Talk about damaged goods

Back in the day (think Gilded Age), rich folks bought seaside "cottages" (think mansions) and private railroad cars to schlep them from NYC to Newport, or wherever else they summered. (I've toured the private car owned by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe's son, who was president of the Pullman Company. He used to to get from his home in Chicago and, later, Washington DC, to Hildene, his getaway place in Manchester, VT, comfortably ensconced in his private car. Nice perk!)

Fast forward and the big moneyed class is still buying second (third, fourth, fifth...homes), and they travel between and among homes (and the site of the sports teams they own) using their private jets. They also seem to buy an awful lot of superyachts. (Think Jeff Bezos, who - it was rumored - was going to have to dismantle a bridge in Rotterdam to get his super-duper yacht out of the shipbuilding yard. Ship ahoy!) 

And, while anyone can have a speedboat or two to use as a superyacht dinghy, it's a lot more fun if you have a superyacht to also have a submarine of your very own. 

Thus, in Gilded Age, Take Two, rich folks started buying luxury submarines, paying a couple of millionaire bucks for that little goodie. 

Given how much private submarines go for, you'd think that s submersible going for $800K would be a bargain.

Too much of a bargain, I guess.

First off, a submersible doesn't give you the full submarine experience. In a submarine, you're diving and surfacing on your own, while a submersible needs a mothership (such as a superyacht) to guide it in and out of the drink. So, for starters, it's a poor man's submarine.

Then there's the fact that the submersible for sale wasn't particularly luxe. And it's old. Vintage 1973. So almost the age of a used U-Boat. 

And this $800K submersible has been languishing on the market for five years. From the real estate market we are all, of course, aware that when your home is on the market for a while, the listing gets stale - and the asking price drops.

Then there's the real killer, metaphorically speaking. (Or not.) The most recent owner of the Antipodes is none other than OceanGate, most recently in the news for the implosion of their latter-day submersible, the Titan. 

No, OceanGate didn't build the Antipodes. But, they own it, and used it for expeditions (albeit more modest that diving to the floor to ogle the remains of the Titanic. Having any association with the OceanGate brand isn't going to help matters any.

So the broker who's been kinda-sorts trying to unload it for the past five years is ready to cry 'Uncle.'

"I don't want to have anything to do with it," Steve Reoch, an expedition-yacht broker who sold his first boat in 1979, told Insider just weeks after another OceanGate sub, the Titan, catastrophically imploded on a mission. (Source: Insider)

Can't blame Reoch if he wants out. If he couldn't unload it before OceanGate became a household word, just imagine trying to sell it now. Seriously, who would buy a used OceanGate submersible? Every moment spent in that submersible you'd have your ear trained for the telltale creak that it and you might be under an awful lot of pressure. 

Anyway, if the $800K price tag is out the window, what might you do with the submersible if you could get it on the cheap?

I guess you could put it in your garden as a convo piece. Maybe use that front section as a greenhouse sort of thing. It's 13 1/2 feet long, so might make a cool little playhouse for the kiddos. Or you could just use it on the surface, tow it around behind your superyacht, taking in the scenery. Maybe get up close and personal with sharks and/or dolphins. 

For any of the above scenarios, the price would have to be pretty close to zero.

A far cry from $800K. 

But talk about damaged goods...

"You're a grand old flag, you're a high-flying flag"

On the Fourth of July, with nothing better to do in late afternoon, I turned on Turner Movie Classics and caught a bit of the ridiculously corny James Cagney film Yankee Doodle Dandy, the heavily fictionalized biopic of George M. Cohan, the songwriter-performer who wrote all sorts of ridiculously corny American songbook songs.

Naturally, I sang along with "For It Was Mary," "Over There," the eponymous "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and - of course - "Grand Old Flag."

Earlier in the day, when I'd served breakfast (grits) and lunch (hot dogs and potato salad) at St. Francis House, I wore a light blue ball cap with the flag on it.

In donning my flagged apparel, I was a bit concerned that someone might take me for a jingoistic, white nationalist - the RWNJ's having done such a good job of co-opting the use of the flag. (Fortunately or unfortunately, they've somewhat diluted the field by also flying Trump 2024, Fuck Joe Biden, Don't Tread on Me, Confederate, and even Nazi flags.) I thought about taping a little note onto my cap indicating that I was "Baptized a Catholic, but born a Democrat" or maybe "LWNJ," but decided to tough it out.

In any case, I like the flag just fine, and am happy to see people flying it, especially on holidays.

My sister Kath has the flag that draped my WWII vet father's coffin and, when she had her house in Wellfleet, she used to put it out on Memorial Day, the Fourth, and Labor Day.

I have a small American flag, one of the flimsy little ones they give out in Boston's Downtown Crossing on the Fourth. It's in a vase in my kitchen alongside the flimsy little Ukrainian flag I got at a Slava Ukraini rally in the winter of 2022.

So, yeah, I'm mostly happy to be an American and like the flag well enough. If I had a house, I'd probably put a flag out on patriotic holidays. Partly because I'm mostly happy to be an American and partly to take ownership of the flag metaphor back from the RWNJs.

But I sure wouldn't want to live any place where I was forced to fly the Stars and Stripes. So I guess I won't be moving any time soon to an under-development 55+ community (1776 Gastonia) in Gastonia, North Carolina, that will be requiring all of its residents to fly the flag all the time. 

"We're handling the American flag like an architectural element," Brock Fankhauser, the owner and founder of Great American Homes, said. "We are installing it similarly to a fixture."

Fankhauser said each resident will be given an American flag upon moving in and will have agreed to display it in front of their homes at all times. Though, Fankhauser stressed his community is not associated with any particular political party.

"I've also said it's very important for us to distance ourselves from any political movement, any political party, and any political figures," he said. "We are completely detached from that." (Source: WCNC)

I could see it if they issued everyone an American flag and encouraged them to, say, fly it on those patriotic holidays that call for flag-waving. Or if the community decided it was part of their decor and flew a bunch of flags in public places, like baskets full of petunias hanging from the light poles. 

But forcing everyone into 365 days of flag flying seems kind of un-American to me. 

And what about when the flag gets old, frayed, and dirty.

Years ago, the local Post Office had a flag out front that got so filthy from car exhaust that it was the red-brown-and-blue. It looked terrible. Eventually, after enough of us complained, they replaced it with a fresh flag.

Who'll be paying for the replacement flags for the Gastonia 1776 residents when the originals they're issued wear out? Are you on the hook to buy your own? And if it's your responsibility, does the replacement flag have to be the same as the original? If you don't like the original - for all I know, they'll be distributing cheesy looking polyester flags made in China, not heavy duty cotton flags made in America, the nice ones where you can see the stitching, the ones that look like they were crafted by hand by one of Betsy Ross's great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters -  can you upgrade on your own. Or does the covenant have specific size, fabric, and country of origin requirements?

As I said, the whole thing seems un-American to me. 

Good thing I wasn't planning to decamp to Gastonia anytime soon.

Meanwhile, hey, it's my flag, too. "Forever in peace may you wave."

No surprise here (at least to me).

