Pat Fight!

Oh, I’m quite sure that, come next Saturday night, I’ll be tuning in and watching at least part of the Patriots vs.Tennessee playoff game. And the next weekend, I’m quite sure that – if the Patsies get by the Titans – I’ll be watching the AFC playoff. Not to mention that, come February 4th, if our boys make it to the Super Bowl, I’ll watch that game, too. I’m not the biggest football fan on the face of the earth. As I have said many times, football to me is like veal. If I thought about veal, I wouldn’t eat it. And if I thought about football, I wouldn’t watch it. Too much martial music. Too much Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Too much right-wingery. And yet…The rest of the football-watching world may hate their guts, but they’re our home town honeys. Go, Pats!

With respect to football, I’m something of a band-wagoner. I’ve gone decades without watching any pro football, and for those decades was among the apparent minority of Americans who didn’t watch Super Bowl. And then, the Patriots got good. No, make that the Patriots got great. And that good to great happened at the confluence of owner Bob Kraft, head coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady. Of this holy trinity, both Belichick and Brady may well be the GOATs – Greatest of All Time – for their respective professions. Since 2002, the Pats have won five Super Bowls and lost (in heartbreaking, fluke fashion) the two others they appeared in.

And this dominance happened in football, which is set up to make it less possible than in other sports. So the Pats may, in fact, be even more impressive, dynasty-wise, than the Bill Russell Celtics or the multi-dynasty Yankees.

Now, however, as the playoffs have begun, there may be trouble in Gillette Stadium’s dynastic paradise.

Rumors, reported by ESPN, have it that Bill Belichick is pissed. That Bob Kraft (who apparently considers Tom Brady a fifth son) forced him to trade Jimmy Garoppolo – the much younger backup quarterback that Coach Bill was grooming to replace Tom Brady when the inevitable happens, and Brady (who’s 40) hangs up his jockstrap for the last time.

The rumors also have it the Tom Brady is pissed. He’s pissed that Belichick forced his training guru and business partner, Alex Guerrero, off the team plane and off his up- close and personal game-time perch on the field. Guerrero is a controversial (and sketchy) force, whose unorthodox training methods (and diet) is credited by Brady with making his superstar and long-lived career possible. (Thou shall not eat nightshades, deadly or otherwise!) There was conflict between Guerrero and the Pats training staff, as a number of other Patriots, whether to suck up to or emulate Brady, have adopted Guerrero’s method. (And, they’re said to be addressing Brady – a teammate – as “sir.”)

Meanwhile, Bob Kraft is pissed that there are any rumors swirling around the Dynastic Trio, and issued a vehement denial, which hilariously (to me at least) pretty much coincided with his good buddy Donald J. Trump’s protests that he, DJT, is a “very stable genius.”

The rumor mill has it that Belichick may be taking his talents elsewhere, if only to prove that he can win without Brady. If the Patriots win it all this year - they’re the Vegas 2:1 favorites – the story goes, it’s on to the New York Giants.

These stories are consuming the local sports media, not to mention the fan base. And I have to admit that I’m very much enjoying it. It reminds me, after all, of the crazy, dysfunctional, palace intrigue workplaces I always managed to find myself in.

There was the famous War Between the Tall Guys and the Short Guys, in which the all-male executive team appeared to have chosen up sides based on height. In this corner, the Tall Guys (COO, CMO, CTO), in the other corner, the Short Guys (CEO, EVP of Sales, CFO, and some guy – a nasty, brutish and short guy – whose role, other than that of nasty, brutish, and short troublemaker, I can’t recall). The Tall Guys lost the battle, which you might have figured would have happened, given that CEO > COO. But the COO and his brother were majority owners, so the CEO > COO outcome wasn’t assured.

As a result of the Tall Guy loss, the CMO – my boss – lost his job. And I lost mine.

Then there was the outfit where the only two women in senior management hated each others’ guts – and rightly so. In one famous incident, these two got into it during a meeting that ended with the straight VP yelling “FUCK YOU” to the lesbian VP, and the lesbian VP yelling back “DON’T TEMPT ME.” How do I know that this is a true story? After all, these two were the only witnesses. Well, I know it because each of these gals told me the story, in gleeful and near-verbatim style. Cat fight!

I could go on…

Pretty much every place I ever worked was riddled with some often pretty nasty politics. I’m sure this had something to do with the fact that I was drawn to f’d up organizations, but probably had a lot more to do with that’s being how organizations work. Even successful ones, like the New England Patriots.

Over the next couple of weeks, if the Pats do what they’re so good at doing, and are expected to do, the news in these parts will be dominated by football stories. Boring, predictable, football stories about the GOATs path to yet another Super Bowl win. Yawn!

Bring on the Pat Fight stories and I’ll be all ears and eyes! Forget let the games begin. Let the rumors keep swirling!

If ever there were an argument for a steep inheritance tax

https://www.gq.com/story/wyatt-koch-billionaire-ridiculous-shirts

Just before Christmas, in a nice little gift to snarky bloggers everywhere, Wyatt Koch went after his former fiancée, looking to retrieve the $180K engagement ring he’d given her when he started to heed his inner Beyoncé and decided that, if he liked it then he should have put a ring on it.

You’d think someone named Koch would be willing to cut his losses and walk away, chalk it up to a learning experience. But the Koches didn’t get to be kabillionaires by overlooking the chump change. After all, $180K here, $180K there, and pretty soon you’re talking some serious money. It really does all add up.

And it’s not as if Wyatt Koch was one of the uber-Koches. No, he’s not the spawn of Charles or David. He’s the son of William the Lesser whose worthy is a paltry $1.7B. And since William the Lesser is only 77 – and being kept young by a wife a couple of decades his junior – it may be a while before Wyatt gets his. Plus there are five offspring who’ll all be looking to, in the immortal words of Don Fanucci (spoken to the young Vito Corleone) wet their beaks.

Still, if there’s an argument for the inheritance tax, I’d nominate Wyatt Ingraham Koch. And not because he’s trying to grab a bauble back from his erstwhile bride-to-be.

No, it’s because Wyatt Koch – when he’s not swanning around Palm Beach acting rich - is using his time, talents, and treasure to bring some of the most god-awful shirts this side and time of Honolulu in 1951.

His company is Wyatt Ingraham (his middle name – wouldn’t want to capitalize on “Koch”; plus no one knows how to pronounce it. Kawtch? Coke? Cock?, and Ingraham sure sounds a lot classier and more Mayflowery), and they make shirts that look like this. Okay, the striped one is fine. And maybe even the one with the rainbow splats. But the eight-ball shirt? The the one with the pink handcuffs on it? I’d say they scream douche, but compared to the moneybags shirt, they really only whisper it.

Is this what Scrooge McDuck wears when he’s on vacay?

Only if he got it on sale, I suppose. This shirt – which is called Wall Street, not Moneybags -  is currently marked down from $119 to $79. (Those other ones can be had for $99, down from $139; higher priced because they’ve got long sleeves.) But when you factor in dry clean only, even on sale they’re not a bargain.

 The Post describes the Wyatt Ingraham signature aesthetic as “out-there patterns and colors” which is a charitable way of saying that these are the busy shirts a middle-manager who fancies himself the office comedian wears on casual Friday…

“My father said to me, ‘Wyatt, you can do whatever you want to in life. Just make sure you do it well and do it with passion,” the designer said to the camera, without a hint of self-awareness….

“I want my shirts to be able to worn in the boardroom or in the discoteca [yeah, he really pronounced it like that] or a nightclub — or on a yacht,” Koch said with a straight face. “I really wanted to create something that’s fun, outside the box, cool, trendy, yet really bold and interesting.” We’re hard pressed to name a boardroom, outside of the one hosting the board of directors from Spencer’s Gifts, that would feature executives wearing neon pink shirts with a handcuffs pattern, but we’ll take his word for it. (Source: Spin)

Although it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, I really don’t believe that men should only wear Oxford cloth blue shirts. Shirts can have colors. And prints. Just not these colors and prints. Prints like checks. And plaids. And stripes. Those kinds of prints.

