Furniture shopping

Earlier this month, there was an article in The Washington Post on the shift in furniture quality that's been happening over the last couple of decades, a shift that has taken us from the once-in-a-lifetime purchase of solid (or at least solid-ish) wooden something or other to the more stylin' wares available from cool design emporia like Ikea and West Elm. 

Furniture isn’t what it used to be. Fifty or 60 years ago, people thought of it as something they’d have for life — a dresser that a grown kid could take to college, a dining table where future grandchildren would have Thanksgiving. Today? Not so much.

Modern consumers are often all too happy to ditch last year’s Wayfair shipment for whatever new trend is sweeping their social media feeds. At the other end of that cycle is an industry relying on cheap labor and flimsy materials to fatten profit margins and keep prices down. (Source: Washington Post)

The article on the what's and why's of design, manufacture, and assembly was interesting - or interesting enough to prompt me to do a mental inventory of my home furnishings.

My furniture sensibility can best be described as eclectic. 

My "stuff" runs the gamut from "heirloom" (ahem) pieces that came from my grandmother; to highish-quality solid cherry pieces from Crate & Barrel, Pompanoosuc Mills, and Heartwoods (now, alas, out of business); to middlingly decent quality pieces from Circle and Ethan Allen. (Believe it or not, Ethan Allen - the place that furnished much of my childhood home - no longer specializes in faux colonial maple. Their style now has style. Whodathunkit.) I also have a ration of odd-ball pieces acquired over the years.

From my grandmother - my heirloom collection - I have a

couple of lamps and mirrors, and a nice solid mahogany claw foot side table (which I had professionally refurbished years ago). I also have a cheapo, flimsily built mahogany veneer desk and chair that, wobbles and all, I'm rather fond of.

My favorite Nanny piece is the chest of drawers that my father and his brother Charlie shared during their childhood. The main parts are solid oak, but the back is a scrim of wood that's one step above cardboard. So much for the super-duper high quality furniture of yesteryear. 

Nanny was a great modernizer, and, when I got this oak chest - nearly 50 years ago, when my grandmother moved out of her house and in with my Aunt Margaret - I had to strip off a good half dozen coats of paint - white, green, pink - spending hours that summer in my mother's backyard with zip strip and steel wool. To finish it off, I used an all-in-one finisher, but it still looks pretty good after all these years.

Another Nanny piece I had for a while was a brass bed, which would have also been cool if Nanny hadn't sawed the headboard off, and swapped the shorter and less decorative footboard into service as the headboard. The footboard then featured the raggedly sawed off headboard. Like the oak chest, the brass bed had also seen many coats of paint that I had to strip off. I didn't use the Nanny bed for very long, and it languished in my mother's basement for years before being junked.

Instead of the ratty brass bed, I sleep on a solid cherry sleigh bed (Crate & Barrel), which I inherited from my sister Kath by way of my sister Trish. Other than in my father's oak chest, I keep my clothing in a couple of nice solid cherry chests, and have a nice solid cherry bedside table. 

I also have my mother's hope chest, c. 1945, and - something I always wanted in my room as a child - a comfy armchair and hassock. I got mine maybe 40 years back at the late lamented Jordan Marsh. It's a medium-tone blue, but for 30 of those years I've had it, it's been covered with a bespoke slipcover, blue-green-yellow check. So unless I want to rid myself of this chair, I'm limited to using blue-green-yellow as my bedroom color scheme. Fine by me. The walls for the past decade have been light blue; prior to that, they were pale yellow. (By the way, in my fantasy, I would use that comfy chair to read in. Mostly it's holding books and magazines that I haven't yet gotten around to.)

My miscellaneous pieces include a lyre-backed chair of my mother's, and a mahogany China cabinet I got at an antique store. I use it for my CDs. I have a chair from my Aunt Margaret's dining room set. And I also have (among other bookcases) the bookcase from my childhood bedroom. It was made by Mr. Porter, father of my parents' friend Marge Porter. It has solid wood sides and shelves, and the backing is beadboard wainscotting from when the Porters modernized their kitchen. The bookcase has seen a lot of paint over the years. In its current incarnation, it's off-white, with the beadboard a sage green.

When I reno'd my condo in 2015, I got new living room furniture. Since then, I've made two purchases.

In November 2016, the weekend after the election, I realized that I was going to need a truly comfy reclining chair to get me through the next four years. So I went over to Circle Furniture, and before I knew it, I'd paid about triple what I went in there intending to spend on a truly comfy reclining chair. But I still need it, and amortized over the years, it's been well worth it.

At some point during covid, I got sick of looking at the mahogany, c. 1925, dining room table and chairs that my husband and I got at an antique dealer about 40 years ago. I was never all that wild about it to begin with, and the chairs - which, admittedly, I had never polished - were beginning to crack every time someone sat in them. 

My friend Joe's niece has a c. 1925 house, and she's a furniture refinisher, so was delighted to get the table and chairs, making way for the more modern cherry table that replaced it. The cherry isn't solid, but it's pretty nice, as are the blackish stained chairs. (I kept the mahogany credenza.)

Unless I need something new when I downsize and move to my one-foot-in-the-grave final accommodations, that table and those chairs are likely the last furniture purchase I'll ever make in my life. 

Sigh of relief: I don't have to worry about putting together anything from Ikea, or whether something that looks nice but is rather cheapo from Wayfair will survive me.

Saint Damien, Pray for Us

Anyone who grew up Catholic in the 1950's and 1960's - especially if they went to parochial school - was surrounded by the gruesome - stories and iconography. 

Saint Lucy, the virgin martyr whose eyes were gouged out. Saint Joan of Arc, burned at the stake. Saint Isaac Jogues, his fingers gnawed to the bone in the process of his martyrdom.

Every classroom - and every Catholic home - had a crucifix on the wall. (In my home, make that every bedroom.) Protestants used the cross (a plain cross) as a symbol of Christ's death. Catholics went the whole way, showing the body of Christ on the cross, replete with gouged side, spike wounds, and blood streaming down his face from the crown of thorn.

No opportunity was ever missed to focus on things that were violent, or, if not violent, non-violent ghastly. 

We venerated Saint Dominic Savio, who led a life of great piety before he died (pleurisy) at the age of 14. Don Bosco, the priest who had special affection for Dominic - let's not go there - and who mentored him along the journey, claiming that from the time he was six years old, little Dom had focused his life on becoming a saint, wrote about this saintly child's life. Somehow, this led to Dominic Savio's canonization in 1954. Just in time to set up the Dominic Savio Club that everyone in my school was a member of, whether we wanted to or not. 

We all considered Saint Dominic Savio to be something of an unbelievably priggish little prig, but the monthly meetings were a break from the routine, and I liked the theme song we sang to him. 

