WOW, just wow.

Shortly after notorious budget airline ValuJet crashed in the Everglades – where the bodies were supposedly eaten by alligators – I was on a United red-eye back to Boston from the West Coast. When the pilot got on to introduce himself, he thanked the passengers for flying United. Without naming names, he then pointed out that it might cost more to fly United, but you get what you paid for with respect to safety, as opposed to those shifty cheapo outfits, with their used planes, poorly trained pilots, shoddy maintenance, and propensity to carry poorly-stowed, poorly-secured chemical oxygen generators. The kind that could easily blow up in mid-flight.

Pilot Bob was clearly going off-script with his ad libbed ad for United, but we all got the point.

You’re taking your life in your own hands whenever you step out of the house, but you really don’t want to play fast and loose with air safety. (As Boeing is now finding out…)

Anyway, I did fly AirTran (which was acquired by not-so-great-ValueJet after the doomed alligator flight so that they would no longer have to use the ValueJet name) a few times, but always felt it was a bit sketchy. (Forget safety: on one flight the food service consisted of a human dog biscuit.)

But I haven’t flown a lot on discount airlines.

Not that they’re unsafe. Mostly, they’re fine. But you do sacrifice creature comfort. (Now that the best food you get in steerage on most flights is a human dog biscuit equivalent, that offering no longer distinguishes bargain airlines.)

All this said, if I lived in Europe, I’m sure I’d be barreling around on RyanAir, which is what my niece M did when she spent a college semester in Galway.

M’s latest trip was a spring break jaunt that combined Ireland and Iceland. (M is quite the contrarian. When hordes of college kids head for sun and fun, M is impervious to lousy weather.)

M didn’t fly WOW Air, a budget Iceland-based airline, on any of her legs, but some of her classmates did. Lucky for them, their spring break ended last weekend, so they all got home.

What I do know is that, when I head to Iceland this fall, it will most decidedly not be on WOW. That’s because yesterday, they ceased operations, stranding folks in Iceland trying to get out of Iceland, and folks in the US trying to get in to Iceland.

The travel advisory on WOW Air’s website also states that all of the airline’s flights have been canceled. The low-fare airline was founded in November 2011 and had its inaugural flight in May 2012.

“Passengers are advised to check available flights with other airlines,” the WOW Air statement said. “Some airlines may offer flights at a reduced rate, so-called rescue fares, in light of the circumstances.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Iceland Air – bless their hearts – was offering discounts to strandees. And those who canceled their plans outright, once they got canceled out from under them, may be able to get refunds. According to the WOW, depending on how you booked your flight, this may be a possibility through your credit card company or travel company, if you booked a passage. If you’re looking for a direcrt refund from the bankrupt, now defunct airline itself, well, get in line.

Anyway, some airlines seem to be have found a way to offer bargain fares while building a sustainable business model, but with WOW European flights costing only $100 or so… Just doesn’t seem viable.

My first flight to Europe was in 1973. I paid $206 (under-26 discount) on BOAC (precursor to British Air). Even at the time, this was a bargain. And $206 today is worth a lot less than it was then.

I feel sorry for those whose trips got screwed up. But I guess this is the risk you you get when you fly bargain air, especially on an airline whose color is fuchsia. (At least there was a never any alligator risk…)

If something’s too good to be true, maybe it really is too good to be true

I want to be a part of it, New York, New York

With the exception of the fraud currently occupying the White House, and the trove of grifters he’s related to and associated with, I love a great imposter story.

There was Ferdinand Waldo DeMara, a fellow from Massachusetts, who throughout his career ran up a pretty impressive string of impersonations: monk (Trappist and Benedictine), Marine, prison warden, psychologist, MD, college professor. In the movie based on this exploits, The Great Imposter, Tony Curtis played DeMara. Most entertaining.

Then there was Frank Abagnale, who as a kid between the ages of 15-21 was a check kiter who impersonated a doctor, a lawyer, and an airline pilot. His saga was told in Catch Me If You Can, and he got to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Abagnale went straight and became a very successful consultant on fraud prevention. Who better.

Unlike DeMara and Abagnale, some folks don’t branch out and pretend to be in different professions. They just run a single con.

One day, about 10 years ago, I walked out my front door and saw a lot of commotion a few doors down. The FBI was looking for “Clark Rockefeller”, a conman who got by pretending to be a Rockefeller. (He even managed to con a pretty smart cookie – HBS grad, I believe – into marrying and having a baby with him.)

And then there was the fellow who buzzed around glitzy Manhattan society pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son.

In this latter category – those running a great pretender con, but not actually trying to palm themselves off as someone with knowledge, skills, and ability, falls Anna Sorokin.

Anna came on the Manhattan scene in her early twenties, pretending to be a German heiress, and duping people into paying her way, lending her money, letting her stay for free in pricey hotels until her heire$$ money could make it to the States, etc.

After high-flying around for nearly a year – trips to Marrakech and to Omaha (for the Berkshire-Hathaway annual with Warren B) – Sorokin landed in the fairly unpleasant precincts of Riker’s Island. And now she’s in court, charged with swindling “friends, banks and hotels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a taste of the high life in Manhattan.”

Before pulling a modest beige turtleneck over her ensemble, Sorokin showed up for the first day of her trial wearing a fairly low-cut fashionista dress, which will give you a tiny hint about the wiles she used to pull her con off.

Anyway, her lawyer offered something of a Twinkie-defense for her:

In his opening statement, her attorney Todd Spodek quoted from a number of Frank Sinatra's famous tracks to argue that his client was 'just trying to make it' in New York and 'wanted to create a life for herself.'

…Spodek told the court: 'Sinatra said, "I will make a brand new start in New York, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere" because the opportunities in New York are endless.

'Anna had to kick down the door to get her chance at life. Just like Sinatra had to do it his way, Anna had to do it her way,' he said of the Russian-born woman who tried to pass herself off as a German heiress with a fortune of $60 million.  (Source: AP, via Daily Mail UK – yes, I’m embarrassed to say, I do occasionally read it.)

O-kay…

I guess we have different definitions of ‘just trying to make it.’ Mine involve things like getting an education, developing your skills, having a job. Those sorts of boring things.

And while there’s plenty of evidence that Frank Sinatra could be a Mafia-loving, sleazy POS, he had plenty of talent and he worked at it. Sure, he did it his way, but not, as far as I know, conning people out of money or pretending to be something he wasn’t.

But Spodek insisted that all Sorokin was trying to do was to receive the same opportunities afforded to the rich.

Well, wouldn’t we all like the “same opportunities afforded to the rich.” But, guess what? That’s life. And as the recent college admissions scandal is showing us, sometimes the rich don’t even get away with the opportunities afforded to them. So there.

'Through her sheer ingenuity, she created a life she wanted for herself,' the attorney said, as Sorokin expressionless sat at the defense table.

Sheer ingenuity? That’s one way to look at it.  How about sheer brazen dishonesty? Sheer ability to “read” her audience and figure out what people want to hear. Nobody’s going to front hundreds of thousands of dollars to the “nothing” daughter of a German truck-driver, which is what Sorokin turns out to be. But an heiress? Now you’re talking. I guess that is pretty sheer and pretty ingenious. (And, sorry, but I really don’t have a ton of sympathy for those she’s duped.)

'Unorthodox, possibly unethical, but this is the life she’s chosen to live.'

And now it’s likely that “the life she’s chosen to live” is going to end her up in the Big House.

As for that slinky black dress? Hey, orange is still the new black, isn’t it?

I’m fine with Men Only, but this is so blech

He didn’t go out of his way to find famous people out and about, but my husband was amazingly good at celebrity spotting. One of his early finds was Sy Sperling, whose famous ad claimed “I’m not only the president of Hair Club for Men, I’m also a client.”

We saw Sy while eating out at the late lamented Magic Pan creperie in Newbury Street somewhere in the 1980’s when the ads were fresh, new and ubiquitous. (And my husband already a couldn’t-care-less bald guy. A very cute one, I might add.)

While some women do experience baldness, it’s mostly a male issue, and I’m all for them having their own club. Not that there’s anything wrong with being bald. In fact, as the daughter, widow, and sister (times 2) of bald men, I’m rather fond of bald. Not to mention that some of my best friends are bald. (Yes, I’m talkin’ about you, Sean.)

But I understand the many men are bothered when their scalp starts showing big time, and I’m happy there are products, services, and clubs that cater to them.

I can also see why men going through divorce might want to work with an attorney who specializes in working with men. The issues are often different than they are for women, especially when it comes to custody. So I get the appeal.

In this, I agree with lawyer/pundit/writer/twitter guy Elie Mystal, who had a recent article on Above The Law (where he’s an editor) that focused on a law practice in Virginia that does guy law, and bills itself as “The Firm For Men”. He’s not an advocate for such firms, mind you. Just that he gets it, as do I.

But where Elie parts company with ‘sure, fine, have at it’ is the ads which are, well, pretty freaking extreme. (You can find them on the home page banner, if you’re so inclined.)

