Lather, rinse, repeat.

I haven’t looked at the back of a shampoo bottle in years. (Now the front, I do look at, just to make sure I’m treating my locks to something designed for the color-enhanced head of hair.) But I do believe that at least some of them used to come with instructions that were more detailed than the simple “lather, rinse, repeat” guidelines. Which, come to think of it, really wouldn’t do the trick for someone who didn’t realize that, before you lathered, you had to a) wet your head and b) introduce some shampoo into the equation somehow. And don’t get me going on that “repeat”, a shameless pitch to get folks to use up their shampoo twice as fast they have to. Seriously, unless you’ve just completed an Iron Man race, or are at the hairdressers, who doubles up on the hair-washing process?

And unless you just dropped down from wherever like The Brother from Another Planet, who actually needs instructions for shampooing their hair?

Surely, this information is handed down parent to child and, failing that, by observing others at the gym – or during a shampoo commercial. (Say, that’s how it’s done!)

Into this category of duh-obvious I hasten to add the old Cool Whip ads in which patrons of the Tucker Inn implored Sarah Tucker to reveal the secret of her Pudding in a Cloud recipe.

Even the most kitchen-impaired among us should have been able to figure out that it was a plop of Cool Whip, into which you added a plop of pudding.

Then the other day, while wasting time trolling the business news for Pink Slip topics, I clicked through on an article on how to accelerate your retirement savings. Since the only methods I’ve been able to come up with have been playing the lottery and trying to figure out if there really is a way-back machine that would enable me to do a do-over. (Note to prior self: work only for companies where the options will be worth something. Let me qualify that: work only for companies where the options will be worth something that is above water.)

So I brought the article up.

The first suggestion?

Don’t limit your saving to your IRA/401K options:

If you're in a high enough income tax bracket, the solution may be simply to think outside of the fund. While there are limits on how much money you can contribute to a tax-favored qualified retirement plan, you can save as much as you want somewhere else.

"Somehow people have a tendency to believe that the only money they can have in retirement has to have the word IRA attached to it … and that's just not true," says Scott Cramer, president of Cramer & Rauchegger, a financial advisory firm in Winter Park, Fla. "If you have maxed out your IRAs and your 401(k)s, don't be afraid to put money into a savings account."

Okay, I realize that the Internet has a ginormous appetite for content, and that its maw must be fed round the clock. But “you can save as much as you want somewhere else”?  This is someone’s idea of advice? Surely, there can’t be all that many people – especially those in the vaunted “high enough income tax bracket”, which, we all know, ain’t all that high – who don’t realize that they can actually have savings that aren’t in an IRA?

I mean, there’s a difference between knowing and doing – as in, I knew I should have been more careful about the companies I worked for, but I was just so drawn to the loveable losers.

As for “save more” being the first up suggestion for how to save more for retirement.

Capital D-U-H to this bit of advice.

Needless to say, assuming that they hit us with their best shot, I took a pass on looking through the follow on suggestions.

But I can imagine what some of them might have been:

• Periodically look through your house for every place where you’ve ever tossed change. Don’t forget to look in coat and jacket pockets – you might even find a bill here and there. Take this money – it might actually amount to something real and tangible, like $48 – and put it in your IRA. Or in a – get this – savings account that has nothing explicitly to do with retirement savings.
• Distract the kids and raid their piggy banks. If you don’t have kids of your own, distract your friends’ kids when you’re visiting them. Don’t do anything too obvious, but a few bucks cadged here and there over the course of a year can add up to something real and tangible, etc. Yes, this is a generational wealth transfer, but where’d they get that money to begin with? If you’re the parent, they likely cadged it from you. If you’re “just” a friend, you probably stuck at least $5 worth of it in a birthday envelope at some point. Special note: that thing with the kitchen knife getting coins out of one of those little amber glass pigs really does work. Not that I’ve used this method on any unsuspecting kids – just sayin’.
• Hold a yard sale. In the spirit of caveat emptor, don’t label with Renoir puzzle “missing piece”. Go ahead and ask for the full two bucks, but be prepared to have it negotiated down to one. If you started with the “missing piece” news, you’d only get a quarter – max. Resist urge at the end of the day – a day during which you had to put up with complete strangers make fun of your taste in books, music, videos, and museum posters, but actually argue over who saw the tacky wedding-gift vase from Aunt Bertha first – to look at the pitiful amount of money in the cash box and say f it and order a pizza. Instead, deposit it in the bank. (Even though the interest rates will be equivalent, avoid depositing it your kid’s piggy bank. You never know who’s out there with a knife.)
• Walk city streets with your eyes trained on the sidewalk. While this used to be good urban practice just to avoid stepping in a dog mess, people are pretty good at picking up after their pooches these days. Now you’re looking for change. The average American will not stoop to pick up a penny. Or a nickel, even, for that matter. But you’re trying to beef up your retirement. So, with eyes on the prize, pick up every stray coin you spot when you’re out and about (unless it’s in the middle of the odd dog mess). Over the course of a year, this could add up to a dollar or two that you can easily add to your savings – be it IRA or non-tax exempt bank account.
• While you’ve got your eyes on the prize, follow only the “Take a Penny” mandate when you’re paying cash for something. To spare yourself some embarrassment, make a small show of looking through your change purse and pockets while muttering, “I know I have two pennies in there somewhere.” Trust me, the clerk will quickly become exasperated, as will the four people standing behind you in line, and hand you the two pennies from the dish next to the cash register. Don’t get greedy. It’s marginally acceptable – particularly if you’re trying to accelerate your savings – to help yourself to three cents, but scooping up four pennies is implicitly verboten.

I could go on, but you get the point. Those pennies saved today may look like pennies from heaven once you retire.

You heard it here!

Something is rotten in the state of Nott Cott

Seriously, folks, I don’t give The Royals all that much shelf-space in my mind. Sure, I gobbled up the article in the latest Vanity Fair on Prince Andrew’s troubling relationship with some American financier who’s done time for procuring and consorting with underage girls. But I only read VF when I’m on a plane, and I didn’t buy it looking for news on Randy Andy.

Naturally, of course, I did manage to glance at all the cute pics of Kate and Wills on their recent trip to Canada and LA. (Come on, who didn’t?)

But, no, I’m not what I would consider a royal hound.

And yet, I can’t deny that I didn’t read last week’s bit in the Boston Globe that talked about how Kate and Wills’ new digs on the grounds of Kensington Palace don’t exactly pass the sniff test.

That’s Nottingham Cottage – not that I’m one of them, but that would be Nott Cott to those in the know – in the lower right, marked with the red-encircled 1.

Sorry I don’t have a clearer image, but I’m not at liberty to share the private photos that Kate sent me.

Anyway, the newlyweds are moving into the two-bedroom Nott Cott, apparently having taken a pass on the late Princess Margaret’s 19 room apartment – the one with the turquoise walls  – for the more intimate option of a standalone house. If anything on the grounds of Kensington Palace, where the non-Queen royals camp out, can truly be said to be standalone.

Unfortunately, as can happen with older houses – I’m not sure about Nott Cott, but Kensington P dates to the late 1600’s – the place smells kind of musty.

So Kate has ordered up a load of high-end air fresheners and scented candles to mask that old, nose-tickling scent o’ moldering damp.

Apparently these items weren’t on her gift registry, so she had to go ahead an place here order for a six month, $1.5K supply of:

…candles and diffusers by high-end British designer Kelly Hoppen. The products come in four scents: aromatic, woody, spicy; woody, spicy, fruity; floral, powdery; woody, citrus.

I hopped on over see what Hoppen scents are all about, and, trust me, that “four scents” doesn’t quite do things justice. Each scent has a “top note”, like bergamot or iris, a “heart note” like lavender or peach, and a “base note” like amber or myrrh.

We have certainly come a long way, baby, from the cardboard pine tree dangling from the cab’s rear view mirror and the can of Lysol

But even the most complex and noteworthy of scents, even the fact that the 4.4 kg candle burns for 400 hours, can only disguise a bad smell. It won’t get rid of it.

This I learned first hand many years back when my mother ignored a very nasty odor emanating from the trunk of her Cutlass. Which she tried to mask with some sort of deodorizer, and by driving with the windows open, even when it was 20 degrees out.

But there was definitely something fishy going on in that trunk, and one day I decided to do a bit of exploration.

I have to say that, when we started to remove the rank yech that was under the trunk mat, I thought we were pulling out dead animal remains. (And gagged in the driveway.) But we soon realized – given that there were chunks of it in the suppurating gunk - that what we had was rotting dog food, which – who knew? – contained fish meal.

Somewhere along the line, a 20 pound bag of dried dog food had ripped open, and some of the tasty morsels had made there way under the trunk mat. Where they were met with some wet caused by the imperfect seal to the trunk. Where they proceeded to rot and puff up well beyond the size of a bite-sized piece of Gravy Train.

Once we had removed all of  the unspeakable mess, the smell dissipated.

This, my dear Duchess of Cambridge, is what is call root cause analysis, and fixing the problem.

So, if you’re going to be spending a couple of years in Nott Cott, I would first off suggest getting a dehumidifier – industrial strength – and having Wills and Harry install it in what is no doubt a really creepy old basement. This won’t solve the problem, but may keep it from getting any worse.

Then I would whistle in Mike Holmes, from Holmes Inspection on HGTV.

