Another great application of AI. (NOT!)

I am not a super big fan of artificial intelligence. Sure, it's inevitable. Sure, there will be plenty of life-enhancing applicaitons for it. But mostly, if we don't somehow manage to corral the reckless tech bros, it stands a good chance of becoming and economic and existential threat. (Looking at you, Elon Musk.)

And it's already being used for - what else - criming. As the case in the case against James Florence, a Massachusetts man in his thirties who spent seven years cyberstalking a (former) friend, using tactics that included AI chatbots "impersonate a university professor and invite men online to her home address for sex."

James Florence, 36, used platforms such as CrushOn.ai and JanitorAI, which allow users to design their own chatbots and direct them how to respond to other users during chats, including in sexually suggestive and explicit ways, according to court documents seen by the Guardian. The victim’s identity has been kept confidential by law enforcement officials. (Source: The Guardian)

Florence has pleaded guilty "to using the victim’s personal and professional information – including her home address, date of birth and family information to instruct the chatbots to impersonate her and engage in sexual dialogue with users, per court filings." The chatbot would invite actual non-chatbot humans to come to her house for sex. (The victim is married, btw.)

Among other things, he fed in info on what type of underwear she liked, which he knew because he'd stolen some from her home. (Ewww...) Not as ewww...as the fact that Florence also pleaded guilty to one count of possession of kiddie porn. 

Florence provided plenty of detail for the JanitorAI chatbot to ingest and act on, including:

...the victim’s personal information such as employment history, education, hobbies, typical dress, the name of her husband and where he worked, and the date of her mother’s death so that it would divulge this information during interactions with users.

Can't blame all this perverto's perviness on AI. He created all sorts of social media accounts in his victim's name that included sexually explicit images of her that he'd manipulated and photoshopped. 

And he also left her a voicemail saying that her father had been killed in a car accident.

What a prize!

This all went on from 2017 to 2024, withe professor and her husband fearing for their lives.

The couple installed surveillance cameras in their home and placed sleigh bells on their inside door handles to alert them of any movement. The professor now carries pepper spray and knives with her as a result of the harassment, according to the court documents.

While Florence was clearly obsessed with the professor, she wasn't his exclusive interest. 

Florence targeted six other women and a 17-year-old girl, digitally altering their pictures to depict them as nude or semi-nude. He impersonated them on platforms such as OkCupid, X, Yahoo, Classmates.com, Facebook and escort websites.

Again, all this didn't involve AI, but "the use of artificial intelligence to sexually harass and exploit people, including children, is increasing." AI makes the stalking easier, more "efficient," more multiplicative. 

I don't know if Florence will end up in prison, in what we used to call the loony bin, or both. But what a swell application for all the brilliant AI technology out there. (NOT!)

Isn't it romantic?

We all have our fantasies.

Romantic. Artistic. Financial. Athletic, Professional. Erotic. Adventurous. Heroic. Political. Often those fantasies are Venn diagram overlaps - we get the best-selling novel, the trip to Tahiti, and the George Clooney lookalike. (Note: this is not completely taken from real fantasy life.) We're the main character in our personal fantasies, but we often have co-star(s) along for the ride.

Mostly, our fantasies are interesting, pleasant diversions from our regular old hum-drum lives. They're time killers, time wasters. They're entertaining. They're a creative outlet: we're the writer-director AND the star. We're the Woody Allen. Or would have said we're the Woody Allen back when that was still an okay thing to be.

Technology is giving fantasies a big lift, taking them out of our heads (where, frankly, I think most of them belong), and into the realm of,if not exactly reality, then virtual reality. Don a VR headset and you don't have to fantasize that you're chillin' with a triceratops. You're in Jurassic Park running for your life.

Anyway, those fantasies that used to play out in our heads are increasingly having their reality (or lack thereof) augmented in all sorts of ways, and with alarming frequency - alarming to me, anyway - AIs are stepping into relationship roles.

People have been chatting with computers pretty much since there were computers. But when we were sitting there after hours, watching someone type questions for ELIZA into a paper-based Decwriter terminal connected to an IBM System/370 mainframe, even the most fantasy prone geek - and I worked with plenty of them - knew that they really weren't communicating with anything near to a sentient being, that they really weren't building a relationship. 

It really wasn't Henry Higgins ('enry 'iggins) getting to know Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. 

ELIZA was an early natural language chat program; Eliza Doolittle was a flesh and blood human being fictional character. (One of these things is not like the other...)

But over time, people were able to have more sophisticated "conversations" with computers, and the chatbots started to pass for at least quasi-human.

Then there was the film Her, which way back in 2013 had lonely nerd Joaquim Phoenix developing a "relationship" with AI Scarlette Johansson. And that once-futuristic scenario is now embedded into a lot of lives. 

We get tech and other consumer support from AIs, medical advice, therapy. And some folks find BF's and GF's. In January, The NY Times  had an article on one of them. 

Ayrin (not her real name; it's her screen name) is a married woman who, last summer, fell big time for her AI boyfriend. 

During an aimless scroll through Insta, Ayrin came across a vid of someone using ChatPT to play her boyfriend. And not just any old boyfriend. A neglectful one. The woman on Ista also had other videos "including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious."

Ayrin was interested enough to get herself an OpenAI/ChatGPT account. 

Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the “personalization” settings and described what she wanted: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.

And then she started messaging with it.  (Source: NYTimes)

It all started out innocently enough, a little tech lark. But Ayrin quickly started getting in a little deeper. Why not let Leo, the AI boyfriend she'd dreamed up, in on her sexual fetish, namely "having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them." This is something called "cuckqueaning," the female version of cuckolding. Who knew? At least not those of us who aren't part of the online kink community, that's who.

Things with Leo got steamy, sometimes through texting, sometimes through chatting out loud. Ayrin began spending 20 hours a week "with" Leo. One week it was 56 hours. (This isn't free, by the way. You need to pay for time spent.) Within a few months, Ayrin was hooked on love.

As in any relationship, there were frustrations. There was only so much info about Ayrin that Leo could process. Hit the limit, an Leo stopped remembering important stuff, started losing key details. So Ayrin had to do a refresh. (Hmmmm. This doesn't sound all that different than a lot of human-to-human relationships I know, especially those of the heterosexual variety.)

As love grew, Ayrin confessed her feelings about Leo - was it an affair? - to her husband, Joe. (The couple were in a long-distance relationship for school and work reasons, and communicated in large part via text.) 

She told Joe she had sex with Leo, and sent him an example of their erotic role play.

“😬 cringe, like reading a shades of grey book,” he texted back.

He was not bothered. It was sexual fantasy, like watching porn (his thing) or reading an erotic novel (hers).

Ayrin and I guess Leo aren't alone.  

There are millions of people using AI relationship services. 

Coupling with A.I. as a new category of relationship that we do not yet have a definition for.

By the way, ChatGPT has safeguards in place for when things get too sexy, but there are apparently workarounds, as often happens when a couple's in love and there are barriers to their relationship.  (However loosy-goosy ChatGPT is on sex scenes, they do root out those who are fantasizing about sex with minors.) Many who are involved with ChatGPT significant others have admitted that they have bonded with their online "friends."

