Spam gets into the PB biz. (Yippy, Skippy.)

With all the spectacular (ahem) gadget news expected to come out of the Consumer Electronics Show this week, it’s refreshing to read a bit of low-tech news.

In this category, Hormel Foods’ acquisition of Skippy Peanut Butter most decidedly falls.

Hormel is, of course, best known for Spam. It also produces Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Hormel Chili, two items, I am a tad embarrassed to admit, my husband regularly consumes.

But mostly, when you think Hormel, which admittedly I seldom do, I think Spam.

Although I haven’t actually eaten Spam in years, I can still remember the chemical, stinging, tip-of-the-tongue sensation that came from that first luscious bite of Spam.

Ah, Spam!

Believe it or not, this was a childhood treat in our house, something we could only have when my father wasn’t home. Four years in the U.S. Navy in WWII gave my father his fill of this canned pork product. Still, we had to wonder about my father’s taste. He loved yucky foods like milk toast, creamed chip beef, and finnan haddie. How was it possible that he didn’t crave Spam – especially if served up with home fries? Yum, yum, yummedy yum yum.

But perhaps it’s a grownup vs. kid thing. As an adult, I am somewhat revolted at the idea of Spam, other than as a goofily fun brand.

Peanut butter, on the other hand, is something that I eat happily and regularly.

Just not Skippy.

I much prefer the local brand, Teddie – Super Crunchy ‘R Us.

In any case, I didn’t grow up with Skippy.

Not that my mother was a choosy mother choosing Jif. (All we ever got was a free sample which, of course, we used.)  No, we were a Peter Pan house. Perhaps it was the only brand carried by Morris Market. Perhaps it was the cheapest.

Anyway, I was surprised to learn that Skippy was the Number 2 brand, behind Jif. I would have thought it was Numero Uno.

Maybe being part of the Hormel family is just what it needs.

At least Hormel is food-stuff oriented. Skippy was owned by Unilever, better known for Brylcreem and Vaseline. Which may explain why Skippy trails Jif…

Most of its Hormel’s business is domestic, and the desire to go global was what prompted it to acquire Skippy:

In a conference call with analysts, CEO Jeffrey Ettinger noted that peanuts and peanut oil are popular in China. And although peanut butter is not a household staple there, he said it is growing rapidly. (Source: Boston.com)

Peanut butter may not be a staple, but it is used in dun-dun noodles, one of my favorite items on the Chinese food menu. Wish I had a big bowl of Mary Chung’s dun-dun in the fridge right about now.

Back at home, Ettinger said peanut butter is already regarded as a convenient and affordable source of protein and that Hormel would apply its innovation skills and ‘‘take Skippy out of the jar’’ to use it with other products.

Hmmm. Wonder what innovation skills have been applied to Spam. (On second thought, it may be best not to know.)

And thinking outside the jar? How far out are we talking?

Whatever your peanut butter preference, is there a more perfect sandwich than a PBJ?

I do acknowledge that there are a few equally perfect sandwiches: BLT, tuna, grilled cheese, the Gus (bacon, lettuce, cheese, and kosher dill pickle on pumpernickel). But there’s really not a sandwich I can think of that’s any better than the classic peanut putter and jelly.

Ettinger also said that Spam, which was also introduced in the 1930s, gave the company experience in handling iconic brands.

There’s iconic and then there’s iconic, and I wouldn’t quite put Skippy in the same category as Spam.  After all, Spam has it’s very own web site, while if you go to skippy.com, you’re on a site dedicated to a cartoon character – the eponymous Skippy – last seen in 1945. Or course, Skippy the Peanut Butter may argue that they’re gone the peanut butter world one better. Skippy the Peanut Butter’s found at peanutbutter.com.

But Skippy’s just about the spread, while Spam has all kinds of cool, spammish stuff for sale, including office products, kitchen utensils and housewares, sporting goods, kids clothing, and out and out kitsch. (Actually, it’s all pretty much out and out kitsch.)

Hormel’s got their work set out for them if they want to turn Skippy into as iconic as Spam’s.

Just hope that, when they start thinking outside the jar for new uses, they don’t start pushing something as ghastly as a Spam and Skippy sandwich. (White bread, only.)

But I do wonder what those out of the jar innovators will come up with…

“I will survive!” (Can Doomsday Preppers release my inner Donna Summer?)

Always on the lookout for a distraction, something to divert us from the fact that our ancient building condo is at a temperature the equivalent of a meat locker, we have found a most excellent reality show: Doomsday Preppers.

As a fast-fact that came onscreen during one episode informed us, 41 percent of Americans think that it’s more important to prep for a disaster than to save for retirement. I find this pretty peculiar, given that the biggest disaster that most of us are likely to encounter is retiring with nary a pension nor a 401K of any heft. But that is, of course, just me.

Mostly, I’m intrigued by the preppers, their thought processes, their plans. (This show’s also given me the answer to ‘who wants all these assault rifles and high capacity weapons?’)

There’s the fellow in NYC who’s come to the conclusion that, if something bad happens there, most people will be heading west to NJ. So his big plan is to pick up his family and drive to Long Island. I suspect that if some unnatural or natural disaster occurs in NYC, there will be just as many people on the LI Expressway as there are attempting to get across the GW Bridge, so it’s probably wishful thinking that this prepper will have clear sailing as he heads east. More than likely, he’ll find the equivalent of the Friday before Memorial Day traffic. He is prepared with bikes, but he’ll also have a six year old in tow who, I’m assuming, may not be up to pedaling all that long and hard to get to the safe house.

A local prepper, from Somerville, Mass., met a woman from South America online. When she got to the States, her introduction to life here was a prep run to the fellow’s 10 acres in upstate New York, where she was unhappily bitten alive by mosquitoes. As with the LI Expressway optimist, the Somerville prepper operates under the assumption that, if Boston is nuked, he will be the only one who thinks about going west, young man, and that he won’t get bollixed up in traffic. He has apparently never tried heading in that direction on Columbus Day weekend. (Good luck, pal. You’d probably be better off staying in Somerville with a blanket pulled over your head.)

Many of the preppers have a very specific fear in mind.

A Virginia housewife believes that there’ll be a tsunami heading her way from a volcano eruption in the Canary Islands.

A couple in Indiana fear that the New Madrid Fault will blow, and the earthquake will create a new continental divide. They’re raising the money to buy the food, batteries, guns and ammo they’ll need to stay alive an keep the hungry hordes out of their modest home by online businesses selling adult sex toys and bearded dragons. (If I’m not mistaken, there just might be a combo business there. I just don’t want to think too long and hard about it.)

One of my favorite preppers is a business student who lives in Salt Lake City, right behind the state capitol. Her fear is that there’ll be a government takeover, and the government will be going door to door to take your rights away. And there’ll be no food. She keeps a watchful eye on the Utah State House for signs of martial law, and has recently worked with a professional sniper (?) to learn how to blow someone’s head off at long range.

Other preppers have more general, end of day fears. One guy in Florida has it all set up – an underground bunker, and a plan to grow tobacco and distill alcohol for the general store he’ll run, since if everything breaks down, cigarettes and booze will be priority items. He’s also invested $100K in an underground assembly line that lets him produce several different types of ammo.

Most of the preppers are naturally focused on saving themselves and their immediate families, but one more idealistic old coot up in Canada has created a bunker that will house 500 children so that civilization can be rebuilt.  As long as there’s room in his inn, you can drop your kids off. No adults need apply.

My favorite prepper, perhaps because he struck me as the most practical, sharp, and business-focused of the bunch, is Larry Hall, who runs Survival Condo, luxury underground condos built on a couple of old missile sites in Kansas. This guy is one thorough prepper…

Not only can the facility survive a direct nuclear hit, your condo comes with five-years worth of foods supply for everyone onboard, and plenty of guns and ammo to fend off the great unprepared. There’s a colossal water storage facility, redundant electric systems, elaborate filtration. Hall even consulted with psychologists on cabin fever, and among the other niceties of the facility are a choice of window views – nature vistas, an aquarium tank – that will give some sense of connection to the great outdoors.

These condos aren’t for those who have to support their prepping habit by selling sex toys and bearded dragons, by the way. The smaller (900 square foot) units go for $1.5M, and the larger units (1820 square feet) go for $3.0M.

Taking a page straight out of HGN, each condo comes with:

• State-of-the-art Kitchen: Stainless steel kitchen appliances include refrigerator, dishwasher, dual-fuel (electric & propane) professional range, wall oven, professional ventilation hood. Granite or custom concrete counter-tops.
• State-of-the-art energy efficient washer and dryer in each unit.
• Built in recessed full spectrum LED lighting.
• Kohler bath fixtures and jetted Jacuzzi tub in each master bath.

But wait, there’s more:

• Organic hydroponic and aquaculture food production.
• General Store.
• Indoor Pool & Spa, and a complete workout facility.
• Custom theater.
• Custom Bar & Lounge.
• Library & Classroom.
• Command & Control Center.
• Medical First Aid Center.
• Communication Center complete with on-site Internet subset access.

Oh, and it’s even pet friendly if your pet is well-behaved and weighs less than 70 pounds.

Since banks won’t grant you a mortgage, you have to pay cash. The first silo has sold out, by the way. And you can start occupying your unit any old time.

If you want to wait for a natural or manmade disaster, your purchase price includes transportation (unspecified) to Kansas.

