He slices and dices no more

Our brains are stuffed with all sorts of nonsense. Sure, some of what's in there is useful. Your Social Security number. Your cousin's birthday. How to parallel park. Your preferred towel brand now - maybe, maybe not - on sale at Bed Bath & Beyond. How to compute the tip.

But an awful lot of what's beneath the cranium is pretty darned useless. 

Oh, I suppose it's there for my amusement, but what good is it that I still remember the theme song to the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon? And maybe I'll make a deathbed confession and it will come in handy, but 'til then, it matters not that I can still reel off the Seven Gifts and the Twelve Fruits of the Holy Ghost.

And then there are all the ads of my youth. Spedy Alka-Seltzer, come on down! Choo-choo Charlie flogging Good 'n Plenty. Atsa spicy meatball. Mother, please, I'd rather do it myself. 

None more indelible, perhaps, than the info commercials for all sorts of crap that we didn't know we wanted or needed, but which suddenly we craved. 

Who didn't want a Veg-o-Matic in their house? It slices! It dices! All the things my mother did with the handy little black-handled kitchen utility knife her father (a butcher) gave her when she got married, and which she was still using - even with nips out of the blade - until she died. But my mother's knife wasn't advertised on TV. It would have been a lot cooler to have a Veg-o-Matic.

If we couldn't have a Veg-o-Matic, why not a set of Ginsu Knives. How great were the Ginsu Knives? You could slice the ham so thin, your in-laws would never come back. How. About. That.

Mr. Microphone ads probably couldn't stand the scrutiny of our more woke era, when women just don't put up with the crap they used to. But, in my family at least, we have a call and response around the ad where the car full of kids are out cruising in their convertible, hassling people they slow-drive by, making remarks on their very own Mr. Microphone. 

Call: Hey, good-lookin'.

Response: We'll be back to pick you up later.

IRL they probably wouldn't have been back later, especially given that the girl city in the back seat with the Mr. Microphone guy whacks him in the arm when he calls out to the good-lookin' chick.

I don't know whether these were all products sold by TV (UHF, non-network, cheeseball channels only) pitch master Ron Popeil. But they were sure sold in his spirit.

Anyway, Ron Popeil has died, taking his food dehydrator, bagel cutter, smokeless ashtray, and - of course - the Popeil Pocket Fisherman with him to the Great Beyond. Because, what's a heaven for if you can't evenly slice a bagel. Or spray hair on your bald spot. (Not that I have a bald spot, but, who knows, I may (non)sprout one by the time I push off to the GB.

Popeil and his confreres, including the latter day uber-hawker, Billy May of OxiClean fame, have been widely parodied. 

There, in the far reaches of my noodle stuffed with oodles of useful gunk, is Dan Aykroyd pitching the Bass-O-Matic on SNL. Just looked it up. That was 1976, almost 50 years ago.

Even further back, on The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton got involved in a marketing scheme and went on TV - then more of less in its infancy - to make their fortune selling the Chef of the Future, which could slice tomatoes, scale fish, and, yes, it could even CORE A APPLE. 

This Honeymooners episode aired in 1955, so it actually anticipated, and perhaps even inspired, Ron Popeil, who did his first TV ad in 1956. 

With the death of Popeil, should we now be saying that the promise of But wait, there's more is broken?

Nah.

After all, there's still plenty of Yankee Swap-worthy items pitched on TV. Who can forget the Snugli? And I have to say that one of my go-to kitchen gadgets is a small Foreman Grill that a friend gave me for Christmas ages ago. It's so ancient, so first-gen, that there's no off-on switch. You plug it in, it's on. You want it, off: pull the plug. But it's incredibly useful for roasting asparagus, or peppers, or a solo chicken breast. I use it pretty regularly.

Still, it's the ads from the way-back that are really lodged in the recesses of my brain. Where they more or less belong. Until I need to dredge up a memory with no muss, no fuss. 

Any stupid ad, theme song, or catechism answer I'd like to retrieve? Hey, good lookin'. I'll be back to pick you up later. 

Spenser for Hire

I've been asking around for book, movie, and TV binge recommendations.

Don't know why I'm bothering for books, because I'm good. I still haven't tackled the latest Hillary Mantel, and I've got a Don Winslow right behind it. Then there's ColsonWhitehead's Nickel Boys and a bunch of other books piled up on the armchair in my bedroom. (I always wanted an armchair in my bedroom. So convenient for piling books on and draping clothing over.)

Movies I'm okay on, too. I'm backlogged. I still haven't seen Manchester by the Sea...

But series I've really needed help with. Succession, The Queen, My Brilliant Friend, Bosch. All done until next season. I've tried to get into Ozark, Schitt's Creek, Catastrophe, Call the Midwife, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and a bunch others, but nothing seems to stick. I'll watch a few and then lose interest.

Then a friend told me that the reruns of Spenser for Hire are on Amazon Prime, and that the Boston locations made it worth watching.

So I found me way there and have been doing a modest amount of binging - a couple episodes here, a couple there - and watching the Boston of 35 years ago is something I'm finding wildly entertaining.

Some things haven't changed.

Much of the show's location shooting took place in my neighborhood, and the residential areas, the Boston Common, the Public Garden, all look pretty much the same. Oh, they take some liberties. Spenser, his girlfriend Suze, and Suze's ex meet for drinks in an outdoor restaurant at the foot of the statue of Washington in the Public Garden. NO. SUCH. THING. Not then. Not now.

Spenser lives in an old firehouse, now the community center where I vote, and just around the corner from where I lived when the show was in production, seconds (45 seconds from where I lived, to be exact. I walked by the other day and timed it.).

I have only vague recollections of seeing Spenser being filmed. (And I'm pretty sure that if I'd seen someone as fine looking as Robert Urich, I'd remember. So I'm saying I never actually spotted him.) But there were two ways into the alley off the alley where we lived, and the one we took 99% of the time went right by the Spenser firehouse. So I'm sure I tripped over cables and got ordered around by cameramen every now and then.

A lot of the location spots take place in my hood, and it's fun seeing what's changed and what hasn't. Walter's Lock and Hardware! I'd forgotten when that was a storefront on Charle Street. And there's Spenser and Suze having lunch in the window at Toscano. I would have bet $100 that Toscano's only been around for about 20 years, but there it was, in 1985. (Tempus sure does fugit.)

I love seeing Spenser buzz around Cambridge - hey, that's MIT's Sloan, my business school!; that's Passim's!). Around the Haymarket/Quincy Market area, with its great old sign for the now defunct Durgin Park, where I worked as a waitress in the early 1970's.

The strangest thing is when he's chasing bad guys around the Boston waterfront.

Back in the 1980's, that area was largely a bunch of decaying, derelict warehouses, a few restaurants (Anthony's, Jimmy's Harborside, No Name - all now gone), and some dirt parking lots.

Now the area is completely developed: office buildings (often occupied by tech companies that moved from the 'burbs to downtown because it's cooler and downtown is where techies want to live), pricey condos and rentals, nice restaurants, shops. A lovely harborside walk. It will be interesting to see how all of this survives the pandemic, but every time I walk down there, I'm in awe of how it's gotten so built up in the last decade or so.

Ditto for Kendall Square in Cambridge.

There wasn't much there when I was in grad school (a few years before Spenser went on the air), but of late it's full of stuff. Lots of tech and biotech and all that brings with it.

One of the biggest changes in the Boston scene is thanks to the Big Dig, which took the monstrous overhanging Central Artery that separated downtown Boston from the North End and put it underground. Vast improvement, but still fun to see the old artery. And the old Boston Garden. And a lot of the old other stuff.

Love seeing Urich in all his Red Sox gear, too. Although having read the backstory that says that Spenser went to Holy Cross, I'm a bit surprised to see him in a Boston College sweatshirt. Unless they've lost a bet, HC folks don't wear BC gear, and vice versa.

The show itself is ridiculous, the plots completely absurd, even by TV standards.

Boston is not an especially violent city, but if you watched Spenser, you'd certainly come away with the impression that, in the mid-1980's, Boston was wilder than the Wild West.

Spenser comes out gunning. In most of the shows I've seen so far - maybe half a dozen - he's managed to kill a couple of bad guys in the first couple of minutes of the show.

He's bodyguarding someone who's running the Marathon. Bad guys kidnap his protectee, but Spenser takes chase and manages to blow 3 - or was it 4 - of the kidnappers away.

He's bodyguarding a high school girl but - and Spenser must be a mighty poor protector - she gets kidnapped before his very eyes. But he did manage to kill one of the kidnappers.

He's shopping for watermelon in the North End and a guy on roller blade tries to knife him, but gets the watermelon instead. Spenser goes after him, breaking up an Italian festa religious parade in the process, and guns the bad guy down.

I don't think I've seen any episode where Spenser hasn't shot and killed at least 3 people.

