Ancient Chinese secret

Back in the day, there was a TV ad for Calgon water softener that was set in a Chinese laundry. The customer asks the proprietor what his secret is to getting her shirts – or, this being the early 1970’s, her husband’s shirts – so clean. “Ancient Chinese secret,” he tells her. At which point his wife comes out of the backroom waving a Calgon box and announcing that they’re out of Calgon.

Calgon may not be one of them, but I have come to appreciate that there are ancient Chinese secrets, and one of them is acupuncture.

I’ve had a frozen shoulder for over a year now.

It’s not as a bad as the frozen shoulder I had a few years prior.

That one was truly awful. At one point, I could barely turn a key in a lock without intense pain.

But PT got me through it.

PT’s taking a lot longer this time.

I go three times a week, suffer through a painful stretch once a week, and do stretching exercises several times each day. I also use arnica gel on it. (I say arnica, but I think I’m going to start using the term wolf bane instead.)

It’s not that I can’t use my arm – no problems turning a key in a lock – but certain motions (like putting dishes in an upper cabinet) are difficult.

So after consulting with my friend Timo from the Gymo, a fellow PT patient who’s become a buddy – it was Timo who introduced me to arnica wolfbane – I decided to go to his acupuncturist. My first appointment was yesterday.

The acupuncturist, who is also a nurse, works out of her house in Cambridge. I was treated in what I believe was at one point her dining room

If the setup is eccentric, LP – the acupuncturist – is anything but. Smart, funny, thorough. Knowledgeable about the ways of Western medicine – she’s a nurse – and of the wonders of acupuncture. Pretty amazing.

In addition to attending to my frozen shoulder, LP took a look at my wonky ankle.

The wonky ankle is no big deal. I had an MRI and “all” it is is some tiny tears in the ligaments and tendons. It doesn’t keep me from getting in my 4-5 Fitbit miles every day, but it’s sometimes sore. I do PT to strengthen the muscles around the problem area, and use an NSAID ointment on it to relieve the nighttime pain. Not to mention that the only shoe that’s comfortable is a sneaker with a ton of support – one of the pricey ones (ASICs or Brooks are my favored brands), and I’ve even taken to wearing sneakers as slippers. So while the ankle isn’t a showstopper, it’s a PITA, metaphorically speaking.

If the ankle went truly bad, there is a ghastly surgery that was described to me by the orthopedist I saw. He wasn’t recommending it at all. Not at my wonky ankle stage. But I did half listen, and the operation seems to involve relocating your ankle, after which it puts you on your back with you foot elevated for 10 weeks. What a treat for my sisters! Coin toss for the first 5 weeks vs. the last?

Things haven’t gotten to that stage, but the ankle has been irksome.

So I got acupunctured, high and low, which involved little to no pain and included lying around a heated bed under heated blankets, which isn’t a bad way to spend an hour or so.

No, I’m not cured. But that frozen shoulder has thawed out a bit more than it does during my average PT session. And the ankle feels a bit less wonky. I’ll be interested to hear what my PT guy says when I see him today.

Whatever Jake has to say – and I’m a big believer in the power and glory of Jake – I have a return appointment to see LP next week for another acupuncture session.

For now, ancient Chinese secrets ‘r us. What else have you got for me?

Robots, robots who need people….

I’ve been fretting for a good long while about what it is that people are going to do once artificial intelligence and robots replace almost all the jobs out there. As an occupational hazard – and, yeah, there still is demand for people who can understand and cogently write about tech stuff (at least for now) – I read a lot about tech stuff. And a lot of the tech stuff I’ve been reading and writing about is related to AI and robots. The bottom line is that they’re good and getting better.

So, truck drivers and Uber drivers, beware. Objects in mirror – those autonomous, self-driving vehicles – are closer than they appear. And don’t get too complacent, you coders. Machine learning’s got its eye on programmers.

What is it, I ask myself all the time, that people are going to do for work?

Sure, we’ve had these fears before. Remember the Luddites out there smashing all those looms?

What has always ended up happening is that when one profession ebbed (buggy whip maker) another one flowed (Ford production line worker). On so on. Sometimes the jobs aren’t an even exchange financially. Those more recently-displaced Ford production line workers made more than home health aides do. Sometimes the pay and working conditions are an upgrade. Programmers make more than Ford production line workers.

This time around, things seem different.

But are they?

