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. 

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* 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...

Who knows where the time goes?

This is a picture of my husband, taken in Rome in April 2012. He was in treatment for cancer at the time - chemo? radiation? I've forgotten the details, but it was pre-surgery, which came in May. He was tired, but we'd promised our nieces Molly and Caroline a trip to Rome, so there we were. A couple of times he hung in the apartment we'd rented near the Spanish Steps and rested while we toured. (He wasn't all that keen on visiting St. Peter's - been there, done that - and the last thing he needed was the mob pushing their way to get in.)

But mostly he was game for wandering around at night eating gelati, dining out - especially when we discovered that Italy is a very good place to dine out if you have celiac disease, which, in the course of my husband's cancer diagnosis, he found out he had - and visiting touristy spots like the Roman Forum, which is where this picture was snapped.

It was a wonderful trip, but sad. Our last European trip - one of many, many that Jim and I had taken over the years. 

We did end up having a couple more trips to NYC - Jim's favorite place on earth - but the Rome trip was our last major jaunt.

Anyway, today is the eleventh anniversary of Jim's death. 

Eleven years? Sometimes I still shake my head in disbelief. 

Who knows where the time goes? 

Political landscape aside, I have a very good life, great even. Great family. Great friends. Great volunteer work. Great home. Good - maybe even great, if that's possible at 75 - health. (Knock on wood.)

And speaking of wood, funny, as I look around the living room, much of the furniture is new since Jim's death. But the credenza, one of the mirrors, a couple of the lamps, the little desk, the cabinet used for CD's, the claw-foot table, and some of the pictures on the walls are the same. Just in different places. But the table where I'm writing this is new. 

During covid, I just got sick of the mahogany 1920's behemoth we'd gotten at an antique store in Brookline a million years ago. I'd never polished it, and the wood had dried out. If you leaned back at all in one of the chairs, you risked cracking the wood. Anyway, I just got sick of living with its dark and gloomy presence. So I put my mask on, marched over to Circle Furniture, and bought a new table and chairs. The credenza I kept.

The big change to the living room is that there's no longer a TV there.

We used to go back and forth about what we'd do if the other one died first. Jim's plan was to get rid of the kitchen clock which, for some reason, he hated. (I, of course, loved it: a very cute little clock with ceramic fruits and veggies for the hour markers.) Me? I was going to retire that big-arse TV. 

Which I did when I reno'ed our condo the year after Jim died.

The cute little kitchen clock stopped working on its own, but I still have it here somewhere, along with the replacement battery clockworks I got on Amazon. Maybe some day I'll get around to it...

What's missing from the living room is, of course, the presence of Diggy, as Jim was known within the fam.

And, yes, after all these years, I still miss him.

Sometimes I wake up, weirdly sensing his presence. Sometimes I walk into our home and weirdly expect him to be there. 

Of course, I miss him. (And for the record, I still miss my father, dead now over 50 years, and my mother, gone for over 20.)

You never stop missing someone you love. It's just that the missing is less acute, not quite continuous. (And, I have to admit, I don't miss the non-stop yacking, the awful jokes, the rag-bag clothing he refused to part with. Most of the time, anyway. I'd be happy to put up with it all if he were still around...)

I've traveled plenty of times without Jim, and it's not the same. Fun, but never as much fun as with him. (And, of course, I miss that he planned all of our trips. Sometimes overplanned. I thought that on Thursday in Paris, we'd eat at Café de l'Esplanade. I'm thinking of having the sole. You liked the veal chop last time we ate there. This would be six months before we were going actually to be in Paris. So, yeah, overplanning. But I miss that Jim did the planning.)

Molly and Caroline are both big travelers, by the way. I'd like to think that the trip to Rome, and an earlier trip we'd taken to Paris, helped set them on their adventurous ways. Both the "girls" (now young women) have been back to Rome, and a couple of years ago they went together to the Amalfi Coast.

Arriverderci, Diggy...

And today we're celebrating...

Well, yesterday was Abraham Lincoln's Birthday. Or, as I've taken to calling it, Abe Lincoln (For Obvious Reasons) Is Rolling Over in His Grave Day. And tomorrow is Valentine's Day, a very sweet (though, for plenty of folks, understandably depressing) holiday. So what's on for today?

