Back in the mask again. Sigh!

When the word went out that fully vaccinated folks were free to walk around the cabin of life unmasked, I gladly put my masks away. The three exceptions have been when I've ridden (rarely) on public transportation, when I've taken an Uber, and when I'm volunteering at St. Francis House, the Boston day shelter I've been involved with for eons, where they're required. I gladly wear my mask there, where I'm in a close and crowded environment, and where there's no guarantee that the guests - who are required to wear a mask, too - have been vaccinated.

But for the past few months it's been nice to take my walks maskless, to sit in a restaurant, and to drop into stores without having to don the mask.

As of this week, however, while I can still take my walks without covering mouth and nose, CDC guidance is now recommending masks indoors, even if you're vaccinated.

It was fun while it lasted.

But thanks to the refuseniks, there's been an uptick in covid instances and, while those who've been vaxxed are almost entirely asymptomatic or experiencing very mild symptoms, we can unknowingly carry a viral load with us. So, to be on the safe side, I'm masking in doors. 

In terms of safe side, this is 99% to keep the other guy safe. Not that I want to catch any form of covid, however mild, but the chance of becoming gravely ill with covid post-vaccination is small. Not infinitesimally small, but small enough to not be worrisome. But I don't want to spread covid to someone who's not able to be vaccinated for some reason, or to an innocent kid, or even to a lunkhead who's selfish refusal to get vaccinated puts us all at risk. 

I had figured that by mid-fall, when it was getting darker and colder out, I was going to be back masking in the grocery store, etc. But this is a few months ahead of schedule.

Sigh.

I do have a trip with my sister Trish planned for Vermont next week. Vermont is pretty much a covid-free paradise - the Number 1 state in terms of percent of population fully vaccinated. As of Wednesday, 67.4%. Massachusetts is second, with 63.6% - not that far off from Vermont, but Vermont apparently escaped the flood of non-vaccinated free-riders of the sort who who showed up in Provincetown over the Fourth of July to take advantage of Massachusetts excellent vaccination hygiene and start spreading Delta variant all over the place. 

Thanks, outsiders. Hope you didn't let the door hit your virus-spreading self in the butt on the way out. On second thought, I wouldn't mind if the door crashed right into you. Glad you're gone. Don't come back anytime soon.

On reflection, I'm being a bit too harsh here. Those P'town covid spreaders may, in fact, have been vaccinated but caught asymptomatic/limited symptom covid from a vaccine refuser - and innocently and unwittingly spread it at a crowded tea dance.

So please allow me to redirect my ire to the vaccine refusers. IF YOU'RE FROM HERE, GET VACCINATED. IF YOU'RE NOT FROM HERE, STAY THE HELL OUT. 

Anyway, I'm hoping that Vermont will welcome us. I will pack some masks and my vaccine card, just in case.

Other than the Vermont trip, and a family dinner or two, most of my upcoming events are outdoors. Crowded, but outdoors.

Will I have to wear a mask to next week's Billy Joel concert? To my early September game at Fenway? Yes, they're both outdoors, but when all those thousands of fans start singing along to "Uptown Girl" (Billy Joel) or "Sweet Caroline" (Red Sox game, mid-8th inning), there'll be plumes of germs spreading. I may end up singing through my mask. 

Did I already say "Sigh"? Worth repeating. Sigh.

I also have mid-September tickets to the Woo Sox - my first trip to Worcester's Polar Park. Don't know what they sing there, other than "Take Me Out to the Ball Game"; don't know where things will stand, covid and maskwise, by then. 

I did read that the vaccination rate has picked up among the reluctant, so maybe we'll be okay. A number of Republican "leaders" have apparently decided that it's best not to kill off their voters, and have reluctantly but at last been coming around to urging their constituents to get vaccinated. So there's that bit of good news. (It must have been a tough call for them, since it appears that many of these treacherous, god-awful wankers were content to let the pandemic drag on so they could blame the Biden administration for its continuation.)

Anyway, I am just so sick and tired that we're being held captive by vaccination resisters. Whatever their motivation - political venom, sense of invincibility, conspiracy theorist, procrastination, good old stupidity - I have little sympathy with those who are f'ing things up for the rest of us. I hope that governments, healthcare systems, and private employers all start mandating vaccinations. Let restaurants and theaters start demanding to see vaccine cards. Sure, they'll be easy enough to fake, but it will be something. 

We can beat this back if we get more folks vaccinated. 

In the meantime, I'm back in the mask again, at least when I have to go into a store and pick up a couple of birthday cards. I've got my cloth masks at the ready; I have a good enough supply of blue surgical masks; and I just Amazon'd some N95's. I am so NOT looking forward to those fogged up glasses. 

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. 

Pulls (rhymes with gulls). There's an app for that!

When I was a kid, apples with a bruise or rot spot on them were called "pulls." Which rhymes with "hulls," "gulls", "trulls." 

I don't know if this term is particular to New England, Massachusetts, Worcester, or my family. Is it Irish (c.f., my father)? Is it German (c.f., my mother)? I don't know whether I've ever heard anyone else use the word, and The Google came up with nada.

Until the other evening, I had a few "pulls" in my fridge, leftovers from a trip to the orchard last fall. Things last a good long while in my fridge, which is quite excellent. So the "pulls" weren't awful-awful. Not great for eating-eating, but okay on a peanut butter sandwich. And perfectly fine for apple sauce, which I made up a batch of, making space in the fruit drawer for more fruit, including some non-"pulls."

This is exactly what my mother would have done if she'd found herself with a bunch of "pulls", back in the day when we didn't waste a lot of food. No one did. Something had to be really over the brink before my mother tossed it out. Garbage - which was wrapped up in newspaper and tied with twine - consisted mostly of eggshells, banana and orange peels, chicken bones, and coffee grounds. Apple cores, too, but there was seldom much left of that apple. (When my father was a kid, when someone was eating an apple, the first kid to call "coresies" got to munch on the core. Yum!)

Oh, I'm sure that occasionally there was a dab of something that "wasn't worth saving", and that my mother threw out, but not much. We ate leftovers until there were no more leftovers. 

Personally, I don't waste a lot of food. Before I got my quite excellent fridge, I used to waste more. Way back in the day, I had a fridge on its last legs that was so tropical-jungle humid that it could turn a perfectly good cucumber into a suppurating mass of gloop within minutes, but my current fridge is a keeper. 

So I'm pretty good about not letting things go to waste. 

I like having leftovers, and consume them with great relish until there is nothing left to consume. Once in a while, there's a piece or two of too-stale bread, or moldy cheese, that needs to go. And try as I do to use up that bunch of basil, parsley, or dill, most of what I throw out is herb-ish.

I might not be much of a food waster, but I've seen numbers floating around like 80 billion tons, 100 billion tons, thrown away in the US each year. An astonishing 40% of the food supply. 

Most of this isn't coming from us individuals throwing away parsley that's gone soupy. It's coming from stores, restaurants, and farms.

But now there are companies stepping up to help steer surplus food into our fridges and pantries before it rots.

At Red Apple Farm’s stand inside the Boston Public Market, hungry passersby can pick up a “surprise bag” of misshapen doughnuts, minidoughnuts, bruised apples, or just leftover food for about one-third of retail cost. (Source: Boston Globe)

Red Apple is selling about 100 bags each month, and they're doing it by using:

...the app Too Good To Go, which sells surplus food from restaurants and other suppliers directly to customers at a fraction of its normal price.

