Privatized prisons? Bring on the public policy debatae!

I always have to laugh whenever someone touts how much better it would be if the private sector ran everything. Services would be cheaper (to the providers running them to provide, of course, not to the consumers who consume them or the taxpayers who pay for them), operate more efficiently (just look at the bang-up job Keolis does with the Boston metro train system), and altogether offer an undeniable, every day proof statement underscoring the private sector’s superiority to the public sector. (A corollary to this, of course, is that we should have businessmen hold high public office. Ahem.)

Maybe I’m just jaded because so much of my private sector career was spent in companies where the products and services always cost more than those of those offered by the competition, where we were not particularly efficient, and as for effective... Let’s just say most of the places I worked are no longer standing.

Ah, but you might well be thinking, these companies were drummed out of existence – as they should have been – by the ruthless efficiencies of The Market. And that is absolutely true.

But we were never providing necessary citizen services. And when it comes to necessary citizen services, there are plenty of then that should be run by the government, not by profiteers.

The most notable example of this is the prison system, which is increasingly owned and operated by private companies.

Their incentive is, of course, to increase the demand for prisons. Which means increasing the supply of prisoners. So it’s in their interest to collude with the prison guard unions, anti-immigrant groups, and communities where there’s no other viable employment opportunities, to promote “law and order”, three strikes you’re in for good, kick the brown folks out, and schemes to throw people in jail for a $50 unpaid traffic fine that over the course of time manages to balloon into 30 days or $3K.

Not to mention that, in keeping costs down, they feed prisoners even worse swill than they used to get, and have fewer opportunities for anything that might keep them out of trouble in the stir or prepare them for life outside of the stir.

Anyway, the last thing I read about private prisons was a story on a class action suit behalf of ICE detainees – 60,000 of them – who were held in Geo Group, Inc. facilities where they were allegedly forced to chose one of two options: work for free or get thrown into solitary confinement. The plaintiffs claim that Geo was violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Their lawsuit argues that Geo violated the law’s prohibition on using threats to obtain labor.

“It would be forced labor for someone to say, ‘We’ll arrest you for not working for me,’ ” says David Seligman, who represents the plaintiffs. “It’s similarly forced labor to say, ‘We’re going to remove you from all contact with other people.’ ” The lawsuit also argues that Geo, through an optional work program that pays $1 a day, violated common law against “unjust enrichment,” since extensive use of low-paid detainee labor has saved the company money; it employs only one janitor in Aurora who isn’t in custody, the plaintiffs say. (Source: Bloomberg)

Geo is, of course, pushing back, maintaining that this is “really a public-policy dispute.”

And, yep, there’s some truth to that assertion.

They also claim that, if the suit goes in the plaintiffs’ favor, they’re ability to operate viable and profitably will be jeopardized.

And, yep, there may be some truth to that one, too. To which I say too bad.

I’m a big believer that those in prison should have the opportunity to work, to build their skills, and make a little money. And that money doesn’t have to be what they’d make on the outside. But their pay shouldn’t be anything that approaches zero or looks in any way, shape, or form like slave wages. And they sure shouldn’t be forced into an either-or decision between being a slave or being held in solitary confinement.

Privatized prisons?

Whether the plaintiffs win their case or not, I say bring on the public policy debate!

Sheer nonsense

For the third time this week – three, count ‘em – my sister Trish has been the fodder spotter for Pink Slip. Well played, Trixie.

Today’s suggestiopn is a complete and utter doozy.

Not since Ricky and Fred made faux couture dresses out of feed sacks, and tricked Lucy and Ethel into believing they were straight off the Paris runway, has there been a more ridiculous fashion statement than Moschino’s dry cleaning bag dress.

Perhaps I should be thanking my lucky fashionista stars that I already have a couple of these in my possession.

Technically speaking, one of these should go back to my sister Kath, since it encases a trench coat that she’s donating to St. Francis House. (Promise: I’ll bring it in next week, when I’m doing a shift in the clothing room.)

But I do have dry cleaning bags that are mine, all mine.

Such potential. Gifts for sisters, cousins, nieces. One size fits all. An even better Yankee Swap item than a Snuggie. 

Seriously, folks. I used to feel that the most absurd fashion of the year was the thousand dollar pair of inside-out ripped jeans. Hah. In comparison to the dry cleaning bag o’ fashion, I’d fill a wardrobe with those puppies.

The dry cleaning bag is, I must say, less costly than the inside-out ripped jeans. It’s only $736 (give or take). So you could take the extra couple hundred bucks you don’t spend on the inside-out ripped jeans on a slip to go underneath that bare-naked dry cleaning bag. Because, of course, slip not included.

The paper-looking shoulder treatment –
“We ♥️ our customers” – is a nice enough touch. Although it does seem a bit working girl to walk around advertising love for customers. And who wants to parade around with “Free pick up and delivery” stamped across their body?

So on balance, weird. Weirdy-weird.

I don’t imagine they’ll sell many/any of these. It may just be an attention getting device. But does Moschino want my attention? It’s not like I’m going to be so intrigued by this piece that I’ll look into what else they offer.

Okay. That’s not exactly true. I was curious enough to dig this up. I’m definitely not their demographic, even if I did have dress-up places to go, which I most decidedly do not.

I suppose that, given all that’s going on in the world, it’s actually enjoyable to have a bit of outre fashion levity out there.

Still, hard to see Moschino’s “cape sheer overlay dress” as anything other than sheer nonsense.  

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Source: HuffPo – via my sister Trish.

Taking the everyday out of everyday objects

Nothing says holiday season to me like the release of the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, which always has some fabulous – and fabulously ridiculous – “fantasy gifts.”

Well, the 2017 Christmas Book is out, and I almost had my hands on an actual physical copy of it. A woman in my building, who gets somewhere between 50 to 75 catalogs a week, leaves 49 to 74 of those catalogs on the table in the foyer for me to recycle. Alas, the only one she was interested in this week was the N-M. So I’ll have to do what I always do: download and “thumb” through the pdf version. Damn!

Anyway, as befits an outfit from Texas, the N-M gifts will be outrageously over the top, and I can’t wait to peek inside.

But until I get around to N-M, I thought I’d take a look at a lower-key, more subdued set of “fantasy gifts.” These are the everyday objects that Tiffany, bless their pale blue little hearts, has swanked up and turned into Everyday Objects. And Everyday Objects cost some serious coin, my friends.

What would you pay for a pencil sharpener? A couple of bucks for one of the little plastic ones from Staples? Nine dollars for a crank-handle wall mount? If you were my husband, you’d bag pencil sharpeners entirely and just find the best utility knife in the kitchen and go to town. But if you want a Tiffany’s pencil sharpener, it’s $275.

Some of the everyday objects they’ve turned into Everyday Objects are not even things that you’d pay for. Like a Band-aid box. Of course, they no longer make those old metal Band-aid boxes – just the flimsy cardboard ones. So I suppose if you really have a hankering for an old-timey Band-aid box, and you have $600 to spare, this one’s for you. Too bad they didn’t partner with Johnson & Johnson to use the Band-aid name. Bet they would sell a lot more of these suckers.

Another used-to-be-free item is a sterling ($600) or vermeil ($900) of the little Tiffany box.

THen there’s my personal favorite, the silver and vermeil coffee can. That’ll set you back $1,500, but it will look so much smarter on your desk than a rinsed-out Chock Full o’ Nuts can.

Talk about gifts for the person who has everything, including money. Maybe these are what Melania Trump uses for stocking stuffers? I mean, Barron could sure use a $300 yo-yo, no? Or drive his father crazy – yes! – blowing some tunes on a $385 harmonica. I vote that Barron starts with “Thunder Road.” Not that his father would recognize the song – it’s not “Cat Scratch Fever” by Ted Nugent – but what joy to the world if a reporter got to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders how Mr. Trump liked hearing Barron play a song by that old leftie Bruce Springsteen.

Shop on, Melania!

