Anthem (“All Hail, Massachusetts”)

On the news the other evening, the West Virginia teachers, who had resolved their strike and gotten a raise for themselves and other state workers, were celebrating at their state house when they broke into song. Take Me Home, Country Roads (West Virginia, Mountain Mama).

It, of course, made me happy that these folks, whose compensation is barely above the poverty level and who still go out of pocket to buy clothing for and otherwise take care of their even-more-mired-in-poverty students, had won their victory. But it also made me realize that one of the things that the otherwise excellent Commonwealth of Massachusetts lacks is a state song.

Oh, we have one. It’s called All Hail, Massachusetts, and I’d never heard it until I moseyed over to YouTube. As anticipated, it was pretty awful. And the fellow singing it, Rick Pickren, is obviously not a Bay Stater. It’s CONK-id, not CON-CORD. Geeza Louisa.  

All hail to Massachusetts,
The land of the free and the brave!
For Bunker Hill and Charlestown
And flag we love to wave;
For Lexington and Concord,
And the shot heard 'round the world;
All hail to Massachusetts,
We'll keep her flag unfurled.

And trust me when I say that, much as we all love our native state, the Massachusetts flag is pretty boring, and not one that I’ve ever seen anyone waving.

Far better is our state folk song, Arlo Guthrie’s Massachusetts, which is actually a pretty good tune. Not to mention that it’s god’s own truth.

Now if you could only see
I know you would agree
There ain't nowhere else to be
Like Massachusetts

Still, I can’t imagine a bunch of teachers bursting into a rousing chorus of Massachusetts while standing under the Golden Dome.

It is, however, a lot more imaginable than anyone bursting into a drowsy, dirgey chorus of the Bee Gees The Lights All Went Out in Massachusetts. What a complete and utter downer. Nonetheless, as I learned from Wikipedia, in 1968, “it was the first No. 1 hit single by a non-Japanese artist on Japan's official hit chart.”

My favorite Massachusetts song is Sweet Baby James, which doesn’t mention Massachusetts, but does mention Boston, my husband’s name (James), and my birthday (December 1). So, yay!

But what would our teachers sing?

Probably Sweet Caroline, because, well, that’s what we sing. It’s lively. It’s energetic. And you get to bellow, “so good, so good, so good”.

But we don’t have a Country Roads, or a Colorado Rocky Mountain High, or an Oklahoma! No Sweet Home Alabama. No Deep in the Heart of Texas. We don’t even have a Georgia On My Mind or Back Home Again in Indiana (which, oddly enough, was the tune to the theme song of my grandfather’s saloon. Alas, there is no one alive who remembers the lyrics, so all we know is that it began “Back home again, in Rogers bar room, that’s the place I long to be.”)

So we’re not near the top of the heap when it comes to state songs, and we don’t fare much better on the city song front, either.

Dirty Water is, of course, a great song. And we get to sing it every time the Red Sox win.

But it pales in comparison to New York, New York (Frank Sinatra/Yankee Stadium). Or New York, New York (from On The Town – as in “the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”). Or even The Sidewalks of New York.

We have a couple of runners-up to Dirty Water: the plaintive Please Come to Boston. The Dropkick Murphy’s Shipping Up to Boston. Charlie on the MTA. But, sorry folks, it ain’t no New York, New York (either version).

Alas.

Chicago has better songs, too. My Kind of Town, Chicago Is (there’s Frankie-boy again), and Chicago, Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town). But the state of Illinois, while I’m sure they have an All Hail, Massachusetts equivalent floating around out there, doesn’t have anything akin to Arlo’s Massachusetts. Or even the Bee Gee’s Lights All Went Out.

San Francisco, where New Yorker Tony Bennett left his heart, has better songs than Boston. They’ve also got Jeanette Macdonald belting out San Francisco. And the hippy-dippy If You’re Going to San Francisco. But points off for MacArthur Park, even if it doesn’t mention the city.

Oh, boo hoo. Wish we had a better state song. Wish we had a better city song. Something like City of New Orleans, which I realize is about a train, but still.

Think I’ll go drown out my sorrows by listening to Frank and Ella sing Moonlight in Vermont. That’s almost the same as moonlight in Massachusetts. Then I’ll segue over to Patti Page crooning about honest to goodness Massachusetts moonlight in Old Cape Cod.

Village of the demented

Forget spring, it’s winter when a not-so-young woman’s fancy turns to thoughts of aging. And, in my experience, that fancy turning happens at some point between the ages of 65 and 70. It’s the signing up for Medicare. It’s the odd and occasional bone creak. It’s the conversations that, increasingly, turn to health issues. Who’s had a hip replacement? Who just slipped on a pinecone in a church parking lot and broke her elbow? (Asking for a cousin, errrr, friend.)

But mostly, given that we’re young old, not old old, most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dementia.

Oh, when a friend’s parent gets diagnosed with Alzheimer’s we are naturally sympathetic, especially given that there may be a genetic connection. When it’s someone closer in age with way-too-early onset, we shudder, we worry, we ask the spouse what we can do, we whisper updates to each other.

On the genetic side of the dementia equation, I’m holding some pretty good cards. My grandmother Rogers – the longest lived person (97) on my father’s side – pretty much had it all together up until the end: sharp, opinionated, testy, and all there. The one instance of senility I ever saw with her was the last day she lived in her house – the place where she’d lived for 60+ years, where she’d raised her family, buried her husband and sons. It was moving day – Nanny was going to live with my (sainted) Aunt Margaret – and she was sitting there, looking through the phone book, frustrated. “I just want to see my name and address for the last time,” she told me. She was looking through the “T’s”, for Trainor, her maiden name. I’m sure there were other little memory lapses over the next few years, but she remained on her game.

On my mother’s side, my Aunt Mary will turn 93 in a couple of weeks. Sure, she’s slowed down in terms of getting around, but she still has all her marbles. And, as with my grandmother Rogers, we’re talking about a mighty full bag of marbles.

So I’ve got a relatively high degree of confidence that I’ll be spared the full dementia sentence, and will just experience more and more of the run-of-the-mill memory lapses, the lost words, the ‘what’s his name?’s’, the ‘why did I just go upstairs?’

That said, if becoming demented isn’t a huge worry, it’s always there, lurking in deep background. What if? What if? What if?

But if it were to happen, I think I’ll learn a few words in Dutch and somehow, perhaps with my last grip on reality, get myself over to Hogeweyk, The Netherlands, the first “dementia village” in the world, excepting, I guess, the fictional town in the cult classic The King of Hearts. (At least it was a cult classic around here, where it ran at the late and occasionally lamented Central Square Cinema for years. I don’t think the movie was actually any good. It’s just that you had to experience it. At the Central Square Cinema. Sort of like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, midnight at the Exeter Street Theatre. King of Hearts. Rocky Horror. Seems like the old memory’s holding strong. What a relief.)

Back to the topic that’s top of my still highly-functioning mind:

Dementia villages are gated communities designed for people who suffer from dementia, a term used to describe a set of symptoms (such as memory loss and confusion) that are caused by a variety of brain diseases. Hogeweyk’s 150 residents live in six-room houses, each designed around one of four “lifestyles”. These are selected for patients after tests and interviews alongside their families. Anja (not her real name) and her housemates live in a “traditional” home. They eat starchy stamppot stews and have a sewing machine that says it is “Made in West Germany”. “You won’t find Danish [modern or minimalist] design here,” says Eloy van Hal, who founded the village in 2008. The neighbouring house is furnished with pink floral wallpaper and kitschy plastic chandeliers; all part of the “urban” style.(Source: The Economist)

Hmmm. Don’t know about that stamppot stew. Maybe American chop suey? And the Dutch apparently have a different definition of what constitutes the “urban” style than I do. Pink floral wallpaper? Kitschy plastic chandeliers? Me? I’d be happier with my own personal urban style. Or maybe even the Ethan Allen ye olde colonial maple style of my childhood.

Hogeweyk’s allowance of small freedoms gives peace of mind to people who have lost a part of theirs. Grouping residents by lifestyles is meant to establish continuity between their former lives and the nursing facility. The idea is based on reminiscence therapy, which holds that anxiety in dementia patients can be reduced by creating a familiar environment. It is catching on. A dementia home in Rotterdam has built a “remembrance museum” in its basement where residents can ogle over childhood artefacts.

