Embezzlers: good people. Until they're not.

When it comes to criminal categories, I don't find thievery particularly interesting. Cat burglar. Stick-up artist. Bank robber. Pickpocket. Somewhere along the line those cat burglars, stick-up artists, bank robbers, and pickpockets made a decision (conscious or not) to become criminals, to participate in what can be a very risky business. That homeowner whose house you just broke into may be armed. That bank guard may be trigger happy. 

Basically, I'm happy when thieves go to jail, go directly to jail. But mostly I find them a pretty boring lot. For every Willie Sutton, who may or may not have said that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is," there are probably a million garden variety dullards who decided that being a thief beats working.

Embezzlement, on the other hand, I find infinitely fascinating. 

Unlike thieves, who likely don't up close and personally know they folks they're robbing, embezzlers steal from their workplaces - their employers, their clients - so they know exactly who their victims are. It takes a special someone to rip off the outfit that pays their salary, the client who's entrusted them with their business. 

I'm of the belief - based on zero actual evidence - that most embezzlers don't set out to become embezzlers. Embezzlement is a crime of convenience, something that a person just falls into. Maybe they started out thinking they're just borrowing the money. They're short this month, there's an emergency. Sure, they've stuck their hand in the till, but in their mind, they're planning on paying it back. Until they figure out that nobody's noticed, so why not keep it up? 

Other embezzlers may be envious or resentful of their clients, especially if their clients are well to do. They want a bit of the lifestyle they're adjacent to. 

This seems to be the case of Lisa Schiff, who was a well-known adviser to high-rollers (on was Leonardo DiCaprio) looking to invest in and/or collect art. Schiff had no desire to go through life like the poor little match girl, nose pressed up to the window of the brightly lit mansion. 

She was living the glam life: a TriBeCa loft that rented for $25K a month. Buzzing around in helicopters, because who wants to wait in Manhattan traffic in a cab - or even a black car. Spree shopping in Paris for items like jeans that cost nearly $1K. Being able to keep up with her clients - flying first class, staying in luxe hotels, dressing for success - gave Schiff "more mojo and confidence." Until it didn't.

While her clients and friends saw a successful woman at the top of her career, she hid a secret. She was stealing from them. To conceal her theft, she would do things like pay one client with another’s money, or leverage their friendships to keep them believing that late payments were always almost on their way.

By the time it all came crashing down in 2023, she had stolen some $6.4 million, from at least a dozen people. (Source: NY Times)

Today Schiff is broke, bankrupt. Seven of her former clients are suing her. She's living in much more modest digs - an apartment her parents are paying the rent on. She's hoping to stay out of prison. (Last fall, she pleaded guilty to defrauding her customers. She's been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.) At 55 - a single mother with a 12-year-old son - the life she's living is anything but charmed. 

Instead of jet-setting around and looking for and at works of art by emerging artists she deems bound for greatness, she's playing with Legos (building a replica of Hogwarts), feeling guilty about fleecing her clients, attending AA and Debtors Anonymous meetings, and worrying about what's going to happen to her kid. (The plan was that if she went to prison, her son will go live with Schiff's brother.)

But back in the day...

Schmoozing at cocktail parties and lecturing clients as an ethics authority, she seemed like the ideal art guru: getting access to hot artists before their paintings jumped in value; discreetly brokering sales with the major auction houses; and warding off predatory dealers looking to upsell and overcharge novice collectors.

Ethics authority? Hmmm.....

She was everywhere, quoted in newspaper pages and speaking at museums. But all last year, she was missing from the cocktail circuit, and absent from the auction floors, except in the fine print: Listed atop three lots in a November auction at Phillips were the words, “Property [including her own extensive art collection] to be sold to benefit the creditors of Lisa Schiff.”

After it's over and done with - prison sentence, probation, whatever - Schiff is not likely to ever be able to work as an art adviser. Most people, I believe, would give a murderer, or even a thief, a second chance before they'd hire an embezzler. She's only 55, so she's got a lot of years ahead of her. 

Ms. Schiff continues to believe that in some ways she was a good art adviser. She listed her tireless efforts to help her clients amass their collections, and claimed she often eschewed making money to steer clients toward art in which she truly believed.

Then she caught herself.

