Essaying Your Way Into B-School

I was fortunate in that, when I applied to business school in the way back of 1978, people pretty much wrote their own application essays.

At least I did.

And from the applications I reviewed as a second-year at Sloan/MIT, I’m going to assume that most other folks did, too.

The process back in those relatively laid back, low stakes days, was pretty straightforward. You answered a pretty straightforward question of the “why do you want to go to business school” variety, making sure that your answer was neatly typed – no strikeovers, no big gobs of whiteout, no typos, no flying letters because your ancient typewriter was out of kilter. A new ribbon to make sure that things were legible. Then cross your fingers that the admissions committee would buy your brand of BS. (One app that I rejected included an essay in which the applicant claimed that, during one summer in college, he had run strategic planning for GM. Now that I think of it, that may explain what had happened about then to the auto industry.)

Life for B-school applicants these days is apparently much harder, and your life, and those of your children, and your children’s children, is no doubt ruined if you don’t get into The School Of Your And Everyone Else’s Choice.

So an industry has sprung up – all part of the vaunted Knowledge Economy – in which consultants “assist” applicants with their B-school applications, and in which – for those who may not be able to afford consultants – there are books of successful essays to model yours on. (Or, if you’re so inclined and don’t mind scanning or keying in, borrow wholesale and hope that The School Of Your And Everyone Else’s Choice doesn’t use turnitin or some other plagiarism checker.)

And now there is wordprom – or, as their clever little logo has it, ɯordpɹom – which the founders hope will replace those costly consultants and the limited and generic essay anthologies with a vast catalog of successful essays. A catalog that prospective MBA-ers can search, based on school, program, question, class, admissions round, country, industry, gender, reapplicant, other.

I mean, why bother with a general purpose “my three weaknesses” essay when you can call one up that was used by just anyone from anywhere when you can whistle one up that worked for a female from France who worked in the insurance industry and wants to go to Wharton.

I can see that folks would really glom on to that “other” search category: show me Nebraskans, classics majors, clog dancers, golfers. (Results: two Nebraskans, one classics major, no clog dancers, 472 golfers.)

Founded by a married couple (with MBA’s) and a couple of techie buds (one of them managed engineering for an online casino):

Wordprom.com lets applicants buy essays from people who were recently admitted to top business schools. Operating since August, the website has collected essays from more than 400 contributors, all either recent MBA graduates or current students. The website started selling the essays about two weeks ago, and “dozens of people” have downloaded them so far—about 90 percent of them from the U.S. (Source: Business Week)

Each downloaded essay will go for $50. (There’s an intro price of $25 per.) Contributors are paid when their essays get downloaded. (Lucky fellow, that HBS banking golfer.)

Gili Elkin, half of the co-founding couple, also does work for:

…Aringo, a boutique essay-editing and admission-consulting.

Which I guess positions her pretty well to figure out how to replace essay-writing-editing and MBA admissions consulting.

Anyway, since it’s no longer possible to admit that you just want to work for your own company and make a lot of money, Wordprom is wrapped in higher purpose:

“I thought it would be a way to make the admissions process accessible to everyone and everywhere,“ [Elikin] said. “Yes, you can buy a book for $10 maybe, but I don’t believe the examples are comprehensive enough to serve everyone.”

This is put even more nobly on Wordprom’s site:

ɯordpɹom’s service allows talented people from all around the world (regardless of their financial abilities) to prepare themselves before applying to top schools…Talented applicants who cannot afford consulting services are either not applying to top schools or applying without the insights that could strengthen their application.

Oh, how mission-driven, how purpose-filled to help those talented applicants without the scratch to pay consultants $250/hour. And part of their profits will go to help “underprivileged kids…pursue their dreams.” (My heart is bursting. I almost want to go buy a couple of essays just to help those underprivileged kids.)

Business schools, needless to say, don’t especially like the idea – so tempting to applicants to cut and paste rather than soak up the wisdom; so dangerous to admissions committees who just don’t want to be hornswoggled by plagiarists. The dean of London Business School goes so far as to say that:

…the idea of selling admissions essays was “prima facie unethical.”

Elkin’s rejoinder is that the essays on Wordprom:

…are supposed to be used for “inspiration” purposes only.

It says so, right there, in black and white on their website.

Users who download them must sign a “terms of use agreement” that prohibits users from plagiarizing, she says.

And plagiarists will find themselves banned from Wordprom (and, presumably, from the B-school they tried to cheat their way into) and possibly even subject to some unspecified action or other.

I don’t know why searching a database full of essays seems so much more unsavory than thumbing through a book to see how smart people answered questions. Is it just knowing that a lot of people are just going to cut, paste, and lightly personalize “their” essay of choice?

I can see the next step is putting a bit of the old AI in to play. Applicants can pick an essay, answer a few demographic questions (or, better yet, have then gathered from Facebook), and have the essay repopulated with the you or you. Sort of like those personalized books for kids that plunk your kid’s name in, the street you live on, the color of your dog, etc., so that, voila, you’ve got a fully personalized book. (Never too young to start promoting narcissism.)

Am I the only one who wishes that Elkin had set her Stanford MBA brain to something more useful and meaningful?

Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire

On the day after The Station nightclub fire, in February 2003, I was having lunch with my brother and his then-five year old daughter.  Caroline kept turning to a TV mounted over the bar, trying to figure out just what was happening on the news. The film was riveting, no more so than for an inquisitive five year old. There was no distracting her from it. She wanted to know just what was going on.

The what was actually pretty easy to explain (however unpleasant the task, especially when you’re explaining it to an exceedingly inquisitive, exceedingly worry-wart kindergartner): a lot of people were killed in a nightclub fire.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, the why turned out to be pretty straightforward, too: a perfect storm of compounding careless and/or thoughtless and/or feckless and/or greedy decisions about safety that ended up with one hundred (mostly young) people meeting hideous and completely avoidable deaths, and a few hundred more survivors, a number of whom suffered dreadful, disabling, disfiguring injuries.

Anyway, John Barylick, has deftly pulled together the story of what happened and why in Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America’s Deadliest Rock Concert, which was published last month.

Barylick* is uniquely positioned to get the story. He’s a trial attorney whose firm represented a number of the victims.And his was one of eight Rhode Island law firms that banded together to form a Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, pooling resources to develop strategies and conduct their investigations before any lawsuits were filed. However up close and personal Barylick was to the material, the book didn’t write itself. It’s the result of years of meticulous research and a painstaking effort to get things right – without any sensationalizing of what could so easily have been sensationalized, and without any exploitation of victim stories that could so easily have been exploited.

For those who don’t recall the details, the heavy metal band White Shark – a second (maybe third) tier group that had met with some modest success during the 1980’s – was performing at The Station, a rundown nightclub in the rundown town of West Warwick, RI. The band’s performance included “pyro”, i.e., setting off fireworks. At The Station, the fireworks ignited highly flammable insulation that had been slapped up to keep the neighbors from complaining about the noise. The audience was well over any reasonable capacity for the venue, people were drinking, an exit was blocked, panic – not surprisingly – took hold. And 100 people – mostly working-class locals who’d been Great White fans during the band’s brief glory day – were killed: burned, trampled, asphyxiated.

Without slipping into the always dangerous cliché zone, Killer Show is, indeed a page turner.

I was especially taken with Barylick’s ability to capture the setting: Working class town straight out of a Springsteen song. The none-too-clean, completely charmless nightclub, with its torn naugahyde, Bud banners, cigarette scars – and totally lacking the cachet of a “dive bar” that might have been frequented by Brown, RISD, or Providence College students slumming. Nope. The Station was for people who couldn’t afford much else.

Those with options, folks who don’t think twice before  plunking down fourteen bucks for a fancy martini, don’t frequent joints like Station. (A telling detail: the door to the men’s room had been destroyed and never replaced.) The place was a dump – a dump where the owners, eager to wring out every dime they could – cheaped out on safety.

And I was also taken with those whose story Killer Show is. Each time Barylick introduced someone who’d been there that night – each time with just enough detail to get a sense of who they were, to fall “in like” with them  - I had to know right away whether they made it. So I kept my thumb in the page toward the back that listed those who had died. With each new name, I immediately had to check and see whether they made it out alive.  Yes! I’m so relieved that the couple with five kids both survived. Oh, no! The bartender studying to be a paralegal didn’t.

Killer Show doesn’t read like a novel. None one of the “characters” are completely drawn, or fully realized.

Yet even with the thumbnails we’re given, Barylick gives us a good sense of who’s who.

We recognize the “power mouse” swagger of the bar’s hangers-on who got tee-shirts and a beer or two in exchange for guarding the band-only exit, and feel them flexing that little-man mouse-power to turn back patrons fleeing the fire.

We ache for the young women with the tough and dead end jobs, cleaners at the hotel where the band stayed, who were so thrilled to get on the comp list for the show.

