Test Drive? Not for much longer.

Test driving the car of your dreams may soon be a thing of the past. Not that it’s an experience I have a car-load of experience with, but I’ll miss it nonetheless.

Un-American as it may well be to admit, I’ve never been much of a car owner. I’ve lived, worked, and gone to school in cities. The great thing about cities – if you pick your spots right – is that in a lot of them you don’t need a car. In my mid-thirties, I got my first car when the company where I was working upped stakes from on-the-Red-Line Cambridge to off-the-public-transpo-grid Lexington. That first car was a used Honda Civic, a 1981 I think, that I bought from a colleague. I don’t think I test drove it. I just gave her a check for $2K and took possession.

The car was from the era when Civics were complete rust buckets. The color: dirty white with authentic rust accents. The car had 52,000 miles on it, and got me where I had to go, which was to Lexington and, later on, to Lowell. But it got rustier by the day. Then the driver-side door permanently locked, so I had to use the passenger side door, humping over the gear-shift to get me into the driver seat. And then it started to give out, making a terrible noise when I was in fourth gear.

Emergency: I had to get a car. A new car. I went to Pride Lincoln Mercury and test drove my Mercury Tracer on the Lynnway. It was an enjoyable experience to drive a car that you could shift with ease, and that didn’t require you to stomp on the clutch to get it in. My friends Peter and Tony drove me to the dealership – it wasn’t clear that my car would make it - and Tony (speaking Greek to the salesman) negotiated the deal, which got me $100 on the trade-in for my Civic, sight-unseen. The next day, my Civic chugged its way to the dealership, never making it out of third gear. (In fourth, it definitely sounded like it was going to blow apart.) When I got to the lot, the car choked and died. The sales guy told me that, if he’d seen the car, the trade-in value would have been zero. But I had my first ever new car, and had had my first ever test drive.

But we’re entering the era of the no test drive, no showroom car buying experience, big time.

Cadillac, it seems:

…has plans to replace showrooms with physical vehicles on-site to ones with virtual reality headsets for customers to use, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Cadillac’s president Johan de Nysschen will reportedly soon ask store owners to commit to switching to the virtual reality headset model. At the revamped showrooms, customers can learn about new products with the headsets. (Source: Fortune)

It’s not clear whether these headsets will provide info-only, or whether they’ll also allow people to do a test-drive a la Flight Simulator. But surely that’s where it’s going. With all the technology around today, it’s certainly going to be possible to simulate everything, from the dashboard right down to that wonderful new-car smell, and the feel of fine Corinthian leather – or whatever luxe material they use for the seats in Cadillacs. 

I find it pretty interesting that it’s Cadillac going this route, rather than some hip, young-skewing brand. Can’t you just picture Uncle Arthur in his fly-boy sunglasses and Sans-a-belt pants putting on his headset and virtually test driving his new Caddie? Of course, my image of the Cadillac driver is an old geezer, when in real life the average Cadillac owner is probably my age. (Which I guess makes them old geezers. Sigh…) Which means that they are not likely to be technologically-averse. Unlike the ancient Uncle Arthur of my Caddie-driving imagining.

Whether this approach backfires on the Cadillac demographic or not, it’s pretty clear that the test drive will be yet another experience of the past.

After I left Wang for another job on the Red Line in Cambridge, I sold my car through an ad in the Want Advertiser. I can’t remember if the guy test-drove it or not. I was just happy to once again be car-free.

Then that Red Line company re-lo’d to Burlington. So once again I needed a car.

This led to my second (and probably final) test drive, and the purchase of my second (and probably final) new car. That car was a New Beetle, purchased in 1998 when they were the Next New Thing.

I test drove a Newbie just to get the feel of it, but that test drive wasn’t necessary at all. For me, the New Beetle was love at first sight. Who needed love at first test drive? All that Baby Boomer nostalgia, plus a flower vase. What’s not the love?

I had to get on a wait list to get that car, and I bought a blue one, even though I’d never even seen a picture or sample of what that blue looked like. I had some nervousness about whether the color would be an ugly reflex blue, but it was quite pretty. i enjoyed that car but, once again, once I no longer needed it to commute, I got rid of it. Volunteers of America came and hauled it away, and I got a tax deduction.

Pay phones. Newspapers. Test drives. Yet another thing to miss, even though you don’t actually need them.

But life goes on. Driving does, too, until the self-driving car renders the entire thing obsolete. Guess we’ll have to settle for virtual test rides.

It used to be good to be Elizabeth Holmes (didn’t it?)

Yesterday, Pink Slip wrote about the list of the wealthiest women, self-made edition, in the U.S. Conspicuous for her absence was Elizabeth Holmes. Last year, Holmes, with a net worth of $4.5 billion, was on top of the pack. Today, she’s worth something closer to, well, zero.

Even by wunderkind standards, Holmes – who is all of 32 – is a wunderkind.

When she was nine years old, Holmes wrote in a letter to her father saying, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” When Holmes was 9, her family moved to Houston and then China, where she started a business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. (This according to Wikipedia.)

Hmmm. When I was 9 years old, I was writing letters to my cousin Ellen saying things like “our new baby cries a lot, but she’s really cute.” That was when I wasn’t newspaper clippings into my Ted Williams scrapbook. Or entering Big Brother Bob Emery’s Curlicue Contest. (With my fabulous Crayola rendering of a guy wrapped in bandages, sitting in a wheelchair, I was one of the prize winners.) So it’s not as if I were completely lacking in genius. Perhaps if I’d had the opportunity to live in China, rather than idling the hours digging a sandbox hole to it, I’d have started a business selling the 1959 equivalent of a C++ compiler. Nah….

Back to Holmes, fast forward a decade, and in 2003 she was onto that “something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” That something was a blood-testing device (dubbed Edison) that could work off of a finger-stick’s worth of blood, rather than those multiple vials that the phlebotomist draws when you need your blood tested. Based on her invention, Holmes was able to raise $700M+ in venture. Her company, Theranos, was valued at $9B.  

Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100 million, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value. (Source: Forbes)

That valuation is less than one-tenth of that $9B, and, at $800M, pretty darned close to the $724M that Theranos raised. Given the way the company is structured,Holmes hefty share of common stock would take back seat to those holding preferred shares in the event of a company liquidation. Not that this is necessarily going to happen, but that’s the scenario in which Holmes is worth nothing.

It’s entirely possible that Theranos will stage a comeback, and that the promise of being able to run dozens of tests from one drop of blood will be realized. The company will end up being worth $9B – or more – and Holmes will be back on top of the heap. And Holmes will win a Noble Prize. Or something.

Meanwhile,

The company has told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that it has issued tens of thousands of corrected blood-test reports to doctors and patients, voiding some results and revising others, according to the person familiar with the matter.

That means some patients received erroneous results that might have thrown off health decisions made with their doctors. (Source: WSJ)

This sure doesn’t sound good. Among the fallout from all this: relationships with Walgreen’s (their source of sales) and Siemens (technology partnership) are on the ropes.

So, at the moment, things aren’t looking so good for Theranos. While some are claiming that this is all a plot by the incumbent blood labs and equipment makers who are afraid of Theranos the Disrupter, and that a lot of the animus being directed at Holmes is because she’s a striking, young blonde, others are claiming that there is no special device – that the entire enterprise has been nothing other than an emperor’s-new-clothes fraud from the outset. And that Holmes should be in jail.

I don’t have a dog in this hunt. Whatever’s going to happen with Theranos and Holmes is going to happen to Theranos and Holmes. Maybe she actually is a genius. Maybe her only real genius is for self-promotion and “image.” (Like Steve Jobs, she only wears black turtlenecks.) Whatever happens, it can’t feel good to have gone from being the richest self-made woman in America to someone worth zero.

The sisterhood is powerful (and some of them are rich)

As they did last year, Forbes has once again gifted us with a list of the wealthiest self-made women in the US. Self-made, of course, leaves out the wealthiest person in Massachusetts, Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson, who made her money the old-fashioned way. She was clever enough to be the daughter of Ned Johnson, CEO of Fidelity. (And Ned was clever enough to be the son of Fidelity’s founder, so cleverness obviously runs in the family.)

Giving the list a bit of a browse was interesting. Number one of the list was Diane Hendricks who, with her late husband, started ABC Supply (“the largest wholesale distributor of roofing and siding in the country”). Not only had I never heard of Diane Hendricks, I’ve never heard of ABC Supply, either. This is no doubt because I’ve never been in the market for roofing or siding. I did check, and there’s plenty of them around here.

