Girl Scouts Forever

I was briefly in the Girl Scouts. Briefly. Very briefly. Not long enough to earn any badges. A very dispiriting experience. The only positive was that, on meeting days, we could swap out our green jumpers and white blouses for the GS green uniform.

My Brownie troop had been kind of fun. 

I had devoured the Brownie Scout books by Mildred Wirt. The Brownie Scouts At Silver Beach. The Brownie Scouts Tree House. The Brownie Scouts at Snow Valley. I wanted to be friends with Veve McGuire. So I was primed to be a Brownie. 

My troop didn't quite measure up, adventure-wise. But we got to hang out after school playing games like "Picking Up Paw-Paws" and doing craft projects like making angel Christmas tree ornaments out of construction paper and cotton balls. (No one had a clue what a paw-paw was, but we were all quite familiar with angels and Christmas trees.)

A couple of days after my sister Trish was born, I "flew up" from Brownies to Girl Scouts. This was in June, toward the end of the school year, and I was looking forward to my dream life as a Girl Scout when school started again in the fall. (Interestingly, Mildred Wirt also had a series of Girl Scout books, but I never read them.)

Alas, there was no dream life as a Girl Scout. My sister Kath - two years older - had been in an active troop. She earned a lot of badges and got to go to Camp Neyati. 

For some reason, Girl Scouts at our school petered out in seventh grade, when girls transitioned from the vaguely Protestant-y Girl Scouts to the Junior Catholic Daughters of America, which was some weird adjunct of the Knights of Columbus. (Uniform: crisp white blouse and shamrock-bright Kelly green skirt.) 

Anyway, by seventh grade, the "big girls" like Kath were out of the Girl Scouts, and us fifth graders inherited the troop. (I also became a JCDA. If you ignored the religious and K of C overlay, there was one excellent aspect of membership in the Junior Catholic Daughters in our parish, as we took an annual bus trip to Boston to see whatever was playing at Cinerama - some sort of  travelogue that provided a quasi "you are there experience." One I remember involved a stomach-churning video rollercoaster ride. On the way back to Worcester, we'd stop at the Eli Whitney House for ice cream. The Big Trip to Boston was a colossal treat, back in those far simpler, far less sophisticated times.)

As for the Girl Scouts, we were under a shadow from the get go, as two of the leaders (both mothers of friends of Kath and me) were stricken with cancer. Some high school girls tried to sub for them, but we didn't do much of anything. We didn't earn badges. We didn't sell cookies. We didn't march in uniform at the annual Little League parade. We didn't go to Camp Neyati, let alone Green Eyrie, the posh Worcester County Girl Scout Camp. 

We sat around despondently. Mostly I remember gossiping and singing songs like "Girl Scouts Together."

At the end of the year we had an exercise in democracy and voted to disband and get our dues money back. There was a tax on our exit. In order to get a refund on our dues - 10 cents a week, I think - we were required to purchase a Girl Scout World Pin, a blue and gold enameled pin signifying something or other.

I haven't spent a lot of time bemoaning my lack of a Girl Scout career, but when I hear about active Girl Scouts, I am occasionally wistful about the lost opportunity to learn things, to achieve, to sell cookies. I admire the Girl Scout success stories, and am maybe even a tiny bit envious of their experience.

But forget about that envy for the moment. I have nothing but admiration for a Virginia Girl Scout who recently achieved the GS equivalent of the Boy Scouts' Eagle Scout status. 

Kate Lindley’s “Gold Award” — the highest award given to Girl Scouts — was given to her to recognize the work she’s done to fight book banning in her community. But the Hanover Board of Supervisors, which has a history of “de-selecting” books, took all mention of book banning out of her personal statement when honoring the four girls who completed projects this year. (Source: Scary Mommy)

Lindley's capstone project was in response to her school system banning a list of books they deemed "offensive." To counter that offensive, she'd set up a couple of "Banned Book Nooks" in local shops (printing, donuts). She also created a website for those looking to find banned books.

Lindley has said that her project “exposes more community members to these titles, hopefully ending their demonization.”

The local school board wanted to honor Lindley's achievement, and that of the other three girls who'd won the Gold Award.  

...but when the school board read about each girl’s accomplishments, Lindley’s self-submitted description was altered to take out all mention of banned books.

Lindley had something to say about the snub:

“You bestowed upon me the greatest honor you could. Greater than that of any proclamation in your censorship of my Gold Award project," she said. “You have shown the world that you are afraid to call something what it is, be that a banned book or a ‘de-selected’ one.”

Predictably, the bluenose prig who'd been instrumental in the local book banning initiative, and "who voted to remove the book banning language from Lindley's award recognition," had a pecksniffy response:

“If anyone wants to support an author whose message is about pornography to children then people have the right to do that," [Michael] Herzberg said. "As a board member, I have a right to say no that I don’t support that request and I also have the right to say yes I have the right to approve the substitute request so the Girl Scout could still get recognized for her Gold Award."

Nice way to tie Kate Lindley to "pornography to children." But I'm pretty sure that Ms. Lindley, Girl Scout extraordinaire will rise above it. And rise well about Herzberg. 

So congratulations, Kate Lindley. I have great hopes for you. Kind of makes me proud to have been a Girl Scout myself, no matter how meager my experience and achievements. 

Girl Scouts Forever!

Another reason I'm happy to be retired

Many years ago, I went through a long interview process with a local software company. It was for a relatively senior position (director-level) at a relatively small place. (Were there 100 employees? 200?More? I've forgotten...) Among the people I interviewed with were the co-founder/CEO and the co-founder CFO. I didn't like either one of them. 

The CEO was extremely condescending and a-holey. During our conversation, we somehow got on the topic of price elasticity and he snippily asked me if I could define it for him. (I'd been to a fancy-enough business school; my husband was an economist. So, yeah, I could define price elasticitiy.) 

The CFO was also something of a prick, and we got into a debate about what financial information should be shared with employees of a small, closely-held corporation. Needless to say, our opinions differed.

Shortly after these close encounters, I had a direct convo with the hiring manager, and we quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn't a good fit between me and them. I did know someone who I thought would be a good fit, and he ended up taking the job. 

I ended up knowing a lot of people who worked at this company over the years, which grew big, went public, made that CEO a billionaire philanthropist, etc. Most of them weren't all that happy working there; most of them didn't last all that long; most disliked the CEO. 

(I couldn't figure out what happened to the CFO, other than finding that he's still alive.)

Aside from me meet and greets with the CEO and CFO, another obnoxious aspect of the job is that when I first stepped in the door for an initial interview, I was asked to sit there and do a writing sample. (Was there a math quiz, too? I can't remember, but I think the writing sample had me coming up with instructions on how to use a toothbrush.) 

I found the process entirely off-putting. It's no wonder I didn't end up working there. There's no doubt I would have hated every moment.  

About that sample: Not that I'm afraid of anything to do with writing. It's just that I found this request insulting for a professional position, especially because I could have easily supplied some writing samples.

Sure, there's be no guarantee that what I would have handed them wouldn't be material written by someone else. (It's been known to happen.) 

Still...

Anyway, I can only imagine how offputting I would have found it if someone had asked me to do a project for them before bringing me on board, which is apparently becoming a fairly widespread hiring practice. 

