All I Want for Christmas is...

Well, this year it's not my two front teeth (or the two teeth flanking them), since I took care of that for myself.

Of course, if I'd known we were in a recession, I might have deferred $8K worth of short term optional/long term necessary dental work. But the teeth look great, and having to spend big bucks on them more or less serves me right for a lifetime of using them as a sort of Swiss Army knife - cutting, twisting off, chomping down. If only I hadn't used my teeth to secure the wire coil that held that backpack belt in place... If only I hadn't used my teeth to open that tiny bottle of hotel room shampoo...If only I hadn't used my teeth to snip all that thread...

If wishes were dental laminates, then I'd have another $8K in the bank.

Of course, I could have helped defray the cost if I'd registered on a gift site, where I could have put my list up next to a convenient PayPal link.

Registries, it seems, have gotten really popular.

They have, of course, been around for a while.

In olden days, brides registered their silver, china, and crystal patterns, in hopes that friends and family would buy them that Lenox Monroe pattern gravy boat, or a pair of Waterford Lismore toasting flutes. (Actually, in olden days, brides probably would have been happy to get an eggbeater or a set of measuring cups, but - like everything else - there's been serious gift inflation over the years. No more buck-in-a-birthday-card!)

Now of course, brides - grooms in tow - register for everything that their greedy little hearts desire: espresso machines, ice buckets, 2000 thread count sheets. A year or so ago, I saw a young couple in Crate & Barrel trying to decide on a wastebasket.

Although I've certainly done it, I'm not a huge fan of ordering wedding gifts off the list. I'd rather get something that, when I'm dead and gone, someone will look at it and remember who gave it to them. But wedding gift registries are convenient for both gifter and giftee. (However, given today's more casual life style, I do sort of wonder when and if the young couple is ever going to drink out of those $75 a piece goblets.)

These days, as  a recent article on CNN reminded me, people register for just about anything - new baby, birthday, housewarming, just because.... There was even a reference to people registering to have their dream vacations subsidized.

So I don't think my teeth would have been out of line.

As I mentioned, I'm not philosophically opposed to gift registries. But, still.

There's almost an element of insult in there, no?

As in, I don't trust you to buy me something that I'll like.

It seems to me that if you don't know someone well enough to have at least a glimmer about what they'd like, you probably don't know them well enough to buy them a gift to begin with.

There are, of course, exceptions. In general, it's not a bad idea to assume that - unless they have explicitly stated an explicit brand, size, and color preference (e.g., black short Uggs, size 8), it is generally wise not to buy something for anyone between the ages of 10 and 20.

Your idea of a cute, hip outfit will not likely be the same idea of what constitutes a cute, hip outfit as, say, your 11 or 12 year old niece. (Lingo alert: once you reach a certain age, you and your 11 or 12 year old niece will likely consider the same things "sick", with two entirely different meanings in mind.)

But registering for a housewarming party?

No, thank you.

Not that I've ever been invited to a housewarming party, but I have gotten presents for friends and family members when they took the plunge and "bought". But these are people I know well enough to buy something for that they'll like and/or need. And, of course, since I am purchasing it, the gift will be sublimely tasteful, and no one would even think of returning, re-gifting, or rejecting it.

Gerette Braunsdorf, of Shaker Heights - or is that Shakedown Heights - Ohio, was interviewed in the CNN piece. Gerette had an understandable reaction to the housewarming par-tay registry. She thought "it was a bit tacky."

"These occasions should be about celebrating with the people who are nearest and dearest to you, not a gimme."

Others see registries as a way to ward off unwanted gifts. Maria Nardi:

...created an any-occasion gift registry for herself at exclusive crystal designer Waterford a few years ago -- and wasn't shy about telling close friends and family about it.

"Honestly, receiving gifts had become a bit of a nuisance, because I have a specific style and the presents I got didn't always match it," says Nardi, director of marketing and events for a San Francisco information technology company.

Nardi successfully registered for crystal, and is now thinking of expanding into china.

She's single, and doesn't see why she doesn't deserve nice things.

Maria's got a point. But registering?

You can certainly tell your parents and others who are close to you, 'you know, what I'd really like is a Spode tiered cake plate.'

We all have a sense of what someone spends on you, and parents and other relations (especially, I'm guessing, older ones) may be delighted to know that they're getting you something that you'll really use.

The last few years of my mother's life, we all let her know what we wanted from the LL Bean catalogue. This made life far easier for her - and for us.

Remember what I said about those closest to you knowing what you'd like? My mother didn't generally fall into that category. "Thanks, Ma, this is great," we'd tell her as we opened up yet another unwearable object. I'd hold the sweater in front of me and think, gee, when did you ever see me wearing a mold, puce, and Crayola-flesh color anything?

The LL Bean catalogue worked perfectly - plus it had the added bonus of keeping one lousy driver out of the mall parking lots during the Christmas rush. (Sorry, Ma. Wherever you are, at least you're not driving.)

The Christmas after my mother died, we used her checking account to get everyone their last pair of slippers, nightgown, or plaid flannel shirt from Liz.

There are now also sites, not tied to any particular retail outfit, where you can put your general, all-purpose wish list.

Brandt Halbach posted his on GetInHisHead.com "so his wife would know what to buy for his birthday or other holidays."

Ah, isn't this a case where a simple "honey, I'd like...", or a good old-fashioned paper and pencil list with some "ideas" on it, would have worked just as well?

I guess if it's not virtual, it's just not real.

My favorite mention in the article was of Emmy Friedrichs, who

...includes two registries in her profile on Fark.com, a news aggregate Web site, where she uses an online persona. "You can arrange it so that the people who buy you a gift don't see your real name or address," says Friedrichs, who estimates that she has received eight to 10 anonymous gifts from people in the Fark community, including an Ella Fitzgerald CD compilation that cost close to $100.

I must away to Fark and see if I can get strangers to send me things.

Note to self: shave 25-30 years off Fark persona. And don't put things like an Ott geezer-bright reading lamp on my list.

Uggs.

Maybe I can get a complete stranger to buy me a pair of  Uggs.

Papa Mia! The Vatican Puts its Employees on the Clock

Ever on the lookout for the quirky little business story, last month I saw one on an effort on the part of the Vatican to boost their efficiency by installing a badge swipe system to monitor working hours. (Source: The Telegraph (UK).)

All employees - including the Swiss Guard, but (I'm guessing) not the Pope himself - will now be metaphorically punching in and out using their new electronic badges.

The story itself has a marvelous arc:

Pope John XXIII - the much adored (at least by liberal Catholics) pontiff who pushed the Vatican II reforms - had done away with clocking in and out over 40 years ago. Pope John, who was as progressive as pontiffs go, apparently disliked the system as being inflexible. I wouldn't be surprised if he also thought it detracted from the dignity of the worker, which would have been right up his Vatican alley.

But Pope John XXIII:

...when asked by a journalist how many people worked at the Vatican, famously remarked: "Oh, no more than half of them."

This is, I guess, an admission that they might have had a slight efficiency problem.

In my experience, you don't usually have to keep an eye on most professionals, most of who don't work with an eye on the clock (except when they're doing hourly billing). In my experience, there are exceptions - and the more bureaucratic the workplace, the more exceptions I've found.

Thus, at Wang Labs, I worked in a cube near two fellows who, first thing in the morning, turned on their workstations, hung their suit jackets on the back of their chairs, and headed down to the caf (newspapers in hand) for a leisurely breakfast. These two guys also worked out at lunch, and took a long coffee break in the afternoon. Both of them were in my group, and when our boss would come around looking for one or the other of them, I could honestly say that I didn't know where they were, as I had no first hand proof that at that very moment they were slacking - just a hunch. Plus, ever since kindergarten I've tried not to be a tattle-tale.

At Wang, product managers could, in fact, be anywhere. It was a highly bureaucratic, highly meeting-intensive environment. You could be at a meeting in any of the Wang Towers, or in any of the satellite buildings. Or, of course, if you were a slacker, you could be in the caf.

Things caught up with both of these guys, and they were pink-slipped in one of the many Great Employee Massacres I survived there.

So Pope John XXIII probably had it right that in the vast Vatican bureaucracy, there were probably more than a few slackers.

But slackers, of course, can generally find a way to work around the old punch clock.

It's harder with those stinkin' electronic badges, which you need to get in and out of doors. Every trip to the bathroom or the vending machine can be monitored and timed. No more punching in and roaming around. With the electronic badges, the bosses can really play some gotcha.

And playing gotcha would certainly be more in keeping with the personality of the incumbent Pope, Benedict XVI, who's just a tad more conservative than Good Pope John. (In terms of boss material, you will not be surprised to hear me say that I would rather have worked for John XXIII than for Benedict XVI.)

Benedict XVI has apparently approved the move to magnetic badges.

“It’s to bring about better efficiency, although that can be hard to gauge with the kind of work we do,” a Vatican spokesman said. “I would say we already work very hard here.”

Well, yes, I can imagine that it may seem kind of hard to gauge efficiency with much of the work that they do in the Vatican. Figuring out who to canonize; typing up Papal Bulls and Encyclicals; granting annulments; answering the call for exorcisms. They may look efficiency resistant, but - as with most tasks - if you set you mind to it, you can figure out how to measure things.

But does the Vatican really want to rev up the annulment rate - Ah, Your Excellency, we have processed 32% more American annulments in the last canonical year, without increasing headcount.

