Footloose and fancy-shoe free

The National Geographic images that stay most with me from my childhood are those where “the natives” disfigured themselves to conform to their society’s appearance norm.

Elongated neck! Lip plates! Stretched out earlobes! Facial scarring!

I’d shake my head and marvel – no multi-culti for me – that people could be so crazy.

And I pretty much feel the same way when I see the pierced tongue, the pierced lip, the pierced nose (what about boogers?). Not to mention the taut, expressionless visage of Joan Rivers (And then there’s the cat woman.)

What some folks won’t do for beauty…

And on my list of what I won’t do is anything that involves the use of a scalpel and/or hypodermic needle that is not 100% medically necessary (as opposed to aesthetically desirable). I might consider laser eye surgery at some point, but I’ve lived with glasses for so long by now, why bother. I did get veneers for my front teeth a couple of years ago, but those puppies were so chipped from years of deploying teeth-as-implements – they really do make a rather handy vise or pliers – that getting them fixed up was more out of necessity than vanity.

And as anyone who has seen my hair knows, the dye-job is certainly on my exempt list At this stage in the game, I truly prefer not to know exactly what’s under there, but I have a hunch it’s not a gorgeous silver-gray. So I make a regular visitation to Rita, the most excellent of colorists, to have my hair restored to the shade it was in nature forty years ago.

But I have to shake my head and marvel that there are folks who will undergo possibly debilitating foot surgery, the better to fit their feet into long, narrow, pointy-toed, high-heeled shoes.

Some of the procedures that are available were written up in a recent WSJ article that my sister Trish pointed out to me.

Needless to say, the ur source for aesthetic foot surgery is in LA-LA Land, where Beverly Hills Foot Surgery is:

… humbled and honored to have become the leader in new techniques and procedures that have changed the experience of foot surgery for over 5000 clients.

Dr. Ali Sadrieh always knew that something was afoot with women’s feet:

For years now, women have been subjected to wearing shoes that aren’t necessarily the best for their feet. History has shown with customs like chinese foot binding, that the well being of a woman’s foot has taken second priority to social norms and beauty

Still, he didn’t start out making the world a better place for high-heel wearers. No, he used to advise people against putting on those high-heeled sneakers:

….But as time went on, I realized that advising women not to wear high heeled shoes, was unrealistic.  This is because in the modern world, professional or formal attire requires a woman to wear high heeled shoes due to social norms and pressures.  This is unfortunate but true.

It certainly is unfortunate, but why – in this day and age – is it true? Are there really professions – other than the obvious one – that require women to dress like Barbie?  Maybe it’s the expectation in advertising, PR, and fashion. And there’s no denying that there are plenty of men who’d like it if women pimped themselves out for the workplace. But as far as I know, women in technology, medicine, law, and a bunch o’ other professions don’t feel the need to wear Jimmy Choo’s to the office. And it’s pretty disheartening if women think they can’t get ahead in the workplace without the perky butt-lift that a high-heel gives them. (I do understand why short women would want to appear taller than they are, by the way. Short people – especially women – can sometimes find themselves patronized or looked down on as children, not to be taken as seriously as the tall guys.)

But, in general, for women wearing high heels at work: don’t they realize that the vixen thing doesn’t age all that well?

Maybe they’re hoping to meet Mr. Bigbucks $. Right, who’ll take them away from the vale of tears that is the workplace, and who will be able to afford to have them carried around in a sedan chair when they can no longer walk.

In terms of high heels “required” for formal occasions, that’s a different story. At least you can kick off your shoes on the dance floor. And a while back, I read about some entrepreneur who was coming out with a tiny fold-up flat that women could put in their tiny date-night pocketbooks, and wear during the segments of the evening that required walking from Point A to Point B. (Not sure what they do with their Manolo’s. Maybe hang them around their necks?)

In general, however, the fact that women are crippling themselves with 6 inch Christian Louboutin’s, to the extent that they require surgery so that they can keep on crippling themselves, is as bizarre as all those ring necks and lip plates.

Not that I never wore high heels.

When I was a girl, being a grown-up meant wearing high heels, and by eighth grade high heels were what I wore for formal occasions (i.e., church). But by high school, heels weren’t worn all that much, even for formal occasions (i.e., church). Sure, sometimes you put on heels, but mostly you wore flats (i.e., Weejun loafers).

When I began my professional career -  although I did own a few pairs of spikish shoes - the heels that were generally worn with the penis-envy, menswear suits of that era became, over time, low heeled, chunky-clunky affairs.  We stopped wearing heels because they a) hurt; b) were always getting caught in bricks, resulting in costly heel covering; and c) looked pretty darned stupid when worn with those penis-envy, menswear suits.

But today’s modern career gal would, apparently, rather have her toes thinned, shortened, and elongated don a sensible shoe. And Dr. Ali is there for them:

…Rather than isolate my practice form the realities of what women endure in the professional world, I decided to create a procedure that addresses the problems that women face when wearing high heeled shoes.

So he came up with:

Procedures like The Cinderella Procedure™ (Aesthetic Bunionectomy with minimally invasive, pain-free surgical recovery), The Liber-archy Procedure™ (Reconstructive Flat Foot Surgery for kids), The Perfect 10 Aesthetic Toe Shortening™ (Hammertoe Correction procedure with advanced fixation technique and hidden side incisions), The Foot Tuck™ (Fat Pad Augmentation for comfortable wear of high heel shoe) and the revolutionary Aesthetic Toe Lengthening, have changed peoples lives.  Every day I hear from my patients that they have been to numerous doctors who wouldn’t provide them with the fresh new way of thinking about surgery that our practice offers them.

Okay.

I’ve got to give some podiatry props to Dr. Ali for his naming style. And I could have used that Liber-archy surgery when I was a kid, as I’ve had the usual minor problems associated with flat feet my whole life.

But what’s with women that we’d line up for both “Aesthetic Toe Shortening” and “Aesthetic Toe Lengthening”?

Having these types of operations just can’t be good for you.  And the orthopedic profession pretty much agrees:

"Shortening a toe to get into a tight-fitting shoe should not be a standard of care in any physician's office," says Donald R. Bohay, an orthopedic surgeon in Grand Rapids, Mich., and co-chairman of public education for the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society.

The American Podiatric Medical Association, representing about 85% of the nation's podiatrists, agrees. "Our function is to relieve pain and correct deformities. We are not trained to allow women to fit into a narrower shoe," says the group's president, Kathleen Stone, a podiatrist in Glendale, Ariz.

(Source for the indented material just above and just below is the WSJ article, not the Beverly Hills foot doc site.)

The majority of medical professionals oppose these cosmetic procedures because there are, inevitably, risks to any type of surgery.

In a 2003 survey by the Foot and Ankle Society, over half of responding members said they had treated patients who were in pain from failed cosmetic foot surgery.

What’s not mentioned in the article is whether having the surgery once sets you up for life, or whether continually wearing ill-fitting, torture chamber shoes will require repeat surgery for at least some of the procedures. (Thinning the pinky toe, maybe?)

If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they come up with a shoe that’s attractive, sexy, and (more or less) comfortable? Why wouldn’t shoes with a moderate heel work?  

“Spikes” used to be three-inches high. Nowadays, that’s practically a flat. What’s with the heel inflation? I’ll give you that the Louboutin to the right is one beautiful shoe, but wouldn’t it still work if it were a bit closer to the ground? I’ll bet that with every additional inch, there’s an exponential increase in bunions and back problems.

And yet every day I see women clomping around downtown Boston, to-ing and fro-ing from work in impossibly high heels. Most of them are young, but some – shockingly – appear to be my age or thereabouts.  They teeter on, while I breeze by in – depending on the season – comfy sandals, comfy loafers, or comfy Uggs, comfortable in the knowledge that I’ll never have to spend a dime on cosmetic surgery on my feet.

 

Knock it off

There was an interesting article in the NY Times the other day on the counterfeit trade.

If you’re like me, you may be thinking that most of the c-trade was $30 Vuitton bags sold at flee markets, and $100 Rolex watches hawked on the sidewalks of New York.  And that the people who buy said “Vuitton” bag or “Rolex” watch either know that they’ve bought a fake, and don’t care, or are so studip they think they’ve gotten themselves the real deal. (“Gee, that Rolex watch only lasted a couple of weeks. I thought they were supposed to work real good. Sure glad I didn’t pay $7,000 for it – bad enough to be out a hunnert.”)

As it happens, counterfeiters have branched out, and are going down-market, faking lower end brands and selling them for slightly knocked-off prices.  The prices seem like a reasonable Internet-type bargain, so the buyers buy – and get stuck.

Uggs are one product where fakes abound:

In 2009, 60,000 pairs of boots were confiscated by customs agents globally… In the same year, the company took down 2,500 Web sites selling fake products, along with 20,000 eBay listings and 150,000 listings on other trading sites like Craigslist and iOffer. That’s despite the relatively low price of real Ugg boots, which cost around $140 for a basic model.