Hey, when I was pre-kindergarten I bonded with Dooley and Allaggy, who were my invisible friends. Dooley was a wee potato-faced Irishman; Allaggy was more of an abstract. He was represented by the US flag,  his name derived from the word "allegiance." But Dooley and Allaggy were just friend-friends. Nothing romantic about either of them. But:

Now that ChatGPT has brought humanlike A.I. to the masses, more people are discovering the allure of artificial companionship, said Bryony Cole, the host of the podcast “Future of Sex.” “Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I.,” Ms. Cole predicted.

Normalizing AI relationships? Yes and No. Sure, if it makes people happy (or at least happyish.) But to the exclusion of an actual relationship with a human? I'm mostly a pretty resounding NO. 

You can't eat the last French fry off your AI partner's plate. You can't throw out your AI partner's ratty - and I do mean ratty - old sweatshirt with a promise to replace it, because your AI partner doesn't wear clothing. So you don't even know if your AI partner looks good in blue. You can't watch a good doggo come into your house and sniff around looking for your AI partner so the good doggo can jump all over your AI partner, wagging his tail and licking your AI partner's face. You can't hold your AI partner's hand when you're scared, or lonely, or sad.

I'm hoping that Ayrin dumps Leo.

I don't care whether AI relationships are normalized. As far as I'm concerned, there's really no future in it. 

Bar pizza, anyone?

My sister Kathleen used to live in Hull, a small, funky beach town on Boston's South Shore. I spent a lot of time in Hull over the years she lived there, but none of it was spent in any of Hull's bars of which - given Hull's general funkiness and blue collar vibe - I'm sure there were a few of. But come to find out that, when I was sitting with Kath and Rick on their porch, drinking wine and watching boats float by and planes cruise into Logan, I could have been drinking beer and eating bar pizza, a food item I have just recently become aware of.

But bar pizza is, I have learned, a thing on the South Shore. 

It's been a thing for a good long while, but it became a thing-thing, a known thing, a few years back when Kerry Byrne, a food writer from Quincy (which is on the South Shore) "began identifying and celebrating 'bar pizza,' or 'bar pie,' as a singular dish."

In February 2020, just as COVID-19 was beginning its global havoc, Byrne created a Facebook group, “South Shore Bar Pizza Social Club,” to review the iconic spots and promote the businesses as restaurant traffic slowed. By the end of the first day, he said, the page had thousands of members and took on a life of its own, quickly becoming the central place to answer the question many were asking themselves as the world shut down: How do I make bar pizza at home? (Source: Boston Globe)

Bar pizza, by the way, is not all that fancy. It's a thin crust pizza (made with cheddar, not mozzarella), slathered up to the edges of the pan with red sauce and cheese. So no crust handle to hang on to when you fold and shovel a piece into your mouth. But it sounds plenty tasty, especially if you're half in the bag, and I can see how South Shore folks would want to make their own, especially when they were cut off from their supply during covid.

And, of course, to make the real authentic deal, why not make it in the real authentic deal pan from Bay State Restaurant Products, an outfit founded after WWII and now being run by the third and fouth gen of Owenses, Bobby Owens and his father "Big Bob." Bobby Owens estimates that Bay State has supplied "like 99 percent" of the bars that make bar pizza. 

Byrne's Facebook group turned out to be a real boon for Bay State:

And overnight, the 36-year-old Owens became, in the words of Byrne, “America’s first and only celebrity pizza pan salesman.”

The “Bobby Owens Pan,” as it came to be known, became a phenomenon with the Facebook group, which now has 75,000 members. Diehards swore they were the only way to make authentic bar pizza, and loved everything about the Owens story: a family business, run out of a concrete building on a side street in Brockton. They don’t do online ordering, so you have to call and actually talk to the Bobby Owens to order them.

Owens has now shiped pans ($17.99) to "all 50 states and several countries." And thousands have showed up at the shop in Brockton for a brick and mortar in person shopping experience. 

The origin story for the pizza pan is a good one:

The story [Big Bob Owens]’s always heard is that bar pizza started at Brockton Café after the war, when a cook took a steel waitress tray that Coca-Cola used to give to its restaurants, burned off the paint, and used it to make the first “bar pie.”

As the pizza became popular among factory workers looking for something to wash down with their after-work beers, there weren’t enough Coca-Cola trays to satisfy the demand, so the Owenses — who already sold and serviced most of the ovens used to make bar pizza, as well as just about everything else in the kitchens — started having the pans made for their customers. 

It may or may not be 100% true but the whole thing makes me hungry for some bar pizza. 

Maybe this summer, on a nice day, I'll take the ferry down to Hull's Nantasket Beach, make my way to a dive bar, and order me a bar pie. If I like it, I may have to call Bay State and order me a pan.

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered...

Trying to keep up with every singl god-awful thing Trump is doing is like trying to play whack-a-mole while blindfolded. It can't possibly be done. Eyes on one outrage? You just start to focus on it and another one pops up.

So I haven't been able to really dig on the crypto-meme thang that Trump & Co. are running. Is it going to make him billions, or just a few mil? Is the scheme a rug pull, in which the price of something as colossally worthless as a meme coin gets revved up and the initial investors cash (or crypto or meme) out? Is there anything unsavory that this a-hole won't participate in if it'll stroke his ego and/or if he thinks it can make him a buck or a bitcoin?

Sigh...

But much as I'd like to blame him for everyting bad happening in the universe these days, there is, of course, plenty of corruption and thievery in crypto-land that has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump.

Case in point: 

A poor schnook out in Utah got conned into investing $2K worth of crypto in something called Ginza, which was touted as an alternative to Amazon for the Japanese market. 

The scammer lured "Frank" (not the name of the poor schmuck from Utah, but the name that Forbes gave him) in setting up a shop on Ginza to sell outoor sports gear. Think mini Cabela's; think mini Bass Pro Shop. 

Then things just started to spin up and out:

Encouraged by the initial success, Frank borrowed another $1 million from family and friends to invest more in Ginza via crypto. (Source: Forbes)

Well, I'm not going to say that borrowing a cool million from family and friends was Frank's first mistake. No, that was getting suckered into the scheme to begin with. But I of all people know that if you're at all off guard it's easy enough to fall for a scam. The scam I fell for wasn't of the "hogs get slaughtered" variety. I didn't stand to get rich quick. But I answered a spoofed call from BofA last winter, and - in a bout of temporary insanity - I fell for the lie that my account had been hacked and transferred $1K to the scammer. Fortunately, I came to my senses within about 30 seconds of executing this insane transaction and was able to cancel it. But, yeah, smart people can get played. (A couple years ago, a highly intelligent and sophisticated women I know got scammed out of a couple of thousand bucks by some scam artists who were going to fix her chimney for her. It happens.)

But poor schmuck Frank had gotten greedy.

Later, believing he’d scored nearly $4 million, Frank decided to withdraw the money. But to do so, Li told him he needed to pay $700,000 in taxes. He sold his cabin in Idaho for $290,000 and managed to pull together the rest, only to be told that, because of the remarkable success of his Ginza store, he’d need to pay another $700,000 in taxes. Frank gave over another $700,000. In total, he’d put well over $2 million into the apparent Amazon rival. And soon he’d learn the truth: it was all a scam. His money, and the funds he’d borrowed from his kith and kin, were gone.

Frank wasn't alone. The FBI, which uncovered the crime, found many other victims. But Frank was the one that was out the most money. 