Do they want to set up a curve, in which only an explicit number of candidates for sainthood actually make the cut - sort of like how GE rated employees, cutting out the bottom 10 percent every year. Ah, Your Excellency, we have done the annual performance review for all of our Blesseds and Venerables, and we have given top ratings to 5% in each group. We recommend the following posthumous promotions from Venerable to Blessed, and the following posthumous promotions from Blessed to Saint. Because they're all dead, pay scales will not be impacted. (Come to think of it, I bet the Vatican does have some sort of system for weeding out the prospective saints who, to their minds, appear bogus.)

Do they want to restrict encyclicals to a certain number of words or printed pages. Ah, Your Excellency, if you want to run over 24 pages, we'll have to go with pdf's. Or if you're willing to go with Times Roman 8 pt, we can still afford to print.

And what if a priest clocks out for what he thinks is a short lunch break, and some sinner stops him in the street, and the sinner is dying, and he wants to make an extra long last Confession, plus he also wants Extreme Unction (which I liked the sound of so much better than the Anointing of the Sick).... Will the priest be tempted to glance at his watch and say, "Okay, but hurry it up. I'm do back in 10 minutes, or the boss will have my head."

Hilltop Steakhouse: No such thing as a free baked potato in Dodge City?

In truth, I don't think most people actually went to Hilltop Steakhouse  for the food. At least I didn't the few time I ate there (the last time was, oh, twenty years ago when a bunch of us went there after work one Friday night).

No, I went with friends - the more, the merrier - for the full Hilltop experience of waiting in a long line that wended its way through a herd of life-sized fiberglass cattle, beneath that gazillion foot high neon cactus that advertised the place. Yee-hah!

Once you reached the inner sanctum, you were given a number and waited until you heard it called over the PA: party 347, go to Sioux City. Or Kansas City. Or Dodge City.

Once you reached  your "city", you ordered a steak - not great, but large and inexpensive - which was served with what I recall as a large and reasonably good house salad.

But you didn't go to the Hilltop for the food, you went for the experience.

You went for the decor - surprise, surprise - was Western kitsch - the kind you'd expect in a fake ghost town: swinging saloon doors, wanted dead or alive posters, steer horns.  Lots of brown.

For the sheer hilarity of standing in line for so long, making your way through rope lines like cows filing up the chute to the slaughter.

For the pure bliss of sitting there, number in hand, wondering what room you'd be hollered into this time.

Even on Route 1 north of Boston, home of kitsch eateries like the giant pagoda Chinese spot, the seafood restaurant shaped like a ship, and the Italian joint with The Leaning Tower of Pisa out front, the Hilltop was special.

In its heyday - the seventies and eighties, i.e., in the dark ages of restaurant dining, before we'd ever heard the words "artisanal" or "reduction" - the Hilltop served 20,000 diners per week, and was the top-grossing independent restaurant in the country. (Have I already said "Yee-hah"?)

These days, I have no desire to drive on a crazy highway to eat at a mediocre restaurant. So it is highly unlikely that I will ever eat there again.

And there's apparently some likelihood that the family of its founder, the late Frank Giuffrida, won't be eating there again anytime soon - at least not for free.

As reported in last week's Boston Globe, the Giuffrida family had a deal with the company that bought them out years ago that they could continue to eat there for free, in what they thought would be perpetuity, and without having to suffer the indignity of waiting in line and being given a number.

Their presence, amid the hungry crowds and life-size fiberglass cattle, would always be the "highest priority" of the new owners. The next available table would always be theirs, and "unlimited" quantities of food and drink would be free to them and their guests. Forever.

The Giuffridas had sold the restaurant years ago, but had hung onto the property until 2004, when they unloaded it shortly after Frank went to his own personal last round-up.

Once they owned the place lock, stock, and barrel, the owners decided that the free food promise had expired.

The family didn't cotton to that, and - what could be more delightfully American, yet so non cowboy code of the West? - decided to sue the bastards.

The court finding that the new owners were within their rights when they relegated the survivors' demands to Boot Hill was upheld last year.

But Giuffrida's widow and daughters "have long argued that they never would have sold the property had they known it meant forfeiting their free steaks."

Hmmmmm. Wonder what the property was sold for. Wonder what the cost of free steaks for friends and family a few times a month amounts to. My guess is that the dollar weighting is on the side of the property sale.

But then there's the ability to two-step your way through the waiting herd, and show off to friends that your money's no good here.

Priceless, apparently.

While the Giuffridas have not won back their rights so far, they are being given their day in court, and have been granted "the right to argue at a trial that they were misled by the owners of the restaurant that still bears Frank's name on a 68-foot cactus sign on Route 1." (Did I say 'gazillion foot high neon cactus?' I was off by a few feet. It just looks a gazillion feet high.)

So, Commonwealth of Massachusetts taxpayers' money will go into paying to mediate this squabble over whether the Giuffridas are entitled to free lunch forever.

Am I the only one who'd rather see that money go to fill a pot-hole or something?

Better yet, I've got an idea.

First, I'm guessing that both the restaurants and the Giuffridas have plenty of money. (One of the owners is a part owner of the Colorado Rockies, a major league baseball team. So he's probably not hurting.)

Why don't they take the money they'd spend on lawyers and donate it to a food bank or homeless shelter?

Or the Guiffridas could agree to pay for their meals, on the condition that the proceeds were donated to a food bank or homeless shelter. Or an education fund for the children of staff members. Or a retirement kitty for the ancient waitresses who've worked there forever.

Or maybe the owners can come up with some compromise freebie for the Giuffridas that maybe limits the open-ended liability of having the family be able to swan in at will, with as many people in tow as they want, and demand a table and free eats. Maybe, say, offer them one free sup at that trough per month, for a party of 10 or 12.

But these solutions are no doubt too simple and pedestrian.

No, so much is at stake here, we've got to go to court.

We're talking free lunch in Dodge City, cowpoke. Yee-hah!

Advice to WalMart on preventing employees from being trampled to death

Okay, Jdimytai Damour wasn't a real WalMart employee - not one of the lucky ones who has the security of that short-sheet workweek, the poor benefits, the paltry wage, the grim working conditions - he was a temp hired by Wally for the holiday season. (Hard to think of a more miserable job than being a WalMart temp, is there?)

Still, he was more or less in WalMart's employ at the time of his death at the feet of a mob of crazed shoppers intent on being one of the lucky ones to nab a bargain-priced flat-screen TV, or whatever else was the lure at the Long Island WalMart where Damour lost his life.

And I'm sure that WalMart, moving forward, will want to have a few more safeguards in place to prevent anything like this from happening again.

So here's a bit of free advice from someone whose retail experience was in the more refined shopping precincts of yore - Filene's and Jordan Marsh - but who nonetheless has some ideas about what could have made this entire sorry scene better.

First, I know that it's way too much to recommend doing away with the come-on Black Friday ads. Ah, those the bait and switch (or bait and run out of) bargains you've so craftily designed to bring customers in with what will be, for most, a false promise, but will, you hope and pray, keep the disappointed in enough of a spending mood for you to make a buck off them.

No, I won't be recommending that.

But how about giving out coupons to the first "n" people in line, guaranteeing that they'll get one of the precious few whatevers that's enticed the crowd.

Of course, once you reach "n", you will have to be prepared to deal with the frustration, disappointment, and anger of person "n plus 1", who had his or her rapidly beating little shopping heart set on that flat screen TV, that lap top cum printer, that day-glo Wii, that fully-sentient Elmo.

So maybe you give everyone who's in line at that point a coupon for $10 off, or some such placating token, on the stuff their dreams are made of.

No, it's not the same as getting their mitts on "it", but maybe knowing that they aren't one of the lucky ones to get "it" will keep them from surging forward in a buying frenzy that is so consumption-crazed that they won't even realize that they're trampling an actual human being, and not just last year's version of Elmo.

And while I'm on the topic of surging, would it be too much to have an orderly line set up, like the ones that funnel us to the check-in counter at the airport, so that people weren't so tempted to elbow the folks around them out of the way, or create a flying wedge so that the group's designated shopper-in-chief can get there first?

Obviously, an orderly line set up won't resolve the surge problem entirely, but it will give people a sense of where they stand and wait, and a better sense that pushing forward really won't help them all that much. Plus, if you've taken my earlier piece of advice, the folks in line will already know whether they're a have or a have not for that sentient Elmo. If you know you're going to get one, no need to push and shove. Ditto if you know you aren't going to get one.

It might be a good idea to have a back up plan around what to do if the size of the crowd gets to a certain point.

Off duty police officers, anyone?

Or, since you have an orderly rope line set up already, let everyone after a certain place in line know that they won't be in the first wave getting into the store.

No, they'll have to wait until the first set of shoppers has exited the building.

Yes, they will have to cast their lusting, jealous eyes on carts full of merchandise that they really and truly want.

But, hey, this is America: you snooze, you lose. You were the one who decided to doze in front of the TV, rather than zoom over to WalMart to be the first in line at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

What do you expect, waiting until dawn on Black Friday?

What are you, some kind of a maroon or something?

I'm not going to say that this poor man's death is all on WalMart.

No, Bentonville is not single-handedly responsible for the creation of the monster that is the American consumer.

WalMart certainly doesn't make people show up at their doors in the wee-small hours of the morning to spend money they more than likely don't have on crap they more of likely don't need.

WalMart certainly doesn't make people push and shove and otherwise behave thoughtlessly and dangerously.

But we all know it just takes one or two people to start pushing and shoving, and the whole crowd turns into an ugly mob. (Talk about the domino effect.)