My cousin Ellen, who spends half her time in Florida, has an expression OFI – Only In Florida – for clothing items that can and should be worn only when in Florida. So maybe it’s an OFI thing. Still, I’m having a hard time picturing her husband Mike in the Eight Ball shirt. (Maybe it’s because they’re Sarasota, not Palm Beach.)

Truthfully, I don’t know anyone who’d wear one of these shirts. Further, I don’t want to know anyone who’d wear one. Maybe I’ll change my tune if the man of my dotage dreams shows up for our fist date wearing Wall Street. But I think not.

I did recently have a disturbing indication that wild and not-so-wonderful men’s fashion is migrating north, along with kudzu and feral pigs. Here’s something I found at Marshall’s around Christmas. Some sort of weird PJ suits which seem to have Wyatt Ingraham written all over them. (Hmmm. I’ll have to head back and see if they’re still on the sale rack. I’m thinking excellent Yankee Swap.)

In any case, there must be some demand for this sort of outré fashion. Is it men’s liberation? Throwing off the surly bonds of the suit and tie and letting out their inner whatever? Sure hope not. (Down, boys.)

Me? I suspect that there aren’t enough guys willing to wear those wild and crazy shirts to earn Wyatt Koch a living. But he may never actually have to earn a living. Even if he doesn’t get that diamond ring back. As I said, if anyone needs an argument for a steep inheritance tax…

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Thanks to my sister Trish for introducing me to Wyatt Koch. Unfortunately, I can’t unsee any of it.

 

The Devil-Doll, or Doobie-Doobie-Doo

When I was growing up, late winter afternoons – in the time between coming in red-cheeked and snot-nosed from skating or sledding, and supper on the table – were devoted to watching wretched old black & white movies on Boston Movietime, on at 4 p.m. on WBZ Channel 4, and which must have had a budget of about seven bucks a day to spend renting movies.

I don’t remember ever seeing anything good. No classics. No Casablanca. No It Happened One Night. No Busby Berkeley. I saw these and other films when I was in college at retro art theaters, on campus, at the Museum of Fine Arts. The MFA ran regular old films. I remember seeing Bringing Up Baby there.

Boston Movietime fare ran to WWII B-reels like Purple Heart, and another movie in which an anti-Nazi “enemy of the people” is pressed into acting as a body double for Hitler. The upshot of the movie was that this poor fellow’s dissident wife ends up killing her husband, thinking she’s assassinating Hitler.

Then there were the bad westerns. And one that I remember quite vividly, a flick summarized on IMDB thusly: An escaped convict uses miniaturized humans to wreak vengeance on those that framed him.

I remembered the title of this film as The Attack of the Puppet People, but that was a bad 1950’s movie. The real name of the bad 1936 movie was The Devil-Doll.

The Devil Doll factors in Rogers family lore because, when we were watching it, we (the older kids) convinced my questioning brother Rick – then all of 3 or 4 years old – that yes, indeed, miniaturized humans, bearing miniature poison-tipped knives, could be sold door to door by bad men disguised as old women, wearing shawls and carrying baskets full miniaturized humans bent on murder. When Rick asked my mother whether this was for real, she told him that it was nonsense.

We (the older kids) one-upped her by hollering into my mother “He’s old enough to know.”

And there was my poor brother, indignantly crying to my mother, “I’m old enough to know! I’m old enough to know!”

I thought of the wonderfully awful movie The Devil-Doll the other day when reading an article in The New York Times about Doob-3D, a company that makes miniaturized stuff, including mini-mes that you can place on your shelf. Non-devil dolls, as it were.

For $95 for a tiny figurine (4” high), up to $695 for a 14” tall doll, you can have something that one user called “creepily accurate.”

Doob, which was founded five years ago and whose headquarters are in Düsseldorf, Germany, is betting big that people want to see themselves made small: smiling alone; hugging their spouses in an eerily perfected version of the old wedding-cake topper; astride a Harley-Davidson, tattooed arms naked to the wind. Whether you consider them cute or creepy, they are perhaps the most currently relatable example of the much buzzed-about, yet perplexing, 3-D printing. (Source: NY Times)

I’m not surprised that this comes out of Germany, as the creepily inaccurate movie The Devil Doll, while set in Paris, really seemed to be set in some Central Europa country, eerily foreboding what was to come in a few years. 

Anyway, there’s no Doob outlet in Boston (yet), but there are two in NYC (Soho and Upper East Side). But I wouldn’t be lining up to get a miniaturized version of myself. If I want to see something “creepily accurate,” I can look in the mirror, thanks.

But lots of folks are not quite so reticent. They’re displaying them in home and office, and using them as props for their Instas. (As The Times has it, a “fitting use..to advance the self-referential digital culture from which doobs sprung.”)

There’s so much good that people are doing with 3-D technology. Why bother with narcissistic, “self-referential” crap like doobs? This is the stuff that nightmares – and bad movies  - are made of, even if the doobs are not actually human, and will not come bearing poison-tipped knives. 

But somewhere a three year old will see a doob and ask an older sib whether it’s real. That older sib will tell them that, of course it is. And after mother explains 3-D technology to her little one, and explains that the doob is really not real, the older sib will start chanting “he’s old enough to know.”

Sigh…

Have a Techie 2018

I recently worked on a couple of 2018 tech trends pieces for clients. One was a look at software applications in a specific vertical. The other was a bit deep-tech geekier – blockchain, digital mesh…

So it’s kind of fun to look at tech trends that will impact us consumer-civilians, in this case via the crystal ball of The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler. Here’s what Fowler foresees for us, which he bucketed 5 reasons to be excited, and 5 reasons to worry.

First on the excited list is something that, okay, doesn’t excite me all that much, given that it’s automobile-related: the Tesla Model Three should start shipping in volume to the nearly 500K people who pre-ordered it. What’s the big deal with the Model Three? It’s really, really, really electric – souped up with all sorts of electronics. I’ve seen it described as a smartphone on wheels. Fowler’s “favorite Model 3 idea:”

It comes with the cameras, sensors and computing power it needs to eventually allow the car to drive itself.

Although I don’t have a car at present, and may never own another, I enjoy driving. So I’m not 100% eager to see self-driving cars. But a self-driven car that I’m riding in when I summon an Uber? Sure, I have sympathy for the Uber drivers that will be displaced come the autonomous car revolution – which is coming: Uber has placed an order for a massive number of those self-drivers – but still I say bring it on!

Half the people I know got an Alexa or equivalent for Christmas. I suppose I’ll fall in line at some point. But when I do fall in line, it won’t be with an Apple HomePod. I am not now, nor have I ever been – with the exception of an iPod in the way back – an Apple person. So while this is no doubt exciting info for Apple folks, again, I’m not all that excited.

Another thing that doesn’t excite me is augmented reality, which, according to Fowler, will be “going places” in 2018, thanks to an “AR headset from Magic Leap, a much-hyped start-up that has raised $1.9 billion in funding,” which Magic Leap is billing as:

A “lightweight, wearable computer that enriches your experience in the real world with digital content” — though to me it looks like a prop from “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

$1.9 billion. That’s some augmented reality, I’ll give you. And I’m sufficiently old-school that the real world experience is plenty enriched when you keep your eyes and ears open to what’s going on around you. I don’t need any digital content floating out there in the corner of my eye, thank you very much.

Back to Apple-ville, there’ll be support for wireless charging for the iPhone Well, yawn-y, yawn, yawn. I already enjoy wireless charging for my Android, thank you. But, but, but…

The tech to charge gadgets without plugs has been a non-starter for years because one very important brand was missing: Apple. But the iPhone maker just added wireless charging to the X and 8, putting its stamp of approval on a charging standard called Qi. Now coffee shops, furniture makers and car companies might be more confident about building wireless charging pads into everyday things. Let’s hope they do, because phone battery life isn’t improving nearly fast enough to keep up with how much we use them.

Fowler’s final exciter is the growth of digital subscriptions. He cites a Deloitte forecast that predicts that, by the end of 2018, half of all “adults in developed countries will have at least two online-only media subscriptions.”

