Dear Reader

I don’t read anywhere near as many books as I used to. Too much time entirely now being spent on the news, grazing Twitter throughout the day and clicking through on any interesting article that appears as a tweet link. Up until a few years ago, I was probably reading 2+ books a week. Now it’s more like 2- books a month.

My backlog includes Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Adrian McKinty’s The Chain, a bunch of other books piled underneath these two on the armchair next to my bed, and three manuscripts of books written by friends. On my Kindle, I haven’t quite finished with the Mueller Report.

I am way and guiltily behind on my reading.

Yet I continue to buy books, and I am resolved to get better at reading them.

I don’t hang on to most of the books I buy. My sisters, brother and I trade off, and books that everyone’s read end up at Kath’s Cape house so that guests always have something to read if they finish the books they brought with them. (One of the best things about hanging out at Kath’s is that there’s a lot of downtime for reading, which has always been how our family rolls.)

I do hang on to some books – books I really love, short story collections, some poetry, some biographies, some histories. I used to have a reasonably good fiction-nonfiction Holocaust collection, but I gave it away. I have a modest collection of Irish-related books. Some of my mother’s books. I have a full set of the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace, my favorite girlhood reads. I have a whole bunch of books I’m going to get to some day.

But considering how many books I’ve read in my life, I don’t have a ton of books. Still, I have plenty. If I’m ever blizzarded in, and can’t download anything to my Kindle, I’ll still be alright.

Here’s what one of my bookcases looks like:

This one is books that I’ve read, plus family pictures, and other stuff. (I have a fondness for both books and stuff.)

I’m guessing that this is what the bookcases of most readers look like: full of well-read and often well-loved books, plus or minus the tchotchkes.

And this is what the bookcase of someone who could give a rat’s arse about reading books, but rather regards books as décor looks like. Maybe even as tchotchkes. In this case, I give you one of the curated bookcases of Gwyneth Paltrow.

The books in this bookcase were shelved by one Thatcher Wine (nom de plume, my sister Trish asks…), bibliophile and collector, who somewhere along the way became a designer and stocker of:

…libraries based on interest, author, and even color for his clients. (Source: Town and Country)

One of Wine’s specialties is the creation of custom book jackets.

My invention for the book jacket means that someone can have the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip color that matches the rest of the room or with a custom image.

Thus, that lovely color coordinated rainbow library depicted above. What was I thinking when I grouped my books by some combination of topic, genre, and author that makes sense only to me. I could have been picking Pantone colors to blend in with my Benjamin Moore wall paint choices.

If you go the Pantone route, I have to wonder whether what’s in the book matters. Why not just put your tasteful and matchy-tatchy covers on whatever you can get in the remainder bin somewhere? So what if you end up with a bunch of Tom Clancys. Or Mueller reports.

But there’s always the possibility that an inquiring mind might actually pick one of the books off the shelf. So to spare yourself the embarrassment of having someone think that you read Harlequin romances, you need to carefully curate what’s under the Pantone covers.

According to Thatcher Wine:

The Stoic philosophers are having a moment now. And classic bestsellers like Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen always do well.

The Stoics, eh? I can see why Cato the Younger and Marcus Aurelius are having a moment. Maybe even Dionysius the Renegade. But, seriously folks, is there anyone out there who believes that Zeno of Citium and Publius Rutilius Rufus are having mos? Come on. Colson Whitehead and Aidan McKinty are having moments, not Zeno of Citium.

No word on whether the Stoics are having a moment on Gwyneth’s bookshelves. Wine based his choices for her on books she owned and her kids liked. And rewrapped them. Colors galore for the family room. And:

In the dining room, we stuck to a more rigid color palette of black, white, and gray since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read.

Dear Lord. The purpose of a book is to be read. Or to be planned to be read. At some point. (Come full retirement, come blizzard.) Not to be color-coded.

Dear reader, can you for a New York - or even a Goop - minute imagine re-covering your books in bespoke Pantone color covers? 

I’ve heard it said that “art shouldn’t match the couch.” Your books don’t need to match your walls, either

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A tip of the Pink Slip chapeau – Pantone number d74894 – to author, editor and Dorothy Day expert Robert Ellsberg, who tweeted about this Town and Country article. Robert is one of the wonderful Tweeters I follow, one of many who I read each day when I should probably be picking up a good book…

Thanks for nothing

My brother needed a copy of his birth certificate, and as I have more time on my hands than he does – and because I’m a bit more adept at navigating the Internet than he is – I told him I’d figure out how to get him one and go ahead an take care of it.

The options presented by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on their Registry of Vital Records and Statistics website were schlepping over to Dorchester and getting one in person ($20); mailing a request in ($32); or applying online.

I could swear that the link provided on the Commonwealth’s organization called Vital Records Certificates, where we are told you can:

Avoid waiting in line. Get your Vital Record from the comfort of your home.

Avoid waiting in line? Comfort of my home?

I was so there.

Anyway, somehow I found my way to VitalRecordsCertifcates.com and filled in my application.

Easy peasy. $40. We’re on our way!

Not so easy peasy. Not so fast.

Turns out that all I got for my $40 was a filled in copy of the form – a form which I could have gotten for free from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – and instructions on where to mail it in with a check for $32. I.e., mail it in to the place in Dorchester in lieu of schlepping over there.

Hmmmmm.

Should have checked the reviews first. This company has scam written all over it. The majority of its reviews gave the company 1 star, a number stating that they’d have given it zero stars if that had been an option.

Lots of complaints about how folks were charged for nothing. Same as me!

Anyway, I wrote them a note asking them to explain what value they were providing (they had no answer) and asking for a refund (which they said they would be processing for me).

In requesting a refund, I did lay it on a bit thick, making it known that I was an elderly widow applying for a birth certificate on behalf of my handicapped brother.

All true! Nearing 70 – very nearing – I definitely qualify as elderly. I thought I’d throw in widow for the sympathy. Sure, I suspect this generally merits a sad little tune played on the world’s smallest violin. But you never know.

As for handicapped brother, it is true that my brother Rick has pretty substantial hearing loss, and has had this since he was a kid. But the real handicap in play is his difficulty navigating anything other than the most rudimentary anything to do with a computer.

My brother is an extremely intelligent man, and has been very successful professionally. Fortunately, in a profession that doesn’t require you to be a computer stud.

My husband was pretty much the same. PhD from Harvard and unable to do much of anything computer-wise other than send an email and search for information. Oh, and use some stat package. (Jim was an economist and as part of his consulting practice, he did forecasting. Thus the stat package.)

Other than that... No matter how many times I explained file folders to him, he was never able to figure out how to save a file to a place where he could get it back again. Sure, he could search for a restaurant where we could have lunch on Tuesday on our six-months-out trip to Paris. But could he find a Word document he’d written a week ago? Nah…

My appeal for a refund worked, even if I did forget to add that I’m on a fixed income, as my sister Trish suggested I should have. Or so they tell me. (The refund, not the fixed income part.) I’ll see when the charge is removed from my credit card.

As I said, I was ultra sure that the link on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts site was to this outfit vitralrecordscertificates.com. And was all prepared to bring my high dudgeon to the case, including writing to our AG, Maura Healey to complain. But the link on the state’s site was to a company called VitalChek.

Somehow, I screwed up.

Maybe I’m just as bad at this computering as my computer-challenged brother and husband. After all, I am just an elderly widow lady…

Just for grins, I checked out how VitalChek stacks up. Turns up they also get really poor reviews, too. On one site, 70% of more than 300 reviews gave them a rating of Bad. Oddly, 23% rated them Excellent.

The ratings on them on the Better Business Bureau site were similarly dismal.

Hmmmm.

I realize that folks with something negative to say are more likely to write a review than someone who’s all happy-dappy, but with both of these services, sounds like a case of ‘when they are good they are very very good, and when they are bad they are horrid.”

Maybe I should drop Maura Healey a line after all.

Meanwhile, my advice to anyone who wants a vital record is to schlep in person or mail it in.

I went the mail it in route. We’ll see if Rick’s birth certificate arrives as promised in a week or so.

Oh me of little faith, I do predict a trip to the Registry of Vital Records in Dorchester in the not so distant future. Good thing that, as an elder, I ride for half-off on the T! Maybe they have a separate waiting line for elderly widows?

Bret Stephens, boo-boo baby. Make that bedbug boo-boo baby.

Although I do read Bret Stephens occasionally – generally when my rage quotient for the day hasn’t been fulfilled, and I have a few minutes to spare - he’s not exactly my favorite NY Times columnist.

Anyway, some of the news that’s been fit to print of late has been about the discovery of bedbugs in The Times newsroom.

When George Washington University associate professor David Karpf saw the news, he sent out a not especially funny but innocuous enough Tweet:

“The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf wrote on Monday. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens."

The tweet got nine total likes and zero retweets, Karpf said. So the professor was surprised when an email from Stephens popped in a few hours later. (Source: Washington Post)

In the email, Stephens – in true Time columnist style – fulminated against Karpf for “setting a new standard” in suggesting that he, Stephens, is a bedbug, however metaphorically-speaking Karpf’s intent was.