The second name on the list was more familiar: Oprah Winfrey, who built her fortune solely on her own – no hubby on the scene for Oprah. But that’s entertainment, which just doesn’t seem as solid, as robust a way to get rich as roofing and siding, or technology. Which is how number three, Judith Faulkner founder Epic Systems (healthcare IT) made the cut. And it looks like she made it on her own. Tying for third-place is another co-founder-with-husband, Doris Fisher of the Gap. She came up with the name, by the way. Her husband was leaning towards “Pants and Discs.” So while Doris was “just” the co-founder, I think it’s safe to say that her naming acumen saved the company from being a one-storefront venture that went out of business in a year or so. (“Pants and Discs.” Oy! Definitely one of the worst company names ever. Right up there with comedian Peter Cook’s fictional Frog and Peach restaurant, which served two items: Frog a la Pêche and Pêche à la Frog. My husband and I had a couple of restaurants that we referred to as Pêche. And, yes, the old dining room at the Ritz, you were one of them…)

Rounding out the top five on the wealthy women list is Johnelle Hunt, another widder lady who, with her late husband, built J.B. Hunt trucking.

The list is full of women you’ve probably heard of – Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, Madonna; women whose products/companies you’ve –probably heard of – Sara Blakely of Spanx, come forth and be counted!; and some who, to me, were neither. (C.f., Judy Love, who had a truck stop/gas station company.)

Lots of fashion names on the list: Tory Burch, Donna Karan, Vera Wang. (Let me note here my one degree of separation from Vera: I once worked for a company run by her ex-husband.) And lots of entertainment names: Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, and – wow, just wow – Judge Judy. (Let me note here my close encounter with Her Honor. My husband and I once saw her dining out a Shun Lee East in NYC. Jim had a just incredible ability to spot “celebrities”, even somewhat obscure ones like Judge Judy. At the same restaurant, we also once saw talk-show host Virginia Graham, and some members of the cast of All My Children.)

Writer Nora Roberts is on the list. She’s worth $340M, and has churned out over 200 books. I’ve read nary a one of them, but maybe I should, in hopes of finding out – even at this late stage in the game o’ life – how to make writing about something other than technology pay. (Danielle Steele – another writer I’ve never read – is also among the wealthiest women in the country.)

New to the list this year are Patricia Mill and Barbara Bradley Baekgaard.

The pair, who were neighbors and friends, got the idea to make colorful bags while at an airport in Atlanta. They each borrowed $250 from their husbands and got to work in Baekgaard’s basement. Today Vera Bradley sells half a billion dollars worth of bags and other accessories a year. (Source: Forbes.)

Okay, is it just me, or is it pretty pathetic that they had to “borrow” $250 a piece from their husbands. They founded the company in 1982 and they had to ask their husbands for $250??? At least they turned it into something, thanks to women who like colorful, quilted bags. (Nothing wrong with liking colorful quilted bags. I’m the proud owner of a VB duffle, a tote, a wallet, and an eyeglass case.)

The youngest person on the list, and the woman who comes in 60th, is Taylor Swift. I am a fan. You go, girl!

Anyway, it’s an interesting read. Here’s the full list if you’re up for it.

Happy Campers

I saw an article on Bloomberg the other day on all sorts of fancy-dancy camping gear. (E.g., a tent with “solar panels that connect to USB charging stations.”) I came away from reading the article with two things: a desire to get me a pair of Versitrail light-weight hiking boots, and a stroll down memory lane.

I didn’t grow up camping.

I did have a couple of friends whose families camped, but crowding into a damp tent with 5 kids was not my parents’ idea of the way to spend an hour, let alone a weekend, let alone a vacation week. And, in truth, it’s safe to say that their offspring felt pretty much the same way. It’s not as if we were going on lavish trips (hah!). But we were better off crowded into a car heading to a crowded rental cottage on the Cape or heading to Chicago, where we crowded into my grandmother’s lake house, where 15-20 people shared a single bathroom. But wherever we were spending our vacation – at the Cape, in Chicago, or staying at home and taking day trips – we knew we’d be sleeping under a roof and in a bed (even if that bed was shared with a sib or cousin).

But somewhere along the line, I decided to become a camper. Sort of.

My first foray was an overnight at Tuckerman’s Ravine on Mt. Washington. It was the summer before my senior year in college. Internships didn’t exist back in the day – at least for the likes of me – and my roommate, Joyce and I, were waitressing. We had a couple of days off and decided to head up north. To say that we didn’t know what we were doing is to understate the situation. Between the two of us we had a Boy Scout knapsack, another cheesy backpack, a WW II canteen, and two really lumpy sleepy bags (which someone we met on the trail kindly roped to our backpacks: we were carrying them in our arms). Forget Versitrail hikers: we wore our waitress shoes, the sturdiest footwear either of us owned. Our supplies included two ham sandwiches and two Table Talk cherry pies.

We slept quasi-out in lean-twos at the base of Tuckerman’s, and headed back down the mountain early the next morning, after Joyce was bitten in the eye by something flying, and had her eye blow up to the size of a grapefruit.

Despite our complete and utter lack of experience and competence, and Joyce’s unfortunate bug bit, we enjoyed the experience enough to decide that, at some point, we’d go real camping.

Which we did two years later when we spent a couple of months driving around the country in a Karmann Ghia stuffed to the gills with camping gear.

We had definitely upgraded from our Mt. Washington outing. We had a decent-enough L.L. Bean two-person nylon tent, with a fly to keep out the rain; warm and unlumpy sleeping bags; egg-crate foam sleeping pads; a high-end (for the time) Burgess lantern that my brother Tom managed to lose a couple of years later; a Coleman two burner stove; a Coleman cooler; cookware and water bottles; and a hatchet – still around here somewhere – used to pound in the tent stakes. Instead of my waitress shoes, I had Raichle boots that I hung onto for years. Up until I decided that they were as heavy as cement blocks, and I wasn’t going to be hiking anywhere in them.

Cross country, we camped at state parks. We camped in national parks. We camped in private campgrounds (as a last resort). One night – was it in Sequoia or Grand Teton? – we ended up sleeping in the car after we saw a couple of black bear cubs playing in the well of our tent when we got back to our campsite after hanging out with the folks “next door.” One night in Georgia, we were flooded out by the remnants of some hurricane or another. And in the Blue Mountains, Joyce and I held hands and our breaths while we heard something sniffing around our tent. We were in bear territory, and had done the usual: keep all the food away from the tent, don’t use hand cream, etc. We were both thinking that this was it. We were going to die, mauled by a bear. And then the clouds parted and in the moonlight we could see, shadowed against the tent, that it was not a bear, but a skunk sniffing around.

The next spring, Joyce and I upped stakes and took some of our camping gear to Europe with us. The tent made the cut. Sleeping bags, foam pads. We couldn’t lug the Coleman stove with us, so we got a GAZ backpacking stove, and a set of collapsible cookware. We both invested in top-of-the-line Kelty backpacks.

Camping in Europe was different than camping in the States. Not much by way of gorgeous state and national parks (at least not in our experience), but most cities had some municipal campground, and we camped along the Seine in Paris and on a hill overlooking Rome. We camped on the beach in Spain, and on a couple of Greek islands. It wasn’t all camping. We did plenty of hosteling. But the camping was plenty fun, including the night of the midnight sun we spent at a Norwegian campground where, as it turned out, we were among the only civilians camping amidst the Norwegian Army, on some type of citizen-soldier maneuvers.

It is highly unlikely that I will ever spend another night of my life camping. I just can’t imagine the circumstances under which it would happen. So – other than a new pair of lightweight hiking shoes – I’m not in the market for any camping gear. But it was fun thinking back to the good old days, when I was a more than happy camper.

Duckpin bowling’s dying out. (And I thought candlepin was weird…)

The first time I went bowling was on an outing with the Junior Catholic Daughters of America. Not familiar with the JCDA? It’s the young lady (11-18 years of age) branch of the Catholic Daughters of America, which was the ladies’ branch of the Knights of Columbus. It’s an organization that I was member of during 7th and 8th grade. I don’t actually recall joining. I think that all the girls in our school may have been automatically enrolled. Anyway, we wore hideous kelly green skirts (perhaps in honor of the Irish heritage of the founding – and, at least in our parish, current – members) and white blouses. We had meetings where nothing much happened. We went to church – I remember putting on a chapel veil. And, every once in a while, we had an outing, like going to a rundown amusement park or bowling. (Fortunately, we didn’t have to wear our uniforms on our outings.)