For more than 20 years - first as a professor at Tuck (Dartmouth's business school), and later at USC - David Kang has kept track of the colleges and business schools that the CEO's of Fortune 500's attended. And he was shocked by what he found. 

“The results were stunning,” he told Fortune. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate.

But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.” (Source: Yahoo News)

My parents always told us that the Rogers kids were not like everyone else - this when we wanted, say, to stay out playing late with all the other kids in the neighborhood, or go swimming at Coes Pond (which they considered dirty, which it probably was; the one time my sister Kath and I were allowed to go there with friends - late grammar school/early high school - Kath ended up with an ear infection) - and here is a case where my parents, decades after the fact, are proven to have known best. When it comes to thinking the "Ivy Leagues would dominate" the Fortune 500 corner offices, I never would have predicted it at all. In fact, that's a finding I would have found stunning.

Maybe the fact that "no college" came out on top surprised me. (But not if I really think about it. "No college" may had only seven or eight mentions, but those mentions were one more than graduates from specific schools like Ohio State or Texas A&M.)

Anyway, I'm not stunned by the lack of Ivy League undergrads among the ranks of Fortune 500 CEO's.

I know plenty of folks who have Ivy League undergraduate degrees. Some of them (probably most, now that I think of it) are lawyers. Some of them are doctors. Some of them are management consultants. Some of them went into finance. Some went into social services or teaching or politics. Some went into the arts. 

Sure, this may be an artifact of where I live and who I rub shoulders with, but I don't know a lot of folks who crawled up through the ranks of Exxon-Mobile or Walmart to grab the brass ring of CEO-dom.

And my understanding of the undergraduate recruitment process is that students who want to succeed in business - i.e. go to a prestige B-school and make a lot of dough - vie for post-college jobs at a high-end management consulting firm (like Bain) or a high-end financial outfit (like Goldman). 

Or they're going to make a go at being an entrepreneur. Or taking a flyer on some startup in hopes that it would turn into a unicorn and make them enough to retire by thirty.

Decades ago - we're talking mid-1970's - I had a crappy office-temp job at a manufacturing company in Boston that made blue jeans. (I probably didn't have to say mid-1970's here, because mid-1970's was probably the last time any clothing was manufactured in Boston.) I can't remember the name of the company; it wasn't a brand I knew of. (I wore Levi's or Wrangler's.) But it's tag had something to do with the American flag. Anyway, I was talking to one of the managers one day - a fellow a few years older than I - and was shocked to find out that he'd graduated from Harvard.

What was he doing at a down-market dungaree company in Boston? Why wasn't he in law school or med school?

I'm guessing now that whatever it was called, it was a family business, But even back then I found it "stunning" that a Harvard grad was working there. 

Fast forward, and I'd still find it stunning to discover many folks with an Ivy League degree working for CVS, Caterpillar, Ford. (Less stunning to find one at, say, a Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or the like.)

In any case, it's good to know that:

A fancy degree isn’t required for business success, and top-tier corporate executives usually don’t have elite educations...

“It’s an extraordinary testament to the vitality of this country, the incredible range of universities that these people went to,” Kang said. “It’s a country that has a massive economy, and many of these companies in the top 500 are not white-shoe law firms, they’re pharmaceutical, they’re manufacturing, et cetera.”

Which is not to say that an Ivy League undergrad won't help you claw your way to the top in other careers.

Just look at the Supreme Court.

John Roberts, Harvard/Harvard Law. Sam Alito, Princeton/ Yale Law. Neil Gorsuch, Columbia/Harvard Law. Ketanji Brown Jackson, Harvard/Harvard Law. Elena Kagan, Princeton/Harvard Law. Brett Kavanaugh, Yale/Yale Law. Sonia Sotomayor, Princeton/Yale Law.

Give another hoya and a chu-chu-ra-ra* for Clarence Thomas, who went to lowly Holy Cross, but gained ground by getting his law degree from Yale.

Only Amy Coney-Barrett, considered the most under-credentialed supreme in recent memory, graduated from the relatively unknown Rhodes College, and got her law degree at Notre Dame. (Her being on the Court is somewhat stunning, but she did have impeccable political leanings, which made her a darling of the Federalist Society, which pretty much rubber stamps the judges when conservatives are in charge.)

So, if you want to become a Supreme Court Justice, you've got a better chance to achieve your goal if you've gone to an Ivy. (And an upper echelon Ivy like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, at that. If you only manage to make it into Cornell you're probably better off aspiring to be a Fortune 500 CEO.)

But if you want to be a Fortune 500 CEO, YAY Good Old State U! (By the way, Jack Welch, late of GE and this world, got his undergraduate degree at UMass and a PhD from Illinois.)

And that's a good thing. (State U. Jack Welch wasn't necessarily a good thing.)

Generally, if someone is “resilient and smart” and works very hard, it doesn’t matter if they go to Harvard or a state school, Kang said. If anything, he added, going to a school that affords them less privilege will force them to “learn more business and people skills” earlier. 

Indeed!

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

* Personally, I would never give another hoya and a chu-chu-rah-rah for Clarence Thomas, but, having grown up in Holy Cross' hometown of Worcester, Mass, I do happen to know the college's fight song. 

Bye Bye Birdie

Elon Musk acquired Twitter last October for $44B; the company is now worth $15B. (So much for the theory that Musk's a genius.) Since buying the platform, Musk has rampaged through it with narcissistic ferocity and Trumpian ineptitude. He cut back on content moderation. Deliberately or not, he promoted rightwing accounts and conspiracy theories - some promoted by his personal account. The number of users declined, as did traffic. Lots of employees got laid off; lots of employees left because of his heavy handed rule and cruelty. Musk stopped paying a lot of his bills. Like his rent. 

Yes indeed, Twitter under Musk has been a hot (and not-so-hot) mess.

I'm a Twitter user, but not much of one. My 867 (give or take) followers (including my big name followers: Nancy Sinatra and Joyce Carol Oates) puts me above the average (707), and I follow 1,158 (give or take) tweeters. I've never been much for tweeting, but when I started using my dormant account in 2020, during the election season, I was a heavy and regular commenter, which is how I accrued those 867 followers.

When I was active, it was mostly fun to vent with fellow travelers. On Twitter, I reconnected with a couple of former colleagues, and with a grammar school classmate I hadn't seen in nearly 60 years. Sometimes my comments got a lot of play. (My record - I believe it was something about Bill Barr - got over 1,000 likes.) Once in a while, someone responded to one of my comments with a vicious attack. These attacks gave me pause. Unlike the attackers - who were all anonymous - I use my real name and the city I live in. Would this crazy AR-wielding MAGAt actually come after me? Fortunately, I'm such small potatoes, I'm sure that no one would consider me worth the trouble or the bullets. 

There are a number of tweeters I follow because I like their take on things political. These include presidential historian Michael Beschloss, Congressmen Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and a couple of legal eagles (Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe and Andrew Weissman, who was part of Robert Mueller's crew). I follow some media folks, like Rachel Maddow. And I follow some Red Sox and Boston-related accounts. And a few writers (e.g., JCO and Stephen King).

