It’s good to be Snooki (I guess….)

Is it just my imagination, or is the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol forecast for us all getting longer and longer?

Or is it that the fifteen minutes is an average?

So, when you take the fifteen minutes that I won’t be enjoying, nor will any of my friends and family, and you multiply it by all the other no-fame cohorts out there, and add them all up, you get a lot more than fifteen minutes for The Kardashians and Billy Ray Cyrus?

I don’t actually begrudge the folks with talent who get their fifteen-minute multipliers.

Personally, I don’t pay Lindsay Lohan any/much attention, but at least at one point in her life, she did have oodles of promise as an actor.

No, the ones that completely bother me are those who seem singularly lacking in anything that might account for their being so present in the media. One thing if there’s at some modicum of intelligence, wit, accomplishment, athletic ability, genius, charm, beauty, charisma, imagination, empathy, vision, talent. But so many of the famous seem only to have a phenomenal talent for brassy self-promo, and a complete and utter lack of shame. (Or are these one and the same?)

Into this category falls the relentless and, if I look at my list, the pretty much everything-less, Snooki Polizzi.

Frankly, after a pouf of publicity attending The Jersey Shore a year or too back, I hadn’t heard Thing One or Thing Two about Lalapolizzi for a while. Perhaps, I thought, her comet had burnt out.

Apparently not.

For as long as there are people out there whose lives revolve around GTL – gym, tanning, laundry (not goodness, talent, and likability; or greatness, thinking, and learning) – there will obviously remain a place in the sun (metaphorically speaking; if you go to tanning parlors you don’t need direct sun) for Snooki.

Snooki found her most recent sun spot in the land of Jersey Shore, speaking at Rutgers University.

Where she was paid $32,000:

…to dish on her hairstyle, fist pumps, as well as the GTL – gym, tanning, laundry – lifestyle.

This, it must be noted, is $2K less than the nice chunk of change that Rutgers is paying Toni Morrison to give the May commencement address there.

Now, whether Toni Morrison – or any commencement speaker, for that matter – is worth $30K, rather than a more modest honorarium ($5K? $10K?, plus T&E) is an arguable point. I’d come down on the side of “no”. But I suppose that parents, after writing big checks for four years want the big payoff of sitting under thundercloud skies in the football stadium and hearing a big name speaker. Those parents want something more than a tee-shirt that says “My kid went to Rutgers and all I got was this lousy Scarlet Knights tee-shirt.” Thus the Toni Morrisons of the world have their day.

I have no idea whatsoever what Toni Morrison would be like as a speaker, but at least she has some heavy weight bona fides behind her: all those novels and, oh yeah, that Nobel Prize in Literature.

Now I do realize that Ms. Polizzi was not giving the commencement address. She was not at Rutgers to impart wisdom, or to assure the paying parents that their tuition money had been well spent. She was there to entertain.

But surely there are plenty of means available to entertain college students that don’t involve the university’s paying $32K to an individual who, to most folks with reasonable standards, seems fairly devoid of any talent, other than a canny ability to keep herself in the public eye.

Or have college students changed that radically since I was one of them that this is what they crave and expect?

Rutgers was prominently in the news last fall when a freshman killed himself, shortly after his roommate web-cammed him making out with a fellow. And broadcast it with the help of another student.

I suppose if that’s entertainment, then Snooki is an upgrade of sorts.

Still, you have to kind of wonder what’s happening on the banks of the old Raritan.

Not to mention in Snooki’s head.

Do you think she ever wonders about the why, how, and worthiness of seeing herself catapulted from well-deserved obscurity to the point where Rutgers will pay here $32K to tell its students to “study hard, but play harder”? (As if most of them need that advice. Maybe we should get her on the road to China, instead. Our own secret weapon…)

All I can say for the Snooki Polizzis of the world is that they may end up serving an important societal function.

As job opportunities for those with nothing in particular to offer continue to diminish, the twin hopes of winning the lottery or becoming well-known and well-paid for having nothing in particular to offer may help keep the lid on society. Let me amend that: nothing particular to offer other than a cretinous world view, where that world view is circumscribed by what’s available at the Jersey Shore with respect to GTL.

Forget bread and circus. We’ll have Big Macs and Snooki.

Talk about cry, the beloved country.

On the cultural upside, there was the heartening news that Charlie Sheen got booed off the stage during the first outing of his one-man show.

Source: Huffington Post.

Wake me when the coffee’s perking. (And don’t forget the donuts.)

I grew up hearing my grandmother talk about the great Irish wakes she’d attended as a girl. These weren’t quite the brawling booze-ups sung of in “Tim Finnegan’s Wake”, but there was always some element of hilarity. Most of Nanny’s stories featured a character known as “Shirty” Connell.  Shirty would always show up at midnight, when the spread was laid out for the wakers who were spending the night in vigil with the deceased and their closest relicts.

I can’t remember why Shirty was called Shirty, but it may have had something to do with his having one clean shirt that he brought out for wakes.

These were the days of the wake-in-the-home, which had pretty much died out by the time I became a wake-goer. I did have one friend whose grandfather had been waked in his living room, but that was before I knew her.

For my wake-going parents, it was a different story.

The wakes of their childhoods were still home-made. And they did have stories about them.

Typically, my father’s stories were funny. They featured raucous boys crawling under the draped trestle on which the casket rested, and pushing the late, lamented up, scaring the beejaysus out of the old Irish ladies in attendance who, by that point, may have started enjoying a drop of the creature, rather than waiting for Shirty to blow in at midnight and declare the party on.

Typically, my mother’s stories were not funny. Her “favorite” – if it can be thus characterized – involved her being dragged to the house wake of someone who’d died in childbirth. Mother and babe – in arms – were laid out together in a double bed, as if they were sleeping. “The baby looked just like a doll.”

To this day, I’m not sure whether the story differential is the difference between the Irish and the Germans, or the difference between the world view of Al and Liz.

Probably the latter, as the dead-babe-in-arms scenario seems right up the alley of any number of morbid, maudlin, sentimental Irish-ers I can think of.

(I also recall my mother saying that, at her brother Jack’s wake, the only people who wanted to take pictures of him in situ were Irish immigrants. Exactly what they planned on doing with the pictures were never quite made clear. Put them in their scrapbooks? Ah, here’s that good looking Jake Wolf. Sure, he looks like he could sit right up and ask for your vote now, doesn’t it?  My Uncle Jack was a state representative in Illinois.)

Anyway, the point (at last) here is that, in the good old days, wakes were explicitly social occasion, and, since you were in someone’s home for them, there was an expectation that you would be fed.

Fast forward to wakes being held not in your parlor, but in a funeral parlor.

While the occasion was still social – trust me here: I’ve been to plenty of wakes – it was less explicitly so.

There was neither food nor booze at the wake, but, rather, after the funeral, when everyone who’d hung with you all the way to the cemetery was invited back to someone in the family’s house or, more recently, to a restaurant or function room, for a lunch.

So I don’t view it as all that unseemly that a Massachusetts legislator has proposed the food be allowed to be served in funeral parlors:

Under a controversial bill now before the Legislature, funeral feeding stations could become de rigueur, allowing mourners to load plates at wakes. A State House hearing before the Joint Committee on Public Health tomorrow will consider lifting the ban that prevents funeral directors and embalmers from preparing or serving food and drink during wakes, services and burials.

Dave Casper, owner of the Casper Funeral Home in Boston, said he sees food for thought in the concept proposed by Sen. Thomas P. Kennedy (D-Brockton), who could not be reached yesterday. Casper said mourners ask him “all the time” if he has any munchies on hand ... and he catches them “all the time” sneaking in snacks.

If “someone wants to grab a cup of coffee or a doughnut or a snack while the service is going on, that’d be OK,” Casper said. But there’s a limit. “If they’re looking to have a prime rib dinner while they’re standing next to the casket, that’s a different story.” (Source: The Boston Herald. That’s right, The Herald.)

I may not have put it quite like Dave Casper, but he’s got a point.

One thing when the wakes were two hours in the afternoon, with a couple of hour break, then another two in the evening. You had time for a bite between sessions.

But now we have what my brother Rick refers to as “the fabulous four”: a one shot, four-hour wake held for a single day. (Wakes of my youth extended over a two-day period, followed by the day of the funeral.)

So what if someone stands around with a cup of Joe while hanging around for some part of “the fabulous four”?

I’m not talking gulp and go here, nor do I think that the spread should be laid out on your way in. I don’t like the idea of someone trying to juggle a cup of tea and a crust-less chicken sandwich, while kneeling before the casket trying to reverently gaze at the stiff. So that, when they move on to greet the family, they can mention what a good job/terrible job they did with Great Aunt Bridie’s hair or mouth.

Also, I don’t think that most people would like it if someone got brownie crumbs, or – worse – spilled a drink (hot or cold) on the departed.

But having coffee, tea, and cookies available for those in attendance would be fine with me – whether in the room with the body, or in an ante-room. A lot of funeral parlors already have bowls of wrapped hard candy on the tables, just in case someone’s feeling in need of a piece of butterscotch or a Brach’s toffee.

