The Village People

Boomers, there's no need to feel down.
I said, boomers, pick yourself off the ground.
I said, boomers, 'cause you're in a new town
There's no need to be unhappy.

That’s because there’s a place you can go and find many ways to have a good time golfing, riding around in golf carts, line dancing, and worshipping at a church that seems entirely devoted to entertainment.

Anyway, use the word “geezers” interchangeably with “boomers,” and that place is The Villages in Florida, the “world’s largest retirement community” and, amazingly – at least to me  - “America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area”.

Its population of 110,000 has more than quadrupled since 2000, U.S. Census Bureau data show. It rose 5.2 percent last year, on par with megacities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Source: Bloomberg.)

Well, I suppose I’d prefer The Villages to – sight unseen - Dhaka, Bangladesh. And, having just read Chimamanda Adichie’s absolutely brilliant novel Americanah, I have no burning desire to transplant to Lagos, either.

Still. The Villages?

Weather, at least until rising sea levels inundate Florida, is, of course, a major appeal. Especially after this winter, I can see why Northerners want to lay their shovels and bags of ice-melt down and hop on the next Jet Blue going south.

But the big draw seems to be that, in the words of one happy resident, “It’s like an adult Disney World.”

Without the waiting lines or screaming kids: The Villages is a 55+ community.

This alone is a deal breaker, I’m afraid.

I may well end up in some Golden Age Home, but I’m really hoping to keep well and indie enough to stay on my own in a community that’s home to people of all ages. Okay, Beacon Hill isn’t exactly teeming with kids, and a lot of the kids here are, quite frankly, entitled little snobs. But I live in a small condo building where the ages range from just-turned-three to just-turned-96. (The two kiddoes in my building are not, by the way, members of the entitled little snobs brigade. They’re really sweetie pies.) In “my” stores, restaurants, and streets, I see and interact with people of all ages. I like that, on any given day, I may have a chat with my neighbor Dick (who’s in his 80’s), with the kids upstairs, or with a my-age friend I happen to run into.

And while it would the ultimate in hypocrisy for someone who lives an an almost entirely white neighborhood to attack The Villages on diversity grounds, I do think I’d find it a bit white-bread. There may not be a ton of “people of color” living in my ‘hood, but I don’t have to venture very far to get me some diversity. Just out the front door to watch the tourists stream by. Or cut through Mass General and see the UN in action with both the patients and the staff. Anyway, I live in a city that’s about 50% white; The Villages comes in at about 97%.

And I’m just not that in to golf carts as a mode of transportation. Give me a Zipcar, ay old day:

Golf-cart accidents have killed more people than criminals, said Elaine Dreidame, president of the Property Owners’ Association of The Villages.

I deliberately omitted the rest of that paragraph, which listed some of the major politicians that The Villages have hosted. (Enough not said.)

But I will note that there does not appear to be a Unitarian Church within The Villages’ confines.

The Church on the Square looked a bit promising, but when I clicked on its link it said nothing about its credo, and a lot about the entertainment it offered. (Come to think of it, that sounds bit Unitarian…) You decide:

Church on the Square is a beautiful southwestern style church that appears to be taken right out of the late 1800’s. Residents enjoy a variety of musical productions here throughout the week, including choirs, quartets, gospel groups, instrumentalists and opera, just to name a few. Every Christmas, Church on the Square hosts a ‘Countdown to Christmas’ featuring different holiday music every night!

Okay.

That ‘Countdown to Christmas’ should have been the give away. Unitarians would have a countdown to Christmas, Solstice, Hanukah, Eid, and Kwanzaa.

(Having found the info I was looking for, I can confirm that it’s not UU. It’s non-denominational, with a different minister ministering each week. Mostly it’s about the entertainment. )

Although I am not now, and never have been, a Unitarian. short of moving to Ireland, I cannot imagine living any place that did not have a Unitarian church.

The creepiest thing about The Villages, which among other creep factors seems to have restrictions down to how many pet fish you can own, is that it’s a company owned community, developed and operated by The Holding Companies of the Villages Ltd., which is run by H. Gary Morse.

In addition to selling homes, Morse, 77, and his family own the local newspaper, a radio station and a television channel.

They also hold a controlling interest in Citizens First Bank, which provides mortgages. The holding company is the landlord of more than 4.5 million square feet of commercial real estate, including dozens of restaurants and retailers.

Actually, make that the second creepiest thing about The Villages.

The first creepiest thing about The Villages is this statue of The Founder, who is Morse’s father. You’d think he was Walt Disney or something…

I’m sure it’s safe. I’m sure it’s clean. I’m sure it’s balmy.

But this all sounds a bit too Stepford-y for my liking.

Fourth of July. (That was then, this is now.)

As pretty much everyone who has ever lost anyone they cared about knows, the first year after someone’s death, you find yourself playing the mind game of ‘a year ago, we were…’

And so, as we observe The Glorious Fourth, I’m thinking back to last year’s July 4, when my husband Jim and I were in New York City.

It was something of a last minute decision, on the week off between chemo rounds, when we were just finishing up what turned out to be the failed Chemo One try.

At that point, we were well aware that Jim’s cancer was “treatable, but not curable,” but we were still small-o optimistic that he would fall into the category of those who win a remission. And we were even smaller-o optimistic that Jim would be one of those for whom cancer becomes a chronic disease, with metastasis held at bay.

Anyway, since New York City was Jim’s favorite place on earth – and one of mine, too – we decided to spend the first week in July there.

The weather was ghastly – miserably hot and humid – and Jim was plenty tired, but we managed to take interesting, small-ish walks each day, try some new restaurants, visit some oldies but goodies.

It was a wonderful trip, and I could almost (but not quite) forget for a New York minute or two just what we were going through.

Fast forward a year, and what I wouldn’t give to be sitting here – New York, Boston, anywhere – with Jim at my side.

If we were in Boston, we’d have The Pops on TV, and be watching the fireworks out the living room window.

If we were in NYC, we’d be strolling around, talking about how the fireworks in Boston are better.

Nearly four months into it, I have to say that there’s not a whole hell of lot that’s on the positive side about being a widow.

So far, I can come up with more closet space, less trash, and the ability to order spaghetti with white clam sauce or duck or something else Jim didn’t like – dishes I wouldn’t have ordered so that we could go half-sies on our dinners out.

It’s not as if I’m sitting around all day in my bathrobe, weeping and cursing the gods. But the fact is that, there’s plenty of time when it’s just plain sad. (Make that I’m just plain sad.)

Today, I’ll be in Salem, watching the fireworks with my sister and her family: laughing, eating, toasting the day. 

I’ll be bringing a blueberry pie.

As I generally do, I’ll start the day by reading the Declaration of Independence.

Despite my father’s annual Fourth of July pronouncement that, “after this, summer’s all downhill,” I’ve always loved The Glorious Fourth. And I still do.

Still, without my buddy around, it’s not going to be quite as glorious as it could be.

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Here’s last year’s take on the Fourth.

Hmmmm. Isn’t this what we used to call “moral hazard”?

Years ago, when the cranky and smarter-than-thou John Silber was the president of Boston University, he proposed that BU take out life insurance on all of its students so that if, as has been known to happen, one of those students fell off a flat-roofed apartment building during a party, or stumbled in front of a trolley on Commonwealth Ave. that they hadn’t noticed was moving, or got crushed by a toppling library shelf, well, BU would realize a tidy little profit for itself.

As I recall, the outrage was sufficiently sufficient that Silber had to back off.

Still, there are apparently some folks out there that think that taking out a life insurance policy on someone who’s not a family member, while it may not help make you a killing, might just help alleviate the pain if something untoward were to happen to that certain someone.

Employees of The Orange County Register recently learned that their owner, Freedom Communications, was interested in taking out life insurance policies on them. And these weren’t just key employees – a lot of companies take out what used to be called “key man insurance”, which was typically for the most senior executives or irreplaceable expert employees – it apparently went down into the ranks of those who wouldn’t necessarily considered themselves (or been considered) “key persons.” (Companies are legally limited to their highest-paid 35% when it comes to taking out such policies.  This is a relatively recent limitation. It used to be everyone in your employ. Before the limitation went into effect, these policies were sometimes called “dead peasant” insurance. Obviously not by the companies taking out the policies, or issuing them. )

… the beneficiary of each policy would not be the survivors or estate of the insured employee, but the Freedom Communications pension plan. Reporters and editors resisted, uncomfortable with the notion that the company might profit from their deaths. (Source: Boston.com)

And it’s not just Freedom Communications:

Because company-owned life insurance offers employers generous tax breaks, the market is enormous; hundreds of corporations have taken out policies on thousands of employees. Banks are especially fond of the practice. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo hold billions of dollars of life insurance on their books, and count it as a measure of their ability to withstand financial shocks.

But doesn’t this seem to open up the potential for a company-in-trouble to hasten an employee on his or her way to the Big Cubicle in the Sky?

Not that this would happen, but, but, but…. Maybe I watch too much 20/20 and 48 Hours.

‘Say, Don, I’d like to see you expensing a few more of those three-martini lunches.”

“Alice, we’re thinking of doing an off-beat travel feature. We’d like you to head out to Mosul and Tikrit.”

“We’re trying to save a bit on snow-removal expenses this year, and will be asking all our employees to grab a shovel. We thought we’d start with you, Bob, now that you’re back from your quadruple by-pass.”

Is this not a variant on what we used to call “moral hazard”?

