Four on the Floor. (Make that Five on the Floor.)

I saw on the news the other day that about 0.6% of cars sold in the US in 2025 had a manual transmission, and this has been the case since 2021. "To put that shift into perspective, in 1980 manual transmissions made up almost 35% of new vehicles sold in the U.S." (Source: Reader's Digest)

In 1980, I didn't own a car. But when I bought my first car in 1986, it was a used manual - a 1980 rusted out Honda Civic I bought from a colleague for $2K. I needed that car to commute to the 'burbs, where my company had moved. (Ugh.) 

When I got my Honda, I had had some experience driving a stick, but it had been a while. I learned to drive a standard when my friend Joyce and I drove cross country in her Karmann Ghia, but most of my driving was on the highway. Joyce did much of the city driving, including in the hills of San Francisco, and the scarier driving in the national parks. 

The Karmann Ghia, like my Civic to be, had a four-on-the-floor gearbox. 

During our trip, I never got all that skilled, particularly with downshifting. To downshift, I would throw the car into neutral and then make my way to the right gear.

But when I needed a car, I decided - what the hell - to get a manual, which was available and cheap. My friend Michele took me out for a few practice ones in her Ford Escort, and I paid for a few lessons with a driving instructor - a young Hispanic man who came to my lessons wearing a sharp sports jacket and a yellow bowtie. 

When I first learned to drive in 1966, the family car was an automatic, so that's what I learned on. Although certainly everyone's father (and any mother who had a license: many didn't, including mine) knew how to drive a manual, the family car of almost everyone I knew was an automatic, which had become quite popular in the 1950s. 

The one exception was my friend Diane, whose family car was a three-on-the-tree (i.e., gears mounted on the steering column) station wagon that also lacked power brakes and power steering. Watching her drive that car was a workout in itself. 

Our friend Kathy wanted to learn to drive a manual, and Diane taught her. Kathy's family car was a nifty Dodge Dart with a press button automatic shift. No heavy lifting on that one. (I may have "driven" Diane's station wagon one time in a parking lot, as I have a vague memory of trying to steer the beast while I was bucking it from first to second.)

After a couple of years of noble commuting use, my Honda Civic died. Something to do with a bearing rod? I got $100 for the trade in, a deal negotiated Honda sight unseen, by my friend Tony, who spoke to the salesman in Greek. When I brought the car in, coughing and sputtering all the way, to pick up my new Mercury Tracer, the dealer said that, if he'd seen the car, he wouldn't even have given me the hundred bucks. 

My new Mercury was five-on-the-floor, as somewhere along the line a new gear - fifth - had been introduced. 

I had the Tracer, which I really enjoyed driving - other than the fact that it was to commute to a job I despised - until I got a job on public transpo. I put an ad in the Want Advertiser and sold my Tracer pretty quickly. 

While I liked that car, I was more than happy to get rid of it.

Commuting to work on the Red Line, reading The Globe, which I picked up each morning from a vendor working the Charles Street T station, was easy-peasy. But, alas, the company decided to locate to the dreaded suburbs, so I was back to car ownership.

This was 1998. Volkswager had just introduced the New Beetle. How could I resist? 

I bought a manual - again, a five speed - and decked the car out with an artificial daisy in the bud vase on the dashboard. I loved that car. As did pretty much everyone.

Shortly after I got it, I was at a Sunday afternoon party attended by a few dozen folks. Half the guys at the party asked if they could take my cute-as-a-button, bright blue Beetle, out for a spin, so I handed them the keys and a bunch of them took turns driving around the block.

Because the thing about manuals is that they're fun to drive. 

Oh, driving a manual can be a PITA - especially if you live in a city or are ever in stop and go traffic. And I'm pretty sure I burned my clutch out once grinding away trying to parallel park in a tight spot. 

That said, there are advantages to driving a manual. They are (or used to be, before they started going extinct) cheaper to buy, and are more fuel efficient. If you wanted to rent a car in Europe, it used to be hard to find an automatic - and definitely more expensive. And, while they're not theft-proof, if fewer and fewer people know how to drive a stick, the automatic-only car thieves will give yours a pass. 

