What would you order to eat on YOUR private jet?

All the focus on our high-flying government officials buzzing around in private planes got someone at the Boston Globe wondering about what it is that fancy folks – other than our government officials, who I’m pretty certain, given their modest proclivities, just pick up a sandwich in the airport Sbarro’s – munch on when they’re on those private jets.

The answer is generally something a lot finer dining that what those of us who fly prole get. Which these days is a lot of nothing.

Airplane food is a funny thing, both funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. Other than a few edibles when I’ve flown first or business, the things I’ve eaten on planes over the years have been execrable. Bland, soggy, tough, tasteless. I was almost happy when American stopped serving “real” meals in steerage and went with a crappy Subway sandwich and some Sun Chips.

The truth is, of course, that I tend to eat at least part of whatever crappy food they put in front of me. Pasta of liquid consistency: right-o! Shred of brownish ice-berg lettuce: yum! Near-frozen roll: bring it on! (Just don’t break a tooth on it.) And let me tell you I’m always plenty happy to see a little wrapped up cheese and cracker thing-y, a tiny cup of yogurt.

Still, better off bringing your own, which for shorter hops (i.e., anything that doesn’t entail overnight) travelers increasingly do, because otherwise they won’t get fed. I’m fine with this. Oh, I don’t like the guy sitting next to me opening up and wolfing down a smelly tuna sandwich. Seriously, tuna sandwiches need to be put on the no-fly list. But I’m good with whatever I choose to bring on board. (Something non-odiferous from Au Bon Pain.)

If you’re fortunate enough to fly private jet around here, however, you may get catered by Rita’s Catering, which:

…serves aircraft operating in and out of Boston-area airports, including Logan, Hansom [sic: in real life it’s Hanscom], Beverly Municipal, and others… Chefs at Rita’s Catering’s main commissary in Everett fulfill all requests, whether it’s for grass-fed beef, escargots, or a simple honey-glazed doughnut. (Source: Boston Globe)

Owner Paul Rossi (Rita’s son) describes his clientele as “very elite.” And here’s what the very elite like to eat:

“This morning, we had a Saudi jet. The menu included no alcohol in any seasoning, fresh squeezed juices, filet mignon, and sugar-free desserts. They unloaded two containers of their own china for us to put the food on. It was a $3,000 order for one guy — the rest for the crew. We do whatever it takes. Jack Welch, former chief executive of GE, had peculiar taste — pasta with tomato sauce, Gummy Bears, and Jello. A health care tech executive wanted pig’s feet.

Other than the sugar-free desserts – that’s no fun – I think I’d rather fly with the Saudi guy than with Jack Welch (seriously, Jack, Gummy Bears are one thing, but Jello?), let alone with the exec who wanted pig’s feet.

Pig’s feet? Pig’s feet!

That’s another item that, along with the tuna sandwich, should be banned from flying.

I’ve actually never eaten pig’s feet, but for some reason – and it’s way too late to ask – my father found them a real delicacy. He’d buy an occasional jar, secure in the knowledge that no one in his family would be clamoring to share the snack. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. Maybe crubeens were a staple in his father’s saloon. But I can still picture what they looked like, in my mind’s eye, and the picture ain’t pretty. In fact, it’s pretty gag-inducing. (And I have a somewhat iron stomach.) I actually like pigs. And I do eat pork. But just think of where those trotters were trotting?)

Anyway, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever see the inside of a private jet, so I really shouldn’t worry about what I’d be served while in flight. But if I could request anything I wanted, it sure wouldn’t be pig’s feet.

Tragedy of the commons, or just plain laziness?

Recently, my brother-in-law sent me an article on eating donuts and drinking coffee at faculty meetings. Since the article was written by a professor, it quickly degenerated into an analysis of why a small bit of donut always stays on the plate, while the coffee pot is drained.

Coffee and donuts laid out at a meeting represent common pool resources (CPR). A CPR is defined as a resource that is non-excludable, yet rivaled. Non-excludability implies anybody in the room has open access to the resource; nobody, in essence, owns the resource and anybody can consume it. Rivaledness means that the resource is scarce and the more one person consumes, the less other people can enjoy. For every cup of coffee I drink, there is less for someone else.

The combination of non-excludable yet rivaled leads to a “tragedy of the commons,” wherein everybody rushes to use the resource and potentially depleting it to extinction. Garrett Hardin coined this term in his famous paper entitled, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

Okay, once I spotted an acronym. Not to mention words like non-excludability and rivaledness, well, MEGO.

Still, after reading the above, a question popped into my head. (My eyes had glazed over, not my brain.) And that question was anticipated by the author:

But what about the donuts? Donuts rarely “go extinct” at meetings. Some portion always remains. The reason for this relates to strong social norms guided by a concern for personal reputation combined with the high visibility of the good’s use in a small community. The person who consumes the last bit of a scarce resource often becomes tagged as “stingy,” someone who doesn’t think of the interests of others. We still want the good, but we restrain ourselves from taking the last piece for fear of being labeled greedy, particularly when everybody in the room can see the culprit. This explains why the one remaining donut often gets cut in half multiple times and there is almost always a bit of it left.

The coffee, if you remember, is different. Contained in a metal pot, the resource is more difficult to monitor and determine who took the last drop. If the stream dries up whilst pouring one’s second or third cup, it is easy to feign ignorance about knowing how much was left  — though we may feel a tinge of guilt for taking the final ounce.   

I’m not an academic. Never have been. Never will be. But I did spend a few decades in the workplace, Margaret Mead-ing it in the field, coming of professional age not in Samoa, but in high tech. And here’s what I observed:

When people leave an ever-diminishing piece of donut, or any other food stuff – the last half-sandwich, the last chip – that’s sitting there on the plate, it’s not because they don’t want to be labeled greedy. It’s because they don’t want to be the one to have to clean up. To toss the donut box, throw out the plastic sandwich platter, bus the cookie plate. And, while they’re at it, wiping down the table. As long as there is any evidence of edibility – something between a crumb and a full-bite – the grazer can assure him- or herself that they haven’t taken the last of it, and are thus off the hook for cleanup.

As for coffee, I never saw it as the Tragedy of the Commons. In fact, what I typically observed was someone leaving a swig of coffee in the bottom of the clear pot. Which I viewed as the Comedy of the Lazy-Arse Person Who’s Too Busy To Take the 30 Seconds Needed to Rinse the Pot, Rip Open a Bag of Coffee, Empty It Into the Coffee Maker and Flip the Switch.

I don’t even drink coffee, and yet this behavior drove me crazy. Especially when whoever left that swig in the bottom of the pot failed to turn off the burner. Because that would have meant acknowledging that there’s really nothing left. Anyway, the swig quickly burnt down, leaving the acrid smell of burnt coffee to permeate the kitchen. Gag.

Of course, whoever left the last bite of donut, whoever left the last swig of coffee, knew in their heart of hearts that someone – and in my anthropological experience, that someone was invariably a woman – would dump the dirty platter, wipe off the table, rinse out the pot – even scrubbing out the burnt on swig-gunk, and make another pot.

Tragedy of the Commons? Nah. Just plain old laziness (with a bit of sexist expectation thrown in…).

Sock it to me?

One of the business buzzwords that I’m most passionate about, in terms of despising, is the word “passion.” But passion is rapidly being replaced by the word “disruption.”

Yep, I more than agree that it’s happening. Zipcar disrupted car rental. Uber disrupted taxis. Dollar Shave disrupted razors. Amazon disrupted retail. And I know that, for investors, if they manage to glom on to a disruptor, that disruptor might turn into a unicorn (don’t get me going). Which will make everybody rich, other than the industry and companies being disrupted. Phooey on them, as they say. Disrupt or be disrupted. Burn someone else or find yourself on the ash heap of history. And, as the great Kurt Vonnegut once told us, so it goes.

Which I guess means we should make way for the new disruption in town: socks.

Yes, you heard right: socks.

The disruptor in waiting is Stance:

…a premium-sock startup that has managed to carve out a small place in popular culture. Stance has become the go-to hosiery of Hollywood actors, hip-hop stars, pro athletes, skateboarders, motocrossers and now at least one global leader. The San Clemente, California, startup accomplished this by making socks that promise durability, arch support and clever designs—and by cultivating a roster of celebrity investors, who promote the brand to fans. One backer, Jay Z, name-dropped the brand in his 2013 single “F.U.T.W.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Jay Z’s just one backer. Kleiner Perkins – an outfit not generally known for its cool – is in on it, as is August Capital (where a friend of mine, who I suspect is not in the market for $30 socks, used to work). And Justin Trudeau – you know, the Prime Minister of our neighbor to the north – has been seen sporting a pair, and we know how hip and happenin’ JT is. (Remember when we used to have a hip and happenin’ guy, not to mention thoughtful and measured, in charge? Sigh…)

All this smart money isn’t exactly betting on socks. they’re betting on Stance CEO Jeff Kearl, who was on the board of headphone disruptor Skullcandy.

Kearl says he became convinced the sock industry was similarly ripe for disruption, to use a favorite VC term. Socks is a commodity market dominated by low-margin products, but there’s really no such thing as a technological edge. Sales of adult socks in the U.S. total $4.8 billion annually, according to research firm NPD. That’s tiny compared with the $56 billion Americans spend on shoes or the even larger markets VCs are accustomed to going after.

Stance began by marketing to dudes – skateboarders, to be exact.