Meanwhile,

Responding to attacks on the Freedom Communications plan, [CEO Aaron] Kushner defended himself in a letter to employees. “Life insurance is not ghoulish, nor are the people who sell it, nor are those who buy it,” he wrote. “Life insurance, by its very nature, was created to benefit the people we love and care about most.”

This is all true.

And, I guess, in the case of Freedom Communications, the people that the execs love and care about most are themselves.

This is the Army, Mr. (and Ms.) Jones

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, my father tried to join the Army.

At 29, and working in plant that did war-related work (produccing industrial fine wire), it would have taken a while for Uncle Sam to catch up with him.

But he was single, living at home with his mother, not leading the most exciting life you can imagine, and his country was at war.

Although my father was a fit, vigorous, and athletic young man, the Army rejected him: flat feet.

He tried to explain to the recruiter that he had something called “Indian feet”, a concept that held that feet might be flat, but they wouldn’t cause you any pain. Thus, despite flat feet, you would be able to march. (I have no idea whether my father made this term up, but when you google “Indian feet” it’s all about the fetish.)

Anyway, the Army may not have wanted my father, but the Navy was willing to take him. (Less marching, more boating.)

In today’s Army, if Yahoo answers are correct – and why wouldn’t they be? – you can be flat footed and still serve.

But these days, flat feet seem to be the least of the Army’s recruitment worries.

Today, they estimate that 71% of American young folk can’t pass muster.

The military deems many youngsters ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high-school diploma, felony convictions and prescription-drug use for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But others are now also running afoul of standards for appearance amid the growing popularity of large-scale tattoos and devices called ear gauges that create large holes in earlobes. (Source: WSJ Online)

Back in the day – WWII, Korea, Vietnam – I don’t think obesity would have been much of a problem. There just wasn’t as much of it going around. When I think of the nearly fifty kids in my grammar school class, there were only two that would have been considered “fat kids.” In retrospect, one was probably moderately overweight, while the other would have likely been classified as obese.  That’s four percent. In my high school class – ninety girls – there are only a couple of girls that I remember as being at all overweight. Today about thirty percent of kids and adolescents are categorized as overweight or obese.

High school diplomas also didn’t matter as much when there was a draft. But aptitude tests were given, and, when my husband’s draft cohort was bussed from Bellows Falls, VT to Keene, NH to take the test, only a handful passed. (It might have been smart thinking to fail the test – who in their right mind wanted to go to Vietnam? But, in Jim’s case, it might have been difficult for someone with a master’s degree in chemistry to flunk the Army induction test. In any event, Jim got deferments by working as a chemist for various government agencies.)

I do believe that felony convictions has always been something of a deal breaker, and ADHD just did not plain exist.

As for tattoos, well, folks got them when they were drunk and on leave while in the service, not prior to going in.

And ear gauges – thanks to the WSJ I now know what those thingies are – in days of yore, they were only seen in the pages of National Geographic, and only among members of primitive tribes.

I thought nose piercing was weird enough. Don’t boogers get in the way? And tongue piercing just makes people talk funny. Plus it seems like an invitation to developing cancer. But boring a large hole in your earlobe I just do not get in the least.

The military’s estimate that 71% of those aged 17-24 would be rejected for service is, if true, quite disturbing.

Come on! If you’re not qualified to join the Army, you’re probably equally unqualified to work in any profession that requires any modicum of intelligence or skill.

Sure, it can be argued that tat sleeves and holes in your earlobes don’t preclude you from doing a job – pick a job, any job. But I personally wouldn’t be comfortable seeing a dentist whose face was covered with tattoos, or hiring a lawyer with a two-inch plug in her distended earlobe. I guess this, at least unofficially, makes me a stuff old fart.

Meanwhile, it’s no wonder that these poor members of the all volunteer army have to do so many tours in crappy places. There just aren’t enough of them. Which may, come to think about it, be a good thing. Might just keep us out of some dumb-ass wars…

Come along and be my (funeral) party doll…

A few weeks ago, in my reality TV cruising lethargy, I happened upon a show focused on unique, some might say over-the-top, funerals. I wasn’t paying all that much attention, but one was country-and-western themed; another featured people dressed up like bacon and eggs because the deceased had been a big breakfast fan; and, in the third, I think they had the casket on wheels and speeding around a racetrack.

Having so recently held one, I’m fine with the personalized funeral/memorial service. And I kind of like the fact that people aren’t so spooked by death that they can’t have a bit of fun with it. But having Uncle Johnny dress up like a slab of bacon or a carton of OJ just seems to be trying a bit too hard. It makes it look like the family really wants their 15 minutes of fame and, if they can’t get it any other way, they’ll latch on to funeral theater of the absurd.

Fame! I want to live forever. And I will, on YouTube, doing karaoke to Honky-Tonk Angel at Cousin Maybelle’s wake.

The latest in funerals, however, is not just about burying Daddy in his Caddy. It’s about propping up the deceased and having them hang out at their wake or funeral, not confined to the old pine box, but posed in some real life scene, tableau vivant without the vivant.

Having grown up Catholic in a time and place where a) people (including children) attended wakes, and b) the bodies of the dead are on display (“open casket”), I am no stranger to having dead bodies as part of the scene.

If I hadn’t grown up being able to comment on how good the stiff looked – “they did a really good job” – I might well find the practice weird and barbaric. But, hey…

Of course, mostly the stiff didn’t look all that good. They were, after all, dead.  And sometimes they looked too good. When my grandmother died, the O’Connor Brothers were somehow able to shave a couple of decades off of her. So, rather than looking 97, she only looked 77. For years, we all talked about wanting the ‘Nanny beauty treatment.’

Nonetheless, I think I would find it quite startling to walk into a wake or funeral and see a body propped up “doing” something other than doing what a dead body is supposed to be “doing,” i.e., lying there dead.

But to each his or her own, and to Miriam Burbank, who recently died in New Orleans, her own meant spending:

…her service sitting at a table amid miniature New Orleans Saints helmets, with a can of Busch beer at one hand and a menthol cigarette between her fingers, just as she had spent a good number of her living days. (Source: NY Times)

There have been a few of these service in New Orleans – socialite holding glass of champagne,  derby-wearing band-leader leaning on his cane - but the custom has really taken hold in Puerto Rico.

Viewings there in recent years have included a paramedic displayed behind the wheel of his ambulance and, in 2011, a man dressed for his wake like Che Guevara, cigar in hand and seated Indian style….The body of Christopher Rivera, a boxer who was shot to death, was propped up in a fake boxing ring for his wake in January in San Juan, P.R.

I like to keep the “fun in funerals” as much as the next mourner, but there’s something just a bit to Madame Tussaud-y about all this.

Nonetheless, I will take a moment to think outside of the box, and beyond the bag of ashes that I will someday become.

If I were going to have this kind of setup as my last word, what sort of display would I want?

• Sitting on the couch with my nose in a book, with the Red Sox on in the background?
• Poised over the keyboard, composing my final blog post?
• Hanging around with family and friends, drinking wine and gabbing? Only I’d be the one who was embalmed/ taxidermed. That’s no fun!

In real life – make that real death – it’s actually not something I’m going to have to worry about.

And I really don’t want to continue this thought experiment by thinking about how my friends and family would be portrayed. If we were the type to prop up the dead.

Nope. Not going there…

And I hope I never have to see anyone I know propped up in fighting pose in a boxing ring after his or her final bell has been rung, and they’ve been KO’d into the big squared circle in the sky.

No thanks.

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A somber tip of the mourning bonnet to my sister Kath, for sending me the link to this article.

You know, sometimes I do ask the BIG questions

For a  number of years now, The New Yorker has run a Cartoon Caption Contest on its last page.

Each week, a new, captionless cartoon is presented, and readers can propose a caption. The three captions deemed most worthy by New Yorker staff are then voted on by the general, New Yorker reading public, and the winner gets a signed print of the cartoon.

Probably because I’m not especially clever when it comes to cartoon captioning, I’m not a huge fan of the Caption Contest. (This, by the way, is not sour grapes, and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that, the one and only time that I did enter a caption – something about the Jolly Green Giant – I didn’t make the cut.

I was not surprised – my caption, now lost to memory, was not particularly witty and, I suppose, was pretty obvious – but I was, nonetheless, disappointed not to see my name in what would probably have been the only time it would have appeared in The New Yorker.

My disappointment was nowhere near as keen as what I experienced in kindergarten, when I sent a brilliantly conceived and executed crayon drawing of a bunny rabbit in clover in to Miss Francis on Ding Dong School. Each day, Miss Francis chose some drawings to display, and each day I chugged back home to ask my mother and brother Tom whether my drawing had been on.

The answer, sadly, was always “No.”

Why my mother didn’t just say “Yes” will be obvious to anyone who knew my mother. But it was probably just as well.

I would have been a tremendous braggart if Miss Francis had, indeed, shown “Bunny in Clover,” and I would no doubt have been challenged with taunts of “liar, liar, pants on fire.” If my mother had fibbed to get me out of her hair, there would no doubt have been one kid whose mother and sibs had been watching the day I claimed my fame, and I would have been outed. (Liar, liar confirmed!)

I do know, however, that, even after the initial spell of braggadocio had died down, this tremendous feat would have been referred to, again and again, throughout my grammar school career. After all, wasn’t there always someone ready to bring up the fact that Arthur Godfrey had read Mary Shea’s query letter on his show. Mary wanted to know just what made Haleloke’s belly wiggle. (Hale was Arthur’s Hawaiian singer and hula dancer.) 