Plenty more where the $385 harmonica came from: ping-pong paddles in Tiffany blue ($650). For the STEM girls (and boys) on your list, a triangle ($400) and a protractor ($425). Me? I’m holding out for a compass so I can have a full matched set.

I was also intrigued by the $9,000 (limited edition) ball of sterling silver yarn. Is it actually usable? Does this ball unwind? And what would one make with it? A chain mail vest? My sister Kath is a serious knitter. Her thought was that there might be enough in the ball to make a headband. Which I can actually picture on Gwyneth Paltrow’s head.

Ah, the things you can buy if you have the right attitude and wallet size.

But, given that the aesthetics are pretty darned similar, why not just display the real everyday object, rather than a surreal EVERYDAY OBJECT? Guess I’m just lacking in consuming imagination.

But it has certainly whet my appetite for a good deep dive into the Neiman-Marcus Christmas Book.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to my sister Trish, who spotted an article on this on Buzzfeed.

Dying for a “wow experience”?

Sorry to have missed it, but last week, Boston hosted the National Funeral Directors Association convention. Damn!

George Clark owns a North Carolina company called Funeral Home Gifts. Here’s their online pitch:

Personalized gifts that celebrate a life well lived

CREATE A WOW EXPERIENCE THAT YOUR
FAMILIES WILL REMEMBER FOREVER

HEIRLOOM QUALITY BEREAVEMENT PRODUCTS

Delivered Overnight

In terms of staying on message, Clark is a marketing manager’s dream. The proof? Here’s what he had to say when he was interviewed on the convention floor:

“If you’re a funeral director, you’ve got only a couple of days to create a wow experience,” Clark said. “These guys have to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ready at a moment’s notice to throw a party for 300 people that’s the most special party that celebrates somebody’s life. What we do is help the funeral director answer the question: How do I celebrate a life overnight?” (Source: Boston Globe)

The bolding in mine, but wow, just wow. Admittedly, I received a lot of compliments on the memorial service I had for my husband – done without any assistance from a funeral parlor – but I didn’t feel compelled to celebrate Jim’s life overnight. I took a month – ample time to line up a Unitarian church that would also let me have an after-party on prem, hire a caterer, meet the organist who happened to specialize in Irish music, and print out the words and music to “The Parting Glass” for the Unitarian minister trainee who just happened to have had a past life as a singer in touring company musicals, etc. It was a pretty good memorial service, if I do say so myself. But I had never thought of a funeral as being a “wow experience,” and wouldn’t have used those words to describe Jim’s “do.” Nor would I use it describe any funeral or memorial service I’ve ever gone to.

Most of them have been more traditional than “wow”, and the experience was typically some combination of sad and bittersweet.

The last funeral I attended was for my mother’s closest friend. It was held in the church of my childhood, the ancestral parish of my father’s family, and the place where both my parents, and my grandmother, were buried out of. My mother’s friend Ethel was in her 90’s, so her passing wasn’t weeping and wailing sad-sad. And yet it was still sad, and absolutely bittersweet. Nothing “wow” about it. Sure, it was an experience. But it wasn’t an experience.

But these days, everything has to be both a “wow” and and “experience.”

And, I guess, a “wow experience” is always enhanced when there’s a gift involved.

Of course, the gifts that Funeral Home Gifts offers aren’t party favors. They’re one-offs. Personalized urns, keepsake pillows, memorial blankets.

Somewhere around here, I have a memorial blanket, sent to me a month after my husband died by the funeral parlor that took care of the removal, the notice, the legal stuff, the cremation. It was not, thankfully, one of these pictorial memorial blankets. I’m sure that there are people who are very happy to have one of these. To each their own. But me? I wasn’t even interested in the relatively tasteful and subdued blanket I did receive – a cream-colored throw with Jim’s birth and death dates on it. But it was something of a “wow experience” when I opened the package up. (Do I even have to say that I blogged about it at the time?)

Anyway, the funeral biz ain’t what it used to be.

Not that it hasn’t changed before.

My parents both spoke of the at-home wakes they’d been growing up. Typically, my mother’s stories were grim: the wake of a woman who’d died in childbirth, laid out on her bed, holding her baby. (My mother wasn’t even 10 when she was hauled to this event. A “wow experience” if ever.) My father’s stories, on the other hand, were about the raucous fun he and the other kids had at the at home wakes. Kids got to stay up late, watch their elders in the jar, and do things like crawl under the casket and push it up so that the body appeared to be moving.

It wasn’t all hilarity for my father, of course. His father died when he was 11, and while my father and his sibs sat at the kitchen table, one of the O’Connor Brothers from O’Connor Brothers Funeral Parlor emptied the blood out of my grandfather’s corpse and ported it, basin-full at a time, to the bathroom that was just off the kitchen to flush it down the toilet.

But back in the days of my early wake and funeral-going, if you were a Catholic, there was a two-day wake (2-4 p.m., 7-9 p.m.) in a funeral parlor, followed the next day by the funeral. Which was followed by the burial. Which was followed by some sort of gathering back at some family member’s house or at a restaurant.

Now even Catholic’s don’t have two-day wakes. They have one four-hour “viewing”, or just an hour before the funeral as wake time.

And as more and more people leave the neighborhoods, churches, and traditions they grew up with, there’s a lot more latitude.

Speaking of O’Connor Brothers, another fellow, Bob Biggins, interviewed for the Globe article credited Frank O’Connor of O’Connor Brothers (one of the sons of the founding brothers, I believe) fame with his decision to become a funeral director.

Biggins, of the funeral home in Rockland, found his calling as a 12-year-old boy grieving his grandmother, Ella, who was bedridden by crippling arthritis in her final years.

Frank O’Connor of O’Connor Brothers Funeral Home in Worcester handled her funeral, and in the process, charted a career path for Biggins, who recalled his grandmother as looking “better in the casket than I had seen her in 10 years.”

“Frank answered every single call, every question that I had. He really helped my family out,” Biggins said. “I was just intrigued by the whole process, but I was more so comforted by his caregiving.”

Well, that Frank O’Connor was a friend of my father’s. Not besties, but they’d grown up in the same ‘hood. And my father, who lived in that ‘hood his entire life, went to plenty of wakes and funerals at O’Connor Brothers, where most of the wakes and funerals of parishioners were held. And that “’better in a casket’” bit? How many times did I hear someone comment on what a “good job” Frank did with the late lamented. At my father’s wake, folks kept coming up to us kids and mentioning just how good my father looked. Me? I thought he looked awful, like Galen in Planet of the Apes. But who was I to argue with some guy who’d probably horsed around with my father at those at-home wakes of yore.

In any event, Frank O’Connor didn’t inspire me to open a funeral parlor.

I must content myself to provide “wow experiences” in other formats.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A funereal, Irish whisper shout out to my sister Trish, who spotted this article (and the O’Connor Brothers shout out).

The air in Ayer

There’s not to much to Ayer, Massachusetts. It’s most well known (at least locally) as the home of Fort Devens. Devens was a big deal at one point, but now it’s a relatively small US Army Reserves installation. There’s also a Federal prison facility there – it’s most notorious resident was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Patriots Day bomber, who was housed at Devens while on trial.

In our family, Fort Devens was famous for having been the spot where my Uncle Charlie served during his short-lived Army career during World War II.

The Army was pretty hard up for soldiers by the time they got around to drafting Charlie.

He was well into his thirties, and the Selective Service was no longer being quite as selective as they had been at the outset of the war.

Amazingly, my father – three years Charlie’s junior – had been rejected (for flat feet) by the Army when he tried to join up shortly after Pearl Harbor. The Navy did take my father, and the rest is (family) history.

But Charlie was not an eager beaver when it came to the service. In fact, pretty much the only thing the man was an eager beaver for was goldbricking and cadgery, which he had down to fine arts.

