“We girls of Notre Dame Academy…”

Last Saturday, I went to my – gulp – 50th high school reunion.

I went to a small Catholic girls school. There were 84 girls in my class, and 20-ish of us showed up for our luncheon. We had the list of who had died, and there were nine names on it. Someone said that, in the actuarial sense, 11% dead by now would be about right. But it sure sounds high to me, especially since one of that 11% is one of my oldest and dearest of friends, who died a couple of months after my husband in 2014.

In a class of 84, you may not be friends with everyone, but you know everyone, and something about them, and here’s what I remember about those who are gone.

C1 was too cool for school. I wasn’t particularly friendly with her, but a couple of my friends were, so I hung out with her a few times. My mental image of C1 is of her with a cigarette in hand, looking cool – or trying to look cool. The report is that she ended up with a drug and drinking problem that she kicked. But she’d done some damage to herself, and died of cancer in her 50’s.

C2 was an odd sort for our school, which was the “fancy” school for the Irish aristocracy, and lace-curtain wannabes. (I was there on a scholarship.) She was from a very prominent Worcester WASP family – old money, DAR, etc. We never knew what her problems were – the rumor was that she’d been kicked in the head by a horse as a girl – but she definitely had social, physical, and learning issues. (Maybe the horse rumor was correct. I just looked up her obit, and it said that in her younger days she’d been an equestrienne.) I’m thinking now that she may have been “on the spectrum.” She was extremely awkward on all fronts. A couple of us ate lunch with her most days, but she didn’t have much of a social life. I remember reaching out to her during a vacation once to see how she was doing. Her family had gone skiing and left her at home with the housekeeper. C1 was definitely a outlier, but I will say something. No one was dying to be besties with her, but I don’t recall anyone being mean to her, either.

K was a doll. Really smart, really sweet. A very gifted artist. We weren’t especially close, but the brainy girls were all in the same orbit, so we were definitely friendly. Breast cancer. In her forties.

L died a few years back of multiple myeloma. Oddly, one of my friends from high school also has multiple myeloma, and she was treated by the same doctor as L was. My friend’s father also died of this disease. And what’s really odd is that my friend’s father picked up L and drove her to school every day, as she lived right along their route into Worcester. Was there something in that car, which was an Austin Mini Cooper that my friend’s family had brought back to the States after her father was transferred back from England? You gotta wonder.

While C2 was the oddest-girl-out in my class, G may have been the biggest within-the-norm oddball. On the day that JFK was assassinated, when everyone else in my Massachusetts Irish-Catholic little school was beyond herself with grief, G told me that she was relieved. “At least now, we won’t have a Kennedy-archy.” The other thing I remember about G was a time when our homeroom class was out in the convent garden with Sister Josephine of the Sacred Heart – a nutter if ever. Anyway, a big bunny rabbit hopped by, and Josephine asked, “Girls, does anyone know how to get the bunny to come over to us?” To which G answered, “Make noise like a carrot.” To which Josephine responded, “Oh, G, do you know how to do that?” Sure, Sta. Sure. G died in her early fifties – cause unknown. (Someone in the alumnae office found a sparse obituary.) Her mother had died of cancer our freshman year, and our class went in uniform to her funeral Mass. It was a brutally hot day, and we walked back to school – a couple of miles, in our heavy serge uniforms – stopping at S’s house along the way, where her mother gave us all water.

S was the first person in our class to die. An aneurysm, someone thought. I really liked S, a very funny girl. Our senior year, we had to write a poem in English. S got an A for submitting “And My Bird Can Sing,” by none other than John Lennon. Sure, it was cheating. And it was too bad that Sister Kathleen William, a superlative teacher, fell for it. But it was funny – especially since S had been John in a freshman year quartet who played Beatles songs at one of the school’s shows. (My poem – which also got an A – was about an anti-war march I’d seen in NYC. My poem included the word shibboleth, but not in a rhyme.)

D was someone I knew from grammar school. While I wasn’t close friends with her, one of my good friends was, so we did plenty of things together. Her father schlepped a bunch of us to school on a regular basis freshman and sophomore years, saving us from having to take the 6:45 a.m. bus every morning. Then D got her license – the only person I knew who could drive a manual. (Not a stick shift, mind you. This was a lumbering station wagon with a gear shift on the post.) D’s father was a Protestant, but, as the nun’s in grammar school pointed out, he was a “nice” Protestant, as he had hand- crafted the lovely velvet-lined wooden carrying case used to hold the giant rosary and plastic Madonna statue that was sent to some lucky home on a regular basis to encourage the family rosary. (I can tell you that, as religious as my parents were, the sight of one of their kids bringing that rosary home was not a welcome one.)

M was on of the funeral parlor daughters, part of the Worcester Irish elite. So she had the Bermuda bags, the Papagallo shoes, the Villager outfits. Not that I wanted to be like her, but I could have done with a few of her outfits. M was one of the few girls with a car of her own. A Mustang. In 1966, this was a really big deal.

And then there was my Marie, whose friendship I wrote about here.

I had a very nice time at my reunion. It was fun to see all those girls of Notre Dame Academy. Most  - but not all – who were there had stayed in Worcester. Most – but not all – had become teachers or nurses. One of the Maureens had been both. Most – but not all – had married and had kids (and grandkids). And all were involved in some type of human service career and/or were volunteering, which I guess says something about “we girls of Notre Dame Academy.”*

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* These were the opening words to our alma mater, the words written by my friend Kathleen H, set to the tune of “The Boys from Wexford.” It replaced “Hail, Notre Dame,” set to the tune of “America the Beautiful.” Somewhere along the line, our song got dumped. Modern girls rejected lines like “in union is the strength of man” and “to light the light of brotherhood in each and every human soul.” Can’t blame them there. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Come on baby, light my Fyre.

It goes without saying that, if a call to action comes my way from Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, I am generally more than happy to answer the call. But I’m heading to Ireland next week, plus my 50th high school reunion was Saturday, so I thought with, all the last minute stuff I’m doing, it might be wiser (albeit sadder) to take a pass on the Fyre Festival that was scheduled for last weekend o the private Bahamas island of Great Exuma. Or was it Not-So-Great Exuma? When I got the txt from Ja Rule, he wasn’t quite clear on the exact location.

Still, I would have been more than happy to support – and represent my generation at this important luxury music, art, and food festival. After all, I missed the mud at Woodstock, and the murder and mayhem at Altamont. Why would I want to miss out on yet another seminal event? I mean, every mass gathering I’ve ever attended has been political in nature, more or less an obligation, a perhaps exhilarating but decidedly no fun event. Why not go to one just to have fun?

Sure, it was going to be costly. Tickets from $1K – $12K, but there was all that promise…

But what got delivered was a scene that was a far cry from folks Insta-ing the selfies they thought they’d be taking with bikini-clad A-listers like Kendall and Bella. Instead, the event has been variously been described as “Lord of the Flies,” “Survivor,” and “Outbreak.”

“Lord of the Flies?” Well, unlike at Altamont, no one got killed, but let’s hand the ur source for Fyre Festival the conch and see what they have to say for themselves:

[Event partners] Billy McFarland and Ja Rule [thought that]…through their combined passions, they could create a new type of music festival and experience on a remote island.

They simply weren’t ready for what happened next, or how big this thing would get. They started by making a website and launching a viral campaign…Suddenly, they found themselves transforming a small island and trying to build a festival. Thousands of people wanted to come. They were excited, but then the roadblocks started popping up.

As amazing as the islands are, the infrastructure for a festival of this magnitude needed to be built from the ground up. So, we decided to literally attempt to build a city. We set up water and waste management, brought an ambulance from New York, and chartered 737 planes to shuttle our guests via 12 flights a day from Miami. We thought we were ready, but then everyone arrived.

The team was overwhelmed. The airport was jam packed. The buses couldn’t handle the load. And the wind from rough weather took down half of the tents on the morning our guests were scheduled to arrive. This is an unacceptable guest experience and the Fyre team takes full responsibility for the issues that occurred.

That’s what their website says now (along with the info that everyone will get a full refund, plus free admission to next year’s happenin’, which will be held at some lucky beach in the US.) Well, there’s full responsibility and then there’s full responsibility. And here’s what they said on Friday, when things started to fall apart.

“Fyre Festival set out to provide a once ­in­ a­ lifetime musical experience,” the organizers said in a statement. “Due to circumstances out of our control, the physical infrastructure was not in place on time and we are unable to fulfill on that vision safely and enjoyably for our guests.” (A second weekend, planned to start May 5, was also scrapped.) “We are working to place everyone on complimentary charters back to Miami today,” they added. “We ask for everyone’s patience and cooperation during this difficult time, as we work as quickly and safely as we can to remedy this unforeseeable situation.” (Source: NY Times)

Okay, a storm is something that’s outside of their control. But, gee, is a storm in the Bahamas really an “unforeseeable situation.” Maybe Billy, Ja, Bella, and Kendall couldn’t foresee it, but I’ll be that someone who knew something about staging events in the islands might have been helpful here. I’ll give them this. I’ll bet they did “provide a one in a lifetime musical experience.”