Does subscribing to The Boston Globe and The New York Times count? Amazon Prime? Netflix? Paper + digital for The Economist? Despite being Spotify and  Hulu-less, am I actually ahead of the curve here? Now that’s exciting!

Mostly, the exciting things aren’t that exciting to me. But that’s because I’m a bit jaded about technology to begin with. So what about Fowler’s 5 reasons to worry?

Online political ads get more devious. Well, that’s certainly a scary thought.

Instead of just demographics, ads could use “psychometrics” — gleaned from how we use social networks and other data — to target us based on our mindsets and personalities. It raises a host of thorny questions about how technology, particularly social networks, can be used to manipulate us and divide society. Online ads may also still be a lure for foreign meddlers, though Facebook and Google have promised more disclosure about who’s buying political ads.

Having succeeded so bigly with the presidential race in 2016, I can only imagine the sorts of folks that Putin et al. will want in Congress. Good thing we can trust Facebook and Google to do the right thing, Oh, wait.

An equally horrible thought: the cybersecurity menace keeps growing. Two big sources of worry? Hackers going after all those smarty-pants gadgets that make up the Internet of hackable Things. And going after our voting systems.

My recommendation: Take an hour and change your password to something unique on every site with personal information.

It won’t do much about voting machine hacking, but it’s time to get one of those single sign-on apps going.

Dongles, dongles, dongles.

Dongle is the icky term for an adapter we need to connect things to phones and computers and proceed to lose at the bottom of bags. And it’s an icky part of gadget life that isn’t going away soon.

Things to do on a snowy day. (Which will be today.) Count my dongles.

Bad enough that you can’t look at anything online without an ad popping up for the item you bought yesterday. Worse still: AI will be getting smarter, and more judgmental. In addition to:

….making decisions about what we watch and read. It can even be used to create authentic-looking fake content that has a scary name: “counterfeit reality.”How might AI be used to judge our voices, faces, emotions — or even whether we’re worth hiring? Companies are starting to discuss AI ethics, but keeping this tech accountable will be hard because we won’t always recognize its invisible hand.

Counterfeit reality? Does this mean we’ll have counterfeit augmented reality? I think I’ll stay in bed with the covers over my head.

The final worrisome trend is that big tech keeps getting bigger. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon…

Expect to see tech giants flogging their “social good” efforts in the year ahead, but our trust won't be restored by watching them act like benevolent dictators.

Since the flapper era, we’ve known – or thought we’ve known – that one thing we’re sure of, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?

Dongles don’t much bother me, but election interference, more hacking, judgmental AI, and way too big tech companies? Think we’ll have to rethink that “ain’t we got fun” piece. Not enough on the tech excitement list to outweigh the worries.

It’s only words. (More of the words of the year.)

Yesterday, Pink Slip had its take on feminism, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2017.

What else made the list, which is based on the number of lookups a word had?

For one, complicit, which had its breakout moment after SNL did a very funny parody of a commercial for a perfume called Complicit, in which Ivanka Trump is brilliantly played by Scarlett Johansson.

"The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this … but won't." The word spiked again weeks later when Trump herself said, in response to Gayle King's question about whether she and her husband were “complicit” in what was going on in the White House, that she "didn't know what it means to be ‘complicit.’"

So, Ivanka doesn’t know what it means to be complicit? Huh? Maybe she was too busy googling “collusion” and “obstruction of justice”. Anyway, I’m sure that if Ivanka’s father gets wind of the M-W word list, he’ll be stoked by the impact he had on it. Feminism, which at least indirectly gained traction because of him. And complicit.

But it doesn’t end there. Recuse was also way up there lookup-wise, thanks to Trump appointee AG Jeff Sessions. Well, recuse me, as Steve Martin used to almost say. Another Trumpish look up was empathy, a word associated with Trump as in “lack of.” Not that positive an association, but a win’s a win.

Not surprisingly, dotard was on the list. Frankly, I’m surprised that it wasn’t number one. After all, words like feminism, complicit, and empathy are fairly common. Even recuse is somewhat frequently used, as when judges recuse themselves from trials, etc. But dotard! Man, what a great word! And one that “saw a 35,000% increase in lookups from last year” after Rocketman, i.e., Kim Jon Un, dubbed Trump with this nickname.

Dotard means "a person in his or her dotage" (dotage is "a state or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness"), and initially had the meaning "imbecile" when it began being used in the 14th century.

The word has an old-fashioned ring to it, and some journalists posited that the odd word choice could be attributed to out-of-date English-Korean dictionaries used in translating Un's comments.

Altogether, an excellent word.

Apparently, I wasn’t paying a ton of attention to last August’s eclipse, given that I didn’t recognize the word syzygy , which is “"the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system."

Clear enough for you? Anyway, if you want to drop a word that has absolutely nothing to do with Donald J into a conversation, it’s pronounced SIZ-uh-jee/. (I would have guessed something close to ZIG-gy.) Of course, if you’re just going to drop it into a tweet rather than into a conversation, pronunciation matters not.

A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with some friends, and somehow the word gyro came up This occurred because one of my friends ordered some sort of fish (or was it lobster) sandwich that was something like a gyro, and another friend said that he never orders a gyro in a Greek sandwich shop because he doesn’t know how to pronounce it. Todd is not the only one, I guess. Questions on how to pronounce gyro inspired Jimmy Fallon and country start Luke Bryan to do a number called “I Don’t Know How to Pronounce Gyro.”

For the record, if you’re in a Greek joint and want one of those shaved lamb sandwiches, it’s YEE-roh. But if it’s gyroscope or Gyro Gearloose we’re talking about, it’s JEYE-roh.

Thanks to attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and throw the provision of medical are back to the states, federalism is on the Top Ten list.

One confusing point about the word is that, while we call our national government the “federal government,” the word federalism often refers to states’ rights.

Massachusetts will likely continue to provide its citizens with medical care. We were, after all, the state that brought into existence the system that the ACA is based on. However, I do believe that we may have to build a metaphorical wall to keep out floods of medical refugees from states that aren’t quite as generous and progressive Just sayin’.

Given all the hurricanes that made the news this year – Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria – September was a big year for lookups of this word.

Lookups of hurricane often spike during and after hurricanes, though we don't think this is due to ignorance of what a hurricane is. Rather, we think people are looking up hurricane to get more detailed information.

If you want that more detailed information, you can look it up.

And if you watched the Academy Awards last winter, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway flubbed the announcement of the Best Picture winner, you’ll understand why gaffe rounds out the M-W lookup list for 2017. Gaffe means “notable mistake,” which would certainly qualify the Oscar gaffe.

I was going to say that we’ll have to see how many gaffes the dotard makes this year. But he actually doesn’t tend to make gaffes. He tends to tell outright lies. Maybe mendacious will make next year’s list…

Word of the Year? Feminist? Why not?

The Oxford Dictionary declared youthquake their word for 2017. I don’t recall hearing it during the past year, but apparently it was popular in England, where the young folks turned out in large numbers to vote against Theresa May when she called a snap election last spring. To me, the word harkens back to an earlier era, the Swingin’ Sixties, when the term was coined and when they were talkin’ ‘bout my generation. (Don’t trust anyone over thirty. Hmm, as I just went to type that sentence in there, I first wrote: Don’t trust anyone under thirty. My, how time does manage to fly. One day you’re quaking the world, and the next you’re starting to pay attention to what Joan Lunden has to say in her ads for A Place for Mom. And you’re not looking for mom…)

For Merriam-Webster, the word of the year was another throwback: feminism, which was the “top lookup” for 2017, boosted by the Women’s March in January and, again, when #MeToo got moving in the wake of the accusations lodged against Harvey Weinstein and sundry others.

Today’s definitions of feminism read: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests.” (Source: merriam-webster.com)

As with youthquake, I go back a way with feminism.