Scientists and academics meeting this week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab to discuss the future of artificial intelligence seemed sure of one thing: there will be plenty for humans to do—especially tasks that require the kind of intuition and emotional empathy that computers are nowhere near able to match. (Source: Boston Globe)

Reading about intuition and emotional empathy reminds me of the “conversations” we used to have, decades ago, with ELIZA, an early AI/natural language processing system that ran on mainframes. You’d sit there and type a question, and ELIZA, playing therapist, would come back with some sort of superficial response, generally a follow-on question, keying off words in your query and putting something out there that would get you to type in something more. It was stupid, but fun and entertaining, in a superficial kind of way. And was a nice after-work time waster. But none of us were worried about ELIZA replacing us any time soon.

Since then, AI has come a mighty long way. But as our friends at MIT (who were the ones who brought us ELIZA to begin with) point out, it’s still not high on intuition and emotional empathy.

MIT roboticist David Mindell, speaking at the MIT EmTech Next conference, said that in studying decades of human interactions with robots, he’s learned one inescapable truth—the machines always need help. “When robots succeed,” said Mindell, “they’re never alone.”

Will those be the jobs of the future, then? We’ll be the companions to the robots, rather than the future that most of us have been anticipating, in which the robots are the companions to us. Turnaround is fair play, and I’m nearly teary-eyed with gratitude that humans will still be needed.

Hey, all you robots out there: you’ll never walk alone.

The assurance from MIT that robots will need people is all well and good. But just how many humans are robots going to need? 

Of course, what they’re really talking about is human endeavor complementing the work of robots. Robots/AI will still be taking a lot of jobs, just not all of them. They give the example of attorneys. AI is increasingly doing much of the discovery work that newly-minted associates used to take care of. But you still need humans to write briefs and argue in court.

Surprisingly, the MIT conference wasn’t promoting STEM careers.

“I think we need to teach people how to deal less with computers and more with people,” said Iyad Rahwan, associate professor of media arts & sciences at the MIT Media Lab. With computers getting smart enough to program themselves, Rahwan said there will be less need for software engineers in coming years.

Some overall advice: focus on building “softer”, human-centered skills and take those humanities courses.

Great news for all those sociology-English-religious studies majors out there. So far, you’re irreplaceable.

British royal expert outed. It’s good old Tommy from Upstate.

Even though analysis revealed the disturbing information that my DNA is 12% English – Jaysus, is my grandmother rolling in her grave muttering that the taint must be from my grandfather’s side – I’m not what you might call a monarchist. If I had to pick a side, well, Brits Out!

Nonetheless, I did keep an eye on the Meghan-Harry nuptials. After all, my husband and I were watching Suits in season one, when no one knew who Meghan Markle was. But we did: she was Rachel Zane. And after all, Harry is definitely the cute prince-brother. (Wha’ happened, Wills?)

Not that I got to watch it – I was traveling that day - but I did see news about the wedding. And I did buy the People magazine dedicated to the blessed event. So I know that Amal Clooney’s outfit was a canary yellow that even she can’t carry off. That Oprah’s dress wasn’t flattering. That Princess Eugenie looked like a PanAm stewardess from 1965. (Or was that Princess Beatrice?) That Princess Beatrice looked like some weird-order postulant. (Or was that Princess Eugenie?) And what was up with that jewelry designer who paired a navy blue jumpsuit with a hat that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Alice Longworth Roosevelt, c. 1906.

The best news, though, to come out of the latest royal wedding is the identity of a key commentator, Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills.

Mace-Archer-Mills – don’t think I’ve ever seen a triple-hyphenated name; well played – is the founder of the British Monarchist Society & Foundation. He’s written a couple of books on royal tipples. He’s a radio personality and frequent TV guest as an expert on the monarchy, where his commentary is given in a plummy, just-so British accent that I suppose would have made my British forebears proud.

