Sam Carpenter's "Work the System"

One of the by-products of Pink Slip is that I occasionally get sent books to review.  All of the books I've been sent have their merits, but - in truth - I do not read business books for pleasure. This is my way of apologizing to the authors (or, rather, to their publicists) of the four books that have been languishing in my business book queue. Nothing personal, but when I put on my Lanz nightgown or my new sock monkey PJ's and get into bed, it tends to be with a good novel, short story collection, or memoir. (Recent authors: Mary Gordon, Edward Jones, Edna O'Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Barack Obama.)

But I finally did get around to reading Sam Carpenter's Work the System, which I would recommend to those running small businesses - especially those who have had no exposure to TQM, BPM, or any of the other put-a-process-in-place-or-else acronymmed systems that most of us who've logged corporate time have been through.

Sam is engaging, and nothing if not forthright - and he learned to put systems in place the hard way, after making a shambles of his life/health/business while running a small company (while, incidentally, single-dadding two kids).

Before Sam hit on the notion that it might help improve things if he had a few processes in place - which he describes as an epiphany of sorts - he was, metaphorically speaking, hitting on something else. And what he was hitting on, metaphorically speaking, was a continuous flow of moles - as in whack-a-mole.

For anyone who hasn't been to an arcade, carnival, ethnic festival, or downscale beach in the last twenty years, when you play whack-a-mole, you're given a rubber mallet which you use to whack the heads of moles that randomly pop up - faster and faster as the game proceeds. The point of whack-a-mole (if whack-a-mole can be said to have a point, other than the pure, simple pleasure of whacking an inanimate object on the skull with your full might) is that you never get to relax. Until the game ends, those moles keep popping up, never where you expect them, never in the same place twice.

A more familiar corporate term for this is operating in perpetual fire-fighting mode, and it's something that I'm quite sure that 99.99% of us have been guilty of in our work life.

I can't remember what the task was, but years ago, I was performing a regular task  that should have been at least partially automated. My boss pointing out that I was going about this task the hard way, and my response was "sometimes it's easier to do things the hard way."

We were both right, but he was righter than I was.

Yes, every month it took less time to accomplish the task than it would have if I'd taken the time to automate things.

But, over the course of a couple of months, the ROI on taking the time to automate the task would have easily paid off. I just never made the time for it.

This is the fundamental point that Sam makes in his book: take a cold, hard look at the tasks in your business, and make sure you have processes - processes that you meticulously document and scrupulously follow -  in place that remove the inefficiencies.  By putting your energies into "fixing one system after another", you'll removed the need to spend your time "careening through the day randomly taking care of whatever problems erupt."

Sam also devotes some time to his recommendation that every company develop a mission/strategy/roadmap/vision - whatever you want to call it, if you don't have one, you won't know where you're going. And you have to examine the tasks that you're spending your time on in light of your m/s/r/v.  If what you're doing doesn't contribute to furtherance of said m/s/r/v, you really do have to ask yourself why you're doing it. Either you've got the wrong m/s/r/v, or the task is a waste of time.

As I said, none of this would be a major revelation to anyone familiar with the fundamentals of the myriad quality and process efforts that have been around for years. What's refreshing about Work the System is that it's written not from the perspective of a big time management consultant and/or high falutin' academic, but from the perspective of a small business man who figured it out for himself.

That, in itself, should recommend Work the System to other small business people.

I spent most of my career in companies  - large and small - that played a mean game of whack-a-mole, but more or less fell down when it came to developing coherent processes and/or sticking to strategic business objectives. Oh, we got trained up in TQM or BPM. We put the processes more or less in place. But them we ignored them. So much more fun to keep playing whack-a-mole!

But guess what? The moles of the world are safe from getting whacked by those particular companies' mallets because - surprise, surprise - those particular companies are no longer around.

A small business owner could do worse than follow Sam Carpenter's advice.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that Shaklee would use my name like this!

Maybe in a couple of years, as I segue from middle age to dotage, I'll change my mind, but at this point, I'm not all that interested in any anti-aging whatever that will extend my life - let alone those of the rest of my giganta age cohort of Boomers -  by a couple of dozen years.

The world, in fact, will need my generation to pass on, not hang on, so that it can free up resources for those who are coming along behind us.

This is not to say that I don't plan to hang around for a while, and I'm doing what I can to make sure that I am physically and mentally fit enough to age independently and gracefully.

But I'm not looking for any Fountain of Youth, any magic potion, any delish elixir, like Vivix, the Shaklee antiaging tonic "which the company hints can help people live 25 years longer." (Especially one that's grape-flavored. Yuck!)

But the idea of anti-aging is interesting, so I was  intrigued to read a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School longevity researcher, who has just resigned from a paid position on Shaklee's Scientific Advisory Board.

Sinclair was only on the board for a short while, and submitted his resignation after The Journal more or less called him on what appeared to be an endorsement of Vivix.

While Sinclair now claims his actions were misinterpreted, he:

...enthusiastically introduced Vivix to the company's sales force in New Orleans. He joined Shaklee's chief doctor in a joint radio appearance, and his picture and name are often used on Vivix sales sites run by Shaklee's salespeople.

I know how you can get carried away in the moment at a sales conference, but here's what Sinclair had to say at Shaklee's last summer:

... "over a year ago, we set out together to do this, to make a product that you could actually activate these genetic pathways that can slow down aging." In a video of the conference -- posted on the Internet -- he added, "Together, as part of the Shaklee family...we can take this technology right now, to our friends, to our family, and really have the benefits of this new technology right now, within our lifetimes, and you'll learn more about the Vivix product later."

He also went on a radio show to promote Vivix, and talked about a study in mice and the "lifespan" extension those little lab critters experienced with an ingredient found in Vivix, which, by the way, ain't cheap: $100 for a month's supply, or about $3 a teaspoonful. But what's $1200 a year if it's going to translate into a lot more of them?

You have to ask yourself exactly what did Sinclair think Shaklee was doing with his words and credentials?

After all, their web site asks grabbers like:

"How would you like to feel 25 years younger and live 25 years longer?"

Shaklee claims the question is rhetorical, aimed at getting people to think about how great it would be to feel 25 years younger, etc.  (In my case, the question got me trying to remember what Ted Mack used to say about Geritol when he was flogging it on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour.)

But we all know how darned easy it is to make that leap from a rhetorical question to a product promise, don't we? Although apparently Dr. Sinclair does not...

Shaklee is no stranger to hype.

They sell their wares through "social marketing" (think Amway, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and the Avon Lady), and, with a certain rhetorical flourish that you'd think David Sinclair might have recognized as an impossibility, they promise "infinite income potential." (I guess we're all going to need that infinite income potential if we're going to live another 25 years, especially with the latest downsizing of our 401Ks.)

My guess is that David Sinclair was more interested in the hefty but finite income potential that his association with Shaklee provided him. And why not? Why shouldn't he be able to cash in on his expertise and research?

He absolutely should be able to.

But he also absolutely should have realized that a marketing engine like that of Shaklee was going to exploit that association - what did he think they were paying him for?

And what did he think he was doing by getting involved in that sales conference?

If he'd just gotten up there and droned on about mice longevity, it would have been one thing. The sales people would have tuned him out, looked at their watches, and figured out how they were going to escape and hit the bars on Bourbon Street. (Did I mention that I've been to more than a few sales conferences?)

Instead he said,

"Together, as part of the Shaklee family...we can take this technology right now, to our friends, to our family, and really have the benefits of this new technology right now, within our lifetimes...

And now he says he was misinterpreted, used and abused.

Isn't this a bit like Claude Rains as Captain Renault in Casablanca claiming, "Shocked, I'm shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" just as Rick's croupier hands him his winnings?

Fortune's dumbest business moments of 2008

Once again, Fortune has come up with a list of 2008's dumbest moments in business.

For the most part, they weren't all that amusing. Maybe that's because, business-wise, 2008 just wasn't as out and out mirth-inspiring as it may have been in the past.

Quite a few of the moments were, not surprisingly, bailout- or politically-related. One that I particularly liked was the hard to forgive and forget incident when the execs from the incredibly shrinking "Big 3" flew from Detroit to Washington DC in separate corporate jets. (Did they fear they'd be accused of collusion if they threw in together and just took one private jet?)

Another bailout goody was the nod to the pork barrel lard ons packed into the bailout bill. One such item larded on removed a 39 cent tax on toy arrows. Now, it's entirely possible that this was a bad tax that should have been done away with. But the fact that the bailout bill had to be sweetened with picayune earmarks to get members of Congress to vote for it....Well, it may not be among the dumbest business moments of 2008, but it's certainly among the most dispiriting political moments. If you believed that the Bailout Bill was wrong philosophically, or just plain wouldn't work, then have the guts not to vote for it, please. But to use it as an opportunity to remove a 39 cent tax that was bugging some small company in your constituency? Yikes.