This is a great idea, especially given that food banks won't typically take pre-cooked food, and most won't take canned goods that are past their expiration date - even though, as we all know, those canned goods are perfectly fine for a good long time beyond that sell by/use by date. Some food banks don't have much by way of refrigeration, so can't accept dairy or fresh foods that need to stay cool. 

Then there's OLIO, which lets people nearby know when you're tossing out food - "home-cooked, home-grown," whatever - that's still got some life in it. Today, OLIO, which has been around now for six years:

...serves 4.3 million users globally and has shared 25 million portions of food plus 3 million nonfood items.

(Due to the pandemic, OLIO "pivoted to no-contact pickups.") 

There's also a delivery service, Imperfect Foods, that specializes in 

...saving foods considered unsellable, often because of physical deformities that don’t impact taste or nutritional value.

“We find product that’s too big, too small, too large, has a little blemish, maybe had some weather damage, like a sun-kissed cauliflower or a little yellowing on the kale or some spots on an apple,” said Maddy Rotman, the company’s head of sustainability. “And we make sure that food has a home.”

Imperfect started out with fruits and veggies. Then they added in other important food groups like: 

 Chocolate-covered pretzel bits sourced from the broken-off chunks at the bottom of the pack line in a pretzel processing plant.

Hmmm. That sounds good. So does the Red Apple surprise bag. Maybe I need to head on over to the Boston Public Market and buy myself a goody bag. Hope mine has minidoughnuts...

Let us now praise not-so-famous demolishers.

One of my brothers was a construction engineer. He built big stuff: manufacturing plants, apartment buildings, an aquarium, an American embassy in South America, and - the crowning glory of his career - Camden Yards, the Baltimore Orioles' stadium. 

After he stopped building things, he became a university professor and taught other engineers how to build things.

That's what construction people do: they build things.

And on the other end of the spectrum, there are destruction people, who implode buildings that need to be taken down. We all recently got to see destruction people in action when Controlled Demolition took down the section of Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, that was left standing when an entire wing collapsed, taking the lives of nearly 100 people. 

Destruction, or demolition, work is the opposite of construction. While both require a lot of upfront planning, construction takes a long time. Demolition? Poof! 

I will confess that I'm a sucker for watching videos of planned demolition.

And one time, I even got to watch one close up. That was in the early 1980's, when I witnessed, from a distance, the demise of the Manger Hotel in Boston. It's fascinating, that's for sure.

Controlled Demolition has been around for nearly 75 years, and it started small. The founder, Jack Loizeaux, had been trained in forestry, and his first use of explosives was to blow up stumps. Then:

In 1947, he demolished his first structure, a chimney at Aberdeen Proving Ground. It had frustrated the Army's explosives experts

"He said felling a chimney was like taking down a tree. You need a tiny bit of explosives, lots of prayer and God's gravity," said a son, J. Mark Loizeaux, president of the family-owned Controlled Demolition Inc. in Phoenix.

His father said that gravity and knowing where to place explosives were the principles that guided his work.

"Gravity is everywhere. It's free to everyone. It's an awesome power that's available out there if you know how to control it," he told The Sun in a 1995 interview. (Source: Jack Loizeaux's 2000 obituary in the Baltimore Sun)

Great demolition projects from little chimneys grew, and soon the company was traveling around the world, imploding housing projects that were past their use-by dates, defunct hotels (including the Sands in Las Vegas), used up factories, the Seattle Superdome, where pro football, basketball, and baseball had been played... Earlier this year, Controlled Demolition controlled the demolition of the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. (Thar she blows! Wish I could have seen that one bite the dust.) 

And in a bit that combines Loizeaux family full circle and Rogers family six degrees of separation:

When clearing the site for Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Mr. Loizeaux had to demolish the Southern Seafood Co. building. He learned that it had been a Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. facility, whose design was approved by his father, A. S. Loizeaux, who had been the utility's chief engineer.

I know from my brother Tom that constructing things is very satisfying. At 69, he's still at it. Last year he built a house. Far more satisfying, I'd guess, than making the world safe for enterprise software. Or whatever it is I did during my career.

But I'm guessing there's probably something intensely satisfying about tearing things down, imploding buildings that are no longer needed to make way for the new.

I'm sure that Controlled Demolition approached the Champlain Towers project with mixed emotion. After all, this wasn't the end of an emptied-out hotel. It was the end of a condo building that people had escaped with their lives, but lost everything they owned. And the task had to be executed so that the efforts of those still searching for the remains of those in the not-so-lucky half of the building could safely continue.
At Surfside, Jack Loizeaux son Mark was the man of the hour, and he got the job done on short notice, without the usual long hours of planning that go into a major demolition.

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters a demolition would take weeks. Loizeaux and his crew said they could do it in days.

“I think I can do this,” Loizeaux, CEO of Controlled Demolition Inc. of Phoenix, Maryland, recalled telling county and state authorities. “I can bring down the structure with minimal impact.”

Loizeaux appeared to deliver Sunday night — with an implosion that toppled the remaining 12-story structure in a matter of seconds and left what Levine Cava said was “only dust” on the existing rubble pile. (Source: Miami Herald)Once the mission was accomplished - a job Loizeaux said was "probably the most difficult we've been asked to approach" - the searchers were able to get on with their grim tasks of recovering the remains of those lost.

It's easy to heap praise on those who build great things, whose work we get to see and admire (and, of course, criticize). A little more difficult with those who demolish. But their work is important, too.

Let us now praise not-so-famous demolishers.

Did the world REALLY need a 6-foot long hotdog???

I walk through the North End of Boston - maybe once a month. And if I'm walking through the North End, I'm 99.9999% certain to be walking at some point on Salem Street. 

Even with all those walks, somehow, I've never noticed Pauli's. Even though it's been there for a decade.

But I'll be sure to notice it now - now that I've seen the write-up on their 6-foot hotdog. 

Not that I'm anti-hot dog or anything. Although I prefer a sausage sandwich, I'm always content to have a hotdog at Fenway Park. Sure the role is soggy, but if you squirt on enough mustard and relish - admittedly not easy on the relish side, as relish at Fenway comes in those mingy little squeeze packs that are hard to open and even harder to squeeze relish out of - those Fenway Franks are fine. Especially when consumed with a Cracker Jack appetizer and a Sports Bar chaser.

And although they haven't been open since covid hit - at least not when I've been by - I would occasionally stop for a hotdog at the little food stand on the Esplanade along the Charles River.

So I'm generally good for a few hotdogs a year.

My husband was a true hotdog lover.

On the day we found out that Jim's cancer was terminal, he decided that what he really wanted to eat was a hotdog. So we went to Cheers and ordered hotdogs. Why hotdogs? A few years before he died, while they were trying to track down the root cause of his anemia, Jim found out he had celiac disease, and went on a gluten-free diet.

Maybe things have improved since then, but back in the day, while many gluten-free options were just fine, the bread generally left something to be desired. And hotdog rolls were no exception.

Anyway, once Jim got the word, he figured it no longer made a ton of sense to strictly follow a gluten-free diet. And what he wanted most was a hotdog on a glutenous roll. Cheers was one of the only places we knew that had hotdogs on the menu, so off we went. Everybody there may not have known our names - we were regulars during the pre-Cheers TV show days, not after -  but those hotdogs hit the spot.)

But a six-footer?

