Climb Every Mountain

I don’t have a lot of things on my bucket list.

See Portugal. See Pittsburgh. (No. Seriously.) Write a novel. (Note to self: better get going.)

Climbing Everest is not on it.

Not that I haven’t climbed any mountains.

I’ve climbed Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. And Mount Katahdin in Maine. (Not 100% I “summitted” on that one.) I got as far as Tuckerman’s Ravine on Mount Washington.

All of these treks occurred well over 40 years ago. Having shown no interest in a climb since then, I doubt mountain climbing of any sort will be added to my list. Especially not the type of mountain climbing that requires crampons, ice axes and face masks.

Then again, I’ve never been a physical adventurer, a big risk taker. If I had to choose between the satisfaction, the triumph of making it to the peak of some peak under grueling conditions, or the pure, unadulterated meh of standing in my kitchen with a cup of tea, watching a snowstorm, well, meh ‘r us.

But that’s just me.

On the other end of the adventure spectrum, there are a ton of folks do seem to want to climb Everest.

It’s not quite the same experience it was in the old days (i.e., 1953) when Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa companion Tenzing Norgay became the first to have paid a recorded visit to the top of the world. Today, the equipment is better. So are known routes. And weather forecast. If not exactly accessible in the same way Mount Monadnock is, let’s just say that it’s easier to get there than it used to be.

And climbing Mount Everest has become quite the tourist business. To the extent that just about any one with the money to get themselves to Nepal and buy into a tour can set out for the summit of Everest.

Fly-by-night adventure companies are taking up untrained climbers who pose a risk to everyone on the mountain. And the Nepalese government, hungry for every climbing dollar it can get, has issued more permits than Everest can safely handle, some experienced mountaineers say. (Source: NY Times)

The result is that crowds are almost as thick as they are around say, the Statue of Liberty or the Cheers bar. (Amazingly, the latter is still hopping, even though the show’s been off the air for 25 years.)

And this season, it’s been so crowded at the top of Everest that 11 people have died. So far.

One climber who made it up and out alive, Ed Dohring, encountered a ton of fellow travelers as he neared his goal. Trouble was, they weren’t behaving like super-polite Brits in a bus queue.

Climbers were pushing and shoving to take selfies. The flat part of the summit, which he estimated at about the size of two Ping-Pong tables, was packed with 15 or 20 people. To get up there, he had to wait hours in a line, chest to chest, one puffy jacket after the next, on an icy, rocky ridge with a several-thousand foot drop.

He even had to step around the body of a woman who had just died.

Did I mention that Dohring is a doctor? No mention in the article of whether he tended to the dead woman. Maybe he’s savvy enough to recognize dead when he sees it. Probably doesn’t take long for rigor mortis to set in when it’s freezing out.

Not to mention that Dohring had that lifelong goal in mind.

And, if he’s like most of the climbers, he was only carrying enough compressed oxygen canisters to get him to the top and back to safety. So when things jam up, and climbers get delayed – and have to expend extra energy hopping over dead bodies – they may start running out of oxygen.

Things might get ugly.

According to Sherpas and climbers, some of the deaths this year were caused by people getting held up in the long lines on the last 1,000 feet or so of the climb, unable to get up and down fast enough to replenish their oxygen supply. Others were simply not fit enough to be on the mountain in the first place.

And it’s been reported that some of these unfit, inexperienced climbers didn’t “even know how to put on a pair of crampons.”

Sheesh. Even I know how to put on a pair of crampons. And, given that we get a lot of ice, I actually own a pair of crampons. Now, they may not be toothy enough for Everest, but they work on the challenging, icebound sidewalks of Boston.

And apparently Nepal is so lax with their permitting and hiker vetting (non-existent), there’d be no problem with me getting the okey-dokey to get in line for the climb. I wouldn’t even have to demonstrate my crampon proficiency.

In the past, say, sometime between Sir Edmund Hillary and a decade or so ago, the only people attempting the climb were experienced. Then came the explosion of adventure travel, and experience buying on the cheap, and Nepal’s over-permitting, and – of course – the selfie culture. Make that selfish culture.

Climbers in groups of 150 are clipped together to a safety line. And people start collapsing. And people start panicking. And most folks aren’t willing and/or able to help out with the panicking collapsers. They’re (understandably) worried about themselves. And less understandably driven to get to the top for the all important selfie.

Anyway, people are fighting through crowds to get to the summit, and then again on the way down. On his way down, Dr. Dohring – who, among other preparations, had “slept at home in a tent that simulated high-altitude conditions” (sounds like fun) - passed another two dead bodies.

Nope, climbing Mount Everest is not going to displace Portugal or Pittsburgh on my bucket list. I don’t want to go any place where I have to worry about my oxygen running out, or where I have to step over dead bodies in either direction.

Novel writing, here I come.

Congratulations Dr. Dembe, Congratulations Dr. Webb

Sometimes I forget what it was like. Back then, back in the day, when women in greater number were starting to forge professional careers outside the traditional range of options open to us: nurse, teacher, social worker, secretary.

Women I know who interviewed for jobs in business were told, ‘why should we hire you when you’re just going to go off and get married?’

I graduated from college in 1971. That fall, only 12% of those enrolled as first year law students were women. My friend Mary was one of them. She went on to become a judge, and has plenty to say about the sexism and misogyny she faced.

I don’t know the exact number, but I think women made up about 20% of my business school class. (It was MIT, so we might have been lower than “normal” schools.) But there weren’t a lot of us.

No, none of the barriers that women had to overcome in my day were anything as formidable as those experienced by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S. (Google her for her remarkable story.)

Still, 50 years ago, even if we were told ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’, women still had a long way to go. We weren’t exactly welcomed in a lot of places, and we were often treated poorly and/or sexually harassed when we got there.

It was far worse for women just a few years older then I am.

And one of the areas where it was especially difficult was academia.

A recent Nicholas Kristof column in the NY Times featured two women whose careers were stymied. Now, 50 years (plus or minus) later than they should have, Marilyn Webb and Cheryl Dembe are getting their due.

When Marilyn Webb asked a distinguished male professor to serve on her dissertation committee at the University of Chicago, he said he would do so only if he could go to her apartment and give her baths.

So she asked another prominent professor, this one an expert in moral development. He pinned her against the wall, kissed her forcefully and “began slobbering all over my face,” she recalled, adding, “He told me it was quid pro quo.” (Source: NY Times)

At this point – it was 1967 -  Webb had put in three years finishing her courses and taking the preliminary PhD exams in educational psychology. 

Then she had these back to back encounters.

Where did you go with something like this, back in the day? No one was all that interested. Me, too? Yeah, me, too. So what?

So Webb ended up dropping out.

She forged a successful career as a writer and editor. But her having been stymied with respect to the career she’d originally wanted still rankled. So when she turned 75:

…she wrote to the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Zimmer, laid out what had happened, and asked him if the university could correct this injustice.

Professor Bathtub and Professor Slobber were both dead. But Zimmer called for an investigation and Webb’s story checked out. So Chicago put together a dissertation committee and decided that she could:

…submit as a dissertation a book she had written, but with a new theoretical framework.

So she did. And on June 15th, Marilyn Webb will become Dr. Marilyn Webb.

A few years after Webb left the University of Chicago, Cheryl Dembe, too, departed.

Dembe, a chemist, was finishing up her doctorate when her research adviser died.

She could not find another — because she was female, the university acknowledges — and so had to drop out with a master’s.

A faculty committee reviewed Dembe’s work as a doctoral student and was impressed; it resembled contemporaneous work at Cornell University that later won a Nobel Prize. So Dembe, too, will be awarded a Ph.D.

Nobel Prize, huh? Just a wild guess: it went to a guy.

I’m not all that keen on those with PhDs using the title “Doctor.” Maybe because my PhD husband thought we’d get better seating in a restaurant if he made a reservation under “Doctor Diggins.” This always made me nervous. What was he planning to do if a medical emergency occurred, and Jim was called on to revive someone? Talk to them about Federal Reserve policy? Gulp…

But I’ll make an exception for these two women.

Congratulations Dr. Dembe. Congratulations Dr. Webb.

Better late than never!

“There are results, and then there are excuses.”

If you look at Michael Avenatti’s website, you’ll see a rotating banner floating pithy statements, presumably from the man himself. First up when I looked: “There are results, and then there are excuses.”

When Avenatti lands in court, it will be interesting to see just what his excuses are – and what the results end up being. From the sounds of it, if the multiple allegations prove true, he’ll be sporting an orange jump suit.

For those who’ve already forgotten Michael Avenatti – understandable, given the large and dynamic cast of characters who’ve achieved speaking parts in the shit show known as the Trump Presidency – he’s the lawyer who represented Stormy Daniels, the porn star one-night-stand Trump silenced with a good-sized payout.

I saw plenty of Avenatti during his run on the show, as he was a frequent guest on MSNBC, which I am a frequent watcher of.

