I Is The AGNES

About ten years ago, I went to some tech entrepreneurship something-or-other  - don’t remember quite what, but I believe it was held in the MIT Faculty or Alumni something-or-other over on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Perhaps if I were a bit younger, or perhaps if the intervening decade had not been quite so jammed packed with multiple sources of overloading information, I might remember the details more clearly. But I don’t, other than to say that I was working at NaviSite at the time; the company was a member of NEBATA, the New England Business and Technology Council; and among the technologies that were showcased at the something-or-other I went to over in Cambridge were an RFID tagging system, nanotechnology, and something related to IM. NaviSite also had a table at the NEBATA awards dinner – held at either the Copley Plaza or the Park Plaza Hotel. (Whew! I do like to give the old memory an occasional workout, since it’s one of my strong points – ask me what I wore for the first day or kindergarten – and I’m a believer in use it or lose it. And I just checked. The dinner was at the Copley.)

What I remember most about the something-or-other I went to in Cambridge, however, was a presentation by Joseph Coughlin of MIT’s AgeLab, which develops technology that will help keep elders independent. Even at the tender age of fifty-something, I remember thinking (and I do remember): this is good, interesting, and useful stuff.

I made a mental note about the Age Lab, and filed it away in a folder in the virtual file cabinet of my mind. The mental note said this is good, interesting, and useful stuff.

And there the mental note stayed, the paper yellowing a bit, until I saw an article in yesterday’s NY Times on the Lab.

The article’s writer had recently spent a bit of time trying to maneuver around wearing the Lab’s Age Gain Now Empathy System, orAGNES, a “souped up jumpsuit” with helmet that mimics the effects of aging – stiffer gait, dimming vision, less mobility and agility in general.

When I read through the catalog of difficulties that wearing, or being, AGNES resulted in, I figured that AGNES must replicate being in your eighties or nineties.

But, no, Aggie is designed “to simulate the dexterity, mobility, strength and balance of a 74-year-old.”

Jeez, Louise. That’s just 13 years around the corner. (Note to self: admit that you’ve been slacking a bit on some parts of the thrice-weekly exercise regime. Let’s face it, those parts are boring. Plus my knee hurts from chopping all that ice in the clogged up storm drain on the corner. But stop with the excuses already and start revving up the routine a bit. Plus start taking the stairs at The Writers’ Room. I was going to write ‘it won’t kill you’, but in fact it probably could. Those suckers are steep and narrow, and there are some linoleum tiles missing on the landings. Talk about tripping hazard. Plus I’m always wearing a heavy back pack. Plus The Room is on the 5th floor. So climbing those stairs probably could kill me. Probably not a heart attack on the way up. I may need to take a breather at the fourth floor, but climbing those 71 stairs – not that I’m counting – is something my ticker can withstand. I’m more likely to stumble on the way down and tumble arse over tea-kettle into a broken neck. Further note to self: update will before starting to take the stairs down.)

Anyway, AGNES helps with the work that the Age Lab does coming up with products that make life easier for the aging – bonus points if these products have appeal to the younger set, as well.

Researchers at AgeLab are studying the stress levels of older adults who operate a hands-free parallel-parking system developed by Ford Motor. Although this ultrasonic-assisted system may make backing up easier for older adults who can’t turn their necks to the same degree they once did, the car’s features — like blind-spot detection and a voice-activated audio system — are intended to appeal to all drivers who enjoy smart technology.

“With any luck, if I am successful,” Professor Coughlin says, “retailers won’t know they are putting things on the shelves for older adults.”

As it happens, one of my earliest posts on Pink Slip was devoted to sneering at cars with automated parallel parking. (Look Ma, No Hands.) I sneered, of course, because parallel parking is one of the few mechanical anythings that I’m actually really, really good at. Now that I’m living the car free life, those skills may have atrophied a tad, but anyone who’s owned a car and no parking space in a city had better get good at parallel parking. I no doubt burned out a clutch or two doggedly getting into or out of a parking space that was only four inches longer than my car, but, damn it, I got into it. (Forget the clutch cost. What about the opportunity cost of spending 45 minutes getting into a space when I could just go and pay to park somewhere…)

Anyway, I now see the selfish error my sneering ways, and recognize that automated parallel parking is not for wusses. It’s for older folks who really can’t turn their necks like they used to.

Not that I ever intend to own a car again, but I would definitely consider this feature next time around, if there were to be another next time around. Which there probably won’t be.

Meanwhile, there was other interesting information in The Times article on aids for independent living. Which I am so all for.

I’ve got a few ideas of my own for things that would help.

I’d like to see someone come up with a little device for figuring out what’s navy and what’s black. Something other than floor gouging crampons to keep you upright when walking on ice-slicked brick sidewalks. (You have to be outside your house, sitting on the freezing cold steps, to put them on and/or take them off.) And something to permanently remove that one weird lip hair that keeps popping out. (Okay, you can still live independently with a rogue lip hair, but you might poke your eye out with a tweezer trying to remove it.)

It’s still a few years before I’m completely AGNES-like in my ability to get around, but I must say I love that old-fashioned name. Half of the nuns I had in school seemed to be Sister Agnes Something (as in Sister Agnes Miriam), or Sister Something Agnes(as in Sister James Agnes). But I had very few contemporaries with this moniker. I did go to grammar school with a Mary Agnes, but she was called Mary A.

I do have an Agnes story, however, and it is this:

When I was in college, I was walking on Brookline Avenue in Boston when I passed a harried mother trying to pack her kids into a cab. One of the children, a girl who appeared to be about eight or nine, was balking for some reason, and the mother was getting increasingly agitated.

After a few back-and-forths with the amazingly stubborn child, the mother got, as we wouldn’t have said then, into the kid’s grill.

“I is the mother,” she shouted at her daughter. “You is the Agnes. Now get in the cab.”

Agnes obeyed. How could she not in the face of her mother’s supreme grasp of power dynamics?

For all of us, there are times when we get to play The Mother, and other times when we get to be The Agnes.

But, if we live long enough, we all age into some sort of AGNES or another.

If we’re lucky enough, prepared enough, and attentive enough it may not be all that bad.

A shout out to the MIT Age Lab for all they do to help make life better for tomorrow’s geezers.

The latest inductees into the Toy Hall of Fame (alas, no ant farm…)

What with the lamented passing of Uncle Milton of ant farm renown, posted about just yesterday, I got to thinking that somehow I had missed the late-2010 announcement of the toys that were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Frankly, this is a lot more interesting to me than the selections for most halls of fame (Boxing Hall of Fame, anyone?), as I have generally had some up close and personal experience with the stuff under consideration, and, thus, would be able to cast an informed vote. If I were part of the voting public which, when it comes to the National Toy Hall of Fame I am not.

I posted about the 2008 winners here.  That year yielded a pretty strong set of inductees – the baby doll, the skateboard, and, my personal favorite, the stick. (The stick joined the cardboard box, which has been part of the Hall since 2006. The bigger the better, I say. The kids in my neighborhood would have been overjoyed if a refrigerator or washing machine was delivered weekly to someone willing to let us cadge the box. What a completely wonderful, multi-purpose non-toy toy. Just think: box + stick = fort. What a combo.)

The 2009 picks were less thrilling to me. Other than the ball, which, amazingly, took a full decade to get the nod, the other two picks that year were the clackety-clack-clack Big Wheel, and the Nintendo Game Boy – neither of which is of particular interest to me.

This year’s winners were the Game of Life and Playing Cards.

I will say that the Game of Life is not now, and never has been, one of my favorite board games. I can easily think of a couple of dozen games that I would prefer to Game of Life. I think my problem with the GofL is that, unlike Clue, it strives for some element of verisimilitude that, in my book, it fails to achieve it. Perhaps it’s the little pink and blue off-spring.

Still, I’m feeling nostalgic for the rainy days of summer, which meant hanging out playing Monopoly, Sorry, Go to the Head of the Class, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, and myriad other games, which provided a far more social experience than thumbing away at your own personal Nintendo Game Boy.

Personally, I’d rather have seen Parcheesi elected than GofL. Perhaps I should nominate it. (And, while I’m at it, how about Cootie?)

But Playing Cards. Now you’re talking.

GoFish, War, SlapJack, Hearts, Crazy-8’s, Old Maid, Authors, I Doubt It, Rummy, Gin Rummy, Rummy Royale, Solitaire (many variations, including Double Solitaire, which isn’t really solitaire now, is it?), and my all time favorite, Canasta.

I never learned Bridge, largely because in college, the bridge players were all smokers, which I was not.

I do come from a family of card players, however, and completely miss those Canasta sessions with my mother, especially when she tried to enforce her vas-licht-bicht rule. (I don’t have any German, but this translates into once you put your cards down, you can’t have second thoughts and put them back in your hand.)

I still enjoy wasting spending a few idle minutes playing solitaire – mostly online these days.

2010’s toy Hall of Fame nominees/non-winners were:

Cabbage Patch Kids, Chess, Dollhouse, Dominoes, Dungeons & Dragons, Hot Wheels, Lite Brite, Magic 8 Ball, Pogo Stick, and Rubik's Cube.

At first glance, what item does not belong on this list?

Yes, indeed, in whose world is Chess a toy? Okay, like Dungeons & Dragons it’s a game, but, while it may belong in some Hall of Fame or other, I don’t see it as a toy. And I wouldn’t rush D&D in there, either. I don’t think of kids having fun when I think D&D, I think of older kids having fun. Let them get their own Hall of Fame – maybe an annex to the regular, normal, kid-friendly HofF.