Then there's his wingman, Hawk, who was/is a contract killer. So if Spenser's not doing the killing, Hawk is.

I know I read some of the Robert Parker Spenser novels in the wayback, and I'm sure I enjoyed the fact that Spenser quotes Shakespeare, Plato, the poet Spenser (relation? no relation?). But in the TV show it comes off as wooden and completely non-charming.

As does his relationship with Susan Silverman, at least to me.

They're supposed to be this ultra hot, lovey-dovey, sexy couple, but the chemistry between the two makes the byplay between Rock Hudson and Susan St. James on MacMillan & Wife seem torrid.

There's one scene where I cringed.

Shortly after Spenser moves into the firehouse, Suze surprisees him there in a pair of red silk PJs and a plastic kid's fireman's hat - and shimmies down the station's firepole to greet him. Only she doesn't wheeeeeee! down it with abandon. She kind of scuds along, hanging on for dear life. Which is how I would have come down that pole. So maybe it's realistic, but it sure wasn't sexy.

Will I keep watching? Hell, yeah!

Can't wait to spot more errors. Hey, that mansion's not in Louisburg Square, it's on Mt. Vernon Street!

Can't wait to spot more places that aren't around any longer. More places that still are. Can't wait to listen to more bad Boston accents. And a few good ones. Can't wait to see more of Robert Urich. (He really is cute.) And less of Suze. Can't wait to see how the body count mounts.

There are three seasons, and I'm only a few episodes into season one, so I've got a lot to go.

Recommendations for my next binge welcome.

I'd kill for a house like that...Or is it die for?

I live in an old building - 160 years old, of thereabouts. I'm pretty sure that at least a few folks have died in this building, but I can't be positive. During the nearly 30 years I've lived here, there have been two deaths - my husband and our ancient neighbor Jack. My husband died in hospice. Jack died, at the age of 99, in the nursing home he'd entered the week before. So, neither died on site.

The house where I spent my childhood from age 6 1/2 on was new, and no one died there, either, while the Rogers family was in possession. My father died when we lived there, but he was in a hospital, back in the day when they kept you in the hospital. My father spent the last 2 months of his life in a hospital bed with nothing much being done for him. I'm sure he would have been far happier at home, but that just wasn't the thing back then. (Early 1970's.)

Prior to moving into our own house - the house my father didn't die in -  we lived in my grandmother's 3-family. I know of at least two deaths that took place there: my grandfather and my Uncle Charlie. I wouldn't be surprised if there'd been a few more over time. 

I've lived in a number of places over the years, and they've almost all been in old buildings. So I'm guessing that these buildings saw more than a few deaths. I lived for a couple of years in converted carriage house - in the hayloft - so there many have been a couple of equine deaths recorded at some point.

But as far as I know, I haven't lived any place where a murder took place.

Which means, I guess, that I'm not eligible for a new home makeover show, Murder House Flip. The show is available on Quibi, a new mobile "short burst" entertainment site that I won't be subscribing to. I'm already overwhelmed by the amount of content available on Prime, Netflix, and HBO. Adding more is the last thing I want to do. And I'm really not interested in short bursts of entertainment. When I hunker down for a show - as I did the other night with Season 6 of Bosch - I want to get an hour's worth or so of entertainment out of it. With the option of gliding right into the next episode in 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds. Guess I'm just one of those helpless old-schoolers with long attention spans. 

Not that I'm not a bit intrigued by the concept of Murder House Flip, a mashup of HGTC makeover shows and true crime. Which is pretty funny when you think about it.

I guess it's no surprise that the producer of CSI, Josh Berman, is involved. 

Murder House Flip will have a couple of designers involved, and:

...will also include a "colorful cast of forensic specialists, spiritual healers and high-end renovation experts. (They’ll) uncover the crimes, shocking secrets and scandalous history of the homes." While the premise of Murder House Flip is extremely different than most other shows in the home reno genre, the goal remains the same—to create a better, brighter space for the family living there. (Source: House Beautiful)

I can just imagine it. Tarek and Christina from Flip or Flop. The Property Brothers - Jonathan, Drew, and the other brother that sometimes comes along for the ride. A couple of ex-cops for the forensics. And Theresa Caputo of Long Island Medium fame, spiritually healing the place by seance-ing with the deceased and then waving around a smoking bundle of sage to purify things. 

When you watch the reno shows, there's always an unanticipated "surprise" that adds to the budget: a bearing wall no one knew was a bearing wall. (Duh!) Mold behind the shower stall. (Did no one have a nose?) A basement that gets water logged when it rains. Knob and tube electric or spaghetti wiring from a bad, earlier reno. Asbestos. There are any number of bad things that can happen once you take a sledgehammer to that first wall...

On Murder House Flip, the "surprise" might be a body. ("We had to call in the police and the coroner's office, and they had to yellow-tape the site off for a couple of weeks. That put a dent in the schedule, but we used the time to go tile shopping...")

The first show sounds like a lulu: the glamming up of a home where seven people were killed by a serial killer.

Maybe it's just me, but I think that what you do with the home where seven people were murdered is tear it down. And maybe just grass the plot in. But that doesn't make for a good story, so...

Star Price is the show's showrunner and executive producer. Here's some of what he has to say. (And yes, Star Price is a he. At first I was thinking that it was Star Jones, a she. But I googled and it's a boy!)

“My feeling through the whole process was that we had to be self aware of what we were doing. We couldn’t take it too earnestly and at the same time we couldn’t be disrespectful ... and at times we could have fun.” (Source: LA Times)

And talk about fun! That first house, the one with the seven murders? The serial killer was actually a landlady who killed her tenants but kept them alive as far as the government was concerned so that she could collect their Social Security checks.

“It’s actually sad to say it isn’t hard to find homes where murders took place,” Price says. The challenge was finding homes where notable crimes took place — “that were interesting at some level, as tragic as they were” — and willing homeowners who were looking, and in some cases desperate, for some sort of reboot to their house.

The show does partial makeovers, based on what the homeowners think needs some work. In one of the shows, a couple decides that they want to replace the bathtub where a man dismembered his wife. I think I might have done that rip and replace before moving in. But, as a consumer of HGTV, I'm well aware that the deal breakers tend to be lack of his and her sinks ("dual vanities"), dated non-stainless appliances, and stingy closets ("we can knock out the wall" - as long as it's not loadbearing - "and take this small bedroom you really don't need and turn it into a walk in closet you'd died for"). No one worries about whether someone got dismembered in their bathtub, although sometimes they do notice that there's a bit of staining on the porcelain... 

Anyway, I suppose that once the couple gets the new bathtub installed, they'll get asked a famous home makeover show question: "So, are you doing to love it, or list it???"

Personally, my answer would probably be list it. One thing to live in a place where someone has died. Another thing when we're talking murder, she wrote. That's a bit too eerie. (And, no, I'm not going to google 'killing' at this address. I did, however, look up where the Boston Strangler murders took place. Thankfully, none here!)

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A tip of the Pink Slip cap to my brother-in-law Rick for sending this idea my way. Hmmm. They live in a house that's well over 100 years old, too. Wonder if anything untoward ever happened there...

What would YOU do if you were a Sinclair anchor?

I don’t imagine you start out dreaming about anchoring local news in Amarillo, Texas or Buffalo, NY or Peoria, Illinois. Nope. If you’re in Texas, you’ve got your eye on Dallas or Houston. If you’re in New York, it’s The Apple. Peoria? Get real. You’re thinking Chicago.

More likely, you’re thinking even bigger: national network or cable news. You want to be Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams (when that was a good thing.) Or have your own hours, like Anderson Cooper or Laura Ingraham (when that was a good thing).

And then you wake up in the TV equivalent of WKRP in Cincinnati. And you’re not Tom Brokaw, you’re Ted Baxter, the bumbling anchor on the weakest pretend station in Minneapolis, WJM, where our Mary – Mary Tyler Moore – worked.

But, hey, there’s something to be said for big fish/small pond. You’re the local news anchor. You’re a big deal in the community. Folks say hello when they see you in line at Kohl’s. They get a kick out of riding next to you in the annual cancer fundraiser. Life’s pretty good.

And then Sinclair – a pretty conservative outfit - scoops up your station, and you may be a bit leery. And you get even leerier when you’re handed a script to read.

If you read the script in a vacuum, it is, of course, fairly anodyne.

Who’s going to argue that “biased and false news” is a good thing? Who’s going to stand up for lies and facts that aren’t facts? Who’s going to defend the spread of lies on social media? Especially when you position it as ‘we don’t like it whether it comes from the right or the left.’ And you wave the flag of “dangerous to our democracy.” Not just any old democracy. Our democracy.

What’s not to agree with? What’s not to like?

But then you insert to word “fake.”

Fake? As in fake news? Hmmmm. Sounds familiar. Why, isn’t that a word that the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll uses pretty darned frequently? On social media?