The timing proved impeccable, catching the wave of skater fashion moving to rolled-up pants. Stance’s socks can hold up to the beating skaters give them, thanks to a tight-knit weave and extra cushioning. Despite the high prices of $10 to $30 a pair, retailers say the socks sell briskly. Image-conscious buyers appreciate the brand’s avant-garde style of clashing patterns and colors, says Natalie Gamette, a sales supervisor at Hobie Surf Shop, located a short drive from Stance headquarters.

After conquering the boarders, Stance moved onto hip-hop, music, acting, basketball (until Nike beat them back, they had a deal with the NBA) and baseball. (Stance is the only sock worn in MLB. Who knew?)

However, more established brands, like Nike, are coming after them.

Even with VC backing, Stance won’t be able to outspend Nike and could struggle to hold on to the customers it has. “Stance is, for the most part, a millennial brand,” says Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research. “And millennials are really fickle.”

Well, they won’t be fickle forever. Everyone outgrows fickle at some point in the musical chairs that is life. Someday, there’ll no doubt be all sorts of flabby, nose-hair growing, geezer millennials who are still true to the Stance socks of their youth.

But I suspect there’s a somewhat limited market of folks willing to spend all that much money on socks.

Oddly enough, I’m part of that somewhat limited market.

I have always loved fun, colorful socks. And I have a long foot that’s getting even longer. Most women’s socks are designed for those with dainty little feet up to a size 9. When I was a mere size 10, I could almost get away with wearing most women’s socks. The narrow width of my foot – AAAA – gave me some wiggle room: what my foot didn’t take up in width could be used to elongate the length. And then my damned feet got even longer. I now wear a size eleven, and while me feet are still narrow enough, they’ve widened a bit to an AA. So less wiggle room in both directions.

In any case, my toes have a tendency to poke through socks if I try to Cinderella stepsister them into a regular sized woman’s sock. And men’s socks are generally too wide, and end up bunching up all over the place.

So a couple of times a year, I make a pilgrimage to Cambridge Clogs, a wonderful little store, not yet disrupted by Zappo’s, that sells socks in – get this – sizes. So I get to buy socks in fun colors and patterns, and, since my toe doesn’t bust through on the second wearing, they’re well worth the price.

Other than the white athletic socks I wear with my sneaks, I don’t wear socks during the summer. But in a few weeks, I’ll be checking my fun sock inventory and heading over to Cambridge to set in my stock for the winter.

Not sure if Stance has anything for women yet, but I’ll be on the lookout for their wares. Even though they won’t be disrupting my sock purchasing habits in the least.

Intellectual property just ain’t what it used to be

Well, last January, the big “intellectual” property story was about real or was it fake or was it real fake mermaid tails. But that was then and this is now and, as it is October, today’s big IP story is Halloween-related, and has to do with banana costumes.

In truth, I don’t give all that much thought to costumes in general or to banana costumes in particular. In truth, my Halloween focus is on the presence of candy corn, already on the shelves in CVS, and Oreos with orange filling, not yet on the shelves at my grocery store. There is, after all, nothing better for body and soul than a handful of candy corn. Some people throw out the term “it’s like crack” to underscore that something’s addictive. But what do most of us actually know about crack? Not much, I suspect. So I’ll offer a helpful alternative. How’s about “it’s like candy corn.” As for Oreos with orange filling, I’m mostly an Oreo purist, but I do like the ones with orange filling, even if they taste exactly the same as the originals. There is just something festive and doubly enjoyable about those special occasion Oreos.

Costumes, however, don’t occupy much of my consciousness, other than when I’m walking around Salem doing a running commentary on some of the really awful costumes there are out there, worn by adults who should know better.

But the Halloween of my childhood – when kids dressed up, in either home-grown or cheesy Woolworth’s costumes and collected candy in whatever paper bag or pillow case their mother handed them – has long been co-opted by grownups and has become a big deal. Americans are now spending more than $9 billion on Halloween-related merchandise, over $3 billion of which goes to costumes. And within the realm of costumes, banana costumes have, apparently, become a big deal.

Just google banana costume and out will pop all sorts of versions. Unpeeled banana, with or without Chiquita label. Peeled banana of some sort. Zombie banana. Jamaica-mon banana. Baby bananas (aww….) Dog bananas (aww…) Not to mention a totally inappropriate flasher banana, peeled from below with a big “it” hanging out.

Anyway,

Turns out, those bananas are big money, so much so that one seller has gone to federal court to defend its banana designs. The phrase “banana suit” now has a dual meaning thanks to a complaint filed in New Jersey federal court. Silvertop Associates, Inc., a costume manufacturer which does business as Rasta Imposta, sued Kmart Corp. and Sears Holding Corp. on Wednesday, alleging copyright infringement, trade dress infringement, and unfair competition. (Bloomberg)

Since 2008, Kmart has purchased costumes from Rasta Imposta, but the two companies failed to reach an agreement this year and Kmart said it would use “another vendor” to fulfill banana costume orders, according to the complaint. “Shortly thereafter, Rasta Imposta discovered that Kmart had begun offering the infringing … costume, which is a direct replication and knockoff of Rasta Imposta’s copyrighted Banana Design,” the complaint states. “Kmart is not free to simply appropriate Rasta Imposta’s intellectual property for its own business advantage without Rasta Imposta’s consent.”

I looked at their website, and Rasta Imposta seems to specialize in a combination of completely boring, completely pedestrian, completely vulgar, and some that would be passably cute or clever if you made them yourself. (And take it from someone who spent plenty of time in fourth grade trying to make a Peter Minuit peg leg out of a beer bottle, DIY for a Halloween costume is actually quite fun. Not that I gave a hoot about Peter Minuit, but for the school Halloween party we had to go as a historical figure from American history. Betsy Ross and Pocahontas seemed to be the only alternatives for girls, and I just plain wasn’t interested in either of them. And the idea of using a beer bottle for a peg leg. Even though I never did quite get it to work, it was a fine idea. Like so many of my fine ideas, it lost something in the execution.)

I suspect there’s not much money to be made in Peter Minuit costumes. But banana costumes, well, that’s another story entirely.

Rasta Imposta has been at it since 2001, and they even got a copyright registration a few years back.

The company licenses out the design and considers the banana “one of the company’s most important costumes.”

So they’re not taking it easy.

While two companies can certainly make dueling banana costumes, in the latest case Rasta Imposta argues that these two are entirely too similar, citing the shape, the black ends of the banana, the vertical lines down the middle of the costume, the cut outs for limbs, and even the advertising, which uses a similarly dressed model.

Am I missing something here? Don’t most bananas – that is, real life bananas – have blackish ends and vertical lines. And wouldn’t a banana costume require “cut outs for limbs” – after all, a trick-or-treater needs legs free to get around and arms free to hold the candy-collection bag. Or, if you’re at a grownup party and not roaming the streets looking for loot, arms free to hold an adult beverage. And how different are people going to look posing as a banana in advertising?

However Rasta Imposta v. K-Mart and Sears turns out, I’m sure the loser will, ahem, appeal.

Guess intellectual property just ain’t what it used to be…

Pie in the sky? Nah. Pie in Kelley Square in Worcester

My mother was a baker, a scratch baker.

My father had a sweet tooth – as did the majority of this children (3 or 4 out of 5 ain’t bad), so we had desert every night. Which meant my mother was baking a few times a week.

As I said, she was a scratch baker. Oh, there’d be a box of Betty Crocker on hand for an emergency situation. And she used a mix for angel food cake. But other than that…

There are plenty of those deserts that I’d just love to sink my sweet teeth into: Jack Horner cake (made with prunes, of all things); quick coffee cake; pineapple-cherry-walnut squares (such pure sugar, it felt as if someone were sitting in your mouth, attacking your teeth with an awl). And Liz was an especially good pie baker. Apple pie baker. My sisters are both excellent pie bakers – not me; I bake, but am no good with crust – but there was nothing like my mother’s apple pie. The other matchless pie was my Aunt Margaret’s pecan.

All this scratch baking talk aside, when I was a kid, I craved store bought desert, which we’d have once in a blue moon. Sometimes it was a jelly roll. Sometimes a chocolate-covered, sicky sweet loaf cake from the Lucky Bakery.

And as a Worcester girl, I always wanted a Table Talk Pie.

I think the four-inch “snack pies” were a nickel a piece when I was a kid. One summer my sister Kath worked in Kelley Square, where Table Talk was located, and she could get pies discounted, in bulk, at the Table Talk Pie store. Yummers.

The apple and pecan weren’t much – no topping Liz and Peg on those fronts – but I loved the gluey pineapple, the gummy lemon, and the fabulous cherry.

My favorite Table Talk Pie memory was a hiking trip my roommate Joyce and I took one nice summer day when we had a a day off from our college summer waitress jobs at the Union Oyster House. We knew nothing about camping at that point in our lives, but we were game. So we headed up to Mt. Washington, wearing tee-shirts, cut-offs, and – ta-da – our white waitress shoes. We had a crummy backpack and a canteen, packed with our toothbrushes, sweatshirts, and provisions: a couple of ham sandwiches and a couple of Table Talk Pies.

We made it half-way up Mt. Washington and camped at the foot of Tuckerman’s Ravine, surrounded by a bunch of serious campers, all cute guys, all our age.

They took pity on us and fed us, but we didn’t want to gorge on the food they’d humped up the mountain, so we ate daintily, then snuck off into the woods and ate our goodies. We were pretty embarrassed, so after gobbling the pies, we crumpled up the cartons and aluminum plates and – I’m ashamed to say – tucked them into crevices between rocks, saving face (if that was possible, given the waitress shoes in lieu of hiking boots) but despoiling the wilderness.