I’ve watched plenty of Mike in action, and I can assure you that he won’t let you get away with disguising “it” with Kelly Hoppen scents with patchouli base notes.

No, Mike is more of a rip and replace kind of guy, but he’ll find your problem for you.

I think he just works in Canada, but that’s a Commonwealth Nation, and you and the hubby just paid O, Canada, such a nice visit. So he’d probably be happy to stop in with his crew. I don’t know the rules of the show, but my guess is that, if you allow your house in all its tsouris glory to be shown as an episode on HGTV, the costs are taken care of, or that you’re at least given a break.

Which would be a nice break for The Royal Purse, given how many mouths it has to feed.

Anyway, good luck with the yucky smell at Nott Cott, and remember that masking ain’t fixing.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and the making of Thelma Madine

A few weeks ago, while lying on my flu-bed, I happened to take in a number of episodes of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which chronicles the wedding planning and the big day itself for young traveller girls living in England. For those unfamiliar with the travellers (formerly called tinkers), they’re an Irish nomadic group, found in England, Ireland, and parts of the US. They mostly live in caravans (mobile homes), and specialize in dog breeding, horse trading, roofing and paving – in a largely underground economy.

Travellers tend to be pretty insular, and live lives decidedly out of the mainstream. I’ve seen travellers a number of times in Ireland. Often times,I’ve seen children, or a young mother with child, out begging. One time in Galway, we were sitting in a pub having lunch when a traveller granny and her grandson came in and sat down near us. The kid fixed us with an if-looks-could-kill stare, while we did everything we could to avoid eye contact, in fear that he would suck out souls out. When granny went to pay her tab, she pulled a wad of bills about eight inches thick out of her skirt. On another trip, my husband and I, taking a stroll outside of Dingle, passed by a small travellers encampment – three or four caravans. As we were walking by, a little boy about three or four years old started pegging stones at us. We didn’t say anything – this was not a crew we wanted to tangle with – but just took off.

An interesting subculture, that’s for sure.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding take whats I’m sure is a typical “reality” show look at this subculture through the lens of a traveller wedding.

Traveller girls are strongly encouraged to remain virgins until their marriage, and are (thus not surprisingly) strongly encouraged to get married during their teens, after which they lose whatever small freedoms they enjoyed and live their lives strictly under the thumb of their husbands. For all of its sexual conservatism (the Irish travellers are devout, if somewhat superstitious, Roman Catholics), girls from a very young age (we’re talking five or six here) prance  around in sluttish Bratz dolls garb, and dance in ways that would make a judge at a tiny tots beauty pageant blush.

Over the years, traveller weddings have turned into colossal productions – at least if we can trust My Big Fat at all, at all.

Precursor to the Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, by the way, is the Big Fat Gypsy First Holy Communion, for which the little ones get primped out in elaborate gowns that often outweigh them and are so uncomfortable that they draw blood, fancy hair-dos, and make up jobs that make Jon Benet-Ramsey appear natural. After receiving their first communion, the children attend elaborate parties, at which the girls do dances imitating Brittany Spears, Beyoncé, and whatever pole-dancers they’ve managed to see.

Then there are the weddings, for which girls don dresses that may weigh well over 300 pounds, and can cost upwards of 50,000 Euros. Here’s what we’re talkin’:

As with the communion dresses for the kiddies, these numbers can cause extreme discomfort, and the brides (at least as depicted on My Big Fat) can barely get down the aisle without toppling over.

Not to be outdone, here’s what the bridesmaids might be wearing (and here you were thinking that you had bridesmaids dresses that you’d never be able to wear again…)

But enough about My Big Fat for the mo’. What find really intriguing here – other than the way in which “reality” TV ends up defining “reality” - is that there is a dress designer who, over the years, has built up a specialty as the go-to for these elaborate rigs. Her name is Thelma Madine, and she’s the consistent thread throughout the episodes of My Big Fat that I’ve seen.

While she apparently does “normal” dresses – of the more Kate-ish and Pippa-ish variety – what Madine has done is carved out a unique niche for herself. It’s an interesting one, although with the traveller communities being relatively small, it might be a challenge to make your entire living at it. (On the other hand, at 50,000 Euros-per, you don’t have to design and sell a lot of these now, do you?)

Madine doesn’t have a web site that I could find, but she is on Facebook, where we learn that:

Thelma Madine is the owner of Liverpool-based Nico's Dressmakers. In 2006, she designed what is believed to be the world's biggest wedding dress for 16-year-old Carly O'Brien, which weighed in at a whopping 25st [25 stone, or 350 pounds] with a 60ft train. The 30,000 Swarovski crystals and 120 metres of silk are rumoured to have cost Carly's father more than £15,000. Not that Thelma's customers like to discuss prices.

Thelma has a made for reality TV backstory herself. (Source: Daily Mirror.)

Left divorced with three kids while in her 30’s, she went on the dole – and started sewing fancy christening dresses which she sold at a Liverpool flea market. Even though she was making decent money from her sales, Thelma stayed on the dole. (Oops.) And ended up serving four months in the Big House for fraud.

After her release in April 2002, Thelma went back to making children’s clothes for a market stall. She says: “One day a girl asked, ‘Do you do Gone With The Wind dresses?’ and I thought, ‘They’re just velvet and sticking-out dresses. I can do that’. So I said yeah.

“She wanted three for her girls and said she would be back next week to pick them up but, in true traveller-style, she didn’t turn up that week. So I put them up on the stall and every five minutes someone was asking, ‘How much are they?’ I thought, ‘My God, I have cracked it!’

“It was all the travellers who were asking me. So for the next few years I was making kids’ outfits for gypsy children, getting more and more extravagant.”

And then a traveller girl stopped by her booth to ask her to make her wedding dress – and the dresses for her 18 bridesmaids.

The rest is history – or, better yet, reality TV – and Thelma has been whipping up dresses for traveller weddings ever since. The wider, the more sparkling, the heavier the better. In one episode of My Big Fat, the dress had light-up butterflies on it.

So here’s to Thelma, a complete and utter success story.

From the downside of time-served for being a welfare cheat, to being a successful entrepreneur and reality TV star/household word.

I was going to say ‘only in America’, but this is the UK.

Ah, that shared cultural heritage!

What Would Madame Defarge Knit

I’m not much of a knitter.

I do know how to cast on, knit and purl, but that’s about it.

I haven’t picked up a pair of needles in years, and pretty much the only things I’ve ever knit are a couple of garter-stitched scarves, and a not-quite bubble gum pink sweater with a pattern of periwinkle and green stripes, and china blue and ivory bars. It sounds completely hideous, but it was actually not bad. The problem was I didn’t realize that the bottom of a the sweater was supposed to be more fitted, so I didn’t make the end-zone tighter. Since this was the part I started with, and I didn’t catch the error or my ways until the darned thing was done, I lived with an ill-fitting sweater that just kind of hung square at the bottom, like a tunic. Only shorter. Sigh…

Crocheting is better for me: it goes faster, is somewhat mindless, and is much more forgiving, and requires far less attention, than knitting. So while I’ve done nothing in the last few years, I have crocheted quite a few scarves and afghans in my time.

My sister Kathleen, however, is an expert knitter. She not only makes things that are complex beautiful, but she also designs her own pattern.

One of her designs (along with an essay) was published recently in a book entitled What Would Madame Defarge Knit, or WWMDK, which is edited by Heather Ordover.

The title alone should be a dead (hah!) giveaway that this is not your average Family Circle Christmas Crafters special (Santa Claus toilet paper covers). If you’ve forgotten your Dickens, Madame Defarge was the villain avec knitting needles in A Tale of Two Cities, who I suspect used more than the garter stitch to encode the names of those on the list for the guillotine. Anyway, the book contains a number of patterns, and accompanying essays, inspired by characters in classic fiction: a stole for Jane Eyre, gauntlets for Ibsen’s Nora, and a neck warmer for Hester Prynne, which is my sister Kathleen’s contribution. (That’s the Hester Prynne’s neck warmer to the left. I’ve seen it in “real life” and it’s quite beautiful. If they ever do another film of Scarlet Letter, they absolutely should have Hester wearing this.)

WWMDK is smart, brainy and literary, and, even though I won’t be knitting anything, I avidly read through a number of the essays. (Okay, I didn’t read the H.P. Lovecraft-er ones.) The ones I read were sufficiently interesting that I now have re-reading Jane Eyre, A Scarlet Letter, and A Tale of Two Cities on my bucket list. I may also add a first read of Moby Dick, since that first time around I will confess to not having gotten past “Call me Ishmael” before I fled to the Classic Comics version.

There’s also a number of interesting business angles to the publication of WWMDK, which speaks to a lot of the issues swirling around in the Internet-wrought, “free the content”, how do the creative types get paid, publishing world. The editor had looked at traditional publishers in the knitting/crocheting world, but, as my sister Kath has it:

…the numbers just didn't add up, and there's also the issue of giving up creative control. 

So, the book is being published by the Cooperative Press, founded by Shannon Okey, a.k.a. Stitchgrrl and Knitgrrl, and dedicated to books in the arts and crafts world that might not be of interest to the major houses keen only on those titles with big-run potential. The book is available in hard- or soft-back, as an e-book, via pdf, and on-demand. To keep publishing costs low – and actually in keeping with the old-fashioned, literary classics theme – WWMDK is published in black and white. Given that knitters usually want to see what the finished product will look like, there are all sorts of links to colored illustrations online.

