fully immersive experience”, which I saw in a couple of tweets, I might have given the Numi 2.0 a pass.

There’s an awful lot of intelligence out there, but do we really need it in our toilets?

Toilets have been plenty smart enough over the years.

They’ve spared us from chamber pots, from outhouses, from cholera.

That’s intelligent enough for me. I don’t need ambient lighting, mood music, or an immersive bathroom experience, thank you.