Anyway, I’m always interested in home town fare – I still drink Polar soda – so I was delighted to read in The Boston Globe that Table Talk is growing:

Worcester-based Table Talk Pies is expanding its operations with Thursday’s official opening of a 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, adding more than 50 jobs to its 300-person workforce.

The space, in the South Worcester Industrial Park, will help the company increase production of its snack pies, to 4 million a week from 3 million. The pies, which come in larger sizes, too, have long been a staple of snack shelves. (Source: Boston Globe)

4 million little pie-eens a week. Yowza! That’s 200 million a year.

I have no idea how widely Table Talk pies are distributed, but I’m guessing most of those pies are being consumed in the Northeast.

Meanwhile, there’s other good Table Talk news.

Last year, they re-opened their long-closed retail store. It’s in something that’s being snootily called “The Canal District.” Next time I’m in Worcester, I’ll have to grab a Coney Island hot dog, then mosey on over to The Canal District for a pie. (I’ll take a pass on the pie milkshake. Sounds ghastly.)

Not to mention that TT pies are winning prizes:

Table Talk’s 8-inch salted caramel apple and 4-inch pecan pies recently netted the company two National Pie Championship awards. The American Pie Council, which bills itself as "the leading authority on the nation's most popular All-American treat,” held the competition last May. Table Talk was up against 22 bakers and 470 pie submissions. The pie company was recognized in the Commercial Division. (Source: Mass Live)

I’m sure that apple pie can’t hold a candle to Liz’s, nor that pecan hold a candle to Peg’s. Still, always nice to hear good news coming out of the old hometown.

November 1969. All we are saying, is give peace a chance.

There was no online.

I suppose we saw flyers. Or read about it in The Old Mole (a short-lived Cambridge leftie newspaper of the time.) Or heard through the grapevine. Maybe it was announced at the October 15th Moratorium Day demonstration on the Boston Common.

But my friends and I knew about it. And we were going.

November 15, 1969. The Moratorium, an anti-Vietnam War demonstration that brought half a million largely peaceful protestors to Washington, DC.

In July of 1969, I’d had negative interest in going to Woodstock.

But I was sure going to Washington.

The first anti-war protest I saw was in April 1967, in New York City. I was on the sidewalk, watching, a high school senior on my first trip to The City. I remember that a lot of the marchers carried daffodils. And that, for my English class, I wrote a poem about it. I mentioned the daffodils, but the only line I remember is “Chanting their shibboleths: anti-war.” It was perhaps the only poem in the history of the English language that include the word shibboleth.

But in the fall of 1967, having spent the summer working in a combat boot factory (while my friend Marie worked in the office of a factory that made the M-16 rifles that were being used in Vietnam), I heard Howard Zinn speak.

I heard a lot of speakers that fall.

I went to hear Ayn Rand at Jordan Hall, and thought she was full of hooey.

Zinn, an anti-war activist and Boston University professor, I agreed with.

The Vietnam War didn’t seem to make a boatload of sense.

So there I was in the fall of 1969, with 100,000 others on Boston Common. I member the excitement when the large group of students marching down through Kenmore Square met up with the even larger contingent coming over the Mass Ave Bridge from Cambridge. On the Common, John Grady, Emmanuel’s wild-haired Sociology Professor, was, I believe, waving the anarchist flag.

There was at least one counter-demonstrator, Jozef Mlot-Mroz, also known as the Polish Freedom Fighter. I can still hear him screeching, in his heavy Polish accent, “International Communist-Jewish Conspiracy.” (Con-speer-AHHH-cy) And Brandeis Jews. (Jooooooos.)

And there I was, a few weeks later, heading over to the American Friends Service Committee in Cambridge, the Quaker organization that was sponsoring the buses to Washington. As best I remember,the tickets cost $9.50. Or thereabouts. It was definitely somewhere between $9 and $10 – not a trivial amount for me and my friends Joyce and Mary Beth, who were making minimum wage at our crummy (but fun) snack bar jobs.

I can’t remember what we carried. I think I had the Boy Scout knapsack that had belonged to my cousin Rob. I suppose we threw in a few sandwiches and candy bars, maybe some gloves. There was no such thing as bottled water. Maybe I brought the matching canteen.

The night before the March on Washington, we all gathered in front of the Unitarian Church in Harvard Square to wait for our buses. Me, Joyce, Mary Beth, MB’s boyfriend Stan, and a couple of our other MIT guy friends.

We waited and waited. There were rumors that the buses weren’t coming, that the drivers had refused to drive.

And then they began rolling in.

We were on bus 40-something.

I think that ours was a yellow school bus. (I checked with Joyce, and she doesn’t remember, but thought that sounded about right.) Uncomfortable seats. No toilet. I’m sure we stopped on the NJ Turnpike. But we made it to Washington by dawn, and parked alongside hundreds, maybe thousands, of buses that had pulled in from all over.

I remember little of the demonstration itself. We marched, and then collected on The Mall. I think Dr. Spock spoke. Peter Paul and Mary were there. Pete Seeger. We sang, “All We Are Saying, Is Give Peace a Chance.”

We ran into Bob, our bus driver, who had changed out of his bus driver uniform and was there actually participating in the rally with another driver in civvies.

And it was cold, brutally cold.

Joyce and I both had on pea coats that we’d gotten at Mickey Finn’s War Surplus. Only they weren’t war surplus. Real pea coats were made for sailors freezing on ships, and were built to keep the cold out. Ours were cheap knockoffs that were stylin’ but didn’t exactly keep us warm.

The rally was winding down, but we had a couple of hours until we needed to get back on our bus. So Joyce and I started looking for someplace to warm up. We made our way to some sort of discount store, and bought a couple of bright yellow blankets for $3 a piece. God knows what they were made out of, but after we’d huddled under them for a few minutes, our cheapo pea jackets were covered with cheapo yellow fuzz.

We headed over to the Justice Department, where many of the rally-ers had dispersed to. We got there just after the protestors had been tear-gassed. So we missed that.

The ride back to Boston took forever. It took nearly five hours to get to Baltimore Airport, which is about 30 miles north of DC.

Bob was getting tired, so the guys on the bus took turns sitting next to him to keep him awake. Every few minutes, we all yelled, “Bob, stay awake.” At one point I think he let someone spell him. Hopefully, it wasn’t one of the guys passing around a flask of Southern Comfort. Between the exhaustion, the unpadded seats, the combination of too much heat and radiant freezing from the windows, and – I don’t remember but I’m quite sure occurred – smoking, it was pretty uncomfortable. Not getting shot at in a rice paddy uncomfortable, but uncomfortable enough. But the Southern Comfort was what got to me. Just the smell – I passed on taking a swig. I pressed my face against the cold window and tried to zone out. I didn’t want to have to ask Bob (or whoever was driving at that point) if he could pull over so I could puke.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary on the war on PBS. (More on that some time next week.)

When they showed the November 1969 Moratorium March on Washington, I searched the crowds, looking for a couple of 20 year olds with long straight hair and pea jackets that weren’t yet covered with yellow fuzz. I texted Joyce. She’d been looking for us, too.

That was nearly 50 year ago.

All we were saying was give peace a chance…

And then, six months later, they were shooting at us, cutting down the students, the protestors. (Four dead in Ohio…)

Food security, glorious food security

Arguably, two of the ugliest statues in Boston are the ones that make up the Irish Famine Monument. It’s a “compare and contrast” installation, with a skeletal family in rags (before) and a confident, sturdy immigrant family (after). It certainly makes sense to have some type of Famine acknowledgement in Boston, one of the main centers of the Irish Diaspora, and the landing place for many who fled Ireland in the 1840’s. But this monument: pretty darned hideous. That it’s plunked at the front doors of a Walgreen’s, rather than in a park somewhere – why not the Rose Kennedy Greenway? – makes it a bit ludicrous.

But there’s no arguing the centrality of the Famine in both the Irish and the Irish-American experience. Among other after effects is the incredibly generosity that the Irish (in Ireland) demonstrate whenever and wherever there’s a modern-day famine. Volunteers, donations: if there’s a food crisis anywhere, the Republic of Ireland definitely punches above its weight.

Anyway, with the latest news, the Irish may be able to lay to rest some of the memories and fears that the Great Hunger wrought.

That’s because Ireland was just named the “Country Best Able to Feed Its People.” The U.S. is fourth, following Austria and France.

Ireland is the world’s most “food-secure” nation, improving its food affordability, availability, quality and safety while the U.S. has stagnated, according to a copy of the sixth annual Global Food Security Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. (Source: Bloomberg)

Not that there’s all that much to worry about here. It’s not like we’re in any danger of becoming Haiti, Burundi, or Yemen, which are all in bottom rankings. Still:

Worldwide, food security fell for the first time in five years, largely because of increases in the number of refugees, weather disasters and a decline in global political stability…

“Food security is in reverse,” said Robert Powell, a senior consultant with the Economist Intelligence Unit in New York. “If we’re aiming for zero hunger, we’re going in the wrong direction.”

The categories that went into the scoring are Affordability, Availability, Quality and Safety, and Natural Resources and Resilience.

A couple of comments here.

Those who’ve never been to Ireland, those who were only there – say – 40 years ago, those who equate their grandmother’s cooking with Irish cuisine…all of these constituencies would be surprised to learn that the food in Ireland is actually quite good. Chicken tastes like chicken. Salmon tastes like salmon. Butter tastes like butter.