On bowling day, I rolled a 13.

Admittedly, this is a truly terrible, eye-rolling-ly-bad score. But, back in those days, there were no bumpers to flip up to prevent gutter balls. Let kids learn the hard way! And this was, after all, candlepin, a variation on bowling that uses small balls, straight pins, and was, like the smiley face, invented in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Candlepin is hard.

Lots of people – not me, of course, the highest score I ever achieved bowling was 120 or so – have made perfect scores with ten pin bowling (or, as we called it, big-ball bowling). The highest score ever recorded for candlepin was 245. For women, the number is 207.

Candlepin was pretty much only played in New England and, when I was growing up, it was the more prevalent form of the game. There were, in fact, plenty of Saturday afternoon TV shows devoted to it, including my favorite, “Candlepins for Cash.”

And then there’s duckpin, an even odder duck in the bowling world.

Duckpin, like candlepin, uses a smaller ball, but the pins look like short stubby versions of ten pins. Like candlepin, duckpin’s also a local phenomenon, mostly played along the Eastern Seaboard, primarily in Maryland, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

And, as the NY Times recently told us, it’s becoming even more of a lost art than candlepin. Which is too bad for Pittsfield’s Amy Bisson Sykes, who is the world’s top female duckpin bowler, a bowler:

…who dominates a black ­and­ white pastime in a Technicolor world. Her sport is so yesterday that whenever another duckpin alley closes, the remaining alley owners descend like predatory relatives to cart off the mechanical parts of duckpin setting machines that have not been made in two generations. (Source: NY Times)

Those duckpin setting machines haven’t been made in two generations because the guy who invented it wouldn’t sell the patent to Brunswick when his company went out of business. Kenneth Sherman thought that Brunswick, which dominated the ten pin world, would just shut duckpin down and put it out of business. Effectively, that’s what happened anyway. Seriously, who wants to be a ball setter? (It was, I will note, one of the many crappy jobs my father held as a kid. Work was work.)

No new automatic pinsetters means no new alleys. Today there are 41 congress ­certified duckpin bowling alleys, down from nearly 450 in 1963.

I believe that’s bowling congress, not Congress congress certified. But, come to think of it, certifying bowling alleys might well be a better use of their time. Are you listening Paul Ryan? Nancy Pelosi?

Meanwhile, I didn’t look all that hard on the stats on candlepin, but I suspect that it’s on the decline as well. As is bowling, overall. (C.f., Bowling Alone.)

And:

To all those armchair athletes rolling their eyes instead of balls, let’s be clear: Odds are, you’d be lousy at duckpin. The grapefruit­size ball weighs less than four pounds and has no finger holes, and the squat duckpins look like out­of­shape cousins to the more familiar bowling pin. And even though a turn can include throwing three balls, instead of the two in the more common game of tenpin bowling, scores are still much lower. According to the United States Bowling Congress, there were 55,266 certified 300 games — that is, 12 consecutive strikes, for a perfect score — in the 2013­14 season of tenpin bowling. But there has never been a 300 game in duckpin bowling.

As all serious duckpinners know, a Connecticut man named Pete Signore Jr. came closest in 1992, bowling a 279.

Sure, that 279 is 10 percent higher than the candlepin record, but it still ain’t no 300. This all makes me feel less ashamed of my lousy JCDA candlepin score of 13.

Back to duckpin queen Amy Bisson Sykes. She became a duckpinner when her father decided to fulfill his dream and own a duckpin bowling alley. Sykes was 3 when he bought one, and soon she was on her way to record-setting (as a junior, she once rolled 262) and a place on the professional duckpin tour.

Hard to believe there is one, but there you have it. (There’s also a men’s version, not to mention candlepin pro bowling as well. I believe that most, if not all, keep their day jobs.)

I really like regional variations, little oddities, and hope that they never die out. I prefer jimmies to sprinkles, elastics to rubber bands, and bubblers to water fountains. I’d like to see the word “tonic” make a comeback. (For those not in the New England know, tonic=soda.)

So long live candlepin! Long live duckpin!

And may Amy Bisson Sykes bowl long and prosper.

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Thanks to my sister (and fellow JCDA alumna) Kath for spotting this article and rolling it over my way. Strike! (Or at least a spare…)

The Hershey’s Jerky Kiss-off

First, a couple of bits of disclosure:

• Other than a small, spit-it-out nibble of a Slim Jim (which may, in fact, have occurred in a dream), I’ve never actually eaten any beef jerky.
• I believe that the Hershey’s Kiss is a near-perfect piece of candy. It’s chocolate, it’s tasty, and it’s charmingly packaged.

Which is to say that I don’t know nuthin’ about jerky, but I don’t like what I don’t know.Isn’t jerky just dried up, skinnied down Spam? And, while I like most chocolate in general, the Hershey’s Kiss is on my short list of favorites, even though I recognize that it is not high-quality, worth-every-calorie chocolate in any way, shape or cutie-cute form. I just like popping a Kiss into my mouth once in a while. So I was a bit weirded out to read that a) Hershey’s may be in trouble; and b) that they may be relying on jerky to get them out of trouble.

Chocolate, it seems, is falling out of favor. Worse for Hershey’s, premium chocolate is eating into the market for old standbys, which are seen as less healthy. I am contributing to this trend. While I do love me a Hershey’s Kiss, I’d rather have a piece of something like Lindt. To me this is not so much about making a healthy choice – actually it has nothing to do with making a healthy choice – it’s just that Lindt tastes better. But health concerns are what’s driving some of the dip in chocolate.

With sugar widely branded a health boogeyman and Americans cutting back on sweets in favor of Greek yogurt and protein bars, Hershey saw sales fall in 2015 for first time in more than a decade. To help turn the tide, the company is betting on the growing appetite for dried meat.(Source: Bloomberg)

I like protein as much as the next guy. And while I probably could be a vegetarian, I do like meat. But getting my protein from dried meat? Not exactly a lip-smacking YUM.

“If it says protein on it, consumers will buy it,” said Carl Jorgensen, a director of wellness strategy at Daymon Worldwide, a retail-marketing firm in Stamford, Connecticut. “This is something Hershey has to do.”

Once again, I prove to not be every consumer. Just “saying protein” has yet to nudge anything off the shelf and into my shopping cart. Peanut butter need not say anything, protein-wise. And once again, it’s those millennials who have nudged us boomers onto the consumer shelf. Nobody cares what we’re munching on. Oh, “they” – the marketers – like us well enough when it comes to Centrum, Viagra, and Poise, but they apparently could care less about our edibles.

Americans, especially millennials, are snacking more than ever, noshing throughout the day rather than sitting down for three square meals. Hershey wants to ride that trend.

Hershey’s is jumping into snack world, with goodies that include snack bars made with acai – the kale of the berry world, “and jalapeno almonds and pumpkin seeds coated in protein.” The company is looking to build a $2B snack business, with one-quarter coming for meat products, including jerky.

Hershey didn’t build its growing jerky empire organically. In 2015, they acquired “Krave Pure Foods, a maker of premium beef jerky.”

Just the idea that there’s something called premium beef jerky out there... Sold at Whole Foods, yet, where it has failed to say protein to me. Maybe I skipped the jerky aisle. Then again, I’m not a millennial, so Krave may just keep mum as I stroll by.

Without me, Hershey has managed to double Krave sales, and they’re going to be expanding the product line with meat bars. (Is it just me, or does “meat bar” sound even less appetizing than “jerky?”)

Alas, “it’s not clear whether snacking can save Hershey.”

Not being able to save Hershey? Oh, I’m sure someone would pick it up for the brand name alone. Still, the thought of no Hershey’s…

I wouldn’t miss Hershey’s chocolate bars. I might miss Hershey’s Reese’s PB Cups, as they do combine those two personal favorites: peanut butter and chocolate. But I would definitely miss Hershey’s Kisses.

A kiss is just a kiss and all that, but sometimes you just need to peel that foil off and snack on something unhealthy for the body but good for the soul. Accept no substitutes. And even if it’s not an over-processed salt lick, and is something worthy of shelf space at Whole Foods – where, by the way, you can’t get buy a Hershey’s Kiss, thank you – jerky is no substitutes.