Somehow, I had missed Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo's getting caught out by hitting the "Reply to All" button on message he was trying to forward along. The e-mail had come from some poor schnook holding a Countrywide mortgage that he wanted some help with. Angelo passed in on, using the words "unbelievable" and "disgusting". Two words that I'm quite sure are, these days, readily associated with Mozilo himself and/or his tan.

My favorite nod for the Dumbest Moments went to something I missed entirely: the iPhone "I Am Rich" app.

German software developer Armin Heinrich created this "work of art" app, which doesn't actually do much other than, well, save your iPhone screen.  He offered it on the Apple official download store, for the just-below-the-limit price of $999.99.

Astoundingly eight people actually went ahead and bought it.

Two of the "I Am Rich Eight" complained and got their money back (one apparently thought it was a joke), still leaving six people with way too much money on their hands if they were willing to pay $1K for a screen saver.

I'm not sure to whom Fortune is attributing thia dumbest moment to - is it the buyers, or Apple for "stocking" this item to begin with?

In any case, Apple had seller's remorse, and removed it. Given that they make a percentage of what gets sold in their online store, you'd think that they may have vetted this one more carefully. Sure, it's probably harmless and legal, but, from Apple's perspective, it didn't do anything other than make them look dumb -  dumb enough to find their way into the annual roundup of 20 Dumbest Business Moments for 2008.

As for those who bought I Am Rich, I Am No Expert when it comes to luxury purchases. Presumably, they provide folks with at least a temporary rush, and maybe even an ongoing feel good. The item may confer some sort of feeling of attainment ("I can afford a Hermès bag.") or attainment wannabe-ism ("I may not have much, but I can still carry the same Hermès bag as that ree-atch bee-atch").

But most luxury goods either have some utility (that Hermès bag can be used to hold your wallet, nailclippers, Kleenex, and Chapstick; that Rolex watch can be used to tell time) or they're experiential. (It may be worth every penny to be one of the few to experience a bungee-jump into a crevasse on the polar ice cap. Wheee.....)

But an iPhone screen saver that costs one large?

Dumb-dee-dumb-dumb.

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!

Clawing her way to the top: Caroline Kennedy's bid for the senate seat

I'd bet anything that Caroline Kennedy is a smart, decent, fun-to-be-around kind of person. Hey, if I knew her, I bet I'd like her.

I'd also bet that, in terms of sheer policy wonkiness, she'll probably make a smart, decent, fun-to-vote-around kind of U.S. Senator. I'd bet she'd be thoughtful, measured, and calm. I'd bet she'll work hard.

But there's something that I find plenty obnoxious about deciding, mid-life, that it might be challenging, interesting, personally fulfilling, and rewarding to become a U.S. Senator - and having the ability to "work your network" to get the job.

Nothing against working your network.

It's how I've gotten most of my jobs.

But all of these jobs follow the career trajectory of a B2B technology marketing professional. And my bona fides? They're all there on my résumé - from the "applied marketing" courses I took in B-school on up (or down, depending on how I'm feeling about that career trajectory on any given day).

Yet for all her accomplishments, I'm guessing that there's not all that much on Caroline Kennedy's résumé that screams U.S. Senator. Yes, she's written some well-received books, and she's raised a lot of money for good causes. Unquestionably, she's got great connections and friends in high places. And it's no doubt those friends in high places, those great connections, that have made it easier for her to both get her work published, and get her requests for a big, fat donation to those good causes answered with a big, fat donation.

Not to invalidate her experiences - she wrote the books, she got the checks written, and she has (of course, of course) "lived" a fair bit of history. But I suspect that when she went looking for a publisher, she wasn't exactly throwing her manuscript in over the transom - and collecting enough rejection letters to paper one of her many bathrooms. Nor do I suspect that when she makes her fundraising "asks" she gets a lot of turn downs.

There may be, I will admit, some element of sour grapes on my part. I wish some publishing macher were gushing for my book, and that a recent ask I made for a capital campaign donation for a cause near and dear to my heart wasn't met with a "call me back when the Dow hits 10,000". (Trust me, I will call back when that day comes. In fact, I have a Post-It note reminding me to do so, stuck to the wall over my desk.)

It strikes me as unfair for Caroline Kennedy - or anyone else, for that matter - to backdoor their way into a plum position like U.S. Senator without, at least, having ever subjected themselves to the rough and tumble of the electoral process.

I'm actually okay with Caroline Kennedy - or anyone else, for that matter - starting at the top, if she's willing to duke it out in a bloody electoral fight, in which her lack of experience as an elected officeholder becomes a campaign issue that she manages to put aside (or not).  And in which she can demonstrate her depth of knowledge on the national issues of the day, as well as on the more narrow, state-related issues in New York. (What's happening in Syracuse these days, anyway?)

Barack Obama didn't have a hugely deep résumé with respect to governance when he decided to run for president. Like Ms. Kennedy, he's smart and an accomplished writer. But he sure went and put his dukes up, showing time and again during the long electoral process that he's tough, competent, and knowledgeable.

Neither of Massachusetts last two governors - Deval Patrick and Mitt Romney - held electoral office before they decided to run for governor. But they both mounted (and bankrolled) campaigns that got them the job. No one gave it to them.

Would Caroline Kenney be running for the Senate if she actually had to run-run, and not glide in through an appointment?

If I were a voter in New York, I'd be asking this question.

Of course, the appointed senator will have the vast benefit of incumbency. If Caroline Kennedy- or anyone else - thinks they can wait it out for two years, they surely know they'll be in for a fight. But maybe she should at least answer tough questions, unfiltered and unmediated. Let her demonstrate her chops, her toughness, her knowledge and wit. Let her show the NY voters that she understands that "politics ain't beanbag." Let her show the NY voters that she's got some sharp elbows, that she can give it and take it, and that she doesn't expect to be treated with kid gloved awe because of whose daughter she is.

I remember Caroline Kennedy the cute little kid riding her pony Macaroni. I remember her clomping around on Jackie's high heels during JFK's first press conference.  I remember singing along with the "novelty" song on the radio:

My daddy is the president.
What does your daddy do?
We live in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue...

I watched, riveted and weepy, every bit of the drama around JFK's funeral, including Caroline in her pale blue coat - as we saw later in Life Magazine: TV coverage was all black and white - as the caisson brought her father's body to lie in state, and as her younger brother gave his famous salute. (I was an Irish Catholic kid living in Massachusetts. This was "our" president. This was personal.)

There is much to admire about Caroline Kennedy, not the least of which is that she's conducted her life with dignity and purpose, and has managed to provide virtually no grist for the gossip mills - which, given her lineage, and our insatiable hunger for such grist, real or manufactured, is no small accomplishment.

I'm a few years old than Caroline Kennedy, and, you know what, I'd like another job, too.

In fact, I'd like Maureen Dowd's job. I think it'd be challenging, interesting, personally fulfilling, and rewarding to be a syndicated columnist. Too bad I didn't think of this 30 years ago, when I might have been able to build that sort of career for myself.

But I didn't.

So tough luck to me.

And, although it's looking increasingly unlikely that he'll do so, I really hope that David Paterson says tough luck to Caroline Kennedy - for her sake, as much as for anything else.  No one's life is ever free of hard knocks. Caroline Kennedy has certainly had her share of personal ones, made all the harder because they've been so public. Yet her professional career has been one of a degree of privilege that few of us enjoy. Most of us actually need the money. And for most of us, there's plenty of disappointment and rejection. We don't get the call back we wanted. We don't get a nibble, let alone the bite, even when the position sounded tailor made for us. We think we aced the interview, only to find out that someone else got the job. The promotion doesn't come through. The pink slip does.

Years ago, my sister Kathleen sent me a birthday card with the caption, "I clawed my way to the middle."

Although "claw" may be something of an exaggeration, it's close enough to what was true then, and what's true now.

That's the way it is for most of us.

There's no danger that this is the way it's ever going to be for Caroline Kennedy. She's always going to have people who'll take her call. But maybe, just maybe, this time she's dialed a wrong number.

If she does get the appointment, it will be really interesting to see how she does in two years, when somebody with sharp elbows and the ability to throw and take a punch gets into the ring with her.

If she does get the appointment, I'll be rooting for Caroline Kenney to succeed.

Still, I'd much rather have seen her get the job by some way other than just deciding she wants it and asking for it.

Pink Slip temporarily pink slipped

The best thing about working for yourself is you can hire and fire yourself at will. (The worst thing about working for yourself is you have to pay yourself.)

In any case, like so like many other businesses, Pink Slip is going on temporary furlough for the holidays. I'll be back on January 5th.

I'd like to wish all my readers, especially the regulars, the Merriest of Christmases, the Happiest of Hanukkahs,  the Wintriest of Solstices, the Coolest of Kwanzaas, and the best of whatever holiday you do or don't observe.