What would be in the US version, and would I be happy to ogle it? Only so many Mickey Mouse wallets and Davey Crockett “coonskin” caps I want to look at. And I understand that most of the Tiny Tears dolls that survived are now suffering from some plastic-rotting disease that’s akin to leprosy, only for dolls. (Aside to V: is your Tiny still holding her own?) What I’d really like to see is a piggy bank made out of a plastic Clorox bottle (with corks for feet). And if someone found one of those giant pooner marbles, a clear one with a metal elephant embedded in it, I’d be delighted to see it.

There are dementia villages in Germany, too, which might be a better fit. I may even have race memory of a smattering of German, what with all those war movies (Macht schnell!) and listening to my German grandmother’s German version of Spanglish. (“Go bei your mommy.”)

In Dresden, one nursing home has a room set up to recall the former East Germany. A poster of Erich Honecker, a former leader of the East German communist party, looms over communist paraphernalia and bulky cassette tapes playing 1960s hits.

Dear Lord, please save me from ever becoming so demented that I’d be happy to see the US equivalent of Erich Honecker. Spiro Agnew, maybe?

Sometimes fakery keeps residents safe. One home in Düsseldorf has a fake bus stop. Residents who decide, in their confusion, that they want to go somewhere else tend to line up patiently there. After they have waited for a bus that will never come, a carer lures them back to their homes.

I can see me now, sitting in a fake Red Line station, waiting for the Alewife train. Or, lurching further back down memory lane, standing outside a fake Ulian’s, hoping that the 19 Cherry Valley bus would show up before I froze to death.

So forget fleeing to The Netherlands. Let’s get some dementia villages going in the US. Fast forward a few years and there are gong to be plenty of folks who could use one. Even if, with luck, I won’t be one of them.

Just us Silicon Valley chickens

I was talking to a guy at the gym/PT the other day, and he mentioned that his wife is a dog trainer, and a dog trainer-trainer. One of her techniques for training the trainer is to use chickens as proxies for dogs. I was a bit skeptical, but turns out it’s a thing.

What’s also a thing is the notion that chickens are actually smarter than dogs.

In terms of IQ, I can accept the fact that pigs might be smarter than dogs. But chickens?

Not that I know any chickens, but, well, my thinking runs along the lines of “nah.”

After all, dogs are smart enough, at least in this country, to get fed well, kept indoors, sleep in beds, and – this is the key differentiator – not get eaten. On the other hand, chickens (even the ones who aren’t industrialized in chicken factories to begin with), on tend to live in cramped, smelly coops, eat chickenfeed, have their eggs snatched, and then get their necks wrung and feathers plucked. All in all, if I’m coming back as an animal, I’d prefer the canine life to the galline one. (And, yes, I had to look it up.)

But if I did have to come back as a chicken, there are worse places to hunt and peck than way out west in Silicon Valley:

In America’s rural and working-class areas, keeping chickens has long been a thrifty way to provide fresh eggs. In recent years, the practice has emerged as an unlikely badge of urban modishness. But in the Bay Area — where the nation’s preeminent local food movement overlaps with the nation’s tech elite — egg-laying chickens are now a trendy, eco-conscious humblebrag on par with driving a Tesla.In true Silicon Valley fashion, chicken owners approach their birds as any savvy venture capitalist might: By throwing lots of money at a promising flock (spending as much as $20,000 for high-tech coops). By charting their productivity (number and color of eggs). And by finding new ways to optimize their birds’ happiness — as well as their own. (Source: Washington Post)

I suppose that if you’ve paid a buck and a half for a modest 3 bedroom ranch, $20K for a chicken coop is, well, chickenfeed.

And you don’t put any old chicken in a $20K shed, or even – if you’re going to cheap out (cheep out?) – a lowly Williams Sonoma chicken coop that goes for $1.5K:

While the rest of the nation spends $15 on an ordinary chicken at their local feed store, Silicon Valley residents might spend more than $350 for one heritage breed, a designation for rare, nonindustrial birds with genetic lines that can be traced back generations. They are selecting for desirable personality traits (such as being affectionate and calm — the lap chickens that are gentle enough for a child to cuddle), rarity, beauty and the ability to produce highly coveted, colored eggs.

Desirable personality traits, eh. Lap chickens, eh.

Tracing back generations – and I thought that’s what ancestry.com was for – so that you can take pride in having a:

…Dorking, an endangered British breed with a sweet disposition and roots that stretch back to the Roman empire.

Yet again, eh.

As for “highly coveted, colored eggs”, I guess when everything is being roboticized, autonomously-driven, and voice-activated and commanded, who wants to spending precious time – time better spent charting chicken productivity or having a convo with your neighbors about optimal personality traits for their flocks – getting out the 10 year old teensy-tiny bottles of Paas or McCormick food dye and coloring your own eggs. When you can have an Easter Egger clucking around that produces pale blue eggs. (Yes, but can these “highly coveted, colored eggs” come in multi-colors with swirls and rick-rack striping? Do they come with decals? I think not.)

And lest you think that for a Silicon Valley moment that these pricey, fancy, high-living chickens are eating feed out of a Purina bag, these chicks breakfast, lunch and sup on:

…a steady diet of organic salmon, watermelon and steak.

Not surprisingly, owners have cameras set up so that they can watch their flocks by night from the comfort of their living room. And, naturally, there’s an app for that. From your smartphone, Coop Tender is controls coop temperature, ventilation and lighting. (Among the features: “predator motion detection.”)

Everyone’s not in it for the long haul. There’s one owner who has plans to, at some point, turn her upscale coop into an Airbnb.

“My timber framed, Gingerbread coop is gorgeous: wired for electrical, plumbed for water, incorporating vintage windows and doors,” Laura Menard, a proud owner from an upscale Silicon Valley suburb, noted over email.

Eww…

Anyway, these are some pampered chickens. Literally. There are chicken diapers that let your chickens free-range in your home without having to worry about slipping on a tiny little leave behind. (Is there an app or Roomba for changing chicken diapers?)

And, by the way, a “chicken whisperer” can command $225 an hour. (Am I in the wrong business, or what?)

The theory is that it’s not so much health or back-to-nature that’s driving the chicken keepers. It’s being able to demonstrate where you sit in the pecking order.

[Chicken whisperer Laura] Citroen’s 19-year-old son, Luca, who grew up around the family business, puts it this way: “Being able to say you have chickens says, ‘I have a back yard,’ and having a back yard says, ‘I have space.’ And having space means you have money, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley real estate.”

That, and being able to show up for dinner and bringing a six-pack of your own bespoke eggs, instead of a bottle of wine. Which might be an okay host/hostess gift if it comes from your own vineyard.

As I say, if I do get reincarnated as a chicken, please, please, please let it be in Silicon Valley, pushing out pale blue eggs, and not within the chicken industrial complex.

Because he’s Jeff Bezos, that’s why

Jeff Bezos is worth more than $100 billion, making him the not just the wealthiest person in the world, but the wealthiest person in history. Rich as Croesus! Richer, even!

The best thing about having this kind of money is that you can drop bucks on any item you want to buy, on any project you care to drop bucks on. Even if we’re talking about $42 million bucks, which to Jeff Bezos probably takes about as much thought as the rest of us devote to yes-or-no on a new raincoat.

Anyway, one of the little somethings (little nothings?) that caught Bezos’ interest is an outfit called the Long Now Foundation, and one of their pet initiatives, the Clock of the Long Now.

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Those italics are mine. I mean, 10,000 years out. They ain’t kidding about long-term thinking.

I am not in the least averse to long-term thinking, especially when it comes to my own personal longevity. And I’m big and generous-spirited enough to want the entire shebang to hang together so that the people I love who will outlast me (and their children, and their children’s children) won’t end up in some death fight to cadge the last raft in waterworld so that they can escape from holograms of Barron Trump III ruling humankind. Even if I blessedly won’t be around to experience whatever that 100 year in the future long-term holds.

Anyway, we know that the Long Now Foundation really thinks things through. They even refer to their year of founding as 01996 rather than the more pedestrian 1996. While I laud their commitment to think in more digits – after all, 10,000 years out, the world (if it’s still on the Common Era calendar cycle) is definitely a five-digit one – 01996 sure looks like a zip code to me. As I suspect it does to the folks of Senftenberg, Germany, whose zip code 01996 is.