As for the other nominees, having never managed to get more than three colored squares together in a row, I’ll take a pass on Robik’s Cube. And Cabbage Patch Kids were after my time. My pick of the remainder list would be the dollhouse. My sister Kath had a kind of cheapo tin one, but we had great fun with it.

I wouldn’t mind having a dollhouse at some point. Maybe I’ll put it on my bucket list, so I can be a dotty old lady, peering into the windows of my classy, non-tin dollhouse, and stalking dollhouse stores looking for the perfect candelabra for the piano, the perfect cast iron skillet for the kitchen.

In any event, I’m happy that Playing Cards have made the cut. Portable, affordable, versatile, fun for all ages. What’s not to like?

By the way, Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm is not in the Hall yet. Perhaps when I nominate Cootie, I’ll add the ant farm to my ballot.

RIP, Uncle Milton. The ant farm lives on.

Even before the execrable comedian Milton Berle dubbed himself “Uncle Miltie”, there was a kinder, gentler, and probably funnier Uncle Milton, and that was Uncle Milton Levine, inventor of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

No, I never had an ant farm. In our house, we were ant cuppers, not ant farmers. If you wanted to see ants during the summer, you could either find them dead or dying near the ant cups, or head out doors and find them pretty much anywhere. If you wanted to see ants during the winter, well, tough luck.

Ant farms came to mind, of course, with the January passing of Milton Levine, which was reported the other day in The NY Times.

Levine died at the satisfyingly ripe old age of 97, which is more than 97 times longer than even a long-lived ant farm ant spends on this earth. Having invented the ant farm in 1956, Levine had well over 50 years to enjoy watching, and profiting from, several generations of ant farming kids. And here is the man himself, obviously enjoying the fruits of his imagination and labor.

First dubbed an antarium, and, when brought to market known by its far kid-friendlier name as an ant farm, over 20 million of these have been sold over the years. That’s a lot of ant farms. And when you factor in replacement ants, which come approximately 30 to a vial, that’s a lot of ants. Even though we know that it is highly likely that, for the majority of those 20 million ant farms sold, the endless fascination of watching ants mosey around in sand probably wasn’t all that endlessly fascinating once the first batch of farmers (farm-ees?) died out.  And die out they did, as there’s no queen bee ant to keep the wheels of reproduction moving along, so the ants who end up in the ant farm gulag are something of the Shakers of the insect world. And once you’re in an ant farm, you’re pretty much stuck for life, unless Junior decides to jump up and down on it with his pogo stick, or shoot it up with his bee-bee gun. (The farms are break-resistant and escape proof, but I’m sure not hell-bent kid proof.)

Anyway, Uncle Milton’s company, the eponymous Uncle Milton’s, sells a lot more than just ant farms and replacement ants. You can get Star Wars-related science kits; wind up tarantulas (I guess there are laws about shipping real ones); disease-free tadpoles (I guess there are laws about shipping diseased ones); and aquasaurs, longtail tadpole shrimp that have apparently done no evolving whatsoever in 70 million years, coining them the title the “living fossil.”

Alas, you can no long get:

…“Executive Antropolis,” a mahogany-framed farm-cum-desk-set with a black and gold Manhattan skyline. It never sold as well as the original models.

Which would have made for some office fun.

Uncle Milton’s lasted as an independent company up until a year or so go when a private equity company snapped them up for $20M. Private equity, is, of course, something of a four-letter word (like hiss, and booo – if you add an “o”), but I’m sure the Levine family was delighted to get the $20 million they cashed out for. That’s about a buck for each ant farm sold over time. Not bad!

Naturally, there are competitive ant farms out there. And the one above looks like a honey.

This type of Ant Farm was devised by NASA scientists when they wanted to understand how ants responded to weightlessness in space!

But I say accept no substitutes. Private equity or not, the original is still the greatest. Shop Uncle Milton.

The Dental Spa

I fear rats. And (most) snakes. Heights – I’m definitely afraid of heights. Except when I’m in an airplane, when mile-high-ness doesn’t bother me at all. I fear being caught on an airplane (or any place else) with nothing to read. Other than these, and my normal, run-of-the-mill existential and political fears, I don’t have a ton of phobias. (Oh, yeah, I forgot to add: fear of breaking a tooth on the eve of a long weekend, which happened to me about 20 years ago when I bit into the wrong cashew on the third of July.)

Still, I sympathize with those whose fear factors include going to the dentist.

It must be terrible to put up with a mouthful of pain and suffering because you fear the man (or woman) in the white coat armed with a drill and a pick.

With the exception of one blessedly brief interlude between the original family dentist and the dentist I’ve had for the last 30 years, I have had excellent dental care. (Special props to my dentist, whose son – every bit as great a dentist as his old man – is now part of the practice. So I have the dentist who most likely will see me out.  Now if only I can find a doctor who’s in his/her thirties…)

Over the years, my dental care has included a number of fillings, wisdom teeth removal, a root canal, a couple of broken-teeth crowns, chipped front teeth bonding, and a set of four very pricey front teeth veneers when I tired of chipped front teeth bonding. (The chipped front teeth were my own damned fault. However good your teeth are, they should never, ever, ever be used in lieu of pliers or scissors.) So I’m no stranger to the dental chair.

However, none of this, I can honestly say, has involved all that much pain. Even the dreaded root canal.

The only thing I loathe at the dentist is when they do the bite-wing x-rays, and even that’s gotten a lot less gag-inducing and, thus, a lot more tolerable, since they introduced the apparatus that holds the x-ray thing-ies in place.

But, as I said, my sympathies do extend to those suffering from fear of dentist.

Thus I read with interest an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day on dental spas.

In addition to revving up the laughing gas or providing other forms of sedation, and/or revving up the pain killers, dental spas may offer:

Entertainment. Headphones, flat-screen TVs—even virtual reality goggles for watching movies—can help patients pretend they are somewhere else.

Atmospherics. Quieter drills and citrus-scented candles help mask the typical sounds and smells of dentistry; some practices have stopped using eugenol, the clove-scented antiseptic; others even bake cookies to introduce a soothing aroma.

Hmmmm  Baking cookies? Do they let the patients eat them or just smell them. Surely, eating cookies in too large quantities, with too little brusha-brusha-brusha after, may have landed someone in the old dentist chair to begin with.

But the real corker is the dentist offices that offer:

Spa services. Foot massages, warm neck rolls and paraffin treatments for hands help patients relax and pass the time.

This is a bit difficult for me to envision. Warm neck roll I can see, but wouldn’t the person giving you the foot massage or the paraffin treatment kind of get in the way of the dentist? Or is it cleverly choreographed, like getting a simultaneous mani-pedi?

Anyway, I thought I’d check Central Park Dental Spa, which was cited in the WSJ article. CPDS offers:

The art and science of Reflexology: …CPDS Reflexology, which is a hand and finger technique applied to the feet that brings about stress and pain reduction throughout the body, [which] is administered on the patients. … A certified Reflexologist also works on pressure points that reduce pain and tension in the mouth and jaw. Used in tandem with traditional numbing agents the addition of Reflexology to the experience of dental treatment is not only a dramatic reduction in pain and anxiety, but a tangible introduction of soothing and relaxed feelings throughout the body.

Unfortunately, dental insurance – which, in my experience, doesn’t cover all that much to begin with – will not generally cover spa treatments, or even super sedation/painkillers.

And you may be paying a bit extra for this:

A beautiful, spa-like environment: The very look, sounds and smells of a dentist office typically trigger fear and anxiety… Scented candles assure that Central Park Dental Spa does not smell like a dentist office. The beautifully designed waiting room with comfortable couches, a water fall, and soothing music immediately put patients at ease.

Scented candles are an interesting touch. They are an item that I mostly hate. One might even say fear. Just the thought of a vanilla-scented candle gets my gag reflex going every bit as much as a bitewing x-ray does.

Not that I’m in the market for one, but I had to check out whether there were any dental spas in Boston. Kurban Fereidouni grabbed the post position when I googled. There wasn’t actually all that much explicit info on the spa-ness of their practice, but their site included this photo.  Looks great.  Looks very relaxing. Ultra-soothing. Sleep-inducing. Fear-reducing. My one and only question is, how do they get the drill into your mouth if you’re lying on your tummy with hot stones on your back? Inquiring minds – and mouths – want to know.

Corporate Super Bowl spending’s back. (I’m relieved, are you?)

I didn’t log much career time in the sorts of companies that spent big bucks on lavish customer entertainment.

Genuity, which was on its spin-out-from-Verizon-let’s-go-public-let’s-go-bankrupt spend-a-thon while I was there, spent oodles of money on everything. Much of this spending was internal – I recall one lavish marketing off-site, when they housed all of us (including the most of us in marketing who lived here) in the upscale Charles Hotel in Cambridge for a three day planning event. The event also featured a catered outing on a couple of Tall Ships in Boston Harbor which nicely coincided with a fabulous fireworks display. (Which, at least, we didn’t pay for. At least I don’t think we did…)

So when we actually spent money on customer wine and dine it didn’t seem all that terrible.

The biggest customer spree that I recalled involved our sponsorship of some PGA event. For the occasion, we hired Jack Welch to yack strategy at some customer forum. I believe we paid the Jack-ster $300K to get interviewed in front of our selected lucky-duck customers, who also got an autographed copy of Jack’s puff-ography. (I told you those customers were lucky ducks.) I believe one of Jack’s requirements was that we also hire Charlie Rose to interview him. Which set us back $75K or so. Jack, apparently, didn’t trust one of our corporate schmoes to do the honors.