And somebody in Bentonville, and at the HQ's of the other stores that contribute to the grotesque "event" that Black Thursday has become, has to know, deep-down, that their rapacious corporate greed preys on and incites the rapacious personal greed of a bunch of people who, this holiday season especially, are fearful that this may be their last spending opportunity in a long time.

What can I say? One more reason to disdain WalMart. (As if I needed another one.)

The Friday after Thanksgiving

One of the great breakthroughs of the latter part of the twentieth century was making the day after Thanksgiving a kind of/sort of holiday. If it wasn't official, you could swap out Veterans' Day or Columbus Day or one of the  other lesser days for it. (If you did go into work, it was something of a blow-off day. Good for cleaning out files, and catching up on miscellaneous and sundry.)

So, even though I'm no longer working full time, I'm taking the day off.

If it's warm enough, I'll plant my tulip bulbs. Then maybe I'll go through some piles of junk in my office. If it's at all cold and rainy - or maybe just cloudy -  I think I'll take an afternoon nap. Then off to my sister Kathleen's to celebrate my brother's birthday/my birthday (just  a few days apart).

Really, there are few days more wonderful than the day after Thanksgiving - especially if you have the capacity to stay the hell out of stores.

Thanksgiving 2008

Well, I just looked at last year's Thanksgiving Day post, and darned if I'm not pretty much thankful for the same stuff - family, friends, work, health, home - again this year.

In addition, I'm thankful for the health of my brother, Richard, who gave us a scare this fall. Fortunately, he's made tremendous progress, and we're hopeful he'll continue to do so. (And, as today is his birthday, here's a shout out: Happy Birthday, Stick.)
I'm thankful for Kennedy Brothers PT. Last year, I was recovering from a recent broken arm/shoulder. But I had stopped making much progress with my physical therapy, and was told that I'd probably need surgery to restore anything near full range of motion.

Thanks to Kennedy Brothers, I've gotten almost all my arm function back. Surgery? No thanks/no need.

I'm thankful that the Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship this year. Not for myself - I'm not that big a basketball fan. But for my husband, a life long Celtics fan (and former starter for the St. Charles K of C team from Bellows Falls, Vermont), well.... Now he can take pleasure in watching a skilled team that is a delight to see in action, and doesn't have to resort to watching re-runs of twenty-plus year old Bird-McHale-Parrish games when he wants to see great Celtics' basketball being played.

I'm thankful that we have a new president elect who is calm, thoughtful, intelligent, well-read, articulate....He certainly has his work cut out for him, but I'm certainly thankful he's here - or will be as of 1/20/2009. (Extra thanksgiving points for our fab first-lady-to-be, and their completely adorable little girls.)
I'm thankful for the work done by St. Francis House, which helps Boston's poor and homeless rebuild their lives.  St. Francis House (a.k.a., "Frank's" in street parlance) starts with the basics: meals, clothing showers...and moves on up to their excellent Moving Ahead Program (MAP), a program that helps people who are ready and able to take back their lives. One of my favorite things to do is to go to a MAP graduation and hear the graduates talk about their life's journey - and their hopes.

Thanksgiving is as good a day as any to think about the basic services that St. Francis House provides - starting with those all- important meals. Over the last year, we've seen the number of meals served each day grow from an average of 700-800 to over 1,000 - with some days hitting 1,200. These numbers will only grow as the economy gets worse, I'm afraid.

I'm thankful for all the donors (especially my family and friends) who make the work of St. Francis House possible. The art work shown above, by the way, is done by one of the guests working in the House's Art Room.

I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting to be thankful for.

And, of course, as an atheist, I'm not quite sure who I'm directing all my thanks for to.

So maybe this time around, I'll change the wording a bit.

Forget that I'm "thankful for". Let's just say that this year I'm "thankful to."

Happy Thanksgiving 2008.

I see a tall, dark small cap index in your future

The New York Times reported last weekend that some folks are turning to psychics for a bit of guidance.

As a Florida trader interviewed in the story said, "if she [his psychic] tells me she is getting a negative view, I will sell.”

Forsooth! 

“Your mortgage agents, your realtors, your bankers, you can’t go to these people anymore,” said Tori Hartman, a psychic in Los Angeles. “They’re just reading a script — at least that’s how my clients feel. People are sensing that the traditional avenues have not worked, that all of a sudden this so-called security that they’ve built up isn’t there anymore. They come to a psychic for a different perspective.”

Psychics, astrologers, spiritualists may be one of the only market sectors that's not in hopper. Business, they say, is strong - and those in need are forking over upwards of $75/hour. And that upwards can be very upward: the article mentioned that some can charge $1,000 an hour. I took a forecasting class in business school. Too bad it was econometric forecasting, not soothsayer forecasting. I always liked playing with Ouija Board. I bet I could have learned how to read a tarot card. Yet another point where my career could have been on that $1K/hour trajectory. Damn!

“My Web traffic is up and up and up,” said Aurora Tower, a New Yorker who constructs spidery star charts for her growing clientele. “People will entertain the irrational when what they consider rational collapses.”

Increasingly, the folks turning to psychics are men, especially those from the beleaguered real estate and investment industries, along with CEO's looking for help trying to figure out whether they're candidates for a give out, a buy out or a bail out. (Having more men in the mix is interesting, if only because these captains of industry tend to ask  questions about the psychic's accuracy rate, and whether they'll guarantee their readings. Oh boy.)

One of the companies cited in the article was LivePerson.com which offers - as the name implies - live consultations. Live Person (with  revenues this year of $30 million) doesn't just have spiritual readers on board. I swung by, and you can get a C++ programmer for $.50/minute, someone to give you real estate advice for $1.00/minute, and help with your PowerPoint preso for $.75/minute. (Hmmmmmm. Maybe I could find a little sideline here.... What's help with your blog worth per minute?)

There's also a mixed bag of medical practitioners, psychologists, life coaches and others who are out there, willing to charge by the minute.

I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't think I'd want to go to a doctor who charges $2.99/minute. ("Average time take per live advice is 10 minutes.")

Many of the Live Person consultants seem to be south Asian - but unlike those "hi, my name is Brian" customer service reps who try to pretend that they're sitting in Wisconsin ("Go, Packers!", these folks are using their real names and personas, which I find a plus.

But the professionals - south Asian or not -  on Live Person are absolute cheap dates compared to the spiritual readers.

On the first page alone - and there are 249 pages of spiritual readers, ten to a page - you could find yourself paying $17.70/minute to a "God gifted psychic."

Or you could send an e-mail to Elizabeth (no price quoted), who is a "certified, 6th generation psychic who will give you an open, honest reading every time."

People are asking their psychics all sorts of life, professional, personal, political, and other pressing questions. (One New York astrologer said "I get a lot of Republicans wondering where their party is going.”)

Given the uncertain times we live in, it's not surprising that people are grasping at the straw of psychic readings - although it's hard to believe that it's worth $17.70 a minute.

But I know the feeling.

During the run-up to the election, I found myself looking at the polling data a dozen times a day; reading every comment on HuffPo; and channel cruising every evening from one talking head to the next. When I really wanted to make myself crazy, I looked at Rush Limbaugh's web site.

Did it really matter what Zogby was saying about Pennsylvania or what Rasmussen was saying about Florida? Especially when it wasn't changing from one hour to the next?

No.

But I was so completely crazed and neurotic that I just couldn't keep myself from behavior that simultaneously alleviated my anxiety and exacerbated it. ("He's down by 1 point in Wisconsin!")

As it turned out, the biggest anxiety-allayer was working a phone bank the Saturday before the election.

At least I felt I was doing something.

Which, as it turns out, is also a pretty decent antidote for recession anxiety.

Read a book, watch a ball game, bake brownies, take a walk, blog...or just commiserate and anxiety-swap with your friends and family, who - last time I checked - do this kind of "work" for free.

The answer, as it usually turns out, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.

The minute he checked into The Clinic, I could see he was a sheik of distinction

Well, Saudi King Abdullah made a recent visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and his trip was apparently just what the doctor ordered to help boost the local economy.

Unlike those of us who visit the hospital with a loved on or two in tow, King Abdullah likes an entourage, and this one included a cast of 500-1000.

Now, if I were to create a list of people who would be interested enough in my hospital stay to accompany me, and I expanded the list to the very maximum possible number of people who might conceivably want to attend me during my time on the catheter, I can generously come up with a nose count of twenty. And that's if I do a bit of rounding-up (of both the numbers and the nose count).

Then again, I am not a beloved monarch, and I don't need body guards, and my friends and family have enough personal freedom on a day by day basis that they don't need to hop onto a 747 and jet off to Rochester, Minnesota, to be able to have wine with their dinner and shop 'til they drop.

Did I say drop?

Well, drop the Saudis did, spending - according to the Rochester PostBulletin -  anywhere between $1M and $2.5 M during their visit. It is suggested that their spending "in the past week [is enough] to offset the impact of the nation's economic woes for the year."

"It was great to see everybody collaborating with one another. We had businesses from caterers to fuel providers to transportation to courier services, hotels, you name it. People really came together on this one, and hopefully hit a grand slam," said Brad Jones, executive director of the Rochester Convention and Visitors Bureau, who says a conservative estimate of the economic impact is $1 million to $1.5 million for an eight-day visit by 500 people.

"I have heard anywhere from $1.5 to $2.5 (million), so clearly the visit had a major impact on our community, and we look forward to many more future visits," said John Wade, president of the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce.

