That was the week that was…

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the past week, and what it’s meant for Boston and the country.

The shock, horror, sadness, and outrage we all felt after Monday’s bomb attack on our friends and family, our city, our special holiday, our Marathon.

I’ve already forgotten whether I even set foot outside the house on Tuesday, so all-consuming was the news. (So crushing the pictures of little Martin Richard, and, as they were identified, of Krystal Campbell and Lingzi Lu. Heartbreaking.)

On Wednesday, I ventured out early. As I walked through the Boston Common, I passed a few National Guard members (including a couple hauling a major league Dunkin’ Donuts bag; America really does run on Dunkin’),and their vehicles (not quite sure what they were: jeepish-tankish), and their tents. 

As I usually do, I picked up some trash along the way.* As I stooped to pick up a mega-Burger King cup, the thought did occur to me that it might be booby-trapped.

But I decided not to live in fear, picked it up – cursing the slob who’d dropped it within 20 feet of a trash can – and threw it away.

My morning’s destination – the gym – was in a building a couple of doors down from the Mexican Consulate. Which had a guy posted out front carrying a machine gun.

This may have made the Mexican Consul feel safer, but it did not make me feel safer. On the contrary, it made me feel frightened.

I expected the armed camp to be in full evidence when, later in the day, I took a train from North Station to visit my sister. I was carrying with me some information on the chemistry of fire – info that my husband (the former chemist) had pulled together for our niece, who has a paper on the topic due soon. The info included a chemistry book, generously outlined and commented in my husband’s red pen, which, admittedly, some might take for the work of a madman. When I was leaving the house, Jim warned me that, if I were searched at North Station, the searcher might think I was up to no good. Hard to believe you have to worry about a high school chemistry project, but you never know. I tucked it under the Tupperware I was returning to Trish.  But there was no – blessed relief –  mega security presence at North Station, and I was able to hop my train without delay, which made me feel far better than the armed guard at the Mexican Consulate.

The next morning, on my return to Boston, I took my usual cut-through Mass General Hospital on my way home from North Station. I knew there were bombing victims still being treated there, but was nonetheless surprised/unnerved to see men – were they Homeland Security? – stationed out front of the hospital carrying machine guns. As with the Mexican Consulate, this did not make me feel safe. It made me feel sorry. (Later in the day, the President paid a visit to MGH to meet with some of the bombing victims, so perhaps that was the reason for the souped-up security. I will say, however, that the back of the hospital was not thus secured.)

By Thursday, Boston was all a-vigil. I didn’t participate in any of them “live”, but I did watch some of the very moving memorial service on TV.

By this point, all the Boston Strong “stuff” was starting to irk me a bit. As if wearing a tee-shirt that says Boston Strong is really going to do or prove much of anything. As if there were ever any possibility that Bostonians were going to go collectively to pieces. (Fat f-in’ chance of that.) I was about to call BS, when I realized that I was the one choking up a bit when I saw this tribute that had appeared in The Chicago Trib, especially since just before I came across it, I’d seen a picture of Martin Richard that had been taken at a Bruins game.

And that I completely thought it was sweet and touching that the Yankees sang Sweet Caroline – a Red Sox anthem of sorts – during their Tuesday game.

Boston Strong, Sweet Caroline.

Time like these, we’re all entitled to gather our comforts where we may.

Then there was this one – which pretty well expresses the general ethos and essence of this city. Needless to say, it didn’t make me tear up . It made me laugh:

Especially when you realize that three of the victims, Martin, Krystle, and Sean Collier, the MIT cop murdered Thursday night, have Irish lineage.

(Boston is, of course, more than just Irish, or even Irish-by-osmosis, as one local African-American politician once claimed was true of all our citizens. And, thus, we were cheered when Red Sox great David Ortiz, Bostonian by way of the Dominican Republic, told the crowd at Fenway on Saturday: “This is our f-in’ city.” Right you are, David. Right you are.)

What also made me laugh was the fact that, by special request of the authorities, Dunkin’ Donuts throughout the area were kept open on Friday while other businesses were asked to close. (Maybe all of America doesn’t run on Dunkin’, but Boston does – and so do the PD’s around here.)

Thursday night, of course, the FBI revealed the pictures of the suspects, and a bit later it was search-on.

Friday, like everyone else in the area, I was glued to the television. We were, after all, on city-wide lockdown, with little else to do but spin between one TV station and the next, one website and the next, one Twitter feed and the next. A disquieting quiet in the city: no car noise, few people seen on the streets.

As it turned out, I almost missed the climax, my husband and I having turned on House Hunters International to see if the woman from Los Angeles would go with the fixer-upper near the Louvre or the over-budget place in Saint Germain (spoiler alert: fixer upper); and whether the family from South Carolina would take the infinity pool or the gated community in Belize (spoiler alert: gated community). We did not find out which place the Walshes of Summit, NJ, chose in Anguilla, as my sister Trish texted me to let me know things were coming to a head in Watertown.

It goes without saying that, like every other decent person on the face of the earth, I am thrilled that they got Suspect Number Two. And that they got him alive.

The less said about Suspect Number One and Suspect Number Two – those evil POS - the better. But I will admit to being curious about what’s going on in that 19 year-old’s head just about now. Terrorism with your bro seemed like a cool idea at the time, eh pal? Well, no more girl friends, pickup soccer games, tweeting, or joints for you, you little bastard. Martin Richard’s life stopped at 8 years of age, thanks to you. Now yours- whether physically or metaphorically we have yet to learn – will stop at 19. Doesn’t seem like quite a fair exchange though, does it? What we all wouldn’t give to give Martin the gift of years. There’s really no payback here that’s quite enough of a bitch.

(At first I thought there was some possibility that the younger brother was duped by the older brother into thinking it was a prank, a statement, a smoke bomb. No harm, no foul. Of course, after Monday at 2:50 p.m. he would have certainly known that this was the real deal. At which point, it would have been time for the 19 year old boy to man-up and turn his brother in. But this fleeting thought was before I heard that the younger brother, hiding in the Watertown backyard boat, had scrawled on the tarp something about his brother’s being a hero…)

But, grateful as I am that they got their man, and thankful I am that they did so without any further loss of life, and acknowledging as I will that the the forces amassed for the manhunt were all there with at least some possibility that they could lose their lives, while I was watching the Watertown manhunt, I couldn’t help but think that deploying all those forces, locking down all these cities and towns (sure, maybe Watertown and the places adjacent to Watertown made sense, but all of Boston?), was maybe just a bit over the top.

Maybe if I’d lost a child or a leg I’d feel differently, or if I lived in Watertown, but when I saw all those state troopers lined up next to the Arsenal Mall, standing there with their Smokey hats, arms folded behind there backs, doing – well, there’s no other word for it – nothing, my first thought was ‘this is overkill.’  As I did when I saw those thousands of “forces” massed for the hunt.

And I have plenty of concerns when I think about how for every Officer Friendly, there now seems to be an Officer Hardass wearing combat boots and carrying an assault weapon.

We really need to think long and hard – as a city and a country - about whether all this show of force makes us any safer, or whether having the force to show means that we’ll just naturally find more occasions when we feel forced to show it.

Anyway, we’re now back to normal, or near normal, or new normal. (At least those of us who didn’t lose a child or a leg, who will never get back what they lost.)

I really hope that, come next Marathon Monday, come next Patriots Day, people don’t have to go through patdown security to get to the finish line. That the 26.2 mile route from Hopkinton to Boston isn’t lined with staties with their hands behind their backs. That twice as many people will run, and twice as many people will watch. That Boston Strong – it’s starting to grow on me - means that we won’t be cowed. And that we won’t need – and don’t want – an armed guard on every corner so that we can feel safe. Even if it does mean that there may well be another nihilistic, cowardly bastard out there, with some pathetic axe and the need to irrationally grind it by screwing with us.

We’re a long way, fortunately, from being a police state.

Let’s see if we can keep it that way.

Meanwhile, if you want to make a donation to benefit all of the victims of the Patriots Day bombing, you can do it here.

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*I know, I know: goodie-two-shoes. But I’ll tell you just what inspired me to do become a regular trash-picker.

A couple of years ago, on a frigid February day, I was walking across Boston Common when I saw an elderly woman paused at the opposite end of a long path that was thickly iced over. (The city actually does a good job of keeping these paths clear, but there had been a melt the day before, and a freeze overnight, and it was early…) I was cutting around, walking through the crusty snow, and I hollered to the woman to wait up, that I’d help her over the moderately-difficult-to-navigate snow.

The woman – both beautiful and beautifully dressed: a real Beacon Hill grande dame - gratefully took my arm, introduced herself – Nancy Ellis – and told me it was her 85th birthday. We chatted for a while, and she told me that she was on her way over to the New England Medical Center, where she was a regular volunteer. I told her that I hoped that when I’m 85, I’ll be going out on a cold, icy day to volunteer.

Nancy Ellis looked a bit familiar, and after a moment or two I realized that she was George Bush’ sister. When I asked her if this were so, she smiled and said, ‘Yes, and George Bush’s aunt, too.’

Anyway, Nancy Ellis had an empty Poland Springs bottle tucked under her arm, and I offered to toss it for her.

