Car free, carefree

I was out getting my steps in the other day, and was wending my way around the 'hood when I happened on some pretty intense towing action. There were at least a half dozen tow trucks, picking up (picking off) cars - mostly pricey SUV's: this is, after all Beacon Hill - that hadn't been moved for street sweeping.

From the looks of things, they'd already cleared this block on Mt. Vernon, and were tackling Brimmer Street, where I once lived.

Caveat, parker!

Once again, I was reminded just how great it is to be car free.

I last owned a car in 2007, and remain firm in my belief that unless you absolutely need a car (say, to commute to those far suburban reaches that aren't on public transpo) and/or unless you have (hah!) or can afford a parking place (a couple of months ago, someone offered $750K for a garage space a block from where I live), you're out of your mind to keep a car in downtown Boston. And I bet this holds for pretty much any downtown urban area.

It's not as if I don't enjoy driving. I do.

It's just that my adult life has been spent in Boston where, unless you need a car, you don't need a car.

When I commuted to the burbs, I kept a car. 

In the mid-1980's, my company moved from Cambridge to Lexington. Boo! So I bought an ancient, rust bucket Honda Civic from a colleague who was moving to NYC, where he wouldn't need a car. I may have paid $2,000 bucks for it. Maybe $1,000. 

At first, I didn't pay for a parking place, but toughed it out, roaming around for upwards of an hour when I got home in the evening to find a space. Then maneuvering my way into it - no small feat getting into a tight space, especially when you drive a standard. But I did learn how to parallel park.

With my Civic, I was towed once - not a pleasant experience - and ticketed three times, twice for the same infraction. I had parked near the Hampshire House (Cheers Bar) in what had, up until the moment I parked there, been a resident parking place. But the Hampshire House had wangled it for themselves, and I didn't notice the notice. I got one ticket at 9 p.m., the other at 6:30 a.m. On my birthday.

Then there was shoveling out after snow storms. Don't get me going on that one. 

The Civic was a mess. The body was rusty and something was always going wrong, as happens with old crappy cars. Towards its end of life, the driver side door was permanently latched, and I had to crawl in over the shift. Very pleasant, especially when wearing a skirted suit.

After a stint commuting to Lexington, I took a job even further afield, in Lowell.

There, my little Civic gave out, literally coughing up its life when I pulled into the car dealership, where I'd purchased a Mercury Tracer. I got $200 for the trade-in.

I loved the Tracer, which was a sweet little car. Plus it was new, and worth protecting in a way the Civic just plain wasn't. So I started paying for overnight parking in the Boston Common Garage. An absolute bargain. I think it was only $90 a month then, for out-by-10 a.m. - in-after-4 p.m. parking. Unlimited parking on weekends, holidays, and snow days. Quite a deal.

Within a couple of weeks after leaving Wang for another Cambridge job I could get to on the Red Line, I sold the Tracer by placing an ad in the Want Advertiser, a newsprint booklet that was Craigslist before there was Craigslist.

Car free!

I was thrilled.

Fast forward and my Cambridge company, lease up, decided to upstakes and move to Burlington, right near the Burlington Mall. A swell location if you like the jungle noises at the Rainforest Cafe.

I bought a shiny blue New Beetle, and, yes, I kept a daisy in the vase.

And went back to paying for parking in the Common Garage.

A few years later, I left corporate for freelance work, but kept the car (for some daffy reason). It was paid for. I used it to get to my sister's in Salem, my other sister on the Cape. But I could no longer justify paying for parking, given I now would need fulltime parking for occasional use.

For a while, I used a parking place out back of my building, owned by a friend who wasn't using it. Ultra convenient. Until a family of rats held a picnic on my engine block. Imagine my shock when I went to top off the windshield wiper fluid and found chicken bones, fruitcake, pineapple chunks, and rat scat.

So I took to the streets, scrounging for spaces, shoveling out, parking in the Garage overnight as a last resort.

There were some months when the only time I "drove" my car was when I needed to move it for the street sweepers. I'd hop in the car at 6 a.m. and, along with a convoy of other parkers, follow the street sweepers around, claiming a space - good for two weeks - once they'd swept it. Good for two weeks, that is, if some moving company or utility crew didn't post signs claiming it for a while. So I had to check regularly.

I kept weighing the advantages of getting rid of the car (many) vs. the disadvantage (few). Then I broke my shoulder and could no longer drive a standard. So I called Goodwill (not Kars-4-Kids) and had them take it away. It made me a bit sad. It was a PITA to own a car, but I really did love that Beetle.

Since then, I've been car free. 

I used to be a heavy Zipcar user, but, while I'm still a member I mostly Uber when I "need" a car. Rarely, I have to rent a car. Rarely.

For years after I was car free, by the way, I'd be walking around the neighborhood on a summer weekend, gazing wistfully at all the free parking spaces that appeared when the locals took off for their summer homes. Where were those empty spaces when I needed one?

Seeing all those towed cars the other day reminded me of just how great it is to NOT have a car.

Car free, carefree.

The stressful workplace: it's killing us

When I worked at Wang Labs during the late 1980's, the company was spiraling downward. In what was a stressful environment to begin with - overly bureaucratic, insanely hierarchical, incredibly cheap (when you traveled on business, you had to do so on your own time and you had to take the cheapest flight, even if it involved multiple stops and flying you 1,000 miles out of your way) - the lack of clear direction, the cost cutting measures, the habitual layoffs layered more stress onto an already dire situation.

To cut costs, they unscrewed one-third of the overhead lights. I guess that move had an upside: it was harder to see how dirty and rundown the place was. They also cut back on cleaning, which meant that they no longer emptied your wastepaper basket daily. Which might of been okay if it hadn't also meant not emptying the oversized, unlidded trash containers they had on each floor near the coffee machine. So each floor had a colossal garbage pail, overflowing with coffee grounds and lunch refuse like banana peels. Because none of us wanted garbage to accumulate in our cubicles, we emptied ours out in the communal bin.

And don't get me going on the bathrooms. We used to joke about contracting typhus. A (male) colleague reported that he'd gone into a men's room stall and found a row of dried boogers above the toilet paper dispenser. No surprise. When you neglect the physical environment, people treat it badly and make things worse. Broken windows theory writ large. One time, I found a desiccated tea bag, shriveled up in a corridor. Another time, while walking between floors, I had to step around a giant loogie that someone had hawked in the stairwell.

But even worse than the physical decay was the continuous fear of being pink-slipped. 

Before one massive scale and particularly gruesome lay-off - they had announced in October that the lay-off would be conducted and done with by December 1st, and, of course, they waited until December 1st to put it in motion - a guy on my floor dropped dead in his cubicle of a heart attack. He was about my age - late thirties/early forties - and had a couple of small kids. Financial speaking, his family was probably better off, given he likely had life insurance and the Wang severance packages were not all that great.

Wang was by no means the only stressful environment I've worked in. I've worked under undeniably incompetent and often malevolent senior management. I've reported to narcissistic aholes. I've had toxic colleagues, and toxic folks reporting to me. (It happens.) 

I've written about it plenty of times, going back to Pink Slip's early days. (All Worked Up, December 2006). In fact, Pink Slip started out mostly being about lay-offs and generally lousy working conditions. 