Sure, there’s plenty of bad meals to be had in Ireland. It hasn’t sat there a hop, skip and a jump from England all those years not to have a few bad meals rub off. (Think mushy peas.) But, for the most part, you can get fresh and tasty food in Ireland without breaking your back looking for it, or the bank paying for it. Even the pizza’s good.

So, quality: check!

As for natural resources, other than peat and plenty of rain, I can’t think of all that many. But, man, are the Irish ever resilient.

They bounced back from the Famine. They bounced back (mostly) from centuries of insanity at the hands of the Catholic Church. They bounced back (absolutely) from centuries of oppression at the hands of the Brits, and even out did the ur source in their use of the mother tongue. They’ve made tremendous strides making their way back from the economic collapse of the past decade, which hit them pretty much as bad as it did any other European country.

So, resilience: check!

I walk by that ugly famine monument a couple of times a week, and really don’t pay it all that much attention. But next time I’m on Washington Street, I may give it a nod and pass the news on to that starving family. No more watching the corn and grain exported to England while the Irish dropped dead in the streets. No more corpses by the wayside, with their mouths green from eating grass. No more crawling your way to Queenstown in hopes of getting on a coffin ship.

Ireland, topping the world in terms of food security.

Good on yez!

Tap on tap at Gillette Stadium?

The big football news this past weekend was, of course, the Divider in Chief doing one of the things he does best (i.e., dividing), and on how his targets (NFL teams in general, African-American players in particular) would react to his nastiness, his baiting, his irresponsible ranting and weird attacks. Our local boys, the New England Patriots, responded like just about all the other teams. Management (the owner is a mega buddy of MAGA boy) was “deeply disappointed” by Trump’s words. The team members locked arms during the playing of the national anthem as a sign of solidarity. Some athletes knelt (all African-Americans I believe). Some fans, semi-responding to a White House request – in reality, he’d ask for walkouts, not jeers – booed  the payers. And Our Tom Brady actually and surprisingly came out with a quasi-political statement explicitly disagreeing with Trump.

So much more important than worrying about what’s happening on the nuclear war front…

Anyway, the game went on, with Our Tom pulling out one of his signature down-to-the-wire wins. One of the players who knelt in the pre-game protest, rookie Brandin Cooks, scored the winning touchdown. All was, I’m quite sure, forgiven by the boo-birds.

Meanwhile, it was hot in these parts on Sunday, way hotter than is usual for September, and it was particularly sweltering at Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play. I know the feeling. Years ago, I was at an afternoon game at Fenway Park, mid-July, hot and muggy. I was guzzling water throughout the game – that is, up until the 5th inning or so, when I had to leave while I could still walk out, as opposed to being carried out by EMT’s. There is nothing like baking in a sports stadium sun, that’s for sure.

The folks who were at Sunday’s game, perhaps worn out by all the booing (kneeling African-American athletes) and cheering (Our Tom leading the boys of autumn to a big win), in that dreadfully hot, unshaded stadium, built up a powerful thirst.

Gillette was somewhat prepared for the temperatures – they’d doubled up on the water bottles.

However, the demand far exceeded what they were able to hold in their concession stands and was almost four times the inventory they would have had for an average game.

As different concession stands ran out of water bottles throughout the course of the day, fans asked for cups of tap water instead. Gillette concession stands don’t have the smaller complimentary water cups you may find at other restaurants, so concessionaires resorted to selling tap water in soda cups for $4.50. (Source: Boston Globe)

Not quite in the same category as the gougers who were charging Harvey and Irma victims, say, a hundred bucks for a 20-pack of water bottles but, hey, when you run the numbers, not that far off.

Unlike Fenway Park, which mercifully allows you to carry in your own water bottle, no can do at Gillette Stadium. As for helping yourself to free water…I’ve been to Gillette a few times (Springsteen concert, soccer games), and don’t recall whether there are any bubblers there. Whether there are or not, there are always the taps in the restrooms. But to take advantage of that, of course, you need a cup. Of course, most people don’t think to carry a cup with them when heading to a sports event. And it doesn’t sound like the concessionaires were interested in handing out free cups.

Needless to say, the Twittersphere, Patriots’ fandom division, made the quick shift from debating whether:

• Patriots’ owner Bob Kraft had been strong enough/too strong in his reaction to the criticism being hurled the NFL’s way from his Oval Office BFF;
• To counting noses on who took a knee during “The Star Spangled Banner;
• To going wild about what they were being charged for a few swigs of water when the Patriots (a plenty $$$ flush team) should have been giving water out and setting up misting stations where people could cool down. (The Red Sox now have a few of these around when’s it brutally hot at a game.)

Obviously, the directive to overcharge fans for free water didn’t come from on high. There’s no way the venerable Kraft Family knew this was going on. They may be as greedy and venal as the next guys, but this is definitely not their brand. Other than Bob Kraft’s odd support and affection for Trump – Kraft is a lifelong Democrat – the Kraft brand is known for a) creating a winning football franchise out of some pretty thin air; b) the family’s extensive philanthropy; and c) the fact that, before his wife’s body was cold, Bob Kraft had himself a girlfriend who was younger than his daughters-in-law. (Maybe that’s the commonality with Trump? Kraft himself says that their friendship was solidified when Trump was very solicitous of Kraft after his wife died.)

Some are guessing that those running the concession are charged by the concession owners for the liquids they dispense by counting cups. Thus, they would be charged for giving away a cup for free. This theory does hold some water. Still, one might think cooler heads might have prevailed and figured out that people were going to be wicked pissed if they had to pay $4.50 for a cup of tap water. Even though, when you buy a bottle of Desani – and, I’m sure, plenty of other water brands – you’re paying for tap in a bottle. Not to mention that, if you’re willing to pay $4.50 for a cup of spray soda, you’re mostly paying for flavored tap water and a bit of fizz. So why not pay $4.50 for something that’s arguably better for you: good old tap water? None of us thinks this way, of course. I’d be plenty ticked off if I’d had to pay that much for water. Maybe a nominal fee for the cup. But even that…

Anyway, the Patriots have apologized to their fans, and have promised not to let it happen in the future. (Just in case, if I ever go to Gillette again, I’ll make sure to carry a collapsible cup in my bag.)

Ah, well, nice to have a tempest in a teapot to focus on, rather than fret about what Trump’s got up his sleeve to further pull the country apart.

“What the Fluff?” (All hail, Archibald Query!)

Somehow along the way, I missed the fact that this is the centennial year for a local delicacy.

Yes, Marshmallow Fluff is celebrating it’s 100th anniversary this year.

I try to stay loyal to local brands: Worcester’s own Polar Soda; Teddie’s peanut butter; sometimes even Prince Spaghetti (“Anthony……). And if I were still a Fluff consumer, I’d of course be buying the very Marshmallow Fluff that Archibald Query first created (discovered? invented?) way back in 1917.

But although Marshmallow Fluff was a staple of my childhood, I can’t remember the last time I had a Fluffernutter.

In Galway last May, I did pass a sweetshop that had Marshmallow Fluff (among other American sweet stuffs) on display in its window. And I was tempted to go in and buy a jar, no doubt paying triple what it would cost back home. But what was I going to do with it? Lug it back through Customs?

I eat peanut butter pretty much every week. It’s one of a handful of items – it may, in fact lead the list – that I always have on hand, but the idea of eating a Fluffernutter (on white bread, of course) just does not appeal. This was, of course, not always the case.

Growing up, I loved peanut butter and Fluff. One of the worst feelings on earth was taking that opaque jar of Fluff off the shelf and discovering that there was so little of it left, it had hardened to a cement like consistency. Honestly, just as Elmer’s Glue started out as a dairy product, you have to wonder whether Marshmallow Fluff originally began life as mortar.

Sigh!

My mother put Marshmallow Fluff to a couple of other uses.

When we didn’t have marshmallows to float in a cup of cocoa, she plopped in a spoonful of Marshmallow Fluff. And since we seldom had “real” marshmallows in the winter, which was when we drank cocoa, a cup of cocoa generally meant a dob of Marshmallow Fluff.

And she used Marshmallow Fluff as a filling for some sort of fake Devil Dog/Whoopie Pie she made on occasion.

Anyway, spotting it in Galway aside, I don’t think of Marshmallow Fluff all that often, other than when I see the news about Boston ex-urb Somerville’s annual “What the Fluff?” Festival, which was held last Saturday. The Festival paid special tribute this year to Archibald Query, the immigrant (from Canada) confectioner who invented this delightful item. Query lived to be 90 (he died in 1964), perhaps on a diet rich in Fluffernutters.

I went to grammar school with a fellow named Roger Query. It was never mentioned, but perhaps Roger Q was related to Archibald. It’s an odd enough last name. And I certainly hope they were related. The only other famous kid I went to school with was Mary Shea, who wrote to the Arthur Godfrey Show to ask what makes hula dancer Haleloke’s belly wiggle, and got her letter read on the air. Of course, my friend Bernadette’s father once stopped and helped Rex Trailer (star of a local kiddie cowboy-themed show) change a flat tire. So there was that brush with fame.

It didn’t take much to impress us back in the day. If we knew that Roger Query’s grandfather or great-grandfather had invented Marshamallow Fluff, well…

Sorry I missed the “What the Fluff?” Festival. Maybe next year.

Meanwhile, all hail Archibald Query.

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

For more on my love affair with Marshmallow Fluff, see Fluff (2015).

 

Oh, those darned bicyclists

With all the truly dreadful and scary news out there, it’s something of a relief to read about something a tad bit daffy. Thus, I did so enjoy last week’s local hoo-hah that took place in the Boston suburb of Arlington, where a bicyclist on the Minuteman Bikeway decided to run a stop sign.