What was not to like? Avenatti is a brash, big-talking, good looking anti-Trump. When it comes to pundits, I don’t require brashness, big talk, or a telegenic face. Thus my fondness for the calm, sober-side, bordering on soporific Chuck Rosenberg, also a frequent MSNBC talking head.

But Avenatti was wildly entertaining, and watching him was fun while it lasted.

His charms began to wear thin for me when he dropped hints that he was considering a run for the presidency. Huh? This was before the Democrats had 647 declared candidates, yet even way back when, I thought Avenatti was one too many.

And then there was the allegation that he had dragged his girlfriend across the floor of his apartment. She got a restraining order; he dodged a felony charge when the LA County DA decided to make it a misdemeanor.

But it didn’t sound all that good, and then and there I dumped Avenatti in favor of the Chuck Rosenbergs of the world of cable news punditry.

Then news started to emerge that Avenatti wasn’t just a flashy, celeb attorney. He is, if the charges hold up, a serial thief and all-round nogoodnik.

He was arrested in New York in March by FBI agents on charges he had threatened to reveal damaging allegations against Nike if they did not pay him millions.

Separately, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have filed a 36-count indictment against Avenatti, alleging he swindled clients and sought to cover up financial chicanery in other schemes.

That indictment charges Avenatti “would misrepresent, conceal, and falsely describe to the client” the details of their settlement and its funds, routing the money instead into accounts he controlled. He would use the money for himself and lie to clients about whether the settlements were being paid or delayed, the indictment stated.

In one instance, Avenatti allegedly redirected $2.5 million intended for one of his clients to buy a private airplane for his company. Federal officials have since seized the jet. (Source: Washington Post)

The shakedown of Nike involved Avenatti threatening to blow the whistle on illegal payments the company had made to high school b-ballers. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Nike is, indeed, guilty of just doing it. That still doesn’t excuse the extortion, however.

In one of the bilk-a-client cases, he’s accused of funneling all but $124K of a $4 million payout into his own coffers. The client was a mentally ill man. Oh, and Avenatti supposedly screwed up the fellow’s Social Security application, so he now has no source of income.

The latest indictment alleges that Avenatti pocketed around $300K from Stormy Daniels – proceeds from her book deal, which went in part to pay for his $3.9K per month payments for his Ferrari. Man’s gotta drive what man’s gotta drive.

Avenatti, naturally, denies it all. See you in court, pal!

He’s also apparently in a snit about not being invited to defend himself on the very cable shows – largely CNN and MSNBC – where he had been such a welcome guest when he was pushing the Stormy Daniels story. Oh, boohoo. (The worst part of the story, other than stealing from the mentally ill client, is that Fox News’ ultra-execrable Tucker Carlson was apparently on to Avenatti from the jump. Sigh.)

Embezzlement (especially of the large scale variety) is one of those crimes that I find pretty unfathomable. Is it that people start small – stealing a few bucks to tide them over – and, when they get away with it, keep on upping the ante with the belief that they’re never going to get caught? But it seems to me that a lot of them do get caught. Top of head, I’ve got: the kids hockey league treasurer who stole enough to buy her husband a fancy car and herself every Pandora bracelet charm in the world. The bookkeeper for the local construction firm who ripped off enough to build a fancy home in Vermont, where she hosted a splosh wedding for her brother that included a paid appearance by Burt Bachrach. (You really can’t make this stuff up.) The local parking meter collectors who brought home bags of quarters – enough bags full to buy homes in a far nicer suburb than their pay would have earned for them. (One of the wives, who was observed paying for groceries with rolls of quarters, was quoted as saying she just thought her husband was a good provider.)

Seriously, I think that most employers would take a shot at hiring someone who’d been found guilty of murder before they’d offer a job to someone who’d been in prison for stealing from their company.

What are people thinking?

Surely, Michael Avenatti, what with his chutzpah, flash, charm and brains, was capable of making a pretty good living. Is enough never enough?

And speaking of enough…

Oddly enough, Avenatti – like Trump – has an undergraduate degree from Penn. (This, of course, means nothing. My brother-in-law was in Trump’s class at Wharton/Penn. These things happen.) And oddly enough, Avenatti  - like William Barr – has a law degree from George Washington.

Nothing to make, really, of those educational coincidences, but still interesting.

Anyway, another banner saying on Avenatti’s site is this:

“If you can’t take a punch, you don’t belong in the ring.”

He’ll find out soon enough.

Get me fact check, stat!…

I’ve never read her work, but I’ve been aware of Naomi Wolf for a while. She’s the lefty feminist thinker and writer who’s big on outrage and who, perhaps most famously, advised Al Gore to wear brown suits when he was running for president. (I don’t know whether the advice was taken, but it didn’t do much good.)

Anyway, fact checking has apparently never been her strong suit.

In a chronological takedown of Wolf, writer Caitlin Flanagan noted:

1990’s: starts the decade with publication of the Beauty Myth which becomes a big blockbuster but includes, as harbinger, a whopper of a mistake: claims 150K women die per year in US from anorexia @CHSommers checks the numbers: 400 maximum. (Source: Flanagan’s twitter feed)

I tried a five-minute fact check of Flanagan, but couldn’t find any confirmation, other than to say that it seems that the number is a lot closer to 400 than it is to 150,000.

But that was then, way back in the 1990’s. And surely someone as Yale-grad brill as Naomi Wolf learned a lesson about getting the data right, right?

Well, maybe not.

She has a book coming out entitled Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.  The focus of the book is (as I understand it, without having read Word One of it) is a Victorian-era British poet who struggled with his homosexuality in part because being gay was something of a death sentence in England at the time. Wolf asserts in her book that she discovered through a close reading of the records that, during the mid-19th century, a number of men were put to death for being gay.

I’m pretty sure that being a 19th century gay man in England was not trip to the beach. Oscar Wilde, quite famously, spent two years in Reading Gaol for the “crime” of being gay. And yet, there’s no evidence that gay men were being executed. As Wolf found out when she was being interviewed on BBC by Matthew Sweet.

Apparently when Wolf saw the words “death recorded” she interpreted it as someone having been put to death. This is, to me, is a reasonable interpretation. But it’s the wrong one. In fact, “death recorded” is:

…a 19th-century English legal term. [It] means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence.

Oops.

After pointing out Wolf’s error:

Sweet pulled up his own research — news reports and prison records — showing the date that Thomas Silver [an individual Wolf had cited in her work] was discharged. (Source: NY Magazine*)

As it turns out:

…there is no historical evidence that shows anyone was ever executed for sodomy during the Victorian era.

Wolf did end up acknowledging her error, and her publisher, while pointing a finger her way, remains behind the book:

A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesperson offered this statement: “While HMH employs professional editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders for each book project, we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking. Despite this unfortunate error we believe the overall thesis of the book Outrages still holds. We are discussing corrections with the author..

But Wolf, the day after the Sweet interview, did a bit of last ditch defense of her work, tweeting out a reference to an earlier article by one A.D. Harvey.

Problem with Harvey is that he’s something of a history maker-upper:

He deceived the public into thinking that Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky met once and created several online personas and an entire fake community of academics.

Having missed the “death recorded” thang, you’d think Wolf would have been a bit more cautious about A.D. Harvey. The first thing that comes up when you Google him is his wikipedia entry, which describes him as “an English historian, novelist and hoaxer.” (Emphasis mine.)

I’m guessing that when she goes to write her next provocative bestseller, Naomi Wolf will be hiring herself a damned good fact checker.

In the meantime, she might want to jettison the blurb featured prominently on her twitter page banner.

Larry Kramer – “A remarkable and moving work of creative scholarship.”

That’s one way to look at it…

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*Here’s the link, which for some reason won’t let itself be embedded above.

Memorial Day 2019

Memorial Day and I go back a long way. Back to when it was known as Decoration Day – the day when you went out to decorate the graves of loved ones. Which is what my family used to do on this day, paying a call of my sister Margaret and great-grandparents Bridget and Matthew Trainor at St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Leicester, Massachusetts, and on my grandfather Charles Rogers at St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Barre, Massachusetts. (St. Joseph being the patron saint of a happy death, there are a ton of Catholic cemeteries named after him.)

None of those loved ones had anything to do with those who died while serving the country in the military, but we remembered them anyway.

These days, I have a lot more dead loved ones, and none of them were killed in action, either. The closest I get to that is seeing the grave of my second cousin John, who is buried near my parents in St. Joseph’s in Leicester, which is the permanent home to quite a few of the extended family on my paternal grandmother’s side. (Even though my grandfather Rogers is buried in Barre, my grandmother – who outlived her husband by 55 years – wanted to spend eternity with her sons (both of whom she outlived), her daughter, her parents, a few of her siblings, and a whole bunch of nieces, nephews, cousins, et al. And not in the godforsaken backwater which is Barre, Massachusetts. I’m guessing I’m somehow related to about 20% of the folks buried in the Leicester St. Joseph’s cemetery.)