The coming year looks like a grim one for the economy - there'll be a lot more pink slips, I'm sure - but let's hope for a happy, healthy, and reasonably prosperous year for all of those who are near and dear to us.

The picture here is a lovely shot of Faneuil Hall in the snow, taken by local photographer James LeMass, and available as a poster on allposters.com.  It wasn't my Christmas card this year. (No, this year it was Charles Addams snowmen cartoons.) But I always like Boston-themed Christmas cards, and have sent them in the past. In terms of image and branding, when it comes to Christmas, nothing beats an old, historic city with lots of brick and snow.

See you on January 5th.

'Til then, as we've had quite enough snow already, let it melt, let it melt, let it melt.

And the real good news, especially those of us in the northern climes: THE DAYS ARE ALREADY GETTING LONGER. Yippee! There's more light at the end of that tunnel of a day.

Santa Claus is coming to town...

The economy's in the doldrums, and the weather outside is frightful - as I write this, it's bitter cold and last weekend's double-whammy storm means that what's really frightful is the footing outside.

As they do every year, a spokesperson for the city has been on TV warning that residents who don't shovel their sidewalks down to the pavement will be fined $50, and businesses who don't the same will be fined $200. This message doesn't seem to have trickled down to all the residents and businesses quite yet.

So, you can walk a ways on clear sidewalk, then hit a width-of-a-building patch that's hip-breaking ice. So, all I want for Christmas this year is a personal sander to lead my way whenever I step toe outside of the house. That or another 300 square foot worth of condo so there's room for both me and my husband to spend 24/7 together, thus making it bearable to stay put when the walking is slip slidin' away.

The condo building I live is in flanked by people who do a half-assed shoveling version on one side, and a no-assed version on the other.

While I was cleaning our sidewalk the other day - while we do have a "professional" shoveler this year, i.e., someone other the me, we had a bit more unexpected precip after he left on Sunday, so I did the final cleanup - the no-assed shoveler on the one side stopped by to give me his philosophy on not-shoveling his sidewalk.

He told me that he is from Buffalo, and, thus, is an expert on how to act under winter conditions. He pointed out - quite correctly, I'll admit - that it's easier to walk in snow than it is to walk on just-shoveled bricks.  Although I don't have Buffalo Peter's authority, I do hale from Worcester - the Buffalo of Massachusetts - plus I've been living in a brick sidewalk neighborhood for a good long time. So I was able to point back out to Buffalo Peter that this is true as long as the snow stays deep and crisp and even. Once it gets tromped on by pedestrians, and does its normal settling in, that nice, crisp, good-grip snow turns to ice. Buffalo Peter acknowledged that I am, in fact, correct, but I noticed that - as of Christmas Eve Eve - his frontage remained uncleared and had become, in fact, an ice pack that one can easily imaging Little Eva trying to make her way across.

The half-assed shoveler on the other side does at least have someone shovel, but whoever it is must work mid-storm. There is always a bit left over to turn into ice cap. Plus they cut such a narrow swath that when I walk in front of their house I feel like aerialist dare-devil Phillipe Petit* as I make my way down the sidewalk, gingerly placing one foot in front of the other.

But my real gripe with the half-assed shoveler house is that whoever they get to shovel doesn't shovel a curb cut at the corner, nor does that shoveler clear out the storm drain.

Thus, when you get to the corner, you have to negotiate a hard, steep, crusty snow mound plowed up by the City of Boston. Once you crest the mound, the general course of events is slipping down the other side and landing knee deep in a frozen water puddle.

This is not unique to this particular curb cut. Curb and storm drain shoveling are no one in particular's responsibility. Instead, we rely on, if not on exactly the kindness of strangers, then on the decency of some citizen to come forth and clear. On my block, I have emerged as a co-captain of corner clearing, a title I share with Dick, who I would guess is well in his 70's, perhaps even 80's.

I haven't seen Dick out shoveling and clearing yet this year. Perhaps he has retired to Florida.

Before I had a chance to clear out the curb and storm drain mess from the latest storm, the lady of the half-assed house emerged, and, as I watched, slowly made her way down her partially icy stairs, and minced along her sidewalk a la Phillipe Petit as far as the corner. There she stood for a moment - apparently deciding whether or not to turn back -  before electing to hazard the snow mound. She nearly missed falling on her mink coat covered keister.

I do wonder whether she asked herself whether she might not want to have her shoveler lend a hand next time there's a storm.

You never know how someone else is fixed, but I'm guessing they can afford it, since the house she lives in is a single-family, occupied by an empty nester couple, and far larger and more swank than the six-unit condo building I live in.

As for the city sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style, in the downtown, shopping area, the situation is much the same as it is in the 'hood. Mostly shoveled areas, broken up by ice patches, and some exceedingly treacherous corners to negotiate.

Silver bells, silver bells? No way. What looks like silver is really just ice.

And with warmer weather and rain predicted for today, I'm sure people are thinking, why bother at this point, it'll all wash away.

But they may not have heard that Santa Claus is coming to town.

Yes, he mostly gets around on the rooftops, but if he has to set boot on the sidewalks of Boston, he may well be in for a fall. (And what if one of the reindeer has to set hoof on a sidewalk and breaks a skinny leg? They shoot horses, don't they, and I'm guessing they shoot reindeer.)

As for Santa, I'm sure that, while he may not be a particularly litigious old soul, this has probably been a slow year in terms of revenue, and, in case of a fall, he may well decide to sue the bastards.

By the way, here's what Santa looks like at my house:

 

 

 

 

This snappy fellow was one of my parents' first Christmas decorations, and has, thus, been around since sometime in the late 1940's, serving our family well, Christmas after Christmas.  He's riding a reindeer with one broken leg - I think the piece of leg is around somewhere. The broken leg is not, however, the result of a fall sustained on an icy sidewalk but was, instead, just snapped off. (No one has owned up to the breakage.)

 

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*In case you've forgotten Phillipe Petit, he's the guy who, way back in the 1970's, walked a tight rope between the World Trade Center Twin Towers.

Happy Birthday, Little Adolph

Technically, the folks at the Greenwich, New Jersey ShopRite probably should have just gone along. There is nothing illegal, after all, about any of the words that Deborah Campbell asked to be iced onto her son's third birthday cake. But I want to give a shout out to the ShopRite, do right bakery clerk, and that person's manager, who turned down the request to decorate a birthday cake with the cheery words "Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler".

This was a repeat request that had already been denied by the store in past years:

Karen Meleta, a spokeswoman for ShopRite, said the Campbells had similar requests denied at the same store the last two years and said Heath Campbell previously had asked for a swastika to be included in the decoration.

"We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate," Meleta said. "We considered this inappropriate."

From the picture in the article, little Adolph is a pretty cute little guy, but my oh, my oh, you have to ask yourself just what chance is he going to have in life - unless, when he reaches the age of reason, he drops his middle name and maybe even rethinks his first name.

But perhaps, by then, he will be so indoctrinated into thinking that the name is cool, or tough. Or thinking that he's the namesake of someone worthy of anything other than loathing and scorn.

My advice to young Adolph - if he doesn't change his name - to dump the use of middle name (or even middle initial) on college applications, job applications, résumés, Facebook, MySpace.

As a hiring manager, it may be illegal to discriminate against someone based on their name, but I'm sure I would have been able to find something on that résumé that would render the candidate "not quite what we were looking for." No way would I have risked hiring someone who might be a racist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-Semite, or so mentally (or morally) challenged that he thought nothing was untoward about his name.

I'd offer the same advice to his sisters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell.

When the time comes, JoyceLynn and Jeannie should serve just fine.

And what's with that Honszlynn Hinler? Is it a misspelled version of Heinzlynn Himmler? Or a wink-wink, nudge-nudge play on Himmler's name?

Well JoyceLynn and Honszlynn are just 2 and 1, so there's plenty of time for them to get their names straight.

Of course, there's also plenty of time for the Campbells to have a few more little ones - an Eva Braun and a Josef Mengele, perhaps. There are actually dozens of options - even more, if they want to branch out beyond the Third Reich. Pol Pot Campbell? Idi Amin Campbell? (Hmmmmm. Probably not.)

The kids father, Heath Campbell, is asking for tolerance, invoking our new president and his mantra of change:

"They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did."

...[He] said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name." He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated.

Well, people being people, I wouldn't bet on the name being unique. Perhaps in combination with Campbell it might be. But even then, it's a mighty big world.

The Campbells claim not to be racist. Campbell pere - or should that be vater - was raised "not to avoid people of other races," albeit not to "mix with them socially romantically." It's okay with him if little Adolf wants to hang out with black folks when he grows up. ("That's his choice.") Plus there were some mixed-race kids at the birthday party - further proof that there's not a racist bone in his body.

Frankly, I think I'd have a little more respect for this guy if he said, 'Yea, I'm a neo-Nazi. I think Hitler was one of the greatest men of all time. Why shouldn't I name my kid after him?" (Well, maybe "respect" isn't quite the right word, but you know what I mean.")