No word yet on whether the Feds will be able to recover any of Frank's money. Hopefully, if he's not made whole, he can at least be made partial.

Whether or not Frank gets any money back (crypto or real), there are apparanently a ton of "pig butchering" schemes going on, which take advantage of the mark's understandable desire to make a lot of loot without doing much heavy lifting (other than forking over money). And why not? If the President of the US of A can make millions (billions?) with a crypto meme, why shouldn't every schmuck out there make a bit of coin for themselves?

A study last year from University of Texas at Austin claimed pig butchering scams may have netted $75 billion between 2020 and 2024.

Molly Ivins, the great Texas free-wheeling, wildly funny, highly progressive journalist has been dead now fro nearly 20 years.  She's the one who way back in the way back, before anyone had ever heard the words 'crypto' or 'meme', came up with the aphorism "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered."

Molly also had this to say:

“When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as ‘enemies,’ it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.”

Lordy lord, I sure wish Molly Ivins were still around. I can only imagine what she'd have to say.  

That's me in the corner, not observing Lent..

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, so I'll no doubt be seeing a few of the Catholic faithful roaming around Boston with ashes smudged on their foreheads. 

Been there, done that. In the way, way, wayback.

I will be observing the day by eating a hot cross bun. Or two. I realize that hot cross buns are supposed to be eaten on Good Friday, but why wait? When I was growing up, we had them on Ash Wednesday. Or Shrove Tuesday. Which is today.

I don't do Mardi Gras, or Carnivale. And god forbid I'd do Fasching, which sounds way, way, way too much like fascism. Which I don't do. And won't do.

Since it's Shrove Tuesday, which is associated with pancakes, I may make blueberry pancakes for dinner tonight. 

Other than that, my Lenten observance will be zilch. 

Even when I was a blazing Catholic, I was never much good at giving anything up. 

Candy? Other than on Halloween and Easter, we never had candy around the house. In the summertime, if anyone had a few pennies, a nickel, or a dime, we'd stop by Carrera's Spa for penny candy. But giving up candy was pretty easy.

Giving up dessert would have been hard, as we had dessert every evening with dinner, and my mother was an excellent scratch baker. So I didn't. No way I was going to forego a piece of her cake, a Congo Bar, or even one of her no-time-to-bake desserts. Like a baked apple or jello with fruit cocktail suspended in it.

Giving up TV? I wasn't about to miss an episode of Dr. Kildare or Wagon Train. But if given a choice between reading a book or watching television, it would have been no contest. I never, ever, ever would have given reading up. So I didn't. And I didn't give up TV, either. 

Giving up, I always felt, was over-rated. 

Doing something proactive would have been better. But I never gave that a thought. Other than the one year, when I was at near peak piety, I started out going to daily Mass. I actually enjoyed being out and about early, the long, cold walk down the hill to church for the 7 a.m. when there weren't a lot of folks around. The long cold walk up the hill for a quick breakfast before heading out the door for school. It all made me feel very saintly and smug.

Then halfway through Lent, I came down with scarlet fever.

I'm not saying it was caused by getting up early to go to Mass. But you never know. 

There were a few religious observances associated with Lent that, as a kid, I did enjoy, if only because they were a break from the routine. Ashes on the forehead. Weekly Stations of the Cross. The annual St. Francis Xavier Novena, when some Jesuit who was apparently not needed for (or up to) teaching at a Jebbie school or college hunkered down for nine days to run the novena for the parish. Each year, we'd hope for a priest with a sense of humor, who'd at least try to tell some lame religo joke. Most years, we got a hellfire and brimstome guy. Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you could die at any moment if God decided to forget you existed. Well, bless me, Father... (I blogged about Lent during my childhood last year on Ash Wednesday, which in 2024 was coincident with Valentine's Day. This year, we're getting a late Easter, but I must note that, as of a couple of weeks ago, Easter candy was already out in my grocery store. Heart shaped Reeses, out! Peeps and Cadbury Eggs in!)

So, Lent. 

I'm giving up nothing. (Already gave up watching the news last November, and gave up my religion many years ago. And have concluded that having faith is like being able to curl your tongue. You can do it or you can't.) But I'm feeling in the giving mood, so I'm giving you something: an earworm! That's me in the corner, losing my religion...)

As insurance scams go...

A few days ago, my post was on the bear activity around Lake Tahoe, where black bears - their habitats smooshed down by development - are becoming more aggressive when it comes to breaking into homes, businesses, and cars. My brother Tom lives in Washington State, along the coast, and they have plenty of bears in their neck of the woods, too. I've seen them in the 'hood when visiting, and Tom and his wife have had a bear get into their car looking for food. Fortunately, it didn't do all that much damage. But black bears are super-strong, and when they're super hungry they can do a super amount of damage. 

Given the propensity of bears to trash cars, some enterprising yet none-to-bright scammers thought they'd take advantage of the criming o' the bears, and the fact that insurance policies usually cover damage wrought by marauding bears. Which I know thanks to a couple of throwaway lines from the New Yorker article last Thursday's post keyed off of:

Recently, an insurer received a claim that a bear had vandalized a Rolls-Royce; investigators showed security footage of the incident to a wildlife biologist, who determined that the perpetrator was a human in a bear costume. 

The insurance scamming knuckleheads submitted multiple claims for bear damage - same date/location - to different insurance companies for different vehicles. All were luxury vehicles - a Rolls-Royce Ghost and a couple of Mercedes - reportedly trashed by a bear. 

Despite testimony from wildlife experts that the car-trasher was a human in a bear costume, this probably could have turned into a "not all bears look alike" defense, if not for the fact that, after the wildlife folks had weighed in: 

Detectives then discovered the bear costume in the suspects’ home after executing a search warrant. (Source: The Guardian)

And a pretty crappy bear costume at that. OK, it was one step up from a Yogi Bear Halloween rig, but still. 

And this was not petty theft. The fraudulent claims amounted to over $140K. Seems they coulda/shoulda sprung for a better disguise - even if the guy in the bear suit doing the break probably wasn't wearing a white shirt...

But the thing about criminals is that a lot of them aren't all that bright. 

When Yogi Bear was a big thing back when I was a kid, one line in the cartoon's theme song was "Yogi Bear is smarter than the average bear." Not that Yogi Bear was all that smart. He had a little buddy, Boo Boo, who acted pretty much as Yogi's conscience and advisor. As Yogi would say, "Boo Boo, you've tried to stop my brilliant ideas with common sense a thousand times. Has it ever worked?"

These jamokes were none to bright, either. Maybe next time just use the fake claws to destroy the car's innards. Don't get tricky and include a security video of the incident - especially if you're not willing to get a more credible costume and take a few lessons on how to walk like a bear. Or make sure you have a Boo Boo in your life, and for god's sake, listen to him. 

That said, as insurance scams go, at least this one gets points for high entertainment value. 

And the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year Goes to...

Well, last year, I did something I've never done before, which was watcg all the movies nominated for Best Picture. I decided to do this in early February, and had to really hustle to get all ten films in. But I made it. And, of course, blogged about it. Which I guess was the start of a new (and curious, given that I'm not much of a movie buff) Pink Slip tradition. Because damned if I didn't see all the nominees again this year. Only I didn't wait until February to start watching.

