Twin Cities?

The day is coming, but I haven’t yet sworn off Facebook. But I have stopped revealing, if not my innermost secrets, then my subsurface preferences, by no longer clicking through on those goofy little “quizzes” that cull all sorts of tidbits out of you. With the promise that they’ll let you know what female 1950’s sit-com star you are. (Lucille Ball. Would rather it have been Betty White…) What famous painting. (Mona Lisa. Whatever.) What your ideal state is. (Hawaii. Not! I actually like crappy weather.)

Since I’m no longer filling out these little thingies, I have even more time so waste coursing around looking at other useless stuff.

Among the useless stuff I love are articles about where you live.

I especially, and quite snobbily, enjoy those that rate Boston or Massachusetts as the best x ever.

These tend to reinforce my perceptions about how wonderful my hometown and home state are. Sure, we tend to rank low in some categories. But they tend to be categories (religiosity) that I could give too hoots about. Or where low rankings translate into what to me is a positive (religiosity).

One that I stumbled on the other day wasn’t so much of the great place to live variety, as it was a listing of which cities yours is the most like. And it was based on not things like weather or education or affluence. But on job mix.

The cities Boston most resembles are New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Hartford, Bridgeport, Austin and and LA. For the most part, other than Bridgeport, there’s nothing surprising here. These are all, other than Bridgeport, cities that I like. Cities that  I mostly could almost even see myself living in. That said, Boston is nothing like New York Chicago or LA. Let alone Bridgeport. When I’ve made comparisons, it’s been along the lines of Boston is like Seattle, Boston is like San Francisco. Maybe because they’re cities of comparable size – and have hills and techies – I’ve felt quite a bit at home in both those places. I don’t know Austin– it’s on the bucket list – but maybe the college town/tech-ness would remind me of home. LA? Not so much.

Still, job mix isn’t a bad proxy it seems.

And what are the job mix commonalities?

For New York, they’re clinical trial administrators (at least 3.7x normal), medical secretaries (3.6 times normal),and ABA therapists (3.7x normal) –  yeah, I knew it wasn’t American Bar Association or American Basketball Association therapists, though god knows the lawyers could use some therapy. Turns out it’s Applied Behavior Analysis.

Anyway, the medical overlaps aren’t surprising. We’ve got a ton of hospitals and bio-techs; so does NY (although I thought their bio-techs were more or less in New Jersey).

But ABA therapists. What’s up with that?

For Chicago, the jobs we have in common are dog walkers (3.2x normal), directors of analytics (2.6x normal), and school nurses (2.6x normal). Directors of analytics I love. Forget hog butcher of the world, Chicago is a knowledge worker kind of town. Lots of brainiacs. And dog walker and school nurse? Just plain sweet and charming commonalities. Especially the dog walkers…

In common with San Francisco, Boston has a lot of scientists (4.5x normal), research associates (4.1x normal), and clinical trial administrators (4x normal).

I loved the sheer nerd tech-ness of the Austin common jobs: product marketing managers (3.5x normal)  - no wonder I’m at home in my home town: I’m in good company, Ruby on Rails developers (3.4x normal), and customer success managers (2.9x normal). Who even knew that ‘customer success manager’ is enough of a thing that there’s a whole profession around it?

The article also threw in comparisons to a less populated area and a place that voted for Trump. Our less populated twin city is college-town Charlottesville, Virginia, which, like Boston, has demand for more than its share of substitute teachers (4.4x normal), research associates (4.1x normal), and research scientists (4x normal), These last two make sense, but what makes a location have such wildly greater demand for substitute teachers? Better contracts for teachers that let them actually take time off? Or a lot of teachers calling in sick? Hmmmm.

Our Voted for Trump pair-wise is Dallas, on of the least Boston-like places I’ve ever spent time in. But we both have a lot of demand for support engineers (2.4x normal), assistant vice presidents (2.2x normal), and client services managers (2.1x normal). Is a client services manager sort of like a customer success manager? Could it be? Should it be? As for AVPs, AVP of what? (Or does this title only exist in banks?)

The fun part of this article is that it’s interactive, and you can plug in your city of interest and get back some fun info. (Or is it just me that finds this interesting, now that I’ve sworn off those prying surveys that grab personal data on whether I’d rather do the cha-cha or the Dougie?)

So, quite naturally, I plugged Worcester in.

Not surprisingly, Worcester is most like Providence, Springfield (Mass), New Haven, and Hartford: all old New England cities.It’s also like Buffalo, and Allentown, Boston (huh?) and Philadelphia. And, oddly enough, Worester’s a lot like Kansas City.

What Worcester has in common with Providence are residential counselors (at least 7.1x normal), recovery specialists (6.7x normal), and substitute teachers (6.1x normal). Which in a dreary sense seems just about right. The Kansas City connections are medical office workers (3x normal), claims representatives (2.5x normal), and patient transporters (2.5x normal).

Pick a random metro, pick any metro, random or not. If you can access this page – NY Times is gated – you, too, can have fun finding out what your cities of choice are twins with, jobs-wise.

How I do love wasting time on the web, especially now that I’ve thrown aside the urge to take part in those nosy, personal info-hoovering surveys. Being interested in what’s like Worcester isn’t much of a give away. (By the way, the real answer is: ain’t nothing like Worcester.)

Play Ball, Ye Olde Town Team

It’ll be sunny today, but the thermometer isn’t supposed to nudge much above the mid-forties. Plenty chizzly-wizzly (as my mother would say) at Fenway Park, where The Olde Town Team plays their home opener this afternoon. I might take my daily constitutional out Fenway Park way, but I will not be shivering in the bleachers. Having donned my little Red Sox earrings, a new for the season tee-shirt, and my trusty old fleec, I’ll be watching from the comfy-cozy of my den.

My first in-person game will be on Patriots Day – much my favorite game of any season. It’s a rare week-day day game with a a rarer still a.m. start. It’s a bit of a PITA to get to the game, as the walk from my house is along the Marathon route. So, thanks to the bombing, means going through security. Anyway, by April 16th, one would hope that it will be a tad bit warmer. I will note that the 14-day forecast is for 50 and rainy for April 16th. But that’s a long way out, so fingers crossed.

I am delighted to have baseball back. So far, so good for the Red Sox. Sure, the away-opener turned into a debacle, after a brilliant Chris Sale performance got smashed to smithereens by a pathetic outing by the bullpen.

Other than that, I’ve enjoyed watching at least part of each game – I even made it to the bitter end of Tuesday’s 13th inning game - and the Sox are a more than respectable 5-1 on the season.

Of course, those W’s (and the L: thanks, bullpen) came against the Tampa Bay Rays and the Miami Marlins, teams with combined payrolls that are roughly $60M less than that of the Red Sox, who lead both leagues, coming in at a whopping $235M. There’s another way to look at it, that doesn’t make the Red Sox seem quite so embarrassment-of-riches loaded. If you look at the Roster-Only payroll – as opposed to the fully-loaded payroll, which includes players on the DL, money going to players that were traded on the condition that the team of origin eats part of their over-pay, andsomething called “Buried” – the Red Sox come in second to the Chicago Cubs. No surprise that two big-market, competitive-expectation, demanding-fan teams would have high payrolls. (Source of payroll info: Sportrac)

In any case, hopes are high that the boys will have a good year.

Ah, baseball.

I can follow most of the major, major league sports with some degree of intelligence. I know the rules. I understand the plots. But the trouble with those other sports are that the plots are all pretty much the same: run up and down the field/court/rink, try to score, run up and down the field/court/rink. Baseball’s plot is different. The teams take turns standing in place in the field while one player at a time tries to advance the ball to home – the same home for both teams.

Maybe it’s because I’m a reader and a writer and enjoy a good plot, but there’s just something about baseball that I’ve always loved. The game just gives me joy.

Baseball is one of my first memories: toddling over to our B&W TV to pick player off the screen (no doubt at the direction of my father who wanted me to pick off a runner). Baseball accounts for some of my fondest memories, especially of being a kid listening to games on the radio with my father, and our annual outing to Boston to see the Red Sox play. In 1960 – my first game – I saw Ted Williams, in his final season, hit a home run. In 1961 – my second game – I watched Mantle and Maris hit back-to-back homers for the Yankees. This in the year they battled it out for most homers on the year, Maris beating out the Mick 61 to 54.

I still love sitting in the bleachers…

As a kid, I was also a baseball history buff, and read all kinds of player bios and team histories. I could entertain my father and his friend (and fellow baseball fan) Spike by being able to answer trivia questions about Nap Lajoie and Walter “The BigTrain” Johnson. (Don’t ask me now…)

Anyway, it’s the baseball season, and I’m back in business. I’ll catch a bit of most games. If nothing else, it’s an excellent respite from political news.

