Memorial Day 2021

Last year's Memorial Day was cool and murky. This is New England. Cool and murky can happen any time of year. But last year, it definitely fit the mood.

Usually on Memorial Day, a veterans group puts out thousands of flags on the Boston Common: one for each Massachusetts citizen who died fighting for our country from the Revolutionary War on down. Last year, they put out a few hundred, separating each flag from the next by a Covid social distance of six feet. 

Most weekends - especially holiday weekends - Boston is packed. Last year, it wasn't. Sometimes I let these hordes annoy me. Last year, I missed them. I spent the day napping and moping around.

This year, things are looking up.

If we haven't yet completely turned the corner, the corner is well in sight. As of last Tuesday, eight states had given at least one shot to 70%+ of their population. All six New England states were in this group.  (Joined by NJ and Hawaii.) With New England all looking pretty good, it is now safe to walk around the region.

Good thing. Later this week, I'm heading to New Hampshire for a getaway with my sister Trish and niece Molly. Later in the month, I'm off to Vermont. Great escapes!

The Memorial Day weekend weather this year has been no great shakes: cool - make that cold - and rainy. Just about as nasty as last year, but much more bearable because it's not last year. And the May weather was mostly been spectacular. A few hot and muggies, but lots of blue sky, warm breeze days. Perfect for walking around and looking at the flowers, which are more brilliant this year than I remember them.

But that was then, and this is now. Cold, dreary, wet. Only the heartiest of tourists and suburbanites are out walking around.

Of course, the most exciting thing, walk-wise, has been the return of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, which sits just up the hill from where I live, on the edge of the Boston Common, just opposite the State House.

Removed last May for restoration, it was actually brought back in March. They've just been keeping it under wraps. On Friday, they unveiled it, commemorating the day in 1863 when one of the first all-Black (enlisted men, anyway) regiments in the Union Army to see major combat marched down Beacon Hill and off to war. The Massachusetts 54th Regiment was lead by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was white. (Two of Frederick Douglass's sons served in this regiment.)

Shaw was from a wealthy Brahmin family, his parents abolitionists. He was a Harvard man - although he left without graduating. And if you think "Colonel" sounds like someone who's old, Shaw was only 25 when he he was killed leading his men on an assault on Fort Wagner. The 54th suffered casualties of almost 50%. And if the assault was a failure, the battle was deemed glorious. (The movie Glory is based on the story of the 54th Regiment.)

The bronze bas-relief that depicts the soldiers heading off to war was the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It is lovely, a true work of art. I've missed seeing it when I walk by.

I wasn't around for Friday's unveiling. I was out in Worcester, planting flowers on the graves of my parents (sun-patiens, a variety of impatiens that does well in the sun) and my sister (begonias). 

But yesterday I walked by and gave the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial a salute.

Memorial Day was begun to honor those who fought and died in the Civil War. Fitting that the monument is back in place for the celebration of this holiday.

And, yes, the flags are out in their full glory on Boston Common.

I don't know that the words of the Roman poet Horace are necessarily always true. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. (It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.) There are plenty of bad causes that soldiers have died for. But the Civil War - so bloody, so ghastly - was, for the Union soldiers, a righteous one. The cynical may discount the role it played, but ending slavery was a noble purpose. And if we're still fighting that war today - and regrettably we are - then shame on us.

Lots to think about on this Memorial Day. There always is.

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

Here's my original, 2007 Memorial Day post. 

Rat Patrol

There aren't many downsides to having a dog, but one of them is that they've been known to put some pretty nasty things in their mouths. Dead birds. Dead frogs. Cigarette butts. Used tampons. Dog turds. Not to mention the average dog's proclivity for licking their privates, and poking their snouts up another dog's ass. 

So while I'm all in favor of dog licks, I draw the line at a smooch on the lips. You really don't know where that mouth has been. Nor do you want to know. 

I wasn't all that big a fan of Lucy Van Pelt - if we'd had teams back when I was a Peanuts fan, I'd have been Team Linus - but when Lucy shrieked and gagged out "dog lips touched mine," I could sympathize. Could feel her pain. (If one can actually feel the pain of a cartoon character.)

Gotta love dogs, but when they're doing what comes naturally, it can get pretty gross. 

Some NYC dog-owners, however, are not all that skeeved out by what their puppers clamp their jaws down on.

These contrarians are members of the Ryders Alley Trencher-fed Society, or R.A.T.S. for short. They bring their dogs out on rat patrol, patrolling some pretty ultra-rat ridden alleys, trying to make at least a small dent in the city's colossal rat population. Estimate: there's at least one rat per capita in The City. That makes for about 8 million rats. Minus the ones the R.A.T.S. dogs managed to bag on their last outing.

The R.A.T.S. have been at it for a while:

They have been chasing vermin for about 30 years and have maintained their nocturnal meets during the pandemic, albeit slightly less regularly... "They're bred for the job. They're wired for the job. They live for the job," explained [R.A.T.S. organizer Richard Reynolds. (Source: Raw Story)

I'm all for whatever can be done to hold down the rat population. Boston's bad enough. I can only imagine what it's like in New York, home of Pizza Rat and all sorts of other super-sized rodents. The fewer the better. Still, however purpose-built, however "wired" dogs are for the task of rat eradication, I really don't like this idea in the least. 

Shorter-legged dogs such as Jagdterriers flush out rodents from piles of garbage, construction debris and bushes while faster, longer-legged dogs like Bedlingtons stand back, ready to pounce.

"It's a bit like X-Men," says Alex Middleton, a 36-year-old dog trainer. "Each dog has its own superpower."

The real superpower most doggos have - the only they really need - is the famous canine capacity for empathy and affection. 

Reynolds, 77, will sometimes pound trash cans with a metal stick to send rats scurrying, while Middleton frequently drops Rommel, a Jagdterrier, straight into dumpsters.

I suppose that, if you're going to name a dog after a WWII German, Rommel is who you're going to go with. At least he was part of the plot to kill Hitler. And given that the soldiers cavorting around the desert in jeeps in the old TV show Rat Patrol were fighting Rommel's troops, it's sort of fitting in this case. But who names a dog Rommel? 

"Go on Rommel, get it," the group shouts, as the dog thrashes around in the rubbish. Moments later, following several squeaks, Rommel, blood dripping from his mouth, appears with the rat, and the hunters cheer.

I sure wouldn't let a dog who'd just had rat blood dripping from his mouth anywhere near me. At least not until he'd had a nice long slurp from the toilet. Even then...

But that just might be persnickety me. Realistically, no dog owner can be all that fastidious.

Anyway, R.A.T.S. gets its leads from "calls and Facebook messages from rat-troubled residents who are usually most grateful for the group's swift and effective response."

The city government doesn't recommend the practice, citing a risk of dogs catching a serious disease known as leptospirosis. But city officials don't stop the group, because the catchers are not violating its health code.

Leptospirosis, you say? Can that be transmitted to humans. asking for a friend.

Many residents are grateful for R.A.T.S. efforts to help rid the city of rats. The more groups involved, the better. PETA, on the other hand...

Animal rights group PETA's senior director Stephanie Bell described the hunts as "archaic, depraved and illegal."

Not clear whose side PETA's on here, the rats or the dogs, but if they're talking dog, they've got a point.   

In addition to the obvious benefit of getting rid of rats:

The group [R.A.T.S.] sends DNA samples to universities conducting research and provides frozen rats for falcons to eat at a nearby avian rehabilitation center.