I don't know how all this came about. Maybe because references have proven unreliable, afraid that if they say anything that might put the kibosh on an applicant, they'll be sued. 

Whatever's driving this trend, it's a-happenin' as I learned when I came across this: 

An employer [Twitter handle: M Stanfield] has sparked fierce debate after being so shocked a Gen Z job seeker refused to spend 90 minutes on a hiring test because it “looked like a lot of work” that he vented about the situation on X, formerly known as Twitter.

People who've job-hunted recently have probably quickly found out that getting hired is no longer as simple as submitting a résumé followed by an in-person interview or two.

The tweet read:

“Me: really enjoyed the call. Please see attached financial modeling test

“Gen Z applicant: this looks like a lot of work. Without knowing where I stand in the process, I’m not comfortable spending 90 minutes in Excel

“Me:…well…I can tell you where you stand now”

In a follow-up tweet, he posted that “if an analyst can’t hammer that out in 90 min, they’re not the right person” for the investment analyst gig going.

Speaking to Fortune, Stanfield—who declined to confirm the name of his company—said such tests are fairly common in his industry as they're used to identify the skill level of potential employees.

During an initial screening call “the steps in the interview process” were laid out in full, he added, and candidates were also told that the test in question “shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“If you want to get hired as an investment analyst, at least at my fund, you need to demonstrate your ability to analyze an investment,” he said, adding the task wasn't on a live project but an example situation. (Source: Fortune, via Yahoo Finance)

The article then devolved into a battle between olds suggesting that Gen Z's are a bunch of entitled brats who need to toughen up - M. Stanfield even suggested that they would have benefitted from getting into a few fistfights at a younger age - and youngs carping about the Boomer mindset, about old fogeys making unreasonable demands and being completely out of it.

I come down somewhere in the middle on this one.

I don't blame the interviewee for asking for clarification on where they stood in the interview process. And I don't blame job-seekers for being suspicious about providing free labor to a company. I've read about plenty of instances where a candidate has created a preso, blog post, or other deliverable and had an unscrupulous company use it without permission or compensation. 

On the other hand, if the candidate actually said something along the lines of 'that looks like a lot of work' - which may not have happened IRL - I don't blame the interviewer from knocking them off the potential hiree list. And the requirement that there would be a test for the position was clearly laid out. So it wasn't exactly a surprise pop quiz. (Can you define price elasticity...)

If hiring companies are going to demand these sorts of pre-hire tests, they should only give them to those who are finalists, or even about to be given an offer. And it does seem obnoxious to expect someone to spend 90 minutes on an unpaid task. So maybe the task could be shorter. Maybe, in this case, M. Stanfield could have had the candidate do a quick look at someone else's analysis (or a fake one) and come back with a first impression of what works, what doesn't.

And if someone's asked to create an actual work product, the hiring company might want to consider some small nod to compensation to those who don't get the job. Even a fifty-dollar Amazon card would recognize that the person had put in some effort. 

I'm no longer in the game, so this is never going to be my problem.  Just another reason that I'm happy to be retired. 

Periwinkle blue. And you?

When I was a senior in college, my roommate - and one of my closest friends to this day - gave me a velour bathrobe for Christmas. It was periwinkle blue. When I opened the box, Joyce said to me, "This is a color you should be wearing."

Fast forward a decade and 'getting your colors done' was a very big deal. So I had my colors done. I can't remember all the details - I think someone at work arranged for a 'color pro' to come in after hours and do color analysis for a bunch of us - but I definitnely had it done.

Sure enough, when they draped the periwinkle blue swatch so that it framed my face, periwinkle blue was my color. I was a Summer. Blues. Pinks. Violets. 

Turns out, those were the colors I'd always gravitated to, and this is probably true for a lot of people. You tend to wear the colors you look best in, the ones that make you feel good, the ones that get you the compliments. But I liked getting my colors done, as it explained some things. Like why I never, ever, ever wore the fabulous, deeply discounted, gorgeous camel-colored jersey dress I snapped up at Loehmann's. It sucked every bit of color out of my face and made me look like a cadaver. In contrast, on the same trip to Loehmann's I'd gotten a less high-end, less fabulous, polished-cotton shirt dress in China blue. Which I wore all the time.

The color analysis I had done was based on the Color Me Beautiful system. Folks took part in color session and/or bought the book, which was a wild best seller. (Just googled: over 20 million copies have been sold since the book was published in the early 1980's. A couple of people I know bought it.)

It is in no way a surprise that my friend Joyce analyzed my colors before color analysis was even a thing, as she always had a tremendous fashion sense. She had an uncanny knack for pulling outfits together from disparate pieces that I never in a million years would have felt went with each other. I always looked better when Joyce "dressed" me. (She went on to have a very successful career in the fashion biz, topping out as the head designer ready-to-wear buyer at Neiman Marcus. In her position there, she was a regular at fashion weeks in NYC, Paris, Milan, and knew all the major designers who, naturally, wanted their lines on the racks at NM.)

Anyway, although I do wear black on occasion, 95% of what's in my wardrobe is from the summer palette.

But I haven't thought a lot about getting my colors done until I came across an article in the NY Post on how "the hottest reservation in town is being told the colors you’ve been wearing for years are all wrong."

When I first saw the clickbait on this article, I saw the number 2,000, and thought that's what people were paying to have their colors done. That's not the case. But Seklab, a Midtown Manhattan salon that offers color analysis, does have a waitlist with over 2,000 people on it.  

In New York City, there are currently only a handful of businesses offering the service, and their appointments are going fast.

“It’s like booking concert tickets,” says Lizzie Heo, 32, co-founder of Seklab with sister Lily, 29.

The sisters book about five appointments a day, and when new reservations come available - which happens twice each month - they're quickly snapped up. A personal analysis takes 80 minutes, and costs $245. (My friend Shelly remembers getting her colors done when she turned 30 in 1984, paying about $40. General inflation would put that number at $120, but Shelly went as part of a group of five, and they were there - as she recalled - for about 2 hours. So $245 for 80 minutes for a personal appointment in New York City sounds about right.)

The Heo sisters trained for their business in Korea, where color analysis is very popular. 

Color analysis, by the way, has gotten more sophisticated over the decades.

Back in the day, you were a Winter-Spring-Summer-Fall. These days - based on Korean color analysis - each season has three subgroups. 

And old-school color analysis, with or without subgroups, could be faulty. 

One person interviewed in the article had had her colors done back in her teenage years (she's now 50) through "Color Me Beautiful," which declared her a winter (white, black, jewel colors). Seklab declared her a "light spring" ("Easter egg colors"), which she finds suits her much better. 

Interestingly, the woman who's palette changed was from a Korean background. It would not be all that shocking if it turned out that the original "Color Me Beautiful" system was more oriented towards caucasions. The Seklab Korean system may well be more nuanced. 

Seklab has competitors. At a House of Colour franchise in Brooklyn, it costs $585 for a two-hour private color analysis session. A color analyst on the Upper West Side charges $299 for a one-on-one. She's booked through July. 