She then told me that, whenever she walked through The Common, she would pick up some trash along her way.

Heading out to volunteer on your 85th birthday, in the dead of winter, and cheerfully picking up after some slob while you’re doing so.

Now that’s Boston Strong…

Kool-Aid and the Kool-Aid Man get a makeover

Well, here’s the news you’ve been waiting for.

Kool-Aid is now available in liquid mix.

So if you want to stay hydrated without having to drink boring old water, and you don’t want to fuss with the powdered version of Kool-Aid, you’ll now be able to get it the sweet object of your desire in liquid form

This is, by the way, nothing new for Kool-Aid.

The liquid mix is a return to Kool-Aid’s roots. It began as a syrup called ‘‘Fruit Smack’’ in 1920. The product wasn’t modified into a concentrated powder until 1927, when it was renamed ‘‘Kool-Ade.’’ The current spelling followed in the early 1930s. (Source: Boston.com)

Wow! Marketing renaming genius as far back as the early 1930s!

But the really big news here is not that Kool-Aid is going back to its Fruit Smack roots. It’s that the Kool-Aid Man – Oh, yeah! – is going to be getting a face lift, nay, a species lift.

The Kool-Aid Man’s species change operation is taking him from a human in a pitcher costume to a computer-generated whatever. On the creepiness continuum, this is actually an improvement over the guy in the pitcher costume. Still, it’s one more acting gig gone bye-bye. But one actor’s job loss is one CGI designer’s job gain.  No word on whether it, having replaced a “him” (or, I guess, “her”), will also replace the cartoon character version.

And speaking of character, the Kool-Aid man is also having a personality transplant.

No more strong, silent, foam-filled type, breaking through walls with little more to say than “Oh, yeah!”.

Erica Rendall, senior brand manager at Kraft Foods Group Inc., says the new ads are intended to fill in the blanks in Kool-Aid Man’s character so people can relate to him.

‘‘He said a few things here and there (in the past), but he really didn’t have a developed personality,’’ she said.

Okay. Let’s see if I have this completely straight:

Kool-Aid used to have an actual human being dressed up in a giant foam pitcher, but somehow he wasn’t relatable.

Now it’s a graphic image, but, one with a “developed personality.”

Personally, I don’t know if that will make he, she, or it all that much more relatable.

I mean, Tony the Tiger had a personality – loud – and I never really felt the need to relate to him. Speedy Alka-Seltzer had a personality, too: perky. Yet I never felt the desire to relate to him, either.

In fact, I can’t actually think of one brand character that I can really relate to.

Jolly Green Giant?  Mr. Clean? The Charmin Teddy Bears?

Since when are these characters supposed to be relatable?

But that’s perhaps just jaded, ancient me.

Maybe I should wait to see the Kool-Aid ads before making a forever declaration here.

Hey, I may be jaded and ancient, but I do want to think of myself as someone who’s open to the possibility of new relationships. Maybe this one will do the trick:

In one of the new commercials, the scene opens with the character’s round silhouette behind a shower curtain. When he steps out, he’s a clear pitcher of water and he explains in a voiceover that his life isn’t all ‘‘cherry and sweetness.’’

Life not being all “cherry and sweetness”? I’m down with that. In fact, I pretty much figured this out just about the same time that the original Kool-Aid Man  - the cartoon fellow who sang “Kool-Aid Kool-Aid. Tastes great. Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid. Can’t wait.” – was born in 1954. (Not that I knew anything about Kool-Aid other than the jingle. We were a Zarex house, which, like Fruit Smack, was a liquid “soft drink mix.”)

And if you need any more evidence that the new Kool-Aid Man is one of us:

‘‘I put my pants on one leg at a time,’’ the voiceover notes, as he stands in front of a pantry full of Kool-Aid mixes deciding what to wear. ‘‘Except my pants are 22 different flavors. I've got grape pants, I've got watermelon pants.’’

Trying to decide what color to wear? Who, other than parochial school students, doesn’t ask this close-to-existential question each and every day?

Of course, I don’t have 22 different color of pants to pick from. There’s black. There’s blue. And there’s khaki. That’s pretty much it. But on the sweater and tee-shirt front? Way, way, way more choices than 22.

So, oh yeah, the “what to wear” quandary is definitely one that’s relatable.

But is that going to be enough to friend the Kool-Aid Man on Facebook, let alone run out and buy some mango Kool-Aid Mix (powdered or liquid). Not very likely.

Wonder what other personality traits they have up their sleeve?

I suppose it’s possible that  there is one that will actually get me to drink the Kool-Aid.

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And a pour from the Pink Slip pitcher to my sister Trish for pointing this ultra-important story out to me.

You ought to be in movies, Worcester edition.

Many years ago, some time in the 1980’s, my sister Trish and I were in Worcester and came across a tee-shirt with the Eiffel Tower on it, and the words “Worcester: Paris of the Eighties.” Naturally, after observing a moment of WTF-ness, we bought it for our friend and fellow Worcester girl, Michele.

We often wondered just what was up with that, but fast forward a couple of decades and I learned from my friend and fellow Worcester girl, Mary, who lived in Worcester at that time and was part of the literary community there, that this was actually a slogan used by the Heart of the Commonwealth. Mostly in reference to the city’s arts scene.

Those who have logged any time in Worcester may be a bit perplexed about any Worcester-Paris analogy, however artsy Worcester was at the time.

If Worcester were going to be any place in Europe – other than the obvious choices like Wroclaw or Birmingham – why not Rome which, like Worcester, is built on seven hills?  As an aside, building a city on seven hills makes sense in sunny Italy. Less so in winter-mix New England. But nonetheless, Roma got seven hills, Worcester got seven hills.

(And as an other aside, this confession: I have no idea whether Wroclaw is ugly; I picked it solely on its ugly-ish name – for all I know, it’s a charm spot. Birmingham is an old industrial city. Enough said there.)

As for the famous tee-shirt, quite wonderfully – since I intend to get one or two of them – it’s back, available at ChipSylvania, which is in Providence, not Pennsylvania, by the way, and which is offering the shirt – black on red, or white on black -  for the low, low price of $20. This is the excellent descriptor:

A classic weird shirt from “the heart of the commonwealth” Worcester MA. We will not explain this item. You either need it or you don’t know what it is.

Well, I’m afraid I both need it and don’t really know what it is.

I guess you had to be there in the eighties, which I most decidedly was not.

In any case, I will be placing my order, and will or won’t wear the shirt when I’m next in Worcester, when I will or won’t stop by the new – just opened in January - Paris of the Eighties Café.

It is, of course, just not enough that my hometown was the Paris of the Eighties.

Of late, it’s filling in as the location for a movie that takes place in New York in the 1970’s.

Or so I learned when, in my desire to put off working on a client white paper on hypervisors, I checked out what was happening in Worcester on its online newspaper-of-record.

Movie crews were busy yesterday [actually, last Thursday] disguising downtown Worcester as 1970s New York City. A Studio 54 sign - or at least a replica of the one that hung outside the famous nightclub - has been installed just off Main Street on a Mechanics Street building. Honey Dew Donuts in Harrington Corner now looks like an off-track betting joint. And across the street, the front of the WCCA-TV 13 building is starting to resemble a cinema, with white marquee signs put in place this morning. (Source: Worcester Telegram.)

Studio 54! OTB!

Worcester’s on the map!  Or New York City’s on the map, and Worcester it playing it.

This is going to be a big-time movie, by the way.

No name as of yet, but this “1970s-era story about gambling officials who bribed New Jersey authorities to get a gaming license” stars Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Robert DeNiro, Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams.

Talk about your A-list!

I actually love seeing movies that are filmed on the wrong location, if only so I can play the smarty-pants role that, I’m afraid, comes quite naturally to me.

All those reputedly Boston scenes that are shot in Toronto…

And a few years go, I watched the movie Conviction, which was supposed to take place in and around Worcester County. I kept looking at the scenes and saying, ‘that doesn’t look like Worcester’, ‘that doesn’t look like New England.’

Sure enough, it was filmed in Michigan, which only looks like New England if you’re not a New Englander.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how Worcester comes off as New York City.

But my first reaction is: Oy!

If the Paris of the Eighties bon mot confounded me, I’m now having a heck of a time trying to decide whether Worcester is the New York of the Seventies or the  Hollywood of the Teens.

Too hard for me! You’ll have to decide this one for yourself.

(Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it, Worcester, Worcester.)

Take a memo, Miss Jones

With the return of Mad Men, secretaries are once again in the public eye, in a way that they are, pretty much, no longer in the private eye.

Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency is built around a charmingly retro (if gallingly sexist) division of labor. Secretaries screen calls, arrange meetings, manage calendars—and often make great wives—allowing their bosses to create life-changing ad campaigns and go out for boozy client lunches. Tellingly, everyone’s desk looks fastidiously neat. Those were the days. (Source: Business Week.)

That’s for sure.