Anyway, the Long Now Foundation has a number of quirky, interesting and downright wonderful things going.

The Rosetta Project is “building an archive of ALL documented human languages.” Well, go raibh maith agat to you. (That’s thank you in Irish for you non-Rosettans.)

Their Revive and Restore initiative is aimed at saving species on the verge of extinction. (Who knew that the horseshoe crab was one of them? Surely no one who stumbles across the horseshoe crab carcasses in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Now it may sound like seeing so many dead horseshoe crabs is an argument that, yes, they are on the verge of extinction. Other than that those dead bodies seem to replenish themselves, year after year, suggesting that there are a lot of horseshoe crabs, at least in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.)

Perhaps even more wondrously, Revive and Restore is planning on working on de-extinction. Send in the pterodactyls.

One of the key Long Now projects is the Clock Of The Long Now,

…which is designed to run for at least 10 millennia, without any need for human intervention. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took an interest in the project six years ago, and has funded it to the tune of $42 million. (Source: Bloomberg)

The Clock is big – hundreds of feet tall – and is being built (it’s almost there, I take it) inside a mountain in Texas. And it’s designed to keep on ticking, tick by tick, for 10,000 years.

Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan…

This Clock is the first of many millennial Clocks the designers hope will be built around the world and throughout time. There is a second site for another Clock already purchased at the top of a mountain in eastern Nevada, a site surrounded by a very large grove of 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines. Appropriately, bristlecone pines are among the longest-lived organisms on the planet. The designers of the Clock in Texas expect its chimes will keep ringing twice as long as the oldest 5 millennia-old bristlecone pine. Ten thousand years is about the age of civilization, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism. (Source:Kevin Kelly, writing on The Long Now)

I’m surprised that Ray Kurzweil, who I believe wants to live forever, isn’t all over this one. Maybe he’s too caught up in The Singularity.

Anyway, the designers have really thought this through.

The clock's materials are deliberately inexpensive, to discourage looting, and its location (on land Bezos owns) is quite remote; the nearest airport is two hours away and getting to the clock chamber requires hiking up 2,000 feet from the desert floor. It's also designed so that most of its components can be repaired using nothing more than Bronze Age technology and tools.

I guess that’s in case we revert back to some sort of waterworld-y Bronze Age.

$42 million does seem like a lot of money to invest in something that no one (except perhaps Ray Kurzweil) will be around to see, even 100 years out, let alone 10,000 years. Especially when you think about all the here and now things – like preserving the horseshoe crabs or bringing back the pterodactyl – that this money could go towards.

On the other hand, if you’ve got $100+ billion, what’s $42 billion to spend on something that’s a weird little brainiac puzzle?

As for why, well, because he’s Jeff Bezos. That’s why.

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.”

As anyone who’s read James Joyce’s “The Dead” – or even seen the movie – knows, it actually does snow in Ireland. But not often, and typically not heavily.

So, even though I was keeping a vague eye on the weather in Europe and knew that there was snow in Rome, London, and Dublin, I was still surprised to get a text from my sister Trish letting me know that they were forecasting a meter in some areas of Ireland. Turns out this was a meter in drift, not snowfall. Still, it’s bit worrisome, given that Trish and I are headed for Ireland in a few weeks. We’re prepared for rain. Snow, not so much.

Like places in the US that don’t get a lot of snow, Ireland went into freakout mode as the storm was visited upon them. The country pretty much shut down, leading tourists from hearty Northern snowish countries to laugh and bitch because tourist attractions (and pubs) were closed due to 2 inches of snow.

Not that we don’t get dire warnings in this neck of the woods when storms are looming – as I write this post, Boston is in the midst of an epic nor’easter. Not cold enough for snow in the city – yet – but there’s pretty widespread flooding in coastal areas, and the winds are howling at hurricane force. And, yes, there were many areas evacuated, warnings all over the map, and Boston this morning when I was out was like a ghost town.

But in Ireland, they’ve pretty much been ordered to shelter in place for the duration of Storm Emma/Beast from the East.

The Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar gave this warning:

“Everyone should stay indoors and we’re asking really everyone to heed that warning and not to risk life or risk limb by going out in the snow and engaging in any daredevil activities.

“Bear in mind in a blizzard scenario people might not be able to see their hand in front of their face – so it could be total whiteout in certain conditions.

“So it’s not the occasion in which to engage in any daredevil activities.” (Source: Irish Mirror)

And if you’re wondering how long a way Ireland has come, Leo Varadkar is the son of an Irish mother and Indian father. And, oh, yeah, he’s gay.

Don’t know what daredevil activities Varadkar had in mind, but the Irish Times had an article on the storm that had people reminiscing about what it was like back in the good old days, before Ireland had gay Taoiseachs. Back in the Ireland of 1947, when Ireland experienced a horrific snowstorm, Dubliner John Houlden was a wee Dubliner:

“Now that was a terrible time,” he recalls. “You must remember it was only two years after the war and rationing was in full affect so we had virtually no fuel and very little food even when it wasn’t snowing. And to say our clothes were not of the best quality would be a real understatement.”

He and his siblings used to be sent to the Johnson Mooney and O’Brien factory nearby where they would get “pillowcases of stale bread for one and sixpence. My mother would turn it into bread and butter pudding by adding water and raisins and that’s what we ate,” he recalls.

“We had no indoor toilets and our taps were on the outside in the backyard. Imagine how cold that was. But at least we had our own backyard,” he continues.

“A lot of our neighbours didn’t have that and had to share taps and toilets with other families. Sometimes I hear people calling people of my age mean but we’re not mean, just careful because we remember how hard things can get.”

 He describes the response now as “a little bit ridiculous. I live in Prosperous [Co Kildare] now and was in a shop yesterday where I saw a woman with eight sliced pans and eight cartons of milk. What was she thinking? The bread will be stale and the milk sour before she can get through it all.” (Source: Irish Times)

Glad to see that it’s not just Bostonians who load up on bread and milk when a storm’s predicted. At least the Irish have the race memory of The Famine as an excuse.

Eamonn McGreevy shared an even worse memory.

He recalls that there was an elderly brother and sister who lived in an isolated location near his family’s farm. A local poitín maker was passing their house to locate some poitín, which he had hidden nearby, when he he heard a “faint cry. He looked in and every stick of furniture had been burned for fuel and the brother and sister couldn’t get out the house.”

They were brought to hospital on a horse and cart but she died a month later, followed within a year by her brother. “I often think of them, even today,” he says.

Sure, it wouldn’t be a real Irish story, now would it, without bringing the dead into it. And, of course, Ireland being Ireland, there was a story on the impact of Storm Emma on undertakers, priests and gravediggers.

“I am just after doing a funeral,” said Fr Paddy Byrne in Co Laois on Thursday. “The crematorium in Dublin is closed so in that context they will have to keep the body over in the hospital,” he explained. (Source: Irish Times)

Not to be confused with Fr Paddy Bryne, Monsignor John Byrne, was also after coping with the storm:

He said, “our gravediggers have worked through the last day”. Mgsr Byrne described the weather as “unprecedented” and said the church has never had to close its doors before. He has been liaising with the local authority and emergency co-ordination group and heeded the advice to close the church on health and safety grounds.

One funeral director, Patrick Larkin, had to postpone a funeral and shutter his pub. (And, no, he’s not the only one in Ireland with this particular dual career.)

He pointed out that there were a lot of people involved in a funeral from musicians and florists to priests and gravediggers.

“It is safety first for the people attending and for the people who work in the undertaking business,” he said.

Thankfully, with “modern embalming”, the urgency to bury the dead is not what it once was.

Still,

“We are in uncharted territory when it comes to access to the deceased,” said [Irish Association of Funeral Directors (IAFD) spokesman Colm] Kieran, who explained that many funeral directors would have four-wheel drive vehicles, particularly those operating in rural areas. “Lots of Dublin cemeteries have informed funeral directors that they are actually closing until further notice,” he added.

Ach, people – in Worcester or (I suspect) in Ireland – used to be tougher. My father was waked during a blizzard, and it was pretty nasty at the cemetery, too.

Anyway, whether your cemetery is open or closed for business, you can’t do much about snowfall:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Source: James Joyce, “The Dead”)

And whether we’re out in the elements or sheltering in place, above ground or six feet under, James Joyce was right. That snow or rain or sleet or hail falls “upon all the living and the dead.”

