There goes the neighborhood

Next weekend, I’ll be visiting some old friends who live in Dallas.

They have a fabulous, ultra-modern home that stands out in their neighborhood of lovely “traditional” houses, in that it’s ultra-modern, while most of the houses in their ‘hood are faux-style McMansions – chateaux, haciendas, ye olde colonial.

When Tom and Joyce went to build their dream house, they ran into quite a bit of opposition from some of their prospective neighbors. But reason, decency, neighborliness, and the lax zoning laws of Dallas – don’t mess with Texas! -  prevailed, and they got the home they wanted. I will admit that, from the outside, it looks a bit out of place. But it is one of the most spectacular homes I’ve ever been in. Architectural Digest, come on down!

But, apparently, the folks in the Oakwood section of Raleigh, NC, are not quite as reasonable, decent, or neighborly as the folks in Dallas, TX. At least not when it comes to letting one couple have it their way.

Louis Cherry, a respected Raleigh architect, and his wife, Marsha Gordon, had long liked the Oakwood neighborhood, a pleasant, older section of town not far from the center of Raleigh, and a couple of years ago they bought a parcel of land on Euclid Street, in the heart of what is called the Oakwood Historic District. Oakwood is not the kind of historic district you would find in, say, New Orleans, where the buildings are of pretty much the same style and the same period. It’s a mix of 19th- and 20th-century houses, of varying size, style, and quality, and construction there is overseen by the Raleigh Historic Development Commission, which, working under pre-determined design guidelines for historic districts, opines on whether or not it considers plans for new construction in the district appropriate. (Source: Vanity Fair.)

Cherry decided to build a home that while more modern than the other homes in the area, was pretty much in aesthetic keeping with the rest of what’s there.

And the Historic Development Commission’s initial finding was that Cherry could go forth and build.

And so he did.

Cherry’s house is an example of modern architecture trying hard, very hard, to be on its best manners—in essence, to be a good neighbor.

See for yourself.

But the initial thumbs up was, apparently, opposable.

The not-so-Mr. Rogers-ish neighbor across the way, Gail Wiesner,

…who had objected to the house at the hearing, decided she was not prepared to let the house go forward. She hired a lawyer to appeal the commission’s positive decision to the city’s Board of Adjustment, which reviews procedural errors by city agencies.

On the advice of a member of the Historic Development Commission that there was no need to worry, Cherry went ahead with his house. Alas, the Board of Adjustment – make that Maladjustment – decided that the Cherry-Gordon plans should not have been approved to begin with, and yanked their permit. The couple may, in fact, be forced to tear the house down.

I went over to Google Maps to take a little buzz of a tour of Euclid Street, which is where the Cherry-Gordon house has been stopped in its tracks. I believe that the pale green house belongs to Wiesner. It is:

…a fairly new house, built in 2008, but hers was designed to look like a much older house. Some of the other recent houses in Oakwood are also what you could call faux-traditional, like hers, and it is clear that at least some of the residents of Oakwood envision the neighborhood as a kind of stage set, an idealized little village in which every house looks like it has been there for a long time, a place where the buildings are old and only the people, the cars, and the kitchen appliances are young.

So there you have it. In this corner, someone putting up a house that, while not a cookie cutter clone of a style from, say, 1920, is – at least from my point of view – an excellent fit for the style of the Oakwood District. It’s not as if the neighborhood was full of real, ginger-breaded up painted ladies, and someone went and plunked down an outsized behemoth that looked like a bunker overlooking Omaha Beach. Or a Levittown split level. Or a doublewide.

This is an eclectic neighborhood to begin with – lots of old (Victorian, Arts and Crafts…) and faux-old styles in play – and, with the Cherry-Gordon house, we’re talking lovely, we’re talking tasteful, where talking the right scale.

Believe me, I well understand the benefits – and tyranny – of living in a neighborhood where everything is controlled by an architectural commission. There are even restrictions on what color you can paint your door and, if you want to be environmentally aware and replace the windows that were put in in 1850, you better be prepared to have them look exactly like the 1850 windows you’re replacing. Which means something custom-made. Ka-ching!

Much of this is for the good – this is, after all, a truly historic neighborhood – Beacon Hill – where I’m guessing that 99% of the structures were built in 1870, plus or minus twenty years. Where tourists love to roam around peering in windows. And where it’s really quite beautiful.

But I really did like that dark coral color we’d snuck in there for a while for our front door. So much more distinctive than the allowable Civil War era red.

Yet I get why there are rules.

But the Cherry-Gordon house didn’t seem to be breaking any rules. Not until Gail Wiesner stuck her oar in the water. I can’t for the life of me see what she’s so exercised about. As we used to say in Worcester, her taste must be in her mouth.

Anyway, North Carolina Modernist Houses, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the state’s modern architecture, has a legal defense fund, which is supporting Cherry and Gordon.

Think I’ll go get me a tee-shirt…(Only $30…)

Close-minded about the open office

It didn’t take an article in Business Week to inform me about the “dark side of open offices.” Having worked in cubicles, shared offices, and private offices of all shapes and sizes, my preference would always be the office that comes with walls that reached the ceiling and a door that closes.

Of course, expressing a preference for an office that’s an office – closed door, your own desk, etc. - reveals that you are to some degree an old fogey who doesn’t care to work at a communal desk while collaborating with colleagues who are whizzing around on skateboards. It puts you right up there with the sorts of creaky old bags who still wear pantyhose. So most of the article focused on the kinds of hip and happenin’ office spaces embraced by those who want to be associated with attributes like cool and creative (vs. dud stuff like pencil pusher, bean counter, number cruncher…).

Balancing the promise of creative office space with the need to get work done isn’t easy, says Elizabeth Dukes, a co-founder of iOffice, a Houston company that provides software and consulting for facility managers. Her new book, Wide Open Workspace, chronicles the evolution of the American office from the cubicle farms satirized in movies such as Office Space to the open plans that have become de rigueur in Silicon Valley.

Even her business has struggled to get it right. IOffice revamped a 7,000-square-foot, 1920s-era printing press building, leaving it completely open to foster collaboration and serendipitous encounters among staff. The arrangement saves on rent and allows the company to tout a greener footprint, Dukes notes. (Source: Business Week)

You know, I worked in all sorts of offices for decades and while I was a big proponent of collaboration when it made sense (i.e., not always), whether I was in an open or a closed environment, I cannot for the life of me recall one event that I’d call a “serendipitous encounter.” Perhaps if I’d shed those pantyhose…

Yet 25 employees—plus their dogs—packed into one big room can get chaotic. The company converted two closets into quiet rooms with soundproofing material on the walls and shower doors. Employees can also work from home, a library, or a coffee shop. “Some employees need that head-down type of quiet place they can reserve for phone calls or certain kinds of work,” Dukes says.

Well, I’m all in favor of take your dog to work day, but a workplace where there are a lot of dogs roaming around? Sure, there’d probably be plenty of serendipitous encounters, and dogs sure do humanize things. But there’d also be at least some ration of snarling, yelping, and – dogs being dogs – butt sniffing. Which might distract a bit from those old-school employees who occasionally need to put their head down for something other than a nap.

There is a further nod to the no doubt pantyhose wearing (and likely pocket protector using) grumblers like Carolyn Smuts, who even has an uptight, stick-in-the mud name, especially for someone in marketing. In fact, Carolyn Smuts is:

…a self-described “uptight, stick-in-the-mud” marketing director for NEAD App Development. In 2010 the tech company moved into a Huntington Beach (Calif.) warehouse decorated with life-size Darth Vader cut-outs and outfitted with a basketball court and wall-to-wall whiteboards. A surfboard manufacturer was next door.

“I worked out of there two weeks solid and got done half of what I would have accomplished at home,” says Smuts. “Even trying to answer e-mails there, somebody would hit me in the back of the head with a Nerf dart.”

Obviously, no one’s going to be setting up office space for the likes of me, but having both worked in cubicles and in a room of my own, I’ll take the room of my own, any old day. I realize that the young whippersnappers are used to having a lot of things going on in background and foreground. And that they can create their own (sort of) virtual office by putting on their headphones. But this, of course, doesn’t mean that they’re more productive because or despite of it.

Whether you think it’s important to be able to have a place where you can leave a pair of shoes, an umbrella, cough drops, tampons, and – yes! – spare pantyhose. Whether you like to be able to pin up a New Yorker cartoon (now I’m showing my age), have a framed picture of your cat, or your very own pencil and pen cup. Whether you really aren’t easily distracted or whether a pin dropping in the next building makes your crazy, there are times when you want peace and quite, when you need privacy: you need to think, you’re talking turkey with a client, you’re giving an employee a bit of feedback, you’ve had some bad personal news.

If you’re going to go with an open office environment, the only way it’s going to work is if there are plenty of conference rooms – of all sizes – and phone rooms that aren’t much larger than a phone booth, but where you can close the door and get some work done.

I can’t believe the workplace has changed that much since I was storming around in my menswear suits, Johnston & Murphy pumps, and pantyhose.