Some funeral directors oppose the food idea.

…Peter Stefan of Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester said he is dead set against the idea.

“Who wants to serve bologna sandwiches during calling hours?” said Stefan.

Peter, Peter, Peter: you’re no fun. Who said anything about a bologna sandwich?

David Wakinshaw, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association is, diplomatically, taking neither side.

He noted that, on the one hand, it would be convenient for families, and a revenue source for funeral homes

On the other hand:

“The funeral event itself is somber,” Wakinshaw said. “You don’t want it to go to the level where people are walking around with snacks.”

Yes, a funeral event is somber. But, in truth, there are many aspects of a wake and funeral that just plain aren’t, especially if you’re not closely related to the deceased and are just there to support those who are. I’m not talking about the funeral of a child here, by the way. I can’t see that as being anything but a terrible and somber occasion, beyond imagining. Or even the wake of a young adult, whose grief stricken family no longer know which way is up.

But most wakes and funerals are, well, for older folks. My age and above. If you can’t share a funny memory or have a laugh or two at a wake, well, my goodness: where is it okay to? And don’t we all want the kind of send-off where people talk about us, remember the good stuff, and have a few laughs?

Wherever two or more are gathered telling stories, sure why not have a bit of something to munch on?

As for “people walking around with snacks,” Mr. Wakinshaw’s grandmother apparently failed to tell him any stories about Irish wakes.

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And a tip of the chapel veil to my sister Trish, who pointed this story out to me.

Layoffs have rippled through Ben and Jerry’s

There are plenty of days when all I want to do is pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Ice Cream, stick a spoon in it, and call it dinner. This was especially true when I was working full-time, and would roll home after an aggravating day of politicking, budget juggling, employee wrangling, and tea-leaf deciphering. If there’d been some type of all-hands meeting, during which at least one executive used advanced doublespeak to explain how we were going to sell or borrow our way out of some crisis or another, so much greater the likelihood of a sup on Ben & Jerry’s. (Or Häagen-Dazs, or Edy’s, or Breyers, or whatever caught my eye and trembling hand. But I do keep coming back to Ben & Jerry’s.)

Now, I don’t generally act on the impulse to dine on Cherry Garcia ice cream.

Instead, when I have it, I pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Fro-Yo, stick a spoon in it, and call it dinner.

Cherry Garcia, incorporates three key nutritional elements – dairy, fruit, and chocolate – so it really does constitute a meal or near-meal all on its own.

Ice cream, even when a bit de-fatted and disguised as frozen yogurt, is nigh unto the perfect food, as far as I’m concerned. And Ben & Jerry’s is pretty good ice cream, not to mention a pretty good company (socially and environmentally conscious, etc.), even if it is has been owned by Unilever for quite some time. (I try not to think about a soap company making ice cream. But when I do think about it, there was a time in my life (when I was four) when I did enjoy sucking on a sodden washcloth while in the bathtub. Not as much as I enjoyed a chocolate ice cream cone from the Cherry Bowl, mind you.)

With Ben & Jerry’s, I just get a kick out of old hippie-ish lefties making good. That they abandoned Long Island for Vermont, where their eponymous ice cream business was founded, and where their eponymous ice cream is still made, is a bonus.

Some days I, too, would like to abandon my home turf for Vermont.

If only I could cook, I could run a bed and breakfast. (Would it be okay to hand someone a tea-bag and a granola bar and wish them a good day?)

If only people bought books, other than through mail-order, I could run a bookstore. Or an old fashioned lending library.

If only I could wangle a job helping Ben & Jerry run their foundation, I’d even forgive them for restricting their grants to Vermont-only.

Because that’s okay. Because Vermont is cool.

I could live there. (It’s not every state that would elect a socialist ausländer like Bernie Sanders to the U.S. Senate.)

Alas, while I could live in Vermont, my husband couldn’t. Having been born there, and having survived a poor and hazard-filled childhood, in a poor and hazard-filled town, he has no desire whatsoever to step toe in the state. (Although I probably could convince him to do a mini-getaway to Burlington at some point.)

But we were talking ice cream, were we not? Ben & Jerry’s, in particular.

And since this is Pink Slip, we occasionally talk pink slips. Which, unfortunately, Ben & Jerry’s is now handing out to a couple of dozen workers at their Waterbury, VT, manufacturing plant. I guess, if you were a Deadhead kind of guy – which I am most decidedly not – you might say that the makers of Cherry Garcia have a little ripple in their pond.*

What’s two-dozen jobs, in the grand scheme of things?

Nothing, really, unless one of the ones being lost is yours.

The folks being let go in Waterbury can take a transfer to the “faster and more efficient” plant in St. Albans.

Which would be okay, if St. Albans weren’t a good 50 miles away from Waterbury. Which would be okay, if you were commuting into Waterbury from the direction of St. Albans. Which would be not so okay if you were already commuting into Waterbury from 50 miles away in the other direction.

Although 50 miles is a long commute by anyone’s standards – the most I ever did was 30-ish, which was plenty long enough - I would venture to say that, unless there’s rain, snow, sleet, hail, or gloom of night, driving to work in Vermont wouldn’t be bad.

Rolling hills dotted with Holstein’s, the state’s official cow. Four seasons to watch whirling by (other than on the days when there’s rain, snow, sleet, hail, or gloom of night). Picture-perfect little towns (other than the one my husband grew up in, and the ones with the ramshackle houses with the rusted trucks in the front yard).

Plus, if you work at Ben & Jerry’s, I understand you get free ice cream. So there’d always be a pint waiting for you at home after, or to spoon into during, your long commute.

Waterbury will remain the go-to place for its popular factory tours. St. Albans will produce the simpler flavors, Waterbury will handle the more complex ones.

I assume that would include their new Jimmy Fallon-inspired - yes, even Jimmy Fallon can occasionally inspire - Late Night Snack: vanilla ice cream, fudge covered potato chip clusters & a salty caramel swirl.

Never say never, but I don’t know about fudge-covered potato chips.

Wonder if Cherry Garcia is considered simple or complex?

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*Ripple is a classic Grateful Dead tune. But if I know this, then I suppose everyone else on the face of the earth does. So this footnote is completely and utterly superfluous.

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty,
If your cup is full may it be again,
Let it be known there is a fountain,
That was not made by the hands of men.

Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow

And I have no one to thank but myself, and possibly Ben and/or Jerry for naming the ice cream Cherry Garcia to begin with, for the fact that the tune to Ripple is now floating around in my brain non-stop.

Source of Ben & Jerry’s lay-off info: Boston Globe.

Roy Santillan: St. Francis House’s Marathon Man

It has been a long and fierce winter, one with scant let up: no extended January thaw, few “promise of spring” days.

But winter is no officially over. And two sure signs that this is indeed so are a) the baseball season has begun, and b) we’re beginning to hear talk of the Boston Marathon.

Before the Marathon became such a big deal, I used to come out occasionally to watch a bit of it, mostly waiting to see Johnny Kelley pass by.  Well into his 80’s, Kelley ran Boston, which he’d won a couple of times. He was also an Olympian (Berlin 1936). Johnny Kelley died a few years back – at the age of 97.

These days my contact with the Marathon is noting (and immediately forgetting) the names of the winners; checking out whether the runners I know managed to finish; and watching as gaunt, exhausted finishers roam around the ‘hood showing off their medallions and sporting silver mylar blankets that make them look like baked potatoes.

This year, however, I have more of a reason to pay attention.

That’s because Roy Santillan’s running.

I haven’t met Roy yet, but he’s part of the St. Francis House family, and so am I. (I’m a long-standing member of the board, and an off-and-on volunteer.)

Roy came to St. Francis House – which has been helping Boston’s poor and homeless men and women “reclaim their dignity and rebuild their lives” for over 25 years – when he was down on his luck.

Like many of our guests, Roy had a record and a history of alcohol abuse – and more than his share of bad luck. When he landed in Boston (from Mexico, by way of a number of years in Chicago), he was sober and looking for a new start.

His big welcome to Boston? Someone stole his bag while he was sleeping in the train station – and with it his Social Security and green cards.

But someone else pointed him to St. Francis House, where he found a place where he could come in from the cold, have a warm meal, take a shower, see a doctor, and get help getting his documentation problem taken care of.

Roy also found First Step, which helps St. Francis House’ guests start thinking about getting back into the work-world. That led to his taking part in the Moving Ahead Program (MAP) – an intensive, 14 week course that really gets folks moving head with their lives. I try to get to a couple of MAP graduations each year. All of the grads have the opportunity to speak about their journeys and their hopes. (Do not attend without your hanky.)

Anyway, Roy is a MAP grad, now studying for his B.A. at UMass-Boston, and living in Next Step, St. Francis House’s residential program. 

Roy’s also a runner, and, come April 18th, he’ll be running Boston on behalf of St. Francis House.

The Friends of Frank (FOF), - “Frank” is street lingo for St. Francis House - a wonderful organization made up of St. Francis House’s younger supporters (which, alas, includes me out), is backing Roy and our other runner, Mike Palliola. Mike is related to St. Francis House through Ultimate Bootcamp (which is exactly what the name implies and, thus, includes me out, as well). Ultimate Bootcamp sponsors an annual Thanksgiving Day fundraiser for St. Francis House.