Don't you just love that word "collaborating", especially in conjunction with a regime that doesn't have the best of human rights records and that more of less promotes radical Islamists as a way to keep the hoi-polloi's minds off wretchedly excessive behavior like million dollar family outings to The States. Not to mention that the whole Saudi operation puts our country in the shameful position of turning two blind eyes to their abuses because we crave their oil.

Ah, but back to the shopping spree.

It's not clear what all they bought - the storekeepers aren't providing much detail, although one did use the words "cleaned us out."

This photo, from the PostBulletin, shows the shopping caravan heading to the airport for the return to Saudi Arabia. Is the dollar really that bad - and the shopping in Rochester that good - that it's better to trek to Minnesota than to settle for London or Dubai? Or is it that, given that all 500-1000 couldn't possibly sit in the uncomfy chair by King Abdullah's bedside all day, they might as well do a little shopping.

My favorite part of the article was the comment posted that said:

The Royalty from Saudi Arabia are truly welcomed and loved by all.My question is, Why is it important to RPB to publish how much money was spent here? Do the Royalty appreciate that? Just wondering...My point is, it is a private matter.

Kudos to the flak from the Saudi Royal family for getting with the social media, but "The Royalty from Saudi Arabia are truly welcomed and loved by all"?

Yes, Midwesterners are nice and all that. And the Royalty from SA may be truly welcomed, but "loved by all."

Hmmmmmmm.

According to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Royals shopped at Macy's, Chico's, and New York & Co.

No Neiman's, no Tiffany's, no Saks in Rochester?

Some of them are also a bit fussy.

At the upscale Chardonnay restaurant, owner Mark Weimer said four members of the Saudi royal family inspected his establishment closely Saturday night as they decided whether to stay.

"People were checking to see if the silver was good enough quality," Weimer said.

Apparently it did, because some of the Saudis supped there. I personally hate, hate, hate if the silver isn't up to snuff, don't you? And don't get me going on restaurants that don't have - at min - Villeroy and Boch china. (Don't tell me you've never turned over a saucer to look!)

Frankly, I'm a bit envious of Rochester, and a bit put out that the Saudi Royals snubbed Boston.

It's not like we don't have good hospitals here. Why fly all the way to Rochester, Minnesota, when Mass General is 1000 miles closer to home? (And we do have a Neiman's, Tiffany's, and Saks - plus plenty of Macy's and Chico's, too.)

Maybe they fear that, in snotty and cold New England, they won't be loved by all.

But they might be surprised by how much love you can buy if you're willing to spread a little green around, especially in a down economy. All that spending! Sweet, sweet charity!

Hey, big spender! Spend a little time with me.

The high cost of giving into temptation: Verizon workers learn the hard way

I don't know how many of them there were - Verizon's being a little bit mum on the topic - but a number of what sounds like VZ customer support reps were canned for snooping around Barack Obama's cell phone records. It sounds like a no-harm kind of deal - they were just looking, not touching - but no-harm doesn't always translate into no-foul, and this is one of those times.

This is not a good environment in which to get tossed from a relatively secure job in a company with great benefits - not to mention a company that's probably not going anywhere, which is more than you can say for a lot of household names these days.

I'm sure the morning after the long arm of corporate HR came down on them, the folks who gave into that temptation to take a quick look at That One's records are feeling like first class morons. Not to mention feeling more than a bit like they have a lump of lead in their stomach, given the looming rec/depr-ession. And given that they were fired, they probably can't even collect unemployment insurance. Talk about a gulp-a-pa-looza.

Yet I can't help but sympathize a bit with the Verizon workers involved in this situation - especially if, as it seems now, they didn't exploit the information or use it in any inappropriate, dangerous, or national security threatening way.

Of course they shouldn't have done it. But how many of us, if given the opportunity to sneak a little glance at some celebrity personal info, wouldn't do the same? Not because we wanted to do anything with it, but because it seemed kind of interesting - and because it was right there.

I can easily see the scenario.

A worker with a few empty minutes on their hands. Oh, why don't I just go into the data base and see if I can find the records of anyone famous. Let's start with A-Rod. No, Jessica Simpson. Wait, how about Barack Obama.

Bingo.

There they are: the man of the hour's cell phone records.

With a few more minutes, you even check out who a few of those calls came from/went to.

But that got old pretty fast, when most of the calls were to David Plouffe or David Axelrod, or to his sister in Hawaii to check on his grandmother. Calls to people you'd never heard of. Bo-ring.

A-Rod might have been more interesting: juicy calls to Madonna. And if you'd sleuthed out Jessica Simpson, maybe you could have counted her calls to Tony Romo.

Very easy to see how someone could scroll around in that big, beautiful, CRM system, killing time during a break, or while waiting for the next boring, disgruntled customer to call up to demand that they get three bucks off their next bill because they spent the day in a dead zone.

After all, isn't this the same impulse that gets us googling during our idle time, sometimes looking for real information, sometimes looking for our kindergarten boyfriends, and sometimes looking for celebrity gossip? (Is Tom Brady ever going to pop the question to Gisele Bunchen?)

I was never in a position to snoop in a corporate data base with anything interesting in it - not with a career in B2B technology marketing, that's for sure.

But I sure enjoyed it the other night when we went to our favorite neighborhood restaurant, and one of the wait staff told us that Mel Gibson had been in a while back, and left a lousy tip.

The only time I ever really saw anything juicy at work - and it was only juicy to those of us who worked at the company - was the time I found a printout of the company salary list.

This was in pre-historic days, before the advent of the personal computer, when we worked on paper-based terminals - ours were DeskWriters - connected to mainframe computers. Our terminals were in the eponymous Terminal Room, and were a shared resource. We worked off of printouts, and generally left material we were done with around so that people could write notes or doodle on it.

One evening, while waiting for some batch project to run - or, more likely, to spit out an error message half-way through - I started glancing through the pile of printouts next to my terminal, hoping to find something at least mildly entertaining.

This was in the early days of personal communication via computer. There was no Internet, but there were some primitive e-mailing types of systems, and techies were finding ways to go back and forth with each other. One of our developers was part of some early Dungeons and Dragons-type group, one that was into mild kink, and he occasionally left weird material sitting about. So sometimes there was something more interesting than printouts of forecasting models or pro forma simulations.

As I flipped through the stack of paper, what to my wondering eyes did appear was a printout of the salaries of everyone in the company.

My first impulse was, 'I can't look. That wouldn't be right.'

My second was, 'I can only look for 10 seconds.'

My third was, 'I can only read it through once.'

By the time my impulse had reached the 'I can only make one copy' level I decided that enough was enough and, before I succumbed to that particular temptation, I took the printout and went and slid it under the door of the stoner guy in accounting who I assumed had left it there.

So I understand the impulse to look. Even if you stop it before it translates into sharing and exploiting the information you find, sometimes you just want to know stuff. It's as simple as that.

I feel bad for the knuckleheads at Verizon who - bored, idle, or just plain nosy - gave into that temptation to search on the name "Obama" and see what they came up with.

I bet they're wishing now that they spent those time-wasting minutes staring off into space, rather than wondering who the hell David Plouffe is.

Ten Assorted Little Things

What were they thinking?
When the Big Three automaker CEO's hopped in their individual corporate jets to fly to Washington to ask Congress to bail them out, isn't it amazing that not even one out of the three thought this might look bad. Couldn't they at least have flown in together? And shared a car service to The Hill. Did they get take their cue from the AIG execs who decided to stick with their par-tays even when it looked like they were par-taying on our dimes.

It could be worse.
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, there was an article on the Russian economy. Among the other problems they're undergoing, there's a big issues with unpaid wages - 300,000 workers are owed a collective $145,000,00o. One woman who hasn't been paid since September. She's continuing to slog away, hoping to be paid by New Year. It's not as bad as it was in the 1990's, "when tens of millions of people were affected. Then, workers went without salaries for months on end, sparking nationwide protests."

2012 has already begun.
I am really not looking forward to four more years of Mitt Romney campaigning for president. Frankly, I'd much rather listen to Mike Huckabee -who, by the way, is campaigning via book tour. I may not agree with him on much, but at least he's got a good sense of humor.

Out of Town News
I'm as bummed as the next Bostonian-Cantrabridgian who's bummed by the impending demise of Out of Town News, which has been selling, well, out of town newspapers since 1955 from plunk in the middle of Harvard Square. I bought papers or magazines there occasionally. Once, before a trip to Ireland, I bought a bunch of Irish newspapers, including flaky little ones like the Kerryman. But, like a growing number of folks, I don't do much newspaper reading off-line. I read the newspaper every day through much of my life, but now I can go weeks without getting newsprint on my hands - even though I'm reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal pretty much every day. No, it's not the same experience, and I miss some of the things - like letters to the editors and the obits - that I no longer read. I do not want to see paid journalism die. Someone's got to report on stuff for us bloggers to blog about. But it's the way the world is going. (I sure do hope that there are still magazines in print for the rest of my life, though.)

Bobby Kennedy's birthday
If he'd lived, RFK would have been 83 yesterday. Hard to believe, isn't it?

eMail Addresses
I know that if I put my mind to it, I could consolidate at least some of my e-mail addresses, at least herding a few of them into the same in-boxes. But until I put my mind to it, I will have to continue to deal with the four e-mail systems I look at multiple times during the day, the three I look at on an occasional or ad hoc basis, and the two I really should tear out by the roots.