I looked for local color analysts, and there's one in Cambridge where you can get your colors done for $400 for 2-3 hours. So the NYC numbers aren't out of whack at all. 

Now that there are 12 palettes (4 seasons x 3 subgroups), maybe I should get my colors done again. As long as I can still wear periwinkle blue...

I love a parade...

The estimated turnout for Friday's Celtics Victory Parade was over a million. I wasn't one of them, but I was somewhat adjacent, and I believe that number.

This was the 13th sports championship parade in Boston since the start of the 21st century. How fortunate we are in this sports-crazed region, how very fortunate indeed. 

I can't say that I've been to any of these parades, other than to walk along the back of the madding crowd and catch a glimpse here in there of the goings on. I don't exactly have to go out of my way, as the route always takes the parade within a five minute (if that) walk of my home.

For one of the Patriots celebrations, I did see Tom Brady and Bill Belichik going by on a Duck Boat. Brady waved in my direction. 

In 2013, when the Red Sox won the World Series, I was walking in the Boston Public Garden when the flatbed holding David Ortiz - for some reason, Big Papi wasn't riding in one of the Ducks - stopped directly in front of where I was walking. So I stopped, and over the fence, over the heads of fans lined up 10 deep, I sang along as Ortiz led the crowd in a chorus of Sweet Caroline, one of the Red Sox theme songs.

The one parade I'm sorry I missed was the 2004 blowout, when The Olde Towne Team won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. It was the Saturday before the election, and I was up in New Hampshire ringing doorbells for John Kerry. (At least Kerry won NH...)

Anyway, on parade morning, I worked my usual shift at St. Francis House, which is right off the parade route. A 15 second walk off it. And because SFH is embarking on a major reno project, they actual have some temporary space right on Tremont Street, along the route. The staff was invited to watch from there, and I could have tagged along. But I was tired. It was hot. And I felt like just going home and watching on TV.

Because the parade was not going to be going by for another 30 minutes after I finished up my shift, I was pretty sure that I would be able to cross Tremont Street and make my way home. But the crowd was way too deep, way too intense. I asked a couple of police officers if there was any possibility I could get through, and they looked at me as if I had two heads. (I only had one, and it was wearing a Celtics cap.)

So instead of walking directly home - which usually takes 10 minutes -  I had to walk 10 minutes to the Downtown Crossing T-station and take the T two stops. To get to Downtown Crossing, I walked along Washington Street, which runs parallel to the Tremont (on the parade route). It was mobbed with fans, all decked out in green, making their way to the parade, and I had to fight the crowds to get into the station.

I hadn't anticipated needing my T-Pass or a credit card, so I had neither on me. Fortunately, I did have four bucks, so I was able to get a ticket (alas, not my half-price geezer fare!) and a water, which was a good thing, as the platform, while not that crowded, was sweltering and I feared that I was going to pass out.

When I got off my train, the platform was crowded with fans who'd watched the parade from TD Garden and were heading home. Charles Street was also full of fans making their ways to, or retreating from, the parade. I couldn't tell which was which, as there were plenty of folks walking in both directions.

The T was running slow, and by the time I made it to my place, it had taken my 40 minutes. 

I did catch a distant parade glimpse, as from the corner of Charles and Beacon, I saw one of the Ducks and an explosion of green and white confetti.

Once home, I got to watch plenty of the parade from the cool and quiet of my den. 

While I'm glad I wasn't there sweating, overheating, feeling faint, being jostled by the crowd, I was happy that I did get to see so many of the fans as I made my way home. 

Sure, there were a ton of young people - teens, twenties - but there were plenty of families, too. There were even a few olds. Everyone seemed so excited, so joyful. Everyone - and I do mean everyone - was wearing something green. It looked like a warm-weather St. Patrick's Day Parade. Many had on newly minted championship gear. Some were holding signs. But what struck me the most was how diverse the crowd was.  Certainly by age, but mostly by race. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. And the crowd seemed to cut across the class spectrum as well. There were folks who looked like working stiffs, folks who looked like finance bros. 

Even where I was - out of the thick of it - occasional chants broke out.

While I was watching on TV, the crowd seemed to burst spontaneously into Sweet Caroline (which, though most closely associated with the Red Sox, has become something of an all-purpose Boston sports song - along with Dirty Water and Shipping Up To Boston). This was on Boylston Street, where my niece Caroline was watching the parade from, but the singing didn't take place where she was standing.

It was just plain fun to watch the parade, even on TV. It looked like such a wonderfully exuberant blast. 

One-million+ people, and there were only two arrests. Amazing! It's not like there wasn't any drinking. My niece Molly works along the early part of the parade route, opposite Boston City Hall, and she reported that after the parade passed by, the area was loaded with discarded nips. But mostly the crowd was friendly and, if crazy, remarkably well-behaved. 

The joy-fest is ongoing.

Yesterday, while taking a walk in Back Bay, a good proportion - maybe one-quarter - of the people I saw were still wearin' o' the green. As I neared Dick's Sporting Goods, the proportion grew - conservatively - to 99.9999%. And there were a ton of people lined up to get into Dick's. I asked one of the folks what they were waiting for. It was to see Al Horford, at 38, the Old Man of the Celtics team, and a fan favorite. (He's mine.) 

I asked the fan to extend my congratulations to Al, and he assured me he would.

Things should get back to normal now. 

On the sports front, we'll be fretting about why the mediocrity which is the 2024 Red Sox has suddenly gotten kinda-sorta good, taking series from both the Yankees and the Phillies (the teams with the best records in the MLB). 

Those who closely follow the Patriots will be wondering how long they'll be wandering in the championship desert, which seems to many to be quite unfair, given that they've only won six Super Bowls since the turn of the century and the expectation that there will be more has verged on entitlement. 

Bruins fans will be counting down the days until the first puck drop, hoping that some Celtics magic rubs off on them.

And the sportswriters and the fans are already speculating about the Celtics repeating in 2025 and beyond. Could this be another Bird-McHale-Parish era? Could this - gulp! - be another Russell-era team. (They won 11 NBA titles.)

Me? I'll be wearing my Celtics cap for a bit longer, then reverting to the Red Sox. 

But I do think I'll be paying more attention to the C's the next time around.

The Celtics are a very likeable team, and I'm likeabling them quite a lot. 

Maybe next year I'll suck it up and watch the celebration up close and personal. After all, I do so love a parade. 

And I thought driving to Lowell was a supercommute

My career in technology product marketing was split between companies in Cambridge, where I could commute via public transpo, and companies in the burbs. Where I - ugh - had to drive.

Commuting even to the near suburbs was a drag, especially to Burlington, where I worked on 128, where I got caught in the always-ugly Route 3 and Route 93 chokepoints. But pyschologically, commuting to Lexington (about 12 miles) and Burlington (roughly 18 miles) wasn't all that awful. Lexington? Piece of cake. Theoretically, I could have walked it. (Theoretically.)

But I also spent time further out. Andover (23 miles or so, for two-and-a-half miserable years). Lowell (30 miles or so, for two-and-a-half miserable years). 

These commutes were ghastly, and not just because of the drive. The truth was that, when I got to work, I was seldom happy to be there. Both were ghastly experiences, and how I lasted two-and-a-half years each at these companies now seems unfathomable to me. Although I did make good friends at both of these stops, which I guess is what made those tenures fathomable.)