Or, as I found at the Wrentham Mall this June, around $90 for last year’s basic model on sale. (Hmmmm.  At least I think they were Uggs and not Fuggs. In either case, I am looking forward to toasty tootsies this winter.)

The Ugg empire is large enough to patrol its virtual waters looking for fakes. (For starters, all they have to do is google “fake Uggs”.)

Not so smaller outfits, which – if they’re fashion-ista-y enough – also get knocked off. They may not have the manpower or pocketbook (real Kate Spade!) to go after counterfeiters.

Perhaps the most peculiar counterfeit item noted in the article was this:

In California, the authorities recently seized a shipment of counterfeit Angel Soft toilet paper.

Counterfeit toilet paper? Say what?

Now, I’m the first to admit I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about toilet paper.

I’m happy to stick with my birth-right brand, Scott’s, which is what I grew up with. I like it just fine and, while I don’t actually want to find myself in the position of writing a t.p. review here, on the bathroom tissue continuum, Scott’s lies about midpoint between the soft and fluffy, 20 sheets to a roll types and the wax-paper style I encountered in loos in England when I first traveled there in the early 1970’s.

But since toilet paper is already relatively cheap – I mean, I haven’t heard any frugal-for-the-duration stories about people tearing up newspapers; oh, wait, there aren’t any more newspapers to tear up – why would someone bother to counterfeit it?

My guess is that bulk buys of counterfeit toilet paper end up in off-price stores in poor neighborhoods, where folks can maybe kinda sorta feel good about buying a “real” brand that’s advertised on TV – even if it’s real-fake – rather than having to go with generics.

Can’t blame them for wanting to trade up. My own experience with generic brands is that they never seem to be as good as what they’re genericizing. That faux kleenex is not as soft on the nose blowing; fake Prince spaghetti leaves more white scum in the pot.

Still got to wonder about the economics of counterfeiting toilet paper.

Could it be that the factories in China that produce the “real” Angel Soft are also producing the real-fake Angel Soft, so it’s not really fake, but real?  Or is it that, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing counterfeit?

Boy, everything sure was a lot simpler when everything worth buying was Made in America, and the only place to buy toilet paper was the grocery store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cat’s Pajamas

Of course, we’re really not talking literal cat’s pajamas here.

Come on, who’d pay $500 for a pair of PJ’s, let alone for their cat?

Why, my last pair of PJ’s – purchased in Filene’s Basement – cost me somewhere between twenty and thirty bucks. Admittedly, you do get what you pay for, and those cotton pants shrunk up from ankle- to mid-calf length the first time I washed them. Which is okay for summer PJ’s, but which I might not like come winter.

Pre-shrunk or not, if I had a cat – and that in itself is a big if – I wouldn’t pay more for cat’s pajamas that I would for human pajamas. And I’m betting that most folks feel the same way.

No, if you’re going to spend that kind of catnip on pet clothing, you’re going to get a really nice taffeta outfit, nice enough to be worn, I’d say, to a formal, black tie, evening wedding in a swank hotel – if your kitty-kat were fortunate enough to be invited or maybe even play a role (e.g., flower girl or ring-bearer). So good that women (and, apparently, females of other species) can wear black to a wedding these days!

I’m not 100% opposed to doing a little pet dress-up. I’m all in favor of bandanas, a change of collar, and even the odd Santa hat around the holidays. I could even justify a sweater or boots for inclement weather. But I don’t know if cats or dogs really need or want fancy dress clothing.

Isn’t one thing that’s so cool about our furry friends is that they look pretty darned good in their birthday suits (as long as they don’t have mange and/or as long as they’re not a hairless variety of animal)?

If you’re feeling compelled to splurge on your kitty-cat, this dress is on offer at Opening Ceremony, a shop for fashionistas with a location in NYC. And you can also buy matching kit for yourself. I’m not their demographic – human or pet – but they do have a lot of cute stuff. It’s all 40/40 of course: designed for someone 40 years younger and 40 pounds lighter. (That’s on the human side. I don’t want to do the math vis a vis me and a cat.)  I don’t, however, know if I’d want to wear something by a designer called Vena Cava. (Munging around a fashion site also led me to a designer called Acne, and a store in San Francisco named Acrimony. Oh, yes, I do all my shopping for Acne at Acrimony.)

In truth, even when I was 40/40, I wasn’t exactly fashion forward. And anything fashion forward-y I did buy was likely scooped up at Filene’s Basement, where there were no haughty, imperious sales people staring me down for having the effrontery to darken their door wearing a pair of Levi’s and Dr. Scholl’s sandals.

Nonetheless, I can and will acknowledge that I like some of the items available at Opening Ceremony.

And I absolutely love their take on their name:

Opening Ceremony appropriates the mission statement of the modern day Olympics from the founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. In 1896, he transformed what the Greeks had created into a modern day business venture. The Olympics were founded under the guise of creatively merging sports, business, and global participation.  Opening Ceremony takes from this foundation and applies these elements towards fashion.

I have no idea whether Baron de Coubertin actually had dollar signs – or drachma signs, or sous signs – in his eyes when he reinvented the Olympic Games. But, for all the pious hoo-hah that swirls around the Olympics, I’m guessing that Opening Ceremony got this one right.

What I’m not so wild about are these men’s shorts from loden dager, which/who:

…delivers those pieces you want to wear day after day. committed to a design aesthetic of "inconspicuous decoration," the brand is equal parts adventure and restraint, resulting in an impressive array of instant, enduring favorites

Maybe it’s just me, but those shorts don’t whisper “want to wear day after day” into the ear of any of the men I know, and I’m including at least one NYC hipster in there.

They are marked down to $123 from $245, if you’re the kind of guy who goes in for the codpiece/diaper look.

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Source of original article on the dress-up outfits for kitty-cats: HuffPo, by way of my sister Trish.

It’s delightful, it’s delirious, it’s de-cluttering

When everyone else in America was out doing nice summer Sunday afternoon type things like watching baseball, grilling tofu hotdogs, and looking at pictures of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, I spent a good part of the day decluttering the visible aspects (and a few hidden pockets) of our bedroom.

Not that it was all that terrible, but when you live in tight quarters with little storage space, and you read magazines and books, stuff does have a nasty habit of building up.

While I haven’t opened that Fibber McGee closet – the one with the ironing basket that’s had unplumbed depths for the last decade or so – I did get at the books, magazines, and assorted piles of papers. (You know, I always wanted to have an armchair in my bedroom, and now that I do, it serves more or less as my personal book repository.)

So, there’s bag of books going to my sister’s at the Cape, from whence it goes to their library.  Some of the books I was junking didn’t make it to the library pile. I really didn’t think anyone in Wellfleet would want to read Carly Fiorina’s autobiography (don’t ask: it was free), so I pulled the cover off and threw the pages into recycle.

There’s a grab-bag full of junk that I put out in the trash, but in an open shopping bag, hoping that it will turn into another woman’s treasure.

I have some loot for the Art Room at St. Francis House, including the old art-project materials my nieces have outgrown, along with a bunch of costume jewelry (mostly from my mother – I did pull out a few things, but am I really going to wear that Christmas pin with the bells on it?).

Some things I couldn’t bring myself to part with: my father’s tie clips, and the dog tags of a pup who’s been dead nearly thirty years.

Dog tags aside, I’m not a big hoarder – I say this while sitting in my little office, where, on the book case over my shoulder, a Fabian Bachrach photo of Cardinal Cushing (inscribed “Albert” – that would be the father of the tie clips - “With appreciation and grateful blessings, Richard Cardinal Cushing”) staring at my back. And on the bookshelf, there’s a heavy aluminum double-runner ice skate (without the red straps), looks to be about a kid size 2-3, manufactured by Globe-Union, Inc. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when we still manufactured things like double-runner ice skates in the good old USofA.  Man, my father was a saint to take us skating when we were still in double-runners, which felt off about every two shuffles on the ice, when what he really wanted to do was speed-skate backwards.

And now that I’m looking around, I spy with my little eye, a pair of nice water colors given to my mother by her friend Ann as an engagement present. And the steer horns that hung in my grandfather’s saloon. And an empty salt-water taffy box from the late LeHage’s of Nantasket Beach (Oh, so good!).

But, no, while I’m a keeper-of-sentimental-objects, I am by no means a hoarder.

I am, however, horrifically fascinated by those who are, so I was more than interested in an article in last week’s Wall Street Journal on a company that cleans out houses, for estates, for down-sizers, and, yes, for hoarders. (Not that the hoarders do the hiring – it tends to be family members who whistle in the intervention squad with the dumpsters.)

Clutter Cleaner of  Virginia was founded by Matt Paxton. It started out as a general purpose cleaner-outer, but now mostly specializes in hard cases. (And has been featured on A&E’s reality show, “Hoarders.”)