FOF is holding an event on April 13th, and is hoping to raise the $5,200 that Roy and Mike must raise as part of an initiative that provides non-profits with Marathon numbers (which are hard to come by).  The money goes to St. Francis House. Given the economy, and the increase that Frank’s is seeing in demand for its services, we can absolutely use it.

So, if you’re feeling spring-ish, or Marathon-ish, or just generous in general, you might want to make a donation towards that  $5,200 goal. (Tell them Maureen Rogers from Pink Slip sent you.)

The Fiesta’s Over for John Junker

Don’t know how I missed all this hoopla when the news started to break a couple of months back, but – thankfully – I tripped upon Jesse Singal’s post on boston.com. And one thing led to another, so now I’m fully in the know about the Fiesta Bowl contretemps.

Singal approached the story through the lens of the University of Connecticut’s Fiesta Bowl experience.

For those who don’t follow sports, UConn, not satisfied to have the world’s best women’s college basketball program, as well as its own pre-professional men’s basketball team, decided a while back that it wanted to play big-time football.

Boston College’s efforts aside, there’s something about big-time college football and New England that just don’t seem to mix.

College football around here is, mostly, deciding at the last minute on a sunny fall Saturday that you wouldn’t mind watching some student athletes in action. Thus, you set off to get a last minute ticket at Harvard, Holy Cross, Tufts, Amherst, Bowdoin, or whatever school is close by. You bask in the stands – there’s always plenty of room for your party to spread out – and enjoy a hot dog and a coke, while watching a bunch of young men who aren’t much bigger than their fellow-students play football, and a couple of dozen band nerds in blazers play the school’s fight song.

The type and caliber of play, while not exactly quaint, would be recognizable to Amos Alonzo Stagg, Walter Camp, and Knute Rockne as sport as played by student-athletes, not ATHLETE-students. (Wink-wink, nudge-nudge on that student bit.)

But there’s gold in the hills of Division 1-A football. Plus, as has happened in the case of Boston College, marketing opportunities to extend your brand and become a “destination college.” Rather than continue to languish as the mostly commuter school for Boston Irish boys that BC was when I was a girlio.

So UConn wants in.

Of course, in order to make gold, you have to spend gold, and UConn dropped $1.6 million worth of the coin of their realm to appear in the Fiesta Bowl last January. Where they got their helmeted heads handed to them by the University of Oklahoma, which has a far longer and more illustrious football tradition than UConn will ever hope to have.

The UConn Daily Campus put the university’s loss a bit higher – $1.8M – and blamed most of it on UConn’s inability to sell the tickets it had been allocated.

By far the largest expense the university incurred came from absorbed ticket sales. The university sold only 2,771 out of an allotment of 17,500 tickets, resulting in the university absorbing 14,729 tickets worth $2,924,385.

That expense completely soaked up UConn's revenue allotment of $2.5 million from the Big East all by itself. UConn's losses were then further inflamed by the costs of travel, meals, lodging and other bowl expenses.

The lack of interest in traveling to watch the local boys make goods is one of the knocks on big time New England college football.

Fans who have no problem flying to Baltimore or Toronto to watch the Red Sox play, apparently don’t jet off to North Carolina to watch Boston College play Wake Forest. Or to Arizona to watch Oklahoma cold-cock UConn. (On football weekends, I can always tell who BC is playing by the packs of out-of-town fans touristing around on game-morning. Bright orange paw prints? Clemson’s in town. Jackets with an Indian on them? The Florida Seminoles are here.)

The money that UConn dropped floated in to the coffers of the Fiesta Bowl, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to organize and promote the Fiesta Bowl.

Now, I’m one of those odd-balls who think that a non-profit should be performing some charitable, educational, cultural, medical, research, or other at least nominally lofty-purpose function. But somehow the Fiesta Bowl’s purpose, at least to me, seems to be getting a bunch of ATHLETE-students together for a big, “important” televised football game, bringing well-heeled fans to Phoenix to spend money, and flogging Tostitos, crisply proud sponsor of the Fiesta Bowl.

I may, of course, be missing something crucial in this brief summary. But why the Fiesta Bowl gets to operate as a non-profit “charity” completely eludes me.

Especially when we learn how the Fiesta Bowl has been husbanding its resources.

Among its other hijinks, Fiesta Bowl had its employees make political contributions, for which they were reimbursed using some sham bonus scheme. Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker and his wife got back the $4,200 they contributed to John McCain. I guess you can’t expect someone who makes a mere $600K/year to shell out that kind of money to support a politician he believes in. (Quick: Do you think that John Junker had a picture of himself, smiling arm and arm, with John McCain prominently displayed in his office. Quick: yes/no.)

The report  [commissioned by the Fiesta Bowl board to investigate matters] highlighted several trips to Chicago, Boston and elsewhere that the Fiesta Bowl hosted for several Arizona politicians and their families. Anthony Aguilar, the Fiesta Bowl’s director of community and corporate relations, told investigators that the trips were meant to show legislators the importance of college football to the Arizona economy. (Source, here and following: NY Times.)

One Arizona state legislator – the one behind the state’s anti-immigration law – was the recipient of those swank trips to Chicago and Boston for his family. In Chicago, they stayed at the Ritz. That’ll show ‘em the importance of college football to the Arizona economy.

A prime beneficiary of Fiesta Bowl largesse was, not surprisingly, CEO John Junker.

Junker was the one flashing the card for a $1,200 strip club visit:.

According to the report, Junker explained to investigators: “We are in the business where big, strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments. It was important for us to visit, and we certainly conducted business.”

This response may well have been crafted by the same spin-meister who came up with Senator Larry Craig’s “wide-stance” story.

I don’t want to be a “looks-ist” here, but does anyone have a problem picturing this guy at a strip club? Oh, I’m sure he averted his eyes from the “dirty” parts and focused on conducting good, clean business. Just the way that big, strong athletes would have wanted it done on their behalf.

But for Junker it wasn’t all strip-club fun and games, and smile-for-the-camera opps with politicos.

After his daughter got into the University of Texas honors program, he had the Fiesta Bowl send a $75 bouquet to the program’s admissions director. I guess you can’t expect someone who makes a mere $600K/year to shell out that kind of money for posies.

And Fiesta Bowl-types apparently like to party-hearty.

The organization paid for the honeymoon for Junker’s assistant, and sprung for Junker, his family, and several other employees to attend her wedding.

Then there was John Junker’s 50th b-day bash. The shindig in Pebble Beach set the “charity” back $33K.

No wonder they’re a non-profit.

All this may result in the Fiesta Bowl losing its tax exempt status – aw, that seems awful harsh, don’t it? – and/or criminal charges. The Fiesta Bowl may also lose its prized position as one of the “important” bowls, that have some relevance when it comes to picking the national college football champion. (Yawn.)

The immediate impact is that John Junker was fired by the Fiesta Bowl. (The COO and VP of Marketing “resigned.”)

Wonder how many of his good ol’ politician buddies are taking his calls these days.

Let the 9/11 Anniversary Exploitation Begin

It’s hard to believe that we’re fast approaching the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. And it’s hard to believe that we won’t soon be overwhelmed with cheesy commemorative gear to remember the event by. (As if any American much over the age of 15 needs commemorative gear in order to do so.)

I’ve seen the signs already.

Like the first robin harbingering spring, I’ve been seeing ads for 9/11 commemorative $2 bill from the New England Mint.

I always hesitate to dump on any New England company. As long as they’re not doing anything illegal and/or immoral, as long as they’re creating employment, as long as they’re home town honeys, I want to give them a pass.

But the New England Mint?

Oooo, baby.  I’m afraid I must make an exception here.  It’s way, way, way too difficult to resist poking a bit of fun at this one.

Now, I can understand why someone might want to buy a replica of the 1933 Pontiac hood ornament. Or a bank shaped like a fireman’s boot, which, if nothing else, is useful for collecting for Jerry’s Kids. Or even Dodge City Marshall’s badge, for when you’re in “I carry a badge” mode (as opposed to your normal “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges” frame of mind).

But paying $14.95 (plus, no doubt S&L) for a couple of colorized $2 bills, gussied up to look, well, as phony as a $3 bill….

Who buys this stuff?

Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the historic events of September 11th, 2001, we are offering the very first Special Edition $2 bills for your collection.
As part of this special collector's edition, you will have the opportunity to commemorate history with a $2 bill signifying a day that will be remembered forever throughout our nation's history. This is a rare opportunity to collect a rare piece of currency that can be passed through generations to retain the motto "Never Forget". Order your 9-11 10th Anniversary $2 Bill today while supplies last.

Well, never forget that you do get those 2 FREE 4” x 7” 4-Panel Archival Folios, plus Certificates of Authenticity. (“We certify that this is a genuine colorized $2 bill.”) Certainly all that’s worth something.

So maybe the supplies won’t last…

If you’re feeling a bit more flush, or a bit more in commemoration mood, there’s the “Tribute in Light” Collection.

