Death of a pizza parlor phone order taker

On Christmas Eve, the Upper Crust on Charles Street - my go-to pizza place for the past 20+ years - closed. At first, I thought they were doing a reno, but after the first of the year a sign went up saying that they had closed. Their next closest outlet on Newbury Street was already gone, and after that...Well, I like being able to order my pizza and go pick it up. This worked well, as the Charles Street location was about a 2-minute walk. I suppose I could switch to delivery, but that always seems to add a whole lot of wait time into the process.

So no more Upper Crust. (Oh, boo hoo.)

I liked their pizza, and they had a pretty straightforward website to order from. Or you could call in and have a human take the order down. Neither method was foolproof. Once in a while they screwed up. But it worked pretty well.

Pizza order screw ups do tend to happen on occasion.

For a while, there was a good deep dish pizza - Bel Canto - on Charles Street, with a yummy whole wheat crust, a very tasty red sauce, and lots of interesting toppings. My favorite combo was broccoli and walnuts; my husband's was pepperoni, anchovies, and jalapeno. We used to do half and halfs. One time when we went to pick up, they gave us a spinach-only, which we were not interested in. I wish I could have seen the look on the person's face when they opened the box and saw our order.

One time, in anticipation of a blizzard, Jim and I ordered an extra-large super-deluxe from the late and surely lamented European Restaurant in Boston's North End. Extra-large was the size of a coffee table, so we figured one would hold us for a couple of snowbound days. The super-deluxe had everything on it, but I don't do anchovies, so we asked for no anchovies on half. Well, they made us two extra-larges - one with anchovies, one without - but when they realized their mistake, they only charged us for one. Those pizzas lasted to infinity and beyond and even I, an ardent lover of cold pizza, finally got sick of looking at it while the blizzard raged around us.

Both the Bel Canto and European mixups were pre-Internet. So were both phone orders, which is actually my preferred way even post-Internet. I like having the person take the order repeat it back to me, even though there were inevitably occasional human errors.

But now it seems that some pizza shops are starting to deploy AI. 

Crush Pizza [small local chain] is one of many small restaurants across New England and the country taking orders and fielding other calls using AI, a move helping cut costs and staff amid slim post-pandemic profit margins, inflated food and labor costs, and ongoing labor shortages. These technologies have been met with resistance from some customers who said they can’t get the service they are used to. 

Tony Naser, who rolled out AI answering systems at both of his Massachusetts-based Crush Pizza locations and another chain, Mickey’s N.Y. Pizza in New Hampshire, said many customers were “surprised,” and some “standoffish,” after the change. (Source: Boston Globe)

Most clients, Naser says, have come around, but I'm guessing that plenty are still not happy. They're probably just gritting their teeth and unhappily accepting one more human touch has given way to technology.

The technology Naser is deploying is from Loman.AI, an Austin TX startup with a website that boasts "Meet your new best employee, an AI phone agent for restaurants." Well, that doesn't exactly give me much by way of the feels. Who needs human employees, anyway?

And what's with the name Loman.AI. Loman is not the name of either of the co-founders, so where did it come from? How many people are there out there who don't hear the name "Loman" and think Willy Loman, the sad and suicidal lead character in Death of a Salesman. Or is Death of a Salesman no longer read? Anyway, a peculiar (and peculiarly depressing IYKYK) name for a company, me thinks.

Loman - AI, not Willy - says that their AI ordering system has an accuracy rate of 98.6 percent, which they compared to a 94 percent accuracy score found among data-taking receptionists in an entirely different industry. (Trust me when I say that marketers have a tendency to glom on to such favorable comparisons, whether they make sense or not.)

Outlets that have adopted AI ordering say that most people order online, anyway. So taking humans off the phone is no big deal.  And for them, AI ordering handles the phone orders better. No phone ringing off the hook; no geting put on endless hold; no disconnects. Unfortunately, the folks who still order via phone rather than online tend to want to use the phone to connect with another human. 

Tony Naser has become a big proponent of AI phone ordering. After all, larger chains/franchises like Chipotle and Domino's have been using such services for years. Why can't the mom-and-pop chains like his enjoy the same benefits? 

Naser said he feels local stores are being held to a different standard even as more large chains phase out human receptionists.