Although he intended to focus on senior relocation with Clutter Cleaner, his first client was a hoarder. "We didn't know what hoarding was at that point," Mr. Paxton says. "We just knew there was stuff stacked taller than us and we couldn't get around." He charged $700 for the three-day job… Today, more cognizant of the work involved, Mr. Paxton estimates he'd charge $7,000 or $8,000, his average fee.

As he took on more hoarding clients, Mr. Paxton quickly noticed that the messier the job, the less likely his competitors were to take it. "I realized this was where we needed to go," he says.

Smart thinking, that.  Messier work = fewer competitors = higher prices. (Wonder where I could find me some messy marketing jobs.)

Dealing with hoarders sounds like it means playing about 1/3 junkman and 2/3’s shrink. It’s just not all that easy when you’re helping someone sort through 10 tons of trash combined with family heirlooms.

A friend of mine helped her sister clean out her in-laws’ home a few years ago. While the in-laws weren’t hoarder-hoarders – they didn’t have to tunnel around their house, which was spic-and-span clean – Mrs. L had hung on to an awful lot of odd-ball stuff.

Sometimes the odd-ball nature was not the objects themselves, but the numbers. 

Realistically, who needs a dozen electric frying pans? Is someone going to use ten Pyrex coffee pots?  How about twenty Lady Buxton wallets, all in their original plastic packages?

The crowning event of this cleanout was when my friend opened a drawer filled with the cut off hems of dozens of Mrs. L’s polyester pantsuits, held together by kilt pins.

By the time all this was going on, both of the in-laws had moved into a nursing home, so they weren’t there to witness the cleanout, and all of the WTF’s that attended it.

But for Matt Paxton, the packrats are often there as witnesses.

I’ve watched the show “Hoarders” a couple of times, but – like so many reality shows – it’s pretty painful viewing.  I’ve seen people defend hanging on to broken plastic hangers. (As long as I keep it to double-runner skates, I think I’m okay.)

Clutter Cleaner is still small (with annual revenues around $500K), but Paxton’s thinking of franchising.  That might not be so easy. Paxton sounds particularly adept at the psychological aspects of his trade, and I suspect that’s not something that is easily package-able for franchising.

Not that I doubt that there’s a lot of business potential here. It’s just that I do wonder about there being so much hoarding going on.

I know that hoarding is nothing new – the Collyer  Brothers were famous in the 1940’s for their house of horrors – but the fact that people can make a living out of straightening out the lives of hoarders makes me wonder whether this is just a weird by-product of our stuffed-to-the-gills, citizen-as-consumer, society.

Maybe hoarders are nothing more than consumers who held on, as opposed to the rest of us who just tossed out the old and marched on to the new.

Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Casual Friday

How casual is this Friday?

It’s so casual that I’ve decided not just to wear khaki shorts and a tee-shirt. Heck, that’s pretty much what I wear every day during the summer, anyway. (Ah, the joys of working from home…)

No, it’s so casual that I’ve decided to take a day off from Pink Slip.

It’s not that I’m out of ideas. (Every time I think that’s about to happen, I open a virtual newspaper.)

It’s just that I’m out of steam at the mo’.

Meanwhile, to tide avid readers over, here’s a link to the July 30th post from 2007 – my first July 30th post EV-AH!  Don’t know if it’s any good – I just write the stuff, not read it.

With that, I’ll close, other than to note that Ivy Bean, at 104, the oldest Twitter user in the whole, wide word, has passed on to the giant social network in the sky.

I suppose now we’ll be collecting Famous Last Tweets. For the record, Ivy’s was: “Going to have my lunch now will be back later.’’

Ta-ta, Ivy.

Personally, I hope that when I’m 104 I’ll be dead, but just in case I’m not, well, I hope I’m still embracing at least some of the new and not just sitting around bitching about the fact that we’re all eating weird hybrid pellet food, there’s no such thing as a printed anything, and the Beatles sounded better on LPs.

By the way, if you want to check out some famous last words, here’s a link. I’m sure that these are all apocryphal but true.  Gotta love that one from Voltaire:

"This is no time to make new enemies." (When asked on his deathbed to forswear Satan.)

“Til Monday, then. Ta-ta.

Inflate me, my sweet inflatable you

Although it pays little or nothing, I’ve always thought it would be kind of fun to appear as an extra in a movie. Of course, I’d probably be bored standing around all day trying to blend into some background or another, making sure to cast my eyes down and keep my lips zipped whenever The Stars were around so as not to impose on their aura, or be so bedazzled that my eyeballs turned to egg whites. (That’s what happens when you look directly at an eclipse, no?)

Why just the other day, I came upon a film crew in downtown Boston, setting up a fake wedding reception in the park on Congress Street, and I thought to myself, hey, I could be a guest at that wedding.

Alas, there just aren’t as many slots for extras these days, now that blow up dolls are on the scene.

Yes, blow up dolls.

No longer just for propping up in the front seat, so that a single gal can feel safe driving around at night.  No longer just for plunking in your car so you can weasel into the high occupancy lane. No longer just for – well, whatever else they do with blow up dolls.

Since Seabiscuit (2003), Inflatable Crowd has been providing, well, inflatable crowds. (And even before there were inflatable crowds, films apparently used dummies or card board cutouts to fill things out. Who knew? I always thought that those big crowd scenes were either borrowed from actual events, or cut and paste from a starter set of humanoids, so that if you looked closely you’d see that woman in the blue jacket over, and over, and over.)

Inflatable Crowd was the subject of a brief piece in a recent New Yorker, that focused on Gail Boykewich, head of East Coast ops for the company.

Gail is an artist, and she must have one of THE most interesting keep-your-day-job-jobs in the art world. She’s the one who creates the personas, making up masks that the inflatables wear so they’ll look like people. It’s actually pretty amazing, the level of detail they go to to make things look real – freckles, five-o’clock shadow.  Then there’s the wigs, and the clothing – tops only: the inflatables are torsos and heads. With all this personalization it makes me kind of wonder whether it wouldn’t be just as easy to use, like, real people.

Of course, real people do have some pretty nasty habits - like taking bio-breaks, bitching up a storm, and fawning over THE STARS – none of which a member of the inflatable crowd will do.

On the other hand, real people don’t blow up when over filled, or spring leaks, or get blown over in a storm.

In any case, Inflatable is a pretty cool little business.

As mentioned, they started out life (or lifeless) during the filming of Seabiscuit. Joe Biggins – then an assistant on the film – was asked to create a crowd for the racetrack scenes:

Before then, cardboard cutouts had been the most popular way to save on extras. But a racetrack is not a stadium. The crowd, instead of wrapping around a field, sits on one side of the track; so, as the camera followed the horses around the track, the spectators would be revealed as a bunch of flat cutouts. “I saw some serious issues with the 2-D solution,” Biggins said, “so I came up with the idea for an inflatable.”

He designed a prototype, then had thousands of Depression-era track fans made.

The rest, as they say: he’s now done over 80 films, providing crowds of anywhere from two for a commercial (cheapos: couldn’t they have sprung for real humans? No wonder we have double digit unemployment) to 11,000 for Cinderella Man.

One company, of course, does not a market make, and there’s at least one rival: Crowd in a Box, which seems as if it may be a more cut-rate operation, from the looks of their web presence. (Just saying.)

A couple of years ago Crowd in a Box tried to sue Inflatable Crowd for patent infringement – and lost.

The companies do offer the crowd-purchaser a clear choice, however.Inflatable starts with a blank tableau, and adds “real clothing, individual, 3D faces, wigs, hats, etc.  Box, on the other hand, provides inflatables that come with “faces, hair and clothing silk screened on. No need for hair, makeup, or wardrobe. Just inflate and shoot.”

Hmmmmm.  That inflate and shoot sounds pretty good – and cheap. On the other hand, how can ready-to-go inflatables be repurposed for fight fans in “Cinderella Man,” toga’d thumbs-downers in a film like “Gladiator”, and contemporary St. Bartholomew’s churchgoers in “Salt” (which used Inflatable Crowd blow ups)?

Plus Inflatable Crowds -  while it may take away (un)paid work from extras -  does give at least one artist a way to make a living that’s at least related to what she wants to do in real life.

Beats pulling ventes at Starbucks.

Buckle down, David Brooks, buckle down

It’s one thing to have bling  - say, a Super Bowl ring – awarded to you. It’s quite another to purchase a big, fat, piece o’bling – say, a $100K belt buckle – and expense it to your public company.

But this is, apparently, what David Brooks of DHB Industries, did. DHB – now doing business (and filing for bankruptcy) under the name Point Blank Solutions – is a  maker of body-armor for the military, police, and anyone else in need of body-armor. (Thankfully, the only body, mind, and soul-armor I’ve needed in marketing has been metaphorical.)

The belt buckle is one of the more fascinating exhibits in a trial that’s winding down in U.S. District Court on Long Island, in which Mr. Brooks is being tried for fraud, insider trading, and, I guess, padding his expense account. (Source: NY Times.)