The best thing about driving a manual is that you actually feel like you're driving.

When manual transmissions were the norm, drivers had to touch and manipulate the shifter, in tandem with the clutch, constantly while operating a vehicle. Passengers saw this action taking place, and shifting gears became imbued with meaning. It represented the allure of the road, for all its good and ill, and stood in for the human control of a big, hot, dangerous machine screaming down the pavement. The manual transmission’s impending disappearance feels foreboding not (just) because shifting a car is fun and sensual, but also because the gearshift is—or was—a powerful cultural symbol of the human body working in unison with the engineered world. (Source: The Atlantic)

This may be overintellectualizing things, but yeah. 

And as fewer and fewer people drive manuals, the ability to drive a shift gives you a bit of a bragging right. You're a cool kid. (Kinda sorta.) And R-E-S-P-E-C-T, especially if you're a woman.

Although we all learned to drive on automatics, all of my siblings drove standards, as did many of my friends. But gradually, they all went over to what we would kiddingly call the dark side. Mostly not by choice, but by necessity. It was just getting harder and harder to find a standard. And now, except for some niches, it's almost impossible. 

It's easy to imagine in a world of EVs that don't have gears, in a world where autonomous vehicles are becoming normalized, that the manual will become totally extinct, except among absolute gearheads who will probably have to build there own.

There's about a six-nines chance (99.9999%) that I will never own another car. There's a similar chance that I'll ever drive a manual again. 

But, damn, I just plain miss the very idea of it. 

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Image Source: Reddit

ICE and violence seem to go hand in glove

I guess they've been around for a while now, but until ICE announced that they were putting in a big ol' order for electric shock gloves, I'd never heard of them. But they've been used by police officers, prison guards, and even school resource officers for years. 

The device that ICE is acquiring is something called a GLOVE. This is not a glove as you and I might think of a glove. Something to wear when it's cold; something to wear when gardening; something to wear when slicing raw chicken. No, it's GLOVE as in an acronym for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. And don't let that "low output voltage" fool you. A GLOVE, especially in the wrong hands, can administer a shockingly painful shock.

GLOVE is produced by a Kentucky-based (surprise, surprise) outfit named Compliant Technologies

Our mission is to provide innovative, non-lethal solutions that empower law enforcement, corrections, security, and healthcare professionals to handle dangerous situations with confidence and control. (Source: Compliant Technologies)

Well, innovative can be a mixed bag - it doesn't always go hand-in-glove with wonderful/marvelous - but non-lethal sounds good. I'm a bit concerned about healthcare professionals as an audience. I know that people can flip out in a healthcare setting, and that patients can become violent, but aren't there de-escalation methods that don't involve shocking someone, which seems like a particularly awful choice in certain environments. Like a hospital. Like a school.

Interesting, the value proposition for the product is not primarily about non-lethality. In fact, they lead with the technology's ability to lower liability.  

How so, you might ask.

Let's hear from Assistant Police Chief Adam Glueck of the Cape Giradeau, Missouri PD. 

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” (Source: Mother Jones)

Glueck joked that “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands." Oh, hah hah hah.

But having a "low optic" torture device, unlike a taser shooting out those treacherous darts, let alone a billy club applied with full force? Who wouldn't want one of those? Look, Ma: no burn marks, no scars. Lawsuit, smawsuit? Bring it! That video some misguided civilian took of the GLOVE'd individual writhing around on the ground in pain? Crisis actor! Fake news!

Glueck isn't the only gushing proponent of the GLOVE. Or to point out the beauty of GLOVEs-on when it comes to liability.

It’s been successful “from the patrolmen to the jailers,” Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. “It’s been a great tool as far as mitigating liability,” according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department sung the GLOVE’s praises, too: “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

Lumpkn County, Georgia. Nelson County, Kentucky. Floyd County, Florida. 

Just sayin'. 

(Despite GLOVEs being positioned as anti-liability devices, there are at least a few lawsuits out there with respect to their use.)