There was an awful lot going on politically when I was in college (1967-1971) – anti-war activity, the burgeoning women’s movement.(For a small Catholic women’s school, Emmanuel College was quite the hotbed of social and political activism. We even had a chapter of SDS and, yes, I was a member.) And sometimes those two threads – anti-war and women’s movement - especially when we started looking around and saw how the women involved in anti-war efforts were often relegated to fetching coffee for the great male thinkers of the era. Oh.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1969. I remember nothing about it, other than that my friends and I avidly tore through it. We then looked back in time and slogged through Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). I remember nothing about it, other than the slog.

Somewhere in there, a friend gave me a very nice sterling silver bookmark from Tiffany’s for Christmas. This isn’t it – I’m not home at the moment to snap a shot – but I still have it.

In 1969, Emmanuel hosted a conference on women’s liberation, a term that was used more commonly than feminism. It was pretty exhilarating, as I recall. And, nothing to do with me, some women who met at that conference went on to write Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book on women’s health. I don’t think I had a copy of the original newsprint edition, but I did grab my copy of the first book-book version (1971).

And I was an original subscriber to Ms. Magazine when that came out later in 1971. Thank you, Gloria Steinem, et al.

Meanwhile, back in the summer of 1970, I was working as a waitress at Ye Olde Union Oyster House in downtown Boston, just opposite the back of City Hall. That August, there were women’s marches throughout the country, held to commemorate the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. During our break between the lunch and dinner (the dinner shift was especially fun, because that’s when we had to ward off rats by throwing heavy spoons at the rat holes), I strolled over to City Hall Plaza and wandered around the end-of-march demonstration.

A mantra of that march was “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot,” which is a) still clever, but b) pretty dated. I don’t think that ironing is quite the “thing” (symbolic or actual) it was back then. I suspect that a millennial reading Tillie Olsen’s classic [feminist] short story “I Stand Here Ironing” would not quite get it in the way that us boomers did. Does anyone’s mother stand there ironing anymore? Or train their daughters up to stand there ironing, too? (In our house, you – where “you” = daughters, not sons -  learned to iron handkerchiefs and pillow cases before graduating to dad’s PJs.)

I don’t think of myself as a capital-F feminist, but I certainly have been a small-f one through the years. “Women’s lib” certainly made it possible for me to have the career I had. (When I was in business school, I think that fewer than 20% of my classmates were women. I suspect that proportion has evened up. The record in high tech is less clear.) And, having been there – if not exactly on the front lines, then not all that many lines to the rear – I understand fully that many of the gains that younger women take for granted were hard won.

The summer before my husband died, we were in NYC and ran into Gloria Steinem. We stood on the sidewalk and chatted with her for a few minutes. She was completely gracious and seemed genuinely happy to spend a bit of times with a couple of “fans.” I thanked her for the work that she and other pioneering, second wave feminists did to make the world a better place for women. Things aren’t perfect, and there’ve been some unfortunate unintended consequences of women’s liberation. But on the whole, the world is a better place for women. And, let’s hope, one that gets even better.

We’ve had our setbacks, of course. (C.f., 2016 election.) But those setbacks have a way of getting things moving. And so I took part in the January 2017 Women’s March in Boston, and will be there again in a few weeks. The sisterhood is still powerful.

Would I have picked feminist as the word of the year?

Probably not. (Narcissist, maybe.)

But it’s as good a choice as any.

And it sure beats youthquake.

Brrrrrr…..Enter 2018!

Usually at this time of year, the temperature’s somewhere in the 30’s. If and when it gets too high, the big worry is that the ice sculptures that are part of First Night will survive or end up in a puddle after doing an “I’m melting” disappearing act. Have no fear about melting ice sculptures this year. It is COLD out there. And has been since just after Christmas, the thermometer barely poking it’s nose about the mid-teens. And then there’s that “real feel” temperature thing-y. Avert your eyes! When it’s 7 degrees out, do we really need to be told that the “real feel” is 10 below? I surely don’t.

I like to sleep in a somewhat cool bedroom, but if I lower the thermostat to 62 or 63, it’ll get even colder. And then take all day to warm back up to the mid-sixties.

This is an old building, and there was apparently no such thing as insulation in the 1860’s, when most of this building was erected. Nor was there any such thing as insulation in 1918 when the part of the building I inhabit was tacked on.

They say hot air rises, and I suppose it does, but the heat that rises from the floor where my bedroom, den, and office are, to the floor where my living room and kitchen live, just keeps rising to the tippy top of the living room ceiling, where it lingers (I suppose) at more than twice my height. It does not, of course, help that the heat registers are about a quarter of an inch from that ceiling. It works great during the summer. During the winter, ah, not so great.

Anyway, it was 57 in my kitchen the other morning. Definitely brrrrr territory.

Of course, that was the morning when I woke up, went out into the back hall, and, what to my wondering eyes did appear than the back door, wide open.

This was at 7:30 a.m., and the temperature was 7. (“Real feel” –10.)

I’m guessing that someone thought they had slammed the door shut behind them, but had failed to turn the second lock. So the door blew open.

However it happened, I did post a note that began “It may seem obvious…”

The pipe from the water heater that leads to my downstairs shower runs through the ceiling of that downstairs hall. Which may explain why, when I turned the shower on that morning, the water that came showering out would have given a polar bear pause. I suppose I should just be grateful that the pipe didn’t burst.

So far, while frigid weather is upon us, I have managed to venture out and get my 10,000 Fitbit steps in. Some of those steps have been achieved pacing around the gym, driving everyone trying to work out nuts, and others have been gotten by circling my dining room table, making me dizzy. But I’m managing to make my daily goal, if barely.

I did venture out to do a bit of shopping, looking for some warm tights and a pair of sweatpants. Marshall’s had some nice fleecy Reebok sweats for $19.99. Alas, what I thought was an M turned out to be an XL. One of the St. Francis House guests will be happy!

I had to do another little shopping tour to secure a Yankee Swap gift for a corporate holiday party I’m invited to. Unlike my family, where oddball and awful gifts are welcome, this one tends to be more straightforward, with useful and/or usable gifts. So it was easy enough to find something chocolate on Charles Street.

Later this week, it’s expected to temporarily nudge up to the 20’s. This brief respite will bring some snow with it. Given the temp boost, I say let it snow, let it snow let it snow.

Ah, well.

It’s now 2018.

I’m not bothering with any resolutions this year, since I never manage to keep them. That said, I do intend to lose 10 pounds, unfreeze my frozen shoulder and, oh yeah, complete the novel that’s been noodling around for a while.

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy new year.

And if January could just warm up a bit, that would be great, too.

Christmas 2017

And so, once again, it is Christmas, time for the three F’s and a W. That’s Family, Friends, Food, and Wine.

I’ve been doing lots of Christmas-y things all month: Volunteering for Christmas in the City, a big party for families living in shelters, followed by a massive gifting event for those in need (but in permanent housing). Here I am at Somerville’s Flatbread Pizza – that’s me in the Santa cap – which did a fundraiser for CITC last week.

While Christmas in the City is hectic, crazy fun, my favorite volunteering gig is at St. Francis House, New England’s largest day shelter for the poor and homeless. I’m a regular-irregular in both the kitchen and in clothing distribution, where I work side-by-side with some of the kindest and most dedicated volunteers you’ll find anywhere. Some are in their 80’s and have been helping out at SFH for decades. (If you have some end of year donation money burning a hole in your pocket, St. Francis House makes an excellent choice.)This is a phenomenal organization that, for thousands of individuals each year, takes care of the most basic of needs for food, clothing, and shelter, on up through career exploration and housing. SFH saves lives and changes lives, and never loses sight of the dignity and worth of those who come in through its doors.

SFH has just purchased the building across the street, and later this month there’ll be a groundbreaking ceremony for the repurposed building. Wonderfully, the annex will include some new units of permanent, affordable housing. Downtown Boston is full of new kabillion dollar condos aimed at financial titans, empty nesters moving in from the ‘burbs after making a killing on their house sale, and the international set looking to park money and/or set up a swank place for their offspring to live while they’re in Boston or Cambridge for school. The housing we’ll be providing is aimed at a different audience. I couldn’t be more thrilled!