“I am the worst kind of perpetrator, because I seem so good,” Ms. Schiff said. “I’m a good person, I’m a good friend, I am loving and generous, I work hard — and I stole your money.”

Maybe this is why I'm drawn to embezzlers. Most of them probably are good people. Until they're not.

Most likely to...

There's an insatiable demand for content. There's an insatiable demand for info on celebrities. There's an awful lot of content about celebrities floating around out there. The maw of the people must be kept fed!

As it happens, growing up, I didn't know anyone who turned into a celebrity. But just think, if Michael C. had become someone that people wanted to know about, I could report that, in first grade, on the day when the boys all got their pants wet sliding in the slush, and Sister Marie Leo made them take their pants off to dry on the radiators, and had them put on girls' coats - which were longer than boys' jackets - so that they could sit there with their underpants covered while the radiators did their thing, Michael C wore my red and green plaid coat. A coat that I loved. In his underpants. Ewwww. 

This is certainly the sort of tidbit that someone obsessed with a celebrity would have loved learn. Maybe it would show up in a profile of Michael C describing how parochial school shaped his future life as a celeb. Or, if I'd become the celeb, maybe someone else in my 1st grade class - who? Paul M? Ginny B? - would have provided fodder content for a profile on me, noting that I seemed to have been more icked out than the other little girls whose coats were worn by boys that infamous day. And what was wrong with me that this little incident turned into such a trauma that, nearly 70 years later, I was still icked out by it. (Note to self: it's pretty late in the game, so it's not gonna happen, but DON'T BECOME A CELEBRITY.)

And if someone in my high school class had become a celebrity - maybe one of the other Maureens: Maureen D, Maureen O, Maureen Q - I could have sold my yearbook to Seth Poppel. 

The first floor of Poppel’s house, in Seattle, is home to some eighteen thousand yearbooks; he and his wife, Danine, advertise their holdings as “the original and largest library of high school yearbooks of the stars.” (Source: The New Yorker)

And not just the stars. Sure, they've got the yearbooks of Patti Smith and Leo DeCaprio, of Marlon Brando and Sharon Stone. But they've also got Ruth Bader Ginsburg's. Which is how I now know that Ginsburg was a high school "twirler." (Sure wish she'd twirled out of the Supreme Court at the right time.) And Harry Truman's - Independence (MO) High School, Class of 1901.

And it's not just the yearbooks of celebrities - be they stars, pols, athletes - but also the yearbooks of those who manage to grab their 15 minutes in the limelight for their infamy:

In September, it took Poppel and his son Jared only a few hours to locate Ryan Wesley Routh’s—Routh is the alleged foiled golf-course assassin of Donald Trump—and sell his adolescent portrait to the Daily Mail for about a hundred bucks. 

Seth Popell, who's now 80, has always been a collector. As a toddler in Brooklyn, he collected bottle caps. Once he could read, it was baseball cards.

Then, nearly 50 years ago, at a baseball card show, he came across a copy of Mickey Mantle's yearbook, and found that, although there were only 41 kids in The Mick's class, Mickey Mantle wasn't chosen as the "Best Athlete." Who could have been better than a future Hall of Famer? I guess he could take solace by having been voted "Most Popular."

My high school class didn't have superlatives. We were woke before there was woke, and didn't want anyone to get left out or have their feelings hurt. We also didn't list activities under the picture, as was generally done back then. Again, those of us on the yearbook staff didn't want anyone with no activities to list, or just one pathetic activity, e.g., Intramural Basketball, 1, look like a null. 

This was, of course, noblesse oblige on the part of the yearbook staff, largely composed of my friends. (I'm still friends with the editor.) We were the girls who would have had a ton of activities. As in Glee Club 1,2,3,4; Student Council 2,3,4; Student Council President, 4; Academy Star (newspaper) 1,2,3,4; features editor, 4; Everyman (yearbook) staff; National Honor Society, 3,4; Literary Society, 1,2,3,4; Latin Club 1,2...I may have been a class officer freshman year, and I played intramural basketball for a couple of years.

We did have pages at the end of the yearbook - called Everyman, a story worthy of its very own post - with chirpy little words and phrases. "Notes to Remember." Mine were Tinkerbell...lines ahead in Latin!...12-year product...merit charts..."great stuff"...SIC VITA...sincere leader. 