Gasoline Tax
Massachusetts is considering levying an 11 cents a gallon tax at the pump. The way people are pissing and moaning about it, you'd think that they'd proposed an $11 a gallon tax. If the average driver puts 20 gallons a week in their tank - which sounds high to me, but then again the only cars I've ever owned were tiny little gas sippers - that's an extra $2.20 a week. Yes, times are hard, but $2.20 a week, and people are tearing their hair out? Cease and desist.

Holiday Shopping
Usually I'm wrapped by Thanksgiving - yes, I'm one of those  - but with a couple of exceptions, I haven't bought any presents yet. Like everyone else, I'll be cutting back a bit. I'll be taking at least some of the cut back money and give it to a couple of local charities that help those who have no place to cut back. (I do, of course, already have my Christmas cards - cannily purchased on December 26, 2008; I already have my Christmas stamps (Nutcracker, not religious); and I already have this year's (and next year's, for that matter) Yankee Swap, which is what the grownups do on Christmas Eve in my family.

I'm not yet willing to go gray
Yes, despite the Age of Frugality that will soon be upon us, I am having my hair colored on Monday. For a long time, I just did highlights. And sometimes I still think of the procedure as getting my highlights done. But who am I kidding? This is a dye job. Because it's a color my hair actually was in nature at one time, I somehow convince myself that it's more or less natural. Plus, when it grows out - because it's not that far off from the real me - it doesn't look weird. I don't get that "roots" look.  In truth, I have no idea what's under there. All I know is it's streaked with gray. And I don't really want to find out - not quite yet. So on Monday, I'll go see Rita-the-hair-color-genius.

Did I Say Ten Assorted Little Things?
Silly me. I meant Nine.

When toys go bad: what's on the WATCH List for 2008

Each year, since 1973, a Massachusetts-based organization has published a list of "toys with the potential to cause childhood injuries, and even death."

It's hard for me to think of a toy that, in the wrong little hands, in the wrong set of circumstances, couldn't cause injury or even death. Let's face it, if you straightened out a Slinky, you could no doubt poke somebody's eye out with it. And I wonder, if you made a thick PlayDoh death mask with no nose holes, I bet you could asphyxiate yourself - or your kid sister.

However, there are absolutely toys that a kid wouldn't have to go very far out of his or her way to do grievous harm with, and World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH) provides an annual service, just before prime toy-shopping season, by alerting us to some of the worst toys out there.

What's on the list this year?

Well, there's this little shop of horrors entry. The ANIMAL ALLEY PURSE PET, from Toys 'R Us, is aimed at everyone (age 0+) - and that means newborns, who could easily breathe in or swallow that easily falling out, hideously-colored hair. Because this is a very inexpensive toy - just $4.98 - you can see someone (someone whose taste radically differs from mine, I must say) picking it up and, seeing that age 0+ marking, throwing this into baby's first stocking. Just ghastly!

For a slightly older kid, there's NINJA BATTLE GEAR - MICHELANGELO, which includes a set of nunchaks - the "kick butt signature weapon" for 4 year olds. Now, without being vilely sexist here, I've yet to meet the 4 year old boy who wasn't capable of turning pretty much anything into his own "kick butt signature weapon" (c.f., "stick"). So who in their right mind would give a 4 year old an official set of nunchaks? Just ghastly - possibly even ghastlier than the Purse Pet.

Several of the toys are almost OK - the pull-toy dog has a pull string that may be a bit to long for a real little one; the Winnie-the-Pooh 'thing' that should probably be aimed at slightly older kids, given a removable part; etc. For many of these, the biggest problem is the age limit warnings may just be too loose. And have little parts that are too loose, especially given the oral-nature of really little kids, and the real attraction of popping a teeny-tiny little piece of plastic into your mouth. (Hey, when I was a kid, I loved chewing on those little red rubber thing-ies that were on the tips of blouse hangers. I was a little older than the babies many of these suspect toys are aimed at, but I'm sure if, at the age of 2, if I could have reached the blouse hanger and maneuvered the little rubber thing-y off, I would have been quite blissfully in danger of choking on on.) In any case, most people buying toys very likely do look at the age advisories, and make the assumption that they've been tested and are safe for kids in those age groups. Apparently not so! So good for WATCH for putting out their warnings.

Here's the toy that makes me channel Keith Olbermann's "worst person in the world" voice, only it's screaming "worst toy in the world."

The SPORTSMAN SHOTGUN offers some quite confusing "guidance." There's “Not recommended for children under 3 years of age” and “AGE 14+”. Well , that "not recommended for children under 3" is pretty clear. But what about kids from 4 - 13? Someone might look at the one warning, and think it was safe for kids under 14, as long as they're over the age of 3. Of course, any realistic looking gun just screams DANGER, given the incidents that have occurred where a police officer, making an instantaneous choice, has killed a kid who was aiming a realistic looking gun at them.

The gun comes with warnings about shooting at an animal (I'm assuming that includes two-legged ones), and about not "aiming at eyes or face", but this baby shoots rubber bullets. Real rubber bullets. According to WATCH, "This weapon is not a toy and should not be sold for use by children."

Not that I think it's all that great for kids to have real guns, but I really can't imagine why anyone would want to give a kid a toy gun that looks like a real gun and actually shoots something (I.e., a rubber bullet). If something is assumed to be a toy, I'm sure that parents wouldn't take the same precautions that they would if they were NRA-types giving their kid a real gun. I'm sure they'd be thinking, hell, it's just a toy.

WATCH has a reasonably good track record in getting dangerous toys withdrawn from the market.

But what's shocking to me is that, with 30+ years of pointing out the worst toys in the world, manufacturers are still making the same mistakes: choking hazards, confusing warnings, and misleading - or just plain WRONG - age recommendations.

When that MBA's only a mirage

Of course, MGM Mirage's ex-CEO is claiming that his bogus MBA from USC has nothing to do with his resignation. But I took four years of Latin - you can look it up on my Notre Dame Academy transcript - and just because post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy doesn't mean it can't be true that when something happens on the heels of something else, there's some causation at work.

If you missed the news (which I saw in the WSJ Online, in an article by Keith Winstein and Tamara Audi - it may require a subscription to access), J. Terrence Lanni stepped down after The Journal started sniffing around about his credentials, and USC said it had no record of his being granted an MBA.

For his part,

Mr. Lanni said, "I must stress that this issue has nothing to do with my decision."

I'm not quite sure why the WSJ was poking around here - did someone dime him, or do they automatically check out everybody they're writing about in this way? - but Mr. Lanni is now gone. (He does remain on the Mirage's board.)

It's actually plausible that he was leaving anyway. Las Vegas is in a downturn; the Mirage is trying to complete the financing of a mega, seemed-like-a-good-idea-when-we-broke-ground condo-hotel complex; and the company's net income is in the hopper.

So why stay?

And Mr. Lanni had a good reason for leaving. (Cough, cough.)

His wife lives in Pasadena, and he wants to be a full-time spouse, rather than a commuter. (No indication on how the Mrs. feels about this arrangement, but she's no doubt like every other wife who just can't wait to have her hubby underfoot full time now that he's retired.)

But back to Lanni's little bio-lie-o.

Apparently the corporate web site's bio claimed that Lanni had an MBA in finance from USC. A "private fraud investigator" - wonder what he was up to? there may be way more to this story - had found "a discrepancy between Mr. Lanni's corporate biography and a database of college degrees accessible to private investigators."

Lanni does have an undergrad from USC. And says that's he's taken MBA classes. But he also claims that he received an honorary MBA.

Unfortunately for Mr. Lanni, the last honorary MBA that USC awarded was given in 1933, well before his date of birth. (Hey, things can be awarded posthumously, and prehumously. Can they be awarded pre-birth?)

Lanni was the guiding force behind the MGM Mirage's big growth spurt.

So he obviously didn't need the MBA.

So why'd he lie?

Or, if he lied in the way-back, why didn't he come clean and not let the lie propagate. Surely, the brief, minor embarrassment that would have accompanied telling some minion that he didn't have his MBA - heh, heh, I never really finished that degree, so best not mention it, or even,  MBA? where did that come from?  - would be preferable to WSJ-level exposure.

How can there be anyone walking around in this day in age - especially someone in a prominent position, as Lanni was - thinking he/she can get away with something that, in the grand scheme of things is a peccadillo, but in the light of the Internet becomes a major deal that involves completely uninterested and disinterested bloggers flapping away about it?

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Over a year ago, I wrote about Marilee Jones, the MIT Dean who resigned in disgrace after her false credentials were discovered.

How you going to keep them down on the farmstead (after they've seen Williams-Sonoma)?

As a non-cook, I don't spend a lot of time in Williams-Sonoma, but I have purchased things (that is to say, 'gifts') there over the years. And I'm sure that if I did cook, I'd want things from there for my own, personal, cook-ish use.

As a non-cook, I'm not on their catalogue list, making it one of the few catalogues I don't get. But someone in our building does, and since I do the recycling here, I was able to get my non-cook's hands on the holiday entertaining issue, A Farmstead Thanksgiving.

A Farmstead Thanksgiving!

While I have spent precious little time in my kitchen cooking delicious and beautiful meals, I have spent even less time on farms, let alone on farmsteads.

There was that one hostel in Switzerland that was a working farm. The hostel bunks were in a Heidi-ish loft in a charming little Heidi-ish chalet, on a Heidi-ish mountainside, in the midst of Heidi-ish pastures, full of Heidi-ish cows. As I recall, those cows even wore dirndls and pigtails. And cowbells.