It’s that insertion of “fake” in there that gives the Sinclair intention away. Dog whistle? Nah. Claxon is more like it.

And then the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll tweets out support for Sinclair and attacks on the mainstream media. Those fakers.

“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased,”

But if you ignore the “fake” in general, and the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll in particular, you don’t hear that claxon, and you can pretend that it’s a dog whistle that you just can’t hear. Which means you can go ahead and read the damn thing, with all the fake conviction and Ted Baxter pomposity and seriousness of purpose you can muster up. A job’s a job, and an anchor job – even in Fresno – is a pretty sweet gig. And mostly you’re left alone to focus on local matters, like the fire in the convenience store on Foster and Main, and the teacher who got the kidney donation from her former student.

But it sure looks creepy when you see a mashup of so many of those local anchors. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the Deadspin compilation, via NPR.

And then there’s this:

Sinclair has been accused of using connections in the Trump administration to ease regulations on media consolidation. In an effort to expand its reach, the company is seeking approval from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission for its $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media. (Source: NY Times)

Oh.

Anyway, I don’t really blame those anchor folks for reading that statement. Orders from headquarters and all that.

Still, it’s bad enough that so many our our citizens still contend that President Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. Or, worse, a bit I saw that other day – can’t find the exact cite – that showed that a solid chunk of Trump supporters feel he should be allowed to rule as a strong man, unfettered by Congress or the courts. Do we really need those who get their news from local TV having that local TV news reinforcing the belief that anything critical of the president is a biased lie from the pit of hell? Fake news. Fake news.

I think not.

Mary Richards, working girl. Make that working woman.

In the TV world of my youth, women were boring, pearl-wearing, shirt-waisted moms (June Cleaver, Margaret Anderson, Donna Stone).The only non-stodgy, pearl-and-shirtwaist mom was Laura Petrie. Unlike June, Margaret, and Donna, Laura Petrie wore capri pants, boat necked jerseys, and Capezios. And, even if she lived in a suburb, it was a named suburb (New Rochelle) outside a named city (New York). Plus she lived in a cool, mid-century modern house. Laura Petrie was played by Mary Tyler Moore, who died yesterday.

The above list was the “normal” wife/moms on TV. None of them worked.

If you weren’t a boring, non-working wife, you were a ditzy wife (Lucy Ricardo, Joan on I Married Joan). Ditzy wives only worked at occasional odd-ball jobs. (Lucy in the bakery, Lucy in the chocolate factory.)

Then there were the ditzy daughters (My Little Margie).

There were a few TV women with jobs: Our Miss Brooks was a wise-cracking old-maid school teacher. There was a private secretary named Susie. The ditzy daughter on My Little Margie grew up to be Oh, Susannah, the social director on a crew ship. Her gal pal was an actress with the fabulous name of ZaSu Pitts, who played a manicurist. Or women worked as maids (Beulah). Other than being a maid, a working woman was known as a “career gal”, a somewhat pitying term, as it pretty much meant a woman who had to work because she couldn’t get a man. Being a career girl may have looked fun and glam, but we all knew if was second best, pathetic, sad. 

It really wasn’t until Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) moved to Minneapolis to take a job at WJM, the city’s most pathetic TV station, that we had a women on the tube who was pursuing a career that more of less resembled the sorts of careers that women were starting to pursue. Sure, it was in a TV station, but the day-to-day reality was a lot like what the rest of us experienced on the job.

Oh, there had been That Girl in the 1960s. But That Girl  – although played by the whip-smart Marlo Thomas – was a nasally whiner, always bleating to her boyfriend Donald to help get her out of some predicament.. (Oh, Don-ald.) That Girl locks herself out of her apartment: Donald to the rescue. That Girl writes a check she doesn’t have the funds to cover: Donald to the rescue. Mostly, her job was looking cute. (I think her career was model.)

I have no idea if these were real plots, but that’s the sort of stuff I remember. And if it wasn’t Donald to the rescue, it was her father steaming in to NYC from Westchester to bail her out. (Oh, Dad-ee.)

Then there was Mary Richards. Our Mary.

As preposterous as the show was on some levels, Mary actually dealt with the same sorts of on-the-job issues that those of us in the first wave of ‘making it in the men’s world’ went through. She got passed over for promotions. We got passed over for promotions. She got a promotion, but it came without a raise. We got a promotion, but it came without a raise. She asked for a raise, but got turned down, or less than she deserved. We asked for a raise, but got turned down or got less that we deserved. She screwed up on the job. We screwed up on the job. She made hiring mistakes. We made hiring mistakes. (In Mary’s famous first hire, she brought on a female sports announcer who’d had a wonderful audition but, as it turned out, only knew about swimming and diving. And absolutely nothing about the sports that Minnesotans love. Like football and hockey. I could write a book about my hiring mistakes.)

And Mary seldom had a boyfriend, so she didn’t have a Donald to bail her out. Not that she needed a bail out. (And not that she needed a boyfriend.) Mary Richards wasn’t a ditz. Okay, she may have been bit too nicey-nice and sweet, but she was a serious professional woman. And, while she would have liked to have found someone, it didn’t dominate her life. She didn’t sit around lamenting her single state, or act is if she were less of a woman because she was single. She got on with her career. She got on with her life.

Work was where Mary did a lot her living. She loved her job, and hung out and made life friends with her colleagues. She made other friends, too, and liked to sit around her cool apartment with her funny, zaftig, altogether sexier friend Rhoda, shooting the breeze – mostly about Rhoda’s love life and career challenges. (Rhoda was a window dresser.)

I was still in college when the Mary Tyler Moore show first started, and my career didn’t begin in earnest until the late seventies, by which time the show was in re-runs. But it was one of the few shows on TV that I looked forward to watching and completely enjoyed. And it was one of the few shows that had anything to do with the lives of anyone I knew.

One of the decorator elements of Mary’s cool apartment was a big gold letter M that she hung on her wall. When I got my first solo apartment in Boston, my mother found one in a craft shop and painted it gold. For years, it hung on my wall, or was propped on a book case. At some point, it fell and split in two. I glued it together, but eventually tossed it out.

So long, Mary. Thanks for representin’. As it turned out, most of us did make it after all.

"The high priest of fraud..."

It’s Friday the 13th, and that should be unlucky, no?

But, as it turns out, anyone who’s a fan of old Westerns has a treat in store for them. Not to mention anyone who likes weird little eerie foreshadowings. Not to to mention anyone who likes making fun of a certain president elect. ("What are you selling, mister, snakeoil?")

I don't trust that this embed is going to work, so here's the direct link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6UcgiDwg0&t=97s


Whether you direct link or cut and paste, this is well worth it. (And Snopes has checked it out and it seems as if it's legit.)

Where's Robert Culp when we need him?

Just in case you were wondering: an update on Nubrella

Since I’ve now been blogging for a full decade, I frequently see news stories that update news stories I posted about in the way back.

The latest was an article from The Boston Globe last week about Alan Kaufman and his Nubrella, the subject of a post I did in 2010.

For those who haven’t memorized everything I’ve written, the Nubrella was the umbrella reimagined, a hands-free helmet like apparatus. When I wrote about it, I was considering investing in a Nubrella – which I really want to type as “NUMBrella” for some reason – rather than continuing to buy a couple of crummy umbrellas each year. At the time of my writing, Kaufman was about to appear on Shark Tank. And I was going to watch to see what happened:

I will definitely be tuning the Tank in when they consider Kaufman's Nubrella. And I'm absolutely considering a purchase - although, at $49.99 plus shipping, that's a good 5 or 6 crappy, fall-apart umbrellas from Filene's....

Plus there's the goofy-looking factor. Do I have the courage to be seen in one? Can I, for once, be an early adopter of brave new technology, rather than a second-waver?

Stay tuned. I'm seriously considering a purchase. (I will be ordering the one with the black back, which looks like a cross between a gun turret in a WWII bomber, and an Amish buggy. What's not to like?)

Well, I guess I get to award myself a couple of Pinocchios here. Not only did I not watch Kaufman on Shark Tank, I did not seriously consider a purchase – at least not starting the minute after I hit “publish” and uploaded the post. (Meanwhile, forgive a bit of a sniff-sniff boohoo-ery here. In 2010, I was buying all those crappy umbrellas at Filene’s Basement, which went out of business in 2011. Fortunately, Marshall’s and TJ Maxx, or Staples in a pinch, are good sources for cheap near-disposable umbrellas. Still, having shopped there for my whole entire life up until 2011, I do miss me my Filene’s B.)

Anyway, Kaufman is back in the news. In fact, he’s suing the Sharks.