A Sterling Reputation

Well, it was just a week or so ago, and I was living a quite blissful existence without any awareness whatsoever about the loathsome Donald Sterling.

For those who have not been within ear shot of a pundit, or within eyeball range of a headline, Sterling is the likely-soon-to-be-former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a.k.a., the NBA franchise in LA that is not the Lakers.

Sterling was recently caught on tape – taped by his I presume erstwhile girlfriend*, but released/sold to TMZ by parties unknown – excoriating  said girlfriend (V Stiviano, who is herself half African American-half Mexican)  - because she had been publically associating with black people.

"It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people," Sterling allegedly says to  Stiviano in the recording. "Do you have to?"

The person TMZ identifies as Sterling goes on. "I'm just saying, in your lousy [expletive] Instagrams, you don't have to have yourself with, walking with black people. ... Don't put [Magic Johnson] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don't bring him to my games." (Source: NPR)

Now, if Sterling had said he didn’t want to see Magic Johnson on Instagram or up close and personal because Magic is so closely associated with the Clippers’ archrival the LA Lakers, that would have been one thing. But the problem with Magic, in Sterling’s mind, doesn’t seem to be that Magic is a Laker. It seems to be that Magic is black.

Anyway, the upshot has been a colossal hue and outcry against Sterling, who has been “banned for life” from the NBA, which translates into no involvement with the team he owns. It is likely that his fellow owners will vote to force him to sell the franchise, which, apparently, they’re allowed to do.

This whole deal could, of course, drag on in the courts for years.

I don’t care an awful lot about professional basketball. My husband was the fan of the house, and I can’t imagine that I’ll watch it much going forward, other than if and when the Celtics become a good team again.(Baseball remains my through thick and thin sport.)

Still, this brouhaha certainly didn’t escape my attention.

This is not Sterling’s first brush with accusations of racism. He’s a big deal LA landlord who not that long ago had to pay a major league fine for refusing to rent to blacks and Hispanics.

So the NBA will certainly be well rid of a racist jerk.

Still, there is a niggling question – niggling to me, at least – that the big outpouring against Sterling, and the pronouncement by the NBA commissioner of the lifetime ban, may not have been the best way to see his back.

In this, I guess I fall more in the Mark Cuban (owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks) camp:

"In this country, people are allowed to be morons," Cuban said Monday night in Dallas' locker room. "They're allowed to be stupid. They're allowed to think idiotic thoughts .... Within an organization like the NBA, we try to do what's in the best interest of the league and that's why we have a commissioner and a constitution and I think [NBA Commissioner] Adam [Silver] will be smart and deal with Donald with the full extent available.

"But, again, if you're saying a blanket, 'Let's kick him out?' I don't want to go that far because it's not about Donald, it's not about his position, it's about his mess -- and what are we going to make a decision on?"

Cuban made it clear that he thought the NBA would be better off without Sterling as an owner, but he also said it would be a "very slippery slope" if the league started forcing owners to sell based on comments made in private.

"In no uncertain terms am I supporting what Donald Sterling said, or his position," Cuban said. "He's obviously racist, he's obviously bigoted. And in this day and age when you're in the public eye you've got to be damn careful -- if that's your position and that's unfortunately where you're at -- you better be damn careful what you say, even in the privacy of your own home.

"But regardless of your background, regardless of the history they have, if we're taking something somebody said in their home and we're trying to turn it into something that leads to you being forced to divest property in any way, shape or form, that's not the United States of America. I don't want to be part of that." (Source: LA Times.)

Here’s what I would have preferred to see happen:

• The continued flight of sponsors, who began fleeing the Clippers in droves once Sterling’s comments were revealed.
• A boycott by the players, which they had threatened. (Not that you have to be an African American to be outraged by Sterling’s attitude, but the player rosters of the NBA are about 70% black.)
• A boycott by fans.

To me, it’s hard not to believe that a lot of what motivated the decision-making by the NBA to toss Sterling out on his racist ear was fear that the above would have hit the NBA where it lives. You get them by the wallet, and their sanctimonious little hearts will follow…

I also think that a let’s-lock-arms move on the part of the fellow owners, the NBA brass, coaches, and players – past and present – getting right in Sterling’s face and telling him that he is no longer wanted, would have been the right thing to do.

If, at this point, Sterling refused to sell his team, then I think the NBA and/or fellow owners should have invoked whatever morals/bad publicity/disgracing-the-league clause they could unearth to force him out.

And, of course, we could then enjoy the prospect of the sunny, affable Magic Johnson (also considered an extremely shrewd businessman) – the person Sterling didn’t want showing up on Instagram with his companion becoming the owner of the Clippers. How fun would that be?

As Mark Cuban has said, this is a slippery slope.

Sterling is clearly a bigot (and a a-hole of colossal magnitude), but that’s not against the law – or it wasn’t the last time I looked.

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*For the record, Stiviano – who is being sued by Sterling’s wife of 50 years, Rochelle, who’s trying to claw back some of the $2M+ goodies that Sterling bestowed on Stiviano over the years – is asserting that she was not sexually/romantically involved with Sterling. Since he is 80, this is certainly within the realm of possibility, and that she may just be the girl-on-the-arm of the old goat.

Stiviano's lawyer said his client was a hard-working young woman who supported herself waitressing and volunteered helping crime victims before signing on to work as an “archivist” for Sterling.(Source: LA Times)

Well, one man’s “archivist” is another man’s eye candy, I suppose.

“She had no association with any rich people before this,” he said.

And I suspect she won’t be having a whole hell of a lot in the future, either.

Boola boola! DeVry! DeVry! DeVry! Rah! Rah! Rah!

Where would American education be without big time sports?

Nowhere, that’s where.

Just ask MIT.

Where would that quasi-community college be if not for their ultimate frisbee and hacky-sack teams?

And who’d want a Harvard or a Yale education if you couldn’t put on a raccoon coat and join the crowd for The Game, urging the Crimson on with cries of “fight fiercely, Harvard” and encouraging the boys in blue with full-throated chants of “boola boola”?

Oh, wait…

The problem is not, of course, the level of education and sports at most smaller liberal arts colleges. It’s the level of education and sports at the football and basketball factories, especially those with the most dismal of graduation rates. And especially those who let their “student athletes” get credit for not-taking non-existent courses.

Unto the breach of all this – at least on the football side – steps DeVry University, on of those for-profit institutions of higher learning that folks resort to when they think they can’t afford to go to “real” college.Or they’re working full-time and think that DeVry is the only game in town. Even when most towns have perfectly reputable community colleges, night classes at “real” schools, and extension schools – like Harvard Extension – where you can actually get an authentic Harvard degree which, while admittedly inferior to a degree from the actual undergraduate college, is worth something, and which exposes students to some pretty good teachers and fellow students.

But DeVry’s going all-in with the NFL.

The Downer’s Grove (Ill.) school has become the “official education provider” to Pro Football Legends, a group for players, coaches, and other professionals who worked for NFL teams. Under the terms of the deal, announced last week, former NFLers can enroll in DeVry University at reduced cost. Players’ spouses and dependent children are also eligible for discounted tuition. (Source: Business Week.)

This isn’t DeVry’s first embrace of the sporting life. They’ve also offered tuition breaks to Olympic athletes who are often training in remote areas where there actually are no real schools to attend:

Winter Olympians often live and train in snowy, mountainous parts, where DeVry’s online programs hold particular appeal. DeVry was particularly popular with U.S. lugers, many of whom live in sparsely populated Lake Placid, N.Y.

It’s, of course, understandable that a school like DeVry, which doesn’t have stadiums, or cheerleaders, or mascots, or bowl appearances, or big game days, to rally around, would latch onto sports.

Okay, it doesn’t give DeVry students a team to root for.

But, hey, they could end up in an online class with some guy who played a few seasons in the NFL and wanted to finish up his degree before the after-shock of getting his brains bashed in began impacting his ability to learn.

Plus sports = marketing, and pretty good marketing at that.

The article asks the $64,000 question – and remember when $64K was something other than the cost per year of a lot of the top colleges:

Assuming that the tuition discounts are enough to make the sponsorship a good deal for retired players, that leaves one obvious question. Whether he graduated or not, virtually every NFL player attended college—where many risked their good health and dedicated thousands of hours to football. Shouldn’t the “official education provider” of retired NFL players be the NCAA?

One would think so, wouldn’t you? After all, it’s these “student athletes” who’ve made a lot of money for their non-alma maters. And who are more than likely out in the “real world” after just a couple of years in the pros, where they more than likely didn’t make a ton of money, which was more than likely frittered away.

Now that so many colleges and universities offer online/remote courses, you would think that the least that the NCAA powerhouses would do would be to encourage their former students – those who left without a degree, without much by way of valuable course work – to finish up virtually, and even extend a free tuition offer to them.

But it looks like DeVry has beaten them to the punch.

Which is too bad, because I’ve got to believe that an online degree from, say, the University of Oklahoma, is more valuable than a comparable degree from DeVry.

But, then again, I’m not a big believer in for-profit education. (Or medicine. Or prisons.)