Once the technology was such that people could write their own memos, pink collar support for rank and file white collar workers started going dodo-bird.  And once DYI apps for filing expense reports, let alone the ability to book your own darned flight on Orbitz, became available…

I was never a real secretary. (I never had any shorthand.) But between dropping out of a PhD program and dropping into business school, I did work off and on as an office temp: answering phones, filing, filling in forms, typing memos and reports and letters (that were given to me on legal pads, written in long-hand). Sometimes I got coffee.

And I am of an age when secretary was a solid profession that many women pursued – some with secretarial work as their end-game (up the ladder to executive assistant or office manager), some as an entrée position. Katherine Gibbs, perhaps the most prestigious secretarial school, had, in fact, something called an Entrée Program that helped liberal arts grads who didn’t want to teach get a toe-hold in the business world.

My mother was a secretary, as was one of my cousins.

I do know that by the time I got out of business school in 1981, there was very limited administrative support provided to anyone other than the head guys – at least in the tech world, where I landed.

Yes, someone answered the phone and left you a message on a pink message slip. And someone made your travel reservations for you. But if you wanted to write a memo or a report, well, that’s what the computer was for. Even if it was a mainframe that you accessed through a dumb terminal. Even if there were only two fonts to play with – Times Roman and Helvetica.  And especially if you were a woman.

Because the truth was that, in the first place I landed after business school, the female admins were a lot more likely to do things for the guys than they were for the women. Our admins were smart and capable, but many of them bore quite a bit of resentment towards the women who were sitting in the offices rather than the cubicles, going on the business trips, and taking home checks that were bigger than theirs were.

I remember asking one admin if she could do some copying for me.

Her response?

“That’s not my cup of tea.”

I didn’t pull rank, but my manager – at that point a woman – went a bit ballistic when she saw me standing at the copy machine.

Fast forward a few years, and I did end up with an admin reporting to me. She supported my group (about 25 people), and I can’t really remember much of what she did: booked meetings, ordered lunch when the meeting was held at noon, did the photocopying. By that point, we were pretty much doing all our own letter writing – it was all e-mail – and producing all our own documents. Expenses were filed online. There was a corporate travel group that made our reservations. But mostly we were on our own.

What’s been the impact of the decline in the admin function?

In Women Laid Off, Workers Sped Up, a paper for the Roosevelt Institute, authors Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal note that women lost 925,000 jobs in “office and administrative support” occupations between 2009 and 2011. And they point out that the continuing “speedup” within the economy has workers taking on ever-increasing burdens, often without extra compensation.

So when you ask yourself why it is that people have to work longer hours these days, it’s to some degree because they’re doing “for free” what someone else used to be paid to do for them.  (Of course, another reason why people work longer hours is that many of the the vaunted “productivity tools” are actually anti-productivity tools. And, yes, that’s you I’m talking about, Power Point. After all, in the days of the 35 mm slide show, you created your presentation and were stuck with it for six months. With Power Point, you can keep changing it ad infinitum. Without, of course, any resultant benefit to your organization.)

Those at the C-level, of course, continue to enjoy administrative support, which makes plenty of sense:

For someone earning close to $1 million a year, an $80,000-a-year assistant needs to help the boss become only 8 percent more productive for the company to break even. “When workers see the boss loading paper into the copy machine, the theory goes, a ‘we’re all in this together’ spirit is created,” writes the article’s author, Melba Duncan. “But as a management practice, the structure rarely makes economic sense. Generally speaking, work should be delegated to the lowest-cost employee who can do it well.”

When I think about working full-time in my great old age, I sometimes think that it would be fun to work as an admin in some local school – maybe at Suffolk Law or Tufts Medical. If the boss-man (or boss-lady) could live without the dictation, I’d be great: I’m organized, efficient, a decent typist, an excellent editor, a proficient Power Pointer and Exceler, a researcher...

As long as no one asks me to take a memo, Ms. Rogers.

What was, up until 2:50 p.m., a glorious day…

Whoever they are, whatever their motive.

May they rot in prison for the remainder of their puny, miserable lives.

Nihilistic bastards.

And guess what?

Next Patriots Day, 27,000+ marathoners will run. And hundreds of thousands folks – locals and tourists – will cheer them on. The Red Sox will play at Fenway to a full house. Kids in tri-corn hats will watch the re-enactment of the battle at Lexington Green.  Etc.

Take that, assholes.

Meanwhile:

Nothing more to say…

Oh, it’s a jolly holiday in Massachusetts. (No wonder that it’s Massachusetts that we love.)

Today is Patriots’ Day, which is celebrated in Massachusetts and in Maine, probably because Maine used to be part of our fair commonwealth.

Anyway, it’s an all-round wonderful holiday for many reason, including that:

• It’s quirky and regional.
• It reminds us of great deeds.
• Although there’s no guarantee that the weather will be anything other than sucky, it does let us know that spring is just around the corner.
• It means the Swan Boats are back in the Public Garden.
• The Boston Marathon is run, and Boston will take on a very cosmopolitan, international city air. Plus, I’ll get to see all the runners walking around with their mylar blankets, looking like baked potatoes.

Patriots’ Day is not our area’s only quirky holiday.

Until recently, Boston city workers got off Evacuation Day (the British left Boston), which conveniently occurred on March 17th, so that the workers could knock off for St. Patrick’s Day without having to be official about it, and Bunker Hill Day. These were unofficially known as “hack holidays” and the city has pretty much done away with them. Which is good, because there’s no reason anyone should get these days off. And which is bad, because it’s one more indicator of the homogenization of local culture, which used to be wicked pissah and is now getting sort of bland.

In any case, I took the occasion to poke around and see what other peculiar holidays different states observe.

In New England, Rhode Island – for whatever reason –celebrates VJ Day (now called Victory Day), while Vermont, quite charmingly, observes Town Meeting Day.

California gets it for diversity, with Caesar Chavez Day and, in Oakland, Korematsu Day, which honors Fred Korematsu, who opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.

Alaska has Seward Day, when they give thanks to William Seward for saving them from being part of Russia. And Hawaii has King Kamehameha Day.

Somewhat predictably, a number of southern states have holidays commemorating the Confederacy.

Texas gives a nod to Confederate Heroes Day, while Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina still observe Confederate Memorial Day. Personally, I think that  - given the somewhat less than glorious associations that surround the Confederacy – this one could maybe be folded in with regular old general-purpose Memorial Day. Alabama also throws in on Jefferson Davis’ birthday, while Georgia – not Virginia – gives a shout-out to Robert E. Lee.

And, remembering the ladies, Susan B. Anthony Day is observed in Florida, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, while Rosa Parks Day is celebrated in Ohio, and Pennsylvania gives Helen Keller a day of her own.

Indiana observes Lincoln’s Birthday – which is February 12th – on the day after Thanksgiving, which makes no conceptual sense, but does provide a nifty four-day weekend.

Illinois quite sensibly celebrates Lincoln’s Birthday on Lincoln’s Birthday. They also have Casimir Pulaski Day.

Hands down, the oddest holiday I came across was Śmigus-Dyngus, which is a big deal, apparently, in Buffalo New York, and in the states of  Indiana, Michigan and North Dakota.

Śmigus-Dyngus (also known as lany poniedziałek, meaning "Wet Monday") is a celebration held on Easter Monday in Poland. It is also observed by Polish diaspora communities, particularly among Polish Americans, who call it Dyngus Day….Traditionally, boys throw water over girls and spank them with pussy willow branches on Easter Monday, and girls do the same to boys on Easter Tuesday. This is accompanied by a number of other rituals, such as making verse declarations and holding door-to-door processions, in some regions involving boys dressed as bears. The origins of the celebration are uncertain, but it may date to pagan times (before 1000 AD); it is described in writing as early as the 15th century. It continues to be observed in central Europe, and also in the United States, where certain patriotic American elements have been added to the traditional Polish ones. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Throwing water on people, flogging them with pussy willow branches, reciting verse, and boys dressed as bears? Move over, Casimir Pulaski, have we got a holiday for you.

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Source for holiday info: InfoPlease and Wikipedia.

Here’s how Pink Slip commemorated “the shot heard round the world” in 2011. (Last year I was in Rome, where – for obvious reasons – they don’t celebrate this day of days.)

Scott London: yet another white-collar bonehead who’s wrecked his life for next to nothing

This week has, as always, brought with it enough life-wrecking news to satisfy the most avid WTF-seekers among us.

The other day, it was a posse of drunken Boston College seniors who, while reveling on St. Patrick’s Eve, broke into an apartment and trashed it, causing $25K worth of damage.  Of course, given that the damage wasn’t quite enough, they went into the basement of the building and tore a dryer off the wall, severing the gas line and starting a gas leak. They were caught because one of the crew, feeling a bit of post-rampage accountability, called the gas company to report the leak.

Not clear what BC will be doing about these about-to-graduate boyos, but, since there doesn’t appear to be any statute of limitations on Internet “news”, prospective employers and prospective in-laws will no doubt be finding out about them for a good long time to come. The good news is that, perhaps when we approach a zettabyte or yottabyte of data per capita, someone will decide that most “Big Data” is boge data, not worth paying the storage fees on. (Not to mention that at some point all this nonsense data is going to start getting just too big to search.)

Anyway, yesterday brought the news that a former KPMG auditor is being charged by the Department of Justice for passing on confidential info to a pal, who used it to make a bit of walking around money by doing a little insider trading.