Stephens also invited Karpf to his home to call him a bedbug to his face. (Gauntlet thrown!)

Maybe I’m missing something. Karpf hadn’t called Stephens a racist a fascist, a climate-denying a-hole – all things I’m sure he’s been called in the past. No, Karpf was just making a funny-not funny comment playing on the Times newsroom’s bedbug out.

So Karpf was a bit taken aback by the vehemence of Stephens’ response. And it wasn’t just the email from Stephens that surprised Karpf. Sure, it was surprising. After all, he hadn’t even @’d Stephens. And it’s not as if Karpf has the following of, say, Barack Obama.

But the real surprise for Karpf was that Stephens had copied the GWU provost on his email.This level of cage-rattling for a harmless throwaway tweet didn’t just surprise Karpf. Understandably it pissed him off. It seemed to him that Stephens, who sits at the top of the journalism world -  the sacrosanct level where you don’t even need to do any journalism – was tattling on him to his boss. You’re at the pinnacle, someone paid to opine for The New York Times. You’re someone who regularly gets to blow it out his arse, and here you are, hoping to get Karpf reprimanded or fired or something. For calling you a bedbug. Well, I see Karpf and raise him: Bret Stephens is something he always rails about: a whiny little snowflake.

Anyway, Karpf posted the Stephens’ email, and Stephens being Stephens – someone with a reputation for going after snowflakes, universities that suppress (conservative) free speech, and political correctness – the Stephens email went viral. And not surprising, many Twitterers took on Stephens with glee.

Rather than backing down, Stephens doubled down, calling:

…Karpf’s bedbugs tweet “dehumanizing and totally unacceptable”.

Further, he claimed that his intent was not to get Karpf fired, or “in professional trouble.” No, it was prompted by his belief that:

…“managers should be aware of the way in which their people, their professors or journalists interact with the rest of the world.”

Sheesh. Maybe we should all write to Stephens’ manager.

I can see all this (sort of) if Karpf had written something scurrilous, made a flaming personal attack on Stephens or his family. But Karpf’s riffing on the Times bedbug problem to call Stephens a bedbug? Doesn’t seem like the sort of hill that someone would want to die on.

To me, it makes Stephens look like a big ol’ boo-boo baby. Thin-skilled. Irascible.

Surely he’s been called worse plenty of times.

But even when he’s not called worse, Stephens has apparently been known to lash out.

Earlier this year, he sent a patronizing and preachy email to a young Deadspin writer who had called Stephens “dumb”. Stephens’ email included this gem of a passage, in which he advised the young guy that, instead of calling Stephens “dumb”, he should have invited Stephens to engage in a spirited dialog about their differing views:

Instead, you performed the digital equivalent of sticking your penis out of your trousers. This is very sad, and embarrassing, because (for now) you have so little to show intellectually or professionally speaking.

“Sticking your penis out of your trousers”? How lofty can lofty get? Is this indicative of your intellectual and professional bestest?

And so it goes.

Here’s the thing about the written word.

In both these situations – Karpf/bedbug, Deadspin guy/stupid – Stephens pretty much had to know that it would be way too tempting for the recipient not to get the word out. After all, here’s a nationally known writer with a gold-plated platform, pushing back, in all his pomposity, on an unknown little guy. Who could resist that?

So Stephens’ intent was never to settle “matters” privately, was it?

I know that no one makes phone calls these days, but if Stephens wanted to make his point, have a “teaching moment” (blechhhh), why not just call these guys up? Tell Karpf why you’re so offended by the use of the word “bedbug.” Tell the Deadspin kid why you think he should avoid name calling (even though you sometimes can’t avoid it yourself, as in writing about Palestinian “blood lust”…)

No, you shouldn’t leave a voice mail. That’s another invitation to send something viral.

But if you wanted a genuine conversation with someone, why not give them a shout? Is Stephens too old to remember the phone company ads that asked us to “reach out and touch someone”?

No, Stephens settled for coming off as a carping boo-boo baby. Make that a carping bedbug boo-boo baby.

I guess the good news is that Stephens has now quit Twitter. If only he’d exit the editorial pages of The New York Times just as expeditiously.

Grand theft auto?

If you’re a collector of rare old cars, and your rare old car gets stolen, there may be a Ford in your future. That would be Joe Ford, a Florida private eye.

Joe Ford specializes in recovering cars whose value lies in not being driven much at all: rare, collectible, fetishized cars that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions or tens of millions of dollars, prized not for their ability to get from here to there but rather for their beauty, the artistry of their design, the care with which they were built, and perhaps most of all, their provenance.(Source: Esquire)

For a non-car person – and I am most decidedly a non-car person – I do get a kick out of classic cars. I’ve been to the Heritage Museum in Sandwich (on Cape Cod) a few times, much enjoying their collection of old timers.

I’ve also been to Lars Anderson Park in Brookline, which houses the country’s oldest car collection.

And every year, there’s a classic car show on Boston Common, and I love walking around, ogling old Bel Airs, Mustangs, and Packards.

Most of these cars are plenty costly, but the cars the Joe Ford hunts down are truly high end:

“I’m in a niche of a niche of a niche,” he says.

In terms of business, being in a niche, even a niche of a niche, is often a good thing. If you’re a small outfit, it gives you focus. It’s easier to express your value to customers and prospects. If they think you know something about them – their industry, their issues – they’re more apt to go with you, and may even pay a premium for your services. And being in a niche let’s you develop a very fine-tuned expertise.

Thus, Joe Ford.

People truly love their cars, and the market reflects this.

In 2017, classic cars topped the Coutts Passion Index, a list of the British bank’s top passion investments, increasing in value by more than 300 percent in the past decade to bypass assets like wine, jewelry, and artwork.

A collectible Bel Air could cost you $125K. Steve McQueen’s 68 Mustang would go for millions. Then there’s this:

A 1927 Bugatti Royale, one of six ever made, a twenty-one-foot-long, seven-thousand-pound commercial failure upon its debut, would be worth an estimated $100 million should one ever become available.

Forget the $100 million price tag for this unicorn. A twenty-one-foot-long car? Wow! When I was an urban car owner, I developed mad parallel parking skills, but even in my prime, I don’t believe I could have maneuvered a twenty-one-foot-long car into a tight parking spot.

Back to Joe Ford, he’s not on the hunt for that unicorn Bugatti.

No, his current great white whale is a 1938 Lago Teardrop with a value of $7.6 million.

Well, who wouldn’t want that honey of an automobile? How fun would it be to tootle around in that one? Talk about a work of art deco.

When it debuted, its wealthy owners commissioned custom wardrobes to match its colors and lines—society-page fixtures using it to make grand entrances at balls.

One of the few cars I’ve owned was blue, and I do wear quite a bit of blue. But the closest I ever came to customizing anything to do with a car was deciding between a fake black-eyed Susan and a fake daisy for the vase in that blue Beetle. (Having been a Beetle owner, I guess it’s no surprise that I’m drawn to the Teardrop. High cute factor in both.)

Anyway, the Esquire article gets into all sorts of details on car thievery and car forgery, with a side-theme on a business partnership gone well awry. No honor among thieves, it seems.

I can’t say I read every word of this loooonnnnggg article. But that car. Be still my non-car person heart

I’ll leave Joe with the last word:

“Some cars speak to me,” [Joe Ford] says…. “This one screams.”

Good luck, Joe. Hope you nab that Teardrop. I’ll give you a shout if I see anyone trying to parallel park it – or that 21-foot Bugatti – on Beacon Hill.

Bunker mentality

I’ve been at this blogging thing quite a long time. Long enough to have written a couple of times about bunker builders/doomsday preppers.

Why, back on Election Day 2012 – when I actually feared that the very worst thing that could happen to our country would be the election of Mitt Romney as president (little did we know what sort of revenge porn the GOP had in store for us…) – I wrote about folks building everything-proof fortresses. (Bunker Down.)

Having survived the Mitt Threat, I was back just a couple of months later with “I will survive!” (Can Doomsday Preppers release my inner Donna Summer?) (Please note that sometimes I do ask the big questions!)

Here’s an excerpt from that post:

My favorite prepper, perhaps because he struck me as the most practical, sharp, and business-focused of the bunch, is Larry Hall, who runs Survival Condo, luxury underground condos built on a couple of old missile sites in Kansas. This guy is one thorough prepper.

Not only can the facility survive a direct nuclear hit, your condo comes with five-years worth of foods supply for everyone onboard, and plenty of guns and ammo to fend off the great unprepared. There’s a colossal water storage facility, redundant electric systems, elaborate filtration. Hall even consulted with psychologists on cabin fever, and among the other niceties of the facility are a choice of window views – nature vistas, an aquarium tank – that will give some sense of connection to the great outdoors.

These condos aren’t for those who have to support their prepping habit by selling sex toys and bearded dragons, by the way. The smaller (900 square foot) units go for $1.5M, and the larger units (1820 square feet) go for $3.0M.

