Baby CEO? Bleak? You ain't kidding!

Kids, from toddlers on, have always liked playing "work." For babies, most of the "work" they play at is around-the-house sort of stuff. 

They joyfully push the tiny plastic lawnmower, cheerfully fake wash dishes in the plastic kitchen sink, and gleefully hammer away with a plastic hammer. 

Sure, these days the little ones also make calls on fake smartphones, and tap away at the keyboards of fake laptops. But those little plastic smartphones and little plastic laptops aren't explicitly about work work. They're more about acknowledging the ubiquity and centrality of electronics in our lives. 

All the little plastic workish playthings already on the market apparently weren't enough for Fisher-Price.

Nope, they decided they needed to come up with an office-themed baby jumper, which artist/writer/baby dad came across when looking for a jumper for his kiddo.  As Rob posted in a series of tweets: 

Looking at baby jumpers and this office-themed "activity center" is so bleak. Prepare them for a life of demoralizing wage slavery by trapping them in Baby's First Cubicle! Includes their first shitty corporate laptop, calendar of bullshit meetings, and a kleenex box to cry in!

Begin the process of gradually eroding hopes and dreams early! It's never too soon to discover that the churn of capitalism is inescapable! The cell phone with an aspirational lock screen of a tropical vacation they'll never be able to take is a nice touch.

Obviously babies don’t know or care about the themes of these things, they just wanna smack shapes, chew on shit, it doesn’t matter. But then why make it THIS?? It’s more what this says about us, what we invite into our homes, the systems that control us limiting our imaginations. (Source: @rob_sheridan)

I'm with Rob Sheridan. 

Once they grasp a bit more about the concept of work, older kids may want to play "office." 

As a child, I don't remember pretending I was an office worker. The jobs my buddies and I played at were teacher/nun, nurse/doctor, soldier, priest (Necco Wafers = communion wafers). And, of course, movie star. 

But babies? As the man says, they just wanna smack shapes, chew on shit.

The boss baby jumper looks like the sort of toy - and, by the way, at $109 on Amazon, it's plenty Fisher-Pricey - that someone would buy because they found it kind of amusing. A baby gag gift. 

Hold their calls because your little CEO will have so much do in the Fisher-Price 2-in-1 Like a Boss Activity Center. Your baby can start off sitting in the entertainer’s spinning seat and interacting with fun activities around them. From a shape-sorter coffee mug to an interactive toy computer that plays lights, music & sounds, baby has everything they need for a productive day playing from home. Then, as your baby grows, replace the seat with a clacker bead bar to transform the infant activity center into a cool toddler table for standing-desk play. (Source: Amazon)

Sorry, Fisher-Price, I don't think there's anything "cool" about this mini-office set up.

What's wrong with baby jumpers with pandas, and lions, and puppies, and kitties...

At least the baby gets to be the boss, so that's at least something. And I guess the items in the Baby CEO Activity Center will help parents expand their baby CEO's vocabulary. Sure, you don't get to ask "what does the paperclip holdersay," but I suppose it will come in handy at some point that your kiddo knows what a desk plant is.

Oh, dear. Bleak is definitely the word.

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Tip of the grownup non-CEO cap to my sister Trish, who spotted this gem. 

There's poor folk needy, and then there's TRULY NEEDY

Mississippi is poor. Really poor. Desperately poor. Dirt poor Nearly twenty percent of their population lives in poverty (nearly double the rate in Massachusetts). 

TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a Federal program that sends money to the states for them to use pretty much however they want, as long as they're using it to alleviate poverty.

Mississippi has a pretty loose definition of poverty alleviation, that's for sure.

Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre wangled millions to erect a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, his alma mater, and - more relevantly - the school where his daughter played - surprise, surprise - volleyball. The funding was supposedly to provide sports opportunities for underserved communities, but it's hard to see that the daughter of a multi-millionaire football star has been anything other than overserved during her privileged young life.

Favre was also given $1.1 million to give speeches - just what needy families need! - but he never actually bothered to give the speeches. And $2 million was funneled into a pharma startup Favre was involved in. 

There were other sporting recipients of the TANF largesse:

Marcus Dupree, a former college football phenom, paid $371,000 to buy a 4,000-square-foot house, with a swimming pool, pavilion, and “adjoining acreage on which Mr. Dupree was to maintain horses.” Dupree claimed in charity filings it would be for “equestrian activities for underprivileged children.”(Source: Vox)

The DiBiases - Ted Sr., Ted Jr., and Brett, a family of well-known professional wrestlers - scored funds for bogus leadership training, a four-month stay for Brett (to the tune of $160K) at a high-end drug rehab facility in Malibu, and $1.7M for Ted Sr.'s "wrestling ministry." (Praise the Lord, and pass the TANF money.)

Non-athletes also had their hands in the till. 

In all, the state auditor found at least $77 million misused from 2017 to 2020. Mississippi’s yearly TANF spending has ranged anywhere from $55 million to $104 million in federal TANF funds in recent years. 

So far, six folks involved in the scam - Favre isn't one of them - have been criminally charged.

Nationwide, only 21 out of 100 families living in poverty qualify for TANF - in 1996, when TANF began, the figure was 68% - and the range is, not surprisingly, wide. In California and Vermont, 71% of those living in poverty receive TANF money. (Couldn't find the Massachusetts figure, other than that it's over 40%.) In Mississippi, it's roughly 4% of families in poverty.

And ain't no one getting rich on TANF. In Mississippi, a family of three, which would need an income of less than $5K to qualify, would get about $260 a month. 

It's worse than shocking that only 4% of poor folks in Mississippi are considered needy enough to receive a few bucks - money that comes from the Feds, by the way, not from Mississippi. 

I'm no expert on welfare funds, but I've had enough exposure through my volunteering to know that most (I'm guessing 99.9999%) of the people looking for help NEED the help. 

I've volunteered for years in a shelter, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that ain't no one who comes in for breakfast or lunch, to get clean (mostly used) clothing, to find help navigating housing opportunities or signing up for the Massachusetts version of TANF, is scheming to find benefits they don't "deserve."

We don't means test. If someone making $200K a year wants to come in for lunch, no questions asked. But guess what? Someone who can afford to grab lunch at Panera is going to grab lunch at Panera, and not get in line to eat off a plastic tray at St. Francis House. (Not that you can't get a good meal at SFH. If I'm working in the kitchen, and there's food leftover, I often grab lunch. The buffalo mac and cheese is my favorite, but last week I took a couple of yummy crab cakes home. And the Italian wedding soup? To die for.)