This beauty contains all ten of the anniversary bills, which means that the New England Mint has been offering these since 2002. (Way to go with coming up with an annuity stream there!)  Yours now, for the low-low price of $199.95 (plus S&L), marked down – lucky you! – from $299.95.

What a piece of work is man who would a) come up with this; b) fall for it.

Yet I’m sure that there are folks who are sincerely patriotic and/or who believe that anything that’s called a “collectible” will increase in value and/or think that that this bit of nonsense has anything to do with the U.S. Mint (which it doesn’t, other than their providing the raw materials, i.e., the oh-so-rare $2 bill that’s used here).

The New England Mint is located in Connecticut. I haven’t looked at the map, but I do believe Norwalk is located in the part of Connecticut that’s Yankees territory, rather than part of the sovereign Red Sox Nation. Which would be ‘nuf said, if not for the fact that Connecticut is both the birth and the death place of Phineas T. Barnum. And that authentic, certified bit of information is brought to you absolutely, bona fide, pinky-swear-on-the-tiny- graves-of –Tom-and-Lavinia-Thumb FREE.

If you’re not feeling 9/11 patriotic, you can get $2 bill sets for the National Parks, Babe Ruth, John Wayne, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Marilyn Monroe.

A little something for everybody.

Well, not quite everybody.

If they were after everybody’s money, we’d be seeing Arthur Miller $2 bills, not just Marilyn Monroe’s.

Maybe this all makes sense?

After all, in the bleak days following the attacks, didn’t the president urge us all to go out and shop?

Perhaps this was what he had in mind.

Meanwhile, caveat emptor: it doesn’t take a whole lot of googling to find a bushel basket full of complaints about the New England Mint – most around credit card overcharges, shipments of unordered merch, etc.

Then there’s a wonderful deconstruction of the New England Mint’s TV ad (this was for the rendition which “honored” our National Parks) done by Michael Ott over on Suite 101.

Among other goodies, the bills aren’t colorized:

The New England Mint adheres a vinyl overlay to a genuine U.S. two-dollar bill. It is legal tender. The vinyl overlay can be easily removed.

That’s because adding a vinyl overlay doesn’t count towards defacing U.S. currency.

As Michael continues,

In other words — if a child were to refer to himself as a mint, wipe his bottom with a two-dollar bill, he could hawk it as a genuine U.S. two-dollar bill honoring toilet paper….

He also notes that, rather than being rare:

As of April 30, 2007 there were $1,549,052,714 worth of two-dollar bills in circulation worldwide, according the U.S. Treasury.

My favorite part of Michael’s textual exegesis of the New England Mint ad is when he pares down the use of the words “historic” and “privately enhanced.”

In the third line, the word "historic" is used to inebriate the consumer. Not until morning, when the consumer awakens with a feeling of nausea and regret, will he or she roll over and find "privately-enhanced" snoring wildly.

It is not often, Mr. Ott, that I LOL.

Anyway, as September 11, 2011 nears, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of this stuff coming at us. Needless to say, avert your eyes, ears, and wallets.

Touched By Angels touched by the Mass. AG

Touched By Angels (TBA), a Cape Cod outfit that takes the profit out of the word non-profit, may have looked like an angel.But then the Massachusetts Attorney General, like Elvis, “got wise.” and figured out that Touched by Angles is “the devil in disguise.”

Last week, Gina Clark, founder and, apparently, prime beneficiary of TBA, was charged with multiple counts of fraud, embezzlement, running an illegal lottery, and a slew of labor violations.

TBA’s mission – or, better, public-facing raison d'être – was to provide financial help to middle-class families that had suffered the loss of a child or parent, or were facing  major medical bills, or something else generosity-inspiring. These families have too much money for public assistance,  but too little to get through a crisis by going out of pocket.

Every month or so, TBA would pick a lucky/unlucky family to sponsor, and do fund-raising on their behalf. The outfit put up collection tables outside of grocery stores, ran raffles, held auctions, and put on “nights.” Unfortunately, the pay-outs to those in need were mostly done under the generally unacceptable rules of “one for me, none for you” accounting. In what was typical of TBA’s MO:

…Clark's fundraising techniques also included operating and promoting an illegal lottery scheme, in which she and TBA staff solicited local businesses to donate items, such as merchandise, gift cards, and gift certificates. Clark and TBA staff informed these business owners that the items would be raffled off and the proceeds used to help the sponsored families.

However, none of the proceeds raised through these unauthorized raffles went to help any of the sponsored families.

TBA had been shut down last August, prompted by complaints from a number of the sponsored families, who were getting next to nothing out of fundraisers done in their names, and ex-employees whistleblowing (including allegations of rigging the raffle winners).

The indictments against Clark were reported last week on Cape Cod Today.

But before the long-arm of the law reached out to clip Clark’s wings, she was given the puff-piece treatment in The Barnstable Patriot,

“I’ve had a few tragedies in my life,” Gina Clark said. “Because of my income, I couldn’t get any help from the government.”

Remembering her own difficulties, Clark wished to help others in similar situations.

“I once owned two spas and was debating on opening another but decided against it,” she said. “I thought, ‘What could I do?’”

Chris suggested she start a non-profit.

Well, I can honestly say that, if I were to ask my husband what he thought I could do to occupy my time and make a living while doing so, the last thing on earth he would come up with would be “start a non-profit.”

And if I were to coming up with a business idea, non-profit would be even further out there than “last thing on earth”. It would be more like “last thing in the galaxy.” (Unless, of course, I win big bucks in the lottery and get to set up my own foundation…)

Anyway, even if you discount all the supposedly profit-making but fundamentally non-profit companies I worked for over the years, I’ve been up-close-and-personal with enough true non-profits to know that running one is hard work. Yes, the “doing good” part of a non-profit can be rewarding, but for most folks involved in the non-profit world, “doing good” had better be its own reward, ‘cause you’re not going to get rich working there. Sure, there are major non-profit CEO’s who make big bucks. But most of those folks are running what is tantamount to a large and complex corporation. The big difference is that corporations sell people something that those people think they’re going to derive some benefit from. In a non-profit, you’re essentially the intermediary between those who need something and those who can afford to pay for that something. So you’re selling an intangible good: feeling good. Maybe it sounds easy, but, as far as I can tell, it’s actually pretty damned hard to keep things going, especially these days.

But maybe it’s easier if you have a touch of larceny in your heart. What’s a better motivator than the “moi” charity?

And you may even get touched by someone who’s been touched by someone famous:

Recently Clark was in a South Shore store talking with folks about TBA when a relative of Ben Affleck provided her with his contact information, encouraging her to get him involved.

“I’m still shocked,” said Clark.

Wonder whether Clark ever did put the touch on Ben.

I’m sure the TBA logo would hold a lot of appeal for him. (Not to mention how thrilled he must be every time one of his relatives dimes him.)

Pink is for breast cancer aware-ness and the wings are for guidance.

“My wings are guiding me through my mission,” said Clark. “I love helping people.”

Well, of course, the Lord does help those who help themselves.

Now, this is ‘merica, so Clark is innocent until proven guilty. And let us not presume guilt because Clark is a blowsy, working-class biker chick, living in a swank $700K home on the Cape (with pool), and driving an Escalade.

And let’s acknowledge that maybe Clark didn’t start out to make TBA her personal errand of mercy. Maybe she actually did have good intentions.

Then again.

This is the same Gina Clark whose name was all over a 2006 complaint filed by an elderly Cape couple against Clark and one of the couple’s daughters. The couple contended that they were defrauded out of nearly $500K. (Source: Cape Cod Today.)

Some of the money allegedly went to Clark acting as the conduit to a mysterious private detective supposedly helping one of the couple’s daughters with her divorce. The last couple-to-Clark-to-detective payment was for $70,600.

Within a short period of that payment, Clark and her husband gave up their modest rental home, trading up from:

To:

Which comes with a hefty mortgage, and which was “purchased” with a down payment of $71,000.

$70,600.  $71,000. Hmmmmm.

Sure, there’s a $400 difference, but is this what’s known as circumstantial evidence? Or just a cowinkidink.

The complaint was later withdrawn for unexplained reasons, but likely either family pressure, or the couple being resigned to not being able to recover their money. Still, there’s an awful lot of smoke curling around Clark’s angel wings…

I guess because I’m the suspicious type, I’m thinking “grifter,” and that Gina Clark’s days living large, and at large, may be coming to an end.

Perhaps those wings will be coming in handy soon. As in: If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly.

Or maybe there’ll be charity willing to help her out. Even at this very moment, there may be a husband somewhere, suggesting that his wife set up a non-profit.

The Law Suit’s Getting Started (at Mohegan Sun)*

Last week’s news on the judicial front included a nice bit about a fellow who is poaching on a $1.2M gambling debt to Connecticut casino Mohegan Sun.

Jerome Powers may not have known when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, or know when to walk away. But Powers, who’s the millionaire CEO of Plum TV, a “lifestyle” cable network for the well to do, knew when to run. And that’s when the gambling debts get a bit steep.