We learn enough about Dan Biechele, the Great White tour manager who set off the pyro, to know that he is a man with integrity and decency at his core. (Now there’s a novel in the waiting…)

And enough about The Brothers Derderian, who owned The Station, to understand just how pathetically limited, weak, and shallow they are.

There were sections of the book that I found slow-going – the descriptions of burns and burn treatment, the section on the legal issues – and would have preferred in shorter version (with the full information covered in appendices which appendix-reading me would have read). That said, the material in these sections was both interesting and important. I especially liked reading about the decision to sue entities (Bud, Clear Channel radio) that had no direct responsibility for the fire.

But these sections did bog me down a bit and got in the way of the story’s flow.

On the other hand, I would have liked to have “seen” more of the deliberations around the disposition of the settlement fund. (Perhaps there were too many confidentiality issues here.) And an update on the survivors. (Maybe that’s another book entirely.)

We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of Boston’s Coconut Grove Nightclub fire, in which nearly 500 perished.

You’d have thought that, 60 years on, by the time of The Station fire, we would know everything we need to know – and act on everything we need to act on – with respect to safety in large, crowded venues.

Apparently not.

The collective settlement pot for The Station was $176M.

Sounds like a lot, until you remember that one hundred people died (leaving dozens of small children behind), and plenty more people suffered grievous injuries that will keep them in pain for the rest of their lives.

(Reminder:  sometimes there are real people who get really hurt because someone did something marginally rotten or just plain stupid that turned into something really bad. Torts are not always about someone looking for a million dollars for a botched BMW paint job or dry cleaning damage to the favorite sport coat.)

Killer Show is a cautionary tale, and should be required reading for every fire marshal, building inspector, bar owner, pyro-loving band member, liquor distributor running promos, and every free-market worshipping regulation hater and/or those who maintain that lawyers are ruining the country. And for everyone in a position to make a stand-alone poor decision that has anything to do with safety. A decision that, when combined with a series of other stand-alone poor decisions, can result in a truly terrible outcome.

The human element being the human element, we’ll never be able to prevent every catastrophe from occurring. But The Station fire was so stunningly avoidable…

In Killer Show, John Barylick carefully, with tremendous craft, and tremendous sympathy for the victims, lays it all out for us.

 

 

 

 

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*He’s also the husband of an old and dear friend of mine from Worcester

The Selling of Generation I

With two teen-aged nieces, iPhone-carrying members of Generation I, I’m used to the natural way in which the “young folks” pick up any electronic device and seem to know intuitively how it works. Seen one, seen ‘em all.

Still, I was a bit surprised this summer when, at a family event, I watched my cousin’s 20 month old toddler grab her mother’s iPhone, navigate to the tunes, find “Call Me Maybe,” and (more or less) sing and dance along with it. Now the singing and dancing part of this performance was echt 20 month old – not all that tuneful, not all that smooth. But the iPhone maneuverability. Wow! The younger end of this Gen I cohort sure knows how to work it.

This gang may never experience the joy of finding change in a phone booth slot; put a penny on the stereo arm so the needle moves over your scratched Rubber Soul LP without skipping; or take pride in the accomplishment of learning how to parallel park. But, damn, they can deftly work those handy-dandy handheld devices in ways that make the rest of us look like all thumbs. (Of course, the Gen I-ers risk becoming all thumb. The better to text you with, my dear.)

But, as the WSJ reported recently, there is a downside to all the mobility. And that’s marketers using mobile apps to push over-processed snack foods, obesity-causing sodas, and sugar-laden treats to kids.

Marketing to kids is nothing new. I grew up bombarded by ads for Sugar Jets and Kool-Aid, neither of which is to be confused with a carrot stick or a bunch of grapes. Farfel the dog puppet not only entertained, he (it?) also pushed Nestles (“makes the very best”) chocolate. (Farfel was mighty cute, that’s for sure.)

But over the years, selling to kids has gotten more pervasive and more insidious. And now:

U.S. food companies are reaching children by embedding their products in simple and enticing games for touch-screen phones and tablets. The new medium is far cheaper than Saturday morning TV commercials and could prove as effective.

And, unlike Saturday morning TV and the Web, where there are pressures on advertisers, and even FCC regulations, putting the squeeze on what they can and can’t do, the gaming world is unregulated. And makers of stuff that’s bad for you:

…are now finding the unregulated medium of mobile devices an effective substitute to trigger demand and cinch brand loyalty.

And, oh yeah, kids may increasingly have their mitts on mobile devices 24/7.  Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration, but for the most part, kids aren’t watching TV or using laptops while they’re in the backseat of the car. If they’re not staring out the window – so yesterday – or watching a video, they may well be occupying themselves with smartphones and tablets. (Which 37% of 4-5 year olds – and at least one 20 month old – use, vs. only 22% who use laptops.)

J&J Snack Foods is completely upfront about targeting ads apps for kids via free games that “feature” their products – SuperPretzel and Icee drinks.

Players love racing against a timer to mix bowls of dough in "SuperPretzel Factory," which since mid-July has ranked as one of the most popular free children's games in Apple Inc.'s iPhone App Store. "Icee Maker" has been downloaded from the Apple store more than eight million times since its release last year, the app's developer said…

"Kids are our No. 1 consumer," said Susan Woods, Icee's marketing chief. "The fact that they may think about getting an Icee next time they see an Icee machine is a lot more likely if they've engaged themselves with something to do with Icee."

And parents hoping to keep their kids occupied for a few minutes are apt to forgive a few ads in exchange. Just part of the Great American Commercialization – sections of the highway “brought to us by” someone or other, streetcars and buses shrink wrapped in what we used to call billboards, that big old Polo logo on our Olympians uniforms.

One game mentioned in the article – which, fortunately, never came to fruition -  was for Dum Dums lollipops. To me, Dum Dus are perhaps the very second worst candy ever foisted on the American public – second only to horehound drops. A design firm came up with an app in which players would:

… ingest a virtual Dum Dum lollipop by licking their smartphone before a clock ran out.

Apple put the kibosh on that one, so “Dum Dums Lick-A-Pop” became “Dum Dums Flick-A-Pop.”

Although I’d certainly rather flick than lick a Dum Dum, this particular time-waster has no appeal to me. But 1.5 million Dum Dummies have:

…spent the equivalent of more than 112 years swiping through the company's virtual lollipops. About a third of the traffic is coming from iPod Touches, which are popular with children.

No word on whether more Dum Dums are being sold, but at a cost of $10K in app development, this is a pretty effective way to reach an audience.

But pretty said to see so much yucky stuff marketed to the kiddoes, no?

I realize parents can just say “no” – my parents were certainly passed masters of it – but why make their lives that much harder by having them have to spend all those cycles explaining why Super Pretzels, Icee drinks, and Dum Dums aren’t necessarily as advertised.

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Meanwhile, if you have a tablet toddler, you may want to take a look at Craig Sender’s new blog, Tablet Toddlers. Craig, who’s the father of a couple of Gen I’s, is keeping his eye out for what’s up and what’s new with mobile apps for kids.

Granted, I’m no genius…still I can’t help but be a bit disappointed

Once again, I an interested to see who the MacArthur Fellows are for the year.

Not that I was expecting one – I don’t imagine that many of them have been awarded to low-end bloggers who are written-word equivalent of a Sunday painter. Still, the annual revelation always makes me wish that some foundation would set up non-genius grants for those of us a bit lower-down on the genius totem poll. The kind of folks whose creative spark is not quite divine. Who lack the drive and mono-focus to become (rather than just be). Who perhaps (but only perhaps) spend entirely too much time watching Love It or List It on HGTV, looking at red state-blue state maps, or wondering whether Honey Boo Boo is a good thing or the end of the world as we know it.

Sigh. I guess us non-geniuses are why lotteries exist. (Remind me to pick up a Powerball ticket one of these days.)

Anyway, the list came out a few days back, and I was delighted to see that Boston-area folks snagged four of the 23 fellowships, each worth $500K (paid out over five years). Of the total, 14 went to residents of Massachusetts, New York, or California. (Told you I’ve spent too much time looking at red state-blue state maps. Okay. Now that I’ve put it out there, of the 21 grants that went to residents of the USA, 18 went to blue staters; two went to red-staters (AZ, LA); and one went swing state (Colorado). May be interesting. Maybe not.)

I was happy to see that Junot Diaz (Cambridge resident) won, as he is at least someone I’ve heard of and whose work I’m actually familiar with.

And I was glad that one winner was actually older than I am:

Maurice Lim Miller, 66, Oakland, Calif. Social services innovator who designs projects that reward and track self-sufficiency among residents of low-income neighborhoods in Oakland, San Francisco and Boston. (Source: Huffington Post.)

Not to mention that another is a “young fellow” focusing on geezer health.

Eric Coleman, 47, Denver, Colo. Geriatrician at University of Colorado School of Medicine who is improving health care by focusing on patient transitions from hospitals to homes and care facilities.