Most I remember. I played Tinkerbell in some class skit. My costume included black tights, saddle shoes, and bright green pettipants with silver kangaroos on them...I did my Latin translations (without a trot, so they were tortured and nonsensical) but I liked to get those lines translated well in advance)...By the end of my senior year, I was a 12-year product of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Four years later, I was a 16-year product...I have no idea what merit charts means, although I believe that when I was on Student Council we were instrumental in getting rid of demerit charts. (Demerits were "awarded" for things like talking between classes. If you "earned" enough of them, you had to stay after school.)..."great stuff" and SIC VITA were words I used ALL the time...sincere leader. Well, yes. Yes I was.

Above is my yearbook picture. If you're wondering what those artful lines are, I just blocked off my part of the page so you wouldn't run into Mary Jane R's section above me, and Joan S's space beneath mine.

Back to the Popells. 

Over the years, the yearbook info business grew. Even pre-Internet, magazines wanted celeb content. Then the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain decided to feature celebs' yearbook photos on their placemats. Gold for the Popells' business! And there was enough business that the Popells' son Jared could join it, and by the mid-1990's, things were booming enough that Seth Popell could quit his day job. 

The Popells finds their yearbooks - the latest demand is for Trump cabinet picks (those ought to be good: White Nationalist Club, 1,2,3,4) - through Internet search and through a freelance network they've built up that scouts antique stores and other sources of old junk.

It may not be the business that's Most Likely to Succeed, but it's got to be in contention for Most Niche.

Me? I've picked up a few old yearbooks that have nothing to do with celebs, and I find them fascinating. Maybe I'll dig up a few more. And who knows? I might run into someone interesting.

Guess there's no such thing as a free cruise

To begin with, I have no - make that less than no - desire to get on a cruise. Among other things, I'd be nervous about floating on the ocean blue in a giant Petri dish. All that covid! All that norovirus! Blech. If I'm going to spend all my time at sea sitting around my cabin wearing a mask and occsaionally gulping a breath of fresh air through my porthole, I might as well stay home.

No, I don't think I'd go on a cruise, even if one were offered to me for free. 

As happened to Minnesotan Mike Cameron, who, while at a casino, won a free Caribbean cruise on Norwegian. Oh, lucky day! Whose dream wouldn't it be to escape a Minnesota winter for a week in sun and warmth?

Alas, Cameron's luck soon ran out. 

He came down with the flu and went to the ship's medical center for treatment. He recovered in three days, only to be stuck with a bill for $47K that he may well never recover from. 

“I was just flabbergasted by the whole thing. I guess I am just used to the medical system in the United States. I can’t believe it happened,” he said.

The bill came as a shock as crew members assured him not to worry as he received treatment. (Source: NY Post)

Cameron had taken out traveler's ensurance, which should have covered the bill. Little did he know that $20K worth of coverage wouldn't have covered even half of the bill. Nor would his personal health incurance. 

To pay the bill - I was going to say "cover the costs," but $47K worth of charges in no way reflects the true costs of Cameron's treatment; he had the flu, not a lung transplant - "the cruise line maxed out two credit cards Cameron had on file and he still owes $21,000, he added."

“The traveler’s insurance doesn’t want to pay it until we run it by our health insurance. The health insurance doesn’t want to pay it because it’s abroad,” [Cameron's girlfriend Tamra] Masterman explained.

Norwegian sent Cameron a letter that stated "that its pricing was 'closely comparable to other cruise lines and is what we believe to be fair and reasonable.'"

'Closely comparable,' maybe. 'Fair and reasonable? NFW. Even if Norwegian claims that its ships all have "a state-of-the-art onboard medical center, staffed with highly qualified physicians and nurses, to provide care for both guests and crew while at sea.” 

No wonder I have no desire to go on a cruise.

Even if Pierce Brosnan or George Clooney crooned "won't you let me take you on a sea cruise" in my ear, my answer would be no, no, 47 thousand times no.

"Three Stars Will Shine Tonight."

One of the crappier aspects of getting older are that people start to die. Not just the people you know and love, but the people who were part of your life because you watched them run for office, or play ball, or on TV or in the movies. It's obviously not the same as someone you know IRL passing away. There are degrees of awfulness and grief there, or course. Your loved ones. Your liked ones. Distant connections who may have played a major role in your life at some point. Colleagues you were friendly with. The neighbors you chatted with but didn't actually know know. There's a continuum, but the grief, whether fleeting or permanent, is real.