A few years after the Ding Dong School dis, I did garner a bit of notoriety when I won honorable mention in one of Big Brother Bob Emery’s curlicue contests. (I turned that curlicue into a person in a wheelchair, which no doubt struck at the heart of some staffer who knew a kid with polio. Anyway, my prize was a Huckleberry Hound Carbon Copy Kit, which contained colored carbon paper and some Huckleberry Hound cartoons to trace. Even at the age of nine, I thought that a prize focused on tracing was not especially appropriate for someone who’d almost won an art contest. Sheesh. Shouldn’t they have sent me an easel and oils? A smock and a beret?)

Back to The New Yorker, my friend Claire did make the Final Three at one point but, despite my vote, she didn’t win. Sometimes I really hate vox populi, but I guess the voting is all about “reader engagement.”

Despite my poorly-received entry, and my friend Claire’s brush with fame, I hadn’t paid all that much attention to the actual New Yorker Caption Contest rules.

But the other day, I noticed this:

Any legal resident of the United States or Canada (except residents of the province of Quebec), Australia, United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, age eighteen or over can enter [or vote], except employees, agents, or representatives of Sponsor or any other party associated with the development or administration of the Contest, or any member of their immediate family.

I certainly understand why those Sponsors and Contest administrators would not be eligible. Why tempt fate? Everyone’s mother wouldn’t be as honest as mine.

But residents of Quebec?

Comment dites-vous ‘abomination’?

I mean, what if your name is Reginald Pinch Smythe, and you happen to be an Anglophone resident of Montreal, and you also happen to be a really, really, really good cartoon captioner?

Do you cheat and drive to the nearest province border and mail your entry in from there. (And make sure that you have a PO Box set up in Newfoundland or Ontario.)

And what about New Zealanders? Are their comic sensibilities any less than those of their Aussie brethren?

What about ex-pats, who are citizens but not residents? How come they can’t play?

A lot of people in India speak English, no? And Singapore, and Hong Kong. Plenty of countries in Africa.

Was The New Yorker Caption Contest always such a stickler about who entered? Were they initially overwhelmed by submissions from “foreigners” whose English was not quite up to par, and whose sense of humor was just on a different wave length? Was there such a rush of bad entries that they couldn’t just toss out the ones they suspected would not be of interest without even opening them? I really don’t think it would have dawned on anyone to ask why there were never any winners from Lichtenstein (other than the Lichtensteiner who kept sending captions in.)

Anyway, since I noticed this about The New Yorker, the question just won’t leave my mind.

What does it all mean? How can it possibly be right?

You know what they say. The unexamined life is not worth living, and sometimes you do have to ask the BIG questions.

June 28, 1914. The real shot heard round the world.

One hundred years ago tomorrow, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo.

The pictures of Franz Ferdinand always make him look like the unbeatable combination of ludicrous and pompous. That stiffly twirled mustache, those medals for nothing, the shiny height-enhancing cap. He’s often shown wearing a plumed hat, which makes him look even sillier. Films of that era – which used a different number of frames – make all motion appear jerky, which doesn’t enhance the serious factor any.

But there was plenty of serious factor around what happened in the aftermath of young Bosnian nationalist Gavrilo Princip pulling the trigger on Franz Ferdinand.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which dragged in Germany (in the Austro-Hungarian camp) and Great Britain and France (and eventually us) on the Allied side.

And since one good war inevitably begets another, the War to End All Wars (which was how World War I was initially branded) led inexorably to World War II, yet another war that didn’t put an end to all wars.

As it happened, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a pretty profound impact on my life.

My mother’s parents – Magdalena (Folker) and Jacob Wolf – were ethnic Germans, living in a backwater town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They were of pioneer stock, their ancestors having emigrated in the 1700’s – in the 18th century equivalent of the Conestoga Wagon – from the Stuttgart region of Germany to the back arse of nowhere.

The Folkers and the Wolfs were farmers, living in one of many all-German pokey farming towns that dotted the Empire.

Their town was Neue Banat (New Banat).

My grandfather was a young man when the war started, little more than a teenager. But along with his brothers – there were seven or eight of them – he became part of the Austro-Hungarian Army. (I don’t know for a fact, but I’m guessing that my grandmother would have had brothers in the army, as well.)

Jake, Nick, Michael, Tony… I don’t know who they all were (other than Jake, my grandfather), but some of those Wolf brothers didn’t make it back.

Somewhere, I have a copy of a poster that was produced in Neue Banat after the war, showing portraits of all the town’s soldier boys. Tote und Lebende Soldaten. The dead and living soldiers, with the dead soldiers shown in the middle, surrounded by a wreath, and those who made it out alive on the poster’s periphery. I looked for it just now and couldn’t find it, but I know there were Wolf brothers within the wreath and others, like my grandfather, on that golden periphery among the lebende.

In 1918, when Jake Wolf made it back to Neue Banat, he married Lena Folker. She was eighteen. He was twenty-two.

They were no longer living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, however.

Neue Banat was now part of Romania, and Neue Banat was now Panatul-Nou where my mother, Elisabeth Wolf, was born in 1919, three days before the first anniversary of The Armistice. (She was part of the World War I baby boom.)

Fast forward a couple of years, and my grandparents were reading the handwriting on the wall, and it didn’t matter if it was in German or Romanian. They wanted out, so they joined some of the Wolfs who were already making their way in the brave new world that was America.

In 1923, with their family passport – issued in the name of his majesty Ferdinand the First, King of Romania – the Wolfs made their way to Chicago. Their passport is stamped along the way in Romania, the Czech Republic, and Germany – but not in the U.S., where they entered via Ellis Island.

On the passport, my grandfather is no longer a farmer, he’s a businessman, which proved true in Chicago. (He prospered as a butcher/grocer.) My mother’s name on the passport appears to be – it’s in script – Laveta. Which is kind of odd, given that Elisabeth in German is Elisabeth in Romanian. Oh, well.

My father’s family was pretty much exempt from World War I. His father and uncles were too old, his brother and cousins too young. He was just five when our boys headed Over There.

The Rogers family did, of course, support the troops.

My aunt embroidered a pillow that read “Come back safely, Moxie Winn” and sent it off to a soldier presumably named Moxie Winn. (Is that a great doughboy name or what?)

The war to end all wars turned out not to be that, but just plain old World War I, making the world “safe” for World War II, which was my father’s war.

He didn’t see action like Jake Wolf did in the rat-infested trenches of the first world war.

As he often said, you went where Uncle Sam sent you.

One of the places that Uncle Sam sent Al Rogers was downtown Chicago, where he was stationed for a couple of years at Navy Pier.

And where he met the daughter of Jake Wolf, who’d been prescient and lucky enough to get the hell out of the old country before it exploded once again.

And that’s how the real shot heard round world helped usher me into being.

Quite a cost though…

Wrestle Mania

Who among us doesn’t have some sort of Walter Mitty thing going on? Sure, we might be sitting in our 6’ x 6’ cubicle all day, staring at a screen and pretending to listen in on conference calls. But in our unreal life - which would be our real life, darn it, if only we had the good fortune or the gumption to carpe that diem – we’re doing something else. Like writing a novel. Or  being a pundit. Or running a bookstore that somehow managed to turn a profit without having any customers, and which featured an over-sized arm chair where you could curl up with a good book and read all day. (Not that any of these would be my Mitty-esque fantasies…)

But there are some folks who go beyond the day dream and actually do something about their secret life, beyond just keeping it confined the deepest, most secret reaches of  the brain.

Over the years, I worked, among others, with a fellow who played bass in a reasonably decent oldies band. With a woman who was a ballroom dancer, and another who entered amateur figure skating contests. With a guy who tried out for the Olympic biathlon squad. And another guy who fenced (swords, not hot goods).

Good for them. (Me, I blog…)

With this as a backdrop, I was amused by a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on a bunch of guys who, when they’re not at work, release their inner pro wrestler.

As an analyst at H.J. Heinz Co., Lou Zygmuncik spends his days thinking about ketchup sales. But about once a month, he transforms himself into the trash-talking bruiser Dr. Devastation.

Mr. Zygmuncik, 38 years old, is one of two dozen wrestlers in the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance, a bottom-rung pro-wrestling troupe. It sets up its ring at the Teamster Temple, a union hall, and draws about 300 fans to its shows, often including Pittsburgh's mayor, Bill Peduto. (Source: WSJ Online.)

Peduto, by the way, claims that wrestling has a “whole other edge that’s off-the-charts hip.”

God knows I haven’t seen much of pro wrestling since the days of Haystack Calhoun, Killer Kowalski (not to be confused with Stanley Kowalski), and Bruno San Martino, but I really tend to doubt that anything off-the-charts hip occurs in the Teamster Temple. But you never know what might appeal to those fedora-wearing, soul-patch growing, hipsters and their bouclé wool, 1960’s coat wearing girlfriends.

Wrestling peaked on TV in the late 1980’s, when 13.5 million households watched Hulk Hogan take on André the Giant. (Gosh, what was I doing in 1988 that was so all-fired important that I missed that one?)

This year, the industry's marquee brand, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., is pushing pro wrestling online, so far signing up more than half a million subscribers to a new digital network.

(If you’ll recall, WWE exec Linda McMahon is a regular losing candidate for political office in Connecticut. McMahon and her husband Vince may be geniuses when it comes to wrestling, but they’re apparently not smart enough to figure out that, if you want a seat in Congress or the Senate, and you’re in Connecticut, you can tip the election results a bit more in their direction if you run as a Democrat. You’d think they knew about things like odds, and good guys vs. bad guys.)

While on the one hand, there’s WWE, on the other there are a lot of these little Keystone-style outfits – some a notch up -  all over the country.