So what's with these people?

Are they some type of agent provocateur performance artists? Are they moral imbeciles who think it's okay to honor one of the most evil madmen in history by naming their son after him? Are they so oblivious that they think that most normal people won't raise both eyebrows over these names? Have they not thought through how teachers, friends, other kids parents, employees, prospective partners, et al are going to react to them?

Or are they just trying to get into People Magazine or US, where they can whine and bitch about how people aren't being tolerant, how their kid is being mistreated, how they're just regular folks trying to celebrate their little guy's birthday. (Actually, I wouldn't mind if they did get into People. Then we could see what Heath Campbell does for a living. He's 35 and has a decent sized family to support. What does he do? I'm guessing he's not a doctor, lawyer, or high-tech marketer, but where would it be okay for someone to say 'we named the baby Aryan Nation' and not have people recoil in horror?)

Maybe they're even thinking they'll get a little Joe the Plumber action - book contract, recording deal.

And not to worry about little Adolf not having his cake.

The folks at Walmart were happy to fill the request, no questions asked. (You just can't make this stuff up.)

But, while we're on the subject of what goes on a birthday cake, who puts a last name on a birthday cake, anyway?

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Material used in this post was taken from a recent Boston Globe article.

Woolworths UK closing (no more place to meet that million dollar baby)

I can't remember when the last Woolworth's closed in the U.S. - a decade ago, at least -  but I do remember the last Woolie's I used to frequent. It was a big, "modern" store on Washington Street in downtown Boston. I didn't do a lot of shopping there, but it was a supremely convenient source for things like needles and thread, houseplants, tinsel, Rubbermaid dish drainers, and Contac paper.

It sold all sorts of things, including goldfish, parakeets, toys, inexpensive clothing and household items. As I could tell from my many forays there, it was a place where people without a lot of money shopped - something of a pre-cursor to Walmart.

I'm currently reading The Skyscraper and the City, Gail Fenske's  wonderful history of New York's iconic Woolworth Building. More on this book at a later date, but one thing that has struck me in reading it are the parallels between F.W. Woolworth's empire and Sam Walton's. Both were built on selling low priced goods to the masses; high-pressuring producers (many, in both cases, overseas) to keep costs down; eradicating the local, stand-alone shops on Main Street; and paying low wages.

The people who worked at Woolworth's also seemed poorer than those who worked at Filene's or Jordan Marsh: less well-turned out, less well-spoken.

The store was always a bit depressing to me, but still I felt bad when it went out of business.

Most of my fond Woolworth's memories are of the store in Worcester's Webster Square Plaza, a miserable little strip mall, anchored by a Zayre's, that opened in our neighborhood when I was in third or fourth grade.

It may have been in a miserable little strip mall, but it soon became the Saturday and school vacation destination for me and my friends. As long as we had a little walking around money, to Woolworth's we did go.

This was, of course, in the late 1950's-early 1960's, when the five and ten cent store was still, truly, a five and ten cent store.

Yes, it did sell more expensive items - Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books cost 49 cents - but you could absolutely find things to buy if all you had was one thin dime.

And what could you get for that one thin dime?

A globe pencil sharpener. An 8-pack of Crayolas. An amber glass piggy bank. A 5¢ pad (a jumbo pad made out of coarse, newsprint paper). A package of jacks. Rolls of caps - not just useful for cap guns, but excellent for sitting around and smashing with a rock. So what if half of them didn't go off? The ones that did gave off a gratifying ing mini-explosion. And, oh, the wonderful smell of cap gun powder.

At Woolie's, you could also buy any number of cheap-o rubber and plastic toys - mostly boy-toys, like little rubber race cars (the axles were metal) and rubber daggers. (The rubber daggers were essentially for our regular family (kids only) enactments of "Oh, Martina," which we used to play at night in the basement when our parents kicked us down there to run off some steam.

Either my sister Kath or I would play Martina, putting on the gaudy, luridly-painted skirt that my grandmother had brought back for my mother from her great adventure to Mexico. Well, a brightly painted skirt decorated with a bullfighter waving his red flag at a charging toro was never going to adorn my mother, but it made a great costume.

There were only two other roles - Juan and Pedro - so one of the four of us would have had to be odd-actor out. (The baby was too little to factor in these dramas.)

It didn't really matter if you had a role, since the whole point of the play was to chant the brief, but action-packed script in its entirety:

"Oh, Martina, will you marry me?"

"No, Pedro, I must marry Juan."

"If you marry Juan, I must stab you to death."

Stab, stab.

Thus, the need for the rubber dagger from Woolworth's.

In truth, we probably only played "Oh, Martina" a few times, but it certainly sticks out in my mind. Not exactly Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney - "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!".

The only other recurring play I remember predates "Oh, Martina." In "I Wonder What's Become of Sally," my sister Kathleen and I would sit in an armchair and sing the only line of "I Wonder..." that we knew. I.e., "I wonder what's become of Sally." When we finished that line, one of us would toss my doll Sally out of the chair.

It was a simpler time....

Ah, Woolworth's.

There was a peanut roasting machine there, and for a dime you could buy a little bag of fresh-roasted peanuts. If you had another dime, you could buy a vanilla coke at the soda fountain. My friend Bernadette and I split plenty of bags of peanuts and cokes at Woolworth's.

You could also buy excellent - and not so excellent - Christmas presents there. I remember buying my father a beanbag ashtray, and my mother these hideous salt and pepper shakers - parsnips or turnips with cutesie little faces on them.

One Christmas, my brother Tom had no presents under the tree for me and Kath. We knew he'd gotten us something, but he was reluctant to bring the gifts out. So, of course, we started to badger him for them.

"You'll laugh," he said.

"We won't," we insisted.

Tom had gotten us each a work of art: a plastic-framed picture, one of the Matterhorn, the other of the Last Supper.

Yes, we did laugh, but I had that Matterhorn in my room for a good long time.

Ah, Woolworth's.

I've been thinking Woolworth's a lot since I started reading The Skyscraper and the City.

But it's also on my mind because I saw last week in the Boston Globe that Woolworth's in the UK is closing its doors next month.

I don't know if Woolworth's UK was the same sort of emporium as it was in the US, and whether it offered generations of little Brits the same tawdry, magical pleasures of shopping there, but it still makes me a little nostalgic to see it go.

30,000 employees will lose their jobs - and a big, bah humbug to you, too - and 800 neighborhoods will be without a place where they can stroll in, browse, and pick up a necessity, a treasure, or an out and out piece of crap.

Ah, Woolworth's.

I never did meet a million dollar baby there, but it sure was fun growing up with a five and ten cent store nearby.

Terrible, just terrible

The Christmas card came back with a note from the Post Office that forwarding had expired for the change of address. So I went online to find the current address, and, on impulse, decided to Google the name of my old friend and colleague.

We had only been semi in touch over the last several years - pretty much just a Christmas card exchange with update, and the odd e-mail. She'd send a picture of her kids with her card, and it would live on my fridge for a while.

I wish I hadn't Googled her name - which I did, hoping to find out where she was working.

What I found, instead, was that last summer, "L" tried to kill her children, and herself.

The stories about this fell off quickly, after only a few days - just another 'Mom goes berserk' story, the kids lived, etc. It was only ever local news in her city.

The story was picked up again later in the fall, as part of a roundup of incidents in which the economic mess we're in can be pointed to as a causal factor in a series of murders and suicides.

Oh, "L." My heart is breaking for you and the daughters you wanted so badly and loved so much.

I met "L" my first year of business school at MIT.

At that time, she was a university teacher (Stanford PhD) who was considering a career jump to business. She was auditing one of my courses.

"L" ended up applying to Sloan, and my second year was her first year.

We struck up a friendship - we were both a bit older than a lot of the other students: there were only a few of us 30-ish women around. Throughout the school year, we'd grab lunch, see each other at the Thursday "Consumption Function" get togethers, chat over the copying machine in the library.

My first job out of Sloan was through one of "L's" networking connections. A year later she joined the same firm, a small econometric modeling consulting company. We were colleagues for a five or six years, and stayed friends even after we were no longer working together.

"L" was very smart and had a marvelously sardonic sense of humor - especially when we got started talking about some of our road trips with a couple of real knuckleheads from our sales team. Our joint favorite was "F", a very good looking but none too bright fellow who, when he made a call in a new city, always wanted to find a souvenir shop so that he could buy a commemorative plate. Between sales calls, he also liked to haunt expensive men's stores, where he would occasionally buy a suit that cost more than weekly salaries.

If, temperament-wise, "L" wasn't exactly cut out for a corner office career in business, well, neither was I.

Years passed. "L" and I saw each other for dinner and catch-up every once in a while, mostly as part of a larger group of women who'd worked together at the same company.