If the Celtics and/or the Bruins go long into the playoffs, I’m sure I’ll catch a bit of their action, but from here on out, until the end of October (or maybe even the first of November: seasons are lllooonnnggg), I’ll happily a baseball grrlll.

Earn those millions, boys! Show us that you’re worth every penny of that league-leading roster/DL/retained/buried/whatever payroll.

Oh, there’ll be plenty of moments when I’ll shake my fist at the TV. Curse the gods. Curse the players, the umpires, the opponents. There’ll be plenty of times where I fall into a snooze and wake up to find I’ve missed a great play. Or a couple of great innings. There’ll be times when I’ll even admit that, sure, baseball can be a bit of slow-action. Boring, even. Maybe just a little.

Still, come this afternoon, I’ll be contentedly taking the home opener in front of my very own TV.

The grocery store was selling completely old-school packages of Cracker Jack which look to be even before my time. How could I resist? So I’ll be munching away, hunting for the scarce peanuts and bemoaning that the prize will no doubt be a crappy fake tattoo. Nothing like the prizes of yore: a charm, a tiny little book, maybe even a lousy little yoyo that really didn’t work.

My soda can (Worcester’s own Polar) will rest on my outsized Green Monster coaster.

Play ball!

Sweet Caroline, I’m delighted that the boys are back.  

April 4, 1968

We didn’t have phones in our dorm rooms.

In my dorm, there were three phone booths per floor, and freshman had to take turns answering the phone between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. each evening. You answered the phone, went and knocked on the callee’s door and, if they weren’t there, called downstairs to the smoker. After that, you left a note.

I wasn’t on phone duty on April 4, 1968. It was a fellow freshman who picked up the phone and went to fetch Mary B, a senior. But I was out in the corridor when Mary B. ran down the hall, crying that Martin Luther King had been killed. Mary B. scared the crap out of me. She was quite tall and plenty tough. (And, by the way, a Worcester girl.) One time, when I was the phone girl for the night, I had called down to the smoker to tell her she had a call. The smoker phone was busy, so I just left a message on her door for her.

Big mistake.

An hour or so later, she was pounding on my door, screaming at me that I should have come down the smoker to get her, and that I’d made her miss an important call about some political activity she was involved in. Of course, if  she was expecting a call that was so all-fired important, maybe she should have been waiting in her room for it, rather than hanging in the smoker chain-smoking and playing bridge. Of course, I said nothing, but after that I stayed out of her line of sight, that’s for sure. (This was pretty easy to do since, as far as I could tell, she spent most of her time in the smoker playing bridge. I maintain that I never learned to play bridge because I wasn’t a smoker.)

Anyway, Mary B. had, I believe, spent a summer registering voters in Mississippi or some other dire place, and was a major supporter of MLK. A friend called her to give her the news. Understandably, she was distraught.

We didn’t have TVs in our rooms. We had radios. There was a communal TV in the first floor lounge of the dorm.

I don’t exactly remember, but I’m guessing we all went down to watch the news about Dr. King. When I was in college, we rarely watched television. Idle time was taken up by bull sessions or jams (someone would put a Motown album on and we’d dance). The only time I remember watching television while I was college dorm-dweller had occurred a few days early – March 31st – when LBJ announced he wouldn’t be seeking another term. Having knocked on doors for Gene McCarthy, I was quite excited by this announcement.

What I don’t remember is being devastated by the death of MLK.

I was absolutely upset, but I don’t recall weeping or being crushed. It was not that I was ignorant of the Civil Rights movement. And I knew that the death of Martin Luther King was terrible. As a news junky, I was very familiar with him. I’d watched him deliver the “I Have Dream Speech” – or at least as much as they showed on Huntley & Brinkley. A few weeks later, I’d read with horror about the little black girls murdered in the Birmingham church bombing. I knew all about Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. And Viola Liuzzo. I’d watched MLK leading the march in Selma. I knew about sit-ins, lunch counters, fire houses, police dogs. “We Shall Overcome.” CORE. SNCC. But my nascent political activism was focused on the Vietnam War.

I now know more about MLK and Civil Rights. And enough to know that, fifty years on, when a police officer shoots a black man – even if that black man is lying on the ground, hands open, pleading for his life – that shooting is more than likely to find be determined to be justified.

If Dr. King had lived, he’d be an old man of 89.

At the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, his nine-year-old granddaughter – Yolanda Renee King – gave a brief but remarkably stirring speech. Yolanda has a dream that “enough is enough.” I’m sure the old man would be justifiably proud.

The aphorism likely originated with Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker, but it was Martin Luther King who made it famous, but here’s hoping that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

What would YOU do if you were a Sinclair anchor?

I don’t imagine you start out dreaming about anchoring local news in Amarillo, Texas or Buffalo, NY or Peoria, Illinois. Nope. If you’re in Texas, you’ve got your eye on Dallas or Houston. If you’re in New York, it’s The Apple. Peoria? Get real. You’re thinking Chicago.

More likely, you’re thinking even bigger: national network or cable news. You want to be Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams (when that was a good thing.) Or have your own hours, like Anderson Cooper or Laura Ingraham (when that was a good thing).

And then you wake up in the TV equivalent of WKRP in Cincinnati. And you’re not Tom Brokaw, you’re Ted Baxter, the bumbling anchor on the weakest pretend station in Minneapolis, WJM, where our Mary – Mary Tyler Moore – worked.

But, hey, there’s something to be said for big fish/small pond. You’re the local news anchor. You’re a big deal in the community. Folks say hello when they see you in line at Kohl’s. They get a kick out of riding next to you in the annual cancer fundraiser. Life’s pretty good.

And then Sinclair – a pretty conservative outfit - scoops up your station, and you may be a bit leery. And you get even leerier when you’re handed a script to read.

If you read the script in a vacuum, it is, of course, fairly anodyne.

Who’s going to argue that “biased and false news” is a good thing? Who’s going to stand up for lies and facts that aren’t facts? Who’s going to defend the spread of lies on social media? Especially when you position it as ‘we don’t like it whether it comes from the right or the left.’ And you wave the flag of “dangerous to our democracy.” Not just any old democracy. Our democracy.

What’s not to agree with? What’s not to like?

But then you insert to word “fake.”

Fake? As in fake news? Hmmmm. Sounds familiar. Why, isn’t that a word that the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll uses pretty darned frequently? On social media?

It’s that insertion of “fake” in there that gives the Sinclair intention away. Dog whistle? Nah. Claxon is more like it.

And then the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll tweets out support for Sinclair and attacks on the mainstream media. Those fakers.

“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased,”

But if you ignore the “fake” in general, and the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll in particular, you don’t hear that claxon, and you can pretend that it’s a dog whistle that you just can’t hear. Which means you can go ahead and read the damn thing, with all the fake conviction and Ted Baxter pomposity and seriousness of purpose you can muster up. A job’s a job, and an anchor job – even in Fresno – is a pretty sweet gig. And mostly you’re left alone to focus on local matters, like the fire in the convenience store on Foster and Main, and the teacher who got the kidney donation from her former student.

But it sure looks creepy when you see a mashup of so many of those local anchors. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the Deadspin compilation, via NPR.

And then there’s this:

Sinclair has been accused of using connections in the Trump administration to ease regulations on media consolidation. In an effort to expand its reach, the company is seeking approval from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission for its $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media. (Source: NY Times)

Oh.

Anyway, I don’t really blame those anchor folks for reading that statement. Orders from headquarters and all that.

Still, it’s bad enough that so many our our citizens still contend that President Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. Or, worse, a bit I saw that other day – can’t find the exact cite – that showed that a solid chunk of Trump supporters feel he should be allowed to rule as a strong man, unfettered by Congress or the courts. Do we really need those who get their news from local TV having that local TV news reinforcing the belief that anything critical of the president is a biased lie from the pit of hell? Fake news. Fake news.

I think not.

Clowning going buggy whip?

Well, Frank Avruch died a couple of weeks ago.

Frank was a local TV personality, best known for having spent a decade or so playing Bozo on local TV. Not only was he Bozo for Boston kids, Frank was the first nationally syndicated Bozo. So if your hometown didn’t have a Bozo of its own, your Bozo at one point was likely Frank Avruch.

It is hard to find anyone who has a bad word to say about Frank Avruch. By all reports, he was a genuine mister nice guy, and I always enjoyed the post-Bozo show he hosted that showed and discussed classic B&W movies. So I can forgive him for having played a clown.

