Was the Peppa Pig themed birthday party worth it, Ms. Mayor?

I'm like a broken record here, but stories about people with their hand in the workplace till NEVER fail to amaze me. Do these folks think they'll pay back what they've embezzled before it gets found out? Do they think that they're going to get away with it, outsmarting the system? (Maybe a lot of them do and that the ones who get caught are in the minority.)

I suppose that many/most embezzlers start small, and once they get away with the initial theft, they just keep upping the ante. 

It just completely shocks me that there are so many people that are willing to grab at easy money only to end up doing time.

Politician thieves are another category altogether, as a lot of times they get caught using government and/or campaign funds to settle illegitimate expenses. After all, politicians being politicians, I'm sure that they can convince themselves that the fancy night out, the spa day, the pricey car, are necessary for them to stay in office. They let themselves stretch the bonds of what faithfully executing their oath of office entails. 

The latest saga to amaze me is that of New Britain, Connecticut's former mayor (in office from 2013 to 2025) Erin Stewart.

Stewart was on the course to get the Republican nomination for governor when details about fraudulent spending came out and she ended her campaign. If she'd gotten her party's nod, it's unlikely that she would have won the gubernatorial race come November. Connecticut is pretty reliably Democratic, and Ned Lamont, the incumbent, is quite popular. (Lamont does have a Democratic challenger, but is likely to be nominated this summer.)

Still, Stewart is young - she's only 39 - and running for statewide office is a credential-builder even if you don't manage to win. Things change over time. Who knows? She might have had a political future. Even reliably blue states have a habit of electing Republicans to state office as long as they temper their fiscal conservatism with social moderation. (C.f., Massachusetts governors Weld and Romney, among others.)

I doubt Stewart has much of a political future now. 

Not after it appears that she spent a lot of dimes on New Britain's account during her mayoral tenure. 

A law firm hired by the city found that Ms. Stewart had racked up $123,018 in expenses from June 2016 to November 2025 that had no supporting documentation to justify them.

The items included clothing, gifts for her husband, diapers, groceries and a membership in a members-only social club in Hartford. The goods were delivered to her home, ordered from Amazon, Instacart, Costco and other retailers, according to investigators, who combed through Ms. Stewart’s social media photos for images of items that she had purchased.

“The findings of this investigation point not to isolated lapses in judgment, but to a pattern of behavior that violated public trust and the standards expected of an elected official entrusted with taxpayer funds for nearly a decade,” said the report, prepared by the Crumbie Law Group in Hartford. (Source: NY Times)

Among the myriad personal expenses Stewart made were party supplies for her daughter's second birthday party, which was "tropical Peppa Pig-themed." State investigators matched these are other dubious expenses to party posts to Stewart's Facebook accounts. Some of her wanton spending had no supporting justification/receipts; some was noted as "office supplies."

An awful lot can fall under the category "office supplies" that would never be found out. But Peppa Pig decorations? Come on, ex-Mayor Stewart. Peppa Pig's cute and all, but please get a little real. 

Stewart also used her government card to buy clothing and jewelry for herself and her family, and baby supplies for her second child. 

All told, the law firm investigation Stewart's spending found over $100K worth of spending with no supporting documentation (and which was pretty much unsupportable, with or without documentation). 

That may not sound like much when, say, compared to the enormity of the multi-billion grift underway by the Trump family, but it's still pretty significant, especially in a blue-collar town like New Britain. And Stewart, although she has said she "will take I will take accountability for any mistakes," and that she "intend(s) to make full and complete restitution to the City of New Britain — my home — for anything that" she ends up owing, she could be in for some non-trivial hurt.

The Connecticut State Police confirmed on Thursday that they had opened an investigation into the matter after the state’s Division of Criminal Justice received a complaint.

I can't imagine that she'll do any time, but she's no doubt out of politics for good. She'll have to come up with the $100K plus payback. And she has to live with the colossal embarrassment.

Sheesh, do people just not think that misdeeds like this may one day catch up with them? Was that Peppa Pig themed birthday party worth it, Ms. Mayor?

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Additional information source: CT Insider

Image Source: Craiyon

Talk about a man-bites-dog story

Every once in a while. Correction. This is loaded-gun-loaded, blood-soaked America we're talking here. With fair regularity, we see a report of a horrific shooting incident in which someone is unintentionally shot and, as often as not, killed.

The two-year-old finds a Glock in their mother's purse and kills her while they're in the cereal aisle at the grocery shopping. The four-year-old takes a loaded Luger out of the bedside table in their parents bedroom and blows their six-year-old sibling's head off. 

Then there are, of course, all the accidental discharges. The gun just "goes off" while someone's cleaning it, and there's one dead spouse on the floor. A gun enthusiast is demonstrating how safe guns are to a gun-shy friend when, BOOM. Too bad they didn't know it was loaded.

Stories like these are so common that they barely make the news. 

Accidental - let alone deliberate - shootings are pretty much yawners these days. If a mass murder only includes four deaths (the FBI definition), it's not that interesting. It's got to be at least a dozen or so to capture our attention.

What we really need are some man-bites-dog stories.

Like this one:

A bizarre incident out of Nebraska is drawing attention after police say a dog accidentally discharged a shotgun inside a truck parked at a convenience store, injuring a woman stopped nearby in traffic.

...At the time of the blast, a woman was reportedly sitting at a nearby traffic light with her arm resting out the window when one pellet struck her in the upper right arm. Authorities said the injury was not believed to be life-threatening, and she was transported to Regional West Medical Center by a family member. (Source: Guessing Headlights)

Talk about an innocent bystander. (Talk about a lawsuit. Does Morgan and Morgan handle dog-shooting suits?)

Fortunately, nobody was killed. And while that almost goes without saying in a situation involving an accidental shotgun blast in public, this really could have ended far worse for everyone involved. 

That's for sure.

But given the weird nature of it, this story got surprisingly little play. Maybe if the woman had died. Maybe if the shot had killed a bus driver who'd driven off the road and all their passengers were killed. Especialy if it were a school bus with kiddos on board. Maybe then the dog-shoots-woman story would have been more widely reported.