By now, most of us know better than to take “reality” TV at face value. But Alan Kaufman, a Newton entrepreneur who pitched his hands-free “Nubrella” on ABC’s “Shark Tank” back in 2010, claims in a lawsuit that the show’s producers didn’t just fudge a few inconsequential details for the sake of drama — they lied about nearly everything.

A verbal agreement made on air that would have seen two of the “sharks,” or judges, invest $200,000 in Nubrella? Kaufman said he never got a penny. And a follow-up episode in which Nubrella appears to sign a distribution deal with The Sharper Image? Completely fabricated, he claimed.

Kaufman claims these distortions — along with re-runs of the show that depict an outdated version of his product — have brought him to the brink of ruin. So last week, he filed a pro-se lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court against the media and production companies behind Shark Tank, seeking compensation for lost investment opportunities, a cut of the revenue earned each time an episode featuring Nubrella airs, and a clear label indicating when the episodes originally ran. (Source: Boston Globe)

Is Kaufman the only person on the face of the earth who doesn’t get that “reality” shows are anything but? And after they treated him so shabbily – the two Sharks who said they were considering investing in him ended up blowing him off – why did he agree to make a follow up, ‘where are they now’ episode, in which he’s seen making a deal with Sharper Image. (Which he now claims had such a rotten reputation that they were the last place he’d have done a deal with.)

Anyway, Nubrella is running out of money, and Kaufman believes that the fact that neither the Shark money nor any deal with Sharper Image materialized is making investors reluctant to smile on his Nubrella.

There are a number of things that Kaufman has going against him.

First, he’s representing himself. I suspect that whatever defense Shark Tank mounts will be anything other than pro se.

Second, he had sued the show earlier, and:

…accepted a $20,000 settlement from Sony. His new lawsuit focuses on the damages allegedly caused by frequent re-runs of the episodes since then.

I’m just a pro se blogger, but I’m guessing that this isn’t a really strong legal leg to umbrella stand on. Don’t we all know a rerun when we see one?

On the other hand, a couple of the other entrepreneurs who’ve gotten into the tank with the Sharks have also had issues with them.But no one, it seems, has been as litigious as the Kaufman.

The Nubrella look has improved over the years: it’s not quite as ridiculous looking as it once was. It’s grown up. It looks like something that an amateur drone operator, or a birder, might wear. And Kaufman’s positioning instincts also seem to have sharpened up. He’s now more narrowly focused, aiming his ware at “people who work outside: photographers, construction workers, and so on.”

Anyway, both money and inventory are running low for Nubrella. Alas, because there’s supposedly a big deal in the making:

A major fast food chain is considering a large order, he said; its workers, who use tablet computers outside to take orders from cars stuck in long drive-through lines, will wear Nubrellas when it’s raining, to protect the devices.

Having worked for many years in a seat of our pants tech company, I know those ‘prosperity is just around the corner’ deals quite well. Good luck with that.

In the meantime, despite all that’s happened, Kaufman would like to appear again on Shark Tank.

“Just be fair. Tell the truth,” Kaufman pleaded. “Put me on the air and let’s tell the audience, ‘this is the new design, and I never did a deal with Sharper Image.’ ”

Now that episode I’ll tune in to.

Naked Came the Dater

I’m a true believer that “reality” TV serves an important keep-the-lid-on function in our society. After all, it provides hope for those who are woefully lacking in truly worthwhile attributes, talents, or capabilities – beyond an often uncannily shrewd marketing sense for building and exploiting a brand (look no further than Honey Boo Boo’s earthy mother or the Duggar clan’s smug daddy-o. Hope for those without worthwhile attributes, etc., but singularly possessed of shamelessness, devoid of any need for privacy, and just plain hungering to make a quick buck. (Well, what could be more All American than that?)

So what if you weren’t born with a silver spoon full of 1% in your mouth? So what if you didn’t get to take AP classes at Ritzboro High School? Heck, so what if you can’t spell AP even if someone spots you the A?

If your reality show strikes the right chord with the American people, there’s your chance to cash in and/or get discovered.

Why, it’s even better than playing the lottery, since if you’re the star of a reality TV show, you actually get to be famous – at least for the duration of the show’s run or, if it’s one of those one-shot shows, for the duration of your episode. Or until the next breakout reality star comes along. (And wanting to be famous is probably even more All American than wanting to have lots of $$$.)

One of the latest reality shows is something called Dating Naked.

A new social experiment provides daters with a radical dating experience where before they bare their souls they bare everything else first. Each week on a primitive island resort, far from the masks of modern society, daters will go on exotic dates and be naked every step of the way.

Let’s face it, there comes a time in most of our lives when we look better in a burka than in a bikini, and that time for me is well in the past. So even if I were to go on a dating show, it wouldn’t be naked. (And speaking of dating, the other day I got an e-mail - Hi, Maureen Rogers, Want to meet singles over 50? - inviting me to look into Our Time, an online dating service for the AARP-eligible. The timing – almost 6 months to the day of my husband’s death – was especially odd. Do you think they comb obituaries and put widows and widowers in tickler files for a 6 month follow up?)

But there are apparently enough folks who like the idea of throwing off the masks of modern society, and going on a few dates on a primitive island resort (whatever that oxymoronic thing means).

One of those folks was Jessie “I’m really a model” Nizewitz, who’s suing Dating Naked for $10 million because for a split second her most private of private parts, which were supposed to be blurred out, were exposed while she was in what, to the naked eye, might appear to be a semi-pornographic pose, frolicking in some sort of naked dating mud-wrestle with her show beau.

In a statement, Nizewitz claims she was told that her lady parts were going to be completely blurred for the show and that she was manipulated and lied to. The Long Islander said, “If you watch an episode, you will see that the blur actually makes it less revealing than a bikini would. Obviously, I did not expect the world to see my private parts," reports Variety. (Source: Huffington Post)

This revelation apparently set off a Twitter storm of people making fun of her. Not to mention that her grandmother got ticked off at her. (So, her grandmother was okay with watching her granddaughter cavort around nude but blurred with a complete stranger? It was just seeing the actual orifices out there for all the world to see that got granny’s goat? Well, that makes sense.)

The suit, obtained by PEOPLE, claims Nizewitz suffered "severe emotional distress, mental anguish, humiliation, and embarrassment" after the slip-up…"I immediately started getting text messages. Everyone saw it." (Source: People)

Ten million dollars worth of  Tweeters making fun of her, causing“emotional distress, mental anguish, humiliation and embarrassment”?

I guess if the reality show in itself fails to provide the pay-day you’re looking for, there’s always the after-the-fact they done me wrong civil action.

And to add insult to injury, it’s not just her grandmother who’s not thrilled.

Poor Jessie believes that the accidental peep show put the kibosh on a relationship that was just starting out.

"He never called me again after the show aired," she told the paper. "I would have hoped we could have had a long-term relationship."

Longer term even than those three naked, unmasked dates on the primitive resort island?

Jessie, Jessie, Jessie.

Guess that’s reality for you.

Call 911 for a cable outage? Oh, grow up!

It’s not as if I’ve never called 911.

Why, in just the last couple of years, I have dialed it on several occasions.

Last December, we smelled burning wires. The odor seemed to me to be emanating from our heating system. It seemed to my husband, who just happens to be the great-great-grandson of Ebenezer Scrooge, that, somehow, my plugging in the Christmas tree  - with those oh, so, powerful tiny white lights – had sparked a chain of Bad Events that was going to burn the house down.

After examining the tiny-white-light wire and plug, and the wall socket, my husband conceded that this was not very likely to be the source of the burning wire smell.

We waited a bit to make sure that the smell was not dissipating – it wasn’t – and proceeded to call 911. When I got the dispatcher, I explained that while this did not seem to be an emergency-emergency – there were no flames licking the walls, no smoke billowing from the vent registers – it did seem worthy of a check out. I asked whether they would advise us to call our HVAC service 24 hour number, or whether they thought the BFD should come by.

Not surprisingly, the answer was BFD. An engine was dispatched, and after a walkthrough of our condo, the BFD declared that, while it was good that we had called, it was not a bfd. We did have a smoldering wire in our heat exchange, but once the heating system was shutdown, we were not to worry. (I also got the BFD to declare that plugging in the Christmas tree had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the incident.)

Not having heat wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world, this being New England in December, but we survived.

Earlier in the same year, I had been at The Writers Room of Boston on a Sunday, working with a friend and fellow member, along with my 15 year old niece, to defrost The Room’s ancient, ice-impacted dorm-sized fridge, which is used primarily to house members’ lunch yogurts, milk for coffee, and left over lunches (which are typically left to go bad). Marilyn and I were doing our civic duty as members. By assisting with Operation Defrost, and helping out a needy non-profit, Molly was earning a couple hours to check off her community service requirements list.

Anyway, in my zeal to complete the project, I managed to sever the Freon line.

Marilyn and I had the presence of mind to get us all out of the kitchen, shut the door, and open a number of windows. Oh, yes, and to dispatch Molly to the downstairs lobby a.s.a.p. so that she wouldn’t be inhaling any Freon.