No word on condo fees or taxes, or how they get paid in case of emergency.

I must say, if I were the doomsday type, I’d be going the Larry Hall route, rather than try to figure out how to manufacturer my own ammo. But I’m not one of the “I Will Survive” brigade.

There’s a certain level of disaster that I would not mind surviving: Hurricane Sandy, even if it wiped out my home; a contained terrorist attack, even if it happened close by and people I cared about were killed (I think so, anyway). But when it comes to earth-shattering (literally or figuratively) cataclysm, when the world as we know it ceases to exist, count me out.

Whatever the level of stainless appliance and dog-friendly luxury, if I can’t take a walk through the Boston Public Garden on a nice day. If I can’t go to Toscano’s with my husband for GF pasta. If I can’t chill out (and drink wine) with my family and friends. If I can’t call someone just to chat. If I can’t check books out from the BPL. If I can’t push my cart around Whole Foods. If I can’t stop by J.P. Licks for an occasional cone, well then, life for me personally would not be worth living, and I’d just as soon be at Ground Zero for whatever Mayan-calendar-level disaster happens.

Maybe if I were younger, maybe if I had kids…But I think not.

If the doomsday’s that doomy, include me out. I’m just not willing to kill someone to protect a bag of freeze-dried peas.

Doomsday Preppers is plenty entertaining, and plenty interesting, but I’m afraid it hasn’t unleashed the inner Donna Summer in me. (Come to think of it, Donna Summer didn’t survive, either.)

Minutemen, what Minutemen? (Hey, we’ve got real Patriots.)

With the  exception of hockey, UConn women’s basketball, and (possibly) the Harvard-Yale Game, college sports are just not that big a deal in New England.

We may be sports-obsessed, but it tends to be the professional sports teams that obsess us.

So Boston College’s having a miserable football season doesn’t even elicit a yawn beyond the locker room at Chestnut Hill, and the only tickets that play hard to get are Boston College – Boston University hockey, and the Bean Pot final (especially when it pits BC vs. BU).

But college football, which is madly followed in many other parts of the country?

Maybe, given the Irish Catholic angle, there’s a bit of interest when BC plays Notre Dame. But, mostly, college sports is a big, fat ‘who cares’ for anyone other than those who play them, and those who know and love those who play them.

Yet our lack of appreciation for and interest in big time college sports has not stopped the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) from funneling millions of our precious taxpayer dollars into trying to build UMass football into something other than what God intended it to be: a nice little game played on a mellow, sun-dappled New England fall afternoon, at a stadium that students can walk to. If they leave at half-time to go get (more) buzzed, so be it.

But UMass, which somewhere along the way built up a marching band that would do any football factory proud, decided that they needed to field a football team worthy of the band.

This entailed a move from the Football Championship Subdivision, where you get to play in putz groups like the Ivy League and the Patriot League (home of West Point, Lehigh, and Holy Cross), to the Football Bowl Subdivision, where you get to play for the opportunity to compete in putz bowls like the Chick-Fil-A and Belk Bowls. But that means you get to play semi-pro, minor-league NFL teams. And that you get to offer a lot more “scholar-ath-a-letes” a lot more “scholarships.”

For its first season in the bigs, the only bowl UMass qualified for was the Toilet Bowl. They went 1-11, and that was against a pretty non-glamorous roster of opponents, including the Central Michigan Chippewas and the Akron Zips. When what you really lust after is playing the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Well, on review of the UMass 2012 schedule, I do see that they got some dream fulfillment going there. The Minutemen did have the opportunity to get coldcocked by the Wolverines. But mostly they played against lesser lights.

Fortunately, they did get to play the Akron Zips, which provided them with their only win. (I was going to write that ‘they don’t call them the Zips for nothing’ but, like UMass, the Zips managed to eke out one measly win and, like UMass, went 1-11.)

Football factories are not, of course, built in a day, so we can’t expect that our boys are going to be beating Alabama anytime soon.

But as part of the grand experiment, the folks in Amherst decided that they couldn’t keep playing in their squinchy football stadium. They’d need to play in a bigger and better facility. To wit, the move to home gaming at Gillette Stadium, where the New England Patriots – our true boys of autumn, our true home town honeys -  bang helmets.

The bad news is that this is almost 100 miles from campus, making it difficult for students to get a bit of a buzz on and decide they want to stroll across the quad and take in a spot of football.

The good news was supposed to be that there are hundreds of thousands of UMass alumni living in the eastern part of the state. And they, presumably, would be more willing to head over to Gillette rather than trudge out to Amherst.

This calculus, of course, doesn’t factor in that, by the time you add in the time it takes to get out of the Gillette parking lot after a game, you would have had time for a leisurely drive home from Amherst, taking the slow route on Route 9, and stopping for dinner in Worcester along the way.

Whether traffic was the reason or not, UMass alumni weren’t showing up in droves to watch “their” team at Gillette.

When the Minutemen played their first homecoming game in Foxborough — a 24-0 loss in October to Bowling Green — they drew a crowd of only 10,846 to the 68,756-seat stadium. (Source: Boston.com)

I’ve been to a few New England Revolution (soccer) games, so I know what it’s like to rattle around at Gillette, but for UMass, things got even worse. For their final game of the season – a loss to the Chippewas – they drew a bit over 6,000 fans. Pretty grim, given that some of the reasoning behind moving up to the higher football division was to perk up alumni commitment (i.e., donations) to the school. So far, so bad.

The sea of empty seats was especially stunning because the Minutemen had been accustomed to nearly packing their campus stadium for homecoming games. Over the previous five years, they had played before average crowds of 13,937 at the 17,000-seat McGuirk Alumni Stadium, on the UMass Amherst campus.

This is, of course, costing both students and taxpayers.

Oh, it’s “only” costing about $5 million for the year (not counting the $3 million that went towards paying down the cost of upgrading the on-campus stadium that’s no longer in us).  But it’s the thought that counts, and this doesn’t seem like a very good one.

I understand the hunger on the part of some on campus for the “total” experience that big time college football brings. But at the same time it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, for many schools, what comes with big time athletics is bit time trouble. The sham of bringing in so many students with no real shot at the pros, and providing them with a less than mediocre education, as happens in so many of the major programs. The slavish fawning over of the football system that ends up with Joe Paterno’s statue being taken down at Penn State. The glorification of athletes that results in crimes committed by those athletes getting swept under the rug – and not just at the total football factories; even at the so-called “good” schools like Notre Dame.

What’s wrong with having a nice little local program? Play the other New England state universities, and schools like Holy Cross? Why not keep it on campus, where students can attend more easily? What’s wrong with 13,000 people watching a football game on a nice Indian Summer day? Does it have to be 90,000 diehards screaming for blood?

Personally, I’d rather see that taxpayer money go for scholarships, or labs, or a few more professors.

Forget putting medical marijuana on the ballot. Can’t we vote on this?

Coach potato

By now, one would have supposed that there is nothing left to say about outsourcing.

And then we read about Boeing’s going out and employing:

…sacks of potatoes as stand-ins for passengers as they worked to eliminate weak spots in in-flight wireless signals.

Why not hire real people to impersonate passengers? Well, Boeing felt that:

…they couldn't ask people to sit motionless for days while data was gathered.

I suspect that, in this economy, Boeing could have gotten on Craigslist and recruited plenty of folks willing to sit still for minimum wage, a bag of peanuts, and a couple of in-flight movies. But if something can be done for cheaper, it’s going to be.

Just ask the toll-takers on the Mass. Turnpike who are going to be fully replaced by automation in the not too distant future.

Then there’s the Paris Metro running driver-less plains, and the prospect of pilot-less plains.

Yep. If something can be automated, it will be. If you can work from home, someone willing to make $2/hour can work it from Mumbai. And if there’s a way to get it done more “cost effectively”, some bean counter will figure it out.

Just what is the future of work, anyway?  A few high-paid jobs at the top of the slag heap, a few more the next level down, and the rest of the world gleaning the slag heap for bits of copper and rags. Sigh…

It’s one thing to be replaced by a machine, by a 12 year-old factory worker in a danger zone where any self-respecting OSHA official would stroke out, or by some snotty-voiced Indian university grad willing to call himself Brian when he answers the phone.  But to lose out to a sack of potatoes…

But as it happens, humans have a bit more than you might think in common with potatoes than just having eyes.

It turns out that potatoes - because of their water content and chemistry - absorb and reflect radio wave signals much the same way as the human body does, making them suitable substitutes for airline passengers.

So Boeing got their grocery cart out and bought 20,000 pounds worth.

If potatoes cost 50 cents a pound, that’s $10,000. Or 1,000 hours worth of humans sitting still for $10/hour.

Don’t know how long the potatoes were needed – or how long they lasted – but we do know that sacks of potatoes do not need bio breaks, press the call button for the stew, or feel the urge to join the Mile High Club.

No word on whether they were Idahos or Maines, russets or Yukon golds, new potatoes or old. Frankly, from the picture, they look more like onions. We do know that Boeing called its project SPUDS (for Synthetic Personnel Using Dialectic Substitution).

