Is this guy what the Brits call a wanker?

Physicians in the UK don't make as much as docs in the US. Most of them work for the National Health Service (NHS), where a junior doctor may make as little as £35,000 a year - the equivalent of about $44K. Hard to imagine any doctor putting up with that here! (Salaries in general, across many professions, are lower in the UK.) But I don't believe that NHS doctors have to work crazy hours, and I do believe that they're allowed to moonlight, taking more lucrative gigs on their days off. 

But that apparently wasn't good enough for one fellow. 

Dr Daniel Coventry, 34, was supposed to be off work at the taxpayer's expense with a suspected virus but instead he was offering facial fillers, thread facelifts and anti-wrinkle jabs at a private clinic in Brighton. (Source: Daily Mail)

His grift was discovered for both reasons old-school - taking a suspicious amount of sick time - and predictably modern - bragging on social media. And it was enough to earn him a short-term suspension of his medical license for gross unprofessional misconduct. Covenry was sent to medical-world Coventry, as it were. 

He apologized for his unbecoming conduct "and confessed to blaming his behavior on NHS 'failing.'"

Amazingly, his initial defense was that he hadn't bothered to read the rules and regulation about side hustles, implying that this was somewhat the fault of the NHS for not doing a good enough job with onboarding new doctors.

Even if one hasn't read the rules and regulations, even if one pointed one's finger at one's employer for not making sure one knew these rules and regulations, how could anyone think lying about being sick and using the paid time off to work another job is the right thing to do? 

We're not talking about an occasional mental health day when you sit around reading and eating bonbons, or taking a nice, long walk to clear the cobwebs, or binge-watching Breaking Bad. We're talking about someone getting paid by the NHS to work with sick people, while also getting (better) paid for working with unsick folks who want to Botox their wrinkles into oblivion and get themselves some big old puffy Kardashian lips. And are willing and able to pay big bucks (big pounds?) out of pocket for the privilege.

Fortunately, Coventry - who is an Oxford-educated MD, thus at least reasonably intelligent - now claims to have seen the light.  

In a statement Coventry said he now accepted 'not having a leg to stand on' at the 2023 hearing and vowed in future to be 'toeing the line no matter what the policy is.' He also said he would 'err on the side of caution' if he was unwell at work in future and follow hospital rules on treating patients.

He explained: 'My attitude during that hearing was overly defensive and on reflection I am quite embarrassed about this. I think that the depth to which I value being a doctor led to an automatic desire to bat away criticism of my behaviour rather than accept responsibility for what is such an obvious error of judgement.

'During that hearing I focused too much on my perception of the failures of the trust [which runs the NHS] and not enough on my personal failure to familiarise myself with the rules of the trust. Whilst I believe that the trust could have done more to support me, I also believe that I should have done more to support myself and absolutely did bear the responsibility to do so.'

He added: 'The judgment was the beginning of my realisation that what I had done was serious and that labelling it merely a mistake from lack of knowledge of the rule was insufficient to remedy the situation.

He goes on to state that it was only being suspended that got him to recognize "just how poor my behaviour had been." And that he's taken the opportunity of the suspension for "personal growth," including taking a free online course on Medical Professionalism, which gave him a "better understanding"of dishonesty.

Seems quite weasel-wordy to me. Quite.

The guy's in his thirties and had to take a course in Medical Professionalism to learn what dishonesty is?

I don't know if the Brits use the word 'duh,' but 'duh.'

And I'm pretty sure Daniel Coventry, MD, is what the Brits would call a wanker. 

People are weird. And some make a living at it.

The Internet has unleashed all sorts of creativity. Some of it's non-monetized (e.g., Pink Slip), and some of it wildly money-making.

Oh, Matt Farley isn't wildly money-making. He's not up there with, say Kylie Jenner - or is it Kendall? - in terms of raking in oodles for being famous for being famous. Still, he's making about $200K a year by releasing thousands of nonsense songs on streaming platforms. So far, he's posted more than 24,000 songs, sometimes producing 50 a day. 

Matt Farley has released thousands of songs with the goal of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. (Source: NY Times)

For Brett Martin, who wrote the Times article, the anything his anybody could think to search for was his name. And, damned, if there isn't a song entitled "Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes."

Some of the songs Farley concocts name-check celebrities (or near celebrities like Martin, who shares his name with a former MLB player and an Australian squash player), and often pulls together tunes grouped according to themes. He releases them under pseudonyms - the Brett Martin song was from Papa Razzi and the Photogs.

Papa Razzi and the Photogs is only one of about 80 pseudonyms Farley uses to release his music. As the Hungry Food Band, he sings songs about foods. As the Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns, he sings the atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different-named girls to the prom and 500 that are marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies; albums devoted to sports teams in every city that has a sports team; hundreds of songs about animals, and jobs, and weather, and furniture, and one band that is simply called the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over.

While Farley has a lot going on, it's his scatalogical offerings, his "poop songs," that have proven the most lucrative. These are released under two names, the Toilet Bowl Cleaners and the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. With titles like "Butt Cheeks Butt Cheeks Butt Cheeks!”, “I Need a Lot of Toilet Paper to Clean the Poop in My Butt”, and "Poop In My Fingernails," Farley has made about $469K from plays on Spotify and other streaming platforms. 

While he doesn't bring in much per individual stream, when a number like "Poop In My Fingers" gets 4.4 million (and counting) streams on Spotify alone, it all adds up.

Farley, who lives in Danvers, Mass. and graduated from Providence College, uses the money he makes for his songs to "help fund his multiple other creative endeavors."

These include his work as a legit musician; a podcast that recaps Celtics game; and quirky movies starring friends and family, and himself, which he makes on a shoestring budget.

He's a big believer in the creative urge:

His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly.

Well, I'm all for creativity, but I'm not a believer in any way, shape or form that every idea deserves an airing. There are a lot of really terrible ideas out there.  

“If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop,” he said. “You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.”

Me? I'd be happy if people rejected the really terrible ones that are their very own. Maybe that would get them to stop.

Still, it's pretty amazing that Matt Farley, freelance oddball, is making a pretty good living off weird little ideas, and some really terrible songs about poop under fingernails. I guess it's no wonder that Pink Slip was never monetized. I've just got the wrong sort of creative mind.

There's more to Cambridge academia than Harvard and MIT

Ask anyone who lives in a downtown area of a big city: rats are one big existence bane.

Once in a while, at dawn or dusk, I spot them scurrying across a sidewalk, heading for cover in the bushes. Or slithering down a sewer. Once in a while, when I'm out walking, I come across a dead rat flattened on the pavement - and I utter a little atheist's prayer of thanks that there's one less of these nasty bastards out there marauding around.

Sometimes, when I'm in bed, I hear them rustling around in the trash. Not my trash, mind you. I'm the goody-two-slippers who gets up at the crack of dawn to take my garbage and recycle out. Alas, despite my regular texts, notes, and signs, not everyone in my building follows in my slippers. They bring their trash out the night before, leaving hours for rats to root through the their black plastic garbage bags. Not the special peppermint-infused, supposedly rat-proof white bags I buy on Amazon and leave out in the laundry room for everyone to use if they must take their trash out the night before. 

In the early hours of the a.m., when I'm bringing my trash out, I find the others' bags chewed open, the sidewalk strewn with eggshells, avocado peels and pits, apple cores. Sometimes, I pick it up; mostly I leave it for Blessed Brian of Unit One who takes care of it. 