Scott London, the info provider, didn’t get all that much for his troubles  - except, perhaps, the good long prison sentence that awaits him. Nope, London sold himself up the river in an orange jumpsuit for:

…about $25,000 in cash, a Rolex watch and fancy dinners, London said in an interview with The Times. (Source: LA Times.)

Although he’s also likely to have the benefit of an upcoming orange jumpsuit fitting, London’s golfing buddy made out better:

…Bryan Shaw, an Encino jeweler, …used the information to make about $1 million in stock trades on the two companies.

Those two companies were Herbalife and Skechers, by the way.

The fact that Herbalife may well be a pyramid scheme, well…ain’t life grand?

The criminal complaint filed in federal court Thursday also portrays London as far more culpable and intimately involved in all details of the trading scandal than he had previously acknowledged with The Times and other media outlets.

In some cases, London called Shaw two to three days before press releases of KPMG clients were issued and read him the details that would soon be made public. He also tipped him off to mergers and even strategized with Shaw on how to conceal his trading so that the two would not be caught.

Shaw apparently didn’t do such a good job at “concealing his trading”. The Feds got suspicious about his uncanny market-timing on Skechers and Herbalife, so Shaw was nailed first. It almost goes without saying that he went all full-cooperation/state’s ev. So if he does do time, it will probably be shorter than London’s.

With Shaw’s cooperation, the Feds set up a sting operation involving a bag of cash, handed by Shaw to London in a Starbuck’s. (I’ll have a Venti Latte and a sack of loot, please.)

Both Shaw and London are mea-culpa-ing all over the place.

Shaw:

I cannot begin to apologize for my incredibly stupid actions. There is no excuse for my wrongful conduct. I accept full and complete responsibility for what I have done and know that I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for my tragic lapses of judgment…I expect that my actions will result in significant civil and criminal consequences, but I realize that this is the painful price I will pay for my transgressions."

London:

"Every day since this occurred I'm saying to myself how stupid I am…I have no idea what I was thinking. I don't know why there was a lapse of judgment but there was."

London said he barely benefited.

"I gained very little," London said. "He gained a lot and yet I bore all the risk."

Advantage Shaw on his my-bad. And note to London: yes, Shaw gained a lot more than you did – it cost him $25K and a Rolex to make $1M? That’s a dandy looking ROI – but you, in fact, did not bear all the risk. But that’s neither here nor there.

The question is how did a couple of middle-aged, middle-of-the-road golfing buds decide that this might be a good idea?

London was a CPA, a KPMG partner. Surely he could have afforded his own Rolex.  Did he just want to play the show-off, the guy in the know, with his old pal Bryan Shaw?

And what’s Shaw’s story? Was he sick of being the wholesaler who couldn’t afford the big rocks he was wholesaling?

$25K and a Rolex?  Even a million bucks?

Bernie Madoff’s scheming almost makes sense: he was living really large!

But these two-bit crooks?

What a couple of bone heads: careers in shambles, families humiliated, and a good many years of regrets (some behind bars) ahead of them.

Maybe the love of money really is the root of all evil. (Or at least a good part of it.)

See North Korea and Die

Ever since former NBA “star” Dennis Rodman – God’s fool or what? – spun over to Pyongyang to buddy up with Kim Jong Un, I’ve been keeping half an eye on what up in North Korea. My interest has, of course, escalated over the last couple of weeks, as Kim Jong Un’s madness has escalated.

I don’t feel bad that I’m scratching my head over what his intentions might be. Apparently, the folks in the State Department who are expert in things North Korean are scratching their heads as well.

If he’s not “just” sabre rattling for some internal political purposes, and he’s really daffy enough to launch a nuclear strike on South Korea or the US, all I can think of is that, as the third generation “leader” to brutalize, brainwash, and starve (physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, culturally) his countrymen, he’d only nuke us in the hopes that we’d nuke him back, then run in with a souped up Marshall Plan and rebuild his country.

Scary, indeed.

But while I was roaming around trying to find out the latest Kim Jong Un news, I stumbled across the website for the mendaciously-named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Anyway, the website is a combo-package of tourist boosting, business development, and online store.

Having chosen – for whatever limelight-licking reason - to tour North Korea, Dennis Rodman is, apparently, what my father used to call a “mental midget”.

Who other than a mental midget would want to spend time in Pyongyang?

Pyongyang is the replica of past, present and future of the country, which one can learn and experience the history, brilliant culture, wisdom, talents and gorgeous manners of the Korean people as well as the breathtaking city views.

…It is blessed with Mangyongdae, native home of President Kim Il Sung and Kim Il Sung University where the revolutionary achievements of General Kim Jong II are associated. Pyongyang is richer in monumental structures including the Grand Monument on Mansu Hill and the Tower of Juche Idea.

Just how grand is the Grand Monument on Mansu Hill?

See for yourself:

The Grand Monument on Mansu Hill shows in formative art the immortal history of the Korean people who conducted revolution under the leadership of President Kim Il Sung.

That would be Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, I believe. (And we get unnerved by the prospect of rising generations of Kennedys and Bushes!)

Then there’s the Monument to Party Founding, a design depicting “the hammer, sickle and brush seized by a worker, a farmer, and an intellectual.”

Just what is there about totalitarian countries that make them go in for such ghastly and soulless “art”, so devoid of any spirit, wit, or beauty? This is not, of course, particular to North Korea. I’ve been to East Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, and have seen plenty of remnants of the monumental works erected under the Communist regimes. As if living under one of them wouldn’t have been depressing, terrifying, and spirit-crushing enough, without the oversized reminders.

For a change of pace, there’s the Spy Ship Pueblo, which those of you who were around in the late 1960’s may remember.  Let’s hope that nowadays we have more sophisticated means of keeping tabs on just what North Korea is up to. 

More interested in business development?

The DPR of Korea (North Korea) will become in the next years the most important hub for trading in North-East Asia. 

Not at the rate they’re going, I’m afraid.

Lowest labour cost in Asia.

Now that I can believe. When there’s nothing to eat, and nothing to buy, well, that has a tendency to keep wages down.

Highly qualified, loyal and motivated personnel. Education, housing and health service is provided free to all citizens. As opposed to other Asian countries, worker's will not abandon their positions for higher salaries once they are trained.

Now that I can believe, too.

Which reminds me of the old joke about the USSR.

How are things going, Ivan?

Can’t complain.

Stable. A government with solid security and very stable political system, without corruption. 

Well, I guess the part about stability is true.

Then there’s the online shop, where for a mere 25 Euro, you can purchase the DVD of the 60 Anniversary of Mass Gymnastics.Or an English-subtitled version of the movie The Blood Stained Route Map. (Perhaps it loses something in the translation.)  The movie Song of Retrospection also sounds like a good one. (English subtitles! New!)  Perhaps O Youth would be more to your liking. (Also subtitled. Also new!) Or A Forest Is Swaying.

Something tells me, of course, that Kim Jong Un and the other North Korean elites don’t do much singing of the song of retrospection or introspection. Plus I bet they get to choose from a broader array of DVD’s. Can you imagine what the average culture starved North Korean would make of Netflix?

Nothing to do with movies, but I was in Berlin a couple of months after The Wall fell, and the KaDeWe – (West) Berlin’s answer to Harrod’s – was thronged with East Berliners walking through the food halls just gaping at the goodies.

Right about now, North Korea is a plenty scary place.

Let’s just hope that the current Cherished Leader is not so insane that he’s willing to set off World War III, annihilating what there is of his country in the process.

How is it that there can be so many comic aspects to something that is so terribly tragic?  

Buy it by the pound. (Samoa Air weighs in.)

Man years – and many pounds – ago, when I was less reluctant to reveal my weight to anyone other my primary care physician, I had occasional occasion to fly into Westchester Airport.  I can’t remember the airline that I flew, but I do recall that the plane was some type of Fokker that resembled nothing so much as a refrigerator. I know little about aerodynamics, but what I did know led me to be amazed that these planes were capable of becoming airborne.

Some of what it took was adjusting the seating plan.

When you checked in to get your seat assignment, the clerk would ask you what you weighed – or size you up. You were then assigned a seat so that the plane was balanced.

While I was doing regular business travel, I was also on a flight – still on the ground – when they announced that, unless the plane was able to shed a few LB’s – I think the magic number was 1,800 – the headwinds were such that we wouldn’t make it to Dallas without a refueling stop. I can’t remember what the incentive was, but they got a few folks to exit, and we made it to Big D without making a stop in Charlotte. (I do remember at the time being surprised that the level of tolerance was fine enough that as little as 1,800 pounds made a difference in our ability to get from Point A to Point D.)

Fast forward a few years – and a few pounds – and my husband and I were in Galway. We decided to take a day trip to the island of Inishmore and, rather than take the floating vomitorium (which we had experienced on an earlier trip), we thought we’d take flight. The plane was almost literally a puddle jumper. From Connemara International Airport in Rossaveal, you could see Inishmore.

Anyway, we made our reservations in Galway City, and the person in the tourist office told us that, when we got to the airport, we would be weighed. Since I knew quite well that I would not be found wanting, I laughed and told the clerk that it wouldn’t be possible for me to lose ten pounds by the next morning.

