Mass Movietime

I am a complete and utter sucker for any clickbait that promises a list, especially when the list is of whatever, shown by states.

Worst/best states to retire in. Favorite cookie in each state. Craziest roadside attraction. Doesn’t really matter what the topic is, I’ll give it a click. When the set up is that you have to click (vs. scroll) through every state, if the subject isn’t that interesting, I may not make it through Arkansas. But I’ll almost always give a state list a try.

The last one I looked at showed the highest grossing movies set in each state. I don’t tend to go to highest grossing films, which are mostly super-hero or violent action, and predictably, I’d only vaguely heard of most of the state champeen grossing movies to begin with. But I did want to check out what was up in the New England states.

Connecticut: The only film I could think of that took place in Connecticut was Holiday Inn, the 1942 musical that gave us “White Christmas.” But I knew that couldn’t be the top grosser. Readers, it wasn’t. The highest grossing film to take place in Connecticut was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which I actually did see, nearly 40 years ago, but I had no recall that there was a Connecticut connection. I thought it all took place in places that had things like lost arks. Anyway, Indiana Jones was a professor at a fictional college in Connecticut. So there. (Gross: $389.9M)

Maine: Hmmm. Something to do with the state’s favorite son, maybe. Stephen King. Bingo! IT ($700.3) which -  like most (all?) Stephen King sagas takes place in Maine - is that state’s top grosser. Matters not that I’d never heard of it/IT. Plenty of other folks did. Not that I’m an anti-Stephen King snob. I really enjoyed Under the Dome and 11/22/63. And I loved his book Faithful (co-authored with fellow Red Sox fan – and my favorite novelist ever – Stewart O’Nan), which chronicled their attendance at most Red Sox home games in what turned out to be the club’s greatest season ever. (They had the contract for the book before anyone knew it would turn out to be 2004 and the breaking of the curse.) Plus I think that King is a completely underrated and brilliant short story writer. No one portrays working class people more authentically. Unless it’s Stewart O’Nan. But, no, IT wasn’t familiar to me.

Massachusetts: I knew it wouldn’t be Friends of Eddie Coyle, Love Story, or The Verdict, all of which were made too long ago to be top grossers. Even Good Will Hunting I thought would have been too old. But never in a million years would I have landed on War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise ($591.7M). Once I saw the name, I did manage to remember that the plot  brought Our Hero Tom Cruise and his kids to Boston to reunite with their mother. But “set in Massachusetts” seems as stretchy as setting Raiders in Connecticut. And in any case, I much preferred the 1953 movie of the same title, which was set in California and was one of those brilliantly cheesy 1950’s Red Scare sci-fi films. Not quite as brilliantly cheesy as The Day the Earth Stood Still or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but right up there…

New Hampshire: Seriously, who would make a movie in New Hampshire? I mean, other than the makers of On Golden Pond and that one with Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid that ends up at the naval base in Portsmouth, which was only partially set in NH. But the Jumanji movies are set and filmed in the Granite State, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle grossed $962.1M. Turns out it was filmed in Keene, NH, which is a fairly charming small city not all that far from the fairly uncharming town of Bellows Falls, VT, which is where my husband grew up. I’ve never seen any of the Jumanjis, but knowing they were filmed in Keene kinda-sorta makes me want to give one a look.

Rhode Island: The Conjuring ($319.4) is Rhode Island’s top grossing film. It almost goes without saying that I’ve never even heard of it. (Or if I had heard of it, I’ve forgotten about it.) While it was filmed in North Carolina, it’s set in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Harrisville is one of the many villages in the town of Burrillville, from whence haileth my old and dear friend Joyce and her almost equally old and dear to me husband Tom. Joyce was from the village of Pascoag, Tom from Wallum Lake. In a few weeks, I’ll be visiting Tom and Joyce who, for some foolish reason – oh, yeah, it was their careers – live in Dallas, Texas. We may well decided to Netflix The Conjuring and see whether fake Harrisville bears any resemblance to real Harrisville.

Vermont: As can happen on occasion, things in life have come around to Bing Crosby. No, not that any top grossing film had Der Bingle in it. But just as the only Connecticut film I could come up with was Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby, the first movie set in Vermont that came to mind was White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby. My husband and I had few Christmas traditions – he hated the holiday – but we always watched White Christmas at some point in December. It is a true howler, but there’s some decent music and dancing in it. Still, it’s mostly a preposterously corny howler. The December before Jim died, we decided not to watch it yet again, as Jim said that he didn’t want to spend any of the last few hours he had on earth watching a dreadful movie. Anyway, the highest grossing movie set in Vermont is not White Christmas. It’s What Lies Beneath ($291.4M), yet another movie I’ve never seen, even though I like Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer just fine.

So of the big deal movies set in New England, seems that I’ve only seen Connecticut and Massachusetts. Looks like I have some film viewing to catch up with. Too bad I just started watching Downton Abbey. I’m only a few episodes in. Just far enough to dislike two of the three Crawley sisters, not to mention Carson and O’Brien. Could be a long slog before I get to Jumanji…

We don’t work. Lucky we!

I haven’t been following the WeWork saga very closely. I was aware of their stratospheric paper valuation – $47B – that the market was placing on this unicorn of unicorns, a real estate company that rents out shared office space, largely to tech startups.

I had a client that had space in WeWork before they grew up and got their own offices. The place was plenty cool – there was a kitchen where all these techie hipsters hung out sipping cold brew. It goes without saying that the only time I was there, I was one of a handful of folks who appeared to be over the age of 40. Make that 30.

Anyway, WeWork (now calling itself We Co.) had to hold up on:

…its hotly anticipated initial public offering after filings last week showed billions in losses and potential conflicts of interest for Adam Neumann, its controversial and charismatic chief executive. (Source: WaPo)

I had no interest in blowing through WeWork’s prospectus, but it did show that the company “had blown through more than $2 billion in 2018,” and “cast serious doubts on the company’s business model, profitability and stability.”

Oh, that. (I’m old enough to remember working for a small tech company with the wild ambition of becoming “the next billion dollar software company.” That was when a billion dollars was a big deal. When we blew through $45 million in venture funding, it was considered totally shocking. We survived – barely – by paring down radically, and ended up being purchased for a couple of million dollars a few years down the road. Hey, I was happy to get my $45K. This was a long, long time ago, but I remain gobsmacked by the numbers that get bandied about these days.)

Anyway, Adam Neumann may be on his way out as CEO and given a BS-y title like “nonexecutive chairman” so that someone else could be brought in to straighten things out, and figure out how to launch We Work’s stalled IPO.

Neumann sounds like the ultra visionary, the ultra disrupter, the ultra crazy man, the ultra annoyance.

I worked for some narcissistic a-holes over the years, but nothing quite like this.

Yes, you have to think big, but Neumann’s goals include “becoming the world’s first trillionaire, taking WeWork to Mars, living forever, being Israel’s prime minister or president of the world”.

Maybe it’s just me, but a little grandiosity goes an awful long way…

He’s also invested in a number of companies that own real estate that WeWork leases, which looks to some (i.e., potential investors) like self-dealing.

Neumann was even paid nearly $6 million by WeWork for the trademark rights to the word “We” during the company’s rebranding. (He later paid the money back, the company said in an updated filing.)

Neumann has certainly built something with WeWork. They manage millions of square feet of property throughout the US and in over 30 countries worldwide. But like Uber et al., at some point you need to turn a profit.

And the culture, with the CEO running around gushing about trillionaire-ing and office space on Mars sounds to me like a true horror show.

Everyone has to go to “camp” each summer to party and work on crafts. (Ugh! One of the worst off-sites I ever experienced was one where they handed us all a box of Tinker Toys and instructed us to build a helicopter. Where’s Leonardo DaVinci when you need him?)

At camp, you might have to listen to Deepak Chopra. (Admittedly, listening to Deepak drone on would have been better than listening to, say, Scott McNealy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, who was the guest speaker at one hideous sales kickoff I had to attend. He began his remarks (this was January 2001) by talking about how glorious it was to have morality restored to the White House now that GW was in office.)

Neumann has suggested, at various times, that WeWork could help stop world hunger, solve the problem of parentless children and end the refugee crisis.

“I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me,” Neumann said, according to New York magazine.

I, I, I, I. Yikes!

As for that $47 billion valuation, it’s now plummeted to about one-third of that amount. Not that $15 billion is exactly down to earth, but it’s a far cry from $47 billion.

But it’s no surprise that there’s been some reckoning, and not just because of concerns over “serious doubts on the company’s business model, profitability and stability.” No, a couple of years ago Neumann:

…told Forbes that his company’s valuation was “more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.”

Energy and spirituality? Talk about intangibles. (We always seemed to have plenty of chicken-with-a-head-cutoff energy, so was the problem with my little go-nowhere companies that we had insufficient spirituality?)