I live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Boston, and there are rat traps - oblong-shaped black boxes set out and serviced by the city - all over the place: front gardens, back walks, up against walls, up against trees. 

When you're up against rats, you have to be vigilant. 

I've never seen a rat in this building -just on occasional mouse - but if I were to see one on the inside, the For Sale sign would be up on the outside within hours.

I. HATE. THEM.

So I was pleased to read about a recent two-day consortium, the Cambridge Rat Academy, "a gathering of the sharpest minds in rat-extermination, to plan the counteroffensive" against these noxious beasts. Attendees came "to learn how to hone their rat-fighting skills and brush up on the latest techniques for spotting and exterminating rodents."

“Rodents tend to be overlooked in general by everybody on every level,” said Robert Corrigan, a well-regarded consultant and the academy’s featured speaker. “That’s a problem, because the rodents are taking advantage of us. We’re just like, ‘Oh, put out some poison. Or just put out some traps. Or go get a guy.’ You need to say, ‘No, if we’re going to control rodents in our cities, we need depth.’”

Corrigan has led dozens of Rodent Academies and travels the country giving seminars on the latest techniques for rat mitigation, particularly as the industry moves away from using toxic chemicals as the go-to solution to the problem.

“It’s much more than pulling out a box of poison,” Corrigan said.

Rat prevention these days, he said, is about “integrated pest management,” or IPM, which encompasses all the nonpoison-related means available to keep rodents at bay. Think: landscaping that dissuades rats from building burrows, and sealing off foundations and exterior walls. (Source: Boston Globe)

My first thought was that Corrigan was "just" an exterminator who somewhere along the line figured out that there was more money in being and expert than being the guy who sets the traps. 

Well, turns out that Corrigan does have a pest control consulting business, which sure sounds like exterminator to me. But he's also a rodentologist with a PhD in entomology from Purdue. (A quick google, and I learn that entomology may sound buggy, but that "integrated pest management" falls under its mantle.)

Cambridge is one city that's been having some success wtih IPM. Reported rat sightings are down; rat killings are up. (Cambridge uses "smart boxes" that electrocute rats; I don't believe Boston's rat traps are all that smart.)

There's another approach to IPM, and that's a canine-based method from Unique Pest Management. UPM is based in DC, but they spend about a week each month in the Boston area with their trained ratters. UPM's Scott Mullaney brought one of his ratters, a Patterdale terrier to the Academy with a "kill count under her collar in the 'thousands.'" 

Once, he said, a team of three dogs killed 88 rats in three hours. 

I'm always thinking about getting a dog, but would never consider a ratter, cute and effective as they might be. What would I do if my cute, effective little ratter actually caught one.

Shudder, shudder, shudder to the nth. 

Meanwhile, I'm just happy to learn that there's more to Cambridge academia than Harvard and MIT.  

And more than happy to learn that the City of Boston has hired Bobby Corrigan to analyze our situation and make some recommendations. 

Cambridge Rat Academy. Boola boola! Sis-boom-ba!

Fun with words!

I recently saw a Washington Post column by Benjamin Dreyer which talked about words for obsolete actions or items that are still used, even though the actions and items are long gone. 

I suppose if you have a landline with a cradle and receiver, you could still hang up a phone, but are there still any rotary phones out there that you dial? Today, we hang up the phone by pressing a button - that's not really a button - or just waiting for the call to somehow disengage. We dial our smartphones via the keypad, but most of our calls (for those of us old school enough to actually talk on the phone) are placed by finding the contact and hitting the phone icon.

Dreyer also noted that, when we email, we routinely "cc" someone. One of those c's makes sense. The one that stands for copy. But the c that stands for carbon? Us old geezers will remember inserting a sheet of carbon paper between an original page and the copy, and rolling it into the typewriter.

He also pointed out that "we listen to podcasts, though who even owns an iPod anymore?" And that Microsoft Word uses the icon of a floppy disk for its Save function. (Some of us remember a time before there was any storage on a PC, and that, if you wanted to save a file, you saved it to a floppy disk.)

The Dreyer article got me scrounging around looking for other examples, and Merriam-Webster came through. They include carbon copy, dial, and hang up on their list, and note that there was something quite satisfying about hanging up a phone by slammig it down on the receiver. Alas, the only smartphone equivalent is hurling the phone against the wall.

We still use the term soap opera, which came from the time when soap manufacturers sponsored most of the overwrought, over-dramatic series broadcast on radio. Soap operas made the leap to TV, and they live there still. I don't watch any, but I understand that, while sponsors may include a laundry or dishwashing y, but are just as likely to run ads for a range of products and services. (Family aside on soap operas. My mother didn't listen to or watch soaps, but my grandmother was a fan. Until I was seven, we lived upstairts from Nanny's first floor flat in her triple decker. After lunch, my older sister Kath would go downstairs to hang with Nanny and listen to The Romance of Helen Trent. This would have been in the very early 1950's, before we all had TVs, but when everyone had radios. Anyway, after Kath came up a few times very distraught about something that had happened to Helen. My mother had no idea what Kath was upset about, but she sleuthed out that she was getting caught up in Nanny's soap opera. And that ended that.)

I have never given a thought to the origin of the word stereotype. It's "a kind of printing plate once commonly used in newspaper publishing," used to create a plate that printed an entire page at once. A good thing. Somehow, the word moved into the more pejorative usage we're familiar with. 

M-W talks about dime stores. Talk about obsolete. While low-priced stores are (thanks to inflation) now dollar stores, dime store is sometimes used to indicate that something's of dubious quality.  

M-W missed the boat on how dime is now used as a verb. As in "drop a dime" on someone, i.e., turning them in. Which goes back to days of yore when a) there were pay phones; and b) you dropped a dime into the slot to use one. 

I was surprised that neither Dreyer nor M-W came up with album, while we still use the word album to refer to a collection of songs put together on a record (which, even though vinyl records are making something of a comeback, mostly isn't a record). 

When I first starting buying records, an album was a LP (long playing) vinyl record containing a dozen or so songs, and slipcased into a flat cardboard "envelope." But for my parents' generation, an album was an actual album - a cardboard (sometimes leatherette-covered) "book" that contained multiple paper sleeves, each of which held a collection of 78 records made of brittle Bakelite.

Even if you didn't have a full album of records by the same artist, you had to keep these 78's in an album to protect them. But some albums were thematically or artistically of a piece. 

When my war-bride mother moved from Chicago to Worcester in 1946 - my Chicago mother met my Worcester father when he was stationed at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago towards the end of WWII - among the things packed in her trunk was an album of Nelson Eddy songs. We had a 1940's record player that played 45's and 78's, and a separate, more modern, stereo that could play 33's and 45's, but we loved to play those old 78's, often to make fun of Nelson Eddy, who we considered an unappealing fop. We couldn't believe that my mother had ever swooned over Nelson Eddy. But we lustily sang along with "Boots," "Shortnin' Bread," and "When I'm Calling You." (I haven't used them in years, but I believe that my skill at imitating Nelson Eddy is still intact. I think it's like riding a bicycle...)

Fun with words!

When is a chaqueta not a chaqueta? Ay, chihuahua!