As for the members, 

The volunteers say their enjoyment comes from seeing their dogs have fun developing predatory skills.

"We do rat control but that's not really why we're here," said Reynolds. "We're here for the dogs, to work the dogs."

Kim McCormick, a 58-year-old paramedic who makes six-hour round trips from Connecticut to take part, also enjoys the camaraderie among owners.

"It's a whole different world, a whole different way of meeting people. We work together, and the dogs are phenomenal together," she said.

There's an informal group of folks who get together morning and evening in the dog runaround area on the Boston Common. The folks chat while the dogs cavort about, chasing, racing, butt sniffing, and all the other things dogs do. Dogs want and need dog buddies, and if and when I get a dog, I'm sure I'll make my way at least into the periphery of this group. That's enough of a "whole different way of meeting people" for me. 

And, just in case, I've scratched any kind of terrier mutt off of my likely dog list. I wouldn't want any pup of mine racing back to me with a dead rat dangled from its jaws. Guaranteed those dog lips would get nowhere near mine. 

Just in case, I'll have to do a bit of research on disinfectant doggy mouthwash. What works on rat blood? On leptospirosis?

Something to look forward to...

No use brooding over Brood X cicadas

By now, you may have heard about the Brood X cicadas. They're a type of periodical cicada, insects that hunker down underground for long periods then emerge en masse. Brood X-ers are on a 17 year cycle, so they're emerging this spring for the first time since 2004. And trillions of them are expected. 

Okay, while cicadas are in the same family as locusts, they don't cause much by way of devastation. If you're a farmer, they won't chow down your crops. If you're a gardener, they'll leave your fruits and veggies alone. Ditto your flowers. Nor will they destroy your meticulously kept lawn. That is, other than the 3-inch high "chimneys" they may build as they emerge from their 17 years underground. And they are sap suckers, so if you have trees and bushes, you may want to throw a cheesecloth shroud over them to keep them from sucking your sap.

Fortunately, they're not coming to (much or any of) New England. (We don't avoid all plagues. Think gypsy moth.)

But if you live in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, New York, Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, or Washington, D.C., you're either a) experiencing them already, or b) are in for a treat.

Well, not a treat exactly. Unless you're interested in eating them. Which actually I would be, if one presented itself to me. A chocolatier in Maryland is making chocolate covered cicadas. And a chef who specializes in Lao food has whipped up a recipe for what he calls "shrimp of the land."

Seriously, I wouldn't mind trying them. 

I say this although, when I did have an opportunity to eat fried bugs, I took a pass. 

This was way back in the way back, when I was waitressing at a Boston restaurant that will remain nameless. It's still in business, and I'm guessing they've cleaned up their act in the 50 years since it was a rathole in which the cooks regularly fried up a mess of cockroaches and served them, alongside clams, scallops, and shrimp, in the fisherman's platter. 

Cockroaches, of course, are nasty, dirty, slum-lordy little things.  Although we will see that, at times, they have some  pretty peculiar moments, cicadas are, in comparison to cockroaches, well, not nasty, dirty or slum-lordy. Even their name is sort of pleasant sounding.

The big thing the big broody cicadas are known for is the noise they make:

The sound of such a massive swarm is said to reach up to 100 decibels. That's bad news for people who value their sleep. (Source: CBS News)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this noise is mostly rustling, not the high-pitched, dog days of summer piercing whine you hear on a hot August day from whatever cicadas do make it into New England. Not sure what that noise is about. Are the alpha cicadas signaling their cohort to burrow down? Or signal kids that it's time to start assembling your pencil box to go back to school.

The rustling night noise - cicada, grasshoppers - is kind of pleasant, in my recall. On the same level as the wonderful spring sound of peepers. Not that I get much of it here, living in a city. But growing up, there were lawns and woods and a pond down the street, so, yep, there was nature. 

Cicadas don't actually do all that much during their brief time on earth. The shed their skins, which - easy-peasy - turns a nymph into an adult. Grown up cicadas then buzz around, mate, lay eggs, and die. All within a few weeks. A life that can certainly be characterized as short, but not nasty and brutish at all. 

Virginia photographer Oxana Ware is taking advantage of this every 17 year occurrence to create cicada portraits. 

Awwww...

But a cicada's brief time on earth (at least the above ground time) is not all innocence, sweetness, light and par-tay.

As Live Science informs us: "some Brood X cicadas will be sex-crazed zombies with disintegrating butts."

All Brood X cicadas want to do is mate and die in peace — is that so much to ask? Unfortunately, a number of the now-emerging cicadas may instead find themselves the victims of a zombifying fungus that transforms their butts into spore-shedding "fungal gardens."...The fungus eats away at cicada butts, leaving behind a yellowish, abdomen-shaped clump of spores. The fungus also hijacks the cicadas' brains and kicks their sexual behavior into overdrive, Live Science previously reported. (Source: Live Science) 

Don't know whether to say TMI or just plane 'Oh.' Make that 'Oh, no.'

Just as happy that this particular plague of insects isn't heading my way. There's enough to brood about without adding sex-crazed zombie cicadas to the mix.

Native tongue

Next up NH. Then VT. Then RI. At the moment, I don't have any plans to travel anywhere that requires a flight, let alone speaking another language. For now, I'm staying local, with a few out-of-state forays. When I do head overseas again, my first trip is likely to be to Ireland, where my native tongue will suit me just fine. In my many trips there, I've run into plenty of folks who speak Irish (either natively or learned in school). But I've never run into anyone who didn't speak English. 

At one point, I attempted to learn a bit-een of the ol' Irish. 

Although I (usually) have a good ear for languages, I found Irish impenetrable. Even when I was in a pub in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking part of Ireland), and locals were gabbing away in Irish, if I had just been plunked down there without knowing where I was, it wasn't clear to me that I'd have known that they were speaking Irish, and not some other unfathomable tongue. It should go without saying that Irish speakers found my attempts pretty impenetrable, too, so we were pretty much even. 

I was okay with please and thankful, but in Connemara, my attempt to order a piece of apple pie was met with this response: "I know you're trying to order something, darlin', but I don't know what it is."

In truth, I didn't really want apple pie. It was just that it was one of the few things that stuck with me from the tapes I had attempted to learn from. 

My one smattering-of-Irish "success" came later in the trip, in a cab in Dublin.

The driver was going on about how he hadn't learned Irish in school - it hadn't been taught back in his day - but that he'd recently decided to acquire his native tongue. There were so many wonderful Irish expressions, he told us. His favorite: Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin. Ah, I told him: There's no fireplace like your own fireplace.

How do you know that, he asked me.

Turns out, he had acquired his native tongue from the same tapes I was using in my pathetic attempts to go native.

Nevertheless, I persist. Whenever I travel to a foreign-language clime, I bring along a phrase book and manage to limp along with please-thankyou-good morning-good night-where-when-how much.

I can do a bit better than that in Spanish (2 years in junior high; one year in college), French (3 years high school), German (a few words acquired via osmosis from my native speaking mother, and a few more words picked up via the free language "learning" app DuoLingo). 

But the best I can do is present tense, kindergarten level vocabulary.

I can generally make myself understood, but I fall down completely when it comes to understanding. Unless I'm speaking with a non-native Spanish, French, or German speaker whose skills are as limited as mine.