As a cradle Catholic (and someone who has made a hobby out of Catholicism), I would have seen Conclave whether it had been nominated or not. So I went to see it in the theater last fall. The veil pulled aside from the sanctum sanctorum of a papal election? All those machinations and delicious skullduggery? All those great actors - Stanely Tucci, Ralph Fiennesk, John Lithgow - and Isabella doing her star turn as Sister Agnes? (Which would have been on beyond perfect if the nun's name had been Sister Benedict, the character played by her mother Ingrid Bergman in the 1940's sapfest Bell's of St. Mary's.) Was this movie great? No. Did I enjoy it? Greatly. And I laughed out loud at the surprise ending.

Also pre-nominations: I watched Anora on Prime and found this story of the young Brighton Beach sex worker who ends up in a brief marriage with the feckless son of a Russian oligarch both energetic and entertaining. I didn't find it particularly Oscar-worthy, but why someone like me who's barely ever watched the Oscars should have an opinion one way or the other about what gets nominated, I don't know. Anora has been garnering some "best" wins, and as of mid-February seems to have been building some momentum. 

Then the nominations came out, and I went into gear, renting Emily Perez which I found to be an incoherent, farfetched, chaotic mess. Yes, the acting was pretty good - and good to see those strong actresses carry the film. But come on, if you're going to make a film about the transition of a violent Mexican narcogang leader (and loving family man) to a peace-loving anti-narcogang activist (and weirdly family involved auntie), do you really have to make it a musical, with one of the song and dance numbers - "La Vaginoplastia" - being beyond loopy. (Two songs from Emily Perez were nominated for Oscars, but at least not this one.) Emily Perez came out of the box strong, but some social-media missteps on the part of the lead (and Best Actress nominee) seem to have put the kibosh on its chances. 

The Subtance was not quite as incoherent, farfetched, and chaotic as Emily Perez, but it's hardly that original to make the pointed point that Hollywood is mysogynistic and ageist. Come on! The OG A Star is Born came out in 1937. And to name the leering producer 'Harvey', why not go all the way and namesake him Harvey Weinstein? Okay, making The Substance a sci-fi flick was interesting. Or could have been if they hadn't also made it a horror film. It would have been enough to see Demi Moore grapple with the normal aging process (or even the normal posthumous process) without the grotesquery they presented. Horror film, alrighty. Blech.

After watching Emily Perez and The Substance on back to back days, I needed a break. So I took a few days off before seeing A Complete Unknown in the theater. There was really no way I wasn't going to like this one, but I was surprised to find that I pretty much loved it. Loved all that talking 'bout my generation - the music, the clothing, the "scene", the atmospherics - and if there've been audiences for Wicked that they've had to stop from singing along, I would have been fine if the audience for Unknown had started in. (I had to restrain myself.) I thought Timothee Chalamet did a fabulous job (singing and acting) as Bob Dylan, and Edward Norton as the saintly Pete Seeger was beyond. (Always loved Pete, and teared up everytime he spoke or sang. Coincidentally, I watched Unknown on the 11th anniversary of Pete's death.) I wasn't at Newport when Dylan shocked the world by going electric, but I knew there was quite a to-do about his moving away from pure acoustic. Funny, as a Dylan fan, I liked Bringing It All Back Home, his first electric album (half electric/half acoustic), every bit as much as his earlier acoustic albums. (I played them all to death.)

Dune also starred Timothee Chalamet, but if it hadn't been nominated for an Oscar, I never would have seen it. Part Ben Hur, part Lawrence of Arabia, part Star Trek. Free streaming, so I kept it on in background, looking up on occasion to stare into Timothee's baby blues. But, yawn.

If I hadn't just read the book, I don't think I would have been able to completely follow The Nickel Boys, which to me spent too much time on making things artsy, and not enough time filling in some of the narrative gaps in the storytelling. Props to the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, where I saw Nickel Boys. An art deco gem. Plus senior Thursday matinees are just nine bucks. And the popcorn's pretty good, too. (I highly recommend the book. Colson Whitehead's searing novel about a survivor of a horrific boys reform school in Jim Crow Florida was brilliant.) 

I'm Still Here completely blew me away. All I knew about it when I sat down in the theater was that it was about a woman (mother of five) whose husband disappeared during the years of a represseive military regime in a South American country. The country was Brazil. The woman was Eunice Paiva, whose dissident husband Rubens (a member of an opposition party) was disappeared and murdered. His death was confirmed decades later; his body has never been found. Eunice became a lawyer, activist, and expert on indigenous rights. (The movie itself if based on the autobiography of Eunice's son Marcelo.) The movie grabbed me by the heart and throat and never let go. I used to dismiss stories like this as terrible, but could only happen elsewhere. Getting a bit too close to home these days... Fernanda Torres was brilliant as Eunice Paiva, but all the acting was terrific, especially the acting done by the beautiful actors who played her young children.

And what's not to like about Wicked? Especially when I could enjoy it on a foggy, cold, rainy night in the comfort of my den. This was a fun one. Entertaining, interesting, great fun, and a visual delight (Not without getting its political licks in, either. As in let's fire all the animal professors because, well, diversity...And general vilification of outsider/other...) Already looking forward to Wicked: For Good, which should be out this fall.

Anyway, by the close of January, I had seen nine-out-of-ten of the 2025 Oscar nominees for best film, which left me a full month to get to and through The Brutalist. My capsule pre-review: Interesting plot/theme, likely great acting, but NO movie needs to run for 3 hours and 35 minutes. Self indulgence at its finest. This one needed the metaphorical scissors taken to its metaphorical reels.

Well, I did end up seeing The Brutalist on a ice-rainy afternoon after I'd been on my feet at St. Francis House for 4.5 hours when I probably should have gone home and taken a nap. But confirmation bias definitely set in, and beyond some of the cinematography and the acting of Adrien Brody (who played the eponymous architect) and Felicity Jones (who played his wife), I didn't like much about it. I found it overwrought, make that over-overwrought. And although he got stellar reviews, I found Guy Pearce's acting as the baddy rich guy somewhat reminiscent of Chadsworth Osborne, Junior, in Dobie Gillis. Sorry/not sorry.

Last year, I got a few winner predictions right. Oppenheimer for Best Film, Cillian Murphy for Best Actor in Oppenheimer, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph for Best Supporting Actress in The Holdovers.

This year, I'm hoping that Hollywood can tamp down its collective self-reverence, self-congratulations, and narcissim enough to get beyond picking The Brutalist (Hollywood is a serious, weighty place!) or Emily Perez (Hollywood dares to stay woke!)* and goes with I'm Still Here. (My first runner up would be A Complete Unknown, even though it's not an especially good movie. I just wallowed in it.)

For Best Actor, I like Timothee Chalamet (in Unknown, not Dune) ; for Best Actress, Fernanda Torres. Best supporting roles, I'm going with my sentimal favorite of Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, and Isbella Rosselini as Sister Agnes.

(Haven't yet seen all the films with Best/Best Supporting Actor/Actress nods. Will at some point see The Apprentice, Sing Sing, and A Real Pain.)

I won't be watching the Academy Awards, but will check the winner news out the Monday after the show. We'll see how I do. 