Because of all the meddling Musk has wrought, the accounts I like to follow don't show up as regularly on my timeline as they used to. Instead, I have to seek them out, or wade through a bunch of right-wing nonsense that Musk has elevated. 

I don't comment as much as I used to, but I still go onto Twitter throughout the day to check on the news. 

But if Twitter went away tomorrow, oh well.

Twitter - the platform - is probably not going away tomorrow, but the Twitter brand, thanks to imperial whim, is no more.

Twitter is now called X, which is Musk's go-to letter. (He even has a child named X Æ A-12, who goes by X.)

Not clear what Tweets will be called. I've seen Xs and I've seen Xeets. My guess is everyone will still call them Tweets, and say that they're tweeting, as opposed to X-ing.

The rebrand is part of a longer-range attempt to turn Twitter, errrrr X, into an app that does everything. As newly minted CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted/x'd/xeeted (which sounds likes excreted):

"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities. Powered by A.I., X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine."

Can't wait to do my banking at the House of Musk. Not.  

On their way to rebrand, they've also gotten rid of the little blue Tweety bird that's been around since the creation. It may not be as universally recognizable as the Coca Cola logo, but anyone on social media sure knows the little blue bird. 

Alas, poor Tweety, it's being replaced by the ultra-inspired X:

Yawn. 

I've got a hunch I'm not going to be long for Twitter X. What'll I do with all that free time?

Water, water everywhere

After 30+ years living in an old - really old - building, I am no stranger to water raining down on my (inside) head.

Some of the leaks were more memorable than others. 

Early on, a woman was living in the flat above ours. She had
weekend custody of her 9-year-old son. The woman was a very heavy (pass-out drunk) drinker, and one afternoon she was passed out drunk and her son (understandably, a little brat) deliberately overflowed the tub. Which came streaming down through the light fixture in our foyer. Swell.

Then there was the Great Flood of Ought-Five, when the folks who owned the top floor unit ill-advisedly (we warned them!) left their heat on at 55 degrees in some pretty brrrrrr February weather when they weren't home. An uninsulated pipe that was flat-up against an exterior wall sprung a leak. The top floor unit suffered about one-hundred bucks worth of damage. As for the rest of us, well...Thanks to the cascade, our damage came to about $50K and we were living at a hotel or squatting for a bit with my sister Trish for a about six weeks in total. 

Our unit is an upside-down duplex. Living/dining room, kitchen and one bath on the first floor; bedroom, den, office and the other bath down below, connected by a narrow, winding "servants' staircase."

I've lost track of how many times that staircase has been flooded. 

It always started at night. At 2 a.m., my ears prick up to the drip-drip-drip. So it's out with the towels and the buckets and an a.m. call to the plumber to repair the ancient pipe that had sprung a leak somewhere above us. After multiple patches to the ceiling, we finally had a trap door put in so that it's easier for the plumbers to get up in there and see what up.

The leaks on that side of the unit generally stay on the staircase. And, let me tell you, it ain't easy getting up and down a narrow, windy staircase when you have giant plastic buckets every few stairs, and towels, towels, everywhere. But one time the leak made it down into the only good sized closet in our unit. Unloading that closet and figuring out what we could salvage was a pure, unadulterated treat.

This is a five story building, and the pipe leaks can happen anywhere along the line in the water, sewage, and roof drain pipes. They can impact any of the units on their way down, but, if there's a leak, it will always show up in mine. 

Sometimes the leaks are in common pipes; sometimes they're in a unit-specific place: sink, drain, toilet. 

We've seen 'em all.

I don't know how old the old pipes are in here.

The main part of the building went up in 1861, before there was indoor plumbing. So I'm guessing that some of the plumbing was plumbed in here in the late 19th century, when running water and toilets became a thang. 

I live in the back forty: a section added to the main building in 1919. So the pipes that got piped in then are over 100 years old.

Over the years, many sections of the pipe infrastructure have been replaced. I think we should be more proactive about making sure the pipes are alright. We have had a crew in here that snaked cameras down them looking for cracks, etc. So we fixed those spots. It's probably time to set that up again.

As for the latest flood sitch, this is not the first time that the lower level bathroom and my office have had water gushing out the light fixtures. (That combination of electricity and water is one of my very favorite things.)

Maybe ten years ago, they were testing some roof fix by flooding the repaired zone. The test failed, as we figured out when the waterfall fell on my office. 

We've also had ground-up water seeping into our unit's lower floor during hurricane level downpours. There's a pump around here somewhere, that my husband used to man, but we haven't needed it for years, since an outside sump pump was put in. Which is a good thing, given that Jim's no longer with us to man that pump and I don't like using it. (Understatement.) Thankfully, the backyard sump pump has so far stood up to whatever Mother Nature's pouring on. If we had a Vermont style flood, however...

Then there's the occasional sewer backup, that comes up and out of the downstairs toilet and shower. Ugh, ugh, a thousand times ugh. Bring on the bleach. We experienced a few of these over the years and, in each case, when the roto guys came in to root out the connection to the city sewer lines it was determined that the problem was flushed baby wipes clogging up the works. 

We knew the culprits. The OCD woman with the little French bulldog whose butt she wiped. And the home health care aides who took care of an elderly fellow who spent the last couple years of his long (99 years) life in pretty infirm state.

There hasn't been a baby wipe problem since OCD moved out, and the elderly fellow died.

Which gets us to the latest affront on the water front.

On Friday night we had a violent rainstorm. 

I was watching the second to last episode of the wondrous series The Last of Us. (I was late to the party, but am glad my sisters convinced me to watch it. I was under the impression that it was all going to be about oogie zombies and violence - and there's plenty of both - but it is actually a brilliantly told story of an imagined dystopia. IMHO, the series would work just as well absent the oogie zombies. The male lead, Pedro Pascal, is a god. And Bella Ramsey, who plays his young companion, is a revelation.)

At a key point in the episode, I heard it. Drip. Drip. Drip. DRIP. DRIP. DRIP.

Site of drip, drip, drip: downstairs bathroom, through the overhead light. 

Thirty seconds later, site of second DRIP, DRIP, DRIP: my office, through the overhead light.

I know the drill: buckets, paper towels, check to see if upstairs is also involved. Then call my personal 9-1-1, my friend Joe who is a fellow unit owner, but who does not live here. (Joe is an engineer by training, but his family has always owned extensive commercial property. Joe and his sibs all learned how to diagnose and repair just about anything. Our condo association is self-managed, and Joe is our main go to when things gang agley. Even when it's not a condo issue, but a personal, my unit problem, I always ask Joe's advise on who to call, what to tell them, etc. Nine-times out of ten, Joe takes care of the problem himself. Because of his family's property, he also knows the best plumbers, electricians, etc. If we need outsiders, Joe pretty much manages things. Without him, I truly could not live here.)

So I called Joe. He said he'd be right over. The minute I hung up, I tried to call him back, but he didn't answer. So I texted him to wait until morning. The storm was just awful - thunder, lightning, gushing rain to beat the band. I knew I could manage the bucket brigade of one, and that Joe might as well wait until it was light and sunny out. 

He showed up anyway, took an initial look, and did an initial assessment. 