Nah. Even if it's all gussied up. (Maybe especially because it's all gussied up.) 

There are six varieties: Chicago-style, with dill pickles,

chopped onions, relish, and mustard; a Seattle Dog slathered with cream cheese; a Cleveland dog with fries and coleslaw; and more. (The Pauli Dog is served over a pound of buttery lobster). (Source: Boston Globe)

The Chicago-style isn't all that gussied up, and would be my choice. But a hotdog "slathered with cream cheese"? I know you should never say never. I was appalled by the idea of mayonnaise on French fries until I tried it when I was on a business trip to Amsterdam years/decades ago, and found it was rather delish. Still, cream cheese on a hotdog? I'll say it: Never.

As for a hotdog topped with lobster. Now that is an atrocity. 

But the real atrocity is the price: $599.99, which works out to a hundred bucks a foot. 

Oh, it serves twelve, but that still works out to $50 per person for a hot dog. For that kind of money, you could order a Pauli's Lobsta Sub ($44.99) for everyone and still have some walking around money left over.

For $599.99 you could get a lot of things that could feed a dozen people, including really nice slabs of steak. Sure, you'd have to be willing to cook, but as long as your guests aren't vegetarian/vegan, your guests would probably be delighted to sup on sirloin or ribeye with a few sides. Paleo dieters would be thrilled! And cooking a steak isn't all that difficult a kitchen task. (Okay, it would take me a while to cook twelve steaks in my kitchen, but I'm guessing that anyone who'd consider paying $599.99 for a hotdog probably has access to an outdoor grill.)

I'm not sure Pauli's is actually selling this mega-dog. I did a cursory look at their website and couldn't find it. Maybe it was just a gimmick for National Hotdog Day. Or something.

I will say one thing. As a gimmick, it sure caught my attention. On my next swing through the North End - coming up soon - I'm tempted to stop by Pauli's and buy one of their "normal" sandwiches. My North End sandwich go-to is Bricco, but Pauli's menu looks pretty good. 

Just not the 6-foot long hotdog. Which is really not something that the world needs. 

Never thought I'd utter these words, but: Yay, NFL!

Sure, I've seen a lot of it over the years and can watch a game with reasonably good understanding of what's going on. I haven't been in years, but my husband and I used to like to take in an occasional college game, of the low-key local variety - like Harvard vs. Holy Cross. (Normal sized athletes who are, in fact, more student that athlete.) Come February, I'll tune into the Super Bowl. But mostly I'm not a big fan of football. I'm especially not a big fan of pro football. And I'm super-especially not a big fan of the National Football League, the organization that runs the pro shebang. 

And yet, here I am, yaying the NFL. It's not top-of-my-lungs yaying, mind you, but it's yaying nonetheless.

The reason I'm yaying is that the NFL has become the American professional sports league that has come out the strongest in support of vaccination.

Oh, all the leagues have put protocols in place, and encouraged - more or less - that players and other personnel get vaccinated. But the NFL seems to have put more teeth into their efforts than the other leagues.

In a major escalation of pressure on NFL teams to vaccinate as many players as possible before the start of this fall's season, the NFL says that teams will forfeit and be slapped with a loss if a game is cancelled because of a COVID-19 outbreak among their unvaccinated players — and neither team's players will be paid. (Source: NPR)

Predictably, some players are squawking up a storm. Pro football players are young and fit, and the majority (although certainly not all) of those who've been hospitalized and/or died have been not so young and/or not so fit. So it's easy to think of yourself as invulnerable. And maybe, at that stage in life, not to worry about those who are more vulnerable other there. When you're young, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about your mortality - or that or anyone else.

Plus there's a definite streak of conservatism threaded throughout the NFL: players (most notably white ones), coaches, owners. So there's a bunch of political hell-no going on there. (While the majority of players have had at least one shot, about one-quarter haven't yet rolled up their sleeves.)

Anyway, despite the grumbling and nega-tweeting, so far - and, admittedly, it's only been a couple of days - the NFL is holding firm. 

Even though it's not quite as dire as it sounds - the League will make best-efforts attempts to reschedule games that are canceled due to covid (admittedly they doesn't have a lot of wiggle room in a crammed scheduled during which teams get only one bye-week when no game is played) - that's a lot of pressure being put on players to get jabbed. Not only do they risk their team's playoff chances, but the pocketbooks of players - both teammates and the players on the other side, who'll all be understandably pissed if they lose a paycheck. 

Another aspect of the NFL policy is that "any burdens, competitive or financial, caused by the postponement or cancellation of a game onto the team whose outbreak caused it." Teams with unvaxxed players who come down with covid will also be subject to fines. 

Good! I mean 'yay!'

We're seeing now the impact of refusal to get vaccination. The delta variant has taken off, and, while nearly all of those dying of covid these days are unvaccinated, the longer it takes to get everyone who can be vaccinated vaccinated (i.e., achieve herd immunity), the more likely that even worse variants will crop up. And there's the fear that the vaccines won't do as good a job at managing those variants as they're doing with delta. 

Even in a place like Massachusetts, which is one of the most vaccinated states, the breakouts of breakthrough covid (both, so far, on the Cape) are worrisome. And I'm not the only one who's ticked off that people who hadn't been vaccinated came streaming into Provincetown and other communities, going out maskless and partying away as free riders on those who have been responsible and gotten vaccinated. F 'em. 

Anyway, I'm guessing that, by fall, we're all going to be going back to masking in indoor spaces. I'm not there yet, but the other day at the grocery store, I saw number of folks back to mask wearing. Just a few weeks ago, you could do your grocery shopping without seeing a soul in a mask.

I'm glad that the NFL is stepping up.

Personally, I don't give a hoot whether there's an NFL season this year. I would feel a little bad for fans who so look forward to it, but for me: meh. 

But if the NFL puts a stake in the ground, it matters. They're big, powerful, and super-visible. Other businesses may follow their lead, which can only be a good thing. 

If some players want to quit, have at it. (A coach for the Vikings has already been let go for digging his heels in on getting vaccinated. Enjoy your unemployment, pal!) And it would certainly be good for the vaccine-reluctant fan base to see more of football's superstars to make some noise about their being vaxxed. Two star quarterbacks - Russell Wilson and Patrick Mahones - have done so. Thanks, guys.

Maybe Tom Brady can follow suit. I mean, I didn't need an invite from TB12 to get my shot(s), but it might be helpful for the vaccine-reluctant who look up to sports heroes if their hero promoted vaccinations.

Our Tom - make that Their Tom - is something of an oddball when it comes to health, not eating tomatoes, nightshades, white food; and following his own somewhat eccentric fitness regimen. Obviously, it works for him, but it's not known where he stands on getting vaccinated. But despite his reputation as something of a Trumpist - that MAGA hat in his 2015 locker - his wife did say that neither of them would be voting for Trump in 2020. And when Tom and his team (the Tampa Bay Bucs) appeared at the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl win, Tom through some shade at Trump - much to the delight of Joe Biden. 

So, come on, Tom: you and the other NFL "bigs" could probably influence plenty of vaccine-reluctant fans and colleagues. 

Meanwhile, I'm just happy that the NFL is getting serious about covid.

I could say "it's about time." Instead, I'll go with YAY! 

So, you want to be a life coach

Getting laid off - especially if you're at a relatively senior level - sometimes comes with outplacement services. Or did when I was getting laid off from a relatively senior level position. Both times I had access to these services, I took advantage of them. 