Curious to know what a $100K belt buckle looks like? Sorry the image isn’t that clear, but you get the patriotic motif – all those diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.  Long may it wave!  But this is just one of the dubious expenses claimed by Brooks. Others included:

…university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees.

A little something for everybody.

And, yes, I know that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but when I read that list, why oh why, did I end up with Gene Autry spinning “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” in my ear?

He's got jelly beans for Tommy
Colored eggs for sister Sue
There's an orchid for your mommy
And an Easter bonnet too.

And, just as in the 50’s Tommy got the jelly beans and sister Sue got the hard-boiled eggs, you’ll note that the daughter got textbooks while the son got porn. Not that sister Sue would have wanted the porn, mind you, but some things never change.

I’m also reminded of some expenses that were paid out in a company I worked for years ago. This company was an agglomeration of a number of small businesses lumped together with little or no integration or, ahem, synergy.  One of those businesses had apparently had an open checkbook expense account for its president. Which he continued to use even after his little company had been merged in with the others. The key expenses I remember were fertility treatments, Porsche repair, and taxidermy bills. Personally, I always felt bad for this guy who, while essentially useless, was essentially a nice guy – unlike a number of other principals of this company who were scheming, nasty bastards.

Personally, I never went in for expense-padding.

The one and only time I ever got a expense report rejected was when I was at Wang. Wang had a $30/per diem food limit. Even in the late 1980’s, this wasn’t all that much, especially in NYC, where I traveled weekly. While there, I always stayed with my sister Trish so that I could both visit her and avoid staying in the tawdry hotels that Wang put us up in. (In Chicago, I stayed once in a motel surrounded by a chain link fence topped with coils of razor wire.) I usually got around the $30/per diem by having someone in the field buy my lunch, and by eating dinner at Trish’s. (I’d spring for a bag of groceries at Key Food.) One time, I splurged and took her out for Chinese in her ‘hood. Since I was saving Wang a hotel bill (however minimal) every time I stayed with my sister, I really didn’t think they’d mind if I – just this once – exceeded the food per diem. Which I did by $1. My expense report was rejected, and I had to refile.

I never would have gotten away with a $100K belt buckle – not with those canny accounting folks at Wang.

Anyway, the Brooks trial has been going on for months, and, while I wouldn’t want to get stuck on a lllloooonnnnggggg jury, if you do get stuck, it might as well be an interesting case.

Oh, I’m sure that The Times pulled out the good bits, but here’s at least some of what the jury heard:

• That Brooks had investigated slipping his CFO a memory-erasing pill, so that she couldn’t testify against him.
• That Brooks had falsified information —” including significantly overstating the inventory of bulletproof vests” — to boost stock performance.
• Brooks’ lawyer asking for a mistrial, claiming that the prosecution’s picture of the defendant had focused on “irrelevant evidence to portray Mr. Brooks ‘as a sex-obsessed, tax-cheating boor’”, and that this had “’incurable prejudiced the jury.’”

Somehow, I don’t think that mentioning the words “sex-obsessed, tax-cheating boor” in the same sentence as your client’s name is great legal strategy, but what do I know.

Brooks’ lawyer further tried to rally the jury to their side by painting Brooks as the apotheosis of the American dream, making a buck while doing his patriotic duty.  The defense also stood up for spending on the prostitutes that the company hired to take care of employees and board members (which may explain why these expenses were approved).

Hiring some working girls was a legit expense “’if Mr. Brooks thought such services could motivate his employees and make them more productive.’”

Forget “Good to Great”. Forget “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Managers.” Think Sex Drive!

Our Mr. Brooks, who is only 55, faces more than 30 years in the stir – sans belt buckle, I imagine.

Okay, he’s not going to prison for expense account fraud – although Brooks’ lawyers may well be correct that this info will tip the jury: it’s a lot easier to follow and understand than accounting-based fraud. But wouldn’t you think that someone running a public company might think twice about crazed expenses like the ones he claimed? Why didn’t he just finagle himself a bigger salary (adjusted, of course, for taxes).

What’s with people, huh?

It’ll be interesting to see what the jury does with this one, but I’m thinking ‘say hello to Bernie Madoff.’

Well, kiss my Super Bowl ring

There’s always, apparently, a silver (or platinum or diamond-encrusted) lining, even in the pitchiest of pitch-black economies, and one of the sectors where there’s a lot happening is the aftermarket for championship rings.

You know, like the 2004 Red Sox World Champeen Ring – the first Red Sox bling-ring ever, given that their last  win had been in 1919, before rings were routinely awarded the winners.  Thanks to the recession, there are plenty of rings to be had on eBay, in pawn shops, and on championship-rings.net, from whence cometh this staff-owned Red Sox ring, which can be had for a bit under $40K. Personally, I like the 2007 edition better, as I’ve always been partial to the red socks vs. the B.  Needless to say, I won’t be bidding on either (although I would be feeling a bit wistful about not bidding if those socks had been the funny old Red Sox logo with the face on it).

Bling, in general, is just not me.  And sports championship ring bling, on top of its general gaudiness, reminds me of brass knuckles. Another item that, in both particular and general, is just not me.

Fortunately for companies  like Josten’s, and Balfour – purveyors of fine sports bling – there’s a recurring market for it, what with multiple professional leagues, and college championships. And even (at least at Josten’s) fantasy sports championships that can and should (at least according to Josten’s) be commemorated.

Then, as noted, there’s the after-market, which was written about in a recent Boston.com article.

If I find the primary market a bit odd – really, wouldn’t most people rather have something simpler plus a big old check - I rather like the secondary market. Most of the rings on offer seem to be from staff members, scouts, umpires – people who apparently share my sentiment about not being sentimental, and grabbing for the moola, rather than the oo-la-la. (One ring I saw on the Champion Ring site was a Lakers’ ring given by Shaquille O’Neil to a member of his entourage.)

Unloading this stuff makes perfect economic sense. Say you’re one of Shaq’s entourage members... Or a $60K/year staffer for the Red Sox, and have a chance to unload your championship rings – which, after all, you didn’t exactly earn – and get a full year’s salary in return. Not exactly a Christmas turkey.

On eBay, you can buy a full suite of Atlanta Brave’s rings-of-the-90’s for a bit under $80K. They’re being sold by a Braves scout. Don’t know what scouts make, but a lot of them aren’t full timers, so $80K puts a nice, healthy wad in the wallet.

Naturally, if the provenance of the ring is such that it once graced the bling-finger of the athlete, himself, the value is higher than one being hawked by the towel boy. Most athletes part company with their rings:

…because of what sports memorabilia dealers call “the three D’s’’ — divorce, drugs, and death. Now, add the economy.

(I guess that third-D isn’t exactly the athlete’s decision.)

But, 3-D’s aside, the Boston.com article claims that:

Most players’ rings reach the open market

Where they are considered pretty good investments, fandom being what it is (and diamonds being forever, and all that). On the Champion Ring site, for the most part, you aren’t told who the player is unless you’re making a serious inquiry.

Popularity of the sport matters, too. Hockey and soccer rings are worth less than NFL and baseball rings. Oddly, all of the bowling championship rings (say what?) are out of stock on CR. And there are NO Women’s NBA rings. (Diamonds are a girl’s best friend? Or is it that the guys scooping these rings up on the after-market want the full try-it-on-look-in-the-mirror-and-fantasize that they just wouldn’t get with a ring from a woman’s sport?)

If you’re looking for bargains, you can head to e-mail, where there are some salesmen’s samples at relative low cost, as well as oodles of replicas on the real cheap. (Think cubic zirconium, not diamonds.)  All of those replicas don’t say replica, by the way, but you can make an assumption about a $300 ring vs. a $30K ring.

Caveat emptor!

Bob Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss

I’d really rather get into bed with Alice Munro or William Trevor, so I’m slowing down a bit on my reading of business books.

A goodly proportion of the ones that I’ve read are just plain stupendously boring.

They take a shred of an idea and magnify it way out of proportion, so what might have made an okay article has been stretched into a yawner of a book.  Or they state the obvious - ‘little did I know that being focused would help my business’ – which wouldn’t be all that dreadful if the books were written with more color. Or they shell out high level, strategic advice, based on wild generalizations from a couple of places the author has consulted (which, as often as not, turn out to be not so good examples a couple of years down the road).  Some are just way, way, way too academic; some are just way, way, way too jargon-ridden. (Those two categories are grouped together for a reason.) Then there are the cutesy-pie ones that are portrayed as carrying great and profound wisdom:  pick a catchy title, write for the fourth grade reading level, add a lot of white space, and sell a lot for use at company off-sites. (“Who Put the Overalls in Mrs.. Murphy’s Chowder: How Companies Can Play the Blame Game and WIN”.)

And please do not, for the love of God, get me started on business puffographies. (Some day I’ll have to figure out what the Irish word for oy is.)

And then, it seems, there is Stanford professor Bob Sutton, who writes with humanity, wit, clarity, and purpose.