I love that, on any given day, there are all sorts of things being celebrated.

February 13th is Digital Learning Day. As a Duolingo aficionado, I celebrate digital learning every day. Even if it's only doing the cheesiest, easiest exercise to keep my streak going. (Over a year, now!) It's not exactly like I'm learning all that much Spanish, but after a year+ I can read a bit, understand a bit, and speak a bit. Given that I volunteer in a shelter with a signficant percentage of Hispanic guests, it comes in handy that I can ask folks whether they want a cepillo de dientes (tooth brush) or calcetines (socks), two of the items I give out. And I can ask the Puerto Rican lady who brings the turtle in most days how her tortuga is doing. 

Some of what I'm learning it pure nonsense, even if it rings true. In real life, I may well want to tell someone that I've always hated clowns, but the person I want to reveal this deep-seeded, highly personal bit of info to is most likely to be English-speaking. Nonetheless, if needs be, I can tell someone that siempre he oidado a los payasos. 

While I like Duolingo, I hope that all learning doesn't get pushed to digital. It's good for somethings, and no doubt great for some learners, but mostly I'm pro face-to-face learning with a real teacher and real classmates.

February 13th is National Tortellini Day. The first place I ever ate tortellini was decades ago at Romagnoli's Table, a very nice Italian restaurant in Quincy Market. This was nearly 50 years ago, and the tortellini had a bit of nutmeg sprinkled on the dish. Yum! I used to always have a package of tortellini in my freezer, there when I needed a quickie meal. Tortellini makes for one excellent boiled dinner, I can tell you. I need to get back into the tortellini on board habit. Sprinkle on a tiny bit of nutmeg. Please allow me to repeat myself: Yum!

February 13th is Get a New Name Day. I've never been all that fond of my name. I like some of the other "een" names - like Kathleen (one sister's name) and Eileen (the other sister's middle name). But I've always been sort of 'meh' when it comes to Maureen. As I've gotten older, I've become more okay with it. I like that it's Irish. I like that, when I'm in Ireland, people know how to pronounce it. (It's MAUR-een, not Maur-EEN.) And I kind of get a kick out of the fact that it's pretty much an old lady name. (Try finding a Maureen under the age of 50.)

Maureen was a wildly popular name in my time and place. There were so many Maureens in my high school class - Catholic girls school - that we all went by our full first-name-last-name. This was also true for the Kathleens, who outnumbered the Maureens by about two to one. 

At one point in my twenties, I tried on Maura for a while, since it sounded classier (to me, anyway) than Maureen. I was working at a temp job, happily going by Maura, when a friend called and gave it all away by asking for Maureen. 

It's too late now, but if I did go out and get me a new name, it would be Elizabeth, which is my middle name, my mother's name, and pretty much my favorite girl name.

February 13th is Galentine's Day. The notion of a day to celebrate women's friendships with each other came out of a Parks and Recreation episode 15 years ago. And it's a good one. Everyone doesn't have a sweetheart, BF (or GF), hubby (or wife), or significant other to celebrate Valentine's Day with. No chocolates. No gushy cards. No roses. No nothing. A sweet but Hallmark holiday designed to make those without a love interest feel depressed, neglected, rejected, and alone. But most of us gals have friends. Female friends. And how sweet it is to have a day to celebrate those friendships.

So I'm picking Galentine's Day as the one I'm going to celebrate.

Thus, Happy Galentine's Day to my wonderful women friends. I've sure had more of them over the years than I've had romantic relationships, and I'm delighted to celebrate our friendships. Yay to you all!

Not that I'll neglect the other celebrations. I'll do my Duolingo lessons. I'll boil up some tortellini. When I think of myself, I'll try to think of myself as "Elizabeth" rather than "Maureen." But today, I'll be mostly be celebrating my friendships with some wonderful women. Here's to you all!

Candlepins for Cash!

I'm not much of a bowler. 

Not that I ever tried to be much of a bowler. I'm 75. Have I been bowling two dozen, maybe three dozen times, in my life? All I know is that I wasn't very good at it. Not that my game is an absolute disgrace. Playing tenpin, i.e., "big ball bowling," I have managed to get my score up in triple digits. And when I use the kiddie bumpers - which eliminate the possibility of gutter balls - I'm reasonably, mediocrely okay-ish.