I was used to going into work five (and even six) days a week. Going to outplacement provided some structure to the week that substituted for the office when the daily grind ground to an abrupt halt. It gave me the opportunity to continue to hang with my fellow pink slipped colleagues, which also eased the transition from work to looking for work. And I found that the outplacement counsellors - or whatever they were called - could be surprisingly helpful. 

The first time I was outplaced, the person I worked with helped me clarify my thinking about what I wanted to do next. In my case, it was to get as far away as possible from heading do-all, all-purpose marketing at a small, underfunded company. Next stop: head of product marketing - a more technically-oriented branch of marketing - at a larger, well-funded company.

When that job screeched to a halt - I volunteered for separation for what was a pretty rich exit package - I knew what I wanted. Which was out. I'd had it with commuting, managing, politicking, and la vie corporate in general, and wanted to start freelancing. 

I backslid for a while, taking a job working for a former boss that I knew would be short-term but which lasted 1.5 years, but for nearly 20 years, I've done freelance marketing writing. In my prime, I made an reasonably good living doing it, and now that I'm winding down professionally, the work I have lets me keep my hand in and make a bit of non-fixed income dough. I work very few hours a week, and only for folks (and on projects) that I enjoy. 

The outplacement person I worked with when I went solo wasn't actually instrumental in getting me to launch a freelance career, but she was supportive and, in that sense, helpful.

That was as close as I ever came to working with a life coach.

But I did know one.

Many years ago, I had a fellow in my group whose wife left her job to establish a life coach practice. 

Although they were both a bit overwhelming, I liked both members of this couple a lot.

They were a pretty golden couple to begin with: handsome, blond, gleaming, both from very well to do backgrounds. Her father was, as I recall, a big-time surgeon; his mother worked in advertising, and, if I remember this correctly, the Bill Cosby jello/pudding ads were filmed on location in his childhood kitchen. (Having Bill Cosby eat pudding at your kitchen table used to be a good thing.) The couple met cute, and their engagement/wedding story got The New York Times treatment. Their first home was an historic house in one of the poshiest of posh Boston suburbs, which they spent a kabillion dollars perfecting. They had a couple of beautiful kids. 

He left corporate tech marketing to become a serial entrepreneur. She left her job to be a life coach.

On hearing that she was hanging out her shingle as a life coach, my initial reaction was that people would line up if she could coach them into her life: rich, beautiful, nice-handsome-successful husband, showplace home, model-cute kiddos. 

She went on to make it very big: podcasts, TV appearances, motivational speaking, etc. 

So I do know that if you have enough ambition, drive, and sheer force of personality, you can hit the bigtime as a life coach.

For most life coaches, however, you have to wonder (at least I do): how do they make a living? And from the consumer perspective, how is it worth it? What, exactly, do they do besides help you make life lists and check in with you to make sure you're taking care of the items on the life list, holding you accountable in a way that, apparently, you're not able to do for yourself.

Not saying I couldn't have used a life coach along the way. Maybe I'd be a best-selling novelist. Or a plain old remainder table novelist. Or a famous marketing guru. Or Maureen Dowd, only a better one, and she would be just another, run-of-the-mill Maureen. But working with a life coach? I'm way too reserved and introverted to want to work with a pushy person who's job was to make me pushier. Just not my thing.

But I guess it must be someone's thing, because the number of life coaches is apparently proliferating. At least according to an article by Beth Teitell I just saw in The Boston Globe. 

Wherever you look, there’s a new life coach. In your Facebook feed talking about her “pandemic pivot.” In your inbox soliciting business. On the phone, chatting about his new endeavor.

“Life coaches are the new yoga teachers,” said Robyn Parets, founder of Pretzel Kids, a nationwide web marketplace for kids’ yoga classes and teacher training.

“If you are not a coach, your sister is a coach or your neighbor is a coach,” she said. (Source: Boston Globe)

The new yoga teachers, huh? I hadn't realized they were a thing, although a friend who's a quite experienced yoga person tried to show me the yogi ropes while on her way to becoming some sort of yoga instructor. Alas, my arthritic shoulder doesn't allow me to master even Downward Facing Dog.

And maybe it's because we're all getting up there, but I'm not a coach. Neither of my sisters is a coach. (Let me clarify: we're not professional life coaches. Amateur coaches, however...) And as far as I know, none of my neighbors are life coaches, either.

But I guess all the downtime during lockdown got a lot of folks thinking that maybe they could get paid for what they'd probably been doing for free for years for friends and family: providing advice that nobody listened to. 

What is a life coach, anyway? Oprah Daily defined the job as an “action-oriented mentor.” Self-help guru Tony Robbins calls them a “supportive friend and a trusted adviser rolled into one.” A blog on the Huffington Post says they’re “people who couldn’t be bothered to actually study psychology, and instead want to earn a quick buck.”

Now, if I were a cynic, I'd go with the third definition, but let's be open-minded here. But not that open-minded. I wouldn't trust word one out of the mouth of Tony Robbins. Guess that leaves me with "action-oriented mentor." 

Local coaches have told the Globe they have helped clients: “unlock secret talents,” “live a truly authentic life,” “explore their inner voice telling them they are destined for something greater,” “uncover repressed anger at God and church,” and “talk through why they are triggered by their mother-in-law and create a new mindset.”

Hmmm. This sounds like it's getting dangerously close to therapy or scam, so maybe I need to rethink that Huff Po definition.

Aspiring coaches can undergo 100 hours or more of training and earn certificates. But at the same time, the field is unregulated, so you could also just stop reading this article right now and hang a shingle.

Despite the good intentions of many coaches — of the people clicking on “Top 35 Life Coach Podcasts You Must Follow in 2021” and “27 Best Life Coaching Books of All Time” — there are charlatans, said Kristina Tsipouras, the founder of mycoachspace.com, which vets coaches to protect clients.

I'll just bet there are charlatans. (C.f., Tony Robbins.) But one person's charlatan may well be another's "action-oriented mentor," or "trusted advisor."

So caveat emptor and all that. 

And I'll take that caveat and not be an emptor at all. 

Eau d'Gaspump

Electric vehicles (EVs) don't make a lot of noise. There's no internal combustion engine combusting away. Once you get going at 20 m.p.h. or so, there's tire and wind noise to let pedestrians and cyclists know you're coming, but under that speed... Because of the lack of noise, pedestrians are about 20% more likely to be hit by an EV than they are by a gas-guzzling auto that those of us on foot can hear coming.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a rule requiring EVs and hybrids to make some noise, but implementation was delayed because of covid, and I'm not sure when it clicks in.

Until then, I guess it's caveat jaywalker. 

Another thing that EVs don't have is the smell of gas. And this is something that drivers actually miss. According to a Ford survey, 70% would "miss the smell of petrol to some degree" after transitioning to an EV.

Looks like I'm not the only one who likes the smell of gasoline.

When I was a kid, I liked nothing better than accompanying my father to the Texaco station when he needed to take whatever Ford he was driving and "fill 'er up." 

I liked everything about gas stations: the snappy Army-brown Ike jacket and cap worn by Walter Marchessault, the proprietor of "our" gas station; the annual toys for sale around Christmas, even if they were always "boy toys" (trucks, tankers, stations themselves); the bell that dinged each time the gallon mark was hit; the rack of maps; the air pumps; the rainbow gas slicks on the pavement... 