All jobs, I've come to believe, can be stressful. (Hell, pretty much everything in life can be stressful.) Working in a factory. Waitressing. Customer complaint taker. Every one of the jobs I've held has had their moments. But what made those moments and jobs survivable was knowing that it wasn't going to be forever. A crappy summer job? You can make it until September. A crappy professional job? The two most beautiful words in the English language are "I" and "quit." First runners up: "head" and "hunter."

Finding a new job is a common response to being in a terrible, terribly stressful job situation. You leave thinking and hoping that the next place you land will somehow be better. More functional than dysfunctional. Which, as we all know, is not always (seldom?) the case. The solution, it seems, is that there's no solution.

And we do need a solution, one Stanford B School professor says. He claims that stressful work environments - not just rat-race blue collar jobs like the Amazon warehouse and delivery positions have employees peeing in bottles since there's no time for a break - are killing people:

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford School of Business, argues that work is exacting an even greater price than we realize. More than 100,000 Americans die each year from adverse workplace conditions, he says. And many more become sick. (Source: Boston Globe)

We're not talking OSHA type deaths and illnesses - the kind of accidental deaths that happen to lumberjacks and chicken pluckers. 

It’s a much broader phenomenon ― encompassing office workers, as well as traditionally high-stress jobs like nurses and first responders. Pfeffer estimates that “workplace management” was, as of 2018, the fifth leading cause of death in the United States.

“I think we are on an unsustainable path. I think we were on an unsustainable path pre-pandemic. The pandemic’s made everything worse, and something’s got to give,” he says.

Pfeffer says it's time to stop blaming the workers for not being able to cope with stress in any way other than quitting or dropping dead. Time to start making employers accountable for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad working conditions in their companies. 

That sort of blame is absolutely backwards. The onus should be on employers.

What's causing all this death and destruction?  

People are working longer hours. They're under pressure to become more and more productive. (C.f., peeing in a bottle so they can work more.) The expectation that, in return for some flexibility - working from home, taking an hour off here and there to take the kid to the dentist - employers expect employees to be always on. Three a.m. e-mail? Where ARE you???

“The economic toll, in terms of lost productivity, lost good years of life, lost days, increased medical expenses,” Pfeffer says, “is on an unsustainable path, and it needs to be stopped. And therefore you need some combination of legislation, regulation, and litigation.”

...According to Pfeffer, the answer is to make employers take better care of the people who work for them.

He says that there are lots of reliable, tested, scientific measurements that could gauge employee wellbeing. And he makes a provocative argument: We should hold companies responsible “for the mental and physical health and the wellbeing of their employees. As you would do for the environment.”

“And if you make them ill, we’re going to fine you... If you dump a bunch of crap into the water, we’re going to hold you responsible for that damage. Same parallel. We should treat human sustainability exactly the same way as we treat environmental sustainability,” he says. 

...If, as a culture, we agree that the cost of workplace stress has gotten too high, Pfeffer believes that action will have to come from both citizens and government leaders.

“If you wait for companies to do this on their own,” he says, “good luck.” 

 Good luck is right. 

I know that Wang Labs was a long time ago, but they wouldn't even clean up a loogie in the stairwell or wipe the dried boogers off the wall.

Hope things have improved, but I have my doubts that companies, for all their lip service about employee wellbeing, will do all that much about it.

Hope I'm wrong...

Shopping around

This is apparently long ago news. So long ago, in fact, that when the story came out, I was just a broth of a girl. A sweet young thing of sixty. So long ago, that Twitter was just really finding its audience (i.e., everyone) and finally taking off. So long ago, that Donald Trump wasn't yet a raging fascistic power monger hell bent on destroying our democracy. Back then, he was nothing more than an annoying huckster, a wanker with a fake reality show ("The Apprentice") who was able to satisfy his narcissistic supply by insulting, demeaning, and firing people who really didn't work for him. Ah, those were the days. 

Anyway, the long ago non-news from the Year of Our Lord 2010 is that Barbra Streisand has a shopping mall in the basement of the main house on the grounds of her Malibu estate.

The mall isn't exactly a suburban mall anchored by a Macy's and/or a Crate & Barrel. It's a "collection of turn-of-the-last-century-style shops [that] beckons 'customers' to step inside," the shops laid out on a "cobblestone-paved, antique-lantern-lit 'street.'"

There's a Sweet Shop, where guests coming to Chez

Streisand/Brolin for a movie screening can load up (for free) on popcorn and theater snacks. She has a Gift Shoppe - genius! - where she keeps new items like soap dishes and candlesticks that she can use when she needs a hostess gift. The Gift Shoppe even comes with its own wrapping table.

This reminds me of an old friend of my cousin's who, in her retirement, worked part time for years at Williams-Sonoma, where she took advantage of the sales and employee discounts to purchase all sorts of Williams-Sonoma wares like pizzelle makers, panini grills, and soda machines. The sorts of thing that people don't buy for themselves, but are happy enough to receive as gifts. 

I was at this woman's house once and we went down to her basement to check it out. It was not a Streisand-esque old timey-town shopping district. It was just a basement. A basement packed, floor to ceiling, with Williams-Sonoma boxes. This was years ago, and the stockpile might be depleted by now, but when I was there is was loaded to the gills.

My cousin and her daughters-in-law were gifted with many of the stockpiled items over the years.

(Seriously, you may not need a pizzelle maker, but who doesn't want one?)

Streisand's personal shopping mall is, of course, something else entirely. 

Like everything on her estate, the shops grew out of years of careful research. On a trip to the legendary decorative-arts museum Winterthur in Delaware, she was fascinated by a series of early-19th-century shops created by curators to display their collections. "Seeing Winterthur's indoor street, I thought how ingenious that was," she remembers. "Instead of just storing my things in the basement, I can make a street of shops and display them." (Source: Harpers Bazaar) 

Winterthur? I don't think it exists any longer, but I used to love getting the Winterthur catalog. In fact, that's where my Christmas tree topper came from. I also have some lovely, pale pink glass beads my mother got from there. Very pretty. I almost wore them the other day. 

...While most of the stores offer stock that comes and goes, the Antique Clothes Shop is truly a museum. Paneled in lavender-painted boiserie, it displays some of the star's most famous costumes, including her "People"-number gown from the Broadway production of Funny Girl, made of green chiffon over pink silk, with little beaded balls on the sleeves. 

Between the Winterthur lookalikes and the clothing museum, it's official: I wouldn't mind an invite to Streisand's mansion. Sounds like a place that's plenty fun to shop around in.

Not that I'm all that much of a shopper. Oh, I still buy things. But I'm not the shopper I used to be. 

Here I'm probably kidding myself. In the last couple of weeks I got some new napkins and a couple of Martha Stewart lemon-design serving pieces. I pretty much had to, given that I was hosting Easter dinner for the first time and really needed something springy and fresh. And the Martha Steward platter and bowl were marked down from $50 to $17.99, so they were practically free. Still, this and a few other recent purchases aside, these days I'm more into de-accessioning. You get to the point in your life when you really don't need anything.

As for clothing shopping, 99.99% of the time I'm wearing casual - and I do mean casual, not business casual - and if I'm buying something it's mostly (but, admittedly, not always) to replace something that's no longer wearable.

