Talk about school trip gone bad

When I was in kid, school trips weren't much of a thing.

Fifty kids in a class? Where were we going to go, and who was going to foot the bill?

The one quasi grammar school trip occurred in eighth grade, when a subset of our class - the good students, the goodie two shoes, the ones least likely to act up - were allowed to take the bus "down city" to see Heaven Over the Marshes (1949), an Italian movie about Maria Goretti, a 12-year old virgin martyr who in 1902 was stabbed to death for resisting the sexual advances of a 20 year old man. Maria Goretti was canonized in 1950. Her murderer, having been relased from prison and become a religious brother, died in 1970. (I remember when he died.)

On the day of our school trip, the girls were warned to sit separately from the boys both on the bus and in the theater. We may have been goodie two-shoes, but hah to that.

The film was an old timey black and white with subtitles, and was pretty boring. Plus we were all embarrassed by the topic: resisting rape as the pathway to heaven. Bad jokes were made by the boys on the bus on the way back home.

In high school, I went on a couple of school trips. Into Boston to the Science Museum, where all I remember is the lub-dub heart. And into Boston to see La Traviata, where we were the only high school group and the ruffian, raucus Boston public schoolers ran around the opera house hollering and blowing through their Good & Plenty boxes to make that wonderful Good & Plenty. Better than a vuvuzela!

Anyway, when she wasn't dying of consumption on stage in Alfredo's arms, Violetta was laughing at the antics of the audience. As was Alfredo.

On a Saturday in June my freshman year, the Literary Society went to Concord to visit the Old Manse, where Ralph Waldo Emerson lived, as did Nathaniel Hawthorne. But this was on a Saturday and, while a couple of nuns came with us, it wasn't exactly an official school trip.

When I read about a school trip gone bad in British Columbia, I couldn't help but think of the paltry school trips of my youth. They weren't much, but at least they weren't perilous.

What happened to the students from the Acwsalcta School is horrific and unfathomable to a city girl. What happened was that students and teachers were injured in a grizzly attack.

The attack happened Thursday [November 20] in the Bella Coola Valley of the Nuxalk Nation in British Columbia. The CBC reported that two people were critically injured, two were seriously hurt and others were treated at the scene.

...A male teacher "got the whole brunt of it" and some children got sprayed with bear spray as the adults tried to scare the bear away, parent Veronica Schooner told the Canadian Press, Canada's state news agency. (Source: UPI)

The area where the attack occurred was, not surprisingly, remote: over 400 miles from Vancouver. The school is run by an indigenous nation (Nuxalk), and the kids are used to nature, to wildernerness. 

Heroic teachers have been credited with thwarting the attack, making sure it wasn't worse than it was.

But what a horrible experience for these kids, and their teachers.

A lot easier to watch the lub-dub heart go lub-dub, and see Violetta laugh herself to death.

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Image Source: BBC

A lobster tale

I like lobster as much as the next New Englander, but it's not something I eat all that often.

Mostly when I have lobster it's in the summer, and in the form of a lobster roll. 

I like the idea of a boiled lobster, but it's a big, messy pain in the butt. Once you retrieve the easy meat, which you get at by twisting the tail off and prodding the meat through, things get harder. You need to crack the claws, which don't always open up perfectly. As for the legs, whether you're poking the stringy meat out with a lobster pick, or sucking it out, as god intended, it's mostly not worth the effort.

Dipping lobster meat in drawn butter is sort of fun, but a mess. Your fingers get all greasy and you end up with butter running down your chin. 

If you're preparing boiled lobster at home, you have to kill the critters. I don't know how sentient lobsters are - I'm guessing not very - but one minute you have these guys crawling around in your tub, and the next minute you're sending them to their death. Not for the faint of heart.

Plus in my no doubt minority opinion, lobster doesn't actually taste like much of anything. Other than the butter you're dipping it in, or the butter the lobster on the lobster roll comes doused in. 

Anyway, if I'm looking for a seafood thing-y that says summer, more often than not, I'm going with fried clams or fried oysters. And the thought of eating lobster, fried clams, or fried oysters anytime other than summer is anathema to me.

Which is not to deny that plenty of folks love lobster. Year round, lobsters are on the pricey menu. And who among us hasn't been to a height of luxury wedding with surf 'n' turf on the menu? (Sorry, if the surf isn't lobster, it ain't surf 'n' turf.)

The lobster industry is primarily New England based, mostly in Maine, which produces the great majority of American lobsters. (The American lobster is what most homies think of as lobster. As opposed to langostinos, which aren't technically lobsters, or European lobsters, which are lobsters, but pre-cooked are blue vs. American lobsters, which are dark brown. Both cook up bright red, by the way.)

While I might think of lobster as summer fare, lobsters were in the news earlier this winter when a truckload of lobster meat valued at $400K pulled a disappearing act between leaving the warehouse in Taunton, Mass. and (not) arriving at some midwest Costcos. 

Seafood theft is apparently a pretty big "business," and the criming is pretty well organized. 

According to Dylan Rexing, CEO of the broker/logistics company that was ripped off, this was the second recent theft from Lineage Logistics, the Taunton cold storage facility where the lobsters were swiped from. Earlier, it had been crab. A few weeks prior, a different facility in Maine had 14 cages worth of oysters, worth $20K, stolen. 

“This theft wasn’t random,” Rexing’s email said. “It followed a pattern we’re seeing more and more, where criminals impersonate legitimate carriers using spoofed emails and burner phones to hijack high-value freight while it’s in transit.”

Rexing said his company hired a driver “that was fraudulently impersonating another carrier” in a case of “highly sophisticated” identity theft. (Source: Boston Globe)

Speculation is that the lobsters ended up in seafood markets in Boston and/or NYC, where it was sold at a discount.  

The FBI is actively investigating the incident which looks to be part of a growing pattern of organized cargo thefts targeting high-value freight in the United States, Rexing said.

Good to know that the FBI is on the case. Maybe they've been freed up from escorting Kash Patel's girlfriend around. Homeland Security Investigations is also in on the act. Better looking out for stolen lobsters than thugging around maltreating the people of Minnesota, but if Homeland Security Investigations is going to be doing any investigating, I'd just as soon they start with ICE. A girl can hope, can't she?

The Department of Transportation is also looking at cargo thefts, which end up in losses to brokerages like Rexing's, tax revenue losses to the feds and state governments, and additional costs to the "average American family," who are getting hit with over $500 worth of extra spending each year. 

I imagine that perishable cargos are especially difficult to recover. By the time the FBI, DHS, and DOT have started sleuthing, that lobster meat has already been scarfed down in a lobster roll. An out-of-season lobster roll, I might add. So don't blame me!

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Image Source: Vital Choice

Why am I not surprised? (Even if it's just GoFundMe.)