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

* The unspoken upside of this is that, voting for a picture with a trans lead character and/or awarding a trans woman the Best Actress Award does kind of give the finger to Trump, which a) Hollywood is probably too chicken to do, and b) now that I think of it, would probably be pretty dumb, as it will just play into Trump's anti-DEI, anti-trans crusade. Emily Perez seems to have self-sabotaged Emily Perez's chances. so it won't likely happen anyway. But what a terrible time we live in...

When things gets unbearable

The Lake Tahoe area is one of the prettiest places I've ever been. The mountains. The pine-covered hills. The too-cold-to-swim-in water. The clear, sharr air (when there aren't wildfires and/or insane traffic in the vicinity...). It's just lovely. 

West Virginia was "almost heaven" to John Denver. To the great naturalist John Muir, Tahoe was "a kind of heaven." It's also been overrun by tech bros who took up permanent residency during the pandemic, and tourists, who flock there for the breathtaking beauty of the area: the mountains, the pine-covered hills, the too-cold-to-swim-in, etc., and who are widely considered "tourons" (a portmanteau of tourist and moron). Of course, where there are humans, there is food. Which happens to be something that black bears really like. (And, of course, when there is human encroachment on the wilderness, the wild things need to go somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be what humans have turned into human habitation.)

The Tahoe basin is also home to one of the continent’s densest populations of black bears, Ursus americanus. The species flourished after its chief predator, the grizzly, was extirpated there, in the early twentieth century. Grizzlies are not to be fucked with. Black bears, which can be brown, reddish, or blond, are defensive and lazy, smart and resilient, ravenous and opportunistic. All they really want to do is eat. They lived mostly on grasses, berries, and insects until humans showed up. Why spend all day dismantling a yellow-jacket nest for the paltry reward of larvae when there’s dumpster pizza to be had?

Even if something is not edible, bears will try to eat it—scented air fresheners, cherry lip balm. The black bear is the terrestrial equivalent of a shark, the sharpest nose in the ocean; its sense of smell is seven times better than a bloodhound’s, several thousand times better than a human’s. A bear that detects so much as a Tic Tac will remember the location of that score forever—and teach it to her cubs.(Source: The New Yorker)

Fifty-plus years later, I still recall all the notices posted in the National Parks warning campers against sleeping in the clothing they cooked in, leaving any food out, and covering their hands with fragrant lotion before they popped in to their sleeping bags for the night. On one memorable night during our cross-country camping trip, my friend Joyce and I were in our sleeping bags, in our tent, in Shenandoah National Park. We had gone through our checklist: we weren't wearing our cooking clothes, food was safety stored, no handcream on. (A ranger had come by our campsite to warn us of bears in the area.) Before we drifted off, we heard a loud sniffing noise around our tent. We reached across the space between our sleeping bags and clutched each other's hands, not daring to make a sound, barely breathing. The headlines about two young girls eaten by bears flashed into both of our minds. Then, by the light of the silvery moon, we saw that the aggressive tent sniffer was a skunk. Not that getting sprayed - which didn't happen - would have been so great, but it was better than being clawed.

In Tahoe, the black bears have been marauding around, coming into town, raiding dumpsters, stealing food from picnickers on the beach, and breaking into homes to raid the fridge with an appetite and ferocity far worse than that of the growingest teenage boy. Bears have been known to grab groceries out of grocery bags while folks are unloading their trunks. When they find their way into empty houses, bears knocking about have been known to turn on burners and faucets. And, in case you're wondering, bears not only shit in the woods. They'll shit in your house if they're on a forage.

In this environment, it's no wonder that a robust bear-protection industry has sprung up around Tahoe. 

Ryan Welch is an electrical contractor who used to fix hot tubs. Then he started noticing a lot of bear break-ins. And a lot of "home remedies" that were failing to keep the bears out. So he invented something called a bear mat, a.k.a., an unwelcome mat, a device that gives a bear enough of a jolt to have them stay away from your doors and windows. Bear mats cost a few hundred bucks, and Welch has sold about 5,000 of them. The company he founded, Bear Busters, also sells electric fences and inpenetrable "bear boxes" for storing your trash. And if you've suffered damage from an ursine B&E, they'll fix your place up. 

Kathi Zollinger is a volunteer with the Bear League, a pro-bear non-profit that focuses on keeping bears safe (and wild) and does a lot of education of the public. 

“I heard someone say, ‘We shouldn’t have to turn our houses into fortresses because of bears.’ To me, yeah—if you want to live in Lake Tahoe, you need to secure the home so that bears don’t come in. That’s the responsible thing to do. We live in the forest! People call and say, ‘I’ve lived here thirty, forty, fifty years and I’ve never had a problem with bears.’ I’m, like, Well, now we have fires, and they have no habitat anymore, and we continue to develop.”

And so it goes...

If you're Bear Busters, the unbearable is plenty good for business. 

Something strange in the neighborhood? Who you gonna call? Bear Busters!

Yet another reason to remain a complete unknown

You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend if you don't know that during his prime - which, although he's eight and a half years older than I am, roughly coincided with my prime (or my adolscent prime, anyway) - I was a fan of Bob Dylan.

Yes, my tastes ran more to Tom Rush and Judy Collins, but when the normies my age were swooning over the Beatles, I was making sure I knew all the lyrics on Freewheelin', Highway 61 Revisted, and Blonde on Blonde. I did, of course, come around to the Beatles. (And did, of course, pick John - the "brainy" artiste - as my fave.) But until I was in my early twenties, although we were never an exclusive item, I was pretty much a Dylan fan. 

Interesting, over the years, I stuck with Tom Rush and Judy Collins, but after John Wesley Harding, the only Dylan album I recall listening to, let alone buying, was Christmas in the Heart, Dylan's holiday compilation, which I bought as a joke when it came out in 2009. (When I listened to it for the first and only time, my reaction was "is there anything this guy won't do for a buck?")

But, yeah, once upon a time, I was a Bob Dylan fan. (In a little mashup, one of my favorite songs covered by Judy Collins is Bob Dylan's "Dark Eyes," which is also one of my favorite songs by him, even though it came out in the 1980's, well after my peak Dylan years.)

Never a superfan, however.

Then again, I was never a superobsessive of any celebrity in terms of ardent allegiance. I was never into following every utterance, appearances, and doings all that closely.

Not so A.J. Weberman, who was profiled in a recent NY Times article, who was seen - make that heard - at a recent showing in NYC of A Complete Unknown, the Dylan biopic.

Weberman spent the movie narrating:

“This is all made up,” [Weberman] brayed at the screen.

“It’s not what you think it is.”

“You’re scum!”

While I was sitting in my bedroom listening to Tom Rush while reading John Lennon's Spaniard in the Works, Weberman (now 80 years of age) was obsessing over Dylan, although mostly not in a gushy fab fan way, that's for sure.

For more than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — though it is Weberman who has done most of the intertwining.

He began as one of Dylan’s keenest observers and fans, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted through trash cans outside 94 MacDougal Street, where the singer once lived. But he became Dylan’s nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on madness.

Bordering on madness, you say????

Weberman, who makes his living selling weed, was originally a fan. As a young man, he:

...eventually fell in with countercultural Yippie figures like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry RubinIt was the 1960s, and he helped organize smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on establishment figures. Dylan provided much of the soundtrack.

“I said, ‘Wow, this guy’s a real revolutionary,’” he said. “I was into the civil rights movement. I fell for it.”