Keep up the good work, Eric Coleman.

But my hands down favorite winner is a Watertown, Mass. resident:

Benoit Rolland, 58, Boston. Stringed-instrument bow maker who experiments with new designs and materials to create violin, viola and cello bows that rival prized 19th century bows and meet the artistic demands of today's musicians.

The Boston Globe gave the locals, Rolland in particular, a bit of play.

A grateful Rolland, 58, says he has a bit of trouble accepting the “genius” label. Like the ancient Greek philosophers, he tends to think that people aren’t geniuses, though they may possess genius in the form of a skill or talent.

“So while I am flattered, the genius is not me,” he said. “It is in the sound the bows generate when they are well-crafted and used properly.”

Rolland originally set out to be a violinist, but, at 16, he jettisoned a career as a musician to make bows rather than take them.

And we are not, of course, talking about fishing line stapled to a dowel here.

Many of the bows are commissioned, and cost in the tens of thousands. Even an off the shelf one will cost in the thousands. (The price has probably gone up since the MacArthur announcement.)

These are obviously not for your average three year old Suzuki violin student, but for musicians who are spending hundreds of thousands on their instrument.

Rolland is also an inventor. Fearing that the Pernambuco tree, which has been the bow wood source for ages, could become extinct, Rolland developed a carbon fiber bow. Which none other than Jean-Luc Ponty – that jazziest of violinists – has dubbed “the 21st century bow.”

What Rolland is not is a TV watcher. Doesn’t own one, so there’s no way he’s going to get distracted by Honey Boo Boo. He does play the violin, compose, and sail. But he doesn’t have time for much other than his craft, which he works 12/7, and to which he is supremely devoted.

“I know it seems like a cliché,” [wife Christine] Arveil says. “But he loves the bows and dotes on each one as a child he’s preparing for adoption — but only after having gotten to know the adoptive parent.”

Rolland will spend his MacArthur years doing what he’s been doing, and fine-tuning the handful of inventions he’s working on.

He is also promising that he’ll “’try to relax’.”

Ah, there’s my problem.

I didn’t wait for a MacArthur grant to get into relaxing.

Benoit Rolland’s web site.

Talk about an accident looking for a place to happen

As it happens, I very much like swinging. (No, not that kind of swinging. Swinging-swinging.)

Oh, I haven’t done it in years, but I did spend many enjoyable hours in the past, swinging away.

What’s not to like?

You’re outside and, more than likely, it’s a nice day.  Although swinging is pretty much a pleasant-weather activity, you might go swinging in the cold – or even gloom of night. But probably not during rain, snow, sleet, or hail.

You are experiencing the laws of physics up close and personal.  No E = MC² to try and wrap your brain around. No Higgs bosun particle to parse. Want to swing higher? You – and just about every other six year old on the face of the earth – knows how to swing. Just put your legs together and pump.

And swinging can be as calm or as scary as you like. And you pretty much control which it is.

Calm, of course, is fine when you’re in junior high, and your best friend is sitting on the swing next to you, and you’re just gliding a bit back and forth, maybe not even taking your feet off the ground, but maybe twisting the ropes/chains so that you can do an unwinding twirl, but mostly you’re talking about your period, or whether Billy M is cuter than Billy T, or whether this year’s nun is crazier/nicer than last year’s nun.

As any swinger knows, scary is far, far better than calm.  Even a scaredycat little kid like I was knew that.

We had a swing set in our back-yard. By neighborhood standards, it was high end. It had three swings and a glider, rather than just two swings. And the green stanchions were thicker and sturdier than the skinny legs of the red and white low-end, two-swing sets. But my father never actually got around to anchoring the set very well. So if you got all three swingers, and maybe even a kid on the glider, and you all swung in time… Well, the legs of that swing set could lift right off the ground. Wheee!!!  I can still remember the wonderful thumping sound when the swing set settled back down to earth when we all swung forward. (Of course, by that point, the back legs were airborne.) It’s really a wonder that no one was killed. (Mid-century childhoods were hardly free-range, but compared to today’s constrained and planned-out middle class childhoods, ours were Huck Finn-ish.)

And then there was always the possibility – never achieved in the Rogers’ backyard, as far as I know it – that, even on your own, you could swing so high that if you just leaned back a smidge, you’d loop around on the swing set.

So, swinging is fun!

Business meetings, on the other hand, reside more or less squarely in the no-fun zone. Sure, there are outliers, where something amusing, interesting, or wildly, preposterously out of control happens. But mostly not. Even when meetings are “productive” and something is actually accomplished, they’re seldom fun.

And now British designer Chris Duffy is trying to inject an element of fun into meetings, and has:

…developed this swing table for the office. “When you’re on a swing at a formal table, there’s something quite hard for your brain to get, and it makes you smile. It really is fun.”

Duffy London, which started manufacturing the table in 2010, has so far sold five in Europe and is receiving inquiries from startups looking to furnish their offices. Each piece is made to order and customizable. “Some companies want each part in different shades of green,” Duffy says. (Source: Business Week)

Cost: £6,895 ($11,218), lampshade not included

To quote Wolfgang the Nazi from Laugh In, I think this is one of those “very interesting but stupid” ideas – at least for every place I’ve worked.

What happens if everyone starts swinging in the same direction? What about if everyone starts swinging in the opposite directions? What happens to everyone’s legs if they meet in the middle?

Oh, yes, I’m sure that in a calm, well-behaved office, this might work.

But what about in a scary office?

And, oh, yes, I’m sure that if your manager’s at the meeting, order will be maintained and everyone will be calm and well-behaved.

But what if – as has happened on occasion – your manager’s a complete and utter a-hole who just wants to stir things up?

And what if a bunch of employees who aren’t even at a legitimate, important, calm and well-behaved business meeting decide to have a little ad hoc, informal gathering in the swinging meeting room?

Collision! Mayhem! Calamity! Broken limbs. Broken teeth. Broken necks.

I note that Duffy has some startups interested in getting one of his swing sets.

My advice to them: stick with the video games or foosball tables. They might be just as big a productivity suck, but they probably won’t result in any loss of life. (Kids, don’t try this in the office!)

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Duffy London actually has some other rather cool and interesting designs. My personal favorite: this magic carpet coffee table.

Bagel head? Bagel head! What would Abbott and Costello say about this?

The other day, I caught, in passing, a news story on a thief who stole a woman’s wallet – but was quickly apprehended after the victim was able to give a pretty good description on the perp. That pretty good description may or may not have mentioned the slight resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, but it did note the the thief had rather distinctive stretched earlobes. I guess Nicholai Dandurant wasn’t paying attention the day they warned ‘don’t do the crime if you can’t cover up a fairly rare physical feature that will enable you to be easily remembered and even more easily ID’d’.

This is not quite as rare as, say, a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater, but I’m betting that it was pretty darned easy for the cops to pick this guy out of the crowd.

On the roster of body modification options, turning your earlobe into something that looks like a boring pink fleshy hoop earring is relatively tame.

Still, boring, pedestrian, middle aged me does have to ask ‘why?’

Of course, members of the bod mod squad likely have little interest in being or becoming boring, pedestrian and middle aged. For them, the question’s not ‘why’, it’s ‘why not?’

And so plenty of people pierce nose and tongue, get full sleeve (often quite beautiful, I must say) tattoos, and hoop it up with their earlobes.

Nose piercing always makes me worry about whether it hurts to blow your nose, and whether the nose-ring gets bugger-y. Tongue piercing, well, why would someone want to talk with a lisp or introduce any foreign object that could interfere with eating. (Yikes.) And major tattoo action (no matter how beautiful) just scream “unemployable” to me.

But upfront confession: I’ve actually done body modification.

As have, I would wager, most women and plenty of men.

My ears are pierced. (And, the first time out, I even did it myself with an ice cube and a needle. But those holes eventually closed up, so I went professional on my next go-round.) My toenails are lacquered. (Okay, not permanently, but this isn’t really natural…) I have $8K worth of laminates on what had been my very badly chipped front teeth. And my hair, well, let’s just say it’s pretty much the same color it was 40 years ago. (Lucky me!)

Still, I was not prepared for a recent article in the Huffington Post talking about a National Geo special chronicling:

…three people who opt into the temporary forehead injections which have become a keen part of the Japanese "body modification" art scene.

To take part in peachy-keen keen part of the scene, saline solution is injected into your forehead to create a sub-dermal blob. The technician then sticks his or her thumb into the center of the blot, producing a look that’s also called bagel head.

My question ‘why’ still applies, but if you’re into something called modcon body art, “it’s about the innovation.” As far back as 2009 – remember way back then? – Keroppy, a Japanese artist, told Vice that:

"People who like extreme body modification want to find their own way of doing things, and they’re always looking for new ways to do that. The more progressive the scene gets, the more these people have to experiment and go their own way."