But this was just another ho-hummer out of Gunville.

Hope the woman's okay. And hope the dog's okay, too. 

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Image Source: Justin McBrayer

Swan's Way

In late March, there was a home invasion - make that mansion invasion - in Beverly, an oceanfront town North of Boston. Beverly is a very nice community, but the real ritzy-ritzes live in the Pride's Crossing area. 

Well, pride cometh before the fall for one of those ritzy-ritzes, as his home was invaded to the tune of $8M worth of stuff that the invader got (temporarily) away with.

I've been to Beverly plenty of times - my sister Trish lives in the next town - and have seen many really nice houes there. But this $18M pile, 28,000 square foot leaves me cold. Sure, the owners - Thomas Swan III and his husband - have four kids, but I can't imagine there's any way to make this pile seem homey. To me, it looks institutional. A mental institution for the uber-wealthy. Headquarters of some Catholic religious order that inherited the place in the 1950s when the OG family wanted to get rid of it, and there were still plenty of nuns, priests, and monks around. 

It may not be to my liking, but it was built back in the Gilden Age, when money was no object, and off-the-boat Irish servants were a dime a dozen. 

Known as “Rock Edge,” Swan’s Georgian revival-style mansion is one of many stately homes lining Paine Avenue, a historic neighborhood in a wealthy area known as Prides Crossing. The house was commissioned in the early 1900s by a woman named Marian Sargent, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson whose husband made a fortune in the textile industry. (Source: Boston Globe)

Thomas Swan has plenty of dough. He runs the family business, which makes and distributes heating and plumbing equipment, and owns a lot of real estate. And he's ritzy-ritz enough to own a home worth about $20M, and at least $8M of whatever - cash, coins, jewelry, watches - that the thieves got away with. That and a Porsche worth $300K that was pretty quickly found abandoned (and dowsed in bleach, I guess to remove DNA evidence) in a cemetery in Lynn, an less grand working class city a few towns down the road from Beverly. 

The heist - which is how all the Boston news outlets have described it, often with the modifier brazen - was a quasi-inside job, the perp who's been caught (supposedly he had a co-invader) is the ex-BF of a housekeeper who'd worked the day shift the day before the breakin. She is now an ex-housekeeper. (She has not been charged. Yet, anyway.)

When the thieves arrived in the dead of night, a back door had been left open, and the Swan family was not at home. (I suspect they have a few other places where they can hang.) But a woman in her 60's - variously said to be a friend of the family, housekeeper, nanny, and dogsitter - was pretty roughed up. Pistol-whipped, and left tied up in the garage with a bag over her head. She's okay (physically) but must have been terrified.

Reports say that the suspect they've apprehended was identified in part because of Ring camera footage. It's not clear whether it was Ring footage from "Rock Edge" or from other homes in the 'hood. I'm guessing it must have been from "Rock Edge," as the mansion is pretty well set back from the world at large. 

It does seem curious that the place didn't have more a sophisticated surveillance system than a Ring doorbell camera, which seems like the sort of security device when you want to keep an eye on your home, but that home isn't worth nearly $20M, you mostly want to see if someone's scooting off with your Amazon deliveries, and you don't own $8M+ worth of property in it.

It just seems completely crazy that this place didn't have inside and outside security to the hilt. Just insane.

If I were a rich man woman -  ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum (not my favorite musical, but I couldn't resist) - I'm pretty sure I'd have plenty o' surveillance gear and a safe or two. Guess it just wasn't Swan's way. 

It's more likely that I would have been there as the housekeeper, nanny, or dogsitter, and I sure as hell wouldn't have been comfortable spending the night alone in a 28,000 square foot house. And I definitely would have checked to make sure all the doors were locked before I put on my nightgown and got into bed with a good book.

Not that this excuses the vicious, dumbo thieves, but there sure seems to be an awful lot of idiocy going on with this story. 

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Image Source: The Boston Globe

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.

MLB transparency - just not what they intended

Despite the high likelihood that the Red Sox aren't going to be any good this year - would it be indelicate to say that they're going to SUCK? - I am looking forward to the baseball season. 

Oh, I'll likely miss turning on their first game, as it's against the Mariners and doesn't start until 10:10 p.m. And I'm sure I'll be turning off plenty of games part way through, sick of watching them flub around. Plus I'm mega-annoyed that I won't be enjoying (m)any games at Fenway. Yeah, I am going to Noah Kahan (VT singer-songwriter) night - a night game in April (night game in April? what am I thinking?) - but that's mostly because my niece Molly is a mega-fan, and she's turned me into a NK fan, as well. (At least there'll be a bobble-head.) But other than that, I have no plans to pay good money - highest ticket prices in the MLB! - to see bad ball. And it ticks me off that I won't be enjoying the anticipation of a game at "America's Most Beloved Ballpark," the great pleasure of walking out to Fenway on a nice day or evening, the equal great pleasure of walking home (especially if they picked up a W). 

I just refuse. Even to get tickets for the Patriots' Day Game, the only morning (11 a.m. start) game they play and my most beloved game of the year, even though it means navigating Boston Marathon crowds and crazy security. I'm way too mad to pay ticket prices that are even more exhorbitant than last season's exhorbitant ticket prices.

If they hadn't raised their prices, I'm sure I'd have bought tickets for a couple of games already.

But this year, nah.

(And it didn't help my mood that, compounding last summer's news that Mookie Betts, contrary to what Red Sox brass had to say, wanted to stay in Boston, Fred Lynn recently said that, contrary to what the previous Red Sox brass had to say way back in 1981, he didn't want to get traded. Nor, Fred added, did Carlton Fisk.)

Grousing aside, I'm reluctantly looking forward to the start of baseball season. 

God know I could use the diversion.

But a diversion I wasn't looking for was the Olde Towne Team taking the field in see-through pants that make up the lower half of the new MLB regulation uniforms.

The Nike-generated, Fanatics-produced uniforms have been dubbed "performance jerseys" by commissioner Rob Manfred and were used at last year's All-Star Game. Many players admit to a lighter feel to them but have issues with the look.