Christmas in the City, the other organization I volunteer for, does do means testing. CITC is centered around helping needy families during the holidays. Pre-covid, we used to run a big party for families living in shelters, and provide toys for those housed but in need. Living in a shelter we worked with automatically qualified someone to come to the party. Who's living in a shelter who's NOT in need? Since we haven't been running the party, we bring gifts directly to the shelters.

For our toy giveaway, families need to sign up in advance for the event. To qualify, they need to be able to demonstrate that their kids are on MassHealth (Medicaid). We sometimes make exceptions, but that's our prime qualifier. 

Sure, sometimes someone shows up wearing a Canada Goose coat and UGGs. So maybe they could afford toys for their kids, but...whatever.

I believe that if someone's willing to drag in town to stand in line to sign up for toys, and drag back in a few weeks later to pick toys up for their kids, deserves those damned toys. Last year, on one of the toy days, it was sleeting. And people stood in line, outdoors, in the sleet because, with covid protocols, we could only let in a small number of folks at a time. These are parents - many of them working a couple of minimum wage jobs, trying to keep body and soul together - who just want to have something to put under the tree for their kiddos.

That's poor folk needy.

I guess when you're Brett Favre or Ted DiBiase, Sr., there's a different level and definition of need entirely, where NEED = GREED. What an astounding level of amorality, pocketing money that could go to making the life of some desperately poor family at least marginally better. 

My father had a couple of terms for people like Brett Favre, Ted DiBiase, and the other Mississippi scammers. One was "bum." Another was NG, for No Good.

What a bunch of NG bums! Hope they all get criminally sacked for their involvement in this scam.

One more sad story about cleaning people

When my mother's family first came to America, my grandmother cleaned houses to help support the family and get my grandfather's business off the ground. Grandpa Wolf  was a butcher who, over time, turned his meat market into a full-fledged grocery store. And if the German butcher isn't enough of a German stereotype, Grandma Wolf was a fanatical cleaner. (I could dedicate an entire post to Grandma's maniacal cleaning routines.)

My mother often accompanied her mother to her jobs. (The first book my mother owned, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, was given to her by one of Grandma's customers.) And in watching and helping her mother, my mother learned cleaning from the best.  

So I grew up in a home that was both neat and clean. There was no such thing as an unwashed dish in the sink, piles of newspapers, towels on the floor, toothpaste flecks on the bathroom mirror, unmade beds, etc. As my mother's ace assistants, my sister Kath and I learned how to clean: the right way to clean a toilet, the right way to dustmop, the right way to polish a faucet.

But my mother couldn't come close to Grandma's fanaticism. Compared to Grandma's house - with its plastic-covered furniture and whitewashed cellar - our house was a relative mess, my mother a sloven. Neither, I assure you, was the case. 

My home is, like the one I grew up in, both neat and clean. Thanks in part to my being a relatively neat and clean person, and in larger part to my biweekly cleaning lady. 

For a while, my husband's mother, a young widow with three kids, cleaned offices in Bellows Falls, VT. As my mother had accompanied her mother, Jim sometimes tagged along with Grace. 

Like me, Jim was neat and clean. Like me, he couldn't stand housecleaning. He once said that he'd get a job as a clerk in the 7/11 before giving up our cleaning people. Fortunately, it never came to that. 

When my cleaning people come - they're a husband and wife team that have done our cleaning for years - I usually take off for a walk, so I don't see them in action. 

When I worked fulltime, I only saw the office cleaning people when I worked late. Really late.

And when I'm staying in a hotel, I'm out of the room when the cleaning folks are in doing their thing. Not that there's much of a thing to do. I can't imagine leaving a mess in a hotel room. 

Or in a store or restaurant, or on public transportation, or anywhere in public. 

Of course, even if there's no mess to be had anywhere, cleaning is necessary. Dust happens. Dirt happens. Decay happens. 

Which is why, even if everyone were neat as a pin, we'd still need people to keep things clean. 

My bottom line is that I know that cleaning is hard work, and I have great respect for those who do it. 

But for the most part, cleaning people are largely invisible, behind the scenes. 

Anyway, it may be because I'm the direct descendant of a cleaning lady, I was touched by a recent story about a cleaning lady in South Carolina who died (of natural causes) in a public bathroom in a Belk's Department Store. And whose body wasn't found for four days. (Her family had reported her missing before her remains were discovered.)

Bessie Durham, 63, was a cleaning lady - she worked for a cleaning contractor, not directly for the stores she cleaned - whose work took her to stores throughout Columbiana Centre, a shopping plaza.  

The woman was found in a single-stall bathroom with the door locked, police said, and a cleaning cart was found outside the restroom. (Source: USA Today)

Sounds like Ms. Durham may not have died while in cleaning, but, rather, while taking care of her personal business.

But it's easy to imagine that a 63-year-old Black cleaning lady from South Carolina had lived a hard life, a hard life full of hard work. Easy to imagine that she wasn't in great good health, and was just plum worn out.

How did it happen that her employers didn't notice that she was missing, that she hadn't reported to work? I suppose they just supposed that she was just another low-wage no-show. 

How did it happen that no one at Belk's noticed a cleaning cart outside of a bathroom for four days without trying to figure out why it was there? Cleaning cart? Whatever. Cleaning lady? Out of sight, out of mind. And wasn't there at least the start of the smell of a rotting corpse? Are Belk employees olfactorily challenged? Or was it just a matter of not my job, man, to report something a bit off? 

Not that this incident is anyone's fault. It's not the fault of KBS (the cleaning service), nor the fault of Belk's. 

But even if it's no one's fault, it's still plenty sad that Bessie Durham's body sat there for four days before someone - turns out it was a fellow cleaning person - thought to open the locked bathroom door and see what was inside. 

In life or in death, I guess cleaning people are pretty much invisible, except to their families. Or the occasional nice customer, like the Chicago lady of the house who gave my mother Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.

This Ukulele Lady Will Be Steering Clear of Southwest Airline

I don't fly all that much, and never say never, but I really hope I never fly anywhere on Southwest Airlines. Their brand is all about having a swell, laugh-a-minute, hey gang, let's put on a show time on a flight. My idea of a good flight is one that's low key, quiet, uneventful. No flight attendants doing the limbo in the aisles. No rousing chorus of "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine." And certainly no ukulele lessons, as Southwest did recently on a flight from Long Beach to Hawaii.

We teamed up with @guitarcenter to surprise a flight full of Customers flying out of Long Beach with a ukulele and a lesson. By the time they arrived in Honolulu they were pros.