And then there are the celebrities - especially those who were characters in your life's play. Here, it's not actually anything on the grief continuum. Are you really going to miss someone you a) never knew; and b) haven't thought of in years. But if they were somehow, someway, part of your growing up, their deaths are going to give you a bit of a pause - and you're probably going to take a bit of a nostalgic little stroll down memory lane.

On Saturday, the actor Richard Chamberlain died. Two days short of his 91st birthday, which would have been today.

Richard Chamberlain wasn't my first heartthrob. That would have been Dick Jones, who played Dick West, the All American Boy, on the cheesy b&w 1950's Western, The Range Rider, and later starred in the equally cheesy b&w 1950's Western, Buffalo Bill, Jr. ("He's a son, a son of a gun. Buffalo Bill, Jr.")

Richard Chamberlain wasn't my second heartthrob. That would have been Tim Considine, who played Spin on Disney's Spin & Marty and, a few years later, the oldest boy, Mike, on My Three Sons. Now there was a dreamboat and, yes, and when he died a few years ago, I did a bit of a nostalgia binge.

But as Dr. Jim Kildare, Richard Chamberlain was perhaps my first near-grown up, "mature" heartthrob.  (I was almost 12 when Dr. Kildare first came on.) And the first time I was part of a group crush.

I was probably 4 or 5 when I crushed on Dick Jones. Did I talk with my friends about how he was so cute? It may have come up in passing. When we were playing dolls, we may have pretended his was our doll's BF or something.

Ditto for Tim Considine. I was six when I fell for him. No doubt my friends fell for him, too. There were only 3 TV networks, so we all watched the same shows. And no one ever missed the daily Mickey Mouse Club (the Mouseketeers show) or Sunday Evening's Walt Disney Wonderful World of Color. Spin & Marty ran on the Mickey Mouse Club. Not that there was anything wrong with Marty - other than the fact that he was s rich snob - but Spin was the dreamboat. Still, I wasn't conscious of everyone being part of an informal Spin Fan Club.

And then, when I was in seventh grade, nearing the age of 12, Dr. Kildare first aired. And my friends were all pretty much smitten. Thursday was show night, and on Friday, before school and during recess, we stood around gabbing about the show, especially if a possible love interest was introduced. (Yvette Mimieux, come on down.)

We collected Dr. Kildare trading cards from Topps. And, unlike the boys (and some of us girls) with baseball cards, we neither flipped them nor attached them to our bicycle spokes to make that wonderful rackety-rack sound when you pedaled. On the other hand, I suspect the Richard Chamberlain cards won't ever have the value of a Honus Wagner.

White long-sleeved cotton shirts, with three buttons at the neck, were the rage. You couldn't wear them to school - we wore short sleeved white cotton blouses with rick-rack trimmed collars - but you could wear them outside of school. I didn't have one of those shirts, but I did have a pair of cotton Dr. Kildare PJ's. The pants were chartreuse. Sometimes, I'd stand in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, swooping my hair up into some sort of French twist, sucking in my cheeks and pretending I was a "lady doctor" colleague having a convo with Jim, who was, of course, my BF.

One of my friends, using her family's little Brownie camera, took a picture of Richard Chamberlain off of the TV. She brought the developed picture to school, and we pretended that she'd seen him in person, passing it around to each other, swooning.

Not all the girls were Jim Kildare fans. The same year we met Jim Kildare, the doctor show Ben Casey also came on the air. The glowering, dark-haired, dark-eyed Vince Edwards played Ben Casey (as opposed to the smiling, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jim Kildare). The tougher girls - the ones who were considered sexier by the boys: they smoked, they told off-color jokes - went for Ben Casey. The tough girls and the odd rebel also liked Ben Casey. But the nice girls, the good(y) girls, crushed on Jim Kildare. 

Funny the things you remember. One time, I asked my mother whether she thought Richard Chamberlain was handsome. She told me she thought he had "bland good looks." I was outraged. Someone whose teenage heartthrobs were Nelson Eddy and Leslie Howard thought Richard Chamberlain was bland? 