“Sure, the scale is all very discreet,” she charmingly assured me.

If you are familiar with the concept of the Irish whisper, you will have some idea what the Irish notion of “discreet” is.

Sure and didn’t the Rossaveal scale have a screen the size of Big Ben’s clock face? And wasn’t it there smack dab in the waiting room, facing the row of chairs where the passengers awaited the boarding call?

Twas.

For some reason, perhaps because the pilot was able to size us up, perhaps because there were only three passengers: me, Jim, and a woman from Milwaukee named Sheila, they ended up not weighing us for the 10 minute flight.

Given my weighty history of flight, I was interested to read that Samoa Air is going to start charging by the pound.

Customers flying Samoan upstart carrier Samoa Air Ltd. on short international hops to neighboring American Samoa are set to pay US$0.92 per kilogram, or $0.42 a pound, for each flight. (Source: WSJ Online.)

This could prove embarrassing on your expense account, when your colleague put in for $50 for her ticket, and you were looking for reimbursement for, well, more.

But on these small planes, it seems to make absolute sense.

This is especially the case in Samoa, where more than half of all adults are obese, making passenger weight no small concern for an airline with a fleet of planes that have three to ten seats a piece.

That means a significantly overweight passenger could drastically reduce a plane's capacity, which could threaten revenue.

The airline notes that this will help ensure passenger comfort. I’m guessing it will also help ensure passenger safety – hard to image ten majorly girth-ful passengers trying to simultaneously deplane during an emergency.

Passengers booking online with Samoa Air are asked to provide their approximate weight and that of their luggage before being given an estimated fare.

Which is, of course, necessary if you want to have a coherent reservation system.

However, passengers tempted to lie about their weight are warned on the website that they will be weighed ahead of boarding, which is standard practice for passengers boarding very small propeller planes.

Other airlines may not be so tempted to follow suit, “because of discrimination concerns.”

Instead, US carriers make those who don’t fit in a regular coach seat to pay for an extra seat if the flight is full.

I’m not quite sure how this works.

If the flight is full, and a double-wide passenger shows up, where does the extra seat materialize from?

In addition to discrimination concerns, another obstacle in the way of pay-by-the-pound airline pricing for anything other than baggage, is the hassle factor. Having to weigh everyone on a 747 pre-boarding would be a complete drag. Of course, with the sensors available nowadays, it could probably be accomplished while people shuffled along in line. Or with vision technology that could estimate your weight.

Still, I can’t see it happening just quite yet on mainstream airlines.

Nonetheless, it is no fun when you’re seated next to an oversized passenger whose body mass is encroaching on your space, especially given how puny some airline seats have become. It’s also no fun when you’re monkey-in-the-middle, and the arithmetic-challenged travelers on either side of you don’t realize that you are entitled to 2/3’s – not one-half – of each of those armrests that abut your arms.

At least this is the math that works on a three-across. On a five-across, things get trickier. Passengers One and Five get their full solo armrest, plus .2 of the shared armrest. Passengers Two and Four get .8 of the armrest shared with Passenger One or Five, and .4 of the armrest shared with Passenger Three, who is entitled to .6 of each armrest.

Think of how difficult it is to explain this to passengers, let alone confound them with the concept of weight-adjusting – and weight-pricing – everyone on the plane?

But if the day comes for the Big Weigh-In for the Sky, I really do want enough warning to shed that pesky ten pounds of overage.

Annette, Annette, Annette. Annette Funicello passes on.

This has been a sad week for a number of different constituencies.

For Tories, there’s the passing of Dame Margaret (“No Compromise”) Thatcher, who is now out to permanent pasture with Ronald Reagan and John Paul II. I suppose they can pass the time crabbing about liberals.

For those who prized floral shifts in hot pink and lime green, Lily Pulitzer has passed on to the Palm Beach in the Sky.

And for us Baby Boomers who grew up envying the kids in the Mickey Mouse Club, and who craved a trip to Disneyland, Annette Funicello  the nicey-nice-nicest of the original Mouseketeers, has died at the age of 70.

I have always had a special place in my little heart of hearts for Annette. At a time when kids of TV were for the most part blandly WASP-y, Annette was clearly one of us. No, she obviously wasn’t one of us as in Irish Catholic, but she was obviously ethnic and obviously – at least to those of us with refined Catholic radar – a Catholic.

When it came to ethnics, if you set aside for a moment that all of the Mouseketeers were Caucasian, old Walt didn’t shy away from obvious ethnics. In addition to Annette, there were all those Irish boys:  Mouseketeer drummer and dreamboat Cubby O’Brien;  Kevin “Moochy” Corcoran – who looked just like one of the McCullough brothers from around the corner; and über dreamboat Tim Considine, who usually got to be Annette’s boyfriend.

Annette was also the first celebrity I ever saw in person.

When I was seven or eight, the Mouseketeers went on tour, and a subset of the crew came to Worcester to make an appearance at the Stop & Shop in Webster Square.

This was right in our neighborhood, and I felt completely honored that the Mouseketeers – who, of course, could have appeared anywhere – chose our little neck of the woods.

Although the Stop & Shop was less than a 10 minute walk from Our Lady of the Angels Grammar School, it was not the direction we walked home in. So my friend Bernadette’s Aunt Anna picked us up at OLA after school, and drove us down in her little black Rambler.  We got there early, and I was beside myself: Bernadette and I were right at the front of the rope line. We were pretty confident that we were in such prime position that we would likely be the recipients of handshakes, smiles, and maybe even autographed b&w photos. Mouseketeer groupie heaven!

Alas, seeing Annette was not just my first experience with celebrity gawking. It was also my first experience with the madness of crowds, and the teenage boy lust factor.

Because although Bernadette and I got there first, we were soon displaced, pushed back by a wild bunch of twelve and thirteen year old boys – jostling, hollering, near-rabid - hell bent on getting close to (as I figured out a few years later) Annette.

Crestfallen – and asking each other why those big boys were so mean, and why they wanted to see Annette to begin with, since they were clearly too old to be watching the Mickey Mouse Club – we found Aunt Anna, and stood there at the outer reaches of the now cold, now gray, now dreary Stop & Shop parking lot, hoping that we’d at least get a glimpse of the Mouseketeers when their bus arrived.

Well, lucky us!

The bus pulled in just where we were standing, and there Bernadette and I were, a few feet from Jimmie Dodd, MC of the show and one of the two adult Mouseketeers – the other was Roy the cartoonist. Not that we liked Jimmie Dodd. Who actually liked him? Even as kids we found him creepy and phoney. That grin? A leer!

Nonetheless, the thrill of seeing someone as famous as Jimmie Dodd!

A couple of other Mouseketeers followed Jimmie off the bus.

I don’t remember who they were. Darlene Gillespie? Tommy Kirk? Cheryl Holdridge?

I would have remembered if Cubby O’Brien or Tim Considine (my true heartthrob) had been there.

And then, ecce Annette Funicello.

But, but, but…

She didn’t look like our Annette.

She didn’t have her ears on. Or her prim Mouseketeer skirt. Or modest Mouseketeer tee-shirt.

She looked like a movie star. She looked like Liz Taylor. She looked like a grownup!

Sure, Annette was older than we were. We knew that. If Bernadette and I were seven or eight, Annette would have been fourteen or fifteen.

But we didn’t expect the grownup hairdo. We didn’t expect the bright red lipstick. We didn’t expect the full-length, leopard-skin coat.

Apparently, the mob of early-adolescent boys had figured out what to expect. As they used to say, va-va-va-voom.

Anyway, we didn’t get autographs, but we did get to be no more than three or four feet away from Annette.

Annette, as is well known, went on to make Beach Blanket movies. But as my sister Kathleen has pointed out in her wonderful Annette commemorative post over on My Rolled Trousers:

…she and Frankie and the gang were way over on the other side of the Great Cultural Divide of 1967. Summer of Love didn't include any beach blanket bingo as far as I could tell. (Full post is here: Not So Merry Mouseketeers.)

Nope. When Annette was in her early twenties making movies with Frankie Avalon, I was in my teens, snobbily preferring Bob Dylan to the Beatles, and going to Worcester’s Fine Arts Theater to see Bunny Lake Is Missing, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, and other “deep” black and white movies. (Black and white was how you knew they were really deep.)

But if I never went to an Annette-Frankie movie, I never lost my affection for Annette the Mouseketeer. Not the Ava Gardner knock-off in the leopard skin quote, but the nice girl. The sweet girl – remember the Disney serial when Annette came to town to stay with Aunt Lila and Uncle Archie, got dissed by the bitchy Roberta Shore, but she ended up with – tada – drop dead gorgeous Tim Considine. The little Italian girl from Utica, NY, who showed to all the world that an ethnic Catholic could be a Mouseketeer.

By all accounts she was  - in real life – a genuinely nice, sweet, and decent person who died too young. (And, yes, 70 is too young.)

Glad she got to have Tim Considine as her Disney beau.

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

Cute couple or what?

As for the title of this post, the theme song from the serial Annette used the refrain “Annette, Annette, Annette”.