Because the fabric is lighter, [MLBPA executive director Tony] Clark said it's a "challenge" to have bigger numbers and letters -- hence complaints that the back of the jersey looks "amateurish," according to more than one player. And some say the eggshell color of the pants -- the fabric is the same as last year -- is creating a see-through vibe. The fit has also come into question.

After visiting over a half-dozen spring camps in Arizona, Clark is getting a clearer picture of the complaints.

"A lot of the rhetoric is confirmation that the pants are see-through," Clark said. "It's been an ongoing conversation where each day has yielded something new that doesn't seem to make as much sense as you would like it." (Source: ESPN)

Overall, while there are plenty of complaints about all aspect of the new look and feel, the biggest issue is the pants. 

Anyone who's ever put on a pair of white pants has worried about transparency. Do those flowered undies show through? Should I wear white panties or beige? Will beige make me look like I'm going commando? 

But the bottom line on these baseball white bottoms is that seeing the tucked-in shirttails through the sheer, filmy pants fabric is super cheesy and unprofessional looking. And if those shirts come flying out during the course of a game, well, lookout below. (Or DON'T look below, or anywhere near.)

MLB/Nike/Fanatics say that, by Opening Day, they'll make good on satisfying the players' desire not to live with the potential that their junk will be on display, even if the junk is veiled in a jockstrap or protected by a cup. Meanwhile, players are digging out last year's pants, and at least one team is planning on going shopping for new duds at Dick's. (Seriously? Dick's? No comment.)

MLB has done some good things. I like last year's changes (pitch clock, runner on second in extra innings), as they're speeding up the game. 

But, as with everything else in the world, we're always looking for more transparency when it comes to whatever organizations that impact our little lives are going. 

This is just not the transparency anyone had in mind.

Didn't anyone hold this fabric up to the light at some point???

Design error? Whatty what what?

It will come as no surprise that I don't have a lot of respect or affection for Sarah Huckabee Sanders. 

When she was Trump's Press Secretary, I found her to be duplicitous, a willing conduit for Trump's incessant spew of lies. As Governor of Arkansas, I find her to be preposterous, posturing about social hot button issues when her state is rock-bottom when it comes to most measures of health and welfare. 

Sure, your state may rank 48th in health, and 47th when it comes to education, but by all means, let's crack down on drag shows.

Turns out she's not just duplicitous and preposterous, Sarah Huckabee Sanders can be downright ludicrous.

As in an application for positions "to serve on state boards and commissions to write explanations of what they admire about her leadership most." (Source: Raw Story)

The state was looking for was an up to 500 word essay answering this prompt:

 "What is an accomplishment of the Governor’s that you admire the most?"

In contrast, a question that asked "What book have you read that would best define your life and why?" only had room for a 250 word answer. 

Five-hundred words on Sarah Huckabee Sanders' biggest and bestest accomplishment?

Yikes!

I could probably come up with 500 words on her recent response to Joe Biden's State of the Union, in which she did manage to tell one truth when she said:

“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left; the choice is between normal or crazy,” she said.

Only Sanders was positioning the right as the normies. 

Yes, there are indeed crazies on the left, and there are plenty of ludicrous fake woke-y things going on out there, but when it comes to normal v. crazy... 

Come on, man, as arch normie Joe Biden might say. 

Anyway, I've been asked dumb things when I applied for jobs, but no one ever asked me to write about how fab the CEO is.

Turns out that the Sanders' administration has acknowledged that this silly question was out there, but chalked it up to a "design error."

"Design error"? How could something so ludicrous be a "design error"? Somebody wrote that essay question. That's not a "design error." That's a content  error. 

Oh, I guess if you asked some lower lever employee to come up with the application form - maybe someone young and naive; maybe someone who's just a true blue, natural born, dedicated ass-kisser - you could say that was a "design error." 

And I guess picking such a person could come under the broadly defined category of "design error." Sort of. It may just be me, but I usually think of including bad UI, clumsy navigation, paths to nowhere, etc. 

According to Sanders spokesperson Alexa Henning, that question was intended only for people applying for summer internships, not official positions on state boards. (Source: Raw Story)

 What? Whatty what what?

It would be okay for young folks applying for summer internships to be required to do some apple polishing? 

What? Whatty what what?

How about asking the young folks to write an essay about some great Arkansan that they admired? Sure, the most ass-kissing of the ass-kissing applicants would have found their way to writing about Sarah Huckabee Sanders or her father, the former governor, Mike Huckabee.

Or they could have picked Johnny Cash. If they were a bit righter-than right leaning could have thrown their application lot with a paean to Douglas MacArthur. 

Someone with guts, but who really didn't want the internship, could have written about Bill Clinton.

What someone admires most about Sarah Huckabee Sanders???

Stupid, stupid, stupid idea. 

Design error? Nah...

Just a really flawed way of thinking. Guess that what happens when you throw in with cults..

To protect and serve? Really?

A familiar trope of the family dramas of my childhood was the boy having to "man up" and shoot the rabid family dog. I guess it was supposed to teach us - including us city slickers who lacked both guns and rabid dogs - that life was tough, that life was unfair. And that at some point in our lives, we (especially the boys) all might be called on to do something shattering, something emotionally devastating, for the greater good. 

Old Yeller, anyone?

Fast forward all those decades, and we get the sad story of a nine-year-old little girl in California who raised a goat as part of a 4H project for the Shasta District Fair. As part of the program, families purchase goats (kids?) for their kids, and the kids (humans) learn about how to take care of animals - and what farmers and ranchers do. Which is raise animals for slaughter. Part of the deal is that the animals are auctioned off and transitioned from pet to food. 

But Jessica Long's daughter became so attached to her goat, Cedar, and so distraught at the thought of Cedar being killed, that Long decided to go ahead and violate the rules. 

She what-the-helled it, and kidnapped Cedar from the fairground barn. Cedar had already been auctioned, so Long offered to repay whatever the lost revenue would be. 

Of course: Rules are rules. Long's family knew what they were signed up for. And all of us meat eaters have to live with the fact that there are actually living, breathing, and - let's face it - at least somewhat sentient creatures that have to lose their lives so we can enjoy a BLT or some chicken nuggets. Or whatever it is that's made with goat. 