Yesterday, when I had my weekly chat with my old friend Joyce, we talked about how we had both had crushes on Richrd Chamberlain. Later in the morning, I got a text from my friend Michele - who's five years younger, and thus too young for a Kildare crush - saying "I see your boyfriend Richard Chamberlain has died. He really was handsome." And I heard from my cousin Mary Beth, who's my age, who texted me a collage of Richard Chamberlan pictures, which shse captioned "My first heartthrob!!"

By eighth grade, the group ardor for Dick Chamberlain was starting to cool. Our crushes were more apt to be classmates. (What were we thinking?) Nonetheless, for Christmas that year, I got the Richard Chamberlain Sings album. If I had that album, if I had a turntable I could play a 33 rpm record on, I bet I could put it on and sing along without missing a word of the lyrics. 

The first song on the album was "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo," but the album also included "Three Stars Will Shine Tonight," the theme from Dr. Kildare.

Three stars will shine tonight
One for the lonely
That star will shine it's light
Each time that someone sighs

Three stars for all to see
One for young lovers
That star was made to be
The sparkle in their eyes

And for the third star
Only one reason
A star you can wish on
To make dreams come true

High in the sky above
Three stars are shining
I hope that star of love
Will shine down on you

And for the third star
Only one reason
A star you can wish on
To make dreams come true

High in the sky above
Three stars are shining
I hope that star of love
Will shine down on you

Maybe there's a fourth star for old crushes. 

RIP, Richard Chamberlain.

Happy Birthday, Eleanor Maguire.

Today would have been Eleanor Maguire's 55th birthday. Alas, she isn't around to celebrate. In early January of this year, Maguire - an Irish neuroscientist and professor at University College London - died of cancer.

I had never heard of Eleanor Maguire until her obituary popped up in a couple of papers I read regularly - The Guardian and The New York Times. And, what can I say? I've long been a devoted reader of The Irish Sports Pages, so when a death notice captures my attention, I'm there for it.

Maguire was known for her work on brain plasticity, notably a study of the brains of London cabbies, who - having acquired The Knowledge - were found to have a larger posterior hippocampus than those who didn't have The Knowledge. And the longer a cabbie'd been driving around Londer, the bigger their posterior hippocampus.

A couple of bits of info that may be needed here. (In other words, this was info I needed.)

First, what's the function of the posterior hippocampus? The posterior hippocampus takes care of spatial processing and long- and short-term memory retrieval. (As an aside, the word hippocampus comes from the Greek word for sea horse, because that's kinda-sorta what it looks like.) 

Second, what's The Knowledge? The Knowledge - also known as The Knowledge of London - is the exam that London cabbies are required to pass in order to get a license. It began in the mid-19th century, takes a few years to get through, and means memorizing thousands upon thousands of streets and landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

Other cities make - or at lease used to make in the pre-GPS days - drivers have at least rudimentary knowledge of their city in order to get a license, but there's nothing out there that's equivalent to the depth of The Knowledge. At least in Boston, in the pre-GPS era, I got in plenty of taxis where the cabbie couldn't find the most prominent of streets, the most well-known of locations. It was shocking how many times I had to tell the cabbie how to get someplace. 

But in London, even with GPS, drivers are still required to pass a rigorous exam. When a London cabbie is licensed, they're licensed.

Anyway, from early on in her career Maguire - who herself was navigational challenged (as I am) - wanted:

...to understand how people negotiate and recollect their paths through the world, and what happens when this capacity deserts them – as it did in some patients who had undergone brain surgery for intractable epilepsy. (Source: The Guardian)

She wanted to learn more, so:

The role of the hippocampus, not only in navigation, but also in episodic or personal memory, and in imagination, became the focus of her research. The unifying theme was scene construction theory, the idea that the hippocampus constantly builds and updates spatially coherent scenes that represent and anticipate the changing environment using information beyond what is immediately available to the senses.

After receiving her PhD at University College Dublin, Maguire -  like so many Irish folks over the centuries - made her way to London, which turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Not only was London a place where "functional neuroimaging was taking off" - so she could see what's going on in brains without cutting anything open - but there were all these London cabbies out there with brains that had aquired The Knowledge.

Maguire came upon knowledge of The Knowledge by happenstance. As a post-doc fellow in London:

...she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.

Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’” (Source: NY Times)

And through her work, Maguire found that the posterior hippocampi of London cabbies grew as they mastered more and more of the streets they drove on.