Boola boola.

And the Academy Award Goes to Pixels Based on the Visage of Matthew McConaughey

There was an very interesting article in the April 28th edition of The New Yorker* on Paul Debevec, a computer scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.

ICT gets involved in all sorts of creepy-cool simulated human digital tech:

The Virtual Patient Lab is creating dynamic virtual characters for interaction training using state-of-the-art graphics and motion capture technology

SimCoaches are web-based virtual humans designed to assist service members, veterans and their family members in accessing mental health support.

Ada and Grace, ICT's responsive virtual human museum guides help educate young visitors at the Boston Museum of Science.

I haven’t been over to the Museum of Science in years. Guess I’ll have to put that on my to-do list, just to check Ada and Grace out.

Anyway, ICT has teams with names like the Virtual Human Embodiment group, the Computational Emotions group, and:

…New Dimensions in Testimony, ICT collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation and Conscience Display that is creating interactive 3-D projections of Holocaust survivors that can answer questions from students or museum visitors.

I don’t know how keen I am on all this computational emotions stuff. Will there come a point when we won’t be able to empathize or grapple with understanding the past if all we have access to is the written word, or old b&w films? That we’ll need holograms that we can ask questions of? I’m pretty sure my gut instinct is “ugh.”

With all the improvements in robotics, we’ve seen a lot of ways in which our Robby the Robot friends are going to be replacing humans.

But personally, I’m not all that wigged out by robots on the assembly line, robots dismantling bombs, robots fighting fires. After all, these robots are taking care of something that’s tedious and/or dangers. And these robots are robotic, not humanoid. Ditto iRobot’s Roomba which, clearly, no one will mistake for, say, their mother vacuuming the scatter rug next to their bed because, say, it’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and the person in that bed is a good-for-nothing teenager who should be up vacuuming, rather than lolling about in bed at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. (Not that I have any direct experience with this…)

But widespread deployment of digital virtual humans, of the kind we’ve seen in video games – or would see in video games, if we actually saw video games – or the obviously cartoonish “folks’” on some airlines videos that show us how to put on our oxygen masks, is starting to enter the completely creepy realm, especially since the technology is getting to the point where the digital will actually be able to pass for the human.

Some of those digital virtual humans – and this is a lot of what Debevec works on – are no longer the “dead-eyed and stiff” digital characters that have populated some films.

His scanning technology made it possible for Brad Pitt to age persuasively in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and has allowed spookily realistic stunt doubles to appear in scenes that are too dangerous for human beings.

How’s this going to work out?

When Hollywood goes fully virtual, will the Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies still be able to sign huge contracts for the use of their visage and persona? And just provide the voice over? Or will the voice overs get digitized as well?

Or will filmmakers just start from scratch, assembling the perfectly beautiful (and perfectly character-actor looking) human being?

Why pay George Clooney or Cate Blanchett the big bucks when you can roll your own actor, create a virtual persona around them – tweets, Instagrams, interviews – and be done with it? No more diva outbursts, no more prima donna demands, no more actors showing up drunk and disorderly…No artistic temperament to deal with.

But, of course, given our thirst for learning all about the lifestyles and off-screen theatrics of actors, the virtual persona will have to go through sordid virtual divorces, crash their virtual Mercedes, enter virtual rehab, attack virtual paparazzi, have cute virtual babies, and do regular day to day things so that they can appear to be “just like us.”

Where would People Magazine be without actors?

And just think of holographic images walking the red carpet at the Academy Awards, in their virtual Versace gowns and Harry Winston jewels. Then giving their virtual acceptance speech, thanking their creator – which will take on a new meaning – and the virtual family and friends.

Some are arguing that the emergence of digital actors will be a good thing, that it will fully democratize filmmaking.

Maybe the Oscars will start going to Best Computational Emotions and Best Supporting Virtual Human Embodiment.

What – and who – is next?

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Ronald McDonald gets a makeover. (But not enough of one.)

I understand, given their philanthropic investment in Ronald McDonald, that Mickey D’s is more or less stuck with a clown for a mascot.

So in that sense, I feel bad for the current crop of marketers and brandingistas who are stuck with a 50 year old character.

I wouldn’t want to be the one who has to balance the creepiest-of-creepy mascots with the hundreds of Ronald McDonald Houses that have been helping families with critically ill kids since the 1970’s.

Ronald McDonald House is a great brand.

Ronald McDonald himself (itself?)? Maybe not so much.

Much of my neagativity towards Ronald McD stems from my general antipathy, a lifelong fear and loathing of clowns. And some of it’s directed directly at Ronald McDonald, who, even by clown standards, is pretty darned loathsome.

But personal antipathy towards clowns aside, there’s no makeover -  short of removing the wig, the giant red shoes, and the macabre kabuki makeup – that’s going to help de-creep Ronald McDonald.

Yet there’s McDonald’s, proudly announcing that Ronald McDonald, “who represents the magic and happiness of the McDonald’s brand” has gotten the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the What Not To Wear treatment.

Ronald McDonald will be sporting a new wardrobe, which includes yellow cargo pants and a vest, accompanied by a red-and-white striped rugby shirt. His iconic big red shoes will remain the same. Reserved for special occasions, Ronald has a whimsical new red blazer with the Golden Arches on the front pocket and his well-recognized signature on the back, and a special bowtie to complete the look.(Source: McDonald’s presser.)

Cargo pants and vest. Wow! Talk about hip and happenin’. And a rugby shirt. Kind of a non-trending trendoid look, but I suppose they didn’t want to pick a more ephemeral style, like camo or a hipster fedora.

Still, is there anyone out there who finds the new look much of an improvement over Old McDonald? At least Old McDonald was clearly an outlier. In real life, no kid would come across an actual person dressed like this. On the other hand, kids may actually know and love people who wear cargo pants, zippered vests, and rugby shirts. So they could mistake a genuinely dangerous creep for someone as benevolent – albeit creepy, if not dangerously so – as Ronald McDonald.

While McDonald’s apparently believes that clothes make the clown, they’re also trying to get with the scene:

For the first time, Ronald McDonald will take an active role on McDonald’s social media channels around the world and engage consumers using the #RonaldMcDonaldhashtag. 

I think I’ll stick with #IncludeMeOut.

But Ron-bo’s not going to be limiting his social media communications to 140 characters. It’s a visual world out there, and sometimes the burden of actually having to read 140 characters is just too darned much. So we’ll get to be seeing more of the new Big Mac:

Ronald McDonald can’t wait to connect with people through social media. “Selfies …here I come! It’s a big world and now, wherever I go and whatever I do...I’m ready to show how fun can make great things happen,” said Ronald McDonald.

Maybe if you’re a family with a kid in the hospital, and you’re staying in a Ronald McDonald House, having the eponymous clown take a selfie with you would actually put a smile on your face.

I certainly don’t begrudge anyone with a sick kid grabbing whatever scintilla of joy that they can. And maybe it’s because of the existence – and success, and good work – of all those Ronald McDonald Houses that McDonald’s has to double down on the brand, rather than jettison Ronald McDonald in favor of something that’s less horrifically creepy.

As Ronald begins his journey, he seeks to deliver on the mission: “Fun makes great things happen” - the idea that moments of fun and enjoyment bring out the simple pleasures in life and can lead to acts of goodness.

And I thought I’d written some lame-ass press releases over the years.

Maybe I’m just jaded because the simple pleasures in my life include never having to have any exposure to clowns in particular, and Ronald McDonald in general.

So, forget about “fun makes great things happen.” I feel really bad that McDonald’s wasn’t able to just retire the creepiest of creepy mascots. After all, they’ve got all those Ronald McDonald Houses out there… But does the face of Ronald McDonald House have to be a clown? Couldn’t it be a puppy, or a kitty cat, or an elephant, or a parrot?

Well, I guess a fast food joint wouldn’t want an animal – especially a dog – as part of their brand image.

So how about making Ronald McDonald a magician? Or an acrobat? Or a juggler?

God help me, I’m actually going to say I’d like him better if he looked like a traditional French mime, and that’s really going some.

McDonald’s SVP Dean Barreett assures us that “Ronald will continue to evolve to be modern and relevant.”

Modern? Relevant? I’ve got it: turn Ronald McDonald into a robot.

More sad news at Pink Slip

This has not been a very happy year hereabouts, that’s for sure.

In terms of rottenness, it would have been quite enough if the “only” thing that happened was my husband’s death. But last week, my very old and very dear friend Marie died.

Several years ago, Marie was diagnosed with lymphoma, likely brought on by all of the decades worth of drugs she’d taken for her lupus.

Last fall, right about the time we were learning that Jim was nearing the end of his road, we learned that Marie’s lymphoma had recurred.

The good news on that front was that, for most people, a stem cell transplant and its accompanying dire chemo did the trick and obliterated the cancer.

But Marie was not most people, and she never recovered from the treatment.

I was fortunate to have a number of good visits with Marie over the last several months, although all were tinged with sadness. I came home from each trip to Providence hoping against hope that there would be some sort of miracle turnaround. Sadly, this was not the case.