Although I have vague memories of finding Clarabelle, the clown on Howdy Doody, funny – I was like five, okay? – even as a child I found something weird and creepy about clowns.

I watched Bozo, but I didn’t like Bozo.

The show first aired when I was in fifth grade, and my friends and I were already too jaded to pratfall for Bozo-ish humor. Instead, we made fun of Bozo, singing a reworded (clever us!) version of the Bozo ditty.

Bozo, Bozo, never laughs, always frowns
Bozo, Bozo, very unfunny clown

And by clown standards, Bozo actually wasn’t half bad.

I am, of course, not alone in my negative feelings towards clowns. I’ve read that the pro-clown/anti-clown numbers run about half and half. (One more example of a country divided.) And I’ve also read that most children fear clowns. Thus, decorating children’s wards in hospitals with clown pictures and letting clowns with time on their hands come in to visit and cheer up the kiddos can have the opposite effect.

And clowns, it appears, have more time on their hands these days.

This has been a terribly sad time for clowns, those purveyors of happiness whose recorded history dates back to ancient Greece. Last year was possibly the pits.

Clowns witnessed the shuttering of venerable Ringling Bros., the largest and latest of circuses to close. The layoffs of regional Ronald McDonalds. The movie “It”? Don’t get them started.

It has been one packed clown car of woe. 

And it comes on top of decades of portrayals of depressed, malevolent and downright crazed clowns in movies and on TV, not to mention in real life: Krusty on “The Simpsons,’” Zach Galifianakis on “Baskets,” Twisty on “American Horror Story,” the Great Clown Scare of 2016, Insane Clown Posse, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Jack Nicholson’s Joker, John Wayne Gacy. (Source: WaPo)

With all this as background, it’s no wonder that the recent World Clown Association convention in Minnesota was not exactly a barrel of laughs.

Oh, there were some lighthearted elements

Exhibit booths featured the latest in rubber chickens, oversized pants, magic tricks and latex noses.

But clowns were advised to be careful. No whiteface in public. Too close to Pennywise.

Attendees lamented that their gigs (and income) were down. Hospitals don’t want them coming in and scaring the patients. (They’re still welcome in nursing homes, apparently. One more reason to stay out of nursing homes.)

Many clowns are responding by removing the greasepaint permanently. Some even make it a point to advertise that they don’t wear makeup. Face painting for kids: yes! Face painting for clowns: hell, no!

Yet for other clowns, the makeup’s the thing. It’s what frees them up to be their true selves.

It’s difficult for me to understand why someone would want to reveal their true self as a weird and creepy person that at least half the population shrinks from but, hey…

In any case, employment opportunities are shrinking. It wasn’t just Ringling Brothers folding its tents. There was McDonald’s getting rid of its regional Ronald McDonald program, an initiative that may have employed as many as 300 clowns around the country – some of them making a decent salary and benefits.

And there are no better days ahead.

“Young people have not been excited by clowns,” says Richard “Junior” Snowberg, a World Clown Association founder and a retired professor. “They’re more excited by entertainment on screens.”

Yet another reason to admire and root for the young ‘uns.

Me, I think that when the final send out of the clowns happens, the little children, and us clown loathing adults, will no longer suffer.

I do actually have plenty of sympathy for those whose livelihoods go by the wayside. I’m sure there were plenty of folks who wanted to keep making buggy whips. And working as switchboard operators. Not to mention having sympathy for (and fear of) the 3.5 million truck drivers who at some point in the not all that distant future are going to be removed from the driver seat by autonomous vehicles. It’s tough to have the occupational rug pulled out from under.

Clowning, however, is different. Maybe because it’s not something that’s necessary – as buggy whips and switchboard operators once were – but merely entertainment. Entirely voluntary. (I was going to write “a nice to have”, but not in my book.) And maybe because half the population can’t stand clowns, which I doubt was ever the case with buggy whip makers or switchboard operators.

Clowns are trying to put a smiley face on things.

“Clowning will never be what it was, but I know it will continue to go on and on,” [former Ringling Bros. clown Tricia] Manuel says. “We’ll survive the closing of the circus. We’ll survive scary movies. There’s something in the human spirit that wants to make people laugh and be happy. Once you do it, you have to do it — even though it might not be the popular thing.”

Agreed that “there’s something in the human spirit that wants to make people laugh and be happy.” But there really are less weird and creepy ways than playing a clown. Then again, maybe this is just me. When it comes down to it, I’d rather see than be one. But I’d prefer not to see one, either. I don’t wish them out of existence – let those who want to clown, clown; let those who enjoy clowns, enjoy – I just wish them out of my sightlines and mind space. Easy enough to make happen. But the bottom line seems to be the clowning may truly be going the way of the buggy whip.

Peep o’ the morning to you…

As so often in the past, my Easter-related post will be devoted to Peeps. After all, in my book, it isn’t Easter until I’ve bitten the head off of a fresh, classic yellow Peep.

For years, the Washington Post’s Peeps Diorama contest was an excellent source of Peeps content. But, alas, last year they decided not to run the contest. Fortunately, the Washington City Paper has taken up the slack.

I have put zero thought into what I would have done if I were to enter a Peeps diorama contest, so I probably shouldn’t criticize, but the Top Ten didn’t seem especially inspired to me (even if the executions were generally good).

The winner was “Night at the Speepeasy.”

This picture doesn’t do it justice, but if you click through to the article, you can see two hapless cops out front, completely unaware of what’s going on behind that innocent looking door.

The runner up, “Cherry Blossom Peep Up Bar,” which depicts – in Peep terms – an actual pop-up bar in the DC area.

Although I don’t get the reference, I like this one because it’s beautiful – well, if anything based on Peeps an actually be beautiful – and, although I’ve never seen them, I’m a sucker for cherry blossoms.

My favorite was “Peeper Curry is Awed by Marshmallow Obama at the National Peeptrait Gallery.”

For those unfamiliar with the absolutely adorbs picture on which this one is based, here you go:

(The little girl’s name is Parker Curry.)

Meanwhile, Peeps Diorama contests have apparently become a thing. There are contests in Minneapolis. Nantucket. Racine. Olympia, Washington. Lake Worth, Florida. And a whole bunch of other places, including Bedford, Mass. So if I’m feeling creative next year, I have a place to go.

Anyway, Happy Easter to all, and to all a Peepnight.

And Happy April Fools Day, if that’s your thing.

Tourist in Ireland Part Four: Talking in Tongues

Many years ago, before one of my trips to Ireland, I decided to teach myself some Irish.

It is, of course, something of a colossal waste of time to try to learn a language
that is brutally difficult, not to mention spoken by so few people. Nevertheless, 
she persisted. Faugh a ballagh! (Irish battle cry that means clear the way.)

I was able to bleat out a respectable go raibh maith agat - thank you - to the Irish
Aer Lingus check-in person at Logan. She was neither amused nor impressed. Well,
póg mo thóin. That would be kiss my ass.

I didn’t really want apple pie, out there in a restaurant in the Irish speaking 
Connemara. But it was the only food stuff I remembered from my tape. So píóg úll 
it was.

The waiter sweetly said, “I know you’re trying to order something darlin’, but I don’t 
know what it is.”

I went back and listened to my tape. I had indeed pronounced apple pie correctly. 
What up?

Even by foreign language standards, Irish is a pretty darned foreign language. 
With Germanic and Romance language, we’re used to the rhythms, and even some 
of the words that have made their way into English. When we hear someone
speaking German, we know it’s German. And may even catch a word or two. 
Ditto with French. Spanish. Etc. With little effort, most of us can learn please/thank y
ou/where’s the toilet/how much. We can make ourselves understood, even if we
can’t comprehend much when people respond.

But with Irish, there are so few hooks for your ear to latch on to. I’ve been in 
Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas) and I can be listening to ultra-Irish looking folks
conversing and still I struggle to recognize the language they’re speaking as Irish. 
Often the only word I can pick out is agus, which means and. Ah, agus, Irish.

After the apple pie incident, I pretty much gave up on my Irish. Other than one 
sentence that kept floating around in my head. Ba mhaith liom dul ag siopadóireacht.
I want to go shopping.

Towards the end of the trip where I tried talking in tongues, we spent a couple of 
days in Dublin.

Once cab driver, a man a bit older than us, told us that, while students now learn
Irish in school, this wasn’t the case when he was growing up. So he’d made it his
business to learn his native tongue.

So many great sayings, he told us. Like níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

Ah, I said, There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace.

How do you know that, he asked?