Like the one that shows a black and white video of a naked woman getting into the shower. The voice over asks the question “Has She Gone Psycho?” If she has, well, who ya gonna call? Why, The Firm for Men.

Now, maybe their advertising firm has forgotten that a woman was stabbed to death in the black and white movie Psycho, and they’re just using a woman getting into a shower (in a black and white video) because. Ah, nope.

Given that spousal abuse is a pretty serious issue (and, yes, sometimes it’s a woman doing the abusing, and sometimes it’s occurring in a gay couple), the Psycho trope is a pretty terrible card to play.

(And lest we forget: Norman Bates turned into a psycho-killer because of his dear old mom, Norma Bates….Just another woman gone psycho, I guess.)

Another ad shows a honey in a gilded hard hat, swinging a gilded pickax (when she’s not hanging onto a gilded shovel), picking dollar bills out of the thin air she’s standing in. If you, Mr. Man, want to “Stop the Gold Diggers Today”, you need to call The Firm for Men. (“She can dig her own gold. You worked too hard for yours.”)

Something tells me that type of men who would be attracted to The Firm for Men aren’t the type of men that gold diggers glom on to. But maybe they do a subspecialty in sugar daddies.

Then there’s the positioning on their web site:

…[we] work consistently to level the playing field so that men’s rights aren’t infringed upon through draconian and biased interpretation and implementation of the law.

That’s because the law has a “soft spot” for women; the system gives them “the upper hand” (when, as we well know, psycho women get a flashing blade repeatedly jammed into their upper torso; and gold diggers, well, they no doubt deserve the back of the hand, not the upper hand).

The overall vibe of the site is a bit bro-ish, and a bit Trumpy – there’s a version of the U.S. flag embedded in their logo. And their point of view seems a tad bit straight-white-male as endangered species.

Anyway, distinguishing your firm by focusing on a niche may be good marketing. So, bravo. And if men want to deal with lawyers that specialize in family issues from a male perspective, go for it.

But there’s something undeniably creepy and sleazy about these guys. There really is a way to get your story across without showing the naked woman – who, by the way, doesn’t look in the least psycho – in the shower. The Firm for Men somehow decided not to go that route.

Consider me bleched out by all this.

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If I were a British barrister, I would be doffing my wig to my sister Trish for sending this one my way. (And to Elie Mystal who is always worth a read and a listen.)

Eat dirt and die, but without your phone to record it

I have had the excellent good fortune to have consumed many wonderful meals in my life, and many of those many wonderful meals were consumed in wonderful, often pricey, sometimes foodie, and occasionally bordering on precious, restaurants.

But the older I get, the more likely I am to opt for a restaurant where I can get, say, roast chicken and garlic mashed potatoes. Hold the infusion. Hold the froth. Hold the nasturtium. Hold the odd pairings Hold the minimalist portions.

Not that I’ve lost all sense of adventure, but mostly I’d prefer that the plate that gets plunked down lands with a satisfying plunk. That I recognize the food. That it’s substantial enough that I can lustily dig my fork in – and take something home in a doggy bag to enojy the next night.

So I was just as happy that an upcoming restaurant, Conversation, will be opening up in another month or so in Seattle, not in Boston.

Some of what Conversation has to offer is regular old foodie:

…a foie gras dish with a counterintuitive texture: “light, airy, cold.” The various influences will come together in dishes like lamb en croute with spring peas, tsukemono pickles, and crispy prosciutto—a blend of French (lamb en croute), Japanese (tsukemono), and modernist techniques (the peas will come in various textures, including freeze-dried). (Source: Seattle Met, via – I think – my friend John W)

Hey, it’s not roast chicken and garlic mashed, but this stuff doesn’t sound all that weird. (Okay, light and airy foie gras does sound sort of weird.) And I mostly feel about modernist food techniques the way I feel about modernist writing techniques. Ah, not now thanks. Maybe later. (Likely never.)

But Conversation will also feature:

…“soils” (edible dirt made from foodstuffs.

Having googled “edible dirt” and “edible soil”, I now realize that this stuff has been around for a while. The recipes run the gamut from the decidedly pedestrian non-foodie (because any recipe with Cool Whip and Oreos as ingredients ain’t never going to pass for foodie) to ultra foodie-plus (leeks and black barley powder…).

But while a mashup of Oreos and Cool Whip doesn’t sound half-bad, why would you want to puree up a bunch of olives, mushrooms, and whatever “foodstuffs” you have in mind so that it’s the consistency of soil. Isn’t part of the fun of eating the actual real-life consistency of food? Why turn it into glorified baby food, or some nutritional glop created for the old, infirm, and toothless. Okay, when I’m old, infirm, and toothless, I’ll likely be begging for edible soils. But for now, it sounds way too much like soylent green. And as we’ve all known since 1973, “soylent green is people.”

Remember man that thou art dust and all that, but I’d just as soon take a hard pass.

On the other hand, Conversation will feature a non-foodstuff that’s a little more conversation a little less edible soil. Their concept is creating a digital-free zone.

In this digital era where text messaging and screen swiping threaten the allure of face-to-face quality time, Conversation intends to create an environment where human connection takes priority.”

The owners, including head chef Derek Simcik are:

…also playing with the idea of having someone come around and gather people’s phones and lock them away for the duration of dinner. “I guess you could call it a tableside phone valet,” says Simcik”

Well, I’m all in favor of conversation. It’s something that I enjoy and – get this – actually excel at. Sure, I’ve been known to whip out my phone in a restaurant, mainly when a question comes up in conversation that calls for immediate information. Say you’re talking about the Mickey Mouse Club and someone needs to know whether Annette Funicello is still alive. (Answer: No. She d)ied in 2013.) Or someone else wants to know which team the Red Sox beat in the World Series in 2007. (How soon we forget: it was the Colorado Rockies.) On occasion, it’s something a bit brainier. Like the difference between synecdoche and metonymy. (Hey, you’ve got a phone. Look it up for yourself. But for metonymy, think “container for the thing contained.”)

But “information, please” at the table is only mildly annoying, especially given that most of the diners are craving the info as much as the person doing the looking up is.

But sending texts, checking emails, or – even worse – holding a conversation with someone who’s not there. JUST SAY NO. Unless it’s something really important – your house just got struck by lightning or your daughter’s baby came early – why is the person who’s not there more important than the company who’s present?

Locking the phones away is a bit contrived, but Conversation may be on to something. Although I know if I were there, and saw “soils” on the menu, I would be sorely tempted to surreptitiously snap a quick pic and text it off to someone who would appreciate it. A fellow roast chicken with mashed non-foodie…OMG. FFS. Get a load of this!

Boeing, Boeing, Boeing. Safety features really shouldn’t be “nice to haves”

The recent Ethiopian Airlines crash killed 157 people. Five months earlier, 189 died when a Lion Air (Indonesia) plane took a nosedive.

When the Lion Air flight was crashing, the pilots were frantically looking through the manual trying to figure out what to do. Not clear yet whether the Ethiopian Airlines pilots were doing the same.

But if airline manuals are anything like software manuals used to be, then frantically searching for a fix when in dire peril is unlikely to yield much of anything, other than continuing to be in dire peril. Until you’re no longer in dire peril.

The commonality between the Lion and Ethiopian crashes is that both involved a Boeing 737 Max plane.

It is not yet known what caused the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and Lion Air Flight 610 five months earlier, both after erratic takeoffs. But investigators are looking at whether a new software system added to avoid stalls in Boeing’s 737 Max series may have been partly to blame. (Source: NY Times)

It turns out that Boeing had some safety features that might have helped pilots cope with the stalling problems. Unfortunately, they were optional. Unfortunately-squared, neither Lion nor Ethiopian opted to purchase these upgrades.

Oh.

Some blame, of course, goes to the airlines for not springing for these safety features. Not the items to cheap out on. Not a surprise, I guess, from Lion Air. They’re a budget airline and they cheap out on everything. But Ethiopian Airlines is the largest (and by some measures the best) carrier in Africa. What were they doing cheaping out on safety?

But Boeing, Boeing, Boeing. Why would you leave safety to chance? Seems really foolish, given that nothing’s going to hurt an airlines brand, reputation, stock price and finances than the appearance (not to mention the reality) of being hinky about safety.

Play around with charging airlines purchasing your planes for niceties. That would be things like more comfortable headrests, better fabric on the seats, device-charging stations, toilets that smell better.

After all, no one wants to leave any money on the table. If an airline is willing to pay a bit more for a heating system that does a better job than blowing pure hot or pure cold on passengers, or seats that recline without crushing the laptop of the person in the seat behind, then aircraft manufacturers should have at it.

Why should Boeing be any less of a nickel-and-dimer than the airlines themselves which, these days, squeeze every possible bit of extra revenue out of passengers. (It’s just a matter of time before the folks in steerage start getting charged for that miniscule bag of pretzels and gulp of soda. And would anyone be surprised by toilets that require swiping your credit card?)