Lord deliver me from any and all obligatory fun. I ran out my string on feigning enthusiasm in high school, when every once in a while, the nuns would surprise us with a morale-building, school spirit enhancing, take a break event. And get royally pissed if we didn't show sufficient gratitude.

Yes, we were all happy to be sprung from our last classes on a Friday afternoon. But how gushing, how jumping for joy, were us cool 1960's girls going to be for the ultra treat of watching Mario Lanza in The Student Prince?

Maybe if it had been a Hard Day's Night. Or even some god-awful Elvis film like Blue Hawaii or King Creole. Not that the nuns would ever have shown us anything featuring the lip-curling, swivel-hipped Elvis playing footsie with a hottie in capri pants.

Of course, Mario Lanza was a Catholic, and I suppose he was all the wholesome rage when most of our nuns were girls.

But we weren't having any.

So when it comes to obligatory fun, include me out. Southwest Airlines is definitely on my Must Avoid list.

It's not that I have anything against the ukulele, mind you.

I grew up watching the "Big Brother" Bob Emery Small Fry Club, every day at noon on Channel 4. And Big Brother began ("The Grass Is Always Greener") and ended ("So Long, Small Fry") each show with a ukulele tune.

Plus my friend Jennie plays a mean ukulele.

So I get that ukuleles can be fun. I might even become a Ukulele Lady on my own some day.

Just not a plane flight.

It goes without saying that Twitter went into drag mode, including a tweet from Amtrak noting that they have a quiet car. Which, of course, set off a tweet-spree on the impossibility of getting to Hawaii on Amtrak.

Beside Amtrak, there were any number of Tweeters channeling their inner me:

"Me when my noise-cancelling headphones won't work against 200 ukuleles," wrote Twitter user AndysBrain.

"I am a big fan of Southwest, but this might have made me homicidal," wrote The Atlantic journalist Tom Nichols on Twitter.

"What if you didn't want to hear a cacophony of ukuleles? What if you just wanted to sit in silence for the entire flight and watch TV or read, like a regular flight?" questioned a Twitter user with the ID BenBaena.

Some other Twitter users pointed out how beginner ukulele players might not have been the best at playing the instrument.

"Trapped thousands of feet in the air with 180 people strumming ukuleles they don't know how to play sounds like the opposite of "fun"..." wrote Twitter user Eddie_NYC. (Source: Business Insider)

These are my kind of fellow travelers!

Southwest was quick to point out that the group lesson lasted only 20 minutes, so little time out of a 6 hour flight...

And the airline also claimed that the flyers all seemed to love it, posting pics of happy ukulelers. I guess the grumps were hiding in the lav. Which is, as the song says, where you'll find me if I'm ever on a Southwest flight giving free ukulele lessons.

If I want to listen to ukulele, I'll take Israel Kamakawiwoʻole any old day.

Going WAY Beyond Meat. (Tastes like chicken?)

SEC football, from what I gather, is pretty serious stuff. Arkansas isn't the top dog in the conference, but the Razorbacks are pretty highly ranked. And - Woo Pig Sooey - their fans are on occasion inclined to go hog wild. As apparently happened after a recent game. That's when one rabid fan got into a parking lot rage sitch with a  another fellow, and bit his nose.

Biting the other guy's nose probably doesn't happen all that often. Most "lose your shit" fighters are satisfied with a knuckle sandwich. Still, the nose-biting incident wouldn't be all that noteworthy if the biter hadn't been the COO of Beyond Meat, which makes a plant based meat substitute. 

[Doug] Ramsey, 53, was charged with terroristic threatening and third-degree battery and booked in the Washington County, Arkansas, jail on Saturday evening. He was released Sunday, according to the Washington County information page. (Source: CNBC)

Ramsey was provoked when a Subaru made contact with Ramsey's front tire. Ramsey allegedly reacted by punching out the Subaru's back windshield, as one does when a Subaru comes in contact with your front tire. Subarus are, are they not, typically driven by folks as aggressive as the average Prius driver. Those ads showing golden retrievers behind the wheel of a Subaru are just a con, trying to convince us that Subaru owners are mild and friendly, when they're really pit bull road-ragers at heart. 

Anyway, after the assault on his windshield:

The Subaru owner then got out of his car, and Ramsey allegedly started punching him and bit his nose, “ripping the flesh on the tip of the nose,” according to the report. The victim and a witness also alleged that Ramsey told the Subaru owner he would kill him.

Before joining Beyond Meat a couple of years ago, Ramsey's entire career was with Tyson Foods.

Guess even if you go full tilt vegan, you never fully lose your taste for meat, especially for bacon. 

But I don't know that human nose, even if that nose is attached to an Arkansas Razorback fan, would taste like bacon. Inquiring minds, however, might want to know what it does taste like. So tell me, Doug. Does it taste like chicken?

Meanwhile, I'm sure the execs at Beyond Meat are just thrilled with this behavior...

Grow your own clothes? I guess I could use a castor-oil sports bra.

Eco-friendly clothing's been around for a while.

Comfy pants made from cotton that's grown without pesticides. Silk shirts made from silk from organically fed worms. Vegan "leather" shoes made of of pineapple leaves and apple peels. (This may sound like shoes Tarzan made for Jane and Boy, but this approach apparently exists. I saw it on PETA.)

But a lot of clothing is anything but eco-friendly. Cotton growing sucks up and spits out way too much water, not to mention relies on fertilizer that's the antithesis of eco-friendly. Then there are leather goods. Sure, the hides come from cattle that's being sacrificed on the altar of meat consumption, but it's pretty well known that cattle raising is an enviro-nightmare. Methane emissions, anyone?

Not to mention that those of us in the over-consumption world over-consume way too much clothing. Our closets are bulging, and even if we donate our wretched excess to charity, or throw it into the recycle bin, a ton of it ends up in landfill.

Cotton, to its credit, biodegrades pretty quickly. But leather can take well over 20 years to return to nature. And polyester? I know, I know, we don't wear polyester. But polyester may take 200 years to while away. 

So the more environmentally conscious and responsible clothing brands are exploring more natural, sustainable ways to produce the inputs that go into the items we put on our backs and feet. For Adidas, that means using leather made of mushroom in its iconic Stan Smiths.

As I read in a New Yorker piece, some of these brands recently gathered in - where else? - Brooklyn to check out the state of the art for the eco-friendly material (and construction inputs, as well).