My response: I apparently learned off the same tapes you did. Which turned out to
be the case, It also turned that Irish is tough enough t learn, but there are all sorts
of regional variations. Which is why my apple pie order was Greek to the Connemara
waiter. The tape I learned from was, I believe, Irish in the purish King's English. 
(Chieftain's Irish?)  The Dublin cabby as the only one in the country I'd understood.
On the last week's trip, my sister and I were in a bookstore, picking up some greeting
cards.  Trish handed me one and there it was. Nil aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

How did you know, I asked. After all, Trish hadn’t wasted any of her precious time 
trying to learn Irish.

Well, duh. The translation was on the back of the card.

Anyway, I won’t be cracking the Irish books or tapes any time soon.

If I’m going to learn another language, I’m thinking French.

Au revoir, Irish.

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Sorry this looks so awful. Can't figure out what's going on with this particular post. 

Tourist in Ireland, Part Three: Galway Girls

While I do have some ancestral ties to the Province of Connacht, I don’t have any direct connection to Galway. Yet the city of Galway is one of my favorite places on earth. It’s not very large – roughly 75,000 people – and there aren’t a ton of grand tourist things to do in the city itself. No Guinness tour. No Kilmainham Gaol. No wonderful walks to lovely parks. (No stable where my great-grandfather worked.)

Sure, there are things worthwhile in the environs: Connemara (Ireland’s remote, Irish-speaking, and wild(ish) west; the Aran Islands.

But mostly what’s great about Galway is its tremendous energy and vitality. It’s a college town. And a tourist town. It has terrific restaurants – a big change over the 30 years I’ve been coming there – and, not surprisingly, terrific pubs. And it all you’re looking to buy are sweaters, scarves, caps, tourist stuff, and Claddagh rings, it’s not a bad place to shop. (We had lunch one day with an Irish friend – a middle-aged woman with a demanding professional life – and she told us that she does all her clothing shopping online or in Dublin. The non-tourist oriented shopping is pretty much a department store that is mired in the 1950’s; a Brown-Thomas (which replaced the beloved Moon’s) that seems to specialize in thousand dollar handbags; and a few designer-ish places hidden away on side streets.)

Whatever Galway’s deficits, I can’t imagine a trip to Ireland without going there. So after a couple of days in Dublin, we headed west to Galway, where the plan was to meet up with my niece Molly (who had spent a semester in Galway last year) and her friend Emilie.

The loose plan was to go to the restaurants and pubs that Molly wanted to revisit – an excellent plan.

Our first night, we had some of the best pizza on earth at Dough Bros, after which we popped over to the King’s Head for a pint (or two) and a music session. Non-trad, but a reasonably good duo.

The next day, I had a good catch-up lunch with friends at the Galway Country Club in Salthill. Pretty good fish-and-chips, and a gorgeous view, even if the weather was pretty nasty. On a clear, sunny day, it must be spectacular.

After lunch, I met up with the Galway girls at Cupan Tae for afternoon tea and cake. Cupan is sweet and charming. Even though I went with my go-to (Irish Breakfast) the tea selection is wonderful, and everyone’s tea is delivered in mismatched pots and drunk from mismatched cups and saucers. Nice place to get in out of drecky weather.

Dinner that night was at the King’s Head Bistro. Very nice, but I miss the Old Malt House, an old standby that my husband I would frequent on our visits. After that, we headed out to another old standby: An Pucan, a pub that has music of some sort every evening. Sometimes their sessions are traditional. Other times a mix of pop and Irish-y sing-alongs like “Dirty Old Town,” “Black Velvet Band,” and “Galway Girl” (Steve Earle, not Ed Sheeran).

When we walked in, the first song the duo du jour played was “Horse With No Name.” As is fairly well known in my family, I am firm in my belief that “Horse With No Name” is the worst song ever written. It went downhill from there. I was considering an Irish exit, but everyone was willing to go. So we departed en masse. Destination: King’s Head, where an excellent instrumental duo was performing traditional tunes. Yay!

Our last day was given over in part to the new Galway. Lunch at Dela, a cool and trendy spot where my veggie wrap was greatly enhanced by the side of bacon my sister had ordered. And where the conversation among me, Trish, and my Irish friend Michelle largely revolved around – whether you’re in Ireland or the US – in the workplace, a woman’s voice is like a dog whistle. Only certain ears are capable of hearing it. Michelle is about 25 years younger than I am; Trish is 10 years younger. Sad that some things don’t ever seem to change.

Evening drinks at Seven, where the evening drink was something called a Gin Bramble (gin, Chambord, simple syrup, lemon, and crushed ice). That was followed by dinner at Caprice, another cool and trendy spot.

We looked in a Taaffe’s Bar, but it was too crowded so, back to King’s Head for one of the most peculiar musical performances I’ve ever witnessed.

We were hoping that the music would start at 10 p.m., and settled in at 9 with excellent seats on the second floor, overlooking the place where the performers would perform. At 9:15, the drummer and sound guy appeared. A half an hour later the keyboard guy showed up. Another half-hour or so and the guitar and bass player blew in.

All the while, the sound guy fiddled, and the musicians futzed around, occasionally disappearing.

A bit before 11, a guy showed up in what appeared to be hospital pj’s. Something that Jack Nicholson would have worn in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This turned out to be the lead singer and main guitarist.

But what was up with the pj’s?

The lead guy was jumping all over the place, setting up, occasionally babbling something into his mike that as difficult to interpret. I caught the word “Watusi”, but little else. He then reached into his kit bag and pulled out what appeared to be the sort of cap worn by Muslims. The cap was pale blue cotton, and matched the kurta pj’s.

He then screeched into the mike that his name was Hassan, followed by a crack about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. WTF? Here’s an Irish guy (name on the band’s website: Jack; the band is billed as a wedding band) dressed in Muslim garb making a bad Holocaust joke. At least that’s what I think he was doing.

A man standing near our table – he sounded Spanish – looked perplexed and asked me if the fellow as a comedian. I answered that I wasn’t sure.

Hassan/Jack then screeched some more incomprehensible garble, and then started in on – wait for it – Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Which might have been okay if everyone in the band wasn’t so over-amped that our pints were shaking off the table. This was followed by more jumping around and screaming into the mike, followed by a song. Something by ELO. Something by Clash. Hassan/Jack mentioned New Jersey and up came Bon Jovi’s “Hold On To What You’ve Got.”

I can honestly say it was as close to sheer torture as any performance I’ve ever experienced, but we hung in, curious about what would happen next.

One peculiar thing was that, for all the sound guy’s prepping and sound-checking, when anyone other than Hassan/Jack took the vocal lead, their mike was cut off.

I will observe that, unlike the other lads, who were quaffing down pints, Hassan/Jack appeared to be drinking water. So perhaps he was a Muslim convert. Just very odd that the only mention he made was a decidedly off crack about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. As I said, WTF.

I didn’t like loud music when I was young, and it certainly hasn’t aged well.

Anyway, Hassan/Jack eventually wore us down, and that was it for the Galway Girls.

The next morning, a Polish fellow who runs a limo service delivered us to Shannon for the trip home.

If it sounds like all we did in Galway was eat and drink, well, that would be close. We also shopped a bit. (I got a very nice blue-green Irish knit cardigan and a dark pink baby sweater for a recent arrival. A baby with the throw-back name of Trish.) And I got to catch up with friends.

I don’t really have a bucket list, but if I had one, spending an extended period of time in Ireland would be one it. And the extended period of time would mostly be spent in Galway, going native.

Slan!

Tourist in Ireland, Part Two: “I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride”

On Monday morning, after an almost full Irish breakfast (no black pudding) at a Latvian-run B&B, we decamped to Dublin on the train from Belfast. The platform at Dundalk was pretty crowded for a late morning Monday, but it was a long weekend, what with Monday March 19th the day on which the St. Patrick’s Day holiday was observed. My sister and I were the American tourists, trying to maneuver our oversized roller bags down the narrow aisle to the other end of the car where the baggage storage area was. Back at our seats, we found that a) the configuration was different than what we’d signed up for online, and b) someone was sitting in one of our reserved seats. Thanks to another American –  a businessman who’d been visiting a friend in Belfast -  who changed seats on the crowded train so we could sit together (and, while he was at it, hefted our smaller bags onto the storage space above our seats), we finally settled in for the hour long ride into Dublin. Then a short hop to our hotel, The Westbury, right in the middle of everything.

The Black Stuff

Our mission for the afternoon was the Guinness tour, so that we could learn all about the black stuff.

It was a crisp but sunny day, so we decided to walk out to the Guinness Storehouse, which, we were told by the person at the Westbury desk, would take about 20-25 minutes.