So on Saturday, I found myself giving the eulogy at her funeral mass, some of which is excerpted here:

I don’t remember exactly how and when I met Marie. When we started high school, we weren’t allowed to talk between classes, so it must have been at lunch.

Maybe our first conversation was about how boring Silas Marner was. Or the craziness that was Sister Josephine. Maybe it was about JFK or the Beatles. I do know that it was freshman year at Notre Dame Academy. And I know I liked her because she was smart, she was funny, she was generous, and she was kind – all of which has held true over the past 50 years – and so we were friends.

We didn’t do much that was exciting. We went to mixers at St. John’s where no one would dance with us. We slathered ourselves with baby oil and got terrible sunburns at Hampton Beach. We went to Fenway Park to watch the Sox lose. We drove around Worcester in our dad-mobiles, invariably ending up at Friendly’s and/or our friend Kathy’s house. Mostly we talked.

Mostly, we were friends.

As everyone here today knows, Marie’s genius, her gift, was for relationships, for connections, for friendship.

Marie was truly, deeply, and genuinely interested in people, in the lives of others.

As a friend, she was like a great novelist. No character, no detail, no event, no feeling, was too trivial, too small for her to ask about, think about, talk about, remember.

If you were her friend, she wanted to know all about you, your life, your story, and, by extension, the lives and stories of those you cared about, whether she’d ever met them or not.

Marie was also truly, deeply and genuinely interested in sharing the lives and stories of her family and friends with you.

Oh, sure, Marie and I also talked politics (violent agreement), sports (violent agreement), books (violent agreement – mostly; I liked The Marriage Plot a lot more than she did). But mostly we talked about the stuff of our lives: our friends, our families, our histories, our hopes, ourselves. (And by the way, I want to point out that, with Marie, talking about people was never gossipy or mean-spirited. Sure, she liked a good juicy story – who doesn’t?

And her wit was often sardonic and occasionally caustic, and she was no one’s glad-sufferer of fools. But it was people’s lives, with all the simple, complex, snarled up, glorious, joyful, and sorrowful stuff that life is made up of that Marie loved. Getting to really know people. That’s what all the talk was after.

What Marie spoke precious little about was her health.

Although for decades she had ample reason to, she never complained, whined, pitied herself, or moaned about the lousy health hand she’d been dealt. Nor was she ever a martyr.

Marie’s motto was “suck it up.” Which, time and again, she did. And if she could suck it up, she damned well expected you to suck it up, too.

Having Marie’s friendship and love is one of the things I have cherished most in my life. And that life has been made immeasurably richer for having known her. I will be bereft without her. Looking around, I suspect this is true for most everyone here today.

Who will care in quite the same way to hear about the glorious, joyful, and sorrowful stuff of our lives? Who will care in quite the same way about us?

When I first knew Marie, she was called Marie Alanna by her family. This was to distinguish her from her Aunt Marie, who was known as Marieshea – as if it were one word. Early on, the nuns at NDA called her Marie Alanna, as well. I think that the name Marie was a bit too French for them. Alanna Irish-ized things nicely.

I had never known what Alanna meant. I suppose I thought it was the female version of Alan. But I looked it up the other day, and it means “darling child.” Now “darling” is not a word that Marie would have used for herself. She would have said she was too tall, too smart, too old, too tough to be a “darling”. But she was a darling person, beloved of all of us here.

Her middle name could just as easily been Cara, the Irish word for friend. For being a friend was Marie’s genius, her gift to us all. Kind, thoughtful, generous, warm, funny, wise, and almost ridiculously focused on others. Some people have the word “friend” written all over them. Marie was one of them.

Farewell, Marie Alanna, dear cara. We are all going to miss you, so very, very much.

What’s taken out of this eulogy are the stories, stories that would mean something to her husband, their kids, her sister, and her many, many friends.

But I will tell one story that didn’t make it into the eulogy, but which says a lot about my friend Marie.

The Saturday before she died, I was able to visit with Marie, who was by then in hospice, semi-with-it, semi-out-of-it. But telling us all that she wasn’t afraid, she wasn’t in pain, that she was ready, and that now she was just waiting.

Shortly after I left, Kim, another one of our high school friends, stopped by. Marie wanted to know whether Kim thought that she, Marie, would get well enough to come with me on the trip to bring some of Jim’s ashes to Ireland.

To me, at least, it’s pretty telling that, in one of the last conversations of her life – the next morning, they started palliative sedation, and she was fully under – Marie was, on however unconscious a level, worried about helping out a friend.

Some say that bad things come in threes.

Then there’s Shakespeare: When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

No thanks. Two sorrows in short order is battalion enough.

Somewhere along the line I came across a Polish saying: misery comes in pairs.

That’ll do.

Make mine a peg leg, please.

Because so many of the Boston Marathon Bombing victims lost their lower limbs, there’s been a lot in the news over the past year about prosthetic devices that are straight out of Steve Austin’s Six Million Dollar Man or Jaime Summer’s Bionic Woman. 

And, of course, there are all the stories we’ve been seeing over the past decade talking about the Iraq vets who lost a leg and have been kitted out with bionic limbs.

I’ve seen a few people walking around on the  Oscar Pistorius-style blades – this was pre-Marathon Bombing, so Iraq vets, perhaps.

It is incredibly impressive to see how smoothly these folks can get around. A lot of this can be chalked up to the hard work that so many amputees do in physical therapy. It’s not like they strap on their new leg and get moving. It’s not like buying a new pair of shoes, good to go. But a lot of the credit has to go to the companies that are making these bionic limbs.

One of these companies, BiOM, is local.

They’re the ones that made the bionic limb for bombing survivor, and, not incidentally, professional dancer, Adrianne Haslet-Davis.

…who lost a foot in the Boston Marathon bombing last year, [and who] performed  for the first time since the terrorist attack as part of the 2014 TED conference last month. (Source: BetaBoston)

BiOM is all about what it calls “personal bionics”, using “bionic propulsion technology to replace lost muscles and tendons” and to make movement more comfortable, more natural, and far less taxing than the movement you get with old-style prosthetics. Here’s how BiOM founder and MIT prof Hugh Herr, himself a double amputee, having lost both legs in a mountaineering accident while still in his teens, explains what they do.

“Bionic integration and how electro-mechanics attach to the body and [are] implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential.”

Bridging that gap is, of course, expensive. Many of BiOM’s customers are wounded vets, so the government picks up the tab for their personal bionics.

Civilians are on their – or their insurance company’s – own.

I have no idea whether Haslet-Davis’ insurance paid for her device, or whether she was able to pay for her prosthetic through the money she was allotted by the One Boston Fund or by using her own personal resources and fund-raising efforts. Personally, I’d be just delighted to learn that she didn’t have to go one dime out of pocket to get back on her feet and dancing. She’s young and certainly deserves to get back in her dancing shoes without having to figure out how to pay for the foot that goes in one of them.

But, as the BetaBoston article pointed out, if Haslet-Davis had been on Medicare, she wouldn’t have been reimbursed:

To win coverage under Medicare, BiOM must demonstrate the cost advantage of its prosthetics, something McCarthy says the worker’s compensation industry already recognizes. The BiOM device, for example, allows employees to return to work more quickly and reduces the need for treatment over the long term. Additionally, patients experience less pain and stress on their joints than with normal prosthetic limbs, [BiOM CEO Tim McCarthy] explained.

Even though I’ll be a Medicare-ier sooner rather than later, I’m actually okay with Medicare holding off until they figure out the cost-benefit analysis here.

Let’s face it, most of the folks on Medicare don’t work, so there’s no benefit to them being able to return to work more quickly. Yes, the reduction in treatment costs over the long term should be considered, but until that can be demonstrated…

It’s one thing for insurance to cover the costs for a young, fit, otherwise healthy person like Haslet-Davis. Quite another to pay for a 75 year old suffering from vascular disease – the reason for 2/3’s of all leg/foot amputations – who isn’t working, may not have the will and the way to go through the therapy required, and may end up riding around in his motorized chair even with his spiffy new personal bionic. Yes, there are plenty of active, fit, long life ahead of them 75 year olds. I hope to be one of them. But this can be decided on a case by case basis, no?

Ah, the horror.

Bad enough death panels, now we have leg and foot panels.

Sound harsh?

Maybe.

But we can’t keep on paying endless amounts of money on all the latest treatments for the village elders, who won’t have a somewhat limited shelf life, if it means we’ll be depriving younger folks of those resources. I’d like to think that if the choice was using tax money to provide a personal bionic to an 18 year old kid rather than an 81 year old geezer, we’d go with the kid. And I’d like to think that the 81 year old geezer would agree that this was the right thing to do.

Maybe Medicare could cover some of the costs – maybe the same amount they would for a traditional prosthetic – and let the rest come out of supplemental insurance or out of pocket. Sorry if that means that some people won’t be able to afford the latest, but that’s life. And it’s not exactly as if the alternative prosthetic is a wooden peg leg.