Turns out that Thomas Mace-Archer-Mills is actually Thomas Muscatello from Upstate New York who acquired his first British accent when he appeared in Oliver! in high school. It was the Wall Street Journal that found him out. But it seems he Tommy had already found who he was:

“I found where I'm supposed to be and who I am supposed to be,” Mace-Archer-Mills told the newspaper, explaining that he feels more connected to Britain than the United States. He even found an elderly British man who agreed that Mace-Archer-Mills could call him his grandfather. He met him outside Buckingham Palace as a teenager. (Source: WaPo)

Good on’ ye (as the Irish would say), Tommy Muscatello, for figuring out where and who you’re supposed to be. I think I’ve got half of it covered. I really am supposed to be in Boston. Still working on who I’m supposed to be, unless I’m willing to accept that I’m it already and that it’s too late to be Maureen Dowd or Joyce Carol Oates. As from Thomas,

He often appeared in a bow tie, tweed jacket and cap. Speaking to a Norwegian TV channel just ahead of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's wedding in May, the American emphasized “keeping integrity, keeping formality and making sure that the traditions and heritage that we have as British people remain at the forefront.”

Forget the bow tie, tweed jacket and cap. Sometimes Thomas gets totally tarted up. And forget Oliver! He looks more like Liza Doolittle’s father about to burst into “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” from My Fair Lady.

And what’s with that royal “we”? Come on, Tommy from Upstate.

Anyway, before becoming a toff-ist, Muscatello sold real estate, “and gave himself a hyphenated last name, adding DeLaCroix to the end to give himself a boost in business with French Canadian clients.” Real estate, it seems, is good experience for learning how to pull off a great imposter, although in the case of Thomas Muscatello-Mace-Archer-Mills there doesn’t seem to have been any fraud, foul, or harm. (If you look at the video embed from this Vanity Fair article, you might even conclude that he has a touch of the comedian in him.)

As Mace-Archer-Mills, he’s got plenty of irons in the fire. In addition to his royal commentator projects, he’s got a new mag Crown and Country:

This extraordinary publication is a unique blend of Royal themes, luxurious advertising and quality editorial which does not expire, thus making this publication one of the finest Royal periodicals in the world.

Yikes! Just how many “Royal periodicals” are there in the word?

Thomas Mace-Archer-Mills also does public speaking training, during which he provides handy tips like don’t rattle change and paper clips in your pocket. Good advice! So I’ll add the good bits I picked up in presentation skills training decades ago: If you’re wearing a skirt, make sure there are pocket in it, as putting one hand in a pocket gives you something to do with the hand you’re not gesturing with. (I had pockets added to all my suits after this.) And the night before any preso, rehearse it out loud in front of a mirror and talk through every point you’re going to make, even if you think you’ve got it down cold. (You won’t use the words verbatim the next day, but going through each point out loud makes you think through what you need to say and will keep you from finding yourself in a verbal dead end.)

It is almost inevitable to report that Mace-Archer-Mills has also come out with a new cryptocurrency. I would have called it Coin of the Realm, but he went with Royal Coin. So Bitcoin, look out.

I hope that Thomas Mace-Archer-Mills can keep his multiple enterprises (except that Royal Con Coin). Despite blood that’s seemingly more British than that of Thomas Mace-Archer-Mills, other than looking at the Will-Kate cute kid pictures and royal headgear, I’m personally not all that interested in what the royals are up to. But if there are multiple publications devoted to the royals, there’s apparently a market for what he’s got on offer. And, let’s face it, it probably won’t be too very long before Prince Philip is off to that Balmoral in the sky, and Queen Elizabeth can’t last forever, either. So we have their funerals, and the coronation of King Charles (the person, on the dog breed) that will be crying out for commentary.

You’re adopted country will be needing you, Tommy boy, if only to remind King Charles to keep the paperclips out of his pockets.   

“Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?”

On June 5, 1968, I was home from my first year in college, and had just started working for the summer at Big Boy’s Restaurant in Webster Square, Worcester. I was on the lunch shift that day, so that morning I was just lolling around, getting up the energy to go iron my company-issued hideous waitress outfit: dark brown heavy cotton skirt, white light cotton pleated short-sleeved shirt, and orange heavy cotton apron. (This ensemble – which couldn’t have been duller and more boring if they tried – was completed by the addition of white waitress shoes and a hairnet. We also had to wear lipstick, something I’d never worn. I experimented with white, but landed on some shade of pink – a nice complement to the pale yellow eye-shadow I favored. Oh, yes, and a nametag that we were instructed to wear well above the breast so that no wise guy would ask “Maureen, eh, what’s the other one named?”)

My family didn’t watch late-night or early-morning television, and I always envied my friends who knew what Johnny Carson was up to on Tonight, and who were familiar with the stars on The Today Show. These friends always seemed so much more worldly, knowing and sophisticated than I was. What was up with my parents? Way too mired in Ellery Queen mysteries and Book of the Month Club selections I guess.