Synthetic personnel! Just like those perky, Valley Girl voices that greet and guide you when you call American Express and Fidelity. (“Sorry, I don’t quite understand you. Did you say ‘check my balance?’” No, I actually said ‘I’d like to speak with a @*(#*)@#*()! human.’ Perky IVR systems just don’t speak @*(#*)@#*()!,)

In any case, the potatoes give Boeing a good idea not just of where the weak spots are, but where there are any potential points where wireless actually could interfere with the a planes actual electronics equipment when in flight. (Phew.)

There is, of course, some risk in using potatoes. As anyone of Irish heritage knows, praties can and do go bad. Those Boeing coach potatoes could easily have turned into suppurating bags of yuck that would have made wireless signals stand on end based on the smell alone of those suppurating bags of yuck.

Not that humans don’t eventually turn into suppurating bags of yuck. But by then, we’re dead, and no ones paying us anything.

Anyway, I can’t help feel a bit sorry that yet another important job isn’t going to humans, but to an item that branched off from us quite while back, evolution-wise. Next thing you know, they’ll be replacing test-crash dummies with sacks of tomatoes. Squish!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: AP article, pointed out by my brother-in-law Rick, a consistently excellent source of blog ideas for Pink Slip.  Rick also suggested that there might be some way to connect this story to Aer Lingus, but I couldn’t find it.

Worst business decisions of the year? (Maybe 2012 wasn’t all that bad, after all.)

There is only one thing I like about ringing in the new year, and that’s the look-back lists that pop up starting in mid-December. You know, those Top 10, Bottom 10, Best of Times, Worst of Times lists that I end up poring over as if they actually mattered. I mean, I’ll look through the Top 10 Movie lists even in years – like the one just closed – when I actually don’t go to the movies at all.

I’m even capable of whipping off a Top Me-related Things list of my own. 2012’s personal best:

• Hearing from the oncologist and surgeon that my husband’s outcome from extensive cancer treatment was the ‘best outcome possible.’ (Fingers and toes remain crossed.)
• Taking our nieces to Rome for their April vacation. (Bonus that this occurred in the midst of Jim’s treatment – post-radiation chemo/pre-gruesome surgery.)
• Seeing Bruce Springsteen at Fenway with my sister Trish. (Next time The Boss comes to town, we’re taking Kath. Just as Trish initiated me into fandom, so we will jointly get Kath there.)

But I do like those lists, so I enjoyed the one I found on Money/MSM that catalogued the “worst business moves of 2012.”

First up, the Apple Maps fiasco, in which Apple replaced old quasi-reliable Google Maps with their own. This turned out to be colossal bollix, one that gave new meaning to the expression “get lost.” Because this was Apple, which usually gets it mostly right, there was a lot of shock and awe going around that they would release an app that was so incredibly faulty. Because this was Apple, the problem was magnified by the application of a thick layer of schadenfreude. (Pink Slip had a bit to say about this one.)

The Hostess CEO’s decision to cut pay by 8% companywide, while sparing himself the cut, also made the list. Talk about a ‘let them eat cake’ move. Frankly, I was too disheartened by Hostess’ closing down after years of piss-poor management and employee-screwing that I gave this company’s demise a blog pass. But I had commented on their bankruptcy earlier in the year. And what a heel this guy must be to keep his full $125K/month while nickel and diming the rank and file.

Then there was Yahoo’s giving Scott Thompson the heave-ho over a minor résumé exaggeration. It seems he claimed that he had a degree in computer science and accounting, when he really had a degree in business administration/accounting. As résumé exaggerations go, this one doesn’t seem to me to rise to the level of fire-able offense – it’s not like he lied about the school, or the level of degree obtained, or whatever. He didn’t say he went to Stanford and claim he had inadvertently confused Stonehill with Stanford. He didn’t say he had a Wharton MBA because one day he drove by Penn. But Thompson was caught out in a lie, and he was the CEO , so… Über baby mama Marissa Mayer, who got to be his replacement, is probably thankful that Yahoo was so persnickety.

I missed Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn’s affair to remember, but I’m sure the 29-year-old leadership trainer can recall that during a couple of business trips when the star-crossed lovers were separated he contacted her – e-mail, phone call, text – over 200 times. Glad to see he was using electronics!

Ah, to be young and in love. Too bad Dunn was 51 and running the company. He did get some walking around money when he left: $6.6 million worth of severance.

I also missed Groupon’s psychodrama, in which it was leaked that the board was considering dismissing the CEO and replacing him with someone with the experience to do something about the 80% drop in share price. They ended up keeping Andrew Mason, but those board meetings must be a bit tense and paranoia-inducing. I did have a tangentially Groupon-related post about a company investor who paid way over market price for his mansion. (Come to think of it, overpaying for your house is kind of in keeping with the major share price plummet, isn’t it?)

Also on the list: J.C. Penney’s failed turnaround strategy. Whatever it was, it hasn’t worked so far, and the company lost several billion in 2012. 

Hallmark UK issued what Money/MSN calls the “worst birthday card ever”, and I’d have to agree that a greeting aimed at a newly minted teen that has the following sentiment is pretty tasteless:

"You're 13 today! If you had a rich boyfriend, he'd give you diamonds and rubies. Well, maybe next year you will -- when you've bigger boobies!"

So much for those three-hanky, sap-orific Hallmark ads where the sweet young piano student sends her crotchety old piano teacher a card telling him just how – sniff, sniff – swell he is. Hallmark’s excuse was that the inappropriate card was produced by a company they acquired, and they hadn’t realized that it was still in circulation. Personally, I find it a lousy card on many different levels, but I can actually see some kids that age feeling very grown up and fun about sending it.

The Denny’s franchiser who threatened to add a surcharge to bills to cover the cost of Obamacare – and who “even suggested that customers could reduce the tip they give their servers in order to pay that surcharge” -  found a place on the worst-of-business list. Deservedly so. Nothing like taking your political pique out on those whose misfortune it is to have to earn their living serving obesity-inducing breakfasts at a Denny’s.  But about what you’d expect from a chain with the reputation that Denny’s has managed to cultivate for itself over the years. (Obesity-inducement is the least of it…)

No surprise that Facebook’s IPO made the cut. I didn’t do an aftermath on the IPO, which would have been a combination of gloat over greed-head losses, and elegy for the (yet again) little guy investor who gets rolled. But I did make note of the Facebook fellow who was going to renounce his US citizenship to spare himself post-IPO taxes. (Interestingly, the Facebook IPO also made one “best business moves” list because it made Marky Z and a bunch of employees oodles of money, even if the actual oodle turned out to be less than the anticipated oodle.)

The final bad business decision on the list was all the money that Wall Street threw behind Scott Brown, only to see their worst nightmare (that would be Elizabeth Warren) prevail. 

The securities and investments industry spent $3 million supporting Brown… The financial, insurance and real-estate sector gave him $6 million.

Well, it may not be Facebook IPO money, but $9M is not exactly loose change.

When you give money like that, you'd better make sure you give it to the winning candidate.

I don’t imagine Lizzie would have taken it…

Anyway, given all the strife in the world, I must say that, business-wise, if the above was the worst that 2012 produced, it was a pretty darned calm year.

Bowled Over: Happy (Meh) New Year.

As holidays go, I have to give New Year’s/New Year’s Eve a 5-meh rating.

Valentine’s Day. Saint Patrick’s Day. Easter. Memorial Day. Fourth of July. Labor Day. Columbus Day. Veterans’ Day. Thanksgiving. Christmas.

Yep. All the other major holidays have a lot more to commend them than New Year’s.

If you don’t watch the Tournament of Roses Parade, what’s there to do?

Well, you could watch some bowl games…

Thanks to my sister, Trish, I know that her alma mater, Northwestern, is playing in the Gator Bowl. I’d be more than happy to root, root, root for the Wildcats. But I do have this theory that, in general, an academically weaker school will beat an academically rigorous school. So NU is doomed, as they’re playing Mississippi State.*  And, by the way, that’s the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl, thank you, as most bowls these days are sponsored.

Anyway, to test my academic theory, I looked through the results of the bowl games that have already been played.

The first on the numbingly long list of bowls that you’ve mostly never heard of was the Gildan New Mexico Bowl, which for me has the double whammy of being a bowl game I’ve never heard of, sponsored by a company I’ve never heard of. The final score – Arizona 49, Nevada 48 – neither proves nor disproves my theory, as I have no idea which school is “better”, and suspect that the near-tie score reflects that they’re pretty much even-steven.

It’s also hard to judge in a complete information vacuum the schools representing in the Famous Idaho Potato, San Diego County CU Poinsettia, Sheraton Hawaii, Little Caesar’s Pizza, R&L Carriers New Orleans, and Military Bowls. (Don’t quite know what the Military Bowl is, but none of the service academies played in it.)

Which was not the case in the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl, in which Air Force lost to Rice. Rice is a pretty good school, so I would have expected a loss here. But the Air Force Academy is presumably decent academically, even if they do have the reputation for being a bunch of religious zealots.

Moving on – and reinforcing if not proving my theory - Arizona State slaughtered Navy in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl.

As for the Beef 'O' Brady's – another hunger-fighting – Bowl: just a few weeks ago, I’d heard of neither the bowl nor the University of Central Florida, which played in it. But I did read that UCF was voted the least academically rigorous school in the country. So it’s no wonder they beat out Ball State.

Then there were the MAACO Bowl Las Vegas, in which Boise State outflanked the University of Washington. The Belk Bowl, in which Cincinnati trumped Duke.  The Bridgepoint Education Holiday – say what? - Bowl, with Baylor over UCLA. And the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, where Texas Tech beat Minnesota. ‘Nuf said.