Anyway, there's more to Streisand's estate than the shopping plaza. 

A veritable village, it includes the rustic mill house, which boasts a 14-foot-high, 4,000-pound water wheel; Grandma's house, a cozy cottage filled with quilts; and the main house, a rambling yet elegant white mansion. But the heart of the property is the barn, a giant U-shaped clapboard structure flanked by a stone silo. A two-tiered central great room inside leads to a show-house-like collection of period rooms: the Federal lounge, the Greene & Greene library, the Stickley office, the art-nouveau bathroom, the napping room, and, yes, that street of shops.

A Stickley office? With a Stickley rocking chair that Babs sometimes sits and rocks in? 

Yep, I officially want an invite. 

I won't really be shopping around. Just window shopping. Maybe sit in the Stickley rocker and do a bit of rocking.

Streisand's spread is, of course, a tad bit on the cra side. And the water wheel is definitely goofy. But it all seems harmless enough. She's earned her money, and she grew up pretty poor, so if she wants to indulge in her fancies, oh, why not.  

And that Gift Shoppe. What can I say that I haven't said already. Genius!

 

Man, Tanner, that's such a bummer

Tanner Houck is a promising young pitcher with the Red Sox. I saw him pitch the other day, and although he coughed up a couple of runs and got the L, he looked good. (Not his fault that the Sox left their bats at home.)

Tanner Houck is also something of a maroon.

How else to explain his refusal to get vaccinated. 

“I think it’s a personal choice for everyone whether they get it or not,” Houck told the Globe...“So, that’s all I really got to say on it.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Personal choice? That's not how pandemics work, kiddo.

Shamefully, the Red Sox have been and remain one of the least vaccinated teams in baseball. And that really matters when it comes to playing their division rival, the Toronto Blue Jays. Because Canada won't let Houck or any other unvaxed player (or any traveler, for that matter) into their country. And the Red Sox, because they're in the same division, play a lot of games in Toronto. They're there now for four games, and have two three-game series in Toronto later this season. Ten games in all. Which means Houck, if he continues to dig his spiked heels in about vaccination, could miss three starts.

Toronto looks to be the better team, but you never know. The Red Sox made it to the playoffs last year. They could make a run. The division or the wild card could come down to those last three games of the season, which will be played in Toronto. Swell!

It's a bigger deal for a pitcher to miss games than a position player. It upsets the rotation, etc. And the Red Sox rotation is fragile to begin with. 

There are a couple of other players - as yet to be named - who will be Canada no shows.

Manager Alex Cora - himself currently out with mild covid (though vaccinated) - is pretty much shrugging things off. 

“We knew it beforehand, so we’ll plan accordingly.”

Looking forward to seeing who the other unvaxed putzes are so I know who to boo next time I'm at America's Most Beloved Ballpark.  

Houck admitted not being eligible to pitch as a result of the mandate isn’t a good feeling.

“I’m definitely bummed that I won’t be able to make that start,” Houck said. “But the starts that I am able to make, I plan on giving 100 percent for this team, if not moreso. Anything I can do for this team to help them win, I’ll do it.”

Not a good feeling? "Definitely bummed."

Wow, Tanner, that's such a bummer. 

If only there were something you could do so that you'd be able to make a start, other than "giving 100 percent for this team, if not moreso."

Tanner Houck is early on in his career. He only makes $700K or so a year. And he won't get paid while he's on the restricted list for his covid refusal. But if he turns out to be any good, he stands to make a ton of money. Teammate Chris Sale makes $30M a year, pretty much for doing nothing. He had a couple of decent seasons with the Red Sox, but in the last two years he won a whopping 11 games. Last year, he made $6M per win. Sweet! He's out injured again this year. Unclear when he'll be back. Oh, and if he remains unvaccinated - which he is to date - he won't be able to play in Toronto either, unless Canada eases up on their rules. 

So, Tanner, bro, there is something you can do to help this team win. You can get yourself $&&@#) vaccination.

I know you're young. I know you're fit and brimming with good health. I know you're a Trumpist. 

But FFS. Even Trump has been vaccinated. 

You don't want to be bummed? Roll up that sleeve!

Meanwhile, you can buy a Tanner Houck facemask. Number 89. So this lunkhead may actually be profiting from the pandemic. Maybe it'll make up for the pay days he's missing out on. On the other hand, I don't think many people are buying cloth masks these days. And I don't think any Red Sox fan still wearing a mask is going to want to be sporting Tanner Houck's number. 

Fore! (Seriously, what did these folks expect?)

There's been a lot of flap in Boston of late about outdoor dining in the North End, the Italian section that's chocked full of restaurants and cafes. 

Anyway, with covid, Boston allowed restaurants throughout the city to put tables out in the street and it seemed to have worked pretty well. The last few springs-summers-falls, there've been restaurants in my neighborhood that have set up shop in the street, and, while I've only eaten out there a couple of times, I love the life that seeing people dining outside brings to Charles Street. European-light. 

But in the North End, there've been a ton of complaints about it. Too much noise. Too much trash. Too much traffic disruption. Too many parking places taken away for the duration.

So some of the folks who live in the 'hood leaned on Mayor Wu to do something about it. Her solution was to charge North End restaurants a fee well in excess of what restaurants in other parts of town are paying for the privilege putting some tables up in the streets. 

I stopped paying attention to the brouhaha that ensued, a brouhaha which appears to have pitted folks who live in the North End (many of them recent yuppie blow ins, and not 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation Italian-Americans, most of who've long fled to the burbs) vs. the restaurant owners (many of them 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th gen Italian-Americans who fled to the burbs but kept their in-town restaurants).

Seriously, I don't really get the complaints. Presumably, you move to the North End because you wanted urban life enough to put up with the noise, commotion, traffic, and parking. You wanted to have the restaurants, the cafes, the tourists, the crowded streets. Then all of a sudden you can't put up with any of the overhead associated with it? 

If you need to park in front of your own house and don't like commotion, you should consider moving out of town where there's plenty of parking, no garbage trucks picking up restaurant trash at 2 a.m., no tourists clogging the narrow streets. You can always Uber in for one of the summer saints festivals, which I understand are coming roaring back this summer. Really and truly, if you don't want the girl in the angel costume flying on a rope across your street while the Roma Band plays loud, live elsewhere. That goes for restaurants in the street, too.

And then there's the Tenczars, a young couple who, a few years back, "moved into their dream home overlooking a golf course" in a town south of Boston. A dream house on Country Club Lane, in Indian Pond Estates. 

They obviously recognized that they wanted to raise their kids in the 'burbs. No North End noise, grime, and commotion for them. But they apparently hadn't really thought through the golf course part of the deal. 

Flying balls shattered windows in their house with such force they sent glass spraying into the next room; the siding on the house was peppered with circular dents, like a battleship in a war zone. Fearful neighbor children wore bicycle helmets when they went out to play, the Tenczars said.

In the four years since moving in, Erik and Athina Tenczar have picked up nearly 700 balls on their property; they no longer fix the broken windows, but instead cover them in thick plastic sheeting. They even built a partition to shield a small section of their deck from flying objects. A golf shot last fall took out a deck railing.

“When it hits, it sounds like a gunshot,” said Athina Tenczar, 36. “It’s very scary.”