There were even a couple of gas stations I fantasized about living in.

One was the Esso station in Webster Square, a grand affair with its exotic red dome. The other was a station out on Route 9 - brand unknown - that had an apartment over the station. The apartment extended out over the pumps, supported by a couple of stone pillars. 

Few things caught my imagination more than that upstairs apartment. I really wanted to live there.

And one of the main reasons I wanted to live there was, of course, so that I'd be able to smell gasoline each and every day. My idea of bliss!

Anyway, Ford, being the marketers that they are, are doing something about the lack of gasoline smell.

Over the weekend, Ford unveiled a petrol fragrance for future [Mustang] Mach-E GT owners at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. The Fragrance is called Mach-Eau. (Source: Teslerati)

And it even comes in an adorable little bottle that looks like a gas pump. Be still my gas-sniffing heart! Or nostrils.

“Judging by our survey findings, the sensory appeal of petrol cars is still something drivers are reluctant to give up. The Mach Eau fragrance is designed to give them a hint of that fuel-fragrance they still crave. It should linger long enough for the GT’s performance to make any other doubts vaporize too,” said Jay Ward, Ford of Europe Product Communications.

Not sure whether you actually dab it behind your ears or on your wrists, or just plunk it in the drink holder, open it up, and let some fumes escape, but Ford put a lot of thought into it. And that thought wasn't to come up with something that actually replicated the smell of gas. (Darn.)

The legacy automaker clarified that the Mach-Eau does not completely smell like petrol or gas but was actually designed to be pleasing to the nose. Ford’s fragrance has smokey accords with aspects of rubber and an ‘animal element’ that is supposed to be a nod to the Mustang heritage.

Hmm. Don't know about the smell of burning rubber. Or the animal element. But I'll take Ford's word that it'll be "pleasing to the nose." Even if it doesn't smell like gas. Which it absolutely should.

Ford worked with fragrance consultancy Olfiction on the Mach-Eau. Pia Long, an Associate in the British Society of Perfumers, worked directly with the fragrance. She studied the chemicals emitted from car interiors, engines, and petrol while designing the unique scent.

You can order a Ford Mustang Mach-E GT, but there's no info yet on how one can get one's hands (and nose) on the Mach-Eau.  

Maybe it'll be an add on feature, an accessory. (Who could resist? Not me!) Maybe it'll come with the car, a nice surprise when you pop open the glove box. Maybe they'll actually sell it. (No plans as of now.)

Almost, but not quite, makes me want to get a car. Almost.

It came easy, and it went just as fast

Plenty of folks I know did something at least a little foolish with their money at some point in life. Took the trip, bought the car, went to the show, splurged on the bracelet, picked up the tab, when they couldn't really afford it. Most of this happened when they were young and didn't have that much to begin with, so there was only so much damage they could do. 

Although once credit cards took off, you could do a lot more damage by rolling up the debt. Fortunately, credit cards weren't that big a deal when I was young and occasionally dabbling in dumb spending.

Probably the dumbest thing I ever did with my money was buy a baby-blue suede blazer on sale at Ann Taylor. I was in my early twenties and I pretty much spent the rent money. This meant that, in order to make sure I had the rent, I spent the rest of the month scrambling. I rolled my coins and spent a week subsisting on a bag of oranges, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread.

Ah, youth. (By the way, I loved that jacket and it was well worth it.)

Not that I haven't done dumb things since. It's just that, when I do dumb things now, I have more money and thus have the financial resilience to survive without resorting to subsisting on a bag of oranges, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. (C.f., the rowing machine I bought last October and still haven't used. I will say that it's more or less paid for itself in that, if ever I have a day when I'm reluctant to get my miles in, all I need to do is glance at the rowing machine and realize that, if I don't start stepping, I have to sit down and row. That gets me moving.) Plus there is definitely a dollar limit on what I'm willing to do that's dumb-ish. And it doesn't go much higher than $1K. (And rarely gets anywhere near that amount.)

Anyway, I don't think I'm constitutionally capable of blowing through $400 million - even if I had $400 million around to blow through.

But I'm not Scott Jones, who has seen his $400 million fortune sift like sand through his fingers. He now has a little over a thousand bucks in checking - wonder if he's interested in an unused rowing machine? - and has credit card debt amounting to $140K. (Gulp!) Oh, yes, and he owes his parents over $1 million. Jones is in his early 60's, so his parents have to be in their eighties. So they're probably not going to make that retirement shortfall up on their own anytime soon. (Gulp! Gulper! Gulpest!)

So how did he get there?

At 25, he was a founding partner in Boston Technology, the company that made voicemail stick. He later founded Gracenote, the music search company he sold to Sony for $260 million and some of the technology that powers iTunes. He was an early investor in Art Technology Group, the ecommerce giant that Oracle would later purchase for $1 billion. And in 2005, he was the mind behind ChaCha, the human-powered, text-based search engine backed by Jeff Bezos and whose data was acquired by either Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. (Jones won’t say which one.) (Source: Adam Wren in Indianapolis Monthly)

That's how he made his money.

So where'd it all go?

Some of it went to his Indianapolis mansion. A place that, in 2009, was chosen "House of the Decade" by MTV, beating out Mariah Carey and Hugh Hefner for the honor. The award was presented by none other than Kim Kardashian. One of the key features Chez Jones: 

A spiral mahogany slide that took a boatmaker a year and a half to build once deposited riders to a well-stocked bar at the bottom of the run. “Some people would take the slide to get to the bar,” he once mused, “and others had to get drunk at the bar to do the slide.”

Wheee!

The slide was only part of the grandeur:

Furnished with a $9,250 Tyrannosaurus rex skull and a Steinway grand piano, the home featured an indoor basketball court, a 25-foot-long saltwater aquarium, and a knock-you-down waterfall shower. Walls hid secret passageways. A 4,000-pound brass tub sprawled across the master bathroom. In addition to gracing several MTV Cribs episodes, the Jones manse made appearances on a variety of HGTV shows and Mega Mansions. It took seven years and $20 million to build and millions each year to operate.

Plus he's in the middle of a hellacious and costly divorce - his third. Oh, and, in February, he had his electricity cut off. (Jones says it was an oversight. He does have a reasonably hefty income by anyone else's terms - $21K/month -  from his work as head of a non-profit coding academy.)

Scott Jones also spent a ton in contributions to Indiana (Republican) politicians, and working on initiatives like getting Indiana to adopt Daylight Savings Time. (That worked.)

And he lavished just a bit on himself, like hiring Ray Charles to perform at his par-tay when he turned 40. (When I turned 40, we waited a month and then flew to Berlin to help tear down The Wall.) And when he flew back to Indy after a trip, he had one aide to pick him up and quickly get him back home, and another to wait to collect his baggage. (Now that might be worth having an aide for...)

Jones was also philanthropic, "funding the roller coaster at the Indianapolis Zoo."

Then there were those divorces, which cost him plenty.

The latest divorce is an ongoing saga that's been particularly tawdry. 

One of the high points - make that low points - was his wife's Tweet attacking a woman she accused of sleeping with her husband. One tweet read:

You blew him for a michael khors bag? Bitch I would’ve got you a MK bag just to leave us be… Jeeesh.

The woman sued "and won an undisclosed settlement." Likely for more than the cost of a Michael Kors bag.

And we all think of Indiana as reserved, Mike Pence strait-laced. 