I know that the Irish are fast walkers, but, even though Trish was a bit under the weather at this point, we’re no slouches when it comes to shank’s mare, either. Twenty minutes into our hike, we stuck our heads in at a tourist office, where we were assured it was about a 20 minute walk from that point. Twenty minutes later, when we asked a woman on the street, we were told we had another 40 minutes to go. That was about right.

In any case, we did make it in time for the tour time we had signed up for. Not that it mattered, as they really didn’t check tickets. Meanwhile, in signing up, they asked if you were a senior, so I clicked that box. Only to find out that there was no discount for seniors. So i gave away a key personal tidbit, and got nothing in return. Boo!

The Guinness Storehouse, where the tour takes place, was packed. It was, after all, a holiday, and holiday-ers, many still seemingly reveling from St. Patrick’s Day itself. Many wearing those hideous “Irish” hats, which I don’t believe were ever worn by St. Patrick. Nor by any Irishman in the history of mankind. Other than the loud-mouthed Irish college students at the Guinness tour. (And, it almost goes without saying, the loud-mouthed American college students on the tour.)

The tour is not given in the factory, but in the Guinness Storehouse, which has a quite modern, interesting, and somewhat Disney-fied telling of the making of Guinness.

We got halfway through, when we took a break. As I mentioned, Trish was a bit under the weather, and the crowds were just overwhelming.

We got a soda – I know, heresy! – and a bag of truly awful Guinness-flavored chips. (I hadn’t realized they were Guinness-flavored when I picked them up. Almost as bad as the infamous Irish Tay-To scampi-flavored chips. Ugh!)

At this point, we decided to cut the tour short, foregoing the “free” pint that we were entitled to. Alas! Guinness (in Ireland) is pretty much the only beer I drink, and I’m guessing that this close to the holy ground where it’s produced, it was a pretty good pint.

Anyway, we cabbed back to the Westbury, too tired for the long walk back.

“I write it out in a verse…”

On the next day’s agenda was a tour of Kilmainham Gaol, where a number of those involved in The Easter Rebellion of 1916 were shot by a firing squad. Unfortunately, Trish was still unwell and opted for a lie-in, while I went out to Kilmainham.

I had toured Kilmainham Gaol some 25 or 30 years back, when it was mostly the building and a few b&w pictures on the wall.

Today, it is one of the most impressive historic museums I’ve been to. And the tour was excellent.

In it, I learned a lot about approaches to imprisonment over the centuries, and about Irish history that I hadn’t really appreciated in the past.

The Gaol was used to punish men, women, and children, under completely ghastly and brutal conditions (up until the 20th century, when conditions ticked up a bit). Many of those thrown in this particularly terrible and overcrowded hoosegow were people who were starving during the Great Famine of the 1840’s. They (often very young children) were jailed for stealing something as small as a loaf of bread or a clutch of onions. One of those jailed was Anne Murphy, who’d stolen turnips. For that offense, she was sentenced to a month. How hungry would you be to steal turnips? And how close to death by starvation would you have to be that a month in a typhus-ridden and (literally) lousy jail was preferable to trying to survive on the outside?

The museum display (that image above is from a slide show) included mug shots from some of those jailed in the mid-19th century. The prison system was taking advantage of the new photography technology, but wanted to save money. So each prisoner was photographed next to a mirror, so that full-face and profile could be captured in one picture. Which I found pretty interesting.

The early history of Kilmainham was very well delivered, but the main historic interest is the role that the jail played in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion. This uprising, which took place in the midst of the first world war, was aimed at freeing Ireland from British control and occupation. Fourteen of those involved in the uprising – including Thomas MacDonagh, John MacBride, James Connolly, and Patrick Pearse, the four names mentioned in Yeats poem “Easter 1916” – were shot for their role.

This was a formative event, as it pretty much turned public opinion away from the British and towards the rebels, which resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. Many Irish citizens had initially been opposed to the uprising, especially given the timing in the midst of a war that many of their young men were fighting in. But then they started thinking things through. When their sons were taken prison of war by the Germans, they were sent to camps, not shot. So why the blood lust to kill the rebels, who considered themselves Irish soldiers? Especially when one of those rebels, James Connolly, was already dying from his wounds, and had to be strapped into a chair so he could be shot at.

As Yeats had it:

Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The cells where the 14 martyrs spent their last days were all marked on the tour, and there were a number of artifacts related to these men, and to other nationalist leaders.

Kilmainham Gaol was also used during the Irish Civil War, in which those who supported the treaty that had created the Republic of Ireland, at the expense of surrendering six counties to the creation of Northern Ireland, battled those who opposed it. (If you saw the movie Michael Collins, this was Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) vs. Eamon DeValera (Alan Rickman).

Michael Collins was one of the few nationalist leaders who was never imprisoned at Kilmainham. But it’s hard to talk about the history of Ireland without Collins factoring in, so there are some of his artifacts on display, including the scapular he was wearing when he was killed during the Irish Civil War. (My father wore the same scapular – the Sacred Heart badge with red crocheted edging – but, of course, he wasn’t an assassinated Irish rebel…)

Anyway, it was a wonderful museum, and I’m sorry my sister missed it. I like Dublin, but it’s not first on my must-return list. It’s a big, bustling, lively cosmopolitan city, that even feels a bit like the one I live in. But I would recommend the Kilmainham Gaol tour to anyone going to Ireland. It definitely makes a stop in Dublin worthwhile.

I walked halfway back to the hotel before giving up and haling a cab. (And, yes, a guard at Kilmainham assured me that it was only a 20 minute walk back to the Westbury. Since the jail was beyond the Guinness Storehouse, I knew this wasn’t true, but I thought I’d go some of the distance on foot.)

Other than the tours and a couple of run outs for tea, scones, and meds for my sister, that was about it for Dublin.

On to Galway.

Tourist in Ireland, Part One: “If Ireland was so great…”

Forty-five years ago this May, I visited Ireland for the first time. That was during a 5 month hitchhike and hostel tour of Europe during which we hit a lot of countries. In rough order of appearance, that lot was: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Yugoslavia (as it then was), Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain.

On my return home, I said that there were three places that I was absolutely certain I would return to: Paris, Yugoslavia (as it then was), and Ireland.

I haven’t (yet) been back to Yugoslavia (as it then was), but I really would like to see Dubrovnik again. Paris? Been back a handful of times. As for Ireland, I took me until 1985 to make a return trip, but since then I’ve been to Ireland a number of times, and I’d place that number between 15 and 20. Last week’s trip was my fifth since 2011.

This one was more impromptu than the others, less planned a year in advance.

My niece and a friend were spending spring break visiting a classmate student-abroading in England, and Molly wanted to also scoot over to Galway, where she’d spent a semester last year, for a few days. So she asked me and her mother if we wanted to meet up with her in Galway. We did.

Trish and I decided to make a week out of it, and we pre-tacked on a couple of days in Dublin and a “Roots” visit to ancestral turf in Ballymascanlon, Co. Louth.

My grandmother Mary (Trainor) Rogers was famously known for saying “If Ireland was so great, we all wouldn’t have had to come over here.” Nanny, of course, had never set toe in Ireland. Her parents, Bridget and Matthew Trainor, however, had shipped out in the 1870’s, leaving like millions of others, because Ireland, in fact, wasn’t so great. So they left for Amerikay.

Bridget and Matthew were from the village of Ballymascanlon, a village on the outskirts of the town of Dundalk.

There is a high-end hotel there, the Ballymascanlon House, a fancy resort and golf course. Out there in the middle of nowhere. We decided that we didn’t want to get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, so we stayed in a very nice B&B (as it turns out, run by a Latvian mother-daughter combo) in Dundalk, and schlepped out to Ballyma to the fancy-arse hotel for Sunday lunch. (When we walked through the door of the House, Trish noted that it was probably the first time that any member of our family had walked in through the front door.)

The countryside in that area, the Cooley Peninsula, is gorgeous territory. And the Ballymascanlon House, which was built up around one of those Anglo-Irish rich-folk manses, has beautiful grounds. And on those beautiful grounds are the stables where, I believe, young Matthew Trainor worked at one point as a stable boy

I think this is the case, but the only people who might know for sure, the last of my father’s first cousins, both died within the last couple of years. And Ellen and Ned took whatever the story is to their graves in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, nearby the graves of Matthew and Bridget (not to mention my parents and grandmother).

The stable boy story makes sense: poor kid from a large Catholic farm family in the village.

So stable boy ‘tis.

Thus, after a quite nice old-school Anglo-Irish three course lunch at Ballymascanlon House, Trish and I went out to see the stables, shown here.