Since rules are meant to be broken, I will point out that Ohio bested ULM in the AdvoCare V100 Independence – ditto on the say what? – Bowl. ULM you may well ask: University of Louisiana at Monroe. And not that Ohio, which like so many of the Division 1 “schools” fielding semi-pro/minor league teams for the benefit of the National Football League, is so full of geniuses. But I suspect that Buckeye-ville has a few more scholars than ULM.

Also along the exception to the rule line, Syracuse beat West Virginia in the New Era Pinstripe Bowl. (Okay, I’m a Northeast snob. I’ve never tried to keep that a secret.)

In the Russell Athletic Bowl, V-Tech beat Rutgers in OT. This near tie makes sense in that these are both relatively decent schools, offering relatively decent degrees.. (Even though my Scarlet Knight of a husband would suggest otherwise.)

And how about the fact that two of the bowls are sponsored by undershirt companies: Glidan (I looked them up) and Russell Athletic? 

I am writing this post before all the scores are in, but, based on my belief that the better school will lose, my predictions for the later-in-the-weekend games are:

Texas loses to Oregon in the Valero Alamo Bowl. [Update: I wsa wrong. Texas narrowly edged out Oregon. As the flagship public universities for their states, both schools are no doubt reasonably decent. It’s just that UT has a more glowing academic reputation, maybe because people keep pointing it out as a proof point that Texas is, indeed, enlightened.]

The Vanderbilt Commodores should lose to NC State in the Franklin America Mortgage Music City – also known as The Mouthful – Bowl.

The Buffalo Wild Wings, Hyundai Sun, Autozone Liberty, Chick-fil-A Bowls are anyone’s guess. (I.e., I don’t have a gut sense about the schools playing one way or another: nothing really stands out.)

As for the bowl games that will be played today.

Oklahoma State beats Purdue in the Heart of Dallas.

Mississippi State topples Northwestern in the Gator Bowl. (Sorry, Trish.)

Michigan loses to South Carolina in the Outback.

I can’t pick a winner in the Capital One, the Allstate Sugar, or the Discover Orange, which is being played at the Mercedes Benz Superdome, formerly known as the just plain old vanilla Superdome. (But now that I think of it, my northern snobbery will kick in yet again, and I’ll say that Northern Illinois will lose to Florida State.)

As for the Rose Bowl, this is a toughie, as it pits Stanford (the Ivy of the West) against Wisconsin (which, along with Northwestern and Michigan, is an Ivy of the Midwest). Perhaps unfairly, I will assume that Wisconsin admits a few more lunkheads. So they’ll win.

For college football junkies, the bowls don’t end here.

There’s Tostitos Fiesta, in which Oregon should lose to Kansas State. This is in keeping with the rule of thumb that a school with “State” in its name is not as good as a school that’s The U of. Which makes the GoDaddy.com Bowl a bit of a perplexer: Arkansas State vs. Kent State. For sentimental, child of the 60’s reasons, I’ll say Kent State’s the better school, and, thus, will lose. AT&T Cotton could go either way. And Ole Miss will croak Pitt in the BBVA Compass.

All of this leads up, of course, to the BCS National Championship Game on January 7th. Alabama plays Notre Dame for the, errrr, National Championship.

Alabama vs. Notre Dame.

Hmmmm.

If my theory holds up, Notre Dame doesn’t have a prayer of a chance.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s arse who wins any of these games. (Sorry, Trish.) As long as me and mine, and you and yours, have a healthy 2013.

Happy New Year!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Yes, I know that even the most mediocre of schools is more than likely to have some very bright students, and that most middle-of-the-road, not especially hard to get into schools will have plenty of them. (Trust me: I have experience here.) And even the most vaunted of institutions will have a few students who will remind you of nothing more than the Three Stooges doing their “Swinging Alphabet (Bee-ay-Bay)” routine. (Trust me: I have experience here, too.) Still, on balance, you’ll find brighter kids at Northwestern than at Mississippi State.

The Heat Is On. (Oh, and Merry Christmas.)

Friday night, we had a little pre-Christmas (mis)adventure.

While plugging in the very tree pictured here, we suddenly smelled something that seemed awfully like something electrical burning. (Even by the low-low standards of smart phone photography, this picture is pretty lame. And although it does almost mask the gaping bare spot in the lower right, it does not do the tree justice at all, at all. It does look pretty good on my Blackberry.)

Anyway, having Smokey-the-Beared the electrical burning, we then realized that the blower part of our HVAC system was no longer blowing HVAC. Indeed, that the circuit breaker for our HVAC system had done what circuit breakers do (I think), and flipped the 100 amp HVAC fuses off.

My husband, who this time of year goes by the handle Scrooge McGrinch, immediately blamed the tree – which draws as much power as an alarm clock in unalarmed mode – fingering it (almost literally) as the party responsible for the blowout of our blower.

Anyway, while Jim called the emergency HVAC number, I called 9-1-1 and asked the dispatcher if she thought it made sense to have the BFD swing by. The answer to that question is pretty much always ‘yes,’ so within a couple of minutes, our condo was full of burly and nice looking young men bearing halligans and axes, sniffing out the source of the burning electrical odor – which, they agreed with Scrooge McGrinch, was behind the panel where our blower lies. They then were up on the rooftop, quick quick quick  - five flights via the narrow back staircase - and turned off our HVAC. Fortunately, it wasn’t all the cold out that night, so we really weren’t going to need the H. But as the world had NOT ended on Friday – I sure called that one -  it was pretty clear we were eventually going to need us some H.

After the boys got through agreeing with Scrooge McGrinch about the source of the electrical burning odor, they agreed with me that the Christmas tree had nothing whatsoever to do with the blown blower. And while they didn’t come right out and say it, I know that they were thinking Scrooge McGrinch was suffering from a tiny bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

We had to wait a while for the emergency, on call HVAC fellow to show, as he was coming from – of all places – Worcester.

Dylan was a new guy we hadn’t seen before, and he was every bit as burly and nice looking as the firefighters who came and went before him.

He found the fault line. Some fairly shoddy legacy wiring that had been taped up with electrical tape and had somehow managed to last over 20 years before having its meltdown.

The fix could not be made right away, so I in my kerchief and Scrooge McGrinch in his cap had to settle down for a long winter’s nap without heat. We survived, and Dylan came back first thing in the morning with the right stuff and fixed us up in about 10 minutes. So we were all set. I had already begun some baking, so we were getting some heat going, anyway. But this is New England and, despite global warming, baby it’s cold outside.

And so it is Christmas. Or, at least, Christmas Eve.

Which means I get to say Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays to all my Pink Slip readers. (No war on Christmas here, but just in case…)

I am taking the week off, but will return on January 1st.

See you then.

If you’re reading this…yippee: the world hasn’t ended.

If you’re reading this, breathe a big sigh of relief. I’ve got some excellent news for you:

The world didn’t end today.

At least not as of yet.

But I guess there’s time.

After all, there’s so many predictors that today’s the day the jig is up.

It’s the end of the Mayan long-form calendar, and if the Mayans weren’t preparing to get up and make breakfast and do the laundry on December 22, 2012, maybe we shouldn’t be, either. (What did the Mayans know, and when did they know it?)

Then there’s the worry that planet earth is going to be sucked into a black hole, which actually might be cool to experience, if you lived to tell the tale. Which you probably wouldn’t. Or we could have a cataclysmic run-in with the planet Nibiru.

And then there’s the web site devoted to the belief that today begins World War III, in which Russia and a bunch of bad-actors in the Mideast take on Europe. Then the real hellzaoppin’ breaks out, with mobs attacking the Vatican, the Pope fleeing, David Cameron decamping to the US, Paris burning, civil war in the US (bad timing on David Cameron’s part), chemical and nuclear warfare, and a tsunami-triggering comet thrown in for good measure. Pick your poison. (Source: December212012.com)

We dodged a doomsday biggie in May 2011, when it was predicted that there’d be a major, mother of all earthquakes earthquakes, followed by hell on earth for a few months, and then complete oblivion on October 21st. Pink Slip was pretty sure that this wasn’t going to happen, and that we’d live to blog another day. Which, as it happened, is how it turned out.

I’ll go out on a limb again here: World end’s today? Ain’t going to happen.

Not that anyone’d be around to say ‘I told you so’ if, in fact, it’s all over now, baby blue.

And I’m in good company.

NASA saying no way the world is ending today, bang or whimper.

And the Vatican’s top astronomer – the Vatican has multiple astronomers???? -  is also urging calm:

The Rev. Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, wrote in Wednesday’s Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that ‘‘it’s not even worth discussing’’ doomsday scenarios based on the Mayan calendar that are flooding the Internet ahead of the purported Dec. 21 apocalypse. (Source: Boston.com)

Not all the predictions for December 21, 2012, are dire. Some New Agers believe something along the lines of “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”

As long as all the men don’t start wearing ponytails, and the only food is tofu, I’m down with this:

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more need for superstition
All your living dreams are visions
Mystic crystal revelations
And the mind's true liberation.

Other than that mystic crystal revelation – huh? – and possibly the bit about “all your living dreams are visions”, which I don’t quite get, either, what’s not to like?

Anyway, the world will NOT end today.

You heard it here!