Heads hanging out the windows so as not to breathe the Freon-ish air, I tried googling to see what level of haz-mat this was. Meanwhile, Marilyn tried to get a hold of her son-in-law the chemical engineer.

When neither of us was able to easily find the answer, we joined Molly in the lobby, where I called 911.

Again, I explained that this was not a grave emergency, but that we just wanted to talk to someone about whether The Room was a haz-mat site, whether we needed to inform the building manager, whether someone who had breathed in some Freon should seek medical attention, etc.

Well, it was a slow Sunday morning in downtown Boston, and the jakes were getting bored hanging around the station, so within a couple of minutes, we had a fire truck out front, and a couple of laughing firemen explaining that the only way the Freon would have harmed someone was if a double-wide freezer-fridge had exploded in something the size of a telephone booth. One of the firefighters volunteered to go up and toss the dorm fridge out the window for us, but we declined.

My third recent 911 encounter occurred after I witnessed a wrong-way bicyclist struck by a delivery truck. The bloody bicyclist was hurled into the air, nearly landing on me, and after I quickly assured him – based on no particular wisdom or authority – that he was going to be all right, I called 911 to report an accident. (By the way, the guy was all right, even though the way he was bicycling was all wrong.)

Of these three incidents, the one where I probably should have called the non-emergency number was the Freon blast – even if I was extremely happy to have the firefighter assurance that Molly was going to be okay.

But, let’s face it, 911 is more memorable than whatever the non-emergency equivalent is. (There is a 211 number but, when I read up on it, it sounded a bit too non-emergency-ish.)

Anyway, over the period during which I called 911 three times, I would estimate that we lost Internet and/or TV service on at least a half dozen occasions.

These occurrences prompted a) grousing, b) calls to Comcast, c) checks on the old Blackberry to see whether there were outages in the area.

It would not have occurred to me in a billion years to call 911.

Then again, I don’t live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and I don’t watch Breaking Bad, which was apparently on the other evening, when  Fairfield was flooded with 911 calls from upset Cablevision subscribers.

The Fairfield Police Department was not amused and took to its Facebook page to post a refresher course on using its emergency system. The message read:

"We are receiving numerous 911 calls regarding the Cablevision outage. This is neither an emergency or a police related concern. Please direct your inquiries to Cablevision. 911 should only be called for Life Threatening Emergencies ONLY. Incidents that are not of an emergency nature may be reported to the Fairfield Police Department. ... Misuse of the 911 system may result in an arrest." (Source: Hartford Courant.)

What would possess someone to call 911 because they didn’t have TV reception?

I don’t typically set myself up as any sort of paragon of normalcy, but isn’t my typical reaction to a cable outage the normal one?

I.e., what is called for is a combination of a) grousing, b) calls to the cable provider, c) checks on the old smartphone to see whether there were outages in the area.

Tell me that almost the entire population of Fairfield, Connecticut, doesn’t have an iPhone that was not impaired…

Calling 911? What a bunch of boo-boo babies.

One commenter on the Fairfield FB page suggested that because the evening’s episode of Breaking Bad was “super-intense and very riveting”, the people who called 911 “ not thinking rationally when reaching for the phone." Which the commenter found “kind of awesome.”

Well, I guess in a way that a TV show can be so “riveting” and “super intense” that viewers suspend the rational parts of their brain is “kind of awesome.”

I certainly got swept up in the final episode of The Sopranos.

But I think that if cable had broken bad while Meadow was parallel parking outside the diner, and Tony was starting to play Don’t Stop Believing on the juke box in the booth, I would have started swearing my head off. And looking for the #$*&&(@!!!&(*number for Comcast.

I might not have been quite as calm as Fairfield resident Benn Gott, who wrote:

"When my Internet went out an hour ago," he wrote on Facebook, "I took a hint, put one of my dad's old jazz records on the turntable, and pulled out a good book. That, plus the crickets and peepers, has turned this into a very good night indeed."

But I don’t think it would have occurred to me to call 911.

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I first read about this in an AP article on boston.com.

The Golden Age of Television: Sky King

Every once in a while, you see a reference to The Golden Age of Television, those sublime years in the 1950’s when a new play by Paddy Chayefsky was televised every other night, and Kitty Carlisle sat around discussing Kirkegaard with Bennet Cerf.

I, apparently, couldn’t stay up late enough to see any of the good and brainy stuff.

What I remember of TV in the 1950’s – and I remember plenty of it – was in good part complete and utter dreck: lousy comedians, simpering family shows, wooden dramas. Sure, there were some shows that have stood the test of time  - I still like The Honeymooners. But there was one whole heck of a lot of crap on those three measly networks.

This all came to mind when I saw the obituary of Gloria Winters in The New York Times a couple of weeks back. (Once a reader of the Irish sports pages, always a reader of the Irish sports pages, I guess.)

Gloria Winters, you may ask. And admittedly I would have as well if the header hadn’t read:  Gloria Winters, Perky Star of Wholesome ‘Sky King’, Dies.

I knew at once: Penny, adoring niece of adoring uncle, Sky King.  And don’t let those cowboy duds or the stage-coachy looking thing in the background fool you. Sky King was no cowpoke; he was a flying rancher, who flew around the Flying Crown Ranch in The Songbird.  The plots of the show were astoundingly forgettable, and I say that because I have an astoundingly good memory, and the only episode I remember is one in which Penny got in trouble with Uncle Sky for turning on The Songbird and using the propellers as a hair dryer. (Oh, that perky, wholesome Penny!)

I did have something of a crush on Clipper, Penny’s brother, and if he wasn’t featured in an episode, I kind of lost interest.

“Sky King” was just one of the many lousy shows aimed at kids, many of which – quite creepily – featured men that, given today’s sensibilities, you wouldn’t let your kid within a barge pole of. (Ever check out the camp director on Spin and Marty? Today’s parents would rather see their sons join the Dead End Kids than hang out at the Triple R Boys Ranch.)

Many of these shows featured absent mothers, or absent parents, entirely, which I suppose was part of the appeal for the kids in the audience. (Who among us didn’t occasionally if fleetingly wish that we’d be spirited away from our “real” families and get to live with some benevolent relation who would adore us with the same only-have-eyes-for-you fervor that the men in Shirley Temple movies bestowed on little Shirley. (Talk about unwholesome geezer interest in ringleted little girls. Ewww. We got to see a lot of these movies because, when there were no crummy TV shows on, Boston Movie Time showed crummy B&W films from the 1930’s.)

So where were Penny and Clipper’s folks? 

I know that Peter Graves, who played Jim, was a nice guy and all that, but what in tarnation was Joey doing living with Jim and Pete-the-ranch-hand on that isolated ranch on Fury?  How were those guys all related? And to think that little Packy’s parents let him go over there to play. Or maybe Packy was another orphan. (And if I have this right, Fury was filmed on the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson family lived. talk about creepy.)

Rin Tin Tin was another one. Nary a woman in sight, which wasn’t surprising, given that it took place on an Army fort smack dab in the middle of wild Indian territory. But why didn’t Corporal Rusty have a mom and dad? Sure, it’s nice to have a handsome Army lieutenant (Lt. Rip Masters), and a good-humored, cuddly Irish sergeant (Sgt. Biff O’Hara) looking out for you, not to mention having a swell German shepherd like Rinty, but still…

Which didn’t keep me from loving this show, even though I didn’t like Rusty at all. (He was certainly no Clipper King, that’s for sure.) My favorite episode – whose wasn’t – was the one where Rusty was going to be trampled by a herd of stampeding buffalo, which were stopped dead in their tracks by the sight of a white buffalo. (Cue mystical, angelic choir music.)

Sky King. Fury. Rin Tin Tin. I’d rather watch the Teletubbies, thanks.

And I think I’m more inclined to agree with Newton Minnow, who referred to TV as a wasteland, than to those who think of the 1950’s as The Golden Age of Television.

As I said, they probably got to stay up later and watch the good stuff. They certainly weren’t sitting their on Saturday morning, eating Sugar Pops out of a melmac bowl, watching Penny plane-dry her hair on Sky King.

So long, Mitch Miller. (Or why I know the words to every corn-ball song written in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.)

Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-Double-L-Y? If you did, it was probably by the light of the silvery moon. Or perhaps even under the shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky. Or maybe you spotted Kelly the banks of the Wabash, long ago?

Gee, but I’d give the world to see that old gang that sat around our family room on Friday evenings, Singing Along with Mitch by the light of our B&W television. Friday was the night my grandmother, uncles, and aunt came to dinner, and, in the early 1960’s - when Mitch was every much a Friday night staple in our house as was fried haddock – stayed to watch Mitch Miller and warble along.