I once worked for a tech company that rolled out a major (i.e., really pricey) collection of services named Black Rocket. The name had nothing to do with anything. We had a new CMO, and he showed up with this name in his pocket and made sure that he got to use it. There was a fake "contest" to name the new offering but - surprise, surprise - his name won.

Once the company had invested a ton in all sorts of Black Rocket merch - not just the usual corporate swag like caps, shirts, mugs and lunchboxes, but goodies like lava lamps, bicycles, and (if memory holds - chairs) - and invested a ton of money in print and TV advertising, someone figured out that Black Rocket was the name for a powerful form of hashish in the Netherlands, and a condom in Spain.

Given this fond memory, I was amused to read about the nickname choice for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, a minor leage affiliate of the LA Dodgers. The nickname: Chaquetas. Which means jackets in English, but in some parts of the Hispanic community, has another meaning. Chaqueta is slang for masturbation.

Go, Jackets! Go, Jack-offs?

Many minor league clubs have a nickname associated with the Hispanic community. Baseball is very big in the Latin American world, and many of current and recent major league superstars hail from places like the DR. (For the Red Sox: David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Rafael Devers...)

The nicknames are part of the Copa de la Diversión (Fun Cup), a minor league outreach program aimed at Latin American fans. My minor league team, the Red Sox Triple AAA Worcester WooSox uses the nickname Wepa, which is a general purpose word used by Puerto Ricans when they're excited or joyful. The Wepa icon is a rocket.

Anyway, the choice of the name Chaquetas was a shout-out to the Mexican population, which is huge in California, and to mariachi music, which is muy popular.

Unfortunate association with masturbation aside, it's actually an excellent choice, given the ornate jackets that mariachi musicians wear. And there was sound reasoning behind the pick when the Quakes decided to change their prior Copa name - Los Temblores, which literally translates to Quakes - with something a bit more fun. (Little did they know...)

The idea of a mariachi theme came up, inspired part by the popularity of mariachi performances at Dodgers games and part by fond memories of Dodgers relief pitcher and Rancho Cucamonga resident Joe Kelly* wearing a mariachi jacket to the White House following L.A.’s 2020 World Series win. (Source: LA Times)

There was, of course, a bit of backlash (largely on social media). Despite this, the Quakes - after talking to members of the fanbase they were trying to appeal to, which apparently doesn't include those who associate 'chaqueta' with 'jerking off' - decided to stick with the name Chaquetas. There doesn't seem to be a ton of Chaquetas merch available. The caps are sold out, likely due to young cut-ups who do associate 'chaqueta' with 'jerking off.'

Ay, chihuahua!

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

*Joe Kelly was part of the 2018 Red Sox team which won the World Series. He was wildly popular here in Boston.

Talk about waterfront property. (A real bargain!)

Nantucket is beautiful. Plenty beautiful. And quaint. Plenty quaint. And swanky. Plenty swanky.

Rich folks. Famous folks. Rich and famous folk wannabes. They all want to have a home there. 

Or so I hear. I've only been there once, and that was when I was in high school. I do remember the beauty, the quaint, the swank. And while way back then, I didn't have all that much consciousness of rich and/or famous, I was still vaguely aware that rich and/or famous folks hung out there. 

But most of what I know about Nantucket is what I hear on the news, read in the newspapers.

And part of what I know from all that hearing and reading is that a lot of Nantucket's waterfront property is under siege from the elements.

Every once in a while, usually (but not always) after a storm, there's a story about a house that just a very short while ago was on the waterfront with plenty of nice beachfront frontage is now teetering on the edge of a sandcliff, ready to fall into the drink. Sometimes the house is shown jacked up and ready to be moved a couple of hundred feet back. Good luck with that, of course. A couple of hundred feet worth of front yard can be eroded away in a couple of weeks. (Remember the kiddo Bible ditty about the foolish man building his house upon the sand? I do believe that Nantucket is all sand. So much for the wisdom or the rich and/or famous.)

Despite a number of "house overboard" occurrences, rich folks, famous folks, rich and famous folk wannabes, and - I guess - just plain folks with some money who just love Nantucket, still spend plenty of $$$  to live there. Especially on the waterfront, where most properties will run you a few million. (Median price of a home on Nantucket is $3.2M.)

But this past winter, a waterfront house - 3 bed, 2 bath, mahogany deck, "incredible views of the Atlantic Ocean and the serene sound of rolling waves"  - hit the market for the low, low price of $600K. Especially amazing given that, just last September, this place was listed for $2.3M. Hmmm. There must be a catch beyond the ominous catch-all words in the listing: Property is being sold "AS IS." Hmmm, hmmm, hmmmmmmm.

The catch was that last fall the home "lost a stunning 70 feet to erosion in just a matter of weeks, putting the home at imminent risk."

Never fear: someone was willing to buy a charmer, whatever the risk.

A longtime visitor to Nantucket, Brendan Maddigan, who lives in New York, toyed with owning a summer home there for his young family for years. He regularly scanned the market and bookmarked links to a half-dozen properties, including the house on Sheep Pond Road. When he got an alert the price had nosedived, he submitted an all-cash offer, and in February the home was his.

From growing up in Woods Hole and now working for a real estate investment firm in New York City, Maddigan, 42, said he is clear-eyed about the risks, especially as sea levels rise and storms become more intense.

“The home is amazing. The location is amazing. And the price mitigates the risk to a good degree,” he said. “I’d like to think that it’ll be there for a while, but I was definitely aware of the risk of any particular storm causing a problem in the future.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Now Brendan Maddigan is no dummy. I may have way too much faith in an MIT education, but Maddigan is an MIT grad, with a mechanical engineering degree with additional focus in management, entrepreneurship, and history. So he no doubt gets the mechanics of a solidly built house. He's had a very successful career in the world of commercial real estate. And that fact that he's had a long-standing interest in entrepreneurship suggests he's a risk taker. But I've got to question that minor concentration in history, given that the recent history of this house having lost nearly all of its frontage in a matter of weeks. Even if the bargain price "mitigates the risk to a good degree."

Hmmmm, etc.

Maybe Brendan Maddigan can afford to spend $600K on a house that might not be there by summertime. Maybe it's such a pittance, that he'll be happy to get one or two summers out of it, and if that doesn't happen, well, shrug.

I don't think I'd sleep all that deeply there, give the "incredible views of the Atlantic Ocean and the serene sound of rolling waves." Those "incredible views" now appear to be just 10 feet away from the front porch, when last summer they were 80 feet away. And I don't know how "serene" the "sound of rolling waves" will be if they're lapping the foundation of your house. 

This isn't the only property on Nantucket that's being "permanently devalued." As erosion continues to occur, as the island's coastline recedes, more and more houses will plummet in price like this one. (It's estimated that hundreds of houses are presently at risk, and over 2,000 at risk by 2070.) Cautious sellers will no doubt sell out. Wait-and-see owners will wait and see. And risk takers like Maddigan will roll the dice that it'll take a while before their waterfront property turns into a houseboat.  

Recent history suggests that catastrophe isn't that far off. A home in Maddigan's new neighborhood "was demolished in October after losing approximately 35 feet of dune in a matter of months." 

Maddigan is planning on building a berm, but that might not do much good. Last fall, some waterfront property homeowners on Boston's North Shore - in a town far less beautiful, quaint, swanky, rich and/or famous than Nantucket - spent $600K on a berm, most of which washed away during a single storm this winter.

But, shrug, Maddigan's hoping that he gets lucky and that his kids end up with some fond memories of their summer home. 