When I commuted to Lowell, I had to get a dental guard, as I found that, as I neared the office, I started to grind my teeth in time to whatever was on the radio. 

And one night, when I was returning home from Andover, when I'd stayed a bit late and was heading out at 7:30 or so, I started driving the wrong way on the road that was going to put me on Route 93. Fortunately, there was no one coming my way, and I was able to course correct. I'm pretty sure this was a virtual teeth-grinding episode.

All of my suburban commutes were supposedly reverse one, going against the traffic that was heading into Boston. But while heading out to work was quasi-reverse, coming back into Boston was always a cluster. 

I pretty much learned every alternate route, every side trip, every back road. This may not have trimmed any time off the commute, but had the benefit that I was usually moving. As opposed to sitting in traffic on one main route waiting to merge into traffic on the next main route. 

But my commuting trials and tribulations were nothing compared to what Kaitlin Jorgenson goes through. Her commute is 544 miles, which is more than the combined mileage of all four of my suburban commuting stints.

For the past 12 months, Jorgenson has commuted by plane every other week to her job at the Scott J. Aveda Hair Salon in the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Source: CNBC)

Jorgenson used to live in Brooklyn, but she moved to Charlotte to be with her BF after her landlord jumped her rent by $700 a month. Another compelling reason was that after the pandemic, she came to the realization that she "wanted to go somewhere [she] could be closer to nature and have more space...that didn't cost a fortune."

But after a long time in NYC, she'd forged a great career for herself and didn't want to have to start over, building a new client base. Not to mention that stylists in NYC make a lot more money than they do in Charlotte, NC.

For Jorgenson, commuting four-plus hours by plane twice a month was a much easier pill to swallow than spending more to rent the same 400-square-foot apartment she’d outgrown — and lose the clients she had spent a decade working with.

She was able to switch her schedule, which was only three days to begin with, to every other week. (She now works 12-hour days.) And fortunately, she has a friend with a spare room near her job that she rents. All in all, even with plane fare, etc., her expenses are $2,000 less per month than when she was living in Brooklyn. 

Jorgenson is a super-supercommuter, but there are a lot of folks out there with a daily commute of 90 minutes or more, and the numbers have grown since Covid-19, when:

Companies embraced flexible work models, and people fled major cities.

They may have fled the major cities, but that's where a lot of the jobs remain. So they spend a lot of time getting there and back.

“It isn’t a new concept, think about all the businessmen in suits who fly with a single briefcase for one-day meetings,” says Jorgenson. “I just think the younger generation is learning how to make supercommuting work for our lives and ambitions.”

And I had a hard-enough time un-supercommuting to Lowell and Andover. 

Reservations 'R' Us. There's gold in them thar rezy hills.

Back in the day, when I dined out - with some frequency - at fancy restaurants, I don't remember ever having much of a problem getting a reservation. Maybe I wasn't going to any "it!" places. Maybe at the time, it just wasn't that big a deal. 

Using a phone - maybe even the your hotel room - you called, as we so quaintly did before there was Resy and Open Table, and made your reservation. And if they couldn't accommodate you at the time and place you wanted, you just moved on to the next place on your list. 

These days, when I do go out for dinner (lunch doesn't tend to be a problem) at a nice place (which isn't all that often), sometimes I can't get a reservation. Again, on to the next.

I am not, of course, doing much dining out in NYC.

Yes, Boston does have restaurants that people desperately want to go to. I'm just not one of those people. New restaurant? Meh. Michelin star? This is Boston: as if! But even if it were to come to pass that we got a Michelin star, I'd take a pass.

Now that I'm an old, I'm no longer as adventurous as I once was. If I'm dining out, it's typically at one of handful of old favorites. Guess I'm just one big dining yawn.

But in NYC, folks are a lot more committed to seeing and being seen than they are in Boston. People in general eat out more often than in other cities. And in general it's harder to score a reservation at a place that's hot, or just got a great review, or was awarded a star, or where the A-list folks committed to seeing and being seen have been spotted (and there are a disproportionate number of them in NYC). At such places, it can be nearly impossible to find a table. 

At some spots, when blocks of reservations are released, they're snapped up immediately. Some restaurants set aside a couple of tables for walk-ins, but if you're a nano-second too late, you may be informed that there's a three hour wait. (As if.)

The difficulty of getting a NYC restaurant reservation has given rise to a new entrepreneurial opportunity. 

To sidestep the reservation scrum, particularly at a hundred and fifty of the city’s buzziest restaurants, a new squad of businesses, tech impresarios, and digital legmen has sprung up, offering to help diners cut through the reservation red tape, for a price. In the new world order, desirable reservations are like currency; booking confirmations for 4 Charles Prime Rib, a clubby West Village steakhouse, have recently been spotted on Hinge and Tinder profiles. (Source: The New Yorker)

(Side note: at this point, The New Yorker article did a bit on the most exclusive NY restaurants by decade. The Sign of the Dove was their pick for the seventies. Well, during the seventies, my husband and I had an incredibly dreadful lunch there. Our table was the size of a dinner plate, or maybe, if I'm being generous, a charger. And all these decades later, I can still taste the vichyssoise, which we immediately renamed "cream of rock salt." We probably had a reservation, which we made by phone.)

Among the businesses spawned by the reservation "crisis" is something called Appointment Trader, "an online marketplace for people to buy and sell reservations." They're not just in the restaurant rez biz, they'll book shopping appointments and doctors' appointments. (Where were they when we needed them for vaccine appointments in 2021?) Anyway, people who want to make a little coin sign on to be sellers, and away they go. "Appointment Trader cleared almost six million dollars in reservations" last year, and the owner/founder rakes in a commission of 20-30 percent. 

One of the sellers is Alex Eisler, an applied math and computer science major at Brown, who:

Regularly uses fake phone numbers and e-mail addresses to make reservations. When he calls Polo Bar, he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do different accents. I have to act like a girl sometimes.” He switched into a bad falsetto: “I’m, like, ‘Hiiii, is it possible to book a reservation?’ I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Which just about covers Brown tuition.

Another seller, who claims to have made $80K last year, said:

“It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Hmmm. Maybe I gotta get off doom-scrolling on Twitter, trying to figure out when the end of the world as we know it will occur, and start making some NYC dinner reservations. 

What am I waiting for? LFG!

And the winner is...

The twenty-first century has been very kind to Boston's sports fans. This century, no city has more championships across the four major professional sports (football, baseball, hockey, basketball).

In 2002, the Patriots won their first of six Super Bowls. They're tied with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most SB wins. For those of us who remember when the hapless, lowly Patriots were nicknamed the Patsies, these six wins are nothing short of astounding. 

When it comes to football, I'm admittedly a frontrunner of a fan. I only started avidly watching the Pats when they started winning, and mostly stopped watching when they folded.

But when it comes to baseball, well, I'm a better or worse kind of fan and, as much as I might piss and moan about the Olde Towne Team, I watch at least part of every game. As I've said many times, I may have been baptized a Catholic, but I was born a Red Sox fan.