Well, if a lot of people end up doing the same thing, then at some point it’s got to stop qualifying as their “find[ing] their own way”. But that point has not yet been reached. As you can see from the shot of multiple bagel heads getting bagel headed at the same time. Gosh, who wouldn’t want to be part of this progressive scene? (Wasn’t there a Star Trek character who kind of looked like this?) If you want to get even more progressive, men can do a scrotum injection. (I don’t want to think about how that goes on display. Guess I’m not as progressive as I thought.)

Wondering just how long it lasts?

The saline is absorbed within about 16 hours, and – supposedly – no drooping sack of skin is left in its place, even if you do this multiple times. (Why am I thinking ‘I’ll just bet’?)

Personally, I think the idea of deliberately injecting anything into your forehead – near your brain, near your eyes – is a really, really terrible idea. I guess I’m the paranoid type, but I’m a-thinking, we ingest and are otherwise exposed to all sorts of carcinogen-ish matter, to such a degree that I pretty much believe that everyone born from 1940 on will end up with some type of cancer in their lifetime. Why take the chance that a completely unnecessary saline drip near the old brain pan will end up being a problem sometime down the line?

As with a lot of things – hot fudge sundaes, gay marriage – if you don’t want one, don’t have one. And when it comes to bagel-headiness, I will not be having one.  And, once I hit the ‘publish’ button, I won’t be giving bagel heads another thought.

I will, however, be plagued by some serious Abbott and Costello flashbacks to their Bagel Street routine (which, like Abbott and Costello in general, I find ridiculously unfunny).

Ah, the golden age of comedy… meanwhile, some YouTuber can’t spell Susquehanna.

Bagel Head? Bagel Head!

Bad, bad, bad, bad vibrations

I was surprised to see a recent article about Brian Wilson and Al Jardine getting fired from the Beach Boys. (Admittedly, part of my surprise was finding out the Brian Wilson is still alive.)

After all, how can you get fired from something that you not only belong to, but are.

But fired they were, along with David Marks, an early-on Beach Boy who was with the group for a couple of years in the early 1960’s.

The boys (formerly known as the Beach Boys) were unceremoniously dumped by Love, who  owns/has licensed use of the Beach Boys name and brand.

How unceremoniously were they dumped?

Well, they were still on the Beach Boys’ 50th Anniversary Tour when they got word. And the word they got was through a public statement made by Love. Talk about fun, fun, fun….

Help me, Rhonda, wouldn’t it be nice if Love – who is first cousin to Brian Wilson (and the other two now-dead original Beach Boy bros, Carl and Dennis) – had at least given the guys a head’s up before he released the info?

Wilson was blindsided.

"I'm disappointed and can't understand why he (Love) doesn't want to tour with Al, David and me," he told CNN. "We are out here having so much fun. After all, we are the real Beach Boys." (Source: Huffington Post.)

You don’t have to have  gone on surfin’ safari with this crew to recognize that Brian Wilson was the creative force behind the Beach Boys from the beginning. Those tunes that even casual BB fans will blast on oldies radio when they come on, singing along with the windows rolled down, well, a lot of them sprang from Brian Wilson’s head. Which makes Love’s dastardly deed, well, pretty dastardly.

And, apparently, financially motivated.

Love was concerned that, if the echt Beach Boys are out there too much, they’d suffer from overexposure. Love said:

“…There are promoters who are interested [in more shows by the reunited line-up], but they've said, 'Give it a rest for a year'. The Eagles found out the hard way when they went out for a second year and wound up selling tickets for $5."

So while Love has ticked off Brian Wilson et al. by giving them the heave ho, his comment on the Eagles’ ticket prices wasn’t given the Eagles a peaceful, easy feeling. And they expressed their annoyance. Love’s response, through a spokesman, was that he was being “flippant”, not “venomous.” (Source: LA Times.)

Love is pretty much an equal opportunity insulter. When the Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Love’s acceptance speech included shots at Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen. (Great and glorious as the Beach Boys are, I’m guessing that 100 years from now, more people will be familiar with – and entertainers covering - the oeuvres of McCartney, Jagger, and The Boss than with the pleasant and ethereal harmonizing of the Beach Boys.)

Meanwhile, the band that will be touring in the name of the Beach Boys will include Love’s son, Christian.

Hmmmmm. I’m thinking if overexposure of the original, authentic Beach Boys drives ticket prices down, how is it going to help to have a “real fake” Beach Boys act on the road. Is this an “absence makes the heart grow fonder” tour, where Love takes a short term hit ($5 tickets, anyone?) so that when he next goes out with the real deal, he can jack the prices up?

Anyway, Wilson (70), Jardine (70), and Marks (64) may want to think about an age discrimination suit here. You may not be able to fight nepotism in court, but presumably in ousting the alter kockers and replacing them with a “kid”, Love (at 70, a fellow alter kocker) may be opening himself up for legal action.

Don’t worry, babies, every thing will work out alright.

Football, football, rah! rah! rah! (The boys are back in town.)

Well, the Great National Crisis is over. The long, dark night of the American football fan soul has ended. The replacement football refs, those rank amateurs making howlingly bad calls while the “real” refs negotiated with the NFL over pension rights, have been replaced. The old pros are back, with screen-cursing fans vowing never to complain about a bad call ever, ever again.

For those who don’t follow professional football – and, believe me, I can’t blame you if you don’t; I do watch games, but tend to get as caught up in asking the big question: what are you doing spending time with this wildly militaristic, super-authoritarian, brain-damage-inducing violent “game”, as easily as I get caught up in the action – the regular guys in the black and white stripes have spent the season up to now locked out by the NFL.

In lieu of those with experience deciding whether the passer was roughed, the pass interfered with, or the offensive lineman tippy-toed into a false start, the NFL dredged up a bunch of b-listers to fill in. Now, it’s one thing for the regular refs to make calls – many of which will be considered controversial – in front of 80,000 howling in-person fans and 80 million second guessers. Second guessers who may have money on the line in Vegas and/or their fantasy football team. And who are drinking beer and munching nachos  in front of their 56” flat screen.

It’s another thing to put someone in the glare who’s been reffing for Christian high school games, or for the Lingerie Football League – in neither of which circumstance is your life apt to be threatened. (Not up on the scantily clad gal footballers? Neither was I, but I’m sure you can use your imagination and figure out how they roll. Anyway, there are apparently quite a few teams – with names like the Baltimore Charm, Chicago Bliss, Philadelphia Passion, LA Temptation, San Diego Seduction, and Las Vegas Sin. If I had to pick one to root for, given that there’s no local edition, I’d have to go with the Minnesota Valkyrie. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll ever have to choose up sides here.)

Anyway, there have been great big gobs of pissing, moaning, whining, and gnashing of teeth over the bad calls that these poor substitutes have been making. To say that there’s been near hysteria is no overstatement. There’s been tons of frothing about how there’s so much at stake in these games, how the calls matter, how important every little W-L is, that you’d think folks were talking about something really critical here. (Remember, boys and girls, it is only a game.)

The furor peaked last Monday night when a couple of bad calls late in the game handed Seattle a last second win over Green Bay. The cheers you heard were not just from Seahawks fans, but from the regular referees who, I suspect, watched the botched calls, listened to the announcers carry on about the sanctity and integrity of the game, and, having been handed a two-ton bargaining chip, started jumping for joy. (That would be a metaphorical bargaining chip, of course, not a two-ton one, which would not enable a football ref to jump for joy.)

The poster boy for the bad refs is one Lance Easley, by day a small business banker for a BofA branch. By weekend, a Christian high school league ref who also officiates at powder-puff games. Easley made the call that gave Seattle the game, and I’m guessing that today he’s just as happy to be out of the fray and back to his day job figuring out whether Mike’s Pizza deserves the loan for a couple of new ovens. (Other replacement reps included an eighth grade geography teacher and the highway commissioner for an Illinois township.O

To move from referring at a high school game attended by a couple of thousand however rabid parents and classmates, to one where the eyes of the Monday Night Football watching world are upon you. Yikes!

The games – commercials aside – are faster. The players are bigger, quicker, and scarier. The rules a bit different. The stakes (however ridiculously inflated) are higher. And there is an awful lot of serious betting money on th eline.

Talk about pressure.

The regular officials, by the way, have day jobs, too. One’s an attorney, another’s an entrepreneur.

These outside jobs are a factor in the negotiations between the league and the referee's union. According to one NFL owner, the referees' reluctance to become full-time NFL employees is one of the reasons owners have been so unwilling to compromise. (Source: WSJ Online.)

I don’t see what the big deal is between part-time and full-time is here. Aren’t all football players pretty much part timers. Yes, I know they have to lift weights and run sprints all year, but they really only work for about 6 months, no?

Anyway, the big issue was over the referees pension plan, their being one of the few groups of part-time workers (and, increasingly, full-time workers) to have a pension plan.