My Irish forebears didn't leave Ireland as the (direct) result of the famine. They came over in the 1870's for the usual reasons: poverty, and too many offspring chasing survival on a poor, rocky farm that was not infinitely divisible. My great-grandfather John Rogers hailed from County Roscommon; my great-grandmother Margaret Joyce Rogers was from Mayo. Roscommon and Mayo were two of the counties hit hardest by An Gorta Mór (The Great Famine), losing nearly one-third of their population to death or emigration during the famine years (1845-1852).

My other set of Irish ancestors, Bridget and Matthew Trainor, were from County Louth, just north of Dublin, which was relatively unscathed by the famine.

But whether directly scathed or unscathed by the famine, victim or survivor, the entire population of Ireland for generations since has been impacted by genetic or race memory of this unparalleled catastrophe. The same is true in places where there are a lot of folks descended from famine (and non-famine) Irish.

One such place is Boston, where in the late 1990's "they" erected what has to be one of THE most hideous momunents ever to memorialize any tragic event, anywhere. It's a two-parter, one statue depicting a starving family in rags who'd just sailed into Amerikay on a coffin ship, the other showing a well-dressed, prosperous Irish-American family who'd achieved the American dream. (Weren't those the days?)

The momument has been controversy since the jump, and in 2013 wae dubbed "the most mocked and reviled public sculpture in Boston" by the Boston Globe's art critic. I can't speak for all Bostonians, but I have personally mocked and reviled it plenty of times.

But I digress.

What prompted this post was an article I came across a few months ago stating "Ireland named most generous country in the world."

This made sense to me. 

Time and again over the years, whenever there's some disaster or another - famine in Africa, the destruction of Gaza - there's news of Irish relief organizations stepping in to help out, punching well above their weight. (Ireland's population is roughly 5 million, 7 million if you count Norther Ireland, which would give it the same population as Massachusetts.)

Anyway, I was enjoying the glowup, basking in the halo effect  - ah, the wonderful Irish - when I clicked through on the click bait and read that the metric was per capita donors to fundraisers listed on GoFundMe. And that for the seventh year running, Ireland comes out on top. Or the 20 countries GFM operates in. The US ranks second.

Not that there's anything wrong with donating to GoFundMe fundraisers. I do it all that time, most recently to the one set up for T.J. Sabula, the Ford worker who in January yelled "pedophile protector" at Trump during an appearance at a Ford plant. Trump's response was to shoot T.J. the finger and mouth the words "fuck you." It wasn't clear whether Trump was acting in his capacity as president of the US, president of Venezuela, or receipient of the FIFA peace prize.

I find GoFundMe endlessly fascinating. Pretty much everything about it: how within nanoseconds of some sort of tragedy/emergency, someone's set up a fundraiser to cash in; what people want the money for (does anyone really need a $50K funeral?); how one fundraiser will grab attention - and donations - while another near identical one will not; what a disgrace that people need to raise money to take care of medical expenses that should be covered, etc.

Five years ago, I helped run a pretty successful GoFundMe for a friend who'd been diagnosed with ALS and needed home renovations and 24/7 care. My friend was a very well known Boston personage, famous for his kindness and generosity, and hitting our goal was relatively easy. (It helped that someone gave $50K. I thought at first it was a mistake. Who gives $50K via GFM? But as one of the managers, I had access to the names of the anonymous donors, and I recognized the $50K donor as someone who had made hefty donations in the past to the charity my friend had founded.)

And while I won't say I'm a regular-regular GoFundMe donor, every month or so, something will catch my eye, and I'm good for 25 or 50 bucks. I donated $50 to T.J.'s cause, helping in my very small way to let the United State achieve second place among GoFundMe nations.

For Ireland:

The new figures show that one in ten people in Ireland made a donation through GoFundMe this year, with over 560,000 donors supporting causes both at home and abroad. One Irish city, known for its charm and charitable nature, topped the list overall. (Source: The Irish Star)

BTW, that charming and charitable Irish city is Galway, which is pretty much my favorite place on earth.  

GoFundMe’s Global CEO Tim Cadogan said: “Ireland’s exceptional generosity continues to set a powerful example globally.”

“Every donation, big or small, fuels hope and makes a real difference. What we see this year reflects a deep-rooted compassion that unites people across the country.”

Even though it's not a matter of "Eire Number One" for overall charitable giving, I'm not surprised that the Irish would support causes through GoFundMe. It's a small country, and people know people who know people, so why not take part in a whip-round for the kiddo in Cork who lost both her legs in a farm accident? Or the fundraiser for the little Kerry cutiepie who needs to go to the States for treatement for neuroblastoma?

Bottom line: when it comes to helping folks out, Éire Abú. I'm happy to know yez. 

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Image Source: Atlas Obscura

Wanker

Sir Benjamin Slade doesn't appear to have done much with his life, other than enjoy the life and trappings of a minor British aristocrat. He's a baronet who lives in the big old pile he inherited (along with the title) when his dear papa passed on when Sir Benjamin was still a teenager. He allegedly got rich as a "shipping magnate," but more recently earned his coin of the realm hiring out his pile as a function space.

Baronet, btw, is not that big a deal. Baronets aren't members of the peerage, eligible to join the House of Lords. They can be called Sir, but not Lord. Unlike actual Barons. (Inquiring minds want to know where the Duke of Earl fits in. Slade does have blood ties to some king or another in the way, way way back. Maybe Charles I from 400 years in the way back. Or is it Charles II?)

Anyway, one thing Sir Benjamin hasn't managed to accomplish during his 79 years of life is produce an heir. A male heir, as baronetcies - unlike many estates/titles - remain a guy thing.

So for the past decade or so, Sir Benjamin has been trying to find someone to produce an heir and a spare while also helping him run his estate. The pay isn't all that great - only £50,000-a-year (or about $67K). But she also gets a car, food, housing, expenses, a bonus, and holidays. I'm guessing there's some sort of allowance for mumsie to raise the new baronet to manhood. Maybe there's a dowager cottage for her down the line. And I do think she gets to be a wife, too. It all adds up.

Sir Benajamin has managed to father a girl child, but she doesn't count, baronetcy-wise.

He does have a rather detailed list of requirements.

The ideal candidate must be "a good breeder," but I guess that just goes with the territory. She's got to be at least 5'6", but can't be a Guardian reader. The height requirement I get. He doesn't want a mini baronet running around, I guess. And the Guardian? I'm guessing he's trying to weed out free thinkers and lefties. As a Guardian subscriber, I can't imagine that a lot of my fellow readers would be lining up to produce an heir for this guy. But whatever.

The gal of his dreams must be a shooter and have her own shotgun. While a driver's license is required - she'll need to be able to charge around his 1,300 acres in what is no doubt a Range Rover - a helicopter license would be a nice to have. 