Saint Maria Goretti beat Dominic Savio to the sainthood punch by a few years. She was another one held up to us as an example, but her story was PG-13 and wasn't introduced to us until seventh or eighth grade. Maria Goretti was an 11- year-old girl who, in 1902, was sexually assaulted and murdered by a psycho. She resisted rape, and somehow she was fast-tracked to sainthood. She was canonized in 1950. (Her murderer died in 1970, so Maria Goretti seemed almost contemporary.)

Although he wasn't a saint at the time, Father Damien of Molokai was someone that the nuns loved to talk about. Father Damien was a missionary who worked in a leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, 

Now, if there's one thing that the nuns liked almost as much as talking about Saint Isaac Jogues' gnawed fingers, it was the horrors of leprosy. 

Leprosy is, of course, a horror, and the nuns liked nothing better than yammering on about how saintly Father Damien was to labor among those whose noses and fingers were falling off, etc. I was an avid reader of Vision Books, a monthly series of books for Catholic kids that my family subscribed to. Father Damien and the Bells wasn't my favorite of the series. That would be a tossup between More Champions in Sports and Spirit, which had a chapter on Herb Score, a Catholic baseball pitcher whose career was ended when he was hit in the eye with a line drive, and Lydia Longley: First American Nun, about a young Massachusetts Puritan girl who was kidnapped by Indians and taken to Canada, where she became a Catholic and a nun. But I liked the Father Damien story just fine. 

And most of what I know about leprosy - that there's no denying that it's a dreadful scourge - comes from that book and the nuns' rants. That and the scene in the movie Ben Hur, when we see Ben Hur's mother and sister exiled to live in a cave outside of town because they'd contracted leprosy. Oh, and I knew that armadillos can carry the leprosy-causing bacteria. 

Leprosy is relatively rare, and mostly occurs in the poorer regions of Asia and Africa. It's also curable. Thank you, antibiotics! 

But it does still exist, and it does still exist in the United States. Especially in Florida. 

In 2020, the Sunshine State was among the states with the highest number of leprosy cases, contributing to evidence that the infection is becoming endemic in the southeastern region of the country, according to a journal published in an August edition from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Central Florida seems to be the focus of the rise in cases, with researchers pointing out that 81% of leprosy cases in Florida between 2002 and 2021 came from the area. Nationally, Central Florida accounted for almost one-fifth of cases. (Source: Raw Story)

We're not talking about a lot of cases - 263 over the past two decades, and 15 so far this year.  Most of the cases were acquired elsewhere, but some were homegrown. Despite the small number of instances: 

Because of the increase in cases, health officials across the country should consider whether a person traveled to Florida when examining potential leprosy cases, according to the report.

Wonder whether Ron DeSantis is a carrier?

Meanwhile, Saint Damien (Sainthood Class of 2009) pray for us.

Rethinking digital tickets? Please do!

It's not as if things can't go wrong with paper tickets.

When digital tickets were still at twinkle in the eye of Ticketmaster and MLB - and a panicked look on the faces of scalpers everywhere - I "never received" tickets for Springsteen at Fenway (August 2012). I put "never received" in quotes because what I believe happened was that I tossed the tickets out. They'd actually arrived, I suspect, but in an easily-ignorable plain grey envelope. the plain grey envelope being the discrete delivery method deployed by Fenway Park to secure tickets from those who might be inclined to swipe tickets if the envelope screamed something like SPRINGSTEEN TICKETS ONBOARD. (I always wondered about this: wouldn't ticket thieves figure the plain grey envelope thang out pretty quickly?)

Anyway, that summer I was plenty distracted. My husband was recovering from cancer surgery. ('Nuf said.) The Springsteen concert with my sister Trish was a nice break from all that. 

With a few days to go before the concert, I realized I didn't have the tickets, so I called Ticketmaster and/or Fenway, and they gave me instructions on how and when to come out to the ballpark on concert day and stand in line in the broiling sun to pick them up. 

So, yeah, things can go wrong with paper tickets, too.

But it took me a while to embrace the concept of digital tickets.

Having had a career in technology that goes back to before the days of PC's, let alone before the Internet, I was always worried about technical problems. If something could go wrong, I feared, inevitably it would.

I was comfortable with printing out tickets (and boarding passes), but I wasn't happy when, a few years ago, things went fully paperless.

Red Sox tickets were my first experience with the insistence on fully digital, and the squeeze play forcing all baseball game attendees into using the MLB app. What I found particularly distasteful about it - other than the fear factor of whether the Internet would be down or my phone stolen - was the fact that the ticket was barcode-less until a couple of days before the game.

Why, I wondered. So I called the Red Sox ticket office and the fellow told me that this was because they had to make sure that there were unique barcodes for each event, blah-di-blah-di-blah.

Huh?

I'm no math major, but aren't there like a kabillion possible barcodes out there? And you can always add another bar or two if you need a kabillion more. So what's the probability of the same barcode being issued for a Red Sox game and, say, a Foo Fighters concert three months later? 

Anyway, I finally got used to Red Sox tickets being digital and even admit that, if I make a last minute buy, it's actually pretty convenient. Still, I'm always a little nervous until I've gotten my digital ticket scanned and I'm through the turnstile.

I'm less worried about boarding passes. It's convenient to have them on the phone, if it's easy enough to print the paper version one out at an airport kiosk.

But the same fear factor I have for ballgame tickets goes for concert tickets. 

I was the designated ticket purchaser for two Springsteen concerts this year: Boston Garden in March, Gillette Stadium in August. For both concerts, I kept (relentlessly) checking on Ticketmaster and on the Google Wallet on my phone to make sure those tickets were still there. What was my recourse going to be if something went bad?

Fortunately, it didn't.

But with the rise of digitized sales, new problems have emerged. Scammers and scalpers have warped the way live events are able to curate an audience, for example. (Source: Boston Globe)

The big problems here are, of course, digital fakery (real fake barcodes, anyone?) and the secondary market for tickets, which is pretty much the Wild West. (I avoid the Wild West. For Springsteen March, I bought the tickets on the Ticketmaster secondary official scalping market, not trusting something on, say, Craigslist. If needs be, I would buy tickets through a reputable agency like Ace or StubHub.)

In the middle of this digital storm, Boston-based True Tickets was born.

True Tickets is a custodial app. 

The moment you buy the ticket on a website that uses the service, True Tickets takes over custody of the ticket.

The company tackles fraud using myriad techniques, such as issuing tickets with dynamic screens or blocking off access to the ticket until a specific time before the event. This prevents scammers from selling counterfeit tickets, or selling the same ticket to multiple buyers.

One of the issues that True Tickets addresses is online scalping. Raising prices to meet demand isn't (always) illegal. But those who are running the event (band, ball team, et al.) want that value for themselves. Thus Ticketmaster came up with dynamic pricing, and their own secondary market, which brought us the debacle of ticket prices going crazy for the first part of the Springsteen tour when it was announced last winter. (By the second leg of the tour, some of the pressure was out of the system and ticket prices were saner. I was able to snag August seats for face value, which sure wasn't the case for Springsteen in March.) But dynamic pricing and adjacent strategies puts the money in the pocket of the performer and/or event organizer, rather than in that of the scalper.