So that was one night down on the farm.

And when I was a kid visiting my grandmother in Chicago, we drove up to Wisconsin for the day to visit some farmer friends. I remember three things about that trip. One, it was a blistering hot day and they were tarring the roads. And since we were in an un-airconditioned car, well, pee-ewww. The farmhouse itself had been cut in half to accommodate two generations of farm families, and there were no interior connections -just blocked up doors. To get from Generation A's digs to Generation B's, you had to go outside, which struck me as odd. I was used to Worcester triple-deckers, where you had your own flat, and when you went from Generation A's flat to Generation B's flat, you used the front or back staircase. Which were indoors. Most memorably, we were served lemonade made with the most atrocious tasting well water. We were used to Worcester's wonderful, drinkable, non-smelly water, and we always had to make an adjustment to Chicago water which "tasted funny." But Wisconsin water! I'd rather drink tar than that lemonade.

So I am no expert in things farm-ish, or farm-steadish.

And yet I have a distinct impression that farm/farmstead cooks are not cooking their farm/farmstead-fresh turkey in the extra-large W-S roaster - suggested retail $420, but for W-S customers, the low-low price of $299.95.

Farm/farmstead Thanksgivings - especially in the Midwest - would no doubt feature a jello salad, but not one that was made with the ceramic mold for $19.95 which "bears the intricate three-dimensional silhouette of a pineapple."  My Midwest mother - city-girl, not farm-girl - used plain old Club aluminum molds, one of which is still in my possession, although it goes largely unused. Although maybe I'll surprise the family by resurrecting one of my mother's jello salad recipes for Thanksgiving. Will it be orange-pineapple, strawberry-cranberry, or Waldorf? I appear to be making fun here, but I'm actually craving a bite of one of those luscious little beauties.

But $19.95 is actually pretty reasonable for a fancy jello mold, and someone on the farm/farmstead might actually splurge on one.

But someone on the farm/farmstead would not likely splurge for the $419, 13 1/4 quart monogrammed hammered copper stockpot. 

And how about the ruffled pie dish for $44? Or the oval Harvest Berry platter - actually quite pretty - for $299?

There is, of course, a whole lot more - including my own personal favorite: the special, kids' table tablecloth for $59. (Four napkins: $26.)

And, of course, I couldn't help peeking ahead at what's in store for us for the farmstead Christmas.

Like any non-cook (but pro-eater), I cut right to the food-stuffs.

There's the personalized ginger bread boys - 3 for $26. (What's nine-bucks for a cookie?)  And the Nutcracker cookies - 15 cookies for $55, an absolute relative bargain. And that fabulous "personalized gingerbread manor" for $249.95.  (If you're a cheap-skate, or worried about the recession, you can downsize and get a plain old gingerbread house for $56.)

A farmstead Thanksgiving! A farmstead Christmas!

I wonder if those farm folks in Wisconsin would remember me - the skinny little blond with the funny accent, turning up her nose at the rancid lemonade. I'd be happy to accept an invitation to a farmstead Thanksgiving.

Invite me, please.

I'll even bring my own bottled water, plus I'll throw in a kids' table tablecloth.

Walmart's CAN: Uncle Sam needs you!

Well, just when I thought that there was little more to say about Walmart, there comes an article in last week's Hartford Courant on the company's Customer Action Network, which in the state of Connecticut alone has enlisted thousands of residents in a "support group" to act as unpaid lobbyists for Wally.

The Can-Doers have their own official website, and from it we learn that the:

Customer Action Network is a program to keep customers informed about government issues that affect Wal-Mart and its ability to provide good value for your shopping dollar.

When government tries to limit your shopping choices, or interfere in Wal-Mart's ability to offer Everyday Low Prices, Customer Action Network members can help by expressing their opinion.

Ah, those terrible governments - especially ones in liberal-y states like Connecticut and Massachusetts, where elitist snobs (of which cohort I am a proud, if non-card-carrying member) try to do things link rein in sprawl, keep a watchful eye on the environment, and try to see that people make a living wage while not being treated like crap in the workplace).

Of course, all this good stuff comes at a cost, and the cost is that products might actually be a bit more costly than they would be otherwise.

Not that this is a good economy in which to make the argument that we should be willing to pay a tiny bit more for things like food and clothing. People are nervous now. Layoffs - huge layoffs - are rampant. Anyone who has a 401K is afraid to peek at it. And most folks probably don't even have a 401K to peek at.

No, now's not the time to do a wholesale trash on the retail wonders of Walmart.

Hell, come The Depression, I might be hitchhiking to the nearest Walmart to buy ramen noodles and toilet paper in bulk. Fortunately, come The Depression, I have enough clothing to survive a good long time, without having to replace anything other than undies, socks, and shoes. Although God knows I'm getting sick of that 10 year old parka, and I may have been too hasty in bringing that LL Bean barn coat - barely worn - over to St. Francis House so that someone who needs a fairly warm coat could have one. On the other hand, it would have been kind of stupid to keep a coat around that was a size too large, wasn't the color I had really wanted, and made me look like a refrigerator carton.)

According to The Courant article, those signing up for CAN membership - and what an odd echo of the Obama campaign theme that is - have done so "eagerly".

"I would stick up for Wal-Mart as strong as I can," said Ernest Kirschner, a frequent shopper. "I really think they've gotten an unfair shake."

That's just what the world's largest retailer wants to hear. Wal-Mart is turning to loyal customers such as Kirschner to become watchdogs, not just shoppers.

As watchdogs, CAN members will be sic'd on those who oppose things like the opening up of Walmart supercenter, a particularly hot-button issue in New England, where we tend to like our downtowns - and where opposition to Walmart expansion efforts has been especially fierce (and at least temporarily successful, in many cases).

Walmart's doing quite the recruitment job here:

As of Thursday, more than 61,000 New England residents have joined CAN, company spokesman Chris Buchanan said. Connecticut tops the list with 25,218 names.

And, by the way, you don't get much for joining. From the CAN site, we find that:

As a member of the Wal-Mart Customer Action Network, you will receive:

• Free newsletters with shopping tips, consumer information and specials.
• Important bulletins and e-mail alerts
• Invitations to special in-store events and receptions
• Information on important issues affecting us all and how you can make a difference.

Shopping tips?

Go to the nearest Walmart. Greet the greeter. Grab a cart. Load it up. Check out. Drive away happy.

Why does the idea of a "shopping tip" remind me of those Cool Whip ads of yore, when people asked "Sarah" in wonder how she made pudding in a cloud, which didn't appear to be anything more than dollop of Cool Whip plopped on  pudding. (Old family recipe, I guess.)

In any case....

Anti-Walmart activist Al Norman thinks the numbers of New Englanders who have actually signed up to man the barricades may be over-exaggerated.

"Here's a giant retailer doing community organizing instead of selling cheap underwear and bananas," Norman said. "A lot of people signed up for this group, thinking they were going to get information about the next sale."

Also worth noting: Walmart hired an outside group to do its CAN recruiting, possibly hoodwinking some folks into believing they were joining an independent outfit. Hmmmmm.

Then there's this from the New England CAN website. (We get our own because we're so special - and nasty - I guess.) I can't actually read the fine print on this one, but I'm generally a pretty good guesser, and I'm guessing that the extra $250o is not on top of what Walmart is already claiming you save at Walmart . (This claim is the subject of some controversy, by the way. But there is supposedly a UMass study that finds that just having a Walmart in town saves everyone money because of price pressure. I wonder if the study also examines any negative impacts of race to the bottom pricing. ) Hmmmmm.

According to Walmart spokesman, Chris Buchanan, the CAN effort is really grassroots.

"It came about at the store level. Customers said they would like to be more involved with the company. That's where it sprung from. We're recruiting customers to join a coalition around issues affecting Wal-Mart."

Customers said they would like to me more involved with the company?

I'm trying to think of the last time I said I wanted to be more involved with a retail empire (other than buying a cap and pins from the Obama website). Hmmmm. (Nice to meet you, Mrs. Dubious.)

The group hasn't made any great headway in New England quite yet.

One of their biggest triumphs?

Wal-Mart's CAN newsletter credits members in Sturbridge, Mass., with helping to defeat a town ordinance that would have banned plastic grocery bags, a ban the newsletter describes as "not the best for Wal-Mart or the community at large."

Nice going, guys! We can sure use more of those initiatives to keep a kabillion flimsy plastic bags in circulation, especially when everybody else on the face of the planet is trying to find ways to reuse, recycle, and generally respect the environment.

CAN member Kirschner, for one, is happy to see Walmart come out swinging

"I think they're finally putting their boxing gloves on. ... They do need the community to fight for them."

Allons, citoyens! Aux barricades! Uncle Sam needs you!

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Thanks to my cousin Mary Beth for sending me the link to the Courant article.

And am I obsessing on Walmart lately? Here's my post from 11/7.

What I'd like to do, come the WPA

Well, all I can say is that in the last few weeks, I've been Ayn Rand-ed by Alan Greenspan's admission, or near admission, or whatever it was, that the market, left to its own devices, may not always regulate itself in such a grand and glorious fashion.

And then, my not so invisible hand involuntarily reached up to cover my mouth as I gasped - gasped! - to hear Martin Feldstein speak about something that sounded almost Keynesian, almost - dare I say it - WPA-ish.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next year or so.