And it's not like I'm a big fan of coddling children, and wrapping them from the facts of life. (I went to my first funeral at the age of 8; I went to my first wake unaccompanied by a parent at the age of 11.) Kids are resilient. Kids are aware. Kids are tough. 

But, but, but...This is a little girl. A very little girl who had lost three of her grandparents in the past year, and who found solace through raising Cedar. 

The Shasta District Fair wasn't having any:

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,” [Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Melanie] Silva wrote back to Long in an email reviewed by The Times dated June 28, 2022. “Also, in this era of social media this has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.” (Source: LA Times)

So instead of attempting to find a resolution that was kind and compassionate, or at least give the Long family more time to adjust, the Shasta District Fair, after tsk-tsking Jessica Long, called in the sheriff's office. Armed with a search warrant, detectives put out some sort of caprine APB and drove over 500 miles around Northern California in their goat hunt for Cedar. (The Long family had found a home for Cedar on a farm. They live in a residential area and could not keep the goat with them.)

Echoing language used when law enforcement search a home for drugs, the warrant allowed deputies to “utilize breaching equipment to force open doorway(s), entry doors, exit doors, and locked containers” and to search all rooms, garages and “storage rooms, and outbuildings of any kind large enough to accommodate a small goat.”

Oh, FFS. Or as a lawyer involved with animal rights had it:

“It’s shocking,” said Ryan Gordon, an attorney with Advancing Law for Animals. “It’s a little girl’s goat, not Pablo Escobar.”

This situation is coming to light now because Jessica Long is suing Shasta District Fair officials and the county:

... arguing it committed an “egregious waste of police resources” and violated her and her daughter’s 4th Amendment and 14th Amendment rights protecting them from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process. Long and her attorneys allege the dispute was a civil matter she was willing to resolve.

But the Shasta officials were hard-assing it from the outset, telling Long from Day One that they were going to call the cops on her. (Remember, they weren't just ticked about the rules violation; they were aggrieved about the "negative experience" that they'd had on social media. A boo anda hoo.)

Side note: the person who had purchased Cedar at auction was fine with not going ahead and slaughtering the goat. 

And another side note: a child in California is allowed to back out of a contract within a reasonable time period.

But, for the Shasta Fair, that mattered not.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Shasta Fair officials. 

What a group.

At minimum, they should have waited for things to play out, rather than rush right in and get the goat. Or they could have made this moment to improve their process. Maybe they should spend more time with the 4H children explaining that their animal would be slaughtered for meat. Maybe they should offer a couple of options: raise your goat for meat, or raise your goat for milk and cheese. (Not that I know much about animal husbandry, but I guess this option would only apply to girl goats. Not clear whether Cedar was a B or a G.) Or raise the goat and let it go on to frolic on a goat farm, helping make more goats. 

In any case, sending in armed police men to seize a little goat seems like a pretty over the top response. Who and what are they protecting and serving here? How about they spend their time looking for bad guys. 

Maybe adults should be the adults, and not take their rigid fantasies about how to toughen up little kids out on those little kids. Nine-years-old. FFS.

And, by the way, if Old Yeller had to go - which he did - maybe, if they make a contemporary version of it, the mother can send the young Travis into the house and shoot the damned dog herself.

Hey, lady!

Vito Perrone had been offered his dream job: superintendent of public schools in Easthampton, MA. He was in the contract review stage, and that's when he made what turned out to be a fatal error. In sending an e-mail to the chairwoman of the School Committee and her (female) assistant, requesting some contract changes, Perrone addressed the two women as "ladies."

Apparently Committee Chair Cynthia Kwiecinski no like. 

Perrone said Kwiecinski later told him addressing the pair of women as “ladies” was a microaggression, and “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Perrone apologized for having caused unintended offense, but next thing Perrone knew, the offer had been rescinded. 

“I was shocked,” Perrone told the [Hampshire] Gazette. “I grew up in a time when ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ was a sign of respect. I didn’t intend to insult anyone.”

The School Committee hasn't commented on this matter, so there's no explanation out there for the revoked offer, other than the "ladies microaggression." But so far, two-plus-two does seem to be four.

There's been plenty of uproar over this issue.

Perrone, who had earlier in his career been Easthampton's high school principal and football coach, has a lot of community support behind him. The local teacher's union has come out and held a rally in his defense. Many are asking the School Committee to revisit its decision; many are decrying that the vote change happened behind closed doors. And many aren't happy that the Committee is jumping in on cancel culture. 

There's also a lot of feeling that this situation could have been handled better. Maybe Perrone shouldn't have spilled the tea so publicly; maybe the School Committee - who better? - should have used it as a teachable moment. Especially since the offense seems so picayune. Come on, Easthampton, it's not as if he called the women hos or bee-otches. 

Those crying microaggression believe that the use of the word "lady" is never appropriate in a professional setting. It's condescending, infantilizing, patronizing, diminishing. 

Ladies.

It's a bit old school, but microaggression?

Not my viewpoint, but I'm an old who came of age in a decidedly non-PC world, where using the term "ladies" would have been the least of anyone's worries. It's just not up there with ethnic, religious, racial, geographic, gender slurs. IMHO.

Ladies. 

I do take umbrage - and did even when I was young - with anyone using the term "young lady." That I do find condescending, infantilizing, patronizing, diminishing. And just plain stupid. Because I always get the impression that the men who use it think it's a bit flattering, when it is, of course, solid BS. (Amazingly, men still use it on me occasionally, mostly in the homeless shelter where I volunteer. I'm 73. I don't know anyone who doesn't find the "young lady" nonsense ridiculous.)

But ladies?

I probably wouldn't use it in a professional setting. Now, anyway. (I may well have in the past.)

But I use it plenty.

When I'm out with women - family and friends, we're "let's go, ladies." I'm on an alumnae committee at my college which, when I was there was "girls" only. When we email back and forth, when we're meeting, we use it all the time. 

In truth, if we didn't use ladies in emails, we'd probably use "all."

