A Major Minor Bankruptcy

I’m not exactly proud to say it, but I must admit that a story about a tech multi-multi-millionaire who’s frittered away his fortune to the point where he has to file for personal bankruptcy just cannot read without some measure of schadenfreude.

Thus my read about one Halsey Minor – extra points for his quite excellent moniker: not quite Chadsworth Osborne, Junior, but right up there – was at least a modestly joyful experience, tempered only by a profound sense of puzzlement.

Thinking about blowing so much money, after all, will bring out the WTF in anyone, will it not?

It’s not clear exactly how major Minor’s losses were. What is known is that he netted $200M when CNET, which he founded, was sold, and that he was an early investor in Salesforce.com, which must have made him a few bucks more.

Today, he lists assets of $50 million and liabilities of $100 million.

However you do the math, in this case, one thing we’re sure of, some rich get richer and some rich get poorer.

In the meantime, in between time, what’s clearer is where the fortune went: houses, hotels, horse farms and art.

Art seems to have been a big part of his downfall.

“For Halsey Minor, collecting contemporary art and design is a hunger that cannot be satisfied, a thirst that cannot be quenched,” said the notes inside the Phillips catalog of the single-owner sale of Minor’s art works in 201o. “It is this addiction to the nectar, to put together one of the most formidable collections of Marc Newson and Ed Ruscha, for instance, that drives him.” (Source: Forbes.)

One tumbler-full of that nectar was part of a Richard Prince series of disturbing paintings of nurses, paintings that strike me as kinked-up potboiler covers. But which obviously caught the discerning eye and soon-to-be-emptied wallet of Halsey Minor. He also sold off an aluminum couch by Marc Newson.

Aluminum couch, eh? I may not know much about contemporary art – other than being able to give a work a thumbs up or a thumbs down on whether I’d want it hanging over my non-aluminum living room couch - but I’m pretty darned sure that an aluminum couch would be uncomfortable. Certainly not something one would want to lounge around on, sipping nectar, appreciating art, and thinking about horses.

Minor didn’t get to enjoy his blue-eyed nurse or aluminum couch for all that long. He had sold them off a few years ago to make good on a court judgment on a bank loan. His art jones also got him trouble with both Sotheby’s and Christie’s a while back, when he bid on $25 million worth of stuff that he never paid for. (Reading about the Sotheby’s and Christie’s brouhahas was exceedingly confusing, and the tiffs apparently went both ways.)

Art wasn’t Minor’s only weakness. So were horse breeding and racetracks. Among his creditors are horse farms and an equine healthcare center, and he also had at some point purchased/tried to purchase interests in tracks including Hialeah and Santa Ana. (When it comes to the ponies, you can contain your losses if you limit yourself to the two-buck bet window at the track, rather than investing in the horses and horse tracks themselves.)

Houses and hotels were also of interest to Minor.

Unfortunately, it’s more complex than moving from the little green houses to the big red hotels in Monopoly, where you can always limit your losses by tossing the board over and going to your room in a sulk.

After years of technology investing, Minor embraced real estate. In February 2008, Minor bought the Carter’s Grove Plantation from Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for $15.3 million. The 400-plus acre estate, with a mile of frontage on the James River, was at one time a museum. Its 12-bedroom Georgian mansion was built for Carter Burwell, a scion of one of the richest families in colonial Virginia, in the 1750s. Architect magazine said Minor planned to raise racehorses on the property. (Source: Business Week.)

Carter’s Grove filed for its own bankruptcy a couple of years ago, as did an entity called Minor Family Hotels, which was building a hotel in Minor’s hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Then there’s the house he actually lives in in Beverly Hills.

Bet that first wife was happy that she got out with a cool $50 million before this blue-eyed nurse of a bankruptcy hit the fan.

All these half-asset assets are just dizzying, frankly.

Although art, horses, and real estate may have been nectar to Minor:

“A case might have been made that I should never have strayed from technology,” Minor said in the e-mail, according to the Daily Progress. “However, I like doing things outside my comfort zone, and I believe that willingness in part accounts for my tech successes.”

Well, I don’t like doing things outside my comfort zone, which is probably why I never had, and never will have, $200 million to my name.

But I’m pretty sure that, if I were in possession of $200 million, there is no way on God’s green earth that I would have whittled it down to $50 million in assets vs. $100 million in liabilities.

My comfort zone just wouldn’t have let me.

The first thing I would have done with that kind of money was set aside enough to live comfortably the rest of my life.

Sure, I would likely live in a marginally nicer home, have marginally nicer furniture, and marginally cooler clothing.

But I can’t conceive of a universe in which I would put it all at risk because I coveted a painting of a blue-eyed nurse or an aluminum couch I really didn’t need.

Not that I’ll ever know…

As I noted, there’s some schadenfreude at large in reading about Halsey Minor. But the more I read about him, the more the feeling is pure and utter bewilderment. W.T.F.?

Lifelogging. (Sigh, just sigh.)

Samuel Pepys? Benjamin Franklin? Mary Chestnut? Charles Darwin? Anne Frank? A wimpy kid?

Come on! Get with it!

Who’s got time to read these days. Who’s got time to write?

Boring, boring, boring.

It’s, like, like life lived in black and white. Without any visual interest.  Sedentary, not action packed.

Writing gives you carpal tunnel. Reading gives you lard ass and squinty eyes.

Who needs it? Who wants it?

And who trusts diarists, anyway? Like bloggers, they’re filtering as they go, picking which perceptions they find worth perceiving, selecting their own personal fictions.  Editing out the stuff that they think isn’t relevant or, worse yet, those secretive cowards, the stuff they don’t want us to know. The stuff they don’t want us to see.

You want honesty? I’ll give you honesty!

You want real life? I’ll give you real life!

You want memories that you don’t have to remember? I’ll give you memories you don’t have to remember.

I’ll give you Memoto, the tiny little camera that you clip on and go. It takes two pictures a minute and uploads them to the cloud, so that you have a visual record of every little jot and tittle of your life that you can comb through whenever you want or need to know what the guy with BO standing next to you on the subway looked like.  How the checkout gal at Trader Joe’s scanned your items. Just how the terry towel hung on the back of the hotel bathroom door you were staring at because you forgot to take a magazine in with you when you had to go.

Magazine? Did I really say magazine?

Hah!

Who has time to read?

And as for the old fogeys who have time to write: If they have time to write, they must be leading pretty uneventful and stultifyingly boring lives. So, even if you did have time to read, why would you want to read them anyway?

What I meant was that your smartphone was charging, and you hadn’t unpacked your iPad. And some bully had called you “Four Eyes” and knocked your Google Glass off your face, crunching them under his loutish, bullying foot. So there you were with absolutely nothing to do while sitting on the pot other than staring at the bathroom door.

Sheesh!

At least you’ll always have a record of the hotel that was so ridiculously lame that they didn’t have a TV – or at least one of those no-choice broadcasting devices they have in elevators and taxi cabs – for you to watch while doing your business, in case you had foolishly sat down without your iPhone or iPad I hand, or your Google Glass on head.

Thanks to Memoto, you can spend the rest of your life photographing everything in front of you, including the good half of the rest of your life that you spend looking through those pictures so you can remember the part of your life that’s already happened.

My brain is exploding at the thought of all this looking at pictures of the pictures I’m looking at of the pictures I’m looking at of the pictures I’m looking at…

Who needs mirrors to explain infinite regression?

The Memoto camera is a tiny camera and GPS that you clip on and wear. It’s an entirely new kind of digital camera with no controls. Instead, it automatically takes photos as you go. The Memoto app then seamlessly and effortlessly organizes them for you.

But what happens if you don’t want to take photos of the time when you’re actually going going? Or making love? Or looking into the casket of someone you loved?

The camera has no buttons. (That's right, no buttons.)

Does this mean that, if you don’t remember to take it off, there’s no way to turn it off?

As long as you wear the camera, it is constantly taking pictures. It takes two geotagged photos a minute with recorded orientation so that the app can show them upright no matter how you are wearing the camera. And it’s weather protected, so you don’t have to worry about it in inclement weather.

The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment of your past.

There are plenty of moments of my past that I’d like to revisit.

And the older I get, when the before is longer (and no doubt more adventure-filled) than what’s ahead, those moments of revisitation come on a lot more often. But I am able to take care of them in several ways that don’t require having a pictorial record of them. One is using my mind’s eye. Another is talking to friends and family about whatever it I want to revisit.

I’ll admit, I do enjoy looking through old photos now and then, and especially like to see one that I’ve forgotten about, or have never seen. One that jogs a memory. This is generally a sweet experience. Similar to finding a beloved Golden Book at a flea market, and having its brilliant illustrations take me back (gulp!) 60 years. Or smelling something that triggers a memory: That’s just what Jane’s house always smelled like! Wonder what happened to Jane?

But the thought of having two picture a minute of my life strikes me as the most wretched of wretched excess.

Yes, but, Memoto argues, with this little camera you’ll be able to:

Remember every moment.