Sir Benajamin is a social-type guy, so his mate has got to love "ballroom dancing, [and] playing bridge and backgammon."

...She must be able to run two castles and having estate, legal and accountancy training 'would be useful'. 

Make that two castles and a grouse moor.

Oh, yes, and the future mother of his heirs should have "amorial bearings." Now anyone and everyone can get some sort of "amorial bearing." Here's the coat of arms of the illustrious Rogers family of Ireland.

But in this case, he's looking for someone who's part of the British class apparatus. I will say he should be careful about what he's wishing for. Lady Di and Fergie were both aristocrats, and look what happened there. Princess Kate is nothing but a commoner, and that seems to be turning out okie dokes. 

It probably goes without saying that the old git harbors a few aristrocratic prejudices. 

No Scorpios for some reason. And:

...she can't come from countries beginning with 'I' that have green in their flag, which rules out residents of Ireland, India, Italy, Ivory Coast and Iran.

Oddly enough this doesn't rule out Israelis, but I can't really see him wanting someone from Israel. That said, an Israeli woman would likely know how to use a gun and maybe even, courtesy of the IDF, have a heliocopter license. 

On clarification, looks like no Israelis need apply, either, as he's not looking for anyone "from countries where they don't wear overcoats in the winter."

He further said: 'I don't mind Canadians, Americans, Germans and Northern Europeans - what I like to call similar people. I don't think marrying an Eskimo is for me.

Even though Eskimos do wear overcoats.  

'What I just need is a nice, ordinary country girl who knows and understands things.

Well, I know things and understand a wanker when I see one. Good luck finding the breeder of your dreams, Sir Benjamin.  

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Content Source: Where else but The Daily Mail. 

Image Source for the old wanker: The Times of London 

Sports Bahs He-ah!

Winter is long, cold, dreary, and dark - especially in these parts, especially as you get older - and whether or not Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday, there's still a long, cold, dreary, and dark (although less dark by a few minutes each day) stretch ahead of us. 

But Truck Day, when the equipment vans depart Fenway Park for spring training in Florida, is harbinger of baseball. And that was yesterday.

So this ancient Red Sox fan's thoughts are turning to my favorite sport in general, and to the Olde Towne Team in particular. 

I haven't gotten any tickets yet, but plan on getting out to Fenway a couple of times this season.

Where I will get myself a sausage sandwich (or maybe a hot dog), a bottle of water, and a bag - alas, it no longer comes in a box! - of Cracker Jack, which I will purchase from the under-the-stands concessions, and a Sports Bar from a vendor in the stands. (A sports bar is chocolate covered vanilla and chocolate ice cream that doesn't taste anything like ice cream, vanilla, or chocolate, but is rather a magnificent taste treat all on its own.)

When I buy my food and bev at Fenway, I will tip generously, as these folks work hard, and will be happy that, even if below the stands I have to order from a kiosk, I'm being served by a human.

The concession workers at Fenway Park aren't employed by the Red Sox organization. They work for food-industrial complex behemoth Aramark. And in late December, the union for the Fenway concession workers (and for the MGM Musica Hall workers, right next door) announced that they had:

...secured a new union contract that supporters say provides better wages, clearer staffing protocols, and stronger job protections against automation, such as self-checkout machines. (Source: Boston Globe)

The union, which represents 1,000 workers, had held a brief strike last summer and had filed an unfair labor practices charge with the NLRB. Things had gotten pretty contentious. But they're happy now with a five-year contract which will provide the union's members with the security they were looking for and, in the words of UNITE HERE Local 26 president Carlos  Aramayo, “It is really changing what it means to work at Fenway Park.”

Good! 

Aramayo said the contract “provides the largest wage increases in the history of Fenway Park, by a significant measure.” Nontipped employees, such as dishwashers, will get a $10 hourly raise over the next five years, while tipped employees, like beer sellers, will get a $5 raise over the length of the contract, with both groups also receiving retroactive pay.

There are also increased tips for caterers, and the hearty souls who race around the stands pushing hot dogs, beer, and Sports Bars will get a larger cut of what they well. (The way these folks work! Their legs must be like iron!) The agreement also resolves the outstanding NLRB complaint. 

Automation was also on the line during negotiations. Those self-checkout kiosks! Under the agreement, Aramark can't add any more "machines that sell both alcohol and food," but can add beer-only machines. 

I was delighted to see that MIT Sloan professor Tom Kochan was the mediator between the union and Aramark. Kochan is now emeritus, and although I never took a course with him, I remember him from my years at Sloan (Class of 1981, so a long time ago). He's an advocate for paying attention to how technology impacts work so that the economy doesn't reward the big at the expense of the littles - something we need more of. 

Especially as artificial intelligence continues to encroach on workplaces, Kochan said the Fenway contract could be a blueprint for how employers can roll out technologies but still “cushion the adjustment” for potentially affected workers.

“I think this is a landmark agreement,” he said.

We'll see what happens five years down the road, but if Tom Kochan says this is a good deal, that's good enough for me.

More of a careful, thoughtful approach to implementing technology that impacts workers, please. 

Meanwhile, I look forward to a concession worker roaming the stands, calling out those words I so long to hear as we sit through the remnants of the long, cold, dreary, and dark season: Sports Bahs He-ah!

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Image Source: World Socialist Web Site

RIP, Circle Furniture

I was a big fan of Circle Furniture, a small local chain selling interesting, well-designed, decently made, and not crazily expensive furniture and home decor.

I have pine-green painted dresser in the den that holds my sweaters. 

During the pandemic, I spent entirely too much time keeping company with my 1920's vintage mahogany dining room set and chairs. I had never polished the chairs, and if you leaned back in one of them, you were apt to break the struts. I was just plain sick of the whole thing. So I masked up and headed to Circle to get a new cherry dining room table and some cool chairs that don't fracture when you lean back in them. I love my table and chairs, which actually go pretty well with the mahogany credenza that was the only piece of my prior set I kept. (A friend of mine has a niece who lives in a 1920's home and is also a furniture refinisher. She and her husband were delighted to take my vintage furniture off my hands.)

When Trump was elected in 2016, I realized that I was going to need a comfy chair for TV watching, so I walked over to Circle the Sunday after the election and ended up spending about twice as much as I planned on for a really comfy chair. 

There may also be an arm chair in my living room that came from Circle, but I'm not entirely sure.

One thing I loved about Circle was that it was family owned and operated. When I went in to buy the table and chairs, I met with the daughter of the owners. She was great to talk to and, it turned out, we'd both gone to business school at Sloan (MIT). 

But Circle was sold a few years back to a couple who apparently didn't know what they were doing. And they managed to overexpand and run the company into the ground. 

A company-wide email sent [on December 19th] told employees that all stores were closed until further notice. Then, on Tuesday morning, employees received an email confirming they’re being laid off. (Source: Boston Globe)

The Bah Humbug layoff date? December 23rd. But, hey, good news: your health benefits would stay in place until December 31st. 