Thus the modern, new-fangled, scary-for-writers world is actually making it possible for a niche product that will have serious appeal to a small but die-hard audience to see the light of day.

I have a number of writer friends, and many of them are caught up in the struggle to get an agent, to get the agent to do anything for them, to find a publisher, to get the publisher to do anything for them, and so on. Even those writers with some track record and commercial success find themselves with incredible shrinking advances, and taking corporate (mostly freelance) writing and editing gigs to support their creative writing jones (and, yeah, their families).

At the end of the day, writers want to get published. They may fantasize that they’ll actually be able to make a living at their “creative stuff”, but we all know that for every Joyce Carol Oates there are ten a thousand folks (for a moment I’d forgotten about all those MFA programs) with the critically well-received collections of short stories that sold 1,000 copies, who are scratching out a living as minimum wage adjuncts and/or writing web copy for banks. And for each of these folks, there’s another 10,000 who don’t even have the critically well-received collection of short stories. They’ve got the $20 story (see below) in the literary journal (circulation 700), and a bunch of moderately encouraging (if you have your happy ears on)  rejection letters.

And so it goes.

For those (of us) without the big name, the benediction of a Joyce Carol Oates, or what is called a “platform” (i.e., your own personal ability to sell a lot of books), the small presses like Cooperative are/will be a godsend.

The Cooperative approach provides an extra benefit for the pattern designers, again, courtesy of my sister Kath:

As an added element:  knit designers are notoriously underpaid (with rates not having changed for a long time.)  In most compilation books (patterns from various designers) the designer is paid a flat fee (most often a pittance).  In the case of WWMDFK, designers will get a royalty based on how the book sells, which is just about unique.  This, of course, aligns the writers with the publishers in desire to promote the book, and offers the potential for a better income than the flat $50 or so they would otherwise receive.  (You know the equivalent in the literary anthology world--20 bucks and a copy of the book.)

Kath’s personal tagline, by the way, is Knitters:  Creating a Better World One Sock at a Time. She ain’t kidding. Her socks are wonderful: comfy and warm. Having a pair almost makes me want it to be winter again.

Literary and knitting types, get yourself a copy of What Would Madame Defarge Knit.

Too much monkey business.

The other day, I gave into a bit of temptation and, feeling furtive and somewhat depraved, clicked through to see what’s up at The New York Post.

What was up was an article on a middle-aged couple who, having lost a Beanie Baby monkey, were trying to cope with their grief:

"It's heartbreaking," [Jack] Zinzi told The Post yesterday. "It's like losing a child. We take him everywhere we go, we talk to him. We even love to stand him up and make him dance and come alive."

It’s like losing a child.

Spoken like someone who apparently doesn’t have the imagination or empathy to consider what it might be like to actually lose a real child, or even a real, animate, honest-to-goodness pet.

Are these folks – Jack Zinzi and his partner, Bonni Marcus – for real, or are they, perhaps, performance artists?

Apparently they do have some sense of reality. The reward they offered for the return of Bongo was “only” $500. I suspect that if this had been a living, breathing child (or even a pet), the ante may have been upped.

Still, there’s that disproportionate statement: It’s like losing a child.

Personally, although I don’t have any children of my own, I do have children that I love deeply, and letting myself even toy with contemplating their loss is completely, unfathomably painful. Unimaginable. Too big for the mind to hold. Like trying to imagine nothingness. Only worse.

So what must it be like for parents?

Having grown up in a home where the specter of our family’s own lost child lurked perpetually in the shadows, I find that someone’s comparing a missing stuffed animal to a missing child stunted, perverse, absurd.

Not that I can’t still conjure up the pain at losing my First Communion rosary beads – dropped on the filthy floor of the Plymouth Theater in Worcester when I was eight or nine, and not to be found even after the kindly usher played his flashlight over the beneath-the-seats detritus of crushed paper soda cups and empty packages of Black Crows and Junior Mints.

But it was only a thing. And things, unlike human beings and pets, are completely replaceable or at least more easily livable without. Or at least they should be, no?

I have a stuffed dog, Sniffy, that I’ve had since my fourth birthday.

I wouldn’t say that we’re attached at the hip or anything, but we are, after all these years, attached. Sniffy “lives” on top of a chest of drawers in our bedroom – at least that’s where I think he lives; he may actually be in the bookcase – and I’d say that, maybe once a year or so, I have commune a bit with the old boy, mostly thinking about my childhood and my parents. I can look him in the eye and remember the steel eyes he came with that, when they were lost, my mother replaced with jet button eyes. I can examine the scar on his tummy, where my mother replaced the stuffing that had been leaking out and flattening Sniffy, with a bunch of cut up nylons. I can look at his worn “fur” and remember the thick pelt he came with. I can still se the box he came in: a long cardboard carton with a cellophane window, much like the cartons that a half-dozen powdered sugar donuts came in.

So, yeah, Sniffy and I go back quite a ways. And, if I don’t exactly love him as I must have earlier in my life, I have a soft-spot for him in my heart, and do have feelings for affection for him. Errrr, it.

Still, if Sniffy went missing, there would be no $500 reward for him. If my home were burning down, Sniffy might make the “top 100 things to save”. But maybe not.

He would be gone, but not forgotten. But he would be gone, baby, gone.

But I guess when it comes to inanimate objects, I’m just the shallow type. Unlike Marcus and Zinzi:

Marcus, who teaches at a Manhattan private school, Rennert Bilingual, says she and Zinzi have a "spiritual connection" with Bongo and that losing him put a strain on their relationship.

She said Bongo's three siblings -- three Beanie Babies identical to Bongo named Doe, Ray and Me -- are also suffering. "The head of the family is gone," she lamented.

Is this what ‘theater of the absurd’ means?

Somewhere along the line, I read that Zinzi and Marcus raised Bongo like a son.

Am I repeating myself here when I ask about the meaning of ‘theater of the absurd’? If this isn’t what it means, then it should be.

Raising a Beanie Baby like a son…

I suspect that Bongo never cried out for them in the middle of the night. Never squirted either of them in the face when they forgot to toss the diaper over Bongo’s wee thing when he was lying there on the changing table. I don’t imagine there was that painful first day in day care. Projectile vomiting. A first step. A lost tooth. No debate over whether his first word was “mama”, “dada”, or “binky”. No panic when they realized that Bongo’s stuffed monkey was nowhere to be found, and how were they going to get him to sleep without it?

Did they ever have to say “indoor voice” or “use your words”? Explain what those two doggies in the park were doing? Talk about how sometimes grownups fail you, and sometimes other kids are mean? Pushed on the toe of the sneakers they’d just paid $60 for and realize they no longer fit? Agonized over how clumsy their kid was at tee-ball? What a mess he was when he ate ice cream? How proud they felt when he was kind to the runny-nosed misfit kid in the park?

Did Bongo ever hug them back?

I may not know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies, but I do believe it’s a bit less physically, emotionally, and spiritually taxing to raise a kid than to “raise” a Beanie Baby. On the teeter-totter of life, the real kid keeps you grounded; the Beanie Baby’s up in the air.

I do hope that Zinzi and Marcus find Bongo – for their sakes, and for the pathetic fallacy sakes of Doe, Ray, and Me. They’ve clearly invested a lot of emotion in Bongo, and this little stuffed monkey is obviously a proxy server for a lot of what’s going on in this couple.

Still, it seems a bit over the top to have this kind of reaction to the loss of a stuffed animal.

Not to mention it raises a grave question: if Bongo were so all-fired important, why was he placed so carelessly in a bag that he could (and obviously did) fall out of? Shouldn’t he have been swaddled in a Snugli? Or at least secured in an inner, zippered pocket.

Anyway, this is what I get for giving into temptation and reading The New York Post.

Never say never, but (maybe) never again.

And in this corner, Octomom

I must say that it has been quite a blessed while since I had given any thought to Nadya Suleman, the Octomom.  And I am thankful for that. I’ll go so far as to state that I had actually forgotten about her existence, and could have quite happily spent the remainder of my life without having given her another thought. (Add Kate Whatsername to the list, too. I am delighted to realize that I’ve not seen hide nor the extensioned hair of that one in ages. So much so that I have actually forgotten her last name. Okay, okay. It came to me: Gosselin.)

Anyway, the only good thing about insta-celebs with little talent other than an uncanny ability to insert themselves as a log in the public eye, is that they do tend to drop out of the public eye, as a new, more exciting log gets rolled in.

But Octomom’s back, and, at the end of the month, will get in the ring for an exhibit match, in Springfield Massachusetts, brought to us by Damon Feldman of the Celebrity Boxing Federation. This outfit definitely knows its “celebrities”. It’s worked with the likes of Jose Canseco, Tonya Harding, John Wayne Bobbitt, Joey Buttafuco, Michael Lohan (Lindsay’s dad), and Rodney (“Can’t we all just get along”) King.

And now the Octomom…

I know that she has 14 little mouths to feed, 15 if you count her botoxed own, but is this really the best that Nadya Suleman can do?

Apparently so.

She’s already celebrity boxed in New Jersey, and Feldman is looking for more venues for her.