Some artists - come on down, Taylor Swift - refused to play the dynamic pricing game, so tickets purchased on Ticketmaster went for the original value. On the secondary market, of course, the prices took off. Other entertainers - Foo Fighters (I think), come on down - not only refused to play the dynamic pricing game, but they refused entrance to their shows to ticketholders who bought scalped tickets. Which didn't make fans happy who'd bought in the secondary market, that's for sure. I'm not sure how this brouhaha was resolved. There's no easy answer here...)

True Tickets’ software uses blockchain technology, so event organizers can track the ownership and number of tickets purchased by any buyer and can cancel large orders after confirming it’s not all for one party. The company also has rules and limits on how many times a ticket can be transferred to another person.

True Tickets is growing, but they're still a small player. (As of a month or so ago, they've delivered 5 million tickets.) Interestingly, their largest client is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Managing tickets is likely made easier and better using True Tickets - among other things, they provide venues and organizations with data on ticket purchasers - but I wouldn't imagine ticket scalping and fraud are big issues for the BSO. 

I'm not sure how all this translates into much of value to those of us who buy tickets, rather than to those who sell tickets. Maybe the fact that True Tickets maintains custody of a ticket makes it more secure, but I'm not aware of any problems with tickets being stolen from Ticketmaster or MLB, which also maintain custody of tickets on their apps. 

But I still wish plenty of good luck to True Tickets. I'm always rooting for locals to do well. And if they think that they can at all improve the digital ticketing process, please do!

That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the option of having an old-school paper ticket. I never collected ticket stubs, but for those who do, a canceled ticket stub thumbtacked to your bulletin board is a lot more fun (at least for us olds) than looking at an NFT!

Was the alpaca farm worth two years in a Federal pen?

For some reason, I'm always fascinated by embezzlers and swindlers. I don't know if "enjoy" is the right word, but I'm always interested to read about folks who steal from their employers (or the volunteer organizations they run) to buy pricey cars and Pandora bracelets, to pay for Burt Bacharach to sing at their brother's wedding, to make that longed for trip to Fiji. Always intrigued by folks who rip off their investors so that they can live out their big old dreams on somebody else's dime. Then there are those who ginned up fake PPP claims to fund their flashy lifestyles: cars, jewelry, furs, lux travel.

Maybe we all have a little larceny in our hearts. Maybe mine is at the root of my fascination. But most of us just channel that larceny into thieving vicariously through the antics of actual embezzlers and swindlers. That and buying lottery tickets so we can spend a few days fantasizing what we'd do with our randomly-gotten gains if we won a big payoff. (For the record, my spend would not be flashy lifestyle related. But I'd still have fun. And I'd buy Eileen Fisher that wasn't on the last year rack at TJ Maxx.) 

There is, of course, something pretty pedestrian about how swindlers spend their swindles, how grifters spend their grifts, how embezzles spend the dollars embezzled. The lists are invariably the same. C.f., flashy cars, pricey real estate, etc. But there's often a bit of an room for individual quirks, the personal touch, the lifelong "if I only had he money" longings. That mention of the Burt Bacharach concert is there because a number of years ago, a local Massachusetts embezzler spent some of her ill-gotten gains on the big event concert for her brother. She also, as I recall, bought herself a life-sized statue of Al Capone. (Who said irony is dead.)

The latest topic-related story I've come across is about a local guy - he owned a pizza shop on Boston's North Shore - who stole over half a million in COVID-19 relief funds, and blew most of it to buy an alpaca farm in Vermont. 

The exact amount was $660K, and how much more fun would it have been if the amount had actually been $666K?

That's a quibble. Not up for quibble (or sympathy) is the sentence. 

Dana L. McIntyre, 59, the former owner of Rasta Pasta Pizzeria, was sentenced by US District Court Judge Denise J. Casper to two years in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $679,156 in restitution and forfeiture...

After McIntyre received the funds, McIntyre sold the pizzeria and used the money “to purchase a farm in Vermont, as well as eight alpacas, and other personal expenses, including two vehicles and airtime for his crypto-currency themed radio show,” prosecutors said. (Source: Boston Globe)

McIntyre has bleated out - do llamas bleat? - a bit of a mea culpa:

In a phone interview on Wednesday evening, Mr. McIntyre, who said he must report to prison in January, claimed that he had viewed the money as a loan that he would someday pay back. “It was a pandemic, and I panicked,” said Mr. McIntyre, who is also the host of a cryptocurrency radio show. (Source: NY Times)

Is anyone surprised that the sort of guy who'd defraud the government to buy an alpaca farm would also be involved in crypto?

And, by the way, this wasn't exactly a temporary, one-time moment of panic. 

He applied for loans (in the names of his adult children) in non-existent businesses. Then there was asking for PPP protection for his pizza joint, stating that he had 47 employees, rather than the actual number which was 17. 

“It’s just putting some numbers and letters and pretty much whatever you want,” Mr. McIntyre said by phone. “Instead of putting seven employees I put 47. That’s my crime. That’s the beginning of the crime. And that’s the end of the crime.”

The beginning and end of the crime?  Sounds like McIntyre is trying to minimize, to pooh-pooh what he did. All I did was make a measly little number change. Coulda been a brain fart. Coulda been an honest mistake. Coulda happened to anyone.

Applying for aid for fake companies - and dragging your kids into it by using their names - suggests to me that fudging the employee numbers wasn't exactly the alpha and omega of this criming.

Anyway, now McIntyre is staring down two years in a Federal pen, not to be confused with an alpaca pen. And a hefty fine. (Which I wish had been for $666,666.)

What. A. Jerk.

 

Oh, the horror OR David Brooks dines at Newark Airport

First off, I have to confess that I find David Brooks - NY Times writer, pundit,  social observer - insufferable. Sure, the boy can write, but I find him snotty, patronizing, holier-than-thou. (One of his first post-college gigs was some sort of suck-up internship with William Buckley at the National Review. So when it comes to learning the snotty, patronizing, holier-than-thou ropes, he studied at the feet of the master.) 

Just wanted to provide some context for how absolutely gleeful I was to see him dragged/ratio'd/meme'd so furiously that even his eminence must have been taken a bit aback.

Here's what happened. 

Brooks decided to tweet out a pic of his meal - a burger and fries - with the caption This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.

In liberal circles - self included - it is generally thought that most pundits/commentators/journalists, in an effort to appear neutral, look at the world through the lens of "both siderism." The theory goes that since so many pundits/commentators/journalists are politically and/or socially liberal, they bend over backwards to criticize both sides of the political divide, creating all sorts of false equivalences to show that they're above the fray. (E.g., Hunter Biden is as bad, and deserves as much bad press as, say, an existential threat to the US like Donald Trump.) Since Brooks is pretty conservative to begin with, he doesn't have to bend over that far.