Sew long, Winmil Fabrics

I grew up in a sewing home. My mother made much of the clothing for my sisters and me, starting with the white shorts she made out of my father’s Navy whites, and the navy Easter coats she stitched up out of his dress blues. One of my favorite dresses – when I was maybe four or five – was a white pique cotton, printed with little flower carts. Although I can picture the fabric perfectly,  I still wish I had a swatch.

I liked going to the fabric store, thumbing through the pattern books- McCall’s, Butterick, and Vogue – and picking out the pattern and the material.

There were plenty of misses – that mustard yellow striped number – but enough hits (cool paisley dress with the dropped waist, the floral print a-line shift I wore to death).

Perhaps the biggest miss, however, was when my mother made bathing suits for me and Kath, and didn’t pick the material all that wisely. Kath’s was a blue-and-white striped ticking, and mine was a turquoise, black, and white checkerboard. Both immediately absorbed water and turned to lead bodysuits. These bathing suits resembled the “bathing costumes” of 1900, when folks would frolic in the shallows in massive garb. We wanted to actually swim a bit, and not just wallow in the shallows. But those suits were too damned heavey. Talk about wearing something to death. That summer, my mother gave in and ended up getting us store-bought tank suits.

Both of my sisters learned to sew and made a lot of their own clothing. I gave it a bit of a whirl, but never mastered the art.

Still, over the years, I continued to enjoy going to fabric stores to pick out material for curtains (which my sisters whipped up for me), and to cover dining room seats (which I could manage on my own, thanks to a good pair of clothing shears and a heavy-duty upholstery stapler). Last fall, in the midst of my reno project, I popped into Winmil Fabrics, in downtown Boston, and found a couple of remnants that went perfectly with the new-old loveseat for the den. The picture doesn’t do this justice. The fabric is simply gorgeous. For $24 I got enough yardage to have four pillows made, and to cover the seat of an old lyre-back chair.

Winmill is a funny place, and you have to wade through the polyester and sequins to find the good stuff, like the remnant table. But it’s just plain fun to go in. It’s such a throwback, with its wooden floors, and it was my go-to for buttons, thread, and press-on tape when I wanted to make curtains without bugging my sisters. Bonus points for the chatty proprietors.

There used to be fabric stores pretty much everywhere. In Worcester, there were plenty of places on Water Street. Weintraub’s, had a branch in Main South where my sister Trish was a salesgirl during high school. Woolworth’s also sold patterns and had some fabric, and I believe that department stores had sewing departments, too. At least I think that Denholm’s, the main store in Worcester did.

There are still fabric stores around – Zinman’s in Lynn has fabulous fabric. But, come June, there won’t be one around in downtown Boston. After 47 years, Winmil is closing, and its owners, Howard and Marilyn Held, are retiring. A dental office is going in.

When Held opened Winmil, Boston still had a garment district.

I remember those days.

I remember looking in at shops where the sewing machines were wearing. And the Dot Hosiery office and showroom for some reason stands out in my mind. The garment district was near Chinatown, where Winmil is located. And there was also an outpost near Boston Garden, where Forecaster of Boston raincoats were made, and where I once had a Kelly Girl gig in a factory that made jeans. (The brand was something patriotic. Was it Old Glory? There was a flag on the label. Anyway, Converse Headquarters is where that jean factory was located.)

All gone. All those stitchers and cutters are in Vietnam and Bangladesh. And no one, other than me the once or twice a year when I have a dress on, wears hose. (Me, I don’t like the look of chicken legs, and I have no desire to slather tanning chemicals on my leg so they won’t look like chicken legs.)

I suppose that next time I need needles or thread, I’ll have to get on Amazon.

Definitely not as much fun as going in to Winmil and chatting with the Helds.

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The full article on Winmil is here. You may need a Boston Globe subscription to access it.

Memorial Day, 2016

Memorial Day is one of those nice little three-day-weekend holidays that we don’t seem to get enough of. Funny, even though I don’t work anywhere near full time, and help myself to plenty of three-day-weekends (not to mention three-day-workweeks), I still enjoy the long holiday weekend, starting with the Thursday night traffic jam leaving Boston, now that a lot of three-day-weekends have turned themselves into four-day-weekends.

As always, there are a lot of tourists in town. As always, a lot of the locals are out of town, and if I still had a car, there would be plenty of places to park on the streets, which seldom happens in real life. As always – or at least for the last few years – there are flags on Boston Common, one for everyone from The Commonwealth who has been killed while fighting for our country. As always – or at least for the last few years – I will head over late this afternoon and help the volunteers remove the flags. We furl them into bunches of twenty, put a rubber band around the bunch, and put them in big Rubbermaid containers – stored and ready for next year.

Tough to think of all those lives – mostly young men – lost to war. And I guess it doesn’t much matter whether it was a good war or a not so good war. (“My war’s better than your war!”) And it doesn’t much matter, either, whether you were a gung-ho patriot or a reluctant recruit, grousing all the way. At the end of the day, you didn’t get to live the full life you would have had if not for that good or not so good war. Sigh…

On holidays, I always look back on what Pink Slip had to say the year before.

Last year, I posted about Ireland’s vote to legalize gay marriage. (Up The Republic!) My first Memorial Day post was in 2007, Decoration Day. That one pretty well sums up my feelings on the day. Some things don’t change much.

On Wednesday, I’m heading out to Worcester to go, with my cousin Barbara, decorate the family graves – geraniums, a couple of spikes, a begonia for my sister Margaret’s little grave in the shade.

Whatever you’re decorating, or not, Happy Memorial Day – especially to those who were in the service, and for those who have a flag on Boston Common, commemorating someone they lost.

 

 

There’s business casual (and then there’s business casual)

Today’s Friday, so – in offices across America – employees are showing up in business casual. In some places, this is a Friday-thing only. In others, it’s business as usual. In still others, it’s anything goes. (After all, if business casual is the norm, how else can you differentiate Friday, other than to have it be the adult equivalent of PJ day?)

At my office, anything goes is actually the norm.

Since my office is right next to my bedroom, I have been known to work in my PJs. Or in a robe, straight out of the shower. I sometimes work – before and/or after – in workout clothes. Mostly I wear whatever I’m wearing for the day – jeans, khakis, knit pants, fleece, t-shirt, sweater. Mostly I’m wearing shoes, but some days I don’t make it out of my slippers (which are moccasins, so actually do resemble shoes).

When I worked full time, the dress codes were really company- dependent, and ranged on a continuum from jeans-always-okay, up through business casual, to business just short of suit, to suits or equivalent (for the ladies: dress and jacket).

Even at the jeans-always-okay outfits, I generally stuck with somewhere between business casual and business just short of a suit. Once in a while, I wore jeans to work, but not often. Decent pants or a skirt, with a nice sweater or jacket, was my norm. Suits when seeing a client.

I tended to avoid jeans because, for a good part of my career, I was one of “them”, holding some sort of management position. I wouldn’t say I dressed for success. But I did dress to convey authority and seriousness of purpose. (That sounds so prissy and/or gaggy, but it’s true.)

But it didn’t bother me that most others dressed down. Other than the guy who showed up one day in a pair of exceedingly short cut-offs and what appeared to be a pajama shirt with holes in it (and what seemed to be small blood stains – ewwww). I had a good kidding relationship with this fellow, and I did tell him I didn’t want to see him showing up in this ensemble ever again. Fortunately, he took my advice. (Or not. I just checked out his profile on Linkedin, and in his picture he appears to be wearing a pale yellow pajama shirt. Hmmmmm….)

What’s happening now in the work place is not a quibble over just how casual business casual is. I.e., do jeans fit the bill, or do we draw the line at Dockers?

No, these days it’s whether it’s okay to wear yoga pants to work.

Sometimes Amy Mains wears black yoga pants to work. She adds a scarf, accessories, and a shirt long enough to cover her backside. "Just making sure everything is as crisp as it can be when you're wearing tights," she said. 

Like many office workers, Mains, 31, wants three things from her workwear: comfort, convenience, and a professional look. Her go-to Lululemons meet two out of three, allowing her to switch from her San Francisco communications job to a studio without need of a gym bag: "It's primarily for comfort, but I do a lot of yoga," she said.

On the style front, though, a few bangles and a long shirt can't distract from the fact she's wearing clothing made for sweating, not working. Her yoga pants may be a welcome escape from the restrictive tyranny of shift dresses, but they still aren't entirely office-appropriate. Mains knows this, reserving the stretch pants for days when she won't see many other humans.  (Source: Bloomberg)

I’m sure that Amy Mains looks fit and adorbs in her Lululemons, but I can’t help but thinking that this is not quite right.