But the thing is, there are an awful lot of places (c.f., much of Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world) where you really don't have to know any language other than English. Where Esperanto failed, English - thanks to entertainment and commerce - has succeeded. 

So, like most Americans, I enjoy the fruits of English hegemony.

Looks like the Brits are doing the same. 

Aston university in Birmingham is closing the department that teaches languages and translation. The University of Sheffield stands accused of sending its language students on dumbed-down courses to save money. Fewer pupils at British schools are taking foreign-language exams (a drop in French, the most popular choice, accounts for most of the decline). A hasty analysis might see this trend as a nationalist, populist, post-Brexit mindset at work. But it has been gathering for a long time, not just in Britain but in America, and not just in the Brexit and Trump eras, but well before them...The most recent research in America by the Modern Language Association found a drop of 9.2% in enrolment in university-level foreign-languages courses between 2013 and 2016. (Source: The Economist)

It's not that non-native-English-speaking Europeans and others who've become fluent in English are morally or intellectually superior to us sluggards. They've needed to pick up English to get around. If you're Hungarian or Dutch or Finnish or whatever, it would be futile and foolish to expect to find your language spoken when you stepped toe out of your native land. 

Still, as The Economist argues, there are reasons for us English speakers to learn another language, even if we're never going to attain flawless fluency. Even if we're just going to stay at the "half-knowledge" level where you develop a vocabulary and some knowledge of grammar, where you can communicate with those at your minimal level, but really couldn't hold a deep conversation or easily read anything more complicated and meaningful than a menu. (This is the highest level I've ever achieved.)

But there are reasons to get smart in another language.

If you're ever going to move abroad, it would be helpful to be able to be able to make small talk with the baker or watch some TV. Even if you're just traveling someplace, people do tend to appreciate it when you make your (however feeble) attempts to speak their native tongue, rather than assume everyone speaks English. And these attempts are fun. I've always enjoyed doing it, anyway.

And learning a foreign language can just plain be its own reward. (Or so I told myself after taking 4 years of high school Latin.) Plus:

Researchers have even found that people make more rational decisions when speaking another language.

Does this mean that, if I'd been ordering in Romanian, I might not have purchased the pricey rowing machine I bought last October, and which still remains unused. The other day, I did move it into the place where I will be using it. Once I start using it. Maybe I should pick up a language course and listen to it while rowing...

At my age, it's about 99.9999% likely that I will never be fluent in any language other than my native tongue. 

But I do have a few trips left in me, so I'll be acquiring teensy-tiny bits of, say, Icelandic. Or Portuguese. Maybe even Japanese.

I may even brush up on my Irish. Dia dhuit. And, oh yeah, Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin. 

Just what we need: vigilantes.

Anyone who's been on Twitter (at least the lean left/act blue version) knows that, since the deadly January 6th riots at the Capitol, there've been a lot of citizen sleuths trying to identify insurrectionists. This has been encouraged by the FBI. And it's working. Folks have turned in family members, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors. Mostly this is for the good. Someone who was spearing a cop with a flagpole (carrying a TRUMP flag, of course), or defecating in the halls of Congress, should be found, arrested, and tried. 

(I'm not talking about the quasi-peaceful knuckleheads who just got carried along and mostly walked around gawking once they got inside. Morons, idiots, ignoramuses of the highest (lowest?) order. Let them go. But keep an eye on them. If they came that far, they're probably not that many steps away from trying to assassinate the governor of Michigan or hang Mike Pence on a public gallows. But the violent perpetrators of assault and destruction: F em! Let them use the Trump made me do it, latter-day Twinkie defense all they want. They all need to do time. And have an eye kept on them.)

See something, say something. It's all well and good.

But there's a thin line between righteous hits and vigilantism. And mistakes can be made. 

Twitter "doing its thing" has managed to find some malefactors. But they've also managed to dox plenty of innocent people. Not. Good.

And then there are the apps that go on beyond Twitter to hunt down bad guys. 

One such app, Citizen (formerly known as Vigilante)

...sent a notification to users in the Los Angeles area with a photograph of a man the app said was a suspect in starting the Palisades Fire on Sunday. It offered $30,000 in reward money for anyone who provided information that led to his arrest. The man was captured by police Sunday evening, but he was released after the authorities determined that there was no conclusive evidence that he was involved. 

...Following the incident, Citizen said in a statement that the company was “actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again” and that the incident “was a mistake we are taking very seriously.” (Source: Gizmodo)

Look, I don't blame people who live in multi-million dollar homes in a fire-ravaged area for being on the lookout for bad guys. But it's way too easy for this to get out of hand. And, in this case, it's way too easy to pin the blame on someone who's homeless and, therefore, especially vulnerable. Yes, some of the California fires have been traced to homeless encampments or homeless individuals. But not all, by any means. 

Citizen has plans to go way beyond just their vigilante app. 

Now, we’re learning the same company is apparently planning to offer its own private security forces to users, according to a new report from Motherboard. (Source: The Verge)

The world is a scary place. Always has been. But thanks to social media/the Internet's vast capacity to spread misinformation and paranoia; to the growing economic inequality that plagues our society - a society that encourages rampant overconsumption and the glorification of celebrity "haves"; and to our country's vast capacity to allow a crazy level of gun ownership, it's getting scarier. Factor in our vaunted reliance on self-reliance. Not to mention the growing awareness that there are a lot of untrained, unfit, unhinged law enforcement officers gunning around out there...

The perfect recipe for the privatization of protection. 

It's already out there in gated communities. Now, if Citizen goes through with its plans, it will be available to the ungated as well.

And just how do citizens need to respond to these privatized cops? 

Do we have to follow the barked orders of some armed, steroid-fueled rando Rambo cop wannabe in black military gear who jumps out of an official looking vehicle? (Pronounced vee-HICK-le.) Can any old jackbooted moron order me to cease and desist whatever I'm doing? Do I have to comply?

Bad enough we have to worry about real cops out there. And, no, I don't believe that ACAB. (All Cops Are Bad) But plenty of them are.  And even the non-bad ones live in the same world we do. Which means they're aware that anyone they come across for any reason may well be armed and dangerous. Sure, they all need better training, and the violent racist/sexist ones need to be weeded out, but is it any wonder that they're trigger happy? That they see guns everywhere, even if that gun is a smartphone or a toy?

I for one am not looking forward to more people taking the law into their own hands. Bad enough we've witnessed the militarization of our police forces. I really don't want to see the privatization of it.

Dear Readers: What, after all, books for?

I have way too many books in my (small) home. While I am not, alas, the reader I used to be - 2-3 books a week has dwindled to something more like 2-3 books a month these days - but I'm still a reader and I buy books regularly. And I regularly exchange books with my sisters and local brother who are all also readers and regular book buyers. All of us have piles of TBR - to be read at some point - books in our bedrooms, as did our parents. I also trade books with a couple of friends and cousins, and with my nieces.

We have overlapping tastes: history, biography, memoir, mystery, thriller, literary fiction, beach read, historic fiction, essays. And mostly once we read a book, we don't really want or need to see it again. Pass. It. On.

Most of us also read on Kindle, but the downside there is sharing. So we all still buy plenty o' books.

So there's always something to read. My brother-in-law once said that one of the best things about marrying into our family was that it wasn't considered rude to pull out of the action and find a quiet place to read.