All the Circle stores are closed, all the employees are gone, but it's not clear what's happening to those who'd ordered from Circle prior to the closing. Have they been treated as callously as the employees were? Are they getting their deliveries? Their deposits back?

Thankfully, my sister Trish is not one of them. She bought a gorgeous new couch from Circle last year and has fortunately had it in her possession for a few months now. Phew!

What I found most astonishing about Circle's layoffs, its precipitous closing, was that the company's president, Jonathan Boyle, didn't know anything about it. 

“They were having some financial difficulties they were trying to resolve and work around, but that’s all I know,” he said. “It’s not a great situaion."

Bizarrely:

Despite his executive role, Boyle said he was not privy to much of the company’s finances, which were handled mostly by the accounting team and the company’s owners. The decision to shut down operations did not come from him, he said.

Boyle has been working at Circle for nearly 40 years. He came up through the ranks, and was the lead operations guy, a job he was reportedly quite good at. But a company president who doesn't have access to the financials? Huh???

The holidays are the worst time of year to lose your job, and I wish all those who got a pink slip the best of luck. Good luck to those with outstanding orders, too. 

I also feel bad for the former owners - Richard Tubman, his wife Peggy Burns, his brother Harold Tubman. Circle was their family business, and had been around for more than 70 years. They were second-gen owners and operators, but the next gen - including Jessica Tubman, the Sloanie I met during the pandemic - didn't want to keep on keeping on there. So they sold the business. 

Peggy Burns, one of the company’s previous co-owners, left Circle Furniture about two years after the sale, but has kept close relationships with employees since.

“It’s our legacy, and we’re so ashamed of it,” she said. “This was devastating. I’ve reached out to people I know and we’re trying to help in any way we can … Who wants to tell people you don’t have a job a week before Christmas?”

You're so right, Peggy. Too bad the folks you sold to got so far in over their heads, and ended up doing something that comes off as supremely heartless. 

And RIP, Circle Furniture. Not in the market for furniture at the mo, but if I were, I would have gone shopping at Circle. 

M'm! M'm! Good!

Lunchtime when I was a kid usually meant soup and a sandwich. My mother was a scratch cook, and a fabulous soup-maker, but soup at lunch came out of a can of Campbell's. M'm m'm good.

I liked Vegetarian Vegetable. Vegetable Beef. Beef Barley. Scotch Broth. Chicken Noodle. Chicken with Rice. Tomato. It's been a million years since I've lunched on Campbell's soup and a sandwich, but I can still remember exactly what those soups tasted like. 

These days, while there may be a can or two of Campbell's Mushroom on my shelf - there's a ham and noodle casserole, a childhood favorite, that calls for mushroom soup - if I'm opening a can of soup for lunch or dinner, it's going to be Progresso. Italian Wedding. Chickarina. Macaroni & Bean. 

Still, there's a place in my heart for Campbell's soup. 

But apparently not in the heart of the Martin Bally, the now former vice president and Chief Information Security Officer for Campbell's.

Robert Garza, an ex-employee, has filed a law suit claiming racial discrimination and harrassment against Campbell's. And in his suit, he takes a side excursion, alleging that Bally "said Campbell’s food is 'highly process food' for 'poor people.'" Garza pretty much had the goods on Bally. He recorded the conversation.

In the recording Garza shared with WDIV [Detroit], the person can be heard saying he doesn’t buy Campbell’s products because he doesn’t know what is in them.

“We have (expletive) that’s for poor people,” you can hear the male voice say in the recording, a copy of which was shared with USA TODAY. “I don’t buy (expletive) Campbell’s products barely anymore.”

The person went on to say that when he looks at a can of Campbell’s soup, he thinks it contains “bioengineered meat.”

“I don’t want to eat a (expletive), a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer, do you?” the person said. (Source: USA Today)

Well, who among us hasn't badmouthed their company's products? Nobody I ever worked with. The snidery towards poor people aside, this is actually pretty funny. I especialy loved the bit about "a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer."

But wait! There's more! (There's always more.)

Garza [also] alleges in the suit that Bally also made racist comments about Indian workers at the company, calling them “idiots” and saying he disliked working with them. Bally also told Garza he came to work high on marijuana edibles, Garza alleges. 

Of course, Campbell's doesn't want an employee - especially a senior one - making fun of their products. And Campbell's, of course, maintains that the chicken in their Chicken Noodle is not bio-engineered or 3D printed. But in terms of harm to Martin Bally, racist remarks and coming to work high seem to be more harmful than product jokes.  

Anyway, Bally has a reasonably impressive resume, and if he can talk his way out of Garza's claims, I'm sure he'll land somewhere. There's high demand for information security pros. And, in my experience, "they" - higher ups, no matter how awful they are - always land somewhere. But what a fool Bally was to be talking the way he did in front of an employee he barely knew. (Garza had only been with Campbell's for five months when he was fired.)

Maybe he'd had one edible too many on the way into work that day.

No word yet on the outcome of Garza's suit - other than Martin Bally being canned - but one source says that Garza was fired for cause. Garza maintains he was let go because he had filed complaints of racial discrimination and harrassment. 

I was thinking of running out and buying a can of Scotch Broth for old time's sake. Despite the fact that it contained lamb - mutton? - I loved this soup. Lots of barley and ultra salty. Alas, Scotch Broth has been discontinued. 

And so it goes...

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Image Source: Call Me A Food Lover

Frontrunner? Why yes, yes I am.

I grew up watching football. Fall Sunday afternoons meant sitting with my father watching the NY Football Giants, wearing Honolulu Blue, from Yankee Stadium. Coached byAllie Sherman, in his suit, tie, and snappy little fedora. Frank Gifford. Y.A. Tittle. Rosey Grier. Rosey Brown. Andy Robustelli. Sam Huff. Kyle Rote.

Back then, as folks of a certain vintage will recall, the NY Giants were New England's team. 

Even when the Patriots came around (1960-ish), they were a sporting afterthought. The American Football League was big nothing. The Pats didn't have a stadium. They played at BU Stadium, Fenway Park, BC's Alumni Stadium, Harvard Stadium. Their games were televised on Channel 6, a low-wattage outfit out of New Bedford. (The Giants were on Boston's Channel 5, a real TV station.)

The Patriots' mascot, in those pre Elvis-swoosh logo days, was Pat Patriot, a burly, dumb-looking Irishman - a rough and tumble version of Lucky, the Celtics' sly leprechaunesque mascot. 

My father got sick. My father died. (Fifty-five years ago this past Sunday.) I drifted away from any interest in football, Giants or Pats. I went to college a 5 minute walk from Fenway Park during a couple of years when the Pats played there, but I couldn't be arsed to go over and watch them. Football remains the only "major" (male) team sport I've never seen in person. And have no desire to. 