Anyway, that was pretty much it for my exposure to any super fancy customer events. (And, while I did get a copy of one of the remaindered puff-ographies, I did not actually get to attend this event.)

Genuity may also have done some Super Bowling at one point, but I’m not 100% sure.

I would, however, have remembered if we’d participated in one of the “legendary Playboy Enterprises Super Bowl parties” noted in a recent Business Week article on the return of the SB par-tay.

Now, after falling 27 percent from 2007 to 2010 (Pricewaterhouse Cooper figure),corporate Super Bowl spending’s back. Premiere Global Sports’ travel group says its piece of this action is up 50-60 over last year.

Not surprisingly, I find this type of spending offensive on many levels. It’s so fundamentally old-school, cigar-smoking, suspender-snapping, babe-ogling, good old boy-ist that I don’t know where to begin. (Although I guess old-school, cigar-smoking, suspender-snapping, babe-ogling good old boyism isn’t a bad place.)

Plus, it’s hard to believe that, in an age of supposed transparency, anyone working in a public corporation is actually allowed to take advantage of any of this sort of corporate largesse.

But if we can interpret this as a leading indicator that businesses are a bit more optimistic about the economy, that’s a good thing. And if this new-found optimism translates into increased corporate spending on anything that even tangentially translates into more jobs…Well, yahoo!  Of course, if it’s just a bit more feeling that it’s okay to be fast-and-loose-y goose-y now that the bailout taint is off the banks and auto makers, I’m a bit less on the yahoo end of things. So maybe it’s a qualified yahoo. (Qualified or unqualified yahoo, all in all, I still think it’s a ridiculous way to do business.)

What’s on tap for this year’s Super Bowl (which will be played on February 6 in Dallas)?

Well, there’ll be a party hosted by Puff Daddy, P-Diddy, Sean Diddy Combs who, for whatever else he is, is a supremely successful businessman. There’ll be another party hosted by Pamela Anderson. Hmmmm. I’m not quite sure what her, er, business bona fides are. Not that I doubt for a moment that she doesn’t have them aplenty. And, business acumen aside, I’m sure that she has a great deal to commend her presence at a business event.  Bud Light is co-sponsoring the Playboy party. And, while this year’s players have yet to be named, Burger King, Captain Morgan, and AT&T are in on a flag football game. (Last year’s game starred NY Giants quarterback Eli Manning and J-Lo. Can’t wait ‘til they announce this year’s line up. Peyton Manning and Lady Ga-Ga?)

Let the game begin!

Hand me my smelling salts. On second thought…

When I was in grammar school, one of the high points of any school day was the distribution of a recently mimeographed quiz, Christmas pageant script, or note home with some important announcement.

As the copies were passed from student to student, we would take ours and breathe deeply.

Whatever the “special sauce” was that printed that purple on white paper, it had a definite aroma to it – alcohol and some other je ne sais quoi.

The nuns didn’t allow us many great pleasures, but they seemed to tolerate – at least for a second – the sight of 48 kids, nose pressed close to the newly mimeo’d whatever, all inhaling at once.

Ah!

I also liked the smell of a gasoline, and used to fantasize about living over the pumps in this cool gas station on Route 9 that had an apartment built out over the station, the part over the pumps resting on stone pillars.

I don’t actually think that a whiff or either a mimeo’d catechism quiz or gasoline was all that intoxicating. But I sure liked it.

That said, I never huffed paint thinner, shook aspirins up in Pepsi bottles, did Reddi-Whip whippets, or did any of the other things that adolescents were supposed to do to get high. (Truly: during high school I was such a straight arrow, I never had a drink or smoked a cigarette, let alone lit up a joint. I wasn’t much of a substance user, let alone abuser, in college, either, for that matter. Being out of control and out of my mind was not all that high on my list of things to do.)

The latest bit of get-high derring-do involves bath salts, of all things.

Although I only take a bath salt bath once a year or so, I do tend to have them around.

I was easily able to lay my hands on a packet of Lord & Mayfair raspberry bath salts. They look like they came from a hotel stay, and promise to “appeal to your senses and skin while providing a refreshing balance to your day.” For adult use only, by the way.

Apparently there are bath salts uses that go above and beyond this appeal to skin and sense – this according to an AP article I saw in the Wall Street Journal.

Kids are apparently snorting, injecting and smoking bath salts, and doing quite a bit of harm to themselves in the process.

Some say the effects of the powders are as powerful as abusing methamphetamine. Increasingly, law enforcement agents and poison-control centers say the bath salts with complex chemical names are an emerging menace in several U.S. states where authorities talk of banning their sale.

It’s not clear whether all bath salts, like my little packet of Lord & Mayfair Raspberry, can be used to get high and/or are dangerous. Certainly, I’m not going to find out. If and when I ever use my packet, it will be by following the directions to the tee: pour contents into running bath water.

But Ivory Wave, Bliss, Vanilla Sky, White Lightning and Hurricane Charlie – which are the names named in the bath salts article, and which are all on sale OTC -

…can cause hallucinations, paranoia, rapid heart rates and suicidal thoughts.

(Interesting names. Ivory Wave, Bliss, and Vanilla Sky sound innocuous enough, but certainly something marketed as White Lightning or Hurricane Charlie is not aimed at those who are looking for a good, comforting soak in the tub.)

Anyway, given the potential disturbing effects of bath salt use, maybe I’ll just dispose of that Lord & Mayfair Raspberry in the trash. I certainly don’t want to be lolling around in the bath water worrying about hallucinations or suicidal thoughts. I’m paranoid enough already, thank you.

The rash of bad reactions to bath salts has been particularly acute in the south, and Louisiana has already outlawed bath salts. Mississippi and Kentucky are considering bans. (Apparently, they’re not aware that, when bath salts are outlawed, only outlaws will have bath salts.)

Not that I want to make light of this. There are reported instances of bath salt overdoses, suicides, murder under the influence, and, in the case of one young man who:

…got high on bath salts, he took his skinning knife and slit his face and stomach repeatedly.

The bad bath salts contain MDPV and mephedrone. These chemicals are made in a lab from cathinone, which is plant-based, and they apparently are addictive.

The bath salts problem may be growing because of crackdowns on the sale of pseudoephedrine, and the consequent blow to the methamphetamine business, which used pseudospehed as its prime ingredient. One police officer interviewed in the article pointed out that the bath salt users he’d been seeing were meth addicts.

It sounds to me as if trying to solve this problem by banning bath salts is a temporary fix. Meth heads who’d turned into bath salt heads will find something else to get high on until whatever’s causing them to use drugs like this is taken care of. Still, it’s got to be scary for parents to think that something that a pack of Vanilla Sky bath salts that could easily have found its way into their daughter’s Christmas stocking could be used to make their son slit his throat.

Ghastly news, this.

One more lousy thing to worry about.

The Uninvited: snubbed by Davos, yet again

The World Economic Forum – or, as those of us in the know refer to it, Davos; or, as I sometimes think of it as, the Big Kloster – is on this week and, yet again, Pink Slip was not invited.

Just not smart enough.  Big-thinking enough. Successful enough. Elite enough.

Boo-hoo, sniff-sniff: no one wants to network with me!

This is not quite as hurtful as not being invited to Kathy O’s birthday party in fifth grade, but it’ll do.

Don’t they realize that the Common Man, not to mention the Common Woman, also wants to fix the world, save humanity, star-gaze, and sip champagne.

Sure, I suppose we could go hang around Sundance if we want to be around some movers and shakers,  but that’s just The Movies. There’s star-gazing aplenty – with stars that are more recognizable than the CEO’s of Lucent and HIS, and even more recognizable than Bono, who’s also a Davos man. But we don’t want to just spot celebrities. We want to “improve the state of the world…[and] shape global, regional and industry agendas.” And that means, Davos, baby.

I guess I should count myself fortunate in one respect: Davos-ing costs a lot of moola to attend. (Note to self: add not rich enough to Davos-related things I’m not.)

The NY Times (Andrew Ross Sorkin’s column) had some of the lowdown on what a run to Davos might set you back if you really need and want to go “chasing successful people who want to be seen with other successful people. That’s the game,” in the words of author Nassim Taleb.

In order to wangle an invite to Davos, you have to have a pre-invite to become a member of the World Economic Forum.

There are several levels of membership: the basic level, which will get you one invitation to Davos, costs 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $52,000. The ticket itself is another 18,000 Swiss francs ($19,000), plus tax, bringing the total cost of membership and entrance fee to $71,000.

But this just gets you into the tent, not into any of the side shows, where the real interesting stuff happens. So you really want to get into the private sessions, as opposed to the events that are open to the Great Unwashed with their measly $71K membership and ticket. (Double-L Loser!) To get into the private events, that’ll be $156K. But I say, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

If you’re going to do Davos, I say do Davos.

Quibbling over a few bucks is so non-Davosian.

The fees cited above give you one ticket – no two-fers here. If you want to bring a buddy, you have to pay more. A lot more. But let’s face it, you certainly don’t want to be there alone at a private function. What if no-one recognizes you? At least if you have a minion colleague by your side, there’s someone you can be pretending to discuss Big Ideas with while you try to figure out whether it’s tacky to ask Bono for his autograph, rather than his Big Ideas. (Oh, those first timers! So easily star-struck…)

Bringing a best-bud is not a matter of ponying up the marginal cost of another ticket. You need the upgrade package. $301K (with two tickets).