“It’s just a fun fight, nothing serious,” Feldman said in an interview this week…

The August boxing event in Springfield will give one woman a chance to fight it out with Suleman. The fight will consist of three, one-minute rounds. The women will wear oversized gloves and protective head gear, according to Feldman, and no experience is required. It’s part of a tour that’s being orchestrated at sites around the country.
“We would love to have a radio personality or someone well-known in the community who has a following and wants to get in the ring with Nadya,” he said.

Ah, yes, ‘just a fun fight.’

Personally, I have little desire to watch any boxing match, but if I were to, I’d be more interested in watching a couple of pros go at it, or Mark Wahlberg playing Irish Mickey Ward, than look at a couple of amateurs wearing puffy gloves fake-flail away at each other for three minutes.

Yawn!

I mean, who would pay to see Nadya Suleman, Joey Buttafuco, or Michael Lohan do anything?

Not to mention that Feldman was put on probation for rigging matches. As if it’s not tacky enough to watch Michael Lohan go slap-happy with John Wayne Bobbitt in a fair fight. This boring crap – faux to begin with – is rigged. Not that this is a new low. We’ve been plenty low before. Still…

Of course, there is a good cause (cough-cough) angle to this:

A portion of the proceeds from the event will go to a local charity, Feldman said. “We heard about the tornado that struck Springfield, and we are interested in contributing to local efforts there,” he said.

Love that weasel-ly “a portion” wording.

Let’s face it. One mil per dollar netted after “expenses” (cough-cough) is “a portion”.

If this event sells more than 50 tickets, I call one more pure and clear signal that the end of the world – or at least America’s once-envied corner of it – is nigh.

Of course there is one way we could pretty much guarantee a full SRO house that would sell out in cities across this great land of ours. It seems to these old failing eyes that Nadya Suleman, in this corner in the red, and Casey Anthony, in that corner and wearing green, bear something of a vague resemblance to each other. A fight between Octomom  (mother to 14 living, breathing, mom-needing kids) and Tot Mom (who just may have gotten away with murder, or may just be a crazy sociopathic liar who had the ill luck to have her daughter snatched and murdered)?

Talk about fight of the century! The ultimate dream match!

This could be enough to ward off a double dip recession, or even spur a recovery, what with the gate, and the television rights, and the souvenirs…

Why, it could even make us forget we ever knew who Joey Buttafuco and John Wayne Bobbitt were.

But if we really want to stir up the economy, how about a second fight on the bill, with Amy Fisher taking on Joey Buttafuco’s ex-wife. Followed by Tonya Harding vs. Massachusetts’ sweetheart, Nancy Kerrigan (in the headlines recently because her brother roughed up their father, bringing on a heart attack that killed him).

Now that I think about it, the “celebrity” match up possibilities are endless.

Think I’ll call Damon Feldman and give him an earful.

Holy Smoke! Here’s some bullets I’d want to be dodging

I had lunch with my friend Peter yesterday, and he mentioned a recent Colbert Nation during which Stephen talked about a company that turns cremains into bullets. Now, I’ve heard of beating swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks. And, of course, having grown up Catholic I got plenty of the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” story. But turning ashes into bullets? Ah, American ingenuity.

Anyway, while I haven’t yet looked at the Colbert Report, but I was intrigued enough to saunter over to Holy Smoke to see what they had on offer.

Holy Smoke is right.

I was marginally familiar with cremation jewelry that included ornamental bullet pendants in which you could stash your loved ones cremains. But Holy Smoke offers the real deal: bullets loaded with gun powder and that little something extra called your loved one.

We offer a way to honor your deceased loved one by giving or sharing with him or her one more round of clay targets, one last bird hunt, or one last stalk hunt.

I guess because I’ve never been a skeet shooter, bird hunter, or deer stalker, I find it a bit unusual, even a trifle unsettling, that someone would want to be turned ex post facto into a bullet that could be used to take the life of another creature (or even to smash a clay pigeon to smithereens).

Not that I have any particularly noble plans for my remains: a couple of grains surreptitiously sprinkled on the warning track in Fenway Park; a teaspoon or two subtly ground in with the geraniums on my parents grave; maybe a smidge tossed into Galway Bay while the moon is rising over Claddagh. As for the rest? If there’s anyone interested in keeping them in a decorative urn, have at it – as long as the urn is tasteful. Something art deco? If you’re feeling flush, maybe a cool Clarice Cliff teapot? On second thought, what a waste of a cool Clarice Cliff teapot. Just toss my leftovers into Boston Harbor or off the banks of the River Charles while humming “(Love that) Dirty Water.”

For those who chose to have their loved ones bulleted, my question is this: if you manage to kill a duck or a deer with a blast of your dear one’s past, do you consume it? There does seem to be a tiny little ick factor going here. Wouldn’t it feel a bit cannibalistic to be supping on pheasant under glass avec Uncle Joe? Or would it be viewed as a gift from the great beyond. (Dad always was a good provider…)

Anyway, in case you’re wondering about the Holy Smoke process:

You tell us what type of hunting or shooting that the decedent practiced and we can help you decide what will best suit your needs…

Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedents ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverent staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.

You get quite a bit of bang for your buck from that professional and reverent staff, by the way. That one pound of decedent’s ash yields 250 shotshells, which will set you back $1,250. Pistol bullets are priced the same as shot gun shells, while rifle cartridges are pricier: that $1,250 gets you only 100 rounds. (All sales are final, by the way, as they should be. There really can’t be much of a secondary market for bullets stuffed with someone else’s ashes. Sort of like the monogrammed tote-bags I used to see in the L.L. Bean outlet store. I don’t know how low the price would have to go before I’d buy a bag that had “Francine” embroidered on it in lime-green italics.)

Anyway, what I know about hunting and ammo could dance on the head of a pin with the heavenly choir. But I do believe that shotguns and rifles are used to shoot game animals.

Are pistols used to shoot game animals, too?

Or are they mostly used for target practice, convenience store stickups, and shooting rats at the dump?

None of which seem like a particularly reverent thing to do with good old Pa or Ma, even if we’re talking Ma Barker here.

And if Pa or Ma is used in a robbery, are they considered an accessory after the fact?

Ah, the ethical, aesthetic, and gustatory questions that arise when we consider when Fire when ready, Gridley gets turned into fire Gridley when ready.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A tip of the deer stalker hat to my friend Peter for mentioning this story to me.

Followed by a thanks for nothing, since, ever since this topic came up, all I can think about is Dick Cheney.

Naked Shorting

I admit, I’m always at something of a loss when I try to figure out how performance artists actually make a living, as opposed to just generating press and gasping gaping (or gaping gasping) from us provincials. Other than Karen Finley and the cucumber – now that I get as a money-maker. I mean, who wouldn’t want to put down their hard-earned bucks to witness such a bold performance?

I suppose, like most of those involved in things-creative, performance artists just keep their day jobs. Take Bob, the locksmith-lottery ticket guy on Washington Street, from whom I bought 35 keys today – the front door of the building that harbors the Writers’ Room of Boston was changed out, and we need to rekey all of our members (ah, the joys of being the president-by-default of a teenie-tiny non-profit).

Bob started out life as a musician, and graduated from the Berklee School of Music. To put himself through college, he bought out a locksmith, and the rest is history. For almost 40 years, his day job has been selling keys, lottery tickets, and cigarettes.

By the way, I tested every one of those 35 keys, and they all worked. So Bob’s now my go-to when I need a key. He’s already my go-to for lottery tickets, but those don’t seem to work so well. I barely ever get one number to match. But the next Power Ball prize is $160M, and I’m feeling lucky – and for that kind of payout, I can get past how humiliating it’s going to be when I win and am exposed as the kind of sucker who actually buys an occasional lottery ticket, even though I know the odds. I look at it as a couple of days of “what if” fantasizing – in my head performance artistry, as it were.

Not that Bob’s a performance artist – that I know of – but having another job is what creative types do, and I suspect that’s true for the crew that just got arrested for some naked shorting on Wall Street the other day. (Source: WSJ Online.)

Zefrey Throwell – am I the only one asking whether Zefrey’s parents actually named him Zefrey, as opposed to something more pedestrian like, say, Jeffrey? Kind of like what someone might ask if I called myself Zaureen, no? Or maybe they were hippies – was the organizer for a:

5-minute piece, which he said was a social critique of Wall Street and involved dozens of volunteers acting out the motions of people at work. He said it was a rehearsed performance "with the very specific aim of public education."

I’m all for social critiques of Wall Street, not to mention political and economic ones. I mean, I do understand that The Street is necessary, plays a critical function, keeps capital markets moving, etc. And I’m not going to be demonizing, or dimonizing, all Wall Street denizens. But what can I say? I’m not partial to cigar-smoking, braces-wearing (as in braces-suspenders, not braces-orthodontia), blue-shirts-with-white-collars and cuff-links kind of Gordon Gekko-ish guys. Who – win-win – tend to return the favor.

The performance piece involved 50 folks portraying the different types found on Wall Street started at 7 a.m. and resulted in the arrest of three of the participants - according to The New Times these were two men and a women who were playing a stock trader, a janitor and a dog-walker. Throwell, who portrayed a hot dog vendor wasn’t one of those busted. But his intent was never to:

…provoke any confrontation with the police.

"I have much bigger fish to fry, that being the financial institutions of the U.S. and the world," he said.