I haven’t done any SFH volunteering this month, as I’ve been laying off an ankle with some small tears to tendons and ligaments. (Don’t ask.) But – ligaments and tendons be damned – I’ve signed up for a couple of shifts this coming week. And I’m much looking forward to it.

Overall, I’ve increased my volunteering this year. Just goes to show that semi-retirement is an excellent place to be. The coming year I may transition to full retirement. Maybe.

There’s been other Christmas stuff I’ve been doing, as well, starting with the tree lighting on Boston Common. Oooh. Aaahhh. (I hope they keep the lights up until spring. It’s quite comforting and cheery to have them brighten the way if, on a winter’s night, I find myself crossing the Common. Then there was the Celtic Sojourn concert, and Christmas at the Boston Pops.

As for Christmas-Christmas, I host Family on Christmas Eve, so I’ll have plenty of Food around for the duration of the holidays. Not to mention Wine. So there’ll be lots of good cheer for Friends – I’m expecting a couple of drop ins -  who make their way to my place over the coming week. (Maybe I’ll be able to palm whatever I get stuck with from the Yankee Swap off on one of those unsuspecting friends…)

Christmas Day I’ll spend at my cousin Barbara’s, keeping a tradition going in which at least one part of the Rogers family has spent Christmas with at least one part of the Wheeler family (Margaret Rogers Wheeler was my father’s sister) since 1946, my mother’s first year in Worcester. Barbara, who was a little girl that year, has been the constant for all those years.

Before I head out to Barbara’s for Christmas Dinner, I will take a walk, keeping a tradition going in which I walk at least 10,000 steps every day – a tradition that I’ve been personally observing since last January. Most likely, I’ll walk through the Public Garden, by Mrs. Mallard and her offspring. Stars of the classic children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings, these little guys live practically in my front yard, and never fail to put a smile on my face. They always have little knit caps on in winter, and while I would have preferred them in something more colorful, these will keep them warm. (At least until the Patriots make it to the Super Bowl and they don their Pats caps and scarves.)

There’s another tradition, one falling somewhere between Barbara’s unbroken string of Christmases with at least one representative of the Rogers family, and my newer Fitbit tradition. And that’s Pink Slip’s taking off Christmas week.

I’ll be back in the New Year.

Meanwhile, on Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer, on Vixen.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good day, one filled with Family, Friends, Food and, of course, Wine (if you’re so inclined). 

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas tree…NOT!

A few weeks ago, I blogged about this year’s Christmas tree shortage, which I figured – correctly – was not really impacting New England, since one of our few natural resources is the Christmas tree. (Before it was Vacationland, I believe that Maine was called the Pine Tree State.)

But other areas of the country have been hit, and that has been a real boon for the artificial tree industry.

While I understand their appeal – they’re easier to put up and take down, you don’t need to water them, and they don’t shed needles – I am decidedly not a fan of artificial trees. And within the subcategory of artificial trees I am most decidedly not a fan of artificial white trees.

Too Mad Men, too mid-century modern, too bland, too boring.

On the other hand, if you’re going to have a fake tree, there’s something to be said for going all the way and going for white.

“What could be more faux than having a snow-covered tree in your living room?” says Carrie Chen, brand manager for Treetopia, an online Christmas tree retailer whose sales of white trees are up 44.5% this year. (Source: WSJ)

Similarly, Wayfair which I must admit usually does have just what I need, says that their sale of white trees quadrupled from last year. Home Depot’s selling more, too.

What folks seem to do with these artificial white trees is theme decorating, another aspect of Christmas tree usage I do not approve of.

Christmas trees should hold, IMHO, ornaments that have meaning, and you shouldn’t worry about whether they all match. I like the fact that my tree has ornaments from my parents first Christmas, ornaments from my travels, ornaments commemorating dead pets…

All of my ornaments don’t hold meaning, but most of them do. That Empire State Building reminds me of all the trips my husband and I took to NYC. That brass three-decker – a gift from my cousin Barbara – reminds me of where I grew up.

White trees, at least if I go by what I see in the WSJ article, are impersonal – a decorator touch, devoid of interest, devoid of story. Like this yawner. Sure, it adds a bit of color to a room that completely lacks any. But where’s the personal? Where’s the personality?

I guess it could be worse. Check this one out. Talk about “I’ll have a blue-blue-hoo-hoo Christmas.” But the woman who puts it up sees “’so ugly it’s kind of beautiful.’” And she sees freedom from having to cope with a real tree with real decorations.

Some are attributing the increasing interest in white trees to folks seeing them on Pinterest and Instagram and deciding they like the decorator look and feel. And maybe Melania’s spooky white White House decorations helped. Or at any rate helped with the 35% of folks who actually approve of her husband’s “performance” in office. (And what a performance it is!)

I actually didn’t mind one of the white trees pictured in the article, which is pretty in a decorate-y sense. Not for the real tree you’re going to spread your presents under, mind you. Just not bad as an extra.

But I guess when it comes to Christmas trees, I’m an old-fashioned traditional kind of gal. Here’s this year’s addition. Busy, crowded, imperfect. Nothing to Instagram or Pinterest about. But mine all gloriously mine.

Nope, you’ll never catch me dreaming of a white Christmas tree.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to my sister Kath for pointing this article my way. If you look closely, you can probably find a handmade ornament of Emily, Kath’s late, great, and completely dog-like cat somewhere in there. 

I think I’ll rebrand myself as a bitcoin company

Admittedly,there are more Google hits for pure unadulterated “bitcoin” – 280,000,000 – than there are for “bitcoin tulip” (532,000) or “bitcoin mania” (977,000) or “bitcoin scam” (6,950,000) or “bitcoin insanity” (478,000) or even “bitcoin bubble” (26,100,1000). And yet…

When it comes to bitcoin, I certainly harbor great suspicion that “bitcoin” and “mania” are inextricably linked.

After all, I lived through the dot.com bubble when there were actually real goods and services with the potential to be more or less  exchanged

Bitcoin, on the other hand, sounds like something that could easily have the plug pulled on them if a critical mass of government entities decided to get together and create their own crypto currency. After all, there’s no government in its right mind (or even in its wrong mind) that wants non-governmental entities to control currency, let alone profiteer from it.

So, I vote “tulip”, “mania,” “scam”, “insanity”,and “bubble”as the long run operative words when it comes to bitcoin.

But as I always ask myself, ‘what do I know?’

Anyway, I read with interest yesterday’s Bloomberg article on the number of outfits jumping in to the bitcoin game.

Virtually every day an obscure microcap firm announces a corporate reinvention -- sometimes in name only -- that orients them toward the cryptocurrency or blockchain business. And why not -- the moves have paid huge, often immediate dividends.

Just one of Wednesday’s examples: Furniture maker Nova LifeStyle Inc. quintupled after saying it’s starting a unit called “I Design Blockchain Technology Inc.” The list includes juicemakers, gold miners and a designer of sports bras.

Announcing that you’re in the cryptocurrency or blockchain business? Is that all it takes?

Yesterday’s juicemaker or bra designer just has to pledge some allegiance to blockchain and, all of a sudden, they’re rich as Croesus?

That bra company? They were innovators. And bra innovation is, after all, well known to be just a cup-size away form crypto currency, is it not?

One fintech company – financial technology to you naifs – is now into cryptocurrency. They pooh-pooh any doubters. After all, no one groks – to use a pre-bitcoin coinage – to what they do. And yet another, Future FinTech group is another true believer:

Formerly SkyPeople Fruit Juice, it still produces packaged food products. Though there’s not much evidence that the company has anything to do with cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology, shares rose more than 215 percent on Tuesday after CNBC anchor Dominic Chu called attention to its business.

Many think of all the excitement about crypto currency is akin to blowing smoke up the market’s ass, so it’s not surprising that an e-cigarette company has announced that it’s entering the crypto currency mining market. And a cigar company has rebranded itself to enter the market as well. After all, the world’s no longer looking for a good 5 cent cigar, but some of it’s hoping for a not-so-good $1 million price tag on a bitcoin.