Lucky them!. And while I don’t know what these guys make, I suspect it’s a reasonable enough rate such that attorneys and entrepreneurs would give up 2/5’s of their weekends a year to scramble around a football field in a polyester shirt blowing a whistle.

Whatever the problems were, the NFL was finding itself with an insurrection on its hands. (Hah!) Fans were going wild, politicians were getting in on the act (interestingly, even the most staunch anti-union ones), and active players were starting to tweet their complaints. I’m certain that, off-tweet, the NFL was hearing from plenty of owners that the strike needed to be settled.

So now we’re back to “real” referees.

Lance Easley can go back to powder puff and small business lending.

And I can go back to decided whether or not I like professional football, without my opinion being swayed by calls that even I, a casual fan, can see are just awful.

Who am I?

I have a couple of ancestry-related items on my bucket list.

I’d like to do one of those cheek-swab DNA things at some point, mostly to find out whether my Irish father – with his black hair, tan-ability, and west of Ireland grandmother – may have had a bit of African blood in there somewhere. I’m about as white as you can get: blondish hair, blue eyes, fair skin that goes up in flames when exposed to the sun… What fun to find out there’s something else going on beyond what the mirror tells me.

I’d like to visit Ballymascanlon. This is where my east of Ireland grandmother’s parents hailed from. I understand from my cousin Barbara that it’s a blink-you’re-gone kind of place, but I’d like to blink through at some point, if only to see the native turf of  my grandmother’s mantra: If Ireland were so great, we wouldn’t have all had to come over here.

I’d like to visit Neue Banat. My mother was born in a pokey farm town in the German diaspora. When her parents were born there, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When my mother was born there, after World War I, it was part of Romania. The town is now called Panatul-Nou, and I suspect it’s no longer a pokey farm town, but probably a bleak whatever with decaying Soviet-era cinder block apartment complexes. Still, while I have little desire to go to Romania – almost all of my mother’s relatives, along with ethnic Germans whose families had, for centuries, lived outside of what eventually became Germany were DP’d back to Germany after World War II – I wouldn’t mind seeing where my mother was born.

I’d like to jump into my ancestry on both sides. Which I hope to do when I retire.

I have no expectations that I’ll unearth anything earth-shattering.

Sure, I have a great-grandmother named Joyce, but I don’t think I’ll find out that James Joyce is my fourteenth cousin once removed. Himself, after all, was a Cork Joyce. “We’re” Mayo Joyces.

On the German side of the house, I’m a Wolf. I don’t think there are many famous wolves to go dancing with. But maybe there are some big, bad wolves out there that we’re kin to. (I sure hope I don’t discover that Hitler is my fourteenth cousin once removed.)

Since my family hasn’t been in The States all that long – since the 1870’s on my father’s side, since the 1920’s on my mother’s – I doubt I’ll find that I’m related to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.

But you never know what you’ll find out, even if it doesn’t tie you to the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

A couple of years ago, I found a website that had information on my grandparents’ emigration – their names, birthdates, date the left Neue Banat, the relatives in Chicago who sponsored them, and the name of the young cousin who came with them. Alas, this was a 3 a.m., can’t sleep, let’s roam around the web find, and I didn’t keep the link. I know it was to a site that was a labor of love of some fellow with an interest in Schwaben Deutsche.

And the other day, again in the sleepless wee hours, I found that, when my Great Uncle Fred Hanratty was killed in the line of duty, my Great Aunt Alice got a $700 death benefit from his union. (Fred worked on the Worcester trolleys.)

So I’ve long had in the back of my mind that I’d do some munging around on Ancestry.com. Whenever I get around to it.

Thus I was interested in a Business Week article  on Ancestry, which, despite it’s ads on TV – the bald guy who found out that all his predecessors were barbers, the woman who discovered that she lived around the corner from where her great-granny had once lived – I never realized was such a big business. It’s even a public company (NASDAQ).

Some of what Ancestry does, through a subsidiary, is dig up interesting celebrity ancestral connections that are presumably more market-worthy/titillating than those of the ‘Great-Great-Great Uncle Louis owned an accordion shop’ variety.

President Obama, for instance, is apparently connected to Brad Pitt, Warren Buffett, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and Rush Limbaugh. 

Oh, yes, and Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame is related to Vlad the Impaler.

As I mentioned, Ancestry is pretty big business, with a near monopoly choke-hold on the amateur family tree market.

Both the number of customer subscriptions and the size of its research archives have more than doubled since 2009, and Ancestry.com will net a projected $480 million in 2012, according to Bloomberg News, which means it will be up 189 percent over the last five years.

If you don’t want to shell out for Ancestry, you can make your way to an LDS reading room, where they let you search their files for free. Mormons believe in posthumous baptism, so their faithful often troll the archives to save their ancestors after the fact. They got in trouble a while back for attempting to save victims of the Holocaust, but I believe they backed off that ill-advised initiative. Personally, I’d be a bit nervous that plunking down in an LDS reading room might set you up for a dose of proselytizing, but I used to work with a woman who, when doing her family tree – this was pre-Internet – did go out to Salt Lake City to use the archives at the mother ship and was treated very well. This woman’s antecedents were all from Ireland, and I went with her once to a library at Boston College that was a pretty good resource on Irish immigration. So that would be another place to do some free searching.

But Ancestry.com is the big kahuna:

It owns five of the top 10 genealogy sites on the Net, including RootsWeb.com, Genea-logy.com, and Archives.com, a Silicon Valley startup acquired last April for $100 million.

Ancestry has two million subscribers, who pay on a sliding scale to access all sorts of records. And they try to hook you:

By sending “hints” about possible new family connections to its users, Ancestry.com easily develops into an addiction.

Hmmmm. My mother was born in Romania. Maybe I’m related to Vlad the Impaler. And Robert Pattinson.

I’m thinking of signing up just to see what kind of hints they drop. If they say Roy or Ginger Rogers, I’ll feel a bit disappointed, of course, as neither Roy nor Ginger was born a Rogers.

Speaking of born a Rogers, one of the reasons I’d be interested in doing the ancestry dig is to find out whether our Rogers was an Anglicized version of something more Irish sounding. In which case I may go native and change my name “back.” Or whether one of Oliver Cromwell’s boys paused mid-rampage to marry an Irish colleen and settle down Beyond the Pale in Roscommon. In which case maybe we’re related to The Queen.

Anyway, genealogy is the second most searched online topic, porn maintaining the number one position that helped push the bandwidth bounds to begin with. I suspect the balance will shift as the genealogy-searching demographic – white women 55 and older – continues to grow at its projected clip.

Gee, white women over 55. And I thought I was special…

Speaking of special:

Practically all people of European descent share at least one common ancestor on their family trees sometime within the last 550 years.

So maybe I am related to Roy and Ginger.

Can’t wait until the records go really far back, and cheek swabs are truly perfected. Then we’ll all find out that we’re monkey’s uncles. That’ll be fun! (I’m related to J. Fred Muggs on my father’s side, and Cheetah on my mother’s. Ungawa!)

Pre-peeled bananas? That’s one unappealing idea.

One of my high school friends was famous for the over-packaged lunches that her somewhat eccentric mother used to pack for her. The packaging highlight: bananas swaddled in Saran Wrap and tied with a string.

Fast forward a few decades, and we have the opposite end of the banana spectrum: a supermarket chain HQ’d in Austria, with outlets throughout Central/Eastern Europe and Italy, recently introduced pre-peeled bananas, served up on shrink-wrapped plastic trays.

Admittedly, the banana is not quite as portable as some other fruits.  With a peach or a plum, you just have to jettison the pit, or wrap it in a Kleenex if there’s no handy jettison point. With grapes, once you’ve finished the grapes you’ve got the slightly pesky crazy-stem to contend with, but the crazy-stem is not that messy if you have to stick it in your pocket or pocketbook. The ultimate portable fruit is, of course, the apple, with its disposable core that can be left with a clean conscience for the birds.

But once you finish the banana, there’s the peel: slimy and funky, too big to wrap in a Kleenex, nothing you want to forget in your pocket or pocketbook. And nothing you want to leave for the birds. Which won’t take it.

How unpopular are banana peels with wildlife?

One morning a few weeks ago, I was taking our recycle out and noticed that a garbage bag that had been put out the night before had been attacked by rats. The rats apparently hadn’t found much of interest. There was just one pawed/gnawed hole in the side of the trash bag. And streeling out of it was a banana peel. That the rats, initially enticed by the promise of banana, had rejected and left behind.

(Non-urban types are, I’m sure, aghast at the idea of rats, but that’s how cities roll. Which is why we try not to put our trash out until dawn.)