The Times was better (and presumably more sympathetic than the WSJ) about those bigger fish to fry. The piece was:

…“an educational attempt,” [Throwell] said, “to lend more transparency to Wall Street, a street which is so damn mysterious.” Drawing on the common fear of appearing in public naked, he hoped to create “an absurdist Freudian nightmare” of nude employment: “Wall Street, exposed,” as he put it.

Throwell had done a one-man version of this piece in the San Francisco financial district a few years back, when he was:

…eking out a living in a cubicle for the first time, as a customs broker in San Francisco: “One of the most Kafkaesque jobs I’ve ever had,” he said, “like entering the void for eight hours at a time. It was horrible. I’d never been enslaved by labor before.”

I know how he feels, as I felt exactly the same way when I worked at Wang Labs in the late 1980’s. In fact, I had Raymond Carver’s poem, “Kafka’s Watch”, pinned to my cubicle wall there. I don’t have the poem in front of me at the mo’, but there was a great line in which Kafka, after a couple of hours toiling at the insurance company, “shakes the watch in disbelief.”

Been there, done that.

Throwell no longer toils in the cubicle. In addition to his (I suspect unpaid) work as a performance artist, he’s a photographer and filmmaker, and runs a tiny 6’ x 2’ x 2’ gallery in the bowels of Rockefeller Center. But it sounds like his heart’s in performance artistry:

For “New York City Paints Better Than Me,” he donned a white jumpsuit and crawled the streets, becoming a canvas for a composition of trash and slime.

The Wall Street project – dubbed Ocularpation – was staffed by fellow performance artists, and members of a nudist group.

Though Mr. Throwell hoped that the public would connect the nude Wall Street workers with the economy, most did not make that leap. Faced with a woman stripping off her bra and panties as she talked into a headset about ordering a case of Champagne for her boss, or with a man, all his bits dangling, leading an invisible aerobics class on the sidewalk, passers-by simply whipped out their camera phones.

Yes, to be a performance artist is to be misunderstood.

But thank god for those camera phones!

We may not all be performance artistes, but, dammit, we’re all photographers now, aren’t we?

Camping

Last week, The NY Times ran another one of those delicious dudgeon-inducing, gorge-elevating articles on what rich New Yorkers do to spoil their kids. This time it was ferry them back and forth to camp in Maine on private jets.

I’m not going to take sides here, other than in my head. But reading about those experiencing the de lux side of summer camping, did bring to mind my own meager experience as a camper. Which was a lot more Little Lulu than Rollo the Rich Kid.

Camp was one of those things that, as a child, I mooned over, in much the same way I did boarding school and horseback riding. They were things I read about in the dopey girls novels I devoured, or saw occasionally on TV.

Yes, indeed, I wanted to be one of those Breck-girl pretty Protestants with a gleaming blond page boy who saved the day for Camp Windchime at the big swim-meet by leaping off my death-bunk to anchor the relay.

Instead, my summers were spent hanging around in back yards playing Clue and Monopoly, running through the sprinkler, seeing how many times in a row I could bounce a birdie off of a badminton racquet, and walking down to the bookmobile when it made it’s weekly stop at Bennett Field to check out more dopey girls novels.

But the summer between fourth and fifth grade, just after my sister Trish was born, I got to spend a week at Brownie and Fly-up Day Camp. (A fly-up is a girl in transition from Brownie to full-fledged Girl Scout.) The other girls from OLA who attended were my classmates Carol and Mary A, Carol’s sister Joan, and her friend Kathy. Carol, Mary A and I were fly-ups. Joan and Kathy were still Brownies.

The camp was held at Leicester Junior College, and part of the thrill was that we were picked up by a bus every day. Although it wasn’t the yellow school bus I would have wanted – riding a school bus was another one of those Leave it to Beaver experiences I craved -  there was still the thrill of standing on the corner of Apricot and Main, lunch sack and towel bag in hand, waiting for the bus.

On the first day, we wove newspapers into cushions called sit-upons. One day, and camp was already yielding a lifetime skill! If only we still had newspapers around, I could weave us all up a bunch of seat cushions. I also met another girl named Maureen – always exciting – as well as some girls who were actual Protestants (even more exciting, even though they weren’t of the Breck-girl pretty, ritzy-ritz Protestant variety; such girls would have been at Camp Windchime, not a some mingy Brownie-Fly-up camp that cost $10/week (if that)).

Beyond the sit-upons, we didn’t do much by way of crafts. We didn’t even make gimp lanyards. (What a bust!)

Most days we played circle games, swam in Stiles Reservoir, just up the road from Leicester JC, and hung out and gossiped. After Day One, however, we did spend some time each day rehearsing for the “talent” show that was going to be the culmination of the week.

Somehow, my “talent” was dancing the can-can with a very nice Protestant girl named Nancy. I was chosen because I’d raised my hand when asked if anyone had anything at home that even vaguely resembled a can-can skirt. What I had at home was a wide, white and blue striped skirt with a pattern of stage-coaches on it, and plenty of material to shake in can-can mode. Better yet, as my sister Kath had a matching red and white number, I could supply two costumes.

By Thursday, as Nancy and I rehearsed in our shorts, gamely pretending that we had all sorts of oo-la-la skirt and crinolines to flash, I began to have slight twinges of volunteer’s remorse.

This was going to be stupid and embarrassing. Not much fun, and certainly not much of a display of talent.

Come show time on Friday, I pretended I had a stomach ache, and, in my stagec0ach can-can skirt, went to lie down under the big pine tree where the fly-up girls hung out. I have no idea whether Nancy performed, but I suspect she was a gamer, and the show must go on…

The other highlight of the last day of camp was when the counselors and the lifeguard took off behind one of the buildings and made s’mores for themselves.

I remember Kathy crying because they wouldn’t give her one.

I didn’t cry (I was a fly-up after all, not a Brownie), but I was plenty miffed. It would have been my first s’more, and I remember how indignant we felt that the big-girl counselors had snuck off to indulge themselves without one iota of consideration or concern for us little Brownies and fly-ups.

To say that I was happy to disembark from the camp bus for the last time is a gross understatement. I could have been no happier if I’d been flown home in a private jet.

Besides, there were better things in store for us that summer.

My Aunt Mary and Uncle Ted and their kids were coming from Chicago on a visit, not via jet, private or otherwise, but in their un-air-conditioned sedan. Between the Dineens’ five kids and our five kids, there’s be 10 kids under our roof for one heavenly week. What bliss! Who needs camp?

So the last shall be first and the first last

A couple of weeks back, Boston was all a-twitter with having been named the worst dressed city in the US by GQ.

Naturally, I wasn’t surprised to learn that a city with a population of what seems like 62.5 million college kids would rate so low, or so high, depending on the way you look at it. And as one who spends a good deal of time on the streets of Boston, it has not escaped my notice that the average male is wearing either a Brooks Brothers sack suit, or some sort of professional team jersey and a baseball cap. There are two clothing stores in my neighborhood specializing in whale pants and Nantucket reds, so I understand that Boston doesn’t exactly scream “fashion.”

Yet I’ve traveled around the states quite a bit, and Boston doesn’t exactly stand out as all that different than other cities, so I had to wonder who GQ’d like. Manhattan, I supposed. Lots of money chasing lots of bespoke suits. Or Dallas, where the Neiman influence must rub off. Or LA where looking good seems to matter more than it does in these parts.

But, no, the GQ article, which I gather was kind of silly, even by GQ standards, pretty much had it in for pretty much every place you can think of, and then some that were just thrown in for good measure: Bristol, CT (home to ESPN); Wasilla, Alaska (home to you-betcha-know-who); and Martha’s Vineyard, which isn’t even a city or a town, but is home to a number of wearers of the odious Nantucket reds.

Number two on the bad-dressed hit parade was LA. Pittsburgh was three, Chicago four, and Manhattan five. Dallas rated 23.

So I guess there’s no place safe from GQ’s gimlet eye, other than perhaps their own HQ.

As a nation, we’re apparently way too casual for their discerning tastes. Perhaps they’d be happier if we had a few more Milans or Parises, where everyone’s dressed to the nines and snottily looking down their noses at American tourists in jeans and comfy shoes.

Dressing well is all well and good but, at the end of the day, if someone’s dressed in a way that’s presentable, comfortable, and not too revealing (yes, you with the butt hanging out, I am talking about you), who cares?

I wore a uniform for 12 years, so it’s probably not surprising that I’m perfectly happy wearing the same thing day in, day out. Cold weather: jeans, turtle necks, and wool sweaters; warm weather: khaki capris or Bermudas, tee-shirts with cotton sweaters. Decent pair of black pants for the odd occasion requiring dress up.

Anyway, Boston being Boston, it is taking enormous reverse pride in having been anointed the worst dressed city in the nation.

We are above all that, more intellectual, less superficial, blah-di-blah. That is, until you read the list and realized that it’s even more utter nonsense than you might have thought a priori.

So we’ll have to grab out true satisfaction from the University of Michigan survey that claims that Boston is the least friendly city in the country. (Source: WERS – Emerson College – News.)

Now this is something that definitely looked worth delving into.

How was this decided? What cities did we beat out? Where’s friendly-ville, so I know where to avoid?

Alas, there was scant detail to be found on this survey. I googled the name of the survey’s author, looked at the Survey Research Center site at the U of Michigan, searched all over for “least friendly city survey” and “most friendly city survey.” And all I found were cites to Boston being the least friendly.

Once again, just the sort of non-award we revel in.

Personally, I find Boston perfectly friendly.