Unfortunately, this approach will not necessarily work:

BiOM is not the first company to confront Medicare with an expensive technology that radically re-thinks current standards of care for the disabled. The iBOT, a stair-climbing, gyroscope-based wheelchair invented by Dean Kamen’s DEKA Research & Development Corp. in Manchester, N.H., was shelved due to a lack of reimbursement money.

Developed with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Independence Technology LLC, the iBOT carried a price tag in excess of $25,000, and was shut down after CMS made it eligible for only about $6,000 in reimbursement.

So why not encourage companies like BiOM, who stand to gain plenty if Medicare approves reimbursement for their products, subsidize those who can’t afford it. As they produce more, their costs will go down, etc. Maybe it would be worth it to them.

Maybe if the shoe were on the other foot, and I needed a personal bionic, and I was on Medicare – which I will be, this time next year – I’d be pounding on Medicare’s door to let BiOM in.

I may be kidding myself, but I’d like to think I’d ask whether it made financial sense to kit me out with the Cadillac of prosthetics.

I hope I never have to find out.

Meet Me at the Fair

When I was a child, one of the many things deprivations I had to endure was never having attended a World’s Fair.

But, unless a World’s Fair were actually held in Worcester, driving someplace other than Chicago or the Cape and traipsing around a futurama was not the sort of vacation our family went in for.

No, our vacations had to be:

1. Visiting Family: Going to Chicago to see my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
2. Relaxing for my father: That meant renting the Bass River cottage of my parents’ friends Mae and Nemo for a couple of weeks.
3. Quick and cheap: Day trips to places like Nantasket Beach or Bennington, Vermont. We’d take a couple of these during my father’s two weeks off, and the rest of the time he’d relax on the chaise longue in the backyard.

The closest I came to the World’s Fair was when friends came over with slides that their son in the Air Force had taken at the Brussels’ World Fair in 1958. Did the excitement never end?

Why couldn’t we have lived in St. Louis in 1904? We could have lived next door to Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien, and met them at the Fair. (Don’t tell me the lights are shining, anyplace but there.)

It’s not as if I would have expected to go to the Brussels’ World Fair. (As if…) Or that I believed that there was a way-back machine that could produce a meet up in 1904 St. Louis. But I was a bit miffed that we couldn’t even make our way 180 miles to Queens, New York for the 1964 edition.

Practically everyone else I knew got to go. (Wah, wah, wah.)

Over fifty million folks attended the New York World’s Fair. Surely we could have been among them, catching a glimpse of the future and what would have been my first glimpse of New York City.

I’ve had to settle for seeing the Unisphere coming and going from the airport.

What did we miss?

At the Bell System pavilion, engineers touted a "picturephone" that allowed callers to see who they were talking to, a concept that lives on in modern-day apps such as Skype and FaceTime. (Source: CBS News)

Picturephone? I would have been thrilled with a sleekly modern Princess Phone. I suppose I should have been happy that, in addition to the old time black phone in my parents’ bedroom, we had a hip yellow wall phone in the kitchen.

The fair also gave wide exposure to the power of computers, which at the time were seen as huge cabinets of blinking lights and electrodes operated by big corporations. At the IBM pavilion, visitors saw a computer system in which a machine took in a card with a date written on it and gave back another card with a news story from that date. At the NCR pavilion, a computer would answer scientific questions or give out recipes from a cookbook.

Hey, we’ve got that.

One exhibit I’m happy to have missed was the Disney “It’s a Small World” attraction. And The Talking Mr. Lincoln? I saw both of these a decade later at Disneyland, and wasn’t impressed with either. Robots have come a long way, baby. But:

"This is the first time that millions of people had the opportunity to see something that could be described as robotic. The special effects you could see in the World's Fair blew away what you could see in the movies," said Joseph Tirella, author of a book about the fair.

Jet packs were demo’d. We still don’t have those, but we do have drones.

And General Motors foresaw a future that would include:

…colonies on the moon as well as in Antarctica, huge underwater dwellings and a machine that used a laser to cut through rainforests, leaving behind paved roads.

Maybe another fifty years or so.

Regardless of whether such notions survived, observers say the fair offered a vision of the world's potential that made it seem like anything was possible.

"It really seems like 50 years ago, we had more exciting visions for 50 years in the future than we do now," [filmmaker Ryan] Ritchey said.

Oh, I don’t know about that. We may have some bleak predictions, but there are also those drones that will be delivering goods to our door from Amazon. I.e., the goods that we won’t be able to print in our own homes on our 3-D printers. Goods we’ll pay for telepathically from the comfort of those homes, which we’ll never have to leave. Because our doctor robots will be able to perform surgery remotely and so microscopically that we won’t skip an Amazon-ordering or 3-D printing beat.

Futurama, come on down.

And how about a Nobel Prize for the Ooho guys…

I haven’t done any sort of real analysis here, but my gut instinct – and the fact that I do pick up trash when I’m out and about – is that discarded water bottles (and around here, that’s mostly Poland Springs) are in the Top Four when it comes to sidewalk trash. (Starbucks paper cups, Dunkin styro, and McDonald’s wrappers account for the rest. If there’s a fifth, it’s probably parking tickets.)

Since I do pick up a fair amount of trash, I find myself completely irked by people who have no problem carrying a bottle or cup when it’s got something in it, but who –once a vessel’s empty – can’t bear to hang on to it for a couple of minutes until they find a trash can. Or, heaven forbid, just tuck the empty into their pocket or pocketbook and take it home with them.

So I am completely in love with the fellows at Skipping Rocks Lab who’ve come up with Ooho.

Ooho is a green, homemade alternative to the tens of billions of disposable water bottles produced annually. The flexible, watertight container has the texture of a gel and, although tasteless, is easy to bite into. (Source: Business Week.)

We have Rodrigo Garcia, Pierre Paslier, and Guillaume Couche – all 30 years old or under – for this idea, which has won the Lexus Design Award for 2014.

Of course, this isn’t the first example of the fully edible foodstuff, in which the packaging can be consumed. Think ice cream cone.

But in general we have a mania for over-packaging everything. Remember the olden days when we used to survive and manage to hydrate without plastic water bottles? We were able to do so because there were bubblers everywhere. (Aside to non-New Englanders: bubbler = water fountain.) Well, those bubblers have gone the way of the payphone. Whenever I see one – there’s still one in the Boston Public Garden and, quaintly, it has a bit of mossy slime in its stone bowl – I take a swig (fingers crossed that no germy kid has just stuck his mouth all over it: probably not; I think today’s moms are way too germ-averse).

Here, in the designers’ own words (apparently translated by someone with English-as-a-second-language) is how Ooho works:

"Ooho!" replicates this behavior, encircle the water in a eatable membrane of algae. It is new way of packaging that propose an alternative to the plastic bottle. Using the culinary technique of sphereification, the water is encapsulated in a double gelatinous membrane. The technique consist into apply sodium alginate (E-401) from the brown algae and calcium chloride (E-509) in a concrete proportions in order to generate a gelification on the exterior of the liquid. The final package is simple, cheap (2ct/unit), resistant, hygienic, biodegradable and even eatable.

…After experimenting the spherification technique with different ingredients, proportions and dimensions, a “recipe” was found to create “Ooho!” with a double gelatinous membrane and in different sizes. The double membrane protects hygienically the inside and allows to locate between the two layers identification labels with out any adhesive. …The main idea of “Ooho!” is that everyone could make them at their kitchen, modifying and innovating the “recipe”. From DIY to CIY (Cook It Yourself).(Source: Design Boom.)

I may never be one of the folks using the open source recipe to brew my own Ooho, let alone improve on it. But what a great idea!

The number of plastic bottles that are thrown away each year by Americans is 35 billion. Of the plastic produced in the United States only about 25 percent is recycled. (Source: Ask)

Even if it can save us from a mere one percent of these tossed- away bottles, Ooho will make a phenomenal contribution to the world we live in.

Bless you, boys. I hope you win the Nobel Prize in something or other. Chemistry, Economics, Peace. Something or other should apply.

I dreamed I was 10 pounds–not just 38 bucks - lighter in my Maidenform undies

I am a member of the last generation that wore something called a girdle.

No matter how slender, by their early teen years, girls of my era – at least good Catholic girls, and what other kind are there? – wore panty girdles when they “dressed up” for church, a school function, a date. (Not that I had many of those…) To not wear a girdle was immodest, a near occasion of sin, and was to invite leering, pinching, and worse from the wolves just hanging around street corners waiting to leer, pinch, and worse at girdle-less girls sauntering by.

While our mothers kept on wearing them – when my mother, in her later years, went on European bus jaunts, she packed a girdle and bra for every day of the trip – most of us peeled off the girdle somewhere around the end of high school/beginning of college.

Many of us then went on to enjoy a few girdle-less (and sometimes braless) years before we realized that our tops, if not our bottoms, could use a bit of control. And thus we pulled on “control top panty hose.”

Somewhere along the line, cellulite reared its ugly head, and all us girls in our twenties started examining our thighs looking for those nasty little lumps of fat.

The cure at one point was scrubbing the offensive cellulite away with a loofah, with or without a special cream.