As for Ja Rule, he assumed real fake responsibility: “I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT… but I’m taking responsibility.”

Well, yeah, Ja, it sort of kind of is YOUR FAULT in that you and Billy didn’t know what you were doing. Which is okay. You’re young. And we all know that young folks learn by making mistakes. So you learned that you were in over your head, and the festival goers learned that sometimes things aren’t as glorious as they seem when being touted by Bella and Kendall, who are also young and in mistake-making mode. (I will say that I don’t know if the whinging Northeastern student I saw on local news, a young woman who spent $12K for the event, will learn from her mistake. She did not come across as someone who had actually earned that $12K, since most students who are working there way through school don’t typically have $12K on hand. And my understanding – although not my direct experience, given lack of plush parental subsidy  - is that you don’t tend to learn from mistakes that someone else actually paid for.)

Oh, wait. This just in. Ja Rule is actually 41. Is that like the new 21 or something?

Shivi Kumar and her pals paid $3.5K for what was supposed to be “the deluxe ‘lodge’ package…four king size beds and a chic living room lounge.”

Instead Ms. Kumar and her crew were directed to a tent encampment. Some tents had beds, but some were still unfurnished. Directed by a festival employee to “grab a tent,” attendees started running, she said. “People were stealing beds out of other tents, ” she said. “It was just chaos…The tents didn’t have any locks, the beds were damp, the blankets were soaked,” from a storm the night before, she said. At one point in the evening, Ms. Kumar said, staff members dumped a bunch of unopened containers — like “Amazon shipment boxes” — at the site, and instructed concertgoers to rifle through them for anything that was missing from their tents. “It was everything from, like, bongos to floaties to sleeping bags,” she said.

A bongo missing from a tent? I could have lived without a bongo, but they really should have been delivering fully-loaded bongs to help the weary festival goers make it through the night.

On Friday, Ms. Kumar and her friends managed to get a room at a hotel, hitching a ride from a local. Taxis were hard to come by, in part because the festival had promoted itself as a cashless event, asking attendees to upload funds to digital wristbands instead. So people were stranded without money.

Just upload your funds onto digital wristbands? Don’t bring any cash? I’m not a big Tennessee Williams fan, but sometimes you just have to quote one of his characters. (In this case, Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar.)

And do you know what I say? Ha ha! Do you hear me? Ha ha ha!

All I can say is, I dodged, if not a bullet, then a lot of chaos and discomfort by not heading off to the Fyre Festival. Sounds like if Billy McFarland and Ja Rule are running the show, it’s not exactly better in the Bahamas.

Start your startups, Part Two

On Friday, I ran through the first half of the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner roundup of the most promising local startups in the Boston area. Today, we tackle the rest. (Note: the list is Scott Kirsner’s; the quoted/indented material all comes from the respective company websites.)

I wish my husband and his Aunt Carrie were alive to see Wristify come into existence. The company is coming out with a bracelet that cools or warms the inside of your wrist, which has the effect of making you feel cooler or warmer. “Wristify doesn't need to modify your core temperature to make you more comfortable. Wristify draws on 30 years of thermal research to maximize comfort in a discreet and energy-efficient way.” 30 years of thermal research? We don’t need know stinkin’ 30 years of thermal research. Carrie told Jim well before that about a way to cool down during the summers he was working on Uncle Bill and Aunt Carrie’s tobacco farm: run cold water over the insides of your wrists. And if you’re cold – which I’m pretty sure didn’t happen on the tobacco farm during the summer - run warm water. I’ve used this trick for decades. As for making a wearable out of it: great idea.I signed up for an alert when they’re ready for sale. Best idea to come out of MIT since the decoder ring T pass. (Alas, I’ve lost mine. And it doesn’t work with the senior discount anyway…)

Fortunately, I completed my education before you got out of school with crippling debt. (I had some loans for business school, but it was maybe $3K – a decidedly worthwhile investment.) But these days a lot of kids come out of college with first-home-mortgage level debt. For them, there’s FutureFuel, an app that matches job-hunting young folks with companies offering loan repayment as a benefit. Great benefit – a lot better than free sodas and fussball – but when I think of all the crazy borrowing going on out there: God help us!

Virtual Cove has an answer for those who say ‘yes’ to the following question:

Do you spend time looking for insight using financial charts, pivot tables, business intelligence or machine learning?

I say ‘no’, so lucky me. I’m not the audience for Virtual Cove’s:

… solution [which] turns complex data into augmented and virtual reality data visualizations. It's especially valuable helping quantitative finance, researchers, analysts, portfolio managers & traders detect anomalies faster and more effectively than machines alone.

I’m sure virtual reality is going to be all sorts of wonderful. I’m just not ready for it, and doubt I ever will be. Physical reality’s quite enough to deal with, thank you.

If I were to vote one of these companies as ‘least likely to come out of Boston’, it would be Telluslabs, which uses satellite imagery and machine learning to make predictions about agricultural yields:

This past growing season, TellusLabs delivered some of the earliest and most prescient forecasts of the US corn and soy harvest ever produced and we’re just getting warmed up.

Last time I looked, there were no amber waves of soybean fields in Massachusetts, but, hey, with satellite imagery you don’t have to be standing in Southern Illinois to see what’s happening down on the farm.

Exero Labs is much more logically at home here, as it combines two of our favorite local things: technology and pro sports. The company has as its co-founder Zoltan Mesko, who was a kicker for the New England Patriots. The company “has developed an innovative impact reduction device to complement advances in football helmet design.” Well, anything that can prevent some of the brain damage that results from playing football is a good thing, but methinks it might be too late to save pro football from what’s starting to look like an inexorable decline. (I know, I know. I was screaming my head off at the end of the Super Bowl this year, but I do believe that football is going to go the way of boxing. People will still follow it, but it won’t be the big thing it once was.)

As someone who ends up diverting most of her UPS and FedEx deliveries to the nearest UPS or FedEx pick up place so that I don’t have to sit around all day waiting for a package, and as someone who has had excellent experiences with Uber, I laud Veho Technologies which aims “to provide consumers complete visibility into the delivery process, with an Uber-like customer experience.”

Veho aims to bring the next wave of innovation to the package delivery space – an $85B industry. Harnessing the crowdsourced economy, and using state-of-the-art mobile technology, we aim to help traditional delivery companies compete in tomorrow’s world. Veho’s asset-light operating model helps carriers enhance last mile economics; easily expand last mile fleet capacity when needed; substantially reduce the rate of failed deliveries; and delight end-customers with after work-hours deliveries.

Of course, before all those Veho drivers get too excited about becoming last-mile deliverers, as soon as it’s feasible, they’ll be replaced by robots and drones.

Well, where was Voatz last November 8th when, like, totes McGoats, we really could have used them? Because we all know it is so damned difficult, not to mention boring and fuddy-duddy, to actually go to a polling place, give some old lady your name, have her check it off, fill out your ballot or push a lever, and have a cop check your name off on the way out. I like voting. It’s pretty much my religion. But, just like the young folks don’t carry cash, they’re not going to want to go to the old fire station or church basement or school hall and do something non-tech and communal. And they apparently don’t care about the “I Voted” sticker. They’re going to want to do anytime, anywhere voting. So Voatz gets my vote. Oh, I’ll keep voting in person but, who knows, maybe on my deathbed I’ll cast the deciding ballot using an app.

Entrepreneurs, start your startups

Yesterday, the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner had a nice roundup of the most promising local startups in the Boston area. A very interesting list, indeed, which I’ll get through half of today, and the rest next week. (The list comes from The Globe, but anything in quote marks/indented comes from the actual company site unless otherwise noted.)

First up was RateGravity, a mortgage matchmaker that’s looking to lower mortgage costs by an average of $30K over the life of a loan. I get that they can find the lowest interest rate for you, speed up processing by using technology, and eliminate the sales person. What I’m not clear on is their calculation on how this might add up to a savings of $2K per year on a $400K loan (the example that RateGravity uses).  Not that I don’t believe that they can save someone $2K a year. This seems entirely plausible. It’s just that when I took a quick look at their numbers, I couldn’t get them to add up. But, hey, this is a non-monetized blog, and there’s only so much time I’m willing to dig in on this – especially given that I know zip about mortgages – so I’ll take their word for it. So please, go forth, and find folks cheaper mortgages.