Good lucky to him!

Hey, McCormick, if it ain't broke, why "fix" it.

Way back in March, on the day before St. Patrick's Day, I set out to do my annual soda-bread baking thang. I had everything I needed: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, baking soda, baking powder, salt, buttermilk, jumbo seeded raisins I had to procure online, and, of course, caraway seeds. Plenty of caraway seeds. Some Morgan & Bassett, some my old standby: McCormick, with a new-fangled, spruced up black and red cap instead of the just plain red cap I was used to.

I was mixing up my final batch, and still had a few bottles of caraway seeds on hand. And all I needed to complete my final batch was one of the small jars. A jar of McCormick's.

So I took one off of my spice shelf and tried to open it. The cap didn't budge. I tried the other McCormick's shorty that I had. Couldn't move that cap, either. 

I googled and found that the top item on McCormick's FAQ was this:

Why can’t I remove the lid on my bottle?

Sometimes too much adhesive is used when the safety seal is applied, causing the lid to adhere to the bottle. This can sometimes happen when too much heat is applied at the time the cap is applied. This was an isolated issue and adjustments have been made to resolve it.

In the meantime, to remove, carefully wrap a hot, wet paper towel around the lid for 5-10 minutes. The heat from the paper towel should loosen the adhesive and allow you to twist off the cap.

Well, that was some safety seal. I tried the hot, wet paper wrap twice on each bottle. And even tried submerging the caps in a cup of boiling water. I tried to dislodge the adhesive with a handy-dandy lobster pick.  

In the process, I managed to twist my left wrist.

Fortunately, I had a non-McCormick bottle at the ready and was able to make my final batch without having to run out for additional caraway.

I occasionally comment, seldom tweet. But I did feel compelled to take myself to Twitter X and send a little message to McCormick.

Hey @mccormickspices, If I mail you these can someone open them and get them back to me by next Paddy's Day so I can bake my soda bread? The hot water-paper towel trick from your FAQ didn't work.

I got a couple of likes, a comment or two, a retweet. But nothing from McCormick. They don't have much of a Twitter presence, but I thought there'd be some response.  

I didn't have my receipt, but the next time I was at my grocery store, I was able to return the bad bottles and get a refund. (And, by the way, I was talking to my friend Joyce, and she had had the same problem with a jar of McCormick something or other.)

Meanwhile, I'd also tried to leave a message on the McCormick support site. Alas, although there was a BIG box to enter your comment/question into, there was an unspecified teeny-tiny character limit.

So I wrote to their support email address:

Here's a pic of the jars I was unable to open. [See above.]

And here's the full message I wanted to leave. Alas, I ran into an unspecified character limit. 

I recently purchased two jars of your carraway seeds - a necessary ingredient for the Irish soda bread I make each St. Patrick's Day. Unfortunately, I was unable to open either container. I did follow the instructions given in your FAQ - wrapping the jars in a paper towel soaked with hot water (which I did twice), but to no avail. In the frustrating process, I also managed to injure my wrist in the process. Sigh! I was able to return the jars to Roche Bros. in downtown Boston for a refund, but the overall experience of not being able to open the jars was pretty frustrating. While your FAQ indicated that the problem has been rare, I was speaking with a friend in Dallas who had the same experience. Fortunately, her husband – a former college hockey player – was able to get the jar open after a Herculean 10-minute effort. All I can say is that it will be quite a while before I purchase any McCormick product that uses one of the “new and improved” black and red caps.

A eight days later, here came a long but not especially satisfying response, especially given that it included the handy-dandy tip I had found on the FAQ, which I had said I had followed. 

Dear Maureen:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. We are sorry for your disappointing experience with our Caraway Seed and hope you will accept our apologies.

We are sorry the lid on your recent container of Caraway Seed was unable to be removed. This will sometimes happen to a bottle when too much heat is used at the time the cap is applied. The glue from the safety seal under the lid melts onto the threads of the bottle and 'glues' the lid fast. We appreciate you providing us with this feedback and apologize for your disappointment with our packaging. We are aware of this issue and adjustments have been made to fix this.

In the meantime, we have a helpful tip. To remove, carefully wrap a hot, wet paper towel around the spice bottle cap for 5-10 minutes. The heat from the paper towel should loosen the adhesive and allow you to twist off the cap. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention and have shared your feedback with our Quality Assurance teams for their review.

We would like to get some more information to help begin addressing your concerns:
• What is the product UPC?
• What is the full Best By date on the package (include all letters and numbers)?
• When was this product purchased?
• What is the name of the store where this item was purchased?
• Where is the store located (city and state)?
• When was this item initially opened?
• Was the inner (or outer) security seal intact before you opened it?

We appreciate that you have taken the time to bring your concern to our attention. We continually strive to provide the highest level of quality in all our products. If you have further questions regarding any of our products, we are happy to help. Please feel free to respond to this email or call us at 1-800-632-5847 between the hours of 9:00 am and 7:00 pm, Monday - Friday EST. Your patronage is important to us and we hope to continue bringing our passion for flavor to your meals.

Sincerely,

Melissa
Consumer Affairs Specialist
Ref # 3541457

Having returned the unopenable jars I did not, of course, have the UPC. But I sent back what info I did have. 

A week later, all I had gotten back was a request to rate my transaction with Melissa. I'm sure that, if she's an actual human and not a bot, Melissa is a perfectly nice person. But I was pretty darned meh in terms of providing a rating and feedback.

Even though I'm not interested in acquiring any of those new-fangled-ly capped bottles of McCormick anything, I was figuring that the'd send me some coupons or something for my trouble. To date, nada.

Anyway, in googling around, I did come across a story on CNN touting McCormick's new-fangled caps, which were "giving its iconic red-cap bottles their first makeover in nearly 40 years."

Shoppers will soon see newly designed bottles that feature updated labeling and a new “snap” cap that the company says keeps spices and seasonings fresher compared to its previous design. McCormick’s new sleeker bottles, which have already begun rolling out in the United States, will first contain its most popular herbs and spices, including cinnamon, garlic powder and crushed red pepper.

No mention of my beloved caraway seeds. But lots of yadda-yadda-yadda.

A new manufacturing process that will help "maintain freshness." The addition of a "best buy" date. A supposedly satisfying "snap" sound when you put the cap back on. Bottles made using 50% worth of post-consumer recyclable material. A design "validated" by a lot of consumer research.  An overall "multi-sensorial experience."

Well, most of my multi-sensorial experience was the twisted wrist. But maybe that's just me.  

Perhaps McCormick should have put a little more research into testing to see whether the manufacturing process worked? Or at least asked themself whether it was worth "fixing" something that ain't broken.

Is North Korean even worse than we imagine?

It's hard for me to imagine a more repressive, stultifying, soul-sucking, terrifying, god-awful society than that of North Korea. And based on a recent reading of a New Yorker article by Ian Urbina on the country's forced labor program, North Korea is even worse than I've imagined.

Which is saying something.

North Korean workers are routinely shipped off to work in Chinese factories where they endure "beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be 'killed without a trace.'” They labor in a range of industries: textiles, seafood processing, construction, software. And there are an estimated 100,000 of them - likely an underestimate - imprisoned in fenced-in dorms, slaving away for next to nothing. Next to nothing for the workers, that is. More than a decade ago, it was estimated that North Korean "earned" as much as $2.3 billion from its Chinese program. Since then, they've expanded and citizens are also farmed out to Russia, Poland, Qatar, Uruguay, and Mali.