That’s likely because I’m a native New Englander, and like a goodly level of reserve.

I want people to be courteous and pleasant when I have any encounter with them, and generally find Bostonian’s to be so – unless they’re operating a motor vehicle, or working at the registry, in which case all bets are off. But there is an absence of the hiya-hawaya, in your face, “friendliness” that some seem to regard as an indication that the territory flows with welcome, milk, and honey for all. Personally, a little of this goes a long way, and while maybe New England could do with a bit more Midwest openness and Midwest nice, I associate really invasive “friendliness” with judgmental nosiness. My fear is that you casually mention to the waitress at the Down Home Café that you find kiddie pageants a depraved, pornographic atrocity, and the next thing you know the Grand Kleagle’s paying a courtesy call. But this is just me.

I do acknowledge that New England/Boston may be a hard place to move into. But that’s because so many of us have always been here, we have friends and family around and aren’t necessarily looking for more of either. Moving to a place with a lot of non-natives likely makes it easier to make new friends.

But, lucky me, I’m not moving here. I’m here. And I’m from here.

Least friendly city in the United States? I’ll reserve judgment until I get a hold of that full survey and see what we’re up against.

But if we are, indeed the least friendly, the gruffest, the meanest, the surliest, the toughest, well, so be it.

Apparently I’m in the right place.

Mini vakay

Pink Slip is taking a couple of days off, and will return on Monday, August 1.

Princely sums

The rich are different from you and me. And it’s not just because they have more money. It’s how they spend it.

Which I find if not endlessly fascinating, then pretty darned fascinating. So I was quite interested in an article on the Sultan of Brunei’s brother that appeared in the July Vanity Fair.

Prince Jefri Bolkiah is or was Brunei’s “notorious royal playboy.”

Notorious royal playboy is not a category I’ve followed closely over the year, so I had never heard of old Prince Jef. But he reputedly holds the informal record for having blown through more money than anybody else on earth which, given things like the Kardashian engagement ring and Donald Trump’s preference for gold and marble, must really mean some serious spending of the green.

I had,  of course, heard of the Sultan of Brunei, and it’s not as if he were at home eating pilchard from cans and extending shoe life with cardboard insoles while his brother spent with abandon.

Initially, the Sultan led the notorious playboy charge with his bro:

They raced their Ferraris through the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital, at midnight, sailed the oceans on their fleet of yachts (Jefri named one of his Tits, its tenders Nipple 1 and Nipple 2), and imported planeloads of polo ponies and Argentinean players to indulge their love for that game, which they sometimes played with Prince Charles. They snapped up …an array of international companies (including Asprey, the London jeweler to the Queen, for which Jefri paid about $385 million in 1995, despite the fact that that was twice Asprey’s estimated market value or that Brunei’s royal family constituted a healthy portion of its business)…The brothers routinely traveled with 100-member entourages and emptied entire inventories of stores such as Armani and Versace, buying 100 suits of the same color at a time.

I wonder whether that “same color” was at least something practical like navy or charcoal, rather than something more morning-after-regrettable like bottle green or maroon. And perhaps it’s because I have the advantage of a business education, but I do not believe that I would ever pay twice the market value of a business that largely relied on my family’s purchasing power. This reminds me of a story an accounting professor once told us about a client of his who inherited some money and set up a business with it. After a year in “business”, he went to his accountant and show him the books. The biggest expense line was the salary that he had paid himself…

And that polo playing with Prince Charles isn’t the only Brunei-boys connection to The Royals. They apparently financed the purchase of Harrods by Dodie Fayed’s father. Another one of those six degrees of separation thangs.

But all good things must come to an end, and the brothers had a falling out over suspicion that Jefri – who spent at a $50M a month clip that would make Paris Hilton blush – had, as finance minister, looted Brunei’s treasury to the tune of nearly $15 B. (A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking some serious money.)

So where’d all the money go?

Well, some, of course, went for girls. And then there was the $17M paid to Michael Jackson for a private concert, and the $6M to Whitney Houston.

Some went to gifts to friends, family, and hangers-on, like the badminton coach who was kept in birdies by a small cash gift of $1.5M. Then one of Prince Jefri’s sons, Hakeem, wanted to learn how to play football. So,

… Jefri imported N.F.L. stars Joe Montana and Herschel Walker to Brunei, at a cost of seven figures each, to teach him the game. Hakeem and his friends showed up in brand-new uniforms, the gargantuan prince weighing 300 pounds, trailed by a valet and guarded by a state security force. Hakeem was not able to catch the ball, so a teammate would hand it to him, and he would then shuffle down the field for an easy touchdown, because no one was allowed to tackle a prince.

I’ll bet those touchdowns made Joe Montana and Herschel Walker proud. Bet they felt they earned that seven-figure pay day, but one would hope that the two of them would have the grace to have been just a tiny bit embarrassed about the episode.

A lot of Jefri’s spending went for just plain stuff. Life’s goodie bag included 2,300 cars, 5 boats, 9 aircraft, a statue of himself holding a solid gold polo mallet, and all sorts of stuff stuffed in 21 warehouses.  Some of those cars, not surprisingly, had barely been driven – if you have 2,300 cars you can use some just to drive around the garage to get to another one -  and the tires and rubber gaskets around the windows of some of the vehicles had melted in the Brunei heat.  Smaller consumer items that had caught Jefri’s eye and opened his wallet over the years included:

…a rug woven with jewels in threads of solid gold ($7 million), 10 jewel-encrusted wristwatches that depicted on the hour a couple copulating ($8 million), and similarly erotic fountain pens ($1.3 million).

Watches like that? Do you buy them off the shelf – ‘Hey, Herb, could you see if we have any more of those watches with the couples screwing? Guy here says he’ll take 10 if we have them.’ – or are they specially designed – “I’d like the face encircled with a combination of diamonds and rubies, and every time the big hands at 12, I’d like Adam and Eve to pop out, in flagrante, just like the cuckoo springs out of the cuckoo clock.”

And what’s going one in the watch makers’ minds when they’re making them? The customer is always right? It would be interesting to have Joe Montana and the watch makers compare notes, wouldn’t it.

Taking out an erotic fountain pen to sign a check must have added a special flourish to any transaction, as well.

The mind – at least this mind – can’t help but boggle at the thought of someone blowing through $15B. But, of course, money does seem to matter less when you haven’t actually had to do a darned thing.

“Shopping, restaurants, enjoyed life,” one of Jefri’s sons answered when asked how he occupied his time.

Well, I like shopping, restaurant, and enjoying life as much as the next guy, but there’s only so much of it you can do.  Wouldn’t you think you’d come up with a sport, a hobby, a good cause? At least Hakeem tried to learn football…

Any how, the Sultan has been cracking down on Jefri, repossessing assets, etc., so the days of buying erotic million dollar watches are in the past. Wonder what he’s doing with his time these days.

Debt is “cool”? Huh? (Huh?)

As if this past year’s hoo-hah over football players trading shoulder pads for discounts on tattoos wasn’t quite enough news coming out of Ohio State, now comes an OSU report that:

… found that many young adults think debt is a good thing. They feel a boost to their self-esteem from carrying credit card and education debt. (Source: Boston.com article entitled ‘Some young adults think debt is cool.’)

And here I was thinking that the rising generation was going to be all kinds of prudent, and learn from the mistakes of the feckless, mortgaged to the hilt hordes who came before them.

Not that debt is all evil, all the time. But “debt is a good thing”?

Holy Moly! (Good-bye, Columbus!)

I made my ‘say it isn’t so’ way over to the OSU Research News site, and there it was again:

Instead of feeling stressed by the money they owe, many young adults actually feel empowered by their credit card and education debts, according to a new nationwide study.

Researchers found that the more credit card and college loan debt held by young adults aged 18 to 27, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt like they were in control of their lives.  The effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class.

I have a lot of sympathy for kids coming out of college up to their eyeballs -  and beyond -  in debt, facing a terrible job market. I feel especially bad for the ones who borrowed $50K a year to pursue their “passion” – a major in interpretive basket weavery – rather than studying something completely practical (electronics engineering) or at least of marginal utility in the work world (psychology). Yes, it was their own damned ill-advised faults. But they were so young and vulnerable. And now they’re out their with a mortgage-sized sack of debt. And they don’t even own the house when they pay it down.

But feeling empowered, feeling good about that sack of debt. Talk about one more downside aspect of the self-esteem generation.

What I find most troubling here, however, is the note that “the effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class.”

Sadly, I can see how a kid from a poor background might naively interpret a college’s or bank’s willingness to let them take on all kind of student loans, and a whole bunch of credit cards “awarding” them $5K credit limits as a sign of faith in their potential.  Hey, these guys must think I’ve got what it takes if they’re willing to forward me this kind of cash.

And there’s nothing wrong with investing in yourself.

Certainly, taking out a “modest” amount of debt to fund your own education should be worthwhile. But when that debt goes much beyond $5K per year for four years, it can become crippling pretty darned fast, especially if you’re not in an especially lucrative field.

Credit card debt, by the way, makes middle class kids get all smiley face.

Those in the middle class didn’t see any impact on their self-esteem and mastery by holding educational debt, perhaps because it is so common among their peers that it is seen as normal.  But they did see boosts from holding credit-card debt – the more debt, the more positive effects.