For those too young to remember, “Sing Along with Mitch” presented a male chorus, conducted by Mitch Miller, which sang tunes from The Great and Not So Great American Songbook. Those of us in the viewing audience were encouraged to sing along. We did.

And when Mitch wasn’t on TV, we could play his albums – including the one  pictured above - on our Webcor stereo. At least when the family stereo wasn’t occupied by the “Four Roses Song Fest”. (Not to be confused with Guns ‘n Roses, even though when you google ‘four roses record album’ and awful lot of Axel Rose comes up.)  If only we’d hung on to all those old LP’s, rather than box ‘em up and drop  ‘em off at the St. Vincent de Paul Society Thrift Shop.  This sucker’s going for $19.99 on e-Bay. I ain’t saying we’d be rich, but $20 for a Four Roses Song Fest here, $20 for a Sing Along with Mitch there. Throw in an Allen (“Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder”) Sherman platter or two, and the Vaughn Meader First Family Album, and it all adds up.

Not that we had to rely solely on Mitch or those fueled-up, song-festing funsters from Four Roses to learn songs of yore

My grandmother, in her own parlor, liked to tickle the ivories on her upright. Her limited, but enthusiastically addressed repertoire, included “Maggie” (“I wandered today to the hills, Maggie.”) and “Mockingbird Hill” (“Tra-la-la, tweedle-y dee-dee, it gives me a thrill, to wake up in the morning on Mockingbird Hill.”). [Note to family members reading this post: the “Black Hawk Waltz”may have had lyrics, but I don’t recall anyone singing them.]

Not that my sibs and I were completely abnormal finks. We all had our ears glued to WORC for Elvis, The Beach Boys, Shelly Fabares and whoever else was popular during the reign of Mitch Miller. (My first call-in request to WORC was to hear “Flying Purple People Eater.”  I was seven or eight at the time, but even at the young age there were clear indications of my refined and sophisticated taste.)

It’s just that, in addition to knowing all the words to “He’s a Rebel” and “Surf City”, we also knew all the words to “There Is a Tavern in the Town” (where, no doubt, they poured Four Roses).

This week’s death of Mitch Miller, as you can see, got me thinking about the early 1960’s, and why I never run out of shower tunes.

Sure, Mad Men portrays the early sixties as a louche world of clever, Brycreemed Madison Ave. chain smokers and the glam girls on their arms (or elsewhere), but most of us who were there witnessed a parallel reality that included a lot more Gunsmoke re-runs, May Processions, and trips to the library to check out more Ellery McQueen mysteries than it did 4-Martini lunches, fab clothing, and deep, dark, mysteries. (Not that there weren’t family secrets, and some of them were pretty darned deep and dark. It’s just that no one seemed to brood about them – at least if your family was composed of equal parts of the double repression whammy of Irish Catholic and German Catholic.)

And now Mitch Miller – aged 99: apparently, singing old chestnuts keeps you, if not exactly young, then alive – has passed away to his blue heaven, where he’s roaming in the gloaming, in the good old summertime. (By the way, Mitch had a quite successful career as a record company executive, and worked with popsters like Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, and Patti Page).

So long, Mitch.  Be kind to your web footed friends.*

Meanwhile, Bill Bailey – whoever you are, wherever you are – won’t you please come home.

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*Mitch’s show always ended with the song “Be Kind to Your Web Footed Friends”, sung to the tune of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Into the "Shark Tank"

Now that I'm off the news, and I can never find Law & Order, I don't have much "must-see" TV in my life.

But I can imagine it will be somewhat easy to get hooked on Shark Tank, a reality show in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a group of investors who decide, on the spot, whether to throw in some money. The investors are:

• Barbara Corcoran, who made her money in real estate
• Daymond John, the FUBU guy
• Kevin Harrington, "Father of the Infomercial" (thanks, Kev)
• Kevin O'Leary, who got rich with The Learning Company
• Robert Herjavec, security technology

Herjavec's bio is interesting. On the Shark Tank website, we're told that he was "eking out a living waiting tables' when he realized that "technology was the ticket to serious money" (Except, I guess, in my case). But according to the bio on Herjavec's company site, he was selling IBM mainframes before founding his own business.  It can, of course, be true that someone started out in mainframe sales, switched to waiting tables, and then founded his own company.  Still, not the norm, and there's no mention of table-waiting on Herjavec's professional site. Waiting tables is, of course, a lot more show-biz than flogging mainframes, which is I'm sure why it's part of his Shark Tank bio. (Me, I'd put down 'combat boot polisher,' the summer shoe factory job I once held.)

But enough about the guys with the deep pockets. Let's hear it for the folks with the big dreams.

Last Friday, the first dreamer up was Jill Quillin, a woman from Tennessee who's come up with a way to remix old partial lipsticks. Having rarely worn it, I don't know a hole hell of a lot about lipsticks, but I do know enough to know that a lot of it stays in the tube where you can't get at it.

LipstixRemix is a little kit that helps you meltdown the old and mold it into a new, perfectly good tube of lipstick. Quillin was looking for $105K marketing-expansion money, in return for 30% of her business.

Quillin was quite good in her presentation, and the idea does seem like one that will catch on for a while. Recession-prompted frugality will get some women to invest in a Remix kit. Longer term, the brigade who claim to spend $0 per week on groceries by clipping coupons, who get all their kids' clothing at swap-shops, and who, in general, make a fetish (necessary or optional) out of watching every penny, will probably enjoy this product, assuming that their budget allows for lipstick that's not home-made by combining melted Crayola stubs with Crisco or something.

Most women, I'm guessing, would find it too-time consuming to go through a melt-mold-freeze-retube process to save a few bucks on lipstick, and will keep on with their usual approach: an annual purge of the partially used lipsticks.

Still, Quillin did an excellent job of presenting her idea.

The two tech investors - Kevin O and Robert - were out of their element when it came to lipsticks, but the others were interested in playing. So Quillin ended up with the money she was looking for - but not without giving up 50% of her business.

Surprisingly, she didn't attempt to negotiate, which suggests that she went in prepared to give up that 50%. Or that, just as those bright lights can melt a lipstick, they can make you want to get the deal over and done with. (At one point, the deal was $105K for 40%, and Quillin went out to call her husband for his advice. By the time she returned, there was a new 50% deal on the table, which she took, saying 'That was the fastest 10% I ever lost.') I would liked to have seen her push back a bit, but, hey, it's her business, and I'm wishing her luck.  Her product does seem a natural for TV shopping.

Next up was one Tim Gavern, AKA Captain Ice Cream, a stunned looking goofball who rode in on his tricycle ice cream cart, a concept he hopes to franchise. Which he will be doing without any help, I'm afraid, from the sharks, all of whom took to his ice cream but not to his idea.

While he may have looked like a goofball, Gavern is savvy enough to have spun up the 10 reasons why his Shark Tank experience was all for the best. Sure, there's an element of licking his wounds, rather than a quiescently frozen confection in his write-up, but he did get right back up on his ice cream cart.

I made a lot of new friends because of “Shark Tank” – especially the production crew as I left about 300 ice cream treats in their freezer (in mid-August in L.A.). One crewmember’s response was, “Thanks, man. We never get anything.”

I can’t wait to find out who might be on the other end of my telephone because of my appearance on “Shark Tank.” Who knows who might call. The President? FYI: my phone has not stopped ringing since my episode aired.

After six minutes of airtime on ABC in front of 5 million viewers, Captain Ice Cream still has zero debt and I own 100% of my company. Ha ha.

The number one reason I was a contestant on “Shark Tank” was to build the Captain Ice Cream brand. Finding a way to instill a new brand name into the minds of millions of Americans is quite difficult today. I did it.

Gavern wants to aim his franchise at laid-off baby-boomers who wouldn't want to get back into the corporate rat race, even if anyone wanted them there.

Sure, riding a ice cream tricycle around beats being a Walmart greeter, but Gavern's only making $200 a day, and in many parts of the country, the ice cream vendor season is pretty darned limited.

No surprise that the sharks took a pass.

There was some interest, however, in Michael Schiavone's idea of the Caffeindicator, a sort of home pregnancy device that will let people know whether what they're being served is caf or de-caf.

Years ago, I watched a waitress pour two cups of coffee from the same (caf) pot, and then proceed to serve me one of them as decaf. When I pointed out that both cups had come from the same pot, she denied everything. Come on, honey, if you're going to serve the customer what she didn't order, why not at least do it out of sight. (Another time, I ordered a dish with penne, and was served spaghetti. Rather than acknowledge that they were out of penne, the guy argued with me that the spaghetti was actually penne. I had to give it to him for sheer chutzpah.)

So we all know that the caf switcheroo can be an issue.

Still, as one of the sharks observed, it's not something that most people are generally all that paranoid about.