Of course, the Billa solution doesn’t make a banana any more portable by getting rid of the disposal problem. Okay, you no longer have to worry about discarding the peel. Now you have to figure out how to get rid of the plastic wrap and plastic tray. And, based on the picture, this concept doesn’t seem to have much appeal to those who want a single banana – someone heading to the gym, someone brown- bagging to work, someone packing lunch for the kids.

What, precisely, was the problem that Billa was trying to solve here?

Are bananas that time-consuming and difficult to peel that we need a pre-peeled banana as a labor-saving device? Sheesh. You don’t even need a knife or your front teeth to get the thing started.

And in a time when most folks are at least a tiny bit environmentally conscious, who needs all this excess packaging?

Not to mention that fruit peels – banana or other – serve an important function: protecting that inner-goodness from turning brown and rotting.

And not to mention that, let us face it, there’s something vaguely obscene about these suckers when stripped of their protective covering. (Vague obscenity being something that bananas, of course,  have a long running start on.)

This – the pre-peeled, ultra-packaged banana -  from a company that brands itself as a “common sense” supermarket.

Anyway, it’s no surprise that environmental groups, including Greenpeace, have been all over this bad idea. And Billa has decided that it wasn’t the smartest thing they’ve ever done

The supermarket has since apologized, according to the Austrian Independent, saying the "one off" mistake would not happen again. (Source: Huffington Post)

Billa isn’t the only one to dabble in fruit packaging, of course. One Huff Po commenter (handle: River City Slicker) graciously supplied a link to Mott, which offers packages of pre-sliced apples.

I’m sure that 90% of all kids would, for better or worse, prefer to have a nifty little package of pre-sliced apples rather than an apple-apple. And with one of those little mini-bags, there’s greater likelihood that the the kids will eat everything. Rather than take a few bites from the apple and toss it aside.

But unsliced apples have a tremendous benefit: they last a very, very long time in your fridge. In contrast with sliced apples, that start browning around the edges immediately.

Is there some fixative treatment that gets used on peeled fruit to keep them “fresh”? If so, one more unnatural act that we don’t need.

Anyway, I’m glad that Billa came to its common senses and took the peeled packaged bananas off the market.

I’ll take the slight risk of slipping on a banana peel to the larger risk to the environment that comes when we keep adding all sorts of plastic packaging to our already heaping trash dumps. At least my high school friend recycled her Saran Wrap and string.

The world’s smallest violin now plays for Dietmar Machold

The U.S. of A. has had its share of Bernie Madoffs over the years, but I guess in Europe they go in for more high-brow swindles.

Such is the case of Dietmar Machold, who, at 63 is facing jail time for a fraud scheme that involved Stardivari and other ultra-ultra stringed instruments.

Dietmar wasn’t an overnight violin huckster sensation.  The story began when his father opened a modest violin shop in Bremen, Germany, in 1951.  Son Dietmar took over the business in 1980, the dawn of the Greed Is Good decade.  Not content to sell pedestrian violins to folks with less-than-Yehudi-Menuhin, not-so-prodigy children so that the kids could scratch out a few bars of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to an audience of beaming grandparents, Machold decided to think and do BIG.

A generation later, as upper-end violin prices — like those of art, houses, credit default swaps and medical care — had crept inexorably upward, a dozen or so global dealers had dwindled to three or four, and Machold was one of them. The Bremen shop was still operating, and Machold now had shops and affiliates in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Chicago, Seoul and Tokyo.

The trade had never known a multinational on this scale. Instruments below $90,000 were “Mickey Mouse violins,” Machold told interviewers. Anything below $1.25 million was not worth his time. (Source: Washington Post.)

Well, as far as I know, Mickey Mouse never played the violin. Maybe Machold meant Jack Benny?

In any case, Machold became the go-to’s go-to for Strads. His reputation was such that he was able to prepare the appraisals for two violins, valued at $6.8 million, that he himself used as collateral for a multi-million dollar loan from the Bremen Sparkasse savings bank.

Those Bremen bankers had a gulp moment when violinmaker Roger Hargrave informed them that the violins were not Strads. In fact, they were worth close to $6K and $6.8M.

The bankers[also] had Hamburg forestry expert Micha Beuting examine the alleged Stradivari instruments. If they had been genuine, the trees used to make them would have to have been felled before 1737, the year of Antonio Stradivari's death.

In his report, Beuting noted that based on the growth rings, the trees had been cut down decades after Stradivari's death -- probably in the northern Alps or the Bavarian Forest, but clearly not in the southern Alps, where the spruce trees Stradivari used to make his violins grew. (Source: Spiegel.)

But it was pretty easy for the bankers to be duped.

After all, Machold had been a good bank client for years. He lived in a 700 year old Austrian castle. He was named an honorary professor by the Austrian ministry of culture. And, in 2005:

Erwin Pröll, the governor of the state of Lower Austria, awarded Machold the "Grand Gold Medal of Honor for Services to the State." Best of all, he anointed Machold a "citizen of the world" in full view of the illustrious assembled guests. (Source: Spiegel.)

Seriously, who would doubt the word of a ‘citizen of the world’? One who owned 44 cars – mostly Bentleys, Rolls, and Aston Martins. And Machold was such a trusted authority that:

At the 2005 annual meeting of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel in Orlando, members were invited to bid on a weekend at Machold’s castle. The ACTEC Foundation looked forward to the auction proceeds. The winning bidder looked forward to “a personal concert played on a Stradivarius violin.” (Source: Washington Post.)

Hmmmm. How many of those American College of Trust and Estate Counsel members do you think could tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a Mickey Mouse fiddle worth $90K? Wonder who won that bidding war…

In real life, by 2005, Dietmar Machold’s world was beginning to come unstrung. Not only was he foisting off violins of dubious pedigrees as thoroughbreds, he was using instruments which he didn’t actually own as collateral in multiple banks, for multiple loans, to pay off the real owners. In some cases, the collateral that the banks held was a photograph of a violin, not the actual violin. (See me after if you’d like to look at a Kodachrome snap of the Brooklyn Bridge.)

In true Madoffian-Ponzish fashion, he’d pay off  Person A with Bank Loan B, and pay off Bank Loan B with Bank Loan C. Thus he managed to keep all the balls in the air until 2008 when the economy went south, taking Machold with it.

Machold filed for bankruptcy, and an assemblage of banks and individuals have claims against him that amount to about $200 million.

Well, they’re not making any more Strads, so the price will keep going up as long as there are folks who want them – a couple of years ago, one went at auction for nearly $16M. But whether he ends up in the hoosegow or not, it’s a safe bet that none of them will be sold or appraised by Dietmar Machold.

Meanwhile, his creditors are no doubt playing one very sad song for him on the world’s tiniest violin.

Fight fiercely, Harvard Club waitstaff

Back in my college waitressing days, I worked a couple of shifts at the Harvard Club of Boston.

It was not a regular gig, but I had a friend who worked there every weekend, and I occasionally got drafted to fill in. My memories are that I mostly served fairly desiccated duck a l’orange to fairly desiccated old geezers who lived there and took their meals in the dining room.  And that my friend was usually humming the Beatles “Everywhere there’s lots of piggies, leading piggy lives” under her breath while she worked.

I think we were paid a flat rate per shift – no tips included – which if I recall correctly worked out to $13.54 for a three-hour shift. At a time when the minimum wage was $1.60, that certainly wasn’t terrible – and was probably the equivalent of what you’d have made with tips. I remember thinking that the flat rate wasn’t a bad deal. But that was eons ago, and today’s wait staff are apparently more attuned to whether or not they’re getting screwed:

Employees filed a class action lawsuit in November, claiming they had been cheated out of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in tips because of a misleading 17 percent surcharge on food and beverage bills that the club stated was collected “in lieu of a gratuity.” Some club members thought they were effectively paying tips, but the workers didn’t get any of the surcharge money. (Source: Boston.com)

Why not just fold the extra 17% into the price and say “no tipping”, which is their policy?

I’m assuming that The Club was paying the waitrons more than the minimum that’s required for those who receive tips – which has always been pretty darned minimal and which I don’t imagine, relatively speaking, has gotten much better over the years. Still, even if they were paying a decent hourly wage, it does seem sort of sneaky and mean-spirited to let the diners infer that the wait staff was making a bit extra off of them.

Anyway, Harvard’s making the aggrieved waitstaff $4 million settlement:

“…in part with the proceeds of a projected sale of one of its buildings at the main clubhouse on Commonwealth Avenue.”

Which is where I worked.

I wonder what’s for sale? Did all the desiccated old grads die? Do they no longer need to clubhouse to be a bunkhouse?

When I did my waiting, I was under the impression that the gentlemen who lived there were a bunch of ancient bachelors for whom Harvard was their dearest and closest relationship. It’s not just poor folks who need Single Room Occupancy residences…But maybe in this day and age, there are a lot more housing alternatives for the elderly with money. (Of course, I’m making a couple of assumptions here. One, that a Harvard grad will be able to afford a place to live in his dotage, and can take advantage of the housing alternatives out there. Two, that the part of the “clubhouse” that’s for sale is the part that the old dears lived in. Not that anyone I waited on could possibly still be alive…)

Anyway,

It was not immediately clear how many current and former waitstaff would receive compensation from the settlement.