By the time Uncle Sam caught up with him in late 1944/early 1945, they didn’t even have any uniforms or arms to issue, at least not to the likes of him. The stories were that Charlie trained for a few months wearing his Chesterfield overcoat, and carrying a fake wooden rifle. Or was it a broomstick? In any case, Charlie was only in a couple of months when he received a medical discharge for being hard of hearing. I believe that, thanks to this, he collected Army benefits for the rest of his life.

Anyway, that’s pretty much the sum total of what I know about Ayer, Massachusetts.

But it’s apparently home to a few factories, one of which is a plant that produces tofu. Which is not such a great thing, Ayer air-wise.

The smell reminds [residents] of rotten eggs, sewage, or fermented dairy. Neighbors also used words like rancid, nauseating, and foul.

The source of this stench? A tofu plant, whose emissions have been assaulting the town’s olfactory senses off and on since May.

“It’s ungodly,” said John Doherty, 19 . “It just smells rotten.” (Source: Boston Globe)

As they say, a factory smell means jobs. As does despoiling the environment. But at least Nasoya Foods isn’t doing that.

I know what a factory-smelling town smells like.

My friend Joyce’s sister was married to an attorney who, early in his career, was a Legal Aide lawyer in Berlin, NH in the 1970’s.

Berlin was home to paper mills, and not only did the town smell awful, the river that ran through it, the Androscoggin, was a roiling mass of putrid looking white and yellow guck.

I was only in Berlin a couple of times, and never during the height of summer, but, boy, did that town reek.

Nasoya acknowledges that they’re the ones causing the problem:

“We apologize to the neighborhood and I empathize with the neighborhood. It’s unacceptable,” Gatta said Thursday in a telephone interview. “We have zero tolerance for this kind of thing.”

Well, neither do the folks in air who can’t breathe the air, and who categorize it as a “serious quality of life issue.”

Unfortunately, despite the two scrubbers that Nasoya has going, things sometimes gang agley and smelly. And sometimes the smell disappears immediately, while other times it lingers – and floats into neighboring towns.

They’re working on it, including looking at replacing the existing scrubbers with something more high tech.

Meanwhile, residents  - in their homes and businesses - are “burning patchouli-scented incense” and “pumpkin pie scented candles.”

Patchouli? Scented candles?

Remind me to stay out of Ayer.

Let the pea soup spew!

I don’t know how I missed this when The Economist took it up last summer, but it appears that there’s an increasing demand for exorcists in Europe. Yes, Europe. Post-modern, irreligious, cathedrals-for-tourists-only Europe. And because the Catholic Church has been a bit neglectful of the practice, openings have occurred for independent operators – independent of The Church, that is.

One such indie is Philippe Moscato.

In casual clothes and chatting about the tools of his trade—a “Vogel” crystal, compass, steel crucifix, pendulum and bag of salt from Jerusalem—he says he can deliver unreal results. (Source: The Economist)

I’m guessing that this is truth in advertising, and that the results that he gets are unreal.

Hired to exorcise an apartment in a wealthy district of central Paris, he predicts that the air will change. In the winter, he says, the owners will no longer need their central heating, the result of beneficial vibrations.

Hmmm. Think of how great it would be to have beneficial vibrations vibrating in your home, so beneficial that you didn’t need to put the heat on when there’s a wind chill of –10 degrees come January. I just knew Moscato’s results would be unreal.

Mr Moscato’s work involves first waggling a pendulum, supposedly to assess the flat’s readiness, then lighting a candle, reciting from an exorcism manual, before blessing salty water that he splashes in every room. As he sprinkles, he delivers a flow of incantations.

Actually, this sounds kind of boring. I mean, waggling a pendulum and sprinkling salty water around. In the old days, didn’t exorcists have to do things like hold levitating bodies down, and dodge spewing pea soup from Linda Blair?.

It’s reasonably lucrative work – €155 ($178) for an hour’s work, and between property and human exorcisms, Moscato gets about 4-5 gigs a week. Not a great living, a good hourly rate. Maybe he has a day job? Other non-priest exorcists mentioned in the article charge more, and one claims that in a good month, he has pre-tax income of €12,000. But that’s working at 15 hour day.

The rising demand is attributed to TV shows like Fox’s “The Exorcist”, which is popular in France. And to the fact that there are more African immigrants around, who believe in things spiritual while not necessarily believing in things Catholic, thus making them more open to lay exorcists. Fear factor also plays a role. After terrorist attacks in Paris and Marseilles, demand surged. And then there’s the internet, where people can now easily find someone to rid them of the devil. (“Who you gonna call? Fantôme busters!)

House and business exorcisms and blessings are more popular than those involving humans, which are quite a bit riskier:

…occasionally victims of violent rituals, including children, have been killed in beatings that are supposed to chase evil spirits from a person. The more responsible fee-charging exorcists say a diagnosis or exorcism of a person should happen only after a patient has consulted a doctor or psychiatrist. (Source: The Economist)

This could get dangerous. If I were M. Moscato, or one of the other exorcists – in the article, all were male, I believe – I’d stick with waving my pendulum and salt water around people’s homes, in hope of freeing them from the thermostat and heating bill.

Meanwhile, if you’re one of those folks who accept no substitutes, and wants a real bona fide exorcist straight out of The Exorcist - the movie, not the Fox show – the International Catholic Association of Exorcists does have “200 members on 6 continents,” and a “mission to provide relief to those impacted by Satan and his minions.” Ordained clergy, only, thanks (Catholic, Orthodox, et al. – no Protestants need apply). And a “strict validation process.”

No word on whether they can lower your heating bills. I think their focus is more on the Linda Blair situations…

Not to early to start planning for Halloween 2018

Today may be All Saints Day, but why spend anytime thinking about all those saints, especially the martyrs, and the gruesome way they died? St. Sebastian with all those arrows sticking out of him. St. Dymphna, who’s father cut her head off because she wouldn’t marry him. St. Lawrence, roasted alive. (And crying out to the pagans killing him to “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.) So: no dwelling on saints today, my friends.

And don’t for even one moment think that buying candy corn on sale at CVS today counts as planning for next year. You know full well that, between now and then, you’ll gobble that candy corn down while watching a rerun on HGTV.

Anyway, what you do want to put in the back of your mind is that, come next year, you won’t have to do any of the heavy holiday lifting that attends Halloween now that it’s become a “thing.”
Alas, it’s a day late and a thousand or so dollars short, but I do want you to now that:

Halloween whisperers are earning as much as $125 an hour to shop for severed heads, advise clients on his-and-hers costumes, and spray bushes with spider webs. (Source: Boston Globe)

Advise clients on his and hers costumes? What???? There are actually people out there too unimaginative to think Fred and Wilma, or Jared and Ivanka? Salt & Pepper Shakers? Yin and Yang? Pasta and Red Sauce? Witch and Broomstick?

And if shopping for a severed head – I assume we’re talking fake heads here – is worth $125 an hour, I’m in the wrong business.

In Chestnut Hill, personal concierge Lisa Schreider spent hours scooping out 10 large pumpkins for a driveway display, a job that left her with a modern workplace injury: pumpkin elbow.
“The original goal was to have the [clients’] kids help, but they were not interested,” Schreider said, adding cheerfully: “I couldn’t use my right arm for two days afterwards.”

Am I the only one thinking that if the kids aren’t interested in scooping out pumpkin innards – and I really can’t blame them for not wanting to deal with that messy gloop – the remedy calls for fewer (or none, even) large pumpkins for the driveway display?
Halloween seems to be a busy season for Schreider.

One client needed a last-minute pirate’s hat, another realized she didn’t have enough candy.

Gee, when folks I know need a last-minute pirate’s hat, they run out and get one. (Party City? Walmart? Pirates ‘R Us?) Ditto for candy.

And, of course, if your kids, like those little Chestnut Hill-ers, don’t want to get their hands messy with pumpkin gloop and you let them get away with that, we all know that no one in the household is going to be satisfied with the rat-ass jack-o-lantern carving that most kids (and most adults, for that matter) are capable of. A couple of triangle eyes and a snaggle-toothed grin? Even if you can manage it, that’s just BO-RING.