Every week, dozens of promotions that are run by second- and third-tier companies hold hundreds of bouts. Many wrestlers work for little money while hoping to get discovered by the WWE and eventually get six-figure incomes.

There’s a mixed reaction out there to the pro-wrestling wannabes, but:

"You can understand why people really miss that personal interaction, to boo your enemies to their face and slap your heroes on their sweaty backs," said David Shoemaker, author of a history of pro wrestling titled "The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling."

Especially when so much enemy-booing occurs online, with no personal interaction, let alone the lure of the sweaty back. (I’ll pass.)

Sure, those sweaty-backed wrestlers might be wearing face paint or a mask, disguising the fact that they’re an analyst for Heinz or the mayor of Pittsburgh. But it’s probably relatively easy to figure out who they are when you see them in the parking lot of the Teamster Temple.

And there’s no anonymity for the fans. They’re not hiding behind a screen and a keyboard, throwing invectives out there, trolling away.

If they’ve got something to say holler, they just come out and say holler it.

I don’t believe in booing Little Leaguers, pee-wee hockey players, or high school footballers.

But booing can be cathartic. Booing can be fun.

Yay, booing!

But I don’t think I’d boo those Keystone wrestlers:

The Keystone wrestlers themselves say they aren't looking for fame, just to put on a good show for their fans and get away from their day jobs.

"You could work Monday through Friday, but when you have that event you're a superstar," said Mr. Zygmuncik, who in his fights enters the arena brandishing a black Louisville Slugger baseball bat at fans.

In his signature move, "the death certificate," he puts his opponent's head between his knees and drops the guy face-first into the mat. It is great theater. "People are cheering you or booing you," he says.

Which, I suspect is a tad bit more interesting than analyzing whether the latest ketchup ad – like the one where the old lady makes the fart noise with her near-empty bottle - had an impact on sales. (Makes me nostalgic for the Carly Simon Anticipation ads of yore.)

"Stepping out of the curtain in pro wrestling might be the single greatest rush one can experience," said Keith Haught Jr. , a heavyset 23-year-old, who graduated in May with a degree in history and psychology and wrestles as the Jester. "Nothing in my life has beaten it so far."

Okay, I have to raise an eyebrow at someone 23 years old claiming that pro wrestling beats everything else he’s experienced to date. He’s only 23 and, thus, can be easily forgiven.

Still, I suspect that if, at my advanced age, I were to step “out of the curtain in pro wrestling” it might well be my greatest rush ever, too.

It’s just that I’ll never really get to test this theory. And if I did get to pick, I’d still rather choose novelist or pundit.

But you gotta admire these guys who are going for it, one fake throw at a time.

Mount Olympics on Beacon Hill? No thanks.

Not that it means all that much, but we learned a couple of weeks back that Boston – yes, that Boston – is on the US Olympic Committee’s shortlist for hosting the Summer Olympics in 2024. Washington DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco also made the cut.

Next up, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers get to spend a lot of money trying to prove our worthiness in hopes that the USOC will pick our town as the one to make the bid to the overall Olympic Committee, where, unless that august and venerable group decides it’s time to placate the United States and/or makes a show of being august, venerable, and non-bribe-taking, we’ll get turned down.

Of the other cities that expressed an interest in carrying the U.S. banner, Philadelphia and New York prudently dropped out, while Dallas and San Diego didn’t make the cut.

Personally, other than the fact that it’s 190 degrees in the summer, I think Dallas is a great place to host the Olympics.

Sure, they may not have much by way of public transpo, but there’s plenty of place to park out there on the prairie, and they already have all sorts of venues. There’s the Dallas Cowboys’ new billion dollar Close Encounters stadium, and the quite nice Rangers’ baseball field just next door. Not to mention that pretty much every high school worth its mascot and cheerleaders has a football stadium that would do most small- to mid-sized colleges proud. Think Friday Night Lights. It’s no exaggeration. These places are out there.

Hosting the Olympics always looks like a “free and easy” way to improve infrastructure, but the costs are, of course, astronomical. London hosted the last summer game -  and gave us what had to be the zaniest opening ceremony event in Olympic history – at a cost of around $15 billion. The Athens Olympics in 2004 cost a similar bundle, and some claim that all the spending contributed to Greece’s epic collapse and ongoing fail. And it’s estimated that this year’s Winter O’s in Sochi rang it up to the tune of $50 billion plus. (I think the oligarch/Putin premium was at last 100% there.)

I actually don’t know who foots the bill if your city is fortunate enough to get the five-ring circus nod: feds, state, local, corporate sponsors. But I’m pretty  sure that I don’t want to see my property taxes go up to build a bunch of soccer stadiums that won’t get used after the fact.

Boston is a wonderful city for tourists, but it’s not a great city for an extra million vuvuzela-blaring tourists – do Olympic-watchers blare vuvuzelas, or is that just a World Cup thing? – tromping around our narrow sidewalks and streets designed by cows as cow paths. And I’d hate to see the look on the faces of those vuvuzela blarers when they realize that all those brochures depicting Boston harbor cruises and swanboats in the Boston Garden were bait and switch, and that they were they’re staying in a Motel 6 on Route One and getting bussed to Gillette Stadium – oh, the horror – where they get to kill time between watching the hurdles and 100 meter by shopping at the Bass Pro Shop at Patriot Place. (Oh, the horror.)

If the Olympics come to Boston in summer 2024, include me out.

If I’m still up and about, I’ll up and about myself elsewhere. Maybe that will be the summer I spend the month in Paris or Galway or somewhere else that Jim and I always talked about. (Gee, I really hope I get to it before then…)

If, by that point, I find myself in the preliminary stages of full-blown geezerhood, I’ll set in my supplies and hunker down for the duration, perhaps spending a few minutes daily on the front steps, shaking my cane at the vuvuzela-blaring tourists surging by my home looking for Cheers which will, no doubt, still be rerunning in Tajikistan and Paraguay.

With respect to the Boston Olympian madness, a couple of different groups have come to the fore.

One is composed of the business and civic leaders (unsurprisingly led by major construction). That would be Boston 2024.

Another is a bunch of “civilians” who think this is a terrible, horrible, no good idea. That would be No Boston Olympics group (with a surprisingly slick web site, by the way).

I think that the No Boston Olympics folks will win the day. There are plenty of things that Boston is good at hosting.

We’re good at the Marathon. At World Series. At NBA Finals. At Stanley Cup.

I don’t think we have enough seats for the basketball NCAA Final Four, but we’d do just fine with the March Madness on ice that is the Frozen Four.

We did a good enough job with the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and if the Republicans want to take their chances here at some point, come on down. (I promise not to stand on the front steps shaking my cane at you.)

We host all sorts of mid-sized conventions and trade shows, and make a reasonably good go of it.

If the Patriots-owning Krafts succeed in their full court press – or whatever the football equivalent is – to get the Super Bowl hosted in Foxborough, well, have at it. I won’t even say “I told you so” if it turns out that we have a foot of snow and wind-chill factor of 10-below that day.

But, maybe because I’m just not capable of thinking BIG, and because I really wouldn’t want to be bothered by the vuvuzela-blaring masses, I’ll be just as happy if we end up losing out to Los Angeles. Or San Francisco. Or Washington, DC. (Actually, DC might be a good location for it: replace partisan gridlock with gridlock gridlock.)

On the other hand, there’s a group touting Boston as the site for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

When you spread it out over Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, this would make sense.

We’re a hockey town, not a track and field town. People around here ski. They skate. They don’t swim, run, or dive.

Winter Olympics makes sense. Just as Mike Eruzione, of Miracle on Ice fame.

The picture on the Boston Winter Olympics home page shows the Public Garden, which is just across the street from where I live. I don’t imagine they’ll be having any of the skating events on that rough ice, or even on the better-groomed ice of the Frog Pond, which is just next door.

still, having the Winter Olympics here might be fun.

Winter ‘R Us, after all.

And I don’t think that there’d be all that many vuvuzela-blaring tourists in town for it.

Besides, I’ll be even older in 2026 than I will be in 2024.

And who goes out in the middle of February, anyway?

Pepper plays a hooker

Every family has it’s own catch phrases, in-jokes, code words, and “just us” vocabulary.

With my husband, there was “yabaddyanget” (something that was scrawled by a professor on one of Jim’s college papers; when he asked the professor to interpret it for him, Jim was told “this is about as bad as you can get”); this professor was at Rutgers, which we always referred to as Rutabaga (long story). Jim and I also had shopping lady (you know one when you see one); Pêche à la Frog (from the old Peter Cook – Dudley Moore skit: code for terrible restaurant); and “stinks like brownies.” (One more crummy thing about widowhood… Although, come to think of it, my sisters have adopted “stinks like brownies,” so I’ll still have that.)

For me and my sibs, the very long list includes “gayyahaddy” (translation: get the hell out of here, as shouted by someone for whom English was a second language, to my father and his friends who were bothering that someone for whom English was a second language); “bum hockies” (bad feet); “It’s only your mother”; and whistling La Vie en Rose under your breath.

Which brings me to “Pepper Plays A Hooker”, which is what my sister Trish and I always say when we see someone wearing something that vaguely resembles an outfit that Pepper Anderson (i.e., Angie Dickinson) wore in one of the many Police Woman episodes in which Pepper went underground as a hooker.

All this long and winding road gets me to the point of this blog, which is that a Japanese company has recently introduced a robot named Pepper which is supposedly capable of reading human emotions. Which, of course, Pepper Anderson was exceedingly skilled at back in the day when she was playing a hooker.