The implications of Maguire's findings that "the key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable" are immense. Think about how being able to grow your brain could help those suffering memory loss, let alone helping the spatially challenged. 

Shortly before Maguire's death, there "was a much-reported study in the British Medical Journal a few weeks earlier, showing that taxi drivers were somewhat protected against dementia. (Source:  back to  The Guardian)

Yay to that! 

I love that Eleanor Maguire was a Dublin girl. (Dublin Abú!)  I love that she was such a STEM girl. (STEM girls rock!) I love that she had an astounding career, and got to pursue science in a way that was so interesting. I don't love that she died so young. 

Happy Birthday, Eleanor Maguire! So sorry that there's an RIP attached to it. 

Opening Day...

It was a terrible winter. 

Colder, snowier, windier, icier than what we've gotten used to over the past few years. Long and dark. Very very long; very very dark.

But, hey, I'm a New Englander, and with all those winters under my belt, the cold, snow, wind, and ice don't really bother me all that much. I actually like having seasons. 

This year, however, the long and dark of it has gotten to me. Not the weather. The political climate.

I go to bed shaking my had. I wake up in the middle of the night shaking my head. I get up in the morning shaking my head. And throughout the day, as new atrocities are revealed, I keep shaking, and shaking, and shaking my head as I watch democracy dying in darkness. 

We need baseball. I need baseball.

And tomorrow, at 3:05 p.m., we're/I'm getting some when the Olde Towne Team opens their season in Texas, against the Rangers.

I've been baseball-less - other than reading the sports pages and sharing rumors/comparing notes with my baseball-loving brother Rich - since October 30th, when the World Series ended with the Dodgers beating the Yankees. Yay to that, but - despite my affection for LA's Mookie Betts (late of the Olde Towne Team, who decamped to LA in one of the worst trades in the history of any professional sports team) - the 2024 World Series pitted my two least favorite teams against each other. So while I could rejoice in the Yankees' loss, I wasn't all that thrilled with the Dodgers' win. But it was baseball.

My brother played baseball (on a pretty good team) through high school, and is far more astute and knowledgable about the game than I am. But for a civilian whose only playing experience was pickup games with the neighborhood kids on the dirt road that the paved street turned into just past our house, I can hold my own.

But baseball was over on October 30th, and within a week, well, things in this country took a definite turn for the worse, and I found myself in the slough of despond. Which has gotten sloughier and more despondent since inauguration day.

So despite ratcheting down my news-watching, I do follow what's going on. Thus: long, dark, slough, despond...

And missing baseball.

I tried to catch (on TV) a few spring training games, but every time I went to turn a game on, it wasn't on NESN, "our" baseball network. But tomorrow, Thursday March 27th, at 3:05 p.m., I'll be plunked in front of my TV watching opening day. 

Just as well it's in Texas as opposed to Boston, where it's still plenty chilly. And it's likely to still be plenty chilly a week from Friday when the Sox open at home against the Cardinals. And once again, I'll be plunked in front of my TV.

I have so missed baseball, and as wretched as the Olde Towne Team was last year, watching baseball was actually pretty anodyne as opposed to watching the news. And this year, I need my daily fix more than ever. I don't tend to watch every game in its entirety, but I always put the game on for a few innings - a practice which I will resume starting tomorrow. 

I don't have plans at present to go out to Fenway and watch many games in person. Generally, I take in a handful of in-person games - some planned for, some day-of decisions when the weather is perfect and I can get a cheapo last minute ticket - but last year, I went to just one game. (Noah Kahan bobble-head night.)

This year, I have tickets for the Patriots' Day game. Red Sox vs. White Sox. The Red Sox sucked last year, but at least they weren't the White Sox, who last year set an MLB loss record with 121 losses (vs. the Red Sox who ended up with a fifty-fifty 81-81 record).  The Chicago South Siders are forecast to be just as awful this season. (Sorry, my South Side family members.) The Red Sox, meanwhile, are expected to at least eke their way into the playoffs. And most of the Boston Globe sportswriters - homers! - are predicting that the Olde Towne Team will win the East Division. We'll see, but they should improve on last season's record. (The team was actually worse than that 81-81 record looks.)