Schiavone wants to pitch his idea to the packaged sugar and sweetener folks, and was able to get $200K for 50% of his company - he was asking for that amount for 25% - contingent on his striking a deal with one of the sugar/sweetener packagers.

I wasn't paying supreme attention, so I must have missed the part about why he would need the $200K if he actually had a deal with Domino or Sweet 'n Low.  Hmmmmmm.

The final business looking for investment was run by a couple who own a coffee shop legal clinic, Legal Grind, which is aimed at middle class folks too rich for Legal Aid and to poor for their own counsel. They come into the shop, have a cuppa, and get their divorce documents drawn up.

Annie and Jeffrey Hughes (he's the lawyer in the family) have been grinding out living this way for a while, and are hoping to franchise the concept.

Not, alas, with the help of the sharks, one of whom characterized their presentation as "bad theater," which, in a way, it was.

But, as far as I'm concerned, the Shark Tank was pretty good theater.

I will definitely be tuning in again.

Talk is cheap, and silence for Conan O'Brien may be really golden

Ah, what I wouldn't have done for a $40M dollar walk-away in exchange for not-bad mouthing a former employer. And, since most of them are out of business, there'd be no one there to hold me to the no-bad-mouthing clause.

Not that I would call anything I've said about my ex-companies bad-mouthing. Is it really bad mouthing to tattle on the late, not-so-lamented Genuity by informing the world that they spent $100K to produce a brochure with a die-cut, brushed-metal cover that was too heavy to mail, which was just as well, since the brochure was written in gibberish. (Lorem ipsum - if you're not familiar with it, that's fake Latin that designers sometimes slot in where the real text will go - would have made more sense.)

No, mainly what I do - here on occasion, and in person (especially at alumni gatherings) - is odd-mouth, weird-mouth, could-you-believe-it-mouth, foible-mouth, and WTF-mouth.

But, according to yesterday's WSJ, Conan O'Brien's being offered just that. (Access to source material may require a subscription, by the way.)

In truth, I don't really have an opinion on the entire Tonight Show kertuffle, as I don't watch the show. Ever.

What I know about Conan O'Brien is this: Brookline Mass, red, Gumby-shock hair, Harvard grad, once stalked by a mentally unbalanced priest.

This is similar in amount and kind to what I know about his predesucessorcessor, Jay Leno: Andover Mass, lantern jaw, Emerson College, collects cars and motorcycles.

In our info-chocked world, it's hard to maintain ignorance of such things, no matter how willful you are.

But I am, of course, intrigued by the $40M "silence is golden" parachute he's being offered to vacate his seat and return it to Jay Leno.

The no-bad-mouthing stipulation - called a nondisparagement clause - is interesting. Disparagement, after all, is in the ear of the beholder, is it not? And one beholder's light poke in the ribs may be another's sledgehammer to the head.

And I wonder whether the nondisparagement is a two-way treaty.

So far, it's apparently not, as one NBC exec has characterized O'Brien as "chicken-hearted", "gutless", and "an astounding failure".

Fortunately, because I'm nowhere near worth $40M worth of employer value or disparagement, I don't have to worry about much in the way of public disparagement about me by former employers. They are, of course, entitled to all the private disparagement they want. ("All those long manifestos. Sure, she made her points, but I stopped reading on page 7 single spaced." ''Talk about analysis paralysis; if she'd only stop thinking for a moment." "Did she really have to ask that question at a company meeting?" "Can't we just get her to shut up?")

Ah, but those who live in the public eye are bound to get disparaged in the public eye - and that goes for both companies and individuals.

Not that the disparagement and counter-disparagement is apt to drag on for too long. With so much comedic fodder in the universe, a year from now will anyone even get an infra dig joke about Leno-O'Brien-NBC?

Whatever the final outcome of the Conan O'Brien-NBC negotiations, I do know that I will personally benefit from Jay Leno's exiting his 10 p.m. time slot. I'm a Law & Order junkie, and 10 p.m. used to mean Law & Order, in one form or another, at least half the days of the week. So, I much look forward to their return to the docket.

Meanwhile, on behalf of the little guy, I am pleased to note that O'Brien's $40M includes some spread-around for his staff.

Take my dummy, please

In the beginning, was the clown.

But the clown didn't provide quite enough horror.

So there was the ventriloquist dummy.

I haven't thought of the ventriloquist dummy in many a year. Maybe not since I last turned my eyes and covered my ears to avert the specter of Ricky Lane and Velvel on the Ed Sullivan Show. (The horror. The horror.) And, not that I have an obsession with Ricky Lane and Velvel or anything, but I just googled "them" and an old Pink Slip post came up #1. (The horror. The horror.)

But then there was that recent The NY Times article on Kentucky's Vent Haven Museum, home to 700 ventriloquist dummies, where "the unsettling amazement is unremitting."

I'll bet.

Edward Rothstein/The New York Times

Not that I am anti-ventriloquist.

In fact, as a child, I longed to be able to throw my voice. As did, I suspect, every other kid sitting in a 50 kid classroom listening to a nun - often even scarier than a clown with a ventriloquist dummy combo would ever have been - spout nonsense or completely lose her cool.

How marvelous it would have been, on so many occasions, to throw a voice from the PA system or the statue of the Blessed Mother, saying "I'll just bet."

Like when Sister Saint Wilhelmina was giving us fair warning about shoplifting at Woolworth's by insisting that there were midgets in baby buggies with cameras snapping pictures of kids light-fingering rubber daggers, globe pencil sharpeners, or Hardy Boys mysteries.

These pictures would be developed, and store detectives - every bit as savvy as the PI's on 77 Sunset Strip - would spot the Our Lady of the Angels uniforms and zoom right over to nab the miscreants.

I'll just bet.

Or when Sister Mary Florence told us that if you bit your finger- nails, broke your fast, but said to heck with it and went ahead and received Holy Communion, you would go to hell if you happened to get hit by a rogue bus or a drunk-driving public school grad on the way home.

Really 'sta?  Really?

Or when Sister Aloysius Patrick told us that the fire that had killed a hundred of so kids at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago was actually intended for us. One of God's few mistakes, don't you know.

Sister, sister, sister: you are nuts.

So I did harbor an occasional desire to vent, and even practiced a bit.

Alas, I never completely mastered the closed mouth. Although I was deft enough to have become, like Edgar Bergen, a radio ventriloquist, where it was okay to move your mouth. It was radio, after all. (I could also, I suspect, have been a tap dancer on radio. Too bad radio days were over.)

There is apparently a precedent for Catholic-based voice-throwing, by the way.

Cardinal Richelieu is said to have used a ventriloquist in 1624 to frighten one of his bishops.

We could have used a little Cardinal Richelieu at my school.

Ventriloquism would, of course, also have served me well during my professional career.

All those meetings when I wanted to call BS.

Hmmmm. Come to mention it, I mostly did call BS, which may be why I never had the brilliant career I could have.

I will say that, while I do find most ventriloquist dummies completely and utterly creepy - and thus would not be apt to seek out this museum, if I were ever to find myself in Kentucky - I actually don't mind puppets.

With the exception of Howdy Doody, who to me was nothing more than a ventriloquist dummy with strings attached - the same slack jaw and bug eyes - I was rather fond of Kookla, Fran, and Ollie.  (Fran was a person, by the way.)

I loved Farfel, the puppet-dog - a version of which is displayed in Vent Haven - who shilled for Nestle's chocolate.

I loved Shari Lewis and her sidekick Lambchop, who was cuter than cute and didn't look anything like Jerry Mahoney or Mortimer Snerd or, God forbid, Velvel.

And the Muppets. What is not to love about the Muppets?

But ventriloquist dummies, I'm afraid...While I'm not exactly afraid of them, I do find them, for the most part, nasty, brutish, and short. Smart alecky I can live with, but there's a real malign aura to the "classic" dummy.

I did note on the Vent Haven site that modern dummies - as evidenced by the snapshots taken at their annual ConVENTion - are more varied and interesting than the wooden creature that most comes to mind when one thinks "ventriloquist dummy."

Which, thanks to The NYT, I have been thinking for the last week or so.

(The horror, the horror.)

Rabbit Ears

As anyone who, in the last six months, has had their TV on for more than the time it takes to watch a sitcom re-run knows, this February, the nation converts to all-digital broadcasts.

Ta-ta, to those analog signals of yester-year. So long to those  blow-down aluminum contraptions on the roof. Bye-bye, rabbit ears. If you don't have cable or satellite, and you still want to see what's out there in the wasteland, as of February 17th, you'll need a converter box if you want to watch CSI or The Biggest Loser on your old B&W Philco, Admiral, or Muntz.

In truth, until those ads started running, I hadn't realized how many people there are out there who still don't have cable. I guess I've just gotten so used to constant access to shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos, to being able to watch every last Red Sox game, to scrolling through hundreds of channels in hopes of finding something on, I'd forgotten that it wasn't all that long ago that TV was ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and a bunch of two-digit "UHF" channels - and not much else.