Consumer protection? What consumer protection? We don’t need no stinkin’ consumer protection

There are recalls all the time. Airbags that explode on no-contact. Listeria-drenched cantaloupe. Moldy UGG comforters. (Ugh!)

Although I’ve returned a number of items that didn’t work as advertised or just plain fell apart way before their time, I’ve never actually participated in a product recall. (Funny, when I first heard about cars being recalled, I thought they were all being recalled to Detroit. I loved the image of hundreds of thousands of vehicles converging on the Ford River Rouge plant or wherever they were heading to, and was a bit disappointed to learn that the recalled cars just went back to the dealership. Yawn!)

Although I haven’t done so in years, taking a page from my Aunt Margaret’s book, I was once quite a complaint letter writer. I never wrote to the Dromedary Date company – one of the Peg letters I recall. She set out to bake her famous Date Nut Bread, and something gang agley with her dates. So she wrote a letter and, in return, got a load of dates.

Me? I once wrote to Cracker Jacks to complain about the lack of nuts, and my prize was a carton full of Cracker Jacks boxes. I can’t remember if they had much by way of peanuts – probably not: that’s been a problem for decades, one I still experience a couple of times a season at Fenway Park. Another time, I wrote to the Tootsie Roll folks to express my annoyance at buying a bag of Tootsie Pops that were pretty much devoid of Tootsie. Again, my reward was a few bags of Tootsie Pops.

Somewhere along the line, consumer goods companies stopped sending bags and boxes, and started sending coupons. And that was no fun. Not worth writing a letter over, even though the value was pretty much equivalent to that of the bag or box.

Anyway, while I haven’t had to participate in product recalls, I’m glad that they occur.

Who wants to take sick from a germy cantaloupe, and hop into bed only to find that your UGG comforter is moldy?

I’m delighted that there’s someone out there protecting consumers.

But there’s apparently one product category that is recall-resistant.

And that’s defective guns.

As far as I’m concerned, most guns in civilian hands are defective, but if you want handgun in your bedside table, if you want to hunt Daffy and Bambi, or if you just like heading to the gun range for a bit of shoot ‘em up, have at it. I don’t want a gun. I don’t want to be around guns. But I’m fine with gun ownership (with the exception of automatics and semi-automatics). And tend to not have a holster full of sympathy when a gun owner shoots himself in the foot.

That said, I don’t like the idea of guns that fire away even when no one’s got their finger on the trigger, or when the safety’s on. As happened with a gun called the Taurus, which:

….sold almost a million handguns that can potentially fire without anyone pulling the trigger. The government won’t fixan the problem. The NRA is silent. (Source: Bloomberg)

One of those who ended up with a bad Taurus was Bud Brown, a retired cop and firearm’s instructor – and a responsible gun owner. His 28 year old son Jarred, well trained in the ways of firearms, borrowed the Taurus. Bud heard the gun go off, and the next thing he knew, he was by the side of his boy, who was bleeding to death, a 45-caliber slug having course through he femoral artery.

When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in the holster, tucked into Jarred’s waistband.

Jarred had grown up in a firearms house – rifles and handguns. Bud is an NRA lifer, and his wife used to pack when she worked as a probation officer.

The Browns refused to accept that Jarred had accidentally shot himself. “Jarred knew his way around guns and safety better than I did,” Bud says. “He never would have done anything that would have made that gun go off.”

Your impulse may well be to think, “that’s what they all say.”

But in this case….

Turns out the Taurus – one of its models is the top-selling revolver in this country – was known to be a bit problematic.

A friend of Jarred did some research and:

…found a curious announcement on Taurus’s website: The company was offering to fix or replace nine of its handguns. The pistol that killed his friend was on the list.

To settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed that Tauruses (Tauri?) “can fire unintentionally when bumped or dropped”.

Taurus offered to fix or buy back the approximately 1 million bad guns.

The company denied any negligence, wrongdoing, or defects in its firearms and also denied that its offer to fix its guns was a recall.

Bud Brown wondered why this was the case. And why the government, which was all over moldy UGG comforters, let Taurus guns be sold.

The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.

Turns out the lack of this particular gun regulation dates back to 1972, when the issue came up and was staunchly opposed by John Dingell, a Democrat and NRA-er (and, yes, the same John Dingell who just retired in 2014 at the age of 88). Most members of Congress went along, and kept the CPSC out of the firearms biz by a vote of 339-80.

Along with wondering why the government wasn’t doing anything about bad buns, Brown also wondered why his NRA – supposed so keen on its gun safety mission – didn’t warn members about the Taurus, even though they had on occasion publicized other gun recalls.

“Why didn’t the NRA warn us? I guess there’s too much money and politics going into the NRA, so they had reason not to tell us,” he says.

No surprise, the former president of Taurus International was a good bud of Wayne LaPierre, the well-known NRA EVP. (You’d recognize him. Wayne’s the angry old man with foam coming out the sides of his mouth.)

So Brown is taking on Taurus, and doing so “as an avid hunter and gun owner” who doesn’t “want someone to pick up a case and say, ‘They just want to take away our guns.’”

Taurus is looking to dismiss the case, claiming that  - despite the buy-back/repair program for nearly 1 million guns – their guns aren’t defective.

If the case goes to jury, even in a gun-friendly area (Brown is from Georgia), I’d bet that in the current climate, the jury sides with Brown.

It won’t get him his son back but still.

Anyway, wouldn’t you think that, given that they can order a recall of bacterial cantaloupes and moldy comforters, the government might want to do a bit of oversight on defective guns. Bad enough there are so many crazy gun nuts out there. I sure don’t want to be anywhere near a gun that can go off by itself.

That’s a relief (if you’re a construction worker, anyway)

I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid events where I have to use a porta-potty. Yuck on yuck. All using a porta-potty does for me – other than instill the level of fear and loathing generally earmarked for an approaching clown, and provide a modicum of relief, bladder-edition – is remind me, yet again, why I’m extremely happy to live in the world of indoor plumbing. Give me a clean toilet, behind a closed door, and toilet paper (as opposed to a page from the Montgomery-Ward catalog, or a leaf – watch out for poison ivy – or a dried up corncob). You can have that Little House on the Prairie experience, thank you very much.

Seriously, I’d rather go behind a bush. Or maybe even in front of a bush. The tradeoff between privacy and the ghastly look, feel, and smell of the average porta-potty, well…peek away.

I am, of course, not talking about those upscale, shiny white portable sanitation facilities that show up at higher-end functions. Sure, they’re portable, but they’re not cesspits. No, I’m talking about those blue, green, red, whatever brightly-colored plastic jobbies that get rolled out for major events. And at construction sites.

An aside: a few years ago, I was in Arizona, and saw billboards – complete with shamrock on their logo -  for a company called Diggins Environmental Services. I noticed this because my late husband’s name was Diggins, and I was wondering how these very likely distance relatives were servicing the environment. Well, look no further than the Diggins porta-potty I spied on a building site in Tucson.

Perhaps if I profited from the porta-potty biz, I’d be more benevolently disposed towards this form of waste disposal. But that is not the case.

However, some folks do make money on porta-potties, and some of them are the ones servicing construction sites in the Boston area.

For those who haven’t been to Boston in a while, we’re something of a small-b boomtown. Lots of high rises rising high downtown, especially in the Seaport district. Office buildings, hotels, luxe condo and rental buildings. Same deal in Cambridge. I recently passed through the Alewife area, where I worked for throughout the 1990’s. In those days, there were a couple of office buildings, some public housing, a couple of strip malls, and a mega T station. Those strip malls and the T station are still there, but there are all sorts of office and apartment buildings up and going up.

All this construction translates into heightened demand for places for all the construction workers to relieve themselves.   

In a curious but inevitable byproduct of the city’s epic construction boom, the market for portable toilets is on fire. New vendors are popping up, older ones are expanding, and big companies have swooped in — all fighting for an ever-larger slice of the surprisingly lucrative porta-potty pie.

Call it Boston’s own game of thrones, complete with price wars, turf battles, and seemingly endless demand. (Source: Boston Globe)

For some of the companies, the growth has been pretty incredible.

In just a decade, the Throne Depot grew from 26 units to 2,100 (“500 of which the company acquired just last year”). Flush Services has had months where they needed to add 150 toilets to their inventory. And over the last couple of years, more and more companies have been entering what – let’s face it – seems like a pretty crappy business. But a much needed and required one.