On display: algae inks, crustacean superglue, yarn derived from squid DNA. “Instead of making stuff from animals or petrochemicals, like fossil fuels, can we do it with biology? Can we design life itself to make the things around us?” a fashion designer named Suzanne Lee, who had convened the summit, called Biofabricate, asked. “Most people still don’t know that any of this is possible, because a lot of these products are not yet in stores. You know, your house actually isn’t grown . . . yet! ”

Lee is touting Namibian-mushroom waste. A colleague was pushing "bacterially grown brick." Which is I guess is what Lee's talking about when she says "your house actually isn't grown...yet."

Back to clothing, Lee's been at it a while. 

Twenty years ago, after working as a fashion designer for John Galliano, in London, Lee started using a modified kombucha recipe—“green tea, sugar, a few microbes, and a little time!”—to grow her own clothes. 

(Hmmm. Maybe there's something I could do with the grocery store basil plant in the kitchen, the indestructible money plants that grace my fireplace.)

For all her efforts, nothing much happened at first, but nevertheless, Lee persisted. And now she's into bio-innovator summits. 

One f the exhibitors in Brooklyn showed off a hoodie made "entirely of plant waste." The hoodie's tag read:

THIS HOODIE IS MADE FROM RESPONSIBLY SOURCED BAMBOO AND EUCALYPTUS, ORGANIC SEAWEED AND WILD HIMALAYAN NETTLE. THE FABRIC IS TREATED WITH NATURAL PEPPERMINT OIL TO KEEP IT FRESH, SAVING WATER, ENERGY AND TIME.

I don't have all the ingredients around here, but I do believe I have some peppermint oil, which I assume is the same as PEPPERMINT OIL. I have it because, if you put some on cotton swabs and leave them in places that mice might frequent, the mice stay the f away. I deployed it in combo with chunks of Irish Spring soap to ward those little suckers off when I spotted one - and "eeked!" - in my den a couple of years ago. Did the trick.

Influencers are getting into the act. Pangaia - makers of the RESPONSIBLY SOURCED hoodie, as well as a sports bra made from castor oil - has a client list that includes Kourtney Kardashian, Natalie Portman, Harry Styles, Jaden Smith, and Pharrell Williams. With influencers like these stellar names now donning eco-friendly apparel, it surely won't be all that long before I'm in the market for a castor oil sports bra. 

I was disappointed to learn that Vi-Delta Emulsion, the liquid vitamins my mother spooned into our mouths each morning was made with fish oil, not castor oil. For a moment there I was imagining that, if only she'd known, my frugal and enterprising mother could have used it to make clothing for us!

The House that Yankee Candle Built

Not a big fan of scented candles here. 

In fact, one of the best things about no longer working is no longer feeling obligated to buy a Yankee Candle or two to support some colleague's kids' school fundraiser. Arguably, the candle were better than the skimpy gift wrapping sets, where one piece of the paper could just about cover an earring box. Still, there were only so many pumpkin spice and holiday balsam candles I could palm off on my mother. And Yankee Candle did seem to enjoy a near-monopoly on Massachusetts school fundraisers.

I may not be a big scented candle fan, yet I have to admire the late Mike Kittredge, a community college grad from western Mass. who built a hand-dipped wax empire from scratch.

Kittredge died a few years back - relatively young: he was just 67 - but before he kicked the pine-scented bucket, he was able to indulge himself by building his dream property in the small town of Leverett, Massachusetts. 

His son had been living there, but it wasn't exactly a bachelor pad, and Mick Kittredge grew tired of rattling around in the place by himself. So he put in on the market, in all of its "Disney-inspired" 120,00 square feet of living space glory. Asking price? Funny you should ask. $23M, which I'm guessing doesn't have a lot of comparables anywhere, let alone in Leverett.

What do you get for $23M?

...eight structures, complete with a bowling alley, golf course, arcade, and four tennis courts...[It] also has an indoor water park, two climate-controlled car barns

with space for 60 classic cars, and a 4,000-square-foot stage that’s welcomed groups such as Hall & Oates and KC and The Sunshine Band...As the listing site says, “The analogy to a country club cannot be denied.” (Source: Boston Globe)

When Kittredge the Elder acquired the property in 1984, he paid $144K for a 3BR, 2BA Colonial. 

But he needed growing room, so he growed that 3BR, 2BA to a setup with 16 BR and 13 BA. 

Apparently, Kittredge liked company. And entertaining. And there was plenty there to entertain his guests, business associates, and folks associated with his philanthropic endeavors, which were many.

In addition to the golf course, tennis courts, etc., there's "a spa with massage and treatment rooms, a fitness center, a sauna and steam room, and men's and women's locker rooms."  (That analogy to a country club really can't be denied.) Not to mention a gym, basketball court, and billiards room. Oh, and one of the tennis courts is indoors. Given the weather in Leverett, this can only be a good thing. 

If I'd gotten an invite, I'd have been spending my free time in the arcade, which comes equipped with old fashioned pinball machines and Skee-Ball. The arcade also features slot machines. No word on whether guests are supplied with quarters or have to BYO. 

I'm sure I would also have found time for the indoor water park, "inspired by the Bellagio."

The main residence boasts 25K square feet of luxury living. I saw a few of the rooms pictured on the listing agent's site, and while not to my taste, what I saw wasn't ghastly. (“The analogy to a country club cannot be denied.”) It's pretty tasteful, especially when you think about that office rug from Mar-a-Lago and all the fool's gold in Trump Tower. 

However nice the digs are, I completely understand that the son wants to sell. It wasn't mentioned in the Globe article, but I saw that another band that played there was Eric Burdon and The Animals. Maybe when he's in the shower, Mick Kittredge just kept finding himself singing, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place." And felt moved to act on it. 

I don't imagine there are a ton of prospective buyers. $23M is an awful lot of candle power, and Leverett isn't a high-roller paradise, like Nantucket or the Hamptons. There's speculation that the estate could be turned into a corporate retreat. Or that one of the local schools - it's near UMass, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke - might snap it up as a conference center. These options sound quite reasonable.

As for the listing agent, this looks to me like it could be a career-making sale. Can't but help thinking about the hard work that went into Mike Kittredge's building his candle empire - he was first inspired as a kid by melting crayons to make a candle for his mother, and took it from there - and comparing it to the relatively easy money to be made when the House that Yankee Candle Built gets sold.

Pumpkin Spiced Tidy Cats? Really???

It's not as if I'm immune to the pumpkin spice thing that has become so central to autumnal bliss. I mostly don't do lattes, so it's pretty much a matter of indifference to me when Dunkin (or is it Starbucks, or is it both?) brings it back.

But I do like pumpkin. I do like spice. And I love those tiny Trader Joe's Hold My Cones, and the pumpkin ginger version, which they have in the fall, is pretty darned delish. (It's not my favorite Hold My Cone seasonal flavor. That would be peppermint, which comes out for the holiday season. Still, pumpkin spice is pretty yummy, too.)