Anyway, after hearing from the Boss Hoggs of the world, let's hear from the bleeding hearts:

The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” 

Worrying about "clear human rights risks" doesn't exactly seem to be ICE's jam.

And needless to say, I'm Team Amnesty International. 

Meanwhile, over at Compliant Technologies - recipient of that $20M of our tax money ICE contract - founder Jeff Niklaus sounds like a bit of a nutter:

...who believes that President Donald Trump has been “anointed” by God. He is also a sometime conspiracy theorist: In a podcast interview in 2025, he blamed the fatal crash of a passenger plane and a military helicopter on “the vaccines,” and on the Biden administration’s inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in the military.

If Trump were indeed anointed by God, well, I'd have to eat my halo. 

Some law enforcement agencies warn against using GLOVEs "against pregnant women, the elderly, or people in shackles." A GLOVE user guide advises not using it against "those with obvious health conditions." But, gee whiz, in the heat of battle, you can't always tell if someone is pregnant. Sure, I'm old and grey, but would someone necessarily clock me as elderly? (Okay, don't answer.) And what about non-"obvious health conditions?" The only thing that's clear about the must-avoid list would be someone placed in shackles, which is clearly visible. And which ICE seems to do with alarming frequency.

Not to worry:

“Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” an ICE spokesperson told Mother Jones.

Alex Pretti and Renee Good might have something to say about that, if they were alive to say it.

I have no problem whatsoever with ICE rounding up baddies and shipping them back to from whence they came. Murderers, rapists, gang members, drug lords. So long, all of yez. And I know that when you're dealing with bad guys, sometimes you need to use force. But most of those who are being rounded up aren't bad guys. (Someone coming in for a meeting to talk about the progress of their greencard application is probably not a violent criminal.) And, as we've seen from countless videos, many of them are being brutalized. 

I can't wait for this nightmare to be over. 

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Image Source: Mashable

It was the best of states, it was the worst of states

I am a complete and utter sucker for state rankings, especially those that are flattering to my home state and the handful of other states I could actually see myself living in.

Massachusetts tends to come out high when things that I value - education, health/healthcare, reproductive rights, worker protections inclusiveness/gay rights, crime rates - are used in the criteria, and not those that are less favorable, like cost of housing and weather.

In a recent CNBC rating of the best states to live in, my beloved Commonwealth was ranked ninth, wedged between Nebraska and North Dakota (as an aside, which I can't resist making, the only red states to make the Top Ten). We came in lower than our fellow New Englanders NH, Connecticut, and Maine, and lower than the #1 state to live in Vermont. Personally, I love Vermont, but my husband (a native) couldn't stand his home state. To each his own...(The other states in this particular Top Ten were Minnesota, NJ, and Hawaii, all places I could at least kinda-sorta imagine myself living, although I think I'd get sick of the perfect balmy weather in Hawaii.)

Given whose on top, most people can likely come up with at least some of the states languishing in the Bottom Ten when it comes to quality of life. Arkansas. Oklahoma. Alabama. Missouri. Utah. Georgia. Louisiana. Indiana. Texas. Tennessee.

The surprise to me on this list is Utah. Not that I can imagine living there, but it always strikes me as a reasonably good place to live, especially if you're LDS. But Utah gets dinged on not having enough primary care physicians and daycare centers, and having a dismal minimum wage.

Massachusetts gets points for having a ton of primary care providers, which I find somewhat ironic given that there are zero PCP's affiliated with my healthcare system (MGH/Brigham & Women) in the entire city of Boston who are taking new patients. I know this because last fall my PCP went concierge, and the only way I could get a Boston-based PCP was by agreeing to work with a resident physician. Which is fine, but it's not great for relationship-building, as the residents are only around for a couple of years.

Of course, quality of life doesn't seem to get in the way of being one of the top states for doing business in. Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Indiana may be crappy places to live - and I can guarantee that I will never, ever, ever in a million-billion years get to find this out up close and personal - but they're good for business.