When I first knew her, "L" was in a live-together relationship with a man with two children, then (I believe) of junior high school age. "N" had custody, and "L" was, for all intents and purposes, the step mother to these boys, whom she'd been with since they'd been toddlers.

At some point along the line, "L" and "N" split. I can't remember the cause. It may have been empty nest syndrome - "N's" boys were in college by then.

"L" was also in a not that satisfying job. I knew other folks who worked at the same place, and most of them had the same complaints about ownership/management. I had interviewed for a position there at one point, and was just as happy not to have gotten it, even though I would have enjoyed working with "L" again.

"L" was unhappy, "L" was drinking, "L" called me one day - a cry for help. I went over to her place and it was a chaotic mess. We talked. We took a walk. She felt better.

Should have I spotted any incipient psychiatric problems?

Maybe, but I didn't.

I saw drinking. I saw depressed.

She was in her mid-40's, newly single, in a crappy job.

There was quite a bit to be down about.

"L" pulled herself together enough to get herself sober. She went to some resort-y kind of place in New Hampshire, and I remember she was there over Christmas. I sent her some home-made cookies, and a paperweight that held a dandelion puff, wishing after I'd sent it that I'd gotten myself one, too.

"L" came home, stayed sober, went to AA, got a dog - and decided that it was time to move.

She wasn't from around here, and she wanted to be closer to her only sibling and her mother.

She found a job, moved out "there", and we stayed in touch.

"L" came back to Boston a couple of times, and we had lunch or dinner, very much enjoying each other's company, and talking about our jobs, our lives, and books. (That PhD of "L's" was in literature.)

Things seemed to be going well, but "L" was longing to be a "mom" again.

She decided to adopt a child from overseas.

I wrote a reference letter for her.

I can't find a copy - that was many PC's ago - but I'm pretty sure that I mentioned "L's" overcoming her problem with alcohol as a sign of her strength.

"L" was ecstatic when she brought "R" home.

She came back to Boston once with her, when "R" was five or six. "R" was a smart, quiet girl - a little shy, very sweet.

"L" wanted "R" to have a sister, so she adopted another little girl, "K".

"R" and "K" were only a few months apart - beautiful girls, the two of them, although "K" was the more classically pretty child.

I'd hear from "L" every year at Christmas, or around our birthdays, which were only a couple of days apart.

I knew that her mother had died, that her sister was sick, that her job situation wasn't all that great.

But she'd gotten a nice house, and she had her girls.

Why, you might ask, am I using "L" instead of my old friend's name?

Only because I want to respect what shred of privacy that she and her girls still have - and because I don't want any of the people who so brutally commented on her, in one of the online news accounts of her brutal acts, to find my blog.

I don't want to hear from anyone who called "L" a freak; a pig; an evil monster; a crazy old bitch; a witch; a self-centered, lazy, piece of shit who doesn't deserve to live, but who should instead rot in hell (dining next to Saddam Hussein).

Although maybe if I didn't know "L", I'd be thinking the same thing. (I do know that, even if I'd thought it, I never would have written it in a comment.)

And as for 'rot in hell': if "L" recovers her sanity, I'm sure that she will rot in the hell of her own mind for the rest of her life.

Here is what "L" did:

Completely overwhelmed, suffering from major depression, compounded by job loss and home foreclosure, and -yes - drinking again, "L" sought psychiatric help, telling the people who treated her that she was a danger to herself and her children.

Somehow - did "L" convince them that she was only kidding? did they just screw up? - they sent "L" home.

A few weeks later, "L" slit the throat of one her daughters, then went after the other one with an axe. She then tried to kill herself.

Fortunately, both children survived the attack.

I'm not sure whether it's fortunate that "L" survived her suicide attempt, as well.

Since seeing this news, I have been feeling the same sensations I last felt after 9/11 - that stunned, shake-my-head-in-disbelief, no this can't have happened feeling of upset, of confusion. And the same type of obsession: reading the same stories over and over again, searching for meaning, searching for clues, trying to make some sense and shape out of it. The same way I did for weeks of looking at those terrible planes, those Towers' collapsing, those ghost figures running through the smoke and ash.

This is, of course, a smaller story.

But it's so personal.

Oh, "L", I hope that "R" and "K" survive intact, that good people take care of them, that they grow to understand that while what you did was terrible, you are not a terrible person. I hope that they don't blame your attacking them on themselves, on the stress that having children - of fearing that you'd failed them - placed on you. I hope that, if they were guilty of any of that typical pre-adolescent, back-talking, eye-rolling, disrespectful behavior that even the sweetest of children are capable of, that they don't blame themselves for precipitating the attack that nearly took their lives.

I hope that they are strong enough to get beyond the terror they must have felt at your hands, that they grow up capable of loving and trusting.

"I'm a bad mom," "R" told the police you said as you tried to kill her. "I have to do this."

Yes, "L", at that moment you were a very bad mom - that whatever madness had overcome you was making you be one.

I hope that "R" and "K" find strength in each other. In the fact that they survived. In "R's" fighting you off, and running, somehow, grievously hurt as she was, to a neighbor's for help.

I hope they understand that you loved them.

I hope that they,the only people who can really forgive you (other than yourself) find the grace and generosity to do so.

Oh, "L", I hope that you get well, and that when you do get well you will forgive yourself.

Every time I read about a murder-suicide, I always ask myself why the person didn't just kill themselves first and be done with it.

I'm asking that here, too.

It can only be evil or insanity.

Here, oh, "L", it is insanity - for what else can explain a loving mother, a good, kind generous person, trying to kill her children.

The violence, the brutality - what insanity fueled the rage (or is it rage that fueled the insanity?) that had you choose such a violent, brutal means to kill your daughters? Why not, I ask myself, an overdoes of pills, crushed into ice cream. Every one dies peacefully, in their sleep.

Of course, if you'd chosen that path, your girls might not have survived.

(I'm thinking about how many times I've used the expression 'It's not as if he's an axe murderer.' Now I know someone who is an axe murderer - or at least tried to be one. So what, exactly, does axe murderer mean, when it's applied to someone like "L".)

Oh, "L", I hope you get the care that you need.

I hope that you get better, and that when you do you have the strength to accept what you've done, to live with yourself, to not just give up and sit staring out into space for the rest of your life - a life that is, of course, now in ruins - but ruins from which I am so hoping that something can be salvaged.

I think about the things that "L" may never experience again: walking barefoot on the grass, ordering her favorite flavor of ice cream, hugging her child (and having the child hug back). No decorating the Christmas tree. No complaining about the knuckleheads at work. No rollerblading - which "L" loved to do.

I hope that "R" and "K" grow up and are able to experience great joy and happiness in their lives. That they grow into the kind, generous, smart women you want them to be. That they both find love. That they are not crushed and overwhelmed by what they have just gone through (and are, of course, going through still).

Oh, "L", I'm not the praying type, but if I were I would be praying for you. And for "R" and "K".

My heart is breaking for all three of you.

In a feral pig's ear

As if there isn't enough to worry about, The Economist on December 6th had an article on the five million feral hogs that roam the US, where they:

...destroy the habitats of plants and animals, spread diseases, damage crops, kill and eat the eggs and young of wildlife and sometimes menace people with their aggressive behaviour.

The "u" in behavior is The Economist's; the italics are mine.

These critters have been around since the time of the conquistadors, who brought herds of cerdos with them, and sometimes lost track of a few strays. Other pigs were released into commercial hunting preserves for sport. Still others are being let go by pig farmers who find it cheaper to release some of their free-loading stock into the wild that it is to feed them.

One rabbit-y thing leads to another, and, Houston, we have a pig problem.

And Houston it is - or at least Texas it is: the greatest number of menacing, feral pigs are in Texas. But they're now present in 38 states.

To put my feral-fearing mind at ease, I checked out the Federal Government's recently updated (November 24, 2008) map o' swine to see if there are any in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Fortunately, as far as feral swine go, Massachusetts is not a blue state, and the nearest sightings have been on the Pennsylvania-New York State border.

But this is small comfort. If you look at the 1982 feral swine map, it's clear to see that these little piggies are on the move - and heading this way.

Did I say little piggies?

These suckers can grow plenty large - The Economist article noted a rumored catch of one Hogzilla - 12 feet long and weighing in at 1,000 pounds.

Hot dog!

Living in the city as I do, most of the wildlife I encounter is likely to be a pigeon, rat, make-way-for-ducklings duck, or Canada goose. Sometimes I see a hawk or a comorant. Once in a blue moon, I've seen a racoon or smelled a skunk. There are wild turkeys stalking the area where my sister Kath lives in Brookline, and I saw a few of those pinheads strutting around near her house just a few weeks ago.

Most of my close encounters with nature occur out of town. At Kath's at the Cape, we sometimes hear coyotes at night, and I've seen a ton of seals on the beach not far from Wellfleet. Plus crabs, of course. There's one walk-to-the-beach that takes us through a veritable horse-shoe crab graveyard. (Who knew horse-shoe crabs could be the size of a Mini-Cooper?)