There are a lot of rotten and dangerous jobs out there, and as anyone who’s seen the movie The Perfect Storm could tell you, a number of those rotten and dangerous jobs take place at sea. Sea Machines intends to do something about that by developing unmanned workboats “that could be charting the depths of a harbor, limiting the damage from an oil spill, or ferrying supplies to an offshore platform.” They’re hiring more software developers so that they can eliminate yet another swath of rotten, dangerous blue collar jobs (c.f., coal mining). Anything that can be automated will be automated, but just saying. Meanwhile, while sub-sea repairs are something I pretty much know zip about, I did do some work for a company many years ago – don’t ask how – that had submersible ROVs (Remote Operating Vehicles) that were used to inspect subsea cables, etc. I’d forgotten all about it. Just googled, and the products I wrote about are still out there, down in the deeps.

BrainSpec,the brainchild of a brainstorming session held a couple of years back at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, provides software for Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS), which does “a ‘virtual biopsy’ by measuring the concentrations of chemicals in the brain.” Having seen what an invasive, physical biopsy can entail, I’m all for virtualizing things. BrainSpec software is used to diagnose terrible things like Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, and metabolic disorders. Go for it. And while the BrainSpec folks are no doubt mostly science-y brainiacs,focused mostly on the science-y brainiac stuff, I have to say that they have software marketing speak down pat. (I’ve highlighted the words that I’ve used at least a million times myself.)

Our revolutionary new software package combines the latest processing technology with an intuitive and accessible interface to put all the power of MR spectroscopy in the hands of doctors everywhere.

Have marketing words, will travel.

OffGridBox began life in Tuscany, and, I were OffGridBox, I might have stayed there, running my company out of a villa that had a pool and someone from town who came out every day to cook for me. But somehow – capital? technology? techies? – the company found their way to Boston. What they produce is systems for NGOs, schools, hospitals, businesses and homeowners that provide sustainable power and clean water by using solar and reusing rainwater. They’re focusing their efforts on Rwanda, a country sorely in need of power and clean water, but the concept is certainly extensible to those who want to live off the grid.

How hip is Bonzer? I’ll tell you how hip they are. They don’t have a fussy old-school URL extension like .com, .org, or .net. Theirs is .rocks. As in bonzer.rocks. They’re sort of like Zipcar, only eco-friendly. Instead of Mazdas, pickup trucks, and date Beemers, Bonzer deploys RaytlleE28PROs, that don’t go very fast or get you very far or fit much in them, but that do get you around those urban places where there’s no public transpo and you can’t walk to. But I’m guessing that the places where Bonzer cars are located are both near public transpo and walkable. Still, there’s the hipster factor in play here. So I’ll be on the lookout for a Bonzer-mobile. Note to bonzer.rocks: I know you’re little, but stay off the sidewalks!

According to PlenOptika,”One out of every five people worldwide lack the eyeglasses they need.” To meet the need for prescription glasses, PlenOptika has come up with QuickSee, a handheld device for optometry that can be deployed “in rural and low-resource settings. It is smaller than a laptop, rugged, and battery-powered.” As someone who’s worn glasses since childhood, I can only imagine what it would be like to have to go without them. Bravo, PlenOptika.

Adaptt Intelligence is, I’m betting, a bunch of really smart guys doing really smart things. Scott Kirsner’s article says that they’re:

…combining software and sensors to make buildings more intelligent about which spaces humans are occupying, and which are empty, so that less energy is wasted cooling, heating, or lighting vacant areas.

Which is obviously a good thing. There’s a lot of smart building technology out there. The more the merrier, I guess. Anyway, they don’t have much to say about it quite yet. (No web site. The closest I could get was adappt intelligence who do stuff with machine learning. Close but no cigar…)

Bottom line: lots of interesting tech-ish startups in Boston. More to come on Monday.

And you didn’t think anything could get worse for United? Hah!

In March, PR Week named United CEO Oscar Munoz its Communicator of the Year for 2017. Since then, Communicator Munoz has had plenty of opportunity to live up to this award. Or not.

First, there was “leggingsgate”, in which some teenage friends-and-family travelers were banned from a flight because they were wearing leggings, which are okay for regular travelers but not, apparently, for those who are representin’.

Leggingsgate was jolly good fun compared to what came next, when a passenger who refused to give up a seat so that United personnel could be accommodated, was roughed up while being dragged off his flight. Big stock price dip, and big law suit in the making, on that one. And Communicator Munoz got very poor marks for how he’s been handling it. All it gave us was a new word: “reaccommodated”,which means that the airline finds another flight for passengers kicked off their original flight.

Then came yesterday’s death of a giant bunny rabbit who expired on a flight from the UK to O’Hare, on his way to his forever home. (I was going to say it was “twagic,” but I don’t know for a fact that this wabbit was cwazy. But how can I resist a comment on the name of the airport that poor Simon was flying through. O’Hare airport. Oh. Hare.)

Simon wasn’t just any old – make that young: he was only 10 months old - rabbit. He was a Giant Continental whose father, Darius, held the Guinness record as the world’s longest rabbit. And Simon, at 3 feet 5 inches long, “may have been on track to break his father’s record.” Simon had been to the flight shortly before he started his final journey and something gang very agley for him,

‘‘He had that exam three hours before he left me to go to Heathrow,’’ [owner Annette] Edwards said in a phone interview. ‘‘He then got to Heathrow, apparently, and he was fine. In Chicago he had to board to go to another flight — and that’s when I believe they found him dead.’’ (Source: Washigton Post via the Boston Globe)

The article doesn’t mention whether Simon was traveling in the hold or being hand-carried. But at 3 feet 5 inches in length, I suspect he was in the pet hold. Quite sweet, in any case, that the way Ms. Edwards spoke about Simon, it sounded as if she thought he was going to get himself on his connecting flight – perhaps with a lift from a friendly gate agent or stew. As someone who’s observed how attentively (hah!) unaccompanied minors are treated, one can imagine the care that unaccompanied pets get.

United Airlines confirmed in an e-mail that Simon had died, writing: ‘‘The rabbit has passed away, but the details surrounding that are being reviewed.’’

In a statement, United added: ‘‘We were saddened to hear this news. The safety and well-being of all the animals that travel with us is of the utmost importance to United Airlines and our PetSafe team. We have been in contact with our customer and have offered assistance. We are reviewing this matter.’’

They better be reviewing the matter. What’s come out in the wash here is that United has a pretty dismal record when it comes to transporting animals. It’s rate of incidents (death, injury, loss) in 2016 was 2.11 per 10,000 animals. The industry average is 0.92 incidents per 10,000 animals. United’s is more than double. Not exactly ‘fly the pet-friendly skies.’

It must be quite terrifying for a pet to fly in an airplane hold: the dark, the noise, the confinement, the cold (or is it heat?), the lack of humans around (which pets will, of course, be used to). I wouldn’t be surprised to find that poor Simon stressed out and had a heart attack. Still, United’s got a pretty poor record with respect to animals.

What will Communicator Munoz have to say about that?

And what’s next in store for United?

A fist fight between a pilot and a steward, which turns into a passenger-involving brawl? Godzilla plucking a United jet out of the sky and munching on it? Snakes on a plane?

Forget what Trump has or hasn’t been accomplishing in his first 100 days. How about Oscar Munoz’ first 100 days since being given the Communicator of the Year award?

Fashion statements

My sisters and I are dedicated followers of fashion ridonculousness. As such, we were all over Balenciaga’s new tote. First off, I wasn’t even aware that Balenciaga was still in business. I thought they went the way of the Jackie Kennedy pillbox – at about the same time. (Luxury gowns on TV when I was a kid were often from Balenciaga. Or maybe they were the gowns worn by the beautiful ladies in the Modess…because ads.)

Anyway, that blue “Arena Extra-Large Shopper Tote Bag” is causing quite a stir, since its price point – $2,145 – is quite a bit higher than the 99 cents that the lookalike Ikea bag will set you back. Come on, folks…

All I could think of was the I Love Lucy when the Ricardos and the Mertzes go to Paris, and Lucy and Ethel want Ricky and Fred to buy them some French couture. Instead, the boys fake up some designer duds out of potato sacks and feedbags. And damned if the fashion world doesn’t take up the look once they see the girls sporting it

All that money for a knockoff Ikea bag! I’d rather have the real deal and pocket the extra $2,144.

And then there are the jeans by PRPS, now available at Nordstrom, that sell for $425. We know that this is not, in fact, a crazy amount of money to pay for jeans. And we know this because we blogged about it last month when my sister Trish announced that the retail outrage of the day was $1K+ jeans that were inside out Levis.

Still, it sure seems like a crazy amount to pay for jeans that are covered in fake mud.

If I were the cultural appropriation police – which I’m not; the history of just about every culture other than some isolated tribe in Borneo is built on cultural appropriation, and I’m all for it – I’d say that the rich db’s buying these jeans are culturally appropriating the look of F-150 driving guys with calluses on their hands from doing stuff like hauling logs and mining coal. (And those guys wouldn’t be caught dead in those shoes, by the way. You could drop a concrete something or other on those nifty oxfords and break a toe. For the real muddy jeans wearers, we’re talking steel-toe.)