Since the crashes, nothing good has happened to Boeing.

Airlines have grounded the 737 Max’s in their fleets. The first order cancellation for the Max’s just happened. Boeing’s stock price has plummeted. The FBI has gotten involved in an investigation to determine whether there was anything going untoward with the certification process for these planes. One can imagine that there’s litigation on the horizon. Maybe even a few Boeing heads will roll.

So, in return for the small-change revenue they clawed out of the airlines willing to pay for the extra safety features, Boeing lost big time.

Making some safety features optional add-ons probably seemed like a good idea when the product manager came up with it. Not so much any longer.

Safety features should be built-in features, not nice-to-have add-ons. Too bad Boeing had to learn this the hard way. Even worse, too bad the 189 Lion Air dead, and the 157 lost on Ethiopian Airlines, didn’t get to learn the lesson at all.

I love to go a-wandering, my $10K backpack on my back

I grew up in the days before the backpack was used for anything other than camping. As kids, we did have an old Boy Scout rucksack, the cast-off of an older cousin, which we used when we were playing World War II.

Then, in the early 70’s, in the great era of Let’s Go Europe/cheap-flights-young-folks-hitting-the-road, everyone who took one of those cheap flights to Europe had all their stuff in a backpack. I was one of those everyones.

And here’s the red Kelty backpack I carried on my back:

This held everything I took with me for my 5 month jaunt through Europe – a couple of pairs of jeans, one sweater (a very pretty dark fuchsia that I got at Macy’s in NYC), one long sleeved shirt (blue plaid – from Spags), a couple of tee-shirts, undies and socks, a blue checked knit dress (a dress was required for getting into St. Peter’s), a bathing suit, a nightgown, socks and undies, cap and gloves, a few personal items (towel, toothbrush etc.), a pen and notebook.

And our camping gear: two-person tent, sleeping bag, egg-crate foam bedroll, tiny little Gaz Bleu one burner stove, cookware, water bottles, etc. Joyce (my traveling companion) and I took turns toting the tent vs. the cook-stuff. I also had some sort of rain-cover for the backpack. Good thing.

The Kelty was pretty much the top of the line backpack at the time – I might have paid as much as $100 or so for it - and it stood the test of plenty of rough treatment during those months of hitchhiking, camping, and hosteling.

At one point, however – somewhere in the Greek islands? – one of the wire coils that held the waist-strap in place came off. I tried to repair it the old fashioned way: using my teeth. The result, no surprise, was a chipped front tooth. But the fix worked; the coil held for the remainder of the trip.

Somewhere along the line, the Kelty and I parted company. I know I used it for storage for a while, but then it was gone…

Since then, I’ve had a number of casual backpacks, from small utilitarian to corporate logo to good for carrying a laptop to fancy tapestry to lug a bunch of groceries. Most of these backpacks are still with me, but my principal go-to is my Anello. It’s good for a small grocery run, an overnight, a carryon bag holding essentials. It cost about $60. Love it!

So I like backpacks just fine.

But I am not in the market for the Louis Vuitton extra-large backpack.

First off, unless I really don’t see this as a backpack. It looks more like something that you might want to sling across the back of a pack mule. I guess that technically makes it a backpack, but once you put something in it, it looks like it would be too heavy to heft onto your bath. Not to mention that you’d be walking off balance all the time, no?

In general, none of the features have any particular appeal to me:

Crafted from a rich fabrication of gray fleece and embossed with the label’s classic monogram pattern, the enormous carryall features a top-flap closure along with two side pockets that look spacious enough to accommodate a bottle of bubbly or fine wine. (Source: NY Post)

Fleece?

That doesn’t sound like an especially practical fabric for a backpack. Talk about not being able to survive in the elements. Out in the rain with that over-sized sucker, imagine what it would weigh once it started to absorb water. Yikes!

Smaller details like the silver LV logo keychain pay tribute to an iconic heritage that is as timeless as it is lux.

I’m way too much of a city girl to carry my keychain dangling off my backpack. So no thanks.

But what makes this a really “key hero piece” – whatever that means – is the price tag: a whopping $10,000.

I think that if I do feel the need for another backpack, I’ll invest in an updated Kelty. That’s enough of a “key hero piece” for me.

Meanwhile, a ginormous backpack full of thanks to my sister Trish for pointing this one out to me. And no, you won’t be getting one for your birthday.

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Thank you, Dave from the blog Going RV Way who figured out and shared his workaround for embedding an image in a post – a capability of the blogging utility Open Live Writer that disappeared in January.

Well, if Thomas Südhof's wearing Birkenstock’s…

Paul Samuelson was a Nobel Prize winning economist, the founder of modern economics. But he was perhaps best known as co-author of the intro economics text book used pretty much by everyone who took intro to economics anytime between 1948 and 2010.

At one point, later in his career, Samuelson did an ad for a moving company. I’m pretty sure the ad was on the radio, and I seem to recall a print (small b&w) version. But I can’t remember the moving company. And I can’t remember whether the ad was local. (Samuelson was a professor at MIT.) But I distinctly remember that there was an ad, and that there was some blowback around it – if only because people made fun of it. I mean, what made Samuelson an expert on moving companies?

Once I got done making fun of the ad, which I did with my husband the economist, I forgot all about it.

That is, until I saw an ad for Birkenstock that just appeared in The New Yorker. Their spokesmodel? Nobel Prize winning biochemist Thomas Südhof.

Although, to some degree I fit their historic brainy, lefty, Cambridge-y profile, I’ve never owned a pair of Birks.

Some of my best friends, however, are Birkenstock wearers. And a few years back, when Birkenstocks had something of a brand bump, for a while becoming the “it” sandal, my sister(s) – I think both of them – got Birkenstocks, as did my niece Molly.

I don’t know what my holdout was. Maybe that they just didn’t look like they’d fit my feet (the only part of my anatomy that’s long and narrow).

Anyway, I was surprised see an ad for them in The New Yorker. Not that New Yorker readers don’t, at least some proportion of them, match up with the brainy, lefty, Cambridge-y profile I imagine. I’ll bet that Paul Samuelson wore Birkenstocks. But there’s also something of an urbanity about The New Yorker that doesn’t immediately scream Birkenstock.

Nevertheless, there it was, in the expensive upfront section, a full page, four-color ad for Birkenstocks featuring Thomas Südhof.

I had never heard of Thomas Südhof, but it’s never a surprise when I don’t know who the celebrity is who’s pictured in the ad for the pricey watch, the pricey car, the pricey hotel.

To begin with, I don’t have fabulous facial recognition – that was my husband’s bailiwick. We’d be watching a movie, and he’d see someone in the background and ask, “Is that Dana Wynter?” Since I could never remember whether Dana Wynter was a man or a woman – always getting him/her confused with Dana Andrews – I was no help there.

And then there are always celebrity holes in what is otherwise my fairly broad and not all that shallow name recognition – i.e., I’ve heard of them and vaguely know what they’re famous for - for famous people.

Seriously, until she and her husband cheated their kids’ way into USC, I was apparently the only person on the face of the earth who didn’t know who Lori Loughlin was.

Anyway, I was curious about what Birkenstock was up to with this ad, which featured an informal portrait of Südhof, wearing his black leather Birks, taken in his office at Stanford, as well as a close up of the sandals (off of his feet) that showed them to be well worn and sweat-stained.

Were there other famous people I’d never heard of out there touting their Birkenstocks?

Well, seems that Birkenstock is running what they’re calling a Personality Campaign:

The BIRKENSTOCK Personality Campaign

… is about diversity and character featuring authentic individuals in their own BIRKENSTOCKs.

Character? Authentic individuals? Well, I’ll be darned. That leaves Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo something-or-other out. (Not that I would have recognized them either. Nor would I have known their daughters who are, I guess, full-time influencers now that they’ve left USC to avoid anticipated scorn.)

BIRKENSTOCK is a truly universal brand; worn all over the world, by all kinds of people regardless of age, gender or race. Worn Birkenstocks take on the life of their owner, representing the many years and thousands of steps in one’s life. They become a part of your story. They are your story.

British photographer Jack Davison travelled around the world with the aim of capturing these stories. He created authentic and truly intimate portraits of real protagonists and their real Birkenstocks in their real surroundings.

Real protagonists?

I haven’t read such hooey since I picked up the J. Peterman catalog that a neighbor left in our building’s recycle basket.

Give me a real antagonist, any old day.

Anyway, here’s the list:

The portraits showcase photographer Ryan McGinley shot at his agent’s house in New York, his second home, actress Luna Picoli-Truffaut in her mother’s house in Paris, Ballerina Romany Pajdak in a training room in London, free skier Tom Leitner in his house, somewhere in Bavaria and New York filmmaker Sean Frank. Further portraits feature Thomas Südhof, Nobel Prize Laureate of Physiology or Medicine in his Stanford University office and Louise Constein in her favorite Berlin park.