According to the CNBC rankings, Ohio is the best place to do business, but Texas rates a number four position; Georgia comes in at seven; and Tennessee and Indiana round out the Top Ten. Massachusetts is number 15, higher than I would have predicted. Our cost of doing business is abysmal (49th out of 50), but this is counter-balanced by our quality of life (if you don't count housing and weather), our techiness (We're Number 8, a bit low as far as I'm concerned) and our education (We're Number 1!) 

These rankings are, admittedly, pretty non-sensical, but I always get a kick out of them. And, hey, we could all use a bit more nonsense in our lives - and these ratings seem like relatively harmless nonsense.

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Image Source: Ultimate Globes  

Eleventh day of each September, we remember, we remember

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, I was in Orlando on business. At a smallish tech conference, one of those gatherings where a company (e.g., mine) paid to get in front of a captive audience to talk about the market (theoretically) and their product offerings (the true reason to be there). The conference was run by the Gartner Group, a consulting firm that sold tech research and advice. I have no idea what Gartner is about these days, but way back then, they were a big deal and quite high end. So the conference was being held at a pretty fancy golf resort.

I was tired. My mother had died a few weeks before, and I'd spent the weekend, with my sisters, visiting family in Chicago, which is where my mother was from. It had been a bittersweet but fun weekend, highlighted by the backyard second wedding of my Aunt Kay, my mother's baby sister - 24 years my mother's junior, more like a cousin than an aunt when we were kids. For years, Kay had lived in what had been my grandmother's summer house, where, throughout my childhood, we spent the first two weeks of July every other summer. 

So it was a bittersweet but loving weekend, catching up with my aunts and cousins.

We flew back to Boston on Sunday, and I had to turn around and hop on a flight to Orlando on Monday morning. There was some commotion with the flight - a last minute concelation, a rebook on an earlier flight (ugh!). But I made it to Orlando.

I was giving a captive audience presentation on web hosting when the first plane flew into the North Tower at the World Trade Center. When we walked out of the presentation - no one had thought to come in and interrupt us - the hotel had already rolled a few TVs into the open area outside the presentation rooms. It took a few minutes to figure out what was going on, to process what we were watching. After a few minutes, everyone pretty much fled to their rooms. Where I watched the first building collapse, then the other. I kept shaking my head in disbelief. I couldn't believe the buildings were gone.

Throughout the morning, throughout the afternoon, like every one else, I was glued to the TV, trying to piece together information. I took a break to grab lunch with a colleague, then back to the TV. 

The news was sparse, confusing, terrible. Beyond awful. Beyond belief. 

Somewhere, I learned that two flights had been out of Logan, both bound for LA. I had been on American Flight 11 a few months earlier. Gulp.

It was pretty clear from the outset that there weren't going to be any/many flights from and to anywhere in the States for a while, so I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to get home, now that the conference was canceled. Fortunately, thanks to a family connection at Amtrak, I was able to book a train going north, with reservations for me and my colleague. (The other option we had was renting a car and driving, but those rental cars were going fast.) 

I hadn't brought along any comfy clothes, so I hit the resort gift store and bought some hideous golfware: black Capri pants, a white sleeveless tee, and a blue golf sweater. I felt like I was on the LPGA tour, but I wanted to travel in something other than my business-lady pantsuit.

We left Orlando in the evening, not knowing how far we were going to get. All they were promising was Richmond, Virginia. It wasn't known whether we were at war, the extent of the attacks. Was Washington, DC under full attack? Was NYC? Was this our Pearl Harbor?

My colleague had family in Richmond. Worst come to worst, we could stay with them and maybe his cousin could drive us further along - maybe even home. My colleague's wife was pregnant, pretty far along, and you never know. So he was particularly anxious to get home. Everyone we spoke to was. 

Approaching Richmond, we learned that we'd be heading to DC, where we could grab the train to NYC/Boston.

DC was eerie, eerily quiet. 

They held the train for us, and we rode to NYC in the same car as Carol Burnett. 

Leaving Newark, the car went completely silent as we watched a black cloud extending pretty much the length of Manhattan. All that was left of the Towers and the thousands who had died there. 