If all they'd done was win the World Series in 2004 - after an 86 year wait - that would have been plenty enough for me. But they did it again in 2007, in 2013, in 2018. (Sure, it sucks to see them mired in mediocrity, as they surely are despite just beating the Yankees and the Phillies (the two best teams in baseball) two out of three. But we'll always have those four great World Series wins, none greater than 2004.)

Not having won the Stanley Cup since 1972, in the days of Esposito and Orr, the Bruins won it all in 2011. (I don't watch a lot of games, but I do follow the Bruins. I keep up by reading the sports pages. I always know where they are in the standings, and tune in once the playoffs start.)

And in 2008, the Celtics won the NBA Championship - the 17th in their stellar history. That year, they won on June 17th. 

And this year, damned if they didn't do it again this year on June 17th. Their 18th banner will be flying over the TD Garden, putting them one ahead of the (hiss-boo) LA Lakers as the team with the most NBA Championships.

As with the Bruins, I don't watch a lot of games, but I do follow the Celts. I keep up by reading the sports pages. I always know where they are in the standings, and tune in once the playoffs start. This year, I even went out and bought a cap. (My husband was a big Celtics/basketball fan, and when he was alive, I watched a ton of games.)

This edition of the Celtics has been a fun team to watch. Bonus points that their coach is a local kid who grew up in Rhode Island. 

After a disastrous, blown-out performance in the the fourth game, it was comforting that the Celtics - up 3-1 - had a reasonable lead through game five, so I could watch without experiencing heart palpitations and an anxiety attack. 

I watched wearing my cap, and for extra good luck, I brought my $3, grocery-store, St. Patrick's Day but still alive shamrock into the den to hang with me.

My cap, my shamrocks: looked like it worked out.

What's most enjoyable about having your team playing for the championship of their sport is how it brings people together.

For the last couple of weeks, the Celtics have been the talk of the town. Lots of Celtics gear out there, lots of wearin' of the green. You pass a couple of folks standing around, and they're talking Celtics. You go into a store: Celtics talk. You're waiting on the corner for the walk sign to pop, how about those Celtics!

Turn on the news, and the Celtics story leads. And most of the newspeople are wearing something green. 

I've been wearing my cap when I've worked lunch at St. Francis House (the homeless shelter where I volunteer; if you don't wear a ballcap, you have to wear a lunch-lady hairnet, which makes everyone look like a nutter), and the guests have gotten a kick out of it. Lots of the staff and some of the guests have been been decked out for the Celtics, too. 

As have the Make Way for Ducklings ducklings statues, who've been wearing Celtics shirts since the finals began. The ice cream truck outside the Public Garden, where the ducklings live, has been flying a Celtics banner. There's a giant sign hanging from the Massachusetts State House bearing the Celtics' slogan: It's Different Here! (Whatever that means: it's different everywhere. But I guess there is all that history, all those banners. Bob Cousy. Bill Russell. Satch Sanders. The Jones Boys. Tommy Heinsohn. John Havlicek Dave Cowens. Cedric Maxwell. Dennis Johnson. ML Carr. Larry Bird. Robert Parish. Kevin McHale. Bill Walton. Ray Allen. Kevin Garnett. Paul Pierce. Rajon Rondo And now, Jaylen Brown, Jason Tatum, and (yea for old guys) Al Horford.)

It's just plain fun to have a winner, to have that buzz, to have the parade.

No date yet for the Duck Boats to roll through Boston. We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave, and the city really doesn't need one million fans - many of them drunk out of their minds - raging around Boston when it's 98 in the shade.

I might walk out to see a bit of the parade, which I usually do, given that it passes within a five-minute walk from where I live. The next week or so, everyone around here will be on a high. (Wish Jim were here to enjoy it...)

Congratulations, Boston Celtics! Greatest basketball franchise ever! 

How fun when the winner is your guys!!! 

Belongs in a landfill? Take that back!

45 Items That Belong to the Landfill and Not in Your Apartment

The article by Amanda Stokes was clickbait. So naturally I clicked on the bait. 

As I expected from the title, it was a snarky list of out-of-favor - dated, old school - items that, because they are so unforgivably out-of-favor (dated, old school), you should immediately pluck out of your home.

The list itself was a mish-mosh of things of which the writer says "it's best to dispose of them in the landfill rather than keep them."

Some of the items are not anything that anyone in the 21st century has ever had in their homes. Certainly not anyone who's clicking on this snarky article.

Seriously, "synthetic fruit?" My grandmother - who died in 1979 at the age of 97 - had a bowl of waxed fruit on her dining room table, and you don't get much more synthetic than wax. But does anyone still display "synthetic fruit?"

The table cloth on that dining room tale was lacey, so naturally I associate this design with Nanny, who probably first put a lacey table cloth on her dining room table when my grandparents bought their house on Winchester Avenue in 1912. (A version of lace-curtain Irish, I guess). But somehow, the writer associates lacey table cloths - "the highest form of outdated design in this modern era" - with the 1990's. Am I missing something here? I don't recall that these were on trend in the 1990's. More likely the 1890's.  

I'm with the writer on doilies, but when was the last time anyone saw a doily? For me, it was probably at Nanny's in 1974, which was the year she moved in with my Aunt Margaret. (Reaching further back, there were plenty of doilies in my house when I was little, but my mother eventually retired them.)

Stokes also despises  damask wallpaper. Now, I'm not big on damask wallpaper, but if someone has, say, an old Victorian home, and wants to keep things authentic, what's wrong with damask wallpaper? (And while we're at it, why not let the Victorian homeowner deploy a lacey tablecloth?)

But my favorite items that I suspect no longer exists in nature are fuzzy toilet covers and rugs. Yes, these items are ultra-gross - especially when the cover is covering the actual toilet seat and not just the lid. Foul and fetid! If these are still being used anywhere, I'm guessing it's in the home of someone both ancient and without Internet access. So no one who needs the advice to jettison these grossities is going to see that advice.

What else does Stokes want you to relegate to landfill?

Mason jars. Thomas Edison lightbulbs. Tiffany bed lamps. Glass blocks. 

What's it to you, sister? 

I'm with Stokes on popcorn ceilings (ugh) and mirrored-anything (ceilings, light fixtures, furniture). But she also has it in for mirrors with gold frames. I guess like the one in my living room that I got when Nanny moved out of her house. 

And for some reason, Stokes doesn't want folks to use strainers or mats in their kitchen sinks. Huh?

And she sets up things that aren't even things. As in don't use a plastic bucket for your kitchen wastebasket. Get an actual plastic wastebasket. Frankly, this sounds like something the writer saw in the apartment of a bad boyfriend. Or maybe of the guy she ended up marrying. 

Whether he's the bad boyfriend or the hubby, woe betide the hapless schnook who gifts Amanda Stokes flowers that have long stalks. Or - worse - a fern!

Interesting, given that the article's title refers to "your apartment," Stokes includes a lot of structural no-nos that, if you're renting, you're stuck with. Tile kitchen counters. Wood paneling. (Honey, I have gorgeous 100+ year old paneling in my living room and it's beyond.) Conversation pits. Built in "soft furniture" in a kitchen eating nook. Artificial fireplaces. 