The high school’s virtual, it’s just the team that’s real

Anyone who watches any television and/or follows any professional football, knows that it pays to be an MVP quarterback. Drew Brees and Peyton Manning seem to be leading the endorsement pack, with Eli Manning and Aaron Rodgers nipping closely at their heels. I’m sure that Our Tom (Brady), with both the looks and the sports cred, would be all over the TV ad map if he hadn’t decided to focus on GQ-style print, where he’s having a nice and no doubt lucrative bromance with UGGs and Movado watches.

The quarterbacks get the glory, the girls, the greenbacks, alright. (They also get more than their share of the responsibility, the pressure, and the blame.)

So if you’ve got a son who seems to have what it takes to become a professional quarterback, an who wants to become one, you’d do everything you could to make sure it happens for him, right?

David Sills IV is doing just that for David Sills V, stretching the definition of “everything” beyond recognition. For starters, he paid a lot of money (which, as a real estate and construction “magnate”, he can well afford) to have his kid – then aged 10 - work with “quarterback guru” Steve Clarkson out in California, which, as anyone with the least sense of geography knows is just a hop, skip, and a pump fake from Delaware, where the Sills live.

David Sills V is apparently a bona fide phenom, so much so that he was offered a full ride by USC. When he was in seventh grade.

Okay. Sending your kid across continent to commune with a quarterback guru may do a bit of everything-stretching, but it’s not over the top extreme.

I would, however, put in that category: building a football stadium and training facility at the kid’s private high school; subsidizing the coaching staff; and offering financial aid to the largely African-American kids who would make up a worthy supporting cast for the athletic ambitions of Sills IV and (presumably) Sills V.

Alas, Red Lion Christian Academy decided that there were more important things in life than operating as a football powerhouse, a junior version of the football factories that many big time college programs are, and they pulled back.

In need of a showcase to showcase Sills V’s prowess, Sills IV was seemingly left with no other option but to establish a new school. Eastern Christian Academy is not only an online school, it’s a school that’s purpose-built to be a football team:

Eastern Christian was established six months ago [this is as of August 2012], and with less than three weeks until the start of the academic school year, 54 students are enrolled in grades six through 12. Forty-six are boys, and 46 are on the football team. The staff includes four teachers, a nurse, a minister and seven football coaches. The running backs and defensive backs coach is the director of operations, the de facto principal. (Source: Sports Illustrated.)

Were the eight girls recruited to be the cheerleading squad?

Sills V claims that the school is all about creating opportunities for poor kids to get into colleges:

“…that’s really what we care about…getting these kids into college, because a lot of these kids wouldn’t have the opportunity to go to college if it wasn’t for football, and we all know that college education is huge.” (Source: The New Yorker, October 15, 2012).

Sigh…on a couple of accounts.

First off, I am of the opinion that the meme that sports offers the only way to a college education for poor kids is a terrible, and terribly destructive, one.

Certainly, if kids are told day in, day out, that the excelling at sports is the only path they have to an “education” and to making something of themselves, and that the bling and the high life that come to those who make it big in the NFL (or the NBA) is desirable and their only way out, they will start to believe it.

Yet we all at least have a gut sense of the statistics: few college athletes make the pros, and at those colleges and universities that serve as the minor leagues for professional football and basketball, many athletes don’t get a degree at all, or get a worthless basket weave degree.

The young athletes who make it into the highest level college programs have no doubt worked very hard to develop their athletic skills. How much better off would they be if they had gotten the message that hard academic work is a better-bet path to a college education and a decent life?

Then there’s the virtual school thing.

Online learning is often a good thing, offering students the opportunity to augment their classroom school work with courses that their schools can’t offer. It’s certainly an alternative worth exploring for students who don’t do well in the traditional classroom. And there’s definitely going to be more of it before there’s less, that’s for sure.

But something tells me that, if we let it, online learning will become a prime educational outlet for poorer communities, while those in more affluent places will get to go the blended route: some online combined with traditional teachers, and food fights, and flirting in the halls, and slammed lockers, and decorating the halls for the Homecoming Hop (or grind, or whatever it’s called these days). In person school will be a luxury good afforded to and by some, not others.

Kids at Eastern Christian, by the way, don’t get a free ride:

Football programs are expensive, and Eastern Christian is not giving scholarships. Parents can help cover tuition by getting sponsors to buy $1,200 advertisements in the stadium and on Eastern Christian's web page, and Sills says he has partnered with a bank to provide families with 15-year loans.(Sports Illustrated.)

Oh, a 15 year loan to send your kid to a virtual high school so that he may or may not get into a football factory, where he may or may not get a (probably bogus) degree. That sounds like a just dandy idea. There’ll no doubt be one or two who makes the pros, and one or two who really takes advantage of the athletic “scholarship” to actually become a student with a worthwhile degree. But for most, it will likely be field of pipedreams.

[Sills IV] expects to hold a prom in the spring. He looks across the prospective 90-acre campus and imagines a football stadium, baseball diamond and softball field. "We'll never put athletics before academics," he promises, "but we'll probably come closer than most." (Sports Illustrated.)

I have no doubt about that final statement.

Check back in a few years and see whether Eastern Christian’s still up and running once Sills V is off to USC, and Sills IV no longer needs a team for his son to play with.

Real beard vs. “traditional” beard, the Santa feud continues on

‘Tis the season when sides are taken, the battle lines drawn, the skirmishes commence.

I’m speaking, of course, about whether the department store, mall, or office party Santa should have a real beard or a fake one.

On the side of the fake beards, which are often made of yak belly hair and can run you over $2K, they often look better than a beard of the DYI variety. (By the way, fake beards are better known as designer beards, fashion beards, or - in a near-Orwellian usage - traditional beards. Traditional? Yes, traditional. That’s because the Santas of near yore, as in The Miracle on 34th Street and my childhood, had fake beards because no one in that near yore would have considered for a North Pole minute growing a full, bushy, flowing, white beard. No, men then wanted to look sharp, feel sharp, and be sharp with a safety razor from Gillette. I don’t remember ever seeing a man in a beard until I was in college.)

“Not many people can grow a beard that looks storybook, but Santa is always supposed to be larger than life. Unfortunately, many people who try to grow a Santa beard look more like street people,” said one local “designer-bearded” Santa who declined to be named, because it’s a small community.  (Source: Boston.com.)

What real beards have going for them – other than the obvious commitment to the trade that they imply – is that they never fail the pull test (which IMHO would be conducted only by a bratty, out of control little monster who deserved nothing so much as a half a lump of coal in his stocking).

Real beard-os contend that real beard = real Santa, and many of those who advertise for Santas accept no substitutes: real beard-os only need apply.

“A real Santa has a real beard. If it’s a fake beard, people think it’s a fake Santa,” said “Santa Bruce,” who will be host to thousands of screaming and smiling children at the North Shore Mall this holiday season.

Santa Bruce? He may have a real beard but doesn’t that sound like a fake handle?

Macy’s, by the way, has declared, coming down on the side of the uniformity, which can only be provided through yak-ery, fakery:

.. last year, Macy’s, whose New York Santaland is an icon of the season, ousted its real-bearded Santas to give all of their portrayers a uniform appearance.

Naturally, one things leads to another, and I stumbled on Clausenet, “the largest social network and online resource for the Santa Claus Community!” Santas on both sides of the real vs. traditional divide seem to get along pretty amicably, I didn’t read through all the bearded forums – Real or fake Beards, Santa Beard – but the comments generally seemed more nice than naughty.

One question I had is how they find so many real Santas with beautiful white beards. After all, how often do you see someone young enough to withstand the rigors of being a Santa, with a beautiful head, let alone beard, of beautiful white hair.

The answer, found on the boards at Cluasenet, is that some Santas, at least, give nature an assist and dye (or even, weirdly, paint their beards, as a read in one reference). Does he or doesn’t he, only Mrs. Santa Claus knows for sure.

Meanwhile, in other Santa-related news, up in Maine – a bit closer to the North Pole – a mall Santa got fired for general snarkiness. He refused to let a little girl sit on his nap because her mother wouldn’t buy the $20 photo, which seems a bit mean, even though a good part of the reason for the mall Santa season is selling those pictures, no?  The same child got dissed when she asked for an American Girl Doll and Santa told her she’d be getting an American football, which seems a bit mean, even though it’s a tiny bit funny.

Anyway, the guy who was fired doesn’t sound like he was cut out to be a Santa – sounds more like David Sedaris coming back to do the Christmas thing, but has been promoted from elf to Santa; maybe the guy’s just a David Sedaris wannabe. Given his lack of Santa empathy and smarts, I’m guessing that the fellow who was fired was a fake beard, traditional Santa. Not that I’m suggesting that fake beard, traditional Santas are lacking in empathy and intelligence. It just doesn’t sound like this one was in to enough to go through the trouble of growing a real on.

In any case, the debate rages on.

On Dasher, on Dancer…Yak, yak, yak.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Battlin’ bearded Santas are nothing new. In 2008, I blogged about a rift between two not-so-benevolent-orders-of Santa Claus, which got the fur flying among all kinds of St. Nicks.

Too cool for school (or, rather, for dorms)

Well, the latter-day privateers have taken over a lot of prisons, KP in the military, and an increasing amount of schooling, so why not start privatizing college dorms?