Perhaps the young brainiacs at Memoto have not yet done anything they regret, or witnessed anything they’d like to forget, but who in the world wants to remember every moment?

I still regret telling my kid brother – he was two, I was eight – that he was going to get leukemia because he’d licked a spider web.

I realize that the unexamined life is not worth living, but do I really want to remember every moment of it?

Of course, lifelogging will no doubt prove to be one of those breakthrough advances that I will Luddite-ly scorn and resist, while the canny folks with their fingers on the pulse of the digital natives – the Me Generation? – zestfully embrace it.

At least they did on Kickstarter, where last fall’s attempt to raise $50K yielded $550K.

Am I the only one who pictures this:  Fast forward a generation or two and the only folks who are able to read and write are the ultra-elite, for whom it is a pastime that differentiates them from the proles, and a handful of academics who study lost languages. Meanwhile, the brains of the masses have lost the capacity to think analytically or creatively. It’s all in the moment, or all in how we recorded the moment. Lascaux cave dwellers without the ability to draw, but with a continuous real-time record of everything that appeared in front of our camera.

Sigh, just sigh…

Tempest in a Hitler-lookalike teapot

Why just a few months back, I was harrumphing – although I do not recall blogging – about Target’s using the color “Manatee” to describe a gray plus-sized dress. Perhaps not as god-awful as calling a pale pink XXL sweater “Sow”, or an off-white misses-sized anything “Lard.” Yet certainly not Target’s finest hour – not to mention one that does not seem all that unintentional, given that the very same version of the gray dress was not listed as “Manatee” for regular sizes. Hmmmm…

Anyhow, these days, the retail tempest in the teapot is over a J.C. Penney designer teakettle that sure enough resembles Hitler.

Although when I was a kid there was a swirly, mottled ham-pink and white tile in the bathtub that, to me, looked like a little boy in a tam o’shanter holding on to his dog during an icestorm,  I’m not one to see Our Lady of Guadalupe in a bagel. Still, this does rather look a bit like Hitler, if Hitler had been benevolently and cutely rendered by Walt Disney, rather than being portrayed as the villainous psychopath that he was.

Perhaps you don’t see it? Like looking at one of those perspective pictures that is a beautiful young woman or an ugly old crone, depending on the tilt of your head?

That curve of the handle is Dolph’s stylin’ swept bang. The knob’s his mustache. The spout well, sieg heil. (Or, as Jarrett Bellini has it on a very funny post on CNN, “That, or he's just waving to the Eva Braun coffee maker.”)

Anyway, if they hadn’t been stalled in traffic, this billboard would have been enough to cause a few California commuters on Interstate 405 to drive off the road.

Since those commuters were stalled in traffic, they had ample time to snap a pic and tweet, which was apparently enough for J.C. Penney to tear down the sign.

Seriously, folks, does any one really believe for a Interstate 405 minute – which, I suppose, can be pretty darned long if you’re stuck in traffic – that J.C. Penney and designer Michael Graves, the auteur of their upscale, Penney-shoppers-have-sophisticated-taste-too line of home furnishings, thought that a tea kettle spoofing Hitler would be a good idea? 

Having looked at Graves’ collection on Penney’s site, I’m well aware that it’s all about “putting the fun in functional” – that nifty toaster that looks like a piece of toast! – and the urge to “upgrade your lifestyle with cookware and small appliances that look great, function flawlessly, and make you smile.” And we all know that nothing says “make you smile” like a reference to Adolph Hitler.

I mean, it’s not completely impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult to believe that Graves is some sort of closet Nazi, or that he’s demented enough to think this would fly.

Nonetheless, there are always those who are willing to take umbrage, and one of them was the mayor of Culver City, where the offending billboard was erected. Jeffrey Cooper took his umbrage in Mother Jones, where he vented:

"I am disappointed JCPenney actually put that billboard up in the first place. ... As a Jew, I am offended, (and) as an elected official, I am mad that the city I represent is linked to this." (Bellini on CNN.)

Being offended “as a Jew”, well, okay.  But “mad” that his city is associated with this? This what? It’s not as if the American Nazi Party had decided to host their annual Hitler Birthday Gala there.  It’s not as if the citizenry of Culver City had engaged in some shameful behavior – say, voting to promote a Holocaust denial curriculum in their schools. It’s not as if Penney was micro-targeting the anti-Semites of Culver City.

Maybe Cooper should be mad that his city actually has billboards. They are, after all, a real eye-sore.

I do not predict a brilliant future for Mr. Cooper in elective politics. Then again, that’s what I said about Bill Clinton after a just dreadful speech he gave at a Democratic National Convention well before anyone had even heard of a town called Hope. After suffering through that awful ramble, I remarked that his career was toast.

Oh, well.

As for J.C. Penney, those tea kettles are flying off the shelves.

Given all the bad news Penney has had lately, this can only be seen as a good thing.

On the other hand…

I know, I know, the whistle doesn’t mimic the Horst Wessel Song, but, now that the resemblance to Der Fuhrer has been pointed out, who would actually want one of these tea kettles?

 

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Happy Birthday, A-Podenska.

Eau de First Response? Something smells funny here.

What good’s a ghastly event if you can’t find a way to exploit it?

For Demeter Fragrance Library, the Marathon bombings in Boston were just too tempting to ignore. For them, it presented a marketing one-two punch:

• Garner lots of publicity with a completely resistible (from an actual use point of view) but irresistibly wacky (from a garner publicity point of view) product.
• Do good – and trumpet your do-gooding – by donating a big percentage of sales (75%) to a worthy cause, in this case the Boston First Responders Fund, which was set up to help the bombing victims.

Originally, I was thinking it was a marketing trifecta, in that they might also make some money off their new product, but I doubt that was ever the real intent. Easy enough to give away 75% when it really doesn’t matter if you actually ever sell any, given that the prime mover was the exposure.

Anyway, what Demeter did to, ahem, help out, was create a fragrance called First Response – Boston:

… a combination of spices and flowers, overlaid with white smoke and rubber.

The smoke and rubber elements are to honor Boston's Firefighters, who with disregard for their own safety, constantly put themselves in harm's way for the benefit of others.   (Demeter Fragrance Library.)

All praise first responders, of course, but does someone really want to smell like white smoke and rubber?

Boston.com, where I read about First Response, gave it the sniff test:

We gave it a whiff, and smoke dominates the fragrance profile, strong and overpowering of any floral or spice notes. But that could just be us. (Boston.com)

At least there’s no rubber nose…(At least according to boston.com. Reviewers on the Demeter site liked the “strong throw...smoke and rubber prevail'", and “the subtle rubber smell on top of it.”)

Anyway, while I was not at the finish line that day, I can imagine that the real smells were gunpowder, runner sweat, and blood from all those blown off limbs.

But Boston.com asks the real question:

Is this in bad taste? Should a fragrance brand (or any brand for that matter) -- regardless of their good intentions -- create a product that is so literally tied to a tragedy?

Well, here I come down on the side of this being bad taste, as well as on the side that questions whether those intentions were not all that good.

Just brilliantly played: do something in poor taste, but not something so odious that it’ll leave a bad smell around your brand. Plus have the scrim of do-gooding to hide behind if anyone questioned your motives.

Well played, Demeter, well played.

All those newspaper articles, all these bloggers.

Fee, fie, fo, fum… I do believe that, when it comes to a good publicity grab, Demeter Fragrance Library is the address of the sweet smell of success.*

So I just had to go check out the Library, which has in its stacks hundreds of scents to choose from.

These go from the pretty pedestrian ones named for flowers (Lilac), booze (Pina Colada), and fun events (Spring Break) to a bunch that are decidedly more outré.

This list includes a whole raft that I suspect end up as gag gifts based on the name, or as little personal remembrances of things past. (And, yes, there is a Madeleine.)

I could do without Zombie, but among the names that I especially liked are:

Holy Water, Laundromat (dryer sheets? bleach?), Crayon, Paperback,  Clean Windows – does it smell like ammonia?, Condensed Milk,  and Holy Smoke (Catholic Church incense – not to be confused with Incense, which runs more along the lines of patchouli oil-head shop).

Holy Water and Holy Smoke:? Holly Smoke! Are we talkin’ stocking stuffer or are we talking stocking stuffer?

For stocking stuffers given to kinkier thoughts, there’s Riding Crop and Rubber.

For the less than kinky, there’s Rye Bread, Pipe Tobacco and This Is Not A Pipe (which smells like pipe).  And all kinds of choices for those with a sweet tooth: Angel Food, Birthday Cake, Junior Mints, Graham Cracker…

Some of the fragrances are just downright weird: Sawdust, Turpentine, Tarnish, Mushroom, Orange Rim Cleaner (actually not as weird as it sounds), – and Mildew. One reviewer complained that it actually didn’t smell like mildew. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you do or do not want to smell like mildew. Personally, I’m in the latter category.

Lobster is

Not for the faint of heart. Probably our most obtuse fragrance, but it is "dead on" so to speak. Demeter's Lobster is a combination of the sea, sweet meat, and a hint of drawn butter.”