Anyway, the house is a goner. And all the stuff in it was offered up in an "everything must go" sale. And I do mean "everything must go."

Half-empty bottles of Windex went for 50 cents.

Scott Jones doesn't even have his own car any longer. He's tootling around Indy in his father's 2008 Toyota Tundra. Kind of pathetic when you think of a guy in his sixties asking his dad if he can have the keys. Hope he at least fills it up when he puts it back in the driveway.

But Scott Jones is still thinking big:

"I will earn between a billion and $100 billion in this next decade. Watch me.” 

But he's also offering himself up as something of a cautionary tale: 

Jones now counsels other entrepreneurs to avoid the kind of high-profile spending he built a reputation for. Don’t own so much that your stuff owns you, he tells them. “I was feeling like my stuff owned me at that point.”

There's a classic Honeymooners episode in which Ralph Kramden finds a suitcase stuffed with money. When no one claims it, he goes on a spending spree, only to find out the that money was counterfeit. He had fun while it lasted, and there's a great scene in which, snapping his fingers, he talks to his wife Alice about his two days a millionaire. "I had it, and I went with it...It came easy, and it went just as fast..."

I'm sure that Scott Jones' fortune didn't come easy. He built it as an entrepreneur, rather than finding it in a suitcase. 

Ralph and Alice Kramden never made it out of their dump of a cold-water flat, let alone into a place anywhere near Scott Jones' crazy house in Indiana. But, as I read this story, I couldn't help thinking about Ralph.

"It came easy, and it went just as fast..."

Hunter Biden: Do Sunday painters typically sell their work for $75K? Asking for a Sunday writer...

I feel quite a bit of sympathy for Hunter Biden. 

He grew up in plenty of shadows, including those of his: 

• Dead mother and baby sister, killed a few days before Christmas in a car crash that gravely injured him and his surviving brother when he was a toddler; 
• Alpha father, who may well be a kind and empathetic individual, but who didn't get to be a U.S. Senator, the Vice President, and now the President without having a ton of alpha drive in there, too;
• Perfect brother, who wasn't just perfect in life, but who had an incredibly sad and tragic ending by dying of brain cancer in his forties. Even the names: Beau to Beautiful; Hunter the, well, hunter for some purpose and redemption in his life.

Hunter Biden's had a tough life, and I'm not saying that much of it wasn't of his own making - the drug and alcohol abuse; some sordid aspects in his personal life; the questionable professional choices that may not have been illegal but sure appear to be borderline sleazy.

But along the way, he managed to get a good education. Oh, I'm sure he got the same admission's lift that plenty of others with famous parents get, but he did manage to graduate from Georgetown and Yale Law. And while neither of those accomplishments are anywhere near what they're cracked up to be, they ain't nothing, either. 

He managed to raise three daughters who seem decent enough, and who seem to love and even like their father, many warts and all.

He managed to write a more-or-less well-reviewed memoir focusing on his addiction. (As so often happens with celebrity memoirs that receive hefty advances, it's on the metaphorical remainder table.) Part of the redemption tour that now has him settled in LA with a new wife, a new baby boy (named - gulp! - for his brother Beau), and new career as an artist.

And, despite having become a serious artist at a relatively advanced age -Hunter Biden is 51 - and relatively recently, he's got a gallery showing (NY and LA) coming up in the fall. And the works are supposedly going to be priced at anywhere from $75K to $500K. 

I'm not going to get into the plethora of ethics issues swirling around this one, what with some sort of "blind trust-ish" thang being put in place so that no one knows who's paying $75K to $500K for art from someone who seems to me to be more or less a Sunday painter. Skilled, sure. But...

Not that there's anything wrong with being a Sunday painter. I'm, more or less, a Sunday writer. And, not that I don't kick myself for not having pursued a career as a "real" writer, it does give me plenty of pleasure and satisfaction to be one. But the closest I'll ever come to writing greatness is having seen John Updike on the Red Line, and - just the other day - having Joyce Carol Oates retweet a comment I'd made on one of her tweets. (Be still my twittering heart.)

The art market is, of course, insane. (And the NFT-ing of the art market is making it even crazier.) Works go for astronomical amounts based as much on on South Sea Bubbles and Tulip Mania as they are on merit. But, hey, if someone's willing to pay.

And that goes for Hunter Biden, too.

If someone's willing to pay $75K for one of his works, well, okay. (And maybe someone will be. But I'm thinking his parents here.)

And I'm sure the "famous name" on the painting is worth something that most Sunday painters aren't able to command. 

Still...

And here's why I feel quite a bit of sympathy for Hunter Biden the artist.

I understand that he's finding comfort and joy in his work. But I don't think he's a moron who's deluded enough to think that he's a great or original or breakthrough artist who's going to make a hefty living at his work. Or a hustling marketer like Banksy or Jeff Koontz who can parlay his talent into the big bucks. 

Good luck to him. 

I hope he gets his shit together. I hope he ends up living a decent life. And I hope he stops listening to anyone who's telling him that his works may bring in half-a-million bucks. That's way too much of a shortcut to fame and fortune for someone who in real life would probably be entering his work in an art show in a local park. And I don't think convincing yourself that you're an artistic genius is a really good way to keep working your way out of addiction. (I'm thinking he might make a good expressive therapist.)

As I said, good luck to Hunter Biden. I'll be rooting for him. But I really hope for his sake, let alone the sake of those in the White House, that no one's daffy enough to pay $500K for one of his paintings. 

Even by gun nut standards, this seems like a new low

Culper Precision is a firearms company based in Utah that customizes, builds, and modifies guns and gun accessories. Even by gun nut standards, there's plenty of gun nuttery going on at Culper. 

They really do like their guns, and see the Second Amendment a "foundationally important to the freedoms that we enjoy." They view 2A:

...as a check on the power that We the People grant our elected officials and as a tool to make the weak strong in the face of those who would oppress and maim, we also recognize and built this to highlight the pure enjoyment of the shooting sports as we feel that like us, our customers truly deeply love the shooting sports and the inherent fun, satisfaction and joy that comes from participation in them. (Source: Culper)

Hmm. God knows, there are plenty of elected officials whose power should be checked, but if I were an average, sensible-gun-law sort of elected official, I might be a tad bit concerned about folks who think of guns as a check on my power. And as a civilian, I'm a bit nervous, too. No, I don't want to maim anyone - that seems more a gun toter sort of thang - but there might be some wannabe gun slinger out there who could be thinking that I want to oppress them by imposing oppressive rules pertaining to gun registration, and by supporting limits on the ownership of military grade weaponry. Sheesh. 

But, hey, it looks like Culper is mostly about the joy, in "inherent fun" of shooting sports.

Oh, I assume there is plenty o' fun involved in shooting sports. Not my jam, but if you want to hang out in a gun range, head out to the dump to kill rats, or even put a bullet in the head of a deer you're going to eat, have at it. 

For Culper, part of the joy is personalizing your weaponry. And to this end, they recently introduced something called Block 19, a $600 kit that lets Glock owners embed their guns in Legos. 

This product, which Culper calls a "fun and safe queen" - which is either a wordo or something that makes absolutely no sense to me - may all be part and parcel of inherent fun. But to me it looks more like something that makes a gun look like a toy and, thus, might be attractive to the sorts of people who play with toys. I.e., children. It also might be something that a good guy, with or without a gun, could mistake for a toy - and end up dead because of it. 