Taking a page straight out of HGN, each condo comes with:

• State-of-the-art Kitchen: Stainless steel kitchen appliances include refrigerator, dishwasher, dual-fuel (electric & propane) professional range, wall oven, professional ventilation hood. Granite or custom concrete counter-tops.
• State-of-the-art energy efficient washer and dryer in each unit.
• Built in recessed full spectrum LED lighting.
• Kohler bath fixtures and jetted Jacuzzi tub in each master bath.

But wait, there’s more:

• Organic hydroponic and aquaculture food production.
• General Store.
• Indoor Pool & Spa, and a complete workout facility.
• Custom theater.
• Custom Bar & Lounge.
• Library & Classroom.
• Command & Control Center.
• Medical First Aid Center.
• Communication Center complete with on-site Internet subset access.

Here’s what a few of his delighted clients have to say, under the veil of anonymity that one might expect from those shelling out big bucks for a survival condo.

“The same quality of condo in New York would have cost me the same, if not more per square foot and you get peace of mind with this.” ~Client

“I am in awe of what I have seen here in person. This is top-shelf, a total class act. Security with all of the amenities and luxury? I would have paid more” ~Client

“I feel better knowing that I have a luxury survival bunker for my family if anything happens.” ~Client

I hope that Kim Jong-Un gives these happy campers enough of a head’s up that they can get out to Kansas in time to survive.

In any case, the first Survival Condo condos apparently sold out, so Hall’s building more. Same luxury fittings. Same pool. Same dog walking park. Same five-years worth of food for each resident. Same occupancy limits, so you better be able to find contentment with something of a ghost town population. (No word on whether the Atlas Missile Site Bunker Two is close enough to Atlas Missile Site Bunker One that they could connect them via tunnel. More kids to play with. More folks to party with. Maybe the general stores could carry different merchandise to allow for a bit more shopping variety, given that in case of cataclysm, it’s doubtful whether Amazon would be delivering packages.)

Hall believes that his work “is a calling, not just a business. ‘I’m saving lives.’”

Hmmm. I’d say that remains to be seen.

Survival Condo is not the only bunker game in town. Above ground, below ground, there are plenty of survival communities. There’s even an underground bunker sale in Las Vegas that comes with a wood-burning fireplace. Hope it comes with good ventilation.

All these survival communities out west are one way to repopulate the fly-over states. But what will there be to vote for?

University of Kansas anthropology professor John W. Hoopes casts a wary eye on these sorts of enterprises:

He accused doomsday investors of hawking “survival porn,” which he described as a “hypermasculine fantasy” that danger is near and a select few will be able to save themselves and their families — if they are prepared. (Source: NY Times)

Might Professor Hoopes have Client 1, Client 2, and Client 3 in mind here? As for “hypermasculine fantasy.” Ya think? (Sorry to be sexist here, but…)

“Fear sells even better than sex,” Professor Hoopes said. “If you can make people afraid, you can sell them all kinds of stuff,” he added, “and that includes bunkers.”

Maybe I’ll feel differently if and when the time comes, but if the Proud Boys end up taking over the streets, if we merge with North Korea, if Ivanka Trump becomes president for life. If there are food riots to quell, and books being burned. Well, I’d just as soon not survive.

So count me out of the bunker mentality. If I incinerate in place and there’s no one to escort my ashes to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, so be it. That scenario beats falling to my death climbing a rock wall in a luxury missile silo any old day.

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A Pink Slip doomsday shout out to my sister Kath for pointing this article out to me. (Can I come to your house if the world ends???)  

Let’s all go to the movies. (Next time tether the mattresses.)

So much of what’s in the news is moronic, irritating, depressing. Often, thanks to the current occupant of the White House, it’s all three. (As in Jews who vote for Democrats – as so many Jews do – are ignorant or disloyal. As in let’s buy Greenland. As in etc.)

The moronic, irritating, and depressing stream of stories is occasionally interrupted by something heartwarming or sobsisterish. Something that “proves” that people are fundamentally good. (Well, yes and no.) Something that tugs at our heartstrings – a cute dog, a cute kid, a not-so-cute but nonetheless deserving grown up in need of our thoughts, prayers, and donations.

But every once in a while, there’s a story that’s just plain serves-not-purpose magnificent fun!

And into this wonderful category, bringing comfort and joy to all, I’d put the story about the Denver Bed Cinema mattress fiasco.

Bed Cinema was setting up for a four-night movie event, running from last Thursday through Sunday, at which moviegoers would be able to watch a movie while lolling on an air mattress. A lie-in, rather than a drive-in.

As the organizers were setting up, a powerful wind blew in.

And off went the mattresses.

Robb Manes was at a nearby pool.

“We were just sitting in the pool and all of a sudden, two mattresses flew in,” Manes said. “At first, it was confusing.”

Then more started coming, and one landed in the pool, and Manes realized they had seen rows of mattresses set up for the event nearby.

So, they left the pool to see what was going on as a big gust of wind caught what Manes said looked like 50-100 mattresses. (Source: Denver Post)

Robb had the presence of mind to capture it on video. And the generosity not to monetize it, even when opportunities to do so came his way.

Unfortunately, embedding a video in one of my blog posts is nigh unto impossible. But here’s the link to the wondrous flying mattress video:

Robb Manes Flying Mattress Video

Next time, the organizers might want to tether the mattresses. But I’m just as glad they didn’t this time around.

Readers of a certain age will remember how mesmerizing it was to watch the flying toaster screen saver. This is even better.

Enjoy!

Hellscape of the week: West Palm Beach, Florida

The Ibis Golf and Country Club is an upscale gated community in West Palm Beach, Florida. When New Yorkers Anthony and Siobhan Casimano were looking for a getaway home, it probably looked pretty good to them. Sun. Sea. Sand traps. A straight shot from NY.

What they didn’t see when they passed papers earlier this year was that there would be oodles of vultures puking and crapping all over their property.

Siobhan Casimano described the smell as “like a thousand rotting corpses.” The vultures have destroyed screen enclosures, and have overtaken the pool and barbeque. The few times the family has visited, they’ve had to park their car in the garage or the birds peck at them with their beaks.

A “thousand rotting corpses”? Welcome to the Sunshine State!

The Casimanos aren’t the only ones in the hood with this plague being visited upon them. Cheryl Katz had a bunch of vultures find their way into her pool enclosure. Smart enough to get in, the birdbrains couldn’t figure out how to get out.

“Imagine 20 vultures trapped, biting each other — and they can bite through bones,” she said. “They would bang against my windows running away from a bird that was attacking them. Blood was everywhere. It was a vile, vicious, traumatic event. And it was Memorial Day, so no company I called would come out to help me.” (Source: HuffPo)

I have a pretty good imagination. But, regrets to Cheryl, I’m not willing to use any of that pretty good imagination picturing a bunch of trapped vultures biting “through bones.” I’ll take her word that “it was a vile, vicious, traumatic event,” even as vile, vicious and traumatic events go.

Fortunately, West Palm’s finest came  to the rescue and moved the vultures along.

I’m guessing that this gated community was built along the migratory path of vultures. And you kinda/sorta can’t blame a vulture for doing what vultures do. But a big part of the reason that the Ibis neighborhood is under siege is thanks to one of their fellow homeowners.

Katz said she has seen the neighbor give bags of dog food and even a roasted chicken to the vultures.

There’s only so much the homeowners association can do, as the vultures are a protected species. (Maybe not for long. Wildlife protections are being tossed out right and left. This one might be a righteous hit.) And it doesn’t sound as if appeals to human decency are working with this neighbor from hell. Nor have fines and a cease-and-desist letter.

A few years ago, there was a problem in neighboring Brookline. An escaped pet cockatoo was pecking through the wood work on an upscale house (the birthplace of RFK) owned by a retired federal judge. Efforts to capture the bird were thwarted by a couple who were feeding Dino but refused to help capture him because they felt the bird should be free. But that was just one rogue bird hellbent on destruction, not a flock of them.

Speaking of flocks, I was curious just what you would call a flock of vultures. A puke? A crap? A nuisance?

Turns out, there are a few possibilties:

A group of vultures is called a committee, venue or volt. In flight, a flock of vultures is a kettle, and when the birds are feeding together at a carcass, the group is called a wake.

Committee sounds too peaceable. Venue doesn’t do justice to their West Palm behavior. Volt might work, since it could be construed as shorthand for revolting.

I also like kettle, as in this is a fine kettle of vultures.

As for wake, well, I’ve been to plenty of wakes and while there’s generally plenty of chewing the fat, I’ve yet to see anyone feeding on the carcass. At least not literally.

Folks have tried a lot of things to keep the vultures off their property – fireworks, balloons, fake owls, blasting music.

Katz tried the owl approach.

“The vultures chewed the owls apart,” she said. “They ripped the heads off.”

I’m not sure what the distinction is between vultures and buzzards, but the only place I’ve seen vultures/buzzards was on the grounds of USAA in San Antonio, Texas. USAA was a client of the company I was working for, and I went down for some sort of meeting. I remember two things about USAA. It was an immense facility, and employees rode bikes (indoors) to get from one section to another. And when we sat in our client’s office, looking out the window, we could see trees populated by vultures/buzzards. Needless to say, it’s hard to concentrate on matters to do with application software when a bunch of buzzards are staring you in the face.