I may have heard of Sean Frank. Maybe. But I guess I just don’t known many authentic protagonists. And Louise Constein? Who dat? Her “bio”, later in the page, says that she’s a teenager. That’s it.

I googled and found out that she’s a model, but, she’s no Luna Picoli–Truffaut.

By the way, I didn’t see a ton of diversity. Sean Frank is the only person-of-color on the list.

Me? Think I’ll stick with my tried and true Clark’s. Plenty brainy, lefty, and Cambridge-y. And I don’t need to be an authentic protagonist to wear them. Or a teenager, either.

As hobbies go…

Other than all these years writing my Pink Slip posts, I’ve never really been a hobbiest. No stamps. No coins. No butterflies. I don’t collect matchbook covers. I’m not an expert on the films of Truffaut. I’m more of a dabbler, I suppose: shallow-dive, transient interest in a lot of little things.

Nonetheless, I enjoy hearing about the hobbies of others. And the odder-ball the better.

Thus, I was delighted to learn of one Tim O’Donovan:

…who has meticulously tabulated the British royal family’s engagements with pencil and paper every day for 40 years. (Source: NY Times)

Mr. O’Donovan, who is 87, doesn’t hold an official position. He just keeps an eye out for who’s showing up for events like:

• The Autumn Dinner of the Fishmongers’ Company,
• The opening of the Pattern Weaving Shed in Peebles, Scotland
• The opening of the Dumfries House Maze
• The dedication of a window at the Church of St. Martin in the Bull Ring

Keeping up with the royals at “work” is a tough non-job, and nobody really has to do it. But Mr. O’ – a retired insurance broker – was, as a man of middle age, looking for a hobby.

He found his fodder in the Court Circular, an account of the royals’ engagements that appears in The Times of London. He decided to clip each one, paste it in a ledger and run the numbers, releasing his first results at the end of 1979.

“It was just a fascination with what they actually did,” he said. “Some of them work extremely hard.”

Mr. O’Donovan – despite the Irish name – sounds every bit the British gentlemen: a royal lover, a royal watcher, and someone who attends the same church as the Queen. (They have a nodding acquaintance.) When talking about himself, he even refers to himself as “one”.

“One started this thing because one was curious,” he said.

As one is.

“One has had a huge amount of enjoyment out of doing it.”

As one does.

“…because one has met people one would never have met before.

As one would.

“It has widened one’s life, in a way.”

Well, one is quite impressed by this, one might say.

Each year, Mr. O’Donovan publishes a table that shows what all the main royals – the Queen, Prince Philip, their children and spouses, Wills, Kate, Harry, and Meaghan – have been up to in terms of how many official appearances they’ve made. He does this because he believes it’s worthwhile to keep a chronicle of royal goings-and-comings. But he doesn’t approve of the way in which his list is used, which is to set off a tabloid firestorm about who’s dogging it.

One year it was Camilla who, with a mere 243 appearances, was dubbed the “laziest” member of the fam. Another year, when William’s position dropped down in the tables – a year in which he had a full-time job in the military and had two toddlers at home – he was snarkily criticized as being “Workshy Wills”.

Tut, tut.

Because the tabloids jump all over Mr. O’Donovan’s table each year, the royal family has in the past hinted that they’d prefer that he back off. But there has been no official request from Buckingham Palace that he cease and desist – a request that Mr. O’Donovan would honor – so he forges on.

Other than do an occasional ooh and aww over the kids of Kate and Wills, have an occasional chuckle over Prince Charles total stuff-shirtedness, and hold to my opinion that Harry is cuter than his brother, I’m not a particular royal watcher. (I’ll amend this statement: I am an avid watcher of the Netflix series, The Crown, which follows the life of Queen E.)

I get that royals are good for tourism. And that there’s nothing wrong with traditions – up to a point. But I’m just as glad to live in a country without a monarchy, and find the super-infatuation with the British royals pretty weird – especially when the infatuation is that of Americans and/or the Irish.

If I were a Brit, I’m pretty sure I’d be on the side of “let’s stop paying these lay-abouts and get with the 21st century.

For the record, for 2018, Princess Anne was the champ-een royal worker bee, logging:

…a whopping 447 domestic appearances and another 71 overseas engagements throughout 2018, which is more than Prince William, Prince Harry and Duchess Kate combined. (Source: AOL)

Anne beat out her brother Charles, who was the top working dog in 2017. The top four was rounded out by bros Edward and Andrew.

No surprise that they’re edging out the old folks. Queen E is in her early 90’s, Prince Phillip is 97. And no surprise that the younger folks have other things to do with their lives.

And I guess, for all of them, it beats working at real jobs.

I know that smiling and nodding at the opening of the Pattern Weaving Shed in Peebles, Scotland, might be a wee bit boring. But you don’t have to put up with endless meetings, politicking, non-stop emails, market failures, commuting, underperforming underlings, and dreadful bosses (unless the Queen is more of a bee-yotch than she appears to be). Maybe they have to worry about when they’ll get their next raise, but they don’t have to worry about anyone competing, All About Eve-like, with someone gunning for their job.

Anyway, carry on Tim O’Donovan. For the Brits, I’m sure it’s useful to seeing in black and white just what they’re paying for.

The WWW and I

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee submitting his proposal for the creation of the World-Wide Web.

The Internet had been around for a while – since 1969 – but it was largely a collection of networked computers used by governments, researchers, and scientists. What Berners-Lee introduced was the notion of web pages, which made the Internet accessible and useful to the rest of us.

On the www anniversary, Berners-Lee was in the news for his comments warning of the need for action to address the web’s “downward plunge to a dysfunctional future.”

Sir Tim said people had realised how their data could be "manipulated" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

However, he said he felt problems such as data breaches, hacking and misinformation could be tackled.

In an open letter also published on Monday, the web's creator acknowledged that many people doubted the web could be a force for good.

He had his own anxieties about the web's future, he told the BBC: "I'm very concerned about nastiness and misinformation spreading."

But he said he felt that people were beginning to better understand the risks they faced as web users.

In his letter, Sir Tim outlined three specific areas of "dysfunction" that he said were harming the web today:

• malicious activity such as hacking and harassment
• problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait
• unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

These things could be dealt with, in part, through new laws and systems that limit bad behaviour online, he said. (Source: The BBC)

I fear the same things Berners-Lee does. (What he said!) And I’m all in favor of having the Internet clean up its act. But the 30th anniversary also got me thinking about what it was like back in the early going.

Even before the Internet was a “thing” that we spoke about, there were networks, and you used them to access mainframe computers.

In the mid-1970’s, before I went back to business school, I worked as a gofer in a bank. One of the things I occasionally had to go for was economic data from a company called Data Resources, Inc. 

The first time I tried to get at some of that data – unemployment rates in New England states, as I recall – it was via a dial-up connection, using some sort of odd pre-PC terminal, the system crashed. I thought I had done something wrong.

Fast forward a couple of years, and, while in business school, I used a timesharing program, on the Internet (before I knew it was the Internet) to run forecasting models for an econometrics course I was taking. That course led to my first post-business school job: creating (really terrible) forecasting models for businesses.

We worked on paper-based computer terminals, attached to a mainframe computer. If we wanted to work from home over the weekend, we could tote a 40 pound terminal home and dial-up the mainframe at a really low-slow rate. The connection was always lousy, and it was nearly impossible to get work done. Plus there was the problem of hyper-extending all the muscles in your arms lugging the “portable” terminal around. 

Over time, the paper-based terminals gave way to screens. And then there were PC’s that we used in lieu of terminals. And there was something called client-server, in which some of the computing power moved from the mainframe to smaller computers known as servers.

But whether it was paper-terminal to mainframe, or PC to server, what we were mostly doing was communicating with a computer, not with each other. And we were doing all this communicating using command lines or lines of code, not via some spiffy easy-peasy interface (even after PC’s made things a bit easy-peasier and spiffier).

Somewhere in the middle of the shift from paper-based terminals to PCs, I went to a company – Wang – that had a wonderful internal email system. Sure, if we wanted to speak with a client or someone outside the fold, we picked up a phone. But if we wanted to reach out to anyone in the company, we sent them an email. It was just great.

During my next stop along the magical mystery tour that was my career, the World Wide Web was born.

It took us a while to figure out what to do with it.

For most of us, the WWW and the Internet – which had now pretty much fused in our brains – meant that we needed to have a web presence. That meant putting up a couple of crude pages that provided the world with some basic information on your company and its products. (I can still remember what that first website for that company looked like. Dark, gloomy and ugly.)

Soon enough, the designs got better, web developer became a job category, and sites became more elaborate. But they were still primarily for providing marketing information online. eCommerce? Say what?

At the same time, Internet-based email systems were being introduced. Suddenly, you could communicate not just with your colleagues within the walls, but with customers, partners, vendors, and your friends and family. Exciting at first, but quickly taken for granted.