And speaking of energy and spirituality:

Neumann’s wife has also been closely involved in WeWork. It should come as no surprise that Rebekah Paltrow Neumann is “the cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress and founder of the natural health and lifestyle brand Goop,” which has a definite aura of oddball, weirdball spirituality. There is certainly something decidedly Goopy about the WeWork enterprise.

And energy?

The Wall Street Journal reported that [Rebekah Neumann] ordered that a number of employees be fired after brief interactions with them because “she didn’t like their energy.” It is unclear whether her orders were followed.

Bet I would have been on that list. I always worked hard, but I’m guessing that my actual energy would have been weighed and found wanting.

I certainly understand why younger folks are drawn to companies where they have a chance to strike it rich. Who wouldn’t want to have their life-nut covered by the time they’re 30? The son of a good friend was one of the first employees of a startup that recently went public, and he’s pretty much set. Well deserved! He’s a great guy (who had one of the most fun weddings ever – colossally excellent band).

But if you have to put up with an environment like WeWork?

All I can say is, we don’t work. Lucky we!

Is there no end to the dumb-ass apps????

I’m always on the lookout for nonsense applications that ain’t nobody wants and ain’t nobody needs. Many of these apps are “smart”, part of the vast and growing Internet of things. Embedded sensors capture data and all of a sudden you can track just about anything.

Sure, plenty of the apps are fun and/or useful: think Fitbit. Others are good for your health: think monitors that keep an eye on a cardiac patient’s heart.

And then there are the pure, unadulterated “Technology in Search of an Application” applications. Into this bucket, into its Hall of Fame, in fact, I would put the smart diaper.

A smart diaper comes equipped with a sensor that can alert a parent if their baby is wet. (One brand can distinguish between wet and loaded.)

Whatever happened to a baby crying? A parent using the old touch or smell method?

There are people who are going to buy a $200 diaper monitoring “system”?

And then I came across a smart water bottle. Make that an electronic smart bottle.

LifeFuels, based in Reston, Va., uses cartridges to shoot peach, citrus or blackberry-acai flavoring, as well as vitamins and minerals, into its smart water bottle. The bottle syncs to an iPhone app to enable you to record your intake of fluids and nutrients such as potassium and sodium.

“People like data,” [entrepreneur Jonathon] Perrelli said. “They want customization, portability and the ability to understand why they feel the way they do. And they want to track it all.” (Source:  Washington Post)

Well, I like data as much as the next gal. But how much data do I want/need on how much water I’m drinking? Drink when I’m thirsty and occasionally when I’m not seems to work out pretty well.

Then, speaking of want and need, there’s customization. Although I did adore the tee-shirt I had with the teddy bears on it and M-A-U-R-E-E-N spelled out in candy-striped letters. But I was four. When I’m offered customization, as often as not, I find it a bother. Value of customization vs. effort expended? Seldom worth it.

Portability? Well, it’s better than having a cement block manacled to something, but – beyond my ID and my phone – there’s not all that much that I need to have with me at every given moment. Okay, okay, there are a lot of goodies packed into that phone. But I really don’t need to be able to whip through a DuoLingo German exercise while I’m on the road. Not really. So, portability? Meh.

I will say that I do like to understand why I feel the way I do. But this has been the study of a lifetime, and I really don’t need an app for that.

As for wanting to track it all? What the hell for?

I do track my miles per day, but that’s about it. (And that’s ridiculous enough.)

But I’m not all that obsessed about every little bitty thing about me, myself, and I. Beyond what I obsess about in my little old mind.

Of course, because that little old mind is, in fact, old, I am not the target demographic for LifeFuels.

They’re looking at urban hipsters who are (even) more self-absorbed than I am.

LifeFuels’ markets care about hydration.

Well, who doesn’t? As I mentioned, when I get thirsty, I drink. Either plain water (Boston tap, refrigerated) or fizzy water.

Perrelli notes the “dehydration is a major cause of emergency room visits in the United States.” But I note, errrr, guess, that those who visit the ER because of dehydration are not the same sort of folks who’ll buy a $179 smart water bottle. Just notin’, errrr, guessin’.

LifeFuels also promotes sustainability: use the jazzed up smart bottle rather than the one-use drink and toss plastic bottle. But it’s entirely possible to cut down on drink-and-tossers by investing a couple of bucks in a non-smart bottle. Or – better yet – cadge one from the corporate swag cupboard.

And while I do drink lightly flavored fizzy water, why does anyone need a water bottle that comes with a cartridge that squirts blackberry-acai into perfectly good plain water.

Anyway, Perrelli has sunk $1 million of his own dough into LifeFuels, and has gotten another $25 mil from investors. Plus the company is partnering with Keurig. So maybe LifeFuels knows something I don’t.

The product went on sale online earlier this week. You buy the smart bottle then sign up for a subscription to the inject-a-flavor pods.

In return:

“We supply you with actionable insights,” the 47-year-old entrepreneur said.

Not that I couldn’t use some actionable insights, but actionable insights about my hydration wouldn’t be high on my list.

Lucky for LifeFuels I’m not the audience they’re after.

Maybe it’s just me, but so many of these smart apps strike me as just plain dumb-ass.

Attention Fashionistas!

Joke?

There have been plenty of times when I would have been more than happy to have a portable chair with me: long walk, no-seat T, musical chairs (I win!). Still, I’m not sure I’m up for the wearable chair. So much so that, when I first saw a reference to it on Twitter (@techinsider) the other day, my first thought was: JOKE.

But, nah.

The wearable, bionic chair is the LEX, the brainchild of Astride Bionics. And thanks to the kick that Kickstarter crowd funders got out of it last fall, it’s got current bragging rights as “the most crowdfunded exoskeleton project.” And thanks to those kickstarters, the LEX is now on the market.

What is the LEX? According to The Guardian, it’s:

…a pair of £200 foldable aluminium legs that you strap to your bum and lean against whenever your legs get a bit tired. (The Guardian)

While it’s the chair that you take with you, wherever, whenever, it’s also billed as a “posture-correction tool”:

…an exoskeleton that helps to keep your back in good alignment whether you’re sitting or standing. It even comes with something called a “load distribution module”, a little platform that you can rest your backpack on as you wear it, significantly lowering the burden on your spine.

And while someone who does not want to appear geeked out may not find the LEX all that attractive, Astride Bionics begs to differ.

TRULY begs to differ. According to their website:

The LEX takes wearable to a new level by becoming a discreet part of your clothing.

Really? Really and TRULY? In what universe is a pair of bright red titanium (?) poles attached to your back “a discreet part” of anyone’s clothing.

I’m sure that in another decade or two, these will be de rigueur. Given that Boomers are literally and figuratively on their last legs, and given that, at least in my subway riding experience, young folks aren’t as ready to offer their seats to geezers as once they were, these might well become the “what to give Grandpa” gift of the year. Or, if the price comes down, a Yankee Swap par excellence.

The Guardian article points out that the LEX may be something of an encumbrance when it comes to using the toilet. For women, anyway. But I’m guessing that the majority of the early adopter population for this is of the male variety, so LEX will have time to figure things out for the ladies.

Meanwhile, still hard not to think of it as some sort of geeks-in-Paradise joke.

But even if it is a joke, it’s not a bad joke.

Bad Joke

For those less interested in wearable tech:

A New York clothing company has introduced school shooting hoodies that have bullet holes in them and feature the names of four schools where nearly 100 students were shot to death, including Sandy Hook, Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Virginia Tech. (Source: ABC News)

Because who wouldn’t want their Sandy Hook first-grader’s name slapped across some hipster’s hoodie?

The company responsible for this fashion statement is Bstroy, a “‘neo-native’ post-apocalypse streetwear brand” that specializes in $135 tee-shirts and $1,000 jeans. ($1K for jeans? Now that’s what I call post-apocalpytic!)

It almost goes without blogging that Bstroy has been mercilessly dragged (including by the families of school shooting victims) over their new clothing line.

In the company’s defense, one of its founders:

…Brick Owens, responded to the critics by releasing a statement on Instagram.

"Sometimes life can be painfully ironic," the statement read. "Like the irony of dying violently in a place you consider to be a safe, controlled environment, like school. We are reminded all the time of life’s fragility, shortness, and unpredictability yet we are also reminded of its infinite potential. It is this push and pull that creates the circular motion that is the cycle of life. Nirvana is the goal we hope to reach through meditation and healthy practices that counter our destructive habits. Samsara [the school shooting collection] is the cycle we must transcend to reach Nirvana."

Huh? I say, huh? Huh?

But The New York Times cleared things up for me.

These guys are the fashion spawn of Kanye and his Yeezy line. They’re the hip-hop generation “arriving in luxury fashion…haute street wear’s next generation of innovators and inspirations.”

As Brick and Du [Grams] of Bstroy conceive it, first will come the apocalypse, then the post-apocalypse, in which people will be seeking ways to survive. (Source: NY Times)

And if you’re wondering whether you’re ready to go neo-native.