“We’re always on edge,” added Erik Tenczar, 43. “It’s been emotionally taxing on us.” (Source: Boston Globe) 

I'm not going to discount how terrible it must be to live on a golf course and be subject to this. (Turns out, the situation of their house puts it on a worse path than other homes in their area. Seems like they should take that up with the homebuilder/developer.) And it does sound like the Indian Pond Country Club was, until recently, a bit douche golf bag-gy in their dealings with the Tenczars. 

But what did the Tenczars expect, buying a house on a golf course? 

The couple say they anticipated putting up with some amount of sound and distraction from living along a golf course. But they were not prepared for the extent, frequency, and intensity of all of it.

“Honestly, if you have all these houses on a course, I assumed it was safe,” Athina Tenczar said.

Erik Tenczar asked: “Should we have looked into chances our house would be hit? Probably. I don’t know. We just fell in love with the house. It was our first house.”

Probably? I don't know? Come on. A golf course would be the next to last place I'd choose to live. (The true last place would be The Villages in Florida.) I don't want golf balls sailing in through my windows, thank you. So I put up with sirens and rats scrounging around in the garbage bags when people put their trash out too damned early.

Apparently, the legal system is - so far - on the side of the Tenczars. 

After a six-day trial in Plymouth Superior Court, a jury on Dec. 6 awarded the Tenczars $3.5 million for damages and mental and emotional suffering. (With interest the award totals $4.9 million, court records show).

Since this judgement was made, the club has jiggered around with the tee location for the 15th hole, and the Tenczars have been golf ball free for a while.

This award seems insane to me, and the Indian Pond Country Club thinks so, too. It's appealing and they're fairly certain this verdict will get tossed. 

I'm sure the Tenczars are a perfectly nice couple, looking for nothing more than safety for their three small children who they don't want to get conked by an errant drive when they're splashing in their kiddie pool. (That pool was hit once, but the kiddos blessedly weren't in it at the time.) But $5M? 

See you in court, I guess. 

As for me, I'm hoping to dine out on Hanover Street in the North End when the weather warms up a bit. 

Learner's Permit

When I was first learning to drive, my father took me out to practice in a cemetery. St. Joseph's Cemetery in Leicester, Massachusetts. Cemeteries were, of course, a natural place to get comfortable behind the wheel. There weren't likely to be a lot of cars on the road, and if you went rogue, you weren't apt to hit anyone or do all that much harm. What's the worst that could happen? You knock over a headstone or two. And at St. Joseph's Cemetery, those headstones were likely to be someone related, as this is where quite a bit of the family on my grandmother Rogers side were buried. Now there are a lot more. (St. John's Cemetery was the main Catholic cemetery in Worcester. It was a lot larger than St. Joseph's, so more roads to drive on. But St. Joseph's was our cemetery, so there we went.)

When my father was taking me out to St. Joseph's, my sister Margaret, who died in infancy, was buried there. As were my great grandparents, Bridget and Matthew Trainor, some of my father's aunts and uncles, a couple of cousins. They've been joined over time by a lot more of the family.

Five years after my father was showing me the car driving ropes, he was buried there on a miserable January morning. Within a few years, my uncles Ralph and Charlie had joined him. Then my grandmother. Then my Aunt Margaret. Then my mother. And so it went.  

A few years back, Ned McKeon, the last of my father's first cousins, made his way to St. Joseph's cemetery. 

Anyway, whether you're related to half the bodies or not, cemeteries have always been a good place to learn to drive. Just be respectful. Don't grind the gears when someone's being buried. Don't practice shifting on the hills over Memorial Day weekend. And stay off the grass.

Which seems like the least you should ask. 

But it was too much for a local (Melrose Mass.) 53 year old woman with a learner's permit who, a couple of weeks ago, "lost control of her Range Rover and veered off the road, plowing into a plot of graves."

No one was injured, but "at least eight gravestones at the city's Wyoming Cemetery toppled."

What a mess!

She had been practicing her driving skills on the cemetery’s winding roads around 2:30 p.m. when she mistook the gas pedal for the brake and went crashing into the graves, said Lieutenant David Mackey.The white Range Rover she was driving appeared to have damage to its front panel on the driver’s side, and Mackey said the vehicle had to be towed from the scene. The vehicle’s front bumper appeared to be dislodged. (Source: Boston Globe)

Those Range Rovers sure our powerful. Mowing down eight gravestones!

Of course, even modest family cars in the mid-1960's probably weighed as much as a Range Rover. The car I learned to drive on was a 1965 Galaxy 500 that could seat about 10 people comfortably and got about 10 miles to the gallon. The car was named Black Beauty. (The car after that was the Green Hornet. After that, my father died and we no longer named cars.)

“No crime involved, just an unfortunate accident with a considerable amount of damage,” said Mackey. “It was an older woman who just never learned to drive, apparently just recently got her permit, and probably shouldn’t have.” 

The woman with the learner's permit was 53. Some "older woman." One time, when I was somewhere in my forties, there was an article in The Globe about an "elderly woman" who was killed in a house fire. The woman was 47. I had seen the article, but just to make sure, my boss' wife sent it in with him with the words "elderly woman" underlined. (We were all roughly the same age.)

My mother learned to drive in her late forties, my Aunt Margaret in her mid-fifties. They were both of the era when half the women didn't drive. Husbands did. And no one schlepped their kids around to activities. (As if.) Sometimes you got a lift, but you were mostly on your own. Of course, there weren't as many organized activities for kids back then, either. We were all pretty free range. 

But by the time she was in her forties, my mother saw the handwriting on the wall. My father was cycling in and out of bad spells with kidney disease. He wasn't going to last forever. And her kids, even though by then Kath and I were old enough to drive, she knew that, while she had a while before "the baby" left for college, and left her in the driving lurch, she'd better figure out how to get behind the wheel.

For my Aunt Margaret, it was pretty much the same. When she hit her mid-fifties, her kids were out the door. Her final chauffeur - my cousin Robert - was graduating from college and heading away from home. (He'd commuted to college at BC.)

Neither my mother or Margaret ever became particularly skilled or confident drivers. Fortunately, neither was ever in a serious accident. (My mother had a couple of fender-benders.)

When my mother got her learner's permit, my father at first took her out. To St. Joseph's Cemetery. It didn't go well. My mother, who completely and utterly adored my father - and the adoration was returned - couldn't stand even the mildest of criticism from him, and came home pretty upset. We never learned exactly what happened up in the cemetery, but that was the one and only time that Al tried to teach Liz to drive. After that one-off, her lessons were all from the pros.

Whatever happened on my parents' driver's ed outing, I'm pretty sure she didn't knock over any gravestones. Surely we'd have heard if she'd taken out the gravestone of Matthew and Bridget Trainor. Knocked over the Deignans marker. (The Deignans had been tenants in my grandmother's triple decker.)

She didn't plow into the giant Celtic cross that marked the grave of the fearsome non-nonsense Monsignor John Redican, who'd been the pastor of St. Joseph's parish when my grandmother was a girl.  

Hitting that monster would have done some damage to Black Beauty or the Green Hornet. 

Six years after I had a few lessons at St. Joseph's Cemetery, my brother Rick got his learner's permit. My father had died, but I took him out a couple of times. And, yes, we practiced at the cemetery. 