In truth, if we didn't use ladies in person, we'd probably use "guys." 

Guys.

That's become another word non grata. 

Another word us olds grew up with. I guess we were just used to the male words being universal. Mankind. No man is an island. Everyman. 

The (then) alma mater of my all girls high school used the word "brotherhood" in it. (One of my close friends wrote the lyrics.)

But ladies. 

It seems friendly, warm, affectionate, maybe a bit ironic. Because, after all, no one I know wants to be associated with the nicey-nice connotations of lady -  ladylike, act like a lady. There ain't no one I know who came of age in the 1960's and 1970's who wants to be associated with. 

Girls who were "ladylike" were saccharine, cloyingly sweet, insipid, boring. What we would have called "pukey."

But ladies? Using the word "ladies?"

How can that possibly be a firing or non-hiring offense?

Yes, I get that some ladies guys folks may not like it. But isn't the right thing to do - the kind (dare I say ladylike) thing - would have been to bring Vito Perrone up to date. Let him know that a word that might work among family and friends is inappropriate for the workplace. And not just rescind an offer for a job that he was deemed best suited for (among the candidates in contention). 

It's not that little things don't matter. But, but, but...

In a world where people are mowing down kids with AR-15's, etc., it sure does seem we have bigger things to focus on.

Trademark this

As I sit here writing this post, I've got the Red Sox on. In what I expect will be a frequent theme this season, the beloved Olde Towne Team is losing. 

Sigh.

Last year they finished last in their division and were pretty much awful to watch from the first pitch of the season to the final out. I'm not expecting much more this season, and have held off on getting tickets, other than a pair for the Patriots Day Game next week. I'm guessing this is one of those years when, if I want to see a game in person, I'll be able to wait until the last minute and go for a steeply discounted seat on one of the scalper sites.

Despite their abysmal showing last season, the Red Sox - one of the most highly valued franchises in Boston - raised ticket prices this season. The nerve!

But when it comes to showing their inner greedy child, the Red Sox never hold back. 

I'm sure they ran the numbers - they're good at that - and figured out that, as long as there are lots of limited-interest-"fans"/tourists willing to pay big bucks for the thrill of seeing a game at America's Most Beloved Ballpark, they can afford if a lot of true fans drift away. 

But ticket prices weren't the only way that the Red Sox have been going after The Big Gouge.  

Until they asked to withdraw their trademark application, the Red Sox (through MLB) were looking for protected use of the name - wait for it! - "Boston." (Other teams in on this swindle were "Seattle" and "Houston." Guess all the other teams thought it was just too dumbass.)

The league’s intent wasn’t to take possession of the city’s name, [Red Sox principal owner John Henry] said.

“MLB’s intent was to protect these clubs’ use of their city name in connection with professional baseball services and apparel, not an attempt to own the city name or prevent others from using the city name,” Henry said. (Source: Boston Globe)

Didn't want to take possession oof the city's name? Just its use in conjunction with the word 'baseball?' Sure sounds like a pure greed play to me. And it's apparently not John Henry's first ride on the trademark rodeo. Henry's group also owns the Liverpool football club, and in 2019 tried to trademark the word "Liverpool."

Trademarking the word "Liverpool." To borrow from the Beatles, this was not fab. Nor was it gear. 

At the time, the club said that move was purely “in the context of football products and services” and to stop people benefiting from the sale of what they described as “inauthentic products,” the paper reported.

What, pray tell, is an "inauthentic product?" 

Presuming it had a headhole and two armholes, and an opening at the bottom, wouldn't a football jersey with Liverpool written on it be an actual, usable clothing item? Every bit as actual and usable as a jersey that the team was selling in their fab gear shop?

Same goes for the Red Sox. 

If I want something "authentic," I can go shopping in the blessed store outside of Fenway. Or buy something inside the park. 

As I write, I'm wearing an official, "authentic" Red Sox fleece that I paid a kabillion bucks for a couple of years back at said blessed store. It's China Blue - a very pretty color. And from the sportswear company Columbia. So, high quality. 

But, stupid me.

It has no pockets, and is also a pullover, when a zip front would be much better. What was I thinking? 

Maybe I should have bought something less authentic but more useful from a street vendor. Or from a store selling shirts that look like baseball shirts or caps that say "Boston" but don't have an "authentic" MLB tag on them. 

If they're not using the stylized Boston Red Sox "B" - and, frankly, even if they are - I'm sure fans know whether they bought something from the Red Sox or from a civilian. And they likely don't care. 

Several law professors were interviewed for the Globe article cited here. Their reaction to the attempt to trademark the word "Boston:" "ridiculous...really absurd"..."kind of ludicrous"...

One said: "This is like if Dunkin' Donuts tried to trademark, 'Caution: hot liquid.'"

What's popping into my head here is Logan Roy, evil, scheming, greedy paterfamilias to the evil, scheming, greedy Roy children, and head of the Waystar media empire in the HBO series Succession. Logan has a catchphrase: Oh, fuck off. 

But I'll be more polite here. 

On behalf of Red Sox Nation, and sensible people everywhere, here's what I have to say to John Henry. TRADEMARK THIS!

Ghastly

When I was in school, the only regular "drills" we had were fire drills, which happened a couple of times a year. (These revved up after a Catholic school in Chicago burned down in 1958. On my birthday, of all things. And the school had the same name as mine: Our Lady of the Angels. Nearly 100 kids were killed.) For fire drills, the alarm rang, we all marched out in orderly ranks, and stood in formation in the schoolyard until the all clear bell sounded.

Oddly, although I was a school kid from the mid-1950's through the mid-1960's - the height of the Red Scare - I have very little memory of the famous duck-and-cover drills that had kids poking their heads under their desks. 

I do remember one time when we marched down the hill to the church, which had a fallout shelter in the basement. 

And, certainly, the nuns were perpetually harping on the threat of Communists attacking the US and going after Catholics. They warned us that we might well be put in a position to become a martyr. If a Communist asked you whether you were a Catholic, sure, you could deny it and live. But if you said "Yes," well, a bullet between the eyes, and you punched your ticket to paradise. (I can't imagine that there would have been too many parents who'd want their children to answer "Yes." My father would have thought this was nuts and even my super religo mother would have been appalled. The nuns might not have concurred, but our parents would have come down on the side of Better Red than Dead.)