And finally, after that, the period they’re designing for: the neo-native, in which those who have survived will begin building things anew.

For now, the Bstory guys are “empowering” through “storytelling”, “making violent statements” aimed at creating a “voice” that “will say things that everyone can wear.”

All this fashion-as-art stuff makes my head hurt. Kinda/sorta a personal apocalypse that I’m not quite certain I want to survive.

My bottom line is that I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to wear a pricey, bullet-riddled hoodie with the name of a Shady Hook first-grader on it.

Guess that makes it official. I’ve officially crossed the line between not and artist and outright philistine.

What the everlovin’….

In truth, I witnessed plenty of bad  behavior when I was in first grade. 99.9999% of it was, of course, at the hands or lips of Sister Marie Leo. Over the course of that long and brutal slog of a school year, I witnessed the following Sister M.L-related incidents in which the good sister made:

Ginny B, one of the few kids who brought her lunch to school, eat the now nearly day old lettuce that she had removed from her ham sandwich because the lettuce had wilted on a brutally hot September day. (This was, needless to say, well before there was any such thing as a cold pack to tuck in your kid’s lunch box.) This was about five-of-three, and we all had to sit there, stomachs churning, while poor Ginny gagged down the lettuce.

Bradley D. lick the milk he’d spilled out of his carton off the ancient wooden floor of the cloakroom. I’m not sure whether it’s worth mentioning that Bradley was a little slow, and, thus, was the frequent target of sta’s wrath and “humor.”

All the boys who’d gotten their pants soaked sliding on the slushy hill in the schoolyard take off their pants, place them on the radiator registers, and spend the rest of the days sitting around in their undies. Sort of. The boys had to put on girls’ coats. The real genius here was Sister ML’s ability to humiliate the boys (undies + girls’ coats) and ick-out the girls (boys undies + our coats). And, yes, I do remember that my red and green plaid winter coat was worn by Michael C. Yuck!

Any kid who’d forgotten to bring in the signed permission card for the new-fangled polio shot trudge home, alone, in the middle of a howling snowstorm to fetch the signed slip. Note that all of those who were sent home would have gone home for lunch a couple of hours later anyway…I raced up the hill and back down to school in record time. I beat everyone back, including kids who lived closer. My friend Kathy S was last in. Her mother had made her stay for a cup of cocoa.

Oh, there was plenty more.

Turn around in class to see who just threw up? You would just have to sit there until your hair turned green.

Step on the “holy grass” outside the church? Mortal sin! And a one-way ticket to hell.

Sister Marie Leo told us that if we ever talked to strangers we would “end up chopped in pieces, floating in a barrel in Lake Michigan.” Nothing wrong with a warning about strangers, but, seriously folks. This one was especially vivid and scary to me, as I had actually been to Chicago’s Oak Street Beach a number of times – my mother was from Chicago – so I’d been in Lake Michigan. (Never did spot any floating barrels…)

And my personal favorite: We always sat in girls rows/boys rows. One day, when Philip N. was coming back from the blackboard, the boy in his row all reached their arms out, touching the desk opposite, to impede Philip’s passage. Well, that was the end of the world. Sister Marie Leo was going to call Monsignor Lynch, and he’d send the paddy wagon to haul these miscreants off to reform school. “If you brought your lunch, that will be the last meal you’re ever going to eat. If not, it was breakfast. And I hope you kissed your mother goodbye, because you’re never going to see her again.”

Seems about right.

I only recall two kind gestures during the entire year.

My friend Bernadette L. had an older sister who had Down Syndrome. She was mainstreamed in our school, and was in fourth grade while we were in first. Every couple of months, Sister Marie Leo would invite Mary Margaret L. in to read to us. (I thought Mary Margaret was a genius, she was such a good reader.)

In their downtime, the nuns made valentines and sold them to us to make money for the missions. Most of them were a heart cut out of construction paper (2 cents), or a heart cut out of construction paper with a holy card or sticker of angel plastered on it (a nickel). But they also made elaborate valentines out of the covers of heart-shaped candy boxes. These went for $.50 or a buck. Stephen W. was a very sweet boy, the youngest kid in our class (and, as a late December baby, one of the few kids younger than me). He was also from a very large family. He wanted to buy one of those candy-boxers for his mother, but didn’t have the money. So he started to cry. And Sister Marie Leo took him into her lap and comforted him.

These small acts of kindness aside, Sister Marie Leo shouldn’t have been in any classroom, let alone in a first grade one.

But if she were still alive and kicking, she might be able to secure a spot in the Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy in Orlando, Florida, where she’d fit right in.

Here’s what happened there:

First grade Kaia Rolle was having a meltdown. Not surprising. This happens. After all, she’s only six (and in the case of this little one, they’re dealing with a child with a sleep disorder who gets overtired). The teacher sent Kaia to the office. Again, no surprise there. Kids act up. They get sent to the office. A parent might be called.

While in the office, Kais’s tantrum continued. A “staff member grabbed her wrists to calm her down”, and Kaia kicked here.

Well that was apparently too much for the coping skills of the grownups at the Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy in Orlando, Florida.

They called the cops, and Kaia was cuffed, put in the back of the car, and driven to juvie. Where she was finger printed and had her mug shot taken, which was followed up by her being booked on an assault charge. Kaia (along with her grandmother, who was caled by the school) will have to appear in court to answer the charge.

There was another child – this one an 8 year old – who was arrested by the same officer that day. Officers are supposed to get permission from their watch commander if they’re going to arrest a kid under 12 years of age. This cop failed to do so. A mere technicality, I’m sure.

Kaia Rolle is African-American. What do you want to bet that the 8 year old arrestee is, too.

I know that even small children can be out of control, terrible, violent. But surely schools should have policies and procedures in place for handling really young children who need to be calmed down. Surely arrest – cuffs, fingerprints, mug shots – shouldn’t be among those policies and procedures.

I read this story and just shook my head.

What the everlovin’ f…

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Source for story about Kaia Rolle’s arrest: Click Orlando. Source for stories about Sister Marie Leo: my brain.

Well, that was fast

Today is the fist day of fall. Fall!

Not that I don’t love autumn. I actually like it more than I like summer.

But where did the summer go?

I had big plans, big plans.

Empty out the only decent-sized closet in my condo and find a place to get rid of 20+ years of accumulated laptops (and a desktop or two; plus a printer).

Go the last mile on organizing my finances, including updating my will.

Start turning a bunch of linked short stories into a novel.

Lose 10 pounds.

None of it got done. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

It’s not like I lost time by going on a big old vacation or anything. A couple of weekends on the Cape; my recent 4-day jaunt to Canada and Bar Harbor.

No, I’ve been around

And I’ve had plenty of time, especially since the Red Sox have been so lousy that I only watch an inning or two of every game, not the entire thing.

But nothing seemed to get done.

Maybe this coming season.

I sure won’t miss the time-wasting that seemed to accompany summer this year. Can’t blame summer, but still…

There are a couple of things I will miss about summer.

Corn on the cob.

Last week, I picked some up at the Farmers’ Market in Copley Square. Probably the last of the season, but it was so tender and sweet. I’ll miss corn on the cob.

Tomatoes.

Yes, you can get good-enough tomatoes all year round. And unlike the pink and pulpy winter tomatoes of yore, they actually look, taste and smell like tomatoes. But there’s nothing like a newly picked tomato. Tomato in one hand, salt shaker in the other. Heaven! I’ll miss tomatoes.

Summer fruit.

As with tomatoes – but not, for whatever reason, corn on the cob – you can get decent fruit pretty much all year round, and if you’re willing to pay enough, fruits are rarely out of season. But I’m not always willing to pay enough, and I’ll miss cherries, plums, nectarines, and peaches. Also the occasional tiny Maine wild blueberries that show up in the market – so much better than the more commercial versions, the blueberries the size of marbles. Wild blueberries. Just like the ones we used to pick in the woods when I was a kid. Yum! (Kicking myself for not getting an extra pint or two for the freezer when they had them at Roche Brothers.) I’ll miss summer fruit.

Baseball.

Despite the Red Sox crash and burn season, I will miss the Boys of Summer. I know, I know, there’s still another week. And I’m going to the final game of this lackluster season on Sunday. And beyond that, there’s the postseason, which runs until the end of October, and which I do keep an eye on, even if the Olde Towne Team fails to make it. (Looking at you, Cleveland, to come through…) But it’s not the same as watching your team during the regular. No more Jerry Remy, no more Eck. There’s always next year. I’ll miss baseball, even though I do have another month plus of it.

Light. Mostly what I’ll miss is the light.