Not just anyone can get sent out of the country for slave labor. You need to be politically reliable, to lessen the chance of defections. If you have a family member who has defected, no dice. Younger workers must have parents who are still living. If the exported workers tries any funny business, their parents are punished. Another thing: given that North Korea's general population is "chronically malnourished," the general population tends to be short. But North Korea doesn't want to be embarrassed by having short people representing their country, so they look for workers who are over five-feet-one. Then there's a rigorous training/indoctrination process.

Urbina was able to ultra-secrectly survey some of the forced laborers. Here's what they had to say:

Workers are held in compounds, sometimes behind barbed wire, under the watch of security agents. Many work gruelling shifts and get at most one day off a month. Several described being beaten by the managers sent by North Korea to watch them. “It was like prison for me,” one woman said. “At first, I almost vomited at how bad it was, and, just when I got used to it, the supervisors would tell us to shut up, and curse if we talked.” Many described enduring sexual assault at the hands of their managers. “They would say I’m fuckable and then suddenly grab my body and grope my breasts and put their dirty mouth on mine and be disgusting,” a woman who did product transport at a plant in the city of Dalian said. Another, who worked at Jinhui, said, “The worst and saddest moment was when I was forced to have sexual relations when we were brought to a party with alcohol.” The workers described being kept at the factories against their will, and being threatened with severe punishment if they tried to escape. A woman who was at a factory called Dalian Haiqing Food for more than four years said, “It’s often emphasized that, if you are caught running away, you will be killed without a trace.”

Amazingly:

Jobs in China are coveted in North Korea, because they often come with contracts promising salaries of around two hundred and seventy dollars a month. (Similar work in North Korea pays just three dollars a month.) But the jobs come with hidden costs.

Much of the money is pocketed by intermediaries or reverts to the state. Workers are given a pittance an allowance, and are charged exorbitant rates for food and shelter. Most of their wages are withheld until the end of their contracts, and the workers generally end up with about ten percent of what they were promised. 

Workers usually sign two- or three-year contracts. When they arrive in China, managers confiscate

their passports. Inside the factories, North Korean workers wear different uniforms than Chinese workers. “Without this, we couldn’t tell if one disappeared,” a manager said. Shifts run as long as sixteen hours. If workers attempt to escape, or complain to people outside the plants, their families at home can face reprisals. One seafood worker described how managers cursed at her and flicked cigarette butts. “I felt bad, and I wanted to fight them, but I had to endure,” she said. “That was when I was sad.”

"Benefits" are few. Holidays, sick days? Forget about it. Workers sleep in crowded dorm rooms with dozens of fellow laborers. On the rare times they're let out, surveillance is intense. Mail is censored. 

Given that North Korea is such a rogue state, companies are not supposed to be using North Korean forced labor. There are US and US sanctions, there are regulations, but of course...

One factory Urbina looked into "has exported thousands of tons of fish to companies that supply major U.S. retailers, including Walmart and ShopRite." Not to mention McDonald's, Sysco, and the US military. 

China, by the way, considers approaching workers or snooping around worksites to be espionage. Not to mention that it usually repatriates any defectors back to North Korea, where the best outcome is that they end up in harsh labor camps.

Wherever they're dispatched to, the working conditions are terrible. Workers labor in Russian logging camps, under gulag conditions in freezing weather, without proper clothing. Construction shifts can last from 7:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. 

Impossible to imagine how worse than imaginable North Korea is. 

Stanley Cups Overfloweth. (Not THAT Stanley Cup!)

As usual with consumer fads, I've missed the boat - or the cup - with the Stanley Tumbler, the resuable water bottle that is apparently the current "it" bottle, designed to replace the disposable plastic water bottles that are gunking up our fragile environment. 

Hundreds of billions of plastic bottles full of water are sold every year, and most of them aren't recycled once the water is drunk. Instead, they end up incinerated, or in landfills, or - worse - in the ocean, where they make up a goodly portion of sludgey waste islands like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In another few years, I've read that there'll be more discarded plastic water bottles than fish in the sea. 

So any effort to replace all those Poland Spring et al. bottles with something that's built to last is a good thing. And that's why I bought a Hydro-Flask stainless steel bottle to carry with me on warm/hot day walks, which I try to remember to do so I won't be tempted to bop into a convenience store and buy a bottle of Poland Springs when I'm thirsty and a couple of miles away from home. 

A good thing, no? One less bottle in the Atlantic Garbage Patch. One less dead polar bear. One less swordfish with a body riddled with nano-plastic particles that will never decay.

Well, not so fast, especially when the virtuous reusable bottle is part of a whirling, swirling fad. As is the case with the Stanley. 

...the craze has sparked some less-than-sustainable behavior. People boast about owning dozens of them. When Target released special editions, including a much-coveted Starbucks version, it caused a mini stampede. (Source: Boston Globe)

2023 was the year of the Stanley. Thanks to clever marketers (sadly, I missed out on the marketing), spurious influencers (sadly, I missed out on the influencing), and super-exposure on TikTok and other social media platforms (sadly, I missed out on the TikTok-ing), Stanley sold an awful lot of tumblers last year. Revenues reached $750M - this in a company with revenues that were under $100M back in 2020. 

Whilereusables might seem like a good, eco-conscious investment - use it for three years and you've replaced 1,000 daily plastic water bottles. Sure, that sounds like a drop in the bucket. But when you multiple it by the 10 million Quencher water bottles that Stanley sold last year...

Alas, the popularity of the Stanley cups has a downside. People fall in love with a product, and they want more and more of it. (Ask me about Allbirds sneakers, why don't you.) And that overconsumption can negate the eco blessings if folks start collecting all the color and other versions of them. Remember, it takes materials and energy to manufacture these suckers. Steel plants burn coal...

Stanley is trying to putting more sustainable manufacturing processes in place. While the popular Quencher tumblers are "made with 90% recycled steel," the use of recycled steel is far less for its other products. "It aims to raise that to at least 50% by 2025."

Production costs aside, there's the time it takes for the purchase of a sustainable product to be worthwhile, environment-wise. 

Researchers have coined a term to measure the amount of time a person must reuse an alternative before it fully offsets the single-use product it replaces: the environmental payback period. A 2020 paper found that for straws, coffee cups and forks, metal alternatives had to be used the longest — anywhere from a few months to a few years — in order to break even.

No mention of bottles, but it probably takes a while for payback to start paying back. (What's the expression about payback being a bitch?)

Then there are other good-for-the-environment products that tend to proliferate. Sure, I no longer take bags at the grocery store or CVS. I use one of my backpacks - I swear, I only have two and one's heavy duty while the other one's for smaller loads - or one my many nylon tote bags (which do tend to fray over time...)  

As for Stanley:

Some trend forecasters say the fad is already over. “Some millennials or Gen-Z are already embarrassed to carry a Stanley,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the trendspotting newsletter, After School. “And we know what’s going to happen,” she said. They’ll sit unused, gather dust on a shelf or in a basement, or “worst case scenario, they’ll end up in landfills.”

There's a new "it" water bottle on the horizon for the influencers to start guzzling from. Owala bottles are said to be taking off on college campuses. 