His first theory of the case was that the building had another lighting strike - we had one a couple of weeks ago, which triggered the circuit breaker for my fridge and caused a five-minute blackout of my cable circuit - which hit a roof drainpipe and then moved lightning-quick through the building to crack the pipe the runs through the ceiling of my bathroom and office on its way to draining into the city's roof runoff drain system. 

But then he poked around a bit, and the new theory is that the flashflood overwhelmed the gutter that runs over my office and bathroom, and found some areas of weakness where the gutters meet - or, in this case, don't meet - the building's wall. 

So, we're getting the pros - Joe's pros - in to make the fix. Then I'll have to get a painter in to patch and paint the bathroom and office ceilings. I think that the lighting fixtures can be salvaged. But: What. A. Drag.

Note to self: never, ever, ever again live an old building. Never, ever, ever.

Meanwhile, guess I'll let a smile be my umbrella. Or an umbrella be my smile. Or something like that.

Glad it's not Vermont-level flooding, but I'm so sick of water world...

What a life!

Tony Bennett sure had a good run. He was 96, a couple of weeks short of his 97th birthday.

Still, although he'd had a good run, and although - beyond owning a couple of CD's and always enjoying whatever he was singing, whenever I heard him singing it - I wasn't a huge fan, I felt saddened when I learned of his death late last week. 

What a life he led. 

First - foremost - he was an extraordinary singer. 

His specialty was performing classics from the Great American Songbook. Sometimes he put those classics into the Great American Songbook, as in "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

Of course I loved that one. Who doesn't?

But my personal faves were "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Fly Me to the Moon," with a slight nod to "Fly Me."

What a voice. It wasn't as grand and glorious as Crosby's or Sinatra's, but what a way to put a song across. Many of the critics say that when Tony Bennett sang, listeners felt that he was singing to them. Yep.

Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”

Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience. (Source: NY Times obituary)

Music aside - and that's a pretty big aside - what a life the man lived.

He was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto into a working class Italian immigrant family in Queens in 1926. The family was poor, and things got worse when his father died when he was just 10. He sang from the time he was a kid, and got to sing, in 1936, at the opening of the Triborough Bridge.

Anthony Benedetto dropped out of high school and worked, among other less-than-glamorous jobs, as a singing waiter. There was a war on, of course, and, still a kid, he was drafted into the Army, arriving in Europe as the war was winding down. He was a frontline infantry man and helped liberate prisoners from a subcamp of Dachau. (He said later that anyone who romanticized war hadn't gone through one.)

After the war, he started building his career as a singer, lost to Rosemary Clooney on Arthur Godfrey's show Talent Scouts, got on a bill with Pearl Bailey, was sort of discovered by Bob Hope, who got him to change his name to Tony Bennett. 

Tony Bennett's career pretty much took off from their.

In the 1960's, there was a wobbly period. Listeners weren't interested in listening to the likes of Tony Bennett. He started using drugs. Got in trouble with the IRS. There were plenty of personal ups and downs. 

But it wasn't all music, and personal ups and downs.

Bennett, appalled by the way that Black entertainers like Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole were treated - not allowed in restaurants and hotels in the Jim Crow South - participated in the 1965 march from Montgomery to Selma led by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

He was also a pretty fair painter. I wouldn't mind owning a Benedetto.

(His philanthropy was focused on young people and the arts.)

As Bennett got up there in years, he kept himself young and his career going by performing duets with younger singers. Some, like Barbra Streisand and Willie Nelson weren't all that much younger. But he also sang with Elvis Costello, K.D. Lang, Queen Latifah, and Amy Winehouse.

And, most famously, with Lady Gaga. If you ever get a chance to see a rerun their Radio City Music Hall concert from August 3, 2021 - Bennett's 95th birthday - WATCH it. Just brilliant. And so very touching. 

Especially given that, in 2016, Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He kept on performing. (For some reason, he could still recall lyrics of songs he'd performed long ago, even as short-term memory faded. This is apparently true for singers. Even with Alzheimer's, Glen Campbell was also able to perform.) Bennett was reportedly still sitting at his piano and singing a few days before he died. The last song he sang? "Because of You", which was his first number 1 hit.

An excellent choice!

Another good one would have been "The Good Life."

Oh, the good life, full of fun seems to be the ideal
Mm, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel
You won't really fall in love for you can't take the chance
So please be honest with yourself, don't try to fake romance

It's the good life to be free and explore the unknown
Like the heartaches when you learn you must face them alone
Please remember I still want you, and in case you wonder why
Well, just wake up, kiss the good life goodbye

What a life!

In a pickle

I'm a pickle fan, and pickles are a staple in my kitchen.

I always have a bottle or two of Vlasic Kosher Dills in the fridge, and a backup in the cupboard. There are certain sandwiches, e.g., toasted/grilled cheese, that cry out for the addition of a slice or two of pickle. And pickle is a key ingredient of a Gus Sandwich - bacon, cheddar, lettuce, mayo, and pickle on pump - which my brother Tom (nickname: Gus) and I invented when we were kids. Every once in a while I just have to break down and buy a package of bacon and make myself a Gus or two.

When Tom and I invented the Gus, the pickle of choice would have been a Dailey's (sp???) Kosher Dill, which I'm pretty sure no longer exists. With no Dailey's (sp???) available, I easily transitioned to Vlasic, and am also okay with Cain's. 

What these three brands have in common is that they are green. As in green green. Think Kermit.

A lot of the other kosher dills - like Claussen - are whiter. And they're fine, mostly. I just don't like them on sandwiches. It's not easy being a Gus if there's no bright green pickle on board. 

When you get a deli sandwich out, the pickle on the side is likely to be one of these whitish ones. 

Claussen and deli pickles are, of course, considered the real deal, more natural, more like what you'd find in ye olde pickle barrel.

Or in a jar of my grandmother's pickles.

As a kid, I wasn't wild about Grandma's pickles, but as an adult I grew to love them.

Grandma pickled up a storm, using - whenever she could - her homegrown cukes. Every year, she'd package up a carton and send it via Railway Express to Worcester. The carton was heavy on the dill pickles, but also included a Mason jar or two of pickled veggies, and some sort of salami or sausage - generally a foul-smelling summer sausage, encased in what looked like a tire tread - that Grandma just knew wasn't available in Worcester. 

When my grandmother died, my mother lugged a bunch of Grandma's pickles back from Chicago with her on the plane, and divvied them up among my sibs.

My most emotional moment after Grandma's death was when I ate the last of her pickles. I stood there with the fridge door open, crying as I debated whether to eat that last pickle standing now or put it off for another day. (I went the now route.)

So, yeah, pickles. I like them.

But for some reason - perhaps because when I'm in buying mode at the grocery store, I'm going for the bright green ones - I'd never heard of Grillo's, even though they're local, and even though they're sold at my store. 

I've heard about them now because Grillo's Pickles is engaged in a suit against the company that, until a couple of years back, was their contract manufacturer. Grillo asserts that Patriot Pickle is now producing a pickle that rips off their secret formula, and is selling them - at a lower price than Grillo's - at Whole Foods under their 365 brand. The 365's sit smack dab on the shelf next to the Grillo's, but go for 30% less.