If you really want to do it up right, you can hire Brooklyn’s Maniac Pumpkin Carvers.I’ll admit: their work looks mighty professional. That’s because the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers are professionals. A custom, artisanal pumpkin could set you back $1.5K (shipping and handling not included).
All concierge’s don’t have fees of $125/hour. The more reasonable Kristin Cantu only charges $65. But that can add up, as it did when she was hired to find “a Soviet-style military costume for a client, a Harvard Business School graduate.”

“I did a lot of online searches, and it turns out these sorts of costumes are really hard to come by,” she said. She went to multiple stores — including army surplus shops in Boston and Saugus — and rented part of the outfit from a costume shop.

More than $1,000 later — not counting the cost of the costume itself — the client got what he needed. “He said he was a big hit at the party,” Cantu said.

I’ll just bet it was.

Anyway, in the interests of advance destressing about next year’s Halloween - what if you need a pirate hat? what if your kids won’t touch that icky pirate gloop – now you know that help is available. You only have to ask – and pay – for it.
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Thanks to my sister Kath for spying this article. (She would, by the way, make an excellent Halloween concierge. Just sayin’)

And tomorrow, Witch City gets back to normal

I believe that the word “salem” translates to “peaceful”, but there’s not likely to be a lot of peace in Salem, Massachusetts today.

A lot of places kick it up at Halloween, but I suspect that few towns can hold a bell, book, and candle to our Salem.

My sister Trish lives in Salem, and I spend plenty of time there. So I know first hand that, from late September on, you can just forget about eating out. Or driving downtown on a weekend and finding a parking place, what with all the tourists broomsticking into town to see the Witch Museum, the cemetery where some of the Salem Witch Trial victims are buried, the statue of Samantha of Bewitched fame. And buying Halloween-related gimcrack.

Salem is a tourist town, anyway: House of the Seven Gables, Custom House where Nathaniel Hawthorne worked, the McIntyre District (lovely old homes), beautiful harbor, the Peabody Essex Museum  - truly one of the finest museums in the country. But in October, well, add on all those interested in Halloween-y stuff.

On Halloween itself, the town goes crazy. If October 31 falls on a weekend, the crowds (mostly young adults in costume – lots of witches, plenty of naughty nurses) starting early in the day are just insane. My sister used to live right off Salem Common, and they’d get several hundred trick-or-treaters ringing their doorbell. Even when Halloween falls on a weekday, it’s still a big deal in Salem, replete with fireworks and extra trains running.

There’s an obvious connection between Salem and Halloween, of course. It ain’t called Witch City for nothing. And they take it seriously. As in their police badge, for instance. And the high school mascot is a witch.

Of course, Halloween has become more of “thing” over the last couple of decades, moving from something for the kiddies that was a one-day event (two-day, if you count Beggars Eve), to something that more of less kicks off in late August when CVS starts putting bags on candy corn on their shelves.

Still, it’s really become something in Salem, and witch Laurie Cabot gets at least some of the credit/blame.

“OK, it is kind of my fault,” she said, referring to what has happened to October in Salem since she arrived nearly five decades ago and began the modern witch era in the “Witch City.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Cabot was a practitioner of witchcraft even before she moved to Salem and, in fact, given the witch connection, she was actually reluctant to move there, which she did in the late 1950’s for economic reasons.

“Salem seemed like a bad idea because I didn’t know how anyone would take me because of the witch trials,” she said.

At first, although she dressed like a witch – black dress, pentagram – she mostly kept mum about being one. People thought she was just another hippie. And then her cat (black, of course) Molly Boo got stuck in a tree, and Cabot, looking for help in getting the cat down, decided to out herself:

Cabot said she called everyone — animal control, the police, the fire department — and they all told her the cat would eventually come down on its own. That’s what cats do.

But after three days of awful weather and no movement from Molly Boo, Cabot made a move she knew would get attention. She called the local newspaper, the Salem News, and gave them a story they couldn’t resist.

“My cat is stuck in a tree,” she said she told the person who answered the phone. “I am a witch. That cat is my familiar (a witch term for an animal-shaped spirit that serves as a psychically connected servant, companion, and spy). And I want someone to come get my cat out of the tree.”

Am I the only one who’d like to have a familiar, at least for a couple of days? Maybe I just need to get a dog…

A photographer came, as did the mayor and several rescue vehicles.

Molly Boo was helped down. And after the photos of a real-life Salem witch hit the wire services, Laurie Cabot’s secret was out.

Shortly thereafter, Cabot opened her “witch shop” – selling “wands and potions and other tools of the trade” - the first in the city. And the rest is history. Other witches came to Salem, more shops opened, and Halloween (or Samhain, Witches’ New Year) just took off.

“I’m still not sure what a guy with an ax in his head and blood dripping down his face has to do with witchcraft,” she said. “Some of it is offensive. The fun house. The scary murderous stuff. It brings bad vibes. It’s projecting the wrong kinds of things.”

For better or for worse, tonight Salem, Massachusetts, will be Halloween HQ. Sure there’s be some bad vibes (all those drunken naughty nurses), but mostly it’ll be just plain craziness with a fireworks chaser.

And tomorrow, Witch City gets back to normal.

Happy Halloween to all.

(Aside to Trish: if I don’t make it out to Salem tonight, save me a couple of Butterfingers.) 

Dunkies by any other name?

Just saw the news that Dunkin’ Donuts is test-driving a name change.

They’ve already got an outlet in Pasadena that goes by Dunkin’, and they’ve got plans for another just plain Dunkin’ to open in the company’s home town, Quincy, Massachusetts, next year.

Say it isn’t so.

One of the inevitables that accompany aging is that things change. The stores, restaurants, amusement parks, and just about everything you grew up with are gone, baby, gone. Not to mention that stores, restaurants, and just about everything else that you frequented as a grown up. They’re gone, too. (Amusement parks tend not to atter quite so much as they did when I was kid: White City, Whalom Park, Paragon Park. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who’d been to Disneyland, that’s for sure. We went to one of the above. And they’re all long gone.)

Us old timers still give directions by saying “it’s in back of Filene’s”. We still call Macy’s Jordan Marsh. I haven’t lived in Worcester in over 45 years. And other than Friendly’s, I barely ever ate out when I did live there. So how can I still miss the White House? The Gaslight (where I may have eaten once, as an adult, when it was called something else)? In Boston, bring back Purcell’s. Please. We don’t need the cupcake shop and Starbuck’s that took its place.

But Dunkin’ Donuts has been a constant. And it’s been a constant as Dunkin’ Donuts. Or, if you’re a local who grew up with Dunkin’ Donuts, Dunks or Dunkies.

Growing up, we were Dunkies people. There was one just down the road from our church, and after the 8 a.m. Mass, the children’s Mass, which my father also attended – my mother’s big break of the week was going solo to the High Mass later in the morning – we spun over to Dunkin’ Donuts and picked up a dozen donuts. Which eventually became a dozen and a half. And then (can this possibly be true?) two dozen donuts.

Quite a number for a family of seven, especially given that my mother didn’t particularly eat sweets. It’s amazing we didn’t keel over from sugar shock, but, hey, kids were skinny then. We did a lot of running around. And my father had a colossal sweet tooth. We couldn’t possibly have consumed them all on a Sunday morning, could we have?

Anyway, my father loved Dunkies, so off we went.

My only gripe was that, in the summer, my father sometimes refused to buy chocolate covereds, since the icing melted. (Similarly, when we were out for a spin on a summer’s evening, if we stopped for ice cream, but weren’t going to consume our cones at the stand, I couldn’t get chocolate, which would stain the cloth seats in our Ford Fairlane. I guess I didn’t help my case that I always nibbled off the tip of the sugar cone, then wondering why the ice cream leaked out. All over those cloth seats.)

Although I grew up calling Dunkin’ Donuts Dunkies, as an adult I adopted Dunks.

Maybe Dunks is more prevalent in Boston, and Dunkies is a Worcester-ism. But Dunks it became..