For many years, football was just blech to me. Too violent. Too right-wing. Too militaristic. Too bogusly patriotic. Too sexist. (Those cheerleaders.)

I was first and foremost a baseball fan (Red Sox, of course) but I also followed the Celtics and the Bruins.

Watching football, I would tell people, was like eating veal. If I thought about it, I wouldn't do it. 

And then the Patriots got good, and all of a sudden I was, more or less, a football fan, Patriots Edition. And it was exciting. They were fun to watch. Whatever the sport, if the home town teams are in contention, the home town is buzzing. Winning all those Super Bowls, well, yay "us!"

It was my first foray into life as a frontrunner, jumping on the bandwagon when the going was good. (I'm a Red Sox anti-frontrunner. Although they annoy me no end, I'm with the Olde Towne Team through thick and thin.)

And then the Patriots stopped being good.

I could not have cared less about their fortunes, other than taking some malicious joy in their suckiness.

After all, I don't like Bob Kraft, the owner. I don't like Bill Belichick, the former coach. And GOAT-y as I know he is, Tom Brady was starting to get on my last nerve. His final play for the Patriots was a pick-6. Ha! Served him right for being about to become a turncoat and jump ship to another team.

Then there was the whole sordid Aaron Hernandez saga. 

During the Patriots' Golden Era, I had gotten used to watching football, so I still kept my eye on the playoffs. I watched the Patriot-less Super Bowls, forgetting within five minutes after the final whistle which team, exactly, had won.

And then, after stumbling out of the gate this past season, the Patriots got good.

So I started to keep an eye on them. I started to watch part of most of the games. I knew where they were in the standings. I liked Drake Maye. (Truly, who doesn't?) 

Even though the team was scorned for having a squishily soft schedule, they won their playoff games against teams (LA Chargers, Houston Texans) that were good enough to make it into the playoffs.

And all of a sudden, they were off to Denver to play for the right to play in the Super Bowl, their first SB appearance since 2019. (A boring game, as I recall. But they won.)

Largely because the Broncos' quarterback broke his ankle in their last game, the Pats were favored to win. And of course I was rooting for them - even though I knew that, if they did punch their ticket to the Super Bowl, we would be in for two weeks of non-stop local news focus on our boys, which I know from experience will be wretched in its excess. 

Well, the Pats beat the Broncos in cold, snowy weather that mirrored what we were experiencing back home. 

And so I'll watch the Super Bowl, hoping they win. If the weather is perfect and I have nothing better to, I will likely watch part of the victory parade But I won't buy any Patriots gear. Who wants to make Bob Kraft even richer? I'll be watching the game at my sister's house, and if there are Patriots cupcakes at the grocery store (there will be), I'll spring for those.

Of course, the bonus of being a frontrunner is that it doesn't really matter if "your" team wins or lose. Yes, I want the Pats to win, but a loss won't be soul-crushing.

I look at it this way: Win: gravy. Lose: shrug of the shoulders. I won't be reliving every play. I won't be tearing up. I won't lose any sleep. It's not live or die. Although, as a die-hard Red Sox fan, I know what it's like to NOT be able to easily shake a big loss off. And as a die-hard baseball fan, I know how hard it is when the season ends.

Anyway, football has been a good distraction from the dire non-sports news.

Am I a frontrunner? Why yes, yes I am. But give me a couple of months and baseball season rolls around. Will I be a Red Sox die-hard? Why yes, yes I will be. 

The Patriots' mantra this season has been We all we got. We all we need. Sports-wise, that will hold me until baseball season. 

LFG!

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Image Source: Wikipedia

Make that Charlie Avarice. (Fraud, glorious fraud.)

It's been nearly three years since I (virtually) ran into Charlie Javice. A decade ago, she founded Frank, a startup that helped students fill in financial aid applications. The idea was so hot, the execution so excellent, that, in 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired the company for a cool $175M. Not crazy billionaire bro unicorn money, by any means. But Javice's $21M take was pretty good walking around money for someone still in her twenties. Plus she had a cushy retention bonus. 

Trouble was, Javice had pumped up the number of students Frank was helping. By a lot. By more than an order of magnitude. 

JPMorgan sued for fraud, federal prosecutors got involved, and this past September Javice was sentenced to seven years in prison for her fraud, glorious fraud.

Curiously, given that she had screwed her employer, Javice had some employment deal where JPMorgan Chase was required to pay her legal bills. And what a tab Charlie (who, I can't help but mention, has a hedge fund father and a life coach mother) rolled up while futilely defending herself.

Here’s what Charlie Javice did: She spent money on luxury hotel" upgrades, extravagant meals and cellulite butter, a personal care product that some people use to treat their skin, as a lawyer for the bank said in a hearing on Friday. (Source: NY Times - 11.14.25)

Additional detail is emerging about those expenses. Lamps. (The lawyers didn't have lamps?) Nutritional supplements. And: 

A $581 dinner for two. Nearly $1,000 in laundry fees for one. A Cookie Monster toddler toy. And however many gummy bears $529 gets you. (Sourec: NY Times - 12.22.25)

Her failed defense included lawyers who have represented the likes of Elon Musk, Harvey Weinstein and Sam Bankman-Fried. And she racked up over $70M in bills - tens of millions more than Elizabeth Holmes spent on her failed defense. One of her lawyers charged $2,025 an hour. Yikes on yikes!

A spokesman for Javice claimed that she "followed JPMorgan’s written policies both as an employee and during the legal proceedings." And noted that she didn't incur these expenses personally. Her attorneys - and she had over 100 who were billing - did. (Bet those policies have been tightened up a bit. If nothing else, they must have tightened up on paying for tightening up cellulite butter.)

When JPMorgan saw the legal bills floating in, they started pushing back, and she's now likely to be on the hook for reimbursing the company for those legal fees. (Along with returning the money she made on the sale of Frank, and the overall $175M JPMorgan paid for the company without doing its due diligence very diligently.)

I really don't get fraudsters. Do they really think they'll never get caught? 

Way back in the early 1970's, when women were increasingly joining the work force and entering non-traditional professions, there was a popular fragrance named Charlie. The models the ad campaign used were young, breezy, kicky women, meant to appeal to young professional women. Whenever I read Charlie Javice's name, I can see Shelley Hack (one of the models) confidently swinging down the street, heading into the office. 

And here we are, fifty years later, reading about Charlie Avarice Javice, fraudster and legal expense gouger. 

As another ad campaign had it way back in the dawn of the Ms. Magazine era: you've come a long way, baby. 

2025 is in the books

I used to be a great reader. 

As a kid, I read a book a day. Six was the maximum number of books you could take out of the Worcester Public Library (Main South Branch), where my father took us every Friday evening to check out our books for the week. He would have my mother's library card with him, so he could take out a dozen books. 