Most evenings, I take a brief walk – a half hour or so – and most evenings I head for the Esplanade, which runs along the Charles River, or the Boston Public Garden. I do walk both of these locations year-round, but in the summer, in the evening, they’re full of folks, and very safe-feeling as long as there’s still some light. Within the next few weeks, I’ll have to switch my evening walk mode to after dark. Which means walking along Charles or Newbury. Fine. Interesting. Good window shopping. People around. But it’s not quite the same as an evening walk along the river or through the beauteous Boston Public Garden, where if you’re lucky the Dirty Water Brass Band or the Saxyderms (a sax ensemble that started out at Tufts, which has Jumbo the Elephant – a pachyderm  - as their mascot) are giving a little concert. (Meanwhile, the swan boats have already been retired for the season. Wish they’d leave them in the water until Columbus Day, but I think that once the college kids who pedal them go back to school, they’re hard put to find workers.)

Time does seem to go by faster as you get older. And there’s even some science to back up the fact that this perception may well be a reality (dopamine levels dropping, etc.). But this summer really seemed to fly by.

I need to figure out how to slow this down. Or just do a better job trying not to waste a season.

Seriously, folks, how many more summers do I have left?

Actuarially speaking, I should make it another 87 and a half years. So a few more summers, falls, winters, springs.

Let’s see if I can make a bit more out of this new season. There’s the financials, the closet, the novel, the 10 pounds. But I’ve got until the end of December. Plenty of time…

Suffering from RBF? There’s a fix for that…

I’ve neve given it much thought, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I have something of a Resting Bitch Face. After all, while I’m plenty friendly, I’m an introvert and I’m no one’s idea of a smiley face kind of gal. No one’s idea of Little Miss Sunshine. So I don’t stand around or walk around with a slap-happy look on my puss. When I’m standing around or walking around, I’m thinking. And when I’m thinking, it’s mostly about the State of the Universe. No laughing matter, that.

Like most women I know, I’m annoyed when a man, generally a complete stranger and never anyone I’d be interested in knowing, tells me to “Smile.”  It’s always a man. Seriously, has any women ever walked by someone on the street and uttered the word “smile” to the person she’s passing by? Anyway, it’s happened to me often enough that I suspect I may have a bit of RBF going on.

And even if I were to find out that I’ve got an extreme RBF, I wouldn’t bother to do anything about it. I’m not running for Mrs. America. I’m not looking to get promoted. I’m not looking to sell something to anyone. I’m not looking to get picked up. And I’m not looking to knee-jerk respond to the man in the street who wants me to smile.

But there are apparently plenty of women out there who aren’t happy with what they’re seeing in the selfies they’re posting on Insta. So they’re turning to plastic surgeons for the fix.

“This is actually a common request from patients — I get several each week,” says Dr. David Shafer, a double board-certified plastic surgeon and medical director of Shafer Plastic Surgery & Laser Center in Midtown.

“They may not always use the words ‘resting bitch face,’ but if I mention ‘RBF,’ they say, ‘exactly.’” (Source: NY Post)

Fortunately, the cure for RBF – other than not giving a damn – doesn’t require surgery, just “the injection of fillers into the face and sometimes Botox.” It runs anywhere from $500 to $5,000, and a procedure can last up to two years.

The increase in requests to do something about RBF is attributed to the Kardashians, who are responsible to some degree for “a public shift in focus from the upper to lower face.” Oh, those Kardashians. There’s no end to the good they do. The K’s are more focused on lip plumping, but while you’re down there…

There’s no set approach for fixing RBF – each doctor has their own process. One doctor “injects filers into their [patients’] marionette lines.”

Marionette lines? Are they part and parcel to an RBF, or is starting to look like Howdy Doody or Knucklehead Smith something entirely else women of a certain age need to worry about?

Then there are the women getting butt injections to boost their booties.

Lordy, lordy, lord.

One of my hard and fast health rules is not to take any pill I don’t absolutely need and not to inject any weird chemicals into my body that’s not, say, a flu shot.

It’s pretty easy for me to believe that getting shot upt with Botox or any other marionette filler might have some long run not-great-for-your-health implications.

Guess I’ll just have to live with whatever degree of RBF I’m blessed with.

Just don’t ask me to smile.

Oh Canada….

I knoh, I kno: it’s O Canada. But we’re not talking the Canadian national anthem – dandy tune that it is – we’re talking the country, which I visited last week. And a dandy country it is.

I’ve always wanted to visit the Maritimes – at least since I read Anne of Green Gables and/or first heard Paul Simon’s Duncan, one of his short-story-of-a-song in which Lincoln Duncan tells about leaving his home in the Maritimes. Yes, I want to get to Prince Edward Island some day (c.f., Anne of Green Gables). And I want to get to Nova Scotia some day. After all, I’m a city girl and Nova Scotia’s where the only Maritime city of appreciable size (Halifax) lies. And I want to get to Newfoundland some day: cool dogs.

But you have to start somewhere, so I started with New Brunswick.

Between Bangor, Maine and the Canadian border crossing, things are pretty bleak. As in Beans of Egypt Maine bleak. A good reminder that there’s plenty of depressed and depressing flyover country in New England, too.

Not that urban squalor is any fun, but I’d take being poor in a city over poor way out in the country in my ramshackle trailer any old day. Sure, big cities have food deserts, but out in the middle of nowhere there are everything deserts: nothing stimulating, nothing entertaining, nothing interesting, nothing to do. It’s no surprise that the opioid epidemic has such deep roots in areas like rural Maine.

Once we reached Canada, it may have been my imagination – after all, I was relieved and delighted to be in a country lead by someone intelligent, articulate and principled – but things seemed to pick up. The houses were neater. (Skies bluer, sun shinier.)

Our stop was St. Andrews, a very British-y tourist town, where we stayed at an old-fashioned, very British-y upscale resort.

Our purpose in St. Andrews was that it’s sort of near Campobello, the summer home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the prime purpose behind our trip. (See yesterday’s post.)

Getting to Campobello required some island hopping via ferry, and it brought us through a couple of areas that could almost rival northern Maine for their rundown-ness. Maybe it was my imagination again, but nothing seemed nearly as bleak as those spots in Maine. Was it Justin Trudeau? National health insurance? Fewer worries about getting mowed down by some maniac wielding an AK-47? Sure, these little Canadian fishing villages weren’t exactly prosperous. Still…

Canada just seems better, nicer, saner than the States. Admittedly, it’s generally easier to fall for a place where you don’t know where the bodies are buried, where all the warts are. Still…

Anyway, Campobello Island was wonderful, but we wanted to experience more of New Brunswick’s charms.

Why not St. Stephen? It is, after all, Canada’s Chocolate Town, home of Ganong Chocolates. So what if we’d never heard of St. Stephen? Or Ganong? There’s a chocolate museum in St. Stephen. We’re off!

The museum is in the building that housed the old Ganong chocolate factory, in downtown St. Stephen, and while it’s not worth a trip to New Brunswick, it’s definitely worth a stop if you’re in the ‘hood.

It has a bit about the history of chocolate, but the museum is largely devoted to Ganong Chocolates, a family owned business – now run by the 5th generation of Ganongs – that’s been around since the late 1800’s. That’s when Ganong Numero Uno is said to have been the first in North America to wrap a piece of chocolate and turn it into the candy bar as we know it today. They were also the first to introduce the Valentine-shaped candy box. (Awwwww…)

The museum features a several decades old video of the old, unautomated Ganong factory. The video was very sweet, mentioning most of the featured employees by name, and shows how the candy is made. Believe it or not, it’s actually fascinating to watch someone construct a candy box, or hand dip chocolates. (Talk about up to your elbows in chocolate.)

Another video features Whidden Ganong, the third gen to run the company. It was made when Whidden (now long dead) was in his 90’s, but hearing him recount his history with the company was quite interesting. Quite a character, Whidden courted the best chocolate dipper in the world – one Eleanor Deacon – for 14 years before marrying her. Eleanor had grown up quite poor – as Whidden told us, she had to trap weasels to make money to buy clothing (I heard this as poor Eleanor actually wore clothing made out of weasel, but I’m trusting my sister here). So  marrying into the Ganong family must have been quite a step up. I do believe that even post marriage, Eleanor continued to dip chocolates.

Among Ganong specialties are the Chicken Bone – cinnamon hard candy with a chocolate center. Sounds ghastly, but it’s okay. Better, though, is the Marrow Bone: a Chicken Bone wrapped in dark chocolate. Yum!

I bought a few to take home at the candy shop attached to the museum, and also took a chance on a Pal-O-Mine candy bar. I opened it with some trepidation – it could have been one of those awful old timey “treats” – but it was actually quite good. If you’re in Canada and see one in a gas station, don’t hesitate.

I took a pass on the gigunda box of chocolates – 3.5 pounds – that’s a Ganong Christmas favorite. It’s a tricky one, as there’s no key to what you’re getting. We all know square is something chewy, oval is something soft-centered, but beyond that, until you memorize what each of the squiggles means, you’re one your own.

St. Stephen/Ganong was an altogether excellent stop. The border crossing there is easy-peasy, too.

From St. Stephen, to quote Lincoln Duncan of Pau Simon fame, we “headed down the turnpike for New England, sweet New England.”