(Side note on 365: I shop occasionally at Whole, and have occasionally purchased 365 products. But mostly I don't find the quality there. I mean, maybe they can do rip-off pickles, but what I value in a paper towel is that it's actually absorbent.)

Grillo’s is asking the court to block Patriot Pickle from using its recipe and order Patriot to remove the pickles allegedly based on Grillo’s recipe from store shelves. The Grillo’s lawsuit also seeks unspecified damages.(Source: Boston Globe)

And that's not just any old recipe This one was the one that Travis Grillo's grandfather had invented 100+ years ago. Travis himself deployed that recipe when he started out running a pickle cart in downtown Boston. (If I'm wondering why I've never noticed Grillo's at he grocery store, I'm extra wondering why I never noticed Travis Grillo when he had a pickle cart about 10 minutes from where I live, in a spot that I passed several times a week when Grillo was hawking pickles.)

Anyway, Travis Grillo eventually graduated from pickle cart to product on the shelves of plenty of grocery stores nationwide (10,000 of them). A couple of years ago, about the same time the company was acquired by King Hawaiian, Grillo ended its agreement with Patriot Pickle. Which apparently didn't stop Patriot Pickle from going ahead with a pickle of their own. Of course, according to Grillo's, that pickle is not exactly Patriot's own. It's Grillo's own. 

Whoever's own those pickles are, earlier this year, Patriot Pickle started producing pickles for the Whole Food 365 brand. 

And Grillo wants them to cease and desist using its secret formula.

Meanwhile, although they're the more authentic whitish pickles than my favorite greenies, I think that next time I'm shopping, I'll get a container of Grillo's. Most of the commenters on the Globe article rave about them (while also dissing the container which, it sems, doesn't do a great job containing).

I'll get a container and give those Grillo's a whirl, but I'm pretty sure I won't be using one on a Gus sandwich. You don't mess with perfection.

Ashes to Ashes, and sometimes to Pink

Throwing things at musicians is nothing new.

Young women famously tossed panties at Elvis, Tom Jones, the Beatles.

Which, if you think about it in a certain way - which is probably the only way to think about it - makes some sort of sense.

I couldn't find any reference to hysterical bobby-soxer Sinatra fans tossing anything at him. Those bobby soxers may have been hysterical, but the 1940's was a different time and place. If the bobby soxers weren't throwing anything at Old Blue Eyes, there was the one anti-Sinatra teenage boy who, ticked off that so many teenage girls were going gaga for Sinatra, pegged three eggs at him at a NY concert in 1944. So there's that. 

But, as it has with so many aspects of our culture, the stage-tossing ante has apparently been upped. 

Las year, someone tossed a chicken nugget at Harry Styles. He's also been hit in the eye with Skittles. Ava Max was slapped by a fan during an LA show. (Bet her stage security has upped its game.) Kelsea Ballerini was hit in the eye by a bracelet. Bebe Rexha ended up in the hospital when she was a hit by a phone someone threw her way. 

And in what is perhaps the nuttiest thing that's been hurled at a performer, a fan in London sent a bag at Pink that held his mother's ashes. 

Fortunately, the ashes were bagged not urned, because even a small urn containing just a smidge of ashes could do some damage. (A bit of my husband's ashes are in a little Connemara marble urn on my mantel. If someone with a good arm fired it on stage and hit its target that would hurt. Please note that I have a couple of concerts coming up: Noah Kahan and Bruce Springsteen, and I won't be throwing Jim in anyone's faces. Nor will I come armed with chicken nuggets, Skittles, a bracelet, or a phone. Nor will I be attempting to jump on stage to slap the Boss, Little Steven, Nils Lofgren or anyone else in the E-Street Band.)

Anyway, Pink handled to ash toss with considerable aplomb.

"This is your mom?" Pink can be heard asking in a video as she picked up the bag. "I don't know how I feel about this."

The 43-year-old walked with the bag to the front of the stage and set it down before continuing singing "Just Like a Pill." (Source: USA Today)

Maybe the ashes to ashes mom was a big Pink fan, but what in god's name did the person throwing them to or at her think she was supposed to do with them. I mean you can eat a chicken nugget or a skittle. You can wear a bracelet. You can at least make an emergency call with someone's phone. (I'm assuming this was a mobile, and not an old Bakelite rotary dial. Now getting hit with that would hurt.) But there's not much you can do with ashes except scatter them, or bury them, or put them in a Connemara marble urneen and leave it on your mantel.

My mother wasn't cremated. She was buried next to my father, which is definitely where she wanted to be. But if she'd been cremated, and wanted her ashes thrown to a performer, that performer would have been Nelson Eddy. 

As a teenager, my mother had a major crush on Nelson Eddy. She had a Nelson Eddy album, when albums were, in fact, albums: cardboard books containing sheaths that held 78 records. We had a record player that could play 78s, and my mother liked to spin her Nelson's every once in a while. 

As kids, we rather favored "Shortnin' Bread" and "Boots." And I could do a credible imitation - at least to my own ear - of Mr. Eddy baritoning either of those tunes.

Of course, we found Nelson Eddy completely unattractive: prissy, wooden, and effete. And we couldn't believe that my mother had ever had a crush on the likes of him - the antithesis of my father.

Among my mother's possessions was a scrap book devoted to Nelson Eddy. Unfortunately, we destroyed it trying to find if there was the picture of anyone interesting on the reverse side of the pics of Nelson Eddy she'd so carefully glued in. We did find a picture of Shirley Temple behind one of them.

Anyway, I can't imagine that, even if I had my mother's ashes to toss, and even if Nelson Eddy were still alive and warbling ("When I'm Calling You..."), I would ever have thrown her ashes at him.

But the world is a changed place. 

People want attention. They want notoriety. They want content for Insta and TikTok. They want to be acknowledged by celebrities, even for an apparently weird and/or hostile and/or worshipful act of assault with a flying object. 

So that's where we're at. 

It used to be ashes to ashes. Now, I guess, it's ashes to Pink. 

Waterworld

While I was keeping my eye on the god-awful heat in the southwest - mostly so I could commiserate with my friend in Dallas - closer to home, Vermont was suffering from god-awful flooding. 

I have always had a sweet spot for the Green Mountain State.

I was 11 or 12 when I first visited our neighbor to the north.

My family was having a "stay-cation," taking a few day trips from Worcester during the first two weeks in July, when the company where my father worked shut down and that was it for your vacation. Every other year, we decamped to Chicago to visit family. On the off year, we took day trips or, later, went to the Cape. 

During our day trip phase, those day trips always involved a trip to the beach (Nantasket or Horseneck), a trip or two to a nearby lake for a swim and an ice cream, and a day jaunt to some place of historic interest within a few hours drive from Worcester. One year, the place of historic interest was Bennington, VT. 

Bennington was the site of a Revolutionary War battle, and home to a museum that had a lot of Grandma Moses' art.