The purpose is to actually make the workplace better for the people who work there.

He did this a couple of year’s ago with The No Asshole Rule, which I blogged about a few times, including here.

Did this book change the face of American business?

Unfortunately not. I have it on good authority that there are still plenty of a-holes out there.

But I’ll bet you anything that it changed the face of plenty of individual businesses when people actually started thinking about the impact that having jerks around has. Maybe it even helped a few people recognize themselves and do something about it.

Well, Bob has a new book – Good Boss, Bad Boss – and since we are blogosphere buddies, he sent me a pre-publication copy.

There is so much to commend this book, and I’m not going to commend it all here, as I’m thinking of taking some of the chapters and using them for point-of-departure posts.  But I will tell you what the book will do for you:

• If you’re managing people (or have been a manager) and you’re not a complete dope, you’ll have plenty of things to think about in terms of your management style. (Got me thinking, and I (thankfully) haven’t managed anyone in years.)
• It will provide you with very concrete and useful tips on how to become a better manager. (Most of these are little things. E.g., during heated group debate “take special care to invite people who are shy, new, or at the bottom of the pecking order to express opinions – and defend them vigorously against personal attacks.” Obvious, maybe, but how many great, dramatic, ‘let’s really punch things out here’ meetings have you been to that devolve into shouting matches or, worse yet, the senior guys monologue, punctuated on occasion by some toadying remark?)
• It will hold your interest. In fact, I put down Alice Munro, at whose short story altar I worship, to read this book. I am not going to lie and say that, if I were going to be stranded on a desert isle I’d rather have the collected works of Bob Sutton than the collected works of Alice Munro. Yet Bob is a damned good writer, with a highly personal, accessible and engaging style.  Here’s Bob on how ticked off he was at the heads of the financial services  firms responsible for tanking their companies and the economy: “I despise these assholes for losing my money and everyone else’s, even though, as an organizational theorist, I know that blaming them for this entire mess is irrational.”
• There are loads of really interesting and fun examples throughout the book.

This is NOT a one simple secret, miracle-occurs-here, guide to being a good manager – just a lot of good ideas that managers can put into practice to improved their managerial lives – and the managerialed lives of those who report to them.

Was I a good boss?

In some respects, yes.

I didn’t call fire drills. I didn’t micro-manager. I defended my peeps. I let anyone who wanted to get exposure to the next level or two up from me. I pushed back up when stupid rained down. I gave credit. I passed on information whenever I could. I treated people humanely and decently. I only lost my temper at an underling once. People wanted to work on my team.

And, yet, I know that I could get caught up in analysis paralysis, playing the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand game well after every option had been exhaustively examined and argued. I’m sure that some people under me felt I played favorites – and I’m sure that I did.

I was, in general, an excellent boss to people who were really good at what they did, didn’t need day to day supervision, and who wanted visibility in the organization.  I was a good boss for someone who had the innate goods, and wanted a mentor.  But I was a not so good boss when it came to people who were really bad. When I had bad performers – and I managed some stunning ones – I wasn’t particularly adept at turning them into good performers. When I first managed, I ended up doing their job for them. Then I got to the point where I could actually sit down with them and try to figure out how they could do their job better. And then when they didn’t improve, I’d generally let them hang on too long.  (I was, on more than one occasion, completely played by a sob story.) This generally ended up with my sandbagging them while we waited for the inevitable next layoff. Or, worse, with them spinning so far out of control that they ended up getting fired.

If there’s one thing that I found missing it was direct advice for those working in management in places where dysfunction reigns  - I almost typed “rains” there, which would have worked, too. You know, the ones where the company strategy is unknown, or ever shifting, and you’re often as not making decisions based on what you think is best, or, frankly, based on what you’re personally comfortable doing.  The ones where it was all politics, all the time. The ones led by really bad bosses.

Anyway, Good Boss, Bad Boss is a very good and useful book. Bob Sutton has, once again, done the working world a favor.

 

 

 

 

What’s in a name? Jim Thorpe’s grave, in this case.

There are some things I haven’t given much thought to, and one of them is how Jim Thorpe, PA, got its name – other than for the obvious.

If I had given it any thought, I would have guessed that the town was near Carlisle, PA, where Jim Thorpe attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. And that, when the town was a newly incorporated entity, it just picked a name to honor a famous and accomplished quasi-local.

While Jim Thorpe, PA is quasi-near (100 miles from) Carlisle, PA, as it turns out, Jim Thorpe, PA was named Jim Thorpe, PA because just plain Jim Thorpe was buried there. (Main source for this post: WSJ article. May require subscription to access. Personally, I subscribe just to access gems like this story.)

It seems that, in 1953 when the great athlete died, his native Oklahoma didn’t want to put up any memorial to him.

His  miffed wife struck a deal with the powers that were of Mauch Chunk, PA, and East Mauch Chunk, PA, who agreed to rename their town in exchange for just plain Jim Thorpe’s body resting there. (Mauch Chunk is pronounced mock-chunk by the way, in case it ever comes up in conversation. It’s Lenape for “bear mountain”. Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Mauch Chunk changed its name because its townsfolk were:

…desperate to attract business. They made a bet on the corpse of Jim Thorpe, a Native American athlete from Oklahoma who was the star of the 1912 Olympics and later a professional football player.

Mauch Chunk took the money they’d saved up – one nickel donation at a time – for town improvement, and spent in on the memorial rather than as a kitty for wooing factories.

Probably just as well they didn’t woo factories, even though they might have had a generation’s worth of work before the jobs went bye-bye.

In any case, the Jim Thorpe name didn’t help attract much old economy (factories) or new economy (tourism). Things did turnaround in the 1980’s. That’s when the leisure biz took hold, with tourists coming because the town is scenic, in the Poconos, offers white-water rafting, and has some interesting coal mining-Molly Maguire history. So life is okay in Jim Thorpe, PA. (Mauch Chunk, if not Jim Thorpe, PA, has also given itself the moniker “Switzerland of America.”  PA’s pretty, and everything, but I would think that Colorado or Vermont might have more of a claim here. Mauch Chunk as Switzerland kind of reminds me of a motto I saw on a tee-shirt year’s ago: Worcester: Paris of the 80’s.)

But if just plain Jim Thorpe’s son just plain Jack Thorpe has his way, there will no longer be such an obvious answer to the Grant’s Tomb question that asks ‘who is buried in Jim Thorpe, PA?’

Jack, it seems, wants his father buried in Oklahoma, from whence he hailed. And he’s suing in Federal court to get the body back.

“We just want to bring him home and put him to rest where he wanted to be," says Jack Thorpe. He has no grudge against the town: "They've always treated us well." …Jack Thorpe says his message to the Chunkers is: "The bones of my father will not make or break your town."

Which is probably true, given that Jim Thorpe may not be two household words to anyone who doesn’t remember the 1912 Olympics, or who hasn’t seen the old B&W Jim Thorpe Story, with Burt Lancaster starring. Thorpe:

… was "arguably the first international sports celebrity," says Kate Buford, whose biography of Mr. Thorpe, "Native American Son," is due to be published by Knopf in October

Anyway, even if just plain Jim Thorpe’s body leaves Jim Thorpe, PA, Chunkers – as the town’s citizens are called, rather than Thorpians – aren’t looking to change their name back. (Can’t blame them there.)

Jim Thorpe, PA, will stay Jim Thorpe, PA.

But it does raise some interesting thoughts about how towns might rename their towns if they had a do-over.

Would they rename for historic greatness? (Like we need any more places named Washington…)  Or would they go the fast and easy celebrity du jour route.

Would Clevelanders have renamed their city to keep LeBron? Cleveland could have become Jamestown. Or simply LeBron. (Boy, would they have been stuck if he’d decamped to Miami, anyway.)

Would some city let Donald Trump pay them a lump sum to start calling themselves Trumpchester. (“It’s the greatest, the most magnificent, the number one….”)?

Maybe Bristol, RI, or Bristol, CT, might start thinking about wooing Bristol and Levi to set their reality show there, in exchange for changing their city’s name to Bristollevi.

Hey, we’re seeing (mauch) chunks of highways going commercial. Sports stadium naming rights going to the highest bidder.

Everything’s for sale. So why not let someone who wants a memorial that will last a bit longer than the cover of People or a Tweet pay you a  consideration to keep their name in the streetlights. (Imagine the town of Gaga, Texas.)

Not that just plain Jim Thorpe paid for the honor.

No, Mrs. just plain Jim Thorpe merely wanted someone to memorialize him.

But it’s not that far-fetched to see ailing municipalities, and states, even, at least considering selling their names. Britney Spears could buy Louisiana; Lindsay Lohan could take Manhattan. It might extend even further: the River Michael Jordan. Kobe Bryant, Japan. Paris Hilton, France.

You never know…

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Interested in Mauch Chunk/Jim Thorpe, PA history? This site is easily as interesting as the Jell-o Gallery of LeRoy, NY.