I’m wondering whether it’s too late to get in on the settlement. I’ll have to let MB know. She’s a recently retired librarian, so I’m sure she’d be happy to have some folding green in lieu of the tips we didn’t make. I know I would.

Solidarity forever!

How do you like them Apples?

Other than those iPhone and iPad users who “upgraded” to iOS6, or the millions of fanatics who queued for iPhone 5 (and attempted to navigate their way home with it), or the starry-eyed worshippers who believe that Apple can do no wrong, I’m a-guessing that most tech watchers are somewhat amused by the fairly hilarious, if not quite epic, fail of Apple’s new mapping application, which they just introduced as a replacement for Google Maps.

Not that Google Maps is all that perfect.

I don’t use it a lot, but I have noticed that it often has a “last-mile” problem. It’s pretty reliable getting you from, say, downtown Boston to, say, Syracuse NY. Which is, of course, the macro, easy part. And less good at getting you to the doorstep you actually want to get to, which is the micro, not-so-easy part.

It also does an occasional choke on my home address. There’s more than one Beacon Street in Boston, but you’d think that putting my zip code in would let them find the right one…

Still, there’s something so smug about Apple, that – as long as no one gets hurt driving off the edge of a cliff – it’s kind of fun to watch them squirm a bit.

I consider myself neither an Apple basher nor an Apple aficionado.

I have an old iPod. Somewhere.

Within the next few months – probably around my birthday – I will finally break down and get an iPad. 

When my Blackberry – what was I thinking? – bites the dust, I will absolutely consider an iPhone (although I will look at Android, too, this time around.

And I’d have an Apple computer if, every time I need to replace my laptop, I didn’t cheap out and stick with Intel onboard.

What I absolutely admire about Apple is their design savvy – without even using them, Apple products just appear lighter, cooler, simpler, more elegant than anything else on the market . And, from a marketing perspective, their ability to build a fan base that is rivaled only by that of Harley-Davidson is an absolute source of wonder and envy.

But it’s hard not to gloat just a teensy, weensy bit. (And if I’m gloating, imagine what the folks at Google, Samsung, Nokia et al. are doing just about now.)

Anyway, if you haven’t read about the Apple map problems, you can do so here on Huffington Post.

Among other glitches, the writer of the HuffPo article, from within Manhattan, tried to get directions to a location on Broadway. But instead was directed to Bayonne, New Jersey. As anyone who’s ever been to Bayonne can attest, Manhattan and Bayonne are not one and the same.

HuffPo  is also the source of these wonderful slides. Which will give you a sense of the mapping problem we’re talking about.

Here’s a highly useful view of Colchester, England. Or maybe it’s Colchester, Connecticut. Or Colchester, Vermont. Through this sort of cloud cover, they pretty much all look alike.

I’m not quite sure what this is a map of, but remind me that I really don’t want to drive on roads that are equal parts Salvador Dali, acid trip, and nightmare.

My personal favorite, of course, is local, which is captioned Boston is melting.

It’ll be a while before I can drive over the Zakim Bridge without having this image flash through my brain.

As you can imagine there’s a lot of moaning about how Steve Jobs would never have let this happen. And a lot of speculation that this is black eye that Apple will have a hard time recovering from. But Apple is pretty much doubling down:

We launched this new map service knowing that it is a major initiative and we are just getting started with it. We are continuously improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get. (Source: CNET.)

I don’t quite get that “as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get” reasoning.

I know there are self-healing networks. But self-healing applications that make Boston look like it’s melting? I must be missing something here. Maybe they just mean that it’s so easy to access cloud-based apps that a lot of people will do so, will take part in the world’s largest unpaid beta test and report problems, etc.

Apple, of course, has its reasons for wanting to get its own map app out there. See if you can locate the operative word:

Apple could have kept Google's more reliable and mature mobile mapping app, but it made a strategic decision about something it needed to own and monetize. Put another way, getting rid of Google Maps was more important than delivering a less-flawed Apple Maps app and dealing with the grumbling.

If you picked “monetize,” you’re correct-a-mundo. Plus:

Apple knows that it can commit resources to fixing the problems and count on the goodwill of its loyalists. The latest evidence: Across the nation people queued up outside Apple stores on Friday as the iPhone 5 went on sale. Why does anybody really need to do that? They don't, but this is like Woodstock.

The mention of Woodstock is pretty apt, given what some of those maps look like. (One pill maps you larger, and one pill maps you small.)

Meanwhile I do appreciate that mapping applications are incredibly complex. And that very few applications – even ones that are far simpler – are released without a few bugs, no matter how well tested they are.

I also appreciate that Apple will be rectifying their mapping problems as fast as they can. And will probably not suffer any permanent fan loss.

Still, it’s kind of fun to watch this unfold, and to ask yourself just what would Steve Jobs do? If there is a great beyond in the clouds, he’s probably doing a bit of teeth-grinding just about now.

Hats off to Buckey!

My mother collected salt and pepper shakers. Sort of. Mostly she accumulated them so that there would always be something inexpensive that her kids could give her for Christmas. (I believe I was responsible for the little pink pigs and the turnips with the long faces.) I don’t think her collection ever amounted to more than a dozen or so pairs.  I have some of them in my kitchen, and they’ve been added to over the years. But I wouldn’t say I collect them.

When I was in first grade, the school crossing guard – a nice old geezer who’d probably be under arrest these days – gave me his collection of match book covers. (Why he singled me out, or how the collection was conveyed, I have no recall. Maybe he gave them to my father, and I was the only kid in the family who wanted them. Maybe the old geezer felt badly that I got stiffed on my birthday that year – no cake – because my mother was bringing my brother home from the hospital that day. These theories are actually less creepy than the thought that the crossing guard wanted me, personally, to have them for some reason other than a stiffed birthday.)

Anyway, all those pages of nicely mounted match book covers – organized by theme (birds, flowers) – are long gone.

So other than those few, those proud, those salt and pepper shakers, I don’t actually collect anything. And I don’t actually know anyone who’s a serious collector of anything other than experience.

Although I am not a collector, I was nonetheless intrigued to read about the collection of the late Roger ‘Bucke'y’ Legried, of Frost, Minnesota, who bequeathed over 100,000 baseball caps his son Scott.

Now, at first blush, the thought of 100,000-plus baseball caps sounds like fun.

Think about it: Old time caps from the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the New York Highlanders. Caps from every Major League Team that ever was. Caps from the Negro Leagues. Caps from the Minor Leagues. Now that is a collection that I could get completely caught up in.

But Mr. Legried, alas, was not a baseball cap collector. As a farm-equipment salesman:

The bulk of Mr. Legried's stash consists of freebies from farm conventions and trade shows. There are no duplicates or toppers with salty language. (Source: WSJ Online.)

Okay. I’m with him on the salty language caps – one time at Fenway Park I sat next to a guy who had a tiny little penis sticking out of his cap. I don’t remember what the salty language was, but I do remember thinking that it probably wasn’t the only tiny little penis he had on him.

But it’s really hard to imagine caps that are more boring than those square-ish, mesh-backed caps that are given out at aggie trade shows. (If you’re wondering what I, as a bona fide city girl, know about agriculturally-related caps: my husband had an aunt and uncle who owned a tobacco farm. By they time I met Jim, they’d converted the farm to a golf course, but there were still plenty of tobacco farms in the neighborhood, and Uncle Bill and his farming neighbors always had some freebie tractor-fertilizer-equipment type of cap on.)

But however boring they are on an individual level, I will say that, when you put them all together, it looks rather jaunty, as you can see from this picture of Buckey with a subset of his collection.

Janet Kubat Willette/Agri News

And what the collection lacks in individual item interest, it certainly picked up in volume. The collection holds the Guinness record for hats.

It’s housed in:

…a garage, a basement and three 42-foot-long semi-tractor trailers at the Legried family farm. A three-ring binder catalogs each cap and its provenance—every John Deere hat from every state is listed, along with a black cap with intricate gold and red beadwork.

Buckey Legried had hoped that the caps would end up in a museum – one of the locations he had his eye on was in Blue Earth, Minnesota, which was already home to a major tourist attraction: a 47-foot high statue of the Jolly Green Giant.

Frost, Minnesota. Blue Earth, Minnesota.

I have to say that other parts of the country have it all over New England – where it’s mostly a combo of British and Indian – when it comes to place names.

Buckey had also hoped to get on the Letterman Show. (You’da thunk an Indiana boy would come through, now, wouldn’t you?)

Looking for a home for the caps has now fallen to Buckey’s son Scott.