Will anyone really buy and/or wear these things? Are white collar white bros, now that they’ve voted in solidarity with blue collar white guys, looking to boost their testosterone levels by doffing the Brooks Brothers and donning the working man’s uniform?

Kind of like Marie Antoinette moseying around in a shepherdess dress.

Après nous le déluge, I suppose. And if the deluge is deluge-y enough, there’ll be plenty of opportunity for all of us to roll around in the mud getting our jeans dirty – without having to pay $425 for faux muddied gear that we haul to the laundromat in our $2,145 big blue bag.

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Sources:

Blue bag: Buzzfeed

Muddy jeans: HuffPost

Courtesy of my sister Trish

Hotel No-tell? Nope.

Years ago, my husband and I had a six hour layover in Frankfurt before we got our flight to Prague. Faced with the prospect of six uncomfortable hours in a noisy and chaotic airport, at a time when we were stupefied by our overnight flight from Boston, we strolled over to the airport Sheraton and asked if we could get a room for a few hours.

Yes, we could. So we had room service breakfast, showered, napped and were in ready-to-go shape by the time we landed in Prague.

Bliss!

I think that was the only time I did a partial hotel stay, but I believe that most hotels will cut you some sort of deal if they have room.

And now – what else? – there are apps for that. And rather than get the sort of partial rate that we got at the Frankfurt Airport Sheraton, you can sign up at some hotels for however many minutes of hotel time you need. It sure sounds like an invitation for a quickie, but it’s really a great idea for someone who wants to get cleaned up, take a nap, get a little work done. And in a use case suggested by the CEO of one of the app providers, it’s great for nursing moms who want a moment of privacy. (Never having been a mom, nursing or otherwise, this was never an issue for me, but I know it’s been a problem for plenty of women. At a trade show some years ago, there was a woman using her breast pump while standing at the sink in the ladies room. I probably wouldn’t have remembered her so clearly if another woman asked her whether she was doing portable dialysis. Duh on duh!)

As for the by-the-minute apps:

How it works [for the Recharge app]: Download the app (free on iPhone and Android), find the hotel closest to you, and hit the “book now” button. Your billing cycle starts 30 minutes after you’ve booked, or once you pick up your key—whichever comes first—and ends when you hit “check out” on the app. If you use the room for 47 minutes, you’re billed for 47 minutes. (Warning: You'll be billed an overstay fee if you're caught hitting the check-out button early.) (Source: Bloomberg)

In the NY hotels that are part of the by-the-minute hotel ecosystem, prices range from $0.83 and $2 per minute.

For the hotels, these quick stays can be quite profitable. Even though hotels incur the costs of cleaning the rooms, those minutes add up, and hotels make a lot more on a hourly (minutely?) basis than they do on an hourly basis for “normal” overnight hotel stays.

Given that hotels seem to have made checkout times earlier and check-in times later over the years, there’s a big slug of free time from late morning until late afternoon when, once a room is clean it’s just sitting there idle. And if hotels aren’t sold out for overnight stays, why not make a few bucks? (According to the Bloomberg article, even if a hotel is sold out, 35 percent of rooms are empty during the day.)

Mostly I think this is a good idea. But I do see a couple of downsides.

Once hotels figure out they can charge you for it, there goes honoring requests for late check outs or early check ins. Sure, you can have it but, like the airlines charging for baggage and Subway sandwiches, you’ll pay for it. And I can see that check out times will get squinchier: out you go by 10 a.m. And check in times will get later: come back at 6 p.m.

The only other downside I can think of is that, if you check in after someone has just checked out, you just might find that the bed is still warm. (Ewww, I know, but it might have just been from a napper…)

Something bugging you?

I’m neither a bug-lover nor a bug-hater.

Other than bedbugs – toward which I harbor both fear and loathing – most bugs don’t bother me all that much. Not that I’m St. Francis of Assisi all over them, mind you. No reverence for all living creatures and all that. I crush any silverfish I see in the bathroom and flush the remains down the toilet. I own (and know how to use) a flyswatter. I step on ants that I see indoors. If I spotted a cockroach, I would be setting off Raid bombs. But I don’t go nuts at the sight of an insect. Nonetheless, in terms of animal sympathy, mine lies with those further up the sentience scale. I would not, for instance, step on a dog or a bonobo. Instead, I would engage with them.

And, hey, I actively like fireflies and ladybugs.

Anyway, even if I had been a STEM type of gal, I wouldn’t have been drawn to a career in entomology. Fortunately, there are people who are drawn to the profession which, if you’re a public entomologist like Gale Ridge, who works for the state of Connecticut, is a lot more varied a job than collecting insects and labeling the jars you house them in.

Her clients enter [her lab] brandishing pill bottles, jam jars, and Tupperware containing roaches and weevils, meal moths and fabric moths, bedbugs and stinkbugs. Tiny mangled spiders come in on bits of Scotch tape; gypsy moth caterpillars by the wriggling bucketful. Some people even send in live beetles by mail: The envelopes arrive empty, with chew marks in the corner.

She has helped gardeners identify the scourges of their crops, she’s guided homeowners through the treacherous terrain of bedbug control, and she’s helped police investigate a murder by examining the maggots found writhing in the victim’s flesh.(Source: Bloomberg)

RIdge has definitely found the right profession. She even has empathy for bedbugs, allowing those from her lab an occasional feed on her blood by sucking on her thigh.

“There is nothing worse or more sad to see than a frustrated bedbug who can’t feed,” she told me when describing one of her experiments.

Well, I can think of just a few things that are worse and sadder than a frustrated bedbug, but I’m perhaps insufficiently kind and empathetic.

In addition to her regular bug-related duties, Ridge spends time as some type of hybrid physician-shrink for those coming her way who believe that their bodies have been invaded, and that they’re being eaten alive, by bugs:

She labels these cases DP, short for delusional parasitosis. Some entomologists prefer Ekbom syndrome, because it carries less stigma. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which most psychiatrists use, the condition is listed as one kind of delusional disorder, defined as an unshakeable belief that you are being attacked by bugs or parasites even when there is no evidence of infestation.

“Patients” Ridge has seen have gone to extremes to get rid of what’s bugging them. One fellow bathed in insecticide.

The folks who come to Ridge have already seen their doctor and a dermatologist. When they’re told that they need a psychiatrist, they take exception.

The patients believe that the proper medication is not an antipsychotic but an antiparasitic, that the correct expert is not a psychiatrist but an insect specialist.

For her own part, Ridge sees up to 200 cases a year, which seems really incredible to me. And she’s not alone.

“Every state has somebody like Gale or me,” said Nancy Hinkle, a professor of veterinary entomology at the University of Georgia, in Athens. She estimates that these inquiries take up about 20 percent of her time. “I tend to stay a couple of hours every day to deal with the invisible bugs.”

Countrywide, the number of cases is growing, and Ridge is collaborating on an initiative to come up diagnostic guidelines. Most, she’s trying “to prevent people’s lives from unraveling.”

I have a tiny bit of an idea what that unraveling might be like.

On a trip to NYC about five years ago, my husband and I both got what looked like a bedbug bite, which is distinguished by a three red dots pattern. We were pretty sure we were bitten at a weirdly charming but rundown little French bistro that we went to on each NYC trip. Not only were the menu and décor completely old school, they had a pianist playing Broadway show tunes, and the average age of the diners made us look like kids. (I just googled, and it closed about a year ago. Maybe the last regular patron passed on to the great French bistro in the sky.)

Anyway, for weeks after we returned home – with no signs of bedbugs in our luggage or on our clothing – I lived in complete fear that we were being infested. I bought some sort of natural anti-bedbug treatment. I bought a bedbug detector. I tossed and turned and regularly got out of bed in the wee small hours to toss and turn the mattress for signs that we had bedbugs. The fear of bedbug infestation didn’t bug my husband. What bugged him was my obsession. I finally went out and bought new pillows, anti-bedbug pillow cases, and an anti-bedbug mattress cover. Only then could I sleep.

So while I don’t exactly have DP, I do get the obsession with bugs.

Fortunately, there are entomologists out there to help DP sufferers, even if they can’t do much for them except get them to start taking anti-psychotics. Fortunately, there’s an anti-psychotic that one study shows is also an anti-parasitic. This gets some of the DP-ers to take a drug for what’s bugging them without having to acknowledge that they have a psychiatric disorder.

Me, I bet that there’s a reasonably good chance that at some point they’ll find that there really are teenie tiny parasites that are too miniscule to be identified with today’s microscopes.

Meanwhile, how’s entomologist for an interesting occupation?