My next stop was at a company – BBN Planet –> GTE Internetworking –> Genuity that, in fact, was instrumental in the invention and development of the Internet back in the late 1960’s. (And was also the place where the @ sign for use in emails was first deployed.)

By the time I got there – the late 90’s – the World Wide Web, pushed along, by the way, by porn sites demanding better bandwidth and better graphics, eCommerce was starting to be a thing.

And despite all the spectacular failures – pets.com, kozmo.com – that eCommerce thing finally started to catch on. And even if you didn’t sell your wares online – and I always worked for companies with technology-based products with big price tags and long sales cycles, so not candidates for online commerce – your website was a lot more than just informational. It was for relationship building, for customer support, and for anything else you could think of.

And now? Even though you no longer have to type “www” in, the World-Wide Web is just about everything. It’s how we communicate with everyone, learn stuff, figure out answers to questions ultra-trivial and ultra-important, buy stuff, sell stuff, entertain ourselves, keep up with the news, stay in touch with everyone and everything.

I don’t miss the old days of primitive dial ups and ugly informational websites in the least. The Internet/World-Wide Web is great, and the benefits mostly outweigh the downsides. But those downsides are out there. And they’re big. And they’re really downside-y.

We need to listen very clearly to Tim Berners-Lee.

Meanwhile, thanks for the web, Tim.

Time to start wearing a burqa grocery shopping

I do my best to ignore them, but I really despise the ads that pop up whenever and wherever you are on line.

Oh, I don’t mind if Amazon suggests a book purchase. Sometimes it’s actual useful. But most of it… Just because I searched for something doesn’t mean that my interest has sustained itself beyond the nanosecond where I was curious, and had my curiosity satisfied by finding something about something. Please don’t keep reminding me. And that includes the cylindrical pillow I looked for on Wayfair a few weeks ago. Unless you’re capable of delivering me an orange cylindrical pillow that’s 14” long – and it doesn’t seem to me that even Wayfair, with a stockpile of virtual goodies that seems to stretch to infinity and beyond, can deliver this particular good – stop with the cylindrical pillow popups, why don’t you?

I find myself increasingly refraining from doing an in-the-moment, ad hoc search – especially if it’s a bit walk-on-the-wild-side-y – just so I won’t get inundated with ads.

Fortunately, I’m off of Facebook, which spares me those ad assaults.

But I do order stuff on line with some frequency. And you’d think that, if I ordered a pair of sneakers, surely the Internet – in its infinite wisdom – should be aware that I don’t want to order the exact same thing the day after. Or are they preying on the elderly, hoping that I won’t remember that I ordered aqua and purple sneakers, and go ahead and purchase the same thing 24 hours later? Then when two pairs of them show up on my doorstep, I’ll just figure what the hell. I now have a lifetime supply of aqua and purple sneakers.

I don’t like being spied on, thanks. And I don’t like those spying on me to make suggestions to me based on their mindless, indiscriminate sleuthing.

If I don’t like it online, I’m really not enamored with the idea of it happening IRL when I’m actually in a store.

A few years ago, the big worry was that, when you were walking around checking out the merch, you’d start getting info coming at your via your smartphone. Then there were the talking shelves that were going to figure out who you were because you were carrying a store card that you’d swiped each time you checked out – in hopes of actually achieving the mythic goal of getting a discount – and were going to start whispering sweet buy-me nothings as you strolled by.

Not to mention the spycams on every corner, which are great if you’re trying to catch a thief, but are pretty creepy if you’re not.

Well, things are about to get worse. Much worse.

An article by Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe the other day details what’s next up, now that we’ve becoming inured to the idea of someone picking our brains so they can pick our pockets:

…a Chicago company called Cooler Screens figures you won’t mind if they put cameras into the refrigerated display cases in retail stores. The cameras aren’t there to prevent you from stealing soda pop. Instead, they’re part of a facial-profiling system that tries to guess what you’ll buy next, based on how you look.

The doors on a Cooler Screens refrigerator are LCD video screens that display images of the items inside the case, so a customer can see what’s available. The screens also show animated ads, like the ones that pop up on a Web browser. They decide which ads to show by studying video images of the customers. (Source: Boston Globe)

The possibilities Bray outlined in his article were uncanny. Was I among a select group of Globe readers who saw this spot-on scenario in the article, or did every reader see this:

A middle-age woman might see a suggestion that she pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to go with her Diet Coke.

All I can say is that I rarely buy Diet Coke anymore, and it’s Ben & Jerry’s fro-yo. Cherry Garcia, if you must know.

I guess this is just an indication of how paranoid I’ve become that someone could actually get me to believe that The Globe knows it’s online readers so well that we’ll be getting customized add-ish power-of-suggestion embeds in our articles. (Hope I’m not giving them any idea. It’s really just a matter of time…)

Cooler Screens it testing its concept in a number of stores. Fortunately, their Boston outlets are not among the chosen few. Yet.

Me? I’m thinking of getting myself a outfitted with a shopping burqa. And note to self: start wearing sunglasses when I’m pushing my shopping cart around. Hopefully that will stymie the retinal scanning that some marketer would like to do.

Seriously, is there anyplace where our privacy is intact anymore? Guess I’ll have to go ask Alexa…

It’s the Ides of March. Other than at Pink Slip, where it’s the Eve of the Eve of Paddy’s Day

I don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in any big way. I haven’t been to the parade in years. I haven’t made a corned beef and cabbage dinner in decades. I may or may not wear anything green on the day itself. If I take a walk, and it’s pleasant out, I’ll wear my Red Sox cap with the green B and the shamrock on the back. Probably.

But over the weekend, I’m sure I’ll drink a cup of Barry’s tea. I’m sure I’ll have a slab of soda bread. I’m sure I’ll play all sorts of Irish music – from the cornball but always entertaining Clancy Brothers to the rockin’ and heartbreaking Cranberries. From the polished but wonderful Chieftains to authentic session recordings from Ti Neachtain in Galway

If you want to read what I think about Ireland, about being Irish American (half), about St. Patrick’s Day, you’ll find it here – my last year’s post, which includes links to all of Pink Slip’s Paddy’s Day pieces. (Some are pretty good.)

And as a gift in honor of the day, here’s a recipe for Barm Brack, an Irish teacake that was known in my family as Daddy’s Favorite:

Pour 2 cups of boiling water over one pound of raisins. Cool.

After it’s cool, add 2 teaspoons baking soda to the raisins & water.

Mix: 2 cups sugar, 2 tablespoons shortening (I used Crisco), and 2 eggs.

Drain the raisins & water, saving the water. Add the water to the batter and mix well.

Add 3 cups of flour. Mix well.

Add the raisins and 1/2 cup of walnuts.

Bake for approximately 1 hour at either 350 degrees or 375 degrees, in a 13x9” pan. The temperature will depend on your oven, and/or your pan. I used the higher temp, as I was using a metal pan. The brack took 55 minutes to bake.

Once the cake cools, you may want to sprinkle/sift a small amount of confectioner’s sugar on the cake.

This is a really simple and tasty little recipe. It reminds me of my father. It reminds me of home. And, more recently, it reminds me of Ireland.

I never knew it was called barm brack until a couple of years ago when, after all these trips to Ireland, I finally decided to order it in an Irish tea room. I took one look, and then one bite, and realized that what I was eating was Daddy’s Favorite. Who knew?

The recipe above is my non-Irish mother’s, but I’m guessing it originated with my grandmother or one of my Irish great grandmothers.

Anyway, I made a pan last week.

I was going to an elderly friend’s house for lunch. There are three of us who do this regularly. We used to go out, but our friend is a bit frail – nearing 90 – so these days, we bring lunch and eat in. It was my turn to make desert, and I knew that the main course was going to be Shepherd’s Pie. So I thought I’d keep with the Irish theme. Thus, the brack.

I used my mother’s handwritten recipe. I used my mother’s large Pyrex “Early American” (cocoa-brown with eagles on it) mixing bowl to mix everything up in, and her 13x9” aluminum baking pan to bake it in.

It was yummy.

Beware the Ides of March, but have a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Hipsters all look alike? Snap, snap.

A Brandeis mathematician recently completed some dense, equation-filled analysis that led to the conclusion that:

…in a bid to make that all-important "countercultural statement", hipsters can end up looking alike. (Source: The Register, by way of my brother-in-law Rick. So a doff of the beanie to Rick.)

As someone who lives in a hipster-rich area – I mean, we’re no Brooklyn, but Boston/Cambridge/Somerville does have its share of hipsters – I am here to tell you that those Brandeis researchers could have saved themselves the time and trouble of doing all that work (and writing it up in a 34 page paper, yet) and just shown a few denizens of hipster-ville a couple of lineups and ask if they could distinguish one hipster from the other.

A summary of the research was published in The MIT Review, along with an image of, well, a generic hipster.

Shortly after their article appeared, The Review heard from an aggrieved reader:

"We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo that ran with the story. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn't too complimentary about the story, either.)"