Although I have way too many books in my (small) home, I don't tend/want to accumulate anymore books than I already have. And for the ones I do have, I'm culling the bibliophile herd.

The ones I'm hanging on to are mostly books I really loved, but it's mostly small l love. I could probably convince myself to jettison most of them. It's not as if I'm going to do much re-reading. I do re-read a bit: "The Dead" from James Joyce's Dubliners each year. So I'll hang on to that. I'll also hang on to Finnegan's Wake, in hopes that someday I'll actually plow through it for the first time. There are a few anthologies I'll probably keep until I die or downsize (whichever comes first). But for most of the hundreds of books held in bookcases in my den, bedroom, and office, well, as the Irish say Faugh a Ballach! Clear the way!

Where to clear the way to is the question. 

Books aren't as difficult to get rid of as, say, computers. (Ask me - or don't ask me - about my collection of old laptops...) And there are still more people who like to read than there are folks who want to take any brown (mahogany) furniture off your hands. But there aren't tons of places that want them. I believe that Goodwill does take used books, and do I have some treats in store for them. Just need to Uber over with my overflowing bags. 

The other thing you can do with books is used them for home décor. 

Most of us do that as a by-product of being readers. But decorators do buy books and use them to, I don't know, make their clients look brainy? 

I've seen rooms where the books are sorted by color! LOL! I don't file my books by Dewey decimal, but my books are grouped by type - short story collections, poetry, of Irish interest - and/or by author. How can you find the book you're looking for if you're going by color? I can tell you that I have a John Cheever short story collection that's red. And Dubliners and Finnegan's are dark blue. Other than that...

I've also seen bookish décor that just uses the spines of books. Why waste all that space with the actual books themselves? I shudder to think of what they do with the guts of the books.

Color-coding and spining at least offer the pretense (totally faux in the case of spining) that someone's a reader. But what are we to make of this decorator trend, spotted recently on Twitter, in which books are plugged into bookshelves backwards?

This I just do not get. It looks, to my reading-strained eyes, ridiculous. What's the purpose here? Other than to provide a bland background of dust-catchers. And eventual home for tiny brown book lice.

One thing about having stuffed bookshelves in your home is that it gives your visitors something to look at. Something that lets them learn something about you. Something to get them talking about mutual interests. What will visitors do when presented with backward books?

My sister and her husband recently sold their book-filled house on the Cape. Kath and Rick's was the place you could always bring your books - and pick up new ones. Every once in a while, they went through and brought discards to the local library (alas, no longer taking book donations). When they were planning on staging their home, the RE agent told them to get rid of the books. Folks, she told them, looking at the house would be distracted by them and spend more time looking at titles than at the fireplace, the view, the new master bath. Fifty-five cartons of books later, they sold the house.

Anyway, I hope this backward books thing doesn't catch on. 

Books, after all, are for reading. Or for trading. Or for piling next to your bed so you have something on hand if you wake up in the middle of the night and want to get a little reading in. 

But mostly, books are for reading. Non-readers using them for décor? I don't know any people who come under this category, but the very thought of it makes me cringe. Metaphorically speaking, I'd like to throw the book at them. 

 

Sorry/Not Sorry

Cryptocurrency investing. Elon Musk impersonators. Dogecoin. This has got to be as near to perfect a scam story as they come. All that's missing is the Nigerian prince.

Anyway: 

Since October 2020, consumers have reported losing more than $80 million to crypto-investment scams, according to the federal agency. Many of the schemes promised that a celebrity associated with cryptocurrency would multiply and return any coins the consumer sent to their digital wallet. The losses to Elon Musk impersonators alone have exceeded $2 million. (Source: Bloomberg)

Gee, who would have thunk that it turns out that there are no crypto-celebs that are going to miraculously multiply your bitcoins and get them back to your digital wallet? 

And what, exactly, does an Elon Musk impersonator do to
convince a person (a mark? a dupe? a sucker?) that he's the

real Elon Musk? Act like a weirdball? Talk about his Tesla? Talk about cryptocurrency? Talk about buying a Tesla using cryptocurrency (which you actually can do)?

Anyway, a number of those who've been scammed by the fake Elon Musks of the world are looking to the FTC to help them get their money back. 

Good, ahhhh, luck with that.

Such ruses had already been going on for years when Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, hosted NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” earlier this month -- raising interest in crypto and making it even easier for crooks to find people to dupe.

I didn't see Musk on SNL, but I can only imagine.  Here's what some of those who've been taken are saying:

* “Fake tweet looking like Elon Musk. Said, in celebration of lunch today, send 1 Bitcoin, get ten back. So I sent one valued at $53,500. I have photos of everything.”

Okay, you have a bitcoin "valued at $53,500," - backed by "a photo and everything". I'm assuming  - or maybe just hoping - that this schnook paid a lot less for it, and saw it wondrously multiply to get to that $53.5K value. Maybe multiply enough so that getting their bitcoin to increase overnight by an order of magnitude seemed plausible. But seriously, where do we get people like this? 

Somehow, they got dazzled into dabbling with bitcoin - probably not even having anything other than the most rudimentary understanding of what cryptocurrency is and how it works - and all of a sudden they think they're the Winklevoss twins who, having been awarded mere chump change for their role in Facebook, decided to get into the wonderful world of crypto. (That damned Zuckerberg may have screwed us out of Facebook, but we'll show him! We'll turn ourselves into billionaires the new-fashioned way, with an even crazier scheme than FB.)

* “I foolishly thought there was a promotional giveaway being conducted by Saturday Night Live to support Elon Musk’s debut to host the show. I went to SNLMUSK.com and sent 30,000 dogecoins that was supposed to be multiplied by 10 and returned. Please help. The transfer was sent to the following address...”

"Foolishly" is certainly a reasonably good word choice here, that's for sure. As for dogecoin, it's a cryptocurrency created as a joke back in 2013 by a couple of software engineers. They took a few hours to set things up, and things took off from there. Doge has its ups and downs, but the company - thin air, if ever - was valued, when last I looked, at about $50B. 

* “This was a Twitter scam with someone pretending to be Elon Musk. Used same icon and had the blue, circle checkmark verification.”

Because no one with larceny in their heart would ever, ever, ever in a million years have the audacity to use a fake Twitter blue check. The blue check, by the way, is granted by Twitter to users that they verify as being "real." To get verified you have to be somewhat prominent in your field (even if your field is "famous for being famous") or have a notable and active presence on Twitter. As opposed to a real or fake Twitter nobody. (I fall into the real Twitter nobody category, by the way. @MaureenRogers49)

“There’s so much hype about the increase in value,” Emma Fletcher, a program analyst at the FTC, said in an interview. “People don’t want to miss out, and scammers want to take advantage of the information gap between their knowledge and the enthusiasm about cryptocurrency.”

All I can say is that I have precious little sympathy for someone who thinks they can increase an investment tenfold overnight. "Information gap between their knowledge and the enthusiasm about cryptocurrency" tells us pretty much all we need to know about those who got suckered on this play. I'd wager that there's more than just one sucker born every day, and a lot of them get drawn into 'get rich quick' schemes. 

What's the saying about something that sounds too good to be true?

Sorry that some people have to learn the hard way, but in the Age of Google, when you can quickly search on whether a scam's a scam,  what I mostly feel is Not Sorry. (And I'm not sorry about that in the least.)

Field of Dreams. (Hell, no! We won't go!)