Meanwhile, Anthony Casimano seems to be maintaining his sense of humor.

It’s a disaster,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a laughable disaster. You can’t make this up. That’s why it’s laughable.” (Source: WPBF)

Still, until the problem is resolved, the Casimanos are staying put in New York. With luck, the vultures will be gone by winter, when you really need to exit New York and enter Florida.

Too bad there’s not a way of funneling the puking, crapping vultures into the yard and lanai of the a-hole who’s feeding them.

And, come to think of it, Mar-A-Lago is just a couple of miles away, as the vulture flies. Perhaps there’s a way a kettle of vultures could be redirected there…

Guess I won’t be retiring to Maine after all

I’ve always enjoyed visiting the state of Maine.

My husband and I used to head Down East a couple of times a year. A few days in Perkins Cover (Ogunquit), where we’d walk the Marginal Way and then sit out on the porch at Barnacle Billy’s eating way overpriced lobster rolls and drinking way too strong G&T’s. We’d hit Portland for a long weekend or two and try out some of the always great new restaurants there.

For a number of years, I spent a wonderful week with my friend Shelly and the in-and-out company my husband and some overlap with my sister Trish and her family in a rundown lobsterman’s house on Christmas Cove near Damariscotta. The spot couldn’t have been more glorious; the house couldn’t have been dumpier.

It had been in the same family since the 1920’s and, other than a modest update to the tiny kitchen redone in the 1960’s, nothing had been touched. The tennis trophies won by the long-gone kids, the colored pencil drawings that had been tacked to the bedroom walls since 1932 were one thing. The pillows and mattresses from the 1920’s, leaden with dust mites, were quite another.

After our first adventure there, my sister Kath (who overlapped with Trish and family on the other end of our two week joint rental) figured out that bringing our own air mattresses, pillows and reading lights would greatly improve the experience. So that’s what we did.

I love Maine.

Maine is beautiful. Maine is nearby. Maine has lotsa lobstas. And lotsa outlets. Plus the whoopie pie is the state treat. What is not to like?

Sure, they tend to elect some terrible and/or useless politicos (their recent governor, Paul LePage; their current senior senator, Susan Collins) but it has always seemed to me that it would be a reasonable place to retire to. And their second senator, Angus King, almost but not quite makes up for Collins.

Of course, when I think “reasonable place to retire to”, I’m thinking Portland, a charming small city with decent medical care. Not up in the sticks in abandoned papermill country. Which is a good thing, given that in the poorer, more remote quarters of Maine – which means most of Maine – there is a colossal shortfall when it comes to people to care for the olds. And Maine, which may not have much by way of natural resources when you get beyond pine trees, lobsters, and water, definitely does not lack for old folks.

In fact, Maine is the oldiest state in the US.

Last year, Maine crossed a crucial aging milestone: A fifth of its population is older than 65, which meets the definition of “super-aged,” according to the World Bank. (Source: WaPo)

Other states will be joining Maine soon – including New Hampshire and Vermont – and, given demographic trends, most will pretty much end up there as well – but for now Maine is one of the worst places for elder care.

People aren’t able to get home health care aides to help keep aging parents in their homes. Skilled care facilities have long waiting lists. Openings (i.e., deaths) don’t come fast enough, and there are too many waiting to occupy a freed up bed before it’s gone cold.

Families in Maine:

….are being hammered by two slow-moving demographic forces — the growth of the retirement population and a simultaneous decline in young workers — that have been exacerbated by a national worker shortage pushing up the cost of labor. The unemployment rate in Maine is 3.2 percent, below the national average of 3.7 percent.

Maine’s problem is exacerbated by its lack of immigrants. They do have some pockets where immigrants have found their way – most notably from Africa, for some reason – but immigrants have clustered in the state’s larger cities and towns, not necessarily where the need is greatest.

As I mentioned, Maine’s by no means alone:

Across the country, the number of seniors will grow by more than 40 million, approximately doubling between 2015 and 2050, while the population older than 85 will come close to tripling.

Experts say the nation will have to refashion its workforce, overhaul its old-age programs and learn how to care for tens of millions of elderly people without ruining their families’ financial lives.

The workforce refashioning isn’t happening fast enough for Maine.

One fellow interviewed for the WaPo article is only 63, but has muscular dystrophy. For over a year, he’s been trying to find a nursing home that can provide the 24/7 care he needs. But nursing homes are not just overtaxed, they’re closing “at an unprecedented rate.” While Mark Honey waits for a spot to open up, he gets by on home healthcare. But the service he works with can’t provide him with the 70 hours a week he’s entitled to.

Honey said he lives in fear of one of the caretakers getting sick and quitting or finding another job. “When you’re confined to a bed, there’s not much you can work with,” Honey said. “It only takes one or two of the girls being sick, or one of the two of them quitting, for me to not be covered. And then you’re up the creek without a paddle.”

It’s not just home healthcare workers.

About one-third of Maine’s physicians are older than 60. In several rural counties in the state, close to half of the registered nurses are 55 or older and expected to retire or cut back their hours within a decade.

Add to this problem the fact that by 2026, the 65 and up population of the state is forecast to increase by 55%. (For the country overall, growth in the old-olds - 85 on up - population is expected to exceed 200%, while “those ages 75 to 84 will rise by more than 100 percent…By contrast, the number of Americans younger than 65 will increase by about 12 percent.”

And you can only raise wages so fast and so furious if there are just not enough people to earn those wages.

“The U.S. is just starting this journey, and Maine is at the leading edge,” said Jess Maurer, executive director of the Maine Council on Aging. “As we are living longer, all the systems that have always worked for us may have to be changed.”

Sounds like a reasonably good argument for immigration. Or robots. In the current political climate, it will probably be the robots rather than any of the huddled masses types who might be willing to work as home healthcare workers.

“Left unaddressed, this will be catastrophic. We as a country have not wrapped our heads around what it’s going to take to pay for long-term care,” [Bruce] Chernof [CEO of the SCAN Foundation, which advocates on long-term-care issues] said.

Wrapping our heads around any problem doesn’t seem to be America’s strong suit, especially in these times. In order to wrap our heads around something, we’d need to unwedge them first, no?

Meanwhile, Maine’s off the old retirement list.

Hey, NRA, is this what you call hitting ‘em with your best shot?

Honestly, in the Age of Trump, it’s sometimes difficult to discern between real news and The Onion.

Can it be possible that the lobbyist for the Florida NRA – an 80 year-old woman named Marion Hammer – actually made this argument against a proposed ban on assault rifles?

“How do you tell a 10-year-old little girl who got a Ruger 10/22 with a pink stock for her birthday that her rifle is an assault weapon and she has to turn it over to government or be arrested for felony possession?” (Source: Tampa Bay Times)

Since I don’t know a ton of 1-year-old little girls to begin with, and the ones I do know aren’t clamoring for pink ARs, I haven’t given these types of question much thought if any.

But now that Ms. Hammer mentions it…

My first thought would be to ask that 10 year-old what she needed a Ruger 10/22 for to begin with.

If she explained that she needed it for sport hunting, I might ask why she needed a rifle that could hold more than 10 rounds, or that allowed you to add-on a much larger ammo magazine. Because isn’t sport hunting supposed to be something of a fair fight, in which the doe or bear or duck or panther or alligator or whatever else Florida sport hunters like to kill, pit their instincts, their native wiles, their keen awareness of the terrain, against a human with a gun. But the human with a gun should be a good shot, no? Not someone who needs a weapon of mass destruction to mow down their prey.

After covering this ground, I might want to note that a pink gun is sort of babyish. But that would be a bit insulting, so I’d go with something along the lines of a pink rifle looking like a toy. And no self- or other-respecting 10-year-old girl would want a younger child - one without the advantage of having been raised in a home where guns are oh so respected, a young child lacking the vast knowledge, superb skills, and inerrant judgment of a 10-year-old – to grab that pink rifle – looking oh so much like a toy – and blow an even younger child’s brains out.

I might give the 10-year-old, Ruger-toting little girl an out, gently asking whether she really wanted that rifle for her birthday, or was she just doing it to please her gun-loving family. I might probe a bit. Would you want a bicycle? An electric scooter? An art set? A jewelry-making kit? A nail kit? The complete Harry Potter?

I mean, that pretty in pink Ruger cost several hundred bucks. That’s an awful lot of other stuff that could be had instead.

Hammer had plenty of other arguments against the (unlikely-to-pass) Florida assault rifle ban.

After all, Florida has worked long and hard to woo the gun industry to locate to that state.

“Gov. Rick Scott and Enterprise Florida solicited and offered significant financial incentives to gun manufacturers to come to Florida to bring more jobs,” she said…

The amendment would ban the future sale of assault rifles in the Sunshine State and force current owners to either register them with the state or give them up.