John didn’t die in Vietnam, but he died of a heroin overdose shortly after he returned. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Probably.

I didn’t know John especially well, but he was around. His mother was my father’s first cousin. They lived in our parish.

Anyway, when my cousin Barbara and I bring our geraniums or, better yet, sunpatiens to decorate the graves next week, we’ll see John’s headstone there amid the other family graves.

John gets a flag, as do my father and my uncle, both of who served in World War II (my father for a far longer period than my uncle, who was older and called up late in the war – so late that they had run out of uniforms and guns…)

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing today, but I’ll likely head over to the Boston Common to help pick up the flags that a veterans group sets out every year to honor the tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents who were killed in action in a war, dating back to the Revolution. Quite a stirring sight.

Anyway, unlike 45% of Americans, at least I know that today is a holiday to commemorate our war dead. I don’t actually find that figure all that shocking. There are so many things that Americans are ignorant about, awareness of the purpose of Memorial Day is the least of it.

The shock is the ignorance of the current president, who seems totally unaware of how our government works – or should work. And, I’m guessing, hasn’t a clue about why we observe Memorial Day.

And the shock is that, as I write this post, Trump is supposedly contemplating pardoning a number of war criminals, servicemen who include a couple of men involved in premeditated murder. (Both awaiting trial.)

Shocking, but apparently Trump’s fanbase believe that those accused or convicted of heinous acts are actually the victims of prosecutorial overreach and political correctness. Sigh…

But today’s a holiday, a holiday to commemorate those who lost their lives in our wars, wars that are good, bad or indifferent, but ours nonetheless. So I’ll chose to think about the meaning of the day – both the official meaning, and the unofficial meaning: the beginning of summer. And ignore whatever tweets are emanating from the White House today.

Wishing all friends of Pink Slip an enjoyable day, however you chose to celebrate it.

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Here’s last year’s Memorial Day edition.

I love my town, but this poll result is just insane. (Wicked insane.)

My town and state typically rank pretty high when it comes to rankings based on objective reality. Health, wealth, education…we tend to end up near the top. Sure, there are some measures where, objectively speaking, we show less well. Traffic and weather are a couple that come to mind. But mostly, on the matters that matter, we come out pretty well.

For subjective rankings, it depends.

People like to visit Boston, but we also make the Top Ten when it comes to the rudest cities. (Who you callin’ rude, bub?)

But I just saw the results of one of these ultra-subjective polls in which Boston placed ludicrously high.

In a survey run by travel company Big 7 across its 1.5 million social media followers, the Boston accent was ranked the second sexiest in the country.

"One of America’s most imitated and parodied accents, Boston almost comes out on top of the country’s sexiest accents. And yes, just like Mahhhhk Wahlberg, locals really do say 'pahk yuh cahr in hahvuhd yahd'." Big 7 said in its rankings.

Huh?

Maybe if we’re talking about JFK’s upper-crust, faked-up Boston accent. (I don’t think anyone but the Kennedys ever spoke like that in real life.)

But Sully from Gate a Heavin in Southie? Droppin’ those g’s. Droppin’ those r’s. Addin’ those r’s where they don’t belong. (I always get a kick out of Boston boy Lawrence O’Donnell’s pronunciation of Cuba: Cuber.)

Sure, it’s wicked pissah to find your home town accent ranked 2nd sexiest something. But WTF?

And Maine is the 4th sexiest? Yet another resounding ‘huh’ going off in my head. Ayuh? Nah…

Number 1 – Texas - I can kind of see. Or hear. Let’s face it. Cowboys are sexy. (As long as you don’t think about how they must smell, and as long as you overlook the bowlegs.) George Strait is sexy. Tommy Lee Jones is sexy.  So, Texas. Yep.

But Number 3 is New York, and Number 5 is Chicago.

Talk about pick your poison.

With all apologies to my Chicago relatives, the Midwest accent is pretty much a screwdriver in the ear.

And New York? Fuggedabouit.

Bottom to top, here’s the full list for you – with my snidery, where I have something to say.

50th. Long Islander (Lon Guylind? With 50 choices, I can see how this would come in 50th, although I would have ranked New Jersey lower.)

49th. New Jersey (Unfamiliar with the New Jersey accent? Not if you ever watched five minutes of Jersey Shore back in the day. Or sang along wtih Bruce Springsteen’s Sherry Darling: “To all the girls down at Sak-er-ed Hawt.” That would be Sacred Heart to you non-New Jersey types.)

48th. Minnesotan Right up there with the worst of the Midwest, with sing-song thrown in for good measure.)

47th. Alaskan Other than Sarah Palin, I can’t place this one at all. But based on SP, 47th seems about right.

46th. California Valley  Is this, like, like Valley Girl?

45th. Southern Ohio

44th. Floridian

43rd. Pittsburgh Don’t know the accent, but they have given us a completely excellent word in jagoff, Pittsburgh for jerk.

42nd. Cincinnati

41st. Pennsylvania Dutch This seems like it would be more buzzkill than sexy.

40th. Appalachian

39th. Colorado

38th. Providence  Providence???

37th. Tallahassee

36th. Ozark I’m thinking Deliverance? So hell, no.

35th. “Hoi Toider” What? Come to find out this is High Tider – the North Carolina Outer Banks.

34th. San Francisco

33rd. Hudson Valley

32nd. General American

31st. Atlanta I actually don’t like the Southern accent at all. It frightens me. Not a turn on.  

30th. New Mexican

29th. Milwaukee Who decides the Chicago accent is sexier than the Milwaukee accent. Is there actually a difference? My guess is Chicago does better because, as a city - accent aside - it’s a ton sexier than Milwaukee.

28th. Western

27th. Charleston See Atlanta.

26th. Kentucky See Deliverance.

25th. New Orleans Forget everything I said about the Southern accent. Think Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy.

24th. Oklahoma Too Tom Joad-y

23rd. Cleveland

22nd. Connecticut

21st. Kansas

20th. Tennesseean See Deliverance.

19th. Virginia Piedmont

18th. Baltimorese Sounds terrible.

17th. Alabama

16th. Midwestern

15th. Cajun Maybe Cajun’ is what Dennis Quaid is about.

14th. Yooper Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Can’t help but believe this is echt Midwest.

13th. Miami

12th. Chicano Only when sung.

11th. Northwestern Is there one?

10th. Californian Too beach-boy.

9th. St. Louis

8th. Philadelphia If you don’t mind gazoline rather than gasoline.

7th. Hawaiian

6th. Mississippi

For the below, see above.

5th. Chicago

4th. Mainer

3rd. New York

2nd. Bostonian

1st. Texan

Were there people surveyed who actually had enough knowledge of regional accents to actually rank all 50 of these places?

Or did they just pick a couple and this is how it all ended up.

Maybe people from the South can distinguish Mississippi from Alabama, but I sure can’t. (On the other hand, I can tell Eastern Massachusetts from Western Mass, and Rhode Island from Maine.)

I’m guessing that Cincinnati might be a little more Southern than Cleveland, but I don’t know this for a fact.

Who other than Hoi Toiders and Yoopers know enough to rank the sexiness of Hoi Toider and Yooper?

Anyway, it’s nice to get recognized, but Boston as the second sexiest accent in the US. Really? Maybe when compared to Lon Giland. Or maybe it’s that, other than Texas, there’s nothing very sexy about any one accent. After all, isn’t sexy about what’s being said and who’s saying it?

Easily influenced

One of the worst aspects of social media is that it pushes how brilliantly everyone else is doing right in your face. It used to be that we just had to endure it annually, when we got the Christmas newsletter.

(As for running into people in person, well, there was always the look in the eye, the body language, that betrayed the “it’s all going swimmingly” reportage.)

Sure, people do share the tough times on social media. But apparently it’s the up times that are getting folks down. Millennial folks, that is. And all sorts of groups – all sorts of financial services firms, that is - are surveying them to see what’s up. Allianz Life is one of them.

Social media also makes 61% of millennials (versus just 35% of Gen Xers and 12% of boomers) feel inadequate about their own life and what they have, with 88% comparing themselves to others on social media (compared to just 71% of Gen Xers and 54% of boomers who say the same), according to the Allianz data. (Source: Zero Hedge)

Sure, who among us hasn’t at one point or another looked longingly at what someone else has: wealth, health, glitz houses, glam vacations, sweetie pie grandkids, cool clothing, professional achievements, adorbs doggos. But most of us get over it and are content with what we have.

The theme song (accompanied by Big Brother on the ukulele) of a kiddie show of my childhood – Big Brother Bob Emery’s Small Fry Club – is one that every Baby Boomer who grew up in the Boston area knows by heart:

Now the grass is always greener
In the other fellow’s yard
The little road, that we have to how
Oh boy, that’s hard
But if we all could wear green glasses
It wouldn’t be so hard
To see how green that grass is
In our own back yard

(You can check out a very early – and longer- version of the song here.)