In the 1980’s, when I was often wearing a suit (menswear skirt suit, silk shirt with some type of bow), a quite popular outside of work outfit was black stretch pants worn with a long, tunic sweater. It was comfortable and convenient, that’s for sure. And those long tunic sweaters did the strategic backside covering. But – and I may be blocking some memories out here – I don’t recall anyone wearing this type of get up into even the most casual of offices. I sure didn’t. 

Yoga pants?

Thanks to ponte pants, “a firm yet stretchy style with an elasticized waist—an industrial strength version of yoga pants that have become a workplace staple” – women do have a pretty decent comfy, convenient, and professional alternative. Admittedly, they may still have to carry a gym bag with their yoga get-up in it, but aren’t they carrying a gym bag with their yoga mat and water bottle in it already?

So I’m going to be a clucking old prude here and say that – maybe other than in the most casual of environments, and then only on Friday – yoga pants aren’t a good idea for the office.

But then I think of myself, walking around in my gym clothing.

I live downtown, in a big city. My gym is in the middle of downtown-downtown – stores, office buildings. And I certainly don’t change when I get there. I wear my gym clothes, which are pretty much the equivalent of yoga pants and a t-shirt, on my walk there. And on my walk home. Often on that walk home I stop in a store. I do food shopping at Roche Brothers. I bop into CVS or Staples for something. I may even drop by Macy’s, if I have something quick to pick up – nothing the requires trying on, but maybe some makeup or a new pillow. Through much of the year, I have a long-enough jacket disguising the yoga-pant-ness of my outfit. But this time of year, I guess it’s all hanging out.

So let me quote Pope Francis here. Yoga pants in the office? “Who am I to judge?” Just be sure to cover your assets, ladies.

That jacket’s very smart on you. (As a matter of fact, it is.)

Many years ago, I bought a pair of blue and white striped denim pants from Land’s End. Of course, they looked just fine on the young adorable model in the catalog, but I couldn’t tell whether they were just a bit on the fuddy-duddy side of the duds continuum.

Anyway, the first time I wore them, I went out to see my mother in Worcester. My Aunt Margaret was there visiting. I walked into the house, and the two of them began falling all over themselves to compliment me on the new pants. I’m guessing that I was about 40, which would have made my mother about 70 and my aunt about 80. Just what I wanted: two of the older set gushing over my new pants and wondering where they could get a pair of their own.

Well, the answer to that one was simple: one of them could have the pair I had on.

What I most remember is my aunt telling me how “smart” the pants were – one of her favorite descriptors when it came to fashion.

That may well have been the case in her mind, but those smart pants soon found there way into the St. Francis House donation bag. They were probably ragged. At least I never saw a homeless person walking around the streets of Boston with them on. (I have seen other of the more distinctive items that I’ve donated over the years.)

Those smart pants came to mind the other day when I saw an article on Bloomberg on a smart jacket that Jacquard by Google and Levi’s are collaborating on.

I wasn’t familiar with Project Jacquard. In fact, the last time I heard the word Jacquard mentioned – likely in combination with the word knit – was probably during the era when Liz and Peg were raving about those wretched pants. In fact, the words may well have been uttered by one of them. But Google’s Project Jacquard is ultra high-tech:

Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms.

Everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces.

First up, the Levi’s trucker jacket:

The Levi's® innovation team and Google teams joined forces to create a modern version of denim that is interactive and yet authentic, remaining true to the century-old tradition of denim manufacturing.

The smarty-pants Levi jacket is loomed up out of threads that have conductive, metal-based fibers in the material. Then there’s the removable “smart tag” that enables:

…the jacket to connect to your phone or tablet via Bluetooth. Gesture controls and specific functions can be customized with the help of a companion app, but there's no word yet as to whether that app will be immediately available for non-Android users. (Source: Bloomberg)

Not that I’m in the market for one of these suckers, but it’s nice to see something happening first for us Android folks, rather than the Apple i-brigades.

Among the tasks the jacket can perform: offering up suggestions for nearby coffee shops (or other types of venues), providing an ETA to your destination, and changing tracks on your playlist. All of the info is conveyed by audio, so you're not distracted by screens. By next spring, Google will release further details on battery specs and whether smart tags can be interchanged between garments; those logistics and the jacket's price are still in the works.

I’ll just bet the price is still in the works…Ka-ching.

As for me, I make far more modest demands of my jackets. I want them to keep me comfortable. Warm and dry.

Just the other evening I was thanking my lucky stars that I’d gotten a spring weight down parka this year so that I could be comfy at a Red Sox game when it was cool and damp (but not raining). That jacket was plenty smart enough for the likes of me, although I will say that when I bought it, I was unaware that the color of the annual Boston Marathon jacket was going to be turquoise this year. My heart did sink a bit on the day before the Marathon when I saw all these runners ambling around in their this-year’s-jackets.

Not that anyone would mistake me for a Marathoner, mind you. It’s just that I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was pretending to be one.

Despite the Marathon confusion, the purchase of that dumb jacket was a smart choice. This is New England, and there really and truly is a need for a down parka that’s lightweight and trim, and can be worn during the spring and fall when it’s cold but not that cold.

Sometimes I have had jackets that weren’t quite as smart. Take the supposedly rainproof summer windbreaker from LL Bean. I really wouldn’t have ordered it if the information had mentioned one key attribute: the jacket was porous. Who wouldn’t want that type of smartness in a jacket worn during a shower? What are umbrellas for, anyway?

I’ll leave the really smart clothing to the young folks for now. I have a hunch, though, that, as us Boomers trudge along into geezerhood, there’ll be plenty of need for smart clothing to zip itself up, to fasten those pesky bras, to save us with airbags from breaking a hip.

Bring it one. I just won’t need it to connect to anything via Bluetooth. I will not be needing the ETA of a 3 a.m. trip to the bathroom.

Nice work if you can get it.

Other than sitting around reading, I can’t think of an more ideal profession than working for a foundation. The thought of giving all that money to all those worthy causes, getting to play a real live Michael Anthony, who fronted for John Beresford Tipton on the 1950’s TV show The Millionaire…Well, what could be more fun?

Sure, you’d have to turn down many worthy causes, but think of how much fun it would be to filter out the true unworthies, the charlatans, the faux causes.

Thus it is that, when I have a PowerBall ticket in my possession, I spend time fantasizing about the foundation I would set up, and how I would dispense my largesse. I would not, of course, have to take any compensation, as I would have cagily reserved enough of the lottery winnings to set myself and those near and dear to me up for life.

This is not very likely to happen, of course, but – just in case – I will be going out and buying a PowerBall ticket later today.

Anyway, my secret and unlikely to be fulfilled career goal came to mind when I saw an article by Sacha Pfeiffer in the Boston Globe on a fellow who’d gotten himself appointed trustee to a private foundation. Mark Avery was no relation to May and Stanley Smith, whose charitable trusts he worked for. But he got his position as a trustee the old fashioned way. He inherited from his father.

Between his compensation – way back in 2003, when the Globe’s Spotlight Team did a series on trusts, Avery made $600K a year, plus legal billings (milk that cow!) – and his spending habits, Avery did quite well for himself vis a vis the Smith trusts, which together were worth $500M. But then Avery managed to burn through $52M from one of the Smith trusts. And it took him just six months. How did he manage that feat?

Avery’s blizzard of spending in 2005 included purchasing an air charter company (despite having no background in aviation), Gulfstream executive jets, World War II military aircraft, Czech fighter planes, helicopters, rocket launchers, a patrol boat, and a yacht. He also paid off more than $600,000 in personal debt and bought a $700,000 home. (Source: Boston Globe.)

And here, for your viewing pleasure, is what a $500K patrol boat looks like:

Avery won’t be needing it where he’s going. Which is the hoosegow. For 13 years.

[Ass’t US Attorney Steven] Skrocki and others launched a federal investigation in 2005, and discovered that Avery had persuaded his two fellow trustees — now dead, but at the time in their 70s and “medically challenged” — to “loan” him $52 million in Smith funds. Avery told them he planned to use the money to start an aviation company that would be used for trustee travel, according to court documents.

An aviation company for trustee travel. I see.