That's not how Culper sees things:

Rather than live in fear of the loud voices on social media we decided to release Block19 in an attempt to communicate that it is ok to own a gun and not wear tactical pants every day and that owning and shooting firearms responsibly is a really enjoyable activity.

Seems to me that wearing tactical pants (or not) is quite a distance from toy-ifying a gun.

They also see Block 19 as enforcing their commitment to an "inclusion mindset," in which guns:

...double not only as ‘The Great Equalizer’ but also hopefully soon the great unifier.

The "great unifier"? Wow. Just wow. 

The only thing unifying about U.S. gun ownership - I believe we're the only country that has more guns that people - is that pretty much every other country on earth is unified in their belief that, when it comes to guns, the U.S. is nuts. 

Unifying? In Culper's dreams.

And here's what else is in their dreams:

 “Here’s one of those childhood dreams coming to life, the Block19 prototype, yes you can actually build Legos onto it,” the company announced on its Instagram page. “We superglued it all together and surprisingly it survived a little over 1,500 rounds in full auto at Shootah this past weekend.” (Source: NY Post)

Culper only sold a few Block 19 kits before - pushed by the pushback they were getting on social and other media, and a cease and desist order from Lego - the company removed the Block 19 from the market. In the process, they decided to exercise their First Amendment rights by taking a parting shot:

...this is our small attempt to that end, making the 2nd amendment too painful to tread on…

I don't know about you, but I don't think that turning a gun into something that looks like a toy is going to make "the 2nd amendment too painful to tread on..." Au contraire, what it pretty much does is underscore just how painful the Second Amendment is, and just how much treading on the rest of us it manages to do. 

What's billionaires' camp got that Brownie and Fly-up day camp didn't?

I don't have a lot of experience with summer camp.

The summer I was 9.5, I spent a week at a Brownie-Fly Up day camp. (A fly up is someone who's graduated from Brownies but hasn't yet joined a Girl Scout troupe.) This was shortly after my new baby sister was born, and I think my parents wanted to give me and my sister Kath (who is older, so got to go to Girl Scout day camp) a break from housework drudgery and childcare. Kath's camp, I believe, had one overnight. 

My camp was nothing much.

Along with my school friends Carol and Mary A, and a couple of younger girls - true Brownies - from my school, I took a bus each morning up Main Street to Leicester Junior College, where camp was held.

We did crafts, played games, walked down to Stiles Lake for a swim, hung around, and got back on the bus in late afternoon. The one skill I learned was how to weave a sit-upon out of newspapers. Which, of course, got all damp from sitting on the ground, leaving newsprint on the rear of our shorts. 

I made friends with a fellow Maureen, who was fun to hang out with. (Post-camp, we had a year or so of correspondence. Even though we lived a couple of miles from each other - she was next parish over - I don't think I ever saw her again.)

As camp experiences go, mine was pretty low key. Nothing like the camps I read about in the cheesy books I read, or the cheesy shows I watched on TV. Those were camps where handsome, wholesome WASP girls learned archery and sailing, told spooky stories around the campfire, and developed crushes on the lifeguard. Or even like the camp Allan Sherman famously satirized in his song "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah."

My camp was also nothing like the so-called "summer camp for billionaires" held each summer in Sun Valley, Idaho. Where, at a conference run by Allen & Company (an investment bank), movers meet shakers, shakers meet movers, and they all have a rollicking good time moving and shaking.

Last year, camp was called on account of covid, so I'm sure the campers were all happy to get back to hanging out with each other, wining, whining (about regulations and taxes, no doubt), and generally who's who-ing with the tech, finserv, media and other elite in-crowders.

Who was there?

Well, Mark Zuckerberg was. I believe he surfed into Idaho directly from his widely viewed (widely meme'd, widely ratio'd) July 4th flag-waving ride on his $12K hydrofoil board.

Families have taken part in the past, but this year, summer camp for billionaires was for the billionaires themselves (and maybe an SO, but no kiddos).

So Zuck had to settle for being there with his professional sidekick, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO. 

Jeff Bezos came to get a bit of camping in before he takes off in his rocket ship for parts unknown. 

Media mogul Barry Diller was there to tell us that movies are dead, and what streaming services stream "ain't movies." Pffft to the Dill. I call sour grapes. I call old fogey. Diller's wife, Diane Von Furstenberg was there, too. (Note to self: buy a DVF wrap dress this fall. I had a couple of them when they first became a thing in the mid-1970's and they were ultra comfy. I can say I wish I'd hung on to the two that I had, but that was 30 pounds ago, so...) 

Warren Buffet jetted in, as did Bill Gates, who spent some time mea-culpa-ing about his divorce. Apple's Tim Cook was there, but I don't think he had any mea-culpa-ing to do for himself. 

New England Patriots' owner Bob Kraft was in attendance, sporting his trademark sneakers. As was NFL head man Roger Goodell. (Gag me with that meet up, but at least he wasn't in a massage parlor getting a handy.)

I'm sure camp was all fine and dandy, a good time had by all, etc. 

And, no, I'm not jealous. In truth, the only camp that would interest me was one where I could curl up in a hammock, drinking Arnold Palmer's and eating BLT's, and reading junk novels. Dealmaking with a bunch of billionaires? Even if I were a billionaire, I wouldn't be interested. Good thing, because I'm pretty sure that the event planners at Allen & Company don't know how to get a hold of me with an invite. They're probably not even aware that I exist. (The nerve.)

But I hope they had fun schmoozing and boozing.

I'm pretty sure that, unlike 1959 Brownie and Fly-up camp, they didn't put on a show on the last day.

Everyone had to do something or other, and somehow I was picked to dance a can-can with a Protestant girl named Nancy. I think we were paired because we were the same height. Nancy was a blonde, too, which may have factored in. But she was one of those fancy, WASPY, Protestant blondes I imagined went to "real" sleepover camp to learn archery. What was she doing with a bunch of parochial school Brownies and Fly-ups?

I volunteered to supply the costumes: striped cotton skirts, one blue (mine), one red (my sister Kath's), that had stagecoaches depicted on them. Not exactly oo-la-la can-can skirts, but they had voluminous enough material that you could swish them around and do high kicks. 

When performance time came, I. Just. Couldn't.

I pretended I was sick and lay down under a fir tree. I have no idea whether the show went on, with Nancy doing the dance solo. I did get the skirt I lent her back. 

The other thing I remember from the last day of Brownie and Fly-up camp was the counsellors and the cutie blond lifeguard heading off to a secret place to make S'mores for themselves. They were found out, and my school mate Kathy cried. I remember the cutie blond lifeguard comforting her, as she wept, face down in the pine needles, under the same droopy pine where I'd taken shelter. I was pissed. Not at Kathy, of course. But at those counsellors, at that cutie blond lifeguard. What were they thinking? Couldn't have waited to push us all onto the buses before they made S'mores for themselves?

Bet that never happened at billionaire summer camp.

One fish, two fish

Way back in the wayback, it was sea lampreys invading the Great Lakes. When it comes to invasive aquatic species, the Great Lakes are something of magnets. Zebra mussels. Asian carp. 

Not that New England waters don't hold their own invaders. It's just that, well, our lakes aren't all that Great, so we don't get all that much publicity when invaders invade and start crowding out the natives.

The latest fish story does not, however, take place in the Great Lakes. 