But candlepin bowling? Yikes, that game is just brutal. One time, I actually "achieved" a small ball score of 13. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Candlepin bowling is one of those New England things. Like calling soda "tonic," and corner stores "spas" (as if), and the porches on three deckers "piazzas" (as if). And like many wonderful items, candlepin bowling (tiny, fits-in- your hand ball; skinny cylindrical pins) was invented in Worcester. (Other wonderful Worcestessr inventions: the mass-produced Valentine, the monkey wrench, and the smiley face.)

But Valentines, monkey wrenches, and smiley faces are easy. Candlepin bowling is hard.

The ball is little, so it's harder to get much mojo on it. And the ball doesn't weigh any more than a pin. Sure, it's got momentum going for it as it hurtles down the alley - as long as you keep it out of the gutter - but in big ball, the ball outweighs a pin. By a lot. 

Unlike with tenpin bowling, no one has ever scored a perfect candlepin game. And a lot of folks, even regulars, never bowl a strike. Unlike with ten pin, where even a lousy bowler scores an occasional strike. (C.f., me.)

But Worcester's a tough, gritty town, and the degree of difficulty doesn't phase Worcester-ites. (Unless you're me when it comes to candlepins.) We don't shy away from challenges. Candlepins 'r' us.

In fact, Worcester is celebrating candlepin bowling at the Worcester Historical Museum, with an exhibit that runs through March. 

“History museums don’t always have to be Civil War, World War II kind of dusty stories,” said Vanessa Bumpus, an exhibit coordinator at the Worcester Historical Museum. “Candlepin’s an important part of our story.”

The exhibit features everything from old candlepin bowling balls and rulebooks to pictures of the game’s inventors and legendary figures it became popular among ... *cough cough* Babe Ruth. (Source: WGBH)

I don't know what's up with that *cough cough* Babe Ruth thing. Babe was an avid bowler, both tenpin and candlepin. There's even a picture of him, wearing him some pretty snappy bowling shoes, and picking just the right small ball to send down the alley. (The picture has to be authentic. Seriously, who would go to the bother of Photoshopping the Babe picking out a bowling ball?)

I, of course, never saw Babe Ruth bowl. Or play baseball, for that matter. He died the year before I was born.

But as a kid, there were a couple of candlepin bowling TV shows on Saturdays, the most noted of which was Candlepins for Cash. (There weren't all that many TV choices back in the day, and if you were stuck inside on a blustery Saturday, you had to make do with bowling or pro wrestling with the likes of Haystack Calhoun.)

In its heyday, there were 250 candlepin alleys in New England. Now there are just 75. Alas, the last candlepin bowling alley in Worcester closed a few years back. 

Q. Will I get out to Worcester to see the candlepin bowling exhibit?

A. Probably not.

But I love the very idea of it, and my heart is always gladdened when things Worcester are honored.

Let's hear it for Worcester's very own candlepin bowling!

_______________________________________

When he was a kid, one of the many odd jobs my father had was pinsetter in a bowling alley. No way to know whether it was tenpin or candlepin, but I'm betting candlepin.

Truckin' like the doodah man

Somewhere along the line, a bit of a roundup of 1970s slang caught my eye. Having been there, and at least partially done that, I thought I'd take a look and see whether any of this slang had been in my vocabulary. 

Well, yeah. Somewhat. 

I used to say "book" for "leave quickly" but I think we mostly said "book passage." And didn't everyone say "Book 'em, Danno" when making fun of cop shows in general and Jack Lord on Hawaii 5-0 in particular. 

"10-4",  as in "10-4, good buddy" was only used when making fun of trucker movies or in facetious reference to the song "Convoy." The term was CB radio short hand for message received. But we (me and my peeps - a word that didn't exist then) didn't use 10-4 in real life.

Nor did we use "Keep on truckin'," which had nothing to do with trucking, but plenty to do with cartoonist R. Crumb, his character Mr. Natural, and the Grateful Dead. I'm not sure that Mr. Natural was the Doodah Man, but close enough. Again, I only remember using this term to go into make-fun mode, leaning back Mr. Natural style, waving my finger, and truckin' like the Doodah Man. 