My husband met me at the Back Bay Station at around midnight. I was never happier to see anyone in my life. 

That night, I couldn't sleep.

I'm not sure if I went into work on Wednesday, but at some point, I had to go to Logan and pick my car up.

When I did go in to work - was it Wednesday? was it Thursday? - no one was doing any work.

We caught up with colleagues who'd been on the road and started to hear about their long journeys home. One colleague had been heading into our office in lower Manhattan when he saw the first plane hit. Somehow, he had the presence of mind to find the first car rental place and get the hell out of lower Manhattan. (Scott Something. I can picture him, but can't recall his last name.)

My company had a small network operations center on the top of one of the Towers. I didn't know the guys who worked there, but I was friendly with their boss. He was on the phone with them when their Tower collapsed. He heard the noise, the great rumbling. The guys had just told him that they had been instructed to head to the roof, that they'd be rescued by helicopter. At least they died with hope...

It was all so unimaginably awful.

For weeks, the images of the collapsing towers, of the people jumping to their death, would intrude unbidden into my mind. Again  and again, I would shake my head.

I had trouble sleeping. (Didn't everyone?)

I didn't know anyone on those Boston flights, in those Towers. But I knew people who knew people. 

I read the terribly sad writeups in the New York Times that gave us a glimpse into the lives of all who had lost their lives. 

I read the stories of heroism. Those brave firefighters heading into the buildings. Others who risked their lives. The men who for months worked The Pile, trying to find remnants of the lives lost. The men on the flight headed to DC who, having learned of the attacks, charged the cockpit and forced their plane down in a field, saving countless lives while losing their own. 

On 9/11, my niece Molly, nearly five at the time, saw her parents crying and asked them what was wrong. My sister had lived in New York for nearly a decade, and had met her husband there. She explained to her little one that something bad had happened to their town. "Was it my town, too?" Molly asked. 

From the first moment I laid eyes on Manhattan, when I was a senior in high school, New York has been one of my favorite places on earth. I only lived there for one year in grad school, but it was my town, too. And Molly's. And pretty much everyone in the United States during those grim days. 

Hard to believe it's been twenty-five years. 

Eleventh day of each September, we remember, we remember. 

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Image Source: AP

Can't we just leave this woman alone?

The Lindsay Clancy trial is over. For now, anyway. 

It ended last Friday with a hung jury, a mistrial declared. The story is that there were 11 votes for not guilty by reason of insanity, with one hold out for one of the criminal charges (murder one, murder two, manslaughter) - even though it is said that the holdout had admitted to having some doubts of their own, but ignored the judge's directives on reasonable doubt and voted to convict anyway.

Clancy's attorney made a last ditch effort to have the judge dismiss that one juror and replace them with an alternate, but that went nowhere.

So mistrial.

The DA/prosecutor will decide whether to bring the case to retrial, whether to bring lesser charges, or whether to strike some sort of deal that would spare Lindsay Clancy and her family the agony of going through another prolonged and painful trial. Given that the DA appears to be a publicity hound and had something of whatever the prosecutorial word for hard-on is when it comes to Clancy, I'm betting he goes for some sort of retrial, even if it is just a bench trial (no jury, judge only), which will deprive him of the spectacle that this jury trial became. (First degree murder was surely an overcharge, but I'm sure a strategic one: put the heavy duty charge out there that everyone knows is unreasonable, so they'll vote for one of the lesser charges.)

Although I was not watching the trial avidly, it was pretty hard to avoid if you live in these parts. Front page news. Lead story on TV news. Streaming live from the courthouse. The talk of the town, alright.

All the elements were there: a pretty young white woman from an affluent town who kills her three children. (Bonus points for Irish Catholic family. This is Boston, after all.)

Inevitably, the trial brought out a cadre of groupies (if that's the right word). Most were in support of Lindsay Clancy, sympathizing with a mother who - they (and 11 of the jurors) - they thought was in the throes of profound, drugged-up postpartum psychosis. But there were some demonstrating outside the courthouse on behalf of the three little ones who were killed. They wanted justice, which to me looked a lot more like vengeance. 