One man’s moose-meat lasagna is another man’s pork. (Does it taste like chicken?)

A few months ago, it was the horse meat that had found its way into the supply chain for European Burger King and the Tesco grocery store chain. And even into Ikea’s Swedish meatballs.

This time around, Ikea’s got a hoof-stock problem of another sort.

US Ikeans don’t need to worry, but if you were shopping in one of the European Ikeas, and decided that all that furniture assembly was going to call for a really hearty supper – and can moose lasagna be anything other than a hearty supper? – you may want to know that some pork had been slipped into the moose meat.

Not that there are probably a ton of super-assiduous kosher and halal observers who had loaded up their Ikea shopping carts with moose lasagna, but I’m sure that Ikea is not happy to have the news that their lasagna was not pure Bullwinkle, but also contained Porky Pig. Which is, I guess, better than finding out there was some Rocket J. Squirrel in the mix. (Squirrels are rodents, are they not?)

Moose meat is common in Sweden though it’s not typically used in lasagna.

Ikea has previously recalled meatballs and other meat products sold in its cafeterias and frozen foods sections after tests showed they contained traces of horsemeat.

The Swedish furniture giant is one of many European companies caught up in a scandal over mislabeled meat in frozen food products.

Ikea’s withdrawn products came from a Swedish frozen foods maker, which in turn blamed the mislabeling on its meat suppliers. (Source: AP Story on boston.com.)

The lasagna was only a smidge compromised – 1.6% pork – but it sill means that Ikea had to take 17,000 portions of moose lasagna out of circulation.

My taste in meat is fairly pedestrian.

My main go-to is chicken which, quite wonderfully, tastes like chicken.

At least once a year (Easter), I have ham. At least twice a year (Thanksgiving, Christmas), I eat turkey.  When we’re out to eat, I’ll sometimes order lamb, duck, steak, a big juicy hamburger, pork, or (I’m somewhat ashamed to admit) veal. Every decade or so I’ll have rabbit. Maybe. (It does actually taste like chicken.)

But gamey meat has no appeal: no lion, no tiger, no bear (oh, my!). And it pretty much goes without saying that nose-to-tail meat consumption is not something I go in for. I have tried sweetbreads, brain, and kidney – but that was pretty much just to say I tried it. Okay, in the case of brain, I ordered it by mistake. On my first trip to Paris, I remembered that “veau” was French for veal, but forgot that “cervelle” was French for brain. Mon dieu, the sneer on the face of that waiter when he plunked the dish down in front of moi. But I gamely ate what was put in front of me. Maybe not all, but some…And, by the way, kidneys do smell like piss.

But I was epi-curious about what moose might be like – curious enough to read about it, if not to actually ingest it.  So I was happy to find a post on Epicurious that contained an interview with an Alaskan locavore whose extended family munches its way through 600-1200 pounds of moose meat each year.  Which they hunt for themselves, which I absolutely have a tremendous amount of respect for. I’m quite sure that if I had to wring the neck of my chicken, or slit the throat of my pig, I’d be a full-bore vegetarian.

Anyway, there I learned that:

The meat is very dense, and because all their fat is stored between the hide and the muscle the meat is very, very lean. It tastes like its habitat -- moose eat a lot of willow, so to me it tastes like willow buds smell in the spring. It has a strong "gamey" taste, most people say. The age and gender of the moose also make a difference -- for example, a young cow is milder tasting than an older bull.

What I also found of interest is that the Alaskan locavore used her pressure cooker to tenderize her moose.

Ah, the pressure cooker.

My mother was a major user of the pressure cooker, mostly in the service of rendering nice crunchy green broccoli into a flaccid yellowish glop. She also used it to make Swiss steak.

Which, many long years ago, I attempted to replicate when I was in Worcester, in charge of the little kids while my mother was with my father, who was dying in a Boston hospital.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, much of a cook.

I have a few things I can rustle up – and rustle up pretty well – but mostly I do not enjoy cooking. I could live without it – and, mostly, I do. (Baking on the other hand… Now you’re talking.)

But one would think that after years of observing my mother in the kitchen, I might have noticed that, when the valve on top of the pressure cooker starts to sputter and whir, you turn the heat down under the pot.

Not I!

I chopped up the ingredients for that Swiss steak  - meat, peppers, onions, tomatoes -  threw it in the old pressure cooker, and pressure cooked away.

When I took the lid off, the grey flaccid glop made my mother’s yellow flaccid broccoli look (and taste) like an epicurean delight.

It was so dreadful, the dog wouldn’t eat it – and we had a dog who would eat just about anything.  I suspect that Grimbald would not have cared at all whether the moose lasagna was adulterated with pork. But I can understand why Ikea patrons might.

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I do want to add that, for a large dog, Grim had an especially delicate way of unwrapping a stick of gum.

That sink(holing) feeling

When I was young, there was a modestly popular, trippy little novelty tune called “The Eggplant that Ate Chicago.”

Now, given my many relatives in Chicagoland, I have pretty good reason to believe that no eggplant has (as yet) eaten Chicago.

But plenty of places in the country are apparently being eaten alive.

Around these parts, a lot of attention has been paid to the erosion on Cape Cod, which has been working its way through the barrier beach at Chatham for the last few years, condemning a bunch of summer cottage to the junk pile.

Fortunately, the Cape will be around for a while longer – most of it, anyway. I hate to think of what the profile of Massachusetts will look like when the Cape gets washed out to sea. We’ll look like all those rectangular states out West. Ugh!

Anyway, last fall, it was Sandy wreaking havoc on the Jersey Shore, Staten Island, and the Queens. All those Staten Island wetland homes that went back to nature. And was there a weirder (or sadder) sight than that of the downed roller coaster in NJ?

Back in what we’re still calling the Bay State, Plum Island on the North Shore is being reclaimed. It seems that with every major storm, a few more houses on Plum Island – houses that used to be well set back from the ocean – fall over, or are – post-storm – knocked over by the government.

Not to be outdone, on Boston’s South Shore, the same major storms that put the crunch on Plum Island do a number of Scituate. House overboard!

I feel really bad for those who lose their homes by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea. And by the rivers, by the rivers, by the beautiful rivers, which has also been known to happen.

Living as I do on reclaimed land – the flat of Beacon Hill and Boston’s Back Bay are the American Amsterdam (they don’t call it Back Bay for nothing) – I occasionally worry about a Sandy-like event striking Boston.  We’re underwater in every 100 Year Storm graphic I see of our city.

Maybe it’s time to move to higher ground…

It’s not always water world, of course.

Think about all those Western and West Coast fires that routinely whip through neighborhoods, and with a seemingly willy-nilly selection process burn to the ground all the houses on this side of the street while sparing the houses on that side of the street.

Then there is Centralia, Pennsylvania, what’s now a ghost town that was built over a mine where a fire has been smoldering for over fifty years.

And don’t get me going on fracking in what that might bring about. (On the upside, if the earth just exploded, it probably wouldn’t be a bad way to go.)

But I think my personal favorite – if that’s the right word – among  creepy natural ways to lose your home is via sinkhole.

There is really something almost Biblical – Jonah and the whale-ish – about being swallowed alive by the earth. 

Come to think of it, I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the possibility of being swallowed alive.

Certainly, as a child I watched with rapt attention every episode of Jungle Jim, Superman, and The Lone Ranger that featured quicksand.

But sinkholes that grab you when you’re innocently asleep, under the covers in your PJs...

How completely and utterly horrifying it must have been to be the fellow in Florida who was unluckily abed in the half of the house that fell into the sinkhole. And how completely and utterly horrifying it must have been to be the brother of that fellow in Florida, the brother who was luckily abed in the half of the house that didn’t fall into the sinkhole.

I wasn’t aware until I read a recent article by David Owen in The New Yorker that Florida is the sinkhole center of the universe. (Note: to read the full article, you have to be a subscriber. If you are, you’ll have the privilege of reading online via a system that seems to me the technological equivalent of slithering around with microfilm.)

In 1999, a four-thousand-acre Florida lake “disappeared down a hole, like a bathtub emptying in to a drain.”

Florida, as it happens, is built on bedrock that’s not particularly bedrock-like, but, rather:

…is mostly limestone and dolostone, is the hardened remnant of a thick accumulation of deceased sea creatures, which sifted onto the seabed for aeons, at a time when sea levels were much higher than they are today. During subsequent aeons, slightly acidic rainwater permeated the ground and riddled the rock with conduits and caverns and underground streams, and from time to time the overlying strata collapse or subside. 

Forget “Look, Ma, no cavities.”

Florida is riddled with them.

The Florida Speleological Society has likened the state’s geology to “Swiss chees coated with oil.”

Fortunately, death-by-sinkhole is relatively rare.

And fortunately, things pretty much stay put.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of the aquifer buoying the ground up. Bad news when there’s a big draw on the water table, as when the strawberry farmers tried to salvage their crop by pumping well-water on it to protect it from freezing.

Of course, just as a drop in the water table can wreak havoc in Florida, so, too can too much rainfall.

Talk about a no-win situation.