Dunks’ CEO Nigel Travis is assuring people that:

…the chain wants to remain the ‘‘No. 1 retailer of doughnuts.’’ (Source: Boston Globe)

Well, that’s a relief.

Not that I consume all that many Dunks in the course of a year. But I’m a fan of the chocolate honey dipped, and do occasionally indulge. (It goes very well with a Dunks’ iced coffee, by the way.) So it’s a relief that even if the company decides not to keep the donut in Dunkin’ Donuts, they’ll nonetheless be keeping donuts on their shelves.

But who knows what will happen? After all, they did get rid of crullers,swapping in “sticks” when they didn’t think we were looking. And who knows? Maybe donuts will become the new cigarette.

And they have been making some changes:

At about 1,000 Dunkin’ Donuts locations, the company has been making cuts to its overall menu, including some doughnut varieties, to make the stores easier to run for franchisees, Travis said. He said too many different types of coffee syrups, sandwich breads, and other items makes it harder on employees.

Hope they haven’t dumped the chocolate honey dipped. I mean, go after one of those ghastly seasonal ones, like the kelly-green frosteds they have around St. Patrick’s Day. But leave the chocolate honey dipped on the menu.

Anyway, if they’re going to change the name, what’s wrong with Dunks or Dunkies? Too Ben Affleck? Too Southie? Did they even test drive the nicknames that have probably been in use since Dunks was founded in 1950.

CEO Travis’ children are plumping for keeping the original name: 

‘‘My two young kids think it should stay Dunkin’ Donuts forever,’’ he said.

Unless they decide to honor the company’s roots and go with Dunkies or Dunks.

Wrinkle free, by dint of genetics or a shot of Botox

This is, of course, subject to change, but when it comes to wrinkles, I still don’t have all that many. This is, of course, thanks to the luck of the hereditary draw. I got the Rogers dent in the head (don’t ask), and the long, skinny, flat feet from my father. (Thanks, Al.) And the Mr. Magoo nearsightedness from my mother. (Thanks, Liz.) But my mother also bequeathed me her largely unwrinkled skin, which she, in turn had inherited from her mother. (So thanks, Grandma.)

Recently, a doctor told me that I am remarkably wrinkle-free for someone my age. He then asked me about my ethnic makeup. I told him half-Irish, half-German. His response: you certainly don’t have Irish skin. Irish skin is baggy and wrinkly.

I don’t know whether this is universally true, but my Irish grandmother and my Irish aunt were pretty wrinkly. (My Irish aunt’s daughter, however, is not especially wrinkly, and she’s 9 years older than I am.)

Anyway, I also attribute my lack of wrinkles (and the same goes for my sisters, one older, one younger) to the fact that none of us ever had the luxury of lolling around on the beach during the summer.

But I do ask myself the question whether, if I had an onset of wrinkles, I’d use Botox. After all, I do color (euphemism for dye) my hair. So why not get a blast of Botox when and if the time comes?

Actually, I don’t ask myself this question. I don’t give any thought to Botox whatsoever (other than, of course, to heap mental scorn on those who resort to it rather than let nature take its course; after all, it does nothing to stop the interior aging process, just the cosmetics – all the Botox in the world isn’t going to stave off the grim reaper and his scythe). That is, I didn’t give it any thought until I saw an article on Bloomberg about Botox.

I suppose I knew that the “bot” in Botox comes from botulism.

But who knew just how creepily dangerous its production can be. For instance, you can’t step in side Allergan’s California Botox labs without signing a waiver:

…acknowledging that within 18 to 36 hours of entering the secured labs, you could develop symptoms including double vision, difficulty speaking, arm or leg weakness, and eventual paralysis of your respiratory system. (Source: Bloomberg)

Then there’s the souped up security you need to go through:

All this scrutiny and precaution isn’t there to protect Allergan’s wildly popular drug from competitors, though it is worth protecting—last year, Botox generated $2.8 billion in sales. Rather, the security exists because the drug that can take years off a person’s appearance by erasing wrinkles also happens to be made with one of the most toxic substances known to science.

It doesn’t take a very large amount to take care of the Botox supply chain:

A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year.

Which is secretly shipped from a super-dooper secure site under super-dooper guarded conditions. That’s because:

…a study published in 2001 in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that a single gram in crystallized form, “evenly dispersed and inhaled, would kill more than 1 million people.”

Scary stuff, for sure. And there have been attempts to weaponize it, including by the Iraqis back in the day.

But, for Allergan, it translates into incredible market share for both medical – conditions like crossed eyes, migraine, overactive bladder, uncontrolled spasms (90 percent) – and cosmetic (75 percent) uses.

It’s discovery of Botox as a de-wrinkler by a couple of married doctors – she: ophthalmologist; he: dermatologistas  – came about by accident. The eye doctor was treating a patient for spasms, and the patient noticed that the treatment was unfurrowing her brow. Meanwhile, the skin doctor had been looking for a way to treat deep frown lines. So, voila!

Cosmetic treatments are costly – $600 a pop – and aren’t covered by insurance. Patients who want to Ponce de Leon it up pay out of pocket. I suspect that this will not want to be a trap I fall into. Bad enough to get sucked into the regular jaunts to the hairdresser for a dye (there, I’ve said it) job.

Also interesting to me is that Allergan has operations in the town of Westport, County Mayo, Ireland.

This is a really lovely town: the Ireland that exists largely in the tourist’s fantasy:

Westport has won Ireland’s coveted Tidy Towns award three times in a decade, an honor “almost unheard of in the modern era of the award,” according to town architect Simon Wall.

Tidy Town isn’t just about neat and clean. I’ve been to Westport, and it is astonishingly free of empty, crumpled up scampi Tayto packets. (Or, if I were to litter in Ireland, a full, crumpled up scampi Tayto packet. Just inedible.) But it’s also completely and utterly quaint and charming.

And, in addition to being a Tidy Town, Westport is the home to some of the production of Botox.

No mention in the Bloomberg article, but inquiring (wrinkle-free) minds ask whether they chose Ireland because there are so many wrinkled up people there to experiment on. (When Irish eyes are smiling, does it produce wrinkles? Hmmmm.)

People, people who need people…

When I was a young and romantic girl, one of my favorite songs was People, as sung by Barbra Streisand. Like so many of the soupy, gloopy songs I listened to, the words didn’t always make a ton of sense.

Oh, the lyrics to People weren’t as outright dumb and ridiculous as those of, say, Last Night at the Dance, I Met Laura (Strange Things Happen in this World).  And, unlike the words to Louis, Louis, People’s lyrics were comprehensible.

Still…

People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world?

Is it just me, or isn’t it better to be needed than to be needy? Or is neediness good because it allows others to be needed? And don’t get me going on “with one person, one very special person…no more hunger and thirst, but first be a person who needs people.” I mean, shouldn’t no more hunger and thirst take priority? But, as is my lifelong and profound tendency, I digress.

I thought of the song People for the first time in a while when I saw an article in a recent Economist that focused on Japan’s demographic problems and the depopulation of some of its towns and cities. Okay, it wasn’t quite the saddest article I’ve read in a long time. That would be the story in the Washington Post on how some poor folks in West Virginia tramp through rattlesnake-infested hills to gather roots that they can sell so that they’ll have a few bucks in their pockets until their next disability check comes in. Now that was a depressing read. 

But this line from The Economist article on Japan’s problems didn’t exactly put a smile on my face:

Some villages are so depopulated that locals have decorated them with mannequins to provide a semblance of activity. (Source: The Economist)

I know that the Japanese are known for a number of cultural oddities. The obsession with Hello, Kitty. The men who have “relationships” with sex dolls. The whole anime thing. Etc. But placing mannequins around “to provide the semblance of activity”? Is that supposed to uplift the spirits of the left-behinds? I don’t see that happening. Especially if the mannequins resemble this jolly duo. Oh, my husband and I are just heading home to commit suicide…Wouldn’t it be better to have young folks mannequins, heading out clubbing, say? Or would that be even more pathetic and gloom-inducing?