Really not a bad place to learn to drive, as long as you don't mistake the gas pedal for the brake. 

Retiring at 100? Congratulation, Ranger Betty.

I'm still working. Sort of. I take on regular (brief) writing projects for a few old clients. But each year, I get pickier and choosier. I average about five hours a week. It seems like a lot more, but when I look at the numbers, five per is pretty much it. 

I'm not making any forecasts about when I'll quit entirely, because at this point, it's pretty much in the hands of those few old clients. If they stop sending a little work my way, that will be it. 

Will I miss it? 

While I generally enjoy the work, I probably won't. 

But for now, it gives me some human contact, a bit of structure, and a few extra bucks in my pocket. 

In addition to my paid work, I have a regular Thursday volunteer gig, and irregular volunteer hours off and on. 

Then there's Pink Slip, which is probably the longest running non-monetized blog in existence. I consider it my "Sunday painter" equivalent.

Will I be working at 100?

First off, I don't imagine I'll live that long. So there's that.

Oh, my paternal grandmother almost made it to 97, and several of her sibs made it into their late 90's, too. And my Aunt Mary, my mother's sister, lived to be 93, missing out on 94 by a couple of months. So, genetics wise, I guess I have a shot on the make-it-to-90 goal. We'll see. As long as I have my health and all my marbles, fine. If not, well, let it go. (Let me go.)

It might be a hoot to still be writing about technology and its uses when I'm 100, but will I be able to feign interest in what will be increasingly robotic-AI applications? Actually, I probably would be able to feign interest. I just might not like it.

But I sure would be a whatever the female equivalent of a graybeard is, able to dredge up - assuming I still have all my marbles - recollections of mainframes, client server, PC's without hard drives, floppy disks, the introduction of Windows, the Internet changing everything, the cloud, AI, smartphone apps. Seeing Bill Gates in a hotel lobby. Sharing an elevator with Bill Joy (Sun). Sitting next to Mitch Kapor (Lotus) on the Eastern Shuttle.

Will I be like Dustin Hoffman's character in Little Big Man? "My name is Jack Crabb, and I am the sole white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn." (Just looked it up: did that movie really come out in 1970? Seems like yesterday...) Not that I have any desire to live as long as the mythic Jack Crabb: 121. Shudder at that thought.

Anyway, my thoughts turned to the magic number of 100 when I read about Betty Reid Soskin, who turned 100 last fall and just hung up her ranger hat. 

Ranger Betty, as she was known, had quite an interesting and varied career. 

For years, Soskin was the oldest active ranger in the park service, leading public programs at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif. That chapter of her rich life has finally come to a close: She retired [a few weeks ago], capping a career that saw her enrich histories of the World War II home front with her own experience as a woman of color facing segregation and hours of toil. (Source: NPR)

Rosie the Riveter was largely "a white woman's story" - Ms. Soskin's words - but, by volunteering to work on the planning committee for the Rosie/Home Front Park, she was able to provide nuance and the African American perspective. (Among other things, she is the great-granddaughter of a woman born into slavery in 1846. That remarkable woman lived to be 102, so Betty knew her.)

After all, she was her own version of Rosie the Riveter: 

As a young woman during World War II, Soskin worked as a shipyard clerk for an all-Black auxiliary lodge of the Boilermakers union, which didn't allow people of color to join as regular members.

After the war, Ms. Soskin and her husband opened a record store in Berkeley that specialized in soul and gospel. The store was in business for 74 years. 

While she was helping run the record store, Betty Reid Soskin was also helping the historical park get off the ground, eventually working there on a grant focused on the Black World War II experience. This turned into a temp job at the age of 84 (!), which, in turn, turned into a permanent position as a ranger. 

Ms. Soskin has has been rightfully celebrated. California Woman of the Year in 1995. A middle school named for her. In 2009, watching Barack Obama sworn in.

And in 2015, Soskin introduced President Barack Obama during the national tree-lighting ceremony in Washington. For that occasion, she carried a unique piece of her own history in her pocket: a photo of her great-grandmother.

 What a story! Congratulations, Ranger Betty!

Me? If I'm alive at 100, will I be working? Probably not. But I do hope I'm able to be doing something other than just hanging on...

What's in a (baby) name

One of the parenthood pleasures I missed out on by not having children was not being able to name the baby.

How much fun it must be to come up with your lists, add to them, scratch names off them, narrow them down, pick the perfect girl name, the perfect boy name, decide whether to share the name with friends and families or surprise them, and then wait for the baby to arrive and decide whether the name fits or you need to revisit your choice.

What would I have named the baby? 

I haven't given it a ton of thought, although if I'd had a daughter she would likely have been an Elizabeth. My favorite name. My mother's name. My middle name. So, probably Elizabeth, with first runner up honors going to Mairead, if I'd been in an Irish mode. 

If that mythic girl had been a boy, it might have been Alexander, so I could have named him (sort of) after my father, Al, without having to give him the dreaded name Albert, which my father never liked. Or it might have been Matthew. A good, old fashioned name - and a shout out to one of my great-grandfathers. In Irish mode, I'd have gone with Liam or Aidan. 

Anyway, I just find it unfathomable that someone would want to outsource the naming of their children. It seems to me that there are some things that money just can't buy. And one of them is your baby's name.

But apparently there are some people who find it way too overwhelming. So they hire a professional baby namer. Like Taylor Humphrey, who was profiled recently in The New Yorker. 

Last year, she helped name more than a hundred kids. Indecisive parents can choose from Humphrey’s services, which start at fifteen hundred dollars and range from a phone call and a bespoke name list (based on parents’ answers to a questionnaire) to a genealogical investigation, with the aim of ferreting out old family names. A ten-thousand-dollar option involves selecting a name that will be on-brand with a parent’s business. (Source: The New Yorker - may require a subscription)

FFS. "Bespoke name list." FFS, "On-brand with a parent's business." FFS. Even if she just made her minimum 100 times, that's $150K. FFS.

The article has her reviewing a list of boys' names with a client. They reject Bohdi because "it's so popular." Bohdi? Where've I been? Has Bohdi replaced Jacob, Henry, and Aiden (misspelled Aidan, in my opinion) on the "so popular" list? The client also rejected Arlo and Astro, but they stopped on Brave. Might work for a first name. If not a middle name. 

Brave. Brave? FFS.

It's interesting how names come and go.

When I was a kid, living in a largely Irish-Catholic area, the name Maureen was very common. Now it's about as popular as Ethel and Bertha. 

Then there's the name Milo, which when I was growing up was heard only on Westerns as the name of the town's old codger. Or, later, as a character in Catch 22. Milo Minderbinder. Or Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth. Then, all of a sudden, Milos were everywhere. 

How everywhere were Milos? 

Both my husband and I have (had in Jim's case) first cousins with grandsons named Milo. So I'm related, however distantly, to two Milos. 

And I'm pretty sure the parents of those Milos came up with the names without paying a consultant $1,500. 

Sometimes, Humphrey - whose active on Insta and TikTok - gives advice away for free. 

On TikTok, she responds to people who post questions, mainly seeking help finding complementary sibling names. What’s a good boy name to go with Calliope? “Oh, my God, Calliope is a baby namer’s dream!” she says, in a video response. Her suggestions: Florian, Barabas, Roscoe, Stavros, and Balthazar.