Fingers crossed for my winter-in-Florida cousins that the worst thing they ever experience is an occasional alligator basking within view.

Meanwhile, we all better look out for the eggplant that ate Chicago.

You never know when nature is going to turn on us.

Ah, Wilderness! “Artisanal Manliness” with the Wilderness Collective

A couple of months back, my sister Trish sent me a link to a story she’d seen in Gawker on The Wilderness Collective,

…a company that specializes in curating artisanal manliness by coordinating expeditions that invite robust young gentlebros "to find out what [they] are made of; to be measured by the wilderness." For $2,500 ($3,500 with bike rental), you can "reclaim masculinity through adventure." Included in the cost is a videographer on-hand to record the masculine rebirth for sick Facebook videos. (Source: Gawker.)

The full Gawker article is hilarious, and should be read in conjunction with viewing the sick – make that unintentionally hilarious -  video of a 334 mile motorcycle trip from Sequoia National Forest to Yosemite, which can be found here.

Nothing wrong with a bunch of guys who want to blast off for a couple of days’ getaway – who doesn’t? – but to position an excursion in which you ride to your campsite, where you’re served “craft cocktails” and artisanal food as a masculinity reclaimer… These treks, while no doubt fun, are not exactly the Lewis and Clark Expedition, on which I don’t believe either Lewis or Clark packed a French press. Or even Easy Rider.  Jack Nicholson had a harder time ordering toast than the Wilderness Collectivists had getting fed.

Gawker particularly liked the part of the narrated video in which the men get to their campsite and figure out, without being told, that they have to unload cars and set things up.

Each guy wasn't told what to do but they found a job; they found a place where they could lead, a place where they could be responsible. It was almost called out of them by the situation we were in; we had to set up a camp.

Wow. Just wow.

It seems to me that it wouldn’t be a revelation to most eight year olds that they were in a situation “where they could be responsible,” let alone a bunch of adults with the jack to fork over $3.5K for an adventure weekend. Presumably, these guys have jobs and home lives where, at least once in a while, they get to lead and be responsible.  Okay, I guess it’s conceivable that they’re so spoiled at home that they never have to be the ones to figure out that a load of wash needs doing or a diaper needs changing, let alone actually do something about it. But surely at work…

It almost goes with out saying that the weekend culminates with the gesture guaranteed to stem “eroding masculinity”: lighting up a cigar and having the epiphany that they’ve become a “band of brothers.” (Tell that to Harry V’s “happy few” and/or the D-Day Veterans of the 101st Airborne Division.)

Needless to say, I had to collect myself and get on over to The Wilderness Collective and let them speak for themselves:

In an age of eroding masculinity where men are depicted as weak, blundering, misguided and shallow, men need to be ever more intentional to carve out time for camaraderie, introspection, and growth.

Hmmmm. Somehow I don’t think that sipping craft cocktails does much to transform that shallow depiction.

WC is not just adventure for adventure’s sake, but rather a chance to take ahold of the truth that there’s something about the wild that unlocks the greatest potential in us.

And although I know that there are hairpin turns at Yosemite, and speed limits on said hairpin turns reading 5 MPH, I don’t think that roaring around “the wild” on a motorcycle is going to unlock someone’s “greatest potential.” (At least I hope not.)

And am I the only one fogey enough to know what the abbreviation WC stands for?

It’s almost as if the wild was designed as a proving ground for men.

Having spent a memorable night in Yosemite sleeping in the cramped front seat of Karman Ghia after observing a bear family moseying around our tent, I want to point out that it can be a proving ground for women, too.

A place to face your fears, to wake up wet, cold, shivering and warm ourselves by a fire the next morning.

What, face your fear that you won’t get your morning cuppa from a French press?

I don’t think it’s exactly Grizzly Adams time to wake up wet, cold, and shivering. That’s about half the camping experience, isn’t it?

Wilderness Collective exists to lead men on memorable expeditions that develop character and provoke courage.

And here I thought that just getting through the regular ups and down of life gives most folks – M&F alike – enough opportunities to “develop character” and “provoke courage”. Silly me.

It almost goes without saying that when you man up,  you need to gear up, so WC has an online shop, where you can get yourself $245 worth of Elsinore Icon Boots. (Elsinore Icon Boots? Wasn’t Hamlet the first existentialist, and not the epitome of uneroded masculinity?) Or a $49 Jetflow Hydration Pack, which niftily merges a backpack and water bottle into one.  Or a $65 Bellroy Wallet made of “premium vegetable tanned cow leather.” Not that you need your wallet for anything once you’re on your adventure. Those craft cocktails are part of the prix fixe.

Meanwhile, if  you want to:

Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure
In whatever comes our way

WC has another trip coming up in early May, and there are still a few slots open.

Yeah, darlin'Gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space

Born to be wild, baby! Born to be wild!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------A tip of the Pink Slip motorcycle helmet (Icon Variant Helmet: $350 at WC) to Trish.

Vera Wang’s Paywall of China Topples

When Vera Wang first opened her Shanghai boutique a few months back, she had way of handling the bridal gown variation of the tire-kicker: she charged almost $500 for the privilege of trying on one of her creations.

Having watched my share Say Yes to the Dress episodes – I swear, I was recovering from the flu – I understand how why a bridal shop (shoppe?) proprietor (proprietress?) would want to impose some type of fee on some of these dress-shopping ninnies. Many of the brides-to-be that I’ve seen appeared to spend more time, and put more thought into, finding the right dress than they did into finding the right man.

If you’ve never seen the show, by the way, I do encourage a look see, if it’s still on. The plot is simple: a young woman, accompanied by a posse that includes some combination of bridesmaids, sisters, cousins, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, mothers-of-the groom, and the occasional father (with checkbook), brother, gay friend from work (with taste), or fiancé, spends dozens of hours, trying on hundreds of dresses, waiting to be thunderstruck with the realization that she’s found The One. Which is typically at least $1K out of her announced price range. (Which is, of course, why she’s brought daddy along.)

The show is as gross a display of cupidity, imbecility, and manipulation (of the posse, by the posse) as you’re likely to see on TV this side of the Kardashians.

And as for those hapless fiancés who didn’t realize it’s bad luck to see The Dress before The Big Day, the real bad luck in my opinion is that they’re exposed to just what a crazed, out of control, Bridezilla (another wedding show, by the way) has chosen him as the lucky fellow to wear the tux and cut the cake for her.

For Say Yes to the Dress, I recommend the Atlanta version, which seems to take the drama of finding “the dress” to new levels.

This side-trip to Say Yes to the Dress has, of course, little or nothing to do with Vera Wang (other than that I do believe her frocks occasionally factor in as an object of desire or scorn).  My excursion here is to establish at least some bona fides, however weak, distorted, and third hand, with the bridal industry.

And then there’s my professional connection.

I once worked for a company whose CEO/president was Vera Wang’s husband (now her ex). Small enough company that I knew him. (Wish I kept the puky e-mail he sent the marketing team after he fired us when the Short Guys beat the Tall Guys for control of the company.)

Anyway, since Vera Wang is well within my six-degrees of separation circle, I was most interested in her original decision to charge brides a fee to try on her gowns, and in the follow on decision to tear down the paywall and let Chinese bridezillas free range around her boutique.

Local and global media had criticized the surcharge as being discriminatory because it was applied only in China, at the company's Shanghai store, which staged a "soft opening" in January as the company's first bridal salon in the country, a vast potential market as the numbers of wealthy grow…

A company spokeswoman told local media earlier this year that the charge was imposed to fend off copying of the elaborate dresses, which fetch thousands of dollars in the original.  (Source: NBC News.)

Last week, the company “abolished appointment fees,” which were no doubt really insulting to the would-be Vera Wang buying brides.

The fee abolishment does not, of course, abolish counterfeiting, which actually doesn’t require an appointment.

Vera Wang's ivory tulle trains and pinched bodice gowns had already found fans in the world of pirates, with knockoffs widely available on Chinese e-commerce sites for a fraction of the price.

Li, one seller of "Vera Wang style" dresses on Taobao Marketplace, China's largest e-commerce site, says he can achieve up to 90 percent similarity to the namesake garments without even seeing the originals.

A Vera Wang original can range anywhere from $2,000 to over $10,000, but on Taobao some imitations go for as little as $100.

The knock-offs, of course, don’t have the hand stitching and posh materials, but, hey, if it lasts the day... And whose going to notice the difference in the pictures?

China is a major source of counterfeit goods – where do you think most of those “Louis Vuitton” bags that the street vendors hawk in NYC, not to mention all those red-soled shoes for sale on the ‘net come from – so I am sympathetic to Vera Wang’s concern about being ripped off.

My concern is, of course, tempered by the fact that someone who can afford the echt Vera Wang is going to buy the echt Vera Wang. And someone paying $100 for a Vera look-a-like was never going to put a penny in Vera’s pocket to begin with. (If ever there were an argument for creating a downmarket K-Mart version of your “brand”…)

Nonetheless, all this counterfeiting is more than a tsk, tsk. If everyone is wearing a Vera Wang, real or faux, then the currency for the true Veras is debased.