We were told that the stable buildings are now used for storage. If so, Ballyma House is missing a tep. These would make really cool timeshares. Or golf condos. Or whatever.

Anyway, it was interesting and a bit moving to see where my great-grandfather had/may have worked. (On an earlier trip to Ireland, I’d visited the church (a beautifully restored 13th century Cistercian Abbey) and cemetery in Ballintubber, Co. Mayo, where another great, Margaret (Joyce) Rogers hailed from. It was similarly interesting and a bit moving to see all those Joyce headstones and know that I was related, however distantly, to everyone six-feet under them.

There was one other thing to do on the Ballymascanlon House grounds, and that was the Proleek Dolmen, an ancient portal tomb. It was a bleak. cold, windy, damp day – when we’d landed in Dublin that morning, there were near-blizzard conditions, and we’d cabbed out to Dundalk amid swirling snow squalls – and we had to trudge along ice-encrusted, muddy paths to get there, but the Proleek Dolmen was worth the trudge. (Did Matthew Trainor trudge by when he headed home after work in the stables?)

Louth is a border county, and at times we were quite near the border with Northern Ireland. Thanks to the EU, that border is now open. It’s not clear how Brexit will impact this. (One cab driver speculated that if the hard border goes back up, The Troubles between Unionists – those wanting to stay part of the UK – and Nationalists – who want the six northern counties to become part of a unified Republic of Ireland – will return. Hope not, but speaking of The Troubles, in Dundalk, we passed the local constituent office of Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin, who until recently represented the area in the Oireachtas (the lower house of the Irish Parliament).

Along the way to/from Ballymascanlon House, we saw plenty of signs for Newry, which is in Northern Ireland.

Newry factored into Nanny’s stories, as it was there that her father, Matthew Trainor, went to market to vend whatever the Trainor family grew or raised. And “the black Protestants would throw rocks at him and his wagon because he was a Catholic.” Note that “black” has nothing to do with skin color, and was just the modifier for Protestant to underscore how dreadful the Catholics found them. (Later in the week, in Galway, I had lunch with some Irish friends (my age) and mentioned the terms. Michael confirmed that this was how Protestants were frequently referred to when he was growing up.)

I’ve never been to Northern Ireland.

Probably worth a look on my next trip to Ireland. Cooley Peninsula and Derry, maybe?

When we got back to the B&B, it was pretty miserable out, and we were pretty tired, so we never got around to exploring the treasures of Dundalk. Typical provincial not-much-to-see-here town, I’m guessing. Still and all, a good place to stop on the way to trod in the steps where my long-gone great-grandfather, Matthew Trainor the stable boy, may (or may not) have trod.

On to Dublin!

Open door policy? Not such a good idea…

A couple weeks ago, five tourists were killed in a helicopter crash in the East River in Manhattan. (The pilot survived.) This wasn’t just a fly-over, it was something called an open-door tour, a tour that enables tourists to take pictures and get more of a bird’s eye view of what’s out there. And it was the open-door-ness of the tour that resulted in those deaths,because these types of helicopter rides use a different method of strapping someone into their seats than do regular old closed-door rides:

The five people who died when their helicopter lost power and had to put down in the East River were tethered to the craft by ropes attached to harnesses so they wouldn’t fall out through the open doors. They drowned after the helicopter rolled over and sank. Divers had to cut out the bodies, according to the New York Fire Department….

The passenger harnesses, which differ from traditional aviation seat belts, attached people from the rear and would have been difficult to remove in an emergency, said Eric Adams, a professional photographer who took a flight by the same company on the same night as the accident. The passengers were given knives to cut the ropes in an emergency, though training on how to use them was limited, Adams wrote in an account for an online publication called The Drive. (Source: Bloomberg)

The passengers were given knives to cut the ropes in an emergency, though training on how to use them was limited.

Think about that for a moment. You come in from out of town, you want to take that breathtaking sky-eye tour of Manhattan, and they issue you a knife to cut yourself free if the needs arises.

With my fear of heights, I wouldn’t have gotten into an open-door whirlybird flight to begin with. But, if I were the open-door whirlybird type to begin with, what would I have made of being issued a knife? Even with concerns about being able to cut my harness during an upside-down, head-under-water emergency, I probably wouldn’t have cut my losses and walked away. I’m sure I would have made some Crocodile Dundee joke. (“This is a knoife.”) And said to myself, how likely is it that the sort of accident that would require me to wield that knife will happen in real life. Sure, it’s a bit more dangerous that a trolley tour, or a horse and carriage jaunt around Central Park, but it’s gotta be safe. Safe enough. Doesn’t it?

The question to me is what obligation is the tour provider under to provide information on the risk, on how difficult it will be to cut yourself loose under tremendous stress? Is there any obligation, or is just caveat emptor. Use your common sense. No tourist guts, no tourist glory..

A friend of mine was on a jury in a trial in which someone was suing a roller rink because they’d broken their ankle. Well, if you don’t want to break your ankle, stay off roller skates.

Still, it does seem pretty reckless to operate this kind of a tour.

In fact, the Helicopter Association International:

…the leading trade group for helicopter operators has, for at least two years, urged a halt to open-door tours such as the one March 11 that ended in the death of five people in the East River off Manhattan…

“We just believe that helicopter tours should be flown with doors closed,” [HAI spokesman Dan] Sweet said. “HAI wants to create the safest possible flight for the public.”

But,  of course, doors-open flights are can be marketed as more interesting, more edgy, more out there than boring old closed-door tours.

Oddly enough:

The government standards governing their operations can be less stringent than for traditional tour flights, according to a person familiar with the practice. U.S. aviation regulations exempt operations including crop dusting, fire fighting and “aerial photography or survey.”

Not surprising, the parents of one victim are suing the company that ran the flight, and the pilot, citing negligence. The family is being represented by a “helicopter crash attorney.” The suit maintains that, if this had been a “normal” closed-door flight, with “normal” seat belts, the victim would have been able to easily unbuckle himself and swum to safety. The helicopter crash attorney had this to say:

“You would have to be Houdini to escape in that situation. It was truly a death trap for him to be hanging upside down in frigid water temperature tightly harnessed with the release inaccessible in the back and no advance training.” (Source: Washington Post)

Amazing that there’s an attorney that specializes in helicopter crashes. That tells me all I need to know. about getting into a helicopter tour.

In any case,

The deaths have led to scrutiny over open-door helicopter tours that experts say allow even novice riders to board helicopters without proper training.

And that scrutiny appears to have moved the Federal Aviation Administration to ground “open-doors” (or “doors-off”) helicopter flights. I suspect they’ll stop categorizing them alongside crop-dusting and aerial fire-fighting.

It really does sound like the right thing to do to ban these sorts of tourist death-traps . So good for the FAA.

Amazing how fast they acted after the accident. With similar speed,within days after a French bulldog died on a United Airline flight after a flight attendant forced its owners to stow him in the overhead bin, a US Senator had pulled a bill together to forbid this practice. After all, he said, “Pets are family.”

Indeed they are. And family is family, too. So good that there’ll more scrutiny given to really dangerous helicopter flights.

What’s really amazing, however, is that we still can’t get any decent gun legislation passed, or even a reasonable discussion going, even after the recent deaths at Parkland. High school kids are people, too, Senator. Maybe if the school had been attacked by crop dusters…

Blood Unicorn

A few years back, Elizabeth Holmes topped the list of the wealthiest self-made American women. The blood-testing startup she founded, Theranos, was worth billions. As was Holmes. And then it turned out that the girl-genius’ invention didn’t quite work as claimed, and the value of her company plummeted from $9B to less than one-tenth that amount. The new value of her company was, in fact, just about on the money ($800M vs. $724M) with the amount that had been invested in it by “smart money” hoping that there was a unicorn in all that blood.

For a while there, Holmes was a real golden girl, running around getting all sorts of super press, which helped pump her company’s valuation sky high. She was, it appears, quite an excellent bullshitter. She may well have believed her own BS, but BS she did. But as has been pointed out, there’s nothing illegal about lying to the press. Unfortunately for Holmes, it is illegal to lie to potential investors.

To back up a minute: Theranos had supposedly developed a blood-testing device that was supposed to be able to take a finger prick’s worth of blood and perform hundreds of tests on it. Immediately. This would, of course, revolutionize blood sampling. No more vials taken out of the best vein in your left arm. No more waiting for the blood to be sent out to a lab and wait some more for the results. You could just go into Walgreen’s – where Theranos had a big deal going – and get the job done on the spot.

Too bad it didn’t work.