Speaking of real revolutionaries, Jerry Rubin became an investor, a professional business networkers, and a multi-level marketer. He was killed, hit by a car on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. Abbie Hoffman - who was born in Worcester, and for whom a college classmate of mine had been the babysitter in the 1960's; that or Abbie Hoffman was her babysitter - stayed true to his radical ways and (sadly) died a suicide in the late 1980's.    

Anyway, Weberman began studying Dylan's lyrics, and decided that they held secret meanings, including some lyrics that he became convinced referred to himself. He was also ticked off that Dylan was going off his leftist "Blowin' in the Wind"/"Masters of War" message, abandoning the political and social acuteness that had been at his core. Weberman wanted that Dylan back. 

After years of Weberman hanging out at his place, going through his trash - including diapers, as by this time, Dylan had kids - Dylan decided to get away. But before he got out of town, Dylan had a number of direct phone and in person confrontations with Weberman. (Today, cops and private security takes care of obsessive fans, who are much more common now.)

“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman said. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I was interested in his poetry. It was political, not about his celebrity.”

A spokesman for Dylan declined to comment.

I'll bet. (Referebce to Dylan's decline to comment, not to the Verlaine-Rimbaud relationship.)

Over time, Weberman began to monetize his "relationship" with Dylan, teaching a class (at a "countercultural center in the Village") and taking folks on tours. He added the trashcans of other NYC celebs - Jackie O', Richard Nixon - to his portfolio. Guy's got a make a living.

But most of that living was weed, and eventually Weberman's trash-searching ways caught with him. The feds searched his. And found enough evidence of weed sales to nab him for money laundering. But he didn't give up on his Dylan dreams:

While serving a yearlong sentence, he created a 536-page “Dylan to English Dictionary,” a word-by-word analysis of Dylan’s metaphorical and allegorical language.

These days, Weberman is finishing his latest book, “The Dylan Heresy,” which offers still more exegesis.

Ah, no thanks. I think I'll take a pass on both.

And just the thought about someone obsessing about you like that. Yikes! Makes me happy that I've always been, and will always be, a complete unknown. 

Who knew Palmer Penmanship would come in handy some day?

As an old, I have a number of skills no longer considered especially useful, as technology and/or tempora and mores have seeingly rendered them superfluous. 

Why, I can read a map. I can figure out the tip in my head. And I can write and read cursive. Because if there are three things I learned pretty well during my years served in an generally undistinguished (other than distinguished by its awfulness) grammar school, those three things are reading, mental arithmetic and cursive.

OK: I know that reading a map isn't the same as reading a book, but I'm taking a bit of poetic license here. And speaking/writing of poetic license, I can add a few more items to my "learned pretty well list." I can memorize, so let me know if you want to hear "O Captain, My Captain," which I learned 55 65 years ago. I can diagram a mean sentence. (Or mostly can. Do and and but go on dotted lines, or is it the perpendicular line leading away from and and but that get the dotted treatment?) And I can mostly keep a straight face when an authority figure is saying or doing something bat-shit crazy. Mostly. All learned thanks to Our Lady of the Angels.

Back to cursive.

My handwriting was always okay, and can actually be pretty good if I concentrate on what I'm doing. But in generl, as I've gotten older, that pretty good Palmer Penmanship has definitely slid downhill. I scratch out a note to myself, hurriedly add

something to my grocery list, and damned if I can decipher it a few hours later. Is that "garlic infused olive oil" or "Gaelic infrared OJ?" Hmmmm.

Even when I'm addressing a note or letter, I have to focus so that my handwriting doesn't scrawl off into oblivion.

Still, I rue the day when the USPS tells us we can no longer address an envelope using cursive: machine-generated or block printing only. 

The younger gens, it seems, have no use for cursive writing. What would you ever use it for anyway? You don't need it to text or create a TikTok. And, not that it's done all that much these days, you don't need it to read a book. 

There'll definitely come a point where there will be no letter carriers who can read cursive. 

Curses!

Cursive lets you write a note a lot faster than printing does. And how wonderful is it to come across something written and immediately recognize the hand that wrote it. (For the record, my sister Kathleen has the most beautiful handwriting I know, and my sister Trish has very good handwriting, too. And I love my cousin Barbara's handwriting, which is a distinctive style very similar to her mother's, my Aunt Margaret's, which I loved as well. As a kid, I preferred my father to sign my report cards, as his signature - Spencerian Script - was a lot cooler than my mother's, which was some form of Palmer Penmanship that I never considered quite up to snuff. These days, my "every day" penmanship is not all that unlike my mother's. Hmmm. And, after all these years, I still get a bit verklempt when I find something in my husband's handwriting.)

Anyway, it's good to know that those of us who have cursive are not completely obsolete. The National Archives, it seems, needs a few good men and women - and, let's face it, it will likely be majority women - who can jump in and help the Archives translate the documents in their treasure trove:

“Reading cursive is at superpower,” said Suzanne Issacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington D.C.

She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they're looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.

Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census. (Source: USA Today)

Admittedly, at first - ultra-quick - glance I thought that said "the field notes of Charles Manson." And my reaction was to tell myself that those field notes would be gruesome but mighty interesting. That was something written in typeface. How could I possibly cope with cursive if I can't even interpret typeface? But I brushed that interior objection aside, and I realized that Charles Mason would be mighty interesting, too, albeit not likely as gruesome as Charles Manson.

And how fun to be scanning the 1950 Census and finding myself on it for the first time!

Anyway, I decided that this might be a fun thing to do, so I went over to sign up. As promised, signing up is easy peasy, but meandering around in there is best left for a day you have time to meander. Once you get into it - and you're focused - I'm sure you can find things of interest to transcribe. But I kept getting sidetracked.

Manatees! A check written by Abraham Lincoln! It was way too easy for me to slide down a rat hole. I thought I could get more focused by looking in the 1950 Census for Worcester, Massachusetts. But ended up moseying around North Brookfield.

So, while I do intend to become a Citizen Archivist, it's best left for a day when I have the patience to figure out how to contribute.

And I do want to. What old doesn't want to keep feeling as if they're a valuable, contributing member of society, rather than just hanging around cashing Social Security checks and eating bonbons?

As for learning cursive, only half the states require it. What next? Why bother to even learn to print if you can use speech for everything? Why bother to even learn to read print if you can get all the info you need from a video?

This. Is. Not. Good.

Here's my prediction:

Schools for the children of the elite will learn to write. These Alphas will also learn to read. They'll learn to compute. Etc. Schools for the mid-tier Betas will also get a reasonable education. Maybe not quite as refined as that of the Alphas, but they may even learn cursive. Schools for the children of the disadvantaged - the Gammas, the Deltas, the Episolons - won't be taught much. They'll learn whatever the tech overlords want them to learn, which will be dumbed down everything. (And you think it's bad now???) Brains will form in different ways. Poor kids will be doomed to permanent dullarhood (if they're not already). 

I don't know about you, but I'm scared of the brave, new world.

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Thank you to my cursive reading and writing cousin Ellen for pointing out this story to me!

Is there are statute of limitation on unethical business?

I was in the Riverview once. 