But Hammer said the proposed amendment doesn’t protect the more than 150 major gun manufacturers in the state, of which many produce weapons that would be outlawed by the ban. Those companies would be forced to move because they couldn’t possess any new assault weapons, she said.

Those gun manufacturers, by the way, churn out as many as three-quarter-of-a-million guns each year. That’s a lot of nifty gifties for 10- year-olds.

“If I were the owner of one of these firearm manufacturing companies, I wouldn’t wait to see what voters do,” she said. “If this were allowed to go on the ballot, I’d say, ‘I’m outta here.’”

Actually, what I’d say is ‘you’re outta your mind.” But that’s me doing me. To the NRA: you do you.

In any case, the measure is unlikely to pass. Even with the assault rifle murders of the students at Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High School still relatively fresh in everyone’s mind, Republicans/the NRA pretty much hold sway in Florida. And those kids at MDS High? Yesterday’s news. Dead and gone. Now there’s that 10-year-old girl with the pink Ruger rifle to worry about. Guess the NRA thinks she might be their best shot at a stay of execution for any gun control measures in the state of Florida.

GE’s not wild about Harry

You remember Harry Markopolos, don’t you?

He was the forensic accounting sleuth who figured out what Bernie Madoff was up to well before anyone bothered to act on it. He reported his suspicions about Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme to the SEC in 2000. It wasn’t until late in 2008 that the Feds came knocking at Bernie’s swank door. And everything came tumbling down around his ears – and the ears of everyone who’d ever been associated with him.

Well, Harry has spoken again, and this time he’s not taking on a flimflam man. He’s going after General Electric which, although it’s fallen from the top 10 standing it held for years, remains one of the world’s largest companies.

To put it mildly, Harry is not wild about GE.

In fact, in a report issued last week, he accused the company “of massive fraud,” and:

… is warning that the company could be in serious financial trouble -- and even go bankrupt -- if the economy turns south.

"GE is one recession away from Chapter 11. Their balance sheet is in tatters," Markopolos told Julia Chatterley on CNNi's "First Move" show Friday.

"We'll see how solvent they are at year end, and we'll see if they make it into 2020," he added. (Source: CNN)

Yowza. No more GE? No more bringing good things to life?

Predictably, once the wise man who was way ahead of the curve on Madoff spoke ill of GE, the market did its thing. In the wake of the Markopolos pronouncement last Thursday, the company’s share price plummeted. GE stock bounced back on Friday, nearly regaining what had been lost. We’ll see what today brings. (The market has, of course, been generally crazy, what with trade wars, recession fears, and the inverted yield curve…)

At the center of the whistleblower’s blown whistle is a claim that GE has $40B worth of accounting fraud hovering around its insurance business, as well as some problems “with how it accounts for its stake in oil services firm Baker Hughes.” One might say that Markopolos is pretty sure that GE is trying to live up to its “imagination at work” tagline in all the wrong places.

In the report, Markopolos claims that GE (GE) is a bigger fraud than Enron and WorldCom, which both went bankrupt following accounting scandals in the early 2000s.

Enron and WorldCom. Now there are a pair of doozies. A company I worked for during the dot.com boom was in talks with Enron around doing some sort of partnership, and at one point I had to review some sort of account plan. Despite my genius boss explaining how brilliant Enron’s business was – and that boss had actually been a rocket scientist – I never quite got what they did and how they made their money. I chalked it up to my own stupidity when it came to intricate financial situations. But maybe, just maybe, I could have been a Harry Markopolos if I’d played my cards right.

There has been plenty of pushback against Markopolos, both from GE and from others in the industry (researchers and short sellers), which claim that Markopolos is being somewhat duplicitous, in that he works for an investment company that is short selling GE and, thus, has every incentive to trash GE. In the tweeted words of a  Citron Research, a “firm that specializes in exposing problems”, Markopolos’ report:

…"was the worst that activist short selling has to offer. Aggressive accounting is not fraud." Citron added that the Markopolos report was "disingenuous all the way through."

GE’s CEO, Larry Culp, made a show of faith by buying $2M worth of GE stock. Old Lar has a lot to gain if GE stock price gets and stays up there, as most of his compensation package is tied to market performance. He stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars if the price is right.

Meanwhile, Markopolos pushed back on the pushbacks, insisting on his purity, proclaiming himself as “a seeker of truth.”

"If I see accounting fraud, I go after it," he said.

Sort of like an inverted Willie Sutton, who famously replied to a question of why he robbed banks by saying “because that’s where the money was.”

Both Markopolos and GE are cooperating with the SEC and DOJ on the matter. (GE has also been working with regulators reviewing its accounting practices for more than two years now.) We’ll see what kind of love the market gives GE today.

Suffice it to say, ain’t no one at GE who’s wild about Harry just about now.

Oh Lordy, Miss Scarlett

I’m just finishing up Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.This novel– which won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award – is absolutely brilliant. It’s a type of fiction – magical realism – that I don’t typically enjoy, but in this case the writing is so beautiful and powerful, and the story – and its metaphors – so true, the magical realism is bothering me not.

The story follows a young slave, Cora, as she makes her escape from a plantation in Georgia via the Underground Railroad.

As Whitehead tells Cora’s story, the Underground Railroad is an actual train that runs through tunnels, and many of the stops along the way are similarly imagined. In one place, Cora works in a museum, where freed slaves (which she is passing herself off as) pose behind glass in slavery- and Africa-related tableaus so that the white folks can gawk at them.

Then there’s the town where they hang runaway slaves every Friday night, and leave their bodies hanging on the road into town.

I first began reading the book right around the time of the 2016 election, and found it so harrowing that I had to put it down. It took me well over two years to pick it back up.

It is a compelling (and important) read, speaking not only to the experience of slaves, but to the impact that white supremacy and slavery continue to have on our nation.

There are some people I’m guessing who just won’t like this book, and it won’t be because of the magical realism.

They’re the same people who want their history, their vision of the noble South, prettified and whitewashed.

I read about this a week or so ago in the Washington Post, which had an article on the negative online reviews that have been popping up about Southern plantation tours.

Here’s a smattering of what some of the low-raters had to say:

“It was just not what we expected.”

“I was depressed by the time I left.”

“ … the tour was more of a scolding of the old South.”

“The brief mentions of the former owners were defamatory.”

…“Would not recommend. Tour was all about how hard it was for the slaves.” (Source: WaPo)

“How hard it was for the slave”? Duh?

One reviewer wrote that “the tour guide was so radical about slave treatment that we felt we were being lectured and bashed about the slavery.” After mentioning her non-slave-owning Sicilian heritage, and bitching about her ruined vacation, this woman wrote that she did hope to come back “to see some real plantations that are so much more enjoyable to tour.”

Oh Lordy, Miss Scarlett…

What were they expecting? Southern belles flouncing around in hoop skirts? Noble young men sipping mint juleps and going on about honor? Period furniture shined to a mirror finish? (Shined by whom???)

If people want a cleaned up version of what plantation life – which rested on slavery, thrived on the backs of those treated inhumanely at best – they should just watch Gone With The Wind on pay per view.

Then they’ll be able to see those beautiful women in their beautiful gowns, the noble young men giving their lives for “The Cause,” the kindly house slaves so loyal to Scarlett O’Hara and her ilk. Sure, there’s fire and death and destruction (as those marauding Yankees burned everything down), but – fiddle-dee-dee – they will hear nary a word about slaves being whipped, families being split up and sold off.

Or they can rent The Birth of a Nation, to learn how the noble KKK was founded to save those hoop-skirted maidens from the depredations of you know who.

Seriously, isn’t expecting your plantation tour to be all magnolias and graciousness kind of like going to Auschwitz to admire the barracks where the SS lived?

It’s not as if slavery were incidental to plantation life. It was fundamental.

There are some hard truths out there in hard truth land, and one of them is the abhorrent truth about slavery, and how it continues to impact our nation to this day.

These reviewers don’t need a plantation tour. They need to read The Underground Railroad.

“By the time [they] got to Woodstock…”

Where was I on August 14, 1969?

Putting in a shift as a waitress at the Webster Square Big Boy’s in Worcester, that’s where.

I hadn’t been scheduled, but I took the hours for one of my fellow waitresses so that she could go to Woodstock.

I had been casually invited to come along, but took a pass. A hard pass. No desire to be there. None at all.

Not that I didn’t like most of the performers who were on the Woodstock program – Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Creedence Clearwater, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Tim Hardin,The Band, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, John Sebastian… I even liked Sha Na Na (which seemed like the odd man out group at Woodstock no?). I wouldn’t have gone out of my way for The Dead or Jimi Hendrix, but most of the acts were musicians that I listened to.

Anyway, I had no interest in going.

I was a music fan, and always had the radio on or an album spinning on the turntable, but wasn’t a huge concert goer.

Not that I was averse to crowds. But most of my crowd-time was spent demonstrating against the war in Viet Nam. (Demonstrations, on occasion, turned into concerts of sorts. Later in 1969, I heard Peter, Paul and Mary and John Lennon perform at the Moratorium in Washington DC.) But I had no desire to spend a couple of days hanging out on Yasgur’s Farm, even if no one knew ahead of time that it was going to turn out to be as much an uncomfortable, rained-on hellfest as it was a had-to-be-there concert. 