With national labor regulations recommending at least one toilet for every 20 construction-site workers — and with some large-scale projects requiring as many as 500 on-site johns — it’s not exactly a surprise that the phones keep ringing.

I don’t know about those numbers. Is there really a construction project in Boston large enough that 10,000 hard-hats are working on it? At the height of its construction, the Pentagon had 15,000 construction workers hammering away, but that was over 3 shifts. I think someone may be a bit math-challenged here. Or maybe I lack the imagination that can conjure up 10,000 construction workers on one building site.Even this big old building going up in the Seaport, which looks like it’s supporting a few toilets per floor.

Despite the demand, it’s tough to be on the supply side:

The industry, those in the business say, can be inherently tough. Finding workers willing to spend their days cleaning out portable toilets is a predictably difficult task.

Not to mention that, when those portable toilets aren’t cleaned out well and often enough, porta-potty companies have to deal with a boatload – see, I can resist the urge to write “shitload” – of complaints.

And bad things can happen to good (if there is such a thing) porta-potties:

Locally, vendors report portable toilets that have been graffitied, tipped over, blown up, set aflame, and — in one instance — chain-sawed through. A couple years back, [Throne Depot’s Michael] Cormier said, he rented out five porta-potties for a fund-raising event in Newton. When an employee arrived later to pick them up, he found that one had been burned to the ground. The other four had simply vanished.

“To this day,” he said, “we have no idea what happened to them.”

Hmmmm. I get that four would have “simply vanished.” My guess is that, with a paint job and some new signage, they became the basis for a porta-potty startup. But “burned to the ground”? That would take some doing.

Guess the fund-raising events I go to are a bit more staid. And I tend to avoid the ones that include porta-potties.

But nice to know that business is booming for those with the stomach and olfactory toughness to enter the porta-potty business.

Chalking it up

Before I went pro in another field – high-tech product management and marketing (yawn!) – I was a professional waitress.

Yes, I’d also been a summer and school-year waitress, lines on the résumé shared by about two-thirds of the women of a certain age I know. (And some of the men, too. I’m looking at you, Ricky T. Only for waiter, not waitress.)

After dropping out of a PhD program at Columbia I probably shouldn’t have been in to begin with, I worked at Durgin Park, a major tourist trap in Boston’s Quincy Market. At one point, a fellow student happened to show up at Durgin, and was seated on my station. “You really were leaving school to be a Durgin Park waitress,” he told me. “I thought you were kidding.”

Anyway, I worked at Durgin long enough to save enough money to spend a few months driving around the country with my friend and fellow waitress, Joyce. And when we got back from driving around the country, we went back to Durgin and worked long enough to save enough money to spend five months hitching and camping around Europe. (Joyce, I will note, also ended up with respectable non-waitressing career. She worked in fashion, and for many years, up until her recent retirement, she had a senior buying position at Neiman-Marcus. Which meant she got to go to every Fashion Week in NYC, Paris, Milan and got to know every big-name designer you can think of.)

I had one more waitressing gig before I went straight and ended up stumbling my way into a “real” career, i.e., a career in which I didn’t come home at night smelling of prime rib and scrod, but – alas – a career in which I no longer had the satisfaction of counting my tips.

For years, at frustrating times on the job, I would say to a colleague, “Well, I can always go back to waitressing.”

It’s pretty clear now that that ain’t going to happen. Which is a good thing. I now have the age and heft more typical of the Durgin Park waitresses of my era. These women were  hearty, ancient crones who’d been there forever. One of them (entering the wrong way) barreled into me when I was leaving the kitchen balancing a half dozen cups full of coffee on my wrist (trust me: it’s doable), so I know up close and personal about hearty ancient crones. I missed a week of work nursing some nasty burns. She didn’t miss a beat.

So while I now have the age and heft appropriate to Durgin Park waitressing, and could probably get up the growly disposition most of them possessed, I don’t think I’d last a shift.

But in many ways I still think of myself as a waitress, and I’m interested in women who end up for whatever reason – generally lack of education and opportunity – as waitressing lifers. Thus, I was delighted to see an article in The Boston Globe the other day about a woman who, post art school, had been more or less one of those lifers.

And then Joan Aylward, in her fifties, was able to make the transition from waitress to artist. It happened somewhat by accident:

“I just didn’t see it happening,” Aylward says now. “I wasn’t doing anything to bring that side out of me.”…

Today, though, in a twist she never saw coming, the 54-year-old has found herself in the midst of a surprising second act: Aylward has emerged as arguably the city’s most prominent and sought-after chalk artist, drawing up trendy custom menus for bars and restaurants all over town. Chances are, if you’ve stepped through the doors of a Boston establishment in the past two years, you’re familiar with her work.

To date, some 150 restaurants in and around Boston have displayed her lavishly designed menu and cocktail boards — from the casual (Tasty Burger) to the elegant (Capo).(Source: Boston Globe)

These days, Joan Aylward is no longer hustling for tips, bussing her own tables (unless she’s at home), or ending her shift smelling like prime rib or scrod (or whatever it is waitresses smell of these days: tiapia? focaccia?). She’s now a professional artist, specializing in chalk-art signage for restaurants. (By the way, Aylward’s mother never lost faith, and kept nudging her to use her “God-given artistic talent.”)

Her first gig was a freebie for a place she was working. But then word of mouth and the growing on-trend-ness of chalkboard signage put some wind in Aylward’s career sails. In addition to her restaurant clients, she’s also done some corporate work.

The Globe caught up with her on one of her jobs:

“Who knew?” she said. “I draw on walls, and people pay me.”

Congratulations, Joan Aylward.

I hope that the chalkboard trend lasts for as long as you want it to last. And that if it doesn’t, you can continuing using your “God-given artistic talent” in some other capacity. Toss out those comfy support shoes, the bottoms coated with kitchen yuck. Rag those sweaty shirts. Save the aprons for use in your own kitchen.

What was the line from the Mary Tyler Moore Show? You’re gonna make it after all…

Who said there isn’t any more factory work???

Last week, Twitter cleared out a whole bunch of bots, and some Tweeters found that the grand numbers on their list of followers had plummeted. Plummeted by orders of magnitude. The purge, of course, precipitated a ton of screeching. You’d think that someone would want their followers to be actual human beings, but guess not.

I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about Twitter followers or . followees. I don’t Tweet, and have two followers, which is one less than the numbers of Tweets I’ve made, two on behalf of Christmas in the City, and one an accidental retweet. (The post I retweeted was fine, but it RT’d by accident.) My follow list is mostly pundits, politicians, MSNBC hosts, a few columnists, a couple of organizations I support, and a few (very few) entertainers. I just checked: there’s no one on there that I didn’t put there. So, Larry Tribe and Larry O’Donnell, in case you guys were wondering, I really am a follower and not a bot.

Turns out that, even if someone’s followers are, like me, honest to goodness humans, they may not be true followers in any sense. This I learned from reading a long and detailed article, The Follower Factory, which appeared last month in The New York Times.

All this is thanks to outfits like Devumi, which promises to:

Accelerate Your Social Growth: Quickly gain followers, viewers, likes & more with our bend of marketing tactics.

I actually wouldn’t mind going out on a date if the right guy came along, but mostly I’m not interested in accelerating my social growth. But if I were, and I wanted to buy not earn my following, Devumi would be one place I could turn (that is, if I had neither scruples nor standards, which, when last I looked, I still manage to maintain – at least I think so):

Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers.

Problem is some of these followers are stolen identities, like a kid from Minnesota who has her real FB and Twitter identity as Jessica R, and another one that Devumi has sold in her name, photograph, and bio. That other Jessica:

…promoted accounts hawking Canadian real estate investments, cryptocurrency and a radio station in Ghana. The fake Jessica followed or retweeted accounts using Arabic and Indonesian, languages the real Jessica does not speak. While she was a 17-year-old high school senior, her fake counterpart frequently promoted graphic pornography, retweeting accounts called Squirtamania and Porno Dan.

Fake users on FB and Twitter – and it’s estimated that as many as 60 million FB and 48 million Twitter accounts are ersatz – are the counterfeit coin of the social media realm. They:

…can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations.