She's also anti- plenty of things that aren't structural that you can get-rid-of-yourself: Landlines. Alarm clocks. Stereo systems.

While I never use it, I still have a landline, which I keep because it's bundled with cable, and nearly free. Plus it's useful to put it on forms when I make donations, so that any follow up calls just float into the answering machine I never look at.

I like having my alarm clock so that, when I wake up and want to know what time it is, I just need to look at my alarm clock. And while I don't have a stereo system, isn't vinyl making a comeback? Lucky ducks who hung onto their old Bose.

Tuscan kitchens. Window valances. Ikea furniture. Leather seats. Computer chairs. 

Platform beds. (I used to have one, and I liked having the drawers underneath it. Excellent storage.)

I replaced that platform bed with another style of bed that Amanda Stokes has fatwa'd: the sleigh bed. Admittedly, the sleigh bed depicted in her article was pretty ugly, while mine is quite nice. It's gorgeous cherry wood and came from Crate & Barrel, by way of my sister Trish who got it by way of my sister Kath. Okay, so Trish and Kath, for their own reasons, didn't want a sleigh bed. I think Kath upped to a king, while Trish decided she wanted something more modern. Anyway, why hate on sleigh beds?

The worst aspect of the article is the repeated suggestion - picked up from the catchy click-baitish title - that anything you don't like should be sent to landfill. 

What. A. Terrible. Suggestion.

Anything cloth - like those ghastly fluffy toilet covers, those lacey tablecloths, those poor window valances - can be dropped off at a cloth recycle spot, where anything not usable is recycled for rags.

Those Mason jars and plastic fruit? That alarm clock. That synthetic fruit. There may be a buyer at Goodwill!

There are plenty of people in desperate need of furniture - think of those transitioning from homelessness - who would be delighted to have that sleigh bed or Tiffany bedlamp. 

Sheesh. Why would anyone ever suggest that perfectly good items get dumped at the dump and make their way into landfill.

Belongs in a landfill? Take that back!

Sheesh. 

This has got my stomach in knots. (Another AI downside...)

On the crime continuum, it's hard to come up with anything worse than the sexual abuse of children. And it's one area where I'm afraid technology, i.e., the Internet, has made things worser. 

Yes, there was plenty of child abuse and kiddie porn before there was the Internet, but the Internet (for all the good that has come of it) makes it easier for evil-doers to find children to prey on, and it makes it a whole lot easier to find pornography involving children - and to find fellow consumers of CSAM (chid sexual abuse material). The ease of finding these sordid images, the ease of finding so many others with the same predilection, also normalizes sex with children. Someone who thought he was the lone weirdo interested in CSAM finds that he's not alone. Instead, there's a big old permission structure out there inviting people to partake.

While I'm not sure where and how people acquired CSAM back in the pre-Internet days - did they lurk around dark alleys? where their euphemisms used in ads that let buyers know what they were buying? - I'm pretty sure it was more difficult to find it, more difficult to find those others.

And then there was the Internet...

A personal side story: When I was a kid, the boy next door was smart, handsome, and funny. In terms of age, he fell between me and my brother Tom, and we were both on pretty friendly terms with him. (There were a lot of boys in my neighborhood - one family had 4 boys to 1 girl; another had 6 boys to their one girl; another famiy had 7 boys, and no girls. While my best friends were girls, with whom I played jacks, dolls, and jumprope, I also played baseball, cowboys & Indians, and GI's vs. Nazis with boys. Some games, like DONKEY, were co-ed.)

The boy next door was something of an exotic. His family were the only Protestants on our street. Protestant aside, there was always something "off" about him. He was a smart aleck, but he was also sneaky and a phoney around adults. My father couldn't stand him, dubbing him "Eddie Haskell" after Wally Cleaver's smarmy wiseguy friend on Leave It To Beaver. 

Fast forward a bunch of decades, and wasn't "Eddie Haskell" arrested and imprisoned (for a decade or so) for possession of CSAM. The material had been downloaded from the Internet, and was found on his harddrive when he brough his computer in for repair. 

My father would have been rip-shit, but not surprised. 

I did ask the youngest of my sibs whether he had ever done anything to them, but he hadn't. But it still gives me the shivers to think that this creep was just next door (and just next door in our neighborhood meant about 5 yards away, if that). 

Not that everything about CSAM isn't horrendous, but the most horrendous thing is, of course, that real children were sexually abused in its making. All those little innocents...

But now, the world is being flooded by CSAM "created by artificial intelligence. 

Over the past year, new A.I. technologies have made it easier for criminals to create explicit images of children. Now, Stanford researchers [at the Stanford Internet Observatory] are cautioning that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit that acts as a central coordinating agency and receives a majority of its funding from the federal government, doesn’t have the resources to fight the rising threat. (Source: NYTimes)

And a big part of that rising threat is child pornography is created by AI. 

A.I.-generated images of CSAM are illegal if they contain real children or if images of actual children are used to train data, researchers say. But synthetically made ones that do not contain real images could be protected as free speech, according to one of the [Stanford] report’s authors.

There's a rapidly growing amount of this stuff out there already, and legislation and the content platforms keeping up with this new threat and outlawing it or, in the case of the patforms, ferreting it out.

Because whether the kids in the pictures and videos are real or not, harm does come to real children even when the images are AI-generated. 

On a single day earlier this year, a record one million reports of child sexual abuse material flooded the federal clearinghouse. For weeks, investigators worked to respond to the unusual spike. It turned out many of the reports were related to an image in a meme that people were sharing across platforms to express outrage, not malicious intent. But it still ate up significant investigative resources.

That trend will worsen as A.I.-generated content accelerates, said Alex Stamos, one of the authors on the Stanford report.

“One million identical images is hard enough, one million separate images created by A.I. would break them,” Mr. Stamos said.

The center for missing and exploited children and its contractors are restricted from using cloud computing providers and are required to store images locally in computers. That requirement makes it difficult to build and use the specialized hardware used to create and train A.I. models for their investigations, the researchers found.

The organization doesn’t typically have the technology needed to broadly use facial recognition software to identify victims and offenders. Much of the processing of reports is still manual.

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

Image source: Washington Post

The Golden Memoir Society? As if...

I have no idea how or why it appeared, but a month or so ago, an ad popped up promising the Gift of Your Parent's Voice. The gift was going to come from something called the Golden Memoir Society. And what popped up was actually a schedule. You pick a time and date and then you spend $199 - the only payment option is PayPal - and someone from the "society" will spend 45 minutes talking to your parents.

We record interviews with mothers and fathers, telling the story of their family's life - in their voice - so everyone can listen to them again and again! You will receive the completed MP3 within 24 hours after the call is conducted. (Source: Calendly)

Although he's been dead from over 50 years, I'd give anything to have 45 minutes worth of my father's voice telling stories. He was an excellent, colorful story teller with a wonderful sense of humor. Even after all these years, I can still conjure up his voice in my head, and it never fails to put a smile on my face. 

I'd love to hear some of his funny stories. Or some of the funny stories told by his best friend, Spike, who was a professional-level raconteur. One of the saddest moments of my life was at my father's funeral when I heard someone sobbing a few pews back. I turned and saw that it was Spike. This was before friends and family told stories at Catholic funerals, but I know if it had been the custom back then, Spike would have rallied and told some good ones. 