It is perfectly fine for Brooks to criticize Joe Biden. There's plenty there to criticize. But to pretend that this meal actually cost $78 for the meal (i.e., the food part) and to lay it at the feet of Joe Biden is beyond ridiculous. Especially given, as we learned when the restaurant he dined at entered the online drag show: 80% of his bill was for liquor.

If Brooks wants to say that, despite low unemployment and decreasing inflation, Americans still feel uneasy about the economy, that's fine. There's a ton of understandable unease out there. "Things", most of them, anyway, do cost more than they did a while ago. People are justifiably concerned about keeping their jobs, especially with the specter of robots and AI replacing them. I was going to write "us," but I don't work anymore. But, come to think of it, a robot could probably do a lot of what I do when I volunteer, like hand out towels and toothbrushes. And ChatGPT could probably take care of my blog quite nicely. (In both situations, I would hope someone would notice the difference.)

Then there's the colossal and widening spread between those at the uppermost echelon of the economy and the middle and lower classes.

So, lots of reason for economic unease.

But to do a snide, albeit indirect, "thanks, Biden" based on what it costs to drink your wait time away at Newark Airport, well...

Pffffttttt to David Brooks.

My favorite drag - and the ratio was major, the memes flying - was from Joyce Carol Oates, who, at 85, is a prolific Twitter presence. She retweeted Brooks, X-ing: (bar bill: $66. food bill: $12. tip: $0 N Y Times expense account).

We don't know what the tip was, but twelve bucks wasn't that far off the mark for the burger. 

Brooks coughed up a bit of an apology:

Brooks said in a PBS NewsHour interview on Friday that he regretted his post: “I was insensitive. I screwed up. I should not have written that tweet.”

“The problem with the tweet, which I wrote so stupidly, was that it made it seem like I was oblivious to something that was blindingly obvious,” he said. “That an upper middle class journalist having a bourbon at an airport is a lot different than a family living paycheck to paycheck. And when I’m getting sticker shock, it’s like an inconvenience. When they’re getting sticker shock, it’s a disaster.” (Source: WaPo)

Once again, pffffttttt to David Brooks.

And maybe I have to take back that "the boy can write."

Because how is sticker shock an inconvenience?

Although I don't have bourbons in an airport, or anywhere else these days, and I'm not a journalist, weird as it is to put it in black and white, I'm probably upper middle class. (I wasn't born that way, but somehow it kinda sorta just happened.) And I have sticker shock every time I go to the grocery store and see just how little you get for the $78 David Brooks spent on a meh burger and a top shelf bourbon. Or two.

In fact, I know exactly what you get at Whole Food - talk about upper middle class signaling - for $78, because that's what I spent there on Friday. 

What I got was enough to fill my backpack with the sorts of items that David Brooks might pick up for an upper middle class dinner. 

I knew the bill would be high because I did buy 1.5 pounds worth of very pricey sea scallops. And a few other upper middle class goods: small jar of capers, arugula, a box of orzo. But the rest of the stuff - cherry tomatoes, a couple of lemons, salad greens, head of garlic I didn't actually need, a few of the last of the nectarines, a bag of clementines - was pretty pedestrian. 

For what I paid for the scallops - $25/pound, but I don't do this all the time - I could have gotten chicken breasts, pasta, veggies, peanut butter. But for $78, I sure couldn't have fed a family of four for a week. (I recently saw a stat that, in Massachusetts, the average family of four spends about $12K a year on groceries. That's over $250 a week. Which really is pretty shocking.)

Anyway, I do recognize that grocery bills are generally shockingly sticker shock-y. But did it inconvenience little old upper middle class me?

Well, no, it didn't, unless you call raising your eyebrows or shaking your head in mild dismay, shrugging your shoulders with an insouciant que sera, an inconvenience. 

I know, I know. I sound as snooty as David Brooks, but I assure you I am not. 

I know I'm fortunate, and I know a lot of folks who aren't buying $25 a pound scallops. (Company for dinner on Saturday. Let me tell you those scallops were delish.) I know a lot of folks for whom the trip to the grocery store is, if not exactly a disaster, a challenge. Who have to keep a close eye on what they're buying. 

I also know folks who rely on food stamps and food pantries.

And something tells me that David Brooks doesn't know a lot of either the careful shoppers or the food stampers. 

Still, he's right about the economic strain that many people are under. 

But anyone who thinks this is a reason to vote for Donald Trump is nuts.

Maybe Americans would be better served by columnists like Brooks, people with prominence and vast reach, spent more time explaining how and why inflation occurs (hint: it's not Democratic policies), and how and why things can get better for those experiencing sticker shock disasters (hint: it's not Republican policies).

But enough with the rambling.

In response to Brooks' inopportune tweet, the restaurant where he dined has:

... made a new meal available to customers: the “D Brooks Special.” Instead of paying $78, customers can get a burger, fries and a double shot of whiskey for $17.78.

Hah! Almost (but not quite) makes me want to eat at Newark Airport. (The last time I ate at an airport - a salad at Wolfgang Puck at O'Hare - I got food poisoning, so I'm in no great hurry to eat anything at an airport beyond a granola bar or a bag of Cheetos.)

I'm still sticking with pffffttttt to David Brooks. 

September Song

Tomorrow is the first day of fall, a season that I've always loved.

I was a nerd girl, and was always eager to get back to school. Come September, I still always experience a few back-to-school vibes. 

September usually means pleasant days and cool nights. It alway means a trip to Brookfield Orchard for a big bag of McIntosh apples. And some penny candy - even though it's been many harvest moons since penny candy cost a penny. I'm ever in hope that the Mary Janes, the Bullseyes, the Squirrel Nuts are fresh and not going to tug at my fillings. And that the maple sugar candy won't be stale.

Even though the Olde Towne Team is, alas, not a play-ah this year, I'll spend October jumping in and out of playoff games and the World Series. 

Come Halloween, I don't think I'll ever grow tired of seeing trick-or-treaters. I don't get any where I live, but my neighborhood - Beacon Hill - is always a hive of activity. Many houses go all out decorating, and that's always fun to see. On Halloween, I'll walk around and check out the decor and the Disney Princesses, the Buzz Lightyears, the Marios...ever on the lookout for clever and original costumes. Ever in hope that there'll be an outfit or two that look homemade by the kids without all that much of a parental assist. 

Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Hurrah for the annual turkey dinner!

Weirdly, creepily, there'll still be green leaves on plenty of the trees up until Thanksgiving and beyond. But there'll still be some glorious leaf-changing to behold. Some of it in my very own front yard, the Boston Public Garden. (Not a great picture, but you get the point!)

I walk in the Garden pretty much every day, rain or shine, and here's what the paths I walk look like on a rainy day, before the garden crew has leaf blown them away.

Fall means the end to baseball, and the end to the wonderful summer light. Not to mention the end of cherries, white nectarines, peaches, plums, and blueberries. (Baseball, light in the evening, and all that wonderful fruit are pretty much the only things I miss about summer.)