If you travel with more than one, the ante’s upped further. You could drop $622K if you want to bring four friends with you. But at least that gets you into the private, good stuff.

And perhaps the biggest perk of all, your car and driver are given a sticker allowing door-to-door pickup service.

Not everyone can join the club at this level. Apparently, there are enough Western-types around already. Applications are only being accepted from companies from China or India that are on the Global 250 list.

(The Times writer points out that all levels of membership grant you invites to other World Economic Forum pow-wows, plus access to research projects. But he was pointing this out “in fairness.” I have so little interest in being fair about Davos, when I’m still smarting from not being there.)

None of the above includes T&E, of course. And nobody flies coach to Davos. Actually, nobody flies coach to Zurich, from whence they can proceed to Davos by helicopter for $3.4K.

(The forum provides a free bus service for those worried about their environmental footprint.)

This is a very good point. You can cheap out and take the bus, Gus, while letting it be known that you care more about the polar bear than the show-offs who are coptering in.

As at any good trade show, companies sponsor events – dinners, cocktail receptions, parties.

The bigger parties, like one that will be given by Google on Friday night for several hundred people, can run more than $250,000 for the evening. (In years past, Google has flown in the band and bartenders; one year, the company had an oxygen bar.)

Oxygen bar. Wowie, zowie.

Some, however, are claiming that Davos is on the wane as a must-attend event.

As one attendee, the author David Rothkopf, recently wrote on his blog, “The entire endeavor is fading for several reasons, all associated with the inadequacy of Davos as a networking forum.”

He explained, “As Steve Case,  founder of AOL, once told me while standing at the bar in the middle of the hubbub of the main conference center: ‘You always feel like you are in the wrong place in Davos, like there is some better meeting going on somewhere in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at. Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere.’ “

And if that’s how Steve Case is feeling, well, can you just imagine what would be going through Pink Slip’s mind if she had been able to wangle an invite to the Google oxygen bar.

Davos, Schmavos. Feh!

This weekend The Banshees – my sisters/cousins gang – are having our own personal Davos in Portsmouth, NH. We may do more shopping and gossiping than world saving. But I’ll bet we’ll have more fun than those who go to Davos hoping that Bono will make eye contact with them and tell them they had something interesting to say.

Protect your interests: start registering all those nasty domain names

This is apparently yesterday’s news – or at least last month’s – but I just came across a PC World article that picked up on Bank of America’s:

…feverishly registering domains that include the names of its directors and executives combined with "sucks" or "blows," according to Domain Name Wire. Hundreds of domain names were registered by the bank on December 17 alone, Domain Name Wire said.

Not only did they take care of CEO Brian Moynihan (a.k.a., BrianTMoynihan), but they even protected their CMO, Anne Finucane. (Funny to think of someone going after a marketing person, isn’t it?) They did not, apparently, extend their whirlwind of domain registration activity to friends and family. Finucane is married to political commentator Mike Barnicle, and, if anyone’s interested, MikeBarnicleSucks and MikeBarnicleBlows are still there for the grabbing. As is MikeBarnicleBlowhard.

Nor did BofA take care of all of its own board members and execs, having left a couple off of their list, at least initially. As PC World reported, board members Monica C. Lozano and Thomas May were left off the list. Whether this was an oversight, or a deliberate decision based on someone’s belief that Monica C. Lozano and Thomas May are way, way, way too nice for anyone in their right mind to set up a suck or blow website aimed at them. (May is CEO of NSTAR; Lozano is a newspaper editor.)

Unfortunately for BofA, the granddaddy (not GoDaddy) of all anti-Bank of America domain names – BankOfAmericaSucks – is long since taken.

No doubt it’s just a matter of time before domain names are irrelevant, and everything’s just hovering out there in one seemingly free-form, massive cloud that’s far more indexed and tied to every thought, word, or deed all of us have been involved in than what’s out there now. The cloud will be searchable in nano-time by some brilliant and colossal engine that figures out who, what, and why we want something. And, voila, information, will be delivered to our all-in-one nano electronic device, perhaps contained in a  sub-cutaneous chip of sorts. Or it will be delivered directly to our very own brain. (Of course, by that point the concept of “very own brain” will not doubt be different than our current view of the personal nature of what goes on in the still private reaches of the mind.)

Or maybe “it” will figure out what “they” want us to know. Forget net neutrality. Perhaps BofA and other megas will pay big bucks to make sure that no restuls ever gets returned in a top 100 spot from a search for some combination of “executive name” and “sucks” and/or “blows”. 

And the engines that do let us find the good stuff will charge us for the privilege. Really want to find “executive name” and “sucks” and/or “blows.” That’s cost you.

Meanwhile, there’ll be a thought police engine keeping track of who did this sort of depraved anti-corporate, or anti-government, or anti-whatever-"they”-don’t-want-us-to do, searching, and will be keeping records on everyone to such a degree that Nixon’s enemies lists will look both ludicrous and harmless. (Wow! Just think about how much easier it would be to run a police state if you don’t have to rely on neighbors spying on neighbors, or kids ratting out their parents. I’m currently reading the immediate-post-war novel, “Every Man Dies Alone,” by Hans Fallada, which chronicles quotidian life in Nazi Germany, so all this is much on my mind. Which is still, thankfully, still my very own mind.  No domain name, and no URL, since this is a resource that, while universal to me, is not one that anyone else can locate, thank you. At least for now.)

Anyway, at some point, it may not matter whether or not all those suck and blow domain names exist.

But ‘til then, corporations should probably make it part of their promotion or executive hiring practice or board member in-boarding to hoover up any domain name that could come back to bite a promotee or exec or board member in the URL.

When you leave the company, having them continue to pay for the registration can be part of your departure agreement. Or you can rollover the responsibility to your new company, in much the same way you can your 401K.

Personally, I’m not worried. If someone wants to grab “maureenrogerssucks”, have at it.

Ay, cholita

We all know that, in real life, no one looks like a super-model. That is, other than the super models themselves (and young girls who think this is the way women are supposed to look). But if you do count the super models themselves – taking into account the photo-shopping to make them look even more dramatic (and young girls who think this is the way women are supposed to look), there are at least some women in real life who are 6 feet tall, weigh 110 pounds, and have concave breasts and cheeks.

There are, however, no real life examples that I know of of someone who actually resembles Barbie.

That’s because, if Barbie were real, her neck couldn’t support her head, there’s be no room in her body for vital organs, her bones wouldn’t fit in her arms, and her feet would fit comfortably in baby shoes.

But, hey, let’s not blame Barbie. She’s just a doll.

We don’t blame Raggedy Ann for being floppy and having flaccid muscles, do we? Or Cabbage Patch dolls for looking like odd-balls? (We do, however, blame Bratz dolls for looking like hos, however.)

Still, I was interested to read about some Bolivian artisans who have appropriated Barbie’s figure, but are making it their own by giving her black hair, and dressing her up in the clothing of indigenous Andean women.  (Source: AP article on boston.com.)

The dolls are made in China and imported to the Andean nation, where 15 young artisans at the Creaciones Hugo shop work to transform them.

They do so by dressing them in:

…low black shoes, a shawl and a long, colorful, patterned skirt known as a "pollera." On top is the crowning touch, the bowler hat favored by Aymara women who dress in "cholita" style.

They must use a different mold than classic Barbie, as classic Barbie’s tippy-toe, perpendicular feet just wouldn’t fit in a boring black flat. Nothing but plastic high heels for our gal. Maybe it’s the bowler hat, or that fact that they’re not dressed like hookers, but I think they’re cute. If I saw one on sale in La Paz, I might be tempted to buy me one. (I do think I’d take a pass on those Bolivian Ken dolls who are lurking behind the Bolivian Barbies wearing what, I can’t determine, but it looks authentically something or other. And so what if these cholita dolls exactly resemble a more authentic Bolivian cholita?

Who among us looks like Barbie? If you were paying attention above the answer is “no one”.  And so what if little Bolivian girls want a doll who’s pretty? (“Por favor, mamacita, I don’t want that authentic folk doll that’s short, stubby, and smells like a lama.”)

And yet…something there is that doesn’t love the fact that one of our country’s most pervasive, lasting, and – alas – imitated exports is the 11.5” of plastic weirdery known as Barbie.

Funeral Advantage. (What’s in a name?)

Product naming sounds like it should be fun, doesn’t it?

After all, it’s creative – and creative’s fun!

And, after all, it’s not brain-hard work like figuring out what the market needs, and what a product should actually do. And it’s not a walk-the-tightrope task like coming up with product pricing, where you’re trying to balance the need for an attractive enough price vs. the risk that you’ll be leaving some money on the table.

Product naming? Well, it’s just a name, and what’s in a name?

After all, even if your best friend ditzes out and names her firstborn Alphonse or Mildred, once you get to know and love the baby, well, the name kind of grows on you.

Still, I was involved in any number of product-naming exercises over the years, and they were all pretty much a waste of time and/or a no-win effort.

But before I ever got name a product, I got stuck with a few doozies.