Any concerns I had about cellulite faded before I managed to loofah it away. I haven’t checked lately. I assume it’s still there. (The cellulite, not the loofah.)

Meanwhile, on the rare occasions when I’m wearing a skirt or a dress, I’m sticking with control top panty hose, thank you.

But there’s a new generation of young women out there for whom control top panty hose aren’t the answer, perhaps because women under the age of 40 don’t wear panty hose. So they’re making the founder of Spanx a ka-billionaire, and, looking for the cure, are also buying up:

…undergarments infused with capsules of caffeine and vitamins. (Source: Boston Globe)

Alas, these undergarments allegedly:

…failed to live up to claims that they would melt away fat.

Which has prompted two local women to sue the bastards:

Annique Bellot of Newton and Tara Stefani of Hingham filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in US District Court in Boston this week against Maidenform Brands LLC and Wacoal America Inc., joining other women who have recently brought cases against the companies for allegedly misrepresenting the garments’ powers.

The Massachusetts suit states that the slimming shapewear, constructed with microcapsules containing caffeine, Vitamin E, fatty acids, and other ingredients that are absorbed by the skin, is marketed as a way to “permanently change women’s body shape and skin tone.” The products cost 50 to 60 percent more than identical garments that do not have the microcapsules, according to the suit.

Maidenform’s contribution to hope for womankind is the $38 Flexee Instant Slimmer, while Wacoal has brought out the $60 iPant.

The iPant – stunningly ridiculous name, no? – is advertised as “anti-cellulite”, and promises to produce “lasting results” if you’re willing to keep it on eight hours a day, seven days a week for four weeks.

“It’s very unfortunate that there are companies out there that are preying on people’s insecurities with claims that may not be supportable by science,” said Newton lawyer Mathew Pawa, who is representing the plaintiffs.

Well, yes, it is “unfortunate that there are companies out there that are preying on people’s insecurities”. And it is equally, perhaps even more, unfortunate that there are people gullible enough to fall for crazy anti-fat, anti-aging, anti-sagging, anti-whatever claims, and underwear seems to be the least of the worries here.

Nutrient-infused textiles are a $600 million annual business, according to the Massachusetts lawsuit. The plaintiffs are seeking refunds and punitive damages, as well as an injunction that would keep the companies from selling the apparel.

Nutrient-infused textiles? Hmmmm.  One would think that piranha-infused textiles might do a better job.

Personally, I don’t see why the two plaintiffs didn’t just go to Macy’s and get their money back, write a complaint letter to Wacoal and/or Maidenform, and then get on social media and trash the products. Isn’t this what social media’s for?

But all that gets you is your refund, not “punitive damages”. And gee, having worn the nutrient-infused girdles for 28 days straight, the duo may feel that they are deserving of “punitive damages.”

Pawa’s co-counsel on the case, Tim Howard, a Tallahassee lawyer and president of Cambridge Graduate University , filed a similar suit against Maidenform and Wacoal in Florida in December.

Telling women you can lose weight “by putting coffee and whatever else you put in the fabric of underwear” is “absurd and extraordinarily crass,” [co-counsel for the suit Tim] Howard said. There are probably tens of thousands of women who have purchased this type of shapewear, he said.

Come on!  If every claim that’s absurd and/or extraordinarily crass leads to court, we’ll have backlogs that will stretch to infinity and beyond.

But some people just want their (pay) day in court.*

Do I have to ask whatever happened to a) caveat emptor; b) if something sounds too good to be true it probably is.

Want to slim that tummy, those thighs? Not that I’m taking my own advice here, but I do believe eating less and exercising more should work.

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*Tara Stefani does seem to be one of them.

She’s not only a plaintiff in this suit, she’s signed on for another class action. In the other one, Ms. Stefani is going after a company called 23andMe that makes a DNA saliva kit and analysis service that the suit claims is based on specious science.(Source: Universal Hub.)

Apparently, she’s a sucker for bad science. Either that, or she’s doing us all a great service by uncovering all these shady products.

Why Patriots’ Day Rules

Well, it’s Patriots Day, a holiday which I have always very much enjoyed.

You want to know why?

1. Patriots’ Day is ours and ours alone. Yes, it’s a public holiday in Maine – and, weirdly, Wisconsin has some school-based observance around it – but it’s 99.9999% ours. (Maine, in the the way back, used to be part of Massachusetts, so there.) Ours, gloriously, ours - which as the world, let alone the country becomes more boringly homogenized, is all to the good. You might even say it’s wicked pissah!
2. It means spring. As only people who dwell in northern climes can appreciate, spring getting sprung is a big deal. (Given the longitude of Wisconsin, this may be the reason they’ve decided to give this day a go.) Sure, it can be in the 40’s and sleeting, but as often as not, the weather is spring-like: magnolias in bloom, daffodils abounding, and forsythia starting to blossom.
3. The Swanboats are back. The Boston Public Garden is my front yard. Bonus points that it’s one of the most beautiful public parks in the United States, and, come spring, the swanboats are there. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, swanboats are pedal-powered and glide around the lagoon throughout the spring and summer. I haven’t actually been on a swanboat in maybe ten years, but I like the idea of them just being there. Maybe now that spring is sprung, I’ll take a ride. One of these days.
4. The boys are back, too. Given that this is Boston, this can only mean one thing: the Red Sox are back in town. They have to be back. After all,  it’s Patriots’ Day, which means home game. And the game starts at the odd little hour of 11 a.m. The Marathon used to be timed so that the game ended just about the same time that the lead runners were pumping through Kenmore Square, just outside of Fenway Park. Alas, somewhere along the line it was decided that 35,000 fans hitting the streets the same time the runners do wasn’t a good idea. It worked before the Boston Marathon became the biggy-big deal it’s become, but no more. Sigh! It’s still fun to get watch the Patriots’ Day game at Fenway. Even when – as is the early-going case this year – the boys aren’t exactly covering themselves with glory.
5. The Boston Marathon is being run. And it’s also being watched. (Safe bet: lots more watchers than runners.) As you can imagine, the race has taken on a new meaning this year, what with the first anniversary of the Marathon Bombings having just passed. With luck, over the years, the Marathon will return to something that more closely resembles what it has always been: a race that brings a lot of elite runners to Boston, but a race that’s also run by people you know (friends, colleagues, neighbors, folks from the gym… ) What’s fun about the Boston Marathon is that everybody knows someone who’s running. And everybody knows someone who’s watching along the way. And everybody knows someone standing near the finish line. Which is one reason why last year’s events shook this city to core. This was personal.
6. It’s the start of school vacation. This may be a mixed blessing for parents, but as a former vacationing school kid, this was the very best vacation week of the whole, wide school year. Christmas week was Christmas week, but there was way too much going on. Including church, as both Christmas and New Year’s Day were holy days of obligation, which meant Mass. Christmas Mass at least had carols going for it. New Year’s Day*: bor-ing. February vacation week was fine, but there was a pretty good bet that there’d be at least one day during the week when you were stuck inside because of a blizzard. Plus, most of the time it was smack dab in the middle of Lent, so there was always pressure to sacrifice something fun like desert, or get up out of bed to go to completely optional daily Mass. But April vacation week. Bliss!
7. Patriots’ Day brings with it no obligations whatsoever.  Let’s face it, most holidays haul an awful lot of baggage along with them. Even if you don’t have any of the church-y things hanging over you, there are presents to buy, food to cook, decorations to put up, places to go, stuff to do. Not Patriots’ Day. Nada. Zip. Zilch by way of obligatory. You can watch the ballgame. Or not. Watch the Marathon. Or not. Watch the reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Or not. Bliss!
8. This was the day when the shot heard round the world was fired. And we – i.e., New Englanders – were there. Okay, in real life this was on April 19th, which is when Patriots’ Day used to be celebrated. But then a light bulb went off and somebody up there realized that a three-day weekend occasionally trumps historic accuracy. Anyway, speaking of the shot heard round the world, I defy anyone to go out to Concord Bridge and not be moved to think about where those embattled farmers standing there firing that shot. (Well, mostly you get to think about it because Emerson’s poem, Concord Hymn is carved in granite and standing, unembattled, staring you right in the face.
9. If you don’t particularly care about baseball or marathoning, there’s a reenactment of the Battle of Lexington going on.  Just down the road from Concord Bridge is Lexington Green where, every year, the Battle of Lexington Green is reenacted. I’ve been to this a couple of times and, other than the fact that you have to get up at the crack of dawn to see it, it’s great fun. The best year for it was, of course, 1975, the battle’s bicentennial. That year, my cousin Barbara had what had to be one of the largest pajama parties ever: every inch of her house in Lexington was covered with someone in a sleeping bag. The evening before, we all ate genuine colonial fare: spaghetti and meatballs. Which fortified us all to get up at 5 a.m. and leg it over to Lexington Green. Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the gunpowder coming out of a blunderbuss.

I suppose I should come up with a tenth reason here, which seems to be the magic list number. But the beauty of Patriots’ Day, and why it rules, is that there really aren’t any rules.