For a lot of reasons, the Patriots' Day game is my favorite game of the year. Let's hope that this is one of the years when the weather is decent. It seems to be pretty binary. It's a balmy mid-April day, or in the 40's with off-and-on rain. A few years ago, we were wondering why my niece Caroline was taking so long in the bathroom. Turns out her hands were so cold, she couldn't unbutton her jeans.

For now, I'll take what tomorrow brings, W or L, BASEBALL IS BACK. 

Play ball!

Some people have way too much time on their hands

A few years ago, I remember reading about folks who make their own reusable toilet paper. Personally, I believe that the invention of toilet paper in the mid-19th century was one of the great breakthroughs of all time, replacing as it did leaves, moss, corncobs, newspapers, pages out of the Sears Roebuck catalog, et al. items that might work in an outhouse, but wouldn't quite work once toilets went inhouse. (Imagine flushing a corncob? Not to mention, where would urban dwellers get access to anything other than a newspaper or catalog? Honey, would you mind stopping on the way home for some leaves and moss? We're running low.)

Anyway, I had just one word for the toilet-paper bloggers out there debating what type of flannel to use to make "family cloth," the nifty euphemism for reusable t.p. And that word was CRAZY!

Seriously, it's not as if washing toilet paper doesn't use up energy. It's not like laundry detergent isn't a pollutant. (Maybe the toilet paper bloggers use rocks in a river.) And then there's the obvious yuck factors involved. As an older child, I changed plenty of cloth diapers, and it was disgusting to slosh a poopie diaper around in the toilet to remove the "soil." Whirling a dirty disposable diaper away in a Diaper Genie, despite the landfill aspects, is just a lot more convenient. Out of sight/out of nose/out of mind.

Then, back in olden times, there was the ammonia smells emanating from the enameled diaper pail in the bathroom. My mother did several loads of wash every day (except Sunday, by tradition a day of rest for our washing machine and clothesline), so dirty diapers didn't mount up. And still the diaper pail smelled...

So no thanks to reusable toilet paper.

But I suspect that those with enough time on their hands to handcraft toilet paper could also be reusing their dryer lint.

According to The Spruce,  there are loads of things you can use that dryer lint for. 

The first hint: keep a resealable storage bag near your dryer and use it to collect the lint you're religiously removing from the lint trap each time you do a dryer load. (I am actually quite religious about this.) Seal the bag tightly, as you want "to keep the lint fresh and soft." Because who likes stale lint?

Once you bag a bag-full, why not make some fire starters. After all, what better use to make of something (i.e., dryer lint) that's highly flammable. You may not be able to do this if you use cloth t.p. - and, if you use cloth t.p., you're probably not using paper towels, either - as you won't have t.p. or paper cardboard towel tubing to shove the lint into. But it you do, shove away and then wrap your fire startersin wax paper and, as if you're rolling a joint (which I'd no doubt be doing if I were making my own dryer lint fire starters), twist the ends. Voila! A fire starter. Or you could tear a cardboard egg carton apart and use the cups. Once filled with lint, seal the deal with melted candle wax. (Just don't use a Styrofoam carton.)

If you're making small crafts that call for stuffing, or even for larger items like throw pillows and comforters, lint will do you. Not a good idea if the item is ever going to be washed, however. The lint will just wad up on you. And I'm thinking that something highly flamable might not be a good thing to use to stuff a child's toy. When I was a kid, I believe that most stuffed toys were stuffed with (highly flammable) sawdust. Too bad women no longer wear nylon stockings, as I've got a tip from my mother: when the sawdust starts seeping out of that teddy bear, or, in my case, my little dog Sniffy, replace it with cut up nylons. (Sniffy recently observed his 71st birthday, and most of his life has been spent stuffed with nylons from the pre-pantyhose era.)

Gardeners can toss dryer lint in their compost pile and use it to "prevent soil erosion and weed growth." Not a great mulch, but if erosion or weeds are your problem, well, there you go. Indoor gardeners can use lint to line plant pots. 

What else? Dryer lint is "a good option" for packing. Or to make papier mache. Less craftily, "dryer lint is great at absorbing spills, especially those from oil." Good to know! (NOT!)

I'm all for sustainability, for protecting the environment, but reusing dryer lint? What's next? How to use dried boogers?

Some poeple have way too much time on their hands.

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And a tip of a papier mache chapeau, crafted from dryer lint, to my sister Kath for pointing this WTF story my way.