Powers, who is one of those high-roller gamblers that the casinos like to woo, lost a cool $1.2M on blackjack. Then,

Powers wrote six checks to the casino to pay his debt, but they were not honored by his bank, court documents say. Payment was stopped on a $465,000 check, and the others were returned because the accounts were closed, according to copies of the returned checks.

Now Powers is asking that a lower court ruling that he has to pay up be tossed aside. He argues that the agreement he had with Mohegan Sun to advance him a wee bit of a credit line for the blackjack table was an illegal gambling contract. (“Shocked, I’m shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”) The case, Powers contends, should have no standing in the Connecticut judicial system because the casino is run by a sovereign Indian nation, the Mohegan Tribe.

It will be interesting to see how this one ends up. If I were a betting man, I’d lay odds that, if nothing else, there won’t be any casinos around willing to front Powers a big pile of chips for the blackjack table any time soon.

So if the party won’t be getting started at Mohegan Sun again, Powers will have to content himself with watching World Series of Poker re-runs. Or keeping up with the goings and comings of the rich and “famous” by channel cruising Plum TV.

For those of us too low-end to realize that “The Best Things in Life Are Plum”:

Plum is a multi-platform lifestyle network that targets the most active, influential, and educated audience in the world. With hundreds of hours of original content from the favorite destinations of this hard-to-reach demographic— Aspen, Nantucket, The Hamptons, Miami Beach and more—Plum combines the power of hyper-local with high-quality national programming. The result is a unique television, internet and digital device destination that has become the channel of choice for millions of viewers.

By the way, “and more”, if you’re curious, is Telluride, Sun Valley, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard. (Personally, I’m pretty darned proud to live in a state with two of the favorite destinations of such a hard-to-reach demographic.)

And here’s what you’ve been missing if you haven’t yet made Plum TV your hyper-local digital device destination:

Sand Collectors:

George Lynch and Carol Gilbert of Southampton have been adding to a sand collection that began over forty years ago. To see sand from so many beaches right next to each other really gives you a chance to appreciate how different beaches really are.

I am dusting off my sea-shells when I get home. And I will never tell anyone to go pound sand again without considering what type of sand they should go pound.

And then there’s Must See TV digital device content on My Vail:

In this full episode of My Vail, host Mark Bricklin (Vail Daily) introduces us to local celebrities & iconic Vail personalities, including Kelly Liken, Chris Anthony, Ryan & Trista Sutter, Helmut Fricker and more, who share their favorite experiences of the Vail lifestyle.

Helmut Fricker! Not THE Helmut Fricker – entertainer and master bookbinder. (Yodel-ay-hee-hoo.)

In truth, perhaps because I don’t watch Plum TV (yet), I had actually not heard of iconic personalities like Kelly Liken, Chris Anthony, and Helmut Fricker. I mean, it’s not like they’re Kardashians or anything. Sheesh!

But I am colossally embarrassed to admit that I am moderately familiar with Ryan and Trista Sutter. They met, I believe, on The Bachelor. Or The Bachelorette. He the hunky Vail firefighter, she the cute blonde lookin’ for love. Sigh! They found each other and I do believe that their nuptials, like the upcoming “do” joining William and Kate, were televised. For a fee. So that they could live happily ever after as reality stars. Sniff, sniff. No wonder people cry at weddings. I missed that show, but now that I know that I can keep up with the Sutters on Plum TV, I will be subscribing.

It’s the least I can do to help out Jerome Powers.

After all, if the Mohegan Tribe prevails, he’s going to have to cough up the $1.2M

The wonder of it all!*

__________________________________________________________

*For non-New England readers: The Party’s Getting Started, at Mohegan Sun, is the jingle used by this casino in their ubiquitous TV ads. The wonder of it all is a jingle catchphrase for Mohegan’s sun rival casino, Foxwoods.

The Widow’s Mite (James Konaxis learns the hard hard way that churn can burn.)

A Massachusetts broker has been kicked out of the securities biz for managing to rack up over half a million in commissions. James Konaxis merrily traded a 9/11 widow’s accounts down from $3.7M to $1.6M, over a two-year period from 2008-2010. Now he’s been fired by his brokerage firm, which is providing restitution to the widow. The Massachusetts Secretary of State has banned him from working as a broker. And the SEC’s looking to claw back some of his “ill-gotten gains,” as well.

While Konaxis was churning away, making butter for himself out the widow’s milk, he was also BS-ing her, assuring her that, while her wealth was being impacted by The Great Recession, her losses were less than that of the other guy.

Konaxis has been tripped up by his excessive account churning, i.e., how often he made trades (which yield a commission whatever the direction of the sale). An average trading frequency of 6 is considered out of range, and Konaxis had a veritable trading mill going. His frequency on the poor widow’s account was allegedly 16.

About 75 percent of the commissions earned by Konaxis came from the widow's accounts, according to the complaint. Those commissions accounted for a large share of the decline in the value of the widow's holdings, the SEC charged.

Way to go, Jimmy!

That’s showing us how the Konaxis of evil, greed, and stupidity works.

Gosh, you’d think if you were going to screw your clients, you might want to even it out some, and not do most of the skimming off one account where it might be noticed. Perhaps he thought she wouldn’t catch on, what with being a widow with three kids and all, including a disabled child, in whose name one of the squandered accounts was held. (That’s an especially nice touch, isn’t it?)

Maybe he thought that, because the money in the accounts wasn’t earned the old-fashioned, sweat of the brow or luck-of-the-inheritance-draw way – its source was the Congress-funded September 11 Victim Compensation Fund – that it was okay to tap into it. After all, that was some of his tax money in there (assuming he paid taxes).

But if the widow – referred to in the Boston Globe article I saw on this as S.T., but named elsewhere online – didn’t earn the money the old-fashioned way, she sure did earn it the hard way. Her husband was a military officer killed in the attack on the Pentagon.

Konaxis is apparently no stranger to churning. I saw elsewhere that he’d churned up a storm at some prior brokerage firms, which had ended up settling with the victims on several occasions.  Apparently, being a churn-artist doesn’t prevent you from finding another brokerage firm willing to hire you.

Bad enough to be nabbed for churning, but widow and orphans…Even in this anything goes era, that still sounds bad. And a 9/11 widow yet. (Something’s are sacred, Jimmy boy, especially as we approach the tenth anniversary of the attacks.)

And now that he’s in the news, with both the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the SEC after him – and his name splashed all over the news and the blogosphere – Konaxis’ illustrious brokerage career is likely a thing of the past. There’s knowing and then there’s knowing. And, at this point, there’s no excuse for any brokerage firm or prospective client not to.

It’s been a good many years since F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.”

Fitzgerald was wrong: just think of Richard M. Nixon and Suzanne Somers. And what would he make of Charlie Sheen?

But maybe he was on to something.

In this day of instant info on everyone, if you screw up big time in Act One, you get the hook and curtain is wrung down on whatever play you happen to be performing in.

Which is not to say that James Konaxis won’t surface elsewhere. Let’s face it, until you drop dead in the footlights, your own personal show has to go on. And for most of us, that involves earning a living. But Konaxis won’t work as a broker again – that particular career is in shambles.

By now he’s probably learned the old-fashioned way that, in the end, churn doesn’t pay. And the new-fashioned way that, once your name’s in lights, thanks to The Google, it tends to stay there.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory: one hundred years on

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

The victims were, for the most part, young women – Italian and Jewish immigrants  - who worked six days a week, for what we can be assured was a pittance, cutting, stitching, and finishing shirtwaist blouses.  The death count was 146, and they died for a lot of different reasons: because the fire engine ladders didn’t reach beyond six floor, and Triangle was on floors eight through ten; because an exit door was locked (to prevent theft); because a flimsy fire escape collapsed.

In what was an eerie pre-cursor to the final hours of the World Trade Center towers, just a few blocks and 90 years away, many of those who died jumped to avoid being burned to death.

The owners were acquitted of criminal charges, but in a civil action against them, the families of the victims were each given $75.

Even in 1911 terms, that wasn’t a whole lot of value placed on a human life.  MeasuringWorth has a calculator that computes relative values, and the range they offer for the worth of $75 in 1911 in 2009 terms (the last year they have available) extends from a low of $1,320 (calculated based on the GDP deflator) to a high of $30,800 (based on relative share of GDP). Frankly, relative share of GDP sounds way too high, since those on the lower end of the economic food change don’t exactly capture a relative share of GDP. So I’ll go with the eye-ball of the mean/median values, which is in the $8K – $9K range.

Not much for the life of a 17-23 year old girl, however miserable her life, limited her prospects and broken her English.

Let’s hope that at least some of the money went to bring over a few more greenhorns, or help put someone’s brother through City College, or buy medicine for a sick baby.

Although a couple of years later, one of Triangle’s owners was still locking the factory doors – at $75 per capita, it must have still been worth the risk - Triangle Shirtwaist led to safety laws, and to a surge in the union movement (which did, lest we forget, lead to an awful lot of good things).