Roscoe is on my list for a dog name (maybe on its own, maybe short for Roscommon if I'm in the Irish mode I never got to be in for a baby). But Stavros if you're not Greek? And isn't Balthazar a restaurant in NYC? 

But Barabas. Barabas? As in "give us Barabas?" F.F.S.

Some of Humphrey's clients come to her for help when they're having their 3rd or 4th child, and have run out of names, having squandered all their naming capacity on Number One and Number Two. 

Seriously, how did my parents manage to come up with six names - make that 12: first+ middle - without outside assistance? And how about the families in the 'hood who had 8+ kids, and there were plenty of them? Jeez Louise. Or jeez Louisa. Or jeez Lulu.

I'm pretty sure they weren't combing through the Social Security database. How would they have found it? here was no such thing as a database. And surely they didn't "mine film credits," as Humphrey does. 

Humphrey also combs through genealogical records to suss out hidden gems among family names. I just don't get it. Why don't people just pay for a few months on ancestry.com and do their own sussing out?

And if you're so at a loss, I believe they still sell 'what to name the baby' books. 

What's up with people too busy, lazy, or overwhelmed by life to name their own kids? And if they can't do it themselves, everybody has someone they can ask for suggestions. And I've never known anyone who was asked for a baby name suggestion who didn't offer one or two up. Sometimes they'll offer them up even - get this - they're not asked. (Years ago, I was asked by a friend and colleague. I threw the name Noah in the ring, and damned if they didn't name the baby Noah. Maybe it was in the ring already, but I like to think it was my suggestion.)

Some also hire Humphrey as a doula. 

Wonder if you can get a package deal on baby naming and doula.

Oh, how the mighty NFT has fallen

Sina Estavi has entirely too much money.

Oh, maybe not "entirely too much money" as in Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. 

But "entirely too much money" to the degree that, in March 2021, he was able to spend $2.9M for a nonfungible token (i.e., digital representation) of the firs tweet sent by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Contents of NFT, Jack's May 2006 message o the future:  just setting up my twittr.

(Can you imagine what someone would pay for an NFT of a recording of Alexander Graham Bell's first "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you" phone call?)

Of course, Sina Estavi may well not have "entirely too much money". He's the CEO of a crypto outfit, so the money he does have may be more "funny" or "unreal" than it is "entirely too much." Nevertheless, last March he did pay $2.9M for that famous NFT.

I'm sure at the time Mr. Estavi was thinking "great publicity" as much as he was thinking "cashing out at some point." But "cashing out at some point" had to have been in there, at least in the background, when he made his purchase. And, sure enough, he recently decided to test the NFT waters and see if he could recoup. Make that RECOUP, as Estavi was looking for $48M, which would have made for a very handsome return.

Of course, it can never hurt to ask, but that $48M turned out to be a tad on the optimistic side. Not really a surprise. Certainly someone who heads a crypto company is all about crazy, surreal even, optimism. 

Instead of $48M - or even a breakeven of $2.9M - there were just seven measly offers made for Jack's First Tweet, and they ranged from about $6 to $280. I'm no crackerjack investor, but I don't think that a $2.9M investment which a year later is worth $280 was a good one.

Not that I haven't made a non-good investment. Or two.

I don't recall how much I paid for a few shares of Wang stock purchased in the late 1980's through their ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). But I do know that when I wrote it off as a capital loss in the early 1990's, I used zero for the value.

Ditto for the shares of Genuity I bought in 2000 in anticipation of "our" IPO. As an employee, as a manager, I felt I had to show a little faith in my company. So I did. But my faith had its limits, and, unlike many colleagues who mortgaged their houses or invested their kids' college funds, I decided that I would invest an amount I was prepared to lose. That turned out to be $11K (1,000 shares at the pre-IPO friends and family price). Good thing I was prepared to lose $11K.

The day before the IPO, there was an article in The Boston Globe that said the Genuity offering was so big - largest ever a the time - and complex that it was "strictly for the pros."

Actually, it turned out to be strictly for the amateurs.

On opening day, right out the gate, the price started drifting down. By the closing bell, I think it was going for about $9. Gulp. (As I observed to a colleague, "there aren't enough office supplies in this building for people to make up for their losses.") 

If only us amateurs could have gotten out at $9. But, no, we had to hold 'em for six months, and during that six months period we got to watch the share price drift towards zero. 

Thank you, Jesus, for the ability to declare a capital loss!

Fortunately, for the obvious reason that I don't have that kind of walking around money, I never made a $2.9M investment that turned into dust (i.e., $280). 

Estavi, of course, let the bid expire. He says that "I might never sell it."

To have and to hold, to cherish and to keep: Jack Dorsey's first tweet. Maybe he can turn it into a pdf, print it out, get it framed, and hang it on his wall.

Not surprisingly, the NFT market is cooling. A recent Fortune article  headlined "The NFT bubble is showing clear signs of bursting" included the gem:

Even some of the best-known NFTs are seeing their values slip. A Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT saleFriday morning seemed like a big-dollar transaction at $224,028.62, but that represented a $67,799.54 loss for the seller, who bought it at the end of January.

I wasn't familiar with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and, frankly I wish I'd kept it that way. But if an NFT of a cartoon ape can go for nearly a quarter of a million bucks - even if that represents a chunky monkey of a loss since January - Jack's tweet's gotta be worth more than $280.

Or not. 

Our culture and economy just seem to be getting dumb and dumber. I believe even bored apes wouldn't be wild spending on NFT's.

Patriots' Day 2022

I'm pretty broken-record about it, but Patriots' Day is a holiday that I really love. The reasons - Massachusetts' own, spring, baseball, the Marathon - are summarized in this post from 2014. Now 2014 was pretty much an annus horribilis for me. My husband died in February, and as of my 2014 Patriots' Day post, one of my oldest and dearest friends was in hospice, two days from her death. So, annus horribilis alright.  

By the way, if you think that I'm familiar with the term because I took four years of Latin in high school, you would be wrong. I know the coinage from Queen Elizabeth's use of it in 1992, when she used it in a speech to refer to what had been a horrible year for her: separations (Andrew-Fergie), divorces (Princess Anne), scandalous pictures (Fergie), scandalous books (Diana), and a fire at Windsor Castle. The fire at Windsor was pretty substantial. Repairs cost in the tens of millions of pounds, and Queen Liz herself chipped in a couple of million. As a result of the fire, people had to start paying to get in to get a gander at Windsor and Buckingham. And as a result of this tax on the royal-loving public, the Queen agreed to start paying taxes on her hefty income. So an annus horribilis by anyone's standards.

As for the origins of the term. Hard to believe that in the thousands of Latin-as-a-language living or semi-moribund years leading up to 1891 it had never been uttered at least once by someone or another. Surely, the Romans experienced an annus horribilis or two. But the first usage that Wikipedia points to is this one. And it's a lulu. 

The phrase "annus horribilis" was used in 1891 in an Anglican publication to describe 1870, the year in which the Roman Catholic Church defined the dogma of papal infallibility. 

Question: Could I love this more?

Answer: No. 