Of course, strategically deployed mannequins are not the real problem, just a symptom of (antidote to?) the issue of a greying and declining population. Most developed nations face a greying population problem. People – although not necessarily in the US: I read recently that our lifespans are going down – are living longer. And developed nation dwellers are having fewer kids – especially in places like Japan -  so the proportion of olds to youngs is growing more out of whack, putting more of a burden on the youngs to pay for the upkeep of the olds. (No wonder they dislike us so intensely. But just wait until it’s their turn.) It would, of course, be cheaper to support geezer mannequins, but, fortunately or unfortunately, most grey hairs are alive.

All this is exacerbated in Japan by the fact that the country is, historically, somewhat resistant to immigrants.

Come on, wouldn’t you rather see a couple of Mexicans running a street food stand on the corner? Some African guys hawking umbrellas? Better than having your walls held up by a couple of aging mannequins…

 

Keeping the nut in Nutella

Somewhat surprisingly, given how much I love both chocolate and nuts, and given that I would never say no to a piece of Ferrero Rocher chocolate-hazelnut candy* that contains a Nutella-filled wafer (now that’s what I call and amuse bouche), I’m not a major fan of Nutella the spread. I have nothing against it. It’s just that I have nothing for it, either.

But for some reason, I do enjoy reading about Nutella.

Thus, I was interested in a recent article in The Economist on how Georgia – no, not that Georgia, not our Georgia, the one that grows peanuts; the other Georgia, the one where Josef Stalin was born – has become a key supplier to Ferrero, maker of both Nutella and Ferrero Rocher. After Turkey and Italy, Georgia provides Ferrero with more hazelnuts than any other country. In fact:

Hazelnuts are Georgia’s biggest export after copper ore. (Source: The Economist)

Since exiting the Soviet Union, Georgia has become somewhat Europe-facing, and they have a number of partnerships with the EU, including the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA).

As trade agreements go, I’ll give this one props for the name. Deep and Comprehensive. Gotta love it.

Yet rather than making Nutella’s supply chain smoother, the DCFTA could render it a bit sticky. About 10% of the hazelnuts Georgia exports come from the Russian-backed breakaway territory of Abkhazia, which has enjoyed de facto independence since its war of secession in 1992-93. Georgia has no formal trade relations with Abkhazia, and hazelnuts are the only product which Abkhazian authorities allow farmers to sell there.

Starting in 2018, the DCFTA will require all Georgian agricultural exports to meet EU standards, including having an official certificate of origin. Even if Abkhazian farmers could get a Georgian certificate, it would be considered an act of national betrayal. Their nuts will thus be barred from Nutella’s mixing vats.

First off, I will admit that I don’t pay a ton of attention to the subtleties and not-so-subtleties of the entities, sub-entities, and nonentities of the former USSR. But Abkhazia? Never heard of it. When I first saw the name in print, what came to mind was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

But come to find out, Abkhazia is in fact a real place. And I suspect that it’s a real place every bit as dreary as most of the entities, sub-entities, and nonentities that once comprised the USSR. Although I wouldn’t mind seeing the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), most of the –stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan), Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,  and Uzbekistan – aren’t on my bucket list. And I’m now adding Abkhazia to my non-bucket list as well. (Sorry, Abkhazia, so many places to see, so little time interest…)

Anyway, once Abkhazia can no longer sell it’s hazelnuts through to Nutella, that may be it for the Abkhazian hazelnut farmers. Abkhazia’s loyalty is to Russia, not Georgia.

“Russia is our strategic partner, and demand for hazelnuts is low there,” says Adgur Ardzinba, the economy minister in Abkhazia’s self-proclaimed government, which only Russia and a few other states recognise. “We have to give priority to products that are in high demand [in Russia], such as citrus and wine.”

As if that weren’t bad enough news for those hazelnut farmers.

An infestation of brown marmorated stinkbugs has devastated the harvest in both Abkhazia and Georgia. Sweet-toothed Europeans need not panic: the Nutella supply is probably not at risk. But the secessionist dispute prevents Georgia and Abkhazia from working together properly to stop the pests.

Can’t even get together to rid all those innocent hazelnuts from the marmorated stinkbug, eh?

And I thought our politics were foolish and fractious…

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*Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that the Ferrero Rocher gets part of its name – the Rocher part – from a grotto at the shrine in Lourdes. What, are they made with holy water or something?

Who DOESN’T want to be home to Amazon’s HQ2?

Some folks can go their whole entire life without getting even one modest proposal, but it looks like Amazon has gotten 238 of them – big kisses on the lips from cities and towns in 43 U.S. states, plus a few Canadian provinces and Mexican states.

It pretty much goes without saying that The Hub of the Universe is one of them. But Boston is not alone among Massachusetts cities and towns wooing Jeff Bezos et al. I heard that 26 of the Commonwealth’s finest locales – including Worcester – have put in bids. That’s more than 10% of the total. Of course, Amazon requested that states/regions pretty much aggregate their valentines, but Massachusetts didn’t want to pick and choose among its splendors. Who’s to say that Leominster and Taunton wouldn’t be swell picks? Leominster is, after all, home to the lawn flamingo. And Taunton? Just because you think dog track doesn’t make it so.

What Amazon is dangling is the promise of $5B in investment and the creation of 50,000 jobs. Good jobs. Techie jobs. Not rollerskating around warehouses and picking stuff off the shelf jobs, which are all being replaced by robots, anyway. Good jobs. Techie jobs.

What Amazon is looking for, of course, is lots of schools churning out grads to make up that techie workforce, and a cool environment that will attract all those techies, and – no surprise here – some mega baksheesh (those oh-so-vaunted “incentives”) to make it worth their while to pick your town.

New Jersey is offering $7B in tax incentives – you read that right – but Amazon is staying mum on the range of goodies that are being dangled in front of them. It must be like Christmas morning up in Seattle, opening up all those 238 packages, tossing the videos aside – they’re all going to look and sound the same; like opening up the nicely wrapped gloves and socks gifts that Grandma puts under the tree: yawn!  – and diving right into the pile of real presents to see what’s inside. That nice Chris Christie’s stuffed $7B in a stocking!  And the town of Stonecrest, Georgia, is promising to make Jeff Bezos their permanent mayor, bless their peapickin’ little hearts.

Of course, it would be a nice nod to Boston to win this. But we already don’t have enough reasonably priced housing to go around. Won’t this just bid up the price of housing? (Wait a second. That might be a good thing. Just making this observation for a friend.) And what about the traffic? Oh, I know, I know, Millennials use motorized skateboards. They don’t even like cars. But, wherever Amazon decides to settle down, there’s going to be traffic jams. The cost of prosperity, I guess, given that, despite all the talk about how important public transpo is and how much those Millennials love motorized skateboards and despise cars, the American love affair with the automobile doesn’t appear to have ended quite yet.

Anyway, even though I’m too lazy to look through the package to see what Boston offered, I would, naturally, be delighted if Boston “won.” But Worcester as the site would be even funner. Except, of course, for the techies who might be scratching their heads if they ended up there. At least people would know how to pronounce the name of The Heart of the Commonwealth. (Seriously, folks, War-sester I get, but how can anyone look at Worcester and come away with War-chester? Let the word go forth: it’s Wuh-stah. And that’s Wuh as in Woof without the f.)

Everybody’s gaming the Amazon decision, of course. The New York Times analyzed the RFP requirements and the respondents and concluded that Denver, Boston, and Washington DC are the top contenders, and that Denver will win out. Moody’s thinks otherwise. They think that the nod will go to Austin.

The Boston Globe assures us that:

Boston is widely considered a strong contender to make at least that first cut. (Source: Boston Globe)

The Globe looked through 16 short lists, including those of Moody’s and NY Times, and came up with their “plausible list of top contenders.”