Humans 1, IoT 0

Juicero is a heftily-backed little company that makes something called a juice machine. Well, I’ve got a blender, and that’s juice machine enough for me. But my blender is not part of the Internet of Things (IoT), so there’s obviously a lot I’m missing out on. My blender, however, does a number of handy things, like chop, whip, and  puree. And since I have neither the need nor the desire to order it around when I’m not in its presence, I guess I’m good with my old-fashioned blender. Plus when I want juice, mostly what I do is go to the fridge and take out whatever juice I have at the moment, which is apt to be orange, or grape, or apple, or cranberry.

But the Juicero juice machine, which costs $400 (over $300 more than the cost of my blender), is not just about any old juice. It’s a transformative device, and what it transforms (by squeezing) are:

…single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and healthy beverage. (Source: Bloomberg).

Well, refreshing and healthy both sound good. But why does it need it to be part of the good old I of T? Glad that you asked that question. The Juicero is all connected up so that it can read the code on the single-serving packet, check it against an online database, and let you know if the contents have expired or been recalled. Golly, that’s a swell idea. How many times have you looked up and down to find the expiration date on something? They print those in the damnedest places. But here’s Juicero, thinking outside of the juice box so that they can give us a head’s up that our chopped fruits and vegetables are expired and, thus, might not be as refreshing and healthy as one might have desired. Or as Gwyneth Paltrow might have desired, since, it will come as no surprise, she’s a big fan of Juicero founder Doug Evans, who prior to Juicero owned of a chain of juice bars that sold cold-pressed juice. In glass jars, natch.

Anyway, what Juicero does is provide consumers with a weekly supply of bags full of triple-washed and chopped fruits and veggies. (According to their web site, “each plant has a specific chop.” Gwyneth, I’m quite sure, would approve.) Consumers run it through the Juicero squeeze box, and voila: a glass full of cold and healthy.

Juicero has been dubbed the Keurig of juice, and that’s a subscription, razor/razorblade model that investors like. In the case of Juicero, investors including Google’s VC wing and Kleiner Perkins put $120M into the company.

But after the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands.

And you can squeeze your bags faster than the Juicero machine, although with a small loss of yield.

Reporters were able to wring 7.5 ounces of juice in a minute and a half. The machine yielded 8 ounces in about two minutes.

Sort of like John Henry, the steel-driving man who beat the steam-powered hammer. Except that John Henry died in the process, and squeezers presumably live to enjoy their cuppa.

Juicero maintains that its customers “prefer to use the machine because the process is more consistent and less messy.” Four hundred dollars worth of consistency and less mess. Okay. And don’t forget the IoT.

Founder Evans has:

…likened his work to the invention of a mainstream personal computer by Apple’s Jobs. “There are 400 custom parts in here,” Evans told Recode. “There’s a scanner; there’s a microprocessor; there’s a wireless chip, wireless antenna.”

400 custom parts – a buck per part! The human hand has only 29 bones and 34 muscles. Even times two, that’s a lot fewer parts than the Juicero has. So you’d think that the Juicero would go a little faster, wouldn’t you? (As for that comparison to the invention of the mainstream PC? RFLMAO. Or am I just suffering from a paucity of imagination in that I can’t see a future in which almost every home has an IoT juicer in it?)

Anyway:

Juicero didn’t broadly disclose to investors or employees that packs can be hand squeezed, said four people with knowledge of the matter.

Apparently none of them thought to try it for themselves. So some of them are a bit teed off.

Me? I’m with Kurt Jetta,

…who runs retail and consumer data firm Tabs Analytics. “Entrepreneurs may be tempted to have a technology angle when it’s not really there.”

Technology in search of a problem to solve, anyone?

Meanwhile, the product – the packs cost $5 to $8, which seems like a lot for a glass of juice, even before you factor in the machine cost (and they won’t sell you the packs if you don’t buy a juicer) – is only available in 17 states, none of which is Massachusetts.

Packs can’t be shipped long distances because the contents are perishable.

Now that’s what I call a flaw in the model.

Anyway, for $400, plus the cost of the packets, I could have had a V-8. A lot of them.

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A Pink Slip squeeze of affection to my sister Trish for pointing this story my way, and for suggesting the title.

Career derailment

Yesterday was a big news day for career derailment.

Annie Dookhan is/was a chemist. Oh, she’ll probably never work as a chemist again, not after her terrible stint working in a Massachusetts state lab that police departments and prosecutors relied on to test drugs. Unfortunately, Dookhan didn’t test all the drugs she claimed she had, sometimes substituting visual inspection for an actual lab test. Which doesn’t work all that well. Didn’t folks used to get duped into buying oregano thinking it was pot? But, hey, that powdered sugar could be cocaine.

Sometimes Dookhan forged her co-workers’ initials on forms. And sometimes she tried to cover up her activities by mixing drug samples.

For her troubles, Dookhan spent a couple of years in prison. (She was paroled last spring.) And prosecutors, it was announced yesterday, got to throw out 20,000 cases that relied on evidence that Annie Dookhan had her hand in on.

Of course, Dookhan derailed her career a number of years back, but yesterday’s announcement isn’t going to get it back on the right track any time soon.

It’s not clear what motivated Dookhan. Was she trying to get dealers off the street, whether they were dealing or not? Did she want gold stars and brownie points for getting her work done more speedily than her colleagues? Was she bored on the job? Or was it nothing to do with motivation and everything to do with mental illness?

In any case, it’s doubtful that Dookhan will ever work again at what had been her profession for more than a dozen years.

Former Patriots’ tight end Aaron Hernandez was also in the news yesterday. On a day when a number of his former teammates were at the White House celebrating their Super Bowl win, Hernandez – who had been serving life without parole for murder – hung himself in his cell.

Last week, a jury failed to find Hernandez guilty of two counts of murder. It’s not that there’s all that much doubt that he was involved in those murders. It’s just that the state’s prime witness was a thug who struck a deal. The prosecutors might as well have been presenting evidence worked on by Annie Dookhan.

Anyway, it can be argued that Hernandez’ career was on the way to derailment early on, as he’d been in plenty of capital-T Trouble since he was a star athlete in college. But it began to serious derail in June 2013 when, shortly after signing a $40M contract with the Pats, he was arrested for what turned out to be murder #3. Speculation is that Odin Lloyd was killed because he knew that Hernandez was responsible for the deaths of those two other men.

Aaron Hernandez is now dead and gone, and while this is mostly a case of sigh of relief and good riddance, he added a complication – or was it an F-U? - on the way out the cell door. In Massachusetts, if you die while your conviction is being appealed (as his was for the Lloyd murder), you go back to “innocent until proven guilty status.” Because of this, the families of his victims will have a hard time pressing civil suits against his estate. I suspect that, given the two trials Hernandez had gone through, most of that estate is already in his attorneys’ hands. Still…

Some commenters argue that Hernandez, knowing about this quirk in the law, killed himself so that his family would get whatever’s left behind. I doubt that he was that smart, as there’s been not a scintilla of evidence that he had any intelligence whatsoever. I’d put my money on his realization that he really was in the stir for life and just couldn’t take it.

(The big excuse for Hernandez’ throwing away a lucrative career and opting for the thug, gang-banger life instead, is that his father died when he was a teenager. Yep. That’s plenty awful, plenty sad. But just off the top of my head, I can think of four people I know and love – my husband (11 years old), my father (11 years old), and my brothers (15 and 18) – who also lost their fathers young and who didn’t turn out to be punks. Just sayin’ this looks to me like a pretty BS excuse.)

Anyway, Aaron Hernandez is gone, and all that’s left are some remnants of his career: jerseys and autographs that collectors jumped on eBay to sell, now that their presumed value had increased.

Yesterday’s third career derailment story was, of course, that of Bill O’Reilly.

In the face of all those advertisers abandoning the not-so-good ship BillO, Fox decided that he would no longer factor in their network lineup, where he will be replaced by the smarmy and odious Tucker Carlson.

O’Reilly came of age in an era where versions of his office playbook, while never exactly acceptable, were accepted. Sure, O’Reilly’s behavior – given his power – was worse than that of most men. But harassment, crude banter, etc. were widespread. They were objectionable. They were irritating. But women mostly shrugged and figured it was the cost of entry into a man’s world. When Senator Orrin Hatch, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, said that he couldn’t imagine anyone uttering the words “pubic hair” in the workplace, everyone in my workplace just laughed.

But the times have been a changin’, and women no longer put up with this kind of crap.

The downfall of O’Reilly is pretty sweet, given his pious rants about how the world would be a better place if we could just hold the calendar steady at 1952. And his latest book in which, I gather – I certainly haven’t read it/won’t read it – he talks about the importance of gentlemen treating women like ladies.

Sorry, Bill. Old school is out. Forever.

He won’t starve. I’m sure he’ll set up some online presence for his audience. He’ll keep best-selling his books. But he’ll no longer be pontificating on Fox, which would apparently like to expand its audience beyond aging white males.

So. Annie Dookhan. Aaron Hernandez. Bill O’Reilly.