I don’t know if calling someone a hipster counts as slander, exactly. It’s not like calling some guy an incel or a Bernie bro. But still, the young man felt that he and his image – a stock photo from Getty of a good looking guy in a flannel shirt and knit cap (the sort of knit cap that is of late known as a beanie) had been used and abused.

By the way, back in the day, a knit cap was called a watch cap. A knit cap with a pom-pom was called a pom-pom hat. And a beanie was something worn by a college freshman who might have been a classmate of Dobie Gillis, or by Catholic school girls.

But now watch caps, knit caps, and pom-pom hats all seem to be called beanie. As a grammar school parochial school beanie wearer, I’m not buying it.

(I’m still having a picture issue with my blog, but in the post below, I’ve included a couple of beanie beanies, along with the generic hipster pic that appeared in The Review.)

But. I. Digress.

After The Review received the complaint from the don’t-call-me-a-hipster guy, editor Giden Lichfield wanted to make sure that they’d used the image properly. So his folks reviewed the image license, and then contacted Getty to make sure that the model had officially released use of his image:

The stock photo giant checked the model release and lo! The guy in the image wasn't even the same dude who was complaining. "He'd misidentified himself," Lichfield said.

Sure, sometimes in a crowd scene, or fuzzy snapshot, or photo from ancient history, you may think that you’re looking at a picture of yourself. Or not. But seriously. How often have you looked at what is a really clear current picture and not recognized yourself. Talk about face blind.

"All of which just proves the story we ran: hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other."

Hah! I say, hah, hah! (That, or I’m snapping my fingers, Beatnik hipster style. Snap, snap.)

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

Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe had an interesting article on this subject in which he gets into the neural network underpinnings of the research. If you’re interested in more than just making fun of hipsters, it’s worth a read.

That's no beanie, that's a watch cap

Here's the mistaken identity hipster picture from Getty images:

That looks to me like a knit cap, a watch cap. NOT A BEANIE.

This is what a beanie looks like, from the old college try beanie era:

And here's what parochial school girls' beanies looked like in the 1950's:

This is not the church-of-my-youth. Way too modern. This looks postwar suburban to me. That light wood. The modern lines of the pews. And that's not my grammar school, either. But close enough. Our jumpers had a U-shaped neck. And our bow-ties were different. Plus our beanies had a patch on them that said OLA (for Our Lady of the Angels) on it, rather than the directly embroidered on look here.  But, dammit, those girls are wearing BEANIES!

Affirmative Action for rich folks

Felicity Huffman’s kids. Lori Loughlin’s kids. The children of the hedge fund managers, the white-shoe law firm attorneys. These kids already have plenty of advantages.

From pre-school on through high school, they go to great private schools or great public schools. They have tutors, if they need them. They go to SAT prep classes. They have books in the house. They travel. They go to museums. They get tickets to Hamilton. They have private lessons for whatever they want to take up (or that their parents want them to take up): tennis, violin, etc. Thanks to their parents, they have built-in networks, so by the time they’re juniors or senior in high school, there’s someone who’s willing to take them under their wing and set them up with a specious internship.

But all those advantages might not have been enough to get them into Harvard, or Stanford, or Georgetown, or USC.

Parents working the system to get their kids admitted to elite schools is nothing new. The alumni interviewer is an old friend, who puts in a word for your kid. You buddy up with the prep school guidance counselor who works hand in glove with admissions officers to come up with the slate of students that will be recommended as the best fit for Ivy College.  You make a mega donation – like Jared Kushner’s father did to get him admitted to Harvard.

But Operation Varsity Blues has revealed an entirely different level of “leverage.” And yesterday, the scam that were the brainchild of one William “Rick” Singer was exposed.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people on Tuesday in a major college admission scandal that involved wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, paying bribes to get their children into elite American universities.

Thirty-three parents were charged in the case and prosecutors said there could be additional indictments to come. Also implicated were top college coaches, who were accused of accepting millions of dollars to help admit students to Wake Forest, Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and other schools, regardless of their academic or sports ability, officials said. (Source: NY Times)

There were a number of different elements to the scheme.

In some cases, parents hired stand-ins to take the SATs and ACTs for their kids, using an away-from-home test center where their kids wouldn’t be recognized. Or they had their kids take the tests at special centers, where someone in on the inside job corrected the forms before they were submitted.

Some parents concocted fake achievements for their kids, going so far as to use fake photos of their kids participating in sports for fake teams. The kids were accepted even if they had lower boards and grades than the norm. This is often the case at elite schools where, as long as the jocks aren’t totally out of range grade and score-wise, they get in. So being an athlete is an edge.

A number of coaches – included the now-former Stanford sailing coach – have been implicated. But the big “winner” – until he got caught – was Singer:

Parents paid Mr. Singer about $25 million from 2011 until February 2019 to bribe coaches and university administrators to designate their children as recruited athletes, which effectively ensured their admission, according to the indictment.

Singer, who had a business doing college consulting – what a honeypot that was – worked on a sliding scale. One couple paid Singer $1.2M to get their little darling into Yale.

There’s also in IRS overlay to the fraud, as Singer often got paid by having parents donate to a non-profit he had set up. Parents got the deduction, Singer got the cash.

No student has been charged, and there’s only one mention of a student actually being even marginally implicated in the scheme. But I really wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of anyone whose parents have been charged. It’s not clear what the schools are going to do with the students who were cheated in. Even if they’re not asked to leave, how completely humiliating. And if they weren’t in implicit cahoots with their parents – and there’s knowing and then there’s knowing – I can’t imagine how furious these kids will be at their folks. Or they’ll just dismiss it as “everybody’s doing it. This is how the game is played.” Shrug.

Thirty-three parents have been named in the indictment, but Singer has been recording saying that 800 students have gotten into prime schools through what he calls the “side door.”

William Macy was not indicted in the scheme, but his wife, Felicity Huffman, the mother of his daughters – was. So I’m guessing Macy, an actor whose work I admire, was somehow in the know.

One of Macy’s great characters is Frank Gallagher, the paterfamilias on “Shameless”, a show about a totally dysfunctional working class (on their best days) South Side Chicago family.

Frank Gallagher is an alcoholic. He’s a drug addict. He’s a liar. A thief. A mooch. A lout. A lay-about. A thoroughly nasty a-hole who’s let his six kids pretty much drag themselves up, largely thanks to the goodness and selflessness of his oldest child, Fiona (who is also the queen of personal dysfunction, only with a heart of gold). He’s also a complete schemer, always looking for the easy way out, some angle he can play so that he doesn’t have to work or otherwise take care of his family. (The mother, Monica, also an addict, is dead.)

I’m thinking of the fictional Gallagher kids. Fiona. Lip (for Philip). Ian. Debbie. Carl. Liam.

They’re all fierce and funny, weird and wonderful. And each has a little well of goodness that’s completely absent in their father.

I’m a supporter of Affirmative Action. After all, there’s always been some sort of Affirmative Action for the powerful and the rich  – legacy admissions, all those coaches and after-school programs, buying that building. But I believe there should be class element to it, not just a racial one. I’d like to see economically disadvantaged kids get a leg up, too.

All those Gallagher kids out there. All those African American, Hispanic, and Native American kids who start off way behind the starting line. Underprivileged. Unprivileged.

I know that, and understand why, parents will do what they can to make sure that their children succeed. But enough it enough.

Fuck these cheaters, these scam artists. Nothing more to say…

The sisterhood is powerful at least in New Enlgand. Yay! (I guess.)

Last Friday was International Women’s Day, so in belated observance, I thought I’d take a look at Bloomberg’s annual ranking of the best states for gender equality and female leadership.

In terms of gender parity – which factors in median pay ratio by gender, labor force participation, college degree, health coverage and women living in poverty – Massachusetts ranks 5th.

Which states come out ahead of our glorious Commonwealth?

Well, Vermont ranked #1, which will come as no surprise to anyone who lives in modern day Vermont (but might surprise native Vermonters from back in the day, like my late husband). Vermont it plenty progressive – hippy-dippy, even. It’s also the state with the most self-identified members of the LBGT community. (Massachusetts is right up there, too.) And it’s the state that’s given us that gift that keeps on giving: Senator Bernie Sanders. (Take your senator, please…)

Minnesota, Maryland, and Hawaii also beat Massachusetts when it comes to gender parity.

Admittedly, We’re Number Five! doesn’t have the same cachet as We’re Number One!

But it sure beats We’re Number Fifty! That honor goes to Mississippi, which is about as surprising as Vermont’s top of the heap ranking.

With the exception of Rhode Island, which ranks 11 on the Bloomberg list, all of the New England states are in the Top Ten. The cellar dwellers are primarily in the South, with a few western states (Texas, Oklahoma, and Idaho) thrown in the mix. These states – I’m going top of head here, but I think that with the exception of those Western states) tend to be all-round poor. It’s not like the men in these states are doing swimmingly, either.