Fast forward those hundred years, and we don’t have Triangle Shirtwaist factories anymore. There are still garment-district sweatshops that exploit poor immigrant labor, but most of the stitching jobs are now overseas. They’re in countries that, for the most part, don’t have any laws against Triangle Shirtwaist-style operations. And, thousands of miles away from wherever our blouses are made, we don’t have to worry about having to watch most of the workers who produce our stuff jumping out of 10th story windows (metaphorically speaking). Unless we happen to live in American communities that still house hazardous jobs like those in meat packing plants and coal mines.

For most of us, when it comes to the unpleasant matters of production, it’s blessedly out of sight…

It’s interesting to note that 1911 was by no means the last of the Great American Fires.

Just ticking off the ones I know of:

The Coconut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in 1942 killed nearly 500 people (including some neighbors of my aunt and uncle). Well over a hundred perished a couple of years later in the Hartford circus fire, when the “big top” – treated with paraffin and gasoline to waterproof it – went up in flames. (Should waterproofing really be the opposite of fireproofing?) Far more recently, the Station House fire in Providence killed 100 concert goers.

What all of these tragic events had in common was that they occurred because there were poor regulations, or no regulations, or ignored regulations.

If there’s any widespread evidence that a completely unfettered market able to dedicate itself to unimpeded pursuit of profit will look out for much of anyone and anything other than Number One, I’ve yet to see it.

Business will weigh risk and reward, and if that old devil reward outweighs risk – especially when the physical risk is to you, not them – well, we know which way that cookie is going to crumble. If all it’s going to cost them is a measly $75/per (metaphorically speaking) to take care of it, what they hey? Life in Bhopal’s supposed to be nasty, brutish, and short, no?

So today, let’s remember Lizzie Adler and Ignazia Bellotta, Rosie Cerrito and Rose Feibush, Esther Goldfield and Esther Goldstein, Kate Leone and Rosalie Maltese – who were both just 14. And everyone else who’s died because greed trumped (someone else’s) life.

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Most info on Triangle shirtwaist came from Wikipedia, as did info on the Hartford circus fire. I trusted my memory on Coconut Grove and Station House.

List of victims and the photo came from the University of Missouri – Kansas City – law school site.

P.S. Don’t mourn, organize!

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride–and then some

God knows I’ve tried, but it’s been pretty darned hard to find any vaguely amusing or mildly quirky news coming out of Japan these days. Japan – which has been such a wonderful source of blog fodder over the years: robots teaching classes, young men dating stuffed dolls, firms that rent out wedding guests…

But it’s hard to find the bright side – other than admiration for the stoic and plucky populace – out of the recent catastrophes. Like everyone else with a flat screen TV and a channel cruiser, I’ve logged plenty of time in a slack-jawed shock and awe, gasping as the scenes of the tsunami played over and over. Hoping that the little old lady would find her husband, the nice young man would find his aunt.

The news from Japan has been absolutely riveting.

Sure, we’d seen the black, debris-filled waters roiling through the streets of Banda Aceh, but those towns and villages were pretty poor to begin with. The swath of destruction in Japan cuts closer to home. The victims may be Japanese, but they have flat screen TV’s and smartphones, they play video games (and them some), they gave the world Hello, Kitty. In other words, thousands of miles of ocean and thousands of years of culture and history aside, the Japanese lifestyle is a lot closer to ours than that of the average Indonesian subsistence fisherman. And for a lot of Japanese, that lifestyle – and many times the life itself – was swept away.

Then there was the nuclear plant problem that turned bad to worse to worser.

Still, there was some good news (sorta).

We were heartened to read about plucky survivors, the brave kamikaze nuclear plant technicians who chose what they well knew might be a slow and painful death to save the day. Even the Kirin Beer plant six-pack looters gave us a bit of cold comfort: They really are just like us. They even loot (a bit, and only when they’re thirsty).

In truth, most of my after-shock thought about the trifecta tragedies in Japan has been an internal debate over whether it’s compassionate or sucker-ish to donate to a relief fund for the third largest economy on earth (even if that economy has been miserably stunted and flailing of late, as it slip-slid from number two to number three).

Then there was the news that, as a by-product of the quake, Tokyo Disneyland’s parking lot had been the victim of ground liquefaction, and had turned into a quicksand like slurry that had swallowed up 30 cars.

Certainly terrible for the owners of those 30 cars, but at least something that could put a smile on a blogger’s face (as long as no one was in those cars).

Mr. Toad’s flivver, you’ll be pleased to know, was spared: the park itself was built on “deep reinforced foundations”, its designers presumably having heeded the warnings from Disney’s classic Depression-era cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. Huff and puff as you will, it takes a lot to blow down amusement rides built on 49 foot deep, highly reinforced foundation.

In fact, Japan’s buildings and infrastructure – nuclear plants aside (an admittedly big aside) – have certainly come off as remarkable. Watching skyscrapers sway like palm trees in a tropical breeze was absolutely amazing. These guys – nuclear plants apparently aside – do know how to build.

Even when it comes to something that really is not all that important for national survival, such as Tokyo Disneyland.

Tokyo Disneyland. Paris Disneyland. Dubai Disneyland.

There may be damned little else that we’re Number One at, but our low-brow cultural exports still seem to do the trick. Not that I don’t love Disneyland. One of the high points of my young adult life was getting to ride the Flying Dumbo and swirl in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Teacups. So what if I was twenty-two. At long last, I had realized The Dream and was at Disneyland.

And that first trip to Disneyland was able to provide me with one of the signal, recurring metaphors of my business career.

In Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, you have your hands on the wheel of the flivver. You are nominally in control, steering your course. But you’re really not. You’re careening out of control, screeching bats are zooming in at your head, and you never know what’s behind the next (thankfully swinging) door. Then  - wheeee – no matter what happens, you do come out safe on the other side. Which is what pretty much happened every where I worked, even as the companies I worked for exploded or imploded.

Which is what will no doubt happen with the Japanese, as well. They are, after all, remarkably plucky, stoic, and hardworking. Difficult to imagine their populace sitting around, knocking back sake after sake in a national pity party. Resilience, I suspect, ‘R Us (or them).

Note to self: get on the Red Cross site for Japan and donate something.

Gender Manager Wanted. (Who said that no one’s hiring?)

I love to look through the Executive Focus (want ads) in the front of The Economist. Mostly they make me wistful that my career wasn’t international, wasn’t do-goody, wasn’t NGO. That I never worked as a teller at the World Bank, shook a coin-carton for UNICEF, or “made a difference to millions”, which is what the Economic Adviser – Trade to “The Commonwealth” is being offered £56,552 to do.

What was I thinking? Man…..

A few years ago, the job I most wanted to apply for was assistant private secretary to HRM The Queen. (Yes that queen: accept no substitutes.) Alas, my only qualifications were 73 w.p.m. and looking good in hats.

The most recent ad to catch my want-adding eye was for a position at the European Bank.

They’re looking for a Gender Manager.

Just what, I wondered, does a Gender Manger do?

And would I be qualified.

After all, I have been managing my own personal gender for quite a few years now, having become aware of it for the first time when my mother plunked my brother Tom down in the tub between my sister Kathleen and myself.

Ah, there, in the claw foot bath tub that yielded such little hot water that my mother had to supplement it by heating up a kettle full and pouring it into the tepid inches we bathed in, was something far different than the plumbing Kath and I possessed. Weird, peculiar, and – I must confess – a tiny bit icky. At three, I was just as happy not to have to manage that particular piece of gender apparatus, however fascinating.

A year later, my grandmother sent me a pair of PJ’s – all the way from Chicago – that violated gender norms. Whether all of her grandchildren (at that moment in time, I believe there were only six of us, four girls and two boys) got the same style I cannot say. She was big on dressing her grandchildren alike, but generally differentiated girl clothing from boy clothing. Thus, we (the girls that is) are all at my Uncle Jack’s wedding in look-alike, slightly color-varied dresses – mine was turquoise striped – while Tim and Tom were sported out in blue shorts and matching Hawaiian shirts.

Anyway, if the pajamas had been on sale, six for ten bucks at Wieboldt's – pronounced Vee-bolt’s in Grandma-speak – my grandmother wouldn’t have given a hoot whether they were boy PJ’s or girl PJ’s. You’re inside your house. You’re inside your bed. No one’s there to see you. What difference does it make? What would have mattered was that we all would have gotten something that cost the exact same amount of money.

Anyway, I was laser-focused on the fact that these purple, green, and white striped cotton PJ’s were boy pajamas. With a fly. Which, if I’d had one of those things, the thing would have peeped out of. Talk about weirded out. Icked out. And fascinated.

But fascination aside, I hated those pajamas. I know that I wanted my mother to sew the fly up, but don’t know whether I ever asked. Or whether she complied. It’s one of those things that could have gone either way. The request would have met with either “Don’t be ridiculous” or “Get me a needle and thread.” I probably didn’t ask. Perhaps I was waiting to see whether wearing those boy PJ’s would make me grow a thing. Which would have changed my entire perspective on gender management, that’s for sure.

Fast forward a few, post boy-PJ years.

When my period started, gender management really began in earnest. (Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until your sanitary napkin falls out while playing co-ed kickball in eighth grade.)

Then there were the usual gender management issues that we all have to deal with, which I won’t go into. (It’s not that kind of blog.)