There’s more, of course.

A medical marijuana company “recently bought a patent for a bitcoin ATM.” Whatever they’re smoking, best to not bogart that joint, my friend.

Biotech, gold mining, electronics, tea… You name it, companies of all stripes are jumping into the bitcoin realm.

Willy Sutton once said that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” Ditto for these bra, juice and tea companies, I guess.

Maybe now’s the time for Pink Slip to rebrand and monetize. Pink Bitcoin? Crypto Pink? Crypto Slip? Pink Blockchain Slip?

If a bra company can do it, why can’t I.

Just wondering, though, whether in the 1600’s, companies jumped in on the tulip mania craze and rebranded themselves to cash in. Tulip teapots? Tulip breeches? Tulip tobacco? Tulip wigs?

Inquiry minds would like to know…

Not so smart luggage

Twenty+ years back, I decided to replace my luggage. I had a few pieces of matching Lark, in a very nice blue-grey, and they were still in good shape. But I’d gotten them ten+ years back, before wheels on luggage were the vogue. Which meant you traveled not only with your suitcase, but with your luggage carrier. (Remember when these were always falling out of the overhead bins on planes?)

I still have that luggage carrier, which comes in handy if I need to lug a heavy box to the Post Office. And I still have a couple of pieces of Lark that I store things in.

But twenty+ years back I knew I wanted to replace that Lark luggage with something on wheels. So I asked a friend who traveled all the time on business what he would recommend. What he recommended was Tumi, which he said would last forever.

I can vouch for the fact that it’s lasted twenty+ years. There’s a fair amount of travel on those large expandable and carry-on roller bags, and on that over the shoulder duffel. And they’re all still in fairly good shape. Oh, I’ve had to rescrew in a handle or two. And the pull-out handle on the larger bag sometimes sticks. But it’s time. Luggage technology has improved during those twenty+ years I’ve been lugging my Tumi bags. And the wheels on the newer bags go round and round now, not just straight ahead.

So I’ve been keeping a partial eye out at Marshall’s to see what they have that might work for me, given that I’m no longer willing to pay the price for Tumi. I haven’t yet seen the Mr. Right of the suitcase world, but I have been naturally avoiding those that have anything techie embedded in them. I don’t want one that will charge my phone. Or follow me around.

I don’t want to complicate my luggage life. Plus any tech embedded in a suitcase will be obsolete before the suitcase wears out. I want my next luggage to last as long as my Lark or my Tumi bags have. I.e., for the rest of my life.

Looks like avoiding smart suitcases is a smart move – or non-move – on my part.

For the past few years, makers of so-called smart luggage—that’s bags with anything from a USB charging port to motorized wheels—have disrupted the market. Airlines are now taking note with arched brows: Earlier this month, American, Alaska, and Delta Airlines announced a ban on smart luggage with batteries that can’t be removed. The restrictions, which take effect Jan. 15, 2018, apply to both checked and carry-on luggage. United and Southwest are expected to make similar announcements soon. (Source: Bloomberg)

The fear on the airlines part is that the batteries will go boom. Think exploding hoverboards. They’re mostly concerned about problems in the luggage hold, but they’re also banning smart carry-ons, given how often both smart and dumb carry-ons end up being gate-checked. Note that – thankfully – “these rules don’t extend to other products with built-in lithium ion batteries, such as phones and laptops.”

Not surprisingly, the makers of smart luggage are going ballistic.

“It’s completely unfair—it doesn't have any point,” Tomi Pierucci, a ‎co-founder and the chief executive officer ‎of Bluesmart, told Bloomberg, suggesting further that mainstream luggage companies might have had something to do with persuading airlines to enact the ban.

Pierucci is looking for an exemption. After all, his brand “was developed under consultation with the DOT and FAA.” And the makers of the rideable Modobag don’t use lithium ion batteries. Theirs are carbon-free titanium. So they want an exemption, too.

Other smart bag makers anticipated that this might happen when the hoverboards started blowing up. So they’ve put in easily removable batteries.

And some perceive that the fact that the airlines are paying attention to them is a sign that smart luggage has final arrived.

Another sign that smart luggage has finally arrived? Some makers are dumbing down their lines, with companion pieces (like duffels) that have absolutely no brains at all.

Me? I’m still looking around for a better set of wheels for my next luggage. But I will not be considering anything smarter than my old, reliable dumb-bunny Tumi. This time, however, I will not be getting black. I’m sick of having to rope fluorescent bungee cording around my checked bag so I can spot in on the luggage carousel…

I swear. (Remind me to stay out of Virginia.)

My mother didn’t approve of foul language. Thus, by and large, she didn’t approve of her five children.

Whenever one of us – as adults, mind you – used a word she didn’t like,she would prissily announce that using vulgar language was the mark of someone with an impoverished, limited vocabulary. Which, quite frankly, we all knew was bullshit.

After all, thanks in large part to our book learnin’ parents and my mother’s obsession with all sorts of word puzzles, all of the Rogers children have rather extensive, big old vocabularies. We know what a bobeche is. What the word ‘inchoate’ means (even if we’ve never heard it pronounced). Sesquipedalian? Got. It. Covered.

So, sorry Ma, but phooey on you-ey if you think that only those with limited vocabularies resort to the f-word. (Fuck that!)

Anyway, I so routinely use swear words that I no longer even hear them. Nonetheless, I’m happy AF that texting has provided us with some nice little  - big old vocabulary alert: – acronyms that have a silent “fuck” embedded in them. WTF would we do without WTF?

What prompted me to think about swearing was an article in The Washington Post on a Virginia statute that forbids swearing.

Virginia law demands that residents keep it clean, even in moments crying out for the foulest four-letter words. It’s illegal in this state to curse in public.

“Profane swearing” is a Class 4 misdemeanor punishable by a $250 fine, right up there with public intoxication. It’s a law that predates the Civil War. Yet modern-day potty-mouths still get charged under it — in small numbers, but in ways that can raise troubling questions about law enforcement.(Source: WaPo)

Can I hear a WTF? Or do I need to stick to Jeez Louise? In any case, I’m staying the F out of Virginia, that’s for sure.

And I’ll just bet it “can raise troubling questions about law enforcement,” as in arresting someone whose jib you just don’t like the cut of. Maybe because they’re from, ahem, out of state.

“This is an interesting issue, in part because (even though they are supposed to issue a summons for misdemeanors) police often use this statute or a related local ordinance as an excuse to arrest someone, or at least stop them, and then do a search incident to arrest so they can arrest the person on another charge,” [the ACLU’s Claire Guthrie] Gastañaga said in an email.

Pink Slip has been at this blogging thing for a very long time. In fact, in early 2007, I tackled this topic in a post that still pretty much holds. I say pretty much because I don’t have the same – big old vocabulary alert: antipathy I once had toward the c-word. I don’t use it a lot, but I’ve adopted it for occasional use in the Irish sense, mostly when I’m putting myself in Irish mode. (In Ireland, it’s generally used to describe a male who’s more or less – likely more – an asshole.) While I attribute my softening on the c-word to the I’ve spent in the old sod, it may the New England – big old vocabulary alert: ambience that’s making it more acceptable. I saw on Wikipedia that New England is the area in the country where the c-word is most commonly used. (In tweets coming out of Maine – I was going to say emanating from, but didn’t want to put out another big old vocabulary alert – it’s second only to asshole as a twitter vulgarity. 

There is someone trying to get the anti-swearing law off the books:

A conservative on most issues, [Republican state delegate Michael] Webert says his goal is to protect free speech and shrink a bloated state code by removing a law already deemed unconstitutional decades ago under Virginia Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

Good luck, Delegate Webert. Until you prevail, guess I’ll stay the F out of Virginia.

Chef of the Future

Although I do watch “reality” TV, I don’t go in for the food shows. Oh, I used to watch the one where Gordon Ramsay barged around yelling at restaurateurs. But the cooking competitions are something I’ve rarely glanced at. Eating I like, but I’m sort of meh when it comes to cooking, let alone competitive cooking. And I really draw the viewing line at cooking competitions that involve kids.