And I do like when the tiny little pumpkins (or pumpkin-like gourds) appear in the grocery store, so I can buy one to put on my kitchen windowsill. 

And I like spices. I make apple crisp with cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. I have a spicey Christmas cookie recipe. There's a spicey, peppery chicken that I make. I have a big hunk of ginger in the cabinet that I grate a bit of when I make peanut sauce. Etc.

So, yay, pumpkin. And, yay, spice.

But does everything have to be pumpkin spice?

A quick google revealed pumpkiny spicey goods beyond my imagining. Coffee-mate. Jell-o. Oreos (a true desecration!). Cheerios. Peeps. Bailey's Irish Cream. Marshmallows, almonds, yogurt. 

You name it, someone has pumpkin spiced it up.

Most of what gets pumpkin spiced up is edible or drinkable. Or is a Yankee Candle. But I've seen cleaners, including laundry detergent out there.

Not that I'm opposed to cleaning aids that smell nice. I'm a sucker for Mrs. Meyer's All Purpose Cleaner - Lemon Verbena. The Geranium isn't bad, either. And I like dishwashing liquid that's lemon-y or orange-y. 

It's just that everything really doesn't need to smell like pumpkin spice. And including in that everything category, I'd put Tidy Cats Kitty Litter.

I'm sure that if I had cats I'd do pretty much everything in my power to keep my house from smelling like I had cats. I might draw the line at trying to toilet train the critters, but I'm sure I'd be there several times a day with my turd scoop, and pretty much changing the litter out daily.

But I can't see wanting the litter to smell like things I might eat or drink. Like those Trader Joe's spiced Hold My Cones. 

I get that product managers for consumer goods are always trying to come up with brand extensions, where they make marginal changes to the core product to get people to buy more, hopefully without cannibalizing sales of the core product. It makes me crazy. How many versions of M&M's do we need? And as far as I'm concerned, having too much choice is not a good thing. It's exhausting. One of the reasons I like shopping at my little indie neighborhood drugstore is that they only have a half-dozen or so toothpaste options. Unlike CVS, where there's a seemingly infinite variety that makes my head hurt. 

But I really do get it.

What I don't get is pumpkin spice kitty litter. 

Because I don't have a cat, my opinion really doesn't count here. But if I did have a cat, I can't see buying this. And I really do want to know: does it do anything for the kitties?

Is Perla a latter-day greifer, or just a nasty person?

The recent transport of a group of asylum-seeking Venezuelan refugees to Martha's Vineyard was such a miserable, mean-spirited, performative stunt on the part of Ron DeSantis. If it weren't business as usual for DeSantis, the stunt might beggar belief. God help us if this nasty, sadistic, fascist-adjacent bastard ever becomes president. 

With luck, he'll be defeated in November, which should take a bit of wind out of his electoral sails. He's no doubt got some voter suppression and/or election overthrow scheme up his sleeve. Guess we'll just have to wait and see. 

Which is not to say that our immigration system isn't a hot mess.

When my Irish great-grandparents got off the boat in the 1870's, I don't imagine there were much by way of immigration rules. Hop on in Cobh, County Cork. Hop off in Boston. Make your way to central Massachusetts. Have a bunch of American kids...

When my German grandparents (my toddler mother in tow) arrived at Ellis Island in the 1920's, things were different. There were rules in place. One pertained to how much money immigrants had to bring with them. Somehow, my grandfather got the info wrong and only had enough cash for one person. (He thought the rate was per family.) So my grandparents were separated - my grandfather to the men's dorm, my grandmother and mother to the area for women and children - until my grandfather's brother in Chicago raised the rest of the cash. 

But even then, the system was a mess, mostly when it came to who got to come. Right about the time my grandparents were coming, there was a ban on Asian immigrants instituted.

And it's gotten messier as we go along. 

There's no simple fix, but as I heard Beto O'Rourke say the other day, let's start by allowing farmers to easily acquire temporary work permits for the seasonal laborers they need; let's stop dicking around with the DACA kids and make them citizens; let's cut the red tape that takes asylum-seekers up to 6 years to have their cases heard. 

If we had the political will, surely we can fix our broken system, which is apt to get worse as those fleeing global warming in equatorial countries start making their way here.

Anyway, DeSantis paying good money (covid funds?) to send 50 refugees (and an awaiting videographer) to Martha's Vineyard is pretty disgraceful.

As was hiring a procurer to lie those refugees, conning them to get on the plane with promises that there would be help waiting for them in Boston (not, note, Martha's Vineyard). 

A number of the refugees were procured by a woman named Perla.

Some of the Venezuelans flown to Massachusetts told reporters the tall, blond, well-dressed woman with the white truck scouted for passengers outside a migrant shelter and in a fast-food restaurant, promising them immigration paperwork, jobs, and free housing if they’d agree to get on the planes. She even put them up in an airport hotel until there were enough of them to fill the flights. As everyone now knows, Perla was lying. 

(Source: Boston Globe)

Just who is this Perla? 

Is she a true believer, someone who hates immigrants, who hates brown people, to the degree that it's okay to add deception and cruelty to the mix of how immigrants should be treated?

Is she a dimwit who believes the people she's conning are actually going to be helped? (Among other tricks DeSantis was up to: giving people an elaborate brochure outlining all the benefits they were going to get if they got on the plane to Massachusetts.)

Is she a paid, Craigslist performer, like those Blacks for Trump who sit behind TFG at his demented, Nazi-adjacent rallies, in need of a gig, anything for a buck?

Or is she a latter day greifer? The greiferin - catchers - were German Jews who, during the war, turned in fellow-Jews who were trying to evade Gestapo capture in Berlin? The greiferin were saving their own skins, or protecting family. Maybe Perla's been threatened with deportation. Or maybe she's just a nasty, soulless person. A good match for Ron DeSantis. Maybe we'll see her on his staff if he runs for president in 2024. (Ugh!)

“We have strapped on the full armor of God,” DeSantis recently said, previewing for top donors his plan to send migrants to the Vineyard, according to The Washington Post.

Maybe it's just me, but if there is a God, I'm not entirely sure that it's his armor that DeSantis and his ilk are strapping on. Just saying...

Meanwhile, the Statue of Liberty's been lifting her lamp beside the golden door for nearly 150 years now. You'd think we could figure this out. And mark me down as someone who was happy that, when they showed up at Ellis Island, Jake and Magdalena Wolf, little Elisabeth in tow, weren't met by some lying POS like Perla. 