As a pedestrian who has regular close encounters with bicyclists, I can guarantee you that Karen Cady-Pereira isn’t the only bicyclist out there cruising through stop signs and otherwise ignoring the rules of the road that bicyclists are supposed to observe. It’s pretty much an everyday occurrence to nearly miss being winged by someone on a bike running a light, riding on the sidewalk, or pedaling the wrong way down a one way street. Not to mention riding their bikes over the Arthur Fiedler pedestrian bridge that takes me over to the Charles River Esplanade for a walk – despite the signs that clearly say “WALK YOUR BIKE” posted at either end of the bridge. I have taken to thanking the bicyclists who heed the sign.

I’m a Boston pedestrian, which pretty much by definition makes me a jaywalker. I’ve slowed down a bit as I creak into old age, but I’m still a regular. You can always spot the tourists trying to cross the street. They’re the ones obediently waiting for the walk sign to come on, even when there are no cars in sight, or when the cars are all in gridlock. The Bostonians look both ways – you have to look both ways, because even on a one-way street there’s a pretty good chance that there’s someone on a bike heading at you the wrong way – and then charge ahead.

But the tourists stand there, pressing their out-of-town thumbs against the walk sign button, hoping that the light will change and they’ll be able to make their legal passage. Little do they know that most of those walk sign buttons are placebos, with no connection to the actual walk sign, which is more than likely on an automated timer. The only thing you get out of pressing the button is the psychological feeling that you’re doing something, making progress. Knowing this, Bostonians realizes that, if there are no cars coming, you might as well scoot across or face a good long nonsense wait.

By the way, I read a while back that pedestrians in jaywalking cities are less likely to be hit than law-abiders. Law-abiders believe that the cars will be law-abiding as well, so they’re not on the lookout for cars (and bicycles) running red lights, etc.

But back to our bicycling friends, and the Great Minuteman Bikeway Protest of 2017. Because Karen Cady-Pereira didn’t just breeze through a stop sign.

[The] 59-year-old Belmont woman was arrested by police in Arlington this week after she failed to stop her bike at a stop sign along the Minuteman Bikeway and refused to pull over for a bike-mounted officer. She said she ignored the officer as a kind of protest.  (Source: Boston Globe)

The bicycle officer took 50-yard chase, and eventually pulled in front of Cady-Pereira, forcing her to stop.

At that point, the officer asked Cady-Pereira if she had heard his repeated commands.

“She stated she did hear and see this officer,” the report said. “But she doesn’t think that it’s right that the police stop bicyclists and the police should stop cars not bicyclists.”

Cady-Pereira ended up in cuffs and brought to the Arlington police station. (The charges against her ended up being dismissed.)

In a telephone interview Thursday, two days after the charges were dismissed in court, Cady-Pereira said she disobeyed the officer because she was set on her destination and felt “annoyed” that an officer tried to stop her — and then followed her — for riding through a stop sign on the path.

The cop may well have been a jerk. It’s certainly been known to happen. And being ignored by someone I’m guessing looks like a lefty-loony-privileged-oddball--feminist (in other words, someone who looks like me) may well have set him off. (According to Cady-Pereira, who does acknowledge that she “was totally out of line, the officer was “just exploding with anger” when he caught up with her.)

Still, whether you’re on foot, in a car, or in a bicycle, it’s particularly not a good idea to ignore a cop (even a seemingly innocuous one on a bike) trying to stop you for actually breaking a law, no matter how Mickey Mouse the law you just broke is. Never a good idea to wave a red flag in front of a bull. (I’m don’t want to get into race here, but if I were an African-American being waved over by a cop, I might well give into the irresistible and possibly fatal impulse to just floor it.)

Cary-Pereira’s protest was motivated by her belief that “cyclists should be treated more like pedestrians.”

Except that cyclists aren’t like pedestrians. They share the roads with vehicles, not with walkers.

Obviously, to lump all bicyclists together based on the behavior of a minority would be unfair, maybe even bicyclistist. But in my experience, there is certainly a goodly minority of bicyclists who decide for themselves, in an ad hoc way, when they want to be pedestrians and when they want to be cars. And they do it for their convenience, not for anyone else’s safety. (The bicyclist scofflaw sub-category I don’t mind is the parents riding their bikes on sidewalks when they have their young learner bicyclists with them. They’re almost always moving slowly, carefully, and apologetically. Yes, I suppose they could be walking their bikes when they’re on heavily pedestrian-trafficked sidewalks, but they mostly don’t bother me – especially if the kiddos are using training wheels.)

For her part, Cady-Pereira wants “a new set of rules” governing bicyclists. She may well be right.  But I’m curious about what these new rules might be. (I repeat: bicyclists aren’t pedestrians.)

Anyway, with more and more bicyclists out there, we all – pedestrians and drivers, alike – need to be more aware and accommodating of their presence. But surely this is a two-way street. Look, I’ll even consider giving up jaywalking if the anarchists on bicycles will obey their rules of the road.

Fire next time…

I don’t know about you, but if I had 20,000 €500 bills, I wouldn’t be cutting them into tiny little strips and flushing them down the toilet.

But someone who’s most decidedly not me, and most decidedly not you, did just that in Switzerland, turning what used to be a metaphor for wasting one’s money, and turning it into an literal thing.

The €500 is something of the bad dude of currency. Since its such a high-denomination bill, it’s a natural for money laundering and other criminal activities. Carrying a wad of fivers takes up a lot less room – one fifth the size and weight, in fact – as carrying a bunch of one hundreds that add up to the same amount. In fact, it’s so commonly up to no good that some wise-guys have nicknamed it the “Bin Laden.” Because it’s used for so many nefarious purposes, the €500 is being taken out of circulation. (Despite our ups and downs, and despite what the bitcoiners have to say, the US dollar still does tend to be the currency of good, bad, and indifferent choice worldwide. It’s just that the highest denomination US bill in general circulation is the $100. And, bang for the cash and carry buck, the Benjamin has some problems competing with the Bin Laden. I’m sure that those who want to MAGA will want to take a look into this matter.)

Anyway, the money in question was found inside of clogged toilets, and in trash cans outside of unclogged toilets, in a Geneva branch bank – not surprisingly UBS – and in a couple of nearby restaurants.

The public prosecutor’s office in Geneva said that the money appeared to have been disposed of by two Spanish citizens, whom it declined to identify, and that unless there was evidence that the cash had been obtained illegally or was destined for criminal activity, no charges could be brought. “The fact that you put the money into toilets is weird, but not criminal,” said Vincent Derouand, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office. (Source: NY Times)

“Weird, but not criminal” sure describes plenty of goings on. But just as there’s criminal (jay-walking) and then there’s criminal (murder in the first degree), there’s weird (my mother’s whistling “La Vie en Rose” under her breath, which you wouldn’t think was a heritable trait but which apparently is) and then there’s weird (as in flushing $120K worth of Euros down the toilet).

Finding wads of cash in toilets is not a common occurrence, however, and the story drew attention in the national news media.

Not to mention the international news media, which is where I saw it.

UBS, whose Rue de la Corraterie branch is a short walk away, on the edge of a quiet area known as the “Quartier des Banques,” or neighborhood of banks, declined to comment. The Geneva police said the investigation was focused on damage to the toilets of the restaurants where the money had been found. The prosecutor’s office said a lawyer for the two Spanish suspects had paid for damage to the restaurants’ plumbing, but added it could not provide further information because it was a private arrangement.

So, what does this sound like to you? Some guys who didn’t want to be caught holding the bag containing beaucoup d’ill gotten gain? Counterfeiters who got cold feet?

Fun to mull, and very Inspector Clouseau-esque, no?

In any case, I enjoyed this one because it reminded me of my late and much lamented father.

As part of his time-served as a charter member of the Greatest Generation, U.S. Navy Division, my father spent a couple of years during WWII stationed at Navy Pier in Chicago. He was a Chief Petty Officer, and his job was paperwork. Anyway, after the war ended, he and his boss, some 90-day-wonder lieutenant, were told that they would be discharged once all their paperwork was cleared up.

So they crated up all that they could and sent it off to St. Louis. As a kid, I thought that this was something of a metaphor for sending things off to nowhere – I had visions of a giant safe just showing up at the train depot, where it would remain unclaimed forever – but St. Louis was, as I later learned, the repository for military personnel records.

Anyway, after they got finished packing up and shipping off everything that they possibly could, my father and his boss decided to flush whatever was left down the toilet. Or so he told us. I doubt that he would have flushed anything important. I doubt that there’s some geezer veteran tottering around, insisting that he was stationed in Chicago during the war, even if they can find no record of his service. But, knowing my father, and knowing his tolerance for Mickey Mouse rules and regulations, and for bureaucracy, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if he decided that some of the forms he needed to clear up were completely flushable.

No way, however, would Al have ever flushed a $5 bill down the head – as it was called in the U.S. Navy – let alone a €500.

But those Spaniards in Geneva? With all those €500’s to burn, errrrr, flush.

Wouldn’t it have been easier and safer to just burn them? (Thanks to my husband’s stint in the CIA, I actually know how to burn paper so that you don’t leave a trace.)

So many mysteries, so little time.

Talk about off the rack…

When it comes to shopping for clothing, I’m pretty much a half-and-halfer. I order a lot of stuff online – Tribal pants are Tribal pants, Yala shirts are Yala shirts – but I also do some in-store buying. Hey, I’m walking by Lord & Taylor and I realize I need new undies.