Not that the new Japanese robot is a hooker. Not yet, anyway.

I read about Pepper a few weeks ago, on boston.com, in an article that borrowed from the  BBC:

It uses an "emotional engine" and a cloud-based artificial intelligence system that allows it to analyse gestures, expressions and voice tones.

The firm said people could communicate with it "just like they would with friends and family" and it could perform various tasks.

Well, I suppose it won’t be all that long before Pepper is sharing catch phrases, in-jokes, code words, and “just us” vocabulary with its friends and family.

Pepper’s being positioned – by Softbank Telecom – as a friendly-priced (less than $2K) household item that will “function as a pet robot,” and will be available sometime next year. In the meantime, it will be hanging out in Softbank retail outlets, chilling with the customers.

Reacting to Pepper, Tech Crunch invokes the singularity (which I so hope not to be around for), with writer John Biggs quite usefully pointing out that:

…it’s important to understand who will soon be changing our diapers, bringing us whiskey, and eventually enslaving us under a totalitarian robot rule.

That would be Pepper.

Which (who?) you can see here: Pepper, not playing a hooker.

Pepper will be in Softbank stores in February and should be for sale later next year. Why do you need one? Given that it’s not quite strong enough to lift you out of bed nor smart enough (yet) to do your shopping, I suspect this will be an Aibo-like toy for the time being. Soon, however, Pepper will dance its way into our homes, hearts, and, perhaps, down our throats and into our chest cavities. The future, as they say, is so bright we gotta run from the robots. (Source: Tech Crunch)

The folks at Softbank are, apparently, not familiar with our Pepper Anderson as, in their parlance, Pepper is a he. As in:

Pepper is a humanoid robot that takes his surroundings into consideration to react pro-actively using proprietary algorithms. Pepper also comes equipped with capabilities and an interface that enables communication with people, including the latest voice recognition technology, superior joint technology to realize graceful gestures, and emotion recognition that analyzes expressions and voice tones. With these technologies, people can enjoy communicating with Pepper in a natural way, just like they would with friends and family. In addition, Pepper can make jokes, dance and amuse people thanks to a wide variety of entertainment capabilities… (Source: Softbank)

The good folks at Softbank – assuming that their CEO is still human and not yet a robot – don’t believe that there’s anything to fear here. (Paranoia about the singularity, be damned!). They look Pepper as the embodiment of their corporate philosophy:

‘Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone.’ To realize our vision, we have made a new entry into the robot business with the aim of developing affectionate robots that make people smile.

An affectionate robot?

Personally, for me “happiness for everyone” is something I like to think of as human, or at least living-breathing. And I prefer my affection coming from humans and dogs. Not to mention my in-jokes and catch phrases.

It looks like we’ll be safe for a while, however, from the weird faux “affection” of robots, as their battery life is a scant 12 hours. Even if “they” figure out family in-jokes, they’ll still run down a lot faster than the average member of my posse.

Pepper plays a hooker, indeed.

Washboard Abs(urd)

Being a millennial is so darned hard.

It’s, like, nothing is, like, convenient enough.

What a drag!

Fortunately, for the millennials, for every millennial who finds it too darned hard to, say, hail a cab on a busy city street; or stop by a CVS and pick up a greeting card for grandma’s birthday (you mean I need to put a stamp on it?); or stroll around a neighborhood and look at the menus posted in restaurant windows and pick a place that looks interesting, there’s another millennial who’s invented an app and/or service to help expedite (or at least digitize) life’s pesky little processes.

I’m sure that at some point, the young entrepreneurs will put their minds to something more meaningful than coming up with marginal improvements to things that are marginally inconvenient.  And/or things that get folks addicted to continuous technological connection at the expense of true interpersonal connectedness.

I mean, there’s got to be a Jonas Salk or a Thomas Edison or, at minimum, a Bill Gates among the bunch.

Doesn’t there?

In the meantime, I guess we’ll have to settle for more modest breakthroughs. Like Washboard, a new quarter-delivery service which, for $27 will deliver you two rolls of quarters so you can get to the laundromat and do your laundry.

College friends Shaun Chapman and Caleb Brown test launched their new Washboard quarter delivery service Thursday morning, offering consumers rolls of coins automatically shipped to their mailbox each month for all their laundry needs.

Brown, of Pittsburgh, said the duo came up with the idea after struggling to find quarters for their own post-college laundry runs.

“There’s a piece of mind to knowing that you’re always going to have a roll or two of quarters a month with Washboard,” Brown said. (Source: Boston.com)

Well, I suspect that what Brown really said was “peace of mind”, but apparently spelling – like having a jar to throw loose change into so you always have washer-dryer money – is so yesterday.

Actually, I do understand why the young folk wouldn’t have a change bucket. If you never pay cash for anything, you won’t tend to accumulate change.

Still, how taxing is it to make sure you have quarters on hand.

If you use a commercial laundromat, there’s a pretty good chance it has a change machine, no?

And if you use the ones in your building, surely you pass a bank somewhere during your busy day that will let you purchase a roll of quarters at cost. (Remember the Saturday Night Live spoof on the Citibank ads in which happy bank customers gushed about how wonderful it was to do business with a bank that contacted them if they suspected that someone was using their card fraudulently? In the SNL skit, bank customers gushed about having a bank that would make change for you.)

Of course, you wouldn’t want to have to step into a bank every week, so you could actually get multiple quarter rolls at a time. Say, enough to last a month or two.

But, hey, what’s a 35% premium to have a couple of rolls of quartered delivered right to your door?

Brown said he understands the skepticism.

“It’s polarizing,” he observed. “If you have that problem you think, ‘oh, that makes so much sense,’ and if you don’t, it’s just like: ‘these guys are reselling me money.’

“But that’s how anything works...you’re paying the extra couple bucks to avoid going to the bank…To me, that makes a lot of sense, to pay a couple of dollars a month to not have to do that, though I totally understand and respect if that doesn’t make sense to someone.”

As someone who this enterprise doesn’t make much sense to, I, of course, had to swing by Washboard to see their pitch:

Wearing dirty underwear? We provide 2-day shipping on every shipment of quarters.

Oh, dear.

You mean there are actually people out there wearing dirty underwear who are willing to wait two days for a shipment of quarters rather than a) figure out how to get the quarters on their own; b) buy some new underwear; c) hand wash what they have. (I do appreciate that briefs can take forever to line dry. Still…)

They also have a nifty little app that lets you calculate how many quarters a month you need, based on how many loads of wash you do, and how many quarters your laundromat gouges you for.

I find it strange that one of the options is one load per month.

How is that possible?

I mean, between sheets, towels, workout clothes, and normal clothes, I probably do at least 3 loads of wash each week.

Who accumulates one load of laundry per month?

Nobody whose home I want to visit, that’s for sure.

So far, Washboard doesn’t have a lot of takers – fewer than 10 customers. But one person’s nonsense is, I guess, another person’s value prop.

“Knowing I have $20 worth of quarters in my quarters jar makes throwing in a load of laundry any time I want so much less stressful." – Cassidy, Pet Care Specialist

The Washboard-ers are not entirely unrealistic in their appraisal of the potential of their business: they’re not looking for funding. (Good thing.) And they realize that the barriers to entry for this type of business are low.

But Brown insists that the “pain point” of not having quarters on hand when you need them is a real one “that no one ever really cared about before.” (Source: valleywag.gawker) And the company has ambitions to branch out into detergent and fabric softener delivery, as well.

I realize I’m not all that current on laundomats, but don’t they have machines that dispense detergent and fabric softener? Sure, they gobble up more of those precious quarters, but still. Not to mention that even the most time-pressured potential Washboard customer must have to occasionally go to the grocery store, if only to stock up on things like toilet paper.

Note to self on possible market disrupter: toilet paper delivery service.

Anyway, while Brown and Chapman try to build their business one roll of quarters at a time, Brown has come to the realization that he’s now spending a lot of time in bank lines.

"It's funny because I built this thing because I didn't want to go to the bank anymore, but right now I'm just going to the bank and requesting quarters as I need them.”

Note to self on possible market disrupter: roll of quarter delivery service providing rolls of quarters to roll of quarter delivery services.

Just unleashing my inner millennial…

The foolish man builds his house upon the sand. (Tunica, Mississippi edition)

I’m one of those folks who cast a dubious eye on casino gambling as an economic panacea.

Not that I have any great moral objection to gambling. Even though I understand the odds, and would probably be embarrassed to admit I had a ticket if I ever ended up winning more than the seven dollar max payout I’ve hit on one occasion, I’ve been known to buy lottery tickets. At the gym, I buy a Super Bowl Square and always submit my March Madness ladder, which I will have either created based on whether I “like” one college or university better than its opponent, or borrowed from my friend Sean who actually thinks about the brackets. And, if I happen to be in a casino, I will be willing to blow a roll of quarters on the slots.

But that’s about it.

My lack of personal interest in gambling does not, however, translate into Carrie Nation-like disapproval of gambling.

Sure, it’s plenty unsettling and disagreeable to see “fixed income” seniors pushing their oxygen bottles around the floor at Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun, no doubt squandering their Social Security checks on keno or whatever. But that’s entertainment.

What I really don’t like about gambling is when people act as if it’s some fabulous sustainable job creator.

Massachusetts is now going through some casino-awarding contortions, which I haven’t paid much attention to. It’s not as if I’m going to be spending any time in these casinos, wherever they end up plunking them. As for New England’s existing casinos, I did go once to either Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun. I was passing by with my sister Trish and our friend Shelly, and we popped in, burned through our quarter roll, depressed ourselves at the sight of all those oxygen-cylinder-pushing seniors, and left after 15 minutes.