I don’t often wear fragrance, but when I do I prefer it not be obtuse, thank you. And that “dead on” in the quotes? Well, yuck.

Boring me, I just find the idea of Geranium more appealing than have Lobster or Tarnish as my signature scent.

For sheer bizarreness, however, I guess I’d have to give it to Funeral Home.

Funeral Home is a blend of classic white flowers: lilies, carnations, gladiolus, chrysanthemums with stems and leaves, with a hint of mahogany and oriental carpet.”

Shouldn’t’ they be touting its “hushed tones.” And, what, no formaldehyde?

I will note that the designers at Demeter must have a great time. The images that illustrate the fragrances are beautiful and/or witty. For some reason, however, the First Response – Boston line doesn’t have an accompanying image. Perhaps they thought that a pressure cooker might be in poor taste so soon on.

In any case, the scent that I would probably find most evocative – my own private Madeleine, and one that I will not likely get a 50,000 page novel out of – is Play Doh. But, since I wouldn’t actually want to go around smelling like Play Doh, it makes a lot more economic sense to just go to CVS and buy a mini-pack of Play Doh and pop open the lid whenever I want to sniff a bit of my past.

Not that I couldn’t carry it off if I did want to smell like Play Doh. In Demeter’s own words, they’re:

…all about the attitude of the user, not the designer or creator. This is because Demeter's single note scents are inspired by real and familiar objects that are eminently understandable. With Demeter, it is totally discoverable in the name of the fragrance itself. And fragrances inspired by real, everyday objects have other special impacts and characteristics.

That sure holds for Play Doh.

But, when it comes to the Marathon bombings, I part company with anything being “eminently understandable”, or “everyday”. “Special impacts”, I’ll give them that. But couldn’t they have just made a nice donation to the victims, rather than come up with a fragrance commemorating an event that nobody wants to be reminded of?

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*”This is the address of the sweet smell of success” was the tagline of a Boston radio station in the early 1960’s. I’m pretty sure it was WBZ, but if there’s anyone out there who remembers for sure. And apologies if I’ve now lodged the jingle in your brain.

Wasting away again in Margaritaville

I’m by no means a Parrothead, but for sheer fun-time sing-a-long-ability, it’s hard to beat Margaritaville, right down to the now terrifically anachronistic reference to cutting your foot by stepping on a pop-top. (Those of us of a certain age will remember barefoot tip-toeing around at the beach, always on the lookout for one of those detachable aluminum pop-tops with their tremendous ability to give your foot a nice bloody slice. Forget sliced bread. One of the greatest inventions of all time was the undetachable pop-top.)

Truly, is there anyone who doesn’t get a smile on his or her face when they hear the opening chords of Margaritaville on some oldies station? Who doesn’t blast the radio – or turn up the volume just a teensy-weensy bit – and sing along?

What I was unaware of, however, is just how very BIG the Margaritaville brand is.

As characterized by Business Week, Margaritaville is “the most lucrative song ever.”

Which is not to say it’s the “Richest Song in the World.”

Last year, the BBC pulled together the Top Ten list of songs that, as songs, have brought in the most money over time.

First on the list: Happy Birthday, which is pretty amazing when you consider that, while it is understandably the most sung song of all time, very few of us actually pay a royalty when we sing it.

Here’s the full list, by the way:

1. 'Happy Birthday To You', Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill/Warner Chappell
2. 'White Christmas', Irving Berlin
3. 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', The Righteous Brothers
4. 'Yesterday', The Beatles
5. 'Unchained Melody', Alex North and Hy Zaret/The Righteous Brothers
6. 'Stand By Me', Ben E. King / Jerry Leiber, and Mike Stoller
7. 'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town', John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie
8. 'Every Breath You Take', The Police
9. 'Pretty Woman', Roy Orbison
10. 'The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You)', Mel Torme/Nat King Cole

Who would of thunk that the Righteous Brothers would grab two places, and the Beatles only one? Or that Every Breath and Pretty Woman would make the cut? Great songs, both, but if I’d have guessed, I’d have put In My Life and I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You or I Will Always Love You ahead of them.

Anyway, if Happy Birthday and White Christmas get more plays,  when it comes to brand-sploitation, Margaritaville represents entirely different changes in magnitude.

Margaritaville isn’t just a song, it’s an enterprise. Or, rather, enterprises.

Margaritaville Enterprises, founded in 2006 and based in Orlando, sells everything from beachwear to furniture and also oversees at least one Caribbean island resort, two American resorts, and four casinos. You can buy Margaritaville rum and combine it with a Margaritaville drink mixer in your very own Margaritaville blender that costs $349.99. According to the Orlando Business Journal, the company brought in at least $100 million in revenue in 2007. As a private company, Margaritaville doesn’t release information about its holdings, but by all accounts it has only expanded since then. (Source: Business Week.)

That expansion includes the 27th Margaritaville outpost, which opened recently in Atlantic City.

The $35 million, 40,000-square-foot complex houses two restaurants, multiple bars, a beach-themed casino, and several breezy, laid-back retail stores—all tucked away in a larger gambling mecca called Resorts.

All I can say is: wow!

Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson – lucrative songbooks, lucrative franchises (especially, for some weird reason, Michael Jackson), but nothing like this. The Margaritaville empire is more akin to Star Wars than it is to You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Houndog or Love Me Do, that’s for sure.

Pretty good for someone who’s a four-hit wonder. I’m sure Parrotheads will disagree, but I looked at his top-tunes list, and the only other ones I recognized were Come Monday, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, and the quite wonderful – even if he don’t want to go to no Buzzards Bay - Volcano.

Weather he’s the greatest songster of all time or not, Jimmy Buffet sure has a good parrothead for business on his shoulders.

Must not have been doing all that much wasting away in Margaritaville.

You know who’s going to save us? Ecovative’s going to save us.

Jamie Dimon isn’t going to save us.

The CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch isn’t going to save us.

Don Draper isn’t going to save us.

Justin Bieber isn’t going to save us.

LeBron James isn’t going to save us.

Kim Kardashian isn’t going to save us.

Bradley Cooper isn’t going to save us.

Angelina Jolie isn’t going to save us.

Ted Cruz isn’t going to save us.

Elizabeth Warren isn’t going to save us, though, god knows, she stands a better chance of saving us than does Ted Cruz.

Mark Zuckerberg and Marissa Yahoo aren’t going to save us. (Although Bill Gates will likely help.)

You know who’s really going to save us?

Brainy, nerdy science guys like Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, that’s who’s going to save us.

At least, having read Ian Frazier’s recent article on them in The New Yorker, they’re the guys – along with others like them -  I’m pretty darned sure are going to save us.

Eben and Gavin:

…were fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips, and observing how the fungal mycelium strongly bonded the wood chips together. This inspired them to think of new ways of using mycelium as a resin. In a class at Rensselaer, called Inventor’s Studio, they formulated a new process for binding together insulating particles, creating some remarkable materials that could replace Styrofoam™. Rather than just decreasing the environmental impact of conventional polystyrene foams, this invention created a whole new paradigm where composite materials are literally grown, harnessing the incredible efficiency of nature. Upon graduating, Eben and Gavin were strongly encouraged by their faculty mentor, Burt Swersey to take a big risk, forgoing “real” jobs to found Ecovative. Within weeks, mycologist Sue Van Hook at nearby Skidmore College read about their mushroom insulation in the local paper and found them. She provided the expertise needed in growing fungi. Eben and Gavin set up their first lab in the Rensselaer Business Incubator in 2007.

Although I never knew what it was called, I’ve always been fascinated by fungal mycelium myself. In fact, whenever I came across it while walking in the woods, I would always say to myself, “Hey, that stuff looks like Styrofoam.”

But since I am singularly lacking in scientific imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit, I never got beyond the “Hey, that stuff looks like Styrofoam” stage in the old product life cycle.

Fortunately for the world, Eben and Gavin have plenty of scientific imagination and entrepreneurial spirit, and they are going to save us from Styrofoam.

Like many of the miracles of science and industry that are inextricably intertwined in our way of life, Styrofoam is a mixed bag.

Yes, it allows us to safely pack and ship items marked fragile; it allows America to run on Dunkin’; it allows us to carry beer and soft drinks in flimsy coolers that are so cheap we don’t care if they fall apart on first use.

And they also are a carcinogen and a major environmental disaster.

Pieces of Styrofoam swirl in the trash gyre in the Pacific Ocean and litter the world’s highways and accumulate in the digestive systems of animals and take up space in waste dumps…Foamed polystyrene beaks down extremely slowly, in timespans no one is sure of, and a major chemical it breaks down to is styrene, listed as a carcinogen in the 2011 toxicology report issued by the National Institutes of Health. (Source: The New Yorker; don’t bother to click through unless you subscribe to the mag…)

All this is why lots of cities are banning Styrofoam. Locally, that includes Brookline and Somerville, Mass. And why I will need to reconsider those cups of tea I get on occasion from Dunkin.