Anyone, on the morning of June 5 1968, no one had turned on the radio, either, so we didn’t know until my father got to work and called home that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in the wee hours in California, and was clinging to life.

On with the TV, but there was nothing like the coverage you get now. There was some information, but I pretty much watched a bit and then chugged off to Big Boy’s from my 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift.

My parents were Democrats, but not fanatically so. (I think they both voted for Ike over Adlai.) They liked JFK, but they weren’t Kennedy fanatics by any means. I don’t remember the candidate they were supporting in 1968. They actually didn’t talk politics all that much. But I imagine they were more Hubert Humphrey Democrats than anything else.

Personally, I had adored JFK, swooning for him when he was elected just short of my 11th birthday and going into full-scale mourning when he was killed just short of my 14th. But I wasn’t a big supporter of Bobby Kennedy. Earlier in the year, I’d rung doorbells in Jamaica Plain and in New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy. And I was on my way to being soured on the pack of them.

I will admit that at the St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston in March, I’d been excited to see Bobby whiz by in a car – could it possibly have been an open convertible? the day was cold and rainy…

Mostly though, I was pissed at Bobby Kennedy for jumping in after McCarthy had done the heavy lifting to get LBJ out. Kennedy privilege… I was fuming.

But hearing that he’d been shot was a gut punch. Medgar Evers. JFK. Martin Luther King. Why were the good guys always getting killed?

Bobby Kennedy hung on that day, June 5, 1968, but we woke to the news on June 6 - the TV on for once in our house in the morning – to learn that Kennedy was dead.

There wasn’t the same shut down of life there’d been when JFK was killed, but things slowed down.

Between shifts at Big Boy’s, I watched the coverage on our black and white TV.

I choked back tears when Teddy Kennedy gave his eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and let the tears flow when I watched the people lining the tracks as the train carrying Bobby’s body made its way from New York to Washington for his burial.

People amass for all sorts of events these days, as everything has become a “thing.” But all those people – in the city, great crowds; in the country, oneside-twosies. Black and white, mostly in appearance working folks. Spontaneously appearing to pay tribute ;to a man who had clearly connected to them. (Here are two Paul Fusco pictures, which were included in a recent New Yorker article.)

And for everything else he was and wasn’t – ruthless opportunist? sainted hero? -  Bobby Kennedy had two tremendous capacities: the capacity to evolve from a nasty little Joe McCarthy pal to someone who spoke to our better angels; and the capacity to connect with people. 

I don’t believe that the world would be a perfect place if Bobby Kennedy had lived. But there sure are a lot of ‘what-if’s’, starting with the greater likelihood that we would have made a speedier exit from the Vietnam debacle.

A few months after Bobby Kennedy was killed, there was a popular song, recorded by Dion (he of “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue”) called “Abraham, Martin, and John.” It couldn’t have been cornier, but it was plenty catchy (and timely). And it’s been rattling around in my brain the last few days.

Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.
Has anybody here seen my old friend John,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin,
Can you tell me where he's gone?

He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.
Didn't you love the things they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free,
Someday soon it's gonna be one day.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John.

Well, this conflation of Lincoln with JFK is pretty absurd. Lincoln was arguably the greatest president of all time. JFK, well…Not terrible, but no Lincoln either. And “freed a lot of people”? The Civil Rights Act was passed thanks to LBJ, not JFK.

Bobby Kennedy? Who knows…

Still, it’s worth remembering a time when a song like this could make it to nearly the top of the charts and sell a million or more copies to become a golden record. And when a million or more people – black and white - would line the railroad tracks on a hot summer day to bid farewell to a politician who connected with them.

Fifty years. Hard to believe. Seems like just yesterday…

What, me smartphone dependent?

Last Thursday, the unthinkable happened. I was separated from my smartphone for 17 hours. Oh, the horror! Oh, the humanity! (Mine.)

For years, I’ve been making fun of those for whom their mobile is another appendage. What’s wrong with someone that they can’t put that infernal device down for even a minute? Who wants it? Who needs it?

But over those years, I’ve become fairly addicted myself.