I don't mind at all that, in the fall, there'll be an increasing number of dreary, grey, often rainy days. I'm rather fond of fall's melancholy. All the more reason to make a cup or tea, or take a nap.

Fall begins tomorrow. Bring it!

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Wondering what the difference between fall and autumn is? There is none. Autumn is the preferred British usage; fall - which is more informal - is more US of A. 

Witch City? It's magic.

My sister lives in Salem, so I've logged a lot of time in the Witch City over the years. 

With Halloween just around the corner, Salem is now in its high period. Between now and October 31st, you can't get near the place. The restaurants are jammed, the stores are mobbed, the trains are thronged. Traffic is off the rails. Halloween itself is a total madhouse.

My sister used to live off of Salem Common, and she'd get hundreds upon hundreds of trick-or-treaters, especially if Halloween fell on a weekend. She now lives in a different neighborhood, but still gets a lot of kids ringing her bell.

Anyway, with the Witch Trials, the hangings, and the burials, there's a ton of witchery around town. The high school mascot is a witch. There's a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery (or is it Samantha Stephens), the good witch from the 1960's sitcom Bewitched.

There are a number of witch-related, occult, crystal shops in town. Not to mention some authentic witches and fortunetellers.

What I hadn't realized is that Salem has been something of a hotbed for magicians as well.

This shouldn't come as that much of a surprise, given that witches and magicians are kinda-sorta adjacent. 

But there you have it.

The centerpiece of Salem's Magic is a group called the Witch City Assembly, which is a chapter of the Society of American Magicians. For the past 50 years, the group:

....has been a booming collective of area magicians, a place to learn the craft, share secrets, and mentor the next generation of performers. (Source: The Boston Globe)

Alas: 

...a combination of factors — an aging membership, an endless supply of YouTube magic tutorials, and the lingering effects of the long stretch where COVID shut down their in-person gatherings — has the assembly scrambling to survive.

So the group is trying to recruit new members, trying to get young folks to be as interested in magic as they are, offering mentoring and a supportive audience for those starting out.

“Nowadays, young people go on the internet to learn magic, but there’s no substitute for having in-person mentors to show you the techniques and provide real-time feedback,” said [Bill] Jensen, the chapter’s president. “Magic is about performance, and this group is a forgiving audience to provide real-time feedback when you mess up, because you will mess up.”

Conjuring up magicians among the young folk may be a hard sell.

“What we’re trying to sell is a love for magic,” said Stephen Silva, 39. “But that’s tough because the public perception of magicians is that they’re geeky and nerdy, and are just out to trick somebody and make them look foolish. But that’s not what this club is about.”

It's hard to imagine that there are as many potential magicians out there as there used to be, what with so many other

distractions for geeky and nerdy kids. Think gaming and Pokémon  collecting (which, from the crowds of young folks I've passed in the Public Garden of late, staring at their smartphones, rambling around trying to collect another character or whatever it is they're after, is back in full force). 

Magic just seemed to be a bigger deal, a more alluring hobby, when I was a kid.

Not that I knew anybody who actually had a magic kit - the closest anyone of my acquaintance came was a Gilbert Erector Set - but kids on TV, kids live Bud Anderson, and the Beav, were always trying their sleight of hand as amateur magicians.

Other than on TV, I've never seen a magic show, but I think I'd rather enjoy it. A good magician is highly skilled, the illusions are - well - magical, and I'm sure I'd find it entertaining, however cheesy and spectacle-y it all is.

Good luck to the Witch City Assembly, I hope they find a lot of goofball, nerdy, geeky little kids who want to make some magic, and who'd like to do it in person, not just virtually. And who aren't afraid that they'll look like a goofball, nerdy, geeky kid when they put on that top hat and cape! 

Rats!

A few weeks ago, I was in NYC for a couple of days.

I did not stay at The Mark, the fancy-arse hotel on the Upper East Side where the rooms start at $1K a night. (Those cheapo rooms  are likely on the airshaft, and are probably used by the assistants to the richie riches who check in to the upper crustier rooms.)

Wondering just who stays at The Mark?

Well, it's a big pre-Met Gala spot, where Vogue's Anna Wintour hangs before she heads over to the grand soiree with the fashionisti movers and shakers. Fellow A-listers like Emily Blunt, Cara Delevingne, and Karlie Kloss also camp out at The Mark to glam up for the Gala. 

And it's the place where the Duchess of Sussex/Meghan Markle had her baby shower when she was pregnant with Archie. That shower was held in The Mark's penthouse, which at shower time was renting out for $75K a night. Which made a minor contribution to the $500K that the shower is estimated to have cost. But you can't skimp out when you're a Duchess - or were one: I can't keep track - your bebe is a Prince - or was one - and your guest list of besties includes Amal Clooney and Serena Williams.

So you're not going to hold that shower in the K of C hall or the living room of your best friend's mother. 

While I was in NYC, I didn't eat at The Mark, either.

I've been to plenty of nice places over the years - most of them long gone - La Cote Basque, Lutèce, La Grenouille - but I've never paid $1,100 for a baked potato sprinkled with caviar, which is one of the specialties of The Mark's Caviar Kaspia restaurant.

A mother-daughter combo doing a recent lunch outing there wasn't springing for the $1.1K baked potato, but their lunch was costing them $500. So they were understandably put off when "they spotted two huge rodents shuffling under a table just feet away from them."

As an urban dweller, I'm no stranger to rats. They are all over the place. I occasionally see them popping in and out of storm drains. I occasionally hear them rustling around in the garbage out back. And every once in a while I come across a flattened out rat carcass on the street. (One down...)

I actually have seen rats in a restaurant. Just not while I was eating. No, it was while I was working.

I will not name the restaurant, which is still a prominent

Boston tourist trap. I worked there during the summer of 1970, and I suspect that they're no longer paying off the city to ignore health violations, etc. But when I worked there...

Yelping when you were startled by a rat crossing your path was a fire-able offense. And if you saw them scurrying under a table your customers were dining at, well, you just hoped that they didn't notice. (The original don't ask, don't tell.)

Mostly, the rats appeared after the diners had left. 

Once we were closing down, the waitresses starting their final clean up (degrease the heavily-varnished tables with hot coffee) and side work prep (fill the salt and pepper shakers), the manager would come up and shoot at the ratholes with a little revolver to keep them away. If he wasn't around, we hurled giant soup spoons at the ratholes, hoping the noise would keep them behind the scenes. 

If, despite our best efforts, the rats appeared, we were allowed to go home, leaving cleanup for the next day.

(My favorite rat story from this place was a sink that was plugged up. A dish boy - known as The Animal - reached in and pulled out a drowned rat. The Animal was known for helping himself to ice cream by dipping his mitt into the five gallon containers. The rule was, if you wanted ice cream, you would only take it from a pristine container.)

But I never saw a rat in any place I was eating.