Most memorably, there was AutoBJ, a data analysis and forecasting application based on Box-Jenkins autoregressive integrated moving average modeling. (You had to be there.) Anyway, the folks using AutoBJ were Wall Street quants, all guys in those days, and they just loved, loved, loved asking the female product manager for AutoBJ just what else the product could do. Wink-wink. Nudge-nudge. Ho-ho. I think it’s safe to say that I have heard every possible bad joke known to man that can possibly be associated with a product named AutoBJ.

Things went from bad, but not to worse. They actually went to better.

Having a product named ATF (for the Automated Test Facility) to sell in the wake of Waco wasn’t exactly fun (especially since an element of the product was called the ATF Agent). At trade shows, odd-balls would occasionally drift into our booth and start raving about Branch Davidians and/or the FBI and/or gun laws (pro and/or con).

Another component of the product was called the ATF Executive, so-named because, from its server base, it ran everything that happened on the client computers.

After one booth demo to someone who seemed to be getting what we were talking about as we explained the product, subtly underscoring why it made sense to pay about five times the going rate for a test tool (and one that required OS/2, to boot), the person we were demoing to shrugged and said, “I really can’t see an executive using this product.”

Well, neither could we.

The best we could ever hope for was that we could hoodwink convince some executive to buy the product, and order some poor schnook of a minion to figure out how to use it.

When I was stuck with product naming, my usual modus operandi was to make a contest out of it.

After all, talk of AutoBJ and ATF aside, in technology companies it does not, for the most part, matter what you call your products. Most folks are going to use the name of the company, not the product. Tech is not like consumer goods, where a lot of money goes into branding Tide and Crest. Product names? Who cares? Does an Oracle database have or need any name other than Oracle?

So, hey, kids, let’s have a product naming contest and see what we can come up with. And I was not above whispering a name I liked into someone’s ear to make sure that at least one name I liked was entered in the contest. Anyway, the contests produced names that were so memorable, even I can’t remember any of them.)

When I was at Genuity, the CMO – having told us that he was thinking of Black Rocket - asked for suggestions for naming a new hosting service we were launching. We came up with plenty of decent suggestions, but to our complete surprise and amazement, the winning name turned out to be – ta-da – Black Rocket. Which, in turn, turned out to be the name of a powerful hashish sold in the Netherlands, and a brand of condom found in Spain. But, never mind, it’s not like we actually ever sold a Black Rocket in Holland or Spain. Or in the U.S., for that matter. But after a $40M marketing spend to launch the Rocket, we weren’t going to come away empty handed. So the company started declaring that every sale of any hosting services was a Black Rocket. Mission accomplished!

The head guys do have a way of getting their way, don’t they?

A few years after Black Rocket, I was at another company, doing yet another employee contest to rename an old set of services that we were going to relaunch.

As I was meeting with the Executive Team to go over the finalists – don’t even ask what the Executive Team was doing getting involved in this bit trivial pursuit when the company was having trouble making its numbers – the disembodied voice of the COO came over the phone.

“Alphonse likes A, B, and C,” he intoned. Alphonse was our CEO. A, B, and C weren’t on my list of candidates.

I was about to say, fine, let’s vote, we can add A, B, and C to the ballot, when our perkier-than-thou VP of Sales chirped up.

“A, B, and C. That’s brilliant! Wow, Alphonse is great at product naming.”

Soon, the other “Executives” were adding their props.

“A! B! C! How brilliant! No wonder Alphonse is the CEO! What a mind!”

I declared A, B, and C victors by acclamation.

And, of course, it really didn’t matter. Customers continued to use the name of the company when referring to our services. And, for the rest of us, A, B, and C did end up growing on us.

My last gasp with product naming came a couple of years ago. My colleague Sean and I were hired to help a company come up with a new naming architecture for their product line. We actually put a good deal of effort into it, and came up with some (we thought) excellent options. Only to have everything we came up with shot down for some incredibly lame reason – including being told that “a product name can’t begin with a vowel”? Take that, Excel!

We finally figured out that, in their minds, the best naming scheme in the whole wide world, the one they really wanted to go with, was based on the name of another company. In fact, that other company had been founded by a group of engineers who had left the company Sean and I were working with. So the name they wanted was really kinda-sorta taken by their ex-colleagues.

Anyway, while elliptical-ing at the gym the other day, an ad came on TV for something called Funeral Advantage.

Funeral Advantage is end-of-life insurance, earmarked for burial and other final expenses (party-after).

But what’s the advantage here?

Sure, you get the funeral and everything, but it’s not exactly yours to enjoy, even if it may spell the difference between a sleek metal casket and a pine box that looks like it would have done the honors for Doc Holliday. And it’s something of an advantage over passing that hat at your wake that your loved ones won’t have to go out-of-pocket for the organist and a couple of vases full of gladioli. Still, it’s hard to see what the big advantage is here.

Not that I’ve got anything against the use of the word advantage in the product. I know I tossed it in there more than once on products I was naming. In fact, just the other day, when emptying out an old backpack, I found a dried up Softbridge Test Advantage pen. But my product advantages were righteous uses of the word advantage.

Funeral Advantage, baaaahhhh.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I really wasn’t thinking of it, until I went to set the post date, but today is the 40th anniversary of my father’s death. Still miss you, Dad…

Seven brides for seven brothers? No problem if you’ve got the cash.

Over the years, I’ve worked with a number of Indian men who were in arranged marriages.

But I never knew anyone who’d married a mail order bride.

There are plenty of them out there, though. In 2007, there were 16,500 mail order marriages in the U.S. alone. (Source: Business Week.)

A lot of those brides came from Thailand or the Philippines. Others came from Russia or the Ukraine.

And some of them came from the Czech Republic, many (paid) courtesy of Joseph Weiner, a Wharton MBA from NYC whose second career (after investment banking) was entrepreneurial. He founded Hand-in-Hand, which matches fellows with marriage on their mind with Czech women.

"Every guy wants a beautiful younger woman," [Weiner] explains. "It's the nature of us."

Let’s face it, as the Hand-in-Hand web site tell us:

In the 21st century, more and more women are deciding to focus on their careers and other interests rather than settling down with a successful and interesting man. However, the advent of introduction agencies such as HAND-IN-HAND can make the dream, which many men aspire to, of having a beautiful, educated, reasonably younger and unique woman by your side a REALITY…This program is designed for single men looking for a true life partner who is beautiful, significantly younger, educated, is unspoiled by feminism and whose culture is one of support & respect.

In its 14 years in a business apparently unspoiled by feminism – which, lets face it, has spoiled so very much for so very many -  Hand-in-Hand has grown from a single outfit, to a global empire with 30 satellite offices  in the U.S., Western Europe, and Abu Dhabi. These offices are franchises – the franchisee having paid Hand-in-Hand $16K for the privilege of….

What, eaxactly?

I was definitely a bit confused here, trying to figure out what value-add a franchisee could bring to an on-line matchmaking business.

But, sho nuff, you can get an answer to pretty much anything – possibly excepting the meaning of life – by a bit of a google. So on FranchiseClique, I learned that Hand-in-Hand franchisee make their $16K back:

1. By selling our services to men in your territory.
2. By offering our packages to travel agents in your own area, and getting an override on all the business they do with us. We are the only company that has a package that allows you to walk into travel agents and do business, so you have little or no competition.
3. By offering our services to the huge gay population. We are the only agency that facilitates the introduction of men to younger, handsome men in Eastern Europe. It's not incumbent on you to sell this service but it is a very profitable part of our business and comes with the franchise package and free leads at no extra cost.

Okay. Other than #2, I still don’t complete get how the franchisees make money, other than acting as a middle man to someone who couldn’t find his way directly to Hand-in-Hand.  Does Hand-in-Hand hand-in-hand over the leads that come in from the franchisee’s territory, and have them work them, up close and personal? Point #3 does mention “free leads.” Whatever.

All I know is that Weiner’s sold 30 of them to folks interested in:

…potential profits of $250,000 per year for an initial investment of as little as $16,000, and the
opportunity to own a franchise in an interesting and glamorous industry that you can operate from your home or small office.

I’ll grant them that this is an interesting industry, but, ah, I’m having a hard time seeing how trafficking in humans is all that glamorous – even if all the women that get trafficked do, actually, look like the glam girls on the Hand-in-Hand site.

And they are all girls. The franchisees who want to work with the gay community must get a secret handshake link to the site where the glam boys are.

Needless to say, where money changes hands in exchange for human beings, there’s bound to be some controversy, and because of some nasty business associated with international matchmaking,

… the U.S. passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 (IMBRA). The statute requires background checks on U.S. citizens before communication via the matchmakers.

Okay. That somewhat protects the mail order brides themselves. What protects the prospective bridegrooms from getting scammed?

Perhaps it’s working with an agency like Hand-in-Hand that is respectable enough to have been profiled in Business Week.

Whether Hand-in-Hand is on the up-and-up or not, they do have a way with words.

Beautiful Czech women and Prague women are the cynosure of all eyes. They possess all the essential qualities that men desire to have in their life partners. It is a dream of every man on this planet to meet gorgeous Czech brides and make them their soul mates... The beauty of Prague ladies lies not only in their sensual look, but they are at the same time adventurous, highly literate, well-acquainted with modern gadgets and courteous with deep respect for family values and traditions.

Who says marketing people exaggerate? (“It is the dream of every man on this planet….”)  Who says marketing people don’t know how to use big words? (“…the cynosure of all eyes”). Who says marketing people never get the technical facts straight. (“….well-acquainted with modern gadgets”). 