The Royal Treatment

I flew to Ireland the day Queen Elizabeth died. It goes without saying that the Irish aren't universally grieving. The long relationship between Ireland and the Brits is complex and plenty fraught. The Shamrock Rovers fans (and a few other football crowds with similar displays) aside - on the night QEII died, they chanted "Lizzie's in a Box" at a soccer match in Dublin - I'd say that the average citizen of the Republic had at least a modest degree of respect for Elizabeth, if not much Capital-A affection. She was old. Really old. She was plucky. She was a gamer. She loved corgis. 

Having greeted incoming PM Liz Truss two days before she died, you can sure say she almost died with her pumps on.

So, there's plenty there to like/admire. (Not perfect, mind you: Not allowing her sister to marry a divorced man. Not allowing Charles to marry the woman he loved (that would be Camilla). Forcing everyone's hand on Charles' marriage to Diana. The overall treatment off that poor girl.)

Plus the Irish love a good tabloid gossip as much as their cousins across the Irish Sea do. And if there's one thing the British royals are, they're fabulous contributors to tabloid gossip. 

Not The Queen, mind you, but a lot of her kids and grandkids manage to punch well above their tabloid fodder weight. 

As I said, the relationship between Ireland and England/Great Britain/the UK (pick one) is complex.

Given that for the better part of two centuries, Ireland's biggest export was its people, there are a ton of folks of Irish descent living in the UK. (It's estimated that 10% of the UK's population has at least one Irish grandparent.)

But the Brits also spent centuries brutalizing the Irish, stealing their land, exploiting their labor, starving them outright, refusing them an education, suppressing their religion and language. (Admittedly, turning the Irish into English speakers turned out to be a good thing, especially for the millions of Irish spilling into the English-speaking diaspora.)

So, football fans chanting "Lizzie in a Box" isn't all that much of a surprise. And it's safe to say that, when it comes to the royals and the Irish, there's little love lost. 

(I was in a pub in Ireland shortly after Princess Di died. Elton John's tribute song, "Goodbye English Rose/Candle in the Wind" came on the radio. The bartender rolled his eyes and snapped the radio off.)

For the British, of course, the death of their queen is another story entirely. 

Still, the national paroxysm of grief has been something to observe. And being in Ireland for a week, we did get to observe it via the obsessional coverage on BBC TV. (BBC TV was quickly dubbed "Mourn Hub" by media wags.)

It's difficult for this American to fully understand the impact of the monarchy on the British people, how interwoven it is to their identity. Even the younger people who, in survey after survey, indicate they want to jettison the royals and become a normal republic, are out in the streets moaning that they feel like they've lost their own granny. 

People - even rich and famous ones like David Beckham - are standing in a five mile line for up to 20+ hours (I think Beckham waited 14 hours) so they can walk by the queen's draped coffin,

I can see myself trying to watch the hearse pass by. But poking along, in the dark and the cold, for 20 hours? Ummmm, no.

But I guess for the Brits it's all wound up with history and tradition, combined with the more modern impulse for over-the-top public displays of emotion. Diana's death ripped the lid of whatever container contained the Brits' famous stiff upper lip, and it apparently never got put back on. 

Then there's the other impulse for every event to have to be a scene where you need to see and be seen. (Personally, I liked the Boston Marathon when it wasn't a big deal that closed the city down, where you could walk up to the finish line at the last moment, and pop into the Elliot Lounge for a beer and see Bill Rodgers there wearing his laurel wreath.)

It'll be interesting to see if the British monarchy continues to survive.

The Queen was such a special case...And the fact that she's directly tied to what was pretty much the last of British greatness (i.e., World War II, when then Princess Elizabeth served her country in uniform).

I'm guessing that some of the nations that make up the British Commonwealth - the agglomeration of countries that were once part of the mighty and ubiquitous (and racist and violent and exploitive) British Empire - will want out. 

I'm also guessing that there'll be pressure on to stop funding the royal family to quite the tune they are now, which is nearly $120M, even though the key royals are billionaires, thanks to all the property they've scooped up over the years.

Charles is not his mother. If nothing else, she was the Queen of Aplomb - a living, breathing instance of "Keep Calm and Carry On." Charles is something of a wanker. Someone squeezes his toothpaste for him. Someone irons his shoelaces. His idea of a love letter was telling Camilla he wanted to be her tampon. 

The Brits will no doubt cut him some slack, but in the age of social media, every little petulant fit he throws - as when, the other day, he imperiously motioned to some lackey to move an inkpot out of his way - will be magnified. 

It's painful to watch him. He always seems so pained.

But it'll be interesting. 

I'm just happy to be on this side of the pond, where our dynasties don't seem to last forever. 

Remember the Kennedys? Fuggedaboutit! Joe Kennedy the Whatever couldn't win the Democratic primary for senator in Massachusetts in 2020. And in Texas, George Bush the Whatever, even though he pretzeled himself into a Trumpist, couldn't win the primary for AG last spring.

Today's Her Majesty's funeral, and, if the spirit moves me, I will get up and watch some of the event on TV. To give myself a bit of the royal treatment, I even bought a scone for the occasion. The tea I'm drinking, however, will be Irish. There's royal treatment and then there's royal treatment.

The crazy things people go to prison for

When you win the Super Bowl, you get more than bragging rights. You get a gaudy, expensive ring that looks like it weighs as much as a set of brass knuckles. And looks like, in a pinch, you could use if as a brass knuck.

These rings are not quite up there with the Honus Wagner baseball card, which a few weeks ago sold for $7.25M at auction. 

For one thing, there are a lot more of these rings than there are Honus Wagner cards.

But they are something that sports memorabilia collectors like to collect.

Given the demand, a young New Jersey guy thought he was on to a a good thing when he found a former Patriots' player who was interested in selling his 2016 Super Bowl ring. 

So Scott Spina decided to take the ring off of the anonymous player's hand. He was even willing to pay good money for the privilege, figuring he could make a few bucks by quickly turning it around. As it turned out, Spina actually wasn't willing to pay good money for the ring. So he wrote a bad check to the former Patriot. Spina did, however, get the sell it quickly on the turnaround part right. He sold the ring "for $63,000 to a  well-known broker of championship rings." ('Broker of championship rings.' Now that's gotta be a niche profession.)

Getting his mitts on the one original ring wasn't enough for Spina.

When Spina obtained the player ring, he also received the information that allowed the former player to purchase Super Bowl rings for family and friends that are slightly smaller than the player rings.