People – entertainers, politicians, athletes – pay Devumi and other follower factories as little as a penny a piece for a follower for some very good rea$on$:

Follower counts on social networks help determine who will hire them, how much they are paid for bookings or endorsements, even how potential customers evaluate their businesses or products.

High follower counts are also critical for so-called influencers, a budding market of amateur tastemakers and YouTube stars where advertisers now lavish billions of dollars a year on sponsorship deals. The more people influencers reach, the more money they make.

According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000…

Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence. “No one will take you seriously if you don’t have a noteworthy presence,” said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.

Good God. “No one will take you seriously…” Seriously? The world really is coming to an end.

Even – surprise, surprise – marketing consultants are getting in on the act. One such a-hole, Jeetendr Sehdev bills himself as “the world’s leading celebrity branding authority.” Pardon me for thinking that this honor goes to DJT, but whatever. To help build his brand, Sehdev bought hundreds of thousands of Devumi fake-os.

…in his recent best-selling book, “The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells,” he had a different explanation for his rising follower count. “My social media following exploded,” Mr. Sehdev claimed, because he had discovered the true secret to celebrity influence: “Authenticity is the key.”

While you might say that shamelessness is the true operative word here, authenticity is the key alright. (One of his fake followers, by the way, was the fake version of Jessica R.) Who says you can’t fake authenticity?

Obviously not Devumi, who claims that its address is in Manhattan.

In real life, Devumi is based in a small office suite above a Mexican restaurant in West Palm Beach, Fla., overlooking an alley crowded with Dumpsters and parked cars.

And Devumi’s founder has a fake résumé, too. On LinkedIn, German Calas – like me! – claims to have a degree from dear old Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only mine is real and his is fake.

Meanwhile, the Devumi’s scammer-in-chief has himself been scammed. An ex-employee supposed stole a list of customer orders and set up a fake version of Devumi. Calas is suing him. Good luck with that!

One thing that’s come out of Calas’s suit is the revelation that:

Devumi doesn’t appear to make its own bots. Instead, the company buys them wholesale — from a thriving global market of fake social media accounts. Scattered around the web is an array of obscure websites where anonymous bot makers around the world connect with retailers like Devumi.

Meanwhile, FB and Twitter are apparently on the case, so far in a more or less half-arsed way. The focus of late has been on the bots aligned with the Russians spreading fake news and fake support for bad ideas and bad people. (Within days after the Parkland killings, the Ministry of Divisiveness was all over the place pushing the meme that the kids who were speaking out so eloquently and passionately about and on behalf of their murdered classmates were “crisis actors”.)

Kind of makes you want to find some mountain top without reception and toss away all your electronics.

But I guess we should look on the bright side: good to know that there are still factory jobs out there…

Location, location, location

At first, it used to startle me a bit, but that was years ago.

Now I pay it no mind when, three minutes after I make the decision of the century and pick the navy heather L.L. Bean fleece rather than the darkest violet, an ad appears in the middle of my Twitter feed showing something that looks suspiciously like the fleece I just ordered, and inviting me to buy it. Me? I skip right by it. Gotta see what Lawrence Tribe has to say or my mad crush Lawrence O’Donnell is up to, tweet-wise.

And if a picture of pair of brightly colored Asics appears in the corner of my eye like an eye floater within seconds after I pushed my virtual shopping cart containing a couple of pairs of brightly colored Asics out the virtual door of Zappo’s, well, sure, like anyone else, I have a moment of hesitation when I ask myself, “Am I losing it, or didn’t I just order that???”. Mostly I ignore it.

Oh, sometimes it bothers me a bit when a banner ad for one of my clients shows up in the middle of an article I’m reading. Of course they want to cultivate me. I just downloaded a bunch of stuff from their web site. Still, I feel a bit guilty – even when I wrote the content of that banner ad. Shouldn’t I let them know that they need to tweak their algorithm so that their ads only pop up for live ones, not for freelance content producers. Please, I ask, figure out a way to distinguish me from someone who’s actually interested in cloud-based B2B software that solves some business problem or the other.

Of course, when it’s a client’s competitor that’s bombarding me with ads, I’m delighted. Waste o’ money, suckers! I just wanted to see that ebook because I’m writing an ebook on the same topic and want to make sure I haven’t missed any important points. (As an aside: my ebook’s better than your ebook. Nyah, nyah, nyah!)

I actually don’t mind it when Amazon suggests a companion book or a CD. Not so much when it’s any thing else that I just purchased. I don’t care that everyone else who bought the long-handled toenail clippers also bought the 30” foot scrubber with pumice stone.

Anyway, while I may not like it, and hope I don’t ever get very far sucked into it, I understand that online marketing is the shizzle.

But then there’s the invasion of the location snatchers.

I may have been targeted by it before, but I really noticed it the other day.

I was strolling around the North End (Boston’s rapidly yuppifying Italian section) the other day with my friend Jennie, enjoying a supremely spring-like afternoon, when we decided to stop in at Polcari’s Coffee, an ancient and funky little hole-in-the-wall shop that sells coffee, spices, Italian candies, and a few odd bits and bobs.

Among those bits and bobs were colorful little kitchen scrubbers. My old colorful little kitchen scrubber has sort of withered on the sink. It still scrubs, but it’s somewhat curled up and dead. So I decided to spring for a new one, which I paid $3.19 cash money for. No cashless purchase life for me when it’s anything under twenty bucks.

If I’d given it a thought, I would have felt that I hadn’t left a trace at Polcari’s Coffee. I didn’t pay by credit card. I didn’t pay by debit card. I didn’t give up my email address to get on their mailing list. I can’t imagine that this throwback of a store would have had one.

Anyway, by the time Jennie and I had strolled over to Caffe Paradiso- despite the yuppification, the North End still has great Italian restaurants and coffee shops -  for an iced mocha (and, yes, to split a piece of chocolate cake), I saw that I had a message on my phone asking me to take some sort of Polcari survey.

I didn’t click through to see what it was, but I was a bit weirded out.

This couldn’t, after all, be a coincidence. Stop into Polcari’s for the first time in decades; get pinged on my phone by some Polcari or another.

And then it came to me: location, location, location.

The marketing gods smiled down on my Samsung Galaxy 6, powered by Verizon – or the other way around – and picked up my coordinates so that the Polcari folks would know that I’d been in their shop.

First off, I’m stunned that Polcari’s would be doing this sort of marketing. Honestly, there is nothing hip, techie, or happenin’ about this place. Other than that kitchen scrubber – I don’t remember these being a thing back in the day; we just used Brillo pads and Tuffies  – this store hasn’t changed a bit since the last time I was in there in 1987. Except they apparently had.

Every once in a while, I read some article raising the alarm about the creepy ability of “them” and “it” to track us, to pinpoint our locations, our comings and goings, thanks to our oh, so very smarty-pants smartphones. Mostly, I’ve dismissed these alarms. I mean, I’m not involved in criminal activities. And the government, bad as it may be these days, isn’t yet sending drones to take out those thinking thoughts of resistance. At least not as far as I know. (Could the NSA, at this very moment, be monitoring my key strokes? If so FU!)

Often, after I’ve made an online purchase, I get an email asking me how the transaction went, or to write a review of, say, that $14.99 long-handled toenail clipper. Mostly I ignore these, but I understand that the price of online shopping is that they have your email address

I’m a lot less keen on stores picking up on my location and bombarding my phone with follow-up messages.

From now on, if I’m out and about, location will be off. Need to know basis only, marketers, and you just plain don’t need to know.

Kylie Jenner as market mover? Can the world get any crazier?

I’m not much for keeping up with the Kardashians.Pretty much what I know about them is that the women’s names all start with K, that they have black hair (unless they strip dye it blonde), and that Caitlyn Jenner used to be part of the pack.Sort of. I know that Kim Kardashian is probably the most famous one, mostly because she’s married to Kanye West. And that the pre-Jenner paterfamilias was OJ’s lawyer. With all these threads, it’s pretty clear that they tap into the country’s zeitgeist big time. (OJ, Kanye, Caitlyn Jenner, celebrity power, and the entire notion of famous for being famous. Wow, just wow.)