But the truth about clothing is that I’m nowhere near the shopper I used to be.

There were periods in my life, when I worked full time and actually needed more clothing, when I shopped regularly. At times, I “grazed the B” (i.e., poked around Filene’s Basement) two to three times a week. Sometimes I came home empty-handed, but you never knew what you might find.

But now, when it comes to clothing, the thrill is gone. I wear the same things all the time, replacing them when they wear out or I just get sick of them. I still like to poke around the women’s clothing stores – the ones aimed at reasonably well-off women of a certain age – that sell the kind of things that pass for cool and stylish for reasonably well-off women of a certain age. I do go on an occasional buying jag, typically at the change of seasons. And I do like having something new to wear. Just not as much as I used to. These days, when I think about clothing shopping, I’m mostly ‘meh.’

And yet I do not welcome the thought of clothing stores disappearing from the face of the earth, a long-predicted day that appears to be creeping closer. And Nordstrom, it seems, is getting in on the act of facilitating this eventuality. (Guess I should save my breath wishing that a “real” Nordstrom’s, rather than just a Rack, would open up in downtown Boston. How is it that, with all the high-end condos sprouting up all over the place, the only new stores in downtown Boston seem to be Old Navy and Primark? Guess the rich folk who live in them just order in. Which, now that I think of it, is probably the case. The other day, I was walking by the delivery entrance to the new – and ultra-posh – Millennium Tower, which stands on the site of the old Filene’s. And there was a Stop & Shop PeaPod delivery truck backing in. Given that there’s a full Roche Brothers grocery store in the basement of the building – the site of the old Filene’s Basement, in fact – where the Millennium Tower stands, and that the Millennium Tower dwellers can access Roche Bros. without having to step outside, I was kind of surprised that someone would still be ordering their food from PeaPod.)

Anyway,

The slow destruction of in-person retail has generated a new tactic by struggling American stores. Looking to cut costs while keeping consumers interested, they’ve taken a page from the e-commerce playbook. Nordstrom Local is the latest iteration of this concept: clothing retailers with little or no merchandise. Come in, pick out a dress, and place your order—then go home empty-handed.

At first, the inexorable march of the online economy was stalled by the apparel industry—you can’t try on clothes you’re ordering online. The new store-without-stock strategy tries to exploit this obstacle. By having merchandise shipped to your home from warehouses, these stores don’t have to flip inventory every season or mark down piles of sweaters that aren’t selling. Most important, supply chains don’t have to route trucks from warehouses to stores. That’s a lot of slashed overhead.(Source: Bloomberg)

Well, talk about sucking all the joy out of an impulse buy. Of course, recognizing that instant gratification is the name of the shopping game, some of these stockless-stores will offer a few bibelots so you have something to stow in your tote bag. Plus, they’ll offer same day delivery if you bop in early enough in the day. Still, there’s something missing from this sort of dry, good-less shopping experience.

And it’s not just Nordstrom Inc.—Wal-Mart is betting there’s a future in these sort-of stores, too. “A store with no inventory becomes very, very efficient,” said Michael Brown, a partner at the retail division of consulting firm A.T. Kearney. “You can get very streamlined.”

I can imagine that a store with no inventory does indeed become “very, very efficient.” The good ol’ ‘suppose they gave a war and nobody came’ strategy. We’re already working our way towards libraries with no books. What’s next? Restaurants with no food? Hospitals with no beds?

Ptui! Don’t know quite where it’ll be, but I’m going shopping…

Mamma Mia! ABBA’s touring as holograms….

God knows, the members of ABBA aren’t getting any younger. Three of them (yes, I had to look it up) are in their 70’s, and the “kid” of the lot is 67. So I can understand why they might not want to go on a tour, especially when you think about having to climb into those costumes. I don’t know about ABBA, but I sure have a few more lbs on me than I had in 1975.

What’s with ABBA, given that their peer geezer rock stars are still getting out there – The Boss, The Stones, Aerosmith, Jimmy Buffett, Warren Buffett ? But, hey, ABBA broke up in 1982. And they just might not want to get back together, other than virtually. They’re probably living pretty comfy up there in Sweden, raking in the residuals every time some community theater stages Mamma Mia.

And so, their next tour will not exactly be in person.

Instead, they'll be recreated into "digital avatars" for a virtual reality tour in 2019, something which was hinted on their Facebook page last October.This, despite all members of ABBA being very much alive.

"It's perfect. We can be on stage while I’m home walking the dogs," ABBA's Benny Andersson, told the Herald Sun.

"I don't have to leave my house. If this really works there’ll be a lot of artists wanting to do the same thing, even artists who are still young and still touring. It’s a very interesting project." (Source: Mashable)

Can’t argue with the desire for the performers not wanting to leave the house. There are plenty of days when I don’t want to open the door and get out in the elements, either. It’s just that the damn Fitbit is there on my wrist, staring at me, goading me to get 10,000 steps in that just can’t be achieved by circling the dining room table.

But you can argue whether or not the hologram scenario is all that perfect. After all, one of the beauties of seeing Springsteen in concert is admiring the fact that, in his late 60’s, he can still pump out a non-stop 3 hour+ performance without flagging. And there’s something to be said for the wonderment of hearing James Taylor, still in sweet voice, singing “Sweet Baby James” at age 69.

It might be interesting to see a hologram concert, but I certainly wouldn’t pay for it the same way I’d pay to see the real thing. That said, pretty much the only way I’d go to see ABBA in concert would be because of the gimmickry of the technology.

There will still be some live aspects to the concert: 

According to the Herald Sun, the band members of ABBA have had their measurements taken over the past year, and the hologram's end result will resemble the band at their peak in the late-1970s.

Okay. Now that’s funny. Wouldn’t we all like to see a projected image of ourselves at our peak, or whatever you want to call that idyllic period (or so it seems now) when you’re in your twenties.

The quartet will be projected in front of a live band, with the vocals stripped from the records and audio from their 1977 Australian tour.

"It’ll be like you're in 1977, with a live band, live backing vocals, a great set design with lights and sound, everything will be like a live concert," Andersson added.

Well, except for one critical difference.

Other than for a losing candidate in last year’s French presidential election, most of the performances that have used holograms have been of dead artists. Tupac “appeared” at Coachella in 2012, and Michael Jackson put in a posthumous appearance at the Billboard Awards in 2015.

But ABBA’s alive and well. What’s their excuse, other than wanting to stay home with the dogs? (Admittedly a reasonable one.) Didn’t they used to be super troupers? Now, alas, it’s all money, money, money – without having to stir their booted stumps for.

I’ll be interested to see what they’ll be charging for this weirdly tech nostalgia act. Just what will people be willing to pay see that girl, watch that scene, digging the Dancing Hologram?

 

Kink Room? Oh, Grow the F Up

It seems as if not a week goes by without some new story about sexism in the tech industry – startups, around-for-a-whilers, VC’s – you name it, women are coming forth to expose the harassment, the crude behavior. As someone who has worked in tech-ville for nearly 40 years, I can report that a lot of what’s being brought out is nothing new.

Models doing demos? Yawn…

I remember working one trade show, in NYC, that focused on technology for Wall Street.

Now, if you want to get the double whammy thing going, well, tech and Wall Street is something of a perfect, lurid storm. Boys will be boys, meet boys will be boys.

Anyway, at this one show, I remember a bunch of models working the floor wearing French maid outfits (baby doll length), complete with black sheer stockings and towering high heels. I believe they were working on behalf of British Telecom, and I believe that they were giving out boxes of Twinings English Breakfast tea. Right.

At another show – ultra techie, but not financial services related – I wanted to get a demo from a company we were going to partner with. I went to the booth, which was staffed by gorgeous young women in black cocktail dresses. I asked a couple of them about seeing a product demo, and was met with blank stares. Then I spied a woman who, while wearing a black dress, was wearing a frumpy black dress. No makeup. And sensible shoes. Bingo! She was the one person “manning” the booth when I dropped by who actually worked for the company and knew something about what they did.

So the demo dolllies are nothing new.

Neither are crude jokes and crude remarks. We used to just roll our eyes at this crap, or tell the guys to knock it off. There was one guy I worked with who was famous for staring at the breasts of any woman he was speaking with. We had a running joke with him, “These are our eyes”, we would tell him, pointing to our eyes, “these are our boobs. When you talk to someone, you look them in the eyes, not the boobs.” But women today – good for them – aren’t going to put up with the sort of behavior that we used to brush off.

Hard to imagine any women these days willing to work on a product – sold to Wall Street-ers, natch – that was called AutoBJ. I would begin every presentation with a declaration that I had heard everything there was to be heard about this unfortunate brand name. The same company had run an ad with an image shot from looking between the legs of a young hottie in a miniskirt. At yet another place I worked, where I was the only woman on the strategy team charged with figuring out how we were going to – ho-ho! – penetrate the financial services industry, I sat through a meeting at which one senior blowhard declared that the market was a prone woman, legs spread, awaiting our arrival. Bonus points because – ho-ho! – the company was name Wang.

Early on in my career, there were plenty of sexually charged situations at work. Sure, there was an occasional randy exec roaming around – at a holiday party, the president, while on the dance floor,asked a young and attractive colleague to go home with him. In his words, “You’d come home with me if I weren’t the president.” Her good riddance response was “If you weren’t the president, I wouldn’t be dancing with you.”

But most of the snap, crackle and pop in the air was because there were a ton of young single people at work, meeting other young single people. Without expending a scintilla of energy, I can come up with a good half-dozen couples who met their spouse at work in the first place I worked out of grad school.