Which comes first, poverty or rotten conditions for women? Probably a simulcast…

But whatever you think of the blue state/red state arguments, there’s no question that progressive politics are correlated with economic success, better health, higher education levels…Again, which comes first? Can progressive states afford to be progressive because they’re wealthier, healthier, and better educated? Or are we wealthier, healthier, and better educated because we tilt in the progressive direction.

Or does it all come down to northern and more urban and industrial states being wealthier historically, and the fact that, except for a few pockets, the South has just never managed to escape its rural disadvantage? Sure looks that way when you look at where states land on measures economic and physical health, for women and for men.

Location, location, location? State of origin is destiny?

I’m sure I sound like I’m taking smug credit for living in Massachusetts. And, of course, I am.

But when I look at the list of the Top 25, the only states I can imagine living (in addition to New England), are on that list: New York, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, Oregon…And these are states that tend to rank pretty high in every quality of life measure I’m interested in. (Okay. I’ll ignore Illinois corruption and fiscal meshugas.)

And places in the Bottom 25, mostly it’s a no, thank you.

I will admit that I always enjoy looking at these lists – typically drawn up by coastal elite MSM types – in which my state always ends up near the top. Are there lists that I don’t see – concocted by Fox News, maybe – in which Massachusetts ranks towards the bottom? Friendliness in grocery stores? Weather?

I don’t know. I just find where I live a pretty good place to be, and I guess I like it when my bias is confirmed.

Back to Bloomberg – now there’s a coastal elite organization, if ever – it also ranks the best states for female leadership. The results area pretty much the same as they are for gender parity. Massachusetts steps up a place, coming in at number four, followed by Maine and Vermont. New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island are all in the Top Twenty.

Once again, Mississippi trails the fifty state pack.

I’m more than happy that I live in a state that’s a good place for women. But before I do too much of a gloat, I need to remind myself that, International Women’s Day or not, it’s pretty depressing that there’s such disparity in all measures of success among the fifty states.

I suppose that someone’s got to be on top, and someone else has to be on bottom. And the view from the top is a lot better. But the tremendous disparity between top and bottom is really no cause for joy.

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Source: Bloomberg

 

And there was light

One of the things I most look forward to each year is the return of daylight saving time.

As those of us who live on the leading edge of the northern end of a time zone know well, it can be pretty darned depressing when it starts getting dark at 4 in the afternoon. Which happens when they call off DST and return to the dreaded standard time in the fall. There’s a reason why the ancients decided to celebrate Christmas in December, that’s for sure. It kinda sorta takes some of the grimness out of the dark. All those lights on the trees on The Common…

Let there be lights! Takes your mind off of the experience of heart of December darkness.

Ah, light.

In these parts, you really start noticing that things are going in a better direction come the middle of February, when you’re out and about after 5 and it’s still – gulp! – a tad bit lightish. Each day, it’s a little lighter a little later. Oh, for joy!

So even though it means “losing” an hour, I’m always delighted when DST rolls back around, and was thrilled when they moved it back to early March from the end of April.

Psychologically, if nothing else, it provides folks around here, always coming off a miserable winter – and no matter how much or how little snow, no matter how much or how little bitter cold, it’s always a miserable winter – a big lift. Promise of spring. Promise of baseball. Promise of warmth. Bring on the forsythia. Enter ye croci: start rearing your charming little purple, white and yellow heads.

Whenever the clocks are moved – forward or backward, matters not – we’re sure to see a couple of articles and/or opinion pieces on the merits of daylight saving time.

Those who hate it claim that it’s terrible for the schoolkids to have to wait for the bus when it’s dark out. They argue that pushing the light to the end of the day doesn’t save us anything energy-wise. In fact, they counter-argue, it’s  a bigger energy waster, as we put our ACs on sooner in the day. Or something.

Anti DST-ers also maintain that it wreaks havoc with sleep patterns. (For crying out loud on this argument. Gaining or losing an hour shouldn’t take all that long to recover from. If someone can’t handle an hour shift, how do they do any travel that cuts across a few time zones? Come on.)  

The pro side – which I am most decidedly on – have a simpler story to tell. Having largely abandoned the energy-saving pitch, we state the obvious: when it’s light later in the day, most of us just feel better. When it’s light out when you get home from work, you’re more apt to go out and take a walk. Or poke around the yard. Or sit on the porch. When it’s pitch black when you get out of your car, you head into the house, slam the door, and hunker down for the night.

There are a couple of proposals that are semi-annually dredged up around DST.

One is that we stay on it all year round. Marco Rubio is a big proponent of this approach, and I’ve got to say I’m down with Lil’ Marco here.

Others want to stay on standard time, saying that moving to DST advantages those selfish hedonists who want light later in the day, and disadvantages the clean-living decent folks (and little school kiddos) who like to get up and at ‘em while it’s light out.

(Funny side story here: My husband had a friend who moved time zones when his kids were still small. When they got their kindergartner out of bed on the first day of school, he looked around and said, “What is this, night school?”)

There are some locals who want New England to go on Atlantic time, and stay on standard Atlantic all year. This, I think, would put us on the same clock as the Canadian Maritime provinces – which might make sense if you live in Maine – but off the same clock as NYC and Washington DC, which makes no sense for those who live in non-Maine.

As a light-at-the-end-of-the-dayer, while I’d prefer to be on the backside of a time zone – which we would be if New England moved to Atlantic Standard – it’s not worth being out of sync with the rest of the eastern seaboard.

So I’m either going with the Marco Rubio plan or sticking with the status quo.

Anyway, yesterday was a pretty miserable day.

I had to get up to work the 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. breakfast shift at St. Francis House, and I really wasn’t quite ready when that alarm went off at 6:15 a.m. (a.k.a., the time of day formerly known as 5:15 a.m.). When I walked across The Common to get to SFH – about 6:45 a.m., it was getting light out – the morning equivalent of twilight.

The weather yesterday was plenty crappy. It snowed a little. It rained a teensie tiny bit. It was grey and dreary. I never really cleared up.

But at 6 p.m., at almost to 7 p.m., even – get this – there was light.

All hail, Daylight Saving Time.

Something there is that doesn’t love an open concept

Those who watch any HGTV to speak of are well aware that Americans are in love, love, love with “open concept,” which can mean anything from an entire first floor with no inside walls whatsoever to a kitchen that spills into the family room.

The shows on HGTV are plenty scripted – was there ever a man in the history of house-hunting mankind who uttered unprompted the words “I really like the tray ceilings in the bedroom” – and a frequent script trope is “we were really hoping for open concept.”

If folks are looking for a new house, lack of open concept is often a deal breaker.

If folks are looking to rehab their way into open concept, there’s often a faux dramatic scene in which the renovators discover that there’s a big chunk o’ infrastructure: pipes, wires, the beam that’s holding up the second floor getting in the way of the open concept dream. How will we survive?

There are any number of (scripted) reasons people want open concept.

They love to entertain. And when they entertain, the person doing the food prep doesn’t want to get left out.

They want to keep an eye on their kids, with 24/7, 360 degree access to their goings on.

They want to watch the game while they’re whipping up a batch of nachos. Or whatever else is on while whipping up breakfast, lunch or dinner. And they want to watch on the BIG TV that dominates their living room or family room.

They want lots of light.

They just crave the togeheriness of the whole scene.

They just happen to love wide open spaces.

Oh, every once in a while an aginner expresses a desire for a walled off kitchen. Or the script calls for some bogus husband v. wife conflict. (“He wants open concept. She likes cozy spaces.” Can this marriage be saved???)

But it seems that the open concept tide just may be turning.

An article the other day in the Boston Globe profiled a couple of local apostates.

“In our old house,” said [Brenda] Didonna, a financial analyst, “I’d come home and make dinner and my husband would be watching TV in the other room, and a good portion of the evening we’d be apart.”

She got her togetherness, all right, in a glorious new house in Millbury. Now when she cooks and her husband watches TV, he’s in full view. Relaxing. While she works. “Frankly it’s annoying,” she said. A real estate agent has been called.

“I miss walls,” she said.(Source: Boston Globe)

I’d miss walls, too. But yowza. Selling the great new open conception home-a-rama shortly after moving in. I’m sure that Ms. Didonna has done the financial analysis, but this is going to cost a bit of coin. Especially given that her comments may well wake people up to the downside of open concept, i.e., sweating over a hot stove while your spouse is lumping around (or nodding off) watching, say, House Hunters on HGTV.

“Buyers are moving away from uninterrupted views,” said Loren Larsen, a real estate agent with Compass, in Boston, who is hearing from clients who don’t want their kitchens — and the dirty dishes — on display.

Or who don’t want all that company breathing down their neck while they’re trying to stuff pigs in blankets, or whatever it is that uber-entertainers do. (Another trope on HGTV is that everyone just loves to entertain. I realize that, when it comes to entertaining, I sit on the misanthropic introvert end of the continuum, but who on earth is doing all this perpetual entertaining that calls for open concept? Even on House Hunters International, where people are moving overseas to a place where they’ve never been and don’t know a soul, the big concern is how they’re going to entertain. Mostly those going abroad are SOL when it comes to open concept, so they’ll just have to settle for entertaining all their new friends, which pretty much seems to be their realtor and some dredged up new colleague, in the mingy little living room.)