Interesting that the attempts to mount a 50th anniversary concert failed. Guess the boomers are too into creature comforts, these days. No hanging around in the mud, trying to stay warm in a sodden sleeping bag while catching a contact high.

The cancellation of the memorial concert does not mean that Woodstock’s Golden Anniversary won’t be observed. And one way it’s being observed is the release of “Woodstock—Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive.”

This is a thirty-eight-CD set – yes, you read that correctly: 38 -

…that includes nearly every moment of recorded sound from the festival, spanning thirty-six hours of audio. (Disk 38 consists largely of crowd noise and announcements from the stage.) By this point, the listener has heard thirty-two performances, a treatise on “celestial sound” from Sri Swami Satchindananda, and countless calls from the stage for concertgoers to climb down from the sound towers.  (Source: The New Yorker)

By this point, I would have been diving off a sound tower, head first, hoping to put myself quickly out of my misery. Probably after listening to Sri Swami S’s “treatise on ‘celestial sound’”.

M.C.s deliver announcements about a lost three-year-old girl with blond hair and about people locked out of their cars, or missing their duffel bags, or in desperate need of their insulin.

A three-year old? Even as a 19 year old Big Boy waitress I would have known better than to bring a three-year-old to a sprawling outdoors middle of nowhere music festival. And I’m pretty sure that if I were a diabetic, I’d have known enough to pack enough insulin.

Guess I just wasn’t cut out for Woodstock.

One aggrieved Mets fan keeps asking for the result of the game, while anyone who was in contact with someone named Fritz is advised to “please go to the infirmary, identify yourself, and get a hepatitis shot.”

Well, 1969 was the year when the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series, so you can’t blame the fan. And I’m wondering whether Fritz has heeded today’s ads for those with Hep-C and asked his doctor about Harvoni. That’s assuming he survived Woodstock.

You’d have to be a survivor, or a cultural anthropologist, to subject yourself to listening to 38 CD’s full of Woodstock. At least IMHO.

But if you fill either of those bills, the producers have made a limited number – 1,969 to be precise – of the boxed sets. And they’re available for $799.98. Or, as we’d say in marketing-speak, “under $800.” Or, as we’d say in the real world, 800 bucks.

Or you could just read what Abbie Hoffman had to say about it.

“I took a trip to our future. That’s how I saw it. Functional anarchy, primitive tribalism, gathering of the tribes. Right on! What did it all mean? Sheet, what can I say, brother, it blew my mind out.”

A gathering of the primitive tribalists? Oy, Abbie. Ow wow.

Abbie, by the way, was a Worcester boy. His connection to Woodstock was two-fold. He wrote the book Woodstock Nation, from whence cometh the excerpt above. And, while on acid, interrupted The Who’s performance to make a political statement. Pete Townshend chased Abbie off, yelling "Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!" Would that incident have made a trip to Woodstock worth it? Tempting, but nah…)

John Sebastian – a man after my own heart (and someone I saw in concert twice: once with the Lovin’ Spoonful and once, a decade or so ago, solo. (Or was it with Maria Muldaur?) – urged concert-goers to pick up after themselves so that the olds couldn’t accuse them of being fuckups.

Fifty years on, I still think I made the right decision to take a pass on Woodstock. I’m pretty sure that I would have loathed every last minute I was there – heat (Canned and otherwise), mud, too many people, poor sanitation…That said, I wouldn’t have minded if I could say I heard Janis belt out “Piece of My Heart.”

Anyway, Happy Anniversary to the Woodstockians. Enjoy listening to that 38-CD boxed set!

Back to school shopping…

Some of the folks killed in the El Paso Walmart massacre were parents doing some back to school shopping for their kids.

I can imagine they were filling their carts with new outfits for the first day of school, markers, folders, notebooks, lunchboxes, and backpacks.

What did they look for? Elsa or Dora the Explorer? Spiderman or Woody? For the junior high brigade, maybe a Fjällräven like the high school and college kids carry. (Which Walmart probably probably wouldn’t stock, but whatever…)

After El Paso, and with Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech on their minds, many parents are looking beyond the cute themes, the superheroes, the brands the kids like. They’re more concerned about whether their kids will get out of the school day alive than they are about whether the kids will get a backpack with the cartoon character they wanted. And the market has responded.

Companies like Guard Dog Security, Bullet Blocker and TuffyPacks designed bulletproof backpacks to quell those concerns.

The retailers said backpack sales spike during the back-to-school season, and all three said they they saw a significant uptick in the aftermath of mass shootings. (Source: CNN)

Sales are up 200% to 300% since the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings.

Some of the packs available are familiar brands – “JanSport or High Sierra backpacks retrofitted with ballistic panels sewn into the back.” Others are newer brands. They go from anywhere to a bit over a hundred bucks to nearly $500. You can get them online or at Bed Bath & Beyond and other retailers. And they’re available in sizes from preschool to adult. Preschool. Let that sink in.

And I’m pretty sure that, if some maniac decides to shoot up a school, they’re not going to do a damned bit of good. For starters:

Most bulletproof backpacks for children can withstand 9-mm and .44 magnum ammunition but not that of a rifle.

(Some backpacks and inserts do withstand [some] rifle shots.)

Admittedly, the Virginia Tech killer used handguns. But Sandy Hook used a rifle (and a Glock, which was what he used to belatedly off himself). The weapon of choice in Parkland was a rifle. I’d forgotten all about the May 2018 massacre at Santa Fe, Texas, high school. Eight killed; the killer used a shotgun and a handgun. And if we go back to the granddaddy of school shootings, at Columbine the weapons of choice were shotguns, rifles, and a handgun.

So whether they’re labeled “bullet proof” or “bullet resistant”, they aren’t going to resist a bullet from a rifle, which seems like the weapon of choice for mass murderers.

And then there’s this:

When your kiddos are in school, they’re not generally wearing their backpacks.  Junior high and high school kids may haul them from class to class, but for the little guys, those backpacks spend the day in coat closets, lockers, or cubbies. And even the older kids are sitting in class with their backpacks on. In the event of a shooting rampage, will there be time for kids to retrieve and don their backpacks? No, there won’t be.

And backpacks only protect the back. Yes, some kids will be shot at while fleeing. Others will be shot point blank while they sit at or under their desks, hovering in the back of a classroom or in a closet. Even if the backpack can withstand a high-powered rifle shot, it won’t protect a child’s front. Or arms. Or legs. Or lower body. Or head.

There are the bulletproof backpacks, and then there are the active shooter drills, in which students and teachers rehearse shooting scenarios. Forget the fire drill. Fire is no longer the fire that people are worried about.

Back to school shopping in my ancient history day meant a new pencil box, (maybe) a new bookbag, and a new pair of Stride-Rites.

Hard to imagine going bulletproof backpack shopping for your little guys.

Oh, what a world we live in.

Everyone should have at least one 'f--- this job' job in their lives

Every once in a while, there’s something on Twitter that offers us a little piece of truth. The other day, a tweet from someone named Domhnall G popped up while I was scrolling through Jeffrey Epstein related tweets.

There was a bit more to it, but the key takeaway is this:

Everyone should have at least one 'f--- this job' job in their lives.

Ain’t it the truth.

My first three “f--- this job’ jobs were waitressing.

One wasn’t because the people at Valle’s Steak House were godawful. It’s just that my friend Joyce and I knew after working one lunch shift that Valle’s Steak House on Route 9 wasn’t for us. We were arm service gals, not tray service gals. And the place just seemed like it was going to be an unholy drag. Regimented, military, no fun.

So we decamped to Friendly’s for lunch, laughed our asses of, and flipped a coin to see who was going to call the head waitress to quit. (I think I lost – or was it won -  and had to be the one to utter the two most satisfying the words in the English language: I quit. Or in this case, we quit.)

Anyway, Joyce and I were out of school, waitressing to fund our wanderlust – which you could do way back then without worrying about your future career – and had recently returned from a couple of months camping cross country.

Now we were going back to waitressing to save enough for a European adventure.

But Valle’s just didn’t cut it.

So we went back to our previous employer, Durgin-Park.

We knew that Durgin would in many ways be hellish. We’d already worked there. We knew that the owner was insane AND mean. That most of the old bag waitresses were just plain mean.

But we also knew that the money would be good, and that crazy as Durgin was, it was also good for plenty of laughs.

So off we went back to Durgin.

Only to quit in a big f-u way after a few months.

The owner was screaming at Joyce for some minor infraction – too much whipped cream on the strawberry shortcake – and she lost it. So she threw the bowl full of partially eaten and fully whipped-cream at the owner.

Quitting – before we could be fired: Joyce for the act itself, me for being an accomplice after the fact – we went over to our tables to explain that we were quitting and if people wanted to tip us, they could tip us now. Of course, our tables couldn’t have missed the shortcake toss, let alone the mayhem – think Keystone Kops chase scene – that took place throughout the restaurant in the aftermath of the shortcake toss, so it was all great fun.