But I have to say that I never came across anything like Upload, a Silicon Valley virtual reality (VR) startup that has been a VC darling, and recently settled with a female ex-employee who sued after being fired. Upload was a party-hearty environment. Models doing demos, liquor flowing.

The freewheeling atmosphere was not restricted to the evening hours. There was a “rampant sexual behavior and focus” in the Upload office that created “an unbearable environment,” a former employee, Elizabeth Scott, said in a lawsuit filed in May.

Ms. Scott said in her suit that the Upload office had a room with a bed “to encourage sexual intercourse at the workplace.” It was referred to as the kink room. Men who worked for the company were described in the suit as frequently talking about being so sexually aroused by female colleagues that it was impossible to concentrate.

When Ms. Scott, Upload’s digital media manager, complained about the hostile atmosphere and other issues in March with her supervisor, she was fired, the suit said. In a statement after the suit was filed, Upload said that “our employees are our greatest asset” and that “these allegations are entirely without merit.” (Source: NY Times)

Ah, but then they settled and apologized. Guess it was true that, as Ms. Scott alleged, she was once kicked out of her room in a house that Upload had rented for a conference so that the chief exec could use it for sex. And it wasn’t just hanky panky that was going on.

She said in the suit that she had other work, too: The women at Upload were required to do what were called “womanly tasks,” including cleaning up. They were also told to act like “mommies” to the men and help them with whatever they needed. The suit presented a portrait of a deeply entitled male culture, one that clashed with the fresh start VR seemed to offer the tech industry. But Ms. Scott’s suit was the second in the virtual reality industry in just a few months to present such an unwelcoming picture.

Well, no one had to tell us to act like mommies, but there was plenty of that back in the day. How many notes did we leave in the kitchen, in the conference rooms, that said “You mother doesn’t work here. Please pick up after yourself.”

But, of course, we’d end up throwing the coffee cups out and mopping off the tables.

And don’t get me going on who always ended up cleaning out the communal fridge…

Girls will be girls, I guess.

Maybe things were this bad way back when, and I just missed it because by the time I got into tech I was older (30-ish), wiser, and no one’s idea of a good-time girl. But I think that one of the reasons that it’s likely worse now is that so many of the young guys have been too busy with gaming, “social” media, online porn, and tech devices that they actually don’t know how to act around women. However nerdly and awkward the guys of my era were, once you got them to look you in the eyes and not the boobs, they were mostly fine.

At Upload, the kink room is now occupied by Anne Ahola Ward, a late thirties, married, no-nonsense looking woman who is Upload’s new COO. It’s

…now Ms. Ward’s office. There is no bed there. She has instituted mandatory anti-harassment training: a two-hour session led by an outside consultant. There is now a human resources department. People have formal job descriptions. And as a joke — but not quite — people in the office gave Ms. Ward a sheriff’s badge.

Am I ever happy to be out of the fray…

Hempfest by any other name

As I write this, it is 8 p.m. on Sunday. Peace is upon the land. Hempfest has ended. The vendor stalls have been dismantled, the lousy bands are no longer blaring their lousy music, speakers are no longer ranting their Carrie Nation rants about the perils of gin (or whatever: when I walked through the other evening, that did seem to be the rant – but I’d had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, so maybe I was just being paranoid), and the contact-high miasma of pot is beginning to dissipate.

Ah, Hempfest.

Oh, now they’re calling it the Freedom Rally, but Hempfest by any other name has been going on for nearly 30 years now.

I recall walking through Boston Common during one of the early editions, buoyed by the thought that the young folks were becoming politically engaged. It was about the environment, I was quite sure. And then I took in a lungful of pure Boston Common air, started reading some of the signs, and caught on. Oh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with MJ.

I, in fact, was one of the majority of voters who, last November, voted to legalize it here in the Commonwealth.

The promised pot shops haven’t opened yet, but I think they’ll be coming next year. When they do, maybe I’ll make some marijuana brownies for old time sake. Or take a toke down memory lane.

Not that I was ever much of a pot head, but I well remember how proud I was when I graduated from twirling the tobacco out of a cigarette and stuffing it with weed – a complete amateur act – to perfecting rolling it on my own in a ZigZag. I remember how fun (and scary) it was - you could get kicked off campus for having a beer in your room, for God’s sake – to light up in the dorm, and activity that involved wetting a towel and shoving it in the crack of the door; fully opening the window in the dead of winter; and sitting with a couple of friends on the window ledge with our heads out the window. And I recall nearly breaking a tooth on a pan of frozen Sara Lee Brownies –when you have munchies, there’s no time to wait for these suckers to thaw.

No, I wasn’t a regular user – more an occasional, social indulger.

Still, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale. (What was the point of not inhaling?)

So I’m not going to go all prude-y tsk tsk about Hempfest.

But as an aging curmudgeon who lives in the hood – within ear shot of the bad blasting music – I’m happy it’s over. And I really don’t think that this needs to consume three days of our public space and time. Didn’t this used to be a one-day event?

Anyway, coming back from an early dinner on Saturday evening, I decided to forge my way through the Hempfest crowd rather than skirt the Common.

So I got to meander my way through the completely stoned crowds, take in all the food vendors – most of which seemed to be roast meat or vegan delights: have the munchies demands changed over the decades, and take note of the assorted tawdry on display.

Those tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts sure haven’t changed much over the last 50 years, that I’ll say. Bandanas are still in style. And, apparently, mean people still do suck. (Good to see that some things stay the same…)

What has seemed to have changed is the bong technology and design. Am I imaging things, or were there actually bongs with attached gas masks on offer at Hempfest? I can’t be entirely sure, as I wasn’t stopping, just letting myself be carried along with the crowd, letting myself take an occasional whiff-een, and wondering whether I still have The Harder They Come CD around somewhere. (Answer: YES! Make that JA! I had to look around a bit, as it was misfiled. Jimmy Cliff should have been between Johnny Cash and Nat King Cole, not after Nat King Cole. But, as the song says, “you can get it if you really want.” Great album, by the way.)

I was one of the few over-30’s in the crowd. A couple of geezer hippies were there reliving their tie-dyed youth. Or maybe they were still living it, as it didn’t look like they’d ever left. And then there were Mom and Pop tourist, saucer-eyed, trying to figure out just what craziness they’d wandered in on. This wasn’t the Minnesota State Fair, for sure.

I made it home safely, of course, put my left-over chicken in the fridge and popped open a can of Polar raspberry lime seltzer. Who says getting older isn’t exciting?

There is, of course, more news to be had on the weed front.

As I read in yesterday’s Boston Globe, Weedmaps:

…one of the country’s larger and more established marijuana firms, is going all-in on Massachusetts and its new recreational pot market.

The California company, which sells software to licensed cannabis operators and publishes a popular online directory of dispensaries for consumers, is finalizing a lease for a downtown Boston office to accommodate its sales and lobbying team. (Source: Boston Globe)

With all the commotion about whether Boston is going to break its neck trying to get Amazon to build big here, here’s Weedmaps sneaking in the back door and even joining the Chamber of Commerce. (And who wouldn’t want to see that crowd one toke over the line, sweet Mary.)

Even more than raising an eyebrow about their joining the C of C, after all my years in the software biz, it never would have occurred to me that there’s specialized software for the cannabis industry. Far out, man! Or is it groovy? Of just plain oh wow?

Its initial presence in Boston will be modest: about 10 people. Eventually, Weedmaps may recruit some of the Boston area’s copious programming and analytical talent to help advance an ambitious big-data project that seeks to match different cannabis strains with various subjective effects felt by users.

Big data? Different strains? Ah, when I was a girl, we just had sensimilla or not…

 

Not that I was going to stay at a Motel 6 anyway…

You’re a Hispanic family. You’re traveling to Phoenix – maybe for a wedding, or a quinceañera. You don’t have a ton of money, but Motel 6’s are clean enough, and comfortable enough. So you, Mr. and Mrs. Garcia and your two kids, check in.

And so what it’s not the Ritz. The kids have never been in a motel, so they rush in and get all excited about the little bars of soap, the plastic glasses wrapped in plastic film, the strip of paper across the toilet. They bounce on the beds. They start begging their parents to let them use the pool.

I know just what this feels like.

I remember heading to Chicago for family vacations, and staying one night along the way at a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson or the like. What an adventure! That pool! Those little Ivory soaps! Even sharing a bed with your sister was okay. This was vacation! This was a motel!

And then, who comes a knocking but ICE. Which of course wouldn’t happen to a nice white family like the Rogers. But just might for the nice not-so-white family like the Garcias.

All because the Stasi wannabes clerking at Motel Six had a cozy little relationship with Immigration & Customs Enforcement. After all, who doesn’t want to keep the “homeland” secure. (And where did that “homeland” thing-y come from? Is there actually anyone who refers to our country as their homeland? But I digress…)

So why not dime the nice little Garcia family. You never know. They may be undocumented. Those little kids may be – hiss, boo – anchor babies. Or illegal imports who are going to grow up to be Dreamers. Sheesh. Can’t have that. And just think about how proud it would make Sheriff Joe Arpaio!

It’s not just in Arizona:

Immigration lawyers representing people who were detained while they were staying at Motel 6 locations and were later deported from the United States said that they had collected evidence showing that the practice was widespread, and not limited to one state. Juan Rocha, an immigration lawyer in Arizona, said that an employee at a Motel 6 in Washington state told him of the same practice there.