Was "go bananas" a term from the 1970s? I guess if they say so. And I did and have used it, although I've been more apt to say "go nuts" than "go bananas."

Not sure when "hardball" entered my vocabulary, but unlike "book," let along "keep on truckin'," it's still there. Very useful when talking business or politics. As in "I wish the Democrats knew how to play hardball." (Sigh.)

Never used "primo," even when referring to good weed, which I occasionally indulged in. Much more apt to use the word "prime."

With so few words mentioned in this brief little bit o' content, I thought I'd look around for more 70s slang. 

Some of the slang I found in a Yahoo list, I've never heard before. As in "keep on steppin'" and "freaky deaky"

Others, I was familiar with and had used. But whenever I used the words "far out" or "groovy," it was when I was eye-rollingly making fun of the hippie folks we referred to as "oh wowers." If I were using "far out" or "groovy" it was always with "air quotes." (Sounds like I did a lot of making fun of back in the day. Guess some things never change."

As for "stoked," I thought only surfers used that word, dude. 

Did I ever say "good vibes?" Yes, I did and do. But I'm equally apt to say that someone was giving off "bad vibes." I also used/use the word "lowdown." And while I haven't used the word "space cadet" in a while, I used it plenty during the day. Either it's way passed its prime - or primo - or there are fewer "space cadets" around these days. (I'm guessing the former.)

"Bummer" and "take a chill pill" have crossed my lips plenty of times. For some reason, my non-slang using mother adopted the word "bummer," only she used it to refer to a person doing something she disapproved of, not to refer to something crappy that happened. 

And speaking of my mother, two of the 70s slang terms on the Yahoo list were "copacetic" and "Jeepers Creepers," both of which I associate with my mother's youth, not mine. 

Another list I found was from a post on the lingoda blog. Some of their terms were repeats ("copacetic," "jeepers creepers," et al.), and there were a few that have pretty much made a permanent place for themselves in (my) everyday convo: "fake me out," "down with," and "rip off." 

But some of their other terms: "flat leaver" for ditching someone; and "Hertz donut" for "hurts, don't it." Nope. Never heard either of those gems. Maybe I wasn't paying attention. 

Anyway, catch you later. Don't go bananas. Keep on truckin'. 

How odd. How terrible. And somehow how Texas.

Certainly, more odd (often terrible) things happen in Texas because there are more people in Texas. And where there are more people, there are more odd (often terrible) people who make odd (often terrible) things happen. (The same is true in Florida as well: more Floridians, more oddballs. Oddly, though, there doesn't seem to be as high a correlation between population and oddness in the other two most populous states, California and New York. I'm not going to state flat out that it's a red state/blue state thang. But inquiring (not odd, certainly not terrible) minds do kinda-sorta want to know why so many odd (often terrible), batshit crazy things happen in Texas (and Florida).

The latest deep in the heart of Texas terrible oddity I read about concerned a Texas high school student - the president of the school's Future Farmers of America organization - who killed a rival's goat by forcing pesticide down the poor goat-een's throat. 

Authorities allege that Aubrey Vanlandingham, 17, used a drench gun to force-feed toxic pesticide to the goat, named Willie, at a barn at the Vista Ridge high school in Cedar Park in October.

According to an arrest affidavit obtained by multiple outlets, Vanlandingham reportedly confessed to deliberately poisoning the animal, an act that was captured on CCTV footage.

The goat died about 21 hours later after convulsing and showing signs of respiratory distress, documents say. (Source: The Guardian)

Vanlandingham - who is (why am I not surprised) also a cheerleader - told police that her motive was a belief that Willie's owner was a cheater, and didn't deserve to win any livestock competitions. In addition to her confession, the police took a look at her search history and discovered that:

...she had searched “how much bleach can kill an animal” and “poisoning pets, what you should know”, People reported. She also allegedly searched “how to clear search history”.

I have no idea "how much bleach can kill an animal," but apparently a large enough amount that it was easier to use pesiticide. And I haven't a clue about "poisoning pets, what you should know" - other than the obvious that "poisoning pets" is a terrible idea, generally criminal, and that everyone in their right mind knows it's a really bad thing to do.