One of my favorites was the one about the time when the two of them went to a recruitment event, held at a downtown Worcester hotel, for a job selling vacuum cleaners door to door. This was during the Depression. They were just kids. But they were laughing so hard at the demonstration of the vacuum cleaner's power - which including running the vac up and down a giant fake thermometer and showing how well the vac suctioned the red liquid - that they ended up trying to bolt out of the room, only to find the door locked. Needless to say, they didn't get the job, but they did get another one going door to door giving out baked bean samples. 

Anyway, I'd love hearing my father tell 45 minutes worth of stories. 

And there are some questions I'd like to ask him, maybe even some serious ones, about the death of his father when he was eleven, about meeting my mother, about what he would rather have done for work than what he ended up doing. (He was promoted from the shop floor of a fine wire factory to become a salesman.) There are other things I wish I'd asked him when I had the chance. 

But what did I know? I was just a kid (14) when he first developed kidney disease, and not much more than a kid (a few weeks past 21) when he died.

I don't have the same desire to hear my mother's voice, which I can conjure up as easily as I can my father's. 

Part of this is the cold hard fact that my mother was nowhere near the storyteller that my father was. But mostly it's because I knew my mother as an adult. I was 51 when she died, and we were pretty close. I'd had 30 years more conversations with her than I had with my father. There wasn't all that much that I needed to know. 

Still, there are some questions I wish I knew the answer to, but they're so painful, I don't think I ever would have asked them. (Most of them are around the death of my newborn, perfectly healthy sister Margaret, my parents' first child. This event haunted my mother; it haunted our family. I would have liked to know more about her feelings, about my father's, too. About how they both coped. Interesting, I spent the night with her before she went for a heart procedure, and I almost brought up the topic then, but something held me back. Why inflict pain by asking what my grandmother's reaction was to Margaret's death? I'm pretty sure she would have blamed my mother. Everything bad that happened to anyone in the family had to be someone's fault, and my poor mother - the oldest in her family - was the frequent repository of Grandma's need to blame. Anyway, I was with her in the doctor's office reviewing the results of her procedure when she had a major heart attack. She spent the final two weeks of her life in the ICU. Needless to say, we didn't spend much time strolling down any memory lanes that weren't upbeat ones.)

But I digress.

To get back to the Golden Memoir Society. 

I have two major questions.

1. Who wants to outsource the task of talking to your parents, or grandparents, or sibs, or other relations, or friends? Isn't this something you should be doing on your own? Why miss out on this opportunity? And, since this is your loved one, there won't be a time limit. No paltry 45 minutes. Plus, if you've ever interviewed someone, you know that an answer can always open up a new line of questioning. And these off-script meanders always make the interview more valuable. Is the Golden Memoir Society interviewer going to know what's worth exploring and what's a dead end? I think not.
2. Then there's the mystery element to this enterprise. I couldn't find any info anywhere on them. No website, no social media, no reviews. No names. (Is the interviewer a human or an AI?) Just an ask to fork over $199 via PayPal, and give up your loved one's phone number. Oh, yeah, and please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting. Even if for some reason you decide to outsource the interview with your loved one, do you want to blindly give out their phone number and provide a few helpful details? I'm absolutely the suspicious type, and this one screams SCAM to me. All that glitters isn't necessarily golden, and that includes memoir societies.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't mind having 45 minutes worth of my father's voice...That would be a real gift. Just wish there was some way for someone to give it to me.

Let them eat cereal!

Not that I haven't had more than a few cereal suppers. Just a few weeks back, I had oatmeal doctored up with blueberries, dried cranberries, raisins, pecans, and a pinch of cinnamon. I may have thrown a few chocolate chips in there while I was at it.

Oatmeal is my occasional fall/winter supper go-to. If I did a cereal dinner during the spring/summer - which would be rare - it would be Shredded Wheat or Cheerios, and whatever fresh fruit's around. In an emergency: raisins. 

So nothing wrong, once in a while, with answering 'What's for dinner?' with 'Cereal!'

Still, it was spectacularly wrong-footed for Kellogg CEO Gary Pilnick to suggest that stressed out consumers cope with rising grocery prices by putting a cereal meal on for dinner. 

Pilnick posed buying cereal for dinner to save money on groceries in an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Feb. 21. He was responding to a question regarding how high food prices are and how more than 11% of disposable consumer income goes toward purchasing it, according to the most recent data available at the U.S. Department of Agriculture....

“The cereal category has always been quite affordable and it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure,” the cereal company’s CEO said. (Source: Today)

Cereal is a great "destination?" Seriously?

It's one thing for me to do cereal when I'm too tired to come up with anything easier, quicker, or better. Quite another when it's a struggling family with growing kids to feed. Cereal's the destination for breakfast. Cereal's a snack destination for a high-energy kid with a hollow leg. It shouldn't be the regular diet for anyone's family.

Pilnick makes millions of dollars a year. I'm guessing he's not putting a grocery-budget-stretcher dinner of Rice Krispies in front of his kids. 

“If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable,” he added. “We talk about making sure that we have the right pack at the right price in the right place. So having a different sized pack that’ll have a different price point, that’ll take some pressure off the consumer while they’re shopping. So, those are some of the things that we’re doing. But, in general, the cereal category is a place that a lot of folks might come to because the price of a bowl of cereal with milk and with fruit is less than a dollar. So you can imagine why a consumer under pressure might find that to be a good place to go.”

And how does "having a different sized pack that'll have a different price point...take some pressure off?"

That different price point, that different sized pack, means paying less and getting less by paying more per portion. And it doesn't do a damn thing to offset hunger. We can't afford the family-sized box, kids, so we're using smaller bowls tonight.

Not to mention that so many cereals are full of unrefined carbs and tons of sugars, and that some of Kellogg's brands are not especially good for you. Okay, they're not responsible for Lucky Charms. That would be General Foods. But I don't care how much milk you pour on it, how much fresh fruit you chop in the bowl, there's no way that Apple Jacks are any damned good for you. 

In the full CNBC interview that aired, Pilnick was asked about “the potential” for his cost-cutting solution to “land the wrong way.”

“It's landing really well right now,” he answered. “Over 25% of our consumption is outside the breakfast occasion. A lot of it’s at dinner and that occasion continues to grow. Cereal for dinner is something that is probably more on trend now and we would expect to continue as that consumer is under pressure.”

Ah, cereal isn't just a destination. It's an occasion.  

I'm guessing that poor folks have been making plenty of cereal-based meals since forever, and that, for them, it's not a destination, it's not an occasion, it's a way to fill empty bellies.

Food costs are sky high. I'm shopping (mostly) for one, and I'm always doing a double take when I see how little you get, even when you're paying a lot. I can only imagine what it's like doing grocery shopping when you're on a tight budget and/or food stamps. Especially if you're shopping in a food desert where a lot of what might be on the shelf is sugared up, poor nutrition cereals from the likes of Kellogg's.

Maybe there are a few things that Kellogg's could be doing to help consumers - lower prices by spending less on coming up with more unhealthful products and bait-and-switch packaging concepts - but asking consumers to eat more cereals sure has a Marie Antoinette ring to it, doesn't it?