The trial definitely brought out some crazies, including a woman who was arrested for taking pictures of the jurors - a big NO-NO - but claimed she just wanted "a picture of Lindsay."

What the hell for? She could have found a million pictures of Lindsay Clancy out there. The "old" Lindsday Clancy, the loving, pretty, vibrant mother leading the seemingly perfect life: loving husband, three beautiful children, a fulfilling career (labor and delivery nurse), strong family ties, supportive colleagues, charming house in a picture-perfect little coastal town. And a milliong pictures of the stricken Lindsay Clancy sitting there day after day while the jury heard her crimes described, where the post-mortem pictures of those beautiful children were exhibited, where experts on both sides claimed she was or wasn't crazy.

I watched very little of the trial. Just what was unavoidable if you watch the local evening news.

The pain, the grief leapt off the screen.

And to compound it all, the true crime internet-ers were having a field day, making sure that their perceptions and speculations were getting airtime. Is she or isn't she crazy? Is she or isn't she a cold-blooded murderer? Did she heartily dislike one of her kids? (I've yet to meet a mother who at one moment in time didn't have a feeling of intense dislike for one or all of her offspring.) Was her husband having an affair? (MYOB, for godssake. And so what if he's remarried?) Was he, in fact, the killer? Or just not sympathetic or caring, letting his wife go through the hell leading up to the slaughter of those innocents. Why didn't he pick up the clues? (Better question: why didn't all the doctors she saw, all those doctors who prescribed all those drugs, pick up on the clues?)

Why did the husband change shoes between picking up the takeout and calling the cops when he found his kids' bodies, or whatever the eagle-eye internet sleuths were going on about? (It was winter. Maybe his feet were wet. Maybe - get this - he was in shock.) 

She's a grifter. He's a grifter. Her parents are grifters. Just look at those GoFundMe's!

Whatever ends up happening to Linsday Clancy, whether she ends up in prison or in a psychiatric facility, there is no punishment that can be any worse than what this woman is enduring.

I doubt she'll ever have a scintilla of joy for the remainder of her life. In moments of awareness, she knows what she did. She has admitted to killing her children. She won't have a waking second when this doesn't weigh on her.

Whether she's in a prison or a psychiatric hospital, there's probably not all that much difference. She'll be locked up. She'll have no control over what she does, what time she does it. No autonomy. The food will be awful. Ditto the clothing. The everything.  No choice. No walks on the beach. No picking wildflowers. No raiding the fridge for your favorite midnight snack. Here you go, like it or lump it. 

And the little things in life that once gave her joy and purpose.

She'll never work again as an OB-GYM nurse, a job she loved. Who in their right mind is going to let her near a baby? She had three little ones; she worked in labor and delivery. She pretty clearly loved babies. Would you let her hold your baby for a nano-second? No one would. What if she had a psychotic break that made her do something awful. 

Ditto for anyone ever letting her alone around children. Ain't going to happen.

Probably for the better. I can imagine that the joy, the sweet little faces, the laughter of kids would be torture for her. Even the whining and squabbling would be. 

Lindsay Clancy is on suicide watch, but part of me thinks 'why not let her?' What's the point of keeping her alive?

If she's a woman of faith - and she was a practicing Catholic - I guess she can hope that she can be forgiven. That there's an afterlife when she can reunite with her little ones and beg their forgiveness. And just be in peace and joy with them. 

Maybe if she regains her mental health she can help other inmates in whatever facility she's in. She can help others with their GEDs. Plump pillows and empty bedpans in the infirmary. Find some purpose in her life, now that the purpose of wife, mother, and nurse is no longer hers.

I don't pray, but if I did, I'd be paying for Lindsay Clancy. For peace and quiet and a life away from the prying eyes and obsessive intrusions of the 24/7, always-on people who don't know her from Adam.

I know she did something beyond imagining, beyond awful. Hypocrite, I, for writing about her. But can't we just leave this poor woman alone?