Of course, there have long been private accommodations for students. In my day, they were run by those called “slumlords” and, in my recall, none of them offered the ability to “lounge around a resort-style pool in private cabanas.”

No, back in the day, we had to deal with 1920’s stoves that always seemed on the verge of exploding, crazy neighbors screaming at each other in languages we couldn’t recognize, heating pipes that woke us up in the middle of the  night with what sounded like a Gene Krupa solo turn, and cockroaches scuttling out of our toasters when we popped an English muffin in.

Today’s students, of course, could not be expected to put up with what we were, in truth, delighted to contend with. This is how students willing to forsake the “comforts” of the shared 10x15 cement block dorm room expected to live in their first foray into the independent adult world.  Instead, they:

…practice their golf swings at the putting green and meditate in a Zen garden. Videogamers sip complimentary coffee while playing "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" on a multiscreen television wall. (Source: Wall Street Journal Online.)

At least if they’re students at the University of Central Florida, where the upscale University House has been developed by Inland American Communities Group.

At the University of Central Florida, the golf swinging, Zen gardening, and video gaming apparently don’t detract from the academic purpose of the school, which was recently ranked the least rigorous school in the country.

And it obviously appeals to some prospective students:

Both students and administrators say housing has become a big factor in college selection, increasingly trumping degree programs or beloved sports teams. Mark Sampson says his daughter took "about two looks at the campus" of University of Florida in Gainesville and declared it too old. She picked University of Central Florida and hopes to move into University House this fall.

Nice! You can go to the state’s flagship university, or you can matriculate at the place with the posh digs. Lack of rigor be damned, full cabana lounging ahead!

UCF isn’t the only college where upscale lodging’s sprouting up. Michigan State, Arizona State, and Texas A&M are among other schools where happenin’ living’s happenin’.

Nor is Inland American the only developer hopping into this lucrative business:

Developers say that colleges provide a steady stream of new customers every year, and that students—and their parents—are willing to pay for luxury amenities.

American Campus Communities and Campus Crest Communities are public companies – or, shall we say, communities - that are helping move college living from 3 hots  and a cot to granite countertops on which to rest your pizza boxes.

And if they don’t want to bother whistling in Domino’s or Papa John’s, they can hang out in a place like the bistro at a “community” for Sam Houston University students.

For one student, the best part about being off campus in luxe housing is the privacy, and the ability to “take a five-hour shower and not worry about it, or take a bubble bath." After which, I guess, you come out nice and relaxed and prepared for an all night bull session on the meaning of life.

Among the amenities that off-campus housing may offer are an ice-skating rink, tanning rooms, poolside jumbo screen, a pet-washing station, a 300-foot-long lazy river, and at Texas Aggie, something called a “cornhole pit”. (I don’t really want to know what goes on there.)

The business is booming because all the later wave baby boomers’ kids are forming an echo boom. And all those later wave baby boomers obviously want their kids to live it up.

There are a couple of downsides to this particular version of a real estate boom:

"Most of these kids are going to have a step down in lifestyle when they have to enter the working-world environment after they graduate," says John E. Vawter, principal of Capstone Collegiate Communities, which developed [several of the “communities” featured in the article].

What a shock they’re in for when they smash their first cockroach.

But that’s a downside for the consumer. Caveat emptor, etc.

But there’s also the downside for those slapping these places up.

Like how crummy and outdated they’re going to look in a couple of years after revolving door packs of students swarm in and out. At least with cement block dorm rooms, never in style, never out of style.  And then there’s the likely coming contraction in the number of families who can afford to send their kids to away college for four years, let alone cough up extra for Zen gardens, tanning beds, and cornhole pits.

Oh, what a world we live in.

The Slaughter of the Innocents

Even by unfathomable standards, the murder of all those little children in Newtown is unfathomable. It almost makes Columbine and Virginia Tech seem as if they make some sort of sense.

But six year olds? Seven year olds?

There is nothing I can add to all of the commentary out there that can lighten the grief of all those families who have been smashed to smithereens. Losing a child to illness, to accident: beyond terrible. But this? Unfathomable is the only word that comes to my mind, but even this word does the slaughter of these innocents scant justice.

There were also six grownups murdered last Friday at Sandy Hook School: the women who worked with the kids and who, by all accounts, acted admirably to try to protect the little ones in their care.

Rachel Davino, Lauren Rousseau, and Victoria Soto were young women, relatively early on in their teaching careers. Principal Dawn Hochsprung, special ed teacher Anne Marie Murphy, and school psychologist Mary Sherlach were well established in theirs.

All of the stories of that terrible day have yet to be told, but the ones coming out tell us that these women were heroes among us – ‘lunging’ at the murderer, putting themselves between him and ‘their kids.’

I hope that we do have these stories emerge. Kids need to know that there are grownups who will try to protect them, to spare them from terror, to save them from horror. We need to know this, too.

The ‘fast fact’ that appeared on one of the shows about the Newtown massacre said that there have been 181 school shooting incidents since Columbine in 1990. Still, you don’t think of school as a dangerous place, or teaching as a dangerous profession.

Yet even in this nice, well to do area, they had safeguards in place. Visitors have to be buzzed in. (One news report said that the murderer may have smashed the glass door in to gain entry.) Teachers and kids have had emergency evacuation rehearsals, which the kids probably paid as much attention to as we did to the fire and stick-your-head-under-the-desk atom bomb drills of my school days.

Emergency drills aside, surely none of these women went to school on Friday thinking it would be anything other than a typical Friday. Maybe a bit more charge in the air, the kids a bit antsier, given that it’s only a week until Christmas vacation, and a school full of 5-10 year olds means a lot of Santa believers.

But probably pretty much routine-routine.

I’m sure the teachers had their plan for what they were going to accomplish, maybe a small special surprise to break things up a bit.

It was a nice day. The kids would have been able to go out at recess and lunch and blow off some steam.

Like everyone does at work on Friday, I’m sure they were all thinking about what they were going to be doing over the weekend. Anyone who celebrates Christmas – which, based on their names, would be most/all of the teachers – likely had a long list of shopping, wrapping, baking, decorating to-dos.

How terribly, how unpredictably, how unfathomably that truncated school day ended for them.

And what of the teachers and other staff members who survived? Who weren’t in the sights and sites of the murderer?  They must be in complete and utter shock.

Colleagues killed, workplace upended, traumatized students to deal with. And the unfathomable slaughter of all those innocents…

How do they go on?

Terrible, terrible day for the teachers of Sandy Hook. Unfathomably so.

.

If you’re keeping score, it’s bonus: 73%, company holiday party: 5%

If all goes as planned, later today I’ll be joining the marketing department of one of my local clients for their annual holiday lunch. I very much like the folks there, and very much enjoy working with them. We’ll be at a nice restaurant, but the event will be low key. There’s a Yankee Swap, and I’ve decided to bring a straight gift, i.e., something that someone might actually like, want and use, rather than a gag one. (For a moment I entertained the thought of boxing up a bunch of the “treasures” I’ve accumulated over the years of doing the family Christmas Eve Yankee Swaps over the years. There’s that hideous clown statue. And the box of c. 1978 catechism class planning cards. Too bad I gave away the Elvis guitar clock.)

Today’s gathering will, fortunately, have none of the trappings of the traditional company party: after dark (after hours), fancy (or fancy-ish) location, fancy (or fancy-ish) dress-up, obligatory spouse drag, and the perilous availability of free alcohol.

On the list of things I decidedly don’t miss about working full-time, the annual holiday party is right up there.

I will say that I got pretty good at gaming my appearance and keeping it to the absolute minimum: show up a little late, grab a glass of wine and an appetizer or two, make sure to make seom face time or at least eye contact with those who keep a mental checklist of who’s there, do a bit of eye-rolling with your work buddies and say hello to their spouses, nab a few goodies from the buffet table and wrap them in a napkin for later, then cut and run. Once home, kick off shoes, thank spouse for his guest appearance, geniality, and restraint, and pour a real glass of wine for yourself.

Even I was only going to be there for 90 minutes max, I always approached the annual holiday party with something approaching existential dread.

Not that I didn’t like my colleagues. I made many close “life friends” at work.

It’s just that, dating back to my parochial school days when we were pretty much forced to feign ecstasy when presented with any perk – a screening of The Boy with Green Hair, the visit of a Filipino priest who barely spoke English (which he barely spoke or half an hour) – I have despised anything that feels to me like “obligatory fun.”

And, although I never worked a 40 hour week, I really resented having to eat into my personal time to attend a company function. (However it may appear on paper, there is no “fun” in company function.)

When I worked at companies that held major “obligatory fun” holiday parties, I always maintained the most employees would rather have $50. Or a turkey. Or an “early release” day. Or, at minimum, comp time for the hours they spent at the party. All preferable to suffering through the company party.

Turns out I was right.

According to a survey done by Glassdoor, reported in Fortune/CNN:

For the second year in a row, almost nobody wants to celebrate the season with a party, "even with an open bar."

What people overwhelming want (73%) is a bonus. Or a bit of time off that doesn’t come out of their existing vacation pot (36%). Folks would welcome a grocery gift card (29%) or permission to telecommute (13%). A mere 5% want a party.

I’ve got to believe that most of the 5% are folks with an at-home spouse who wants a break from spit-up and Dora the Explorer and/or wants to finally put a face with the names that the at-work spouse is always grousing, gossiping, raving about.