So here’s what Eben and Gavin are doing about it:

Ecovative’s materials start on a farm, with the parts of plants that cannot be used for food or feed and therefore have limited or no economic value. We strive to utilize only renewable, regional raw materials.

A patented process cleans and prepares a blend of agricultural byproducts, and inoculates it with mycelium. You can think of this process as planting the mushroom tissue. There are never any spores involved. This inoculated mixture is filled evenly into forms in an automated process.

Then, the real magic happens. The mycelium grows indoors in about a week without any need for light, watering or petrochemical inputs. It’s like a vertical farm for mushroom materials. The beauty of this process is that we grow the shape you need.

Every cubic inch of material contains a matrix of 8 miles of tiny mycelial fibers! At the end of the process, we put the materials through a dehydration and heat treating process to stop the growth. This final process ensures that there will never be any spores or allergen concerns.

As we as an all-consuming society continue to keep our heavy foot on the gas pedal of unbridled consumption – environment be damned, you fuzzy-headed tree-huggers – stopping just doesn’t seem to be an option that anyone wants to opt for.

So we need the Ebens and Gavins of the world to come up with ways that we can consume (and live) sustainably.

Eben and Gavin, I salute you!

You and the other sustainability geeks out there give me hope for the future. I hope you make a billion dollars. I hope you win the Nobel Prize for better living through chemistry. I hope you have long, fruitful, ecovative and invention-ful lives.

You almost make me want to up and move to Green Island, NY, to work for you.

Go forth and save the world!

Working in “Gun Valley.” (Have gun, won’t travel.)

I am not an especially rabid anti-gun person.

I don’t own a gun, and I don’t intend to ever be a gun owner.

If things get so bad that I need one, I’d just as soon get plugged in the eyeball on Day One of the new era.

But I think that if someone wants to keep a hand gun, for whatever reason, they should have at it, as long as they’re smart and decent enough to keep it away from kids and evil doers.

And if someone wants to hunt, be my guest. I don’t want to kill Bambi’s mother, but if hunters want to stock up on venison – or just give in to the primal, atavistic urge to rope a dead antlered creature to the hood of their car – they can have at that, too.

I do part company with gun aficionados when it comes to high volume, shoot ‘em up assault rifles.

Imagine what Grace Kelly would have had to say to Gary Cooper if the shootout in High Noon involved machine guns rather than six-shooters?

In any case, I’m just as happy to live in Massachusetts, which is one of the least gun-toting of states.  At 12.6%, we’re third from the bottom. Only New Jersey (12.3%) – so much for The Sopranos – and Hawaii (6.7%) have lower rates. (Source: About.com)

Not surprisingly, we also have the most laws regulating gun ownership, and the second lowest rates of gun deaths (second only to Hawaii).  (Source: Bloomberg News.)

More surprisingly, we’re the home to quite the gun industry.

In the Boston Globe’s recent listing of the leading 100 companies in Massachusetts, the top gun was Smith & Wesson.

In fact there are, in the Connecticut River Valley* (which includes Connecticut), a.k.a. “Gun Valley”, “dozens of firearms manufacturers and suppliers”.

While not in “Gun Valley,” my home town used to have a big gun manufacturer, Harrington  & Richardson, which built M16’s during the Vietnam War.  While I was making combat boots at H.H. Brown Shoe, one of my friends worked one summer in the office of H&R.

Harrington-Richardson is no more, but, let’s face it, in the US of A, guns ‘r us:

Gun sales are soaring across the nation, with many manufacturers having posted record profits in 2012. And no matter where you fall on the gun debate, there’s no argument that this expansion has very real economic implications for a struggling region. There’s even a chance that the current boom could see guns reprise their role from two centuries ago, powering the growth of other high-skill manufacturing throughout the area.

Although California and Texas are home to more gun-related jobs, Connecticut and Massachusetts rank fourth and fifth in total economic output from this industry, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms trade association. (Source: Boston Sunday Globe.)

Most of the gun slingers around here aren’t household names like Smith & Wesson and Colt in Hartford. There’s also And Savage Arms  - is that a great name or what? – in Westfield, where they make sport/hunting rifles, and where there are workers making decent money making guns that people from somewhere else are – fortunately or unfortunately – buying a lot of.

Once of the brink of destruction,

[Savage’s] year-over-year growth was 50 percent in 2011, 40 percent in 2012, and is on pace to pack on another 40 percent in 2013. The company is running round-the-clock shifts on weekdays and has added one on Saturdays. It has about 415 employees in Westfield, nearly double the number from just three years ago and part of a companywide workforce of 740. And it is racing to hire more. The Westfield factory made and shipped more than 350,000 guns in 2012, while also distributing another 300,000 that were made at Savage’s Canadian plant or by the vendors in China and Turkey that produce the company’s cheaper Stevens brand weapons. One company projection calls for the Westfield plant to be producing 650,000 guns by 2015 and distributing more than 1 million in total.

By the way, the boom in gun ownership is not coming about because more individuals own guns:

Even as sales soar, only about one-third of US households have guns, down from about half in the 1970s.

But the folks who own guns tend to own more of them.

I’m not sure if I should find this settling or unsettling, but I think I’m leaning towards unsettling.

And while Savage if busily manufacturing sporting rifles, which give the deer and the antelope a sporting chance, Smith & Wesson is doing so well in large part because if makes assault rifles. (Industry euphemism: “modern sporting rifles.”)

Whatever guns they’re building, gun companies provide decently paid, reasonably skilled, blue-collar jobs. Because the jobs required skilled labor, they didn’t migrate South with the textile mills. Still, gun companies fell on some hard times, and the recent Armageddon’s-just-around-the-corner mania has certainly contributed to its resurgence.

As are the technological innovations that have lowered the cost of making guns, thus encouraging “existing gun owners and collectors to buy more of them.”

Which is good for the workers in “Gun Valley,” if not an unalloyed benefit to the country as a whole.

It’s never all that simple, is it?

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*The Connecticut River Valley is also the home to a lot of tobacco farms, which always manages to surprise people. They grow shade tobacco, which is used for cigar wrappers. My husband’s aunt and uncle owned a tobacco farm which they converted into a golf course in the 1960’s, but there are still plenty of working farms around their neck of the woods.

Operation Swill

There’s a wonderful John Gorka song that goes “I’m from New Jersey, I don’t expect too much...”

If Operation Swill is any indication, Mr.Gorka knew what he was singing about.

For those who missed the news, a recent Garden State investigation – delightfully code-named Operation Swill – revealed that a whole slew of bars and restaurants throughout the state were substituting well brands for premium brands.

This is, of course, one of those “No shit, Sherlock” situations that makes one ask whether you need a year-long investigation to ferret out something that most of us suspect goes on in plenty of bars, and not just in New Jersey.

All that ordering Stoli or Grey Goose and ending up  with Popov or Smirnoff’s….

But substituting Fleischmann’s for Tanqueray was the least of it.

One bar “allegedly mixed rubbing alcohol with caramel food coloring and served it as scotch”, while another “is accused of pouring dirty water into an empty bottle and passing it off as liquor.” (Source NJ.com.)

Now I’ve heard of watering drinks, but dirty watering a drink?

I don’t think that’s quite what the Standells had in mind when they sang “Love that Dirty Water.”

And that caramel colored rubbing alcohol passed off as Scotch?

Scotch on its own is nasty enough, but caramel colored rubbing alcohol?

I know that restaurants can be a low margin business, but the profit potential on booze, it seems to me, doesn’t have to be artificially enhanced.

First, the markup on even premium brands is pretty darned good.

Assume that a bar pays $20 for a bottle of Stoli – which they don’t: they pay a lot less – and gets 20 drinks out of it, that they charge $10 a pop for.

Do the math. Even when you factor in the cost of the bartender’s time to pour the drink (15 seconds, max), the cost of the glass, washing the glass, serving the patron, presenting the bill, putting through the charge, processing the tip… Pretty much every bottle of liquor or wine has a pretty good ROI.

In the way back, I was a waitress, but I wasn’t aware of any booze watering or swapping out in the places where I worked. That’s not to say it didn’t happen.

This was also, of course, in an era when there was less premium anything. I don’t ever remember anyone requesting a specific vodka, and Coors was considered an upscale, classy beer.

Still, there are always trimmers.

As a diner outer/drinker outer, I have had an occasional Cape Codder (cranberry juice and vodka) that didn’t seem to have much alcohol in it, but those occasions were surely balanced out by the Cape Codder that was so strong it looked pink rather than red.

One time, many years ago, my husband and I were having a drink at the Peacock Alley bar at the Waldorf Astoria, and we observed the waiter knocking back half of each of the shots the bartender had poured for our drinks. I remember we laughed about it, but I don’t know whether we bothered to call him on it. It was just so idiotically brazen, reminding me of the Groucho question, “Who do you believe, me or your own eyes?” Similarly, on the non-booze front, I once watched as a waitress poured me a cup of de-caf coffee from the caf pot. When I told her I’d watched her pour me a cup of caf – the orange-handled pot was empty – she denied it. Again with the Groucho question. I refused the coffee and told her that, if she was going to do something like that, she’d best do it out of the sight line of the person who’d done the ordering…

Back to Operation Swill:

Thirteen of the establishments identified were TGI Fridays franchises operated by the Briad Group, a Livingston-based hospitality company. TGI Friday's corporate offices in Texas said today that the accusations are "very disturbing."