If only these millennials had grown up with more Big Brother Bob Emery and less social media, they might not feel so awful about themselves. And while I might make fun, I do find it quite distressing that the young folks are feeling so inadequate.

Worse yet, these feelings of inadequacy are driving some pretty lousy spending habits:

According to a new survey by Charles Schwab, almost half of millennials (49%) say their spending habits are driven by their friends bragging about their purchases on social media vs. around one-third of Americans in general. 

And two-thirds of those millennials, according to yet another finserv survey – this one from Fidelity – believe that “social media has a negative impact on their financial well-being.”

And they’re influenced by influencers:

…a 2018 survey from Allianz Life shows that more than half of millennials (57%, versus just 28% of Gen Xers and 7% of boomers) say they’ve spent money they hadn’t planned to because of something they saw on social media.

It isn’t that I’ve never been influenced to buy something because my peers had it.

In eighth grade, I somehow convinced my parents to buy me a bright red windbreaker for Christmas. I craved it mostly because a lot of the girls in my class had one. The first one to show up in one was, I believe, my friend Kathy Shea. An influencer before we knew such things existed, Kathy was smart, pretty, funny, kind, a leader, and, in eighth grade, nearly six-feet tall. If Kathy Shea had a red windbreaker, well, who in her right mind wouldn’t want one.

Except during the bitter cold weather, I wore that thin windbreaker with a sweater under it. I remember shivering in the school yard. But, damnit, I had that windbreaker!

In high school, I coveted anything with a Villager label in it. Even the sweaters I got in Filene’s Basement (for three bucks) with IRREGULAR stamped through the label. What was most irregular about them was the colors. Khaki, pale orange – the sweaters available for three bucks were never anything that looked good on me. But I was swayed by the high school influencers, the ritzy daughters of funeral parlor owners, girls who had carried Bermuda bags and drove Mustangs.

After that, I wasn’t so much influenced and just wore what I liked, or – in the case of those menswear suits of the 1980’s – wore what women wore in business back in the day.

The millennials, according to Varo, do feel that “social media portrays an unrealistically positive view of people’s lives”. Nevertheless, they go out and buy stuff “to feel better about their own lives.”

Which they can ill afford to do. Most millennials have no savings. Then there’s all the research that show a correlation between spending time on social media and mental health issues.

I’m just as happy that I came of age before social media, when the only influencer who influenced me was Kathy Shea and her red windbreaker.

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A big old Pink Slip thanks to Ricky T, my brother-in-law, who influenced me to write this post by sending me the link to the Zero Hedge article. He warns me to consider the source, and keep in mind that these surveys may well be BS. Still, I’m pretty sure there’s something there.

Tweet in haste

There are all sorts of little feuds and contretemps that swirl around on Twitter, but that don’t always gain much traction in the normal (anti-social?) media.

One recent one involved a DC Metro rider named Natasha Tynes.

Tynes was riding the rails when she spied a Metro employee eating on the train, a practice that’s verboten. (No one – employee or rider – is supposed to be eating or drinking while on a train or in a station.)

Not satisfied with the options available to most normal folks – ignore it entirely, roll eyes/make a face (the passive-aggressive stew), mutter something to the person seated next to you, or – if really riled up - maybe say something along the lines of “are you aware that you’re not supposed to be eating”, or report it to transit officials (perhaps being a bit vague on the details) - Tynes settled on a multi-pronged close encounter.

She directly confronted the employee, only to be told to buzz off (“worry about yourself”). Decidedly not content to worry about herself, since that was way not enough, Tynes took a picture of the scofflaw and tweeted her little report off to @wmata, the person’s employer.

The Metro responded to Tynes having @-ed them with a complaint.

…and thanked her “for catching this and helping us make sure all Metro employees are held accountable.” Tynes then provided further details, including the time, the train the employee was traveling on and direction that it was headed. (Source: Washington Post)

Tynes – a communications and social media expert employed by the World Bank – was happy to supply the deets, and the Metro was happy to be supplied with them:

We appreciate these details and have included them in the report. Enjoy the rest of your day and thank you for riding with us. -KP

The Metro employee was a black woman, and Tynes, while a person of color (she’s a Jordanian American), is not a person of that color.

Twitter went into uber-umbrage mode, dragging Tynes as a racist.

No reason to believe Tynes was motivated by racism. Certainly, you should be able to criticize a black person.

But there’s plenty of reason to believe that Tynes is a busy body, a show-off, thoughtless, and – at least at the moment when she launched her initial tweet – nasty.

There are all sorts of little things that happen, day in day out, that degrade communal life. Folks litter. People hawk and spit. Clerks treat you rudely. A pet owner doesn’t scoop the poop. A commuter pushes onto the train while travelers are still trying to get off.

You pick your spots. Sometimes you say something, sometimes you don’t bother. Sometimes it feels too risky to speak up. Other times you just feel like saving your breath.

I shake my fist at drivers running red lights, sometimes, when I’m in a crosswalk (not jaywalking, mind you) and someone sails through a stop sign or light, I’ll slap the side of the car, just to let them know that they might have hit somebody.

Confronting someone – passively or aggressively – can be a dangerous practice.

One time, I was almost clipped by a fellow tearing around the corner (in a Porsche or some similar too-fast-for-an-urban-neighborhood vehicle).  I hollered, “Asshole.”

The guy slammed on his brakes, hopped out of the car, and yelled at me: “Why am I an asshole?”

I wanted to say, “Why are you asking a complete stranger? You should be asking someone who knows you.”

Instead, figuring that anyone who wasn’t willing to give this a pass was probably pretty loosely wrapped and possibly dangerous, I weasel-worded him. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He got back in his car and roared off.

Since everyone is now armed with a camera, many of these little encounters are now filmed. And the reason for filming is to have something to put on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Because it’s not enough to be ticked off, it’s not enough to just do something about it, you really need to center your response on public shaming.

Eating on the subway can be offensive. (Did I offend the other day when, while riding on the Red Line, I found the end of an old roll of (stale) Butter Rum Lifesavers and ate a couple of them?)

But a transit employee eating on the subway is hardly a major infraction. It’s not screaming at or hitting a passenger. It’s not breaking into a fare machine and shoving the cash in your pockets. It’s not brandishing a pistol. It may be illegal in DC to eat on a train, but it’s “small i” illegal. A venial rather than mortal sin.

So why is it no longer enough, when the incident is a pretty innocuous one, to just say something to the innocuous offender, or even report the incident to the authorities? 

I’m just as glad that there are now phone cameras that can be tapped to solve crimes, reveal police brutality, report potholes and all sorts of other society-enhancing tasks. But why are we so compelled to video people who are picking their noses and upload it for the world to see?

Why couldn’t Tynes have taken a deep breath, thought about the implications of putting someone’s picture out there, hanging them out to dry, as it were? Why not ask yourself whether the person doing the eating on the subway had her reasons? 

Barry Hobson, the chief of staff for the Metro workers union — Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 — said in a statement that the Metro employee was taking her meal break while in transit from one assignment to another. The statement notes operators have “an average of 20 minutes to consume a meal and get to their next access point to ensure all buses and trains are on time, safe, and ready to serve the riding public.”

Okay, I do find it tiny bit unbelievable that members of the Metro workers union only get a 20 minute meal break. But still…

When the twits hit the fan, Tynes pulled her tweet (and the photo) and apologized, but the harm was done. To her.

Tynes is a writer who publishes articles on parenting in the Washington Post. She also has a novel coming out shortly.

The book is about a Jordanian student who is murdered and realizes that her “consciousness” has inhabited Wyatt, a 3-year-old boy with speech delays, according to the synopsis.

(Think I’ll take a hard pass on this one.)

And it looks like her publisher and distributors might decide to take a hard pass as well.

The distributor, Rare Bird Books, has said:

“We think this is unacceptable and have no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way.”

And the publisher, California Coldblood Books, has:

…announced it will postpone the book’s publication date “while we further discuss appropriate next steps to officially cancel” it.

And people have been posting pre-publication negative reviews.

Tynes is not without her defenders.

A Twitter account, Unsuck DC Metro, has pinned Tynes’ tweet and the employee’s picture:

“NO one wants to watch you stuff your pie hole. NO one wants to smell your nasty food,” the account tweeted, adding in a reply that it was committed to leaving the photo online and “no one is getting in trouble for this.

Unsuck DC Metro sounds nice!

Anyway, by posting the photo, and @-ing the Metro, it sure did look like Tynes was trying to get the employee in trouble.

Roxane Gay (@rgay) perhaps had the best counterpoint to Tynes:

We all complain on social media but you... don’t identify the person you’re complaining about, in a photo no less, and try to get them fired. What on earth? For eating on the train?