Vanlandingham could be looking at two years in the slammer if she's found guilty of cruelty to livestock animals. Cruelty seems like way too mild a word, by the way. She's really guilty of capine murder. The family of the 15-year-old girl whose goat was murdered wants justice, and to them that means jail time. The 15-year-old was holding Willie when he died, which sounds pretty traumatic. 

“We don’t believe there is any remorse there,” the mother added. “We want justice served, we don’t want a slap on the wrist. We want to make sure that she is punished.”

Well, time will tell if a pretty suburban cheerleader from an affluent suburb - it's the wealthiest suburb in the Austin metro - will go to jail or go into therapy. Likely therapy. But will therapy determine whether Aubrey Vanlandingham is a psychopath, a true baddie, a spoiled-rotten bitch, or just an f'd up, overpressured teenager (albeit one on the far out end of the spectrum of f'd up, overpressured teenagers)?

And, of course, I was wondering why an affluent suburb of Austin would have an FFA program to begin with. Yes, there are FFAs in plenty of high schools in Massachusetts, but they're mostly county schools of the agricultural and technical sort, not affluent suburban Lexington High, not Wellesley High, not Brookline High. 

Turns out that most high schools in Texas have FFAs. Texas is, of course, a big agricultural state, and a lot of those affluent suburban high schools are built on the grounds of former farms and ranches. And the suburbs often still have a farm or two, a ranch or two, in their environs. 

A friend of mine has a niece who lives in a different affluent Austin suburb, a town full of doctors, lawyers, consultants, and techies. Her niece's daughter is in high school and likes hanging out in the barn with her FFA friends. She's considering joining FFA next year. Of course, this girl is half farmer, as her dad grew up on a working farm in Missouri. (It may have been a working farm, but her dad's father was also an accountant.) But this girl's mother grew up in Westchester County, so no ag roots there. It'll be interesting to see if she goes through with her plans to join FFA.

Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what Aubrey Vanlandingham needs, but she certainly needs something.

And killing a sweet, innocent little goat? How odd. How terrible. And somehow how Texas. 

Looking for another reason to fear AI?

I have very mixed emotions about artificial intelligence.

On the one hand, it can be a force of good, as when it's used to solve thorny medical diagnostic problems, help the disabled live more independently, make buildings operate more efficiently.

On the other hand, well, it sure has the potential to be a force for no good - which in many situations, it already is. What's the plan for all the jobs that will be replaced? (Any appetite for a guaranteed income that will sustain people who are no longer able to work because the only job they know how to do is now done by a robot?) How are we going to handle all the misinformation and disinformation out there that, thanks to AI, is so rapidly created and disseminated? What about all the deep fakes that are sexualizing and traumatizing middle school kids? And what, what, what about the environmental impacts?

First off, AI is admittedly doing some things that benefit the environment. 

Among other things, the technology is already being used to map the destructive dredging of sand and chart emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, [as] UNEP, for example, uses AI to detect when oil and gas installations vent methane, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change.(Source: UN Environmental Programme)

So, BravAI!

But there's also a horrendous environmental downside.

The proliferating data centres that house AI servers produce electronic waste. They are large consumers of water, which is becoming scarce in many places. They rely on critical minerals and rare elements, which are often mined unsustainably. And they use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

How bad is it? For a couple of examples:

The electronics [that the huge data centers that house AI installtions] rely on a staggering amount of grist: making a 2 kg computer requires 800 kg of raw materials. 

Globally, AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million, according to one estimate. That is a problem when a quarter of humanity already lacks access to clean water and sanitation. 

...to power their complex electronics, data centres that host AI technology need a lot of energy, which in most places still comes from the burning of fossil fuels, producing planet-warming greenhouse gases. A request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search, reported the International Energy Agency.  

And yet, unless you do something to change it, Google Search now seems to default to an AI-based response. And I've come to rely on giving the AI-based response at least a quick glance as my first stop when search results are concerned. Sometimes I end up looking further. I want more detail. I want to fact check - AI can be wrong. 

And even when AI's right - or right enough - do I really need the insta-search result that AI produces to learn that Boston, Worcester, and Providene all have a ton of triple deckers among their housing stock?

No, I don't.

But I've been too lazy to turn off AI Overview and go with good old-fashioned Google Search.

As I said up front, I have mixed emotions about AI. But if you're looking for another reason to fear it, the environmental impact may well be it.