Fast forward, and I was back from months hitching around Europe at odds on what to do now. (Career, what career? I don’t need no stinkin’ career.) So I went back to waitressing, at a terrible place where the waiters got to work in the part of the restaurant where they could make decent money. And the waitresses were stuck in a dark basement, short-money pub where, on top of not making any money, we had to wear polyester miniskirt sailor dresses in an electric blue.

With one of the other waitresses, I began agitating for the waitresses to get to join the union that the waiters were part of – and to get a chance to work in the real, money-making part of the enterprise.

Anyway, management wasn’t having any, and we got into a big f-u that ended up with our walking out. I can’t remember if I returned the polyester sailor minidress or burned it.

Eventually, I stumbled into business school and a career, as one does.

Quitting a job is generally quite satisfying. By the time you’ve decided to part company, you’re probably not in that happy a place. But mostly when I left a job for something better, it was on good terms. (And this included two times when I was laid off. My third layoff was more of an f-u to me, followed by an f-u to them. Another story entirely.)

But one job I didn’t quit was only made tolerable because I carried an f-u around in my pocket. (Actually in my brain.) This was a place where I worked for nearly a decade, and it was during a rough patch when I was reporting to someone truly terrible. I remember after one particularly awful and hurtful incident, I went home and told my husband that I couldn’t stand it much longer. His response: “why don’t you just quit.”

Hmmm.

It wouldn’t really have occurred to me to quit without another job, but after talking with Jim I pretty much felt “permission granted.”

Let me tell you, it made it so much easier to withstand the daily crap knowing that I could walk out without looking back.

And the upshot of this tale: I didn’t end up reporting to this person for much longer, and shortly thereafter, she was laid off – in part on my recommendation. (The president of the company asked a few of us who we thought should be on the lay-off list. I mentioned her name, and he laughed. “No one starts with her,” he told me, “But everyone gets to her.”)

Then there was the consulting client who I gloriously fired.

Now, I’ve turned down some opportunities because I had worked with the person in the past and wasn’t looking forward to doing it again. And other opportunities because I didn’t have the time and/or the interest. But most of those I’ve worked with on a freelance basis have been just fine. Some have become friends.

But this one time, I actually had to fire a client.

When I first began working with her consulting company, doing freelance writing, it looked like a dream opportunity. She wanted me to commit to writing x reports a year. The pay was good. And it looked like I might have a pretty good anchor tenant for my business.

She turned out to be irrational and nitpicky, hating everything I wrote, often claiming it was wrong and unclear – complaints I’d never heard from anyone else – and rewriting things (poorly). She’d then ask me to edit her work. I’d edit them back to the original writing I’d done and, voila, she accepted everything.

And then she made a particularly ridiculous demand. So I told her that after I completed work on the current project (which I’d committed to), we would part company.

My husband predicted that, in a few months, she would come back looking for my help. Which indeed she did, but there was, of course, no way.

Turning her down was almost as satisfying as quitting had been.

Yes, “everyone should have at least one ‘---this job’ job in their lives.”

Thanks, Walmart, this should be a real big help

There are no studies that link violent video games to violent behavior in real life.

In truth, this surprises me. It seems somewhat counter-intuitive that shooting the head’s off increasingly realistic looking video game “people” doesn’t inure a player from feeling anything when someone’s head is blown off. But studies repeated find no evidence that those who behave violently – e.g., mass murderers – decided to do so because they were egged on by video games.

Don’t know if there are any studies on whether mass murderers become more accurate shooters because of their experience with video games. But I did read somewhere that the military trains recruits in use of weaponry with video games. Sort of like flight simulator for guns.

In any case, with the types of weapons that mass shooters deploy – guns that can fire off so many rounds in seconds – you may not need much by way of pinpoint accuracy to kill a ton of people.

The one correlation that does stand starkly out is that countries with lots of guns – that would be us – tend to lead the pack when it comes to mass murder.

USA! USA! We’re number one!

Walmart was the location of the El Paso rampage aimed at Mexicans. And Walmart, as it turns out, is one of the largest gun sellers in the world. Maybe even THE worldwide leader.

Not surprising. After all, after Amazon – and they’re not a retailer in quite the same sense as Walmart – Walmart is the world’s largest retailer.

Which doesn’t mean they have to be gunslingers.

A couple of decades ago, they stopped selling handguns, other than in Alaska. (I just checked online, and the handgun-ish things available from them are air or BB guns. They sure look like the real deal, but what do I know, gun-wise?)

In New Mexico, they don’t sell any weapons, a decision made because the company didn’t want to comply with New Mexico’s law on background checks.

Anyway, in response to the El Paso murders, Walmart decided to get “remove video game displays and other signs or videos that show violence.”

The move came as Republican leaders including President Trump and Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, have drawn a link between deadly shootings and video games, despite researchers’ conclusions that there is no strong connection.

Walmart has also faced pressure from Democratic politicians and supporters of gun control to end or limit its sale of guns. But there has been no change to the retailer’s gun sales policy, said Randy Hargrove, a spokesman for Walmart. (Source: NY Times)

Oh, I see, remove displays that illustrate video game violence, but don’t do anything that makes it harder for folks to get their itchy little trigger fingers on guns and ammos. Sure makes sense to me. Not.

Not all Walmart employees are thrilled with this tactic. One was quoted as saying:

“It’s kind of funny that we can still sell firearms but we can’t show picture of a cartoon character holding a gun.”

Is this funny peculiar or funny ha-ha, as we used to say back in the day. (Just looked up this saying. Turns out it came from the kids’ show Beanie and Cecil, which began life as a puppet show before becoming a cartoon. I was around for the puppet version. And, let me tell you, turning 70 is going to be funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.)

While the violent signs are out, this may not be a permanent situation. The Walmart spokesman stated:

“We’ve taken this action out of respect for the incidents of the past week, and it does not reflect a long-term change in our video game assortment,” he said. “We are focused on assisting our associates and their families, as well as supporting the community, as we continue a thoughtful and thorough review of our policies.”

The memo told employees to “review your store for any signing or displays that contain violent images or aggressive behavior.”

This includes showing violent movies in Electronics or hunting season videos in Sporting Goods.

But whatever you do, don’t get rid of guns.

I’m not a gun owner, and I’m more than happy to live in an area where a-holes aren’t walking around open-carrying in grocery stores and coffee shops. When I’m in places where the gun-culture has more of a hold – Arizona, Texas – I find it unsettling to go into a restaurant and see some guys who are strapped sitting at the bar. Last winter, on a hike in a (wonderful) state park in Arizona, we encountered some folks on horseback, wearing cowboy hats, holsters and guns. Yippee kay-ay-oh. Maybe they needed them to shoot varmints, rattlers, whatever.

I just plain don’t feel safer when I see “good guys with guns.” Au contraire – as us East Coast, non-gun-toting elites say. In fact, it scares the shit out of me.

A few years ago, a guy came into the ATM I was using wearing a holster and gun. The guy was in khakis and a polo shirt, but looked kind of ex-military or cop-ish. Anyway, when I left the ATM (hurriedly, I might add), I mentioned it to the cop on the corner. He told me is was probably a newly minted police officer who was just a bit excited to be on the job, even when he’s off the job.

About the same time, there was some sort of Second Amendment demonstration at the State House, and there were all sorts of yahoos waltzing around carrying rifles. I got home fast.

Massachusetts, as it turns out, is not a traditional open carry state. You’re not supposed to open carry, but it’s not a Class A violation to do so.

In any case, it’s way out of the norm to see people carrying guns here.

And, while we do have gun-related crime, it’s way out of the norm to have a lot of gun-related deaths.

Massachusetts has one of the lowest rates of gun ownership among states and, no surprise, one of the lowest rates of gun deaths. We also have an overall murder rate that is well below the national average.

Does gun ownership correlate with murder? Hmmmm.

All this said, I’m not opposed to gun ownership. Hunters gonna hunt, etc.

I just think that there ought to be a few more lids put on it. Registration. Training. Background checks. Waiting periods. Bans on the sale of things like machine guns. Devices that can turn a plain old gun into a weapon of mass destruction.

Seriously, who needs the ability to fire off 100 rounds in a nano-second to hunt a deer or protect their home from an armed intruder?

My thoughts are hardly original here, but I’ve got the right to bear words.

And I can even conceive of becoming a Second Amendment Liberal.

If there is a civil war, and the nutters come for my books and ACLU membership card, I’d just as soon go down fighting. Hopefully, I’ll stroke out before I need to take up arms.

Of course, if Walmart stops selling guns, it really won’t make all that much of a difference. They don’t sell the AK-47 “military-style” guns  favored by mass murderers to begin with. They only sell any guns at about half their stores. And they don’t sell guns to those under the age of 21.

But banning signage depicting violence seems like a hollow gesture at best. Why not make a slightly less hollow gesture – in fact one that’s pretty damned powerful symbolically - and stop selling guns period.

Ain’t gonna happen, I know.