And who says marketing people have no sense of humor:

If you want to join the mounting list of males who are mad to meet gorgeous Czech brides, then open the doors of eternal love and happiness- Contact Us. (Italics mine.)

And lest you think that these Czech lovelies are gold-diggers, we are told that Hand-in-Hand is not only about women who are unspoiled by feminism, but who are similarly unspoiled by the rampant consumerism that has undeniably tainted the world, never more so than in the last several decades:

Keeping materialism at bay, these attractive ladies as prospective brides believe in serious relationship full of love and commitment.

Okay.

These gorgeous Czech women are interested in men they don’t know who are twice their age, as opposed to Czech fellows their own age, and it has nothing to do with materialism?

Hmmmmm.

As for seven brides for seven brothers? At $2K per capita, that’ll cost you $14K if you don’t bother with the trip to Prague, but just have the brides delivered F.O.B.

For another $2K, you might as well go ahead a buy a franchise.

Butling: yet another career in demand

Why waste your time trying to develop valuable technical skills at ITT Tech? Why bother with an online MBA from the University of Phoenix? Don’t even think about shifting gears and learning how to drive an 18 wheeler.

If you really want to prepare yourself for the brave new world, in which a relative handful of global elite kabillionaires live large, while the rest of us live and work out our miserable existences at their sufferance, you’ll want to consider becoming a butler. And, come April, you’ll have a place state-side to learn how to do so. That’s because,

Come April, Ms. [Dorothy] Hamilton, the founder and CEO of the International Culinary Center, will inaugurate an Estate Management Studies program, its mission, according to a press release, being "to Train a New Caliber of Household Staff." (Source: WSJ Online.)

Right there in New York City. On Broadway.

The dean, if that’s the right term, is Christopher Ely, who was a footman at Buckingham Palace, and the butler to the late Brooke Astor. (Who’s on your cv?)

The program will ultimately cover as many as 20 skill sets within the framework of household cleaning and organization, and culinary and laundry essentials. These include silver polishing, pressing, stain removal, organizing closets, packing, making beds, creating healthy meals and, perhaps most important of all, doing no harm to your employer's Warhols, Chippendale chairs or 18th-century Limoges dinner service.

Well, I could probably waive out of laundry, as I’m actually pretty okay at it. (Although, admittedly, I’m not the world’s foremost iron-er). Being able to waive a course will save me about $1.5K, which is the cost for a unit (which takes a week to get through). By waiving out, however, I would have to forego a certificate, suitable for framing. But, what the heck’s a colored printer for, anyway? I could probably forge make my own laundry certificate.

Here’s a link to Butler U. (No, not that Butler U, the one that made it to the NCAA basketball finals last year. The other Butler U. The one where you learn stuff like silver polishing and making beds.)

I do think they should have a unit on bed bugs, by the way. Just saying.

Although they don’t yet do bed bugs, specifically, they are considering a course for the nouveau riche who may be ordering around staff for the first time.

I do want to point out that I copped on to the coming demand for butling way back in April, 2008, when I wrote about:

Charles MacPherson, president of his own placement and consulting agency and former head of the International Guild of Professional Butlers, [who] has declared a nationwide butler shortage.

The Guild is going to start a school "to help offset the lack of supply."

(Am I a trend-spotter, or what?)

As for The Guild, they did, indeed establish a school: the Butling & House Management School and Agency.  For Americans, it’s not as conveniently located as the NYC program – it’s in Holland, at:

Kasteel Oost (literally translated Castle of the East) is beautifully located in the historical city of Valkenburg (officially the city is called Valkenburg aan de Geul) in the south of The Netherland.

But, hey, you get to go to school in a castle.

They welcome applicants of all ages, and have had a graduate as old as 68, butling, perhaps, being the one profession where  advanced age may actuallycount for something. No time to go back to school to learn butling? You may want to settle for self-paced, eLearning on Napkin Folding over at the Butler’s Guild. (I must away. As I do not (yet) have a butler of me own, I want to master the Cardinal’s Hat before my next dinner party. Fortunately, I have plenty of time.)

.

“Residue, residue, residue”: bad foreclosed house vibes be gone…

There’s probably not a lot going on for the professional witches of Salem, Massachusetts, once Halloween’s over.

Sure, a lot of them still have their shops open, but there’s just not the crazy buzz, the tremendous commercial vibes there are during the month of October when being in Salem is just one big meshugas, culminating in the meshugas to end all meshugas on October 31st.

As my sister Trish lives in Salem, I get to see the meshugas up close and personal, and it’s great fun if you a) don’t have to drive through it (I train it and walk to my sister’s house); and b) you have a place of refuge when the meshugas gets too meshugassy (I walk to my sister’s house).

Still, I always wondered what the witches do during their off-season, and had assumed that many of them had a diversified portfolio of skills to fall back on when black and orange are no longer the colors du jour.

And now, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, I know what some of them do. They rid foreclosed houses of their bad ju-ju so the new owners don’t have to deal with it.

I had heard of the practice of burying a statue of St. Joseph, upside down in your yard to help you sell a house. But I hadn’t heard about using witches to whisk away any negativity in a house you’d just bought.

Witch Lori Bruno and warlock Christian Day – and if that isn’t a great name for a warlock, I don’t know what is – helped Salem house-buyer Tony Barletta with his new home before he started gutting it. (Apparently just tearing out the old sheetrock and ripping up the old linoleum isn’t enough, when it comes to a foreclosure.) To help Barletta out, Bruno and Day:

…clanged bells and sprayed holy water, poured kosher salt on doorways and raised iron swords at windows.

I really like that melding of the Judeo-Christian traditions. (Would gargling with holy water with kosher salt in it relieve a sore throat better than tap water and Morton’s, I wonder?)

Ms. Bruno also hollered the bad stuff away:

"Residue, residue, residue is in this house. It has to come out…Lord of fire, lord flame, blessed be thy holy name...All negativity must be gone!"

That negativity is all those “’energy imprints from past discussions, arguments, money problems. All of that is absorbed by the house." This according to a “so-called intuitive” who seems to know something about distressed home sales in California. (Why am I not surprised that a “so-called intuitive” has hung her shingle out in Orange County?  Meanwhile, if, by “intuitive” they mean Myers-Briggs personality test intuitive – as in INTJ – then maybe I can do foreclosed house de-negativity-ing.  I’m an “N”, after all, which is Myers-Briggs for “intuitive” since the “I” was already hogged by “introvert”. See how easy it is to get diverted?)

Salem has seen an upswing in the use of cleansing rituals on foreclosed houses: there were eight last year, compared to one or none most years.

The witches of Salem aren’t getting rich on this, by the way.

Ms. Bruno and the other Salem witch mentioned in the story don’t charge for it. (I hope they take tips at least…)

For them, this is goodness-of-the-heart kind of work, but there are others elsewhere trying to turn house cleansing into a business.

Austin, Texas-based feng shui consultant Logynn B. Northrhip is teaming up with Scottsdale, Ariz., real-estate agent Jason Goldberg to offer a package of services to create better vibes in a home, either before sale or after purchase. The two met at a yoga retreat.

Good luck with the competition, which not only includes the good-hearted witches of Salem, but also:

…psychics, priests and feng shui consultants, among others, [who] bless or exorcise dwellings.

While they don’t get paid for their house-cleansing services, it is  head’s up marketing for Mr. Day and Ms. Bruno.

He owns the Hex Old World Witchery magic shop downtown [Salem] and she gives psychic readings there.

Now that I think of it, I actually live in a foreclosed home, a condo bought at auction in 1991 from a flim-flam man who’d done a bit of real estate speculating. When we first bought our place, he was still living in the building, but eventually “his” unit, too, went on the auction block, and he was given the old heave-ho.

When I consider all the odd-ball aspects of living where I do, beginning with the flim-flam man and continuing to the present day of general building weirdness, I’m starting to wonder whether we shouldn’t have done an exorcism of some kind before we moved in.

Hmmmmm.

Wonder if Ms. Bruno and Mr. Day would consider an ex post facto bad ju-ju cast out?

Of course, it’s not contained in our unit: it’s the whole building. But since they don’t charge to begin with, I guess they wouldn’t charge extra.

I’d pay their transpo. Plus give them a nice fat tip.

Wonder if it’s too late to rid our building goof-ball negativity?

I know where I can buy kosher salt; I guess I could stop by a Catholic Church and poach a bit of holy water from a holy water font.

Would you have to believe in it to make the cast-out effective?

It may not be in the Comic Book Code, but…

I just love a good say-something-stupid-on-the-web stupidity story and this one, as they say, is a capital L-U-L-U lulu. With a couple of Pink Slip bonus points awarded because the stupidity involves blogging.

Here’s the scoop:

There’s a local business man in these parts who runs an online comic book and graphic novel site.

I am not a frequenter of said/unsaid site.

I was a kid during the 1950’s and 1960’s, but, unlike the kids on TV, we didn’t really go in for comic books. Other than the odd Little Lulu or Archie, I don’t remember ever buying a comic book. (Other than MAD, but that’s another story.) As I did with every other difference between the way we lived and acted, and the way kids on TV lived an acted, I chalked the proclivity to purchase a comic book up to a function of religion. Kids on TV were Protestants; we were Catholic. They just had a different sense of humor than we did, and must have actually thought comic books were funny. We didn’t. Case closed.

So, no, I am not a frequenter of the comic book/graphic novel site in question.

But somebody must be, because it’s apparently how the local businessman makes at least some part of his living.