In my camping days, I saw plenty of bear - including finding two cubs playing in the well of our tent one time. That night, fellow campers, was spent sitting up in the car.

Anyway, we're coping with a feral economy, feral terrorists, asteroids that - if not exactly feral - may well be wild, and heading our way for the ultimate splashdown. And now I have to worry about the encroachment of 1,000 pound feral pigs, with their gouging tusks and bristling coats. (See how that damned evolution works? Those cute little piglets evolve into vile hairy beasts. And I bet they don't even make very good bacon.)

Anyone spotting a feral pig heading Northeast, please drop a line to feralpig@uga.edu. (I'll be on the lookout.)

Meanwhile, I'm staying put.

What's in your wallet?

Well, there's no getting around the fact that for most of us, in our extended, metaphorical, 401-K-ish wallet, there's less than there was last year.

But if you're reading this blog, there's an exceedingly high probability that there's more in your wallet than there is in that of the average person who uses the services of St. Francis House.

For 25 years, St. Francis House has been serving the poor and homeless of Boston.  St. Francis House - which is, by the way non-denominational (although founded by Franciscans) - provides basic and rehabilitative services.  The painting shown here was done by Ivory, who is a frequent visitor to the SFH Art Room, the "headquarters" for the Expressive Therapy program. Almost all of Ivory's pictures are of trees, and this is one of my favorite of his works.

The St. Francis House motto is "rebuilding lives", and SFH does so with remarkable success. But before you can rebuild, you need to feed and clothe, and a lot of what St. Francis House provides is simply that. And while demand for "consumer goods" may be falling this holiday season, I can assure you that demand for food and clothing at St. Francis House isn't.

We have, in fact seen the average number of meals (breakfast and lunch) served each day skyrocket over the last year. Clothing demands are always great, especially in the winter.

The need at St. Francis House is great, and growing greater, as the marginal in our society are always the first, worst, and longest victims of an economic downturn.

St. Francis House works with poor and homeless adults. Christmas in the City helps poor and homeless children have a  real Christmas. Unless you're in downtown Boston, we're running a bit late to get anyone to sponsor a "wish list" for one of the thousands of kids that Christmas  in the City helps out each year.  But you can still make an online donation, or send in a check.  As the vice-president-in-charge-of-recording-checks-and-depositing-them this year, I can promise you that 100% of your donation goes to the kids (and to helping their parents get back on their feet). Christmas in the City is an all-volunteer endeavor, and the lowest overhead outfit I've ever seen. (It's run out of Kennedy Brother Physical Therapy and fitness center, and you can barely get to the equipment these days, what with the piled up gifts all over the place.)

Like everyone else, you have your favorite charities.

These are mine.

If you haven't finished your shopping yet, a donation to either of these organizations makes an excellent gift for that special someone who's hard to shop for and doesn't need another darn thing (e.g., another wallet).

Tongue Tied: Languages on the Brink of Extinction

There was an article in The Economist a while back on languages that are dying out.

For those of us whose mama loshen is English, we really don't have much to fear at present. English is- at least for now - proving itself to be the Esperanto that actually works.

But, if you were Marie Smith (an English name, if ever), you were the last person on earth who knew the Alaskan Eyut language. She took that knowledge with her when she died, age 89, earlier this year.

Presumably, given her name, she also had English with which to communicate with her friends and family.

Still, it must be a bit sad to have no one else on earth that you can make a muttered aside to, in the language of our childhood - a language that most people don't know - and have them get it.

I've sat in plenty of Irish pubs where the natives will on occasion make a few comments - generally to much laughter - in Irish, before reverting back to English, leaving us Yanks perplexed and wondering whether they were making fun of us. Which they no doubt were. This was fun for the Irish, of course. The kind of fun that poor, old Marie Smith wasn't able to enjoy in her waning years.

Eyut is not the first language to die out, and it won't be the last: The Economist notes that, there are at present nearly 7,000 spoken languages worldwide - and, by the turn of the next century, 50% to 90% may be gone.

The world is getting smaller, and with English as the current language of - you pick - commerce, science, technology, and popular culture, it makes more sense for someone to learn English than it does for some to learn, well, Eyut. Or Hungarian. Or Finnish. Or Gaelic.

Eyut would obviously be a big waste of study, now that Ms. Smith has passed on. But unless you needed to do so for scholarly reasons or you were planning on emigrating to Hungary, Finland, or some Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) area of Ireland, it might not make a lot of sense to devote time to learning those languages, either.

Languages, like species, evolve.

Except for the Plymouth Plantation re-enactors, no one today speaks the same English that the Pilgrims used for gabbing on the Mayflower.

My mother's native tongue was German. Her family immigrated to the States when she was about four, and the language of the house became, in short order, something that was more or less English. (I say more or less because my grandmother's English was not just heavily accented, it was somewhat fractured - as in "Go by/bei your Mommy.")

Because there was a steady influx of immigrant friends and family, my mother retained some German as a girl/young woman.  She also studied German in high school, as did my Aunt Mary, who loves to tell the story of the nun who didn't quite get German pronunciation. Sister Whatever pronounced the word "schiess" as "scheiss," much to the amusement of the girls in the class who were from German families, and had no doubt heard their fathers mutter an occasional "scheiss."

A number of years after my grandfather died, my grandmother married a not-that-long-off-the-boat landsmann, and I think my mother used her German when she spoke with Pete. When she made a late-in-life trip to Germany, she found that while she could generally understand and generally make herself understood. She also found that she had largely stopped acquiring new vocabulary in the 1920's/1930's, and was thus not up on current terminology, slang, and manners of expression. Instead, she had the German equivalent of 23 skidoo and oh, you kid.

The article doesn't say, but I'm guessing that most of the languages that will die out over the next century are those that are primarily oral, not written. Latin survives because the Catholic Church still kinda-sorta speaks it, but more so because it has a written body of work for scholars to delve into.

Recordings will help preserve knowledge of the lost languages. But the lost languages themselves will be the preserve of scholars with recordings - not used by real people, who will have acquired more practical, statistically speaking, ways to communicate.

And those ways will be changing, too, in the way that languages always do - perhaps none more dramatically than English, with its multiple roots and jumble of words grabbed from all over, and its miraculous ability to create and embrace new words whenever and wherever they're needed. Most of us don't give a nano-seconds thought about where new words come from. If we do give them a nano-second of thought, heck, we just google for the answer.

A year or so ago, I saw a part of some sci-fi movie, set in the near-ish future, in which everyone spoke a hybrid form of English that included words that were, to current ears, still "foreign language." (I don't recall any of them, but I think they were mostly Spanish or Chinese sounding.)

And so it will go.

The world becomes Eyut-less. English will grow and morph.And a hundred years from now, if anyone's watching early 21st century movies, they'll seem like costume dramas in which people are speaking the equivalent of thee-thou Quaker.

Some things are lost. Some things are gained.

We can think about it and say OMG, or relax and say LOL.

At least IMHO.

Finding your inner North Dakotan

Aside from the extremely large troop of twenty-somethings in Santa hats and Santa suits I saw jamming into the pub across from the Writers' Room last Saturday, this seems like a pretty low-key, subdued Christmas season.

Boston's hum-bug isn't helped any by the hole in the ground  - formerly occupied by local department store Filene's - that's just sitting there in the middle of what used to be the downtown shopping district. Funding for the BIG IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT PROJECT that was going to fill the hole has fallen through, and they're trying to decide whether to lop off the 7 floors of luxury condos or reduce the office space. The City or the developers have tried to perk things up by hanging Christmas wreathes all along the Washington Street side of the cyclone fence that surrounds the hole in the ground. But the effect is more dispiriting than cheery.

All the news is about cutting back. No more lavish company parties. No more "every child's wish is your command" letters to Santa. No more bulging Christmas stockings. (What's that in the toe? Why, it's a lump of coal. We could burn it, but it's a pollutant. Wait a minute. Maybe it's licorice.)

While this may not be what our "oh, so reliant on the leveraged consumer" economy could use at present, it's probably not a bad thing that we're all finding our inner North Dakotan.

Why North Dakota?

A few days ago, there was an article in the NY Times on how North Dakota is, so far, largely withstanding the recession.

While their 401K's aren't immune to the same glance-and-gulp losses that the rest of us are suffering through, North Dakotans are enjoying 3.4% unemployment and one of the lowest foreclosure rates in the country. Housing prices are also gaining in value - modestly, but gaining nonetheless.

Some of this is the good fortune of being an agricultural state in a world where folks may not have to buy everyone in the family a different colored iPod Nano as a stocking stuffer, but do still have to eat. North Dakota is also an oil-producing state - who knew?