We spent our final night in Bar Harbor, where there was plenty to see, shop, and eat.

But, Oh Canada, I really enjoyed my time up north.

With Franklin and Eleanor at Campobello

Last week, I went on a road trip to New Brunswick, Canada. My traveling companions and I are all celebrating landmark birthdays this year – my sister Trish just turned 60; our friend Michele turned 65 (and retired); and for me, the big 7-0 is just around the corner – and we wanted to do something to mark the occasion. Our initial quasi-plan was Iceland, but we couldn’t quite agree on the plot. But we’re all Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt fans, and Campobello (where they summered) was a close second to Iceland anyway. So Campobello it was.

We stayed in the charming seaside town of St. Andrews, where we treated ourselves to rooms at The Algonquin, one of those grande dame resort hotels from the late 1800’s. The actual building we stayed in is massive Tudor-style pile which replaced the original, which burned down in 1912. We think that our rooms, which had smaller windows and were on the top floor, were originally used as servants quarters. Seemed fitting, as any of our ancestors who would have made it to The Algonquin would definitely have bunked in the servants’ rooms.

Anyway, the hotel was just lovely, and walking distance to St. Andrews downtown. Quaint enough, but not much for shopping. We did have a very enjoyable dinner at the Niger Reef Tea House, where we were able to eat out overlooking the water.

St. Andrews to Campobello is a straightforward – sorta – jaunt. You drive to the town of George and take a regular old ferry to Deer Island. You then drive the length of Deer Island on one of the two roads that runs down its sides, and stop when you see a line of cars pulled over to the side of a dead end road. There are no signs, but some of those in line had a bit of info to share: trips on the hour, cash only, no toilet on board. (Porta-potty in the weeds on the side of the boat.)

There was no infrastructure, no pier, no boat ramp. Eventually, a barge being herded along by some sort of half-tugboat/half-swivel chair hoved into the inlet, and let down its ramp right there in the muck.

Half and hour later we pulled into an even less impressive and even more poorly marked inlet.

Campobello. We had arrived on the island.

The Roosevelt home, part of a national park jointly administered by the US and Canada (and FREE!) is close by.

The setting for Franklin and Eleanor’s “cottage” is just spectacular. Pine trees, craggy cliffs, water. The best of Maine/the Maritimes. (Campobello is in New Brunswick, but looks across the water to the States.) The day was gorgeous – sunny, cloudless skies, mid-sixties – and the tour of the Roosevelt cottage was (mostly) excellent.

I just loved this house. If a 34 room cottage (18 BR, 6 baths) can be described as modest and simple, this one is. All the rooms are light and airy, and most of the bedrooms have twin beds (which look pretty swayback, after all these years, and were probably not all that comfortable – horsehair – to being with), including the guest rooms. And – get this – some of the rooms on the bedroom floor were used by the servants. So FDR and Eleanor were just down the hall from their cook and maids.

Wanting to put a stamp on this house (in a way that she wasn’t able to with her New York City home, which was pretty much dictated by her harridan of a mother-in-law), Eleanor used a lot of floral wallpaper throughout the house. I’m not all that much of a wallpaper person, but I loved some of the patterns, especially the hydrangea and forget-me-not patterns.

The furniture was simple and comfortable. (The antithesis of Mar-a-Lago, for sure.)

The house definitely looked lived in. (Although FDR wasn’t able to get there after 1939, since the island couldn’t be properly secured during wartime, the family spent summers there regularly throughout their marriage. FDR had spent his childhood summers there, as well. Eleanor visited Campobello up until her death.)

There are some personal items scattered throughout. Nowhere near as much as is on display at the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, but we did get to see a Franklin hat and ashtray, and Eleanor’s knitting.

My one complaint was with the tour narrator, who didn’t appear to think much of Eleanor, going out of his way to criticize her capabilities as a mother – and going out of his way to build up her MIL, Sara Delano Roosevelt.

Eleanor was admittedly not mother-of-the-year, had difficulty relating to her children, and spent much of their childhoods doing community good and ignoring her brood. Eleanor had suffered a difficult childhood herself. She was orphaned by the age of 10 and was shipped off to a European boarding school as an early teen. (Not an altogether bad thing, as it was there that she blossomed.)

Anyway, her parenting upshot (and let’s not leave Franklin out here; he may have been the emotional parent, but he had his flaws, too) was that her children all ended up with somewhat dysfunctional lives – the five who survived to adulthood had 19 marriages under their collective belts. But given everything she accomplished in her life, I’ll give Eleanor – a woman ahead of her time, chafing under the constrictions of an oppressive family life, however privileged hers may have been – a pass here.

The read on Eleanor was more positive when we went to “Tea with Eleanor,” held at a nearby (more modest) cottage on the park grounds.

I was expecting a costumed Eleanor, but as it turns out, Eleanor’s grandchildren – a number of them actively involved in Campobello on an ongoing basis – didn’t want an Eleanor impersonator. No, the requirements for the presenters at tea with Eleanor is that they develop an expertise in some aspect of Eleanor’s life. Ours focused on Eleanor’s humanitarian work.

I knew some of the stories – the DAR’s refusal to allow Marian Anderson perform at Constitution Hall; her Civil Rights work; her meeting with the Tuskegee Airmen; her other visits with the troops throughout the War – but hadn’t heard the one about getting a gun license to protect herself from the Ku Klux Klan who had threatened her life. (I’d seen her gun license on display at Hyde Park, but didn’t know the story behind it.)

The narrator also got in a bit of a dig (deserved, IMO) at Sara.

Anyway, as an admirer of the Roosevelts, I was very moved to see their summer place.

Sure, I know they weren’t perfect. FDR authorized internment for Japanese-Americans; FDR let the State Department refuse Jewish refugees into the country. But he was the right man for the time and the job. He helped the country (and democracy) survive the Great Depression, and led the country well during World War II.

Wouldn’t it be nice…Sigh…

As for Eleanor, whatever her failures as a parent, she was a brilliant and accomplished humanitarian. I was thrilled to walk in her footsteps, and look out the windows that she had.

I suppose I should include a picture of the Roosevelts at Campobello. Or the “cottage.” Or the gorgeous view.

But this picture of Eleanor, aged 70, schlepping her own bag at La Guardia Airport is pretty much my favorite.

Wouldn’t it be nice… Sigh…

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Some readers haven’t been able to see the pictures I embed. I haven’t tracked down the problem yet. Here’s the link to the ER picture.

Reputation for sale, Part Two

I’m an MIT alum. No, not a real alum. That honor goes to those brass rat ring-wearing folks who got their undergraduate degree from the ‘tute. The only relationship I had with MIT as an undergrad was that I worked one year as a grill cook/soda jerk in Twenty Chimneys, the campus snack bar.

No, I’m an alum courtesy of their business school. And even though I know that, to insiders, my MIT degree is the equivalent of a certificate in basket weave, it means something to outsiders, conferring intelligence, attainment, and seriousness of purpose. In other words, a good brand. And I’m proud of my association with this institution.

That said, I’ve donated very rarely, and very little over the years – maybe $1K total, maybe $2K. And mostly when the class agent called me directly during a reunion year. Certainly not much by MIT’s standards.

My rationale has been that there are better places for me to place my philanthropic dollar and, besides, MIT surely has bigger donor trees to bark up: grads who’ve made it big, foundations, those who just want to be associated with MIT’s luster…

Ah, but that latter category is where MIT is running into trouble…

It may not be in the news worldwide, but the Boston papers have been all astir with the revelation the late and nowhere as far as I can tell lamented Jeffrey Epstein donated oodles of money on the down low over the years to MIT’s Media Lab.

Now Media Lab doesn’t sound like much. Glorified AV Club? Students playing around with social media?

But it’s pretty prestigious, and kind of a big deal.

Here’s how they talk about themselves:

The Lab creates disruptive technologies that happen at the edges, pioneering such areas as wearable computing, tangible interfaces, and affective computing….

…for over 30 years Media Lab researchers have anticipated and created technologies to make our lives safer, cleaner, healthier, fairer, and more productive. But along with benefits, technology’s everyday efficiencies have also brought their share of issues: obesity, poverty, ethical implications, bullying, divergent politics. The Media Lab’s antidisciplinary research community is uniquely equipped to address these concerns, leveraging the best that technology has to offer, and connecting technology back to the social and the human. Current Lab research examines the deeper implications of where technology creation and adoption has led us—and where we want to go next. (Source: MIT Media Lab)

A mouthful, for sure, and you can see that they’re plenty high on themselves.

They’ve had some reason to be.

I’ve heard big machers from the Lab speak a number of times over the years, and what they have to say has always been fascinating.

But it might be time to start thinking about the ethical implications of their donor practices.

Here’s what’s been happening re: Jeffrey Epstein.

The MIT Media Lab had been taking quite a bit of money from Jeffrey Epstein, and had been using his help to woo in other big-donors.