By the way, while this fellow may be guilty of online stupidity, he is not your run of the mill dummy.  He:

…is a National Merit Scholarship winner, and graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Computer Science and Roman History, and worked at a succession of startups in the Boston area. (Source: CrunchBase.)

But, National Merit Scholar or no, this guy is now in big trouble for a post-Tucson comment or blog posting he made:

…saying “one down 534 to go” in reference to [Gabrielle] Giffords and the other 534 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. (Source here on out: Boston.com.)

As a result, police buzzed in and seized a “large amount” or guns and ammo that Mr. Degree in Computer Science and Roman History kept in his home, and suspended his firearms license.

Perhaps the online comic book industry is more dangerous than one might think. Or perhaps this guy is just one of those folks we affectionately refer to as a “gun nut.” Or maybe he’s  just a(formerly) armed and dangerous person.

Whatever he is, this guy has demonstrated a complete and utter lack of judgment, and I can’t help but believe that this will at some point come back to haunt him. Surely someone, someday, who’s considering investing in this man’s start-up, or who’s thinking of hiring him, would read about this comment (and, frankly, all that gun ownership) and take a pass. Or at least a long drawn out pause.

I know, I know. this individual’s probably not the only person to (shamefully) think or utter such a thought in the wake of the shootings. And sticks and stones break bones, not words. (Yes, but: words matter.) But, in this day and age, to put something like this online without thinking that there may, just may, be some repercussions? Wow? What was he thinking?

[He] has since redacted the comments, but police consider the threat to be credible until they can prove otherwise. Police have also contacted federal law enforcement agencies about the comment.

Of course, since stupid isn’t always as stupid does, this may end up being an absolute free publicity business coup for Mr. National Merit. Think of all the smart bloggers who are posting about his comic book business… Some are even using his name, and providing a direct link to his comic book/graphic novel site, rather than making you work for it by clicking through on the hyperlink to CrunchBase or Boston.com. which the Bloggers’ Code requires that I put in.

For all I know, Mr. High Above Cayuga’s Waters has become something of an insta-hero among some element of the comic book/graphic novel and/or ‘I hate the government’ set, who believe that – ho-ho – making this kind of joke was all in as much good fun as ordering sea monkeys from the back of an Archie and Veronica comic book.

Still, it really can’t be good for business to have the Feds and the locals crawling up and down your arse, and to have exposed yourself as an out-and-out, tasteless cretin who thinks it’s funny to joke about our elected representatives - no matter how loathsome and reprehensible one might find them to be – getting shot at.

You think the country’s in terrible straits now? Just imagine how dire those straits would be if that loathsome and reprehensible scenario played out.

Whatever happened to the Comic Book Code?  Sheesshhhh.

Nevergreen: more mfg. jobs exit the Bay State

In terms of weathering The Great Recession, Massachusetts has been more fortunate than many other states. We were spared, of course, by having lost so much of our manufacturing base decades ago, and by not having had anything resembling a crazed building boom. There’s something to be said for living in a non-Go-Go kind of place.

That said, life hasn’t been all that easy for blue collar workers who never made the transition to higher skilled professions in industries that have been doing okay, like technology.

So, when we do have some decently paid manufacturing jobs as part of our mix, there’s always something feel good about it.

Thus, we rejoiced when Evergreen Solar, maker of solar panels, invested (with the help of $43M from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) in a factory built on the site of the old Fort Devens. The factory employed 800, whose jobs, after less than three years, are now gone with the wind.

That wind took the jobs to China.

And not just because the average factory worker makes a whopping $300 a month, compared to Massachusetts’ average factory pay of $5,400.  This amount sounds absolutely tycoonish, but we’ve long shed all our really low skilled factory jobs in textiles, shoes, plastic toys, etc., and instead focused on more technical, higher skilled production jobs, mostly in smaller shops.

Evergreen’s ability to compete had been compromised because the price for solar panels has gone down.

No surprise here: products do tend to get commoditized, and we all get to have more stuff, cheaper. (A decidedly mixed blessing, of course.)

But Evergreen’s CEO, Michael El-Hillow, lays at least part of the blame for those 800 pink slips on the extensive subsidies that manufacturers get from the Chinese government, which has prompted Evergreen to close down its factory in Massachusetts, and move all production to its facility in China. (This facility is supposedly built on a site which “municipal police had used…for mass executions into the 1980s.” Nice tidbit, that.)

Here’s what we’re up against:

Evergreen, with help from its partners — the Wuhan municipal government and the Hubei provincial government — borrowed two-thirds of the cost of its Wuhan factory from two Chinese banks, at an interest rate that under certain conditions could go as low as 4.8 percent, Mr. El-Hillow said in August. Best of all, no principal payments or interest payments will be due until the end of the loan in 2015.

By contrast, a $21 million grant from Massachusetts covered 5 percent of the cost of the Devens factory, and the company had to borrow the rest from banks, Mr. El-Hillow said.

I dunno.

We seem to keep trying to convince ourselves that economic redemption of the job creating kind will come in on the big green wave of demand for non-fossil fuel based energy.

Doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen any time soon.

If we can’t keep the dirty old manufacturing jobs, and we can’t keep the cool new green manufacturing jobs, just what is it that Americans who are never going to be nano-scientists, genome mappers, or (blecchhh) investment bankers actually going to do to make a living?

Nothing that hasn’t been said before, but the end of those 800 Evergreen jobs got me thinking about it again.

Living in interesting times is scary, no?

Source for this post: NY Times.

“There she is, lighter than air she is…”

I saw in the news the other day that the Miss America contest was held over the weekend, apparently when I was watching football.

It was held in Las Vegas, where it emigrated to from its home in Atlantic City a few years ago. (Is Las Vegas all that much more wholesome than Atlantic City, or just a place that people would rather be?)

Because I was watching football, I did not see Teresa Scanlan of Gerig, Nebraska, the 17-year old who will wear the crown for the next year.

That seems awfully young to me, but this is perhaps one of those cases where the judges hoped to crown someone without much mileage on her  - similar in reasoning to why The Royals opted for the sweet young Diana as an appropriate bride for the older Prince Charles. I.e., they are in hopes that there will be no surprises emerging – no YouTube scandals in the wings. And Miss Scanlan – I was going to write “Ms. Scanlan”, but I think not – has the requisite bland, conventional, whiter-than-white teeth looks that go with the territory.

Plus, Miss Scanlan  is a student at Patrick Henry College, a conservative Christian college hoping to turn out conservative Christian politicians and judges, both of which Miss Scanlan hopes to be someday.

She beat out our Miss Massachusetts, Loren Geller Rabinowitz, who I suspect didn’t have a prayer of a chance.

Ms. Rabinowitz – and I think I’m on safe ground with the Ms. here – was profiled the other day in The Boston Globe.  She’s only 5’2”, which puts here at more than a munchkin-sized disadvantage when compared to the statuesque, leggy swimsuit blondes. (There hasn’t been a winner this short since 1921.) And, while she’s plenty attractive, her looks aren’t of the bland and conventionally pretty variety. She’s also Jewish, and, if she’d won, would have been only the second Jewish Miss A. (Bess Myerson remains the one and only.) Not the mention that she would have been the first to graduate from Harvard. (Fight fiercely, Harvard!)

What Ms. Geller is, however, in every other aspect of her life, something of a superstar.

It was exhausting just reading about her: Ivy League grad (magna), championship skater, poet, concert pianist, combo skating coach-tutor, and future pediatrician. She’s weighing her med school acceptances now. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that she will not have to attend med school in Grenada. While at Harvard, she won  the David McCord Prize for "depth of talent in the literary arts," and the Harvard University Le Baron Briggs Prize, "for work as a humanitarian and poet." Oh, yeah, and she’s the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.

I’m guessing that there were few Miss America candidates who could top Ms. Rabinowitz when it comes to résumé or likelihood of stellar future accomplishment.

But none of this helped get her the crown, or even a place in the semi-finals.

Probably the biggest thing she had going against her was being from Massachusetts, which has never, ever, ever in the whole wide world has had a candidate who won. Only a handful have even placed in the semis. One was 1st runner-up. (Thanks, Wikipedia, for confirming what I knew in my heart, anyway. Massachusetts across your however ample chest is a kiss of Miss America death.)

I guess there’s just not all that much of a beauty pageant culture in these parts. No Little Miss Cunning starter events for three year olds who’ve already had their eyebrows done. No, “oh, goodie, Miss America is coming to town for a ribbon cutting at the new WalMart.”

So instead of sending contenders, we apparently send girls from Massachusetts who are actually in it for the scholarship loot.

I do, however, believe that Ms. Rabinowitz stood a better chance than our 1965 candidate, Mabel Bendiksen, whose talent was a Dramatic Reading & Folk Singing of "The Hazards of Nuclear Fallout" & "What Have They Done to the Rain".

Bet that went over big with the judges!

Anyway, Mabel Bendiksen was handily beaten by Vonda Kay VanDyke, a signing ventriloquist.

Take that, Mabel Bendiksen.

When I was in high school, a girl from our parish, Carol Ann Kennedy, was Miss Massachusetts. She was a dancer and, as I recall, a pretty enough blonde who did The Commonwealth proud by making it to the semi-finals. I remember seeing her once, in a convertible, wearing her crown on the way to some function.

I did not, however, know her personally because she lived in a different neighborhood and, more important, was a “pub”, i.e., someone who attended public school. Unless you lived next door to one, you just didn’t know any pubs.