It seems like overkill for Tynes’ publisher and distributor to turn on her. But tweet in haste, Ms. Tynes, repent at leisure..

Lost in Space

I pride myself on posting every weekday – and have a pretty much unbroken streak since shortly after I began blogging many moons ago.

Today, there was supposed to be a post, but damned it I can figure out where it got to.

Back tomorrow….

Wayne’s World

With so much cra going on in the news – most of it of the “you can’t make this stuff up” variety – last month’s word that then-NRA President Oliver North was in a shootout with NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre was almost lost.

But really, is there not something entirely delicious about these two going after each other? I mean, who’da ever thunk that liberals would be rooting for Oliver North?

North – who was recently shown the door as the organization’s president – was going after LaPierre with allegations of financial improprieties.

LaPierre fought back, and Ollie was kicked to the curb. But the info on LaPierre’s spending became public.

Among the more interesting tidbits was a one-day $39K shopping spree at the Zegna store in Beverly Hills.

Shades of Paul Manafort’s ostrich jacket!

The odd arrangement that LaPierre had was that he expensed the excellent shopping day at Zegna, along with hundreds of thousands more, to the NRA’s PR agency. Hmmmm.

I’m sure the PR folks want old Wayne to look snappy when he’s out on the hustings raging against the coastal elites who are trying to pry semi-automatic rifles out of the hands of regular folks in flyover country who’re just trying to protect their property. But wouldn’t it be more appropriate if LaPierre was outfitted by Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shop? Surely a camo suit and fluorescent orange cap can be had for a lot less than the cost of a Zegna outfit.

Apparently that’s not the part that LaPierre wanted to look.

But if LaPierre wanted to shop at Zegna, where, in truth, all $39K will get you is a handful of suits, you’d think that he could pay out of pocket for it. After all, his total compensation package last year was $5M. That should be able to cover the cost of at least a few fancy duds.

The expenses also allegedly include more than $200,000 in “Air Transportation” costs in less than a month, partially connected to a Christmastime Bahamas visit by LaPierre, the [Wall Street] Journal reported. (Source: The Hill)

Hmmmm. That’s about $30K a day in air transportation. Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to just shoot him from guns, at least for the short hops? Might wrinkle a Zegna suit, but might be worth exploring.

And one does have to wonder as we wander just what official business LaPierre would have been on in the Bahamas during Christmas.

Maybe it’s a hotbed of Second Amendment activity. Or something.

Oliver North’s replacement has jumped in to defend Wayne’s world:

NRA President Carolyn Meadows told the newspaper in a statement that the “entire board is fully aware of these issues. We have full confidence in Wayne LaPierre.”

“It is troubling and pathetic that some people would resort to leaking information to advance their agendas,”  she added.

Tut, tut. Someone trying to advance their agendas. Tuttedy tut tut tut.

And let’s see how long that full confidence lasts if Oliver North’s contention that the NRA’s spending habits is causing the organization to face an “existential threat.”

Given that the NRA has long posed an “existential threat” to Americans, I think it’s reasonable to say that turnaround is fair play.

In the leaked confidential April memo dating to the week before he was dramatically ousted as president, North wrote that the NRA was being billed nearly $100,000 a day [in legal fees]. North then pleaded for an audit of their payments to outside attorney Bill Brewer. (Source: Slate)

$100K a day in legal fees to their outside attorney. I’d say it’s pretty good to be Bill Brewer. Bet he can afford to shop at Zegna’s on his own dime.

The NRA in financial peril, Wayne LaPierre’s profligacy exposed, the presumed legal risk of all those expenses floated through the PR firm (which presumably turned around and billed the NRA). Who says there’s no good news out there?

New York, New York

Last week, I spent a couple of days in New York City.

The occasion was the civil wedding of someone very dear to me, someone I’ve known since he was a year old. (Sam’s parents were our landlords, and we became exceptionally close to their kids.) Sam and Sarah are having a big splash destination celebration, but I’m not able to go, as the timing coincides with my niece’s college graduation. So they invited me to their City Hall tying of the legal knot. (Other than the parents, I was the only one in attendance.)

Anyway, I love New York, so I went down early and stayed over late to just plain hang.

When you come in on Amtrak, through The Bronx and Queens, the views of the Manhattan skyline aren’t all that inspiring. But the minute I caught sight of the Chrysler Building – my favorite building on earth - my heart went pitter pat.

Whether it was coming in on the bus, through Harlem, the first time I saw The City in 1967; or any of those  upon dozens of times I came in from LaGuardia or JFK over one of the bridges; or on September 12, 2001, when the train I was on from Orlando poked out of the tunnel coming out of Newark, and I saw the  black cloud over Manhattan, and the hole where the Twin Towers had stood, there has never been a time when coming into Manhattan wasn’t a thrill. Never.

I love Boston. It’s home, and it has been for pretty much all of my adult life. It’s a great city, vibrant and beautiful. But it’s not New York. No place is.

The vitality. The hustle. The commotion. The diversity. The energy. The zoom.

I stayed at a small boutique hotel on the Chinatown/Little Italy border so that getting to City Hall for the wedding would be easy. (It was: I was about a two minute walk away.)

On the night of my arrival, I walked up to The Village for dinner at a place that my husband and I always ate at when in New York.

I had to laugh when I saw that the reviews said that North Square was an excellent spot for “the olds.” Hah! But the truth was that, other than grandkids, I was one of the younger people there. Anyway, I had a lovely dinner, and nice pre- and post-dinner poke around The Village.

I walked back to the hotel through Little Italy and Chinatown, the narrow streets teeming with people. All those restaurants, all those stores selling junky tourist crap, all those odd-ball businesses – especially in Chinatown. (My one regret from the trip is that I didn’t take advantage of a Chinatown foot massage.)

For someone who wants to experience echt New York, and America at its diverse best, I highly recommend showing up for City Hall weddings on a Friday, the most popular day.

The weddings actually aren’t in City Hall, but around the corner in the City Clerk’s office.

What a scene!

I arrived before the bride, the groom, and the parents, so had plenty of time to observe. Brides and grooms. Brides and brides. Grooms and grooms. Wedding dresses. Tuxes. Best duds. Over the top outfits. Casual clothing. An occasional slob. Whatever.

African American. African Africans. Blacks from the islands. White natives. White immigrants. Hispanics. Chinese. Koreans. Vietnamese. South Asians. Gay. Straight. With kids. Without kids.

Some couples on their own, some with major entourages.

All queuing up to get hitched.

Lots of noise, lots of commotion, lots of joy.

You don’t make an appointment. You just show up and it’s first come, first served.

While I was waiting on the steps for someone I recognized to arrive, I realized that I had forgotten to throw a Kleenex into my pocketbook. And I knew I was going to need one.

A couple was walking up the steps, who appeared to be about my age. I asked the woman if she had a Kleenex to spare. Indeed, she did. Turns out it was the Sarah’s mother.

Soon enough, we were all there.

Sam bought Sarah a bouquet of peonies from the flower vendor out front, and we were on our way.

It took about two hours. Quite an operation. After you make it through security, you get assigned a number – Sam and Sarah were C31 – and wait to get called to a clerk window. (I think there were about 20 of them – all fully occupied at any given time.) You then get ushered (jammed) into a waiting area – again by number – and then into a quiet, blissfully private room for the ceremony. All very sweet. And yes, I did need that Kleenex I got from Sarah’s mother.

We all took pictures – a must is one taken in front of a mural of City Hall – and then headed out to a celebratory luncheon. One of the nicest weddings I’ve ever been to.

I spent the evening moseying around Chinatown and Little Italy.

The sheer commercial hum. The share variegation.

Tons of tourist shops, mostly staffed by South Asians, all selling pretty much the same stuff – caps (including, yuck, MAGAs); personalized fake license plates; snow globes…You do know that you’ve hit Little Italy, however, when there’s a shift to The Godfather and Sopranos-themed crap. And t-shirts that say Bada-Bing, and Fuck You You Fuckin’ Fuck. (I took a pass.)

I had dinner in a noodle shop, where Shallow was playing on a loop. As in Shallow was the only song on the loop.

I topped the noodles off at an outdoor gelato stand outside an Italian bakery. The fellow working the gelato stand was a Latin American (Mexican, I think). The woman working the cannoli stand flanking the gelato stand was Chinese.

All come, to look for America.

I did some meandering around, hearing a lot of yammering in Chinese – Chinatown is still full of Chinese immigrants. Little Italy seems to have fewer Italian immigrants in residence. Although I did hear some Italian spoken, it was more common to hear Soprano-speak being barked out by guys trying to woo people into their restaurant.

On Saturday morning, I walked over to the Brooklyn Bridge but not over it, then stopped by the Seaport area, which may well be the only boring section of Manhattan. Yawn.

The only cool thing was looking up and seeing the new World Trade Center, reaching up to the sky.