Others on that list are Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Toronto, and Washington DC. All have their pros and cons. (Sorry, Chicago, beautiful city and all, but you’re a bit saddled by the state of Illinois crazy finances.) I’m guessing the pick will be something East-Coast-y. Amazon has already got Pac-Rim facing covered. Europe ain’t dead yet, so something East Coast makes some sense.

What the hell. I’m a true homer.

Go Boston! Go Worcester!

Road Trip

My sister Trish and I just did a road trip to/through parts of New York State. First up?

Cooperstown When I was growing up, our family vacations fell into one of three categories: Chicago (my mother’s hometown) to visit family; Bass River on The Cape, where we rented the modest little cottage of my parent’s friends Mae and Nemo; and day trips conducted during my father’s two weeks off in July – one day to an ocean beach (Nantasket, and, later on Horseneck), one day to somewhere touristy in New England (e.g., Bennington VT), and a couple of lake swims at Castle Beach.

But in 1961, over Columbus Day weekend, we went to Cooperstown. Mostly we went to see the Hall of Fame – my father was a major league baseball fan (like father, like daughter) – but with other stops at the Farmer’s Museum (to see the Cardiff Giant) and at nearby Howe Caverns (which included a ride in subterranean rowboat, and the experience of pitch black when they turned the lights out). The trip also meant eating in restaurants and staying in a hotel (The Hotel Augusta in Cobbleskill.) These were things we NEVER did, so it was plenty novel and amazing.

Anyway, that was the last time I was in Cooperstown, and I was quite happy to return.

I like history, and I like looking at old stuff, so The Baseball Hall of Fame is right up my alley. A few too many reminders that the Red Sox had “sold” Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919, thus begetting the Curse of the Bambino, which wasn’t broken until the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, for the first time since 1918. Other than that, I enjoyed all the exhibits, especially the ones devoted to the Negro Leagues and women’s baseball. And fun, of course, to see the Red Sox players who were inducted since last I was at the Hall in 1961. Teddy Ballgame, Yaz, Bobby Doerr, Pudge Fisk, Jim Ed Rice, Pedro Martinez, Wade Boggs, Eck (even if he is wearing an A’s cap).

Not much shopping in town. Unless, that is, you’re a baseball fan. Other than a couple of Christmas gifts, my wallet mostly stayed shut. But in one store (obviously not the HofF shop), this shirt was on sale for $5. Not that I would ever wear it. But I did want to send something tangible off to my niece Molly for her birthday along with a check…

We also took in the Farmer’s Museum, congratulating ourselves all the while for having been clever enough to have been born in the 20th century. They have an exhibit focused on farm implements, how things were grown, how things were made, how households were run. Talk about drudgery! I was exhausted just looking at the churns and plows. So much easier to live in a world where, for $5, you can buy a tee-shirt that says Y*NK**S S*CK, rather than having to spend your day swinging a scythe or mangling your only other dress to get the water out of it on laundry day.

And the Cardiff Giant is still there. (The Cardiff Giant is a stone “man” which was displayed under the claim that it was a petrified human giant.) I believe that in 1961, the Giant was displayed outside, but he’s sheltered now. Good to be reminded that humbuggery has a long and honored history in America.

Hyde Park How has it taken me this long to get to Hyde Park to see the FDR Museum and Library? I like history, and I like looking at old stuff, so, once again, this was right up my alley. I know quite a bit about the history of the Depression and WWII, but I still learned a few things. And I teared up a few times when I did a mental compare and contrast between Franklin & Eleanor and the current incumbents of the White House. Fireside chat vs. hair on fire tweets…Refusal to let paralysis get himself down vs. sidelined by heel spurs… I could go on, but, well… We also did a quick drive-by of Eleanor’s place of her own, Val-Kill. Here be my favorite image on display at Hyde Park. That’s Eleanor at LaGuardia Airport, no kid at the time, a wealthy former First Lady and world-traveling humanitarian, carrying her own suitcase across the tarmac. Enough said.

Tarrytown  I don’t give a lot of thought to Washington Irving. I’m sure I read some version of “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” as a child. I still remember the theme song to the Disney rendering of “Sleepy Hollow.” Other than that… But you can’t go to Tarrytown without learning a bit more about Washington Irving. He was not only the first American “man of letters” – i.e., someone who made his living as a writer – but he was also something of a mentor to Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Melville. He hosted his friend Charles Dickens when he came to America, and Ebenezer Scrooge may have been named (as something of a jest) for Irving’s brother, a man of great good humor. Irving lived on the banks of the Hudson River in a house he designed and built called Sunnyside. Best old house tour ever! (Did I mention that I like old things and I like history?) Usually I shudder at the sight of costumed interpreters, but the folks who give the tours of Sunnyside – and there’s one for every couple of rooms – are knowledgeable, interesting, fun. I enjoyed every moment of the tour, and the house, with its pokey, quirky little rooms is pretty much my dream house. (Other than modern convenience thing.) Irving in some respects was well ahead of his time. He did have a system for hot water in the house, but, alas, his ingenuity didn’t extend to figuring out toilets. The outhouse, however, was pretty upscale and snappy.

We also “did” Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Irving is buried. As are Samuel Gompers, Andrew Carnegie, and Elizabeth Arden. Not quite Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, but quite an assemblage nonetheless.

The one disappointment was the lack of decent foliage. Here it is, mid-late October, and the trees in the Catskills and Hudson River Valley are still 99% green. We peeped a few decent leave in Connecticut and Massachusetts on the way home, but nothing like what we should have seen. It’s just been way too warm for this time of year… And then, in Tarrytown, we heard all sorts of birds chirping. Which would have been pleasant, if not for the fact that it’s the type of chirping you usually hear in May.

So I’ll just leave it at disappointed at the lack of color, rather than let myself be freaked out by green leaves on the trees and birds chirping away when they should have flown south already.

Nonetheless, all and all, a great little getaway.

Even a cat lover might give pause (paws?)

Let’s make one thing clear: dog person here, not cat person.

Sure, cats are beautiful, and they’re interesting to watch. But I hate when they jump up on the bed in the middle of the night and purr in your ear. Then there’s the whole Kitty Litter thing. Yep, it’s easier than getting up and taking the pup for a “walk” in a sleet storm. But who wants to be sifting littered turds out morning, noon, and night?

And, as I’ve read, cats spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to kill their owners, which they would apparently do if only they were bigger, like the size of a Bengal tiger.

Bottom line on the old pet front: I much prefer the affection and sweetness of dogs. If you’re going to go through the trouble of having a pet, you might as well have one who actually likes and appreciates you.

But if I did have a cat, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t be buying a Licki Brush.

Licki Brush, you may well be asking.

The Licki Brush is a tongue-shaped, silicone device with really pronounced taste buds. The user slips it over their tongue, and licks their cat. Sort of like a cat licks itself. Or a mother cat licks her kittens. Only this time, it’s a human licking a cat.

Because, apparently, there are plenty of cat lovers out there who have actually licked their cat and ended up with a hairball. Okay.

Jason and Tara O’Mara (a couple, no surprise here, from Portland, Oregon) pitched the idea on Shark Tank last winter, but they got no takers. But there’s always Kickstarter, and they managed to raise $52K so that folks could start getting their licks in.

Cats groom each other as a form of social bonding. There's also evidence to suggest that cats view and treat their human captors as large cats. As a human, you're left out of the intimate licking ritual. At best, you have a one-sided licking relationship with your cat.

My goodness. Concerned about being “left out of the intimate licking ritual”? Yowza. I’m going to state here and now that I can’t imagine wanting to be part of any intimate animal ritual.

Decades ago, a dog – a dog who was a stranger – tried to hump my leg. Buzz off, Fido. Find one of your own or a telephone pole. Another time – and this was one of the weirder experiences of my life – I was scratching the belly of a young male bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee). He was enjoying himself immensely. So immensely that he grabbed one of my hands with one of this feet and quickly dragged it down so it was touching his boy toy. No thanks.

I guess I’m just not into animal intimacy. My bright line is this: human intimacy only.