Briad is, of course, shocked, just shocked.

Briad president Rick Barbrick said today that the allegations are "troubling and surprising to us."

"We can assure our loyal and valuable guests that it is our corporate policy to treat all of our patrons honestly and fairly, "Barbrick said in a statement.

I suspect he meant “valued guests”, rather than “valuable guests”, but I may be wrong. After all, a guest that’s willing to pay over ten-bucks for a mixed drink with premium or well liquor is obviously a “valuable guest.”

In any case, the tsk-tsk behavior is certainly not in keeping with the Briad “brand promise.”

Welcome to fun.

If you can eat there, drink there or sleep there, we can play with it, adding our special brand of flare to the flavor of fun we like to call The Briad Group. Welcome to our website, where you’ll learn about one of America’s fastest growing hospitality companies.

That’s some “special brand of flare” they’ve got going there, that’s for sure.

"This is essentially a wake-up call to the less altruistic operators in the industry that they need to get their act together," [Michael] Halfacre [Director, NJ Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control] said. (Source: back to NJ.com.)

Congratulations, Mr. Halfacre. This is perhaps the first time the the word “altruistic” has been associated with the food and beverage industry.

Personally, I think it’s nice if a restaurant wants to collect quarters for the Special Olympics. Or give away pies at Thanksgiving. And I love that Panera has set up some Panera Cares restaurants, where they suggest a price, but where everybody doesn’t pay the price. The haves subsidize the have-nots (and the selfish jerks who take advantage of a nice, bleeding heart endeavor). Note to self: have lunch – and overpay – at Panera Cares this week.

But I don’t really expect any business to operate in altruistic mode.

I do expect them to be honest with respect to the goods and services they offer, and not to serve me wares that are adulterated. If I want a dirty-water-and-cranberry rather than a Cape Codder, I’ll order one, thank you.

As for the restaurants that Operation Swill nailed, I bet that more than a few of them are going to be saying C-ya to those liquor licenses. Not to mention the “valuable guests” who won’t be heading back any time soon.

Serves them – the restaurants, not the “valuable guests”, right.

Memorial Day, 2013

Time, it appears, flies whether you’re having a good time, and the past year hasn’t been all that much of a good time.

Last year, on this day, I see that I was posting rather a lot about my husband’s recovery from cancer surgery, and rather a little about Memorial Day.

This year, I’ll try to equal the balance out a bit.

On the cancer seat on the teeter-totter, after eight months of living cancer free, we found out in February that my husband’s cancer has recurred, and we’re now in “treatable, not curable” mode. So Jim’s been going through chemo, and tomorrow we find out whether it’s working, Needless to say, we are on pins, we are on needles.

Just as last year, I was mastering the care and feeding of Jim’s post-surgical feeding tube, this year it’s the less complex but far scarier chemo pump.

Was I the last person in the world to learn that some chemo regimens are on a take-out basis?

Jim’s first blast is given in the hospital, then they bag him up for drug #2 with a portable pump, carried in a rather fetching man-purse. After it runs for 46 hours, you can have “it” – the needle, the line – removed back at the hospital, or have your caregiver take care of it at home.

Although we are less than a 10 minute walk from the hospital, we have elected for the home take down, which involves scrubbing up, donning surgical gloves, capping a line, syringing the tube with saline solution and heparin, and, finally, removing the needle from the port.

Then there’s the disposal.

The pump, lines, and gloves are double-bagged and FedExed off to some processing center in Michigan. The non-lethal “stuff” – like the plastic syringes that contained the saline and the heparin – can be tossed in the trash. And the needle and the part of the line that trails it are placed in your own personal sharps jar – ours is an old spaghetti sauce container. When it’s full – another round or so – I can bring it back to MGH for them to get rid of.

The first time I went through this process, I was plenty nervous, imagining a line gone wild spurting chemo all over the place. (They do send you home with supplies and instructions for what to do if that happens.) My nervousness was not alleviated any by my husband asking whether I was clamping the line in the right place, whether I was syringing in the right order, etc. The capstone of his arm-chair quarterbacking was when, observing what can only be described as a flop-sweat – sweat was literally dripping off my nose - he said, “You seemed so confident when they showed you in the hospital.” Thanks, hon, that sure helps…

But, now that we’re into it, things run pretty smoothly.

And if this is the worst thing I ever have to deal with, well…

It’s not exactly the horrors of war and those who face them down, who are the folks that we memorialize today.

It promises to be a brilliant spring day here in Boston, but as I right this it’s cold, dreary, drizzling – not atypical spring weather in these parts, and actually pretty fitting, when you think of it.

Sure, war is sometimes conducted on delightfully balmy days. But as often as not, those in battle are coping with terrible physical conditions.

It’s frostbitten feet at Valley Forge. It’s contending with the heat at the Battle of the Wilderness.  Muck in the trenches of Château-Thierry. Rappelling up the cliff at Pointe du Hoc during a pelting rainstorm. The cold and ice at Choisin Reservoir. Monsoon season in Vietnam. Sandstorms in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And that’s in addition to having the other guy trying to kill you, while you’re trying to kill the other guy. Having to crawl over the body parts. Watching your buddies buy the farm. Praying that you’ll make it out alive (or for the million dollar wound).

An altogether crappy way to live (and die).

Of course, most of those in the military never see combat.

Fortunately, most of the time there isn’t a war on.

And even if there is a war on, only about 10% of those who serve will ever see combat.

My father’s war-time experience was surely not atypical.

Although it would have taken a while for Uncle Sam to get him – he was 29 when WWII started, and he was working in a wire factory engaged in war-work – my father volunteered.

He tried the Army, but they wouldn’t have him: flat feet. Can’t march, so no good in the the infantry.

But the Navy wasn’t so fussy, so my father was inducted.

One of the first things they did was give the new recruits an IQ test.

My father scored pretty high, and although he wasn’t a college graduate – he was going through college, course at a time, via night school – he was told that he was smart enough to become an officer.

Because my father was smart enough to become an officer, he declined the offer.

I think it was mostly because he didn’t like the officers he’d met, WASP-y Southern boys who were never going to be especially fond of a wise-guy Irish fellow from Massachusetts.

So my father ended up a Chief Petty Officer (the highest level of non-com, which was fine with him).

He was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. In Trinidad, when that was going to be staging center for a big invasion of Africa that never quite came off. And in downtown Chicago, at Navy Pier.

Not exactly the horrors of war. (Unless you count four years out of your life…)

The only time my father’s life was in jeopardy was on the ship going to and from Trinidad, where there was risk of being sunk by a U-Boat.

Still, as my father would say, you went where Uncle Sam sent you, so Norfolk, Trinidad, and Chicago it was.

Up until the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he thought that he might end up being shipped out to the Pacific theatre. So he and my mother, whom he’d met while stationed in downtown Chicago, waited to become engaged until after that first bomb was dropped, and they knew with certainty that the war would be over soon.

So my father never got to be a big brave combat veteran.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, given the chance, he would have been.  (And there’s no doubt in my mind that anyone who knew my father would disagree with this. He was tough, physical, charismatic, and courageous. He was also not stupid, so he wasn’t raising his hand asking to be sent into combat, But if he had been, he would have done good.)

But plenty others out there have been in combat, and today we think of them. Mostly young men, with what should have been their lives before them. Then gone, often, quite troublingly, for a not particularly good reason.

I’m not the biggest John Kerry fan on the face of the earth, but he had it right when he said:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

But we continue to do so, and that has nothing to do with the bravery of those who serve or the respect we should pay to those who are killed and wounded.

I’m not one who believes that everyone in the military is an automatic hero. Even those who have died. Far from it. But I do believe that, in an all volunteer military, one wouldn’t go in to begin with unless they had at least some small measure of bravery, love of country, and willingness to put his (or, increasingly her) life on the line.

So, on this Memorial Day, I salute those who’ve died in time of war, especially the 33,000 from Massachusetts who’ve been killed in battle since the Civil War. Each year, for the last several years, a group has placed flags on the Boston Common commemorating their sacrifice. This picture does not do it justice, but it’s really something to see. That’s an awful lot of flags, especially when you consider that each one is attached to an awfully young life.

I was going to end with “Happy Memorial Day,” but can Memorial Day ever be really and truly happy? Sure, it’s the start of summer, and a long weekend, and there’s baseball being played at Fenway. Still, if we think about it at all…

So instead I’ll end with – to all those who’ve died while serving our country, to those who are “in” now: I’ll be thinking of you.  (You, too, Dad, even if you never saw a day of combat.)