Whether due to COVID, or because of their drive for streamlining, efficiency, or good old-fashioned greed, Major League Baseball has been doing some downsizing of it minor leagues. 

One casualty of MLB's drive was the Frederick (Maryland) Keys, which lost its position as a single-A minor league club in the Orioles organization. Quite a blow to a team that had consistency drawn well and was the pride of its town.

That would be Frederick, made famous as Frederick's Town in the Civil War era John Greenleaf Whittier poem, "Barbara Frietchie." Some folks probably weren't required to memorize poetry during grammar school. I'm not one of them, and this bit was on the agenda when I was a girl, along with "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "O Captain, My Captain." Whittier's poem recounted the story of one Barbara Frietchie, a town resident in her 90's who refused to take down her American flag when the Confederate Army marched through. She also threw some shade at General Stonewall Jackson while she was at it.

"Shoot if you must this old grey head, but spare your country's flag," she said. 

Barbara Frietchie was an actual person, but there's no evidence that this noble incident ever happened in real life. Something similar may have occurred, but the woman who waved the Stars and Stripes at the men carrying the Stars and Bars was supposedly someone else. Maybe her name didn't scan as well as Barbara Frietchie's did. 

The Stars and Stripes has another big connection to Frederick's, as Francis Scott Key grew up in those parts. And his name was bestowed on the local minor league team. 

It took me a while to figure out that those things that look a bit like daisies are actually fireworks - "bombs bursting in air". The colors didn't help any. The predictable, the pedestrian color scheme would have been red-white-and-blue, no? But, hey, star-spangled black, orange, and yellow works, too. Sort of.

While I'm digressing, how's this for a digression:

Another denizen of Frederick was Roger Taney, the first Catholic member of the Supreme Court  - and doesn't the composition of the current SCOTUS more than make up for that lack? sigh... - who had his law practice in Frederick. As Chief Justice, Taney authored the Dred Scott Decision, which held that Black people, whether enslaved or free, could ever be citizens. Citing the Constitution - hmm, where else have we heard about originalists on the court? hmm - Taney further tossed aside the Missouri Compromise. (The Compromise restricted the admission of new states as slave states only if they were located in the South.) And the rest, as they say, is history. Terrible history.

The Dred Scott Decision is widely considered the worst and most consequential decision the Supreme Court ever made. (Let's give the current Court a while. They're just warming up, as it were.)

Which is why the team was called the Keys, and not the Taneys. 

There is, by the way, a Key-Taney connection. Taney was married to Francis Scott Key's sister. 

Digression. Over.

The Keys have been a key part of the Frederick community for more than 30 years:

After arriving in Frederick, the Keys instantly became the pride of the city, which then had about 40,000 residents. Games were routinely sellouts. Fans would show up on players’ birthdays with baseball-mitt-shaped cakes. There were fireworks, bobbleheads and promotions involving monkeys riding dogs. Once, even President George H.W. Bush came to a game. (Source: Washington Post)

I'm down with the mitt-shaped cakes. And the fireworks. And the bobbleheads. But it might have been more fun to see a monkey riding George H.W. Bush. He was said to have been a good sport. So why not.  

Anyway, despite being dumped by MLB and the Orioles, the Frederick Keys decided that hell, no, they're staying put. 

“The team has been here for over 30 years,” says new Keys General Manager Andrew Klein, who was promoted in early April. “And we have no intention of leaving.”

They won’t be, at least for now. Come May 26, baseball will once again be played in Frederick, but in the new MLB Draft League, essentially a last chance for unaffiliated college juniors and seniors to show off their skills to a professional organization. Hope — and grass — is springing eternal on this baseball diamond.

Single A minor league ball is pretty scrubby to begin with. The MLB Draft League? The players who'll be taking the field next week for the Keys will likely include both hangers-on, last ditchers like the Kevin Costner character in Bull Durham, and pure amateur college kids. All hoping, perhaps against hope, that they'll make it to The Bigs. The Keys, giving proof through the night that the opportunities are still there, are providing a Field of Dreams. Hope it works out for some of them.

The marvels of flying

I'm not 100% certain, but I believe that the last time I flew was in October 2019. To and from Dallas to visit friends. Or maybe it was May 2019. I'm too lazy to check my calendar, but it's been a while.

I enjoy flying, but I don't exactly miss it.

Like most folks, what I miss is going someplace. So with that, I guess I'm looking forward to getting on a flight in the not so distant future. What I'm not looking forward to is the cramped seating, trying to carve out some space for your elbows if you're stuck in the middle seat, everyone competing for the overhead bins, the delays, the kid in the seat in back of you whose parents are indifferent to their kicking, the jerk who insists on max reclining so their head is practically in your lap, the awful food, the lack of awful food, the guy who insists on standing to chat with a colleague - right next to your seat with his butt planted in your face, the squalling babies (even though I know the poor little things can't help it), etc.

All this said, I haven't had a ton of truly terrible flying experiences. Oh, there was the 12 hour+ delay at O'Hare that landed me home at 4 a.m. The flight from Honolulu to LA, seated across the aisle from a guy who apparently hadn't showered in a couple of years. The blessedly short flight from Cleveland to Boston which featured a howler monkey, locked with its owner in one of the two in-flight toilets, howling away. (The monkey, not the owner and not the toilet.)

What I haven't experienced is a truly unruly passenger incident. 

No one with a crapping emotional support pony. No one (human edition) crapping on the food cart. No one trying to open the emergency door mid-flight. 

My husband once witnessed a couple of stewards getting in a shoving match with each other. But the closest I came to any action was sitting near a Federal Marshal with a handcuffed prisoner in tow.

But there are plenty of flights that have disruptive passengers on board, and the numbers are increasing now that there are so many pitched battles over mask wearing. And, I suspect, because there are more jerks out there. Or the same number of jerks, only now, thanks to The Former Guy, they feel liberated to revel in their dear and glorious jerkdom.

And the Feds are cracking down on them:

The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday that it will seek fines totaling more than $100,000 against four passengers on recent flights, including a penalty of $52,500 against a man who was arrested after trying to open the cockpit door and striking a flight attendant in the face. (Source: Boston Globe)

It's sure likely that alcohol was involved. That and/or mental illness. (For the record, the drunken fellow who crapped on the food cart on that flight - and who paid a hefty fine to reimburse the passengers who'd witnessed his disgusting deed - died of Alzheimer's a few years later, so there may have been some early dementia at play.) 

Airlines have reported a spate of troubling incidents in recent months, many of them involving passengers who appear intoxicated or refuse to wear face masks — that's still a federal requirement even after health officials relaxed guidelines around mask wearing last week.

The FAA says it has received more than 1,300 complaints from airlines about disruptive passengers this year. The agency says it is taking a zero-tolerance stance against unruly passengers — instead of counseling them, it is going straight to enforcement actions including civil penalties.

One of the recent penalties was a hefty $27K fine levied on a guy yelling that he had a bomb and was gong to blow up the plane. Smaller fines are being meted out to passengers refusing to wear masks. Hopefully, the battles over masks will wind down soon. But if airlines start requiring vax passports, the skirmishes will just move to a new front: the check in desk and/or TSA.