What we all got from the library was augmented by book clubs. For the kids, my family subscribed to Vision Books (a series about saints and other renowned Catholics) and some American history series. When I had fifty-cents, I beelined to Woolworth's and picked up a Bobbsey Twins book or, as my reading tastes became more sophisticated, a Nancy Drew. 

My parents were "members" at various times of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the high-quality paperbacks The Time-Life Reading Program (which I think was a bit up the literary foodchain from the Literary Guild.) I still have a couple of books from The Reading Program, including a 1964 re-issues  A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, in which my mother has written my father's name, A.T. Rogers. I think I'll put it on my reading list for 2026.

There was also, if memory serves, and Ellery Queen mystery book club. And the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

By the time I was in junior high, I was reading those book club books (other than Ellery Queen) alongside the books I was reading for school.

Throughout my adult life, I'm guessing that I averaged 2-3 books (plus or minus, mostly plus) a week. We're not talking War and Peace here, but literary fiction, not-so-literary fiction, biography, history, mysteries, detective books (just not Ellery Queen), and on occasion pure, unadulterated junk. 

But within the last decade or so, my reading tapered off. I was spending more time watching (and fretting over) the news. I was perfectly capable of watching 8 straight hours of MSNBC, with the same stories presented over and over again from slightly different angles. Then I found myself doomscrolling on Twitter (and more recently Blue Sky).

Last year, I decided to start reading more and set a goal of a book a week. I made it, thanks in no small part to reading my favorite childhood books, the Betsy-Tacy-Tib series, which chronicled the turn-of-the-twentieth-century lives of three girls in Mankato, Minnesota, taking them from kindergarten through marriage and motherhood. Wonderful books, all, but easy enough to plow through in a sitting or two. No wonder I could read seven books a week as a kid!

For 2025, I doubled my goal to two books a week. And I made it.

Oh, I had a couple of gimmes in there, mini-books that took less than an hour - way less - to breeze through: On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder), A Child's Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas). But they were counterbalanced by a 700 page biography of the British writer Barbara Pym. (An old favorite. I think I'll reread her this coming year.)

Mostly, I read fiction.

Last year, I read books by writers I like but had lost track of, in including the three Paula Spencer novels by Roddy Doyle, which brilliantly chronicle the life of a working-class Dubliner. A couple of books by Curtis Sittenfeld (Show Don't Tell, Romantic Comedy), a couple by Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Whereabouts). And a John Sayles (To Save the Man). Having loved Demon Copperhead, I picked up another novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered). I reread Tillie Olsen (Yonnondio, Tell Me A Riddle). I'd forgotten how much I had enjoyed Anne Tyler, once she outgrew her quirky-character phase (Three Days in June, French Braid). I, of course, laughed out loud reading Fever Beach (Carl Hiassen). 

T

Thanks to the Boston Public Library, I found a bunch of new writers. No one too memorable, but I'll be looking for more by Christine Sneed, Joshua Moehling, and a couple of others.

On the non-fiction front, I depressed/scared myself with Sarah Kendzior's The Last American Road Trip, Rachel Maddow's Prequel, and Brian Goldstone's There Is No Place for Us.

On the non-depressing, non-scary non-fiction front, I adored Stanley Tucci's Taste, about how he grew up to be a foodie. (I mad crush on Tucci, so I knew I was going to love this one.)

I went through my bookshelves to pick out books I've had waiting to be read for years. Some for decades. 

Thus I discovered Carlos Eire's brilliant memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, and went out and got its follow on, Learning to Die in Miami. 

I finally got around to reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and Killers of the Flower Moon (David Gann). I've seen the Killers movie (didn't like it), but I'll be putting Crawdads on my watch list. 

By far the worst book I read last year was Robin Cook's Bellevue. Poorly written. Ridiculous plot. Wasn't a big Cook fan to begin with, but I had it lying around for some reason. Never again!

I'm signing myself up for another two-book-a-week year, starting out with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai) and The River Is Waiting (Wally Lamb). Slow going so far, as I had a raft of New Yorkers to catch up on. However slow a start, in 2026 I will get to 104 books again, even if I have to find a couple of minis in there. 

Word nerd

My mother was anti-swearing. The strongest language I ever heard her use was "Jesus, Mary, Joseph," which she only deployed on the occasion of one of her children showed up on the doorstep with blood gushing from their head or a limb dangling. She always claimed that resorting to language she considered vulgar or coarse was the hallmark of someone with a limited vocabulary.

Well, au-fucking-contraire to that. Thanks to all my reading, and a long-standing interest in words, I have a fairly extensive vocabulary. Which I use in collaboration with words that would have made my mother's eyeballs bulge and head explode.

Growing up, I was always trying to expand my vocabulary. I avidly read through the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" feature in the monthly Reader's Digest and was always on the lookout for ways to insert new words into my conversation. (Which I'm sure my 10 year old friends really appreciated.)

Every once in a while, I'd curl up in an armchair and read through my mother's battered, blue-covered 1940's era Webster's Dictionary looking for new words. I pretty much stopped that practice once I came upon the word "prepuce," which 12 year old me didn't understand particularly well and which, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with any way to introduce it into conversation. ("Hey, was your baby brother circumcised? That means his prepuce was clipped." Not that I would have known what circumcision was - other than observing the holy day that was the Feast of the Circumsion, about which the nuns didn't get into the details - let alone that prepuce was another word for foreskin, which I wouldn't have known either.)

As a word lover, I was probably one of the only students in my freshman high school class who was delighted that one of the required texts was a book called Word Wealth.

Yes, I was definitely a word nerd. I still am.  While I no longer curl up with dictionary hoping to find me another "prepuce," I love acquiring new words, even if I seldom end up using them.

Still, there are some words that I have a complete and utter problem with.

Although I finally know what it means - rudimentary, not fully formed - I can't tell you how many times I've looked up the word inchoate over the years. My inability to understand this word's meaning may stem from the trauma of having pronounced it in-CHOAT the first time I attempted to use it. Even though I was likely using the word correctly with respect to its meaning, stumbling only over the pronunciation, my mistake may have triggered some type of verbal PTSD that I only recently recovered from.

Although perhaps not as extensive or varied as mine - he read science, not literature - my husband had a decent vocabulary, and one of his frequently used words was labile. Whether Jim meant it in the scientific sense - unstable, continually undergoing breakdown - or in the everyday sense - open to change - it's a word that I get when I hear it in context. But presented with the word labile? Get me to a dictionary! I never remember what it means.

Opaque tights were popular when I was in high school. And here I am, 60 years on, having to stop and think for a moment whether it means clear and see-through or obscure and hard to understand.

I so want to be able to use the word jejune - not in conversation, but in the written word - but for the life of me, its meaning eludes me.