But for those who crave pet intimacy:

…you'll develop a more intimate and bonded relationship…

Of feline bondage!

I believe that the Kickstarter campaign may be over, but if you’d thrown in $35, you got 2 Licki Brushes. One for you and one “for a friend or significant other. Give your cat the joy of a 2-tongue massage.”

Okay. Now we’re in complete OMG territory.

Bad enough to be doing the cat licking all by your lonesome (save for the cat). But with your significant other? Maybe I’m just a prude-y old prude. One of one is close enough to bestiality. This is approaching bestiality groupie-ness.

Yuck…

If you want to learn more, here’s the O’Maras website.

By the way, it’s not just for cat lovers. The O’Maras suggest that you could use it on a dog or a bunny rabbit, too.

Never in a million years.

But, gee, the world sure is an endlessly interesting place.

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This is an old story, more than a year old now. Maybe I should watch Shark Tank. But I would have missed it entirely were in not for my friend Valerie who commented on it when she saw it on Facebook. Thanks, V.

 

Mulan Sezchuan Sauce and the Madness of Crowds

Starting from the top:

Yes, I do know who/what Mulan is. I have two Millennial nieces, so of course I do.

No, I had never heard of Mulan Szechuan Sauce from McDonald’s. When I pay my annual call on McDonald’s, I go for a Quarter Pounder, not Chicken McNuggets with dipping sauce. Plus, it was only offered briefly, nearly 20 years back, as a Disney tie in with McD’s. So, had I ever heard of Mulan Szechuan Sauce? Of course not.

No, I had no idea who/what “Rick and Morty” is/are. Something that I now know has to do with Adult Swim, a cartoon Network show for grownups.  Which I had heard of, because a decade ago, some Adult Swim-mers placed something that looked like a bomb under an elevated Boston highway. Those is the know thought it was just HI-larious. Foolish old fogeys thought it was a bomb. Silly us! Anyway, “Rick and Morty” is a cartoon on Adult Swim.

The story is that last spring, “Rick and Morty” started agitating for the return of the Mulan Szechuan Sauce. Change.org petition and all. (Change.org is generally used by social justice warriors on behalf of noble causes like getting Harvey Weinstein booted from the vaunted Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, not for frivolous initiatives like bringing back Mulan teriyaki dipping sauce.)

McDonald’s did just that, and apparently a goodly proportion of the nearly 45,000 signatories of the “Rick and Morty” change.org petition showed up at their local McD’s to get them theirs, only to find that the allocation per store had been a meager 20 packets. And not all locations got them. There were near riots, fights broke out, counters were jumped, and windows banged on. The cops were called in to at least one McDonald’s outlet. It almost goes without saying that people took their rage to Twitter. Here’s one:

Fuck off @McDonalds - less than 20 packets of Szechuan sauce per store, sold out before the onsale time? Way to be a Jerry #boycottmcdonalds. (Source: Huffington Post)

Mulan Szechuan sauce. “Rick and Morty.” And, now, yet another cultural reference I’m missing. Way to be a Jerry? Even Google was no help to me here. The closest I came was the Urban Dictionary: “Jerry: A sexy beast, good with the ladies and with a 8-inch wang.” And a guy, tweet that like it’s supposed to be a bad thing? I’m definitely missing something here. Maybe he meant “way to be a Jerry Lewis,” which was never a good thing, and is even worse now that M. Lewis is dead.

McDonald’s, of course, tweeted out their response:

“The best fans in the multiverse showed us what they got today,” McDonald’s tweeted in apology. “We hear you & we’re sorry not everyone could get some super-limited Szechuan.”

And now they are promising to bring back Szechuan sauce, in ample supply, this winter.

Meanwhile, the new packets, given the madness of crowds, turn out to be worth something. One woman scarfed down her packet before realizing they were fetching $300. And Rachel Marie of Michigan, who was lucky enough to get a hold of this precious item, “managed to parlay it into a car.”

That’s right, a car. She posted a picture proving that she’d gotten her hand on a packet, and found a guy willing to trade for it with a 2000 VW Golf.

“He was a dedicated fan of the show and already had a second car.”

Business Insider interviewed the man, who did not give permission for his name to be used. He justified the seemingly imbalanced trade by telling the outlet he “just needed me some friggin sauce!!” (Source: HuffPo again)

Maybe Rachel should have held on to it for a while longer. I mean, a 2000 VW Golf is nice and everything. And definitely worth more than a tiny little old sauce packet. But someone supposedly paid $14K for a nearly 20 year old original sold on eBay.

Ah, the madness of crowds!

Who doesn’t want to be Bertha when they grow up?

My cousin Mary Beth lives on the Cape, and has these wonderful next door neighbors. Lew and Paul spend part of the year in Massachusetts, and part of the year in Florida, where they have their businesses. And where they have Lew’s mother.

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Bertha Gordon, but Mary Beth knows her well from Bertha’s frequent visits up north. My sister Kathleen and her husband Rick got to meet her recently, and reported that Bertha is, as advertised, amazing – from her delightful personality and sense of humor, right down to the coral suede flats that matched her sweater. I’m hoping to meet Bertha on her holiday swing this way. Can’t wait.

But what’s amazing about Bertha Gordon is not that, at 92, she remains with it, engaging, perky, and nattily dressed. It’s what she’s still managing to do at 92 that has me in awe. What Bertha does is volunteer. Make that VOLUNTEER with a capital V-O-L-U-N-T-E-E-R.

Bertha’s volunteering attracted some recent attention when, while Irma was battering Florida, she managed to get into the Delray Medical Center in Delray Beach and get to work. Here’s some of what Tenet Health wrote about Bertha:

Even in the midst of Hurricane Irma, Delray Medical Center’s 92-year-old volunteer, Bertha Gordon, continued to volunteer her time at the hospital’s ER making beds, visiting with patients and helping to provide the best patient experience possible.  Gordon wears many hats at Delray Medical – she is President of the Auxiliary, Star Walker, Golf Tournament organizer, Santa’s elf, and emergency department volunteer. For a little lady, she packs a lot of energy. Her 26 years and almost 7,000 hours of volunteer experience at Delray Medical Center has taught her that you always get back more than you give. (Source: Tenet Health)

Little lady – they ain’t kidding. Bertha is under 5 feet tall and weighs about 80 lbs. And 7,000 hours, even spread over 26 years, is pretty darned impressive. That’s an average of five hours a week. Which is a lot. And the ER isn’t exactly the least stressful place in the hospital to hang out. My husband and I logged a few sessions in the MGH ER during the years of his illness, and, if Delray Medical Center is anything like MGH, we’re talking lots of people buzzing around, bad lighting, and lots of noise.

Hospital volunteering isn’t it for Bertha. In addition to the two days she’s working at the hospital, she logs another two days in the nurse’s office of a local elementary school. And, just so the fifth potential workday in the workweek doesn’t go to waste, she spends another day making dolls for kids with cancer.

What a lazy bones! What a slouch!

When you’re working full time, you’re always sort of thinking about packing it in. But maybe no so much time thinking about what you’re going to pack into all those hours that were once consumed by working, getting ready for work, commuting to work, commuting back home from work, thinking about work, worrying about work, bitching about work, etc.

Having gone freelance in my fifties, I got a head start on what to do when you’re not being consumed by all of the above.

Right now, I have managed to come up with a pretty good mix. Enough freelance work to keep my hand in (and some coin in the piggy bank), and enough volunteer work to get me out of the house and with other people – which, given that I work from home and can go weeks without having any contact with clients that’s not via email,is important.

Don’t know if I’ll make it to 92. But if I do, I definitely know I won’t be adorbs – that ain’t never going to happen. And these size 11-double A flat feet will definitely not be in cute coral flats. They’ll be in ugly, sensible shoes. Kind of like they are now. But how great would it be, getting out there five days a week, doing things with it for other people, staying active, staying engaged, staying in the game. Maybe it’s not what everyone wants, but I sure wouldn’t mind being Bertha Gordon when I grow up.