“Spina then called the Ring Company, fraudulently identified himself as [the former player], and started ordering three family and friend Super Bowl LI rings with the name ‘Brady’ engraved on each one, which he falsely represented were gifts for the baby of quarterback Tom Brady,” according to court documents. “The rings were at no time authorized by Tom Brady. Defendant Spina intended to obtain the three rings by fraud and to sell them at a substantial profit.”

Spina entered into an agreement with the Orange County man who purchased the player’s Super Bowl ring to sell him the three family rings that Spina now claimed Brady had given to his nephews. After agreeing to buy the three rings for $81,500 – nearly three times what Spina paid for the rings – the buyer started to believe that Brady did not have nephews, and he tried to withdraw from the deal.

The same day that the buyer tried to back out, and the same day that Spina received the rings in November 2017, Spina immediately sold them to an auction house for $100,000. During an auction in February 2018, one of the family rings was sold for $337,219. (Source: US Department of Justice)

There is so much to unpack here. But the biggest unpack is the halo effect of having the name "Brady" engraved on the ring. And that someone was willing to pay $337,219 for a ring that they believed Tom Brady had purchased for a nephew (that he may or may not have). 

Not that I haven't spent money on studip thangs. But all that money for a ring that was NOT the one that had been given to Tom Brady, or any other member of the winning Super Bowl team, but was a lesser version of the ring that Brady supposedly purchased for a family member?

Wow. Just wow.

Maroons are everywhere, I guess. 

And speaking of maroons, Spina will be doing three years in a federal pen for this escapade. 

Spina admitted in his plea agreement that he defrauded the Orange County ring broker when he falsely claimed that the rings “were ordered for Tom Brady directly from [the Ring Company] for select family members.” Spina also admitted that he defrauded this victim in relation to three wire transfers for the deposit on the family rings. Spina further admitted he committed identity theft when he posed as the former Patriot to purchase the rings.

He's also been ordered to pay the anonymous Patriots' player $63K in restitution.  

The crazy thing people go to prison for. 

Crypto mining. (The miners don't end up with black lung, but it's plenty hazardous to your mental health.)

I know next to nothing about crypto currency, other than that a lot of folks think it's going to make them rich; it attracts a lot of dreamers, schemers, and flakes; investing in it is inherently risky; and, things will likely shake out and it'll be a big finance thang in the future that ain't none of us going to be able to fully escape.

I also know that running the crypto show requires a shit ton (technical term) of datacenter computing power. 

And now I know that crypto datacenters also make a shit ton (technical term) noise.

If I lived near Poor House Mountain in North Carolina, I would have already known that. 

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, powerful computers perform the complex computations needed to “mine,” or create, digital currencies. And those noise-generating computers are kept cool by huge fans.

“It’s like living on top of Niagara Falls,” said Mike Lugiewicz, whose home lies less than 100 yards from the mine.

“When it’s at its worst, it’s like sitting on the tarmac with a jet engine in front of you. But the jet never leaves. The jet never takes off. It’s just annoying. It’s just constant annoyance,” he said. (Source: Washington Post)

Top of Niagara Falls, you say? That's a lot o' noise.

While the name Poor House Mountain, and the location (Appalachia), might give the impression that this is some poverty holler full of hillbillies and moonshiners, it's

actually a lovely residential area, full of townhouses and condos. And the area is beautiful - woods, mountains. 

But it's now, thanks to crypto mining, plenty noisy.

Kurt Fristrup, a former Park Service scientist who studied noise impacts on rural environments, compared the noise near Lugiewicz’s home to living close to a very busy road without normal pulses in traffic.

Imagine “45 sedans traveling close together nonstop on a three-lane road at 35 miles per hour,” Fristrup said. 

I'm a city girl, so I'm used to a lot of noise. Ambulance sirens, fire engines, garbage trucks that show up outside my window as early at 6 a.m. Traffic sounds. People-loud-talking-on-the-streets noise. Sometimes I hear helicopters. Sometimes I hear planes. Sometimes I hear music from concerts on The Common or the Hatch Shell. 

I'm also occasionally assaulted by the wine-fueled gabfests held by the people who're renting the VRBO next door and, on a fine summer night, are inclined to hang out on the back porch holding a wine-fueled gabfest. The other noises I can live with. The gabfest. Oy! If they run much after 1 a.m., I have on occasion opened my window and pretty-pleased the wine-fueled gabfesters to take their wine-fueled gabfest inside. 

But I'm not used to a constant thrum of noise. I'd hope I'd get used to it, and it would just be background, white noise. But maybe not. Certainly a lot of the people living on Poor House Mountain haven't gotten used to it. 

Lugiewicz is moving up the mountain, nearly out of hearing of the data center hum-a-thon. 

A retired Army officer with PTSD moved to the area for the quiet he's no longer getting. Cicadas are one thing; datacenter noise, another. There goes the peaceful retirement he earned. 

And a Philadelphia woman who moved there after surviving a traumatic car crash. The noise, she claims, is ruining her life. 

Crypto mining datacenters are popping up all over the place, mostly in areas that are sparsely populated and where there's a lot of power to be had. Many are in places like Poor House Mountain, NC.

How awful for folks who moved there to get away from it all, only to have a noisy crypto datacenter pop up next door.

Just as happy to live in an area where they're not apt to pop up.

I know that the effluent from paper mills can make the surrounding areas smell pretty awful, but I bet it's a lot quieter out in Dalton, Massachusetts, living in the shadow of the Crane mill that prints the paper that US currency is printed on!

Old folks at home...

Like every other aging person I know - and, as you can imagine, at my age, I know plenty of aging persons - I would like to be able to keep all my marbles and my mobility, stay in my home up until what I hope is not a bitter end, and die in my sleep (or, second best, drop dead while eating ice cream).

Realistically, I know that this full scenario is unlikely. 

There may come a time when I need to move into a place where there's some level of assistance. As did my mother.

The year before she died, my mother sold the family home and moved into a congregant living facility. She had decided that too much of her energy was going into maintaining - or finding people to maintain - a 4 BR house with a big yard. None of her kids lived nearby. Finding someone to rake, to shovel, was getting to be too much. My mother was fully compos mentis, and still leading a full and vigorous life -  volunteering, traveling, taking classes. Still, at 81, rattling around her house was getting to be a bit much.

So she moved on out. 

Her new digs were pretty near ideal.

She had her own apartment - we called it her first "single gal" flat. It was a good sized one bedroom, with a small but full kitchen, a nice combo LR/DR, and a bathroom with a walk-in shower. (One of our worries was that, despite our suggesting it, she hadn't put one in her home. She did concede to grab bars but that was it.) Her apartment had a balcony overlooking a pond. (Okay, the pond was across a busy street, but still...) One of the best parts of her new home: right across the street from the church she'd been a member of since she'd married my father and moved to Worcester 55 years earlier. All she had to do to get to daily Mass was walk out the door and cross the street.