Instead, he went wild, making extravagant purchases that prosecutors said “did nothing” to benefit the trusts. Within months, the company was crumbling, Avery was on the cusp of bankruptcy, and the $52 million was gone

Avery would probably have been okay if he’d been content with his pittance of a trustee salary, and whatever he could wave the way of his law firm.  After all, another Smith trustee, Ruth Collins, appears happy with the $125K she draws for 10 hours of work each week. Plus a slight add on:

Her Corte Madera, Calif., company, Adminitrust, billed the Smith trust nearly $1.3 million in 2014 for “trust administration.”

This kind of self-dealing is actually legal, so you’d think Avery might have been a happy camper with his salary plus legal compensations. But it’s the old story. Avery just got greedy.

Now in my PowerBall-funded foundation, all will be on the up and up.

Once I go, whoever’s left holding the bag will get paid for their work. Up to an on the up and up point. Mostly, they’ll get paid to wind the thing down and pay the thing out.

No patrol boats, no Czech fighter planes. Just make some worthy causes happy. A list will be provided, with a few blank spots so that my trustees can add their own favorites. I’ll give them two years to close things out. A year to recover from their profound grief over my untimely demise which, whenever it happens, will no doubt seem untimely – at least to me. And a year to enjoy playing Michael Anthony to my John Beresford Tipton. Have at it!

Google invents the 21st century cow-catcher

As a card-carrying pedestrian, I have quite naturally been concerned about the coming of the self-driving car. Bad enough trying to catch the attention of some jamoke about to run a red light while texting when I’m in the middle of the cross-walk. Let alone trying to make meaningful eye contact when you’re jaywalking, which I believe is actually common-law legal in Boston. (Just like common law marriages are recognized in some states, the fact that everyone in Boston jaywalks just must mean it’s legal, if not exactly promoted.)

But what if there’s no pedestrian-hating driver to shake your fist at? No asleep at the wheel jerk who you can wake up by whacking the side of their car as it glides through a stop sign without stopping?

I suppose we’ll still be able shake our fists at the passengers. But the jerks we’ll be waking up won’t be asleep at the wheel. They’ll be dozing. Or carrying on with an all-important collaborative work conference. At best, our whack at the side of the car will startle them a bit. They’ll no doubt shrug their shoulders, give us a wan smile, and get back to the important business of business.

What will pedestrians be able to do in this brave new world? Maybe we’ll all be issued jetpacks, so we can hurtle over these self-drivers?

Perhaps there will be no need. Google – which has saved us in so many ways, c.f., from having to remember the name of the guy who played the butler on Spin and Marty (J. Pat O’Malley); from having to know how to read a map; etc – has come up with a solution to the problem of autonomous vehicles mowing down formerly autonomous pedestrians.

The company received a patent [last]Tuesday describing a way to reduce pedestrian injuries in an accident with a robotic vehicle. The impact of the crash, Google suggests, would expose a coating that glues the person to the front of the car. (Source: Mercury News)

"The adhesive layer may be a very sticky material and operate in a manner similar to flypaper, or double-sided duct tape," the patent said.

The pedestrian-as-fly-paper won’t do much to prevent the initial impact injuries, but will prevent anything more from happening when the body is thrown out of the way – or into the path of another car (self-driving or not). This approach, of course, is not without its downside. If, say, the self-driving car that caught you up in its gluey cowcatcher went on to smash into a building, or tree, or Humvee, you could end up worse off than if you were shot into the air and landed in a rhododendron bush.

As for “similar to flypaper.” Well, sort of. After all, no one would want the hood of their car to be covered with the insects, leaves, pebbles, Dunkin Donuts napkins, plastic CVS bags, etc. that would stick to the flypaper. So,

An eggshell-like layer covering the adhesive would protect the sticky surface during everyday driving, but shatter in an accident to reveal the glue.

If you’re wondering how easy it would be to get glue tough enough to hold you on the front of a car off – or to get you off of, “the patent included an option to use a "releasable adhesive" that would allow the person to be unstuck "after a period of time."”

Google may not go through with this invention, but just wanted to make sure that their intellectual property is protected just in case.

Overall, in the long run, we’ll probably be safer on the roads when vehicles are entirely autonomous. But that’s in the long run, in the meantime, we’ll be needing those cowcatchers.

My bigger worry is not about taking the driver out of ‘car and driver.’ It’s about what’s going to happen to the millions of truckers, UPS delivery guys, and Uber drivers when they’re no longer needed.

What, exactly, is it at the people are going to do when all the tasks that can be automated are automated?

Thanks to having been married to an economist, I understand that in the long run we’re all dead. But what are we all going to be doing in the meantime?

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A tip of the cap to my friend Valerie for shooting this one my way.

 

A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

Like any good Baby Boomer, I spent much of my childhood glued to what was then known as the small screen, and later on as the boob tube. Who cared what it was called? Although in our house we were all readers, card players, and game players, and no strangers to the great outdoors (where kids in the olden days played unless there was a hurricane), there was also plenty of TV watching.

Some shows we watched as a family: Ed Sullivan, Perry Mason, Sing Along with Mitch, Wagon Train, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, College Bowl. These were entertainment aimed at grownups, but they were pretty tame by today’s standards. And since most homes contained one TV, there was no doubt what show was going to be watched if there was something the kids wanted to see vs. something the ‘rents wanted to watch. There were, of course, viewing hours reserved for the kids, and the schedule included weekday day-timers like Captain Kangaroo and the Mickey Mouse Club, and all those low budget Saturday morning shows like Fury, Howdy Doody, and Range Rider.

And then there were the in-between shows that had “family” written all over them. Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver. The big attraction of these shows to use kids was that they had kids in them, and that’s what we mostly wanted to see. I was fascinated by any show that featured children, and early on interpreted them as providing a true portrait of how Protestants lived. Two-to-three kids, no one ever yelled, kids squabbles were nowhere near a blood sport, big houses with nothing stray sitting around – like a magazine or a library book… I didn’t know anyone who lived like that. I didn’t know any Protestants. Ergo…

The family I most envied on these Proddie shows was the Greggs on Bachelor Father. Who didn’t, at one point or another, want to dump their family of origin and go live with a rich, handsome uncle who doted on you? I didn’t like thinking through how this was going to happen. First of all, I really didn’t wish my parents and siblings dead. Just, on occasion, temporarily out of the picture. And I didn’t have an uncle like Bentley Gregg – played by the dashing John Forsythe – waiting in the wings to come swoop me up in his convertible while the rest of my family was, say, confined somewhere with typhoid fever, from which they would all recover in good time. The closest I came to a dashing uncle was my Uncle Jack, who was quite good looking and a part-time musician. But he had a wife and a kid, and no convertible, so he wasn’t going to swoop in and save me.

But I digress…

I don’t recall my parents ever shared the watching of the supposed family shows. I suppose they were sitting somewhere else, talking or reading Ellery Queen mysteries.

They must, however, have seen them occasionally, as my father dubbed the boy next door “Eddie Haskell”, after the sneaky-sly-phony friend of Beaver’s brother Wally. (My father had pretty good instincts that there was something no quite right about our young neighbor. Decades later this fellow went to federal prison on a kiddie porn charge.)

But mostly the family fare shows were kids’ terrain.

One with crossover appeal, however, was Mr. Ed, a show about a talking horse. Mr. Ed did not speak to everybody. He spoke only to his owner, Wilbur Post, and much of the plot revolved around people thinking that Wilbur was a bit dotty because he was often overhead talking to himself. Of course, of course, we in the audience were in on the gag. We knew Wilbur was deep in conversation with Mr. Ed.

A couple of time, Mr. Ed would break out and say something to a kid. When Wilbur would ask him why he took the risk of exposing himself as a talking horse, Mr. Ed would answer “Who’s going to believe a kid saying a horse can talk?” (I can’t recall the context in which it came up, but there were a number of occasions on which my husband would use this line, always noting that he was quoting from the famous Mr. Ed.)

It is difficult to explain, in this day and age of special effects – Mr. Ed’s lips moved when someone tugged on thin nylon thread under his lip - and sharply written dialog, just how funny and charming this little show was. Or at least is in my memory.

Of course, of course, I haven’t seen an episode in 50 years, but I remember liking it and finding it funny in a way that I didn’t find many of the supposedly funny shows funny. To me, the Lawrence Welk show was funnier (and least in the make-fun sense) than, say, Green Acres. No doubt I would find Mr. Ed ridiculous, corny and embarrassing. But back in the day, it was one of my favorites.

Anyway, Bamboo Harvester, who played Mr. Ed, died quite a while back. But Alan Young, who played Wilbur, died just last week.