Patriots’ Day: What’s not to like?

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*Somehow I remembered this as the Feast of the Incarnation, but I looked it up and found that January 1st celebrates the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. Oh, woe is lapsed me.

The Notell Hotel goes Airbnb

I guess this was inevitable, but it seems that Airbnb is suffering from the “from our house to whorehouse” syndrome.

This we learned earlier in the week when that bastion of journalistic integrity and intelligence – and yet an occasional source of excellent scoop - The New York Post, reported that, just as civilians can save on steep hotel bills with Airbnb, so, too can hookers. No more sleezoid Notell Hotel. No more paying through the nose for someplace upscale. Nope, now it’s all the comforts of home – and more – at Manhattan apartments.

One person who found herself an unwitting madam-for-the-day is Jessica Penzari.

“She [the renter] told me that she was in the Army and needed a place to hang out before she got shipped out,” Penzari said of her Airbnb “guest.”

“She said she was being deployed that week. She was asking for places to go out with her friends.” (Source: NY Post)

Ah, yes, another version of “thank you for your service.”

But when a hooker got slashed by a client in the West 43rd Street apartment over the price of his “massage,” Penzari got a call from cops.

When she returned, Penzari was shocked to find telltale remnants including baby wipes and “at least 10 condoms.”

No word on whether the condoms had been, ahem, unfurled and fulfilled. (Double, triple, quadruple EWW.)

Penzari said Airbnb put her up in the swanky InterContinental hotel in Times Square for two nights — with room-service meals — and also paid to change her door locks, clean her apartment and replace her pillows and other belongings.

Which does not exactly make up for the full double, triple, quadruple EWW factor, I’m guessing.

I suspect there’s a new apartment in Jessica’s future.

And Jessica is not, of course, the only one whose digs are being compromised. One working girl told The Post that her escort service rents Airbnb flats for days at a time.

“It’s more discreet and much cheaper than The Waldorf,” said the sex worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Hotels have doormen and cameras. They ask questions. Apartments are usually buzz-in.”

Smart business move, no?

And speaking of working girls and not-so-smart business moves. Many years ago, my husband and I were in the lobby bar at the NY Hilton on 6th Avenue. Sitting at the table next to us were what we assumed were, based on our eavesdropping, a prostitute and a prospective john.

I remember feeling terrible for the girl – who seemed very young, maybe 20-21 – who told the fellow that she was a model. When he asked who she modeled for, her answer was “Mostly for myself.”

She then agreed to accept a check, which didn’t seem like the shrewdest move on her part. On the other hand, if he used a legit check and tried to cancel payment, the girl would have a way to track him down. Wonder whatever happened with that transaction. Personally, I would have held out for cash.

There have been plenty of unseemly incidents involving Airbnb renters: an orgy that was promoted online; a flat that ended up used as a nude massage parlor; apartments pillaged; souvenir crack pipes left behind.

Although I do know some people who have done so – not as prostitutes, druggies, orgy-participants, or crack smokers; just as ordinary travelers - I’ve never used Airbnb. I have, however, used vacation-rental-by-owner services (including Vacation Rental By Owner), which are a bit more structured: references, contracts, security deposits required.

Airbnb maintains that all the unseemly incidents are nothing particular to their business model:

“The entire hospitality industry deals with issues like this, and we have zero tolerance for this activity,” it said.

Zero tolerance, sure, but also zero security measures – guards, cameras, front desks – that even the slimiest of Notell Motels would have.

Not that I was considering it to begin with, but I sure won’t be renting out my digs anytime soon.

There’s even a popularity contest for spokescharacters

Someone over at Forbes had nothing better to do with their time than to get E-Poll Market Research to figure out which “spokescharacters” are the most popular. (Hey, it takes a time waster to know a time waster.)

Anyway, E-Poll is best known – that is, it would be best known, if they were known at all – for its celebrity rating service, which I guess is there so that marketers won’t sign up a celebrity spokesperson, only to realize that people detest him. (I mean, who wants to get stuck with Justin Bieber representin’ for them, when they really should have gone with Justin Timberlake?)

As Justin B., Lindsay Lohan, and untold others have amply demonstrated over the years, having a celebrity front for you – unless it’s someone 100% guaranteed for sweetness and light, like Jennifer Garner – can really backfire.

Which is why spokescharacters are so much the safer choice. Tony the Tiger is not going to get wasted and drag race and/or urinate on his neighbor’s front lawn. As the man says:

“Spokescharacters can be a very safe and memorable way to represent a brand as they won’t end up in jail or the tabloids and they won’t Tweet something inappropriate,” ” says Gerry Philpott, president of E-Poll Market Research.” The fact that they never age allows them to appeal to many different age groups and provides the marketing nirvana of ‘cradle to grave’ branding.” (Source: Forbes)

I don’t know how much we can trust E-Poll. I’m a tad bit suspicious, given that one of the little fast facts on their home page claims that “one-quarter of 16-34 year olds plan to purchase a Toyota or a Honda in the next year.” Even if I were a marketer at Toyota or Honda – make that especially if I were a marketer at Toyota or Honda – I wouldn’t be all that excited about this, as it sounds so obviously BS-y. Maybe one-quarter of 16-34 year olds who a) participated in our unscientific poll, and b) say they’re going to be a car next year, for whatever reason said they’d be buying a Toyota or a Honda.

But. I. Digress.

It’s all about the ranking of the spokescharacters.

First place is occupied by the Budweiser Clydesdales, and I have to agree with this one. I am a complete and utter sucker for an ad using a Clydesdale. Not that this translates into my actually purchasing a Budweiser. Still, those Clydesdale ads: the soppier and more sentimental, the better. Throw in a Clydesdale baby and/or a dog, and I’m there.

Met Life’s Snoopy is in the second spot, which is a nice nod to tradition. And it’s interesting that the first two spots are occupied by silent spokescharacters. (Does this make them non-spokescharacters?)

Insurance grabs the next two spots: Allstate’s Mayhem – one of two spokescharacters on the list that’s actually a human – is in third. Well, E-Poll never asked me, because I heartily dislike this campaign. (I was going to say “despise”, but it really does seem excessive to “despise” an ad campaign, doesn’t it?) But this is just me, apparently:

Allstate was ranked by Facebook to be in its top five brands globally, and the Mayhem page has 1.8 million fans.

Geico’s Humpday Camel comes in fourth. Not wild about this ad, but, in general, I find much about Geico irritating, including the Geico gecko and the Geico pig. Perhaps they would be less irritating if, like Snoopy and the Clydesdales, they didn’t give voice to their spokescharacter-ness.

Believe it or not, a real oldie but goodie places fifth: Smokey the Bear. I wasn’t even aware that this icon of my childhood – Only YOU can prevent forest fires – was still in play.

Shamu, who fronts for Seaworld, is next, followed by the Coca Cola Polar Bear. Awwww, those coca-bears are awful cute, but I pretty much resent the fact that Coke went after Worcester’s own Polar Beverage, which – as the name implies – has had a polar bear as its spokescharacter since time immemorial. And, by the way, Polar sodas are way-far better than anything that Coke has to offer. I highly recommend the Orange Dry and the Cape Cod Cranberry Dry.

The talking M&M’s placed eighth. Is it just me, or is there something vaguely obscene about these guys?

The E-Trade Baby – who I just love – comes in ninth, but he’s being replaced, I’m afraid.

And speaking about vaguely obscene, there’s the Pillsbury Doughboy rounding out the Top Ten.

All this got me thinking about the spokescharacters of yesteryear: Speedy Alka-Seltzer, all those cereal spokescharacters, Chiquita Banana (is “she” still around), and my personal favorite, Reddy Kilowatt.

Mayhem? Humpday Camel? They sure don’t make spokescharacters like they used to.

Nice to know that some things haven’t changed. (Harrumph…)

My first job out of business school was for a company that sold software and data to Wall Street.

The confluence of technology and finance? Well, let’s just say it was a perfect storm of sexism.

Shortly before I’d joined the company, they had run an ad that was notorious, even for the times. (This would have been the late 1970’s.) I can’t remember all the salacious details, but it featured a mini-skirted chick, legs spread, shot from behind while walking towards a bunch of leering men. I have fortunately blocked the caption completely out of my mind.

At one point while working for this company, I was the product manager for a forecasting tool called AutoBJ, which I occasionally had to demo to the Wall Street crowd. Let the hilarity begin.

I will say that the techies were not quite as bad as the traders, perhaps because half the techies had a touch of Asperger’s, and were overtly more goofy than puerile-y sexist. But in general, the tenor of the place was often hostile to women. There were few – if any – women in policy positions, and some of the senior executives were complete and utter skirt chasers.

Fast forward to a new company, where I was still in the technology for Wall Street game, and where I was the only woman on a team charged with plotting the company’s financial services strategy. At one meeting, one of the charmers on the team said, “Think of financial services as a prone woman, legs spread, waiting for us to penetrate her.” It goes without saying that our strategy failed abysmally – as did that company.