My mother's facility provided breakfast and lunch, changed her bed and laundered her sheets and towels, did light housekeeping, and offered plenty of social activities. Plus she had friends who lived there. There was also a section you could move into if you needed a higher level of care.  

Ideal!

Sadly, less than a year after we moved her in - raving about how great the storage was - my mother died. (We, sadly, emptied out her apartment, lamenting that she hadn't been able to enjoy it for that long and raging about how great the storage was.)

That was 21 years ago. Now, 21 years older and (perhaps) at least a bit wiser, well, objects in mirror closer than they appear. 

Not that I have to move tomorrow, but I do occasionally put 'what next' on my fret list, fast forwarding to the point where I may need to act on it. (Objects in mirror closer than they appear.)

So I was more than a little interested to read about how the Netherlands takes care of their old folks when they can no longer stay home.

Unlike in the US, where, as with so many social needs, you're on your own, baby, the country has been planning for their "demographic tidal wave." In 2040, they estimate that 25% of their population will be older than 65. (In the US, the forecast is that, by that point, 20% of our population will be that old.)

Here in the Netherlands, a social welfare state roughly twice the size of Massachusetts, leaders have been planning for this graying of society for a half century. Drawing on public funds, a sense of shared responsibility, and compulsory insurance premiums paid throughout their working lives, those born in the post-World War II baby boom take for granted that they’ll have the home and nursing care they need as they age.

“It’s pretty much undebated,” said Bram Wouterse, assistant professor in health economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “People know that when you get old, the government will provide good care.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Here, people stay up night worrying about whether their money will run out before they do. Whether they'll end up warehoused in a grim nursing home, doped up and with bedsores. If you have good fortune (and/or a reasonably big fortune), you'll be okay. But for everyone else, it's worrisome.

But in the Netherlands:

The Dutch use the word solidariteit, or solidarity, to describe their commitment to older residents. The Netherlands was the first country in Europe to introduce a mandatory long-term care system in 1968. It has updated and refined its plan several times since, holding to its vision of universal care even as it relies more on managed competition between nonprofit providers and insurers to control costs. The most recent overhaul, in 2015, aims to help residents age in place.

They do so with a system that's "varied, experimental, and humane." And by paying for it from the get-go. In the Netherlands, more than 4 percent of GDP is devoted to long term care, which far exceed the percentage spent in the US (which is roughly 1.5%, the lowest amount among industrialized, comparable countries). To support this, Dutch workers are levied payroll deductions that can near 10% of income.

The system pays off. Old Dutch folks are happier, healthier, less stressed, and live longer than Americans. And: 

In a separate 2021 survey on loneliness, which casts a discomforting shadow over tens of millions of older folks worldwide, the database firm Statista found that only 15 percent of Dutch adults acknowledged feeling lonely, less than half the share of Americans (31 percent).

The Netherlands knows they'll be facing some hurdles. More old folks, fewer healthcare workers. So they're already enlisting locals to look in and hang with the aged in their communities, and they're exploring innovative technology that will help people age gracefully and in place. (There's plenty of exploration in the US in the aging tech arena as well.)

“We have a very strong belief in societal responsibility,” said Marco Varkevisser, an Erasmus University professor. “We call this solidarity. It’s there, we nurture it, and we like it.”

Somewhere along the line, I read that homogeneous societies are more likely to provide more support across the boards for their citizens. In more diverse countries, like ours, it's easier to us and them. 

Still, wouldn't it be nice if we could nurture a bit more of that Dutch solidarity. 

This once and future old folk sure hopes it happens. 

The Steel Drivin' Men from Woburn, Mass.

When I was a school kid, a lot of what we learned in history and geography centered on who invented what, what was produced (manufactured or grown) where, and how (sort of) things were made.

We proudly learned that Massachusetts' very own Elias Howe (born just up the road from Worcester, in Spencer) invented the sewing machine, and that Massachusetts' very own Eli Whitney (born just down the road from Worcester, in Westborough) invented the cotton gin.

We learned that Chicago was the hog butcher of the world. That Detroit was The Car City. That Youngstown was The Tire City. And that Pittsburgh was The Steel City. 

Steel, we learned, made not just Pittsburgh great, but made our country great. All those blast furnaces, blasting away 24/7!

We are no longer the leading steel producing nation. In 2021, China, India, and Japan ranked ahead of us. But we still produce a ton. (Actually, 86 million tons in 2021.) And steel production, not surprisingly, isn't all that great for the environment.

Every ton of new steel manufactured spits out two tons of carbon dioxide into the environment.

...making steel accounts for about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Steel Association.  (Source: Boston Globe)

Those emissions are thanks in large part of the coal that fuels the industry. 

So there are a number of companies looking into how they can swap coal use out for something more environmentally friendly. One such company is Massachusetts' very own Boston Metal, a Woburn-based startup dedicated to finding a sustainable way to produce iron. (Note: Woburn was once one of the largest leather-producing towns in New England. Their high school athletic teams are called the Tanners, and their mascot is a snorting bull. Leather gotta come from somewhere.)

The startup, Boston Metal, wants to help the steel industry reduce its dependence on burning coal-based fuel and use electricity instead — ideally sustainably produced electricity from sources such as hydropower or solar. Many of the world’s steelmakers, points out Boston Metal chief executive Tadeu Carneiro, “have made pledges to be carbon neutral by 2050, and they still don’t have the solutions to get there.” His company wants to be one of those solutions. 

Why focus on iron? Because it's a "key ingredient" of steel. And its making is a big culprit when it comes to noxious emissions.  

In traditional steel manufacturing, a special form of coal is used to fuel a reaction that turns iron ore, an oxide, into pure iron. Then you can add elements like chromium to the molten iron to make stainless steel, or manganese to make structural steel, explains Adam Rauwerdink, a senior vice president at Boston Metal. But the iron production stage “is where the overwhelming majority of the emissions come from,” he says. 

Boston Metal has a lot going for it. Its founders are MIT professors and a grad with a PhD in metallurgy. And its backers include an investment firm associated with Fidelity; BMW's venture wing; and a fund started by Bill Gates. So, smart money backing smart guys.

There are a number of other companies focused on this issue, but I wouldn't bet against the Steel Drivin' Men from Woburn, Massachusetts.

Go, Tanners! Maybe Woburn will end up changing their team name to The Environmentalists!