The good news, of course, is that people are growing more conscious about the use (and disposal) of those odious plastic water bottles. This is good news for the environment, even if we do end up with a bit of overconsumption of the new and shiny objects that replace them.

Sea glass community in an uproar

I like beach glass.

It's pretty.

I have a few pairs of beach glass earrings, a couple of necklaces and bracelets. All in "my" colors: lovely blues and greens. 

A few times, I've found a piece of beach glass while walking along the beach. Almost as exciting as coming across a sand dollar. 

But what I didn't know about beach glass...

For one, what I've always called beach glass is actually sea glass. Sea glass is found on the ocean; beach glass can be found by a lake or river. Conceivably, some of my earrings, etc. are beach glass, but since all of my sea glass merch is local, much purchased on the Cape, I'm going with sea glass. And puting beach glass way, way, way out of my mind.

So from here on out, it's sea glass.

Another thing I didn't know is that there are a lot of folks who collect sea glass. Who very seriously collect sea glass. 

And there's a controversy around the practice of seeding, a process through which broken glass shards are deliberately thrown in the water so that waves will do their thing: tumble the glass around, smooth out the edges, work some moisture in there to create the frosted look, and turn it into sea glass that can turned into jewelry.

Purists don't like seeding. They think it's cheating if the glass was just tossed in the drink last year vs. something that was formed from a 1948 Coke bottle that someone hurled out to sea in 1948. Although it may be hard to distinguish naturally-formed sea glass from sea glass that was seeded, the real aficianados try to determine a piece of sea glass' provenance. 

If there's a controversy around seeding in general, there's a really big controversy about seeding with marbles.

Most sea glass is flat; sea glass marbles are formed from actual marbles, and they're historically a rare find. (There are a number of theories as to why sea glass marbles exist, including that in the late 1800's they were used as bottle stoppers. Another likely source come from kids who used to play a lot more marbles than they do now, with some of those marbles games played on the beach.)

“A marble is supposed to be the most exciting thing to find beachcombing. It’s the ultimate treasure,” [New England sea glass hunter Dave Valle] said as he hunted a field of beach pebbles on a recent day, holding a walking stick with a spade fashioned to one end. “TheyS [seeders] say they’re leaving this for the future? It’s littering. And it sucks the magic out of it. Who wants to find a marble someone threw there?” (Source: Boston Globe)

I don't see the big deal between a marble thrown in a few years ago vs. one that strayed from Dick and Jane's marble game in 1935, but I'm not a sea glass purist.  

And Valle and other purists are mad as hell that finding a sea glass marble, thanks to aggressive seeders, has gone "from a once-in-a-lifetime find to once a day for some hunters."

Purists vs. seeders: the outrage is flying on both sides. Enemies attacking. People and/or topics banned from Facebook forums. 

Mary McCarthy is:

...a Maryland beachcomber who has written and lectured on the cheapening effects of seeding, who want the pressure to remain on until it becomes unforgivable.

“Its most significant sin is the loss of provenance,” she said. “Beachcombers find stuff on beaches that is there for a historical reason. They’ve done the research and know there was a resort or a ferry or an amusement park or a dump, and you find things that tell that story. Throwing marbles is Easter egging. It’s artificial.”

McCarthy travels to sea glass festivals all over the country, where she will examine finds to help people trace their story. “And I spend too much time informing people their precious marble was purchased two years ago at a Michael’s.” 

Sea glass festivals? Not sure what happens here. Much as I like sea glass, and my sea glass earrings etc., doesn't it all start to look alike after a while?

Anyway, seeders - especially marble seeders - counter Valle and McCarthy with arguments that "sea glass is a diminishing resource," with "the good stuff" having all been scooped up. Modern glass is just not as high quality as old-fashioned, 1948 Coke bottle glass. Marbles get that sea glass "frosty" look pretty quickly, especially in New England, and then make their way into their second life as vase fillers or pendant necklaces. (Somewhere around here, I have a sea glass marble pendant. I suspect - now that I know of its existence - that the marble was seeded.)

There's also a mid-ground of sea glass people who are okay with some seeding, as long as it's not overdone. 

The Internatonal Sea Glass Association has not, to date, taken an official stand on the controversy, although "it is strongly discouraged."

My goodness.

I don't know when the next time I'll be walking on the beach, but I'll be on the lookout for sea glass. And since I'm such an amateur here, I'doubt I'll know the difference between natural and seeded. 

But I suspect that the sea glass community will keep on keepin' on with their uproar.

Take that, climate change!

I'm a cranberry fan.

Once in a while, when I have a drink-drink that's something other than a glass of wine, I enjoy a Cape Codder (vodka, cranberry juice, and lime). Or two. 

Cranberry and soda, with or without a squeeze of lime is good, too. If I'm out for lunch and not having an Arnold Palmer or a Diet Coke or just plain tap, it's usually a cranberry and soda. 

I don't usually keep cranberry (or any) juice around the house - too much sugar - but I like cranberry juice. I also like cranapple and crangrape. 

Cranberry juice, however, is good to keep around the house if you're susceptible to UTI's. Just sayin'. 

Thanksgiving wouldn't be Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce - the kind with cranberries in it, not the jellied blob. (Shout out to my sister Trish's cranberry sauce recipe.)

A turkey sandwich wouldn't be the a turkey sandwich without cranberry sauce.

I like to toss dried cranberries in my salad.

I like Cranberry Bog ice cream. Yum! If I'm on the Cape, that's my go to. (That an Ryder Beach Rubble.)

Speaking of the Cape, Chequessett Chocolate in Truro has a wonderful cranberry chocolae bar. (Chequessett, I heard, is temporarily closed. I hope it is just temporary. During the early days of covid, my sister Kath sent us all CARE Packages from Chequessett. A kathsend godsend.)

I like the color cranberry, which was popular when I was in high school. I had a cranberry parka, a cranberry madras skirt, a cranberry button down shirt, cranberry and black plaid luggage. Alas, cranberry as a color doesn't seem to be that widely used these days. (Has it fallen out of favor in the same way the name Maureen has? O tempora, o mores.)

Not that it has anything to do with Massachusetts - or cranberries - but I'm a big fan of the now defunct Irish group, The Cranberries. (RIP Dolores Riordan, the brilliant singer/lyricist.)

I like the fact that cranberries  are native New Englanders. I like that a lot of them are grown in Massachusetts. When it comes to agriculture, we're not known for much - unless you call Wellfleet Oysters agriculture - but we do have cranberries.

I'm always shocked when I read that Massachusetts is only #2 when it comes to cranberry growing. Weirdly - to me anyway - Wisconsin is #1. 

How can something so associated with summer on Cape Cod actually be majorly grown in Wisconsin? Ocean Spray - the cranberry growers co-operative that brings us so many great products -  is headquartered in Middleborough, Massachusetts, not Waukesha, Wisconsin. And the drink is called a Cape Codder, not a Milwaukee Slurp.

Anyway, I like the association of cranberries with my home state, even if we're just the first runner-up when it comes to cranberry production. And I'm alarmed that our bogs, thanks to climate change, are in jeopardy.

This has been going on for a while.

One of the reasons Wisconsin got to be #1 was that they have colder weather than we now do. Cranberry cultivation requires cold. And the ice that comes with frozen winters. Cold and ice cold have been in short supply here, as the climate shifts and we grow warmer. So cranberry growing has migrated to Wisconsin, and to Canada, over the years.