Then Ubering off to the ugly and always chaotic Penn Station for the train back to Boston.

Saturday evening on a perfect spring day – 60’s, not a cloud in the sky – and Boston is plenty crowded. But Boston-crowded sure ain’t New York City-crowded.

I walked through the gorgeous Public Garden, where all the flowering trees were flowering, and the beds are full of tulips, and it was packed. But it was Boston-packed, not New York City-packed.

My husband wanted to retire to New York City. Not me. I don’t know if I could live there. But there’s no place like it, and I sure do love it.

Already looking forward to my next trip back.

Canned hunting? These folks seem nice.

If you want to hunt animals so you can eat them, not my cup of tea, but fine (as long as you’re not hunting with AK-47’s or worse, and no hunting from helicopters, of course). It’s not like I don’t eat meat. I just keep several degrees of separation between what’s on my plate and how it got there.

If you want to hunt animals to cull the herd, or whatever they call it when there are too many of them for our liking, not my cup of tea, but fine (as long as you’re not hunting with AK-47’s or worse, and no hunting from helicopters, of course). It’s not like I’m not happy if there are fewer tick-carrying deer out there bringing us more Lyme Disease.

If you want to hunt animals just for the hell of it, not my cup of tea, but fine. I may not have any atavistic, primal urge (nor the requisite testosterone) to want to go after a creature that’s done me no harm, but fine (as long as you’re not hunting with AK-47’s or worse, and no hunting from helicopters, of course). It’s not like I don’t  understand on several different levels that it might be thrilling to do something physically and mentally challenging, that it’s probably plenty of fun to hang with the guys and do guy things like not shampooing, and swilling down Old Crow.

Of course, my “but fine” pretty much goes out the window when I think of big game hunting vs. deer-bear hunting. Big game hunting isn’t hunting for food, or for thinning the herd. It’s pure blood sport. And you have to wonder what goes through the mind of someone who’s delighted to take down a magnificent animal like an elephant or a lion or a tiger. Especially given that the survival of these animals in the wild is in such jeopardy.

And the scenarios that I’m more or less fine with all play out in the wild. Hunters have to figure out where their prey are, stalk without spooking them, get off a good shot. Sure, the hunters are armed and the poor animals aren’t, but the odds don’t favor the humans all that dramatically. The animals are, after all, on home turf. They’re the ones who really know the territory. Plus they can move a lot faster than humans.

Anyway, if a hunter’s gonna hunt, if the odds are even…

But big-game hunters who go to those reservations where the animals are penned in so that the big, brave hunters – often accompanied by a “tour guide” whose doing everything for the big, brave hunter other than pulling the trigger. Seriously, what do they get out of it?

You didn’t do anything big, you didn’t do anything brave.

What pride can you possibly take from this?What’s it for? The picture in your man cave? The head mounted on the wall so that you can lean back in your club chair, wreathed in cigar smoke, armiring it?

Since shame and decency are such quaint concepts of the past, it’s no wonder that there are plenty of places where big, brave hunters can satisfy their trophy-craving, sadistic needs. There,

The easy slaughter of animals in fenced areas is called "canned hunting", perhaps because it's rather like shooting fish in a barrel. A fully-grown, captive-bred lion is taken from its pen to an enclosed area where it wanders listlessly for some hours before being shot dead by a man with a shotgun, hand-gun or even a crossbow, standing safely on the back of a truck. He pays anything from £5,000 to £25,000, and it is all completely legal…

Trophy-hunters are attracted by the guarantee of success, and the price: a wild lion shot on a safari in Tanzania may cost £50,000, compared with a £5,000 captive-bred specimen in South Africa. (Source: The Guardian)

And then there are the ranches that provide the animals to populate the canned not-so-happy hunting grounds.

In South Africa, there are “more than 160 such farms legally breeding big cats.”

With so many of these factory farms in South Africa, in that country:

There are now more lions held in captivity (upwards of 5,000) in the country than live wild (about 2,000).

The farms, of course, disavow knowledge of what happens to the lions after they sell them off. And they say that the practice of seizing new born cubs from their mothers isn’t a bad thing, that the cubs are fine. (No: they’re not.) In fact, the reason for taking the cubs is so that the mother can reproduce more quickly than if she were feeding her cubs.

Breeders claim that having hunters take out farmed animals in canned environments is actually better than letting hunters have a go at wild populations, further endangering their existence. The fact is, of course, that captive hunting doesn’t protect animals in the wild. Au contraire:

The lion farms' creation of a market for canned lion hunts puts a clear price-tag on the head of every wild lion, she says; they create a financial incentive for local people, who collude with poachers or turn a blind eye to illegal lion kills. Trophy-hunters who begin with a captive-bred lion may then graduate to the real, wild thing.

Ah, a gateway drug. Swell.

Hunters got to hunt, and business folks need to business, I guess.

But what a shameful practice this type of hunting is, what a shameful business those factory farms are, and those canned hunting reservations.

Whether they’re metaphorically shooting the fish in the barrel, providing those chock-full-of-fish barrels to big, brave hunters, or stocking the barrels to begin with, there’s something really ghastly about all these enterprises.

Glad I don’t know any of them.

I suppose it could have been worse

It was in Stardust Memories that director – or should I pay true homage: auteur – Woody Allen’s protagonist lived in an apartment with a mural on the wall of one of the iconic (brutally so) photos of the Viet Nam war. You know the one: some South Vietnamese general shooting the brains out of a captured Viet Cong. The image was capture at the exact moment of impact. Horrifying, chilling.

Even after nearly 40 years, I still remember a couple of my reactions: Woody Allen is no longer funny, and Woody Allen is so caught up in himself, he either thinks that it’s just dandy that his onscreen alter-ego would have this as part of his home’s decor, or he’s making some really deep statement that’s lost on me. Henceforth, I concluded, I would have to consider Woody Allen a complete and utter asshole. (In that, I was certainly right.)

Not that artists don’t have creative license to draw on whatever themes and images they want, however painful. But in this case, it just seemed like a cheap trick.

I hadn’t thought of this in years, but it came to mind when I read about the online retailer Redbubble. I’d never heard of them, but they’re apparently a sort of Australian Etsy cum CafePress, offering AWESOME PRODUCTS DESIGNED BY INDEPENDENT ARTISTS.

Redbubble recent got an earful (or a tweetful of earful) from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for:

…allowing products depicting scenes of the concentration camp to be sold on its website, including a $45 throw pillow and a $40 miniskirt.

The products used photographs of the electronic fence, guardhouse and train tracks at the notorious Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, where hundreds of thousands of Jews and other minorities were put to death from 1940 to 1945. The Polish memorial called the casual use of Auschwitz photos “disturbing and disrespectful” in a tweet.

“Do you really think that selling such products as pillows, miniskirts or tote bags with the images of Auschwitz — a place of enormous human tragedy where over 1.1 million people were murdered — is acceptable?” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote in a tweet.(Source: Washington Post)

Redbubble (I almost typed in Redrubble) agreed to pull the products, along with others that violated the guidelines that Redrubble was suddenly aware that they had.

They didn’t do such a hot job purging their site of offensive items. After the miniskirt, throw pillows and tote bags were removed, the Auschwitz watchdogs found:

…a T-shirt bearing a cartoon of a bearded man in a top hat that read, “Dr. Holocaust wants you to get a beard.”

What do you say when the guy wearing this shows up for a first date? Sorry, I don’t live here anymore.

Hey, artists, artisans, con artists - they all have the right to use whatever images they want. But when done in what can only be regarded as execrable taste, they should aspect to get pushback. As for banning crap like the Auschwitz miniskirt from Redbubble, I’d prefer to let the market speak and just not buy any of this tasteless merch.

And who would buy it? Young people who thinks this stuff is edgy or cool? People with no knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust? Moral imbeciles? Folks who just don’t (or can’t bring themselves) to think?

I suppose it wouldn’t be a far reach for some of the idiots who’ve been dragged for Instagramming their cutesy Auschwitz selfies – here I am pretending the railroad tracks are a balance beam, here I am making a droll face under Arbeit Macht Frei – to want to lug their groceries home in an Auschwitz-themed tote bag, or snuggle on the couch with an Birkenau pillow.

I suppose the Redbubble miniskirt and tote bag designers could have chosen worse images to exploit.  

The pictures they used were “just” the buildings, the chimneys. No Nazi guards with whips. No Dr. Mengele experiments. No  children being wrested from their parents. No heaps of skeletal bodies.

They could have chosen other horror shows: Emmett Till’s brutalized young body. An African American swinging from the tree where he’d been lynched. Jackie’s blood-spattered pink suit.

So many to pick from. The list is endless.

And all reasonable and appropriate images and topics for artists to explore. In art, cinema, fiction, poetry, and – yes – even standup comedy.

Just let them get criticized, booed off the stage.