They did this on the condition that Epstein not be allowed to take public credit for the donations, and use his philanthropy as part of a reputation rehabilitation tour after his earlier sex crimes conviction. But MIT was plenty happy to take his money.

First indications were that the Media Lab had gone rogue, acting on their own to secure the money and covering things up as “anonymous” donations. Joi Ito, head of the Lab, was forced out.

But according to e-mails that circulated in 2014 and 2015 among university officials, at least two top MIT fund-raisers, along with a finance department administrator, were aware of Epstein’s involvement in the Media Lab and knew that his donations were to be treated as anonymous in the university’s donor tracking system. (Source: Boston Globe)

We learned this thanks to a whistle blower.

But wait, there’s more. There’s always more.

The other day, in an email sent to all alums, MIT President Rafael Reif informed us that the school had retained Goodwin Procter (big time Boston law firm) to figure out what had been going on between MIT and Epstein.

Turns out one of the things they found out was the Reif himself, shortly after he became president, had signed a TY note to Epstein.

Now, Reif was probably signing a stack of letters, and I’m pretty sure that this will turn out to be 100% innocent. Pretty sure. But it does add further embarrassment, when there’s already enough of that to go around.

I know I’ve already said this, but wait, there’s more. There’s always more.

Neri Oxman is an architect/designer/professor associated with the Media Lab. A few years back, her group got a relatively modest (or so it appears at this time) donation from Epstein. $125K. In keeping with the MIT omerta regarding Epstein, she was told to keep it under wraps. Oxman has also stated:

“Joi [Ito] assured me that Epstein was an approved donor who wished to devote his fortune to science and technology, in part to make amends for wrongs he committed earlier in his life.” (Source: Boston Globe)

In return for the donations, Oxman was asked to write thank you notes to Epstein.

Then Ito upped the ante. He:

…requested that her design lab, which often produced donor gifts for the university, send a token of appreciation to Epstein: a grapefruit-sized, 3-D printed marble with a base that lit up. It came with a pair of gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on the surface.She complied, and asked lab members to mail it to Epstein’s Manhattan address.

So now there are students lightly implicated – and ticked off. They felt pressured to work on the grapefruit-sized 3-D printed marble with the light up base, even though at least one of them knew Epstein was a sleaze. She pushed back initially, but in the end gave in to the pressure.

Oxman was also feeling pressured:

At the time, she was trying to win tenure in a male-dominated world by showing she could publish significant research, produce enough groundbreaking work, and raise enough money to support the lab’s mission. Oxman became a tenured professor in 2017.

I know I’ve already said this, but wait, there’s more. There’s always more.

Oxman’s husband is Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire.

He jumped in at some point, writing to Ito about how worried he was that Oxman would:

“be forced into a position where to protext her name she is required to be transparent about everything that took place at MIT with Epstein.”

“Once her name appears in the press, she will face a barrage of questions, and anything other than perfect transparency to the media will make her look like she is hiding something. This has regretfully become a witch hunt.”

As, in fact, has happened, although I don’t necessarily see that going after those who benefited from Epstein’s donations even though they knew he was a truly depraved individual should be categorized as a witch hunt. Sometimes there are actually witches worth hunting.

I’m sorry to see MIT caught up in this. (I’d so much rather it be Harvard…) But you take dirty money, your hands don’t stay clean. The fact that MIT wanted to keep the Epstein money quiet tells us all we need to know.

Betcha it won’t be too long before I get to, once again, write ‘but wait, there’s more.’

There’s always more.

Reputation for sale, Part One

Lisa Bloom is one of those power attorneys who manages to make here way into the news with some regularity. Like her even more in-the-public-eye mother, Gloria Allred, Bloom is regarded – or was – as a feminist, often defending the rights of victims of sexual harassment and/or assault. She was instrumental in getting Bill O’Reilly ousted from Fox. More recently, she’s been high profiling by representing victims of Jeffrey Epstein.

And now it’s been chronicled in a new book She Said, which details the New York Times’s exposé of ultra-predator Harvey Weinstein that Bloom is also capable of playing for the other side. It’s alleged that she not just stood up for Weinstein, but that she was willing to do so by speaking out against the women who were accusing Weinstein. Oh.

Six months before the Times began its investigation into Weinstein, Lisa Bloom, a civil rights attorney known for representing female assault victims and the daughter of famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, wedged herself in the producer’s corner. Her role, she proposed in a startling private memo, would be to use her insider knowledge of victimology to attack Weinstein’s victims.

Regarding Rose McGowan, an early accuser, Bloom told Weinstein, “I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them.” She suggested a “counterops online campaign to push back and call her out as a pathological liar.” She educated Weinstein on “reputation management,” and encouraged him to stage preemptive television interviews, wherein he would invoke his deceased mother and claim that her passing had caused him to “evolve” on women’s issues. (Source: WaPo)

Wow.

Weinstein evolved on women’s issues, alright.

Why put your carefully crafted reputation at risk? That oldest of motivations: money, honey. Bloom was looking for a hefty retainer.

In writing about Bloom, WaPo columnist Monica Hesse weaves in the Aunts from The Handmaid’s Tale, the women who policed the state the young, fertile women existed in.

Margaret Atwood has a just out sequel, The Testaments, which I haven’t yet read. Don’t know when I’ll have the heart to read it, but Hesse has done so, and deftly explores the Aunt Lydia-ness of Lisa Bloom.

Eerily The Testaments even has a character who :

…had previously been employed as a judge and an advocate for women. Her opposition to the new regime lasts only a few weeks into her own mistreatment, at which point she’s approached by an official with a job proposal: She can use her prior feminist experience to help manipulate women in the new world order.

Doing so means jettisoning everything she’s ever fought for, but it comes with a heck of a benefits package: power, security and becoming one of the few women still legally allowed to read.

Hesse goes on to point out that Bloom’s advice to Weinstein is pretty garden variety. Not anything that any other “crisis manager” wouldn’t have come up with. That’s how it goes.

It’s that Bloom was willing to sell-out the women she has represented – and, in the case of the women who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein, continues to represent – by using her “insider information” on what makes victims tick to undermine those who were Weinstein’s victims. And given her experience, she did so fully in the know about what “would happen to Weinstein’s victims if [Weinstein’s attorneys] executed [Bloom’s] plan.”

Bloom has apologized, and “has vowed to make her law practice 100 percent victim-focused.”

I never agreed with the sappy Love Story bit that went “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I thought that was BS when I first heard it fifty years ago, and I haven’t changed my opinion at all.

Sometimes you really do have to issue an apology. Easy enough to do. But sometimes it takes more than sorry to get forgiven. Let’s see if Bloom can pull it off.

In addition to a hefty retainer, Lisa Bloom was apparently looking for Weinstein to help her out with a movie project.

Oh. Wow.

Seems like when Bloom looked at the words “Me, Too” she focused a bit to hard on the “me.”

I’m sure that Lisa Bloom will bounce back from all this. As we’ve seen time and again, Fitzgerald was wrong about there being no second acts in American life.

I wouldn’t be surprised if she even gets that movie deal. (Of course, it probably won’t be with Weinstein. His second act may be long in coming.)

Meanwhile, if I were one of Lisa Bloom’s clients, I’d be thinking twice about moving forward with her.

Let me voice my concern here

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the technical “improvements” that are enabling deepfake videos. These videos are getting slicker and slicker, to the degree that it’s nearly impossible to detect that they’re fakes.

As if we don’t have enough disinformation floating around out there – and as if politicians don’t actually say enough unbelievable things already (forget the bad actor sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Sharpie in hand; has anyone caught Boris Johnson lately?) – but just the idea of all  these seemingly credible videos out there further undermining our fragile polity. Oh, no, Mr. Bill.

And. Now. This.

Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive’s speech and dupe his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, the company’s insurer said, in a remarkable case that some researchers are calling one of the world’s first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists. (Source: WaPo)

This happened at a British energy company, where last March a pretty senior employee – senior enough to have big-buck authorization - believing that he was on the horn with his even more senior boss, went ahead and wired – as requested – $240K to an account in Hungary. (Hungary? Is Hungary the new Russia? The new Nigeria?)

The employee admitted that he had found the request “rather strange”…”but the voice was so lifelike that he felt he had no choice but to comply.”

Our voices are pretty much like fingerprints.

Oh, there can be near duplicates.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Zac Brown Band concert at Fenway. (Excellent, by the way, except for the head-banging metal encores. I didn’t like loud music like this when I was young, let alone as I’ve gotten older – even with my hearing slightly diminished. Blessedly, the bulk of the concert was ZBB’s great combo of country, ballad, Jimmy Buffet…They even covered James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James.)

We didn’t know ahead of time who the opening act was, and as I walked in with my sister and niece, we heard a very familiar voice. A voice that sounded just like Willie Nelson. No, it wasn’t Willie. It was his son Lukas, who sounds exactly like his old man. Only he’s really good looking. (Sorry Willie.) And quite good. I will be buying his band’s CD.