The office fridge. (Be afraid, be very afraid.)

Well, yesterday’s post dealt with existential issues, so I thought we’d take a bit of a breather and talk about something more pedestrian.

Did I say breather?

That’s a metaphorical breather, folks, because you probably want to be holding your breath (with a clothes pin on your nose) when you open the office fridge door. Which was the topic of a short piece from Bloomberg/BusinessWeek that my brother-in-law John directed my way a couple of days ago.

Anyway, the take is that, with more folks brown-bagging, there’s more opportunity for the office fridge to turn into a hazardous waste site. I’d actually guess that the opposite might be true. What with all this throw-back penny-watching we’ve all gotten into, I’m guessing that folks aren’t so apt to forget that carton of Yoplait that they virtuously brought to work.

No, I’ll bet it was in the palmy, go-go days of “let’s go to Panera” that all those Yoplaits, last night’s meatloafs, and tuna-on-wheats became leave behinds.

As someone who cleared out the office fridge on more than one occasion, I have two words for you: memento mori. Opening up those sixteen month old yogurts is as close as I hope to come to an exhumation. 

I'm, unfortunately, the type that has to open every last container up and look.

Which is, aesthetics aside, a pretty bad idea.

Last year at an AT&T call center in San Jose, a helpful employee decided that somebody really ought to clean the company fridge. When she cracked it open, noxious fumes sent seven of her co-workers to the hospital and forced authorities to evacuate the building. "It was like a brick wall hit you," employee Robin Leetieh later recalled about the stench. Guys in hazmat suits were called in to clean up the mess.

The most noxious fumes I ever experienced in the workplace did not actually come from opening any Pandora’s icebox, however.

One of the more eccentric techies I ever worked with – and that is saying something – worked in an isolated office down a seldom-used corridor. So it took a while for us to get a whiff of what was coming out of said office. The cause: emanations from a 50 pound bag of suppurating yams that looked (and certainly smelled) like they’d been imported from the Irish potato famine.

I didn’t like yams to begin with, let alone when we discovered this retching, wretched excess.

How this guy – who was extremely sweet – was able to work in that environment, I’ll never know.  But I wouldn’t be surprised to open the paper someday and read that he was one of those headline-grabbers found living with their mother/brother/sister/dog who’s been dead for 5 years. (I’m not saying Norman Bates here, but, come to think of it, this guy did kind of resemble Anthony Perkins.)

Among the interesting bits in the Bloomie/BW article was the claim from the owner of a cleaning service that some folks just couldn’t throw old food away because good old mom or their sweetie-pie girlfriend had made it. Awwww….

I will confess that I had a tear in my eye when I ate the last of my Grandmother Wolf’s pickles. And I get a little sniffy when I pick up a recipe written by my mother or my aunt Margaret.  But if there’s no use crying over spilled milk, there’s no use carrying a torch for rotting food, even if it is the last morsel of cole slaw your sainted mother shredded, or the Valentine’s Day beef-something-or-other your girlfriend burned. Use that torch to get rid of the foul stuff!

There are some cleaning services, by the way, that will take on the task of cleaning the office fridge on a regular or ad hoc basis. I never worked in the kind of place that would spring extra for that service.

No, the fridge was No Man’s Land – at least until some woman (and, yes, it was always a woman; often me) would open the door and start a pitch-out fest. (One weekend, at the same office with the suppurating yams, yet another eccentric [male] techie did help me throw everything out. It was a fine bonding experience.)

The worst thing mentioned in the article was this:

In some cases, decaying food is the least of the problem. Alice Henneman, [a registered dietitian with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension], who has devoted much of her career to studying this occupational hazard, surveyed people on the worst things they'd encountered in office refrigerators. "The two scariest examples were human stool samples stored in the same refrigerator as employee lunches," she says, "and cow manure samples refrigerated next to food items."

Is it just me, or would everyone rather have it be cow manure than human manure?

And I thought it was a bad deal when I encountered a nicely formed (human) turd on the floor of the 3rd floor ladies room at Genuity one afternoon. (Yes, I did dispose of it.)

‘Henneman] concedes that the stool samples "probably came from some type of company involved with laboratory procedures; there was no mention of any workers getting sick."

While it’s not as bad as a crock of shit in the vegetable locker, the article notes that some of the worst office fridge horror stories result from the leftovers from a group gathering are shoved in the fridge.

In my experience, the chips, cookies, and sodas all go, and what’s “wrapped” (with the thinning plastic wrap it came in) and “saved” are the slices of salami, roast beef, and swiss that sit there, eventually buried under fresh Yoplaits, until all those cold-cuts just curl up and die. (Keep in mind that they’d probably been left out en plein air for a few hours before some good soul decided they shouldn’t go to waste.)

There are two antidotes to moldy fridge.

One is to declare Friday everything-that’s-perishable-gets-tossed day.  And:

Then there's the Stackable Office Fridge, the brainchild of a New York industrial designer named Spencer Schimel. Though it has yet to reach the manufacturing phase, this Lego-style stack of mini-refrigerators—which vary in size from 6 in. by 6 in. to 12 in. by 12 in. — could allow your co-workers to have their own individualized lunch storage space.

There is, of course, nothing to prevent a co-worker from keeping rotting food (and, I guess, their very own personal stool samples) in their very own personal fridge.  And it may prove a little harder to clean out someone’s personal property. Nonetheless, as we learned with the yams, the personal ends at my nostrils.

One more thing not to miss about full-time work.

Civilization overboard: checking out the Lifeboat Foundation

God knows I’m no great Maurice Chevalier fan – anyone else see him softshoe-ing for Les Boches in The Sorrow and the Pity? -  but the tune that’s rattling in my head right now is Maurice warbling “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore.”

I’m blaming yesterday’s NY Times for putting it there, since that’s where I saw Ashlee Vance’s blog post on the Lifeboat Foundation.

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.

Because I have plenty of folks I care about in the two generations that are behind me, I’m all in favor of doing something about existential risk – as they all might want to hang on no matter what. But if technology gets so rampantly out of control, well, include me out. If it gets that bad, I want to be at whatever Ground Zero is, wearing a beanie with Take Me First embroidered on it. (And I thought today’s techno-fret was that Amazon is selling more e-books than me-books, i.e., books printed on paper.)

That Singularity thang – which sounds like some crazed cult – is pretty scary. The Singularity will come about when machines get smarter than humans, and we just don’t know what HAL et al. will do once they outsmart us. Sorry, I really don’t want to take marching orders from my vacuum cleaner or Blackberry.

What else could be in store for us?

Well, according to one Lifeboat blog post (by Jared Daniel), all plant life could turn black.

A green color may be a sign of health, but it is also a sign of inefficiency. If the could only absorb and use green light better, it would be using solar energy more effectively and could grow faster, for either its own or human purposes. If a plant absorbed and used all light falling upon it, it would be black, not green.

Can’t wait for that to happen. I’ve seen what those packaged up salad greens look like when the arugula turns black. No thanks.

Not that I have anything against the color black. In fact, I like black as much as the next late middle-aging boomer woman – where would we be without black pants? – but I just can’t imagine Ireland as forty shades of black.

The blog categories, by the way, are pretty interesting: …existential risk, finance, fun….  Just think, all that’s between fun and existential risk is finance. How ugly is that?

I just didn’t have the heart to click on “fun” to see what an organization dedicated to combating existential risk might consider fun. Although I didn’t find out what they consider fun, here’s what they consider existential risk:

…a risk that is both global and terminal. Nick Bostrom defines it as a risk "where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential". The term is frequently used to describe disaster and doomsday scenarios caused by non-friendly superintelligence, misuse of molecular nanotechnology, or other sources of danger.

I’m certainly on board with what the Lifeboat Foundation’s doing. For instance, they:

…believe that, in some situations, it might be feasible to relinquish technological capacity in the public interest (for example, we are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the Internet).

Me, too!

But all this worry about existential risk…

Man, I’ve been watching Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel, so I knew that the world was going to come to an end in billion years or so. I just thought we had more time.

The Lifeboat Foundation mainly looks to raise money to fund various programs, largely through universities. (When I last looked, they’d taken in about $460,000.)

Vance in his post lists some of the donors. Interesting that Google coughed up a mere $450, while Sun gave $1K. Does Scott McNealy Jonathan Schwartz know something Sergey Brin doesn’t? Nah, probably not.  And if something was going to, metaphorically speaking, eat us alive, I’d bet on Google, not on a Solaris box.

Anyway, you can direct where your donation goes. So whatever existential risk floats your lifeboat….So many existential risks, and (apparently) so little time…

I’m considering.

There’s always room for a Jell-o Museum

Massachusetts certainly isn’t the only place in the world with interesting things to see.

One Pink Slip commenter – who shall remain anonymous because she was anonymous – noted that she’d paid a visit to the Jell-O Gallery in LeRoy, NY, part of the LeRoy Historical Society.  It’s in LeRoy because Jell-o was invented, or discovered, or however it came into being, in LeRoy.