Kitchen Nightmare, alrighty

Last December, I posted about a rather intemperate Boston restaurateur  (Pigalle-ing Out) who went flaming after a diner who claimed that the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie tasted like vomit. The story had an awwwwww ending: chef and diner ended up FB friending each other. Still, it was an object lesson about the perils of using social media. Let’s face it, if you’re going into the restaurant these days, the only thin skin you can afford to have is on the duck confit. You need to be able to tough out the negative comments, swallowing hard and reaching out to the wronged diners to say how sorry you are about the bad experience, and how you’re just dying to make it up to them. Sure, you may end up adding a bittle of spittle to their soup when they come back, but, that’s the cost of being in this sort of business in the era of everyone-who-walks-in-the-door might be a Mimi Sheraton or Craig Claiborne wannabe. Without having to worry about losing their amateur job as a food critic.

Anyway, the Boston vomit-pie incident was nothing compared to what’s been going on with one Arizona restaurant.

Apparently the owner of Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale got fed up with yelps on Yelp, and other online reviews.

As far back as 2010, Amy was going after Yelp reviewers who gave her place negative reviews:

In August 2010, Joel Latondress, an IT worker who writes a recipe blog, wrote a negative review of the restaurant on Yelp. Amy Bouzaglo responded by likening Latondress to a "tramp and a loser" writing, “Do us a favor and keep your ugly face and your ugly opinions to yourself." Bouzaglo explained her response, saying, "If someone comes here and tries to attack me or harass us I’m going to stand up and fight for what I believe in 100% in my company." Source: Wikipedia.)

This got picked up by local media and ended up in some sort of ongoing flambé war that took a while to die down.

The tension over the social media takedowns of the business  reached a new level after the restaurant’s star turn on Kitchen Nightmares, which unfortunately for them did not turn into the show’s usual misty-eyed redemption. If you’ve ever watched it – and I’ve seen it a few time - the episodes usually end with the restaurant owners, with their new menus (no more frozen chicken!), the cleaned up kitchen (the scummy fry-o-lator cleaned at last!), the spiffed up dining room (out with that mildewed carpet!), fall weepily into Gordon Ramsay’s arms, forgiving every harsh word he uttered in the heat of the battle to Save Their Restaurant. (After watching a show, I always give a google, and quite of few of the eateries that Ramsay rescues end up closing despite his 48 hour effort.)

No, Gordon Ramsay wasn’t able to work his mojo, even temporarily, on Amy’s.

Instead of redemption, owners Amy and Samy Bouzaglos got damnation.

After one bite, he quickly deemed Amy’s Baking Co. a disaster and chided the Bouzaglos for growing increasingly irate over his constructive feedback. Among his many critiques: The store-bought ravioli smelled ‘‘weird,’’ a salmon burger was overcooked and a fig pizza was too sweet and arrived on raw dough.

‘‘You need thick skin in this business,’’ Ramsay said before walking out. It was the first time he wasn’t able to reform a business, according to the show. (Source: Boston.com)

In the show, the owners lash out at customers who have complaints:

"We stand up to them," Amy Bouzaglo tells the camera at one point. "They come and they try to attack us and say horrible things that are not true."

Nothing says come on back like having the restaurant owner attack you when you let them know the soup is cold!

Years ago, my husband and I ate La (late and lamented) Cote Basque in NYC. We had the smoked salmon appetizer, which we had had a number of times before. Not really complaining, just asking, Jim asked the waiter if the salmon was different and mentioned that he’d preferred the earlier version. Indeed, the salmon was different.  The chef-owner came over, white toque, apron and all, and explained that they had switched suppliers, and the salmon was now Norwegian rather than from Scotland, and that they had perhaps not tested it well enough, etc. For dessert, he came over to the table and personally whipped up an orange crème chantilly to go with the fabulous chocolate ganache the restaurant was known for.

Now that’s how to respond to a customer complaint. (Not that we were complaining, mind you.)

Anyway, after Kitchen Nightmares aired a few weeks back, Amy boogalooed over to Facebook and let ‘er rip.

‘‘I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE,’’ read the posting on the Facebook wall of Amy’s Baking Co. in suburban Phoenix. ‘‘YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD.’’

And Amy, unfortunately, hadn’t snagged the URL for her name, leading to some of her enemies – I suspect from the tenor of it, we may be talking ex-employees here – to set up an incredibly nasty site in her name. (I won’t link it here. However vile the Bouzaglos may be, I’m  not a big fan of the c-word or anti-Semitism.)

Personally, I take online reviews of anything – especially the vitriolic ones typically posted by anonymous commenters who use the invisibility cloak of anonymity to be more savage than they’d be in “real life” – with a grain of salt. I’ve seen plenty of reviews of places that I like that are full of complaints – complaints that may well be legitimate in the moment: any diner can have an off-night food- and service-wise. We went to one of our go-tos the other evening and had a new waiter, one we hadn’t had before, who was just god-awful. I suspect he won’t still be working there next time we stop in, but if he is, we would prefer not to sit in his station. But unless I see review, after review, after review dumping on a place, I won’t necessarily shy away from it (okay, if someone mentioned rats…), especially if the restaurant had some sort of response.

But I would be exceedingly reluctant to step toe and lift fork in a restaurant in which the owners went on the attack like Amy Bouzaglo has done.

In the wake of the Kitchen Nightmares airing, the restaurant closed temporarily, but may or may not be back in business.

If it is, it may not be for long.

Change.org now has a petition going asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether the owners pocketed tips meant for their servers. (This was shown on the Kitchen Nightmares episode.)

The restaurant’s PR firm quit on them, since the Bouzaglos had ignored their wise advice not to flame out online.

Information on Amy Bouzaglo’s felonious past has surfaced.

And it seems that Samy Bouzaglo is in danger of being deported. (He also has a criminal record.) Nothing to do with the show, but it sure won’t be helping build their business back up.  (Source: AZ Central.)

Anyway, for Amy’s Baking Company, there’s sure been a kitchen nightmare that they haven’t been able to wake up from. And it’s mostly off their own making.

Well, I appreciate World Nutella Day, even if Ferrero doesn’t (and even if I don’t actually like Nutella).

We have long been told that the most successful consumer brands are those that get their consumers to do a lot of their marketing for them. Thus, Harley-Davidson has fans who sport the official H-D gear, get the company logo tattooed on their arms, and name their children Harley and Davidson.

Closer to home, half the people in Boston are occasional walking billboards for one of the local sports teams. As the possessor of a Red Sox fleece, tee-shirt, pin, earrings, and two caps, I’m one of them. And that doesn’t even count my “Pennant Fever” tee from 1986.

Right now in Boston, I’d say we’re trending about 55% Bruins (it helps to win), 40% Red Sox (it helps to be in season), 3% Patriots, and 2% Celtics. (Sorry Revs.) Although I only have Red Sox “stufff”, I am partial to the Bruins “Keep Calm and Bergeron” tee-shirt (after B’s star Patrice Bergeron).

Other sorts of goods and services would be lucky to inspire such brand loyalty – imagine someone with, say, a Verizon or Bank of America tattoo – yet marketers can always hope that someone will do some sort of fan-appreciation deal-io for their brand.

Thus, one might have imagined, the folks at Ferrero would have been delighted that an American had put her heart and soul into celebrating an annual World Nutella Day – Nutella being a Ferrero product – which Sara Rosso has done faithfully since February of 2007.

The purpose of the day is to:

“celebrate Italy’s edible treasure with online and offline tributes” and to share recipes. It caught on—the Facebook page for World Nutella Day now has nearly 40,000 likes. (Source: Business Week.)

While I will admit that I never turn down the offer of one of those Ferrero Rocher foil-wrapped chocolate hazelnut sins – yummy – I am not a fan of Nutella, and am unlikely to join the nearly 40,000 likes celebrating World Nutella Day.

I’m not quite sure why I don’t really like Nutella, since I am pretty much a chocoholic. Maybe I’d like it better by the spoonful, rather than on bread, where to me it doesn’t quite belong. (I will have to try it on ice cream: that might do the trick for me.)

Still, I know that there are fans out there – I am related to a few of them – and I am happy that the Nutellans of the world have their very own day.

Anyway, from a marketing perspective, was a bit shocked that Ferrero had tried to put the kibosh on it.

“They asked me to take down the site because they consider it to be an unauthorized use of their intellectual property and trademarks—the Nutella logo and brand,” Rosso wrote in an e-mail [sent to Business Week].

Now, I understand that a company would want to protect its brand from misuse, malfeasance, and baddies.

Mountain Dew would certainly not be happy if the KKK declared it the official soft drink of white supremacists, and started sporting the Dew logo on their robes and hoods .

And no brand would want to see someone else using their logos, etc., for their own profit. Thus, major league sports, and Disney, and everyone else out there with images that someone else might be interested in exploiting, are eternally vigilant to make sure that no one’s making a dime off of them. (That 1986 “Pennant Fever” tee-shirt – which, even though it’s a 50-50 cotton-poly blend, has the wonderfully retro smiling Red Sox on it -  was not officially blessed by Major League Baseball. Neither, I suspect, are those “Keep Calm and Bergeron” numbers I have my eye on.)