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Image Source: Spotify

 

Thank you, Ms. Steinem.

I was saddened to learn that Gloria Steinem has died, but at 92, she'd had a good run. And a brilliantly accomplished run at that. 

I came of age during the second wave of feminism (1960's through the 1980's). I read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunich, and Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will.  On the fiction side, I gobbled up Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, and Marilyn French's The Women's Room. I bought a first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Collective. (This book was inspired by a workshop that was part of a female liberation conference held at my school, Emmanuel College, in the spring of 1969. Emmanuel College: a pokey little Catholic women's (then; co-ed now) that was something of a hotbed for social justice and radical thought. I took part in that conference, but can't recall which workshops I attended. Women's health wouldn't have been one of them.)

I didn't strike - I had a summer job and needed the money - but in August 1970, I joined the NOW-sponsored Women's Strike for Equality, Boston-edition, marching from the Boston Common to City Hall during my break between shifts at the Union Oyster House. I was wearing my white waitress dress and white waitress shoes. One sign I remember being carried: Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot!

And I was an OG subscriber of Ms. Magazine, which was co-founded by Ms. Steinem. 

I liked and admired Gloria Steinem. And in July 2012, I got to tell her that.

My husband and I were in NYC. Jim was on a break from cancer treatment, and we were spending the week in his favorite city. On Saturday evening, we were heading out to dinner on the Upper East Side, when who would we spot but Gloria Steinem.

Actually, it was Jim who spotted her, as he had an amazing knack for recognizing celebrities out on the street.

When I told Jim that I had long admired Steinem, he told me I should let her know that. So he stopped her to say hello.

For someone who I'm sure was pestered all the time, she could not have been more charming and gracious. 

After I told her what an influence she and her work had been on my generation of women - the first to enter the non-traditional workforce in any great numbers - and thanked her for all she'd done, she asked us where we were from. Which launched into a wide-ranging 10-15 minute conversation about Boston, the Cape, Maine, dogs, travel, and I can't recall what else. It was the sort of rambling, whatever convo you might have with any old stranger you sat next to on a plane or in a restaurant or on the sidewalks of New York. Only this one was with Gloria Steinem, who seemed genuinely interested and engaged. (She could certainly have broken things off the minute I had offered her my words of praise, but she kept the converation going.)

After that 10-15 minutes, Gloria Steinem said, "I'd like to keep talking, but I'm meeting some friends for dinner. But let me give you a restaurant recommendation. Candle 79." (Candle 79 is a now-closed vegan restaurant on 79 Street). Well, as it turned out, we had eaten there the year before with some young vegan friends, and as the words, "Thank you! We actually ate there last year" were coming out of my mouth, Jim was saying, "Oh, Candle 79. We ate there and didn't like it." (He may have even said that we hated it. Which I hadn't, but he had. I had actually enjoyed my meal there (something mushroomy, I think) but he had some seitan dish - could it have been fake steak? -  recommended by our young vegan friends, which he hadn't liked in the least. And he was certainly not one to hold back on sharing his opinion with Gloria Steinem or anyone else.)

Gloria Steinem just smiled and strolled off to meet her friends. We strolled off to a distincly non-plant-based dinner elsewhere. 

And so went my up close and personal encounter with the great Gloria Steinem.

Thank you, Gloria, for all you were and all you did for women. And for stopping to gab with a couple of strangers on the sidewalks of New York. 

Rest in peace. Rest in power.

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Fugitive

I didn't watch a ton of TV when I was in high school - too busy trying to translate Latin without using a trot (cheat sheet), too busy mooning around listening to Bob Dylan - but I absolutely loved the show The Fugitive. (I just looked it up, and its run completely coincided with my high school years: 1963-1967.)

The premise was that Dr. Richard Kimble (played by David Janssen) is an innocent man who'd been convicted of murdering his wife. He escapes and travels all over the country in pursuit of "the one armed man," he'd seen running from his home just before hd discovered his wife's body. 