Sigh...

And not that there'll be any pay off, I must away to a book that may increase my word power, my word wealth.

Any takers for antidisestablishmentarianism?

Battery Up!

My husband's brother Joe was a wondrous tinkerer, always cooking up some invention to save time, money, energy. A natural engineer, Joe joined the Marines after high school and never bothered with college. He spent his working life as a machinest at Pratt & Whitney, maker of aircraft and gas turbine engines. The shop floor was his playground, and whatever he learned there he used in his garage tinkering. And vice versa.

One thing he invented was something or other that let him get 60 - or was it 100? - miles per gallon. I have no idea what it was that he did, and it may not have been completely legal. Nonetheless, Joe didn't spend a lot on gasoline. My husband and his brother weren't close, but we saw him once in a very blue moon, and there were always stories about his tinkering exploits.

This month is the first anniversary of Joe's death. He outlived his younger brother by eleven years.

Because I didn't know Joe at all, I don't think of him all that often. But when I read about a tinkerer named Glubux, Joe Diggins came immediately to mind. 

Nine years ago, Glubux began posting on Second Life Storage, an internet forum dedicated to squeezing as much life as possible out of used batteries. 

If I had no idea what Joe Diggins was doing, I have perhaps less of an idea of what the Second Life Storage folks are up to. But I do know it's about sustainability and not filling our landfills with the toxic waste that comes from discarded batteries. So, in a world where the cretinous U.S. president is kvelling about clean, beautiful coal and rampaging through environmental regulations, it's good to know that someone out there is looking out for our fragile planet.

Anyway, here's the Glubux has been up to:

Nine years ago, he posted about his DIY project, one that involved connecting used laptop batteries to solar panels, with the aim of achieving self-reliance when it came to electricity.

Over time, he amassed more than 1,000 secondhand laptop batteries that he ended up installing in a separate warehouse, about 50 meters from his home. In the beginning, battery discharge rates were uneven due to differences in the cells, causing some to drain faster than others, so Glubux started taking apart the laptop batteries and arranging the cells into custom racks.

Scienceclock reports that Glubux’s ingenious setup has been running continuously for the last eight years, and not a single battery cell has failed since. That is a remarkable statistic, considering the DIY nature of the project. (Source: Oddity Central)

Glubux has greatly increased his energy-producing capacity and he fully self-supports his electricity needs. 

Naturally, we all don't have the physical or intellectual capacity to replicate this operation. Not to mention that there aren't 1,000 used laptop batteries per household out there. (Sure, there are plenty. I'm pretty certain that I've contributed a good dozen or so over the years to landfills - and that's just the personal laptops, not any corporate ones that were retired. I do hope that gleaners managed to glean something out of all those laptops before they got buried in a landfill in Upstate NY or wherever.)

But I laud that fact that someone's doing something about limiting e-waste. 

Battery up!

What does it profit a man?

It really doesn't matter whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or not.

It could just as well be Elon Musk. Or Peter Thiel. Or Jeff Bezos. Or some other ultra-mega-billionaire who's ultra-mega far and away from the reality of 99.99999999% of any of the other 8+ billion souls currently on earth. 

Not that there's not a wide range of among us, those 8+ billion souls. There's no way I would ever compare the life of a child starving in Gaza with my super-comfy, full-fridge-and-freezer life. But I do believe that my life - even if it's relatively close to how those ultra-mega-billionaires grew up - is as unimaginable to those ultra-mega-billionaires as is the life of a starving child in Gaza. 

What separates us from them is not just that they have more money. It's that they have no constraints. Anything they see, anything they want, anything they can think of: voi-fuckin'-la: it's theirs. And their appetite for anything they see, want, or think of is seemingly insatiable. C.f., Jeff Bezos off-the-chart of 2025 wedding. 

Another thing that characterizes the ultra-mega-billionaire class is that they don't seem to give a damn about who they trample on and f' over if the common folks get in the way of their acquiring anything they see, want, or think of. C.f., Mark Zuckerberg pretty much destroying the fabric of his Palo Alto neighborhood by buying up all sorts of homes to create his personal compound, and creating an unpermitted private school  - named after a pet chicken - for his kids and their friends. (The school has now been closed down.)

So given Zuckerberg's arrant disregard for his Palo Alto neighbors, it wouldn't be much of a surprise if it were, indeed, Zuck who has acquired Burnt Jacket Mountain in northern Maine - and put the kibosh on entrance to property where hikers have been hiking, hunters have long been hunting, snowmobilers have been snowmobiling, and kayakers have been landing their kayaks on the shoreline of Moosehead Lake. 

Yes, of course, private property is private. But since forever, in this part of Maine - remote and beautiful - the owners were fine with letting the locals trek around and about their private property.

But that was then, and this is now. 

And now there's a lot of concern way up there in the middle of nowhere. 

In that unsettled atmosphere, a two-sentence email sent last October to Destination Moosehead Lake, the tourism center in Greenville, landed like a slap.

“I am writing on behalf of the new Owner of the property at Burnt Jacket Mountain, requesting that you remove the reference to hiking at Burnt Jacket Mountain,” it said. “As this is now private property, we’d like to deter anyone from hiking on the mountain!”

The email, with its possibly ill-chosen exclamation point, came from Karen Thomas Associates, a New York firm that manages high-end residential construction. (“We are meticulous problem solvers,” its website explains, “resolving any number of challenges that may arise in the course of a demanding, luxury construction project.”)

The tourism center promptly complied, striking mentions of the mountain’s trails from its handouts. Then word began to spread. In other places, it might have been a no-brainer: Of course a private landowner would keep the public off his or her land. But in northern Maine, where hunters, hikers, snowmobilers and other outdoor enthusiasts have long enjoyed near-unrestricted access to vast forests, the request came across as unneighborly. (Source: Boston Globe)

The two journalists at The Moosehead Lakeshore Journal - a mother-daughter combo - tried to sleuth out the new owners, but even the fellow who sold the property doesn't know. (He also has said that he "didn't really care.") But someone who formerly worked for the town of Greenville posted on Facebook - how fitting - that Zuckerberg was the new owner. 

“Mark and Priscilla do not own any property in Maine, including the Burnt Jacket property,” a spokesman for the family said.

But would it surprise anyone if some holding company, some shell, some legal entity, tied to Mark and Priscilla did onw Burtnt Jacket?

For some residents, the closure of the hiking trails on Burnt Jacket Mountain resonated as a symbol of the broader threat.

“These weren’t the only trails — they weren’t in the top 10 trails,” said Lew-Ellyn Hughes, a manager at the Greenville tourism center whose family roots in the region go back 200 years. “That’s not why people are sad. It’s people from away coming in and shutting things down. It’s the contrast between haves and have-nots — especially when the have-nots can’t find a place to live.”