Then there’s me and my sisters. We don’t look alike, but our voices (and coughs) are remarkably similar. When we would call my mother, we would sometimes string her along, not giving her an immediate hint about which one of us she was talking to.

And we’ve all heard impersonators who sound uncannily like the person they’re imitating.

But we all recognize voices – sometimes even more quickly than we do faces.

Years ago, when Boston Celtic Reggie Lewis died suddenly, my brother Tom, out on the West Coast with the news on, looked up when he recognized the voice of the doctor who had declared Lewis dead as she was interviewed on national TV. That doctor was the daughter of my mother’s closest friend, and we’d all known her forever. She’d even been Tom’s grammar school classmate. He’d known right away that the voice was that of Mickey McGinn.

Anyway, voice faking software – “ultra-realistic voice cloning” - is coming out of biggies like Google and start ups alike. This sofware:

…can copy the rhythms and intonations of a person’s voice and be used to produce convincing speech.

And they’re out there for free.

As always with emerging technology, there are noble uses:

Developers of the technology have pointed to its positive uses, saying it can help humanize automated phone systems and help mute people speak again.

Yes, and more likely to be used for nefarious purposes.

The Hungarian swindle is one of at least three instances that Symantec has found of executive’s voices being mimicked to swindle companies.

Lyrebird, an AI startup that’s unleashed one of these voice faking apps, noting that the technology is inevitable – which is so true – has this to say in its ethics statement:

“Imagine that we had decided not to release this technology at all. Others would develop it and who knows if their intentions would be as sincere as ours.”

The only way to stop a bad guy with voice faking technology is a good guy with voice faking technology? Or is it the other way around?

The technology is still not fully refined:

But in some cases, thieves have employed methods to explain the quirks away, saying the fake audio’s background noises, glitchy sounds or delayed responses are actually due to the speaker being in an elevator, in a car or in a rush to the next flight.

The scammers are also savvy about who to go after – those with the authority to wire money off ASAP – and they create a sense of urgency: have to have it now! – that makes someone more likely to take care of the request ASAP. Hey, it’s Mr. Big, and he needs a quarter-of-a-mill to go to Hungary. Here you go.

After their first energy company scam was successful, the scammers called back again. This time, the employer called his boss. And while he was on the phone with his boss, the fake boss called back. Bad timing!

Google and other AI developers are “working to build systems that can detect and combat fake audio, but the voice-mimicking technology is evolving rapidly.” And, of course, they’re the same folks who are developing the voice faking technology to begin with.

“There’s a tension in the commercial space between wanting to make the best product and considering the bad applications that product could have,” said Charlotte Stanton, the director of the Silicon Valley office of the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Sort of like Sackler/Purdue Pharma unleashing OxyContin on an unsuspecting world, and then turn around and develop an antidote.

“Researchers need to be more cautious as they release technology as powerful as voice-synthesis technology, because clearly it’s at a point where it can be misused."

Oy!

I hate to admit it, but sometimes I wouldn’t mind going back to the good old days. No, not the bad ones. But maybe if we could have a decade back, knowing what we know now…

Future Equinox Member? NOT!

Well, it didn’t exactly have my name on it – but they got my unit number right – so I’ll take being addressed as “Future Equinox Member” personally. I’m good with it. Other than the fact that I’m not a “Future Equinox Member.”

Not that I shouldn’t get fitter. There’s certainly less that I can eat and more that I can do.

But so far, so good, health-wise. And I still manage to average 5 miles a day on foot.

Anyway, I’ve never gotten a flyer from Equinox before, so I’m guessing the boycott may be getting to them a tiny bit. And, in truth, if I were going to upgrade my gym, Equinox and Soul Cycle - both partially owned by a major DJT financial backer – would be way at the bottom of the list. Sure, Equinox and Soul Cycle claim that Stephen Ross has nada to do with how they run (or pedal).. But if some of their profits go out their door and briefly into the pocket of Stephen Ross before passing into the coffers of Trump 2020, well my not joining is a no brainer.

Anyway, I already have a gym.

Sure, it’s a dump, but it’s my dump. It’s friendly, cheap, low key and, while there are some beautiful young things there – mostly as PT patients, as my gym is mostly a PT facility (and runners haven) that offers fitness membership at low cost to PT alums – most of us are there wearing ratty t-shirts and beat up sneakers. No one wears makeup. No one looks groomed. Us regulars – and I have a crew of gym buds – tend to laugh a lot.

The AC is terrible, and in the winter it’s alternately freezing or broiling. Our equipment isn’t exactly glam either. We have two new ellipticals, but a lot of the gear is rundown. When it starts to fall apart, there are gerry-rigged fixes. Duck tape abounds, and I often end up with some gummy residue on my workout pants. Thank heavens for goof off!

We have a TV, which a few years back us regulars chipped in for. It’s generally tuned to either ESPN or CNN, with an occasional tune-in to MSNBC. The head guy is an unapologetic liberal. I can’t imagine anyone trying to put Fox News on.

But I’ve been going there for over 10 years now, I’ve gotten sucked into heling out with the charity founded by the guy who runs the place, and it’s something of a home-away-from-home three mornings a week.

As it turns out, my gym is on the same street as one of the Boston Equinoxes, or as a Latin purist might say, Equinoctes. And that’s about where the resemblance ends.

My gym is no one’s idea of “the epitome of elegance.” We don’t have a chandelier, spiral staircase, 18-foot windows or a vaulted skylight. But we do have balloons throughout the gym and throughout the year. Depending on whether one of “our teams” is in the playoffs, there’ll be red-white-blue (Red Sox or Pats); green for the Celts; black and gold for the Bruins. For the Marathon – and a lot of the PT clients and gym rats are serious runners – we have blue and yellow. Then there’s the obvious color schemes for Halloween, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s, the Fourth. Admittedly, the balloons for the Fourth of July this year were light pink, baby blue, and white rather than red, white and blue, so it looked more like we were setting up for a baby shower, rather than Independence Day.

And we don’t have “luxe amenities.” Our towels aren’t eucalyptus towels. In fact, they’re one step above the shower towels we hand out at the homeless shelter I volunteer at. And we don’t have Kiehl’s products. The hand soap in the ladies’ room is whatever’s on sale at CVS.

Equinox is currently waiving their $300 initiation fee (again, leading me to believe they’ve taken a bit of a hit a, even though I’ve been reading that some of those who’ve tried to take their leave have run into a lot of bureaucratic hurdles). My place doesn’t have one to begin with.

New Equinox members receive a free “propriety fitness assessment.” I’m not quite sure what a “propriety fitness assessment” might be. Fitness according to Emily Post? Do you wear white gloves and keep your pinky up while you’re being assessed? Do you think they mean proprietary? (And I will apologize for the snark. Not like I never made a typo or word-o.)

At my gym, even when you’re not in a PT program, you can get a proprietary assessment any old time from the man in charge or one of his assistants. Ask and you shall receive. My gym is completely open concept: PT-ers rub frozen shoulders with fitness members. No private rooms. We’re all in this together.

Unlike Equinox, we don’t have Tier X, which helps patrons “realize your infinite potential through lifestyle management.” And yet, I do feel that, at my gym, even those of us completely lacking in “infinite potential” are helped to realize whatever it is we got. Lifestyle management? Let’s just say every once in a while – Opening Day of the baseball season, St. Patrick’s Day, the Friday before Super Bowl – you can get a beer and a hot dog from the completely non-OSHA compliant indoor grill.

Sure, Tier X sounds good, but I’ll stack my gym’s ability to support our “unique goals, passions, and personality” up against Equinox any old time. Only we place a lot more emphasis on personality than we do on anything else.

We do, however, fall down when it comes to never letting someone ever reach a plateau. I’ve reached plenty of them, at which point it’s up to me to ask the PT guru or one of the assistants for some help. That said, sometimes they do come over and stick their noses in and make suggestions. Similar, I guess, to the trainers at Equinox, who offer “a few choice words…at the exact moment [their members] need them.”

Sorry, Equinox, but I’ll stick with my home-away-from-homies.

The March of Time

In anniversary terms, the 18th is no big deal. The traditional gift associated with it – yawn – is porcelain. No, it’s just not a biggie.

The first is a biggie. Then 5th, 10th, 20th, 25th, 50th…The further out something gets, the wider the interval of interest. 25th anniversary: BIG ONE. 35th? Meh…Hang on until the 50th, why don’t you.

So, when it comes to observing 9/11 or not, the 18th will pass by with little notice. Oh, the news stations will mention it. I’m sure there’ll be something in NYC to commemorate the terrible event. Trump will likely tweet something about all the funerals he attended not!), the Muslims he saw dancing for joy on the roofs of New Jersey (not!), how one of this buildings became the tallest in NY once the twin towers collapsed (true dat, I think: even a broken clock is right twice a day). Whatever he says, the betting is that Trump’s 9/11 tweet will have DJT at its center.