Three pretty good-sized career derailments for one day…

Rx? (Don’t take Taltz if you are allergic to Taltz…)

I am most fortunate in that, even at my great advanced age, I don’t take any prescription drugs. Oh, there’s some ear cream that I use sporadically, but I don’t think it has a real brand name. And it’s certainly not advertised. Maybe there aren’t all that many people plagued by psoriasis of the ear.

But there are plenty of folks with severe plaque psoriasis. At least I’m guessing that’s the case, given all the ads for different drugs for treating plaque psoriasis. (And a lot of the plaque psoriasis sufferers are apparently MSNBC news junkies, because that’s where I see most of the ads…)

Taltz. Humira. Ortezla.

I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones that are top of mind.

But whether it’s a plaque psoriasis drug, or something else, I’m always amazed (and alarmed) by all the warnings that come along in the ads. In fact, once the ad is over, I tend to forget what the drug is supposed to treat. Instead I remember the lines like “Don’t take Taltz if you are allergic to Taltz.”

Okay. That sure makes sense.

But who would know whether they’re allergic to Taltz unless they’ve taken Taltz and broken out in hives or whatever?

We’re warned in drug ads about all sorts of bad things that can happen to you.

Tuberculosis. Lymphoma. Pancreatitis (which may prove fatal). Heart failure. Loss of vision or hearing. Suicidal thoughts. (And then there are the minor ones: diarrhea, headache.)

I get that the cure may end you up with some other terrible health problem. Three years ago this Sunday, my closest friend died from complications to a stem cell transplant that was treating a recurrence of lymphoma. Lymphoma which had been likely brought on by the drugs she had taken for years to treat lupus. So, there are tradeoffs, and if you’ve got something god-awful – like severe lupus – then they may well be worth making.

Still, those ads are just so dire.

There are ads that tell you to let your doctor know if you’ve ever been treated for cancer. Or had a liver transplant. I know that people switch physicians all the time, and that medical records don’t necessarily keep up (even when you’re seeing the same doctor, and when everything you’re doing, medical-wise, is within the same healthcare system). But how could you forget to tell your doctor that you’ve had a liver transplant? And if you’ve neglected to tell them, shouldn’t they have seen the scar and asked ‘what up?’

I can’t remember a time when there weren’t ads for OTC medications. (“Mother, please, I’d rather do it myself” was an infamous line in an Anacin (aspirin) ad. It even made it into a novelty song. And, of course,  “I’m not a doctor. I just play one on TV…”)

At some point in the 1980’s, we began to see ads for prescription drugs. Which is actually fairly odd (and somewhat insidious), given that, unlike other items that are advertised direct-to-consumer, we can’t go out and buy what’s being advertised. Prescription drugs aren’t like Ford F-150s or iPhones. We need to ask our doctor to prescribe the drug for us. So all of a sudden, once those ads started popping up, we had patients-as-consumers bugging their doctor to prescribe specific drugs that they wanted to pop.

I’m all for patients advocating for themselves and their loved ones. Doctors don’t know everything – there’s way to much to know – and you certainly have supreme interest in what it is that’s happening to you. Why not suggest avenues of exploration to your doctor?

But requesting branded drugs because you’ve seen them heavily advertised on TV (dire potential consequences or not)… Doctors are already being pressured by the pharma reps. Now they have their patients clamoring for the little purple pill.

Back to all those dire potential consequences…

If you do need to take a prescription medication, you really need to tune out the warnings or you wouldn’t take them.

Other than the one for a certain category of drug.

I’d say it is more than prudent to get medical help right away if you’re a fellow who’s experiencing an erection that’s lasted for more than four hours.

While you’re at it, tell your doctor if you’ve had a liver transplant. And don’t take Taltz if you’re allergic to Taltz.

Got stuff? Got a place to put it?

I always say that, every year, we should all pretend we’re pulling up stakes and use the “let’s pretend” to throw out all the stuff we’d toss if we really were moving.

I always say a lot of things, and this is just one of many that I always say and then proceed to ignore.

When I reno’d my condo in the fall of 2015, I did actually toss most of the stuff I would have thrown out if I were moving. Out went the old massive, mega BTU, energy-inefficient AC that we somehow hung onto when we moved from the carriage house we rented to the condo we owned- you know, the one with central HVAC. That old AC ran on the wrong kind of power – 220? 110? whatever it was, it wasn’t what we were wired for – not to mention that there isn’t a window in here that it would fit in. But hang on we did, for nearly 25 years, letting it take up precious storage space until I had the Brazilian junk hauling guy junk haul it away.

But I wasn’t ruthless enough when I went through things. The closet space that used to be taken up by the AC is now clogged with old PC’s and laptops. It’s on my “this year” list to do something about.

But what will I do with the space that’s freed up?

The plan is to move my Christmas decorations – now in a crawl space that I really do have to crawl into – into a quasi-walk-in closet that I can quasi-walk into. But I don’t plan on acquiring any new stuff to stuff into the crawl space. Stuff I still got plenty of. Or as much as fits into a 1250 square foot condo with limited storage, without making the place look like an episode of Hoarders.

If my footprint is small, I still have a lot of stuff. And even though I’m now hitting the Age of De-Acquisition, I’m like most modern Americans. I like stuff. And sometimes I fantasize that I have a big extra closet somewhere. Or that I have an outside storage unit. Where I could stow Christmas decorations. And things that I don’t exactly need or use, but that I want to hang on to for someday, for posterity, for my sisters and nieces to comb through, swearing under their breaths.

Which I won’t do. Who needs the extra monthly expense? Who needs the stored stuff?

But the storage problem is a real one for urban dwellers. We don’t have attics. We don’t have garages. We don’t have basements. So we either do without stuff (or periodically call in the Brazilian stuff-haulers), or we rent storage units. But some folks are starting to take a closer look at storage. Take NYC, where:

…as self-storage buildings have multiplied across the city, they are drawing increased scrutiny from city officials and community groups who say they take up space that could be used for something more productive. Now the city is proposing to restrict the development of new self-storage buildings in some industrial areas in the boroughs outside Manhattan, as part of a broader strategy to save more land for manufacturing and industry.

New York joins a small but growing number of communities, including San Francisco, Miami, and Charleston, S.C., that have moved to restrict or curb the spread of self-storage buildings, seeking to strike a balance between the demands for more storage with the needs of communities for other things such as jobs, housing, and grocery stores. (NYTimes, via the Boston Globe)

Self-storage is a relatively young industry, having started out in the 1960’s, when, I guess people became more mobile, and, I guess, had more discretionary money to spend on stuff.

People just didn’t use to accumulate as much crap as they once did. My grandmother Rogers lived in the same place for more than sixty years. As any of her grandchildren can bear witness, Nanny had a lot of stuff. There wasn’t an inch of space that wasn’t covered by some knickknack or another. Yet her stuff never spread beyond the confines of her flat.

Nanny lived in (and owned) a large three-family house. We moved out of our flat in 1956. The other renters had moved out a few years earlier. Despite the fact that she could have use the money, my grandmother never rented out either of those flats. She didn’t want tenants, period. But her stuff never spread out to encroach on either of those apartments. Nor did she ever use the cellar for storage. Her spillover storage was a hall closet just off the back entrance.

While Nanny was an accumulator, she was a small thing accumulator: bird figurines, decorative plates, her own water colors. She had the same furniture forever (some of which I now possess).

My mother lived for 45 years in the house we moved to around the corner from Nanny’s. Like Nanny, she was an accumulator, and there was stuff on every surface. Mostly small things: bird figurines, decorative plates, craft projects.

But her closets weren’t stuffed Fibber McGee, and, while there was plenty of junk in her cellar that we needed to get rid of before she moved out shortly before she died – stuff like old figure skates and bikes – the cellar was by no means packed to the gills.

Nanny and my mother were typical of their generations: stuff but not stuff. Certainly not stuff that would merit using a storage facility. Not like the current inhabitants of Planet America, where we all have 7.2 square feet per person of storage space. Okay, you can’t store much in 7.2 square feet, which is really just a small closet. But, in the aggregate, there’s a ton of self-storage space out there, taking up space that some cities believe is a more productive use.

I really don’t see manufacturing coming back to the heart of cities, but, sure, stores, gyms, and apartments are certainly more productive than places to store old Christmas ornaments.

But where are we going to put all of our stuff? And what happens to the economy if and when we stop accumulating it? First world, 21st century problems, I guess.

Thank you, Kathrine Switzer

Pink Slip generally celebrates Patriots’ Day with a paean to our quirky little holiday. Last year’s post was no exception.

I really love this holiday, and this year the forecast is for beautiful weather. And, once again, I have tickets to see the Red Sox play. The Marathon runs nearby, so when we spill out of Fenway, we’ll spill into the less-competitive runners. Post-game, I may go to a post-Marathon party at Kennedy Brothers PT, when we’ll fete the runners who ran on behalf of KBPT’s charity, Christmas in the City. All in all, it promises to be an excellent day. But, other than this one paragraph, this year’s post isn’t a tribute to Patriots’ Day. It’s a tribute to Kathrine Switzer.