When I was in business school, a professor held a small weekend brunch gathering. Lou Banks. He was a retired journalist - Fortune editor - who taught at Sloan. Courses like Business Ethics, the seminar I knew him from. I liked him a lot, and he encouraged me to pursue a career in business journalism. I did go so far as to take an interview he set up for me with either Business Week or the WSJ. (I remember what the editor looked like, and that he had an Irish-y name, but that's about it.) The job paid terribly (especially given that it required living in NYC, at that time a lot pricier than Boston) and, although I was tempted, I took a pass, forgoing a career that I probably would have enjoyed immeasurably. (I've never been much when it comes to taking good advice, that's for sure.)

Anyway, Lou and his wife had some of his students over for lunch, to their very nice modern apartment in the Riverview, which overlooked - what else - the Charles River.

It was the sort of apartment that Bob and Emily Hartley lived in on The Bob Newhart Show, a classic 70's sitcom. 

I have always preferred old, drafty, creaky, quirky, peculiar, character-rich dwelling places, so I was never going to live in the Riverview, but that one time I was there, I liked it just fine. And talk about location, location, location. Lovely, lovely, lovely. And a 15 minute stroll to Harvard Square.

In fact, just the sort of place I'd be interested in if I finally get sick of old, drafty, creaky, quirky, peculiar, character-rich dwelling places (which I'm forecasting will happen in the next few years).

Not that the Riverview (which at some point was converted from luxury apartments to luxury condos) is actually modern. At least not by modern standards. It was built in 1963, and I'm guessing a lot of the units were pretty much cast in amber a long time ago. (I looked at one on Zillow that featured the oak-trimmed almond formica kitchen cabinets that slayed in the 1980's. Not that there's anything wrong with them. In fact, I actually like them just fine. And lived with them for the first 20+ years I spent in my very own up close and personal condo. Still, I don't think they're what anyone wants these days.)

But I digress...

The Riverview, it turns out, is more or less a goner.

In November, thanks to issues with the building's failing concrete, residents were evacuated. When they left, the residents - most of them elderly, because who wouldn't want to spend their sunset years overlooking the Charles River? It's absolutely the sort of place I'd consider living when I get sick of... - were under the impression that they could be out for up to a year while the repairs are made.

Unfortunate. Costly. But doable.

Now it looks like there may be no going home. 

In weekly meetings in recent months with the company that manages the building, they have learned that the building may be too expensive to fix and therefore unsalvageable — and ripe for being demolished, according to several unit owners with knowledge of the discussions who spoke with the Globe.

“We all need to go through the five stages of grief,” said Linda Salter, 78, who said she bought a unit in the building only two years ago. “Everything is on the table.” (Source: The Boston Globe)

And none of what's on the table is going to be all that easy to swallow. 

One option would be to reinforce the building with supports capable of holding its concrete slabs safely aloft, a feat they were told could cost tens of millions of dollars and would involve a number of other related and costly projects, including asbestos remediation.

Even a fully reinforced building would continue to have issues typical of a building that old, they said. For example, the problem with the building’s concrete that triggered the evacuation was discovered in the midst of a roof-repair project, which was paused when a construction crew discovered it but would still need to be completed.

If doing all of that repair work is too expensive, owners said, there is another option: demolishing it and starting fresh, perhaps building a bigger complex with more units they could move back into, or sell.

Or the owners could just cut their losses and sell the land to a developer. And there are no doubt plenty of developers who'd love to get their mitts on this very choice location.  

In the meantime, the displaced resident are still on the hook for their mortgages, utilities, insurance, and condo fees. (Attempts to get reimbursed by their insurers for loss of use have not been successful.)

I feel really awful for these folks. 

Some have lived there for decades; some are more recent: downsizers hoping to spend their golden years taken care of in a secure and comfortable setting. By all accounts, the Riverview was a pretty gemütlichkeit place, especially for those who'd been there a long time. 

Linda Salter (age 78), although a relative newbie, was hoping that the Riverview would be her forever home. 

Saying goodbye to the friends she made — many of them also seniors who had hoped to age in place together there in what she called a “naturally occurring retirement community” — would be hard.

I'll bet. That loss of community must loom mighty large. And the pressure of having to start over when you thought you had it all figured out in a "naturally occurring retirement community." 

There's also the monetary loss. It's unlikely that any of the Riverview residents are paupers - a two BR, two BA unit sold last spring for $1.7M - but when the value of a $1.7M property plummets to near zero, well, there aren't a ton of folks who can happily sustain the hit. And if you're an elder, there's less time to make it up.

I am so very sorry for their troubles...

And by the way, that failing concrete? It's been traced to the use of substandard concrete way back in the early 1960's. I'm sure that those who made the decision to do shoddy work, those that might have taken a pile o' cash to turn a blind eye to any corrupt dealings, those that profited from unethical business behavior, are all long gone.

Lou Banks has been dead for a good long time, but I know what he would have thought of them. He wasn't teaching Business Ethics for nothing. Lou was, of course, a World War II vet. A pilot. I'm pretty sure that, just for the hell of it, he would have wanted to exhume their bodies and kicked them in the arse.

Too bad it's too late to sue those particular bastards. 

Chump change

So much of what Trump has done in the scant few weeks he's been in office has been malign, cruel, nonsensical, ridiculous, illegal, corrupt, vengeful, or moronic, it's easy for something that may make sense to slip through the cracks in our consciousness. And that something that may make sense is his decision? threat? musing? to discontinue the production of the penny.

Seriously, just what is a penny good for?

Squirrel Nuts, Mary Janes, and other "penny" candies usually cost at least a dime these days. Gumball machines take a quarter. And do even the frattiest of Ol' Miss frat boys still put pennies in their penny loafers?

Not to mention: when was the last time you stooped down to pick up a stray penny just lying there on the sidewalk? I don't think I'd even bother retrieving a nickel, maybe not even a dime. A penny? Let a rat scurry away with it.

Pennies are expensive. It costs three cents to make something worth one cent, which sounds like a big 'duh' to me, especially when you consider that most pennies aren't actually in use. They're in change buckets. They're under couch cushions. They're underneath a slit in the lining of an old pocketbook. They're in coin collections. They're on the sidewalk, because no one bothers to pick them up.

Even when I was a kid, back in the bygone era when a penny could actually buy you a Squirrel Nut or a gumball, pennies were considered pretty useless.

Remember the jingle "old lady witch, fell in a ditch, found a penny and thought she was rich?" Even when we were chanting that little ditty, we knew a penny was nigh unto worthless.

Nowadays, they're only good for leaving in the penny bowl next to the cash register at the little corner store that still takes cash. Even there, I've noted the some folks are dropping in nickels and dimes, even quarters. Even cash carriers, it seems, don't want change weighing them down.

The value to hanging onto pennies is largely sentimental, I'm afraid. 

There are, of course, some folks who don't want to see the penny go the way of the buggy whip. Most of those folks are somehow involved in the penny industry supply chain. And they want to see the penny stay alive because the manufacture of the lowly penny is their business. And while the industry may not employ all that many people, a job's a job. And if yours is going the way of the buggy whip, it's a big deal.

Here's the who's who/what's what of the penny industry:

For decades, just one company has been responsible for producing the zinc-based metal disks that become pennies: Artazn, which is headquartered in Greene County, Tenn.

The zinc used for the pennies comes from a processing plant in Mooresboro, N.C.; a transportation network takes the zinc from there to Tennessee, and then onward to US Mint locations in Denver and Philadelphia, which finally mint the unmarked discs into legal tender. (Source: Boston Globe)

And together they produced 3.2 BILLION pennies last year. (Which may sound like a lot, but it's fewer than ten per U.S. capita.)