Oh, I’m still perfectly capable of going out, looking at the person I’m with and carrying on an actual face-to-face conversation without placing my phone on the table where I can glance at it (and pet it). And when I’m volunteering in the kitchen or clothing distribution at St. Francis House, the phone’s in my locker. Four hours phone free! Just imagine…

On the other hand – the hand holding my Galaxy 6 in the black and white polka dot Kate Spade case – when I’m out for a walk, and realize I’ve forgotten my phone, I backtrack and retrieve it. What if I passed out? Or got knocked out by some long-boarder? That phone contains my emergency contacts, thank you. Plus if I feel the need to check my precise Fitbit steppage, or see what Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Hayes, or Lauren Duca is up to on Twitter, I can check right in.

When I’m at PT/the gym, I used to leave my phone in the locker. More recently I started keeping it by my side. Just in case, in the middle of a row, I can check my email or look at Twitter to see what Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Hayes, and Lauren Duca have to say for themselves.

And of course, that smartphone is marvelously handy for looking all sorts of useless things up. Which was what I was doing that resulted in the temporary but quite painful separation from my increasingly precious smartphone.

On Thursday, I was out in Worcester with my cousin Barbara to do our annual family grave visit.

The smartphone had come in handy earlier in the day, when I took pics of the graves of my parents and my sister – the plan being to send them off to whatever outfit I can find that will clean the mold off their gravestones.

Back at Babs’ house, we were sitting around talking and Barbara mentioned a former neighbor who had held a high governmental post. Barbara and her husband aren’t much for using their smartphones for information retrieval, so I of course jumped in and volunteered to sleuth. Having found the info we “needed” on that neighbor, I placed my phone on the table next to where I was sitting, and there it sat while we adjourned for dinner.

When I take off from someplace other than my own home, I generally do an obsessive check to make sure that my phone is in my pocketbook, or in my hand. But for some reason, on Thursday night, as we headed out so that Barbara and Dick could drop me off at the train station, I didn’t. (And, as an aside, I will point out that I did not have any wine with dinner. So I was in full possession of my faculties.)

As the train was pulling out of the station, I did think to check my pocketbook and my backpack. Uh-oh.

Now, if you’ve ever had a Longchamps bag, you’ll recognize that they are completely “open concept”: no multiple compartments, other than a skimpy little patch of material capable of holding a key or a folded panty shield. But not a smartphone.

Similarly, there’s no place to hide in an Anello backpack, which held my gardening gloves and the tools I’d used for grave-tending.

Nevertheless, I persisted in checking and rechecking.

I would have borrowed someone’s phone to call Barbara but, of course, I have no idea what her phone number is.

In fact, the only phone numbers I know by heart are the landlines of my sibs and a couple of friends. (That and the phone numbers of people who are long dead. If I need to call my mother or my Aunt Margaret, or the parents of my high school friends, well, I’m on it.)                         

The first thing I did when I got home – after an I-feel-naked-without-my-phone walk home from the Back Bay Station – was use my landline to call my cellphone. I was hoping against hope that I would hear that reassuring ring, emanating from a heretofore unknown slot in my pocketbook or backpack. Perhaps it had slipped into one of those gardening gloves…

On the other end, I could hear Barbara trying to answer my phone, but it’s tricky.

I went to call her and realized I had no idea what her number – cell or landline – is. If she lived in her old home (which she’d left 13 years ago), I would have known her number. But they’d upped sticks and had a “new” number. I.e., a number from the post cell-phone era. So I called information. For some reason, Barbara and Dick’s landline is unlisted. But the operator hopefully offered the number of their same-name son in Bedford, Mass. So I gave him a ring to get his mother’s numbers.

It almost goes without saying that no one in their house picked up. Who answers when they don’t recognize the number?

I use one of my handful of remembered numbers – a lifeline - and called my sister Trish to get Barbara’s number.

Finally, we connected.

Fortunately, on Friday, Barbara was coming into Bedford, Mass for her book club meeting. She would meet me at 12:30 at the Riverside T-Station to hand me my phone.

I needed to get to PT in the a.m. and wanted to set the clock. When was the last time I used my alarm clock? Years. I use my phone. It took my a mo’ to refigure out how to the alarm clock works.

I also realized that I wanted to know what the time was so that I could make sure I would get out to Riverside on time. When was the last time I used a watch? Years. I use my phone. On Friday morning, I had to find a jewelry store to replace the battery in my long-dormant watch.