With this as backdrop, I certainly wasn’t surprised to read about the failure of Harrah’s Tunica Casino, which is located in northwestern Mississippi. In early June, after 18 years in operation, its last one-armed bandit swallowed a roll of quarters, the last chip was placed on red 31, the last croupier raked in the chips. Or whatever it is they do in casinos. (Most of what I know about what goes on in there comes from watching Casablanca.)

The Tunica Miracle — as boosters called the coming of gambling to what had been an isolated, economically moribund slice of the Mississippi Delta — is over. A boom that peaked with 13,000 jobs has slid into a struggle for survival.

The first casino opened on a riverboat docked at a remote river landing in 1992. With people lining up, more casinos came, building glitzy resorts in Tunica County’s northern end, as close to Memphis, Tennessee, as possible. In the first full year after Harrah’s began operation, casinos in Tunica County won $776 million from gamblers. The peak came in 2006, when revenue reached almost $1.2 billion.

But increased competition and a recession that drained patrons’ pocketbooks began to bite. In 2013, Tunica’s casinos took in about $700 million. (Source: Boston.com)

While a couple of smaller casinos will remain open, the overall casino-employment is less than half of what it was at the peak, and gambling tax revenues – which funded public service jobs and infrastructure improvements – are also getting sliced.

Yes, the recession didn’t help Tunica any. Nor, I suspect, did it’s location in the back ass of nowhere. Okay, it’s close to Memphis, but still... Casinos on the Gulf Coast – which also offers goodies like beach and shrimp – are doing well.

What really clobbered Tunica, and is the real crap shoot-ness behind the casino-as-an-economic-miracle fallacy, is that fact that casinos, with their easy money aura, tend to beget other casinos.

Thus,

In the early days of Mississippi gambling, there was little competition, with patrons trekking from Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere. But those and many other states have casinos now. In recent years, competition has gotten even closer to home, with Southland Park Gaming and Racing in West Memphis, Arkansas, luring many traditional Tunica patrons. Southland won $142 million from gamblers last year, more than an average Tunica casino.

BINGO, as they say in the church hall on Thursday afternoons.

There’s a finite number of gamblers out there, as the Connecticut casinos are going to find out when the Massachusetts casinos open. And as Massachusetts will figure out when Vermont (okay, Vermont would be far fetched) decides to open a casino at the base of Killington.

Gambling is just not the industry you want to bet on for your area’s economic future. Yet, like gambling itself, it certainly has a certain lurid lure. Hey, it’s a lot easier to “get” than biotech. And I guess you do get those couple of good years of construction jobs, followed by casino-based employments.

Still, any region that’s gambling on casinos saving their economy is placing a pretty foolish bet. The smart money’s on industries that are more sustainable.

Losing Lbs., one Oz at a time

I haven’t watched a lot of Dr. Oz.

When it comes to TV doctors, I prefer the old fashioned kind – Jim Kildare, Marcus Welby, Doug Ross, and even Greg House. In other words, fake doctors who stick to doctoring, and don’t’ get caught up in being celebrities.

Oh, I don’t mind the occasional commentary by Dr. Nancy Snyderman on NBC, or our local version, Dr. Mallika Marshall. But, when it comes to my personal health, mostly I’ll take my doctors straight, one-on-one, focused on me and my health, even if it’s only for the duration of my breeze-in-breeze-out appointment.

Sure, I’ll look online – Mayo Clinic, WebMD – for information, but I don’t want to get my medical advice from a “personality.”

So, to me, a little Dr. Oz goes a mighty long way. Decidedly not my medical cup of tea.

Thus, I wasn’t exactly upset to see him getting a bit slapped around when he appeared before the U.S. Senate Commerce subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance, which he did earlier this week.

The hearings were on slimy miracle diet cures.

Lawmakers are taking an interest in diet fads after a string of actions by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against fraudulent players in the industry.

The FTC is currently suing a Florida company that claimed its Pure Green Coffee product would help users shed 20 pounds in four weeks.

The campaign used footage from Oz's show where he discussed the alleged benefits of green coffee extract. (Source: The Hill)

Green coffee extract, eh?

Why am I having a flashback to Steve McQueen trying (unsuccessfully) to treat his cancer with coffee enemas?

Okay, you can’t blame Steve McQueen for making a last ditch effort to save his life, whatever the quackery involved.

But McQueen was an actor, and Oz is a bona fide doctor.

Oz, a bestselling author and cardiac surgeon, acknowledged to lawmakers that he had made the FTC’s job “more difficult,” but defended his motives.

“My job is to be a cheerleader for the audience when they don't think they have hope,” he said.

So, where does cheerleader end off and charlatan pick up?

“I have things I think work for people. I want them to try them so that they feel better, so that they can do the things we talk about every day on the show [like diet and exercise].”

Getting people to lose weight by eating less and exercising more – which, as far as I can tell, is the only sure-fire way to lose weight – is absolutely for the good. So why isn’t cheerleading around eating less and exercising more enough?

Oh, silly me.

It’s not enough because a) it’s boring, and b) we all want a miracle cure. Hey, let me slurp down some green coffee extract – while parked on my couch watching Dr. Oz (and Dr. Phil, while I’m at it). It’s a hell of a lot easier than eating just one Cheeto and doing a few sit ups. Maybe even use that green coffee to wash down a sleeve of Oreos.

But Dr. Oz, apparently, needs more than just old-fashioned pompoms and megaphones, and the chant of give-me-a-d for diet.

“When I can't use language that is flowery, that is exulting, I feel like I've been disenfranchised,” he added.

The “exulting” language that’s in question was Oz having categorized green coffee extract as “a magic weight loss cure for every body type.”

Oz is careful not to endorse specific products, but he does get all enthused about general categories. He then gets ticked off when specific products in those general categories use his “exulting” claims as endorsements, probably because he doesn’t make any money off of it.

The lead senator on the attack was Claire McCaskill:

“The scientific community is almost monolithically against you in terms of the efficacy of the three products you called ‘miracles,’ ” she said.

Oz didn’t exactly back down, defending himself by claiming that he doesn’t endorse any approach he doesn’t believe in.

And, of course, cheerleading, exulting, and flowery speech is what gets you higher ratings than a calm and boring old Marcus Welby would get by telling you to stop eating chocolate and get off your arse and get moving. Take it from someone who really does need to shed ten lbs., one oz. – not Oz – at a time.

Riding the rails (here and there)

On Monday, I took the commuter rail to Providence. It’s a trip I’ve made many times to visit my old and very dear friend Marie. Yesterday’s trip, like my recent visit to Ireland, was bittersweet. The occasion was the annual luncheon of a non-profit where Marie had worked for many years. Marie died in April, and the luncheon included a tribute to her.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I was on the local commuter rail this week, and – as is my general experience with it – it was clean enough, comfortable enough, and reliable enough.

Sure, I wish the leatherette seats weren’t that hideous Barney-purple color.

Other than that, count me as a satisfied customer.

For my trip to Providence, I purchased my ticket from a human being.

This was at Back Bay station where I don’t recall seeing a ticket machine. (At North Station, although I generally buy my ticket form a human being, there is a machine option.)

Anyway, last week, my train trips were in Ireland, on Eirann Iarnrod, Ireland’s AMTRAK equivalent.

While I was a bit nostalgic for the beat-up old Ireland trains I’ve used over the years, with their dirty orange engines and rackety passenger cars, it’s easy to be nostalgic when you don’t have to deal with something on a regular basis. The new Irish trains are sleek, modern, techie, and clean. And, unlike on Boston’s local commuter rail, where humans dispense tickets, collect tickets, announce stations, and (sort of) help you off, in Ireland, you barely come in contact with a human being.

Not that having human beings on the old Eirann Iarnrod were an unalloyed benefit.

On one Ireland visit, my husband and I took the train from Dublin to Enniscorthy.

We figured early on that the train was too long for most of the pokey stations it was stopping at, and our hunch was that Enniscorthy would have pokey station, too.

Which meant that passengers had to figure out which car was gong to be the magic one that you needed to be on in order to get yourself off on the actual platform, as opposed to, say, jumping off onto the tracks.

Unfortunately, the conductors seemed to have made themselves scarce, and the barman couldn’t tell us what car we needed to be in, either. We eventually found a couple of old ladies who knew what car you needed to be on to get off the train in Enniscorthy, so all we had to do was mind the gap, rather than, say, jump off onto the tracks.

Ah, the good old days.

No conductors on Eirann Iarnrod these days.

Once your train gets called, you slip you ticket into a machine that gains you access to the platform. And hang onto that ticket, as in some stations, you need to use it to get out.

On the train itself, the only human being you’ll see is the kid manning the tea cart. This will no doubt be robotized as some point in the not so distant…

Instead of humans, you get canned announcements – charmingly in both Irish and English – that all end with mind the gap and/or keep your feet off the seats.

As for buying the ticket, Eirann Iarnrod really, really, really wants you to buy it online. So much so that the charge will be nearly doubled if you actually have the nerve to go to the station and buy it there – even if you go to the station and use a ticket-dispensing machine, as opposed to queuing up to buy your ticket from an actual human. To add insult to injury, if you want a reserved seat – with your name electronically displayed over the seat – it’s free on line, but five euros offline.

Curiously, I was able to buy our tickets from Galway to Dublin (and reserve our seats) online but, when I went to buy our tickets from Dublin to Limerick, my credit cards were all rejected. (Pay Pal, unfortunately, is not yet up and running.)