Meanwhile, there's no way to screen passengers with mental health issues. But maybe airlines should consider giving breathalyzer tests before they let passengers board. And then shut them down after a drink or two. Maybe they should stop serving alcohol on flights entirely. I like a glass of bad wine to wash down a yucky in-flight meal as much as the next traveler, but I could live without it. If they banned booze, maybe they can offer anxious passengers some Xanax. Or an edible. Just a thought. It might cut way down on all those incidents that end up costing unruly passengers big time. And make flying a worse experience than it needs to be for those unlucky enough to end up on a flight with them.

Ah, the marvels of flying. Looking forward to traveling again, but maybe that first trip is going to be by train. 

Flipping out over baseball cards

When I was a kid, baseball cards were a big thing. 

They came packaged with disgusting Topps bubble gum - a tasteless pink shard of something or other. If you got a slightly stale package the gum was brittle and broke off into sharp-edged pieces that could slit your lip. If you were naive or foolish, you might have thought that Topps was chewable. It wasn't. So inferior to the sublime Bazooka!

But you didn't spend a nickel on Topps for the gum. You bought it for the baseball cards.

Back then, a lot of kids collected cards, storing them in shoe boxes, teams clumped together with rubber bands. No one thought they were going to get rich collecting them. It was just a thing. 

In my immediate family, cards for the most part weren't for collecting, they were for using.

Boys (and even some girls) flipped cards. You'd stand in a circle and toss down your cards, one at a time. I can't remember the rules, but I think you won the flip if your card touched another card. Being a good flipper helped you accumulate a lot of cards. If you had cards that you really liked, you weren't likely to risk losing them by flipping, so a lot of duds ended up in flipping games. But flipping was fun.

Unless you got skinned. (Sometimes known as getting skunned.) Skinned or skunned, it meant that someone had taken you for ALL of your cards. So you had to scare up another nickel and buy another pack of Topps so you could get back in the game.

Kids also traded cards to acquire the ones they wanted and build their collections. If you were looking for a Pete Runnels (Red Sox), you might be willing to part with a Virgil Trucks (A's) and a Vito Valentinetti (Tigers). 

The best use of a baseball card, as far as I'm concerned, was using a clothespin to attach it to the spikes of a bicycle wheel. As you pedaled around, it made a completely satisfying clicking sound.

And when my sister Trish was a baby/toddler, we used baseball cards as flashcards, regularly quizzing her to see if she could identify the players. One of her first words was "gageegyger", her way of pronouncing Gary Geiger, a journeyman Red Sox player of the time. She became quite adept at the player recognition game. This may have been the formation of her becoming an avid baseball fan, a true Red Sox lifer.

My cousin Rob was a collector. He was older than us, and he had an enviable collection. At some point, his mother - my Aunt Margaret - in a fit of pique at him, decided to gift the Rogers kids with Rob's enviable collection. By then he was a teenager. Margaret didn't like clutter. I'm sure she was thinking enough is enough. Anyway, it was quite a collection. Plenty of Teddy Ballgame cards in there!

We did not treat Rob's prized collection kindly.

Sure, it was a treasure trove, but we mostly deployed the trove for flipping (and losing: who cared - they hadn't cost us anything) and for offering them around so all the kids in the 'hood could fully-load their bicycle wheels.

Over the years, Cousin Rob would frequently comment on the loss of his treasure. Especially once cards started getting valuable.

I'm sure Rob's collection would have been valuable. 

The cards would have been in pristine condition. He was the youngest child in his family, so there were no younger kids to destroy them. Plus he was careful and well organized.

If he'd had a 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card in there - which he probably did - it might well be worth a million bucks. (I'm not about to tell him.)

All this came to mind when I read that Target had decided to stop selling sports and Pokemon trading cards in their stores. 

Although the Minneapolis-based retailer didn’t give a direct reason for the change, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that it came after police in Brookfield, Wisc., said four men attacked another man over cards on May 7.

“The safety of our guests and our team is our top priority," Target said in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to temporarily suspend the sale of MLB, NFL, NBA and Pokémon trading cards within our stores, effective May 14. Guests can continue to shop these cards online at Target.com." (Source: Boston Globe)

I get that these cards can be valuable, but four guys jumping another to get at some potential big scores? People sure are crazy. And awful. 

Give me the more sensible time of yore, when the best use of a baseball call was clothespinning it to the spokes of your bicycle wheel. Clickety-clack. I can hear it now. 

Happy Tax Day?

Well, I waited until the near-last moment of the COVID-extended filing date, but I finished up my taxes on Friday and tossed them in the mailbox. Godspeed, 1040. I'm getting a lot of money back this year.

Of course, this just means I was gifting Uncle Sam with some interest free float, and I don't ordinarily want to do that. So I'm pretty careful about making sure it doesn't happen. But this year's filing was a strange one for a number of reasons, the Number One being that last year I had to report excess Social Security benefits received. And pay back a hefty sum. But stupidly, in doing my withholding this year, I didn't fully account for having written Social Security a whopper of a check.

How did this happen, you might ask? When I hit the big 7-0 I swapped out my widow's payment for my own, and for a good long time, I was in receipt of two payments a month. Since they're direct deposit, I couldn't just not cash the check. Anyway, it took me months to straighten this out. Honestly, when someone dies, the Social Security stream is turned off in a nanosecond. For the life of me, I can't figure out why this shift from account A to account B was such a hassle. 

Bottom line: all cleared up and, whenever it comes, I'll be happy to get my refund.

Another thing one might ask is 'you actually do your own taxes?'

Why, yes I do. And I do it the old fashioned way, without benefit of Turbo Tax or whatever the state-of-the-art tax preparation app is called. I use Excel and - get this - check all those calculations by hand. 

Sure, sometimes I make an arithmetic error, transposing a number or two, but "they" catch it. And there's something satisfying about filling out those forms, in adding and subtracting and multiplying. 

Admittedly, some of the forms and calculations are just ridiculous. 

My favorite one is the computation for figuring out what percentage of your Social Security is taxable.

I started doing this calc in 2009, when my husband started collecting his Social. 

The formula is absurdly complicated: (pi x hat size)/area code. For a few years, I religiously worked through the arithmetic, only to find that the answer was always 85%. Eventually, I just started using 85%. I assume if this is wrong, "they" will let me know.

There are other forms and calculations that are, if not quite as complicated, similarly - hah - taxing. And don't get me going on the instructions.

My path through, however, is simple. I just take out my last year's return and follow along. Yes, I'm occasionally thrown for a loop - one form changed slightly this year; what was line 9 is now line 8 - but this mostly works. 

And, of course, each year I have to renew my annoyance with the blue state whammy of no longer being able to deduct the full amount of state and local. Even though it's not a ton of money, still I grrrr. 

But mostly my DYI taxes works out. 

Still, the process is sufficiently curlicue and complex that I don't blame most people for throwing their folders full of scribbled on papers and official receipts etc. at a tax preparer.

What I've never done is question why filing your taxes has to be so brain-numbing and complicated. 

Turns out, it doesn't have to be.

Turns out that, way back in 1985, St. Ronald of Reagan "called for a simple tax filing system under which most people would not have to fill out a tax return. Instead, they’d just receive a form from the IRS showing their refund or tax liability."

The idea was proposed again in 2010, and yet again in 2019 (by Elizabeth Warren).

So why aren't we able to use the easy-peasy approach most other countries use?

The answer is simple and infuriating: the power of the tax preparation industry. Much like a public option in health care, a public tax filing option would save many people across the country significant time and money. But it doesn’t get created because powerful corporate interests don’t want to dent their profits.