So, yeah, gender manager. Been there, done that.

Still, I did have to wonder just what the European Bank was looking for.

Disappointingly, it turns out that they’re “keen to boost the participation of women, particularly in business and decision-making roles.” That they’ve “created a comprehensive Gender Action Plan” – which no doubt sounds more interesting than it is – and want the Gender Manager to “bring it to life.”

They’re looking for an advanced degree (check!) and the types of “gender equality experience” that can help “introduce a gender equality dimension to the Bank’s investments.”

Well, everything I know about the gender equality dimension I learned by working in high-tech for a kabillion years. Most of what I learned was this: That a woman’s voice is like a dog whistle – only certain ears are attuned to hear it. That admitting to mistakes and failures is perceived as a sign of weakness, not of honesty. And that no woman would ever take the Wall Street Journal into the restroom at work to read while on the pot.

Based on a quick assessment, I suspect I don’t qualify for the job of Gender Manager.

But don’t you think they could have come up with a better title for this position? Something a bit less weird, peculiar, and fascinating?

Maybe it’s the Brits.

I googled “gender manager” and the first relevant thing that came up was a “Gender Mainstreaming Manger” for Amnesty International in the U.K.

Yep. As I suspected, it’s the Brits.

Adieu, Dalton. Brearley, bye-bye. Tough to think you’re life is ruined at the age of four.

Ciao, Chapin. So long, Spence.

A Manhattan mother is suing her daughter’s former pre-school because, in her view, the school turned out to be “one big playroom”, rather than the grind factory she had hoped for when she initially wrote the check for $19K/a year.

Lucia Imprescia’s first year at York Avenue Preschool was promising enough to have her mother sign on for year two. But a month into the “school year”, Nicole Imprescia felt that the curriculum was being dumbed down. Her daughter was spending her work days with a bunch of clueless two-year olds whose curriculum focused on shapes and colors – BOR-ING – rather than on the meatier, more challenging tutelage Lucia would need to ace something called the ERB test.

ERB (founded in 1923 as the Educational Records Bureau, and now going by its more stream-lined acronym) serves the nation’s elite (or at least the branch located in NYC) in two ways. It provides the Independent  School Entrance Exam, which I take it is the SAT for prep schools, and the Early Childhood Admissions Assessment, or ECAA:

ECAA One-to-One (Early Childhood Admissions Assessment–One-to-One): A uniform testing program that eliminates testing at each school to which a child may be applying. Parents select participating schools to receive and use the results as part of their broader admission process for Pre-K - Grade 4.

(ERB also offers this:

ECAA Online (Early Childhood Admissions Assessment–Online): Coming Fall 2010. A child-centered, computer-adaptive admissions assessment for candidates to Pre-K – Grade 1.

They can’t possibly have kids take this in the “privacy” of their own homes, can they? It must be in-person. How else – other than with expensivo Cisco telepresence gear – could they get around the cheating parents? Not that any parent would cheat to get their kid into a prestigious Manhattan pre-school. Hmmmmm. Wonder if they go so far as to have ringers take the tests for their little ones? Elite School Teacher A to Elite School Teacher B: I seem to remember that little Florian had dark hair and a far richer vocabulary.)

But, in one version or another, the ECAA is, presumably, the test that the York Avenue Preschool failed to prepare Lucia Imprescia for, dooming the poor child to a life of abject, squalid mediocrity – middle management at an insurance company, marriage to a high-school phys-ed teacher, a 1960-era raised ranch in some cheek to jowl Long Island suburb.

Anyway, the NY papers were a-buzz last week with squawk about the suit. Here’s a bit from The NY Times:

The suit charges that preschool education is critical to a child’s success in life, quoting from various news articles. “It is no secret that getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school,” says one. “Studies have shown entry into a good nursery school guarantees more income than entry into an average school,” says another.

Ms. Imprescia (the elder) is seeking on behalf of Ms. Imprescia (the younger) “exemplary damages, costs and attorney’s fees”.

The suit said the school refused Ms. Imprescia’s demand to return that year’s tuition. It did not say whether Lucia had taken the test.

But that’s the staid old Gray Lady, whose readership likely includes the sorts of folks who fret about their kids’ performance on the ECAA and ISEE.

The grittier, blue-collar, more overtly class-conscious Archie Bunker Daily News had far more interesting and florid scoop:

In court papers, Nicole Imprescia suggests York Avenue Preschool jeopardized little Lucia's chances of getting into an elite private school or, one day, the Ivy League.

She's demanding a refund of the $19,000 tuition and class-action status for other toddlers who weren't properly prepped for the standardized test that can mean the difference between Dalton and - gasp! - public school…

Fortunately, Imprescia's lawyer said, the tot's prospects aren't doomed.

"Lucia Imprescia, for the record, will get into an Ivy League school - York Avenue Preschool notwithstanding," said [Matthew] Paulose, of the firm Koehler & Isaacs.

God knows there’s plenty to make fun of/be alarmed at here:

• The image of the pushy, status-obsessed NY parent.
• Kids being pressured to make the grade at age 4, when they mostly want to make jokes about whose butt stinks.
• Worrying about Princeton for a toddler. (Let the scratching and clawing, the legacy donations, the child differentiating – Come on, Tristan, you’ll stand a much better chance if you’ve written an operetta or taught yourself Braille and ASL or raised $100K for a girls’ school in Afghanistan, than if you insist on being a second-string Little Leaguer because you “like” baseball. Listen, pal, what you like has precious little to do with it. Daddy’s not busting his ass as a hedgie so you can do as you please.
• The lawyer who’s arguing against a leg of the law suit he’s bringing. If Lucia’s smart enough to get into an Ivy without the help of the York Avenue Preschool, this doesn’t exactly bolster the claim that they’ve damaged her chances.
• The fear about the dumbed-down color-shape curriculum. (I think back to my sister’s reaction when she realized from her three year old daughter’s description of the dog with a target around his eye that the kids in her pre-school had logged some time watching the Little Rascals. Maybe the lesson that day was about The Great Depression, or the history of black and white entertainment?)

But Ms. Imprescia the Elder is probably on to something.

The world is increasingly the oyster of the few, the proud, the global elite. And these folks do tend to go to Ivy (or thereabouts) universities.  While these institutions may not be fully meritocratic in their approach,  they do offer opportunities for the little guy to improve his lot. But in “real life” an awful lot of the opportunities go to the children of the few, the proud, the global elite who have the grades, the SATs, and the c.v.’s to make them attractive applicants. All in a very meritocratic sense, if you discount the leg up that being the type of kid who goes to a fancy private school (or an excellent public school) has over some poor schnook from Palooka-ville whose parents don’t know there’s a difference between a degree from Yale and one from Just Around the Corner Community College.

Personally, I’m not sure that being part of the few, the proud, the global elite is necessarily what you’d want for yourself or your kid. (I will confess to an occasional miffy fit because I didn’t go to an upper echelon college that might have gained me entry into this swirl…If only I had a completely different personality!)

But are we not watching the economy being hollowed out and the country shift ever-closer to oligarchy-control (or worse)? Don’t we all sometimes get the pit-in-the-stomach feeling that someday soon there’ll be the tiny number of glittering them, an ever-larger lumpen other, and – for the rest of us - a scrounge around the midden pile that’s left for the incredibly shrinking number of middle class jobs out there?

Forget about the competition to get into the global elite. What about the fight to stay in the middle of the middle?

Nicole Imprescia’s may look silly, but I can guarantee that she’s not the only one worried about making sure her child has a shot at “it.”

Places to stay the hell out of. Just added Sweetwater TX to the list

If you’ve ever wondered where the snakes went when St. Patrick drove them out of Ireland, your wonder years are over.

While some of them surely held their breath and body-surfed across the Irish Sea to Fair Albion, a good number of them – the rattlers, anyway – apparently managed to slither their way onto St. Brendan’s curragh. (This was the one he used to discover
“America” somewhere in the 6th century, well before Leif Ericson, Christopher Columbus, and Amerigo Vespucci were twinkles in anyone’s eyes.)  On landfall, the immigrant snakes – first members of the Irish emigrant diaspora - decided to shake, rattle, and roll on over to Sweetwater, Texas.

Ah, Sweetwater, Texas. Sounds almost as sweet as Sugarland, Texas, doesn’t it?

We just don’t seem to get place names like this in Massachusetts. They get Sugarland; we get Ashland. Which, given that Puritan and Irish are two of our mega-strains here in the Commonwealth, shouldn’t surprise all that much. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is what we gets written here; they gets Don’t Fence Me In.

As for Sweetwater, the closest we come in terms of town names is the more prosaic Watertown, which is located on the banks of the River Charles, a.k.a. the “Dirty Water” of the old Standells’ hit. Nothing sweet about it and us.

But, as is my Pink Slippery habit, I digress.

This is perhaps to get me off the topic du jour, which is snakes, one of the handful of members of the animal kingdom that I actually despise. And before you go all Freud on me, I don’t like rats either – even though St. Patrick didn’t bother to drive them out of the Old Sod.