Although Klan Kardashian is always out there, running below the consciousness of the average American online media consumer whether they actively look at Kardashian “stuff” or not, I was still surprised to see Kylie Jenner front and center on Bloomberg yesterday. Yet there it was:

Shares of the Snapchat parent company sank 6.1 percent on Thursday, wiping out $1.3 billion in market value, on the heels of a tweet on Wednesday from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore. Whether it’s the demands of her newfound motherhood, or the recent app redesign, the testament drew similar replies from her 24.5 million followers. Wall Street analysts too have begun to notice, citing recent user engagement trends noticed since the platform’s redesign.

Here’s what Kylie – new mom of a baby girl named Stormi, by the way, a name that seemingly trumps those that her sister Kim has come up with for her kids: North, Saint, and Chicago – had to say that set the market moving:

sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad.

sooo, guess I’m just a sad little nobody, because I never opened Snapchat to begin with. Ugh. This is so sad. Sometimes I just weep for myself.

And it wasn’t just Kylie Jenner questioning Snapchat.

Shortly after she tweeted out her disparagement of what was once the hot platform, Maybelline polled its followers, asking them to give a mascara pen up or down with respect to whether they should stay on Snapchat.

And why shouldn’t Kylie and Maybelline ask the big question and throw a little shade Snapchat’s way?

After all, there are plenty of more popular social media platforms out there. There’s old fuddy-duddy Facebook, still leading the pack thanks to all those grandparents out there sharing baby pictures. And Insta, Twitter, and Pinterest both outpacing Snapchat.

Kylie’s not getting all the blame, but she was apparently on to something, as there’s been a general bad reaction to a recently introduced redesign of the app:

Citigroup analyst Mark May downgraded the stock to sell from neutral earlier this week after seeing a “significant jump” in negative reviews of the app’s redesign. He expects the reviews could cause user engagement to fall, hurting financial results.

Since I don’t know what the Snapchat interface was to begin with, and thus couldn’t appreciate the changes to the app that are riling up Snapchatters, I have no opinion about whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. But users have even gotten up a change.org petition going. And when I looked, it had over 1.2.million signatures and counting. (Didn’t change.org used to be for social justice warriors out to remake the world, not for social media warriors interested in stuff like “Remove the new Snapchat Update”?

Ms. Kylie did backtrack a bit:

"Still love you tho snap," Jenner hedged in a later tweet.

But the damage was done.

Kylie Kardashian Jenner, market mover. Who’da thunk it?

The Eatin’ of the Green

The day after Valentine’s Day, I was in Roche Brothers and came across a table full of St. Patrick’s Day cupcakes. Not that I’m in the least averse to tarted up baked goods that wear the green. I grew up in a home where St. Patrick’s Day meant wearing a little Erin Go’ Bragh flag to school, corned beef and cabbage (and, yes, I know that the Irish-Irish don’t serve this; only the American-Irish), and chocolate cake or cupcakes frosted with white icing with a kelly-green icing shamrock in the middle. And last year, I actually bought a Roche Brothers lemon meringue pie frosted to look like the Irish flag.

So I’ll cool with edibly celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.

Anyway, back at Roche Bros, I rounded a corner, and there was another table. This one covered with shamrock-shaped sugar cookies sprinkled with green sugar.

Another corner brought me to a Guinness display.

Not that it is a surprise that a grocery store chain in one of the most Irish-identified cities in the US, a chain founded by a couple of boyos named Pat and Ambrose (Buddy) Roche, would pick up on the theme of St. Patrick’s Day.

But kicking off the eatin’ of the green so close on the heels of Valentine’s Day seemed a bit premature.

We’re used to seeing things way in advance. Halloween candy in August. Christmas decorations in October. Easter Candy the first day of Lent. Yes, the Easter candy’s out, making me crave jelly beans.

I suppose it makes sense. When I see Halloween candy in August I may well buy a bag of candy corn. Why wait? And that won’t stop me from buying another bag in October. So I’ve doubled my consumption of candy corn for the year. Ditto with the jelly beans. Smart marketing.

Still it does seem a bit odd around a “holiday” like St. Patrick’s Day. A month in advance? Come on…

Turns out it isn’t just Roche Brothers.

The day after I spotted the green cupcakes at Roche, I was in the Shaw’s, hoping to find the raisins I use to bake soda bread for – ta-da – St. Patrick’s Day. Roche doesn’t stock big raisins; Shaw’s used to. Alas, no more – I had to special order from Sun Maid – but I did see that they have their Irish cookies and cupcakes out as well.

But wait, there’s more..

Back at Roche Brothers just the other day, I found that they’ve doubled down on their pushin’ of the eatin’ of the green.

I have to say that one of the things I like about Roche Brothers is that I can get Barry’s Tea there. And McCann’s Oatmeal. And Kerry Gold butter. And (dirty little secret) their Irish soda bread is almost but not quite as the Aunt Peg recipe that I use. (I even plucked a loaf from the midst of this display just to taste-test it and make sure.)

But, faith and begorrah, what in God’s green little bit of heaven do Lucky Charms have to do with St. Patrick’s Day?

I guess the answer is that, if you package it in a green box, and call it the Limited Edition for St. Paddy’s Day, and make sure that there are green clover marshmallows in that green box, your product gets to be Irish by association. If that’s the case, then someone better tell General Mills that, while the clover is associated with luck, and luck for some bizarre reason is associated with the Irish, and that the Lucky Charm mascot is a leprechaun which is certainly Irish, the actual Irish symbol is the three-leaf shamrock, not the four-leaf clover!

I guess the only thing to do is roll with it. Which is, I guess, why I bought a loaf of that commercial (pretty good) soda bread to tide me over until I bake the real deal. That and head over to CVS and see if they’re stocking green Peeps yet. If they are, I may have to craft up some McPeep’s. Doesn’t look too hard. Maybe Roche Brothers will let me sell them in the Downtown Crossing store.

I’ve got a few more weeks, but I better get going.

“Strategic brilliance…”

Although I’m not – to say the least – looking for a job, I always enjoy glancing through the help wanted ads in The Economist. Sometimes the jobs on offer are quite excellent. A few years back, there was one (if I remember correctly) for the secretary to HRM The Queen. I didn’t qualify, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t interested.

This week’s edition had a few jobs that stood out. The CIA is recruiting “the intellectually curious adventurer looking for an unparalleled, high-impact international opportunity.” No specific work experience required, but the spooks would welcome sales, marketing, and real estate professionals. Maybe folks familiar with, say, money laundering with oligarchs?

But the position on offer that really caught my eye was for the President and CEO of Canada’s Post Office, which provides “innovative physical and electronic delivery solutions and services…more than 9 billion messages and parcels annually.” Forget “neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night” – and, yes, I know that’s the US mantra not Canada’s. But you don’t think Canada has snow and gloom or night??? And forget Deliver De Letter De Sooner De Better. This is the 21st century. We’ve talking innovative solutions,

Most of the “wide array of competencies sought” are pretty standard senior management fare, albeit with a few current corporate-speak bingo words thrown in just to see if folks are awake. Or awoke. Experience with complex business transformation.  Decision-making ability. Multi-faceted organization. Executive experience. Working collaboratively with a wide array of stakeholders. (Am I mis-remembering, or was there really a time when we didn’t worry about collaborating with stakeholders?)

Canada Post would like to see someone with experience in a large, unionized organization, which would leave plenty of resumes on the floor.

But my favorite competency on the list was this one:

Strategic brilliance with the ability to assess what the future holds.

Lord-y lord. Wouldn’t someone who truly had the ability to assess what the future holds take that competency to some arena where they could make a boat load of money? Or make the world a better place? Just sayin’

As for strategic brilliance, lord-y, lord-y, lord-y lord.

Throughout my long career I can’t count the times I’ve seen strategic brilliance. That’s because the number is zero.

Admittedly, I didn’t exactly spend that long career in companies known for baseline strategic competence, let alone strategic brilliance. Even looking in – nose pressed to the window, little match girl style – at other companies (generally competitors) that seemed to have their strategic shit together, what looked like a genius strategy generally turned out to be stumbled upon luck combined with market luck multiplied by excellent timing, factored up by pi.

Oh, yeah, and it never seemed to last.

Those guys who were eating our lunch, who seemed to have the world by the balls, who seemed to be making all their employees (our former colleagues) millionaires? Give it time, and those shining stars turned out to be shooting stars. And all those employee millionaires? Paper only, of course, By the time they could cash those options in, share price had peaked and plummeted. Sorry we expended all that energy being jealous of your wealth.