Unfortunately, that mother-daughter combo ladies who lunch at Caviar Daspia couldn't say the same. One of the "appalled" diners: 

...claims the hotel would only take the dessert off their huge bill by way of apology for the stomach-churning sighting. (Source: The Daily Mail)

After learning about this straight out of Ratatouille incident, the Daily Mail decided to do some sleuthing. They visit the hotel, where they:

...witnessed what appeared to be multiple droppings scattered across Caviar Kaspia's deep pile orange carpet.   

The rats, the staff told them, were coming from a nearby construction site, which happens. But The Mark thought they'd gotten things out of control. Nonetheless,

The hotel supervisor conceded that the sight of rats in at the restaurant was not in keeping with the elegant surroundings: 'It is disgusting and unacceptable.' 

Ya think?

And you know what's also disgusting and unacceptable? Not comping the full lunch costs for the diners who spotted the rats. 

The loss column

One of the truisms of growing old is that the losses increase. 

At my age, the parental losses among my age peers have pretty much slowed to a trickle. These days, the lives my friends and family members mourn are those of our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our cousins, our classmates, our colleagues, our friends. Sometimes - rarely, thankfully, but always unfathomable - it's the loss of a child or grandchild.

Sometimes the great losses are pets, but the great thing about losing a dog or a cat is that while those precious critters are actually, of course, irreplaceable in our hearts, they are in fact replaceable in a way that humans just are not.

The losses we experience are painful, but we all know that they're part of life, the admission fee we pay. Sure, we could avoid losses by avoiding relationships, but who wants a life devoid of what make life worth living?

Then there are the celebrity losses that have nothing to do with our "real lives," but which we mourn nonetheless. 

Although I watched plenty of Bob Barker hosted game shows as a kid, I felt nothing - other than a vague quiver of nostalgia - when I heard that he died at the age of 99. (Mostly, I laugh when I hear his name, as Bob Barker is a major supplier of items like soap to institutions like jail. And homeless shelters. I volunteer in one, where we hand a bar of Bob Barker soap to our guests when they sign up for a shower.)

When Tony Bennett died, I didn't start weeping, but I did order a couple of CDs of his that I didn't have. 

And I of course sang Margaritaville in the shower the morning I found out Jimmy Buffett had passed away. 

So the celebrities - the athletes, the actors, the singers, the writers, the pols - that have been around forever start passing into the great beyond. And while all those mounting demises don't tend to impact our day-to-day lives - when I have a few free moments, I don't think "gotta call Tony Bennett" the way when I had a few free moments for years after my mother died I'd think "gotta call Ma" - they are the occasion for mini-mourning.

So are the losses in the natural world. 

A few weeks ago, I read that the emperor penguin population is at risk. And horseshoe crabs. Horseshoe crabs have been

around for half a billion years, give or take. Now they're facing extinction. 

And we'll no doubt be hearing about a lot more losses in the natural world. 

The inanimate losses rack up, too. 

Many of the stores of my childhood are long gone. 

Denholm's was Worcester's primo department store. It's been gone for decades, but I still have (and use) a lovely covered casserole dish my mother bought for me at Denholm's nearly 50 years ago. And I miss the idea of Denholm's.

I actually miss the reality of Filene's, especially the Basement. And Jordan Marsh. 

The body's barely cold, but already I miss Bed Bath & Beyond, where there was always something I wanted and/or needed. And the Christmas Tree Shoppe? No trip to the Cape was complete without a stop at the thatch-covered mega Christmas Tree Shoppe at the Sagamore Bridge. 

And what was that old-school (and not all that good) restaurant just outside their parking lot? I miss a stop there, too.

There are too many restaurants of yore to mourn and, fortunately, most of my local regulars are still around. But others are long gone. 

I miss Lala Rokh, and the little Dutch place on Charles that's been gone since the 1980 or so. I miss Gallagher's. And although I didn't much like the English Tea Room, I do sort of miss having it around. Or maybe I just miss being in my 20's, which was when the Tea Room, with it's ghastly sopping salad with the honey infused oil they passed off as dressing. 

Do I miss Durgin-Park, which closed a few years ago? Although I worked there 50 years ago (gulp!), I never ate there. It was awful. And yet when they closed a few years back, I did a bit of mourning. (No, I didn't wear black, but I did go to their going-out-of-business sale, and if the hand-painted wood signs for Indian pudding and strawberry shortcakes had cost less than $500, I might have gotten one of them.)

There are plenty of very good restaurants in Worcester when I make an occasional visit there, but, you know what? I miss the Webster House, and would love to stick a fork into one of their chicken pot pies, one of their lemon squares. 

And why am I so bummed out by the news that Brandeis University is eliminating its PhD program in music?

Do I know anyone in the program? No. Do I know anyone who was ever in the program? No.

My late friend Nanni had two children who got their PhDs in music, but neither of them went to Brandeis.

So why did I feel so awful when I read about Brandeis? Does it serve as a proxy for all the liberal arts programs that are being gutted, which is just a dreadful trend. 

I have no illusions that everything in the past was joy and roses, and I'm not one to traffic in nostalgie de la boue. (At least I hope not.) 

But the reality is that, as you grow old, the losses do start to mount, and it's not just the big ones, but the little ones.

So many entries in the loss column...

What are you going to do? Life and all the stuff related to life belongs to the living.

C'est la vie. 

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.

On the one hand, hat's off to someone who's 84 and still looking for love.

On the other hand...

Since Bob, her long term (30 years!) partner, died eight years ago, Ellie Goldstein has been lonely. Before connecting with Bob, Ellie was married an unspecified number of "several times" - all the marriages ended, alas, in divorce - so she's used to having a man around.

I get that. 

Things can get lonely, especially if you're used to being a relationship. (Personally, I very rarely - maybe never - feel lonely, but maybe that's just me being me. I liked being in a relationship, but I come from a long line of widows, so I definitely get the ropes. But ask me how I feel a decade from now.)

Anyway, rather than sit around feeling sorry for herself, Ellie Goldstein - who's still living independently, by the way - found herself a matchmaking service:

She filled out a questionnaire and made an appointment for a face-to-face session with Michelle, one of the matchmakers at The Matchmaking Company in Burlington.

Goldstein told Michelle she wanted to meet someone about her own age. They did not discuss the availability of men in her age bracket. As the session drew to a close, Michelle told her the price for four “introductions” was “thirty-nine ninety-five.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Understandably, Ellie interpreted that figure as $39.95. 

Oops. Michelle was talking $3,995. 

When Ellie gulped and told Michelle that was just a bit more than she wanted to spend, Little Miss Matchmaker went into hard sell mode and convinced Ellie that signing up would be a life changer that would dispel loneliness from her life. 

So Ellie charged the full amount and signed a contract that was "non-cancelable and non-refundable." She even initialed the para about the cancellation policy. But by the time she got back home, she had second thoughts. She called The Matchmaking Company to see if she could back out and left a message. But she didn't get any response. The following day, after a series of calls, someone did answer the phone and told her that non-cancelable, non-refundable meant exactly that. 