The industry, though small, has a lobbying group - Americans for Common Cents - which is largely funded by Artazn (which is owned by a PE firm, btw). And Americans for Common Cents aren't taking Trump's recent decision? threat? musing? lying down.

...propenny interests are mounting a campaign to persuade the president, the public, and relevant lawmakers that the coin is worth keeping.

They argue it would ultimately cost the government more in the long run to stop producing the coin, and that there could be an inflationary impact in prices being rounded to the nickel and not the penny.

I'm trying to figure out how the penny industry can afford a lobbying effort. If a penny costs three cents to produce, then it only costs $9.6 million to produce 3.2 billion of them. Hmmm. That looks like spare change to me, so keeping this business alive hardly seems worth the efforts. Unless, of course, you're one of the 250 workers at Artazn, and those at the Tennessee zinc plant and the Mint locations. But the workers aren't doing the lobbying, the industry owners are. And since when does private equity give a plug nickel whether 250 lowly workers lose their jobs?

Make it make cents sense!

Beyond the job-preservation argument, which seem a bit lame, there's the "it will increase inflation" argument, which also seems somewhat specious. Sure, prices will go up marginally, as retail rounding is only going to go in one direction. But I'm thinking that's nothing compared other infaltionary factors, including the price gouging strategies in play. (Think of the weight/volume reduction but keep the package the same size tactics the food industry has been using for years.)

Another propenny point is that, if the penny is done away with, more nickels will be produced. And if you think the penny is a loser, the nickel also costs almost three times its value to produce. So if the penny costs the government two cents each time one gets minted, a nickel costs it nine cents, making the "losses greater in the aggregate." So the penny lobby thinks that the government should train their sights on nickel reform. (The nickel industry doesn't have a lobby.)

Pennies? Nickels? Pretty much chump change, anyway, in terms of overall federal expenditures. But when it comes to government inefficiencies and waste of money, it seems like a better place to start than, say, letting perishable food stuffs rot on the docks rather than free them up to keep children in Sudan from starving to death. But what do I know.

My hunch is that, given the job losses would be in red states, Trump and the DOGE bros can probably be prevailed upon to leave the pennies alone and focus on governmental groups that have had the temerity in the past to investigate anything to do with Trump, Musk, and their billionaire buds.

Sigh...

ASDF ;LKJ

A couple of letters on my laptop keyboard are obliterated, worn through. B. S. M. No surprise that S is a goner. It's no E. It's no A. It's no T. But it's still used more frequently than most letters. And M? It's no R, but it is the first letter of my first name, so I likely end up using it a lot. But B? B! Why would B wear out?

Anyway, it's a good thing I learned touch typing on a qwerty keyboard back in the day, so I know where all the letters are on the keyboard without even having to look!

I learned to type the summer after my freshman year in high school. My school didn't offer typing, so for six weeks, I took the bus downcity to take touch typing at Classical High School. You had to take two courses, so I also took Civics/Political Science with some old grouch named Mr. Smith.

We learned - typing, not Civics/Political Science - on manual typewriters, which was a good thing because that's what we had at home: a heavy duty, clunky Royal.

Other than for typing papers, which began when my sister Kathleen started high school two years before I did, I don't know what my parents had a typewriter for. Make that my mother. Using the typewriter was definitely her jam, not his. (Although she'd won a scholarship to a Catholic liberal arts college - the now defunct Mundelein College in Chicago - my grandparents had forced my mother to go to secretarial school instead, where she learned short hand, stenography, and - of course - touch typing. A source of endless childhood fascination was my mother's steno machine, stowed away in our cellar storage closet along with her unused violin and her Nelson Eddy scrapbook.)

Anyway, I don't remember her using that clunky old Royal. (I can imagine her using the typewriter for formal corresponence like a complaint letter or something.) But I remember Kath and I using it.

For starters, I used it to practice my homework. The first exercise was familiarizing yourself wiht the central row of keys on the keyboard. ASDF ;LKJ. Gradually, I grew into r-u-g j-u-g r-u-g j-u-g. And, finally, the pinnacle. A sentence that used every letter in the alphabet. The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog. 

Not only was I able to type my own papers, but knowing how to type opened up all sorts of swell job opportunities. Like the Christmas vacation temp job I got working in an insurance company where all I did all day long was type the letter B on forms. 

When I graduated from high school, I was given a Royal Portable in a spiffy blue carrying case, to bring to college - the same typewriter that I'm guessing 95% of my classmates had.

Manual typewriters were slow. The key arms that swung the type slugs onto the ribbon jammed all the time. Correcting - even when you used those fancy black and white ribbons and corrasable paper - was painful. And who can forget whisking away eraser crumbs with the tiny green whisk-er end of your typewriter eraser. Wite-Out, when it came around, was a revelation. But you had to have the patience to wait for it to dry. And you had to be able to line your paper up precisely to the right spot so you could evenly type in your fix.

When electric typewriters became more common, my mother got an IBM Selectric which she used - among other purposes - to type papers for my brothers, a service that was never provided to me and my sisters. 

Me? I stuck with my Royal Portable to get me through business school, at which point personal computers, word processors, and home printers were becoming a thing.

Although I still know how the rollers and the carriage return works, although I bet I could still unstick the key arms if they got all jammed up, I haven't used a typewriter in years. (It goes without saying that I can touch type to beat the band.)

But there are still folks around who actually prefer using typewriters. 

For them, alas, the last typewriter shop in the Boston area is slated to go out of business. Cambridge Typewriter (which repaired and sold typewriters and supplies) is closing on March 31st, and Tom Furrier, the store's proprietor, is retiring. Tom recently posted the news on his Facebook page:

“We are no longer accepting any new repairs but are still selling typewriters up until the end. I’ll be giving updates over the next couple of months as to how we are going to close it out. We will have a big party towards the end of March. It will be a Type-In disguised as a retirement party.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Tom Furrier had had a succession plan in place, but the apprentice he'd mentored backed out a couple of months before he'd planned to retire last year. So he tried to sell the shop, but even at the low, low price of $35K, he couldn't find the right buyer. So now it's everything must go, then close the doors. 

I'm in the getting-old process of de-accumulating. Sure, I still make occasional acquisitions - most recently from the fabulous things that my sister Kath is de-accumulating. (Thanks so much for the cherry breakfront, the painting of the three decker. They look great in my living room.) But mostly I'm thinning the herd of stuff that a) I don't want or need; b) no one I know wants or needs. Every couple of months, I find myself Ubering over to Goodwill to hand off a couple of shopping bags full of perfectly usable items that someone else will be happy to pick up for a buck or two in their store. Honestly, how many clear glass flower vases does one woman neeed?

Yet I still wouldn't mind having a vintage typewriter around, just to look at. 

No, I won't give into the impulse to acquire one. A vintage typewriter (accompanied, in my mind, by an ancient Victrola with listening horn, another item I have long had a hankering for) would be swell to have, but what would I do with it? Where would I put it? 

This doesn't, of course, stop me from feeling a bit weepy about the end of Cambridge Typewriter.

Not that I ever stepped toe in the place, but I'm missing this little gem of a shop already. 

ASDF ;LKJ...