Mostly what I remember about the day is just the lovely Vermont countryside. Hills and mountains. Dairy farms with all those black and white cows munching all that green Vermont grass.  Winding roads. Shallow rock strewn rivers with water rushing along right next to the winding road. Pokey little towns with the requisite white clapboard church. (I also remember my father trying to keep up with the baseball All Star game, then a day game, by fiddling around with our car's AM radio.)

Anyway, I loved Vermont. And I was primed for it.

All those Currier and Ives scenes. All that Norman Rockwell. All those cornball movies - as black and white as the Vermont Holsteins - that I watched on Boston Movietime, movies that showed Vermont in all its bucolic glory: Dark Victory. Now Voyager. White Christmas. 

Our brand of maple syrup? Vermont Maid, of course!

During college, I was an occasional skier. So, Vermont. 

Then I met my husband, a Vermont boy. 

Jim hated his native state and couldn't beat a fast enough path out. He went to college at Rutgers, grad school at NYU and Harvard, and never looked back. Forget Vermont boy. Jim became a city boy. His favorite place on earth was New York City, as far a cry as you can get from his hometown of Bellows Falls, the ugly, nothing-quaint-about-it town where Jim grew up.

Jim's father died when he was a little boy, and he had little to do with his mother. In all the time I knew Jim - and his mother was still alive for 25 of those years - I think we visited Grace maybe four or five times. (Jim was very close to an aunt and uncle who lived in Western Mass, and we visited them regularly. I considered them my in laws.)

We did a bit of Vermont tourism around our rare visits to Bellows Falls. We spent a few days in Burlington. A weekend on Stratton Mountain. A few days in the scenic AF town of Grafton. 

But Jim couldn't understand why anyone would want anything to do with Vermont. He'd grown up poor, in a troubled family, in a hard little town. He wanted out, and got it.

I, on the other hand, never lost my affection for Vermont, and I've made a few trips there in the last few years. 

In my most recent trip, my sister Trish and I spent a couple of days in Burlington, in a hotel overlooking Lake Champlain, which is gorgeous. Burlington also has excellent restaurants and nice sops. But it's a bit crunchy-granola (think Bernie Sanders). Still, I enjoyed it, and could imagine myself living there.  

We then wended our way to the capital of Montpelier. There's not much to do there, that's for sure. But we stayed in a very nice ye olde inn, with a very nice restaurant, and used the town to explore the environs. (We even took a day trip to the Vermont Country Store, where we were disappointed at how few muumuus they had on offer.)

Of course, driving the back roads of Vermont, alongside all those shallow rock strewn rivers with water rushing along right next to the winding road, I certainly realized that, while Vermont has a ton of lovely scenery, and plenty of those charming towns with the white clapboard Congo or UU churches, there's a lot of Vermont that's pretty nasty. More Deliverance than Cascade, the lush Vermont mental health resort where Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) got all better in Now Voyager. Dilapidated porches. Beat up trucks with gun racks. Trump flags. 

This was the Vermont that Jim couldn't wait to abandon. And I can't say that I can much blame him.

Still, I do continue to harbor a mostly sentimental appreciation for Vermont and its beauty. (And, despite its rural Trump spots, its overall lefty politics.) So I was devastated to see the damage the recent floods caused.

Forgot those burbling brooks of fond memory. Here were gushing rivers overflowing their banks and taking down everything in their path. 

Downtown Montpelier, with all its little one-off shops and restaurants  - it's the only state capital that doesn't have a McDonald's - was totally flooded. Fortunately, the dam outside of town held, so the town wasn't totally destroyed. But it was heartbreaking to watch the bookshop owners, the restauranters who'd just reno'd their places, digging out from the muck. Many didn't have flood insurance. Sure, they'd been bothered by a hurricane every once in a while, but this was Vermont

Vermont, the state that Pew Research had just declared the state least at risk of damage from climate change. (Number two was New Hampshire; number three was Massachusetts. Maine was the only New England state that didn't place in the least-risky Top Ten. Texas placed 44; Arizona was 37. No surprise that Florida is the state that's viewed as most at risk.)

This Pew study just came out in late May, and one of the factors they considered was "inland flooding." (The others were heat, drought, wildfires, and coastal flooding.)

Wonder how those rankings will change if and when the study is revisited.

Meanwhile, Vermont is still bailing out from waterworld. 

Weston, Vermont, home of the Vermont Country Store, was cut off from the rest of the world for a bit. 

Bellows Falls didn't appear to suffer much damage, but it is on the Connecticut River, and some residents stood on the town's Vilas Bridge to watch the river rampage downstream to destroy less fortunate towns. 

God help us.

Hot, hot, hot

I have a very old and very dear friend who lives in Dallas. 

We frequently text throughout the week, and have a regularly scheduled catch up call on Sunday morning.

Most of the our recent text exchanges include some variation on the "it's hot out" emoji. And our Sunday convos are increasingly consumed by yammering about the weather. 

Dallas has, of course, been hot, hot, hot. Days on end with temps over 100, and the real feel temp on many days over 105...With no relief in sight. 

Each morning, when I get up, I check the 10 day forecast for Dallas. And sigh. 

The heat is enervating, depressing. Joyce and Tom are feeling trapped in their house, venturing out only to run an occasional (and essential) errand. And given our age, some of those essential ventures are medical or dental. (Both of them have experienced dental emergencies in the last couple of weeks.) 

It's been too hot in Dallas to use the pool. The passenger side window on Joyce's car dropped into open mode, so Joyce was carless for a few days while it was repaired. You certainly can't go tootling around Dallas in a car with no AC.

Joyce is an excellent cook, but she's doing a lot of salads these days. Tom is the grill master, but the evenings are too hot to fire up the grill.

When we talk about the heat, we always drift into the folks in Texas who are less fortunate than Joyce and Tom who live in a beautiful home with central air. They're in a leafy neighborhood with lots of permanent conservation land surrounding them. 

We talk about the folks who work outside, who deliver their mail, who provide their yard care and pool care. Those who live in small homes (houses or trailers) where they may have no air conditioning and rely on fans, which don't do much when it's 100+ out there. Or have an old air conditioner in just one window that barely blows any cold and that costs hundreds of dollars a month they don't have to run. And they live in neighborhoods that are anything but leafy and surrounded by conservation land. Dallas is mostly sunbaked. 

Then there are the homeless...

I also check the weather in Arizona. My sister Kath and her husband own a home in Tucson. They only use it during the fall, winter, and early spring months, when Tucson weather is lovely. But Tucson is the desert. Talk about sunbaked! Tucson makes Dallas look like Vermont. 

Fortunately, Kath and Rick don't have to spend the summer in Tucson. They decamp to relatively cool and absolutely leafier Massachusetts for the summer. 

I check on the weather in Phoenix, too. I'm not in contact with any of them, other than Christmas card exchanges with a couple of them, but I do have four first cousins and my one remaining aunt living in the Phoenix area. So I wonder how they're faring, and hoping they're okay. 

I know that Arizonans are used to hot summers. But there's hot, and then there's screaming emoji HOT. 

I've never been a big fan of hot (let alone HOT).