Somewhere along the line  - yet another tech company, but one not focused (thankfully) on The Street - I made my way into the management ranks, where I quickly learned that a woman’s voice was like a dog whistle: only certain ears were attuned to hear it.

Truly, I would say something at a management meeting and it would be totally ignored. Until a couple of minutes later, one of the men made the same point. I soon learned that the best thing to do was to say something like, “Thanks, Joe, for supporting me on this.”

Truly a grrrrrr situation.

Meanwhile, one of my fellow “execs” – we were such a small company, it seemed ludicrous to think of us as executives, but, indeed, that’s what we were – was famous for doodling breast-like doodles throughout our meetings. This same fellow, at one point, thanked me for helping him prepare for a major presentation by saying “Thanks for being my wet nurse.” (I don’t think he was being sexist. I did mention Asperger’s, did I not? Still, it will give you some sense of the climate for women back in the dark ages of the late 20th century.)

Given all this, I was not surprised at a recent article in The New York Times chronicling the troubles that women continue to have in tech – especially women who are themselves techies. The article leads off talking about Elissa Shevinsky, who realized she’d had it with the tech sector over the positive (hee-haw) reception that an app called Titstare which enables “you to take photos of yourself staring at tits.”

Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders. The question for newcomers to a field has always been when to play along and when to push back.

Today, even as so many barriers have fallen — whether at elite universities, where women outnumber men, or in running for the presidency, where polls show that fewer people think gender makes a difference — computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind. Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away.

Tech executives often fault schools, parents or society in general for failing to encourage girls to pursue computer science. But something else is at play in the industry: Among the women who join the field, 56 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men,according to research from the Harvard Business School.

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered. (Source: NY Times)

I find this colossally disheartening, especially since I am a major proponent of young women pursuing a STEM education and career.

Alas, the number of women in the computing field is actually going down:

In 2012, just 18 percent of computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Which is really too bad, especially because this is where a lot of the good jobs are going to be.

It’s not just the jerk quotient that keeps women out of tech. It’s a complex combination of factors that Pink Slip is certainly not going to come up with a solution for.

And I will say that I very much enjoyed working with most of the techies I met over the years, and that some of my best friends are engineers.

Still, I’m bummed that 30-plus years after I started in technology, it remains a tough go for women.

A stroll down a not so pleasant memory lane…

Last April 15th, I/we were still guardedly optimistic about the treatment for my husband’s recurrent cancer.

Yes, we got that it was “treatable, no curable” But we hoped that “treatable” would translate into some sort of long and glorious remission, or something like “cancer as a chronic disease” in which, as long as you could tolerate the chemo, and the cancer kept at bay, “it” was just a condition you lived with.Like arthritis or hay fever.

So, feeling guardedly optimistic, last April 15th, we spent the morning at MGH for Jim’s chemo session, and had our traditional post-chemo lunch at Scampo’s at the Liberty Hotel. After which I had my traditional post-chemo, post-Scampo’s nap while Jim watched TV. He gave me a shout when the news came on about the Marathon bombings in Copley Square, which is maybe a mile from where we live.

My quick response at the time “What was up until 2:50 p.m. at glorious day” has a title that somewhat exaggerates the case. How glorious is any day on which your husband is being treated for a recurrence of the cancer that’s inevitably going to kill him? Still and all, Patriots Day has always been a glorious little holiday, mostly because it’s quirky and pretty much all ours.

My longer response, “That was the week that was,” pretty well sums up how I felt at the time – and pretty much still do.

Over the summer, some wildly misplaced romanticism about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got me a bit irked. (“Free Jahar?” Give me a break.” More recently, I blogged about B Strong, the Red Sox-ized version of the ubiquitous Boston Strong rallying cry that took over the town last April.

And now, here we are, a year later.

It almost goes without saying that Boston’s media has been consumed with the anniversary of the bombing because that’s what the media does. And because it’s Patriots Day, which is our personal and particular thing, and because it’s The Marathon, which is another of our personal and particular things, that just happens to take place on Patriots Day, which this year falls on Monday, April 21st. So the consumption with the anniversary will take place in two parts, the actual anniversary (today) and next Monday, when The Marathon is run.

I’m sure that over the next week or so I’ll walk over to The Marathon finish line, and take a look at whatever’s going in Copley Square. I’m sure on Marathon Monday, I’ll turn on WBZ midday and watch stuff. And take a bit of a walk about to see the runners walking about wrapped in their baked potato jackets (the silver Mylar blankets the finishers are given).

But mostly I’m sure I’ll be thinking that, last April 15th, we/I were still guardedly optimistic about what the next year was going to bring.

Sigh…

In (department of) defense of the shoe industry

Although my “real” career has been in high tech marketing, I did make an early professional foray into the shoe industry.

Professional may be too grand a word to describe my minimum wage job at H.H. Brown. There I worked near the end of the assembly line as a finisher, responsible for putting shoe polish on the exposed seams of combat boots (black for the Army, brown for the Air Force – or was it the other way around?), and for using acetone to remove glue and other gunk that got onto the boots while they made their journey from piece of hide to shoe box. While I was busy as a finisher, my friend Kim – now a partner in a major Boston law firm – was working a few tables behind me as a “heel podder”, gluing thin strips of leather on the inside heel position of a boot.

My biggest nightmare as a shoe factory hand was the day they took me off finishing and set me to the task of removing boots as they came down the vertical conveyor belt from the second floor, and pulling out any nails that were protruding from the innards of the boots.

It took me about two minutes to figure out why the other folks who performed this task had their fingers swathed in adhesive tape. But I had no adhesive tape, so I had to feel around in those boots very gingerly.

Since I was so slow, I did not in the least keep up with the boots raining down on me from the second floor. I just let them go back from whence they came, while I slowly did my voyage of nail discovery, and yanked any nails I found out with a pair of pliers.

It was only when the former came raging over to me to tell me I was useless, and sent me back to finishing (where I bled all over those exposed boot seams for the remainder of my shift), that I found that if I didn’t remove a pair of boots from the conveyor belt, it dropped off somewhere in the bowels of the factory.

Live and learn that I really had no future in shoe biz.

Not that many folks in America did, especially in New England, where, by the time I was working at H.H. Brown, most of the shoe factories had gone south. Since then, they’ve mostly migrated to China and Vietnam.

But, apparently, the combat boot business stayed in the U.S., thank to a World War II era law:

Under a provision of 1941 legislation known as the Berry Amendment, the Defense Department must buy boots, uniforms and certain other items that are 100% U.S.-made. (Source: WSJ Online)

There are Berry Amendment get-arounds:

It can make exceptions if U.S. manufacturers don't have the capacity to make what it needs, and has done so for athletic shoes needed for boot camp.

The Army, Navy and Air Force "allow members to select and wear the type and size of athletic shoe that provides the greatest comfort and reduces the potential for injury," regardless of where they are made, a Defense Department official said.

Well, the shoe industry – particularly in the M-states: Massachusetts, Maine, and Michigan, where sneaks are made – are pushing lawmakers to get rid of the sneaker exemption.

Shoemakers have to demonstrate that they’re capable of producing the sneakers that the armed forces need. If they do so, the Department of Defense may rule that G.I. soft footwear be born in the USA.

Local shoe darling, New Balance, is one of the companies lobbying for home-grown athletic footwear. New Balance:

…is the only U.S. maker of athletic shoes with large-scale production in the U.S. Its five U.S. plants in Massachusetts and Maine make about 25% of its shoes sold in the U.S.; the rest are imported.

New Balance spokesman Matt LeBretton said the company has spent more than $1 million on equipment and training to produce the midsole, which is normally imported. Orders from the military could create 200 jobs at New Balance, which employs about 2,900 in the U.S., and more at suppliers, he said.

Reebok and Converse are also from around here. Don’t know that much about what Reebok’s up to, but if the military’s worried about safety, it’s hard to believe that Converse’s Jack Purcell’s or canvas high-top Chucks would fit the bill. (In case you’re wondering, Jack Purcell was a badminton player. Chuck Taylor was a salesman/shoe evangelist.)

The armed forces give recruits stipends of about $65 to $70 to spend on athletic shoes, though sometimes it makes them buy a particular brand. Mr. LeBretton said New Balance could supply shoes in that range. "This might actually save them a few bucks," he said.

Sixty-five to seventy bucks, huh? I guess that rules of Nike Lebrons…

While New Balance is already making shoes domestically, Wolverine – which has Keds as one of its brands – could make sneakers in Michigan, if they had a market for U.S. made sneaks.

The military still has to be persuaded that U.S. shoe companies can ensure all recruits get the right fit and style. Wayne Hall, an Army spokesman, cited the stresses soldiers undergo during long runs at boot camp.

Worried about fit, style, and stress? Whatever happened to, This Is The Army, Mr. Jones?

Anyway, I’d just as soon have the sneakers that our service men and women wear made in the USA.

Forget that old saying about the Army moving on its stomach. The Army runs on its athletic shoes.

Let them all be made in an M-state.

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Thanks to my sister Kath – who also put in time at H.H. Brown, I believe as a shoe boxer - for pointing this article out.