“The pendulum is swinging back,” said Bob Ernst, president of FBN Construction in Hyde Park. “The reality is that life can be loud.”

Sometimes the pendulum swinging back doesn’t mean turning around and insta-listing the open concept dream home that turns into a nightmare. Sometimes it means reno-ing your reno.

Take the case of the Partan-Tveteraas family. They had a new condo in Brookline that was calling out for an opening of the concept. So they went with “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” approach and took the walls out.

“It was going to be like a gallery,” said [Asya] Partan-Tveteraas, a writer. “We’d have art-viewing parties and it was going to feel like this cool New York loft.”

Fast forward to reality:

Unless the couple’s two school-age children are in their rooms, the couple can’t watch a (non- PBS Kids) TV show, have a neighbor over for a drink, or conduct a work call.

So now they’re putting up walls and “considering pricey sliding doors.”

There don’t seem to be any studies about the pros and cons of open concept.

But researchers have looked at what open space means in the workplace, and home buyers might want to take note.

“It’s Official: Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time,” read the headline of a 2018 Inc.com story.

It reported on a Harvard study that found open offices kill teamwork, and the lack of privacy drove employees to wear headphones and correspond electronically rather than talking face to face.

Hey, having worked in an open concept office, I could have told them that for free.

As for open concept living, I’m pretty closed minded.

I have a pretty large living room-dining room combo (open concept-y, I suppose, but just a big old room that back in the day may have been a dining room or a library). But my galley kitchen is all on its lonesome. And I like it that way. Even if connecting it directly to the LR-DR were aesthetically and/or structurally possible – which it isn’t – I wouldn’t want it combo’d in. I actually like defined spaces, cozy rooms, walls.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to tune in to more HGTV and see whether they’ve begun promoting closed concept. They’ll still have his and her sinks and walk-in closets to focus their house-hunting energy on.

More bitcoin meshugas

I’ve been keeping a rather jaundiced eye on the bitcoin phenomenon since shortly after it first became a thing. Now, as then, I believe that at some point cryptocurrency will be widely adopted. But that it be governed by some sort of world bank-ish type of entity, not by a bunch of private investors and fanboys who seem like they ought to be celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day, not ruling the international monetary system.

To me, crypto has always been a weird little world, and it’s just gotten even weirder.

It began with the death – or, as many articles term it, the “alleged” death – of one Gerald Cotten. Cotten was/is the founder of Quadriga, a Canadian crypto exchange.

Cotten supposedly took the keys to his crypto kingdom (i.e., the passwords) with him, and now, no one can get into the digital ledgers kept on his encrypted laptop. To the tune of coins worth $144M.

Not a terribly major amount of money – certainly not enough to upset the crypto applecart, as there’s estimated to be about $400B of it floating or not floating around out there.

Still, $144M is plenty of money if you’re one of the Quadriga account holders who had a piece of what was stored in Cotten’s “cold wallet” (off the Internet and stored on impregnable hardware).

Anyway, since Cotten’s (alleged) death in December, sleuths have been trying to figure out what’s in his wallets. And what they’re finding is that those wallets were nearly empty.

So where’d the dough go?

Ernst & Young has been trying their damnedest to get to the bottom of things, but so far they’ve only found about 10% of the missing coins.

And now the G-men and the Mounties have gotten in on the act:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are said to be looking into the implosion of Quadriga, a cryptocurrency exchange that has been unable to account for at least $136 million in customer funds since the mysterious death of its 30-year-old CEO in December. (Source: Fortune)

Some maintain that the money was never in a cold wallet to begin with, but is circulating in hot wallets (on the Internet, somewhat traceable). But where is it?

This isn’t the first flakiness that Quadriga has been involved in. Among other oddities of a suspicious nature, Cotten’s co-founder is a felon who’d been convicted of identity theft, and has been tied to money laundering as well.

Anyway, I’m sure the Feds and the Mounties will figure out where the real-fake-money went. And maybe even whether Cotten has actually died. (There is no evidence that he’s alive, but the evidence that he died – which occurred in India, where (allegedly) it’s easy enough to fake a death – is a bit sketchy.)

Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping my actual, concrete money in actual, concrete financial institutions where it belongs. Personally, I’d stuff my money in my mattress before I’d invest in cryptocurrency.

Forever Young

Sometimes my ankles ache. Sometimes my knees ache. Sometimes my hips ache. A little. Not enough to keep me from getting my daily walk in, mind you. But achy enough, and sometimes that walk is a little old lady slow and creaky walk.

Sometimes my hands cramp up. Sometimes my left thumb does this weird herky-jerky thing. Sometimes it’s my left pinkie doing the herky jerk.

I need a lot more light to read by. And my night vision isn’t all that great, so it’s a good thing I’m not out there driving around after dark.

I’ve always had a pretty much cast-iron stomach, and it’s still that way. Mostly. But I do find myself shaking the Tums bottle more than I used to.

Despite all these minor, small-i ills, I’m still – knock on wood, marble, and quartzite – pretty damned healthy.

I can usually ward off a cold by taking the tea with lemon and honey cure, plus – of course – taking a long hot shower after I’ve slathered my throat and the sides of my nose with Vicks VapRub.

Nonetheless, I’m guessing that, now that I’m about to round the corner on 70, there’ll be more little health glitches.

Sure, it kinda sorta sucks but, hey, as we say in geriatric circles, it beats the alternative.

But there will likely come a day – 15? 20? 25? years out – when this will no longer be the case.

At some point, even for the healthiest among us, things fall apart and our bodies, ourselves, are no longer able to hold on. And then, well, so, long it’s been good to know you.

Fingers crossed, of course, that our last days on earth aren’t miserable, that we die in our sleep or blissed out on EOL pills. Not tubed up in an ICU, or otherwise no longer able to function on our own and fully aware of it.

Meanwhile, I do plenty of small things to keep the inevitable at bay. I take those daily walks. I do regular, half-baked workouts. I stay active, mentally, physically (within reason), and socially (within reason). If you ignore the daily cookie or two, and the nightly ration of fro-yo, I’m a pretty healthy eater. 

But I’m not looking into or planning on ever taking anything that even remotely looks like an extraordinary measure.

Sure, ask me in 15, 20, 25 years. But for now, this is my story and I’m sticking to it.

But some members of my cohort are more aggressively committed to staying forever young.

Some have been taking plasma injections, which the FDA recently warned have “’no proven clinical benefit.’” In the wake of the FDA’s announcement, Ambrosia, announced that it was no longer treating patients. Prior to: that, the company had gotten more than 100 folks to pay $8K to $12K:

…to receive plasma from 16- to 25-year-old donors as part of Ambrosia’s participant-funded study. (Source: HuffPo)

But if Ambrosia hadn’t discovered a fountain of youth, there’s still a ton of money in the forever young market.

The global market for anti-aging products is expected to exceed $330 billion by 2021, according to one estimate. (Source: An opinion piece by law professor/novelist Stephen Carter that appeared on Bloomberg)

The driver for this market is, of course, the Boomers, hoping to add another couple of decades to their lives. (Warning to follow-on generations: if you think the Baby Boomers are pains in the arse in our 60s, wait until we’re in our 100’s.)

All this doesn’t have to be a vanity project, brought to you by what has been – to date – the most self-absorbed generation ever. Ambrosia may not have helped folks stay young, but Stanford University has a clinical trial going to test whether young blood plasma injections can help those with Alzheimer’s.

Other research projects are a bit more squirrely.

Nectome was an M.I.T.-linked startup that got big press early last year for its ambitious plan to pump embalming fluid into the arteries of the dying to preserve body and brain until future scientists can upload the mind. Although plenty of people joined the waiting list at $10,000 a pop, controversy followed once critics pointed out that the technology was necessarily fatal.

Well, bring me the head of Ted Williams.

Anyway, MIT started to get some bad press, so they backed off from its association with Nectome. Phew!

Carter notes that there is a:

…tendency nowadays is to mock such technologies as the silly playthings of the worried super-wealthy.

Yep!

But some of the ideas may end up panning out.

What then?

Not surprisingly, as Carter points out, the super-wealthy will be the ones who are able to afford all this. So on top of having nicer things that the rest of us, they’ll be able to enjoy them for a lot longer than us mere middle-class mortals enjoy our more modest stuff stashes.

Life is unfair. Death, too.

But those left behind, having to accept a normal lifespan, will inevitably start agitating to get in on the forever young/live forever action.

I’d like to live long enough to see AOC become president, but I don’t know if I want to live long enough to see geezers rampaging through the streets demanding the right to get their liver-spotted hands on a vial of life extender.

Ugh!