But, dear God, Walmart’s got to know that getting rid of signage that show violence isn’t really going to do much to help us overcome our national obsessions with violence and gun ownership.

Now he tells us

As bad actors go, it’s pretty difficult to top Jeffrey Epstein. He’s definitely in the pantheon of 21st century rotters.

Of course, now that I think of it, he may well have been a pretty good actor, since he was able to convince so many (supposedly) reputable people that he was a really interesting guy: a brainy philanthropist who could talk a good intellectual game. No doubt in my mind that, as the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein proceeds, some of those (supposedly) reputable folks will no doubt be exposed as having been interested in things other than Epstein’s brilliant mind and scintillating conversation.

One of the questions hovering around Epstein is just how he acquired his fortune.

It is, of course, all wrapped up in his relationship with Leslie Wexner, “the billionaire mogul behind Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.” Along the way, Epstein amassed both a $$$ fortune and an impressive real estate portfolio that includes a a $77 million townhouse/mansion in NYC that once was Wexner’s and was rumored to have been given over to Epstein for the slightly-below market price of $1.

Other rumors suggest that Epstein paid $20M for the home, but since whatever amount Epstein paid, it likely came from money he had ripped Wexner off for, it really doesn’t matter all that much. By the way, Wexner’s words for ripped off: “misappropriated vast sums of money.”

Mr. Wexner, the chief executive of the retail giant L Brands, included the accusation in a 564-word letter he sent Wednesday to the Wexner Foundation, giving his most detailed account yet of how his life and affairs became intertwined with Mr. Epstein, who was arrested last month and charged with sex trafficking involving girls as young as 14.

In the letter, Mr. Wexner said the misappropriation was first discovered in 2007 as he separated from Mr. Epstein. In early 2006, Florida authorities charged Mr. Epstein with multiple counts of molestation and unlawful sexual activity with a minor. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution from a minor and was required to register as a sex offender.

“It was agreed that he should step back from the management of our personal finances,” Mr. Wexner said in the letter. “In that process, we discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family. This was, frankly, a tremendous shock, even though it clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now.” (Source: NY Times)

Wexner may have been a genius when it came to making money, but when it came to judging character, he apparently got played. And apparently missed out on the sleaze alert factoid that, while he may have been positioning himself as a money management genius, Epstein had also been “trying to pitch himself as a recruiter for Victoria’s Secret models.” Seems like that should have set off something of a klaxon-level, high-decibel alert. Or maybe it just made Epstein seem like more of a – hubba-hubba – Victoria’s Secret kind of guy.

Wexner had pretty much gone all in with Epstein, giving him “wide powers over his finances, philanthropy and private life.” Epstein was given:

…a so-called power of attorney, which enabled Mr. Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, and borrow money — all on Mr. Wexner’s behalf.

Well, that would explain the purchase of a $77M house for $1.

Anyway, Epstein was supposedly running a hedge fund. Easy enough to do if you have the ultimate hedge of stealing to keep it in clover.

Epstein also had some convoluted back and forth with Wexner’s charitable foundations and his own, the C.O.U.Q. Foundation. (I was unable to find out what the acronym stands for, but couq? Clever boy, that Jeffrey Epstein.) I tried to look the foundation up on Guidestar. No surprise that there’s no info on it, other than a note that it’s not registered with the IRS.

Not only had Wexner’s charities made donations to C.O.U.Q., C.O.U.Q. turned around and made donations to Wexner’s charities.

I guess this proves once again that you don’t need to be smart to make money. You just have to know how to make money.

Anyway, Wexner has managed to claw back some money from Epstein. But nowhere near what he lost. Live and learn.

“I am embarrassed that, like so many others, I was deceived by Mr. Epstein,” he wrote. “I know now that my trust in him was grossly misplaced, and I deeply regret having ever  crossed his path.”

All of this is dinging a brand that was already struggling:

…to find its footing as retailers move away from sexualized marketing in the era of #MeToo. This week, Mr. Wexner told employees that Ed Razek, its longtime chief marketing officer, was retiring. Mr. Razek was instrumental in developing eroticized campaigns for Victoria’s Secret, as well as its annual fashion show.

Here's my question: why did Wexner wait more than 10 years to blow the whistle on Epstein’s theft? Seems like there may have been a crime or two committed here and, although Epstein got away with his bad behavior with that sweetheart deal he brokered in Florida for his sex-related crimes, he might have ended up in prison for stealing from Wexner. After all, theft is so much worse than sex trafficking, don’t you think?

If Wexner had called in “the authorities”  back when he realized he’d been had, Epstein over the last decade if Epstein had been in the stir. Talk about a missed opportunity. Instead we’re sitting here scratching are heads. Now he tells us…

Boston Center for Adult Embezzlement

I am always astounded when I read about people who embezzle from their companies.

I know I’ve blogged about it frequently enough that I should have an “embezzlement” tag.

Most recently, just this past May, I posted about Michael Avenatti - fast-talking TV presence lawyer, defender of all things Stormy Daniels – who has been charged with swindling his clients.

Today’s tale o’ embezzlement is closer to home. Maybe a 10 minute walk away.

It seems that the executive director and the comptroller – because, of course, it helps to have one bad actor covering for another – of the Boston Center for Adult Education managed to syphon $1.7 from BCAE coffers.

Now the BCAE is an organization that I really should like and be involved with. Right around the corner. Lifelong learning. Community involvement. All sorts of good stuff.

But even though I look through their offerings on occasion, there’s never any course that I want to take. The last time I took something there was in the early 1970’s, when I took a seminar on Boston politics conducted by Barney Frank, then a state rep and later a U.S. Congressman. Basically, we sat around while Barney monologued, and it was all very entertaining. But I haven’t been back since.

Still, to read that trusted, in-charge employees had had their mitts so deeply in the till…Wow. Just wow.

Susan Brown was the ED, and her skim /scam was setting up her partner (partner in the romantic, personal sense), Karen Kalfian, with payments for allegedly non-existing marketing services. This was to the tune of $565K. Nice non-work if you can get it!

Mark Mitchell was the comptroller and he was an even bigger greed head.

Almost $900,000 in checks allegedly were written by the comptroller to himself, and more than $300,000 to groups for his personal benefit, including a youth baseball team in Saugus that he managed. (Source: Boston Globe)

Nice to see that Mitchell had such community spirit!

These folks were completely brazen. Not only were the stealing away, and lying about it, they were also falsifying documents to show to their board. Among other things they faked were the 990 forms that nonprofits have to file with the IRS. Because Mitchell and Brown weren’t actually filing these forms, BCAE lost it’s nonprofit status.

Last June, the center’s board members discovered their organization had lost its tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, court records show. Mitchell and Brown told them it was an IRS mistake and in September Brown gave the board a letter that appeared to be from the IRS saying all was well, records show.

It was dated July 25, 2018. Investigators later found the same letter in a Word document on Mitchell’s computer and believe it was falsified, [prosecutor Julien] Mundele wrote.

Mitchell told investigators he and Brown “would often fabricate the financial information” together, Mundele wrote.

We hear a lot about the importance of workplace collaboration. Guess it’s not all for the good!

Brown claims that she had no idea that Mitchell was writing weekly checks to Kalfian. (“Shocked, I’m shocked…”) Kalfian, for her part, claimed that she did strategic marketing work for BCAE, and “that it was the only client her marketing company had.” But when asked to expand on what she actually did for BCAE, all Kalfian could come up with was “marketing.”

She may have had more to say to the investigators who were interviewing her in the home she shared with Brown. But as the prosecutor reported,

“At this point in the conversation, Brown walked into the residence and ended the conversation by stating that they wanted an attorney present

Sounds like that was an excellent idea.

All three have somewhat diversified professional portfolios.

Mitchell was a member of the Saugus (town north of Boston) Board of Selectman. He’s been accused of dipping into campaign funds to cover some $15K worth of personal expenses.

Brown and Kalfian – before they lucked into the BCAE scheme – owned an embroidery business in their town, Marblehead. (Like Saugus, Marblehead is north of Boston. Unlike Saugus, Marblehead is charming, quaint, and affluent. Just the sort of place that could support an embroidery shop.)

If Brown and Kalfian end up doing time, embroidery might be a nice calming pastime to resume. That is, unless the needles are too pointed, the metal hoops are forbidden because you could turn them into a shiv, and the embroidery thread could have been hoarded until enough was saved to make a getaway ladder. (Don’t laugh. There actually was a jail break in which the escapee used a dental floss ladder to climb down to freedom.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this all turns out.

Meanwhile, I checked out the fall catalog of BCAE. Alas, still nothing I’m interested in taking. Maybe I should sign up to teach a course in interesting embezzlement cases…

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A tip of the Pink Slip hat to my sister Kath, who pointed this story my way. Knowing my interest in embezzlement, she also sent me a link to an article on a fellow who, in his capacity as a bookkeeper, managed to steal well over $1M from a mom-and-pop soundproofing business and a pediatrician’s practice. He gambled it all away. As one does.

What is wrong with these people? I know we’re all supposed to have a bit of larceny in our hearts, but honestly…