Anyway, as anni horribilis go, this isn't one for me personally. Things keep chugging along and, while the Ukraine situation is heartbreaking and scary, and it looks like we'll never fully shake covid, mostly things are okay. For me. Personally. But ask me in November if a certain autocratic, fascist-adjacent tending political party has wrested control of the House and/or the Senate and are rubbing their hands together in drooling anticipation of sticking it to us coastal elites by destroying democracy altogether, and this may well turn into an annus horribilis yet. 

As for now, things are looking up a bit, at least on the covid front. It's still lingering, but for now it seems as if the worst is over. Those of us who've been religious about vaccination, and at least semi-religious about masking (I'm still an in-the-store masker), seem to be exempt from the worst of it: hospitalization and death. And other than having sympathy for those who cannot for some reason be vaccinated, and for folks with kids under the age of five, I am completely drained of sympathy for anyone who has refused to get their jabs in.

And other things are good (enough).

The flowering trees in Back Bay are flowering. The swan boats are once again gliding around the Public Garden lagoon. The runners are running. And, as of Friday, the Boys Are Back. (That is, the Red Sox are playing at Fenway.)

Although you have to fight through the Marathon-watching

crowds to get in and out of Fenway Park, the Patriots' Day game - and the Red Sox are always home; and the game is always at 11 a.m. - is much my favorite of the year.

The weather can be chancy. A few years ago, the game was canceled because it was in the forties with howling winds and icy rain. (Poor runners! The Marathon ran on.) But sometimes the weather is gloriously balmy. Today the weather will be okay. Sunny-ish. Cloudy-ish. In the mid-fifties. A tiny bit chill, but I've sat through worse. And it is good for the runners, which is as it should be. 

The Sox are off to an erratic, bouncy start, but what else is new?

I've got great tickets, and will be there with three of my favorite people in the world: my sister Trish and my nieces Molly and Caroline. My only quibble is that it's no longer possible to get physical tickets (unless you go through some sort of antler dance and prove that you're over 80 and don't have a smartphone or something). You have to have the MLB app on your phone, and for some reason they don't give you the bar codes for your tickets until a day or so before game day. (This is a post for another day.)

Meanwhile, I'm happy it's Patriots' Day. I'm happy it's spring. And I'm happy to be watching baseball.

Home Opener

Later today, I'll be watching the Red Sox Home Opener. I've been watching at least a couple of innings of each game so far. Mixed results so far, but that's the Red Sox. That's baseball. You definitely can't win 'em all.

For whatever reason, I've been thinking about watching the Home Opener in 2014.

April 4, 2014.

Less than two months after my husband's death, I took the train down to Providence to watch the game with my wonderful friend Marie. Marie was dying.

During their illnesses - both had cancer - Jim would often tell me, "Marie has it worse than I do." And Marie would often say, "Jim has it worse than I do."

Turns out they were both right.

Marie and I met our freshman year in high school, so by 2014, we'd been friends for 50 years.

We shared a love of politics, books, history, talking, and sports. Especially baseball. Especially the Red Sox.

For our Home Opener, I brought lunch: hot dogs, Cracker Jack, and Hood Sports Bars (chocolate covered vanilla ice cream). I even bought a little cooler to carry those Sports Bars in.

Marie was dying.

She managed to get part of a hot dog down, and a Sports Bar. She managed to make it through most of the game.

We talked Red Sox. In 2013, they'd won the World Series. So opening day was a big deal. Over the years, we'd gone to an occasional game together, and, during the season, when we talked we usually covered the Red Sox in our conversations. 

Marie was dying. She hadn't yet been declared terminal. No one had said that 'this is it.' Yet. Marie was (clearly) dying.

I stayed for dinner. Chinese take out. Marie was so tired, so weak. She kept drifting off. Marie was dying.

Marie's husband drove me to the train, and we talked around things. Later that evening, we exchanged emails, where we didn't talk around things.

Did I see Marie two more times? Three? I'm pretty sure I went down to Providence at least twice during those last couple of weeks. 

The week after the home opener, Marie was admitted to hospice.

The last time I saw her was Saturday, April 19th. Holy Saturday. Easter was late that year. Even later than this year. 

We talked about families. Her kids, mostly. About friends. About dying. 

Marie told me it wasn't scary. But that she was waiting. Waiting to hear something from her parents, both of them long dead. (Her mother died in 1999, her father in 2001, a few months before my mother. My father - the person who gave me my love of baseball - was long, long dead. He'd died in 1971. When Marie's parents came to the wake, they gave my mother a Mass card with $15 in it. There was some tradition of giving the widow cash - was it Irish? Marie's parents were both the children of immigrants - and my mother got cash from some others, as well. I remember wondering whether the people who gave money thought we were so destitute that we needed help with groceries. My mother just told me it was something that some people do. For all the wakes my father went to - and he was a true, Irish sports page devouring wake-goer - and I went to a few with him, I don't remember him giving anyone an envelope with any money in it. But, of course, it's not something he would have mentioned.)

While I was visiting Marie in hospice, she drifted in and out. People drifted in and out, too. Marie had a large extended family, and a ton of friends. (Her particular genius was the gift of friendship.)

I was wearing a pink challis scarf, and Marie said, "You've had that scarf a long time."

"You're right," I told her. "Maybe ten years. Fifteen maybe."

"No," she insisted. "Longer."

When I left, late afternoon, I kissed her goodbye and told her that I loved her. That our friendship had been one of the best things in my life. When I left, she was wearing the pink challis scarf draped over her shoulders.

That night she was put under palliative sedation. No visitors, other than her husband, her kids, and her sister.

That night, when I got home, I noticed the picture taken at my mother's 65th birthday party, in 1984. I was wearing the scarf. Damned if I hadn't had the scarf for at least 30 years. Damned if Marie wasn't right.

On the day Marie died, I spoke with another friend from high school.

Kim had been into see Marie on that Saturday, too. An hour or so after I left. She told me that Marie had asked Kim if she (Kim) thought she (Marie) would be well enough to go with me to Ireland to bring some of Jim's ashes there.

What do you make of a friend who, on her death bed, is worried about whether she's going to be able to help take care of you?

I was most fortunate to call Marie a friend. Most fortunate for her to call me one, too. 

I miss her. I always will.

When I'm watching the Home Opener this afternoon, I'll be wearing the pink challis scarf, which Marie's daughter returned to me - dry-cleaned: definitely her mother's daughter - on the day of her funeral. I'll be wearing the pink challis scart, and I'll be thinking of Marie. 

TikTok is the new Ed Sullivan Show

If I hadn't seen a fleeting reference to it on my Twitter feed, I would have been completely unaware that there's a balloon popping thang. But there is. If you want to see that thang in action, all you need to do is Google "balloon popping." And if the first thing that pops up is a link to the YouTube vid of "Balloon Popping from Level 1 to Level 100," it is well worth your time - if you have 4.50 minutes to spare which, if you're reading this, you likely do - clicking through to watch it. 

Who knew that balloon popping was a thang? That there are millions of people who enjoy watching all sorts of balloon popping methods that go way, way, way beyond pricking the balloon with a needle, squeezing it between your hands (risking an ouchie), or just plain stomping down on it. There's even a subgenre: frozen balloon popping.  

Some of the tricks are really quite amazing. (C.f., "Balloon Popping from Level 1 to Level 100.") And - get this - you can actually make a living doing it.