Which didn’t stop Holmes from pretending it did. She used earlier versions of her product, devices from other companies, and even sent samples out the old-fashioned way to external labs, to fake up an elaborate “show and tell” that was light on the actual “show,” but pretty heavy on the “tell.”

Meanwhile Theranos and Holmes were going around giving interviews about how revolutionary their technology was, without ever mentioning that it didn't work and they didn't use it. This got them a lot of favorable press and a $9 billion valuation, which went on for a while until the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou reported in 2015 that the product didn’t work and that Theranos was lying about using it, after which Theranos fairly quickly collapsed. (Source: Bloomberg)

That’s when Holmes fell off of her perch on the self-made rich lady list.

But just because the company was a fraud didn’t mean that fraud had been committed.

It becomes fraud in the legal sense if you use those lies to get money. Theranos, in parallel with being a massive fraud, was also raising a lot of money… If you are going around lying publicly about your technology while also raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, that certainly suggests that you were defrauding those investors. But it's not a certainty. Theranos wasn't a public company; it raised all that money in negotiated private fundraising rounds where investors received disclosure documents and had the opportunity to conduct due diligence.

Could be that, as Bloomberg writer Matt Levine so wonderfully and facetiously speculates, while Holmes was going around self- and company-aggrandizing, she was making it quite clear to her investors that – heh, heh – the technology behind the talking points wasn’t exactly – heh, heh – what it was supposed to be. Investors would then have a better idea of the risks they were taking. 

But no, no, that's not what happened at all. Instead the Securities and Exchange Commission today brought fraud charges against Holmes, Theranos and its former president, Sunny Balwani, and its complaint alleges pretty strongly that the investors were just as bamboozled as everybody else. In fact, Theranos made direct use of its positive press to raise money: It "sent investors a binder of background materials," which included "articles and profiles about Theranos, including the 2013 and 2014 articles from The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Fortune that were written after Holmes provided them with interviews" and that included her misleading claims about the state of Theranos's technology.

Theranos also faked up demos. And forecasted revenues that were orders upon orders of magnitude more than the revenues that were actually realized. I’m quite familiar with those miracle-occurs-here hockey stick forecasts, in which all of a sudden low, sluggish revenues go sky-high the next year. But nothing along the lines of what Theranos tried to pull off: forecasting $100M for one year when in actuality the revenues for that year amounted to $100K. Nobody with one shred of intelligence and/or sanity and/or integrity can be off by that much, no matter how loonily optimistic.

The SEC has weighed in and declared that real, honest to goodness (dishonest to badness?) fraud had taken place.

Theranos and Holmes settled with the SEC without admitting or denying the allegations; Balwani will apparently fight the accusations. Holmes agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty to the SEC, "return" 18.9 million Theranos shares to the company and relinquish her super-voting control, and be barred from serving as a public-company director or officer for 10 years.

$500K seems pretty featherweight, given that the bamboozlement amounted to nearly $800M. Apples and oranges, but Martha Stewart went to prison for 5 months for what amounted to some relatively penny ante insider trading. Like Elizabeth Holmes, Martha Stewart is a pretty blonde. The difference? Martha Stewart was in her sixties when she was issued her orange jumpsuit and sent up the river; Holmes is in her thirties. Hmmmm. Just hmmmm.

Anyway, I really can’t imagine, pretty blonde or not, that Elizabeth Holmes has to worry about “serving as a public-company director or officer for 10 years.” Really, who in their right mind…

Meanwhile, as Levine points out in his article, bad enough that Elizabeth Holmes was defrauding her investors. Theranos was “performing a lot of fake blood tests.”

The Wall Street Journal has reported on the “trail of agonized patients” who got blood-test results from Theranos that turned out to be wrong, and Theranos ultimately “voided” two years of results from its machines because they were not sufficiently accurate.

Bullshitting the press. Defrauding investors. Building a “trail of agonized patients.”

I’m guessing that the next time Elizabeth Holmes decides to become rich and famous, she’s going to have a harder time getting rich or famous. Can’t get blood out of a stone. Or out of a Holmesian unicorn. Sometimes a myth is just a myth.

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Earlier post on Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos.

All out of guac? Oh, no…

When it comes to pushing my shopping cart around the grocery store, unless something is insanely expensive, I don’t pay all that much attention to prices. I know enough not to pay $10 for a bag of cherries, even if I want them. But mostly I’m not all that price conscious. Lucky me.

So I haven’t noticed that avocados have gotten more expensive.

I like avocados. I use them on salads. I put them on sandwiches – an especially goody-good sammie is avocado, tomato, sprouts, and cheese, open faced, toasted. Yummers. Sometimes I mash an avocado up in a baked potato and call it a day. Extra points if there’s a slice or two of bacon to add to it.

I will admit that I don’t make guacamole from scratch, even though it’s simple enough to do. (I know this because I have observed my sisters making it.) I just buy the tubs as needed.

I’ve also been known to stick toothpicks into the side of an avocado pit, suspend it in a juice glass full of water, and watch it grow. I may have ended up with an avocado plant out of it at one point – back in the day when I had macrame hangers for my plants – but mostly once there are a few leaves, that’s about where my interest ebbs and out it goes. Fun while it lasted…(I like it because it reminds me of putting the top of a carrot in a pudding cup full of water until it ferns up, which my mother let us do when we were kids.)

Any way you look at it, I’m a avocado-er, one of the Americans contributing to the avocado on it’s way to becoming our nation’s favorite fruit.

I suspect that, like most Americans, I don’t consider the avocado a fruit. Sure, it’s got a pit. Just like a peach or a plum. Still, it seems more veggie than fruit, which is how we all pretty much treat it. Sort of like a tomato, when you think of it.

Our per capita consumption was seven pounds in 2016 – up from one pound in 1989. I’m more than doing my bit towards making America a great consumer of avocados. As of 2016, we were up to gross domestic consumption of 2.3 billion pounds.

Avocado was not something – fruit or vegetable – that I was aware of as a kid. They weren’t on our table, and I don’t imagine the were in the fridges at any of my friends’ homes, either. The sum total of our avocado awareness was that some people had kitchen appliances that were avocado green. Not that I knew any of them, but even before the advent of HG-TV, I knew that avocado, alongside harvest gold, was a thing.

When my friends started getting married, we didn’t get them fridges or stoves, of course. But I’m pretty sure I bought at least one avocado-colored fondue pot as a shower gift. I had some kitchen implements – a spatula, an egg beater, a stirring spoon – with a plastic avocado handle.

In my memory, avocado as an accent color was out there before people started eating much by way of avocado.

I did have some avocado awareness. When I was in college, I worked in a student grill that served a sandwich called a Bacon-Avi. And the California Burger had avocado on it. So I can date my knowledge of avocado as an edible to my sophomore year. But avocado still wasn’t a big deal.

Then, all of a sudden, there were margaritas, and chips and salsa, and guacamole. Cobb Salads appeared out of nowhere. And they included avocado.

Fast forward a decade or two or four even, and there it is: almost our favorite fruit.

America’s enthusiasm for avocados may be dented, however, by soaring prices. The wholesale price for a case of 48 avocados peaked at $83.75 in September, up from $34.45 a year before, according to the American Restaurant Association. Some restaurants were forced to add a surcharge on guacamole, or temporarily to scrap it from their menus altogether. Others swallowed the bill. Chipotle, a Mexican-themed restaurant chain, said that “historically high avocado costs” were a big reason why it posted disappointing financial results last year.

Supply shortfalls, brought about by droughts, storms and wildfires in California, Chile and Mexico, help to explain the jump. Production in California dropped by 44% in 2017. Harvests in Mexico that year were off by 20%. Labour strikes in the country further reduced supply. (Source: The Economist)

We’re not the only ones getting in the avocado act. China’s going avocado crazy, and they’ve made trade deals with Chile and Mexico to forge trade deals that – catch this – eliminate tariffs on their avocados.

Maybe we need a trade war – I hear they’re fun and easy to win – that will get us to step out avocado supply.

Not so fast, I guess.

Raising production will be tricky. This is because avocados are a fussy plant to grow, says Mary Lu Arpaia of the University of California, Riverside. Salinity levels need to be just right, the slope of the terrain not too steep and temperatures stable. Erratic weather conditions can easily kill the crop.

Damn!

I don’t want to live in a world without avocado. All out of guac? Oh, no.

Wonder if I impale the pit of the avocado currently residing in my fridge, put it in a water glass, and encourage it a bit – I can even play Mozart to it if needs be – I can figure out how to grow some avocados in my kitchen.