Ellie admits that she should have just walked out when she found out what the cost was. But here was Michelle sweet talking here, preying on her loneliness. "I was easily convinced because I was so lonely," Ellie says. 

Ellie, by the way, is totally with it. 

Goldstein is a retired bookkeeper who still does taxes for family and friends. She drives and manages her finances and uses the internet and keeps a spotless condo, with Bob’s framed picture sitting on a box containing his ashes in the living room.

So the matchmakers weren't taking advantage of a senile little old lady.

Still...

Ellie jumped into action. She contacted her credit card company. She contacted the state's AG. One of her sons got into the act, threatening to sue.  

So far, no dice. After all, she's not senile and she initialed the para on contract cancellation.

Still...

After all, at Ellie's age - and presumably at the age of any partner she'd be interested in - the likelihood of finding someone is pretty slim.

Among those age 75-84, for every 100 men there are nearly 150 women, and among those age >/=85, for every 100 men there are nearly 220 women. (This is a 2005 source from the National Library of Medicine, but presumably the odds aren't improving with age.)

The Globe ombudsman, whom Ellie appealed to, appealed to The Matchmaking Company, pointing out that Ellie hadn't used any services yet, and asking whether a full refund might be in order.

Mike Carroll, who's a Matchmaking VP, working at company HQ in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, pushed back, claiming that "client acquisition costs" are $2,800 per new client.

“Giving a full refund wouldn’t be fair to me,” he said. “I spent money upfront with good intentions.”

Now I don't know how many months worth of matchmaking that $3,995 was going to get Ellie, but I'm guessing at least a year. And if the service is any good, they should be able to set her up with a match in that time. So if the full expected contract value is one year - and, frankly, at 84, how many years would one expect the contract to last; I'd think by 85, someone would be really tired of dating - then I'm going to go out on a marketing limb and say that if the acquisition costs for a $4K contract are $2.8K, The Matchmaking Company spends way too much on client acquisition. Either that or those acquisition costs have been rounded up a bit. Just sayin'.

Anyway, Carroll did offer to refund Ellie $1,200, since he spent so much upfront money with such good intentions, and just couldn't go out of pocket for a fully refund.

Since there's no cooling off period for dating services in Massachusetts - looks like there should be! - the ombudsman suggested that Ellie take the offer. But she's not backing down. Yet.

You'd think that The Matchmaking Company would give her the full amount, given that it sure seems as if - however within the bounds of legality they were operating - the company took advantage of a lonely old lady. The service might have been worth $39.95 to her, but $2,800??? That's just a screw job.

Me? I'm just happy I'm content with things as they are. 

Anyway, there has been an update to the story. The Matchmaking Company is still digging its heels in on the refund; so is Ellie: she wants he full $3,995 back. 

Bonus points that the story attracted a few potential suitors. Four swains have reached out to Ellie, and she's already had a date with one, a 93 year old named Arthur. She hopes to see him again, but is just happy to be back in the swing of things. And she may well end up getting her money's worth out of her investment in the dating service.

So I took me out to the ballgame

Yesterday, I was supposed to have lunch with a friend, but he had to postpone, so I decided to take myself out to the ballgame.

The Red Sox have been pretty awful this year, but despite their dismal performance, I still watch at least a couple of innings of each and every game. And I like to get out to Fenway for a few games, which hasn't happened this season.

My one and only game this year was the Patriots Day game in April. Unfortunately, Patriots Day was cold and rainy, and, having gotten soaked during a sudden-onset torrent, my sister Trish and I decided that we were never going to get warm, we were never going to get dry, and the rain delay wasn't going to be over anytime soon. So we ate our hotdogs under the stands and went home to watch the game in my den.

And that was it.

Usually by now I've been to three or four games, but this year's been nada/zip. The team. The weather. The team and the weather.

But today, if this can ever be said about a team battling it out for last place in their division, the stars aligned. My canceled lunch. A perfect late summer day: 70s, low humidity, nary a cloud in the lake-blue sky. A Red Sox-Yankees matchup, even if the matchup ain't what it used to be. (At game time, they were tied for last place in the AL East.) An afternoon game scheduled because of the night before's rainout. And good last-minute tickets available on Ace Ticket.

So I scored a $101 ticket for $32 and took myself out to the ballgame. 

One of my great city pleasures is walking out to Fenway Park. I always walk up the Comm. Ave Mall with its lovely canopy of shade trees - elms that survived Dutch Elm, lindens, maples, sweetgums...Then there's Kenmore Square, which is usually thronged for game time, but not yesterday. The stream flowing out of the Kenmore T-stop was more of a trickle. 

In line to get my sausage and peppers sandwich and Cracker Jacks, I chatted with the young couple in front of me. Yankees fans. We bemoaned the seasons that both our teams were having, and I told them that every Red Sox fan would be looking at their phones throughout the game to see if Chaim Bloom, the Red Sox GM and Chief Baseball Officer, has been fired. 

Oh, the Yankees fan guy told me, he was fired a few minutes ago - when I was still enjoying my shady walk up the Mall.

Huzzah!

Someone had to go, and that someone was Chaim Bloom. 

Admittedly, he had a tough job, but repeated last place finishes aren't going to fly with this fan base. Not with the highest priced tickets in baseball-dom, thank you.

No one expects a World Series every year. What fans do expect is a competitive team. And that Bloom has not delivered. I was semi-negative on him, but finding out a few weeks ago that, unlike what the Red Sox had kinda-sorta told us when Bloom traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers for nothing in return, Mookie, in fact, WANTED TO STAY IN BOSTON. Which he revealed when the Dodgers were in town a few weeks back. So my semi-negative on Bloom turned into a full-blown, his guy's gotta go.

Mookie was a generational player: all the tools, high character, great personality, a community guy. Everyone adored Mookie.

Yes, Bloom was pretty much forced by ownership - for whatever daft reason - to deal Mookie. But to get nothing in return? Yikes. That was on Bloom.

It will break my heart (if I live that long) when Mookie goes into the Hall of Fame as a Dodger. But that's baseball.

When the game started, the crowd was pretty sparse. I'm guessing maybe 5,000, which looked like a game of the rotten Red Sox teams of my childhood. The row in front of me had one person in it; the row behind me had two. There was no one on either side of me. Attendance picked up - there was a nearby water main break that had delayed some arrivals. But the park was never full. There were only about 100 folks scattered in the bleachers; and no one in the miserable right field grandstand. (I'm guessing the fans who bought tickets for those sections decamped to better seats.) Beautiful day, but a rain delay game, two loser-ama teams...

Too bad. The no-shows missed a good game.

Good pitching. A couple of dingers. A Red Sox 5-0 win.

Going into yesterday's afternoon game, the Sox were tied with the Yankees for last place in the division. With the win, the Sox pulled one ahead of the Evil Empire. (I'm writing this before the nightcap was played, so they're now either back in a tie or two-up on New York.)