In Boston, there will probably be a ceremony over at the memorial in the Public Garden which was set up to honor the locals killed on that day: those on American Flight 11 or otherwise caught up in the maelstrom. There’s even a first-responder named, a local fellow who somehow ended up a member of the NYFD.

I walk most days in the Public Garden, so I’ll walk by the memorial at some point today.

I don’t have any direct connection to anyone who died on 9/11. A couple of know-someone-who-knew-someone things, but that’s it. Two guys from the company I was working for were killed. I knew a few witnesses who were working nearby that day. The next day, on a train coming up from Florida, I saw the black cloud over Manhattan as we came out of Newark. Noisy car became a quiet car.

Wherever you were, if you’re old enough, 9/11 is one of those days you remember, even after 18 years.

Seems like only yesterday. After all, time does seem to go a lot faster as you get older – and there’s even some science to back this up.

I’ve been at this (blogging) for a long time, and have done a number of 9/11 posts.

Here’s one from a couple of years back, Blink of an Eye.

Man, do those blinks of the eye come on faster and faster and faster.

Hold me closer, robot dancer

Just when you think there isn’t a darned surprise left in the world, here comes the news that there’s a nightclub that’s starting to use robots as pole dancers. No, that’s not the surprise. The surprise to me is that this is happening in France, rather than in Japan.

France, of all places. The French try to retain language purity, but they don’t even have words for pole dance. Pole dance in French is pole dance. Mon Dieu!

France, of all places.

The country that gave us Cyrano de Bergerac, the poetry of Rimbaud. Jules and Jim, A Man and A Woman, Let’s Make Love. Not to mention Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel.

And let’s not forget champagne, the Eiffel Tower, the bateau mouche, lovers smoking Gauloises in boulevard cafés, and, of course, Apache dancers.

Yikes! The French practically invented modern sex and romance.

Jacques Brel is definitely not alive and well, and I’m guessing that he’s rolling in his grave.

The robots will be deployed at a nightclub in Nantes which is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Nice touch: each robot has a CCTV camera for its head, taking in the crowd, I guess, to see how they’re enjoying the robots pole dancing.

And while they may not have much by way of their heads, you’ll be delighted to learn that the pole dancers are wearing high heels. Sexy, no?

The bots were the brainchild of British artist Giles Walker, who has overlaid their metal bodies with parts from plastic mannequins.

Referring to their CCTV camera heads, he said the robots aimed to "play with the notion of voyeurism", posing the question of "who has the power between the voyeur and the observed person”. (Source: Sky News)

It’s art like this that brings out the philistine in me. Truly, if those CCTV cameras were trained on me, they’d see a head of a philistine on my body.

When I started reading this story, my first thought was a bit of worry for the pole dancers of Nantes. Were they going to lose their jobs at France’s version of the Bada Bing?

I’ve been doing a bit of research on the future of work, and what robotics/AI/machine learning are going to mean for us working stiffs. And what it’s all going to mean is that a lot of working stiff jobs are going bye-bye, to be replaced by TBD.

But there’s good news on the Nantes pole dancer front. The robots are augmenting, not replacing, the 10 human pole dancers the club employees. Instead, the add of the robots is a “way of honoring the technology.”

Honoring technology is a pretty odd concept. Shouldn’t we be honoring people, not things? Let alone things that are out to replace us?

I don’t frequent clubs where pole dancers are featured. I don’t frequent clubs, period. That said, decades ago, I did go to what my husband recalled as a NYC jazz club which had turned into a NYC strip joint. We stayed for a beer, but what struck me the most was that the dancers – there were no pole dancers, back in the day – looked colossally bored. And that they kinda of resembled me and my friends: not much make up, decent looks and bodies, but nothing knock-out-y.

Other than what I gleaned from The Sopranos, I don’t really know what pole dancers look like, what expressions they have on their faces as they dance around their poles. Are they bored? Robot pole dancers wouldn’t be. Do human pole dancers spend their twirling-whirling time faking it for the tips? Robot pole dancers wouldn’t feel compelled to fake anything, but if they did want to fake it, surely that could be programmed in.

The robot pole dancers, by the way, don’t appear to be wearing G-strings either. So where does a patron tuck a bill? Inquiring minds…

All I know is that the world keeps getting weirder and less human-as-we-once-knew-it.

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I doff the Pink Slip cap – and that is all we’re doffing – to my friend Valerie for sending this story my way, knowing full well that I would post about it tout de suite. Merci, V.

Let barking dogs bark!

When I’m out and about early in the morning, when I’m strolling around early in the evening, I sometimes walk by the designated dog play area on Boston Common. It’s not a proper dog park: there’s no fence around it. But it’s a space where dogs are allowed to be off the leash, and folks come out in force before and after work for a big ol’ collective doggo playdate.

I love looking over at all those pups, cavorting around while their folks stand around in clumps chatting, keeping half an eye on their dogs, almost as attentively as they’d watch their kids in the playground. But while you’d probably holler at your kid if they were sniffing another kid’s butt, or barking, those are the types of behaviors that are perfectly fine for the canines around us.

Mostly. At one point, when dogsitting for my sweet and much adored dog-nephew Jack, I took Jack out for a walk. We ran into another dog and its person and, dogs being dogs, the new friends decided to check each other out, doggy style. The woman pulled her pup away, giving him a really strong yank. “Disgusting!” she said. Hmmm. I made a remark about dogs being dogs, but she wasn’t having any of it. I hope she wasn’t the real owner, but just a temporary caretaker who didn’t know anything about normal dog behavior, and what dogs acting naturally actually did.

Speaking of which, I have a neighbor – I’ve yet to see her in the Boston Common communal gathering – who is perfectly lovely. But she rarely takes her Frenchie out for a walk and, in fact, uses diapers and baby wipes on him. Please do not ask me how I know this. I just know. This woman had a previous dog who died, age 5 or so, from a stroke. I firmly believe that poor little one died from stress.

So, even some dog owners don’t know the first thing about dogs.

Then there are the neighbors of a dog park in Chevy Chase Village, a wealthy Maryland suburb, which is posted with signs that read “NO EXCESSIVE BARKING.”

What does that mean?

Excessive barking, in my experience, is a lonely or sad dog, howling all day when their owners are away. Not the sort of touch-and-go playing around that dogs do when they get together. A little woofing here, a little boofing there. A yip or two from the little guys. An occasional growl.

As to that ridiculous sign – after all, dogs can’t read - you really can’t stop a dog from barking unless you’re a meanie willing to clamp your dog’s snout closed or a pushover willing to fatten your pooch up by feeding them perpetual treats.

In Chevy Chase Village:

The drama began last fall when the village spent $134,000 to turn a muddy triangle of land into a park where pups could run off-leash in a fenced refuge. Chase tennis balls. Sniff one another’s butts.

But after about a month, signs decrying the barking of those dogs began appearing around the park. The village police started receiving almost daily calls about the noise, mostly from one particular neighbor whose house backs up to the park. By spring, the tension had escalated so much that the Chevy Chase Village Board of Managers called a public hearing. Then another in June. And another in July. (Source: Washington Post)

Dog owners who frequent the park are trying to keep their dogs quiet. And the town pushed the opening time from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. They’ve even removed mention of the park from their website, hoping to limit the number of folks who learn about it. (One of the objections that people voiced was the fact that outsiders were driving in from god-knows-where, i.e., DC, to use the park. So the town board:

…paid $1,300 for a woman with a graduate degree in epidemiology to spend weeks studying the behavior of the dogs and their humans.

The epidemiologist found that the vast majority of those using the dog park were locals who’d walked there.

But on the barking, no conclusion was reached.

The most aggrieved neighbor – the one who has called the police to complain a few times – is ticked off that “she had to turn on music inside her home so she didn’t have to hear the dogs.” She also claims to be a dog lover, a former owner herself. If her dogs dared to bark, she would take them inside. She’s advocating for the fence that fences the puppers in to be taken down, turning the dog park back into a plain old park park. I’m guessing that will keep dogs on the leash – and make life a lot less fun for the furry set.

There’s a public hearing today to decide the park, and the barkers’, fate.

The dog lovers are planning to crowd the hearing, have organized a letter-writing campaign and started a Facebook group, Save the Chevy Chase Dog Park, with more than 100 likes.

Maybe I’ll violate my no FB rule and get on and give them a like.

Sometimes when I walk by the local unofficial dog park, I stop and watch for a bit, thinking about my future doggo and how much fun it will be when Miss Pym (for Barbara Pym) or Rosco (for Roscommon) is flying around with her or his companions, sniffing butts and barking.

Maybe I have a high tolerance for barking dogs, but I’ve never noticed that the dog barking – and, in Boston, we’re talking dozens of frolicking dogs at prime times – is all that terrible.

To the Chevy Chase Park complainers, I say turn up the volume on your music or get yourself some earplugs. Dogs barking in a dog park is the sound of joy. Let barking dogs bark!