But, realistically, as scary as idea of a Catholic-hating Commie was, we knew that there had never been an American Catholic child martyr. 

The prospect of a school fire was more realistic, but even then, OLA Chicago was a one-off. And we were in a modern, one story school - the antithesis of rickety old multi-story OLA Chicago. We could all jump out the windows if worse came to worst. 

Today's kids know that school massacres are very real. That they happen. That they're relatively common.

Shady Hook. Uvalde. Parkland.

These kids know. They know they could be targets. They have to live with it. 

And, sadly, the response hasn't been to do something about keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of those under the age of 21 and/or with mental health issues and/or who've made threats on social media. The response has been to harden the schools.

Cops in the halls. Arm the teachers. Anti-ballistic backpacks. Active shooter drills. 

And then there's the Rapid-Deploy Safe Room System from KT Security Solutions, which has recently been deployed in a school in Alabama (to the tune of $60K per classroom). This product is a:

... “functional white board that can be customized to fit any classroom and expands into a fold-out room in under 10 seconds to serve as a protective shield, storm shelter, or additional meeting space inside the classroom...The device “provides ballistic shield for an entire classroom of students and staff” and can stop .308 caliber ammunition. (Source: Vice)

And a selling point is that a four year old can single-handedly deploy the safe room. (Shades of the black-and-white TV ads for Castro Convertibles which showed a four year old in a nightgown opening up the Castro sofa and converting the family living room into the guest room.)

KT Security Solutions "builds ballistic, rapid-deployment housing units for the military warfighter in our forward operating bases around the world." Founder Kevin Scott says that the impetus for creating the school safe room was Uvalde. 

Scott isn't happy that there's a need for his product, but, in the wake of Uvalde, he felt he needed to do something to save children. Although Scott may not be thrilled, he does see a good business opportunity.

There are currently two [school safe rooms] deployed and he hopes to grow the company quickly. "Our goal is to have a million classrooms in a year. That's what we want. There's three to five million classrooms around the United States."

Even if the price goes down with volume, this could certainly be a pretty lucrative business.  

Scott is relieved that the Alabama school is finding other uses for their safe room.

"The teachers said the kids actually call it the 'Calm Zone,' and they actually call it the 'Calm Cottage' now. She [Alabama teacher] leaves hers deployed all the time and it is a reward system that she has put in her elementary class where, when the kids do good things, they get a good grade, they read all their stuff, they do all their homework, they get a little free time on Friday in the Calm Cottage," he said. "They can go in there and do free reading, play little table games and things like that. So it's actually had the exact opposite effect of what you and I would have thought before we had them implemented."

"That's been a blessing that I didn't see coming," he added.

Unfortunately, the blessing I don't see coming is the nation gathering the will to do something about the rampant, Wild West use of guns in this country. 

What we're doing to our children is ghastly, just ghastly.

Yeez Louise, that's a lot of ugly sneakers

I'm the first to admit that, when it comes to popular music, I'm something of a fuddy duddy. 

Oh, I'm not a complete and utter fuddy duddy, but a minor league one nonetheless.

I'm not sitting around mooning over why Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis aren't more popular. I don't sing Patti Page tunes in the shower. (Okay. Once in a while, I may break out into Old Cape Cod. But I promise you I have never, ever, ever in a million years performed a shower warble of How Much Is That Doggy in the Window.)

I can make fun of Lawrence Welk and his full cast, from Myron Floren to the Luffly Lennon Sisters. 

And while I still enjoy many of the performers I loved 50+ years ago - Tom Rush, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Elton John - I like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles just fine. In a couple of weeks, I'm going to see Lewis Capaldi. 

But.....

But....

Not that an old white woman is the audience, but I don't care for/appreciate/get rap. And while I understand that a lot of folks consider him a genius, I don't care for/appreciate/get Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West; latterly known as Yeezy - I think). 

And if I don't enjoy his music, I really don't think much of his fashion. 

I don't know if he still has his clothing line, but my reaction when I first saw it was something along the lines of this is some fugly stuff. (Insider info: One of my closest friends was a lead buyer for a very high end retail firm. I won't name names, but think Dallas. The store did business with Kanye - they were somewhat forced into it [I can't remember the deets] - and he was difficult to work with. And not many of the dedicated followers of fashion who dropped tens of thousands of dollars a month at the store would have been caught dead wearing anything "designed" by Kanye.)

If his clothing line was fugly, well, bring on Yeezy footwear, the latest of which looks like an unhappy meeting of Crocs and Edvard Munch's The Scream. And they certainly don't look like they'd offer the kind of support this old lady needs. Talk about ankle-breakers!

But Yeezy sneakers are popular. If no one wears them, collectors collect them and scalpers scalp them. And they cost a ton more than Crocs.

A few years ago, I was walking up Newbury Street and passed a large crowd gathering in front of a store. I asked one of the waiters what he was waiting for. I thought at first that he told me that Kanye West was coming, but then I figured out that it was some new edition of Yeezys that were hitting the shelves. 

Yeezys have helped make Ye richie rich. And they helped swell the coffers at Adidas, which had a deal with Ye that went south when Ye started spewing crackpot antisemitism, Adidas - a German company - was pushed to drop their arrangement. Which stuck the company with a Yeezy inventory worth $1.3B.

Stored in warehouses around the world, the sneakers are a reminder of the once-fruitful tie between Adidas and Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye. Since the first Yeezy Boost 750 shoe dropped in February 2015, his Yeezy brand became a defining force in the sportswear industry and an incredibly lucrative cornerstone for Adidas. (Source: NY Times)

Since January, Adidas has been headed by CEO Bjorn Gulden, who's been spending some of his get-acquainted time trying to figure out what to do with all those Yeezys. 

Mr. Gulden said he and his team were still weighing their options, including the idea of potentially selling the inventory and donating the profits “to do something good.” He said the shoes most likely wouldn’t be destroyed.