Rolling up credit card debt while in college so that you can let the good times roll. Gasp! I do not have sufficient imagination to understand how having credit card debt can yield any positive effects. I’m the old-fashioned crank type: How about you forego the new iPad or that Kate Spade bag?

The young folks bearing so much debt – smart debt, stupid debt – are eventually going to figure out that paying it down stinks, and can relegate you to living in some dump with a kazillion roommates – or back with your folks – with little money to spend on the discretionary stuff that folks in their twenties should be focusing on: going out with friends, traveling, buying a new couch.

It’s no surprise that:

Only the oldest of those studied – those aged 28 to 34 – began showing signs of stress about the money they owed.

Yep. Now that they’re settling down, they’re realizing just what a bad bargain some of that debt might have been.

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Here’s an earlier post on a college student taking on some really stupid debt.

Well, that’s the last time I’ll take a grocery store sample

There’s grocer samples. And then there’s grosser samples.

As some Albuquerque, New Mexico shoppers found out when they sampled the red-light special on aisle four at a Sunflower Market.

A store employee had added his own special sauce, a secret ingredient, to the yogurt samples he was distributing last winter: his own precious body fluids.  (Source: AP article seen on Boston.com)

The taste rang a bell with one sampler who found that the flavor was quite reminiscent of semen. The police tested a sample, determined it was tainted, and DNA-matched it to one Anthony Garcia, who was just indicted by a federal grand jury

…on charges of adulterating food and making false statements to federal investigators. He was arrested Wednesday afternoon and is scheduled to appear in court Thursday morning.

This is no ha-ha, laugh it off as a dirty joke type of situation, by the way:

If convicted on the adulteration charge, Garcia faces three years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a year of supervised release. The other charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.  (Source: KOAT.com)

Gulp!

On second thought, don’t gulp.

U.S. Attorney Kenneth Gonzalez has let it be known that he doesn’t care what Garcia’s intent may have been. His office intends to:

“…vigorously pursue those who deliberately adulterate foods for the purpose of causing harming to innocent consumers, or as malicious pranks, or for deviant sexual gratification.”

That must have been a stomach-churning and/or smirk-a-lot grand jury to have served on, that’s for sure.

Predictably, when this incident first came to light last winter, commenters were buzzing about whether this was yet another one of those glass-in-my-salad, what’s-that-fly-doing-in-my-soup set ups that scam artists create so that they can sue. (Interesting enough, a number of those early commenters also asked ‘how would anyone know what that stuff tasted like?’ LOL. If one doesn’t actually know first hand (or first mouth), surely a consenting adult – one old enough to comment on an online article – would have the experience and/or imagination to figure out how someone might have come into possession of this information, even if they, themselves, had not. Those comments reminded me of a long-ago trip to the San Diego Zoo, during which two giant land tortoises decided that, public be damned, the time was right to get it on. There was a middle-aged couple standing near me, and I overhead that wife ask the husband ‘What are they doing?’)

Anyway, it seems to me that there are enough gross things that can happen in the food chain without scam artists making them up. And since the DNA ties the “yogurt” to Garcia, this one seems like the real deal.

I’ve had a couple of gross food things happen to me over the years. I found a pinky-sized bandaid in some cole slaw; and a finger nail in a drink. One time, I found a piece of gravel in a bowl of soup, but fortunately my tongue found it before I crunched down on it and broke a tooth. I did break a tooth once on a stoned-wheat cracker, and my first thought was that what I had in my mouth was a pebble. I started to put it in a baggy, the better to run it back to Whole Foods with my j’accuse, when I observed that the pebble looked an awful lot like a piece of tooth. Oh, gross! Even worse than a teensy-tiny pebble, it’s a teensy-tiny piece of someone’s tooth. Then my trusty tongue made it’s way to my less trusty tooth, and I realized that that teensy-tiny bit o’ tooth was mine.

Years earlier, I’d been craving a peanut butter sandwich, so when I returned from grocery shopping I eagerly opened up the peanut butter jar. Only to find that someone had kindly pre-twirled the lid for me, and had not so kindly shoved his/her mitt into the PB and scooped out a giant wad. Peanut butter jar in hand, I ran back to the store and demanded a replacement.

But, as far as I know, I have not been subjected to someone else’s bodily fluids, precious or not, when I’ve helped myself to the grocery samples.

Meanwhile, Sunflower Markets – a small chain located throughout the West – which offers “serious food, silly prices” is not-so-strangely silent on this incident. The closest mention on their news page is the one announcing their GMO-free house-brand of tofu. (One does, of course, assume that Anthony Garcia is no longer on hand as a store employee.)

But it’s always interesting to take a look at what a company has to say about itself and hold it up to the light of some piece of disturbing news.

Sunflower kind of aw-shucks thinks of themselves as:

…just hard-working folks who get a real kick out of negotiating the best possible deal anywhere.

There’s no doubt that Garcia got a kick out of his personal foray into organics; and I’ll bet that his lawyer is, just about now, trying to negotiate “the best possible deal anywhere.”

Our customers and suppliers tell us that they find our way of doing business to be a refreshing change.

Change, assuredly. Refreshing? Maybe not.

As for me, I’ll be saying a quick ‘no thanks’ to any grocery sample that’s in liquid-ish form.

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Pink Slip has been on the adulterated food story before. See Ratatouille to read about someone who found a mouse in her canned green beans.

J-E-L-L-Oh!

On a long-ago business trip, I got to go to Bloomington (State Farm Insurance) and Peoria (Caterpillar), Illinois. We got to stay at Jumer’s Chateau which, while it didn’t quite have “theme rooms”, was right up there on the odd-ball business hotel list. Alas, Jumer’s is no longer called Jumer’s, which was part of its mega-charm, in my book. It’s now just the boring old “Chateau.” Anyway, the trip was memorable for a number of reasons. One was horrific: on the drive back to O’Hare, as we made our way through the soybean and corn fields, we kept moving in and out of radio reception while we tried to piece together what had happened that day in Oklahoma City. Had somebody really bombed a bunch of kids in a daycare center?

As for the business aspects of the trip:

Caterpillar went with someone else. We were just in there as due diligence fodder, and it didn’t help that our product demo didn’t work. (Wasn’t the first time; wasn’t the last.)

State Farm was an existing customer, and we got some add-on business from then.

But what I most remember about State Farm was their cafeteria. While it had the standard large-caf stations – entrees, soup, sandwiches, salads, desserts – it also had its very own Jell-o section. On offer were about a half-dozen different colored and/or flavored Jell-o desserts. Plain, with Cool Whip, with fruit, with Cool Whip and fruit. (Okay, okay. I don’t actually know if they were made with authentic Jell-o as opposed to, say, Royal – if Royal is even still in business – but Jell-o really is one of those Kleenex brands, isn’t it? Do I get to throw in the word eponymous here?)

I didn’t have any Jell-o myself, but one of the customers we ate with did, so I couldn’t exactly sit there making snarky comments about the variety and abundance of gelatinous desserts available.

And who was I to make fun of Jell-o to begin with?

It’s not as if I were any stranger to it.

My father had both a hollow leg and a sweet tooth, so my mother made a different dessert at least 4 or 5 times a week. Most of what we’re talking here was scratch baking: pies, cakes, cookies, squares, brownies. But when she was pressed for time, Liz would do a quickie pudding or Jell-o thing for us. You haven’t lived until you’ve had green Jell-o with canned fruit cocktail suspended in it.

While Jell-o was nowhere near as satisfying Daddy’s Favorite (raisin nut cake), Jack Horner Cake (spice cake made with prunes; amazingly tasty), or pan of Congo Bars, it was certainly better than a plain old apple. (This is so making me crave a piece of Daddy’s Favorite or Jack Horner. Apples I have all the time.)

But my mother kicked out all the stops on holidays, when she made a fancy Jell-o mold: “Waldorf Salad” made with apple Jell-o, apples, celery, and walnuts. Or orange Jell-o with pineapple and grated carrots. Or raspberry Jell-o with strawberries and walnuts slathered in sour cream. (Can that be right?)

Ah, yes, I make fun now, but they were all pretty darned tasty.

At any rate, I had ample reasons to be interested in a recent WSJ article claiming that “flavored gelatin is turning up in the work of avant-garde chefs and established design studios across the country.” (“Flavored gelatin”? Hooey. Why don’t you just come right out and say J-E-L-L-O, so we all know what you’re talking about.)

Colleen Whiteley, a furniture designer, used lemon-flavored gelatin to sculpt the head of Walt Disney at a recent Jell-O mold contest. (“Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” preferably made out of butterscotch pudding.") Whiteley’s oeuvre garnered her:

… a creativity prize in the Brooklyn, N.Y., Jell-O Mold Competition. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York provided prizes and her team of sculptors recently spent weeks perfecting their replica of Walt Disney's head.

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum! Jell-O sure has come a long and high faultin’ way from the grocer’s shelf.

Among other notable works: Obama’s head’s been “done”, as has Buckingham Palace, in honor of the recent royal nups.

The work of these artists and chefs is firming up gelatin's reputation in the culinary world. Companies like Blooming Gelatin Art in Los Angeles are selling gelatinas—gelatin cakes in flavors like mango and cappuccino with ornate flowers injected into the center. Michelle Quiles teaches classes on the technique, which she learned in Mexico City and involves injecting colored milk into the bottom of a gelatin cake.

Who knew?