Let them eat cereal!

You got a know when to hold 'eme, know when to fold 'em

Gambling is a big no-no in sports, a big NO-NO when players (or those with insider info on things like player injuries) are implicated in betting scandals. 

Baseball had a recent brush with a gambling scandal when Shohei Ohtani's interpreter was caught siphoning money out of Ohtani's bank account to pay off gambling debts. MLB breathed a sigh of relief that Ohtani himself - the league's super-most superstar - wasn't doing any of the gambling. 

In basketball, the Toronto Raptors' Jontay Porter recently received a lifetime ban for not just betting on NBA games while he was playing in the G League (basketball's minor league), but - far worse - providing bettors with confidential info and limiting the amount of time he was on the court  while playing in an actual NBA game. 

The scheme was  discovered when sportsbooks (legal bookies like DraftKings and FanDuel) picked up on some irregularities on the over/under on Porter's stats in a couple of games. Porter could obviously exercise some control over his performance by getting himself taken out of a game for a spurious injury. 

The NBA's investigation found that Porter revealed information about his own health to a known sports bettor ahead of a March 20 game against the Sacramento Kings. Another bettor privy to the information placed an $80,000 same-game parlay bet that featured unders on Porter's statistics and would win $1.1 million, according to the NBA. Porter played three minutes before leaving the game with an illness. The bet, which was placed at DraftKings, was not paid. (Source: ESPN)

Porter was also caught betting on NBA games through someone else's online betting account. In the 13 games he bet on (none of which he played in), he netted about $22K in winnings.

$22K?

Jontay Porter isn't one of the big ballers. He's not Golden State's Steph Curry, who's making $52M this season. Or Jaylen Brown of the Celtics, who's got a five-year contract worth $304M.

Still, during his tenure in the league, when he bounced back and forth between the NBA and the G League, Porter earned several million dollars. And he was likely to earn over $2M next season with the Raptors. 

Sacrificing $2M for a measly $22K worth of betting wins (plus, whatever the bettors were slipping him for insider info) is not a very smart career move. Jontay Porter is only 24, so he has plenty of time to figure out something else to do with his life. Or play in a European league or somewhere else. But where was he going to make the kind of money he stood to make, even as a second-tier player, in the NBA?

I'm sure it doesn't help his mood that his brother Michael, who's a year older, is having himself a pretty good NBA career with the Denver Nuggets, working off a multi-year contract worth between $172M and $210M. 

I don't imagine holiday gatherings chez Porter are joyfests.

Then there's the NBA and betting. Like all the professional sports leagues, the NBA works hand in glove with sportsbooks, making tons of dough off of the incessant betting opportunities that the sportsbooks offer. If you watch any professional sports on TV - and I mostly watch baseball - you're going to be inundated with ads for the sportsbooks, encouraging you to bet on anything and everything. 

And:

[NBA Commissioner Adam] Silver was the first major U.S. sports league commissioner to advocate for legalizing and regulating sports betting. 

But of course.

Which is not to say that the major leagues invite bettors to bet more and better. It's just that...This hand and glove-ness doesn't seem like all that great an idea.

Meanwhile, Jontay Porter is left to contemplate the hand he's dealt himself and look at the cards he's holding. Read 'em and weep, Jontay. Read 'em and weep. 

Ready for your closeup, Mr. Parisi?

The standards are different from one to the other, but if you want to run officially in one of the major marathons - Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Tokyo - you have to qualify. And everyone who wants to run doesn't get to run, even if they've completed another marathon in a qualifying time for their age group and gender. 

There are ways of getting around it, for Boston at least.

Local charities are awarded bib numbers - getting those bib numbers in itself is highly competitive - that they can give to runners who will raise money for them by running. Obviously, no one who's not at least a somewhat accomplished runner and/or pretty fit and/or a glutton for punishment is going to sign up to run 26.2 miles. But if you're willing and can raise the required amount of dough, you might be able to run Boston.

Even though it has a colossal number of runners (over 50,000), the New York City Marathon- which seems pretty cool, as the course takes you through all five boroughs - is one of the most difficult to get into. One path to getting a number for New York is entering a lottery. There aren't a lot of numbers available for lottery-ites. And this year, the New York Road Runners (which organizes the NYC Marathon) sent out 160,000 rejection emails.  

Even if it's part of an impersonal, mass rejection, getting turned down is never easy.

Why, this coming Saturday, the Savannah Bananas (a barnstorming baseball team; think basketball's Harlem Globetrotters of baseball) are playing a game at Fenway Park. Both my sister Trish and I put our names into the lottery hat for the opportunity to buy tickets to this game. And we were both rejected.

Oh, they tried to let us losers down easy:

Well, Friend... There's no easy way to say this... Your name was not one of the ones drawn to grab Banana Ball tickets.

No need to sugar coat it - there were WAY more people on the Ticket Lottery List than tickets available. We were hoping to see your name on the lucky list of randomly drawn folks, but it just wasn't in the cards right now. We know that this news is a bummer, but we still think you're a really, REALLY cool person. Tell you what... We will love you forever and always...WE PROMISE

Boo-hoo! I'm sure the Bananas were inundated by local baseball fans who, like Trish and I, are pretty much boycotting the Red Sox, but still like to take ourselves out to an occasional ball game.  Still, we were plenty bummed out. Rejection is painful.

If you're a reasonably good runner who wants to run New York, getting the turn down email is going to hurt. 

Like the Bananas, the New York Road Runners tried to let its huddled mass of losers down gently with an attempt at humor. In this case, using a picture of a prior year marthoner by the name of NICK (according to his singlet) giving the world a couple of finger guns. 

As it turns out, one of the rejectees was Nick Parisi, who was a bit taken aback when he saw that the rejection letter used his very own image, finger gunning at the finish of the 2023 New York City race - his very first marathon -  to tell him and 159,999 other runners that they were out of luck. 

And all of a sudden, one of the 159,999 rejected runners decided to create a meme out of it. And all of a sudden Negative Nick was a thing. 

The story has a happy ending for Parisi, though. The viral photo reached the NYRR marketing team, and they felt they had to make it up to him. NYRR CEO Rob Simmelkjaer showed up at Parisi’s club Front Runners NYC ...apologizing for the mix-up and offering him a guaranteed spot at the 2024 TCS New York City Marathon start line with the bib “Positive Parisi.” (Source: Running Magazine).

Parisi, by the way, is already running Berlin in September, so he'll probably be plenty tired if he also ends up doing NYC.  When he runs Berlin, he'll be doing so in honor of his mother, who died in 2022 from skin cancer - and raising money for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As a sign of good faith, the New York Road Runners will match the amount Parisi raises. 

Which I bet will be plenty after all of this. Serves them right. Kinda sorta stupid to use someone's picture without permission. Maybe they should have AI'd it. Of course, that would have meant the possibility of an AI screwup, and a picture of someone with eight fingers doing that gunning. (Too many digits seems to be a somewhat common AI tell.)

Anyway, I hope that Nick Parisi has a great run in Berlin, and an even better run in New York City. 

I'm sure he'll be ready for his next finish line closeup.