But if I were into them, there’d be plenty of choices: “Top Chef Junio,” “Chopped Junior,”  “Master Chef Junior,” “Kids Baking Championship.” Kids as young as 8 years of age appear on these shows.

On “Top Chef Junior,” which debuted in October and ends in February, competitors ages 11 to 14 appear to have internalized the adult manners of the reality TV “cheftestant”—paring down their stories into screen-ready morsels, taking cleansing breaths during emotional interviews and infusing their dishes with personal meaning. (One contestant dedicates her dessert to a deceased Girl Scout troop leader.) Some contestants already have the beginnings of branded websites, including one with a currently empty section labeled “merch.” (Source: WSJ – subscription required)

Branded websites? Never too young to start building your brand, differentiating yourself from all those boring, nothing eight-year-old kids who just want to play with their Legos and American Girl dolls. Never too young to think about capitalizing on your brand and start pushing “merch” on the 2-11 year old demographic in your audience.

It’s not like there weren’t child celebrities when I was a kid. We had them, and they were called Mouseketeers. There were certainly some brands among them that were more powerful than others. Annette Funicello’s brand sure trumped that of Darlene GIllespie. But these glamor kids were, for the most part, collectively branded. Sure, there was plenty of gear you could by. Disney-as-marketing-genius is nothing new. But I don’t remember any of it being specific to any one kid. (Maybe there were Annette paper dolls or something along those lines.But there wasn’t much. Branded “stuff” was around a show which, as often as not, featured an adult. Thus the Davey Crockett “merch.” The kickin’ Roy Rogers slippers I had. The only kid brand I can think of belonged to Shirley Temple, and her brand was first built in the 1930’s and was later resurrected, via a kids show she hosted and via Shirley Temple dolls, in the late1950’s early 1960’s.

Anyway, I find all this commercialization of children pretty distasteful, that’s for sure.

But what the pint-sized chefs are most valued for is their tears, which the cameras apparently love even more than they love a kid talking about plating his panko-encrusted salmon.

“We didn’t want to pretend that the kids didn’t cry—to me it kind of honored their process,” says Dan Cutforth, an executive producer of “Top Chef Junior.” The first episode featured two other visibly upset children. When it came to crying footage, Mr. Cutforth says, “we kept more than we cut.”

“Honored their process.” If that’s not a mouthful of unplated hokum, I don’t know what is.

The fact that the kid cooking shows keep “an on-set psychologist” around pretty much tells us all we need to know about what’s going on with these programs.

And that is that someone’s exchanging the emotional well-being of kids for ratings.Forget all this about kids being resilient. They absolutely are. But they’re also fragile, not in perfect command of their emotions, and subject to bullying – because for each classmate who’s proud to know someone who appeared on TV, there are likely a couple of dozen who want to make fun of that kid who knows how to plank a slab of panko-encrusted salmon. And for every mini toke-wearer, there are millions of strangers “out there” willing to make fun of them.

And let’s not forget that those clips of kids losing it on TV – especially if the kid is a little nerdy, goofy, or chunky – will live on to infinity and beyond, feeding the insatiable and cruel maw of the anonymous commentariat.

There’s a classic Honeymooners episode in which Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, in one of their famous ‘get-rich-quick-schemes’ buy a load of kitchen gadgets and decide to promote it by making a TV ad for it – in which they starred. The most memorable line is when one of the boys asks the other about the gadget, which is called the Chef of the Future. The question in question: “But can it core a apple?” The answer is, of course, that “Yes, it can core a apple.” Unfortunately, it can’t core a apple without demolishing said apple.

And thus it will likely go with the little Chefs of the Futures who are today starring in all those “reality” competitions. Yes, these kids may know how to plate a dish. And they can probably do a ton of relatively pedestrian kitchen tasks, like coring a apple. But I can’t help but think that these kid chef shows, in hustling these kiddos into reality stardom, are demolishing a number of these shiny little apples in the process.

Cereal cafes? Really? Cereal cafes?

As a Baby Boomer, I must say I enjoy seeing the millennials replace as as everyone’s target  - good, bad, and indifferent: consumer  sweeping generational generalizations, all-hail their openness, all scorn their helplessness, and – of course – all that consumer marketing aimed at them. It’s about time that some generation has come along large enough to take some of the attention and heat off of us. (And let me tell you, you young whippersnappers, you’re going to miss us when we’re gone. By cracky, you’re going to miss having someone around who knows how to dial a phone, read a map, and put a penny on the arm of the stereo so the needle doesn’t skip when you’re playing an LP.)

Anyway, I took great delight, a year and a half back, making fun of millennials for finding cereal too inconvenient to eat (dirty bowls and all that), and of Kellogg’s for trying to turn breakfast cereal into a snack. (Here’s my snap, crackle and popping take on that issue of great import. And if you do read it, I know, I know. There’s a point where I use “serial” for “cereal.”)

Well, Kellogg’s back at wooing the millennials, this time by:

…opening a cavernous new cereal cafe in Manhattan’s Union Square -- doubling down on a concept that it started in Times Square last year.

The cafe will be about fives times larger and feature an Instagram station with props and professional lighting, designed to help customers perfect their social-media posts. There’s a full cereal bar, giant murals of Kellogg characters like Tony the Tiger, a station to heat up Pop-Tarts and a special iron to cook fresh Eggo waffles.

“We want cereal to be seen as modern,” said Aleta Chase, a marketing executive at the Battle Creek, Michigan-based company. (Source: Bloomberg)

As it happens, I have a millennial niece who goes to school not far from Union Square. I’m guessing she wouldn’t darken the doors of this joint. Unless this cafe becomes an “ironic” setting for the millennials –could Tony the Tiger actually be woke? -  who live and learn in the vicinity of Union Square, I can’t see this going anywhere.

I’m sure Kellogg’s spent a kabillion dollars market researching this idea. And God knows what I know about consumer marketing could dance on the head of a pin with Toucan Sam and Snap, Crackle & Pop. But it seems to me that the cereal cafe idea might fare better near the big state schools. Lots of millennials, but just a tad fewer hipsters than in NYC.

But Kellogg’s is desperate. Cereal sales have been plummeting for years. Thus, the company’s push to start making cereal a snack rather than a breakfast food.

…the cafe in Union Square is an attempt to generate some foodie buzz. In fact, it was the slew of pictures posted by visitors to the Times Square location that helped convince the company it needed a bigger space.

I’m guessing that this is the first time in recorded history that breakfast cereal has been associated with foodie buzz.

“We needed something that was more experiential,” Chase said. “There’s a more lasting emotional connection if they experience it firsthand -- that’s hard to do with a TV commercial.”

Oh, I don’t know about that. I have an emotional connection to the Kellogg’s Rice Krispies jingle, even if it wasn’t all that experiential.

But it’s a different world out there.

Breakfast this morning? It might be Cheerios and blueberries. Or it might be plain yogurt with granola and blueberries. Whatever it is, it will be consumed in-house and not in a cereal cafe. And it will not be shared with the world on Insta.

My shopping’s done, and then this. Darn!

Many years ago, there was an ad campaign for business-friendly Massachusetts that used a jingle about “making it in Massachusetts.”

Most of what’s made in Massachusetts is, of course, of the non-tangible variety: healthcare, financial services, ideas. And in the technology lane, most of what’s made in Massachusetts is also intangible. Software, and within that, most of what is made is for business or for technologists. (My career has been mostly in B2B and T2T software.)

But there is, as Scott Kirsner detailed in a recent Boston Globe article, some consumer stuff made here as well. He writes:

For much of the year, I’m a grinch, complaining that Boston startups don’t really grok the consumer mindset. They excel primarily at selling to businesses. All the cool electronics companies are on the Left Coast. And so on . . .