Not so sweet news at Necco

The New England Confectionery Company used to be located on Mass Ave in Cambridge, and when you got anywhere near it, you got a whiff of that wonderful sicky-sweet candy smell.

In the early aughts, Necco moved out to Revere, just north of Boston, but they still kept making Necco Wafers, Sweethearts, Sky Bars, Candy Buttons, Mary Janes and Squirrel Nuts. Childhood standbys – even those Candy Buttons which were half-paper.

Even with the annual Valentine’s Day sales goose that Necco gets for Sweethearts, those little candy hearts with the message on them, Necco is ailing/failing. Unless they find a buyer in the next couple of months, they may have to layoff most of their workforce: 395 mostly worker bees, with a few execs thrown in for good measure:

Employees who could be affected include cooks, hard candy makers, truck operators, various machine operators and attendants, and administrative positions — including the chief financial officer and chief executive. (Source: Boston Globe)

Necco Wafers have been around since 1847. In truth, sometimes when you bite into a Necco wafer the feeling you get is that your roll might have been one of the first ones to roll off the line. Still, it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Even though, once I stopped playing Mass and using white Necco wafers for communion – and that would have been 60 years back – I have probably averaged one Necco wafer a year. And that’s a wafer, not a roll.

And a world without Sweethearts. Sigh. I just like the idea of them. So much so that, when some young friends had a baby on February 13th and invited me over to MGH to meet her on Valentine’s Day, I stopped by the pricey kids’ store on Charles Street and bought an absolutely adorbs little two piece outfit decorated with Sweethearts.

And I will sorely and surely miss my annual Mary Jane and Squirrel Nut, purchased (only if they’re fresh!) at Brookfield Orchards when my sister Trish and I make our annual apple run and load up on penny candy. I guess I’ll be okay as long as Happy Apple still stocks Boston Baked Beans and maple sugar candy (that wonderful New England invitation to a diabetic coma).

Ah, it’s so hard when these little blasts from the past fade away.

All may not be lost.

Necco chief executive Michael] McGee stated in the March 6 notice that the company “has been in ongoing negotiations with potential buyers to allow for its continued operations,” but that if a sale is not completed or if the company opts for layoffs, employees could be terminated as soon as 60 days from the date of the notice.

I worked at a couple of places that, because of the volume of jobs impacted, had to stick with this 60 day layoff notice. And it was always hell. Everyone would pretend to work – which is possible in a white collar professional environment in ways that it most decidedly would not be in a candy factory – but spent most of our time speculating about who was going to get the axe. Certain product lines? Certain departments? People hired after x? People hired before y? People at or above a certain level? People at or below a certain level?

We would make black-humor jokes. And tell layoff horror stories, including the one about the guy who had a heart attack and died the day before Layoff Day. At his desk. And, yes, he had been on the list.

Those who felt most vulnerable would update their resumes.

Those who knew people who knew people would try to glean whatever stray bit of inside scoop they could, even if they were sworn to secrecy and couldn’t share it.

Those were the days. Days that I don’t miss at all.

In high tech, whether we were staying (this round anyway) or going, most of us were pretty sure we’d find comparable work somewhere else. Not so likely this will happen in candy land. Cooks, hard candy makers…Not a lot of jobs like that around.

“We deeply regret and understand the uncertainty this action may cause our valued employees,” McGee said in the letter.

Not as much as those cooks and hard candy makers…

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Nearly a decade ago, I did a post on Necco’s quality control guy (and, of course, on my Necco memories).

Oh, goody, the Winklevoss twins are back!

I must say, I do spend quite a bit of time contemplating The Big Questions. Sometimes, the questions are one-shots:

Why did the a-hole in the SUV, turning on a red light from the second outer lane on Arlington (not from the lane that comes with the right hand turn arrow, which at the moment of offense had a red light) into a crosswalk with a walk sign on Comm Ave – you know, the woman staring fixedly into the smartphone she was holding up – give me the stink-eye when I yelled at her for almost hitting me. I am a practiced jaywalker, so I know enough to look when I’m doing anything pedestrian-y, even if what I’m doing is 100% legal and 100% MY right-of-way. So, that’s the kind of one-shot Big Question I tend to ponder

Then there are the semi-recurring questions, as in:

Who the f bags up a dog poop and leaves it on the front steps of a building that’s not even theirs, especially when there’s a trash can less than 5 seconds walk away. (Variation on a theme: Starbucks cup, beer can, pizza box…) I know I live on a well-traveled main drag, but still, that trash can is seconds away. It’s your trash. How about you dispose of it, not me.

Not to mention the really Big Questions, the Mega Philosophical Questions:

Why? Why me? What for? How?

I also have a somewhat unique Big Question category, and that is Big Questions related to the Winklevoss twins:

Why? Why them? What for? How?

Would the idea of these guys be so amusing if they had a name like Gates or Buffett or Sergei Brin, rather than a name like Winklevoss?

Okay. You can’t help what your name is. And more than once I’ve wished for a surname a bit less boring than Rogers. But Winklevoss? This is just a funny name. A winkle. Sounds like a tiny little something-or-other. Like a tiny little sea snail. Oh, that’s because it is. Or, in an alternative meaning: extract or obtain something with difficulty. "I swore I wasn't going to tell her, but she winkled it all out of me.”

And that voss part? Low German for fox.

So a Winklevoss is a foxy little sea snail? Or someone who extracted a fox with difficulty?

Anyway, Winklevoss is something of a smile-on-the-face name, no?

Then there’s the fact that they always appear in tandem, leading to the question:

Would this connected at the hip thing seem less weird if they were regular old brothers, rather than twins?

There are, of course, other questions about the Winklevoss, and you may be asking the biggest of them all.

Who are they?

As those who saw The Social Network, the movie about Facebook, know, the Winklevoss twins were the prepped out fellows who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. They sued Zuckerberg and ended up with $65 million, which is several orders of magnitude removed from Zuckerberg’s wealth, which is $75 billion. In the movie, their big scene is when they go whinging off to the office of the president of Harvard to complain about their not-so-prepped out classmate who ripped them off. (As I recall, the president of Harvard just about laughed in their twin faces. He may even have called them douches. But that may have just been a thought cloud.)

That was then, and $65 million is only relative chump change, so the Winklevoss brothers (a.k.a, the Winklevi) have been able to eke out a modest existence as venture capitalists. And, hoping not to get screwed out of the big payday again, some of their venturing capitalism has focused on the bitcoin world. Because if an online platform where most of the users share pictures of their grandkids or run contests for the next flavor of Dorito turns into $75 billion, how much might a big old tulip-bulb of a disruptor like bitcoin be worth some day.

Seemingly (at least according to Wikpedia), bitcoin has yet to deliver the success of their dreams (and Zuckerberg’s living reality). Their dabbling has been a decidedly mixed bag (emphasis mine):

The twins' company, Math-Based Asset Services LLC, filed to register a bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund called Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust in 2013. The fund was denied in March 2017.

In 2013, the twins led a $1.5 million in seed funding of BitInstant, a bitcoin payment processor. However, in January 2014,Charlie Shrem, CEO of BitInstant, was arrested and charged with money laundering related to the Silk Road online black market investigation. The brothers said they were passive investors in the company.

In 2014, the twins launched Winkdex, a financial index that tracks the price of bitcoin. The index uses data from seven exchanges, weighed based on the daily trading volume of each exchange.

In March 2014, it was announced that the twins had purchased seats on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic shuttle using the profits they had made from bitcoin

In October 2015, Gemini, the twins' Bitcoin exchange, received approval to launch from the New York State Department of Financial Services. The exchange is targeted at both first-time users and professional traders.

And now they’re looking to:

…create the Virtual Commodity Association, a self-regulatory organization meant to police digital-currency markets and custodians. The non-profit group would aim to develop industry standards, promote transparency and work with regulators including the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to prevent fraud. (Source: Bloomberg)

God knows that mondo bitcoin could use some regulating. And a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner, Brian Quintenz, has given the Winklevi a shout out:

“I congratulate Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss on their energetic leadership and thoughtful approach in outlining a virtual commodity self-regulatory organization (SRO) concept,” he said.

I’m sure I’m piling on here, especially given that I’m sure there have been plenty of times when my name has been coupled with a sib, and our last name used just once. But “Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss” sounds like they should be a married couple, not two professionals in business together. Wouldn’t Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss be a more serious way to refer to them?

But I’m sure that I’m being a complete and utter nitpicker here. Leading to the Big Question:

Why am I such a nitpicker?

And, of course, a final Big Question:

Will the bitcoin market, as currently constituted, explode or implode before the Winklevoss twins have the opportunity to regulate it?

So many deep thoughts, so little time…