When I left Fenway, the post-Chaim Bloom Red Sox had a perfect 1.0 record.

Pennant fever!

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I recently posted about the Cow Parade, artfully gotten-up statues of cows being auctioned off for the benefit for Dana-Farber. Here's the Red Sox/Fenway Park cow, which missed my earlier cattle call.

"Don't it make your brown eyes blue?"

Rona Wang, 24, is a recent MIT grad and future MIT grad student whose resume boasts some pretty impressive credentials. She was a Math and Computer Science major whose experience includes the requisite Microsoft internship. So, STEM girl. And last year, her first novel, You Had Me At Hello World - which received a six-figure advance - was published by Simon and Schuster. So, artsy girl, too. So, double threat. (Note: Wang had an earlier collection of short stories published by a small press. It was withdrawn from distribution under a cloud of credible accusations of plagiarism. So, not perfect.)

Anyway, Rona Wang decided she wanted to use a more professional image on her LinkedIn profile. After all, her present LinkedIn pic does kind of scream undergraduate. Plus the mask sort of dates it.

Wang decided to play around a bit. And last month she asked AI for a bit of help. She worked with different AI portrait generators and ended up with some fairly odd results: "images of herself with disjointed fingers and distorted facial features."

Then this happened:

Wang uploaded a picture of herself smiling and wearing a red MIT sweatshirt to an image creator called Playground AI, and asked it to turn the image into “a professional LinkedIn profile photo.”

In just a few seconds, it produced an image that was nearly identical to her original selfie — except Wang’s appearance had been changed. It made her complexion appear lighter and her eyes blue, “features that made me look Caucasian,” she said.

“I was like, ‘Wow, does this thing think I should become white to become more professional?’” said Wang, who is Asian American. (Source: Boston Globe)

Here's the before (which I guess wasn't used purely in pursuit of a professional look, as she's still got an MIT shirt on, which is semi-pro at best; but, hey, she's still a student, albeit a graduate one):  

And here's after:

Which (assuming she didn't indicate she wanted to look like a white woman) is completely crazy, as it doesn't even look like her. And don't it make her brown eyes blue? How odd is that.

Research — including at MIT — has found so-called AI bias in language models that associate certain genders with certain careers, or in oversights that cause facial recognition tools to malfunction for people with dark skin.

Well, at least it didn't come back with Rona Wang looking like a man. So there's that. 

AI is, of course, still being perfected. And this imperfect attempt may have just been a random blip. 

Or, [Wang] said, it may have been trained using a batch of photos in which a majority of people depicted on LinkedIn or in “professional” scenes were white.

In any case, the fact that AI "thinks" this way is not harmless:

It has made [Wang] think about the possible consequences of a similar misstep in a higher-stakes scenario, like if a company used an AI tool to select the most “professional” candidates for a job, and if it would lean toward people who appeared white.

“I definitely think it’s a problem,” Wang said. “I hope people who are making software are aware of these biases and thinking about ways to mitigate them.”

The folks at PlaygroundAI said they're looking into it and will use Wang's experience to make refine their models. 

Bottom line: AI sure is worrisome.

Talk about chutzpah

I have a pretty good imagination. And I've volunteered in a shelter for years. But I really can't imagine how terrible being homeless would be. Not having a place of my own to hang my hat at the end of the day...No privacy...None of my things around (other than what I can carry)...No trips to the kitchen for a snack...No comfy bed to nap in...No luxuriating in the shower...No curling up with a good book. Or even a bad one...No welcoming family and friends...No putting up my Christmas tree...No sense of security...

I see how god-awful it is to be homeless, so damned hard. 

It always amazes me how well most of the guests - most of them homeless, or at best housing insecure - at St. Francis House are able to keep it together. I don't see what's roiling around inside, but most of the folks I see are clean and more polite and pleasant than you might think would possibly be the case. The resilience I see every time I'm in SFH never fails to amaze me. 

Years ago, when I worked in a dinner program for the poor and the homeless, I told a fellow volunteer that I wouldn't have the courage to be poor. 

That still holds. 

If I were homeless - unless it was the result of some sort of immense natural or national disaster, which would be plenty bad but which I can imagine navigating and surviving - if I found myself homeless, I'd probably flip out on day one. 

So I have plenty of sympathy for those who end up squatting, occupying abandoned buildings so that at least they have a roof over their heads and the ability to get and stay out of the elements. 

For those (knowingly) squatting in an unoccupied house, I'm a little less sympathetic. (I wrote knowingly, because apparently there are some folks who are scammed into signing a legitimate-looking fake lease from an imposter landlord.)

My direct experience with squatters is pretty much limited to squatter-adjacent.

A few years ago, a unit in my building was occupied by a couple who stopped paying rent shortly after they moved in. It took a few years to dislodge these Pacific Heights wannabes, who were a colossally hostile and occasionally downright scary presence. Plus costly. I didn't own the unit they were squatting in, but these con jobbers ended up suing all the owners in the building personally on a bogus, exceedingly flimsy pretext. Suing the owners netted them zero, but cost us quite a bit in legal fees to ward them off. Fortunately, there was eventually a court order that dislodged them. 

So my sympathy when I read about squatting situations tends to be leaning towards the landlord.

One squatting situation that I came across recently caught my eye for its sheer brazenness.

It occurred in Texas, where neighbors suspected that something was up when some new people moved into a house that was for rent in their very nice cul-de-sac. 

From the jump, there were signs that something wasn't quite right when the management company managing the rental was nowhere in evidence when the new kids on the block moved in, tearing down and tossing aside the rental sign and calling in a locksmith. 

The "new kids" did have a legitimate looking contract, but it was a fake. And from the tenor of the article, these folks weren't innocents being scammed, but were themselves the scammers. While the new neighbors were doing grocery shopping, and having the cable guy connect them, they had no furniture, but were just camping out on blankets. Plus they had a lot of cars coming and going at all hours of the night.

Sensing that something was up, the neighbors first called the rental management company to confirm their suspicions. And when the cars starting drifting in, fearing that there might be something extra-illegal going on, some of the neighbors starting videoing the activity.

With no provable crime - and since the squatters had a fake lease in hand - the cops couldn't do anything. 

The management company is lining up a court date for the eviction hearing, but until then (where "then" may take 6 months to a year)...

Meanwhile, the squatters, pissed off that their new neighbors weren't rolling out the welcome wagon, but were instead filming them, called the police to report that they were being harassed.

Reminds me of the joke about definition of chutzpah being the fellow who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

There may be some benefit of the doubt here. Maybe the newbies really did think that they had signed a legit lease? But the no furniture, and the vehicular activity, suggests otherwise. Sounds pretty fly-by-nightish to me. 

And given my experience with the couple from hell, I'm inclined to think that they're up to no good. 

Good luck to the neighbors putting up with the hostility that will be emanating from the squatter house while the eviction crawls through the process. (And if I'm misjudging the squatters, my apologies.)

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Info source:  ABC News (Chicago)