Just two companies — Intuit (the maker of TurboTax) and H&R Block — dominate the private tax preparation industry, shepherding to the IRS 81% of individual returns filed with tax prep software. This earns these companies billions of dollars annually. And that’s why, for decades now, they’ve colluded with the government to prevent the IRS from sending you a simple form with your tax bill, which you could then either accept or dispute. (Source: mic.com)

You don't say. 

In forging their "corrupt bargain" with the government, the tax

-prep companies do provide "free" tax filing products (free to those with incomes under $72K). But very few of those eligible for free filing programs are actually using them. 

According to extensive reporting by ProPublica, Intuit has spent the intervening years [since the first free filing programs were offered] perfecting a system to nickel-and-dime mostly low-income folks by pushing them into paid products even though they qualify for the free version, and by rolling out programs under the free filing agreement that are hard to navigate and full of tricks. The strategy has worked: In 2020, only about 4% of people eligible for free private filing programs used them, per CNBC.

And so it goes. Fat cats get fatter. Folks get screwed, with poor folks most likely to find themselves the screwees.

Time to simplify this system. Let the government figure out who owes what to whom. Maybe if you itemize your deductions, you'll still need to fill out some forms, but filing sure could be a lot more straightforward than it is now.

I'll probably keep doing my own hand-crafted, artisanal tax flings. But "they" would sure make me happy if "they" did away with that crazy taxable Social Security formula.

"'Make Way for Goslings"? Not so fast...

Look closely at this picture and you'll see twelve baby geese, an even dozen cute and fluffy goslings that, before we know it will turn into big old Canada geese, crapping their way along the banks of the River Charles.  That's where you'll find them, that and in the Boston Public Garden, where they'll also be merrily honking and crapping along. 

God, I hate them. 

This was not always the case.

Back in the day, I loved seeing them twice a year, coming and going, in chevron flight from wherever they summer in Canada and wherever they winter in the U.S. Which is well south of Boston.

I thought they looked majestic: those long necks, those lovely black and white heads. 

So much more interesting than farmyard geese. (Not that I'm all that familiar with farmyard geese. Just sayin'.)

But my tolerance for Canada geese went way down when some of them got too lazy to fly back to Canada or down to South Carolina and started hanging out in Massachusetts.

When first I noticed them, they were in my cousin MB's backyard on the Cape. She lives on a pond, and that meant that a water park was available to the geese. Theirs for the honking. So they moved right in.

The thing with geese is that they might swim in the water, but they don't crap in it. They crap on land.

So MB's backyard became a minefield of goose turds.

When the geese were meandering around the yard, MB's husband would go after them with a bullwhip. No, not to whip them, but to make a cracking noise that would scare them. I was going to say 'scare the shit out of them', but that really wasn't necessary. Their crap was already all over the place.

After a few years, they apparently stopped including West Dennis on their migratory tour.

That was about the time they started showing up in droves in Boston, where they flocked to the Esplanade, a beautiful park along the Charles where Bostonians of the human variety flock to walk, run, blade, bike, sunbathe, and picnic. I walk there several times a week, but especially this time of year, it's pretty hazardous. The walkways (and presumably the grass) are covered with crap.

Many years ago, when I first lived on Beacon Hall, the public sidewalks were equally treacherous, only they were covered with dog crap. If you were walking on Charles Street, you weren't window shopping. You were looking down. As we used to say, "You feet better have eyes." 

Then, all of a sudden, people started picking up after the dogs, and now it's a bit of a shock to come across a pile o' turd. These days the only place you need to look down - other than the occasional glances ahead to make sure there are no loose bricks - is when you're in the street. You really don't want to step on a flattened rat.

While the geese aren't dirtying up Charles Street, or the residential streets on the Hill - too far from the waterfront for their liking - they are in the places where people do want to walk, run, etc. And that's the Esplanade and the Boston Public Garden.

Minefields, both.

It didn't used to be this way. When it was just ducks in the Public Garden or along the Charles, I don't recall ever encountering a duck turd. The water was apparently their toilet. Good for them! We could admire their serene swims, their amusing ducking, the flotillas of ducklings they produced each spring. 

Geese, on the other hand, don't give a crap where they go. Or maybe they do. Whichever the case, they manage to go just where you're about to set foot, or - if you're the picnicking type - throw down your picnic blanket. 

Their turds are disgusting. There's always a greenish element, then a black and whitish extension that looks like a giant cigar ash. And speaking of cigars, that seems to be about the median size of a goose turd. They ain't tiny, that's for sure.

A few years ago, they tried chasing the geese off by setting dogs after them. The dogs didn't kill the geese, mind you, but this was still considered animal cruelty. So they called off the dogs.

Then there was a scheme where volunteers would come out, find the nests, distract the nester, and coat the eggs with vegetable oil. This would keep the eggs from hatching. The finest in birth control. As I recall, this brought some group of nutters out to protest what they considered some sort of anserine abortion.

Sigh.

This year, there doesn't appear to be any concerted attention being paid to the rapidly reproducing and incessantly defecating goose population.

So they're everywhere.

The other day, on my morning stroll, one of the geese - not sure if it was a goose or a gander, they look a lot alike - started to give me the stink eye. There were no goslings nearby to protect, and I hadn't been giving it the stink eye, so maybe it was just reading my mind and knew that I was thinking: dirty bird! get ye to Canada!

As I said, there were no goslings around, and there were no people around either, so I gave the stink eye goose a nasty look and told it, "Get out of here, you little shitter."

The little shitter, of course, paid no attention and proceeded to take a dump in my path.

I really do despise these critters.

I would not, of course, do anything to harm them. No swift kick in the goose ass. No running towards them waving my arms and honking. No harm, no foul (fowl?) to those darling fluffy little goslings.

But I'd sure be happier if all the goose-gander-gosling families marauding around my walking paths made their way out of Boston.

I don't care if the goose is cooked. Sorry to be so NIMBY-ish, but I just want them OUT.

Talk about frivolous - and last ditch - lawsuits

Not that it happens all that often, but when I do think about coal country, I'm thinking Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Sure, I know Wyoming is a big coal mining state. But when I'm thinking Wyoming (not that it happens all that often) I'm thinking rich folks playing skier-rancher in Jackson Hole and cowboys. After all, that's a buckaroo on their license plate, not a grimy faced guy with black lung disease.

But in real life, Wyoming produces 40% of the coal mined in the US. That is, of course, 40% of a declining number. (By the way, Illinois - Land of Lincoln and the Windy City - is another big coal state. Not surprisingly, Massachusetts is not.) Even with exports factored in - and, when compared to domestic consumption, exports (although now in decline as well) have pretty much held their own - coal is on the downswing. Down over the last twenty years from making up half of US power consumption to about 20%. As, of course, it should be. Dirty, destructive, non-renewable. The only thing coal should be used for is making the face on a snowman. And stones do just as well. 

Anyway, many states are setting renewable energy goals, or taking other actions that will assist with the inevitable death of coal. The state of Washington has refused to allow developers to build a coal export dock on the Columbia River. And since Wyoming in landlocked, not being able to easily get their coal on a ship out of town doesn't help with their exports. 

Wyoming, with 5,000 people employed in the coal industry, isn't taking too kindly to those states that are putting the health and welfare of their citizens (and of the country and the world) by extracting themselves from coal.

So they're taking their case to court.