“We’re looking at a situation where people with Hispanic surnames check into Motel 6, get their names reported to ICE, and a few hours later there are immigration agents knocking on the door to take them away,” Rocha said. “This is racial profiling that is tearing families apart.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Headquarters – the parent company, G6 Hospitality, is located in Texas – is doing the “I know nothing” routine, claiming that the decision to play footsie with ICE was local, not corporate. Which is probably true. Doesn’t sound like the kind of program that would get disseminated from HQ and not get leaked.

It really does seem like a poor business strategy. Whether the nice little Garcia family was documented or un, surely the word/palabra would seep out about that knock on the door, the roust in the night. (I really don’t like Holocaust analogies, but this sure sounds like “Juden raus,” doesn’t it?) Bet there are plenty of people giving the Motel6.

ICE isn’t saying much, other than noting that “the agency does not pay any bounty or reward for such information.”

So there’s that at least.

Motel 6? How about Motel 86. Or Motel Do-tell.

I can see calling ICE if say, a bunch of guys wearing ski masks check in with cartons full of pressure cookers and a textbook entitled “How to Make a Bomb Out of a Pressure Cooker.” Or if someone driving a van signs in, leaving the van in the broiling parking lot, and you happen to hear moaning coming from the van when you walk by.

But the people who got raided at a Motel 6 were people who were doing nothing other than going about their business and their pleasure. What skin off of anyone’s nose is it to just let it go? I’m guessing there are plenty of illegal things that these gung ho law and order types let slide by. But when those suspicious folks are brown-skinned, well…

Not that I was ever going to stay at a Motel 6. Talk about the last resort…

Yet I do have fleeting fantasy of taking an aluminum scoop-full of ice cubes and tossing them down the back of the shirt of these nasty tattletales. You want ICE? I’ll give you ice…

 

Two ex-Googlers walked into a bar…

Us Baby Boomers get plenty of opprobrium heaped upon our graying heads. The generation most-likely-to-be-vilified gets credit for nothing, but blamed for not doing anything about global warming, not saving enough for retirement, selfishly staying on the job, running up housing prices so that no one else can buy (although somehow we do get to sell and fritter away the profits), cashing in on the last of the pensions, ushering in the ‘anything goes’ mentality, raising a generation of slackers, and, lest anyone forget, electing Donald J. Trump. Wrack, meet ruin.

I’m not here to defend my generation. But I am here to predict that, at some point, someone’s going to come to the stark realization that no cohort was, is, or ever will be worse than the millennial sub-generation of techno-hipster-entrepreneurs out to disrupt the failing, boring, useless old way of doing things, no matter who or what gets in their way. Who cares, when you’re on a way to making more bucks than your parents would have thought imaginable. Make that bitcoins, I guess. Bucks are so yesterday.

Yes, a lot of what the whiz kids are inventing is going to come in handy when us boomer-geezers slip on a banana peel and need assistive technology. And I’m sure betting on them to come up with something that will part the seas so that they don’t flood the East Coast as far inland as Worcester. Yet they do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time being smug and obnoxious.

The latest news on that front comes from Fast Company (by way of my sister Trish), and is about Bodega, a start up created by a couple of ex-Googlers who “want to make bodegas and mom-and-pop corner stores obsolete.”

Here’s their big disruptive idea: “unmanned pantry boxes in apartments, offices, dorms, and gyms.” These unmanned pantry boxes will stock whatever the top 100 items that machine learning figures out is in demand in your particular apartment building, office, dorm, or gym. Women’s dorm: lip gloss and tampons. Men’s dorm: Red Bull and jerky. Gym: power bars and fancy-arse water.

An app will allow you to unlock the box and cameras powered with computer vision will register what you’ve picked up, automatically charging your credit card. The entire process happens without a person actually manning the “store.”… “The vision here is much bigger than the box itself,”[co-founder Paul] McDonald says. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.” (Source: Fast Company)

Tough noogies, I guess, if you want a Butterfinger and every one else in your apartment building prefers Milky Ways. But, hey, your corner store doesn’t carry everything, either. And so far, non-perishables only. So no running out for bread and milk. (You’ll have to order that from Amazon and have a drone drop it on your window sill.)

There are already 30 proof-of-concepts in the Bay Area. And here’s what they look like:

I’ll say one thing for it, it strips out the mind-numbing number of choices on offer at the average CVS that has you spending 20 minutes trying to figure out what toothpaste to buy. And I will admit that there have been plenty of evenings when I would have been happy to be able to walk into the foyer of my condo building and have a vision system record that I’m taking a bag of Tate’s chocolate chip cookies – there on the top shelf, four in from the left - off the box’s hands. (They really do taste like homemade…) And points for stocking DiCecco pasta.

But just what are these darned kids doing – other than trying to come up with unicorn disrupters – that’s so all-fired important that they don’t have time to walk to the corner store and buy something there?

If you live in a big city, you’re probably not much more than 100 feet from a store already.

Needless to say, Bodega is venture-backed, and they hope to have more than a thousand of their shops across the country by the end of next year.

The major downside to this concept–should it take off–is that it would put a lot of mom-and-pop stores out of business. In fact, replacing that beloved institution seems explicit in the very name of McDonald’s venture, a Spanish term synonymous with the tiny stores that dot urban landscapes and are commonly run by people originally from Latin America or Asia. Some might bristle at the idea of a Silicon Valley executive appropriating the term “bodega” for a project that could well put lots of immigrants out of work. (One of my coworkers even referred to it as “Bro-dega” to illustrate the disconnect.)

Bro-dega. I like that. Because, in truth, the thing I find most smug and obnoxious about this concept is the use of the word “bodega.”

Bodega did surveys in the Latin American community and supposedly no one was bothered by the name, but I have some doubts here. 

I really don’t give two hoots about cultural appropriation. I think most of those arguments are utter nonsense. Still, bodega to me says bustling little shop in a busy neighborhood, likely run by someone from the Latinx world. In Manhattan, a lot of the corner mom-and-pops aren’t bodegas, they’re “Koreans” because they’re owned and operated Koreans. In my area in Boston, we have small food stores, but they’re not for the most part mom-and-pop convenience stores. But I do occasionally stop in a mom-and-popper on my walks, and they seem to be run by a variety of ethnic groups. And there’s always some old tad buying a copy of The Herald and a couple of scratch tickets, an hanging around talking to the clerk.

Growing up, the mom-and-pop stores were called, for some reason that I believe is particular to New England, “spas.”

We lived right off Main Street in Worcester, and our closest store was a real (albeit old fashioned) grocery store. But there were “spas” in the neighborhood. The one I spent the most time and coin at was Carrerra’s, which sold penny candy. It was in the basement of a three-decker near The Oval on Sylvan Street.

(The Oval in itself was something of a peculiarity: a large, sun-baked crab-grass covered oval at the confluence of a bunch of streets. Kids played ball there, and big boys hung out, but it wasn’t really a park in any true sense of the word. Just The Oval.)

Perry’s. Carrerra’s. The one on the corner of Main and Ludlow. (Did it even have a name?) Spas – our bodegas – were real places, owned and run by real people. Mr. Carrerra could be a crab, but mostly he and Mrs. Carrerra were infinitely patient with the kids coming in with their nickels to buy penny candy. They were immigrants – the name sounds Italian, but I believe they were Portuguese. (We didn’t have either in the neighborhood, so what did I know?) Sometimes their son Butchy worked the store. Mostly I remember him looking sullen, plopped on a folding chair. (His parents never sat.)

I don’t imagine that machine learning will ever learn that the people in a building want an assortment of Squirrel Nuts, Mary Janes, buttons, wax lips, candy cigarettes, Mint Juleps (two for a penny – excellent for sharing), licorice whips, wax buck teeth…

Nor will the Bodega boxes give out candy bars on Halloween. So what if what Carrerra’s gave out was the execrable 3 cent Lunch Bar? (Was there even any chocolate in it?) Carrerra’s was on everyone’s trick-or-treat go-to list.

Anyway, when Bodega tries to expand to New York City, Frank Barcia will be waiting for them. Garcia chairs the

“…New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, [and] represents thousands of bodega owners. Garcia’s grandfather was the head of the Latin Grocery Association in the 1960s and was part of the original community of immigrants who helped settle on the term “bodega” for the corner store. “To me, it is offensive for people who are not Hispanic to use the name ‘bodega,’ to make a quick buck,'”Garcia says. “It’s disrespecting all the mom-and-pop bodega owners that started these businesses in the ’60s and ’70s.”

In fact, Garcia would consider making it harder for McDonald to set up the pantry boxes within his community. “I would ask my members  not to allow these machines in any of their properties in New York State,” Garcia says. “And we would ask our Hispanic community not to use the service because they are not really bodegas. Real bodegas are all about human relationships within a community, having someone you know greet you and make the sandwich you like.”

Bodega’s not exactly quaking in their boots. In fact, they envision a world in which mini-Bodegas are everywhere.

Over time, McDonald hopes to be able to create partnerships with other retailers to bring mini-versions of their stores to where they are needed. Home Depot might set up little Bodegas at construction sites with the 100 most-requested items there, Staples might set one up inside an office, or GNC might have mini-stores in gyms.

Because, God forbid, you actually have to wait a couple of hours to get your Super Wheybolic Powder delivered from GNC, or have to walk to a Staples to buy a stack of yellow pads. And actually have to interact with someone, other than a machine that’s learning all about you.

I’ll say one thing about the Boomers. We knew how to have relationships with something other than a device full of 100 items.

(And I thought Mr. Carrerra was an old crab…)