And some “civilians” in the counterfeit wars do end up getting screwed. (If the folks who end up getting screwed, however, think they were going to get a ‘real’ Vera Wang gown for $100 then they pretty much deserve what they get.)

Bottom line: if you’re in Shanghai, and were planning on trying on some Vera Wang wedding gowns while you’re there, the price is now back to right.

What a relief. (Phew!)

Higgins Armory Museum’s to close: doors to clang shut this December

One of the many eccentric pleasures of growing up in Worcester was going to the Higgins Armory, a museum – make that the only “dedicated museum of armor in the western hemisphere, housing one of the few significant collections of knightly armor outside of Europe” – will be closing at the end of the year.

I probably haven’t been there in forty,  maybe fifty, years, but I will be putting a visit on my list of to-do’s for 2013.

I probably went to the Higgins three or four times during my childhood, and pretty much all I remember about it  is that it’s in a funky building, and it had dog armor as part of its exhibit.

My interest in armor is not even minimal. It’s non-existent.

Other than reading Hillary Mantel novels about the era of Henry VIII – which feature an occasional joust – I pretty much find the entire terrain boring: knights in armor, Crusades, Maid Marian, chastity belts, lily maids, lion hearts, Ivanhoe. Yawn!

Perhaps this is because I have no doubt whatsoever just what I would have been doing in this oh, so romantic world. Which would have been emptying the chamber pots for those lily maids.

So mostly I want to make a swan trip back to the Higgins Armory to see the funky building.

I’m not sure what will become of the funky building, but the oddball collection is moving to the (quite excellent) Worcester Art Museum, which already has some medieval stuff of its own, including a chapel that was imported rock by rock from Ye Olde Europa.

In any case, reading about the Museum’s imminent demise started me thinking about Worcester’s Great Industrial Era. And Worcester’s Great Industrialists, the stiffly upright, stiffly uptight WASPs who ruled the Worcester roost when I was a girl. They owned the businesses, they owned the newspaper, they dominated the cultural and social landscape [okay: what there was of it].  Sure, “we” got to be cops and firemen and schooleachers, the member of Congress, and (mostly) the mayor – apparently they had little interest in grubby city politics, once they’d changed the governance model to one with a weak mayor/strong city manager. But mostly they employed the Catholics. They lived in solid, Protestant ethic homes in solid, Protestant ethic neighborhoods. They lunched at “Put’s” – Putnam & Thurston, eating what I could only imagine to be bland, haute WASP foods.

Needless to say, I didn’t know any of them (other than the men who ran the company where m father worked: I told you that they employed the Catholics). I will confess that every time we drove through one of “their” neighborhoods, I felt a bit envious. How much more wonderful it would have been to live there, and look like a Breck girl, dress for dinner, play tennis and sail, know boys from Worcester Academy, etc. – rather than be a plain old Catholic me from Our Lady of the Angels.

Anyway, one of the Great Worcester Industrialist was John Woodman Higgins, benefactor and founder of his eponymous museum.

A graduate of Worcester Tech, Higgins’ first job was with the Plunger Elevator Company.

The Plunger Elevator Company!

They just do not name companies the way they used to.

Imagine trusting your life to an elevator called Plunger! Wheee…..

After Plunger, it was on to the almost equally charmingly named Worcester Ferrule and Manufacturing Company.

Ferrule and Manufacturing. How ‘bout that?

Anyway, F&M was more boringly renamed the Worcester Pressed Steel Company.

So Higgins long had an interest in things steel, which he turned into collecting armor, and then doing the good-citizen, contribute to the community sort of thing that the Great Worcester Industrialists did so darned well.

Anyway, I do want to get to the Higgins’ before it clanks to a close come December.

One more little remembrance of things past that’s going out of business.

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

Source of info on John Woodman Higgins: Wikipedia.

Spammit all

Each week, I work with one of my clients on a blog post. One or the other of us comes up with an idea. I start writing about it, pinging him along the way if I have any questions. I then send the draft to him for his edits. I then do any final clean up and post it in his name.

We’ve only been doing this for a couple of months, but it’s working out pretty well, and we’re having fun.

So are the spammers, which have – quite hilariously – glommed on to one of our posts and are coming out of the woodwork.

Before I launch into my spamalysis, I should probably mention that this blog is for a deeply, deeply, deeply technical company. None of this B2C, or B2B. Nope, these guys are strictly EE2EE, and they are among my all time favorite clients. I completely love them to death, not just because they are wonderful people, but because I’ve learned a tremendous amount from them.  I’m not quite an honorary electrical engineer, but I know a lot more about chips and boards and sensors and connectors and signal processing than I used to.  And I now know how to read block diagrams.

Anyway, the post that set off spam-a-lot was actually one of the geekier ones we’ve done. Perhaps it was the use of the word “vibration” in the title that triggered such a reaction from spammers/spam engines.

At least that might explain the sex-related comments, like this one from a company in India promising “Livesex on Cam” – which I assume means “on camera” as opposed to punting-on-the-River Cam, where I suppose that the occasional Cambridge University student has engaged in live sex. When I thought about it, of course, I realized that the young Indians who studied at the Oxbridge U’s were more likely to end up running hedge funds in The City than back in India, working as spammers. And they would likely have a better grasp on The Queen’s English.

Ahaa, its nice dialogue regarding this article here at this
web site, I have read all that, so at this time me also commenting at this place.

The folks in India weren’t the only ones plumping for live sex on camera. “Krisztina” practiced her English – or a content generating engine that needs a bit more work sent something out there - on behalf of what’s apparently a major sex site. (Alas, I googled it. Even though I most certainly didn’t click through on anything. So now I’ll probably be getting popups and personal spam coming from all over the globe.)

I loved as much as you’ll receive carried out right here. The sketch is tasteful, your authored subject matter stylish. nonetheless, you command get bought an impatience over that you wish be delivering the following. unwell unquestionably come further formerly again as exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this hike.

Of course, gibberishing probably doesn’t detract much from the journey in store at the live cam site…

One of the other sex-cammers was more succinct:

Thanks for sharing such a good opinion, article is pleasant, that’s why i have read it entirely

Well, I’ll take credit for the article being pleasant, but, come on, how hard is it to read entirely a post that’s only 400 words long?

To be sure, the spam wasn’t all sex-related.

Someone was pushing dining room tables:

I was pretty pleased to find this website. I need to to thank you for ones time due to this fantastic read!! I definitely savored every part of it and i also have you saved as a favorite to see new stuff on your web site.

And someone else pushing decorated king-sized beds (seemingly on a Brazilian Harry Potter-related site. At least that’s what it looked like when I googled it, but I didn’t dig too deep.):

Thanks for finally writing about  this. Liked it!

And someone pushing fake Christian Louboutins had this to say:

This will be the correct weblog for everyone who desires to find out about this subject. You recognize so significantly its virtually challenging to argue with you (not that I actually would want?-HaHa). You undoubtedly put a new spin on a topic thats been written about for years. Wonderful stuff, just very good!

Chicken! I’d actually find it virtually challenging to argue with you – HaHa!!

Faux Louis Vuitton gear was a major spamming theme – and, boy, do they spam long comments. Here’s a snippet from one of the many we got:

louis vuitton handbags the variety of this bag pattern comes from its unique quilted diamond check grain of the materials louis vuitton 2013Every girl wishes for all the best for the big day and finding that something sexy and romantic can help to make it an extra special night too with some beautiful bridal lingerie. Your big day is important but so is your special wedding night. A night to remember.

Okay. Maybe louis Vuitton does sell lingerie, but I can’t imagine that there very many men on the face of the earth who would find it sexy if his bride was lugging a big brown and gold Louis bag – real or ersatz – into the honeymoon suite.

Guateng, South Africa-related companies were quite a source of spammy comments. This from someone fronting for a Johannesburg private investigation company:

Really no matter if someone doesn’t understand after that its up to other viewers that they will assist, so here it happens.

And from someone “working” on behalf of a business removals company:

This is a very good tip especially to those new to the blogosphere. Brief but very accurate info… Appreciate your sharing this one. A must read post!

At least they got something right here. The post was both brief and accurate.

Unlike the person (or thing) commenting for the South African logistics firm:

Someone necessarily help to make seriously articles I’d state. This is the very first time I frequented your website page and up to now? I amazed with the analysis you made to create this particular put up extraordinary. Excellent activity!

I did like the esprit of the Guateng shuttle service spam:

I delight in, result in I discovered exactly what I was taking a look for.

You’ve ended my four day lengthy hunt! God Bless you man. Have a great day. Bye

I am more than happy to have ended someone’s four day lengthy hunt for information on shock and vibration testing for connectors on small form factor SoMs. Must have been a real drag, all that searching.

Anyway, plenty more spam where these came from.

But I’ll end with this from a commenter linking to a post on white dwarves from a French blog on astrophysics:

Hello! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading this post reminds me of my previous room mate! He always kept chatting about this. I will forward this write-up to him. Fairly certain he will have a good read. Many thanks for sharing!

That previous room mate must be really something, since this comment shows up on websites for Bible study, Ikea ornaments, fishing tackle, and football.

To all our spammers:

Many thanks for sharing!

Sorry we just couldn’t bring ourselves to actually publish your comments.