And yet it seems pretty crazy – mean-spirited and just plain wrong-headed -  to clamp down on someone who’s just trying to promote your product, does it not? (And am I the only one who thinks it’s a hoot to think of anything to do with Nutella, other than maybe the recipe, as being “intellectual property.”)

Still, Ferrero would not be the only group to be protective of its brands. Last year, the U.S. Olympic Committee sent a cease-and-desist letter to the online knitting group Ravelry about its marathon knit-off called the Ravelympics.

Nutella? Ravelry? Yes indeed-y, I can see a bunch of knitters getting confused with lugers and sprinters. Seriously, folks… What is up with these over-zealous brand polizei?

Not having worked in consumer goods, I’m happy that I never had to put up with this sort of nonsense.

I did work for a company that had a product called “ATF” (Automated Test Facility), that had a component called the ATF Agent. Fortunately, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms never came after us for violating their brand standards. (This product was around during the Waco hoo-hah, so at trade shows we’d occasionally attract quasi-lunatics who thought we had something to do with the take down of David Koresh et al., and would start to yell at us. I remember one fellow ranting on about the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Actually, talking with him was more interesting than talking with some of the prospects who actually wanted to know something about how ATF worked.)

Not surprisingly, Ferrero – after dealing with a few days of w.t.f. social media uproar – has backtracked. On Tuesday, the announced that it would cease and desist asking World Nutella Day to cease and desist.

“The case arose from a routine brand defense procedure that was activated as a result of some misuse of the Nutella brand on the fan page. Ferrero is pleased to announce that today, after contacting Sara Rosso and finding together the appropriate solutions, it immediately stopped the previous action,” the company stated.

Now, wouldn’t you think that they would have thought of that before they started sabre rattling in Sara Rosso’s direction? Unless, of course, there’s some scheming marketing mastermind behind the scenes who figured out that, however bad it made Ferrero look, this brouhaha would be good publicity for Nutella…

Nah…. This “routine brand defense procedure” was just dumb, dumb, dumb. Haven’t they read Marketing 101?

If someone’s willing to do your marketing for you, just let them.

Greetings from Nerd-ville: We’re Number Two!

Sometimes you just luck out and end up living in the place that suits you.

Seriously, I pity the anonymous commenters who frequent boston.com and bostonherald.com (and who may even be in the paid employ of  the latter, given the insanely frothing nature of the comments there) to – no matter what the topic of “conversation” is – piss and moan about how terrible it is to live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Honestly, you’d think that the Bay State is anything other than an excellent place in which to live.

Most educated – 1st

Lowest divorce rate – 1st

Healthiest – 4th

Wealthiest – 5th

Pursuit of Happiest  - 10th

Gun-happiest (i.e., firearms death rate) – 50th

And all round best places to live – 7th

Seriously, other than being in the Top 10 for taxes paid – which may have something to do with being the 5th wealthiest state – there are few factors that we don’t rate pretty darned high (or low, where low = good) on. Even – and this is incredibly surprising – our rank as the state with the worst drivers, which is 48th.

Maybe our weather isn’t the best but, still, this is a great place to live, especially if you’re the type of person who likes living around healthy, educated people who aren’t generally shooting at each other. 

In any case, I am always delighted to see the news when we rate high on yet another list, the most recent being the pocket protector rankings. This list ranks states by the concentration of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) professionals.

Massachusetts came in Number 2, second only to Virginia (which outstrips us because of all those government agencies, contractors, and sub-contractors there).  In the Number 3 position was, thanks to Microsoft, Washington. (Source: Bloomberg.

There are other states with more techies in absolute terms – think California – but in terms of geeks per capita, Massachusetts is right up there.

Just as the top of the heap is not surprising, neither is the bottom:  Mississippi, West Virginia, and Nevada.

Being high on STEM-mers is good for a lot of reasons. It’s where the growth is. Where the high-paying jobs are. It’s the future.

And, as someone who has enjoyed a good long career in nerd-dom, I have always enjoyed working with techies. For the most part, they were smart, funny, off-beat, and decent. Not that I never encountered any techie a-holes: I met plenty of them, often – why am I not surprised? – in the executive ranks, where an apparent willingness to be nasty and aggressive conveyed them out of the cubicle and into a windowed office and a seat at the table. Sometimes even at the head of the table.

But for the most part, working with techies was wonderful – certainly one of the best aspects of working in high tech.

When I worked full time, whatever the company, I was always part of a bull session group that, maybe one evening every couple of weeks, gravitated to someone’s office, where we spent a couple of hours shooting the breeze and, of course, solving the company’s problems. (If only they had listened to us…)

These groups always had at least one techie (in my world, that would have been a software engineer). Ed, Charlie, Frank, Paul, Ted. Some of the most wonderful and interesting guys I ever worked with were techies.

So, too, were some of the oddest.

There was Mike, who more or less lived at work, and in whose office we one day found a bag of suppurating sweet potatoes that were stinking to the high heavens.

Not to mention Jim who, when we doled out desserts at Friday lunch – at this small company, we took turns bringing dessert, and had our weekly full-staff meeting over brown-bag lunch and mostly home-made goodies – would tremble with anxiety if he felt he was going to be deprived of a second helping.

And then there was the marvelously (mostly) outspoken Bill.

For one client project – a custom information system -  I was managing, Bill was the only full-time tech resource I had. When the client came to town, I introduced Bill as the lead engineer on the project.

“Lead engineer?” Bill snorted, “I’m the only engineer.”

All was forgiven a while later when, as part of what was more or less a hostile takeover (at least as far as the rank and file were concerned), our new president flew in from wherever out of town to address the troops. He had started into his remarks – the usual bull and bromide – when Bill’s hand shot up.

Mr. President acknowledged him.

“Would you mind introducing yourself, sir?” Bill asked him.

Our new president told us his name.

Bill nodded deeply. “I thought so,” he told the slack-jawed new head guy, who was just starting to get a clue about what he was in for.

Ah, techies.

When younger marketing professionals ask my advice on whether to pursue a career in product marketing or marcomm, I always ask them one question: If you were stranded on a desert island, would you rather be stranded with the engineers or the sales guys.

I always knew who I’d rather be with, which is how I ended up going the product marketing route.

One of the things I miss these days is that I don’t get to meet with the techies as often as I’d like. I’m with the product marketing folks, the product managers, the marcomm-ers. Once in a while, I get to work with the engineers, but I only have one client with whom I work directly and regularly with the geeks. No surprise that they’re just about my favorite client.

Sure, maybe they’re not the smoothest of the smooth, the coolest of the cool, but what’s not to love about nerds?

So happy to live in a place where we have so many of them.

Landlines

I’m one of those old-fashioned types who still has a landline.

I can’t remember when the last time I made an outgoing call on it. (Actually, that’s not quite true. On the day of the Marathon bombings, when there was no mobile service for a while, I used it to call the landlines of my local sister and local brother to make sure that they were okay, so I could email by traveling sister and non-local brother and let them know we were all safe.)

Once in a blue moon, I’ll use it my landline to dial into a conference call. Sometimes it’s just easier to be on speaker, and the landline is better than a smartphone for that. But an outgoing personal call?

Pretty much the only time I use it for one of those is when I’ve misplaced my Blackberry and want to track it down.

Mostly the landline is used incoming by a) good causes looking for money, even though I tell them time and again that I DO NOT give to anyone (other than one of my schools) that solicits me over the phone; b) political surveys and/or get out and vote calls; c) bad people trying to get me to give them my credit card information; and d) my dentist calling to tell me that I have an appointment the next day.

I hang on to it mostly for the fear factor of not having a landline to call 911 or whatever.  There’s also a sentimental attachment to the number, I suppose, which I believe I’ve had for nearly forty years now.  But I’ve had my cell phone number for nearly twenty years, so sentimental/schmentimental.

My “real” phone is my cell. On my landline, I have the most minimal plan allowable, and augment the local coverage with a two-buck a month long distance service from some little phone company in Maine. On my cell phone, I have the mega-minutes plan, plus texting, and, of course, Internet access.

My husband, the last person in America to not have a cell phone, has a VoIP-based Magic Jack number, which mostly works, if you don’t mind terrible reception. But if the phone call matters, he uses the landline.

While those of us of a certain age keep the home-phones going, many of us are at least quasi-ambivalent – how’s that for an expression of ambivalence -  about keeping a landline home phone. But for the “young folks”, it’s a no-brainer. They just use their cell phones.

This, of course, means that, just as young folks won’t know what it’s like to dial, use a pay phone, call collect, or memorize their friends’ numbers, they won’t know what it’s like to pick up the family’s general phone and holler, “Hey, it’s for you.” Nor will they ever have to remember to tell a parent or sibling that they got a call, let alone actually take down a message.

All this reminds me of an experience my sister Trish had answering the family phone – PL-35811 – a few years after my father had died.