There is an upside to the downward slide in Massachusetts' cranberry-growing fortunes.  And that's turning our bogs into wetlands. (Or turning them back into the wetlands from whence they came.)

Wetlands, an area of land sturated by water, reduce the impacts of sea level rise and coastal erosion by acting as a sponge that can absorb flood waters. They can also mitigate climate change by storing carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Both make them a key strategy for Massachusetts’ battle to adapt to and fight climate change.

...So far, Massachusetts has completed six cranberry bog restoration projects totaling more than 350 acres. But another 18 restoration projects are already planned or under construction, according to the Division of Ecological Restoration. That would total more than 800 acres.

The seeds of grasses and shrubs that are necessary to re-grow the state’s lost wetlands are already here, lying dormant underground for more than 100 years.

“Once you bring them to the surface and bring back the right conditions, like water and sunlight, they explode back into heathy wetlands,” said Jessica Cohn, ecological restoration specialist at the Division of Ecological Restoration, which is part of the state’s Fish and Game agency. (Source: Boston Globe)

Cranberry growers have been handed a lemon, and they're turning that lemon into lemonade that will benefit all of us.

Sure, I'm sad to see our cranberry "industry" in such distress, to see our cranberry farmers - many running family operations that have been in business for over 100 years - going out of business. But I love the fact that some good's coming out of it. 

When our environment's under attack, what do you do? Stand up! Fight back!

Take that, climate change! 

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

Did I mention that Dolores Riordan is brilliant? See for yourself. 

Have a ball (python)!

If I were to have a pet, it would be a dog.

If I were to not have a pet, it would be a snake.

I'm not going to get into any deep examination of why I'm not wild about snakes - paging Dr. Freud - but I'm not wild about snakes. I find them exceedinly creepy. The eyes, the tongues, the no arms, the no legs. Slithering around. Let's just say I'm glad I live in a place where there aren't a lot of dangerous snakes. We do have timber rattlers and copperheads, but they're rare and seldom encountered on the streets of Boston. And if I swim in a local lake, I'm not in any danger of getting attacked by a cottonmouth.  (Could my feelings about snakes be the result of my Irish heritage? After all, St. Patrick did drive all the snakes out of Ireland...Way to go, St. Patrick!)

But plenty of folks do like snakes and keep them as pets. And a lot of the snakes being kept as pets, being collected even, are something called ball pythons. 

They're non-venomous, considered docile, and - unlike, say, a boa constrictor - they're relatively small, just 2-3 feet long (3-5 for females) vs. boa constrictors which range from 6 to 10 feet in length. Of course, they do eat mice and rats, so there's that. But as snakes go, they're fine as pets, if you like that sort of thing. 

And thanks to creative breeding, ball pythons come in all sorts of colors and patterns not found in nature, all part of a pretty big business of "designer" ball pythons. 

When it comes to designing colorful ball pythons, Justin Kobylka is considered the best in breeding. From Kinvoa Reptiles, his Georgia business, he's always trying to selectively breed "one-of-a-kind" ball pythons. These go for a lot of money, and Kinvoa is a multi-milllion dollar a year business. Even the ones that turn out to be not quite as unique as Kobylka hoped, still sell for plenty.

Ball pythons originated in Africa, and in the wild they are typically dark brown with tan patches and a pale underbelly. Those bred for their appearance, as Kobylka’s have been, often have a brighter palette, from soft washes of pastel to candy-colored bursts of near-fluorescence. Their patterns, too, have been transformed: a snake might be tricked out with pointillist dots, or a single dramatic stripe, or colors dissolving into one another, as in tie-dye. One captive-bred ball python’s splotches and squiggles show up only under a black light. 

...Arguably, no other snake, lizard, or turtle has been so sweepingly restyled by human effort. (Source: New Yorker)

The rarer the design - no suprise here - the more expensive. A colorful ball python can cost more than a giraffe, a lion, a tiger. (Note: an individual cannot legally own a giraffe, a lion, or a tiger. But zoos can buy them.) 

“I’ve had offers of over a hundred thousand dollars on a snake,” Kobylka said.

A snake worth that kind of money is not likely to be sold by Kobylka. His preference is to hold on to them in order to breed more and more interesting looking snakes. 

“But the way I operate, it’s important to keep those snakes for my future work. You actually lose money long-term if you sell the most amazing thing at the time.”

I have to admit that, having been intrigued by this article, I googled, looking for pictures. While I found them interesting enough, pretty even, the colors were largely yellows, oranges, brown... I thought I'd be finding designs there were really out there. I was envisioning a snake that looked like a tie-dyed Grateful Dead tee-shirt, a snake that was the same bright blue as my old VW Beetle. Alas...

The coolest ones I found were something called an "emoji python," that have a smiley-face pattern. 

Anyway, if you've decied that a colorful litle snake would make a dandy pet, note that "the standard life spanof a captive ball python is fifteen to thirty years."

In any case, "household reptiles" started to become a thing in the 1990's. 

Children raised on “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Jurassic Park” reimagined scaly pets as characterful and intriguing. Retailers started to see an uptick in iguana sales. New Caledonian crested geckos, believed extinct until 1994 and jeopardized today by wildfires and invasive predators, became well established in captivity. Snakes were pitched to prospective buyers as perfect for cramped urban residences: undemanding, hypoallergenic, and needing to be fed only once a week. 

And ball pythons - small, docile, plentiful, cheap; and, unlike goldfish, you can hold them - really took off as "starter pets." But things didn't get too exciting until breeders like Justin Kobylka figured out that this "ideal" snake pet "need[ed] a totally different paint job."

After all, you sell an interesting smiley-face emoji snake for a lot more than the $30 bucks you'd get for a boring brown-on-brown snake. 

Astonishingly:

An estimated six million households in the U.S. include at least one reptile.

Interestingly: 

Millennials make up the largest group of reptile owners, but snakes, lizards, and turtles have become increasingly popular with Generation Z. “One of our concerns is that technology will take kids away from this world,” a breeder observed. “Why would a kid today want to peer at a snake through glass, when they can put a V.R. headset on and play with dinosaurs?” 

So, just when I learn that designer ball pythons are a thing, it's inevitably threatened by technology. 

Looks like I'm rooting for snakes as pets? Who knew that was ever going to happen?

 

Thanks, Buddey. A grateful nation thanks you!

Look, I get why people who live in desperately poor regions would eat bushmeat to augment their meagre diets. If your children are swollen-belly starving, if they don't get enough protein, enough iron, I get that you'd provide them with every source of nourishment you could get your hunter-gatherer hands on. And you wouldn't give a rat's ass whether the meat that you're hunter-gathering - salting, drying, stewing, frying - came from a bat, an impala, a pangolin, or even a primate of the non-human variety.

But eating locally is one thing. Black market trading, smuggling possibly infected bushmeat into another country, is quite another. After all, bushmeat could be a carrier of the Ebola virus. So say no more.

There is, however, more to say. Even if it weren't for Ebola, the bushmeat trade - which is valued at billions of dollars annually - is destroying species and wreaking havoc with biodiversity. 

Plus - and apologies for any cultural insensitivity - I'm no Anthony Bourdain, willing to try anything once. The idea of munching on fried pangolin or monkey burger makes my stomach churn. I guess it's what you're used to, and I'm used to eating meat that comes swaddled in Saran Wrap and purchased at the grocery store. The Beverly Hillbillies may have relished Granny's possum stew, but as a meat eater, I pretty much stick to the basics: chicken, beef, pork, lamb - meat that comes from animals raised for human consumption. No, I don't eat a ton of meat. And if I thought about it, I'd eat even less. But when I do eat meat, it's going to be one of the Big Four.