Getting rid of the Yeezys is complicated.

Selling the inventory puts the coveted sneakers into the market, and Ye is contractually entitled to his share of the profits. Giving the inventory away puts it to "good use," and there goes Ye's share (yay!), but there goes any profits that would go to do-gooding. 

Destroying the sneakers seems totally wrong-headed. Surely, there are direly poor folks throughout the world - some of them perhaps (blessedly) completely unaware of who Ye is and what cra stuff he stands for - who could use a pair of colorful Scream-Crocs. Not to mention the toxic sludge that would be produced by shredding/burning/whatevering those puppies. 

While Adidas is grappling with plenty of other issues, the Yeezy line was a "cornerstone" of their business, contributing as much as half-a-billion to their bottom line. 

“Losing the Yeezy business is so hard,” [Fulden] told reporters on Wednesday, praising the creativity of the collaboration on multiple levels, including the design, marketing and its use of social media and apps.

“There is no other Yeezy business in the market,” he said. “The people who think you can just replace this with something else — you can’t.”

I'll take Gulden's word that you can't just slot in another big name for Ye and get the same results. But maybe the next time around, they can come up with something that isn't quite as ugly. 

Pumpkin Spiced Tidy Cats? Really???

It's not as if I'm immune to the pumpkin spice thing that has become so central to autumnal bliss. I mostly don't do lattes, so it's pretty much a matter of indifference to me when Dunkin (or is it Starbucks, or is it both?) brings it back.

But I do like pumpkin. I do like spice. And I love those tiny Trader Joe's Hold My Cones, and the pumpkin ginger version, which they have in the fall, is pretty darned delish. (It's not my favorite Hold My Cone seasonal flavor. That would be peppermint, which comes out for the holiday season. Still, pumpkin spice is pretty yummy, too.)

And I do like when the tiny little pumpkins (or pumpkin-like gourds) appear in the grocery store, so I can buy one to put on my kitchen windowsill. 

And I like spices. I make apple crisp with cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. I have a spicey Christmas cookie recipe. There's a spicey, peppery chicken that I make. I have a big hunk of ginger in the cabinet that I grate a bit of when I make peanut sauce. Etc.

So, yay, pumpkin. And, yay, spice.

But does everything have to be pumpkin spice?

A quick google revealed pumpkiny spicey goods beyond my imagining. Coffee-mate. Jell-o. Oreos (a true desecration!). Cheerios. Peeps. Bailey's Irish Cream. Marshmallows, almonds, yogurt. 

You name it, someone has pumpkin spiced it up.

Most of what gets pumpkin spiced up is edible or drinkable. Or is a Yankee Candle. But I've seen cleaners, including laundry detergent out there.

Not that I'm opposed to cleaning aids that smell nice. I'm a sucker for Mrs. Meyer's All Purpose Cleaner - Lemon Verbena. The Geranium isn't bad, either. And I like dishwashing liquid that's lemon-y or orange-y. 

It's just that everything really doesn't need to smell like pumpkin spice. And including in that everything category, I'd put Tidy Cats Kitty Litter.

I'm sure that if I had cats I'd do pretty much everything in my power to keep my house from smelling like I had cats. I might draw the line at trying to toilet train the critters, but I'm sure I'd be there several times a day with my turd scoop, and pretty much changing the litter out daily.

But I can't see wanting the litter to smell like things I might eat or drink. Like those Trader Joe's spiced Hold My Cones. 

I get that product managers for consumer goods are always trying to come up with brand extensions, where they make marginal changes to the core product to get people to buy more, hopefully without cannibalizing sales of the core product. It makes me crazy. How many versions of M&M's do we need? And as far as I'm concerned, having too much choice is not a good thing. It's exhausting. One of the reasons I like shopping at my little indie neighborhood drugstore is that they only have a half-dozen or so toothpaste options. Unlike CVS, where there's a seemingly infinite variety that makes my head hurt. 

But I really do get it.

What I don't get is pumpkin spice kitty litter. 

Because I don't have a cat, my opinion really doesn't count here. But if I did have a cat, I can't see buying this. And I really do want to know: does it do anything for the kitties?

Fore! (Seriously, what did these folks expect?)

There's been a lot of flap in Boston of late about outdoor dining in the North End, the Italian section that's chocked full of restaurants and cafes. 

Anyway, with covid, Boston allowed restaurants throughout the city to put tables out in the street and it seemed to have worked pretty well. The last few springs-summers-falls, there've been restaurants in my neighborhood that have set up shop in the street, and, while I've only eaten out there a couple of times, I love the life that seeing people dining outside brings to Charles Street. European-light. 

But in the North End, there've been a ton of complaints about it. Too much noise. Too much trash. Too much traffic disruption. Too many parking places taken away for the duration.

So some of the folks who live in the 'hood leaned on Mayor Wu to do something about it. Her solution was to charge North End restaurants a fee well in excess of what restaurants in other parts of town are paying for the privilege putting some tables up in the streets. 

I stopped paying attention to the brouhaha that ensued, a brouhaha which appears to have pitted folks who live in the North End (many of them recent yuppie blow ins, and not 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation Italian-Americans, most of who've long fled to the burbs) vs. the restaurant owners (many of them 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th gen Italian-Americans who fled to the burbs but kept their in-town restaurants).

Seriously, I don't really get the complaints. Presumably, you move to the North End because you wanted urban life enough to put up with the noise, commotion, traffic, and parking. You wanted to have the restaurants, the cafes, the tourists, the crowded streets. Then all of a sudden you can't put up with any of the overhead associated with it? 

If you need to park in front of your own house and don't like commotion, you should consider moving out of town where there's plenty of parking, no garbage trucks picking up restaurant trash at 2 a.m., no tourists clogging the narrow streets. You can always Uber in for one of the summer saints festivals, which I understand are coming roaring back this summer. Really and truly, if you don't want the girl in the angel costume flying on a rope across your street while the Roma Band plays loud, live elsewhere. That goes for restaurants in the street, too.

And then there's the Tenczars, a young couple who, a few years back, "moved into their dream home overlooking a golf course" in a town south of Boston. A dream house on Country Club Lane, in Indian Pond Estates. 