The caller was none other than a childhood friend of my father’s, one “Moko” Doyle, a fellow who had figured largely in tales of my father’s youth. Moko had been something of goof-ball, a not especially bright guy who was a trouble magnet. When my father was evaluating the friends of my brothers, it was not an entirely good thing if my father characterized any of them as a “Moko Doyle.” (There were worse designations, I must say. A “Moko Doyle” was at least likable. A bum, a louse, a crook, a complete POS, was a Vincent P. Egan, but that’s a story for another day.)

Anyway, Trish was home alone when she answered a call from Florida, Moko checking in with his old pals after many decades away.

My sister, still just a kid of 14 or 15 at the time, had to tell Moko that my father was dead.

He then asked about my Uncle Charlie.

No, Trish was sorry to report, Charlie had recently passed away.

Spike? Moko asked hopefully.

Alas, Spike was gone as well.

Poor Moko, reciting the litany of his boyhood friends, only to find them all gone. (Poo Trish, having to give Moko the news.)

Finally, Moko asked about Nemo, who, Trish was happily able to report, was still among the living.

With no landlines in the house, calls from the likes of Moko Doyle will be a thing of the past. Exchanges like this will all happen on Facebook or LinkedIn.

It’s not just homes, of course, that are getting rid of landlines. Businesses are hanging up on them, as well. (Hanging up: another thing that doesn’t happen much anymore, either.)

Of the nearly 300 employees at Evernote, only a handful – those in customer support, for the most part – have a landlines.

At Facebook, it’s the same deal for their 5,000 employees. Ditto for the 53,000 workers at Google.

Silicon Valley companies big and small are pulling the plug on desk phones in favor of mobile devices. While consumers have been cutting the cord for years, businesses are joining the trend at an accelerating rate thanks to the increasing capabilities of mobile devices, which make it easier for workers to be productive and stay connected from any location at all hours. (Source: Bloomberg.)

Which, of course, means that there’s no cutting the cord between work life and personal life, a condition that has been in the making for a number of years – and is not an unalloyed good.

That aside, the trend really spells trouble for the landline equipment and networking providers like Alcatel and Avaya. Business spending on landlines fell by one-third between 2008 and 2012, and is expected to plummet by the same amount between now and 2016.

And for the telecom providers like AT&T and Verizon, it means figuring out to squeeze more revenues out of wireless as the cash cow of landlines dries up. I’m sure that they’ll figure it out. After all, they have plenty of experience with the decline of Yellow Pages and the end of personal “rental” of phones, which was what the model was in the good old days. (A few years ago, we were visiting my husband’s elderly aunt and realized that, although she had, maybe a decade or so earlier, replaced her old black rotary dial phone with a jazzier number, she had been paying $9 a month fee for that old Bakelite number month in, month out.  We called “wrong number” and returned it for her, although, as I recall, there was some super hassle about sending it back.)

As one guy interviewed for the Bloomberg article – the head of a start up where everyone uses their personal mobile phones for work (and gets reimbursed for overages) – said:

"You just don’t need desk phones. We talk over e-mail, text message, chat clients, social networks. "

This is, of course, true.

I do a lot of my client communicating via e-mail. When I was still working full time, I hung out with remote colleagues on IM. But there are plenty of times where you really do need to get on the horn and actually talk-talk with someone: not over e-mail, not over text, not via FB.

Sometimes you really do need to pick up the phone and call.

At which point, it really doesn’t matter if you’re using a landline, a cell phone, or Skype.

As the AT&T ad used to say, back in the day when Bell ruled:

Reach out and just say ‘hi’…

Hey, they’re waiting to hear from you.

Come on, admit it. Don’t you like to get a call once and a while from someone – business or personal -  who just wants to yack for a while?

A dream is a wish your pocketbook makes

A dream may have been a wish that Cinderella’s heart made, but, Jiminy Cricket, if you’re a well-heeled NYC parent and not a hearth-sweeping skivvy, a dream is a wish that your pocketbook makes come true.

Or so it seem, based on an article in the NY Post – and when are they ever wrong?  -  on hush-hush, word of mouth service that, for about $1K a day, is (make that was) helping folks who had better things to do than wait on line tapping their Tod’s in the broiling Florida sun. Hel-lo-o!

The workaround is hiring a disabled person to become an ad hoc member of your family, letting you cut ahead of the common folks and whisk yourself right into a ride.

The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom.

“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida. (Source: NY Post, by way of boston.com)

This came to light, by the way, because of social anthropologist Wednesday Martin’s research for a book entitled Primates of Park Avenue. That sounds like a good one. Can’t wait.

As for giving those with disabilities a break, believe me, I am in complete sympathy with those who need to use handicap parking, etc.

I have an old and dear friend with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. Forty years (and twenty operations) into dealing with it, she can’t walk all that fast or all that far, and has no use of her fingers. She has handicapped parking tag and, believe me, she needs (and deserves) to use it.

I have another old and dear friend who after surviving ghastly treatment for malignant mesothelioma – no, it doesn’t just happen to asbestos miners; it happens to librarians who work in asbestos-ridden old libraries – has to use one of those motorized scooters to get around in.

However, I do believe that plenty of those folks buzzing around in motorized scooters have a problem getting around because they’re obese, not because they have a disability. So, right off the bat, it doesn’t seem fair that just because you’ve signed up with The Scooter Store, you get to cut line with your posse.

But, sure, for folks in wheelchairs and those who really do need help walking, life is crappy enough as it is, why not give them a break. (Disney, by the way, doesn’t guarantee preferred ride boarding. They just promise a “more convenient entrance.” But those discerning NYC mothers swear by it.)

Hiring someone in a wheelchair or scooter to play ‘poor Aunt Hephzibah’ so you and your precious little ones can scoot to the head of the line: just despicable. (Gives new meaning to ‘hire the handicapped’, that’s for sure.)

Dream Tours, the group that was the supposed go-to for the NYC elite, is a Florida non-profit that is:

Dedicated to providing quality based, memorable, and affordable vacations, to people with special needs.

Well, I suppose you could argue that Rollo the Rich Dude and his brood have special needs, if you consider not feeling like standing in line to get into “It’s a Small World” a special need. (Personally, I’d pay a thousand dollars a day not to get into “Small World” but that’s, after all, just me.)

Dream Tours is focused primarily on adults with special needs. In the words of their home page: We specialize in accessible travel. The company takes individuals and groups on tours of Disneyland, and runs other tours – a cruise, trip to the Smokey Mountains – as well. Their web site is full of heart-warming pictures of families having fun.  Their web site also makes frequent use of Disney characters. Wonder if that’s Disney-approved, given that at one point a few years ago, Disney went after a family that carved Winnie the Pooh on their child’s gravestone. And their logo incorporates the cap of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. If they don’t have Disney permission, I suspect that they’ll be hearing from old Walt’s legal team any day now.

Dream Tours’ program goals include:

• To emphasize community inclusion for individuals with disabilities, fostering partnerships to provide access to the same social, cultural and recreational facilities and activities enjoyed by all citizens
• To provide enriching activities that are meant to challenge everyone’s own personal physical abilities and at the same time allow them to socialize with their peers in a safe environment
• To create a mechanism for sustainability, businesses, partnerships and grants, successfully continuing the program

Theirs is, at least nominally, a very laudable mission. But it may have been that “create a mechanism” goal that tripped them up.  After all, if you can rake in a thousand bucks taking a group of non-disabled POS’s around, and it helps support their efforts to work with those who are both in need and deserving of help, then their thinking may be ‘why not?’.  Maybe the secret handshake is that the New Yorkers know that they have to say that Little Lord Fauntleroy has ADHD, and Dream Tours doesn’t dig too deep. Is this maybe a case of doing the wrong thing for the right reason?

Ryan Clement, who founded and runs Dream Tours, is denying any malfeasance.  It was supposedly his assistant, Jacie Christiano, who was the tour guide on what it appears to have been one of their VIP Tours. 

Due to inaccurate press and slander, Dream Tours is not offering VIP tours at this time. Our focus has primarily always been providing magical vacations for adults with special needs and helping their dreams to come true.

As I learned time and again in small companies that were, as often as not, unintentional non-profits, when you move away from what your “focus has primarily always been” you tend to get in trouble.

Guess that’s what happened here.

And when that happens, donations – in the case of the small companies of my experience, these were donations masked as investments (or vise versa) – tend to dry up.

If they really were legitimate do-gooders, here’s hoping that Ryan and Jacie can get back on track. As it says under Jacie’s bio:

“Around here, however, we do not look back for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things…” Walt Disney

As for those queue-jumping NYC a-holes: shame on you for your cavalier behavior, and for what you’re teaching your children. (Just one of many dreadful things they’re teaching their kids, I’m certain.)

As for Disney, you may want to keep a closer eye on how many families “poor Aunt Hephzibah” rolls in with. You really don’t want to be encouraging liars and cheats. How un-Disney like. Sure, Disney is pretty expensive, and beyond the reach of many families. Nonetheless, doesn’t Disney still believe that “when you wish upon a star, makes no difference who your are”?