Anyway, for those in the know on all things snake, Sweetwater is something of the epicenter of the rattler world.

It is there that the Rattlesnake Roundup is held each March.

"This event is a way for us to help control the population of the western diamondback rattlesnake in our area," says Donnie Willman, a volunteer with the Sweetwater Jaycees who run the event.

The roundup began more than 50 years ago as a way to combat the rattlesnake population that was killing livestock and threatening pets and even people.

"The rattlesnakes were literally coming into Sweetwater, down the streets looking for water," says Willman.

"They bite livestock, they bite the animals, your pets. They'll bite kids, people. They're a very serious problem around here." (Source: CNN.)

People can complain all they want about Massachusetts – and, believe me, plenty of them do – but to my knowledge we have never had snakes literally coming down our streets looking for water. (And that goes not just for Boston, but Worcester, and Watertown, and Ashland, too.)

Personally, I find garter snakes icky enough, without worrying about a snake that could actually kill me.

As if rounding up rattlesnakes weren’t quite enough, the festival also features a beauty pageant, Miss Snake Charmer.

The winner is picked along the usual talent and beauty lines, but the upshot of the pageant is that the winner has to decapitate and skin a snake.

"Tomorrow I get to skin snakes and chop their heads off, and I am super-excited about it," said Laney Wallace, Miss Snake Charmer 2011. "I would of never imagined in a million years that I would be Miss Snake Charmer. I'm so lucky."

Well, at least it’s not the bland “tomorrow I get to cut the ribbon at the opening of the new Walmart” duty of the more traditional pageant winner.

Everyone, by the way, gets to skin a snake while they’re at the Roundup.

For $10, visitors can take a turn at snake skinning. To record their feat they rub their hands in snake blood and leave handprints on the wall.

Whatever becomes of the bloody handprints, the snakes themselves get used. Their venom is milked – gee, that sounds like fun – and used to make snake-bite antidotes (which they probably wouldn’t need so much of if they weren’t so gung ho on hunting, milking and decapitating snakes to begin with). The meat is fried – I do believe it tastes like chicken. And the skin goes into snakeskin shoes and accessories. (Ever wonder where that snakeskin belt came from? Now you know.)

I do have to say that Laney Wallace does not look at all like your average prissy, fakey beauty queen.

She’s plenty cute – this picture doesn’t seem to do her much justice. There’s a better one on the JayCee’s site, but they disabled right click, and I’m not canny enough to grab it otherwise.

Laney is a junior at Sweetwater High and was co-winner of the talent competition, in which she sang and yodeled, “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” (Source for this bit: The Sweetwater Reporter.)

Given that she’s game for rattler decapitation and skinning – plus she can yodel – I bet Laney’ll have a better shot at becoming a cowboy’s sweetheart than I did when I thought Adam Cartwright was going to be my boyfriend. Of course, Adam would have had to give up his Ponderosa cowboy ways for the true, brooding, East Coast intellectual that lurked within – and have moved back East. Even at 12, I knew better than to dream about living on the ranch, given that every woman who stepped even one romantic-involvement toe on the Ponderosa ended up dead.

There is, of course, plenty more to Sweetwater, Texas, than the Rattlesnake Roundup. It was the site of WASP (women flyers) training during WWII, and it’s the leading wind power generating center in the Western Hemisphere. (Source: Wikipedia.)

As a member of the Sweetwater Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors put it:

"If you're bored here, it's your own fault."

Actually, I wasn’t thinking bored. I was more thinking weirded out. And more than quite possibly a bit scared at the prospect of rattle snakes teeming down Main Street. Perhaps it’s the Irish in me. We just don’t do snake.

But chacun à son goût, and all that. And, as they say, East is East and West is West….

Me, I’m just as happy to be in the namby pamby world where we don’t have to worry about rattlesnakes.

Now if only St. Patrick would come back from the dead and drive the rats out of Boston.

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By the way, what do Fred Astaire, Lawrence Welk, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley have in common?

They all entertained at the Sweetwater Municipal Auditorium, where Miss Snake Charmer was crowned.

Got a light? Zippo Lighters expands its mission

Like most of the men of his (debatable greatest) generation, my father was a smoker. He smoked unfiltered Luckies, lightened up with Marlboros (which were at least filtered), then quit entirely when I was in my early teens. This was just about the time he became ill with the non-smoking related kidney disease that would kill him a few years later.

While he was still a smoker, we – his children – often gave him smoking-related gifts for Christmas and Father’s Day. Sometimes it was a beanbag ashtray from Woolworth’s, which I’m happy in a non-smoker kind of way to see is still available for purchase. Sometimes a couple of us chipped in and got him a carton of cigarettes. (Not exactly a swell gift to give Dad, but this was pre-Surgeon General’s “revelation” – long after cigarettes were known as ‘cancer sticks’ -  that smoking caused cancer.)

Surprisingly, we never thought to get him a cigarette lighter, and I don’t actually recall if he ever used one.

It does seem unlikely, however, that he made it through four Lucky Strike-smoking years in Uncle Sam’s Navy during Big WWII without having gotten himself a Zippo lighter. (He did, after all, have a pair of ultra-cool RayBan sunglasses – Navy-issue, perhaps – that he used when summer driving for the rest of his life.)

If he’d used a lighter, it definitely would have been a Zippo, the official cigarette lighter of WWII era dads. And one that was definitely marketed as a swell father’s day gift. (The smokin’ dads in ads in the 1950’s were always depicted with the more wholesome, upscale, I-went-to-college-and-wore-bucks pipe, rather than the more raffish, working stiff butt.

Anyway, Zippo, after nearly 80 years in the lighter biz – still family owned, and still making lighters in their Pennsylvania factory – is taking a look at the decline in the numbers of American smokers, which, of course, their product has indirectly help hasten, and is diversifying. They’re branching out into men’s fragrance, clothing, watches, camping gear and other “lifestyle” goods.

In diversifying, Zippo is hoping to trade in on their small-i iconic brand in a way similar to a capital-I Iconic  brand like Harley Davidson, as well as other smoking-related brands like Camel. (While Marlboro has some branded merchandise – or did for a while; I remember seeing windbreakers – apparently my father’s cigarette of origin, Lucky Strikes, was never deemed sufficiently iconic brand-worthy.

Naturally, with the Zippo fragrance, one asks whether is smells like second hand smoke or cigar fumes or something else smoker-ish. (Actually, some pipe tobacco smells pretty good, at least when you’re walking past the smoke shop in Harvard Square.) But Zippo has taken a different olfactory path:

…the new cologne doesn't smell anything like lighter fluid, says David Warfel, Zippo's global marketing director. Instead, Zippo says, it's "woody" and "spicy." (Source: Wall Street Journal.)

Much as I’d like to see Zippo succeed here, I think they’re up against it when it comes to the cologne name-thang.

I do believe most cologne-using men have something in mind when the slap on the old after-shave, and that something is not associated with the word “zippo.” Now “zippo” may, in fact, be what most cologne-using men get most of the time. (Think “unlucky strike out”.)

Thus, men’s colognes are more likely to have names that are more evocative of getting some and/or that at least give good macho. I actually couldn’t think of any men’s fragrance other than Paco Rabanne and Aramis, which was sold on the counter kitty-corner to the one I sold stationery and pens on at Filene’s one Christmas, oh, about 40 years ago.

Aramis fits: it sounds romantic. And Paco sounds rakish enough, proving my point (at least to my satisfaction).

Anyway, I went to check out what men’s colognes are called by going to a fragrance web site.

Most are named for a designer or brand – Calvin Klein, Polo - but a number of them (also) have tags like “Sport” and “Extreme.”  I note that Swiss Army has a men’s cologne, and there’s also something out there (on the discount table) called Randy Moss Grabman. (Just don’t tell the ladies you’re wearing it.) The most peculiar I came across is Eau d’Issey, which sounds way too much like “Oh sissy”. So maybe there’s a chance for a cologne named Zippo, after all.

Zippo has tried to expand its product line before:

In the 1960s and 1970s, Zippo tried to spread its bets by making tape measures, key holders and belt buckles, but all were later discontinued. Zippo even considered making golf-ball warmers to increase driving distances, only to conclude that the legal liability would be too great if the heated projectiles bounced off people's heads. Over the past two decades it has added pocket knives and leather purses.

Although the golf-ball warmers won’t be on offer – and who needs a golf-ball warmer when you can whack your Titlist with a Callaway Big Bertha and if you want to get a bit more travel out of it? -  Zippo will have plenty of goods. They plan on selling them in airport boutiques, kiosks, and stores like Urban Outfitters – which fits with their rock-band business. Fans buy lighters with a band’s logo on them, then wave them around at concerts. (After the Station House fire in Rhode Island, I’m guessing these are outdoor venues.)

I wish Zippo all the luck in the world with its new product lines. Small ($200M), family-owned, made-in-the-USA kind of business. Went with us to the last “good” war. Guarantees their product for life – and that’s life of the product, not life of the user, which is likely abbreviated if he/she uses that Zippo with much frequency.

And I do hope they’ not planning on calling their cologne  .

That flame would definitely be dead.