Years ago, there was a restaurant in Boston's Quincy Market that served "normal" (i.e., Big Four meat and fish), but specialized in wild game, including lion and bear. I can't recall the restaurant's name - Wild Something-or-Other? - but my husband and I went there once. We ate normal, but the meaty smell of cooking lion, tiger, and bear - oh, my! - was overpowering, and Wild Something-or-Other never became one of our go-to's. 

So, I'm not the target audience for bushmeat.

But there are a lot of immigrants who, for reason of nostalgia, for longing for home, consider bushmeat comfort food. And the only way to get it is to have someone smuggle it in, or buy it on the blackmarket. I'm sure there are also those whose desire for bushmeat has nothing to do with nostalgia, but is a "just because" item of their desire "just because" it is rare, illegal, and risky to consume. But I'm guessing most of the consumers are from immigrant communities.

And I do get comfort food. A couple of times a year (including for my birthday), my sister Trish makes a family chicken goulash dish that I adore. And what I wouldn't give for a grinder from the now-closed Maury's Delicatessen in Worcester's Webster Square. (Unlike the Wild-Something-or-Other, the Maury's smell was divine.)

But I really don't like the idea of someone bringing bushmeat into the US, especially if they're bringing it in to Boston.

As recently happened, and which we know about because a suitcase containing dehydrated monkey remains was found at Logan Airport, sniffed out by an alert Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) pooch named Buddey. 

The bushmeat traveler flew into Logan from the Democratic Republic of Congo in early January.

During a preliminary baggage screening, Buddey drew attention to a particular bag.

When questioned by CBP, the traveler said it was "dried fish," and that's how it looked on the X-ray screen, the agency said in a press release. (Source: Boston Globe)

Dried fish? Hmmmm. CBP decided not to take the traveler's word for it. 

...when agents opened the bag, they found the "dead and dehydrated bodies" of four monkeys -- referred to as "bushmeat," which is raw or minimally processed wild animal meat. It comes from a variety of wild animals, including bats and primates.

It is often smoked, dried or salted, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that treatment doesn't render it noninfectious.

Following CDC guidelines, CBP destroyed the piece of luggage, and, presumably, the dried monkey remains.  

Ebola or some other ghastly disease averted! How often do we find ourselves cheering on the CBP, but Go Customs and Border Patrol!

While there is a $250,000 penalty for smuggling bushmeat into the US, the person bringing the dried monkey into Boston wasn't charged with anything - even though they lied about the monkey meat being fish. All they lost was their suitcase, and the opportunity for sharing a downhome meal with friends and family who hadn't been back home in a while. Maybe they weren't charged because the small amount - only four dried monkeys - was clearly for personal use, and the traveler was likely not part of some big profit-making bushmeat cartel.

Anyway, I'm happy that Buddey was on duty at Logan and able to ferret out the bushmeat. 

Thanks, Buddey. A grateful nation thanks you!

Remember when "million dollar smile" was a figure of speech?

I volunteer in a homeless shelter, and plenty of the folks I see there have lousy teeth. It's no surprise. They're poor. Many live on the streets. They haven't always led the healthiest of lives. They've abused drugs. They've abused alcohol. Their diets may not be the greatest. They've been in prison. They've been in fights.

Some have no teeth at all.

One fellow - an older guy - has a terrible underbite, and, while most of his lower teeth are missing, he does have a set of protruding lower fangs. His condition can only be described as disfiguring, and I'm sure it has impacted every aspect of his life. On top of that, I suspect he's in pain. Having that degree of underbite can throw your entire body off.

I've never spoken with him. I've only seen him come through the foodline, where there's no time to chat with anyone. I suspect he grew up in a rural area (I'm thinking in the South), where there likely would have been poor or no access to dental care. I may be wrong (and I may be being judge-y) here. If he comes into the Resource Center, where there's often an opportnity for a convo, I might find out where he's from. (A lot of our guests like to chat.)

I thought of this fellow when I read about Thomas Connolly, DDS, who, from his offices in NYC (SoHo: think edgy) and Beverly Hills (think buckets o' money), outfits

his patients with "million dollar smiles." Literally.

Dubbed the "Father of Diamond Dentistry" by Rolling Stone - perhaps the only dentist to be dubbed anything by Rolling Stone - Connolly has a lot of well-known patients. 

[He] reconstructed Post Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, eight platinum crowns and two six-carat diamonds replacing the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Just diamonds.

The total cost: $1.6 million. (Source: NY Times)

That was back in 2021, when diamond dentures weren't so much of a thing. Fast forward, and Connolly and his team "now perform diamond dentistry almost daily."

Post Malone is by no means the only big name patient Connolly's worked with. 

[He] has reconstructed the mouths of the rappers Gunna and Lil Yachty, the professional boxer Devin Haney, the baseball pitcher Marcus Stroman, the Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, the Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and others.

Admittedly, I've never heard of Gunna or Devin Haney. But those other Connolly patients are big names. (Amazingly, I have heard of Lil Yachty.)

And then there's the biggest of the big names, even if the biggest of the big names is only a two-letter word.

Yes, Ye - once known as Kanye West - hired Connolly to create the "six-figure titanium structure" that Ye began showing off a short while back.

You don't have to pay a milion dollars to get in a Connolly chair:

Full diamond teeth range from $100,000 to $2 million, and porcelain veneers with diamond insets from $10,000 to $75,000.

I'm guessing those $100K diamond choppers aren't much higher in quality than cubic zirconium. But $100K is still a lot to pay for a set of teeth. 

And I'm not going to criticize veneers. A while back - a long while: maybe 20 years, maybe more - I got veneers for my front teeth, which were chipped so badly that the bonding my dentist kept trying never held. I can't recall what I paid, but it was a lot. ($7K for four sticks in my mind.) So $10K in 2024 for a veneer with a diamond inset doesn't sound outrageous pricewise.

But dental diamonds? 

Sorry, but that does strike me as outrageous. As does having a multi-million dollar mouth. 

I guess it's a logical extension of the gold grills that rappers started sporting nearly twenty years ago. And even variations on the gold grills theme have been around for, like, forever. Archaeologists have discovered Etruscan "golden dental appliances" from the seventh century BC. 

And those modern grills have been sporting diamond inlays for a while now. Full diamond teeth though, that's something new. 

I don't get it. But I'm not supposed to.

Connolly insists that:

“This is not a gimmick...We changed the profession a little bit and pioneered something that was catching on and made it a little more mainstream.”

I guess "a litle more mainstream" doesn't mean full-blown mainstream...And, of course, it will never become mainstream among us old fuddy-duddies, just happy to be hanging on to our own teeth.

But spending more than a million dollars on your mouth does seem cra.

Much as I'd like to, I'm not going to engage in the sophistry of arguing that the money could be better spent on, say, dental work for the fellow with the underbite and fangs. Rich folks, celebreties, can do whatever they want with their money. And if they want to keep Dr. Connolly and the engineers and jewelers he works with employed, so be it.

Still, I can't help but think of the guys I see day in, day out, who'd like to have a few good teeth in their heads.

Just sayin'...