But North Dakota's relative prosperity is also due to:

...a conservative, steady, never-fancy culture that has nurtured fewer sudden booms of wealth like those seen elsewhere (“Our banks don’t do those goofy loans,” Mr. [Justin] Theel said) and also fewer tumultuous slumps.

(Theel is part owner of a Bismarck, ND car dealership.)

North Dakota is not only enjoying a state revenue surplus, but they also have 13,000 jobs that need filling.

Of course, getting someone to move to North Dakota may not be all that easy.

When I checked the Bismarck Tribune for the weather the other day, here's what I found:

Blizzard conditions still threaten Bismarck-Mandan residents in the next three days, with up to 8 inches of snow, low visibility and subzero temperatures possible.

I remember my mother telling me about some friends of my grandparents who farmed in North Dakota. Someone had frozen to death, or their hands had frozen off, or something equally dreadful, while trying to make it from house to barn to feed the cows one fine winter's day. Brrrrrr.

It's also easy to imagine North Dakota as something of a boring place, with nothing much to do other than counting frozen-off hands in the snow, and laying bets on how many kids will fall under the combine next harvest.

But, as the world has gotten smaller, isolated places like North Dakota have gotten more open and progressive. While I might not want to pull up stakes here to go after one of those 13,000 jobs, I don't get the sense that North Dakota is as aggressively and repressively conservative as some other parts of the country are. (When I was over doing my weather check, there was an ad for the Dakota Divas Holiday Drag Show flashing on the screen. North Dakota: it's not just for Lawrence Welk fans anymore.)

You are, no doubt, thinking Fargo.

North Dakota: it's not just cold, it's weird. (You betcha.)

But that was just a movie. (Wasn't it?)

In any case, that steady, never fancy, no goofy loans culture is looking pretty darned good right now, isn't it?

Yes, a lot of us will be seeking out our inner North Dakotan in the months to come.

We'll decide that last year's winter coat still has some warmth in it. That it doesn't matter if that turtleneck jersey has a stubborn stain on it, since it's always worn underneath a sweater where the stain doesn't show. That it's really foolish to pay $4.99 for what sure looks like a short-weight half-pint of blueberries, even though they really do make the cereal taste better. That a brown-bag lunch actually tastes better than a take-out sandwich. That those dated, 1980's kitchen cabinets aren't that bad, after all. And that $85 is just too much to pay for a ticket to a baseball game when you can just stay home and watch it for free. (Well, the jury's still out on this last one.)

Life in Bismarck, ND, meanwhile, is doing just fine, thank you.

Downtown, in the line of gift shops along Broadway, where shop owners reported sales that were healthy (though always sensible), residents said they were pleased — if a tad guilty — about the state’s relative good fortune.

No one was gloating. No wild spending sprees were apparent. No matter how well things seemed to be going, many said they were girding, in well-practiced Midwestern style, for the worst.

North Dakotans are smart to gird for the worst, as they aren't likely to fully escape the recession. It's just that the recession is not as likely to be as long, as deep, and as bad as it is in other places.

As for the rest of us - those who do live in those "other places" - we will just have to keep on finding that inner North Dakotan that has been dormant for so long.

Haven't found yours yet? Keep trying! (Take a deep breath and think Lawrence Welk: Ah, one an' a two...)

Bernie Madoff: "People make mistakes"?

Of all the things I've read about Bernard Madoff's $50B Ponzi scheme, the quote in the Wall Street Journal from one Frank Christensen, a retired NYSE broker, is my favorite:

"I really think very highly of him," said Mr. Christensen. "People make mistakes."

That people make mistakes is certainly a truism.

I myself have made mistakes - personally, professionally, sartorially, financially, aesthetically, grammatically.

But a $50B Ponzi scheme does seem to fall into a category of its own, now, doesn't it? The category that in a kinder, gentler time we might have called "lulus", and which we would now be more apt to characterize as a major, over the top, out of control, f-up.

Actually, I take that last word back.

An f-up implies a kind of bumbling well-intentioned goofiness, or cocky, cock-eyed arrogance.

I don't see how this one is going to end up being anything other than one of two things: a colossal act of insanity, or a do-time crime.

There's a lot of news on Bernie Madoff's victims in these parts, because Boston was part of his "territory."

One small local non-profit has - poof - been wiped out, taking with it a half dozen jobs and a history of good works. Several local capital-P Philanthropists are among the bamboozled, as well.

And, of course, those who 'always knew there was something fishy going on' are now emerging to point out how sage they were to have known that there was more bull than bull market in Madoff's ability to provide unspectacular but unruffled - solid and steady-state  - returns over so many years.

In these circumstances, it's always worth a traipse to the company's web site to see what they have to say.

Sure, there's a little statement from the judge stating that he's got someone in there scrutinizing affairs, but most of the content's still intact.

So we learn that Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities is a "leading international market maker," who's been around for years.

During this time, Madoff has compiled an uninterrupted record of growth, which has enabled us to continually build our financial resources.

Yes, I realize that this is talking about the Madoff trade execution business, and not the side action as a wealth advisor/manager, but it's certainly easy to see how simple it is to compile "an uninterrupted record of growth" when it's a Ponzi scheme.

Too bad that Ponzi schemes always have to come to an end, isn't it?

Our sophisticated proprietary automation and unparalleled client service delivers an enhanced execution that is virtually unmatched in our industry.

I'm sure that those whose portfolios have been gutted will agree that the client service is unmatched, unparalleled, and decidedly proprietary. (At least let's hope it is.)

Madoff's market maker business has relied on sophisticated technology,

...underpinned by the personal commitment of founder Bernard L. Madoff...

I guess that's the same personal commitment that pinned under the advisory clients.

Madoff's website also touts their "sophisticated disaster recovery facilities," but I can't think of any disaster recovery facility that's going to let anyone recover from this particular disaster.

Last week's SEC press release outlines the complaint against Madoff, using terms like "stunning" and "epic proportions." It also gives us a bit of a look into the company meeting during which Madoff 'fessed up about what was going on on the advisory side of the house:

The SEC's complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan, alleges that Madoff yesterday informed two senior employees that his investment advisory business was a fraud. Madoff told these employees that he was "finished," that he had "absolutely nothing," that "it's all just one big lie," and that it was "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme." The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different investors. Madoff admitted in this conversation that the firm was insolvent and had been for years, and that he estimated the losses from this fraud were at least $50 billion.

Now, this will have to go down as one of the all time great company meetings. (C.f., lulu, f-up.). Just another day at the office, honey!

According to regulatory filings, the Madoff firm had more than $17 billion in assets under management as of the beginning of 2008. It appears that virtually all assets of the advisory business are missing.

Maybe it's off hiding somewhere with the $700 billion Wall Street bailout money. Maybe it's on its way to Detroit to help out the incredible shrinking Big Three.

Back on Madoff's web site, we're told - in suddenly cringe-inducing copy -

In an era of faceless organizations owned by other equally faceless organizations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner's name is on the door. Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark.

Well now....

Allowing this copy to appear on your web-site may come under the "people make mistake" category. Maybe.

But bilking people out of $50B, over the course of many years, surely demands a category of its own.

And where's the SEC been during all of this? Their own press release talks about the long duration of Madoff fraud.

Could we possibly be in need of just a teensy weensy bit more regulation?

Toyland, toyland: The National Toy Hall of Fame

With all the doomy-gloomy topics to choose from, I almost forgot about the Toy Hall of Fame, which last month added the baby doll, the skateboard, and - how wonderful in this era of 3 year old's asking for expensive video games -  the stick, to the list of toys that can say that they have been officially proclaimed as classics.

The Toy Hall of Fame lives at the Strong Museum in Rochester, NY, which is:

home to more than 500,000 play-related objects including the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of toys and dolls (more than 70,000 items).

The Toy Hall of Fame is a who's who (what's what?) of fabulous toys, some branded, some not. Generics like alphabet blocks sit side by side with Legos and Lincoln Logs.  Monopoly, Candy Land, and Scrabble are there, but so's checkers.

It's hard to quibble with the list, although I can't see how it took all this time for the baby doll to make the cut, given that Barbie's on the list, as are Raggedy Ann and Andy, who certainly deserve to be.

Just reading through the Hall of Famers is a grownup child's nostalgic delight.

I never had an Atari, but I did have a bicycle, one of those heavy, balloon tire old clunkers that my father picked out for me - a light blue and white Western Flyer. (This isn't the exact bicycle, but it's close enough. Source: Little Congress Bicycle Museum, in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.) Or maybe I chose it myself. It had a head light on it, which was just the sort of thing that would appeal to me. Unfortunately, the battery in the headlight corroded within a couple of weeks, and the headlight quickly became covered with this hideous orange-yellow gunk. It even got in the screws, so my father had to pull the thing off, leaving two big holes in the front fender. Sure, I rode it, but that bike was never the same to me again.