And as images to be used for trivial commercial purposes. Let their inventory wither on the shelves. I’m guessing most of the items on Redbubble are print-on-demand. Too bad! I’d like to see them stuck with truckloads full of their tasteless gear.

As for those who buy it. Let them be accosted by their parents, their peers, complete strangers on the street, calling them out for the idiots they are.

Really, what is wrong with people????

Who doesnt love a good scam? (Or even a bad one.)

One of the folks I follow on Twitter goes by the handle of The Hoarse Whisperer. He is one of a number of progressive voices in my echo chamber. I don’t always agree with 100% with what he says, but he’s always thoughtful and often funny. (While I tend for the most part to follow liberals/progressives, I also followsome conservatives – George Conway, Max Boot, Rick Wilson, Nicolle Wallace et al. But they’re Never Trumpers, so you might say they’re in my echo chamber as well. I do not follow anyone who supports Trump, but I do see plenty of what they have to say via retweets.)

Anyway, Hoarse Whisperer isn’t always political. He tweets about his family, about sports, about what he’s eating, and how he’s feeling. And the other day he had a very funny tweet about some Nigerian scam artists that had come after him, informing him that his long lost uncle, Michael Whisperer, had left him a great deal of money. We all know the rest: in order for Uncle Michael Whisperer’s beloved nephew to get his hooves on his inheritance, he would have to put up a bit of earnest money.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve gotten an email from the Nigerians. But I do get regular phone scam calls, on both my landline (yep, I’m old school enough to still have one!) and my cell phone.

Interesting, the cell phone callers, who mostly use spoof numbers that look a lot like my mobile number, very rarely leave a message.

Not so the landline lubbers.

I pretty much get one a day, and, of the recent spate of robocalls, most of them were from different numbers using the same voice: a woman with a very faint and vague accent. And all of them start in mid-flow. They start far enough in to the message that you’re left wondering what you’ve missed. (But not wondering all that much.)

One of them told me I owed some non-specified company money for “this services by auto debit registration. It is just to let you know that today the money is going to automatically be debited from your bank account.” And, of course, they left a call back number. Their hotline. Because, after all, it is such an urgent matter.

Sure, I’ll get on that right away. The last thing I want is you debiting my bank account for that auto debit registration, whoever you are, whatever you claim I signed up for.

Another one left a garbled message about my computer and some remediation Microsoft wanted them to take care of.

I haven’t got any recently, but I’ve gotten plenty that inform me that there’s something funky going on with one of my – always unspecified – credit cards. Or that I’m about to get arrested for something or other. Or that I’m in big trouble with the IRS.

The IRS? Hmmm.

Well, I did just hear from the Commonwealth that I transposed a couple of numbers from one line to the next, so I owe another $36 bucks.

And one of my clients sent me a 1099 overstating my earnings by a couple of orders of magnitude.  So there’s that. (The company did send me a corrected version and assured me that this was the one that was filed.)

There are some folks who deliberately call the hotlines back just to harass the caller.

I’ve done this a couple of times. Sometimes it’s just plain fun to harass the harasser and see how long you can string them along before they figure out they’re not going to get anything out of you. Or until I end up screaming at them for being such rotten people.

My favorite call of late informed me that my Social Security number was being used, and that my Social Security was compromised. All they needed for me to do to clear up this matter was the call them and give them the last-4 digits of my SS#.

Sure….

On one hand, all of these scams are laughable. Come one, who falls for this hooey?

But it’s not just stupid people that get sucked in by these scams.

Admittedly, in order to fall for one of those Nigerian-send-us-$20K-scams, you have to be greedy and and not the sharpest tool in the shed.

But for the more run-of-the-mill scams?

If you’re distracted, if they get  you on a bad day, if you happen to pick up the pone when you usually don’t, if you’re worried about whether your credit card number was stolen, if you just heard about a major hacking incident in the news…

Hey, I can see someone giving up their credit card number or last 4 digits.

But the best rule of thumb is: JUST DON’T.

Call the number on the back of your credit card. Call the real IRS. Google that “hotline” number to see if they’re legit. (Clue: 99% of the time they’re not.) Etc.

Meanwhile, I’ll be making sure that I’m never distracted enough to give my info to one of these bastards. I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing. Unless I recognize the number, I won’t answer the phone.

Don’t call me, I’ll call you…

What a swell party this is

I’m not a big fan of corporate functions to begin with.

If alcohol is involved, bad things can – and will – happen. At one such event I was at, an admin got blasted and went on the attack. After the head guy. The head guy – I’ll call him JZ - was something of an absentee landlord. JZ worked in Philadelphia, we were in Cambridge. He blew in occasionally, generally to convey bad news and/or to conduct a layoff.

At one of his guest appearances, JZ held an all hands meeting. He was starting to speak when one of our more outspoken of our techies raised his hand.

“Sir, could you please identify yourself.”

JZ said, “I’m JZ.”

The techie nodded his head, thanked JZ and said “I thought so.”

Anyway, there was no love lost between JZ and the employees at our little outpost, yet no one, other than that one admin, thought it would be a good idea to get drunk and angrily up in JZ’s grill.

Somehow I was swept into the incident.

The admin was screaming in JZ’s face about how he didn’t even know her name. She pointed at me – I was standing nearby – and yelled, “I bet you know who she is.” I was, after all, the most senior woman in our neck in the woods. Which didn’t make me very senior at all.

JZ looked blankly over at me and said, “I have no idea who she is.”

Meanwhile, someone was dragging the drunken admin away…(Do I need to mention that, in the next layoff, she was a goner.)

Another corporate function that had a bit of a sticky situation didn’t involve alcohol. (Well it did involve alcohol, but alcohol had nothing to do with the embarrassment.)

We were having our annual user group and  planned an interesting dinner event for our clients.

This time, we were at the DeCordova Museum, a small, ultra-cool (we should have known) institution outside of Boston.

What drew us there was that they had an interesting exhibit: an 18-hole mini-golf course with each course designed by an artist. Sounded like fun, and something that our clients, who’d come in from all over, would enjoy.

We didn’t look that closely at what the different holes were about, only to find out that a number of them made some pretty strong political and social statements.

The one I recall the most vividly was about spousal abuse. When you hit the ball, you heard screaming, punching, and moaning.

Not that anyone’s in favor of spousal abuse, but this – and a few others – didn’t exactly make for a light evening.

So, corporate events…

Even when folks aren’t drunk, things can go wrong.

Best not to get too tricky.

Tricky or not, I was never wild about having to show up at corporate social functions – whether those hosted by whatever company I was working for, or by a customer or partner. Obligatory fun? A couple of hours of awkwardness? No, thanks.

But at least I never had to participate in anything like the recent event Hermès held in New York’s meatpacking district. (That should have been the first clue that things might get a bit too cute for words. Hermès scarves in the abattoir? Nice one!)

Anyway, here’s the concept:

…actors would pose as waiters, greeters, and chefs, and mingle with the guests, with the goal of making them feel mildly harassed. [Actor Jesse] Kovarsky recalled that, at the audition, he “sat on a piano and then poured someone’s drink into a trash can and then fed them something out of their hat.” He got the job. (Source: New Yorker)

Like most rational, sensible people, I despise clowns and mimes, especially when they get anywhere near me. And this sounds way too much like clowns to the left of me, mimes to the right. And here I am, stuck in the middle trying to untie my Hermès scarf and strangle myself with it.

Anyway, Hermès wanted to show the world its “crazy and fun side,” because nothing says “crazy and fun” like a $500 scarf with saddle and stirrups on it.

But Hermès decided that it wanted to be “slightly irreverent, slightly topsy-turvy.”

Here’s how Hermès communications exec Charlotte David described how things were going to go down:

“At the cloakroom, when you leave, you’re going to give back your ticket to get your coat, but they are not going to give you your coat! They are going to give you a pair of skis.”

“Or a bag of oranges!” a co-worker added.

Okay, Hermès is a French brand, and maybe all this topsy-turvy was homage to Dadaism.

Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Being handed a pair of skis and balk at it, you’re a no fun, unhip party pooper. Accept it and you’re trapped in an Instagram-ready moment. Lucky you!

I’m guessing the cloakroom attendants are pretty savvy about reading body language and figuring out who to f with.

At yet another horrible corporate dinner I went to, we gathered at the Medieval Manor for a hi-larious night of eating greasy food with our fingers and being bullied and insulted by some a-hole playing the king.

One of the things the king did was yell at people getting up from the table to go to the bathroom, bullying them back to their seats. Well, I needed to go, and managed to catch the king’s eye. He was a fast study. I believe I was the only person he didn’t say anything to.

(I also fondly remember this event for the fellow in sales operations who got slammed and was walking around, waving a loaf of French bread between his legs. Ho-ho!)

Believe me, if I’d been at the swell Hermès party, I would have been grabbing my coat the minute I saw the first “waiter” grab a drink out of someone’s hand and toss it in the trash.