When I was a kid, I'd get overheated running around, and my parents would have to drag me in to cool down. At Sunday Mass during the summer months, there was always at least one Sunday a summer when I had to walk out of church at risk of fainting from the heat. (I don't recall that it was any cooler outside, but maybe the air was a little less close. In any case, there I'd be, standing outside until I felt well enough to come back in and plunk down in a pew.)

Fast forward, and I still don't do heat. I like summer for the light, but you can have the heat (and the humidity). If I had to pick heat or cold, cold always wins, mittened hands down. 

Boston has been having a bit of a heat and humidity spell. A couple of days when it even hit 90 degrees. (Plus drenching humidity.)

Nothing compares with the Southwest, but still right up there on my personal uncomfortable index.

I take my walks in the morning or evening, when it's marginally cooler. And I mostly restrict my pleasure/fitness walks to the leafy and verdant Boston Public Garden. I take my water bottle with me, make frequent stops to rest on park benches, and always hit the bubbler - that's New England for water fountain - to refill my bottle and drench my ballcap. 

When I get back in out of the heat - to my centrally air conditioned condo - I do the Aunt Carrie cool down tip: turn on the tap and run cold water over the insides of my wrists.

The other day, I had to go out mid-afternoon for my semi-annual teeth cleaning appointment. Oy! I had to stop every two minutes for a breather and, halfway home, having exhausted the water in my bottle, had to pop into a 7Eleven and buy me some Poland Spring.

I slogged home to do the Aunt Carrie trick, then hop into the shower.

When it comes to beating the heat, I am, of course, better off then most people. My home is cool. I can afford ample AC. There are plenty of days when I don't need to step toe out at all, other than for voluntary jaunteens around the Public Garden.

But I do get out several days a week to volunteer at St. Francis House. 

It's a short walk - maybe a half mile - and the walk is through the Boston Common. So, reasonably shady shade. (Not as good as the Public Garden provides, but pretty okay.) I'm typically heading in at about 6:45 a.m., so it's relatively cool. 

St. Francis House is in an old building, but the AC works pretty well. My volunteer work, however, is in the Resource Center, where my corner - although we have some sort of cool air blower - gets warm and stuffy, and the kitchen where - although we have fans - it's a kitchen, where we serve hot meals for hundreds at breakfast and lunch.

It's been pretty crowded of late. 

Some of the crowding is due to what appears to me to be an influx of young, desperate refugees from Haiti. But a lot of it is due to the heat. 

It's dangerous to be outside for very long in this weather, and St. Francis is cool, and the cold water never runs out. Every morning, we also provide showers, and our number of signups for showers has increased from 30-40 folks a day to 50+. 

When I think of the hot days when I blithely take a couple of showers, I realize how fortunate I am. And how good it feels to take those showers. For me, I "need" a shower because I've been out for a bit. For the folks who take showers at SFH, it's because they've been out in the elements for a while. They've made their way from the overnight shelter where they've slept - overnight shelters close in the morning; St. Francis is a day shelter - or from sleeping rough. Or from just being out sweltering. Sure, they can sit on a park bench as easily as I can, but even if you're in the shade, it's pretty hot just sitting there. So they come in to hang out where it's cool and where, if they want, they can take a shower. 

The news about the heat has been so alarming.

These relentless heat waves. The forest fires that come hand in glove. The bathwater/hot tub temperatures found in the ocean in the Atlantic Gulf. The destruction of the coral reefs. 

And yet we remain politically paralyzed when it comes to acknowledging that the world is heating up, and that our continued reliance on fossil fuels isn't helping any. Let alone when it comes to doing anything about it.

How does science become a culture war issue?

What's wrong with us???

Let them eat cake!

I'm always astounded when executives at major public corporations - surrounded as they are by aides coaching them what and what not to say or do, and when and where to say (or not) or do (or not) - do something that's completely wrong-footed.

Such was the recent sitch with United CEO Scott Kirby and his amazingly tone deaf decision to not fly United.

As have most other airlines, United has been plagued of late by delays and cancellations. Weather. Cascading scheduling glitches. Air traffic controller shortages. And, at United, internal problems. The last week in June was particularly dreadful:

The airline [had] canceled more than 3,000 flights since Saturday [June 24th] stranding thousands of customers. On Friday [June 30th] as of the evening, United had 979 flight delays, or 34% of its operations, and 234 canceled flights, according to FlightAware. (Source: CNN)

It's been a mess, exacerbated by the fact that Americans, still getting back in the post-covid travel swing, are rarin' to go on vacation somewhere, anywhere.

Scott Kirby no doubt had somewhere he really wanted to get to.

Kirby was trying to get from the New York/Newark area to Denver, Colorado. 

But how to get from Point A to Point B if your flight's delayed ad infinitum, or even canceled?

Well, you can rent a car, but Newark to Denver's a pretty far piece. Over 1.700 miles as the crow - or a United plane - flies. That's a lot of driving, even if you can find a rental car at the airport.

There's always Uber, but that might be pretty pricey. And you might get bored by your driver after all that time stuck in a car with them.

The train isn't exactly direct.

And who wants to spend all that time bumping down the highway on a Greyhound.

I'm sure that Kirby carefully evaluated all these choices, which he no doubt weighed and found wanting. But then, being a smart guy and a successful executive, Kirby landed on a pretty attractive option: private jet.

The airline confirmed Kirby flew from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, and that the company did not pay for his

flight. Teterboro is about 17 miles from Newark, New Jersey, where one of United’s largest hubs is located and which was the center of the airline’s meltdown this week.

The "company did not pay" kinda-sorta suggests that this wasn't a business trip, but a pleasure kind of thing. Kirby's a graduate of the US Airforce Academy, which is in Colorado, so maybe he wanted to reunite with his old stomping grounds. Maybe he has a summer place in the mountains. Maybe he just wanted to getaway. 

And he's plenty wealthy, so why not hire a private jet? 

What's the point of having money if you can't spend it where and when you want to?

Fly in haste, repent at leisure.

In a statement, Kirby said he regrets that his actions distracted from the professionalism of United employees.

“Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home,” Kirby said in a statement. “I sincerely apologize to our customers and our team members who have been working around-the-clock for several days – often through severe weather – to take care of our customers.”

Twenty years ago, no one would have known that Kirby had skipped town, leaving the hoi polloi to sprawl out on cruddy terminal floors, trying to get a bit of shut-eye. Living off of handfuls of trail mix purchased with their $12 meal voucher. Let them eat donuts! Let them eat cake!

But in this age of social media, caveat executive. "They" see you when you're sleeping. "They" know when you're awake. "They" know if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

Look, there's really and truly nothing wrong with what Scott Kirby did. Who among us wouldn't take care of business and/or pleasure if we had the means?

But the age of social media is unforgiving. Which Scott Kirby learned the hard way. (Or maybe not. Maybe he just learned that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.)

I hope he at least got to enjoy his downtime in Colorado.

I'd be just as happy to have been part of the Jetsam 26

Flying has become a truly stressful and terrible experience. Even when you pay for early boarding, aisle seat, extra legroom - which I invariably do - every flight I've been on in the past few years has been something of a hassle. 

You get to the airport early, happy that you paid for breeze-through TSA Pre and don't have to take your shoes off, only to find out that there's no TSA Pre. (What up with that, Aer Lingus at Logan?)