I don’t recall reading the news about Kathrine’s attempt to be the first woman to officially run Boston. That was in 1967, and I was spending the week in NYC with my friend Kathy – the week I fell head-over-heels in love with Manhattan. So I missed the news about Kathrine – who used her initials K.V. to register – getting chased by race official Jock Semple. There’s Jock in hot pursuit, trying to pull the numbered bib off of Kathrine’s sweatshirt – and screaming at her to “get the hell out of my race.” Not to be outdone, Will Cloney, who was the head of the Boston Athletic Association (which runs the Marathon), was quoted as saying, “If that girl were my daughter, I would spank her.”

The nerve of a “girl” – Kathrine was a twenty-year old Syracuse student at the time – trying to run the boys-only Marathon.

Admittedly, fifty years is a long time. But for those of us who were there and then, it’s just yesterday.

And that was a yesterday when there were far fewer athletic opportunities for women. My high school (all girls) had one sport: basketball, which was played old-style: half-court, with two stationary forwards, two stationary guards, and two rovers. I didn’t play on the inter-scholastic team, but I did play intramural. Again, basketball was the only sport for intramural. The uniforms (which were our gym uniforms) ooked like waitress dresses. Each class had different colored waitress gym uniform. My class was Dawn Yellow. The “real” team’s uniforms were similar, but I don’t think they had starched white collars, which our gym unis did.

Phys ed, by the way, was mostly about doing wand drill and playing Squirrel in a Cage, supervised by the ancient Miss Foley. We didn’t shower after gym, because no one worked up a sweat.

These days, my high school is something of an athletic powerhouse, and has teams for cross country, field hockey, soccer, swimming & diving, alpine ski, basketball, winter track, golf, lacrosse, softball, spring track, and tennis.

What a difference fifty years make.

And that difference was made in no small part due to women like Kathrine Switzer.

This year, the Boston Athletic Association is retiring the number – 261 – that she wore way back in 1967. The BAA doesn’t retire numbers lightly. The only other retired number is 61, in honor of the 61 races run by Johnny Kelley. (When I first came to Boston – fall of 1967 – I went quite often to watch the finish of the Marathon. It wasn’t a big deal back in those days. You could walk about to the finish line at the last moment, and you stayed until Johnny Kelley had crossed the finish line. Johnny Kelley would have been sixty the first time I saw him race in 1968.)

By the way, at age 70, Kathrine will be running Boston again to commemorate her 50th marathon-i-versary. She’ll be in good company. Last year, out of the more than 30,000 numbered racers, 46% were women.

Although I love sports, I’m no athlete. When I was younger, I skied a bit, played tennis a bit, but never seriously took up any sport. I suspect if I were in high school now, I would be doing something. My father was a superb, multi-sport athlete, and both of my brothers played sports. One of my brother was a chip off the old block, athletic-wise. It’s even irritating to play mini-golf with him, as he just has that natural athlete confidence and sense. I’m typically okay on the first nine, but then get in my head and blow up on the back nine. Nonetheless, I did stand a 50-50 chance of inheriting the athlete gene. So who knows?

Anyway, here’s a shout out to Kathrine Switzer, Marathon Woman, still running after all these years.

At 70, she won’t be finishing among the elite runners. Maybe when the game is over, I’ll see her legging it through Kenmore Square. Go, Kathrine.

A few years ago, I stopped Gloria Steinem on the street to thank her for all that she had done for the women of my era.

I’ve got another thanks in me.

Thank you, Kathrine Switzer.

 

 

Goats to the left of me, goats to the right of me

You know, I can go days, maybe even weeks, without giving goats first, let alone a second, thought. And then, what do you know? Goats to the left of me, goats to the right of me…

Goats, apparently, are a thing.

And given that I didn’t get around to finishing up my taxes until 11 p.m. last night – and was confronted with the I-O-them realization that I had neglected to factor in Social Security – oops - when I made my estimated payments; and thus owed a chunk of changes – I was way in need of a some goat news to put me in a cheerier frame of mind.

First there was the wonderful video of goats doing what looked a lot like parkour, which the Huffington Post (and more than 10 million viewers) picked up on. Watching kids of the human variety parkour their way up the sides of buildings and do a parkour leap from roof to roof makes me nervous. Watching kids of the caprine variety, well, that just me smile and give a tiny little bleat of joy.

While goat parkour filled me with joy and ooh-aah wonderment, a news article on goat yoga filled me with puzzlement, the puzzlement perhaps stemming from insufficient knowledge and appreciation of either goats or yoga.

Anyway, a yoga studio in Western Mass is holding a special class “Goat Yoga For Charity” next week.

 “It’s just yoga with baby goats running around,” explains Shae Blaisdell, who co-owns the studio. “They jump on people’s backs, lie on people’s mats — they just play.” (Source: Boston Globe) 

“Just yoga with baby goats running around”? Oh. Just that.

Participants – and the event is sold out – have been warned that they should only wear and bring gear that they’re not afraid to get a bit of pee or poop on, as that’s what happens when you “blend movements and gentle stretches with the playful antics of live kid goats.”

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of mixing goats and yoga.To me, yoga – despite pose names like Downward Dog - always seems kind of humorless. Having a bunch of goats scampering around might lighten things up quite a bit.

Goat yoga isn’t just happening in Western Mass, of course. It truly is a thing. There’s even an outfit in – no surprise here – Oregon that combines goat yoga with wine tasting. Do you taste the wine before or after the goats crap on your yoga mat? Just wondering…

With Easter upon us, it’s kind of fun to think about an animal other than Easter bunnies and Easter chicks. Maybe next year there’ll be goat Peeps. Not that yoga practitioners would ever let a bite of Peep pass their lips. Still…

So, Happy Easter.

May there be a gift certificate to a goat yoga session in your Easter basket.

Cleanliness is next to sickiness. (You dirty rat…)

Even before I heard of the hygiene hypothesis, I knew that us hale and hearty types were going to eat a peck of dirt before we died.

I grew up in the era before there were different colored cutting boards and knives for each different food type. And while I did have food poisoning/stomach flu a couple of times, it was never because my mother didn’t bleach the kitchen after cutting up a chicken. One time, I was poisoned – along with hundreds of others – after eating Chicken a la King at a Christmas thank-you event held for everyone who worked for or volunteered at Our Lady of the Angels parish. (I was a worker: my friends and I had the very plum job of opening the donation envelopes, and counting and recording the collection take from all the Sunday masses. We got paid a couple of bucks, plus we got money for breakfast and junk food and were allowed to raffle off any Kennedy half-dollars that were thrown in the basket. As a side benefit, if all the priests were out, we could snoop around the rectory.)

I had the “stomach flu” a couple of times, too, the most memorable occasion being when some virulent virus went marauding through my college. The nurses went door to door distributing Lomotil – bring out your dead -  as we were all too sick to make it to the infirmary. Again, nothing to do with my mother’s neglecting to bleach the kitchen.

Throughout my life, I have pretty religiously followed the ten-second rule about food on the floor. I really don’t think there’s any salmonella lurking on my living room carpet. And, while I do wash fruits and veggies before I eat them, I have never felt the need to sterilize them.

And no one was wiping us down with special wipes, or dipping out mitts in Purell, every time we came in from our grubby play.

So here I am, on the cusp of old age, barely worse for the wear.

Anyway:

THE hygiene hypothesis posits that certain diseases—notably asthma, eczema and type-1 diabetes—which are becoming more common than they once were, are caused in part by modern environments being too clean. The diseases in question result from misfunctions of the immune system. The hygiene hypothesis suggests such misfunctions are the result of children’s immune systems being unable to learn, by appropriate exposure to viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasitic worms, how to respond properly. (Source: The Economist)

But the fetish for cleanliness in the house can’t hold a candle – a candle no doubt dripping waxen germs – to the sterility of a scientific lab. So now researchers are checking out an extension of the hygiene hypothesis, that: “laboratories’ spotlessness might also mean mice are sometimes too healthy to act as useful models for disease.”

Which isn’t such a good thing, “because mice are often used in medical experiments on the assumption that their reactions are similar enough to those of human beings for them to act as stand-ins.”

Mice acting as stand-ins for humans pretty much says it all. Of mice and me? No big difference? But better those little pink and white lab rats than a more sentient and human-like critter like a chimp or a dog.

So far, it’s not clear whether the hygiene hypothesis works with mice. Some studies say yes, another not so fast. As is often the case with these sorts of preliminary literature reviews, the outcome is a grab-bag of intriguing results, rather than a coherent hypothesis or prescription for action. But the evidence Dr [Lili] Tao and Dr [Tiffany] Reese have assembled suggests there is something going on here that needs investigating. It seems to be a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. The point of raising mice hygienically is to eliminate as many uncontrolled factors from an experiment as possible. That hygiene itself might be such a factor has not, until now, crossed people’s minds.