I thought it was an aesthetic triumph to do a two-layer, two-tone Jell-o thing.

But Jello’s gone foodie:

The Way We See the World, a design studio in New York, has invented edible cups made of agar-agar with flavors like ginger mint and grapefruit chamomile. The cups are meant as a snack to go along with the cocktails they hold. The studio hopes to package and sell the cups next spring.

And directly boozy:

Michelle Palm blogs about creative Jell-o shots at Jelly Shot Test Kitchen when she’s not working as a financial consultant.

Jell-o, not surprising, is hoping to get in on the act:

Kraft Foods Inc., which sells about 165 million boxes of Jell-O instant gelatin dessert per year, plans to launch a marketing campaign this fall, known internally as "Mold Mania," introducing new molds, such as one in the shape of a brain for Halloween. "We definitely see a resurgence in molds," says Cindy Chen, director of marketing for the Jell-O brand.

I do believe that Archie McPhee beat Kraft to the brain-shaped mold. In fact, I used to have one, which I gave to a colleague to use at his kid’s haunted house party. But not before I made a brain mold for a family function.

Meanwhile, that 165 million boxes a year sounds really low to me. Come on, that’s not even one per capita. What’s the world coming to? So little Jell-o consumed. This is not the America that I grew up in. Thus, it must – by definition, no? – be un-American and just plain wrong.

While the avant-garde chef-erati are doing their bit. I’ll think about ways in which I can do mine. I must say that these nifty Santa caps might well be comin’ to town at my house this Christmas Eve….

Here on Gilligan’s Isle…

Sherwood Schwartz died last week, at the considerable old age of 94. On the life-scale, it can absolutely be said that he got a lot more than a three-hour tour, a three hour tour.

Sitcom cognoscenti may not be familiar with Sherwood Schwartz’s name, but they will, no doubt, immediately recognize that “a three hour tour, a three hour tour” is an excerpt from the brilliant lyrics to the series Gilligan’s Island. Written by Mr. Schwartz, who created and produced this timeless classic.

Did I say timeless?

I meant endless. Relentless. Mindless.

Hell for me would surely involve an endless loop of Gilligan’s Island reruns.

At one point, hell for me was having an office next to a sales guy who incessantly whistled – off-key, of course - the theme to Gilligan’s Island. (I’m having flashbacks now. Grrrrrr.)

There were certain sitcoms that even a young TV junkie like myself avoided at all costs, and Gilligan’s was certainly one of them. (You can throw Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres on that grill, too.)

Gilligan’s Island!

What was Bob Denver doing on such a show, after he had performed so admirably as beatnik Maynard G. Krebs in the droll and mildly subversive Many Loves of Dobie Gillis?

Well, I suppose he was just making a living, but Maynard G. Krebs vs. Gilligan?

Not that Gilligan’s was completely devoid of wit.

The ill-fated boat that the castaways were on when marooned was called the S.S. Minnow,

…named for Newton Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chief in the early 1960s had become famous for proclaiming television "a vast wasteland."

Well, all the nostalgia for the Golden Age of Television aside, old Newton sure must have had shows like Gilligan’s in mind. Since the speech pre-dated Gilligan’s, he can’t have had it in mind. (Was the Beverly Hillbillies on the air yet, I wonder?) And, of course, it’s amusing to think of the three-network TV landscape, with a few “educational” stations and unaffiliated rogues thrown in for good measure, as a vast anything. (In my day, we meant it when we complained that ‘there’s nothing on.’)

Anyway, I’d take Maynard G., Dobie, Herbert T. Gillis, Thalia Menninger, and Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. over the Skipper, Mary Ann, the millionaire and his wife, any old day.

But maybe I was missing something:

TV critics hooted at "Gilligan's Island" as gag-ridden corn. Audiences adored its far-out comedy. Schwartz insisted that the show had social meaning along with the laughs: "I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications."

The “gag-ridden corn” is all flooding back to me, but I don’t think I was part of the audiences that “adored its far-out comedy.” Far-out. Now Dobie Gillis, that was far-out, man. I mean, come on, a beatnik on TV. (“You rang?”)

Sherwood Schwartz also gave us The Brady Bunch, which aired after my TV-watching prime, but which I did occasionally see. (And which had a theme-song that was equal to that of Gilligan’s on the obnox-o-meter. Fortunately, I never had a colleague who whistled The Brady Bunch while at work.)

I did “meet” Ann B. Davis, who played the Bradys’ housekeeper, Alice, when she came in to Durgin-Park while I was waitressing. I caught her eye when she walked in and said something brilliant like “Hey, you’re Schultzy.”, a reference to the role she’d played on The Bob Cummings Show (told you I’d been a TV junkie). For whatever reason, she got all snotty and haughty, and just swept by me, even though I wasn’t being a nasty D-P waitress, just someone who was, if not exactly thrilled, then pleased to see an iconic TV character of my childhood.

However greatly I may decry the shows he was responsible for, I will say that Mr. Schwartz lived a long, full and accomplished life. I read in his Wikipedia entry that he disliked Red Skelton, for whom he worked at one point. Disliking Red Skelton in itself wipes out the misery of my having had to listen to my colleague incessantly whistle (off-key) the theme to Gilligan’s Island.

And then there’s Schwartz’s nephew Douglas, who created Baywatch….

Gotta say one thing about this family. Gilligan’s Island. Brady Bunch. Baywatch.  They sure knew how to tap into something that resonated with the American TV-watching public. Would that I were so gifted and blessed.

Info Source: AP article on boston.com.

Human Cannonball-ing

Oddly, given that the economic landscape seems to be so dominated by GIANTS like BofA and Exxon-Mobil, we’re constantly reading both the small business is the true engine of job growth, and that we’re all going to end up as free-lance entrepreneurs, architecting our very own bespoke careers that are long on short engagements.

Some professions, of course, do seem to lend themselves quite nicely to the on-your-own economy; others less so (free-lance assembly line worker, anyone?).

But David Smith, père et fils, seem to have figured it out the self-employment thing. They’re human cannonballs, as are a couple of other of David Smith, Sr.’s children.

David Smith, Sr., at 69, was in Lowell, Massachusetts, a couple of weeks back, entertaining the Lowell Spinners baseball crowd with a “Human Home Run” stunt. It actually wasn’t a home run, as the cannon was set up near second base – but the plan was to shoot him out of the park, so…

The article I saw on boston.com on Smith was written before the shot heard round the Spinners’ home field, but I’m pretty sure I would have heard about it if there’d been a misfire.

Which can happen.

According to wikipedia – so it must be right, right? – over the course of human cannonball history (about 150 years), thirty cannonball have been killed in action. That may not seem like a lot, but there haven’t been all that many human cannonballs during that period. So, as occupational hazards go, this one is right up there. In fact, last April, in the UK, one of the few, the proud, the cannonballs died when his safety net failed. So kids – even if you happen to have a cannon in the backyard capable of fitting a human down its barrel, and a soft landing spot – puhl-eeze don’t try this at home.

David Smith, Sr., by the way, started out as a teacher, but decided after a few years that life would be more interesting and rewarding as a daredevil.

Of his 11 children – he’s apparently been a human cannonball in other aspects of his life – six have worked at one point or another as human cannonballs.

The one who’s grabbed the URL is David Smith, Jr., who just last March broke the record that his father had set.

He is the highest flying Human Cannonball in the world today with his world record braking human cannonball shots and his dynamic personality.

Not sure if that “braking” is a spell-o or has some greater meaning. Personally, I always brake for human cannonballs.

Human Cannonball, Jr. – whose sobriquet is “The Bullet” to distinguish him from his father “The Cannonball” still thinks his old man is all that and a bag of chips:

I need to thank the greatest human cannonball that ever lived, the brain behind the machine, My Father, David Smith Sr. For setting the bar so high. without you I may never have learned to fly.

David Smith, Jr. joined the family business when he was just 19, as I learned from a profile that appeared a few years back on Portfolio.com, where I also read:

"You do fly, and the violence [to] your body on takeoff is significant," he says. "Coming down is like coming down from an eight-story building."

Well, I’m not going to quibble with whether he’s fly-flying, or being propelled flying, but that “coming down from an eight-story building” all sounds pretty ghastly. Smith, Jr. has been injured – broken leg -  in the line of duty, as has one of his sisters, who hurt her spine when she overshot her landing airbag. (I guess now we know why it’s a spine-tingling thrill to watch someone shot from a cannon.) But the job is not without its rewards:

For his troubles, Smith earns anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars per jump, depending on the venue, the size of the crowd, and the difficulty of the jump. All told, he earns comfortably in the low six figures per year.

This would not have been possible if David Smith, Sr., had not revived the lost art of human cannonballing which, by the mid-20th century had become nearly “extinct”, what with TV competing so effectively for the entertainment eyeballs.

But, as the growth of NASCAR and the life and times of Evel Knievel have shown us, watching a spectacle where someone could get seriously injured or die never goes out of style.

Meanwhile,

If you are looking for something big and powerful, that will astonish live audiences and give you great press coverage and the best chance to get a front page You are looking for DAVID "THE BULLET" SMITH - Human Cannonball Show.

But if you’re looking to set yourself up as a human cannonball, don’t bother. David Smith, Sr. makes the cannons, and the Smiths seem to have something of a family monopoly going.

So, back to the drawing boards and find your own darned personal, one-off career. This one’s taken.