Last year, they joined with Montana - a fellow cowboy-coal state - and asked the Supreme Court to get involved in the Washington state case and let the export dock be built. (The Supremes haven't decided whether they're going to get involved. Too busy clamping down on voting rights and other things deemed important if we are going to be able to transition from democracy to autocracy. Meanwhile, the developers of the Washington state dock project have filed for bankruptcy.)

And Washington is looking to do more:

While most states pursue ways to boost renewable energy, Wyoming is doing the opposite with a new program aimed at propping up the dwindling coal industry by suing other states that block exports of Wyoming coal and cause Wyoming coal-fired power plants to shut down.

The law signed April 6 by Republican Gov. Mark Gordon creates a $1.2 million fund for an initiative that marks the latest attempt by state leaders to help coal in the state that accounts for the bulk of U.S. coal production, which is down by half since 2008.

"Wyoming is sending a message that it is prepared to bring litigation to protect her interests," Gordon spokesman Michael Pearlman said of the fund signed into law April 6. (Source: VOA News)

To my ears, that message sounds more like a last ditch attempt to try to hang onto coal when the world is moving away from it. Any lawsuits may turn out to be nothing but frivolous and wasteful. Sure, the $1.2 million allotted to the legal battles isn't a lot of money, but it's money that would be better spent on training coal miners for newer clean energy jobs. There's plenty of wind in Wyoming that can be harnessed, no?

But politicians gotta politick and Gordon's finger in the Wyoming political winds must be telling him that it's a good idea to take a page from the Trump playbook and plump for coal, even if coal is in a rapid death spiral. (Trump took 70% of the Wyoming vote in the 2020 election. Only two counties went for Biden: the county where the University of Wyoming is located, and the county where Jackson Hole sits.)

Hopes may be high in Wyoming that the suits will succeed, but legal scholars are dubious. Robert Percival is an environmental law professor at the University of Maryland. His view: "I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on."

But industry associations are all for it. Shawn Taylor of the Wyoming Rural Electric Association said:

"It's just kind of part and parcel of folks feeling that states and state agencies and entities outside Wyoming are having more of an impact on our energy resources than we do." 

Well, yeah. That's what happens when you persist in continuing on a stupid course. And, gee, the death of coal is going to happen whether Wyoming likes it or not. And that'll have a pretty big impact on the state's energy resources. 

And it's not like Wyoming's coal doesn't have a negative impact on other states. And it's not like these other states are doing any harm to Wyoming in terms of the health of its citizens, of its environment. Steering their power plants away from using coal harms only the short term paychecks of miners and the short term profits of the mine owners. I couldn't care less about the mine owners profits, but I do feel badly about miners losing their livelihoods, however terrible those livelihoods seem to me. 

So put that lawsuit money to use encouraging more wind farms to be built, and training miners to work in them. It's more likely to turn out to be money well spent than blowing it on frivolous, last ditch lawsuits.  

Woo woo! Polar Park in Worcester has opened.

On a lovely, albeit breezy (maybe even windy) May afternoon - nary a cloud in that blue, blue sky, temps in the 60's - Polar Park in Worcester opened for business yesterday. I wasn't there. Even if they had been allowing more than 25% occupancy of the stands, I wouldn't have dragged out, even if I had gotten a ticket. Which I probably could not have. Worcester-ites are buying everything up and, hey, they deserve first dibs for sticking it out in Worcester.

Me? I couldn't flee fast enough. One after the other, in chain reaction, my sibs fled as well. I have one cousin who lives in a suburb. (Curiously, she did not grow up in The Heart of the Commonwealth.) So I'm out there a few times a year to hang with her, and to make an occasional stop in at the cemetery where so many of my family members - dozens of relatives (across four generations) descended from Bridget and Matthew Trainor, my Grandmother Rogers' parents are buried. They'll all be spending eternity hanging out with each other in St. Joseph's Cemetery in Leicester, just outside Worcester. Actually, maybe not eternity, as the cemetery is on a spring-fed hill and it's getting pretty mushy. Lots of the headstones are at a tilt, and it's probably just a matter of time before my parents caskets start slip-sliding away and land in the laps of the Sisters of Mercy who are buried at the flat part at the bottom of the hill.

But I digress.

Maybe not this season, but I will be heading out to Worcester at some point to catch a game. Polar Park (named because it's partially underwritten by Worcester's own Polar Beverage) looks kind of nondescript from the outside, but on the inside - which is where it counts - it looks like a thing of baseball beauty.

I always meant to take in a game or two when Worcester had a Can-Am team, the Worcester Tornadoes. But they were there and gone (2005-2012) before I had a chance to make the trek out to watch them play at Holy Cross' Fitton Field. (While on the subject of the Tornadoes: what a name. On the one hand, it's excellent. On the other, the name commemorates a horrific event: the 1953 tornado that wrecked a goodly section of Worcester and killed nearly 100 people, including the grandparents of one of my high school classmates.)

But the Woo Sox aren't the Tornadoes. None of this Can-Am stuff. This is Triple AAA baseball, the major league of the minor leagues. And these are Red Sox prospects, baby. Not to mention that at some point during the season, there'll be authentic MLB Red Sox sent down to Worcester to recuperate from an injury or get over a slump. And there'll be minor leaguers called up to the mother ship. 

NESN, the network that broadcasts the Red Sox games, broadcast the Opening Day ceremonies, and the first home game, for the Woo Sox.

And I couldn't help but put it on for a bit.

I was in and out of the den. Even I have better things to do than listen to a parade of pols being interviewed. But it was fun to see them trot out a bunch Red Sox oldies: Pedro Martinez, Jim Rice, Luis Tiant, Jim Lonborg and Worcester's own Rich Gedman, who spent many years catching for the Red Sox. (Six degrees of Kevin Bacon alert: my sister Trish went to high school with Gedman.)

James Taylor and his son Henry sang the National Anthem, Taylor sporting his Number 9 (Teddy Ballgame) Red Sox cap. They sounded a bit flat to me, but that might have been the wind. (I'm so sorry that Taylor won't be performing at Fenway this year. Sweet Baby James is getting up there, but I hope he has one more Fenway outing in him. I've seen him perform there a couple of times and it's just terrific.)

They also had Celtic great Bob Cousy to do the "Play Ball" thing. Cousy is a native New Yorker, but he's lived in Worcester since he came to play basketball at Holy Cross in the late 1940's. The Cooz is 92, but he still sounds plenty sharp and he looked pretty good, even though he needs a haircut: his white hair was just whipping around in the wind.

Other than the first pitch, I didn't watch any of the game. But the Woo Sox fittingly won, 8-5. I should have watched. A slugfest is my kind of game. 

When I took my walk today, I wore a Woo Sox cap. Representing!

The Woo in Woo Sox comes from Worcester's nickname, The Woo. No one called Worcester The Woo when I was growing up, but the Miss Worcester Diner was known as the Miss Woo, so there's that. The team mascot is Smiley, because one of Worcester's claims to fame is that the smiley face was invented there. (Wish I'd hung on to the original I had when I was in high school. Maybe it would be worth something...)

And notice the heart in the Woo Sox W. That's because Worcester's formal nickname is The Heart of the Commonwealth.

Anyway, yesterday, at least for a while, my heart was in Worcester.

Looking forward to getting out there, which will probably be next year. 

In the meantime, inquiring minds want to know: do they play "Sweet Caroline" between the top and bottom of the eighth?