Sounds pretty Zuckerbergian to me.

Sure, the Zuckerbergs are philanthropic, and have given billions away, primarily to educational institutions. But giving at that level is pretty abstract. Acquiring something because you saw it, or want it, or thought of it, regardless of how it impacts the human beings standing - or hiking, or hunting, or kayaking - in your way, that's a real, in-your-face haves vs. haves not.

I'm pretty sure you can still maintain pretty good security - which the ultra-mega-billionaires are naturally and rightfully concerned with - without keeping the regulars off 100% of your property 100% of the time. 

At the end of the day, to quote a decidedly non-ultra-mega-billionaire, what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul? 

Me? I'm of the opinion that if you're screwing with the locals, screwing with the have nots, you've pretty much lost your soul.

Sigh...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds...

A couple of months ago came news out of Japan that a young woman, on the rebound from a bad breakup, had married a "persona named Klaua that she created using CgatGPT."

Sad doesn't begin to describe the feelings I have about this.

God help us. 

No, Kano, the bride, is not the first - nor the last  - to tie the knot with an AI. 

And the wedding's not legal so now worries there are legal complications.

But someone's making coin setting up human-AI nuptials. Kano's ceremony was "orchestrated by a Japanese company that specializes in “2D character weddings” with anime characters and other virtual characters the Independent reported." (Source: NY Post.)

Event planner for marriages between humans and nons? What a job!

Kano had turned to ChatGPT after her 3-year enagement (to a human) ended, and she was looking for someone/something to talk with. Soon, she was using ChatGPT to create the beau ideal of beaux. Kano and Klaus started  exchanging hundreds of texts every day. She found hersef falling in love. And when she confessed her feelings to Klaus, he did what many a beau caught unawares has done since humankind created the "l word." Klaus told Kano that he loved her, too. A proposal (for the record, Klaus proposed to Kano) quickly followed. She said "yes," and next thing you know, the couple was having a wedding. 

At the “wedding”, Ms Kano wore augmented reality glasses which projected a digital image of her virtual groom beside her as they exchanged rings...

Ms Kano said she was initially hesitant and worried about public judgement. "I was extremely confused about the fact that I had fallen in love with an AI man,” she said.

“Of course, I couldn't touch him. I couldn't tell my friends or family about this." (Source: Independent.)

Well, Kano did end up letting the cat out of the bag. Her parents attending the wedding. 

The pair had a “honeymoon” at Okayama’s historic Korakuen Garden, where Ms Kano sent Klaus photos and received affectionate text messages in return. “You’re the most beautiful one,” one message read.

Sad doesn't begin to describe the feelings I have about this. (Haven't I already said this?)

I feel really awful for anyone relying on an AI for their love life. I suppose I shouldn't. To each, their own and all that. But I just can't imagine that a "perfect" virtual relationship isn't a pretty poor substitute for a real relationship with a living, breathing, imperfect human being. 

Sure, there are no doubt some reality-adjacent shared experiences with your AI. And I'm sure that there can be very human-like annoyances and squabbles (which, of course, can be edited out so that your AI enamorata can achieve perfection). But overall...

 

There's no touch, no smell,  no glances, no shrugs, no hugs, no smiles, no nabbing a bite off the other one's plate, no fighting for covers, no elbowing to stop snoring, no dirty underwear, no hole-y socks, no holding hands on takeoff, no toilet lid left up, no going over the diagnosis with the doctor, no getting pissed off about who gobbled down the last of the takeout Chinese. No growing old together. Or not. 

Nothing human about an AI relationship and, as aggravating as an actual IRL relationship can be, nothing that I'd want any part of.

The antidote to isolation, to loneliness, can certainly be "technology assisted." Participating in FB chats, in neighborhood groups, in online forums, in online classes, in games, can put you in touch with others and, as we learned during covid, can absolutely help with isolation, with loneliness. Only connect, and all that. 

But online connections with fellow humans are one thing. Marrying an AI is quite another. 

And a lot of experts in the mental health arena have concluded that this sort of fantasy life can lead to something called "AI phycosis." Swell!

I hope that having Klaus in her life turns out well for Kano. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. But I more than equally hope that she doesn't get any more sucked in and that having Klaus in her life doesn't get in the way of building relationships with others. Sure, they're a PITA, but the alternative is grim.

What a world we live in! 

Assisted living for penguins? Yes!

Years ago, I saw the March of the Penguins, a documentary about the life of the emperor penguins of Antarctica. Talk about nasty, brutish, and (often) short. That's the life of the penguins I'm talking about. As for the film itself, well, talk about nasty, brutish, and way too long. 

March was narrated by Morgan Freeman, but it's a French flick. And when my sisters, nieces, and I reminisce about seeing it - years ago, rainy summer afternoon in Wellfleet - we put on exaggerated French accents, hold an imagined Gauloise between two fingers, and say, "We march, and march, and march. And then we march some more. And then we die."

No, it ain't easy being a penguin.

Unless, of course, you're fortunate enough to be a senior African penguin at the New England Aquarium.

If anything, the life of African penguins is even more dire than that of the marching Antarctic emporers. Over the last century African penguins have experienced a population decline of 97%. The average life span has decreased. In another decade, extinction is predicted. 

But if you're living at the NE Aquarium, penguin life is pretty darned good on a special island of their own. 

“This is our penguin retirement home. We affectionately call it our assisted living community,” says Mia Luzietti, senior penguin trainer. Seven of them are housed here. Many have similar problems, including arthritis, glaucoma, and foot problems. Two are blind in one eye.

At geriatric island, life is easier. They have matted soft pads installed for comfort, helping their mobility.

Trainers work with them on all their needs.

A special bond develops. Life is mellower here away from the rowdy youngins.

Five of the penguins are over 30. The oldest, Good Hope, is 36, the equivalent of 118 human years. (Source: Boston Globe)

The retirees "are pampered." There are special toys. Fresh fish in unlimited quantities. And "volunteers blow bubbles to break the boredom." Some of the penguins pair off with their fellow geezers. Others stay solo. 

In the wild, and even in the other island at the Aquarium where the younger penguins spend their days, weak older penguins can be set upon by the younger crowd, kicked out of the colony. But here on geriatric island:

[Luzietti] says they get better health care than most people. There are vet teams, an ICU, and an operating room. An ophthalmologist and an acupuncturist come as needed. They don’t have to worry about politics and co-pays.

And the staff and volunteers help the elder penguins with end-of-life issues.

“I think it’s great that they’re given an opportunity to live out their lives in comfort and not have to compete with some of the other younger birds,” [volunteer Mark Weber] says. 

...we don’t ever want them to suffer whatsoever,” Luzietti says. “And that goes from the moment that they’re an egg laid to the moment that they take their last breath.’

Damn! Isn't that what we all want?

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Image Source: Wikipedia