It’s conceivable that Blue Earth could come through:

Cindy Lyon, executive director of the Blue Earth Area Chamber of Commerce, dreams of displaying the hats in a park near the Jolly Green Giant…

In her plan, the hats would share space with the museum of Giant memorabilia, just off a coast-to-coast interstate highway and near other local attractions, such as the Spam Museum in Austin, Minn.

"Why not have it at the Giant park? You wouldn't believe the number of people who come there. We've had 23 countries and every state in the nation this summer," she said.

One problem: it’s estimated that ten foot high racks would have to extend for half a mile to hold the entire collection.

Another: while I see the connection between Spam and Green Giant – it’s almost a full, yummy meal – the John Deere caps only connect tangentially.

But here’s hoping, Buckey. My fingers are crossed, and my cap’s off to you.

If I’m ever driving through Blue Earth, Minnesota, I will absolutely be sure to stop..

The Full El Monte

It’s been a tough year for lifeguards.

First, there was the young man in Florida who was fired because he made the bad decision to save the life of someone drowning in a section of the beach that his company wasn’t being paid to watch. Then there was the fellow lifeguard who was fired for acknowledging that he would have done the same thing.

And now there are the 14 El Monte, California, guards who got the hook after posting a YouTube, “Lifeguard Style,” that spoofed a wildly popular (well over 200 million views) video done by Psy, a Korean pop star.

Apparently, the spoilsports at Sony or Google won’t let me do an embed here, so you’ll have to click through to YouTube, but here you go:

The El Monte 14

This is cute and funny enough on its own – a bunch of healthy young folks obviously enjoying themselves, but when you look at the video it’s parodying, it gets even better

The world gets smaller, and crazier…

All made funnier to me because I first  heard the words as “Condom Style,” not “Gangnam Style.”

For those who aren’t familiar with Condom Style Gangnam Style – which, when I wasn’t hearing it as Condom Style, I was reading it as Gangman Style:

Gangnam is a wealthy neighborhood in the South Korean city of Seoul where young people go to party. In the song, Psy describes the kind of guy he is and the kind of girl he wants, painting caricatures of the ostentatious culture of people who hang out in Gangnam. (Source: NY Daily News.)

As for the El Monte lifeguards:

Supporters thought the goofy video brought good-natured attention to El Monte and offered a rare opportunity to market the city of 114,000 people.

City officials disagreed. Supervisors in the Parks and Recreation Division called the lifeguards — as well as a manager who did not appear in the video — into a meeting in which they were asked to review pages from a staff manual.

Then, the 14 part-time employees — mostly college students making $9.54 to $14.20 an hour — were fired.

In a statement, officials said the lifeguards made an "unauthorized video" that used city resources without permission, namely distinctive red lifeguard swimwear and the city pool itself.  (Source: LA Times.)

What a bunch of stiffs those city officials must be.

Who cares if they used those city resource bathing suits, which didn’t look all that distinguished to me. I’ve seen Baywatch. Doesn’t every lifeguard in California wear a red suit? And do they actually re-use the suits or share them one guard to another. (Ewwwww.) And if those guards were working later that day, what’s the big difference if they put the suit on a couple of hours early?

As for using the city pool, it pretty much looked like they were doing this during off-hours, so what was harm? Okay, I guess there was some liability – what if one of them bonked their head or slipped on the edge of the pool. But it isn’t exactly as if they were ignoring someone doing the dead man’s float for real, or a kid with a diaper leak, or a teenager cannonballing onto the neck of the some old lady doing geriatric aquarobics. Sheesh.

Those fired – which apparently included at least a couple of folks who didn’t actually participate in the video – were given no warning, no notice, no nothing.

Firing these lifeguards – most are college students – seems way disproportionate to the offense. Maybe a verbal or written warning. Or a day without zinc oxide on their nose.

But firing?

The functionaries who made this decision have to be a bunch of humorless cranks, that’s for sure. Sure, there’s a little vulgarity in the video, but on the vulgarity continuum, it’s pretty tame – especially for this day and age.  But mostly the video just looks like some kids having fun. And I suspect they had fun coming up with the idea, choreographing it, rehearsing, etc.

Aren’t organizations looking for employees who understand technology, social media, creativity, and collaboration? Aren’t these good things?

Not in El Monte, I guess, where at least a few of the town sachems felt the guards were lacking in propriety, and embarrassing the city. (A city that, of course, most people have never even heard of.) 

As I see it, the only ones being embarrassed should be the officials who’ve made El Monte out of El Molehill.

Meanwhile, the El Monte 14 are fighting back.

They’ve appeared at a City Council meeting to defend themselves. And, not surprisingly, they’re using the social media – which, of course, was how they got into trouble to begin with. But which can certainly be well-mobilized for their defense.

You can sign a petition to support them here.

Bring back the El Monte 141

(Marco. Polo. Marco. Polo.)

Attention young folks: have you considered nursing school?

Maybe I’m just being a bit oversensitive here, but if there are three words I don’t like to see strung together in a headline, they’re aging, baby, and boomers.

So I was not exactly delighted to spy a Business Week headline that read Aging Baby Boomers Face Losing Care as Filipinos Go Home. (The inclusion of the words face, losing, and care certainly didn’t contribute any postivos to my feeling.)

Health care among aging baby boomers is much on my mind of late. Even though, frankly, I don’t think of us as aging. Not aging aging. Not yet anyway.

Last week, my brother-in-law had a hernia operation. (Doing fine.)

A few weeks back, a friend had a hip replacement. Her second hip is scheduled for Halloween. (Talk about trick or treat.)

Although my PCP has told me that I am in stunningly good health, I was just diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. So each night I Velcro my left hand and wrist into a Futuro splint.

(I won’t even count my husband’s health woes in here, as he’s technically not a boomer, having missed by two years. He just looks like one of “us.”)

Anyhow, it seems that, over the last few decades, hospitals throughout the U.S. and the rest of the developed world have increasingly relied on nurses and physicians from elsewhere. Much of the time, for nurses, that elsewhere was the Philippines. (The doctors are from India.)

In truth, the Filipino angle hasn’t been apparent to me. Of the dozens of nurses I have encountered over the course of my husband’s illness, almost all were American. At MGH, in fact, most of the nurses we ran across were local. The only true outliers I can recall were a nurse from Jamaica, and another from the Midwest who was surprised when I recognized – thanks to a cousin-in-law from Port Wing – that her accent was from Wisconsin. I guess this isn’t all that surprising: in the US, only 5% of the nurses are foreign. For doctors, the percentage is 27.

We didn’t run into any Indian doctors that I know of, but I certainly get the 27% foreign stat. Jim’s PCP has a Spanish name and accent. I think he’s from Latin America somewhere. Of the “Big Three”  (oncologist, radiologist, surgeon) for Jim’s recent cancer ordeal, two were “foreigners”: a Greek oncologist and a Korean radiologist. Jim was also treated by a few other MD’s from somewhere else, but none that I recall were from India.

But that may just be Mass General for you.

A hub for crack international physicians from everywhere, but not having to actually import doctors from anywhere. Ditto for the nurses, I guess. There may just not be any shortages when it comes to MGH, which (as we know from the signage that’s all over the place these days) is ranked the Number One Hospital in the country.

But shortages are starting to occur in less desirable locations. And they’re going to get worse, as there are more of us (consumers), and less of them (providers).

The BW article doesn’t tell us what’s up with the doctors from India, but apparently a lot of those Filipino nurses are now starting to stay home.

One young nurse profiled decided that she didn’t want to spend her life sticking thermometers under tongues, and switched to becoming a call center worker, where she places calls to bank credit card holders reminding them to pay up. Tough as nursing is, I can’t see call center as a career alternative, but as Nurse Nancy said:

“If I can maintain a relatively high standard of living as a customer-service representative, why go overseas to work as a nurse?”

Overall, this is bad news for boomers in the US, Europe, and Japan as we:

…reach the prime age for medical care. Economic growth in emerging economies, despite some signs of recent slowing, is stoking investment in hospitals and creating job opportunities in other industries that mean a growing number of health workers choose to stay at home.

For Filipinos, of course, this is good news: better health care, more career options. But what about us?????? (Can you believe the complete and utter selfishness?)

Of course, the medical personnel shortages  - WHO estimates a world-wide shortage of 3 million health workers - are nowhere near as acute in the US and other developed nations as they are in  poor places like sub-Saharan Africa:

…which has a quarter of the global burden of disease and only 3 percent of the world’s health workers.

All this is good news, of course, for doctors and nurses, as their pay is apt to go up and their options spread out.

At least we’re in a place where a lot of the potential migrant nurses and doctors are going to know the language. Not so in Japan, which has a rapidly aging population and a language that people can’t learn from pop lyrics and exports of “Two and a Half Men.”

Meanwhile, a shout out to young Americans: have you thought about nursing or med school?

Just think how much fun it will be ministering to us aging baby boomers…