Will the 'worst economic crisis since the Great Depression' turn out to be better or worse than we expected? Will everything shake out for the better, leaving us in more robust shape (as in 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger')? Will more of the institutions that have been part of the fabric of our economy since, like, forever disappear on us? Will the last company that actually makes something tangible, like a car, disappear from our shores?

And what does President Obama have up his long skinny sleeve and in that big, smart brain of his?

I'm hoping for a twenty-first century version of the Works Project Administration, the New Deal initiative that put folks back to work building roads, court houses, libraries, and other public structures.

Surely, we could use some investment in our infrastructure - all those tumbling down bridges, pot-holed roads, and crumbling inner-city schools.

And while we're at it, how about keeping branch libraries open longer hours. And set up more after school learning programs for kids?

Hey, we're already so in debt, what's another tril if it helps us out of the current funk?

And how about a resurgence of the Civilian Conservation Corps?

Surely there's environmentally useful work to be done in our parks, national or otherwise?

And, of course, while we're at it, how about a new Federal Writers' Project.

Surely, those travel guides that folks like Studs Turkel, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and John Cheever worked on in the thirties need updating. (Thanks, wikipedia, for this list of FWP writers.)

Even if it only paid the "$80" (inflation adjusted for 2008) a month that writers got paid during the Depression, I'd like nothing better than to work on the Massachusetts guide book.

A lot of people, I'm sure, will stick their hand up to take Boston, but I'd love to do Worcester.

City of the Seven Hills. Heart of the Commonwealth. Land of my father's pride.

And, while I'm at it, I'll take Leicester (where my grandmother Rogers hailed from), and far-out Barre, Massachusetts (where my grandfather Rogers grew up and fled at the first possible moment to forge his way in the big city of Worcester).

FWP writers took oral histories down, too.

I volunteer to speak with everybody over the age of eighty about what Worcester, Leicester, and Barre were like in their day.

I'm not sure how far the FWP charter extended, but now I'd like to see it fund poets, fiction writers, essayists, playwrights, and - of course - bloggers.

What a contribution we could make to the preservation of our culture before it goes completely non-written word. Before the only written language is txt.

Federal Writers Project! Make that FWP!

Hurry! Hurry!

Where do I apply?

Get Smart Shoe

As I inch towards geezerhood, I'm increasingly interested in the technology that's going to keep us doddering old Baby Boomers up and, if not exactly running, then at least walking.

One use of technology is the iShoe - it had to happen, didn't it? - which I read about in an AP article I saw on CNN.com a while back.

The iShoe - which is actually an iInsole - was developed by Erez Lieberman, a graduate student at a joint Harvard-MIT health sciences and technology program.

It doesn't prevent falls, but gathers information, and provides an early warning system if someone's in danger of falling. Falls can be catastrophic for the elderly. Many result in hip fractures, and hip fractures have a surprisingly lousy mortality rate. (According to the article, 24 percent of those over - ahem - the age of 50 die within a year of fracturing their hip. Many others end up disabled. For joy!)

Having fallen myself last year and broken my shoulder, a fall is no bed of roses for the pre-elderly, either. I also know that, when my mother was still living, we worried constantly that she would take a bad fall, with our two main "worry zones" being the "scatter rugs" that she had on the slippery hardwood floor next to her bed, and the steep cellar stairs she went down to do the laundry. My mother did take one spill, but it wasn't a catastrophic one. Still, we worried, and did our best to spill-proof her environment. Boy, did she hold on to those scatter rugs!

The sensors in the iShoe insole monitor the wearer's balance, which tends to worsen as we age. There are exercises for improving one's balance , which - by the way - you're never too young to get working on.

The idea for the iShoe came from work done for NASA to help astronauts get back down to earth after living in zero gravity conditions. (Who says the space program is a waste of time and money?)

The iShoe, with a half dozen sensors, is not an instant alarm, though it will send out a signal if the wearer actually falls. It's more like a data recorder that the user can bring to a doctor or balance specialist for help if the dangerous pressure patterns are seen.

Once a balance problem's detected, the doctor can figure out the cause and the cure.

The iShoe is still in development, but it's general availability is not that far off.

But for those who don't want to wait around for the iShoe, or who don't want to have to worry about improving their balance, there's always the personal airbag (as written up by the BBC).

A Japanese company - Prop (great name, eh?) - has come up with a device that the elderly can just strap on and fall away. The device inflates when it detects the wearer falling, and has two separate air pockets to cushion the fall: one behind the head, the other around the hips. (Best not to fall flat on your face: no airbag.)

With its aging and aged population, Japan is big into assistive devices for the aging and aged.

The personal air bag isn't cheap - $1.4K - but what price safety?

And by the time I need one, the price will no doubt have come down. Or the iShoe will be so perfected that it will actually prevent a fall to begin with.

Not that I'm looking forward to being an old geezer or anything, but I'm sure happy that scientists are at work to help make sure that we can stay our independent, crotchety, geezery old selves.

Collateral Damage: Icon Recognition and the crimp in the Wall Street "deal toy" market

There are so many ripple effects to the Wall Street implosion. It's not just all those rescinded MBA offers. All those lay-offs. All those incredibly shrinking bonuses.

It's also the sandwich shops and after-work hangouts. The cigar bars and the car services. The custom tailors and the cufflink purveyors. The bicycle messengers who won't be pell-mell pedaling, and the restaurants that won't be hosting those lavish holiday parties.

And the company that sells the "deal toys"

Like everything else over the last decade of up-the-ante, up-the-spoils excess, the mementos of done deals have gotten more and more elaborate.

Back in pre-history, you may have gotten a framed copy of the "tombstone ad" that appeared in the WSJ to announce that Apogee Industrials had acquired Nadir General, and that the deal had been "done" by Goldman, or Merrill, or whoever brokered and banked it.

Then the framed tombstone turned into a lucite embed.

And if you can embed a piece of paper in lucite, well, there's a lot of other stuff you can get in there as well. And it doesn't have to be suspended in mid-lucite, it can stand on its own. And the standalones can be pretty darned spectacular.

Icon Recognition, right down there on lower Broadway, did a pretty good business embedding stuff in lucite, and coming up with honeys like the gold-plated Mandalay Bay Hotel shown here (all pictures are from their site).   Icon was written up recently in The New Yorker "Talk of the Town" as yet another victim of the collateral damage that the current economic crisis is inflicting.

“This is definitely a tough time,” Stephen Sokoler, the president of the company, said. He’d been up early working the phones: “You call and ask, ‘Is there anyone who’s announced a deal recently or closed a deal? Anyone you’ve heard of?’ ” He added, “It feels like we’re a ship in the middle of a storm. Not only are you in the storm but there’s no visibility as to whether the storm’s gonna clear.”

I haven't as yet had to resort to these type of calls - 'Anyone you've heard of who needs some product marketing help?' -  to keep my own modest enterprise going, but I do feel bad for anyone who's scrounging for business - especially those whose business is more or less 100% reliant on discretionary spending decisions. (Although if there are any deals going down that aren't complete fire sales, I'm sure people will want to commemorate them.)

Sokoler is a young man - only twenty-nine - but he's nostalgic for the old days, when:

...he made a faux emerald-and-ruby crown to celebrate a deal for Merrill Lynch, and J. P. Morgan ordered up a batch of ten-by-fifteen-inch Lucite blocks with dinosaur heads inside (three hundred dollars each)—a “Jurassic Park” reference—to celebrate a deal involving Universal. “That was just a monstrous piece,” Sokoler said.

Icon has embedded all sorts of things in lucite: a fake banana split for a Friendly's buy out was one of my favorites.

The days of the free-wheeling embeds may be waning. The New Yorker article mentioned that at Goldman, a directive's gone out announcing that employees who want a deal toy have to buy it for themselves, which will likely put a crimp in Ion's business - maybe those retro framed tombstones will take on a new cachet.  Who wants to go out-of-pocket on a miniature banjo that you can actually strum? Or a bronze statue of Apollo shooting a bear - especially when it now seems as if the real story would be a bear mauling Apollo.

If people are going to still go for deal toys, it's interesting to think what they would use, iconically speaking, to illustrate the deals.

• Pile-up car crash to commemorate the acquisition of one of the Big Three automakers? Or a little toy tow truck hauling away a wreck?
• A smashed tea-cup for Royal Worcester China (ye olde UK company that announced its bankruptcy last week)?
• Empty piggy bank on its side for WaMu?

The possibilities, as they say, are just endless, aren't they?

Meanwhile, I'm just as happy I don't have any deal toys made up of cool stuff embedded in lucite.

I know that the inner child in me would want to get the cool stuff out. Just as I tried (as an outer child) to free the tiny little brass elephant embedded in clear glass in a pooner marble I had when I was 9 or 10.

I remember sitting in the back yard, holding the marble on a flagstone surface with one hand, hammer in the other, trying to get rid of the glass imprisoning that cool little elephant, without destroying that cool little elephant.

Needless to say, all I did was wreck the marble, and end up with a not-so-cool little elephant covered with nasty pointy shards of glass.

Not to mention that it was probably my sister Kath's marble to begin with....

No deal tools for me!

Best wishes to Icon Recognition in their attempts to weather the storm that Stephen Sokoler so well described his little company as having found itself in.

Veterans Day, 2008

When I was growing up, everyone's father was a vet.

This was the Baby Boom.

For us first wavers, everyone's father was in WW II.

For some of the younger Boomers, the war was Korea.