So, grrr, grrr, grrr, a ticket that should have cost 30 Euros cost 53 Euros.

I’m sure that there must be some old rural Irish geezer with no Internet access workaround, so that old rural Irish geezers with no Internet access don’t get gouged. At least I hope there is.

But it was interesting to see that Ireland’s railroad is so much more technically advanced than what we have locally (or on AMTRAK, which I also take on occasion). And so avidly squeezing humans out of the travel equation.

I guess in some respects we’re just a public transpo and technology outback…

Ireland Abú

Well, I have to say I found Ireland a lot more positive, economically speaking, than I did last time I was back in 2011.

The people we spoke with were cautiously optimistic. Yes, things were on an uptick, compared to a few years ago.

There seemed to be fewer “ghost estates” – abandoned construction sites – than we saw in 2011. Maybe because some of them have been torn down.

Yes, there are still plenty of projects that seemed to have been stopped in mid hammer blow, in mid concrete pour, wheelbarrows tipped up on rubble heaps, making the housing estates look for all the world like a latter day Pompeii.

But there don’t seem to be as many obvious signs of construction devastation and ruin.

Certainly, the streets of Galway and Dublin, where we spent our time, were teeming with both locals and tourists. The restaurants and pubs were full.

In Galway, I went into the Penney’s to buy some wash cloths, and the store was full of Irish housewives, shopping away. So it wasn’t just the stores catering to tourists where there was buying.

I asked all of our cab drivers – Pat, Mike, Michael, Martin – how business was, and they all said that it was picking up.

We were in Dublin on Friday, the Friday before the Monday on which Bloomsday is celebrated.

Bloomsday!

This is the date – June 16, 19004 – on which James Joyce had his first time out with his eventual wife, Nora Barnacle. A first date that is famously commemorated in the novel Ulysses.

The celebration was already underway on Friday the 13th.

We saw a long-ish bicycle parade up Grafton Street, the riders all decked out in 1904-ish garb.

In the outside patio of Davey Byrnes pub, Bloomsday celebrants were sitting sipping red wine and, presumably, eating gorgonzola sandwiches – homage to James Joyce/Leopold Bloom, who stops there on his pilgrimage through Dublin.

Years ago, I was food-poisoned after eating bad oysters at Davey Byrnes.

Should have stuck with a gorgonzola sandwich, like the revelers who were sitting out there last Friday in their fake straw boaters.

Anyway, I’m just as happy we won’t be here for Bloomsday.

Hard to believe that most of those observing this literary high holiday will actually have read this near-impenetrable novel.

I did get through it, but it wasn’t the pleasure that Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners were.

But, literary-wise, I’m a traditionalist.

Ulysses was at least coherent and readable, unlike Finnegan’s Wake which, IMHO, is neither.

I’ve managed to machete my way through about 1/4 of Finnegan’s, and I scratch my head in wonder that anyone not familiar with Ireland and Catholicism can hack their way in. And how does this get translated into other languages?

I do understand the pleasure of just reading Finnegan’s out loud. And as I do have the familiarity with Ireland and Catholicism, I will get through it in its entirety. Eventually.

It’s on my bucket list, right up there with Venice.

What, I wonder, would James Joyce make of all the hoo-hah over Bloomsday?

Joyce, who famously said that "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."

Most say that he would despise it, but I think he was enough of an egoist that he’d get off on it.

(His only living heir, grandson Stephen Joyce, is best known for suing the pants off/complaining about anything that gets done in his grandfather’s name. I’m pretty sure he’d be appalled by the guys with the fake boaters sitting out in front of Davey Byrne’s.)

Meanwhile, the other James was much on my mind throughout this trip, my first trip to Ireland without my husband Jim since 1985, when we made our first trip there together.

This is a place that Jim very much loved, and where we very much enjoyed traveling.

We did some “memory lane” on this trip. Meeting up with friends at MacSwiggan’s in Galway. Having a wonderful dinner at the Malt House, also in Galway. A day trip to the Aran Islands.

Some of Jim’s ashes were interred, at his request, in Galway Bay.

Dublin was less “our town” than Galway, but my nieces and I walked by many places where Jim and I have been.

Bittersweet, for sure.

But Jim would have been delighted that our nieces, Molly and Caroline, so very much enjoyed their introduction to Ireland.

And that Ireland does seem to be on at least a bit of an economic rebound.

I couldn’t have Diggy forever, so Ireland Abú.

Inis Mór

Well, my nieces and I had a wonderful trip to Ireland: low on the purely touristic experiences, high on the just plain being there.

Not that we avoided tourism altogether.

We did spend a day on Inis Mór, the largest – pop. 800 -  of the Aran Islands,which are off the coast of Galway/Connemara.

My husband I had made two trips to Inis Mór, maybe 10 years back, maybe 20 (maybe earlier – time does tend to scrunch up).

On the first trip, on a typical Irish cool and rainy day, we took a ferry over – The Queen of Aran – which we quickly nicknamed the Shah of Iran. The boat was small and unlovely, and we got the message that we were in for it when we saw, hanging from each of the portholes in the cabin, a plastic shopping bag. We had been pre-warned by a friend who’d journeyed to Inis Mór in the early 1960’s, in the pre-plastic bag era, when they set out old pots and pans for seasick travelers to use.

Anyway, by the time Jim and I figured out that we needed to be on deck, and not in the “comfort” of the cabin, it was too late.

I couldn’t even reach the plastic bag, but lost it in the Sunday Boston Globe travel section on the Aran Islands, which I had just been reading. Jim, for whatever reason, refused to give it up. He just put his head – a head which was sweating profusely and had turned a nasty shade of grey-green – down on the bench and closed his eyes for the duration.

There wasn’t much on Inis Mór, but one of the townswoman had a small shop in her front room, and we were able to buy the last package of Dramamine on the island. So we were good for the trip back.

On the island itself – back in the day – there was a pub that we went to, in which a traditional session was going. The local fishermen – enjoying a day off (it was Sunday) – performed an incredibly intricate, loud and agile circle step dance, while hooting and hollering in Irish.

On that first trip, we also walked up Dún Aonghasa (Dun Aengus),the cliff-side fort on Inis Mór, where my husband scared the crap out of me by going over to the unfenced edge to look over.

Before we walked back to town, we took a rest on a stone wall at the foot of the climb to Dún Aonghasa, where a cow who’d been grazing sauntered over and stuck his head between us.

Not much was doing on Inis Mór, back then. The pub, Dún Aonghasa, the cow…

Fast forward a few years, and we flew over in a small (six-seater, I think) plane.

When we made our reservations in Galway, the woman told me that there was a weigh-in for the flight. When I mentioned that I wouldn’t be able to lose 10 pounds by the next morning, the woman told me, “Don’t worry. It’s very discreet.”

Well, I guess if you consider a scale with a face the size of Big Ben (facing out into the waiting area) “discreet.”

Inis Mór was a bit more built up, the second time around, with a modern tourist center.

It was at the tourist center that we enjoyed one of our favorite Irish experiences.

The only other person on our plane was a woman named Sheila, with whom we ended up spending the day.

She wanted to exchange some dollars at the tourist bureau, so we accompanied her there.

The woman running the desk told us that she wasn’t the person who did the currency exchange, but that she’d check and see whether the vice-president in charge of Aran Island money changing was available. She went behind a curtain, not six feet from where we were standing, and the next thing we heard was yer woman saying, “So,I’m to tell them you’re not here, is it?” (They don’t call it an Irish whisper for nothing.)

We had lunch in a little restaurant that hadn’t been there the first time around.

Things were, on trip two, more touristic than they’d been on trip one.

On both of those earlier trips, we’d taken the bus up from Galway to Rossaveal, and there wasn’t much build up along the way, especially once you passed Spiddal.

Trip Three to Inis Mór showed just how many changes had occurred over the years  - maybe 10 years, maybe 20 (maybe earlier – time does tend to scrunch up).

First off, the weather could not have been more perfect.

After two pelting days in Galway, it was sunny, balmy (by Irish standards), and the blue sky had nothing but big puffy white clouds in it.

Second, the area between Galway and Rossaveal was much more built up.

Sure, there were a few abandoned construction sites, but not as many as I would have predicted. Mostly, there were loads of what appeared to be new suburban and vacation-homes.

The pier in Rossaveal was pretty new, and the ferry boats were large – seating hundreds, not dozens – and stable.

I had prophylactically taken a Dramamine, but it was in no way necessary.

Progress!

The Inis Mór pier was new, as well.

And there were a lot more shops and pubs around. There was even a SuperValu supermarket replacement for the front room shop run by The Missus.

We had lunch at a lovely little restaurant at the foot of Dún Aonghasa, where there was quite a little shopping center: a couple of cafes, shops selling Aran sweaters, and other goods aimed at tourists (including the usual POS keychains, etc. – which, were also available in one of the shops near the pier). The restaurant served a lovely salad, made with Inis Mór goat cheese.

Another change was that you now had to pay to climb up Dún Aonghasa. Not to mention that, if you were gong to be there during the summer, you could take evening yoga classes up there. The cliff side remains open, and, needless to say, I didn’t get anywhere near the edge. (And yes, my nieces – especially Caroline – got a bit too close to the edge for my comfort. They weren’t alone. Most people drifted quite near to it, and many were a lot more dare devil than either Molly or Caroline were.)

I told the girls that my bet was that the yoga instructor was not a native of the Aran Islands. (Nor, I suspect, was the guy weaving and selling baskets as we climbed up to the cliff. Nor the goat farmer that made the cheese in the very tasty salad I had for lunch.)