Here’s what I would have missed:

- Waiters balancing drinks trays on their heads.

- A “photographer” pointing a camera at someone, only to have an “origami horse pop out of the lens”.

- People standing behind you in an elevator making bird noises.

- A woman who had her dinner plate snatched away from her. She wanted the lobster tail, and managed to snatch it back.

- Someone wandering around pretending to read a novel by Marguerite Duras. (Likely not the first time that someone has pretended to read French lit.)

The actors who participated in the event:

…were given instructions, like, ‘Make the guests feel welcome but also uncomfortable.’ At the back of the hall, curtains opened to reveal a circus troupe dressed as chefs, including a guy juggling whisks.

Circus troupe! I just knew it! If you really want to host a terrible party, send in the clowns!

BS Artist

Many years ago, I found a book that made working in a man’s world a lot easier.

It was the mid-90’s, and I had just been promoted to Marketing VP in the small software company where I worked. I was the only woman on the management team – and the only tea member who didn’t have the VP title. I made my case and got the promotion. But no increase in pay.

Hmmm. That didn’t seem quite fair.

Somewhere in there, I came across a book by Adrienne Mendell: How Men Think: The Seven Essential Rules for Making It in a Man's World.

I seem to recall finding it online. It may even have been my first Amazon purchase.

Anyway, I don’t recall what those seven essential rules were – one may have been don’t say “I think” and “I feel”; just declare that something is. But my prime takeaway from the book was that men don’t usually admit to weaknesses. Women do. This puts men at an advantage. What we hear from them is that they’re great at everything. What they hear us saying is, ha-ha, she just admitted she’s no good at X.

The explanation was that most men had grown up playing team sports, and when teams were choosing sides for pick-up games, no little boy wants to be chosen last. So they did this “pick-me-pick-me-pick-me” thing, “I’m great at hitting/I’m great at fielding/I’m really fast.” No one wanted to be the forlorn kid sitting on the end of the bench, waiting to see which team was going to be stuck with him.

The explanation is dated  - more women in today’s work world have played sports – and maybe even a bit sexist, but it makes sense to me. Sure, after one pick-up game, everyone will know who’s any good. But for starters, who’s going to pick the kid who admits “I suck at batting but I’m mostly good at catch” when the other kid is yelling “I can do it all!”

I do know that I did follow some of those rules and ended up with a 20% raise, an increase that put me into six-figure territory for the first time.

It may have been in the Mendell book, or something I read later, but somewhere I came across a reference to study in which they asked boys and girls how the thought they did on a test. Girls tended to be a lot more pessimistic about their efforts than boys were – even those who had done well downplayed their probable grades - but for the most part were able to pretty accurately access outcomes. Boys, on the other hand, wildly overestimated how well they thought they did.

I thought of all this when I saw an article in the Washington Post on BS artistry. The article described a study that ended up finding that “males are much more likely than females to profess expertise they don’t really have.”

Study participants were asked to assess their knowledge of 16 math topics on a five-point scale ranging from “never heard of it” to “know it well, understand the concept.” Crucially, three of those topics were complete fabrications: “proper numbers,” “subjunctive scaling” and “declarative fractions.” Those who said they were knowledgeable about the fictitious topics were categorized as BSers.

Using a data set spanning nine predominantly English-speaking countries, researchers delineated a number of key findings. First, men are much more likely than women to master the art of hyperbole, as are the wealthy relative to the poor or middle class. North Americans, meanwhile, tend to slip into this behavior more readily than English speakers in other parts of the globe. (Source: Washington Post)

The one surprise in there: Canadians were bigger BSers than those from the US. Maybe they just need to compensate for not being their American cousins…

The boys as bigger BSers than girls held across all nine countries, but there were significant differences in the BS gap between boys and girls, depending on the country.

The widest gaps were observed in England and Ireland. The gaps were quite a bit less in Canada and the US. Nice to see that our girls are catching up to boys in something. I guess.

There’s also a significant class-based difference, with respondents from the wealthier classes BSing more than those less advantaged. Again, the gaps were the lowest in Canada and the US. Nice to see that our poor are catching up to the rich in something. I guess.

Does make you wonder why there’s a wealth gap. Are those with less money just so beaten down and fearful that they’ll be found out if they BS, that they avoid it?

Taken as a whole, the results appear to suggest that the countries with the greatest propensity toward bombast also have the smallest variances between groups living within them. In the U.S. and Canada, for instance, there may simply be so much BS going around that everyone ends up partaking in it.

Interestingly, the Celtic countries – Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland – were the least BS-y. Is it harder to BS in Gaelic?

The study also suggests that men’s higher propensity toward this behavior “could help them earn higher wages and explain some of the gender wage gap,” said study co-author Nikki Shure. “This has important implications for thinking about tasks in job interviews and how to evaluate performance.”

Hey, I could have told them that. But that would be bragging, maybe even BSing.

Flights of fancy

The other day, I came across an article on Paleofuture/Gizmodo about defunct airlines that failed, not for the usual reasons - bad at business, just plain unlucky - but because they were just too weird to survive.

I wasn’t familiar with most of the airlines on their “incredibly weird” list.

MGM Grand Air was around from the late 1980’s through the mid 1990’s. No surprise that I have no recall of this lap of luxury outfit. It flew only from LA to NY, and one-way tickets cost $1,400 ($2,800 inflation-adjusted).

Their pitch was that they were almost equivalent of having a private jet. Flights had no more than 33 passengers, attended to by 5 flight attendants. Passengers included Madonna and Axl Rose.

The airline flew the Boeing 727-100 and the DC-8-62, and every seat was deemed first class. The interior of the Boeing planes were outfitted in gaudy 80s style finishes, something that might be described as just one step below Trump-esque.

Trump-esque? Sorry I missed it.

And missing from the list? Trump Shuttle.

I flew to NYC pretty regularly, mostly on what was the Eastern Shuttle, which somewhere along the way became Trump Shuttle. So I’m pretty sure I was on the Trump Shuttle, as I pretty much hit all the odd-ball shuttles at one point or the other: People’s Express, The Big Apple (bright red planes).

Anyway, since, as pundit Rick Wilson has told us, Everything Trump Touches Dies, it’s not surprising that Trump managed to run the Trump Shuttle into the ground.

It’s actually pretty easy to fail at the airline biz. Wither People’e Express and The Big Apple? Now failing with a casino, that takes a bit more doing.

Smokers Express popped up in 1993, shortly after smoking was banned on flights.

The Baltimore Sun laid out the appeal of the airline in an April 2, 1993 article:

In addition to uninterrupted smoking from takeoff to landing, Smokers Express promises competitive fares, free cigarettes, free headphones and movies, a free Lotto ticket, steaks and hamburgers—and no screaming, aisle-racing, chair kicking children (passengers must be 21 or older).

Just the thought of non-stop smoking on a flight makes my stomach heave.

I remember those days when you could get a non-smoking seat right in front of the smoking section. That really helped. And when you had to use the toilet. Gag!

One time, my husband and I were on a flight and the women seated next to us lit up. We kindly told her that she was sitting in Non-Smoking. Her answer: there were no seats available in Smoking. Not our problem, honey!

Don’t miss those days, for sure.

Anyway, Smokers Express never raised enough money to get off the ground.

The Lord’s Airline is another one I managed to miss. “Fly the heavenly skies” was their motto, and their overarching theme was providing a “Judeo-Christian atmosphere,” with Bibles for Christians and Torahs for Jews.

The airline planned to fly three times a week from Miami to Jerusalem. And yes, the back of every seat was supposed to have a plaque with the Ten Commandments and there would even be in-flight religious classes for kids. All the movies would be religious, of course, and alcohol would be strictly forbidden.

Bet those in-flight religious classes would have been wildly popular. But we never got to find out, because the Lord’s Airline never took flight. But not before investors and founders got to feuding, accusing each other of being in cahoots with the devil.

On the other side of the sacred-profane continuum, Casino Express Airlines actually lasted for quite a while – 16 years flying gamblers for next to nothing between Elko, Nevada and cities in the west and on the west coast.

The airline helped bring 40,000 people a year to small northern Nevada town of Elko, which currently has a population of just 20,000 people and relies heavily on gambling tourism.

It might have been good for Elko and its casino, but the airline eventually ran out of runway.

Remember the days before Me, Too?

There was once an airline called Hooters Air, that used Hooters girls, pardon me, Hooters brand ambassadors, to serve food and drink on their flights. They weren’t actually trained and certified as flight attendants, so that’s all they could do.

Hooters Air served places like Allentown, PA, Columbus, OH, and Gary, IN.

In other words, places that most real airlines didn’t want to fly to.

Hooters Air only lasted a few years. They are survived by the restaurant chain that bears its name.

Not sorry I missed any of these gems.

And not sorry that, today, I’m taking the train to NYC.