Now that it’s crossed the minds of at least a couple of scientists – and I do find it interesting that the scientists wondering about whether the lab is too clean are women – the next steps aren’t clear.

Running trials twice, with “dirty” and “clean” mice, could be one approach. Another might be to agree on a set of bugs to which early exposure is permitted.

We may see the day when you dirty rat is a good thing to have around the old lab.

Keep on experimenting, folks. Quite selfishly, whatever you discover via mice may prove useful to us aging Boomers. But I can tell you that the dirty mice will have more in common, hygiene-wise, with those of us who grew up before the world got so damned clean than those clean mice will.

How to take $103 million and turn it into $31 million

The rich are different from you and me. And, no, it’s not just because they have more money. They also give their children names like Chauncey Devereux Stillman. And where the rest of us live in neighborhoods or on streets, they have named estates, like Wethersfield.

Wethersfield was the home of Chauncey Devereux Stillman, grandson of James Jewett Stillman, who headed up the bank that eventually turned into Citigroup. So despite the terrible name, Chauncey was born with a leg up. When his grandfather died in 1918, he left his heirs an estate that would be worth $1.6 billion in current dollars. Obviously not much compared to the big bucks numbers that get bandied around these days. We all know that a billion is the new million. Still, $1.6 billion isn’t all that shabby, even when diluted among multiple generations of descendants. There was a Depression in there, but you’d think that $1.6 billion is sort of built to last.

All of the $1.6 billion did not, of course, go to Chauncey. But he scraped together what he could and, as a young man in the 1930’s, bought up a few “depleted” farms north of NYC and created an estate named Wethersfield. (Wethersfield was the town in Connecticut where his ancestors had emigrated in the early 1700’s.)

 He spent more than two decades creating gardens evoking those in 17th century Italy. A room with a vaulted ceiling and frescoes once displayed his most prized artwork, “Portrait of a Halberdier,” a painting by Pontormo that sold at auction to the Getty Museum for $35 million shortly after his [Chauncey Stillman’s, not Pontormo’s] death in 1989.

But by the early 2000s, the Wethersfield fortune began to fade. The foundation’s expenses and grant outlays exceeded revenues for 14 straight years, filings show. Trustees diverted millions of dollars to personal causes, including alma maters and children’s schools, according to admissions they made in connection with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s probe.

Homeland’s assets totaled $103 million in 1998. By April 2015, they’d dwindled to $31 million. That year, Schneiderman alleged that former trustees used the foundation as “a piggy bank” and that its ex-president misdirected $701,328 for personal benefit. In an agreement with Schneiderman’s office, seven former trustees admitted they routinely awarded money to “institutions that had nothing to do with the Wethersfield Estate.” (Source: Bloomberg)

I’m not the canniest person on the face of the earth when it comes to finances, but $103 million to $31 million? That’s quite a dwindle in 17 years, especially when they bolstered the coffers with $35 million with the sale of the Pontormo. But I guess that’s what happens when the trustees can tap the foundation for their pet causes and/or their walking around money. Not a lot of oversight going on there. And I’m sure if you’re a trustee with oodles of money just sitting there it’s way, way, tempting to be a showoff and write a big check that’s not coming out of your own pocket. You get the stroking and the kudos, the cultivation and the sucking up, and it costs you zilch. (Then there’s the temptation to outright steal, which was going on a bit with that “misdirection” of funds.)

So now, in hopes of keeping Wethersfield alive (gardens, trails, stables, stately manse, etc.) – it’s been open to the public since Chauncey Stillman’s death in 1989 -  the family foundation is selling off Stillman’s art collection.

On the auction block will be works by Degas, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Maybe they’ll go to museums, but it’s more likely that they’ll go into private collections of those with a lot more than $1.6 billion. Where no one will see them ever again in the whole wide world. Unless, of course, the estates of the purchasers turn their billions into millions and need cash.

What is up with United Airlines?

A few weeks back, it was the teenaged sisters who weren’t allowed to board a flight because they were wearing leggings. Turns out they were flying on an employee family pass, and United has a special dress code for family members because, even if no one knows who they are, they apparently represent. My guess is someone in this family party ticked off a gate agent – for a real or imagined reason  – and the gate agent decided to power-mouse it up and exercise some  capricious and arbitrary authority. That or the girls looked like they were going to do a pole dance mid-flight and the gate agent feared that the average passenger would be offended.

Anyway, “#leggingsgate” flared on social media for a while, with calls to boycott United, etc.

Well, now United has gone ahead and upped the ante, and in the process, upped the anti.

It all began at O’Hare on Sunday night when United was trying to resolve an overbooking situation. After the passengers were seated for a full flight, United realized they had no place to seat four United employees who had to be in Louisville for the next day. So they offered passengers $400 – later (once the flight was boarded) upped to $800. Plus an overnight hotel room, and a flight to Louisville the next afternoon. It comes as no surprise to me that there were no takers. It’s Sunday. People flying on Sunday are either a) going home and want to get there; b) need to be where they’re flying for something on Monday.

I’ve never been bumped, but I did take the offer one time. My husband and I were flying to San Diego on vacation and had a stop in Chicago. They were overbooked on the Chicago-San Diego leg, and were looking for volunteers. The offer was lunch money, an upgrade to first class, and a small (couple hundred bucks) flight voucher, in return for a six hour delay. Back in the day before you had to be at the airport two hours early, six hours meant we could take the El downtown, walk around the Magnificent Mile, and have a nice lunch. What the hell? We took the offer and made a nice old day of it. Other than the fact that it was freezing in Chicago and we were dressed for San Diego, a nice outing entirely.

Another time, on a business flight from Atlanta to Dallas, they came on and announced that, given the head winds, they wouldn’t have enough fuel to get to Dallas unless 1,800 pounds of human and baggage got off. I had to be at a meeting, so I didn’t volunteer. I don’t remember what the offer was, but they did find some volunteers and off we went.

Can’t remember which airlines these “incidents” occurred on. The SD-Chicago may well have been United. The Dallas flight was likely American. But both occurred back in the TWA and Pan Am days when all sorts of airlines were flying around.

Back to United’s latest fiasco, rather than do the economically rational thing to do, i.e., keep sweetening the pot until they found four passengers to take the offer and deplane, or suck it up and hire a private jet to fly its employees to Louisville, United invoked a fine print rule that lets them randomly select passengers to bump.

Well, it’s one thing to be bumped when you’re in the waiting area. It’s another to be bumped when you’re sitting there with your seat in the upright position, seat belt on, carry-on safely stowed, and the tray table snapped in place.

And for some reason, someone at United (actually Republic Airways, running a United Express flight) decided it was a good idea to get everyone seated before bumping. So rather than figure this all out in the waiting area, where people might get pissed off, but wouldn’t have to be forcibly pulled off, United let the passengers board and get comfy, and then announce the lucky winners of the random drawing. And what happened is that, while three of those randomly selected took the offer, one of the randomly selected passengers did a hell-no-we-won’t-go:

In a video that quickly went viral, a passenger is shown shrieking and bloodied as he was forcibly removed from an overbooked United plane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport Sunday night by police officers [Note: these were actually unarmed airport security personnel, not real cops]. He refused to leave the plane, saying that he was a doctor with patients to see in the morning…

In the disturbing video, fellow passengers yelled, “Oh my God, this is wrong! Look at what you’re doing to him,” as officers dragged the man down the aisle. He didn’t fight with the officers. Instead he went limp and was pulled across the floor of the plane, arms first.(Source: Boston Globe)

Maybe the doctor was being a jerk. But when it comes to siding with a jerk or the goon squad, well, we know where the sympathies are going to lie. And that is not likely to be with the not-so-friendly skies.

So, inevitably, folks began live tweeting the situation. Within 24 hours, nearly four million people had viewed the video. And, inevitably, there was insta-talk of a boycott.

It took a while, but United is all apologies for what the company’s CEO termed "an upsetting event to all of us here at United."

"I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers. Our team is moving with a sense of urgency to work with the authorities and conduct our own detailed review of what happened," United CEO Oscar Munoz said in a statement Monday. Munoz said the airline is trying to reach the passenger to "further address and resolve this situation." (Source: Chicago Trib)

It doesn’t help the situation any that the passenger dragged off was apparently a POC (Asian). Nor does it help that power moves on the part of “authorities”- however tin the badge and mickey mouse the authority – do seem to be disturbingly on the increase.

As for United, I’d hate to be their in-house flack or their PR firm. At least this PR nightmare has relegated #leggingsgate to a position further down the old search engine. But the real bad news is that #boycottunited is trending.