We took a mini-van tour around the island, and the driver told us that, in the last ten years, tourism had replaced fishing as the primary industry.

The good news, of course, is that you’re not likely to drown from tourism.

So I suppose that, on the whole, the Aran Islands are now more prosperous and comfortable than they were back in the day.

Still, it was comforting when we went into a pub while waiting for the ferry back to the mainland and found that the bar was loaded with old geezers downing pints of Guinness and gabbing away in Irish.

Sure, they were wearing jeans and baseball caps, but it was good to see that some things have stayed the same.

I just wish that there’d been some ceili music playing, and that the old geezers had gotten up and done a bit of a dance.

Whither Pink Slip?

Taking the day off to enjoy Dublin with my nieces.

Maybe afternoon tea at the Shelbourne Hotel (a grande dame which I’m a bit disappointed to note is now a Marriott). Or maybe poor-man’s tea at Bewley’s.

Maybe poking around Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, wondering why the Church of Ireland, which had relatively few members compared to the R.C.’s, felt entitled to grab the beautiful old churches.

Maybe looking at the Book of Kells and thinking about what it must have been like to be one of those civilization-saving monks back in the day.

Anyway, back on Monday, with some posts about the Ireland trip.

Memento Mori

I will be the first to admit that one of the best things about museum-going is going to the museum shop. Some museum shops are so alluring that, on occasion, I’ve been tempted to bypass the museum entirely and just get to the goodies. It’s not that I ever end up buying all that much in a museum shop. I just like looking at how the museum manages to commercialize their collections.

Probably the strangest – and, admittedly, least tasteful  - item I ever bought in a museum shop was at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, a JFK museum located in the old Texas Book Depository building, from whence Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy. It was a pen with a photo of Jackie in the (in)famous pink boucle suit and pillbox hat, mercifully taken before her husband shot, so not yet bloodstained. Nonetheless, it was supremely tasteless, so supremely tasteless that it may no longer be available. (I checked the online store and it’s not there.  Which is not to say that it isn’t in the store itself. If this tie is any indication, they sure don’t have a problem with tacky.)

Anyway, in my experience, historical museums tend to have more kitsch on sale than, say, hoity-toity art museums, where stuff just seems to be more elegant and brainy.

Not all historic museum shops are full of kitsch, of course. There was a shop at Auschwitz, and I’m pretty sure I stuck my head in just to make sure there were no “My grandparents went to Auschwitz and all they got me is this tee-shirt” goods on sale. I think it was mostly books, and maybe some pictures – of what, I’m blanking on. But I’m pretty sure there were no snow-globes, baseball caps, or pens depicting prisons in striped suits. Fast forward another hundred years or so, and nothing would surprise me.

The museum shop that’s creating the furor of late is the one at the just opened National September 11 Memorial Museum.

The shop, of course, is just one of the many things that people – most appear to be family members of victims  - are complaining about. Some don’t like that the unidentified remains will be housed (note: not displayed) at the site. Some are angry that a fancy-dancy reception was held at the museum. Some are ticked off that there’s an nice café going up there.

Okay, so all museums don’t have remains on prem, but the complainers need to keep in mind that the lifeblood of any museum is not general admissions, it’s donations. And hosting receptions, running a café, and, yes, having a shop where visitors can buy souvenirs.

As museum shops go, I didn’t find the 9/11 memorial too chocked with ultra-tacky, ultra-tasteless wares. I might raise an eyebrow at the twin towers Christmas ornament. And those guardian angel tchotchkes honoring first responders aren’t my cup of tea. And the stuffed search and rescue dogs, while definitely cutie-pie, may be a tad too cutie pie. (Awww…..)

But most of the stuff seemed pretty bland – mugs, lanyards, key chains with subdued images on them. And plenty of the run of the mill NYPD/NYFD that you see all over the place.

There was one item, however, that so many took umbrage with that it was immediately taken off the shelves. And that was a commemorative ceramic platter with markers at NYC, the Pentagon, and the place in Pennsylvania where United 93 crashed. I believe those markers are hearts. Pretty tacky, but it could have been worse. Those markers could have been little airplanes. Or it could have been billed as a pastry board – “Let’s roll!”

Still, it’s pretty bad. But I don’t imagine that the store would have sold all that many of them. If nothing else, what tourist wants to lug this home? I’ll take a couple of the lanyards, please.

Eliminating the cheesy cheeseboard from the stock items does raise the question of where the remainders – note that’s remainders, not remains – go.

Does the manufacturer take them back, yank out the hearts, and turn it into a just plain vanilla, good old US of A platter? Can’t be easy taking off the hearts without leaving a scar… Or do they end up in third world countries, alongside the tee-shirts touting the losing team in the latest Super Bowl as the winner?

The museum (and its shop) are taking the pushback seriously:

Responding to criticism of the gift shop since the museum's dedication earlier this month, Joe Daniels, president of the memorial foundation, said Wednesday in an interview that the museum would enlist more help in vetting products from the 9/11 family members who sit on the foundation's board.

Merchandise reviews, he said, will now take place in the museum store itself, allowing the vetters to see the items in the context of what many regard as a sacred space.  (Source: WSJ Online)

Well, that’s good. As it is a sacred space, especially, I’m certain to those who lost a loved one on 9/11.

Last fall, before the museum was completed, but when the memorial itself was open, my husband and I visited the site, on what turned out to be our last trip to NYC. We didn’t spend a lot of time there – it was crowded, it was hot, Jim was in the midst of chemo, and, in truth, it wasn’t Jim’s “thing” to begin with – crowd, heat, and chemo aside. But it was very lovely, and it was very moving.

And to keep it so, the museum shop will need to keep selling “stuff”. That’s just a fact of museum life.

Nice to have the family members on the foundation’s board help vet the items that get sold, but nothing is going to be to everyone’s liking.

As for that ceramic platter, I would have let the market do the talking. Seriously, was anyone actually going to buy these things?

Kingdom come, kingdom go

Well, I’m in Ireland, where some claim that everyone’s descended from kings.

I’m a bit dubious.

Personally, I think that, if I went poking around the bogs, I’d find that my ancestors were sitting around in a dirt-floored hovel, staying warm by huddling with their pigs and tossing an occasional clump of turf, with clay pipes clamped in their toothless mouths.

Of course, back in the day, this may have been how Irish royalty lived, so maybe there is something to be said that we’re all of royal blood.

But Ireland pretty much ran out of royals quite a while back. (The flight of earls in the early 1600’s?) Any kings or queens after that were Brits and, let’s face it, who wants to be descended from them?

And who wants to be a monarch in this era of 24/7 “news”, insanely aggressive paparazzi, and the generally celebrity-besotted culture we live in, in which the average gawker feels entitled to see and hear everything – right down to the thong-clad posterior of Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton – that has anything to do with the royals (by blood or marriage or dating)?

But, let’s face it, at least in the English-speaking world, most of our interest is focused on the British royals which is no doubt a function of the British royals being English-speaking – hey, they’re just like us – and the fact that they actually attend to a lot of (however unnecessary) royal duties, like cutting ribbons at pre-schools and patting the knees of soldiers in infirmaries, and having fancy-schmancy weddings that get televised.

So we don’t tend to know a lot about lesser royals in other countries, other than to laugh up our sleeves at titled poseurs who occasionally make some sort of a news splash. (Ho, ho. Prince Von Sturm und Drang dropped trow in Gstaad in front of Lady Gaga.)

Thus it’s a nice change of pace to hear a bit about other royals, what with the news that Spain’s King Juan Carlos is calling it quits after a 39 year reign.

“A new generation deserves to come to the front line,” the 76-year-old king, who has suffered from health problems, said in a televised statement from his palace near Madrid. “My son Felipe, the heir to the crown, embodies the stability which is the monarchy’s identity.” (Source: Business Week)

Juan Carlos was born while his family was in exile following the Spanish upheavals of the 1930’s that resulted in the long and brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco. And speaking of Franco, Juan Carlos has the dubious distinction of having been anointed by Franco, who named him his successor as head of state in the late 1960’s – that old softie.This resulted in JC’s getting enthroned a couple of days after Franco passed on, putting the Spanish royals back in business. (On the plus side, Juan Carlos does get some credit for helping Spain make the transition from Franco-rule to democracy. Having spent a couple of weeks in Franco’s Spain, I can affirm that this can only be seen as a good thing.)

Anyway, Juan Carlos, at 76, is hanging up his crown in favor of his son, Crown Prince Felipe.

It’s not clear what exactly the King of Spain does, other than function as the titular head of state. Maybe if you’re on the ground in Spain, you have a better perspective on what he does, other than swan around representing tradition and stability, and inciting the ire of anti-royalists.

By the way, Juan Carlos is not the first Euro-royal to give way to the younger generation in the past couple of years. Queen Beatrix of Netherlands and King Albert II of Belgium both retired last year. And while he didn’t give us his throne for a son or daughter, I guess you could say that Pope Benedict XVI abdicated, as well.

Just don’t expect to see any torch-passing among the only royals who really matter, i.e., the Brits.

Next year, knock on ermine cape and diamond tiara, The Queen will pass Queen Victoria’s tenure as the longest reigning monarch in British (and modern European) history. Even if she did feel like giving it up to Charles and Camille, or asking Charlie to step aside in favor of Wills and Kate, she’s not likely to do so until she’s eclipsed Victoria’s record.

Me, I’m just as happy to be sitting here in the land of saints and scholars, rather than the domain of kings and queens.