They obviously recognized that they wanted to raise their kids in the 'burbs. No North End noise, grime, and commotion for them. But they apparently hadn't really thought through the golf course part of the deal. 

Flying balls shattered windows in their house with such force they sent glass spraying into the next room; the siding on the house was peppered with circular dents, like a battleship in a war zone. Fearful neighbor children wore bicycle helmets when they went out to play, the Tenczars said.

In the four years since moving in, Erik and Athina Tenczar have picked up nearly 700 balls on their property; they no longer fix the broken windows, but instead cover them in thick plastic sheeting. They even built a partition to shield a small section of their deck from flying objects. A golf shot last fall took out a deck railing.

“When it hits, it sounds like a gunshot,” said Athina Tenczar, 36. “It’s very scary.”

“We’re always on edge,” added Erik Tenczar, 43. “It’s been emotionally taxing on us.” (Source: Boston Globe) 

I'm not going to discount how terrible it must be to live on a golf course and be subject to this. (Turns out, the situation of their house puts it on a worse path than other homes in their area. Seems like they should take that up with the homebuilder/developer.) And it does sound like the Indian Pond Country Club was, until recently, a bit douche golf bag-gy in their dealings with the Tenczars. 

But what did the Tenczars expect, buying a house on a golf course? 

The couple say they anticipated putting up with some amount of sound and distraction from living along a golf course. But they were not prepared for the extent, frequency, and intensity of all of it.

“Honestly, if you have all these houses on a course, I assumed it was safe,” Athina Tenczar said.

Erik Tenczar asked: “Should we have looked into chances our house would be hit? Probably. I don’t know. We just fell in love with the house. It was our first house.”

Probably? I don't know? Come on. A golf course would be the next to last place I'd choose to live. (The true last place would be The Villages in Florida.) I don't want golf balls sailing in through my windows, thank you. So I put up with sirens and rats scrounging around in the garbage bags when people put their trash out too damned early.

Apparently, the legal system is - so far - on the side of the Tenczars. 

After a six-day trial in Plymouth Superior Court, a jury on Dec. 6 awarded the Tenczars $3.5 million for damages and mental and emotional suffering. (With interest the award totals $4.9 million, court records show).

Since this judgement was made, the club has jiggered around with the tee location for the 15th hole, and the Tenczars have been golf ball free for a while.

This award seems insane to me, and the Indian Pond Country Club thinks so, too. It's appealing and they're fairly certain this verdict will get tossed. 

I'm sure the Tenczars are a perfectly nice couple, looking for nothing more than safety for their three small children who they don't want to get conked by an errant drive when they're splashing in their kiddie pool. (That pool was hit once, but the kiddos blessedly weren't in it at the time.) But $5M? 

See you in court, I guess. 

As for me, I'm hoping to dine out on Hanover Street in the North End when the weather warms up a bit. 

And let's hear it for Mark Cuban!

You read the horror stories all the time, the most common are the ones about the diabetics who rationed their unaffordable insulin and died in the process. While this doesn't happen all that often, it does occur. And I've read that one out of four diabetics does resort to insulin-rationing which, if it doesn't kill you, does exacerbate the cascade of health problems that diabetics suffer from. And the high cost of insulin seems particularly galling, given that its discoverers "sold" the patent for $1 way back in the 1920's so that it could be widely used by those in need. 

While insulin is the one horror show medication that we hear the most about, with some cancer drugs being a close second, there are all kind of drug affordability trap doors that Americans fall through, even those who are well-insured. 

I'm fortunate in that the only prescription drug I take is a low-dose statin, which costs me about five bucks a month. But my brother who, like me is on Medicare with excellent supplemental insurance, falls into the "donut hole" of coverage and, one month a year, ends up paying $800 for one of his prescriptions. It's ghastly, but he can afford it. A lot of people can't absorb that type of hit.

Well, here comes Mark Cuban to the rescue.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban launched an online pharmacy Thursday that offers more than 100 generic drugs at an affordable price with a goal of being “radically transparent” in its price negotiations with drug companies.

The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company (MCCPDC) is a registered pharmaceutical wholesaler and purchases drugs directly from manufacturers,

bypassing middlemen to lower the price of more than 100 medications, it said in a statement.

For example, the leukemia drug imatinib is priced at $47 a month on MCCPDC compared to the $9,657 retail price.

The online pharmacy’s prices for generics factor in a 15% margin on top of actual manufacturer prices and a $3 pharmacist fee, the statement said.

The markup on generics average “at least” 100%, the MCCPDC said, while the Wall Street Journal reports in some cases it exceeds 1,000%. (Source: Forbes)

The company will also build its own manufacturing facility.  

Cuban - an entrepreneur who is one of the sharks on Shark Tank, and who also owns the Dallas Mavericks - got involved in response to a cold call (well, cold email) he got from Alex Oshmyansky (himself no slouch: among other things, he's a physician). Part of their motivation was the bad behavior of "Pharma Bro" Martin Shrkeli, who acquired a drug company and promptly jumped the price of the lifesaving drug they produced from $13.50 to $750 per pill. (Shrkeli is in prison for unrelated securities fraud.)

MCCPDC is mostly the brain child of Oshmyansky, but: 

[Cuban] said he decided to put his name on the company to “show capitalism can be compassionate and to send the message I am all in.” It’s not clear how much he had invested in the company.

Whatever he's all in for, Cuban's name on the door is clearly helping the new company gain attention and traction.

MCCPDC won't be all things to all patients - at least for now. Among other things, they offer generic replacements for some Type 2 diabetes pills, but nothing for insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetics who get their insulin via injection or pump. They also don't have a generic for the drug my brother is getting gouged for.

But it's a start.

We hear plenty about the not-so-great billionaires out there. Big buckers like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their space race. Etc. (I won't be including Trump here, as I'm guessing he's a not-so-billionaire.) Nice to see Mark Cuban getting involved in something that will help a lot of people.

It's a shame though, isn't it, that we can't find a way to make drugs as affordable as they are in other countries, isn't it?