The holiday parties I didn’t mind were the ones like I’m going to today, or a full company party held for employee only, during working hours, at the office or at a nearby restaurant.

There’s enough stress around the holidays without compounding it with the company party.

Not for me…

And I wouldn’t have liked to 1950’s-1960’s drunk-out in the office, lampshade on the head, grope in the darkened office version either.  Still, they were fun to watch on Mad Men.

Enjoy!

At Mad Men era parties, the wives stayed home. (I suppose if there were husbands, they stayed home, too.)

.

Bring me the head of, well, myself

I’m not quite a Luddite.

It’s not as if I don’t TXT, or order tulip bulbs online, or, errrr, blog.

And, after all, my career has been in technology.

Still, I’m not 100% enamored of new techie stuff just because it’s new. Or techie. I tend to view all of it – including the elements that I use (and enjoy using) regularly, like TXT-ing, ordering tulip bulbs, and blogging – with a slightly jaundiced eye. Do we really need cars that park themselves? Yet another social networking app that lets everyone and his brother know where everyone else and his brother is at any moment in time?  I like doing flight check in ahead of time, but do I really need to be able to watch a TV show on my smartphone?

But if there’s one technology that I am absolutely capable of falling virtual head over virtual heels in love with, it’s 3-D printing.

“YOU can carry your own head in your hand,” enthuses Bre Pettis, inviting customers to try out a three-dimensional photo booth that will scan their head and then print a miniature plastic version of it as a solid object. (Source: The Economist.)

Not that I actually want a plastic 3-D scan of my head, or the head of anyone else, for that matter. But I’m loving the idea of MakerBot, which is the maker-bot of:

…desktop MakerBots, which make things out of plastic, for just $2,200. It is still early days, but MakerBots and machines like them are “empowering people to make the things they want, rather than buy them from factories,” says Mr Pettis.

Forget economies of scale! Think scale of one.

Fast forward a few years, and how cool will it be to go to a shoe store and have them print me up a pair of 10-1/2 AA shoes that don’t look orthopedic or nunnish. Not that I’ll be bringing on the Jimmy Choo’s or the Laboutins, but a pair of fun-colored kippy flats that won’t fall off my feet? I’m so there.

How about being able to merge a Peter Paul Mounds with a Peter Paul Almond Joy and get both dark chocolate and almonds. Because sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. (And while I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice the scrumptious blue M&M’s to do so, I’d also like to bring back tan M&M’s while I’m at it.)

And I’d love to be able to print out a Christmas tree. A real one, thank you. Seven-foot balsam (with that real balsam smell).

Although I don’t consider myself a classic narcissist, I’m down with empowering me to make the things I want.

The first MakerBot store is in NYC, on Mulberry Street. Wish that I’d known this when I was in The City a few weeks back. I would love to see these MakerBots in action. I might even have let them print out a copy of my head. (Christmas ornament?)

Given that one of Dr. Seuss’ first books was And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, how cool that a store that sells products that are almost Seussian in nature plunks itself down there. (And to think that I didn’t see it on Mulberry Street, even though I was just around the corner. Oh, boo-hoo.)

Okay, okay. 3D printers aren’t printing out many real things. Yet. Certainly not Christmas trees. Or Jimmy Choos.

But they’re extremely useful for creating prototypes, so I’ll imagine that product designers are all over this. Here’s a nifty little John Deere printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2.

And check out MakerBot’s Thingiverse, a gallery of objects designed/created by MakerBot users.

I have no idea whatsoever what I’d do with it, what I could possibly contribute to the Thingiverse. But the Replicator 2? I want one!

Who knew there was a techie thang out there in the thingiverse that could get to the acquisitive heart of this near Luddite?

If dogs have a heaven, there’s one thing I know…

The past few days, I’ve been dog-sitting my dog-phew. I don’t think I’m being at all biased here when I say that Jack is absolutely in the Top 10 when it comes to adorable and sweetie-pie, cutie-pie pups.

If it’s cute your after, it’s hard to do better than a Black Lab. Jack, by the way, came from a no-kill shelter, where his family of origin had left him for some reason that was undoubtedly sad for them, and certainly a boon for our extended family.

Forget Rodgers and Hammerstein: There is nothing like a dog, nothing in this world…There is nothing you can blog, that is anything like a dog.

Although Jack is just in his dogged, middle aged prime, my thoughts turned to him when I saw an article on boston.com on the growing niche market for products and services for geriatric canines.

Old dogs touch a nerve — and the pocketbook. With an eye on burgeoning market possibilities of the senior set, canine product purveyors sell specially formulated kibble, beds, bowls, ramps to get up into the car, harnesses, diapers for incontinence, as well as various supplements, herbs and holistic remedies designed to cosset a senior dog through its last years. Doting owners find it difficult to resist the pitch for anything to help their four-legged family member.

Well, young and middle-aged dogs touch a nerve – and the pocketbook, too. But I absolutely understand why anyone who can afford it goes the extra mile to make sure their aging pal is comfy and cozy in his great old age.

Orvis – inventor of the dog bed - has an entire line of products for dogs getting along in dog years, mostly memory foam and Tempur-pedic beds. I noted with interest that many of the dog beds bear a dog’s name, and the most popular names are Dakota and Jack. Jack, as it happens, was originally named Dakota, but was rechristened when my sister and her family adopted him. So I guess naming your dog Dakota or Jack is like naming our kid Jacob or Madison. One day, you’ve never heard it, the next day it’s everywhere.

(By the way, if you click through to Orvis, the dog who most closely resembles our Jack is the one posing with the Solid Foam Microfiber Backseat Extender.)

And speaking of Jacks, the first night of my dogsitting gig, we had a pajama party at Auntie Moe’s place in Boston. While I was taking Jack out for his final airing of the evening, we ran into the man who lives across the hall, who is also named Jack. Human Jack was pleased to meet a four-legged namesake. Canine Jack was silent on the matter.

Of course, today’s dogs are more likely to sport human names than the dogs of my childhood.

My grandmother had a series of Black Labs named Midnight, Thunder, and Lightning. My cousin had a Meadowlark, whose sister, owned by another cousin, was named Kelly, but I believe that she was named for a place (Kelly Pond) not a person. Dogs in the ‘hood when I was growing up included Dapper, Clipper, Sheba, Rasputin, Brian Boru, Blackie, and Queenie  (whose face actually resembled that of a carp).

Blackie was the one dog I actively hated. That’s because I was bitten by him while innocently walking by his house, swinging my OLA school bag. Blackie, apparently, took some offense, and pell-melled off his porch and bit me in the arm. My father had to come home from work and take me to the ER for a shot. There, I had to wait in line behind someone who had stapled his thumb with an industrial stapler. Ouch.

Blackie was pretty much a menace, but his owner was a cop. So what were you gonna do?

There were some human-named dogs around, even in the old days. My uncle had a mutt called Luke, and we had a Sid and a Cindy floating around the neighborhood. My friend Marie had a Sam, a lovely poodle-mutt who just disappeared. 

Which sometimes happened to dogs. And some dogs were put down, and some died in there tracks. But a lot of dog mortality was death was by car, in that era of free-range dog life.

Our dog Grimbald had a quasi human name.

Grim, who was quasi free-range – he sometimes did an overnight cavort with Sheba (that bitch!) -  made it to 12 – reasonably ripe old age, especially for a large dog (German Shepherd) who’d been diagnosed with dysplasia as a puppy. The day my mother and I took Grim on the last leg of his dog’s journey, a final trip to the vet, was one of the saddest of my life.

So I understand completely why someone would pay $275 for an Orvis Tempur-Pedic Dream Lounger Dog Bed.

If such an item had existed, and I’d thought it would have given Grim a shot at a bit more of his doggy life, why not? And I would not have been alone.

Jon Comeau, product development specialist for dogs at Vermont’s Orvis Company, says his company’s market expands with the aging dog population.

What a great job title! Product development specialist for dogs. Talk about being able to go home from work each night knowing you’d done good.

“We see it in the sales figures that come through,” he says. “Ten years ago, we were selling products to keep dogs off the couch. Now we’re selling products to keep them on the couch.”

An aging dog population is occurring alongside the aging human population, and for some overlapping (sorry) reasons. Vet [medical] care is better, dog food [nutrition] has improved, and a more affluent population is willing to lavish more money on their mutts [selves], keeping them alive. (Not that having a seasonal change in dog collar is going to extend your life, but didn’t dogs just used to get one chain collar, issued when they reached adult size, and that was about it. Sort of like the one shirt that peasants had in medieval times.)

If your wondering what constitutes old age for a dog:

The actuarial table depends on size. For small dogs, old age begin after 10. For bigger dogs, after age “8 or 9,” according to Moses, and for “giant breeds (Great Dane, St. Bernard) at 5 or 6.”

Fortunately, our boy Jack has a few more squirrel-chasing, pajama partying years to go before we have to order him that Orvis Tempur-Pedic Dream Lounger. (Good idea for a combined Christmas-Birthday gift from us.)

For those not old enough to recognize the other dog-related tune that Elvis Presley popularized (the first being, of course “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog”), the title of this blog is taken from the song "Old Shep.”

Now Old Shep is gone where the good doggies go,
And no more with Old Shep will I roam.
But if dogs have a heaven, there's one thing I know
Old Shep has a wonderful home.

Sniff, sniff.