When we picnicked, or hung out in the backyard playing Monopoly or Clue, we did so on Navy or Army blankets. When we played war, we had real canteens. We wore white sailor caps - brim turned down, which was the cool way.

We got VFW and American Legion magazines. They were pretty boring, and had the least funny cartoons - cartoons that made Beetle Bailey look like a laugh riot - but they came every month, and, since I'd read anything, I read them. My father wasn't active beyond dues-paying in either organization. I doubt he even paid American Legion dues, since he considered them a bunch of right-wing nuts. But we still got the magazines.

And when my father died, we - his surviving children as long as you were in school and under the age of 22 - got money from the VA.

It wasn't much, and I only got to collect it for a year, but for my younger sibs and mother it came in handy.

It wasn't much, but it was pay back for the four years my father took out of his life, 1942-1946, to serve in the Navy.

He didn't do anything very exciting while in the service.

He was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia; Trinidad; and downtown Chicago. (War is hell!)

Getting to and from Trinidad by ship was the most dangerous experience my father had. And while he was stationed there, they brought in a captured German U-Boat.

Why Trinidad, you might ask?

My understanding is that at one point, the main front was going to be through Africa and Italy, and Trinidad was a prime staging area for materiel. My father was a Chief Petty Officer, and he managed some sort of supply depot.

As my father always said, you went where the Navy sent you.

And after Trinidad, that was Chicago, where he was a paper-pusher. And where he met my mother.

From World War II until Vietnam, military service was pretty much an expectation for young men.

You went in. You went where they sent you. You (mostly) came home in one piece.

Vietnam put an end to that - and an end to a military comprised of people from all walks of life, all levels of society.

I still know plenty of veterans of my era. Yes, most of the people my age that I know escaped somehow - lucked out with their draft number; got the get-out-of-military free card from a willing doctor; worked (like my husband did) for government agencies that got you a deferment; went into the Guard/reserves when, unlike in today's Army, that was a way out of actually going to war, not a guaranteed way in. But I know a lot of men in my cohort with military experience.

But next generation down?

I don't have any friends or family with sons or daughters in the military.

Other than a few acquaintances with relatives who are "in", my only connection to the war is reading the sad stories in the newspaper when someone local is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I used to be more optimistic, but now I pretty much believe that, as long as there's mankind, there will be war. Whether they involve "us" or not, there'll be no escaping that, I'm afraid.

Somewhere along the line we fell into the notion of the professional military - things were too complex and sophisticated to leave to draftees who were only in for two years. And yet somewhere along the same line we fell into the deployment of the 'citizen soldiers', the members of the reserves/National Guard who thought they were signing up as back-up, and instead find themselves front and center (and front and center, and front and center).

Somewhere along the line we omitted the national conversation on what's worth dying and killing for. The national conversation on who's doing the dying and killing, while the rest of us get to do the living. It's easier to avoid that conversation if your skin (and that of your kids) isn't in the game. Which is a darned shame.

Veterans Day is as good a time as any to reflect on that.

There goes Speedy*: no more greyhound racing in Massachusetts

In last week's election, voters in Massachusetts got to vote on several initiatives. We (collectively) voted "No" on getting rid of state income taxes; "Yes" on decriminalizing marijuana; and "Yes" to end greyhound racing.

I was with the majority on two out of three.

I could have gone either way on greyhound racing, but at the last moment, doing away with dog racing entirely struck me as both overkill - wouldn't better safeguards on the treatment of the dogs have worked? - and class-inspired. The people who work at and frequent "the dogs" are blue collar folks, working stiffs - "them", not "us."  Not exactly the sport of kings.

Wouldn't it be better, I thought as I cast my vote, to just make sure that the dogs are better cared for, let the people keep their jobs, and let dog tracks wither away and die from lack of interest, which is what's happening anyway?

But getting rid of greyhound racing passed handily - the proponents of the ban were very well-heeled and spent a lot of money on advertising.

And in the aftermath of the vote, come 2010, those who worked at the dog tracks in Raynham-Taunton and Wonderland/Revere will be out of work. [Dog] shit out of luck, as it were.

One such worker was quoted in a Boston Globe article on the vote:

"I'm 52 years old with a high school education," said Mike Curran, a trainer at the track for 30 years whose eyes welled with tears as he spoke. "This is a dream job: playing with dogs all day. That vote is a life-changing event for us."

Hard to believe this is someone's dream job, but there you go. And there it went.

The tracks are going to see if they can get slot machines legalized, which is, of course, just what we don't need; and which, presumably, wouldn't necessarily translate into one-for-one jobs for dog trainers like Curran.

As noted, dog racing has been dying out on its own anyway.

Now, many afternoons at Wonderland, fewer than 50 people gather in the spacious, dreary building that smells of stale cigarettes. Most are retired men watching simulcast races on small television sets. One man was there yesterday just to watch the weather forecast.

It may be just as well that the good citizens of the Commonwealth are putting it out of its misery. ('They shoot horses, don't they?')

But there is the troubling matter of those who will be losing their jobs, especially those who've worked at the tracks for 30, 40 years (which, from the sounds of The Globe article, is just about everybody on the rolls). They're wondering where - at their age, with their education, with their résumé, in this economy - they're going to find work.

Wal-Mart greeter comes to mind, but that's about it.

And they're feeling more than a little devastated by what they perceive as their portrayal as animal abusers. As one trainer said, "you wake up and find out the state of Massachusetts don't want you. It's a little more than just getting fired."

I could have gone either way on this matter. And maybe it's all for the better, that we're truly putting a lot of nice doggies out of their misery. But we're sure putting a bunch of two-legged creatures into some misery of their own.

Sad.

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*For those who grew up in places where they never saw ads for dog tracks on TV, Speedy is the mechanical rabbit that the dogs chase.

Last Store Standing....

The market's down again. And again.

Just about every place you've heard of  - Fidelity, GM, Mattel - not to mention all those places you haven't heard of are having lay-offs.

The only fun economic news lately was yesterday's revelation that Sarah Palin didn't know which three countries are part of NAFTA. (This can't possibly be true, can it? But it was on Fox, so it must be true, eh? Plus, they report, we decide. I like being a decider, and I decide that this is true.)

We are in this weird place right now, aren't we?

During previous recessions, we weren't bombarded by 24/7, incessant pre- , intra- , and post- on what was happening on a moment by moment basis. You read about it in the business section of the paper, and heard five minutes per night about it on the news. "It" - the recession - happened; we endured it; we came out of it.

But now, with all the reporting, it's almost as if we're gearing up for bad economy as Godzilla, recession as tsunami. We're the panicked citizens, racing to get out of its path, or huddling in our houses hoping it passes by (or crushes us quickly). Shriek! It's coming! I hear it. RRRUUUNNNNN!

And while we're waiting for it, there's also some sort of odd sense of Phoney War, as we all wait for the other metaphorical shoe to drop. (At least during this Phoney War, the other shoe isn't on the goose-stepping foot of Nazi storm troopers.)

So we're in an eerie place now, aren't we? And, Obama election aside (at least for some of us), all the news is bad.

The latest bad news cluster is around retail sales, that economic bellwether in our shop-aholic, consumer-driven economy.

Retailer after retailer is reporting disappointing autumn sales, store closings, low Christmas expectations.

Bad news on every store front.

But what's this I hear, that ka-ching coming from Bentonville?

Huzzah!

Wal-Mart, we are told in The New York Times, is "poised for a blockbuster Christmas."

“In my mind, there is no doubt that this is Wal-Mart time,” H. Lee Scott Jr., the company’s president and chief executive, said recently at a meeting of analysts and investors in Wal-Mart’s hometown, Bentonville, Ark. Referring to the discount chain’s founder, he added, “This is the kind of environment that Sam Walton built this company for.”

I'll admit, I'm a fourteen-carat gold snob. Maybe even a twenty-four-carat gold one.

Plus, I'm a carless urban dweller.

The amount of time and money I've spent in a Wal-Mart, if somehow combined, could dance on the head of a pin with the heavenly choir, leaving room for The Rockettes.

I have been in exactly one, where I bought some stuff to stuff in logo'd lunch boxes my company had for some trade show promotion we were doing.

That was it.

So my one and only Wal-Mart expense was expensed.

As a fourteen-carat (possibly twenty-four-carat), East-coast, elite, liberal, urban, godless snob, I quite naturally do not particularly like Wal-Mart. While I don't exactly sneer at them, I don't like much of what I've read about their labor practices, the pressure tactics they use with vendors (eventually low price usually does have to come at the expense of quality), or their greeters.

I also found the one and only Wal-Mart I've been too depressing, poorly lit, chilly, and not all that clean. It reminded me more of shopping in East Berlin (pre-reunification) than shopping in most places I frequent.

All this said, I recognize that they do offer many necessities at a low price, and that this can be a life saver for many people, especially those on a fixed income and/or with families.

But I sure don't want them to be the only shopping alternative left in this country.

If that's the case, what will us carless, urban folks do?

Will there be airlifts from Bentonville? Will the drop crates of Levis, Nerfballs, and Cup-a-Noodle Soup into our parks? Will we develop a new, urban cargo cult, worshipping the shipments from Arkansas that drift down from our dreary skies? Will I cat-fight other women for the parachute silk (or whatever it's made of) so that I can hand-craft my own underpants?

Forget what I said about being godless a moment ago.

Dear God, please, don't let Wal-Mart be the last store standing in the world. Really, please, pretty-please, reverent-please: I'll do anything you ask. Just don't let that happen.

(Can I get an 'Amen'?)