No, right about now, the goldfish invasion is hitting the Land of 1,000 Lakes: Minnesota. And the invasion isn't coming from throngs of goldfish swimming upriver, or downriver. It's coming from pet owners who want out of worrying about whether those little goldfish they got to entertain the kids during covid are going to go belly up and freak the kids out. Or from pet owners who are sick and tired from having those little mouths to feed, from having to keep the aquarium clean and well lit. Or from pet owners too squeamish to commit the cold-blooded murder of their little cold-blooded critters, too squeamish to just be done with it and flush them down the toilet.

So they go the Born Free route and release their no longer wanted goldfish into one of those 1,000 local Minnesota lakes. 

Far from being an innocuous domestic animal, a goldfish freed in fresh water is an invasive species, an organism that is introduced to an environment, can quickly reproduce, outcompete native species and destroy a habitat. And even though they get less attention than invasive organisms such as Asian carp or zebra mussels, goldfish appear to be a growing problem in bodies of water across the United States and around the world....

Goldfish, like their common carp relatives, feed at the bottom of lakes, where they uproot plants and stir up sediment, which then damages the water’s quality and can lead to algal blooms, harming other species.

“Goldfish have the ability to drastically change water quality, which can have a cascade of impacts on plants and other animals,” [Minnesota natural resources specialist Caleb]] Ashling said. “They are a major concern.”(Source: WaPo)

And they don't stay 2" long, either. They can quickly grow to over a foot long, and easily hit weights of four pounds or so. A nine-pounder has even been reported. So has a twenty-pound goldfish.

Goldfish can live a lot longer than your average flushable home tank little fishy: up to 25 years old. Not to mention survive in really cold water - frozen-over lakes - where they can go without oxygen for months. Plus they breed like rabbits. 

One Minnesota county fished out 30,000 - 50,000 goldfish in one day. 

It's not just a Minnesota problem. In Washington state, they've overrun a lake and are jeopardizing the native trout population. (Although goldfish are edible, people really want to fish for and eat trout, thank you.) In Virginia, a 16" long goldfish was bagged. 

Having seen giant goldfish in the mini-golf course in Orleans on The Cape, I knew they could grow pretty large in koi ponds. But I had no idea that goldfish were thriving in the wild, while raising havoc with water quality and with indigenous fish species. So this story came as something of a shocker. Right up there with blind albino alligators in the NYC sewage system. (Which, unlike the invasive goldfish, don't actually exist.)

So, one more thing to worry about. At least it's gotten my mind off of whether kudzu is going to overrun Massachusetts.

Up, up and away

What's not to like about balloons?

They're bright, they're cheerful, they're fun and, if there are balloons around, it's generally because there's a joyous occasion happenin'. 

I know this joyous occasion thing isn't always true. Some folks release balloons at memorial services/funerals. And, let's face it, as much as you can try to make a memorial service/funeral a joyous occasion - and, trust me here, you can definitely have fun at/with a memorial service/funeral - there's generally an undercurrent of sadness.

But mostly, balloons = fun.

Of course, there's always the burst balloon that brings on a mini-flood of tears. Not to mention the look of shock and awe of the face of a kid when they realize that, when you let go of a balloon, it floats up, up and away. And, of course, much of the time, the letting go is of an expensive balloon, not the cheapo multi-pack kind you get at CVS: the kind that bring your lungs to the edge of collapse when you're blowing them up. No, those runaway balloons are apt to be of the expensive, mylar variety. So long, Minnie Mouse.  Au revoir, Thomas the Train.

But, as I said, balloons for the most part are fun. 

Except when they're not.

As in when a whole big old bunch of them get released into the great outdoors, and they end up damaging the environment.

So Rhode Island has just signed into law a bill prohibiting anyone from "intentionally releasing 10 or more helium or other lighter-than-air balloons outdoors."

How, I wonder, would one unintentionally release 10 or more balloons outdoors, but I guess these things happen. You could be holding 10 or more balloons and have a hand cramp. Or a brain cramp. And just let go. 

Something like this happened to me with a big tub of movie popcorn. Years ago, I was at the movies with my sister Trish and friend Peter, and I was seated on the aisle, holding the still mostly full bucket of popcorn. Suddenly, it just flew out of my hand and into the aisle. It almost made me believe in poltergeists. 

Anyway, popcorn strewn across the already grotty movie theater carpeting wasn't really doing anyone much, if any, harm. Balloons, on the other hand...

Wildlife advocates say that balloon releases, which have typically been used as a display for memorials or celebrations, have become an environmental nuisance as birds and marine animals can ingest or become entangled in the balloon litter. When the law takes effect in November, violators will face a fine of $100. The law does not impact hot-air balloons, indoor balloon releases, or scientific and weather research. (Source: The Boston Globe)

I'm all for the ban. Balloon litter just plain isn't good for flora and, especially, fauna. Right up there with the plastic rings that hold soda six-packs together. I don't consume a lot of soda, but when I do buy it, I immediately pull all the cans out of the plastic holder and cut the holder up into pieces, so that there are no longer any bits of plastic making up a circle that could strangle a turtle or permanently clamp shut a bird's beak. So, yay, ban!

The article states that Massachusetts has a similar ban in place, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on google. And it's not worth contacting my state rep to find out what the story is.

Seriously, though,  can Massachusetts be less enlightened than Tennessee, which I read has a balloon ban, on this or any other front?

Balloons Blow is a Florida-based non-profit behind balloon laws. They're not thrilled with the new RI law, which is watered down from what was originally proposed, but they're happy to be making some headway.

On their website, the organization shows the grim reality of poor little creatures getting caught up in balloon detritus. And then there's the fact that, even if those limped out balloons aren't being ingested by (or strangling) animals, they're being added to the huge floating debris patches out there. (C.f., the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.)

Balloons Blow also offers some celebratory alternatives - some action-oriented, some purely decorative. All sustainable. 

These include dancing inflatables, ribbon dancers, garden spinners, bunting, pinwheels. Instead of releasing balloons, have some drummers drumming. Or set out a flock of reusable pink flamingoes. Or you can decorate with tissue paper pompoms. Now, I've never made a tissue paper pompoms, but my freshman year in high school, for our field day, my home room ran a booth where we sold cookies. The "roof" was chicken wire covered with white, yellow, and aqua Kleenex flowers we made by the hundreds, under the keen-eyed direction of Sister Josephine of the Sacred Heart. The trim was yellow, the background white, and our homeroom number - 101 - was written out in aqua. (Wish I had a picture. I'm sure it was stunning.) Anyway, I made over 100 of those flowers, created by folding a piece of Kleenex into pleats, securing it in the middle with a bit of wire, and then fluffing it out. I bet tissue paper pompoms use a similar manufacturing process. So this I could do. 

Not on the Balloon Blows list: flaming Chinese lanterns, butterfly releases, or dove releases. All bad for the environment and/or exploitative of animals. 

Even the balloon industry trade association, the Balloon Council - "Affirming America's Ongoing Love Affair with Balloons" - has come out against releasing balloons. 

"This change in stance fully recognizes the need for everyone to be as ‘green’ as we possibly can be to protect our planet.”

There doesn't seem to be much downside to outlawing balloon releases. Other than the argument that I'm sure is coming: if balloon releases are outlawed, only outlaws will release balloons.  AKA, mah freedom!

Meanwhile, I'll be just as happy not to look, up in the sky, and wonder whether what I'm seeing is a nasty old balloon release.

Congratulations, Rhode Island!