In 1897, Pearle Wait, a carpenter in LeRoy, was putting up a cough remedy and laxative tea in his home. He experimented with gelatine and came up with a fruit flavored dessert which his wife, May, named Jell-O. He tried to market his product but he lacked the capital and the experience. In 1899 he sold his formula to a fellow townsman for the sum of $450.

“Putting up a cough remedy and laxative tea” – were they one in the same? But isn’t that just the serendipity by which great discoveries are made. Think about how Elmer’s Glue-all was spawned through a quest for a coffee creamer.

Anyway, while Pearle gets credit for the invention, let’s give it up for May – marketing genius, par excellence – for coming up with the name Jell-o. Just think, no focus groups, no $1 million branding brainstorming, and the damned name has stood the test of over 100 years time. May, babe, you knew how to name product!

But that $450. Pearlie, Pearlie, Pearlie, what were you thinking when you sold this formula at not-so-great price? Sure, 450 bucks in 1899 would be worth more today, but only about $11K more. I do sympathize with Pearle, May, and their descendants. I’m quite certain that if I ever came up with an idea, I’d end up selling it cheap, too.

Of course, Pearle and May, despite May’s clear marketing bent, may not have had the chops needed to commercialize their discovery. Having worked for a couple of companies that didn’t have Clue One how to take a great technology idea and actually figure out how to package and sell it, I know the feeling. (Hell, we didn’t even have May’s naming knack. You may recall my mentioning that I’ve worked on products named ATF and AutoBJ.)

The fellow who bought Pearle out, Orator Frank Woodward, was a successful businessman, having:

…engaged in the manufacture of a composition nest egg with "miraculous power to kill lice on hens when hatching." This became a widely known and used product in the United States and Canada.

I guess killing lice on hens is proximate to the food business, but now Orator was in the food biz, with Grain-O, apparently some drink (which sounds way too much like Dran-O for me to want to take a quaff), and Jell-O.

Overtime, Jell-O got marketed, sold, and famous. The rest of Jell-O history is history. The product is now owned by Kraft Food.

Ah, Jell-o. As it’s early packaging had it: Delicate. Delightful. Dainty. Which are not necessarily attributes I would associate with Jell-O. I’m thinking more along the lines of: Tasty. Slimy. Fun.

Too bad LeRoy is a bit out of my way. I am in upstate NY a few times a year, but don’t usually get past Syracuse, which puts the Jell-o Gallery about 100 miles out of reach. Darn! 

While I can’t get there easily, I can buzz the online gift shop, and maybe order me up a tee-shirt. I was always more of a red or orange Jell-o person, but I do like the grape shirt.  I must say I could have lived without that “Watch it wiggle,  See it jiggle” caption over the boxer shorts.  Giving equal opportunity to the distaff side, it’s also the tagline on the aprons. Just below the breastline. Oy!

They’ve got a lot of stuff for sale, but they’re  missing a beat on the Christmas ornaments.  I have one that’s a bright green Jell-o mold. I hang it on my tree each year in honor of my mother, a Jello-o molder from way back.  Sure, I made plenty of fun of those molds, but I rather liked the orange with the shredded carrots and pineapples. And the strawberry one with the strawberries and nuts. Not to mention the classic Waldorf, with celery, apples, and nuts, that was made with the golden apple Jell-o of yore.

My mother hailed from the Midwest, and I’ve always associated Jell-o molds with that neck of the woods. I was on business once, at State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, Illinois, and when we went to the caf for lunch, I was heartened/amused/shocked to see that there were all sorts of Jell-o things to be had.

Jell-o, of course, has its own website, where you can find out about all sorts of nifty Jell-O things. It includes dozens of “recipes”, including those that are alcohol-related, travel-friendly, showstoppers, holiday-themed, and something called first-time-host. (Or was it last-time-host. I’ll have to go back and check.) I also saw that Jell-O now has mousse. Say it ain’t so!  That’s way to fancy-pants and upscale for me.

I’m going grocery shopping later.

Do you think Whole Foods carries Jell-O?

1001 things to do in Massachusetts – now including The Hermitage in Worcester (a.k.a., Deed Rock)

What with all the old stuff, and all the pretty stuff, and all the beach stuff, we get a lot of tourists in these parts.

Oh, I’m well aware we don’t get the most – I’m a-guessin’ that California, Florida, and New York nab a few more.

But Massachusetts probably ranks higher, touristically speaking than, say, North Dakota or Mississippi. Not that there’s anything wrong with Fargo or Pascagoula, mind you. Just saying.

Within the state, I’d give the old one-two to Boston and The Cape. And having spent time in my sister’s town of Salem during the month of October, I’d also say that her city could give any tourist destination a run for its money in those days leading up to Halloween.

Tourists can be aggravating when you’re not one of them. My daily route takes me along part of The Freedom Trail, which guides walkers to some historic sites, like Paul Revere’s House. Our sidewalks are narrow, and I’ll probably die stepping out into the path of a duck boat full of tourists while trying to get around a knot of folks form Pascagoula and Fargo gaping at Old City Hall (it is charming) or trying to take a picture of Old South Meeting House, probably thinking it’s Old North Church. (Keep walking. Old North is not far from Old South.  Old South Meeting House, that is. Old North is a bit more distant from Old South Church.) 

Anyway, in order to expose tourists to some of the lesser sights in our state, kind of a spread the wealth across the Commonwealth, the state has published a list of 1,000 things worth seeing. They made sure along that way, I believe, that every one of our 351 cities and towns had at least one worthwhile something or other in it.  (I didn’t do a nose count on this, but if you’re curious, the list is on Boston.com.)

Naturally, I was curious to see what they said about places I know about – and curious to see what was left off.

Take Worcester:

Bancroft Tower, Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center, Higgins Armory Museum, Mechanics Hall, The EcoTarium, The Hanover Theater, Tuckerman Hall, Union Station, Worcester African Cultural Center, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester Hibernian Cultural Centre, Worcester Historical Museum

Now, most of the stuff I’ve heard of, I get. Not quite sure what the Worcester Hibernian Culture Centre is. Having grown up a Hibernian in Worcester, you’d think I’d have known if we’d had one. But since they threw in eating spots in some other towns – e.g., The Beachcomber in Wellfleet – I thought they might have listed a diner or two, or Coney Island Hot Dogs, if only for the sign. (Photo by James Suprenant.)

But I was really hoping that they’d have the completely obscure but wildly interesting site known to us as kids as The Hermitage on the list.

Not that it’s convenient or easy to get to – no Freedom Trail here – but if you don’t mind climbing through creepy, rocky, hilly woods in the middle of nowhere, it will take you to a completely eccentric little site that was a “must see” local attraction during my childhood.

“The Hermitage” was, we were told, a will carved in a large rock, by “the hermit”, leaving the property around it to God. Having finished his carving, the story went, William Hall donned a set of wire and wax wings, covered with chicken feathers, and tried to fly to God. Needless to say, he didn’t make it.

The Hermitage was the occasional family (other than the women-folk, who were doing the dishes) post-dinner destination on Thanksgiving Day. It was an uphill walk of a mile or so, then some scrabbling through the woods, until we got to The Rock. (Okay, you can’t quite see the handwriting on the rock, but you get the point.)  The picture comes from Daniel Boudillion’s interesting and detailed account of The Hermitage, which – in real life, if not in Rogers’ family life – was called Deed Rock (or, erroneously, Will Rock – so I guess we weren’t the only ones who thought it was a will). [If you want to read what the rock says, check out Boudillion’s site, which you should take a look at in any case.)

Assuming that Boudillion’s rendition is more accurate than that of my father’s telling – and there is absolutely no reason to believe it’s not, especially if you knew my father – the real story is only a bit less colorful than the one about William Hall and his Daedalus wings.

Hall was the property owner, and he sold his plot of land on Rattlesnake Hill – yet another interesting hill name in my childhood ‘hood; the other was Dead Horse Hill – to one Solomon Parsons (yes, he of the Parsons’ Cider Mill family, where we bought our gallon of cider on Thanksgiving morning).* Parsons requested that the land be deeded over to God, and Hall commissioned some fellow to carve the deed in one of the boulders laying about.

Parsons had been heavily influenced by a preacher from Vermont who preached end-of-days, and, in addition to deeding the land to God, he also built a temple there. 

While the world didn’t end as promised – good thing, huh? – Parsons continued to worship in his temple every Sunday until he died in the 1890’s.

Meanwhile – and here we get to the name The Hermitage – a nephew of Parsons’ built himself a shack on the property, and lived there for a while, a pond-less Thoreau, in the 1870’s.

So, while it was a bit disappointing to find that the wax-wing story was a canard, the true story is quite fascinating. (Again, go read Daniel Boudillion’s account.)

What I don’t know is whether the wax-wing story was particular to my family, or was the general neighborhood lore.