On the prison bus bringing him to the big house where he's going to be executed for the crime he didn't commit:

Richard Kimble ponders his fate as he looks at the world for the last time, and sees only darkness. But in that darkness, Fate moves its huge hand.

That was each episode's intro, but just so you know, Fate moved its huge hand by crashing the prison bus into a freight train, giving Dr. Kimble the opportunity to escape. 

Well, Rhode Island has its very own fugitive saga, only this time it's not a doctor convicted of killing his wife. It's a doctor convicted of sexual assault who takes off mid-trial and goes on the lam, only to be found 20 years later. (He was convicted in absentia.)

Unlike Dr. Richard Kimble, anesthesiologist Ronald Fischer didn't spend his time buzzing around trying to find a bad guy. No, he managed to create a new career for himself as a biotech consultant and executive who spent his spare time sailing on a luxe 56-foot sailboat. (A luxe sailboat was the site of the sexual assault he was convicted of. Prior to that conviction, Fischer had been charged with rape aboard his yacht. He pled down to assault and battery and received a suspended sentence. Because yacht-owning doctor, I suppose.)

As a fugitive, the alias Fischer used was Richard Graydon. (Not quite Richard Kimble, but almost.) An as Richard Graydon he self-published a book, “The Genetic Risks of Cancer: The Effects of DNA, Genomics and Inheritance on Aging and Survival.” So what if he self-published? So what if virtually no one read it? (There's just one review on Amazon. Three-star.) You can apparently parlay this sort of credential into some pretty impressive jobs.

Other than writing his book, it's not clear (from the article I saw) what Fischer/Graydon did between making his escape in 2005 and 2022. I read elsewhere that it was said that he did have money squirreled away, and a go-bag with papers that allowed him to disappear. 

Anyway, in 2022, Atossa Therapeutics hired Graydon as "its interim chief medical officer."

“We are privileged to welcome Richard to Atossa, where his deep experience in CAR-T cell therapy fits well with our current strategic direction as we explore our opportunities in cell therapy,” said Steven Quay, Atossa’s CEO, in a statement released at that time. “We look forward to collaborating with Richard to assess our strongest options and develop a pathway that provides our shareholders with strong results and enhanced shareholder value.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Richard Graydon must have been some mighty fine bullshitter. His background was as an anesthesiologist. He'd been on the run for more than a decade. But somehow he was able to create a resume that managed to get a biotech company to believe he was some sort of cell therapy expert who was going to enhance "shareholder value." 

Don't companies check resumes and references? How did Richard Graydon work his particular warped brand of magic?

Atossa wasn't the only biotech that was hoodwinked. There was also Immix, which brought Graydon on board last March:

When Immix hired Graydon as its new chief medical officer, the company described him as a board-certified hematologist-oncologist with over 20 years experience in clinical development. Graydon was said to have joined Immix from Merck and Johnson & Johnson, where he claimed to have led new and supplemental drug applications for Darzalex, Carvykti, Keytruda, and Imbruvica — some of the best-selling cancer medicines in the world, Immix said.

Board-certified hematologist-oncologist? Working on major cancer drugs for Merck and Johnson & Johnson? Are there no ways to check credentials? 

Call me dumbfounded.

As of a few weeks ago, Graydon has been terminated by Immx. But couldn't they have saved themselves a ton o' embarrassment if they'd given Graydon's application a bit more scrutiny? Ditto for Atossa. 

I'm pretty yikes on this one. And I'm also getting that a head or two in the hiring/non-vetting process will will roll now that the story is out there. 

Anyway, poetic justice-y, Ronald Fischer/Richard Grayson was apprehended on the Silver Lining, his $1.4M sailboat, in the waters off lower Manhattan. And he has been extradited back to Rhode Island. This time, he's being held without bail and, at the age of 70, faces life in prison. 

No more sailling for you, Dr. Ronald Fischer/Dr. Richard Graydon.

Oh, and, in the last episode of The Fugitive, the one-armed man on  is found and makes a deathbed confession to the murder of Dr. Richard Kimble's wife. Justice served!

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Image and Fugitive Intro Source: Wikipedia