Carol Ann Kennedy did, however, factor tangentially in an earlier event in my life.

Every year, each grade at Our Lady of Angels grammar school put on some bit of entertainment as part of the annual Christmas Pageant (the only “pageant” any of us were ever associated with). One grade might have a “rhythm band” (clap sticks and tambourines); another might play “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” on their recorders. The eighth grade always did the Nativity tableau. Generally, there was some latitude in what each nun picked for her grade.

In fifth grade, Sister Saint Wilhelmina decided that we would all don kelly-green crepe paper vests and sing “Christmas in Killarney,” while a hand-picked selection of girls step danced. Since Sister Saint Wilhelmina despised me (among a number of other girls, one of whom I’m guessing is reading this blog), I was not one of the chosen few. Sister Saint Wilhelmina also thought it would look better if all the step dancers were short, which further knocked me (not to mention that other girl, my cousin MB, who I’m guessing is reading this blog) out of the box. She did, however, invite her pets among the tall girls (MB and I not among them) to “join in the fun of the jigs and reels” and learn to step dance.

Step dancing was taught by Carol Ann Kennedy, still in her pre-Miss Massachusetts days, and a catechism student of Sister Saint Wilhelmina. (Catholic pubs had to attend weekly religious education classes. On catechism day, we were warned to bring anything valuable home, and to hide our pens and pencils in the back of our desks so it would be harder for the pubs to filch them. I’m guessing that Carol Ann Kennedy was not a pencil-filching pub.)

Surprisingly, given the Irish-American majority in our parish, I didn’t actually know anyone who took step dancing.

We all knew about it, as it was a frequent act on Community Auditions, “New England’s Showcase for Talented Amateurs”, which ran on Channel 4 ever Sunday morning for years. Our neighborhood talented amateurs took piano, tap, or baton.

Anyway, because I was both tall and despised by Sister Saint Wilhelmina, I did not get the opportunity to meet the future Miss Massachusetts personally.

Thanks, Sister Saint Wilhelmina. Thanks for nothing.

Think how ticked off I would be if Carol Ann Kennedy had actually gone on to win the whole shebang?

See amid the winter snow. (All those recycled Yellow Pages….)

I have a long and glorious history of complaining about the annual attack of the Yellow Pages, White Pages, Yellow Books.  Here I am on my old marketing blog, in January 200,9 and here’s a  Pink Slip post from just a couple of months ago. I also did a slightly more benevolent read on Yellow Pages in 2007 – ages ago, for sure.

Yellow Pages (and variants thereof) are on my mind because yesterday I performed my annual ritual: The Dumping of the Phone Books, in which I place a couple of dozen Yellow Pages, White Pages, and Yellow Books into recycle bags, and leave them out for the recycling truck, which roams the neighborhood today.

I live in a six-unit condo building, and – blame it on the landlines – more than six of each of these books are delivered to our building every year.

They’re left on the top step, and I’m, invariably, the one who brings them in.

I leave them in the communal foyer, on the communal table, for a few days. My watchful waiting period.

The other residents of the building either a) ignore them entirely, or b) toss one into the communal recycling basket that sits in the communal foyer.

I am the emptier of the communal recycling basket. And the cleaner-upper of the communal table.

Thus, I am the one schlepping the full complement of Yellow/White Pages from the front of the house (where they’re dropped off) to the back of the house (where the trash guys pick up).

In a couple of hours, they will be removed from their perch on the snow bank out back, and tossed into the maws of the recycle truck. Or into the non-caring, non-discriminating general purpose garbage truck, that I occasionally catch grabbing the recycle. (In much the same way as, years ago, I observed my company’s cleaning staff emptying the waste baskets and the blue recycle tubs into the same trash bucket.)

Personally, having done my best, I don’t care whose maw these books end up in, as long as they’re out of our foyer.

Satan, be gone!

Still, I do have to wonder what the business impetus is behind continually producing directories that no one under the age of 91 refers to – I’m using the “if she were alive” age of my mother  here. How do they continue to con businesses into thinking it makes sense to appear in a paper directory, which 99.99% of the time ends up in the dump or in the recycle brew?

I get that you’d want to be in their online directory, but who’s buying the quarter-page ads these days? (I could tell you if I hadn’t already jettisoned the stash sent to our business; and, as of this blogging, I am not going to chance the snow, ice, and gloom of night out there in order to retrieve one to take a look.

Truly, I can’t conceive of what the long-run business model is here.

I did see something in the papers – read, by the way, online – that quoted someone official as raving about how these tomes are now all on recyclable paper. But recycling still takes energy, etc., and wouldn’t it be, overall, a more kindly gesture to Mother Earth to just give up on printing them entirely.

Let those who need them order them. (Online.)

Let those who need them pay for them – or get subsidized by those of us who cast kindly eyes on 91 year olds who need to look up a new optometrist, or a florist where they can order a bouquet of white roses for their great-granddaughters First Holy Communion. Or whatever.

Hey, I’ve worked in some de-pressing places over the years.

You know the type: keep re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; keep holding up that wall, while the opposite wall collapses, conking you (and everyone else in its path) on the noggin; the “we’re, alas, ahead of the market” kinds of places; the “we’re, alas, behind the market” kinds of places.

I know, up close and personal, what it’s like to be in a failing organization.

But I am singularly lacking in the imagination that would enable me to truly picture what it must be like to work in sales or marketing for “The Pages” businesses.

Talk about buggy whips at ten paces.

As the Irish say, I’m sorry for your troubles.

But not sorry enough to do anything but toss these bad-boys into the recycle bucket.

(And, yes, I have tried calling/e-mailing to get delivery stopped.)

Snow Day

When I was a child, there were no words sweeter than those uttered by the radio voice on WTAG or WNEB, informing the eager kiddies of Worcester that there was “No school. All schools. Worcester public and parochial.”

There had to be at least a foot of snow for this to happen - none of this candy-assed couple of inches shut down. And school was never called off in advance. I remember trudging up the hill from grammar school in complete white out, blizzard conditions when a storm began during the school day.

Even though almost everyone had a mother at home, there was no such thing as early release.  Nope, you waited until the bell rang at 3 p.m., and then you braved the elements. Hoping all the way home that the storm would last long enough so that we’d hear that “No school. All schools. Worcester public and parochial.”

(I also remember, in first grade, trudging up the hill, all by my lonesome, in complete white out, blizzard conditions because I’d forgotten to bring in my signed permission card for the polio shot. The shots weren’t being given that day, mind you. We were just supposed to have the form in. And Sister Marie Leo was not one for giving any of us a pass. So, she sent a bunch of us out in the storm, Little Evas on the ice floes. I’m not sure how many of us were sent home, but Kathy Shea and Kevin Mulcahy, as I recall, were among the unforgiven. I was the first kid back. The other mothers insisted that their kids warm up a bit. Kathy Shea’s mother even made her a cup of cocoa. I can’t remember if my mother offered. At the time, she would have had an infant and a three-year-old on her hands, so she might not have been in the offering mood. Plus I probably would have convinced myself that it was a mortal sin not to speed right back with the signed polio shot form. After all, this was the same Sister Marie Leo who’d told us it was a mortal sin to step toe on the “holy grass” that surrounded the church. What a life, where you could go to hell for touching a blad of “holy grass.”)

At least in grammar school, we could walk home – school was only about a half-mile away.

In high school, getting home during a bad storm could take hours. It required taking the special bus into downtown Worcester, then waiting to transfer to a regular city bus. (The 19 Cherry Valley, usually.  Or the 33 Brookfield.  I can’t remember the route numbers, but there was also an Apricot bus. And a Grand View that you could take – but that was only in dire circumstances, as it was a long schlep home from the Grand View stop.) Naturally, during a bad storm, buses took 4EVA.

There were many times when I stood huddling with my friends, shivering in our loden coats, waiting for the 19 Cherry Valley to appear. Not to mention that our feet would be soaked right through the soles of our Bass Weejun penny loafers. Boots? Who knew there was going to be a freaking blizzard when we’d left for school in the morning?

Fast forward a few years….

During the Blizzard of ‘78, everyone was snowed in. I was already living on Beacon Hill by then, and the city of Boston was totally shut down. It was something to see the National Guard called out for snow removal. And something else to see folks grabbing a dozen loaves of bread when the first post-blizzard deliveries were made to the stores.  Banks were closed for a couple of days, too, and this was the era before the ATM. (Remember having to plan your cash that carefully?)

Yesterday’s storm was supposed to be a big deal. And it was in other parts of the state.

But I think we only got about 8 – 10 inches.

In the old days, that was certainly not enough for “No school. All schools. Worcester public and parochial.” But Worcester schools were closed today, and they’re closed tomorrow. As are Boston’s. Of course, Worcester probably got at least twice as much snow as Boston did.

The night before this latest storm, I’d joined the panicked hordes at Whole Foods, where the bread shelves were stripped nearly clean by the time I arrived. Well provisioned, we were all set.

So I took a snow day yesterday, and didn’t budge out of the house. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as “No work. All work.” A downside of the always on, live by the computer world we live in.

But it does appear that our condo association has found a shoveler who is not me. And our mailman, who didn’t have to deliver anything other than first class mail because of the weather conditions, brought me my New Yorker, anyway.

So I was able to enjoy my sandwich on the near last loaf of bread (When Pigs Fly Tuscan Wheat) from Whole Foods while flipping through the New Yorker.

Snow days are fun!

This morning, I will venture forth.