When the show was being cast, the story goes that comedian George Burns, who ran the production company that was producing Mr. Ed, told his casting staff, “Get Alan Young. He looks like the kind of guy a horse would talk to.”

Not a bad epitaph, as epitaphs might go.

And we could, of course, all take a lesson from both Wilbur and Mr. Ed.

From Wilbur, we learn how to be a good listener, a good friend, and how to keep a secret.

And from Mr. Ed we learn – or not – to never speak, unless we have something to say.

So long, Alan Young. You done good by us little TV-watching Boomers.

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A Pink Slip shout to Rick T., my brother-in-law, who was hot off the press, sending me a link to this bit of news.

Rally for Ratt

I don’t know Rich “Ratt” Kennedy, but I do know his brother, Jake, the other half of Kennedy Brothers PT, where I have been an off-and-on patient and on-and-off gym member at the downtown Boston outpost of Kennedy Brothers for the past eight years. Knowing Jake, I know that Ratt is a marathoner, a genius at his chosen profession, and someone who is tirelessly engaged in the community. Jake, through his all volunteer non-profit Christmas in the City looks out for the those on the economic margins of society, mostly the kids. Ratt’s charity is the Angel Fund, which over the past two decades has raised over $4 million dollars to fund research aimed at a cure for ALS, the disease that took the lives of Jake’s and Ratt’s father, and their brother Jimmy.

I don’t know about you, but if there’s one nightmare life-and-death scenario, it’s ALS.
Sure, Alzheimer’s pretty dreadful, but, from what I understand, by the time you’re really a goner with it, it’s mostly terrible for those who care for you.

No one wants terminal cancer, and the end ain’t pretty. Having lost my husband and my oldest and dearest of friends within two months of each other in 2014, I fully understand that this is a really tough way to go. But both Jim and Marie had some degree of autonomy and agency, right up until pretty much the end.

I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my last exchanges with my husband – maybe a half hour before he died – was a little squabble over whether he should be getting up to go to the hospice bathroom or pee in the jug. Jim hadn’t been on his feet for a few days, so I voted for the jug. But, damn it, Jim wanted one of his last acts on this earth to be standing up.

The last time I saw Marie, a few hours before she was put under palliative sedation, she complimented me on the scarf I was wearing, and said “you’ve had that for a long time.” Sure, I agreed, maybe ten years. No, Marie told me, longer than that. At least twenty-five years. Well, I wasn’t going to argue with her, but I thought she was wrong.

When I got home that night, I looked at a picture taken at my mother’s 65th birthday, twenty-years ago. Damned if I wasn’t wearing that scarf.

Although they both drifted in and out during their last few days, both Jim and Marie were abled to communicate, to have conversations, right up until the end. Something that ALS victims are denied. I can't tell you how precious those last conversations with Jim and Marie are to me.

But let’s face it, when most of play out the end game in our minds, we want to go like my Aunt Margaret.

Peg was 85. The night before her death, she had some of her family, including her new great-granddaughter, over for dinner. On the day of, she got up, went to Mass, went to the Star Market, went to the library, and came back home. There, she lay down on the daybed where Nanny, my grandmother, had died nearly twenty years before, pulled an afghan that my mother had made for Nanny up to her chin, closed her eyes, and never got up.
Yes, the suddenness was awful for those of us who loved her – we thought she’d make it to 97, the great old age that Nanny had attained – so it was a true shock. But, really, who doesn’t want to go out this way?

But ALS…Is there anything worse? I really can’t come up with it, if there is.
And now Ratt Kennedy has been diagnosed with ALS.

Having seen his father and brother die from ALS, having worked with so many ALS patients and their families over the years, Ratt knows what he’s in for. There will be no more marathons, and no more being able to work at the job he loves. He’s a tough guy, incredibly fit, a fighter. But there’s still no cure as yet for this ghastly disease. Hopefully – and hopefully thanks in part of all the money that Ratt has raised – a cure will be found in time for Ratt, and for all the others. Let’s wish them 100 years, and then a close-your-eyes death on the daybed like Aunt Peg’s.

But until then, the friends of Ratt are looking to raise the money to help pay for experimental treatment for him.

The GoFundMe page is Rally for Ratt.

I graze through GoFundMe all the time. Sometimes I find the causes heartbreaking, other times interesting, often over the top, occasionally absurd. I’ve thrown a couple of bucks at a few things, but that’s about it.

But now it’s someone I almost know who needs help, and the need is anything but absurd.
If you’ve got a few spare bucks lying around, this would be as good a place as any for them to land.

Millennial experts? This is an actual profession?

Well, just when you think that the economy isn’t producing enough high-paying jobs, along comes a new career that was completely and utterly unimaginable just a few short years back. I give you the millennial expert.

What, exactly, does a millennial expert do?

Mostly they give companies advice on how to attract and retain younger workers. This largely comes down to making sure that work is “meaningful”, that there’s plenty of feedback to go around, and that schedules are flexible enough to allow time off, say, for someone who wants to “accompany a friend to a snowboarding competition.”

Which doesn’t sound all that different than what everyone has always wanted.

Of course, much of the meaningfulness of work was something we had to supply ourselves. You know, there’s just so much meaningfulness to be had in a company that produces mini-computers, or one that makes software to test other software. Still, we managed in the way folks have always managed to get out of bed on Monday and put one foot in front of the other. We found meaning in supporting ourselves and our families. In the inherent satisfaction of doing a good job. In the companionship of our colleagues. This was about as “noble purpose” as it got, unless you were in one of the naturally meaningful professions, like teaching, medicine, social work, et a few als.

But consultant Lisa McLeod, who’s 52 and who sometimes works with her 23 year old daughter, is all about the noble purpose thing:

The McLeods help companies set a “noble purpose” to strengthen young employees’ connection to their work, the elder Ms. McLeod said. For a concrete company seeking to boost employee engagement, she suggested that managers share stories of how constructing solid residential foundations helps people feel safe at home. She also advises clients to strip out numbers from internal presentations because, she says, millennials find stories more compelling than figures. (Source: WSJ)

McLeod rakes in $25K to give a keynote speech. If her daughter tags along, the ante’s up to $30K. I’ll bet that millennial daughter, who’s 23, finds making $5K a pop to speak millennial-ese a pretty compelling figure. Talk about noble purpose!

I’m now going back through every job I ever had looking for an n.p., and the closest I came is when I worked in the shoe factory, polishing boots that went to U.S. paratroopers and the South Vietnamese Air Force. This was the summer before my consciousness was raised and I started hopping on the bus to DC to protest a bad war. But when I was making those boots, I was serving the purpose of keeping those jumpers and fly boys shod.

While millennials crave noble purpose, they apparently loathe voice mail. Which may explain why, at one of my clients, where they disappear employees when they hit 40, employees don’t have work phones, nor do they generally give out their cell phone numbers. Fine by me, but I will note that, back in the day, calling someone – rather than emailing (this was pre-texting) – conveyed either urgency or the willingness to give the bad news and/or take responsibility live and in real time, rather than slip it into an email. Text, I guess, is the current urgency method – and I use text plenty (not so much with clients, but with friends and family), mostly to chat, share reaction to something in the news or on TV, check on plans, etc. – and it’s great. But some things seem to me to be worth a conversation. And, for the most part, when you’ve left someone a voice mail, you had intended to actually speak with them. (That is, unless you’re deliberately playing phone tag, weasel-y leaving messages early in the morning, at lunch time, late in the day.)

Ah, but what do I know about what the millennials want?

If I did, I could hang out my shingle as a millennial expert, rather than just some schlub who knows how to write clearly about B2B and T2T applications. I’d be joining a cushy market:

Intergenerational consulting barely existed a few years ago, but these are boom times. Source Global Research, which tracks the consulting market, estimates that U.S. organizations spent between $60 million to $70 million on generational consulting last year. More than 400 LinkedIn users globally list themselves as a “millennial expert” or “millennial consultant.”

The ones cited in the WSJ article, by the way, were mostly non-millennials. One fellow was in his early thirties, which means he’s pretty much picked up where the Gen-X-ers left off. But the others are in their forties, fifties, and seventies.

Seventies, you may well be asking? That would be Morley Winograd (73) and Mike Hais (72), whose company Mike & Morley – which sounds more like a radio sports call-in – develop “strategies for engaging young adults.” Hey, Mike and Morley aren’t even boomers. They’re bona fide old guys, members of the Silent Generation, sandwiched in there between the somewhat overhyped Greatest Generation and us much-maligned Baby Boomers.