“You can’t call a lot of these big fast food chains. So why do customers get upset when a smaller mom-and-pop shop wants to try to get a little technological advancement or be a little bit more efficient?” Naser said.

Naser's got a point. 

But so do the folks who just want to have some human interaction. And so do the folks who want other folks to have jobs, even it's a crummy pizza parlor job for a high school kid answering phones and screwing up an occasional order. And there's no doubt that those jobs are going away. Loman says that two-thirds of their clients are able to cut staff by roughly one "human" shift per day. So, death of a pizza parlor phone order taker.

Where it all ends up, I don't know. 

My immediate worry is where I'm going to get pizza the next time I'm hankering for a sausage, ricotta, and roasted red pepper from Upper Crust? Sure hope another pizza joint goes into the space they just vacated.

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Image Source: Loman.ai

Remarkably, Bill Belichick makes Bob Kraft look good

Locals have now had a week to recover from the Patriots' Super Bowl loss.

My recovery is blessedly complete. In fact, I was fully over the loss as soon as I finished watching Bad Bunny's excellent halftime show. By that point, the handwriting was on the scoreboard and I figured the Pats were toast. So I turned off the SB and turned on All Creature Great and Small on PBS. 

I was pretty mixed on whether I wanted the Pats to win to begin with. I'm a frontrunner, fair weather fan, but I did watch a few games this year once the team got good. I liked the coach and what little I knew of the team. So go Pats!

But I can't stand the Trumpist team owner Bob Kraft, especially given that, shortly before the Super Bowl, he made a pointed and highly publicized appearance at the premier of Melania, the apparently pointless puff-umentary about FLOTUS. 

So, I was there watching the Big Game rooting for the team to win, but for Krafty to lose. Guess I couldn't lose.

I was also cheered by Kraft's not getting elected to the Football Hall of Fame. In truth, given some of the crappy team owners who are "enshrined" in Canton, Ohio, Kraft probably should be there. But Kraft has been shamelessly lobbying for election, almost but not quite exceeding the aggression and zest with which his BFF has begged for a Nobel Peace Prize. 

A week before Kraft was dissed, former Pats' coach Bill Belichick also failed to make the Hall of Fame cut. The rejection of Belichick's candidacy is perhaps even more ridiculous than Kraft's coming up short on the ballot. Love him or hate him, Belichick wears an awful lot of Super Bowl rings, and that all can't be 100% attributed to wonder-GOAT Tom Brady. But Belichick is a gruff, snide jerk, so he didn't get voted in his first time on the ballot. In large part because he's a jerk. (As an aside, if being an a-hole were a dealbreaker for election to the Football Hall of Fame, there probably wouldn't be ten people in there.)

An interesting aspect of these dual HofF snubs is that Belichick and Kraft have been at odds for the past few years. One of their main beefs was Kraft having engineered a documentary, The Dynasty, which pretty much ignored Belichick's role in all those Super Bowls wins. 

In the aftermath of the documentary, there's been some back and forth sniping between Bill and Bob. But when Belichick failed to make the Hall of Fame, Kraft was supremely gracious. The Pats' owner:

...issued a glowing statement on his former coach, acknowledging their differences, then saying, “He is the greatest coach of all time and he unequivocally deserves to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer.” (Source: Boston Globe)

How to Belichick return the favor?

Well, on the eve of the Patriots' ignominious Super Bowl appearance, Belichick appeared with his girlfriend at a UNC basketball game while she was wearing an Orchids of Asia tee-shirt. Orchids of Asia was the Florida massage parlor where, back in 2019, one Robert Kraft was arrested for engaging in prostitution. The charges were dropped in 2020, but the reputational damage had been done. And the million jokes and memes regarding Kraft's not-so-happy ending have still not exhausted themselves. 

Anyway, as The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy wrote:

This was nothing less than a declaration of war on the Krafts. It almost guarantees that the Belichick-Kraft feud will never end, and creates a world in which it’s impossible to imagine Belichick ever being inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame. [Note: not to be confused with the the overall Football HofF.] 

Did Belichick really need to remind the world that, whatever success he achieved in the NFL, he's now a mediocre college coach at the University of North Carolina. And did he really need to remind the world that for the past few years he's been embarrassing himself by having his 24-year old girlfriend Jordon Hudson hanging on his arm - and humiliating himself by having Hudson (50 years Belichick's junior) call the PR shots for him. This isn't the first time she's made him look like a fool. And it likely won't be the last. 