My father had grown up in the neighborhood. He and his sibs, and my grandmother, were greater walkers (not to mention talkers), so I’m guessing they trooped up to The Hermitage with some frequency.  It was also a great spot for blueberrying, and we did our blueberry picking there each summer. (Nothing like those tiny little low-bush blueberries. Backbreaking work, but yum!)

While it would be interesting to learn whether wax-wing was a family or neighborhood story, I’m leaning family. My grandmother was a mythology buff, and the wax-wing sounds right up her alley.

Like my father, my grandmother was a superb story teller. The best stories, of course, don’t always adhere 100% to the truth, and there were plenty of things I was told as a kid that I now look back on and question. My favorite in this category has to be the story of Mr. Mur-FAY.

Mr. Mur-FAY was a very pleasant looking old geezer, always well turned out  - a nice grey homburg and overcoat in the winter – who walked everywhere.  Not in itself that odd – I knew plenty of people who didn’t have cars.  They walked or took the bus.  Mr. Mur-FAY didn’t live close enough for me to know him personally, but I certainly knew who he was.

According to my grandmother, Mr. Mur-FAY was a left-hander, i.e., someone who had fallen away from the Catholic Church. Further, Nanny told us, after leaving the Church, he had changed the pronunciation of his last name from Murphy to Mur-FAY. Everyone knew, of course, that people named Murphy were Catholic, so the nefarious Mr. Mur-FAY rebranded himself so that no one would suspect his Catholic origins.

Well, somewhere along the line, I figured out that there was probably no one in Mr. Mur-FAY’s family who would have had an inkling of what we were talking about, since they, no doubt, had always called themselves Murphy.

Ah, Worcester.

Anyway, while I’m disappointed to see that The Hermitage didn’t make the top 1,000 list, and while I’m disappointed to learn that the wax-wing, fly-to-God story was a myth, I have decided that I’m going to put a visit to The Hermitage on my bucket list.

I am counting on a sibling, or my intrepid cousin Barbara and her husband Dick – my only remaining Worcester-area relations – to accompany me there.

Any takers?

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*This must make it sound like I had some bucolic childhood, a notion at odds with my claim to being a city girl. The neighborhood I grew up in was intensely city: small houses and three deckers clustered cheek to jowl, with an ethnic intensity you just didn’t find in suburban Beaver Cleaver-ville. At the same time, it was on Worcester’s fringes, with lots of woods and ponds, and even a tiny, goofball farm just down the street.

Location, location, location

The big news in the ‘hood for the past week or so was a devastating fire in a local grocery store.

Now, given where I live, this just wasn’t any old grocery store.

Like everything else around here – gaslights, brick sidewalks, wrought iron, window boxes, and even a couple of small cobble-stoned streets – this store was ye olde quaint charming to look at:  charming awning, fruit displays on the sidewalk, bakery shelves laden with yummy looking goodies.  This store is so charming looking, it appears on some postcards of Boston.

As as with so much that looks good – brick side walks can be slippery, and cobble stone streets are completely treacherous -  looks can deceive, and this store had its share of problems.

They’ve had a couple of health violations over the years, and have been shut down for short bursts of time.

Most people in the neighborhood are aware of the store’s rat issues. This is the city, after all, and you do occasionally see the critters out and about in the evening. But a friend of mind saw a posse of them cavorting inside amidst the fruit and vegetables one night when she and her husband were strolling by. 

The son of some friends of ours worked there one summer during college, and he would talk about going on Rat Patrol in the morning to make sure that any gnawed through loose items and packaged goods were discarded.

Personally, even though this store is about a one minute walk from where I live, I stopped buying produce there years ago. They were my go-to for English muffins, Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, and wine.  Things in cans, or things to do laundry with. And that’s about it.

When I stopped buying produce at the store, I wasn’t so much aware of the rodent problem as I was of the freshness problem.

Inspect those raspberries as I would, holding up the container at all angles to catch sight of any tell-tale mold, by the time I got them home, they were in full, fuzzy, mold bloom.  A cucumber might appear firm to the touch, but within hours it was a suppurating mess, oozing around the bottom of the vegetable crisper.

Interestingly, the guy who used to be their produce buyer showed up at the Cape as the produce buyer for my sister’s summer-local store. For the first year he was there, the produce freshness deteriorated, but Kath says that it’s back to being good. Leading us to surmise that this fellow took everything he’d learned about buying looks-okay-but-is-just-about-to-rot produce at a bargain (and selling it at a premium) with him to the Cape. But that the Cape store and its patrons wouldn’t put up with it.

Anyway, these days, the only produce I’ll buy there is a banana for tomorrow’s cereal. (Examined for tiny tooth marks, of course.)

There was also the time that I found a dead lizard of some kind in my green beans. But that can happen. At first i thought it was a long, moldy green bean. But then I saw its little legs, in full rigor mortis.

Then there was the sour milk problem.

You’d think that, as long as you checked the sell-by date, you’d be good, wouldn’t you?

Not always. Their dairy cases weren’t always cooled to the extent necessary. (Don’t know whether this was to save on electricity, or because the ancient electrical system was the problem.)

Cheese was another sketchy item.

The store carried a wide selection of imported cheese, and one day I went in, hoping to pick up a few things for a party I was going to.

Unfortunately, pretty much everything other than Cabot’s Vermont Cheddar was well past the sell-by date. When I reported this to the cashier, she asked which cheese, and I had to tell her pretty much all of it.

My sister Kath’s theory is that throughout the store’s existence – it’s over 100 years old – it has been a dumping ground for Haymarket cheese and produce that the keen-eyed Italian shoppers from the North End – little old ladies who knew how to pinch a tomato or a sniff out a rotting cantaloupe – would reject. In 1910, the merchants were probably laughing up their sleeves about the Beacon Hill haute-WASPs and their Irish servant girls never noticing the difference.

And don’t get me going on the over-under charges.

I finally stopped checking, figuring that, for every time they charged me 2 cents for a can of tuna, they were charging me $5 for a banana. It just wasn’t worth hassling every transaction with them.

So I generally took my custom elsewhere, ordering non-perishables from PeaPod, and making the 1/4 mile schlep to Whole Foods for everything else.

The story of The Great Beacon Hill Grocery Store Fire – in which, fortunately, no one was hurt; the store was open, there are a number of upstairs apartments and a number of other businesses in the block, this could have been a bad one  – got more interesting the other day when it was reported that the store owner had moved some of the goods from the burnt-down store and was trying to sell them at his other similarly quaint store in Back Bay. (Thanks to my sister Trish for alerting me to this story.)

While it was initially reported that the owner had tried to salvage produce (which might have been okay – smoke does preserve things, no?) - it was apparently some canned goods, bottled water, and cases of wine that he didn’t want to go to waste.

But of course, there are laws about such things, what with insurance claims and all that. Not to mention that something like wine that’s been exposed to the tremendous heat of a fire might have turned a bit.

Someone – I’m guessing a disgruntled (ex-)employee  - dimed the store owner on the transfer of the they-don’t-look-damaged-to-me goods.

And apparently, while the inspectors were there checking out this violation, they noticed that the salad bar wasn’t properly cooled and was covered with flies.

So they closed the Back Bay store down for good measure.

Anyway, the upshot is that the store owner, who was initially getting gobs of sympathy in the media for his fire, now looks like he was trying to pull a fast one with some of the stuff that had made it through the fire.  Plus dozens of folks who’ve never even heard of the store are seeing the online comments come in fast and furious – and most are about the rats, the limp produce, the expired cheese, and the general dirtiness of the store.  Most of those commenting confess to shopping their on occasion, even though they know about the rats, the produce, the cheese, and the dirt. It comes down to location, location, location.

Astoundingly, though, some of the store’s defenders rave about the fresh produce and the array of cheeses. Maybe there’s a parallel universe they’re shopping in, and there may well be. My husband was told by someone who worked there that the owner set aside fresh items for his favored regulars. (We got the lizard in our green beans.)

It will be interesting to see how this all ends up: how soon they’ll come back, whether the store will be cleaner, whether the produce will be more up to standard.  Great fodder for the neighborhood yack-mill, that’s for sure.

In the meantime, I’m hoping that the 7-11 – the next nearest store – will start stocking Pumpernickel. Don’t know where I’m going to get my Skinny Cow ice-cream sandwiches between PeaPod orders.

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A tip of the butcher’s cap our grandfather wore to both of my sisters for their keen following of this story, and their suggestions for this post. 

As for why the store isn’t named.  Anyone who knows Boston will know exactly what I’m talking about. For anyone else, it really doesn’t make any difference. And, while I’m sure that owner doesn’t know me, he would sure recognize me as someone who’s in and out for wine, baking powder, a banana, and Skinny Cow. I wouldn’t want someone figuring out that I’m the bee-otch who blogged about him, and having him berating me, and banning me from his store. Not just being paranoid here – my sisters had the same thought.