“We want older generations to understand this young generation, and not make the mistake of ignoring or resisting their influence,” Mr. Winograd says in a promotional video on the duo’s website, mikeandmorley.com.

Believe me, I have no intention of “ignoring” the millennials. I’m actually rather fond of the ones I know. And I’m not necessarily going to resist their influence, either. Hey, I’m all over texting. And I’d even throw in a bit of current slang, but I don’t want to appear dated, so will want to check it out with my personal millennials. (Is sick still sick? I’ll be happy AF if it still is.)

I want millennials to be happy at work and at play.And I want them to replace, or at least equal, the Baby Boomers as the generation everyone loves to hate.

But, frankly, I mostly want them to make the world a better place. I want them to make the economy run better, save us from nativist borderline fascism, fix the environment, and come up with all sorts of assistive devices for us incipient old-geezers. If that means more feedback and fewer voice mails, so be it. Is telling this to corporations worth $20K an hour? Not in my book. Sounds like boondoggle to me. But if companies are willing to pay….

Do you think it’s too late for me to become an millennial consultant? Think of how few hours I’d need to work to make my nut.

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A tip of the Pink Slip millennial fedora – if fedoras are still the thing – to Pink Slip reader Fred Wright for pointing this article my way. Thanks, Fred, for a perfect suggestion.

“All Encompassing Software.” Good luck with that.

There was an article in the Boston Globe yesterday on a new “all encompassing” system that Partners Healthcare (which includes pretty much all the top hospitals in Boston under its umbrella) has been rolling out. For $1.2B, it ought to be all encompassing, but some of the feedback coming from doctors and nurses using it is that it’s too hard to use and takes away from meaningful patient contact. Some medical professionals even said that having to learn it was hastening their retirements. For many, it’s not what the doctor ordered. Anything but.

I’m glad that Partners is implementing something that will eventually streamline the way that healthcare information is gathered and shared. They’ve been improving over the years, but they haven’t quite gotten to where they need to be.

Years ago, I had to wait for an appointment with a surgeon while he rummaged around in file folders, sitting in wheeled bins in the corridor outside his office, to find a copy of my mammogram. (Talk about HIPAA compliance.) When he finally dredged them up, I told him that all the information – including those scans – could have been available to him online. He was amazed that this was possible. This was maybe 20 years ago. Today, those mammograms are online. Yea!)

For years, when I went for my annual mammogram, I had to fill out exactly the same information (on paper). Gradually they went to a computerized input system, but for some reason, you still had to fill in the same info each year. Now it’s all better: you only have to say what’s changed since your last visit.

Still, I know from my husband’s relatively recent illness that there was a lot of information overlap and underlap. How many times did we have to give yet another doctor’s office a list of Jim’s medications? Shouldn’t that have been online somewhere?

And there were some doctors who for some reason couldn’t manage to get your appointments online. As of a couple of months ago, this was still the case for one doctor I see.

But, as I’ve said, from the patient-as-consumer point of view, I have seen improvements over the decades that have flown by while I received my healthcare through physicians affiliated with MGH, which is part of Partners.

My PCP (40ish) is great online: making appointments, answering questions, posting results, filling prescriptions. Her office is very easy to deal with. I’m happy to hear that I can expect even further improvements from the overall system.

Yet I am sympathetic to those doctors and nurses who are finding it rough going to make sure that everything they say and do now has to be digitized. It can’t be easy, and I do know what it’s like to have to work with a software system that is so all encompassing that it’s really difficult to use.

When I worked at Genuity, they introduced a major all-things-to-all-people “enterprise” system.

Profligate as Genuity was – and it may be time for another profligacy post: stay tuned – the company did not spend anywhere near $1.2B for our sorry-arsed system. But I do believe it was the most costly system of its time, between the software, the customization, and the consultancy that worked with us.

The system was rolled out with much hoopla. Everyone had to be trained up on it. We were all encouraged – and in some instances forced – to use it.

I was most interested in the customer relationship management (CRM) aspects of it, but it turned out to be worthless, as no one was putting in any data that was of interest. You could only find out the most meager info on our clients. Nothing that you pretty much didn’t know already. Big, honking, useless.

We also had to use the system to process our expense reports. I’m thinking this was the way in which they would at least compel those of us who traveled to utilize the system. It was so unintuitive to use that, even though I had carefully written out step-by-step directions, each time I had to submit an expense report, I had to resort to calling the help desk.

After the system was in play for a few months, some consultants did some consulting-by-walking-around and popped into random offices to get some feedback. One of them darkened my door and asked me about how I was enjoying our new “solution.” I had to tell her that the only way I would use the system regularly was if the president of the company was standing next to me, with a gun pointed at my head, and I knew that a) the gun was loaded, b) he was willing to pull the trigger.

So I feel the pain of the doctors and nurses struggling with their new system.

But here’s the thing.

I didn’t matter whether anyone used Genuity’s enterprise system or not. (Especially given that the company disappeared off the face of the earth.) But it does matter that our healthcare providers get things right. Keep trying, boys and girls. It’ll get better. It has to.

The man who desired streetcars

Unless you count reading and conversation, other than blogging, I’ve never really had a hobby. Sometimes I think that it would  just swell – in an earnest, 1950’s kind of way – to have some mono-obsession: stamps, coins, model airplanes, paint-by-number, collecting teacups or spoons. Then I shake my head and get back to my book or my conversation. Hobby case closed.

Then I read about Ivor Walsh, and all of a sudden I was gripped with a case of hobby envy. Or, if not hobby envy, then a real hankering to see the documentary about him, Tiny Tracks. What a fascinating tiny little story.

Ivor Walsh was a man who loved streetcars, and he traveled the world to check them out. But his favorite destination was Boston, where he traveled with some frequency from his home in Toronto to gaze longingly on our streetcars, mostly the Green Line, which travels both above and below ground. And sometimes the above ground runs right smack dab down the middle of a street. In the case of the E (Heath Street) segment of the Green Line, the streetcars sometimes jockey for territory with car-cars. Mayhem!

When Walsh visited Boston, he took notes and photos. Lots of them. And, one day, he decided to build a model of Boston street scenes, avec streetcars, in the 1950’s.

“He just started and I would watch him and come down to see what he was doing,” says [his widow Hilda] Walsh. “He’d put on Frank Sinatra and away he’d go.”

The two decades of labor is evident even at first glance. The replica, which is built into the walls, takes up the majority of the 20 by 30 foot basement. It shows various stops on the Green Line—Copley, Park Street, Boylston, Symphony, and others—that display the above ground-to-underground transition that fascinated Walsh so much. (Source: Boston Magazine)

Walsh hand painted cars. He made tiny guitars to put inside the tiny guitar store. He hand-wired the circuits in hundreds of lights. “He used molds to craft hundreds of tiny Bostonians, and carved the sidewalks’ cobblestones from clay that he tinted himself.” That’s Hilda with part of Ivor’s world.

You may have noticed that the cars on the Green Line are actually orange. This is no longer the case, but when I first moved to Boston there were cars on the Green Line that were, in fact, orange. This was on the now-defunct Green Line – A Line. I’m sure there’s a reason for this. Things like this sometimes do happen. As with the trucking company Yellow, which has signage that’s orange. In the case of Yellow, they did a study way back in the day and determined that the orange they use is the most visible color on the highway. The question there is why they didn’t change the company’s name to Orange. The question for Boston is just plain ‘why?’ I’m sure there’s a reason. Or not.

Anyway, it took Ivor Walsh 20 years to get it all done, down there in his basement, where Hilda Walsh keeps it going more than a decade after her husband’s death. She hopes to find a permanent home for the model transportation system. And she hopes that a new documentary film, Tiny Tracks, by Naomi Hocura, will result in some interest. (The images here are from Hocura’s site.)

If I had 20x30 feet to spare, I’d be giving Hilda Walsh a shout to see if I could adopt Ivor’s labor of love.

I would give it all sorts of TLC. Possibly even turn it into a hobby, rather than just blogging about it.

Surely, there is someone in Boston who does have 600 square feet. Better yet, there is surely some public space in Boston – room in the basement of City Hall, an unused conference room at the MBTA – where this wonderful model could be displayed. Absolutely worth saving.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tip of my conductor’s hat to my brother-in-law, Rick T, for sending the link to this article along. And a runner up tip to Rita, my hairdresser, who also mentioned it to me. If there’s enough interest in Boston, maybe something can be done to preserve this brilliant artifact.