But what was Bill Belichick thinking? That this stunt was funny? That it made him look cool?

Agreed that it is kind of funny, but it made him look like petty and nasty. Which may well be Belichick's true self. But it sure doesn't make him look like a mature, accomplished, pretty darned great football coach who should absolutely be in the Football Hall of Fame. Belichick may think his GF is polishing his brand, but all she's doing is tarnishing it.

What's remarkable to me is that Bill Belichick is actually managing to make Bob Kraft look good.

Shaughnessy speculates that the Football Hall of Fame voters will come to their senses, and that both Bill Belichick and Bob Kraft could well end up getting elected next year now that the voters have vented their initial spleen and shaking their animus out of their systems. This would put them together on the dais at Canton in 2027 when next year's winners are inducted. 

Won't that be a wonder to behold. Not a big football fan, but I could well tune in for that show.

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Image Source:  Savage Sports on X

Skeletons in the closet?

Certainly, everyone's entitled to a hobby. 

Personally, I've never had one - if you don't count reading, watching the Red Sox, or fretting over the news - but if someone wants to go all-in on stamp collecting, painting still lifes, gardening, or cupcake decorating, well, have at it. And if you can monetize your hobby, well, have at that, too.

But what do we make of one 34-year old hobbyist/entrepreneur Jonathan Gerlach?

A Pennsylvania man has been charged with stealing and desecrating dozens of skulls, bones and other remains from a historic cemetery, the authorities said. The local prosecutor described the case as “a horror movie come to life.” (Source: NY Times)

The charges against Gerlach - and there are hundreds of them - include abuse of a corpse; theft; burglary; criminal trespass; intentional desecration of public monuments, venerated objects, and historical lots and burial places. As of early January, he was being held on $1M bail.

Gerlach had collected over "100 sets of human and skeletal reamins from his home and storage unit." Under surveillance, skulls and bones were seen "in plain view" in his car. Yikes! Whatever happened to bobble head doggos and "my kid's an honor student" decals? And:

When Mr. Gerlach was taken into custody on Jan. 6, the authorities found the mummified remains of two children, three skulls and other bones, in a burlap bag, the affidavit said.

Oh.

The cemetery where Gerlach was doing his desecrating is Mount Moriah, one of those beautiful, bucolic, garden-style resting places established in the mid-1800's. Over 160 acres, it has over 150,000 gravesites. And a lot of mausoleums.

Gerlach was apparently not interested in the mess, fuss, effort, and more obvious possibility of detection associated with digging up a grave. He raided mausoleums and the crypts inside.

One of the crypts inside, which had held the remains of a girl who was born in 1854 and died in 1869, had been opened and was now empty, the affidavit said.

Another mausoleum held a Monster energy drink can that had been left behind, it said. This provided an opportunity to take fingerprints and a swab for DNA testing.

Mr. Gerlach is also accused of stealing jewelry, some of which was believed to have been taken with the human remains.

Some of the remains were pushing 200 years old. Others were of more recent vintage. One body still had a pacemaker attached. 

So far, no motive has been unearthed. (Sorry. Couldn't help it!) But monetization may have been a factor:

In addition to investigating Gerlach, authorities are also investigating a Facebook group he was connected to, called "Human Bones and Skull Selling Group." He was tagged and pictured holding a skull on the group page, ABC 6 reported. (Source: People)

Bones and skull selling group? 

Just how many macabre ghouls are there trading in human skulls and bones? To each his/her own, I guess. But I'd rather have folks trading/selling stamps. Or their bad-art still lifes. Or cupcake decorating trips.

This is just so very, very weird.

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Image Source: Hidden City Philadelphia

Talk about school trip gone bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image Source: BBC

A lobster tale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image Source: Vital Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

This made sense to me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Ireland:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image Source: Atlas Obscura

Wanker

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

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

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

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

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

He does have a rather detailed list of requirements.

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

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

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

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

Make that two castles and a grouse moor.

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

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

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

No Scorpios for some reason. And:

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

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

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

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

Even though Eskimos do wear overcoats.  

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

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

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Content Source: Where else but The Daily Mail. 

Image Source for the old wanker: The Times of London