Fortunately, my sister Kathleen could generally be counted on to let me us her bike which, while not an English racer - the three speed wonders owned only by uppity, only-child rich kids - was a lot lighter weight and sleeker than my bike, which wouldn't have looked out of place if Andy Hardy had been delivering newspapers with it. (That is, if the "boy bar" had been added to it. I always thought those bars were ridiculous. Certainly, no girls of my era were wearing skirts to play, yet our bikes were "girl bikes", without that stabilizing piece of hardware across the middle. As a kid, I always wondered why the boys had the boy bar, given that it they fell forward suddenly, they had more that could get hurt than us girls did. Ouch!)

We collected marbles as kids, and traded them, but we really didn't play marbles very much. Occasionally, we'd shoot them, but it always seemed pointless - especially since no one seemed to know the rules. We did carry felt bags (mine was a green mouse face) full of cat's eyes, glass-ies, clay-ies, and pooners. Clay-ies were the poor-man's marble. They looked like they'd been hand crafted in Pompeii. I don't remember them being for sale at Woolworth's, where we bought our marbles. But they were always around: dull, terra-cotta brown, and boring. (Were they also called midgies? I think they were smaller than "real" marbles.)

Among my other personal faves in the Hall of Fame are jacks, the jump rope, and the Hula Hoop.

Jacks and jump ropes were the only "sports" I ever excelled at.

I was particularly good at jacks, and could very often get all the way through ten-sies without a falter. I also knew all the variants - like tap jack, in which you had to tap the jacks after you picked them up - that you played after you'd got through the vanilla rounds.

And jump rope. Ah, jump rope.

Jump rope is what girls played in the school yard. Single rope, Double Dutch. I was pretty darned good, and still remember the chants - why not, I must have used them hundreds of times.

All in together girls, mighty fine weather girls...

Apples, peaches, pears, and plums, jump out when your birthday comes...

High, low, medium, wavy, walky, talky, slowly, peppers...

I well remember the hula hoop craze.

My father brought home one orange and one blue one for the girls, and a couple of smaller ones for the boys.

I claimed the blue one, and Kathleen seemed eager to have the orange one. Once she'd indicated that the orange one - since it was unusual: most hula hoops were blue, red, or green - I started to think that there might be something to it. So I started making a little whiney noise about wanted the orange one. She let me have it.

Kathleen is two years older, and she had either psyched me out - she really wanted the blue one - or she genuinely didn't give a damn.

In any case, one of the long-standing, highly frustrating patterns of my childhood was bracing for a squabble over something, only to have Kath let me have it. (We had real fights about plenty of things, but it was never over stuff. The hula hoop. Or the last fudge pop in the freezer. She never fought for stuff. This was completely irritating, removing all the satisfaction associated with winning the fight or being the martyr who didn't get what she wanted. Completely irritating.)

There's lots of other good stuff on the list, including the cardboard box which was, of course, a play object non pareil, since it could be anything - especially if the cardboard box were a big one. I remember one refrigerator box coming into the neighborhood when we still lived in my grandmother's house, on a street with ultra-steep front yards. Put a bunch of kids in an old fridge box, have the other kids push it off the top of that steep front yard, and it would end with a satisfying and somewhat cushioned thud on the cement sidewalk. Let's do it again!

Mr. Potato Head. Play-Doh. The Slinky. Roller Skates - boy, did they weigh a ton, and how miserable it was to have to keep trying to tighten them with that skate key. I only knew one kid with shoe skates. Mary B - naturally, an only child. Only children got everything.

The baby doll is, I believe, long overdue for the Hall of Fame, and I'm glad it's on the list. (Sure, I had a Tiny Tears, and a Ginnette, but I want to give a shout out to Amputatee, a baby doll with a deformed arm - the plastic seemed to have melted, leaving a big gap between baby shoulder and baby arm.)

Skateboard, fine. I remember the first wave of skateboards, somewhere in the mid-sixties. My brother Tom had a red (wooden) skateboard, and I used it once in a while. But it wasn't of supreme interest to me.

And the stick. Since it's primary toy use is that of a weapon, it's more of a boy toy, of course,but it can also be put to many other uses: drawing lines (and circles) in the dirt; tying a dish towel on it to make a flag; and throwing it for a dog to fetch. Smaller sticks can be used for fake food; short, stubby sticks (wrapped in a dish towel) can be turned into a baby doll. Multiple long sticks, placed on a lawn, can be used to outline a pretend house. Etc.

So what got nominated this year for the Hall of Fame and didn't get chosen?

Well, the dollhouse, Flexible Flyer, and Wiffle Ball got dinged, as did Clue, The Game of Life, Hot Wheels, the Magic 8 Ball, Rubik's Cube, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Yahtzee.

From this list, I'd have had to go with Flexible Flyer, dollhouse, Wiffle Ball, and Yahtzee. I certainly spent enough time playing Clue over the years, but I never did like those creepy little people in the Game of Life.

Are the Magic 8 Ball and Rubik's Cube - on which I never managed to get more than one side "done" at a time - really toys?

Hot Wheels, yes and no.

But Thomas the Tank Engine? Way too commercial, and not enough longevity, to make the Hall of Fame.

But that's just one former child's opinion.

Got a toy you want to nominate?

Let the Toy Hall of Fame know.

Are the Eighties Finally Over?

Yes, I know, one look at Rod Blagojevich's hairdo and you'd think that the 1980's were still going strong, but there's at least one small, sweet indicator that the Me Era, the Gordon Gecko 'greed is good' era, may be ending.

The small, sweet indicator is from the response to one of the questions asked in a poll WSJ-NBC conducted last week. The question was whether or not you'd be willing to take a 5% pay cut in order to save jobs. I've heard this variously reported as "save jobs" and "save your own job" - which makes a really big difference -  so I went and looked at the source . The question was:

Would you be willing to take a five percent pay cut if it meant saving jobs at your place of work?

And 64% said that, yes, they would be willing to do so.

Okay, okay: talk - even 5% pay cut talk - is cheap.

And, with so many people fearing for their jobs, this is also a case of hoping that everyone would be willing to save yours.

And for all I know, people answered the same way in the 1980's.

Still, it's heartening to see this little bit of altruism emerging from the current crisis, and I'd like to see some of the places slashing jobs - with cuts of whatever magnitude - give a little thought to putting something like this into operation.

Taking a 5% pay cut wouldn't translate into saving 5% of jobs, of course. "Fully loaded" employees cost a lot more than just their direct salary. And in companies where there's a lot less production work, it might not make sense to have a lot of people hanging around with nothing to do.

Yet there are plenty of creative ways that companies could use the willingness of employees to take a hit, to benefit the employees who are getting hit. Maybe in the "less work" places, everyone works a few fewer hours. Or maybe the 5% gets thrown into a kitty used to supplement unemployment insurance benefits for workers who do get pink slipped.

In Massachusetts, unemployment benefits are pretty good. They may not make up for a lost paycheck, but they're reasonable. The highest rate, based on your salary, used to be $500+, with other +++'s for dependents. But in some states, the benefits are really trivial. Having another source of income to draw on would no doubt be welcomed. And what a nice "It's a Wonderful Life" little overlay if the money's coming from your former colleagues.

Of course, you'd want to make sure that the voluntary pay cut was actually going for an uncommon common good, and also that, when good times returned, the 5% pay cut would be restored.

It's a nice thought....

The one and only time I was in one of these pay cut situations, the pay cut was restored after the crisis passed.

I don't think the 10% cuts we took were to save anyone's job, and it wasn't voluntary. The company I was working for was quite flaky and volatile, and I think this was a matter of us not being able to make payroll.

As he always did, our Mighty Mouse of a CEO flew off somewhere and found some investor to sucker in for a few bucks to keep us going for a few more months.

I was with this company for many years, and we eventually became more self-reliant, managing to live within our paltry means, and even eking out a modest quarterly profit for a few years.

But we only got clean and sober after our investors put in a stop loss order when they hit $40M in with no hope of anything coming out  - other than BS and promises - in sight. They brought in a turnaround guy who actually managed to turn the place around. (So long, Mighty Mouse!)

So I know that money doesn't magically solve a company's problems.

Still, it's nice to think that people would be willing to pull together a bit to get use through hard times.

Sure, many people are living so close to the edge that 5% less might put them over. But everyone  doesn't really need a new smartphone, or a Wii, or another cashmere sweater, and plenty of people have a lot more than 5% fat in their budgets.

And if expressing a willingness to give a little means that there's a possibility that we're going to shake off the consume-at-all-costs culture that's helped get us into the mess we're in, what's not to like?

(Would someone please hand me a hanky so I can dab my eyes a bit?)

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

And speaking of Rod Blagojevich, I'm "half-Chicago" and dropped a w.t.f. e-mail to my cousin Ellen, who grew up on the South Side and lives just outside the city.  She told me that Blago lives right around the corner from Grandma's house on North Mozart. Grandma's long gone, but just the thought of old Rod being in the 'hood our mothers hailed from....