Naturally, those who don't have cable/satellite are, for the most part, those who are rural (in un-cabled territory with a last mile, or hundred mile, problem) and/or those who can't afford to pay a premium for TV watching.

So this switch to digital is no doubt going to result in some loss for those who fall on the wrong side of the digital divide. (Of course, not having access to the Internet is one thing, not having TV is another. This divide promises to be even wider than the Internet gap, even if it impacts fewer people.)

But, as the ads have been telling us, the government is here to help. It's been promising consumers $40 coupons to help with the cost of the converter boxes that those with old-style TV sets will need in order to receive those new-fangled digital signals. (Even being able to receive these signals doesn't help with the potential for losing those signals. Unlike analog signals, digital signals don't just fade out with distance - as in the old days, we could get the Manchester, NH TV station, but weak and fuzzy - but have a tendency to just drop off - as in the cell-phone dropped-call effect.)

I remember, of course, the days of the TV antenna. I can't remember if the same guy who repaired your TV (in our case, our neighbor Joe May) also took care of the antenna on your roof, but they were both in need of regular care and feeding. And then there were rabbit ears. Did they replace or augment the aluminum monstrosities on the roof? I've forgotten entirely.

The family rabbit ears had a brown plastic base, some kind of turning knob, and a pair of aerials. They worked - sort of. Sometimes you had to wave them around, hold them in the air, or attach tin foil to the tips. Occasionally, they needed a more radical boost. I remember my father trying to watch a Patriots game broadcast by Channel 6 in New Bedford. This was in the days when the Patriots were really small-time, and New Englanders mostly rooted for the NY Football Giants, whose games were shown on ABC, or some "real" network. Anyway, my father wanted to see this game, and the only way he could get it to come in was to pile encyclopedias around the base of the TV, and to station several of his kids at a few strategic locations near the encyclopedias. The game still came in as if it were being played in a blizzard. Perhaps it was. But you never knew in the old days, given how much fuzz and snow there was during a not atypical TV viewing outing.

I suspect that, decoder boxes or no decoder boxes, TV reception for the have nots (or the will nots: those who place so little value on television that they don't bother with cable or satellite, even though they can well afford it) will be less than perfect come February 17th.

And, of course, to make matters worse - and in the current economic climate, everything seems to make matters worse, doesn't it - the government has run out of money with which to subsidize the purchase of the digital converter boxes.

This I saw in an article yesterday in The Boston Globe, where it was reported that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (part of the Department of Commerce):

...announced that it has run out of funding, even as consumers continue to apply for coupons. New applicants are being put on a waiting list and will be contacted if more funds become available.

Okay, most people can probably manage to come up with the $50 or so it will cost to get a converter box, although certainly for those eking out a meager existence (small fixed income, no work), this is a lot of money.

Still, the government's failure to deliver on its promise of help with defraying an expense that doesn't particularly benefit the average person who needs to make the conversion is a pretty dismal one.

Not exactly a catastrophe along the lines of Katrina, but can't we get anything right?

Just what our new president needs in his first month in office, eh?

Financial meltdown, high unemployment, the Israeli crisis, war on two fronts, the last of the glaciers in Glacier National Park.....All that's not enough? We have to add on a couple of million poor folks who won't be able to watch TV?

Stay tuned!

Celebrity Apprentice

I wasn't going to watch, but a couple of weeks ago, I accidentally caught the last couple of minutes of The Apprentice - just in time to see Nadia Comaneci get fired. (Nadia Comaneci! I remember when she was the darling little Romanian gymnast, balance beaming in her little pigtails all the way to Olympic Gold. Now she's a washed up "celebrity" trying unsuccessfully to avoid getting "fired" by Donald Trump.)

So I went and tuned in an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice.

I struggled a bit at first, since I wasn't all that familiar with a number of the celebs.

Sure, I knew Nadia. And the guy who played Big Pussy on The Sopranos. My husband, who has a surprisingly excellent eye for spotting actors, recognized Marilu Henner, who played Elaine on Taxi. (Which shouldn't have been all that much of a surprise, given that he's probably seen every episode a dozen times.) I knew who Lennox Lewis was. And Omarosa, who became a celebrity for being on The Apprentice - talk about self-referencing - and is now, apparently, such a big celeb, that she can go by her first name only - like Oprah, or Hillary, or Rosie.

And, yes, I recognized Stephen Baldwin as one of the lesser Baldwins - although, I guess other than Alec, they're all lesser Baldwins. And I knew the name Gene Simmons, but would have recognize him better if he was in his Kiss kabuki - NOT THAT I AM NOW OR EVER WAS A KISS FAN - but I knew who he was. (I was thinking that he was invited on because his dye-job and hair-do make Donald Trump's look like an ad for Preference by L'Oreal, but then I looked up his Bio on the show's site, and he's oh, so much more. In fact, I'm guessing he is second to no one - including Donald - in his ability to self-promote and self-aggrandize).

Oh, and my apologies to Mr. Trump for referring to him as Donald. Even Jim Cramer, who was one of the judges this week, used the respectful "Mr. Trump" when addressing the master. ("It's insolence to you, Mr. Trump," he advised Mr. Trump when Gene Simmons all but dared MT to fire him by ignoring his near-command not to bring Omarosa and Jenny Finch - whoever she is - back to the boardroom for the round in which "someone will be fired.")

I looked her up and Jenny, like Nadia, is an Olympic athlete - a softball player - and she has a son named Ace. (Poor kid.)

The other celebs, well, I was at something of a loss, but was able to glean who they are on line.

Piers Morgan - tabloid editor. Tito Ortiz - extreme fighter. Carol Alt - supermodel (are all models supermodels?). Trace Adkins - C&W signer. Nely Galan - TV producer. Tiffany Fallon - Playboy centerfold.

All I can say is, celebrities aren't what they used to be in my day, when there weren't that damn many of them and you'd actually be at least vaguely familiar with who they were. In those long ago days, before there were People, and Us, and celebrity gossip TV shows, celebrities were people who were actually famous for doing something - like Conrad Hilton, founder of the eponymous hotel chain and author of Be My Guest - rather than people like Paris Hilton who are famous for being celebrities.

For those unfamiliar with the central theme of The Apprentice, the wannabe's are split into teams. Each episode, the teams are assigned to a business task - renovate an apartment and sell it; flog Trump bottled water; come up with a marketing campaign for something or another. One team wins, one team loses, on either objective grounds (who sold the most whatever), or subjective grounds (whose work did the judges like better).

The project manager of the losing team has to chose the two weakest members (or the two he/she'd most like to see fired). The three then make an appearance on camera, in camera, before Mr. Trump and his advisors to make the case why they should stay and someone else should be fired.

The series culminates with two finalists duking it out, and the winner of the final task getting an offer to work in the Trump organization.

The task on the night I watched was coming up with a campaign to promote Kodak's new ink/printers.

Two Kodak managers ruled for Team A, which had quite sensibly tried to promote ink/printers. Team B - led by Gene Simmons - had not so sensibly tried to rebrand Kodak at a very high level of abstraction.

Gene Simmons argued back, telling the Kodak folks to kiss off, stating "I'm more qualified to make a decision" about how to market their products than they were.

Well, as a marketing consultant, I do feel that sometimes the outside voice is more qualified than the insiders, but in this case...

I am not likely to turn on another episode of Celebrity Apprentice. Bad enough watching the desperate suck-ups who really want to work for "Mr. Trump", let alone a bunch of quasi-celebs who I believe are playing to make money for their favorite charities, but who mostly seem to be playing to get their mush in front of the camera, and their quasi-recognized names (and mushes) a little better recognized. (At least I'm guessing that they're not playing to actually get a job working for the Trump organization, although I'm sure a few of them could use the job.)

As for the "Mr. Trump," maybe it's just that I've spent my career in the informal halls of high technology, but - other than when I worked at Wang, and everyone called and referred to Dr. Wang as Dr. Wang - I've let to work anyplace where everyone wasn't on a first name basis with everyone else.

Mr. Trump?

I don't even entirely, 100% "get" why everyone other than wife and mother has to call the president of the United States "Mr. President" (or "Madam President," as the case may well turn out to be), let alone all this pseudo-respectful, kow-towing to Donald Trump.

Sorry, Donald.

When Jim Cramer - who must really want to get on one of the major networks in prime time to appear on this show, rather than stay satisfied with his market-hours screech-fests on MSNBC - said "It's insolence to you, Mr. Trump", The Apprentice just completely jumped the shark into the campiest of self-parodies.

In any event, that's it for me and Celebrity Apprentice. I have fired myself from watching. I don't care what half-baked celebrity is left standing - although I must say that based on what I saw in the episode I did watch, please, nobody tell me if Stephen Baldwin ends up the winner.