Still, when it comes to heavenly dog epigrams, I’ll stick with Will Rogers:

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”

I wonder how Grim and Jack will take to each other, and will I be there to see it? Hope so!

Lampooned: Timothy Durham gets 50 large

As Ponzi scheming con-men go, Timothy Durham was no Bernie Madoff. Still, $200 million remains a relatively significant amount of defrauding, and Durham will be spending the next 50 years in The Big House because of it. Given that he’s 50 years old, this pretty much amounts to a life sentence. The prosecutors had asked for 225 years, so Durham should be counting his blessings. (Something to count, now that he doesn’t have much money or property left.) Of course, his attorney had asked for three years, so…

Durham was not just a pint-sized Madoff in terms of the amount he larged off with. Unlike Madoff, who, while bilking some middle-class folks, mostly schnookered the supremely well-to-do (before they got well-to-done, thanks to Bernie), Durham specialized in the little guys:

Durham and two associates were accused of bilking more than 5,100 mostly small blue-collar investors in Fair Financial from the time he bought the business in 2002 until its collapse in November 2009…

Unable to succeed legitimately as a businessman, Durham robbed thousands of investors to finance the trappings of a multi-millionaire lifestyle, complete with exotic cars, planes, mansions and assorted businesses," prosecutors said in a pre-sentencing report. (Source: Huffington Post.)

For those who weren’t familiar with Durham – I wasn’t – his is quite the colorful story. And quite the All American story, at that.

Among other tidbits, he got his big start in life when he married a rich man’s daughter and went to work for the old man, who was a wealthy entrepreneur. Durham quit being a boring old Indianapolis attorney and became an investor. His specialty was buying companies, sprucing them up, and the flipping the sale. And he had a niche: heavy-duty, Rustbelt companies that manufactured school buses, auto parts, cargo trailers. Stuff like that. You know, stuff.

Then he went Hollywood, buying up the remnants of The National Lampoon, part-aying at the Playboy Manager, and pirating around the Caribbean in his yacht. But for a while he stayed rooted in the Midwest and, as life went on, the cost of supporting the hot-shot lifestyle grew, and pretty soon – darn the luck – legitimate investments turned out not to be quite enough to cover his wildly growing nut. Among the businesses he got into:

… a rally-car builder, a plastic surgery center, a car magazine, a tour bus operator, a limo rental company, a nightclub, an Italian restaurant, and a cell-phone billing processor… (Source: Business Week.)

Now if that’s not a combination of the All American aspirational (plastic surgery, limo rental) and the All American standard (nightclub, Italian restaurant).

I am always intrigued and/or horrified by what these jamokes blow their – or, as is so often the case -  somebody else’s money on.

For Durham, this included a party for 1,000 of his closest friends to celebrate his 45 birthday.

For this blessed even, he had:

…30 glamour models, flown in from Los Angeles, picked up at the airport in exotic cars from Durham’s collection, put up in a hotel, and paid standard modeling day rates, according to model Megan Hauserman. “He said it was a Playboy-themed party, so we should wear what we would typically wear to the mansion,” she says. The standard uniform there is lingerie and heels.

Where there are glamour models, there are, of course B- and C-list male guests. For this soiree, that meant Indianapolis Colts players, and none other than –  brace yourself – Kato Kaelin. (Didn’t I tell you this was an All American story?)

Durham dressed like Hugh Hefner, in a plush robe. When he went to blow out the candles, his cake was frosted with his likeness in the center of a million-dollar bill.

Keepin’ it classy, eh?

By the way, the fleet of exotic cars used to ferry the glamour models to the party so they could meet Kato Kaelin included:

…a Lamborghini, an Aston Martin, a Bentley, and a 1929 Auburn Speedster. The crown jewel was a 1929 Duesenberg Phaeton, driven by Elvis Presley in the 1966 film Spinout.

Playboy party, Kato Kaelin, Elvis Presley. And just when you think you’ve read enough, you have one of those ‘but wait, there’s more’ moments:

Durham’s [30,000 square foot] home, too, was a monument to acquisition. Constructed in a faux-manor, brick-and-slate style, it included not one but three entrance gates, with a large interior courtyard for showing off vehicles, as well as a tennis court, and elaborate landscaping. On display inside, as he noted when a local television station came to visit, were a Picasso and one of Frank Sinatra’s Grammy Awards.

What did I tell you about All American aspirational – Picasso – and All American standard – Sinatra Grammy?

But how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve bought The National Lampoon.

Short answer, you can’t.

Durham moved to Hollywood, where he rubbed shoulders with Gene Simmons and Khloe Kardashian, and became buds with Ludacris.

Durham pointed to one bedroom where he said the rapper Chris “Ludacris” Bridges was staying. In another there were boxes and boxes, stacked waist-high, filled with unworn shoes.

Shades of Imelda Marcos!

And if you think things couldn’t get any more ludicrous, among the blue collar folks that Durham bilked were:

…members of the Amish and Mennonite communities, who provided a steady revenue stream.

Talk about breaking Amish.

A few years back, as The House that Durham Built began its collapse, an Indianapolis TV station asked him:

“If you could recreate your wealth, would you spend [it] the same way?” they asked.

“Probably not. No, probably not,” he said.

What? No Kato Kaelin? No Elvis car? No Old Blue Eyes Grammy?

Say it isn’t so!

The world is treating me bad, misery

Actually, living as I do in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the world is NOT treating me bad. It’s just not every day that I get to quote The Beatles. (Although if I put my mind to it, I probably could dredge something up on a near-daily basis.)

Now, if I lived in Mississippi, the world would, indeed, be treating me bad. Maybe not me personally, but me as a Mississippian. Which I have never been and hope never to be. So far, so good.

Even if I did really, really, really want to move to a state which proudly displayed the Confederate stars and bars on its flag. Even if Eudora Welty came back from the dead and invited me to live in her cool house in Jackson. Even if I had a powerful hankering for hushpuppies. Even if all these factors were in play, I could never, ever, ever live in a place that was sweltering hot and dripping humid six months out of the year. (Presumably, I’ll be dust in the wind by the time the weather in Massachusetts gets this bad.)

But if you happen to be a Mississippian by birth or desire, you probably already have a pretty good idea that, even if you’re comfortably ensconced in a Welty-esque home, which you never have to leave, there’s a shrimp-boat-full of misery in your state.

In fact, according to Bloomberg, Mississippi ranks Number 1 (or Number 50, depending on the way you look at it) on the Misery Index, with a ranking of 73.17 out of a possible 100.

Misery loves company, and Mississippi is surrounded by other states with heavy duty misery. Neighboring Louisiana is Number 2, neighboring Alabama is Number 3, and neighboring Arkansas is Number 5. South Carolina, which grabs the Number 4 spot, is not an abutter, but it’s not far afield.

These are, of course, poor states, so it’s no surprise they rank high in the items contained in the misery index: “air pollution, child poverty, infant mortality, poor health, premature death, violent crime, unemployment.”

Still, you can live pretty darned well in any of these places.

I’ve been to Charleston, S.C., which is almost Disney-esque in its pristine charm.

But, of course, most people don’t live in the old town section of Charleston.

On the other end of the misery continuum, Minnesota (at 20.12) is the least miserable of states. New Hampshire is right behind it, then North Dakota,  Vermont, and Massachusetts. Of the top 10 states, three were plains states, three were Midwest, and three were from New England.  Hawaii made it onto this list, which is no surprise, if you’ve ever stepped toe there. I’m sure it has its pockets of poverty, and I know they have to pay a lot for cars and appliances. Still, living in a place that’s perpetually and pleasantly balmy, plus has bougainvillea growing in abundance everywhere you look, has to put a smile on your face most days.

I know, I know.

Indices like this are pretty ridiculous. It’s not as if everyone in Mississippi drops out of high school and dies young. It’s not as if everyone in Minnesota has a PhD and lives to 100.

But even if you live in Mississippi, and have a PhD and an annuity table that forecasts a mega life span, it has to be pretty depressing (or enraging) to know that, on so many vectors, your state is doing just terribly. That everyone else in the country looks down at you. Even if you live in Louisiana, you can always tell yourself ‘at least I don’t live in Mississippi.’

Of course, there’s the opposite tendency in the low-misery states: we get to be smug and condescending because “we” have it better. At least the “we” who check the news on Bloomberg do.

In the early 1960’s, many Americans were shocked, or embarrassed, or galvanized into action, when they read The Other America by Michael Harrington and In the Midst of Plenty by Ben Bagdikian, which chronicled poverty in these United States.  Fifty years on, there’s still an other America ratcheting around in the midst of our plenty. (And, let’s face it, even in 2008, in the throes of the recession, we still had, in aggregate, plenty.) Maybe, relatively speaking, the Other America’s inhabitants are materially better off than they were back then. Maybe there are fewer people living in crude shot-gun shacks with wind whistling through the cracks in the wall. But is it an improvement to be living with your kids in a dumpy motel with no fridge, with your earthly possessions stuffed in garbage bags?

The poor they will always be with us. The miserable, too.

Hey, I’d rather live in a low-misery state than in a high-misery state. We do, on balance, have it better: richer, healthier, better educated… So I’m in a good place.

But a day doesn’t go by when I don’t pass someone panhandling, or sleeping on the streets.

Plenty of misery to go around, I’d say.

We don’t need an index to tell us that.