But this week, I’m trying to see the eggnog glass as half-full. You could stuff a pretty big sack full of goodies made by Boston-area companies — or easily dole out one for each night of Hanukkah. (Source: Boston Globe)

So he “curated” – his word – a list of gifts, not all electronic, by the way, that, if not made in Massachusetts (seriously!) are at least designed and marketed here. Here are the items (unlike B2B software) that he thinks can plausibly land in your shopping cart:

Bose noise-cancelling headphones made the list. I see people with these on planes all the time, but airplane noise doesn’t really bother me. But there’s a major reno project just getting underway next door – gut reno, including replacing most of the floors (minor fire on their top floor last summer resulted in “totaled” water damage; those fire fighters don’t hold back when it comes to dousing flames, thankfully) – and there’s the hole in my hall ceiling that lets in the gurgling pipe noises from the floors above. So, yes, I could use some noise-canceling headphones. Would I spring for $350 to have a set that comes with a Google assistant. Probably not. Still, since I’m all shopped out for everyone else, it is time to consider what to put on the “me” list.

I’ve never heard of Brunswick Park, but I just took a look and I’d like in. Or I would have liked in, if – when I donned that machine washable, comfy, stretchy, machine-washable blazer (“apparel for innovators, creators, and makers”) I could look like one of the models. It’s pricey, but seems like it might be worth price. My only concern is the woman’s blazer  - “designed for the woman who kicks ass and takes names from morning to night” is a short cropped-ish jacket with a detachable peplum. Word association: peplum/ugh. Plus, I do believe I’ve aged out of the kicking ass and taking names demographic.

Then there’s Ministry of Supply, which ups the ante with Millennial professional clothing made with a 3-D knitting technology. And the founders are MIT engineers, which makes it quite interesting. (Word association: MIT/unfashionable.) The clothing is cool but, once again, I don’t think I’m there demographic. Plus I’m a bit worried that they describe their clothing as “sculpted.” Word association: sculpted/ugh. Still, I walk by their store on Newbury Street all the time. Someday, I just might stick my head in. Maybe after I lose 20 pounds.

Pavlok invites its customers to “TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR BEHAVIOR. CHANGE YOUR HABITS, CHANGE YOUR LIFE”, and asks you to start out by taking a quiz on what bad habit you’d like to drop – oversleeping, wasting time, nail biting, negative thoughts, unhealthy eating, oversleeping. They make a life-changing wearable, a wristband that shocks you when you behave badly. As long as Trump’s in office, if I chose negative thoughts as my bad habit, I’d end up being lobotomized. Pass! But props for the LOL name.

I have enough problems dodging make-your-own-rules-of-the-road bikers in Boston. I would really not be encouraging any of them to add  electric wheels from GeoOrbital or Superpedestrian to their steeds, as these wheels “can turn just about any bike into a speed demon.” As if these guys don’t go plenty fast enough already (even on sidewalks, and always when pedaling headlong down a street – the wrong way, of course).

Speaker Creatures, are designed for bath-time. Sounds like fun if you’re giving a kid a bath. I’m not. Plus I create my own music in the shower, thank you. Isn’t that what oldies and a good memory are for?

With SharkNinja and iRobot, the Boston Metro is awash in robot housekeepers. Nothing I’m interested in. And the Jibo Robot “which aims to serve as a kind of countertop concierge for your home.” No thanks on that one, too. It’s also billed as “the world’s first social robot.” I can’t begin to fully grasp what that means for the future of mankind. Nor do I want to.

A little less socially, but probably more useful, Franklin Robotics will have a “solar-powered bot that battles weeds” out next summer.

Sonos isn’t made here, but they do tech development in Boston. And Amazon Echo’s embedded speech recognition office “is crafted in Cambridge.” Artisanal software? Lordy, lord. So Bostonians can buy locally if they pick up a Sonos One smart speaker or Echo Dot. And security conscious folks may want to pick up a SimpliSafe security camera.

But wait, there’s more:

Shopping on sites like Chewy.com (pet gear), Wayfair (home furnishings), Gemvara or CustomMade (custom jewelry), or The Grommet (unique products from independent creators) supports jobs in Boston. So does buying a gift card from sites like Rue La La (apparel and travel) or Drizly (beer, wine, and liquor delivered to your door).

There’s a young woman in my building who orders a ton from Rue La La, and I did meet some of their folks volunteering in the kitchen at St. Francis House a while back. But basically the only company here I purchase from is Wayfair because, yes, when I did my reno they really did have “just what I need.” I had to get rid of the Wayfair app on my phone, however. It had the annoying habit of ringing a doorbell every time they had any sort of little promo or whatever to share. That bit of annoyance was most decidedly not what I need.

Thanks, Scott, for the roundup of local products. Good to know that, after all these years, you can make it, make in Massachusetts.

The rest of the Neiman Marcus Fantasy Gifts

The Neiman Marcus Fantasy Gift list is just so long and lush, I had to devote two posts to it. More or less as a public service, mind you. After all, if you didn’t find what you wanted in the first half, surely you might in the second.

Rolls Dawn Drophead Coupés I’m mostly an Uber and Zipcar kind of gal, but if I were to get another car, I might consider a Rolls. And $439,625 for this charmer seems well worth the price. After all, you can’t roll into George and Amal Clooney’s driveway at Lago Di Como – that’s Lake Como to those who aren’t on a first name basis with George, Amal, and the twins – in an Uber or a Zipcar. If you don’t like the Lago Di Como Blue – or, as the N-M copy says, you believe that “sharing is overrated” there’s a slightly pricier version for $445,750 in Saint Tropez Orange. The prices might seem silly-high, but I will note the cars do come with lambswool floor mats.

Olympia Le-Tan Bespoke Handbags An order of magnitude down the Fantasy Gift price chain, Olympia Le-Tan (who may be related to Gray Malin, Stephen Webster, or the D’Ornanos, whose wares graced yesterday’s post) will whip up six bespoke handbags. Once again, if you’re not familiar with Le-Tan’s work, she “designs witty and wonderful clutches that reflect her obsession with embroidery and literature.” Obsession with literature? Ummmm. All four of those witty and wonderful clutches (Psycho, Vertigo, Rebecca, and Casino Royale) are movies. Three made by Alfred Hitchcock. Sure, Rebecca was a novel. And I guess you can call something by Daphne du Maurier literature. But that’s the movie poster on the witty and wonderful clutch, not the book cover. As for Casino Royale, I don’t believe that the works of Ian Fleming are considered literature. Just good reads. And a side note on that Psycho bag: if any man I know saw a woman approaching him carrying a Psycho bag, I don’t think he’d be thinking witty and wonderful. I think he’d be thinking Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close, and dead bunnies.  

Experience the Ryder Cup as a VIP Well, the Ryder Cup is in France next year – at least it’s not at a Trump course -  so there’s that. But for $250K… As the saying goes, first prize: one trip to the Ryder Cup. Second prize, two trips to the Ryder Cup. Nuf said on this one, but I’m not a golfer.

Give clean-water wells, get 250 ornaments At $50,000 this one actually seems worth the price. Sure, that’s a lot to pay for a bunch of paper ornaments, but this is actually a donation to Paper for Water. “Founded by two enterprising young sisters, the nonprofit
offers handmade paper ornaments to help fund clean-water wells for
communities in need.” And if you buy just one of the ornaments for $50, all the proceeds go to this endeavor.

Private New Year’s Eve Party for 300 in Times Square I don’t know 300 people, so this one would be lost on me – even if I did have $1,600,000 (of which a measly $80K goes to charity) to spring for it. Anyway, it’s at the Knickerbocker Hotel, which has been all tarted up – forgive me, I meant “fully reimagined for a new era.” Everyone in your party party gets two nights at the Knick, assuming they’re willing to share their room with one other (significant or not). What a swell party it sounds like:

On December 31, 2018, the sky-high private party will brim with premium drinks, a sumptuous passed dinner, a spirited DJ, and that brilliant ball drop—the most exciting minute in the world. More than a billion people will see it, but only a few will see it like this.

If I manage to keep my eyes open, I’ll be one in a billion watching the ball drop.

Anyway, now that you’ve seen the 2017 Fantasy Gifts, what are you waiting for? Go forth and shop!