The Internet may not have changed everything-everything, but it did change plenty. And one of the changes it wrought was the creation of all sorts of Internet-related work to replace the non-digital, buggy-whippish jobs that are being eliminated.

If you're among the digerati you can be an app developer, digital marketer, search engine optimizer...

You can be an influencer, which has got to be the most god-awful non-job job ever invented.

Or you can TikTok your balloon popping tricks and monetize your way into a pretty good living.

Back in the day, Canada's own David Beck was working as a waiter/bartender. With a sideline in making TikToks for his 1,000 followers.

Then he posted a "life-changing" video:

In the alley beside his Brentwood Bay apartment building, David Beck kneels in front of a gold water balloon, gripping an ax in both hands. In slow motion footage, he swings the ax down towards the balloon, scrunching his face with the effort. When the ax finally hits it, the balloon pops, revealing another, fully-intact balloon underneath it. (Source: Capital Daily)

That video struck gold. On Day One, it was viewed more than a million times.

This was in March 2020, the Beginning Times of the pandemic, and Beck was about to lose his "real" work. Which gave him more time to hone his balloon popping craft. By posting balloon content, he grew his account to 11.2M followers. And found that he was able to monetize his lark into a full-time job. One of his videos has had over 100 million views. 

Beck has an international following, and it's somewhat comforting to learn that Americans aren't the only ones spending time watching balloon popping on TikTok. "Only" 25% of his views are from the U.S. "with other top countries including the United Kingdom, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, but he’s not sure where Canada ranks."

From many of the young folks, this would be the ideal job: creative, not much heavy lifting, completely flexible, you're your own boss. 

There are thousands of kids who probably dream of doing Beck’s job. A 2019 survey found that 86 per cent of young Americans want to be influencers, and a 2018 British survey found that “social media star” was among the most popular dream jobs for children. However, Beck explains that while he loves what he does, it’s not always as easy (or as lucrative) as people expect.

His income has been estimated to be over $2.5M, but Beck says that this ain't so.   

“That’s complete bullshit… I’m not the Logan Paul of Canada,” he laughs. “There’s a discrepancy between what people think you make in what you actually make. People think ‘oh, seven million followers [at the time of this article; now over eleven million], you must be making hundreds of thousands of dollars’ or something. It's not like that. It's more humble than that.”

If you're wondering where the income comes from, and I surely was:

Beck explains that a TikToker’s earnings depend on what kind of content they’re making—not just how many views they get. The money he earns comes from a few different sources, including musicians who pay to have their songs featured in videos, brands who pay for their product to be shown on screen, and TikTok itself, which will pay for Beck to participate in campaigns or trends.

He makes a reasonably good living, and likes what he does. So, no Kardashian, but still living his best life. So, props to him.

Growing up, Sunday evening in our house meant watching The Ed Sullivan Show. (It also meant College Bowl and Rocky and Bullwinkle. An all round excellent TV viewing night!)

Ed Sullivan presented a smorgasbord of talent: popular singers (Elvis! Steve and Eydie Gormé! The Beatles!); opera (Beverly Sills and Robert Merrill) and Broadway stars (Ethel Merman, Robert Goulet). Harmonic players. The Bolshoi Ballet. Tap dancers. Borscht Belt comedians. Ventriloquists, puppeteers, puppeteering ventriloquists. And, often, a circus act of some sort.

Inevitably, when Ed introduced an act with some sort of circus-y talent, my father would ask the question: how did this person find out they had a talent for juggling bowling balls, eating fire, spinning plates. The answer for most of these acts was that they were probably either born into it (i.e., were part of a circus family) or figured out that was a way to make a living in the circus (after running away to join it). 

We were not, to say the least, circus types. On the contrary, making fun of the circus was something that - led by my father - we all enjoyed as a family. (Other than my mother. She was too nice to ever make fun of anything.)

I can only imagine what my father would make of someone who was making their living posting balloon popping videos.

TikTok is, I guess, the new Ed Sullivan Show. And it's a really big one. 

Drone on, Elon Musk

Elon Musk is plenty rich and plenty smart. He's also plenty weird and obnoxious. And interesting.

I read that he's estranged from his father, but his mother probably likes him. Maybe his kids like him, too, although we'll need to ask his son X AE A-XII what he thinks about being named X AE A-XII once X AE A-XII reaches the age of reason. With a surname like Musk, you should probably stick to first names like John and Jane.

I probably wouldn't like him. Nothing against being rich, smart, weird, obnoxious, and interesting. Some of my best friends...(although the rich ones aren't Elon Musk rich; they're just sort of Rollo the Rich Kid from old-school, unfunny Nancy and Sluggo comics rich). But I think in the case of Elon Musk, the weird and obnoxious would just weigh me down. And I likely wouldn't like him.

Not that I'm ever going to get the opportunity to like or dislike Elon Musk IRL. And in IUnRL, if he flexes his pecs as a Twitter part owner/new board member and forces the company to let Trump start destroying the country one tweet at a time again, I really, really, and truly, truly won't like him. [Update: after quite an outcry from employees and tweeters alike, Musk was unasked to be on the Twitter board. That's the good news. The bad news is that there's now no limit on the amount of shares he can own. He may still end up destroying Twitter and democracy as we know it.]

But I have to give him props for being interesting. And I know about some of those interesting things because if there's one thing Musk excels at is attracting publicity. 

As he did to celebrate Giga Texas, a new factory in Austin - bigger than the Pentagon, which is hella big. That's where Tesla is going to build Cybertrucks, which are tricked-out half truck-half sports cars that go for about $50K (which probably isn't that much to pay for a tricked out half truck-half sports car). 

Anyway, when money is no object - Musk is worth nearly $300B - and you want to celebrate good times, you get to throw big parties for 15,000 folks. And get to wear a big black cowboy hat to the party, and call it a "cyber rodeo." 

The “cyber rodeo” featured art installations including a Tesla coil, multiple stages and a sea of Texas-made Model Y sport utility vehicles, arranged to look like the Texas state flag... The event kicked off with hundreds of drones flying in formation against the night sky, aligning to form shapes including the cybertruck and a Shiba Inu dog. (Source: Irish Times)

Plus fireworks bursting in air to the tune of Beethoven's 5th. Da-Da-Da-DUM to you, too, Elon. Harrison Ford was there for some reason. As was Musk's mother. (Told you she probably likes him.)

Forget about fireworks, though. Fireworks I can see on New Year's Eve if I sit on my front steps. And out my living room window on the Glorious Fourth.

But I really wouldn't mind seeing hundreds of drones flying in formation, even if the shape they were shifting into was the Tesla cybertruck or a Shiba Inu. (This must be a shout out to crypto currency company DogeCoin, which uses a Shiba Inu as its mascot/logo/whatever. Or is it a shout out to the Shiba Inu bitcoin, which is a competitor to Doge? This crypto world. It just be so crazy!)

As a kid, I used to love seeing an occasional blimp drifting by. 

I still enjoy a blimp sighting, but, however rich, smart, weird, and obnoxious Elon Musk is, I wouldn't mind if he decided to drone on over my house. Drone formation, please. Now that would be interesting. 

I might even start to like you.

On second thought, nah...