I’ll give you that there are some companies known for their lasting strategic brilliance. Apple comes to mind. It’s just that they’re companies that I have neither first nor second-order experience with.

I’d love to be a fly on the Canada Post wall when the interviewer asks the interviewee to talk about their strategic brilliance. Tell me about a situation in which you demonstrated your strategic brilliance. And probably even see if they can tap a bit of that strategic brilliance on behalf of Canada Post. If you were the CEO of Canada Post, what do you think the most strategically brilliant initiative you could undertake that would enable CP to provide an innovative physical delivery solution? How many times will the answer be “drones” before someone realizes that they’re seeing strategic ho-hum predictability rather than a flash of strategic brilliance.

I’m not great at assessing what the future holds, but I’ll bet that, whoever lands the job at Canada Post, strategic brilliance isn’t going to be the sharpest tool in their tool box. Strategic brilliance in the past is not that transferrable from one organization and situation to the next. Too much luck, etc. involved to duplicate it. But the good news for the new CP CEO is that it will take a while before someone figures out that, whatever the strategy in place is, it’s probably not all that brilliant. Like most organizations, I’m guessing they’ll be just as happy with strategic competence.

Curiously, one of their requirements wasn’t the ability to execute a strategy.

Whether the strategic is competent or brilliant, if you can’t execute on it, what good it is?

Anyway, good thing I’m not interviewing for the job. All I could come with is drones…

Welcome, Immigrants of 1871. There’s an opening for a bunger in New Jersey…

The Internet is a wondrous place which, if you’re ready,willing, and able to waste a ton o’ time, will wondrously accommodate you. And there’s the equally wondrous Google, ready, willing, and able to serve as your tour guide, or random walk guide, or whatever.

I can’t quite remember what I was googling for when I came across the U.S. Government’s “Special Report on Immigration”, which was published by the Government Printing Office in 1871. Did I want to know what the cost of a velocipede was in 1869? Was I watching a re-run of The Rifleman and felt the need to know what a sod-buster made? Did I wakeup with a hankering to learn how many folks from Norway immigrated in 1820? Or was I just trying to get the earworm “My Sharona” out of my brain. (Thanks, Kath. Hope I paid you back with “Sharif Don’t Like It/Rock the Casbah”.)

Whatever the purpose and urgency driving my googling, there I was with this wondrous book, information at my fingertips that I hadn’t realized I needed to have anywhere, let alone at my fingertips. And what wondrous information it was:

Information for Immigrants relative to the prices and rentals of land, the staple products, the facility of access to market, the cost of livestock, kind of labor in demand in the western and southern states, etc. etc. [sic]

To which are appended tables showing the average weekly wages paid in several states for factory, mechanical, and farm labor; the cost of provisions, groceries, dry goods and house rent in the various manufacturing districts of the country in the year 1869-1870.

All compiled by one Edward Young, PhD, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics.

The first thing that came to my mind was the question: just how many PhDs were there in 1871? But rather than get distracted into seeing if I could find out, I just forged on.

This was 1871. With the opening up of the west, the abolition of slavery, the growing number of factories – it was pretty much welcome immigrants to our shores.

During the first seven decades of the 19th century, the United Kingdom (which included Ireland at the point) made up half of all immigrants. They “speak our language..and are soon assimilated into and absorbed into our body-politic.” All well and good. No mention of the scourge the shanty Irish were.

The next major immigrant group was Germans, who “are intelligent and industrious”, followed by Scandinavians, who are “industrious, economical, and temperate.”

As for real foreigners, “Asiatic” immigration “has not yet reached such proportions that it would excite alarm in the most apprehensive.” And

“The Latin nations contribute little to our population, and the Sclavics (sic) still less, while today, as from time immemorial, the different branches of the great Teutonic trunk are swarming forth from the most populous regions, to aid in the progress of civilization.”

I’m pretty sure that the great Teutonic trunk is not the grey, home-made wooden trunk my German family came through Ellis Island with in the early 1920’s. I’m guessing it’s the Northern European ethnics (Germans, Scandinavians, British Isles) who were the kind of immigrants we welcomed when we were in a welcoming mood.

The narrative sections of the book are a tremendously entertaining read. In them, we find that Edward Young has found that it’s better for unskilled laborers to go west and chop down trees and “engage in subduing the forests” than to fester in the cities. And that the demand for Velocipedes is down.

Then there’s Edward Young’s variation on the camel entering the eye of the needle:

“The son of a rich man, whose raring and education cost $20,000, if not trained to usefulness, is worth far less to the community than the son of a mechanic whose whole cost has not exceeded $2,000, if the latter is a well-instructed and skilled artisan.”

Young was working on it, but couldn’t yet put a price on an immigrant – i.e., the net value to the United States of having them here -  but he was definitely in favor of keeping ‘em coming.

And come they did, even in those decades before the really crazy immigration happened (1880-1920, when 20 million immigrants rolled in. How much is much? In 1880, the U.S. population stood at 40 million. Immigrants and their offspring pushed that number up to 106 million by 1920.)

From 1820-1870, the period covered in Edward Young’s wondrous book, 2.7m immigrants came from Ireland. From Germany, the number over that period was 2.268 m.

I think that 1870 was right around the time my Irish great-grandparents were heading over. The Germans were laggards. They waited until after a hellacious world war and found their way to the US in the 1920s.

Being part of these two great-in-number immigrant strains makes me feel, well, so very American.

By 1870, the Italians, Russians, and Poles hadn’t shown up in any great numbers yet. And over that period, only 198 Greeks came to America. 98 from Hayti and 57 from Porto Rico.

In FY 1870, there were a ton of farmers (36k) and laborers (85k) in the immigrant bunches, but there were also 4 actors, 3 dentists, and 10 priests. Not to mention 727 butchers (ach, those Germans), and 990 bakers. No word on candlestick makers, but there was 1 lone hoe-maker.

Hard to imagine that, in a still largely agricultural nation, we only managed to import one hoe-maker that year. Especially given that FY 1870 brought us 23 jugglers. (What was the demand for jugglers?)

That year, our population also increased by 36 nuns, 362 brewers (no doubt those Germans again), and 14k servants. (Was my great grandmother Margaret Joyce among them?)

There was a lot of information provided to immigrants, including where they could buy land – and for how much – and where the jobs were and what they paid.

Some of the jobs are really hard to imagine. Working in the scraping room or a starch factory? And what, pray tell, do mule spinners and mule backside piecers do? I didn’t realize that the backside of a mule had to be pieced.

Easier to think about how god-awful it must have been to work on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, where men made $5.50/week, women made $3.60, and boys $2.50.

Lots of excellent info on M vs. F jobs and wages, and B vs. G.

A type founding company in NY was one of the few places where the girls (rubbing type: $6.50 a week) could make more than the boys (breaking type: $5.50/week).

Oh, the places those immigrants could go and the jobs they could find there. Rhode Island needed spoon and fork makers. Massachusetts could use calendar men ($9.14/week) and calendar boys (4.60/week) at an India rubber goods factory.

Head west to Missouri, young man, to work as a forger, twister, or screw cutter in a lightning rod factory.

Go work as a felt-hat stiffeners, a steel worker in an artificial limb factory, a hair-cloth weaver, a hoop-skirt maker. Soapstone cutting paid exceptionally well: $23.50 a week.

So did work in a wall-paper factory in New Jersey. Flockers made $25, water color painters made $20, and bungers – whatever they did – could haul in a cool $24 per week.

Did immigrants use information like this? I don’t think my immigrant antecedents necessarily did. The Irish branch came to Massachusetts because there were already a ton of Irish here, including friends and family from their home towns. And my more recent German immigrant relatives (my grandparents and toddler mother) went to Chicago for precisely the same reason. Landsmen galore!

But my friend Joyce’s grandparents came over from Lithuania in the early part of the 20th century. They rolled into Ellis Island with little money and less English. There,her grandfather was told that they could use a cobbler in Burrillville, RI, a town of then about 6,000 or 7,000 in population, in the middle of nowhere. Off they went to find work cobbling shoes, and raising a good-sized family that I believe made up the entire Jewish population of Burrillville.

Anyway, I’m guessing that cobbling in Burrillville was better than being a hair-cloth weaver or felt-hat stiffener. Maybe even better than being a bunger in a wallpaper factory.

Ah, history. Ah, data.

Who knows where my next useless Internet stroll will take me…