Then there are the entreaties at the gate, on perpetual loop, asking passengers in the later boarding tranches to voluntarily offer up their bags for gate check since there'll be no room in the overhead bins for their super-sized roll-on. 

Every flight I've been on of late has a lengthy standby list, so that things are pretty much cheek to jowl once you're jammed on.

The terminals are also jammed and I'm amazed I haven't as yet seen a traveler mowed down and over by one of the geezer passenger carts careening pell-mell through the terminal. 

Then there are the delays, delays, delays.

I flew from JFK to Boston a few weeks back and, thanks to some sort of circuit meltdown in air traffic control in the DC area, Dulles, Reagan, and BWI were all shutdown. This set off the domino effect, and there were all kinds of delays and cancellations up and down the East Coast. My flight was delayed by 4 hours. I should have been home by 9 p.m. or so, but rolled in at 1 a.m.

And don't get me going on the norovirus I'm pretty sure I picked up from a Wolfgang Puck salad consumed during a layover at O'Hare in early May.

Maybe airline travel has always been a miserable experience. Maybe it's just less tolerable to me in old age. Maybe it truly has gotten worse. 

And a proof point here may be the recent incident where Frontier Airlines kicked 26 already-boarded travelers off of plane due to weight issues.

Calibrating flight weights is nothing new.

Years ago, I was heading to Dallas on business. There was a tremendous headwind, and when we got to Atlanta - I can't remember whether this was a scheduled stop or not - we were told that 10 people needed to get off so we'd have enough fuel to make it to Dallas.

I remember being shocked that the weight tolerance was so fine grained. But it never occurred to me to volunteer to get on the next flight. Now I'm thinking I'd be happy to get off rather to worry that we were going to drop from the sky because of collective BMI overage and end up in a cornfield somewhere. 

I used to travel on occasional business to the White Plains (NY) airport. This was a very small airport and the planes were weirdly shaped Fokkers, reminding me of refrigerator cartons. I always wondered how they could get and stay airborne, but somehow they did. But not before they asked (or guessed) what people weighed, and balance us from one side of the plane to the other before we took off.

Then there was the 6-seater my husband and I took from Rossaveel (County Galway) to Inishmore. When we bought our tickets, the clerk told us that there'd be a weigh-in at the airport. I joked that it wasn't going to be possible to lose 15 pounds overnight, but the clerk assured me that it was all very discreet.

Ah, the Irish.

When we got to Rossaveel, there was the scale, next to the check-in counter, as big and bold as Big Ben, and facing the passenger seating area. 

Discreet, me royal Irish arse.

For some reason, there was blessedly no weigh in. Maybe because there were only 3 passengers and the pilot on the 15 minute flight.

Anyway, at Frontier they decided that size mattered, and they bounced an 26 "unsuspecting" passengers off a flight.

Inevitably, there was someone on the plane to record and TikTok the event:

At the onset of the clip, the pilot is heard communicating with passengers over the intercom system.

“Unfortunately, with the weight issues we have we’re going to have to remove 26 people,” the pilot says.

He adds that the gate agents are aware of the safety

issue and “will be taking care of this.”

The pilot apologized and said it was an “unforeseen issue,” and their “hands are pretty tied at this point.”

“Good luck and thanks for your patience,” the pilot says at the end. (Source: Daily Dot)

The call had been made by the Frontier loadmaster, a role I wasn't familiar with.

A loadmaster is responsible for deciding how baggage and cargo will be organized on an aircraft, according to Indeed. They also calculate the aircraft’s weight to determine how to secure passengers and cargo in a way that won’t disrupt the vehicle’s center of gravity. 

Guess they decided that the cargo was more valuable than the passengers. But the weird precision of 26 - not 25, not 27 - passengers...And what happens if everyone they picked weighed a skimpy 100 pounds, when they needed an average of 150...

Naturally, I would have been pissed to have gotten the heave-ho, but on reflection would have been just has happy to have been part of the Jetsam 26

As for the pilot wishing the passengers "good luck," what was that all about?

Those who stayed on board certainly needed as much "good luck" as the kicked-off extras. Especially after they learned that, although bound for San Juan, Puerto Rico, they were going to be landing in Orlando.

Ah, the joys of air travel. 

National Geo news makes me kind of sad

I grew up in a magazine-subscribing household.

At one point or another, we got the following kids' mags: Jack & Jill, Calling All Girls, Boys' Life, Seventeen. I'm sure there were a few others. (We got to read Highlights at our dentist's office.)

Non-kids magazines were also plentiful: Newsweek, Look, Readers Digest, Catholic Digest. Sports Illustrated. Sporting News, Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Family Circle. My father got the monthlies from the VFW and American Legion (even though he thought the American Legion was fascist-adjacent.) In addition to Catholic Digest, there were a couple of Catholic mags in the mix. And at some point when I was in high school, we started getting the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, thanks to my sister Kath. (We got to read the pulpy Argosy at Vic the (Blind) Barber's, where Kath and I got our bangs trim, and where my brothers - accompanied by me and/or Kath until they got big enough to go it alone - got their "basic boys" cuts.)

I read every magazine that appeared in our mailbox, even the VFW and Legion rags. 

What else came our way?

Why, National Geographic, of course. 

And for someone who'd never been been anywhere other than Worcester, Boston, Chicago, and the Cape, National Geographic was a revelation.

While I read pretty much every word in the other magazines, I don't remember actually reading National Geo. But I loved flipping through the pages and doing some far-flung armchair traveling.

With the exception of the New Yorker and the Atlantic - to which I still subscribe - I haven't read any of the above in years. Probably since my mother died in 2001, when I would have had access to the Digests, Readers and Catholic, and - of course - National Geographic. 

Despite the fact that I haven't read National Geo in ages, I still felt a bit of melancholy when I read that they'd "laid off all of their remaining staff writers."

The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department. (Source: Washington Post)

Even before they were clued in last April, I don't imagine this was a surprise to any/many of them. Since 21st Century Fox took control in 2015, there have been thee other layoffs, and a major reorg/deorg. (Disney stepped in in 2019.)

In the light-speed world of digital media, National Geographic has remained an almost artisanal product — a monthly magazine whose photos, graphics and articles were sometimes the result of months of research and reporting.

Forty years ago, when people still read magazines, National Geo had 12 million subscribers in the US, plus millions of international readers. Today, the "artisanal product" has fewer than 1.8 million subscribers. And as of next year, if you're not a subscriber but have a hankering to read a copy, you're out of luck. They won't be sold in newsstands. 

Still, given the collapse of the magazine market, National Geo "remains among the most widely read magazines in America."

But we've become a nation of watchers, not readers, and National Geographic's bread and butter is its cable and animal channels. 

While they produced documentaries equal in quality to the magazine’s rigorous reporting, the channels — managed by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like “Sharks vs. Tunas” at odds with the society’s original high-minded vision.

That high-minded vision dates back to its first issue in 1888.

The magazine has stated that it's still committed to publishing a monthly magazine. They'll just be doing it with freelancers.

I don't know exactly why, but this makes me feel kind of sad.