Fortunately, I made it out to Riverside with a few minutes to spare. I had thought that I’d be able to use a payphone there if I needed to call Barbara. But, even though this is both the terminus of a rapid transit line and a long-haul bus station, there was no payphone. If I had to call Babs, I would have had to rely on the kindness of a stranger to lend me their phone.

Fortunately, Barbara was right on time. Like a reverse of the wife of Charlie on the MTA, who went down to the Scollay Square Station each day to hand Charlie a sandwich through the open window, Babs slowed down and, through the open window, handed me my phone

Talk about mother-and-child reunion. Although all I had was 3 percent battery juice, I was elated to see my best ol’ buddy, my precious little always-by-my-side friend.

Seriously, how did we live without them?

Oh, to be middle-aged again. (Elder hostile much?)

Today is my half-birthday. Which makes me 68.5.

I’m an elder. An older person. A senior. A senior citizen. An old geezer. (Or is it geezeress?)

There’s no denying that there are some benefits. Medicare’s great. So’s the half-price Senior T-Pass that lets me ride the commuter rails, buses, and rapid transit for short money. Discounts – movies, museums, Friendly’s: all good.

Still, it’s tough to think of yourself as, well, old. Which is why most baby boomers don’t. The first wave of boomers turned 70 last year. And you know what I read? Boomers define old age as starting at 73. I suspect that, in a couple of years, that number will have been extended by a couple of years.

Some people say that “age is just a number.” But that, as us golden agers know, is bull-sheeetttt. The reality is that, if you’re old and plan on getting older, you’re old and getting older. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. You sag and bag. You don’t bounce back as quickly from slings and arrows, healthwise. You get crepey skin. People die on you. And it’s no longer “just” your parents. It’s spouses. It’s sibs. It’s friends. Sure, there’s something attitudinal about being old. But, let’s face it, age isn’t just a number. It’s an actual number. And numbers in real life don’t end with infinity.

Nonetheless, I don’t consider 68.5 old. Or elder. Or senior (except where it comes to the senior discount). But by some standards, I’ve been old/oldish for a while.

My husband could recall with absolute clarity where and when he was first called “Sir”. (Textbook section of the Harvard Coop. He was in his mid-twenties and was “sirred” by a clerk.) I don’t recall my first “ma’am-ing.” But I do recall shrieking when, at age 49, I read an article in the paper in which the victim of a fire was characterized as an “elderly woman.” She was 47.

And when I took the first survey in which I had to lump myself into the 64 and older category, I gulped.

Apparently it’s not just us old folks who are sensitive about what we’re called. Middle-aged people – a cohort (40-65) that I’ve barely grown out of and, in truth, still consider myself a member of – are bristling at being called middle-aged. They’re even considering rebranding themselves.

…a 52-year-old Maryland woman, Lisa Nagel, is suggesting “mid-century modern.” It’s an idea born of disappointment with the term “middle aged” (it’s an “anchor”) and appreciation for the current decorating craze. (Source: Boston Globe)

Another suggestion is “’perrenial’ because it’s ‘vibrant, everlasting, and forward thinking.’”

Okay. I’ll give them 2 out of 3. They get credit for vibrant and forward thinking. But everlasting? Where’ve they been, sitting around their mid-century modern houses congratulating themselves on their sense of style and good bones? Are they out of their everlasting minds???

WGBH Radio host Henry Santoro wants to eliminate the middleman, errrrr, middle age, and make things binary:

“You’re either young or you’re old,” he said. (This is definitely appealing, but imagine the war that would be waged over where to draw that line.)

I kind of like this one, but it’s all relative, situational. When I’m at the Sunday matinee of an Actors Shakespeare Project, I’m the breath of spring. When I’m meeting with clients – most of them in their 30’s or early 40’s (max) – I’m old, even if they don’t realize just how old old is. (Unless they read today’s post, that is…)

Maybe the thing to do is forget about generational catchalls. Maybe we should go for more precision. I’m in my sixties. Or I’m (alas) in my late sixties.

And all I can say to those decrying their being labeled as middle age is a quote from 74-year-old Joni Mitchell:

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

Yesterday’s middle-age is tomorrow’s old person.

You like tonic? So don’t I.

We hear a lot about globalization. Not so much about its precursor, nationalization. No, not nationalization as in nationalization of an industry, in which the commies take over the railroads. Or something. No, the nationalization, I’m talking about my own coinage. It’s the process through which, over the years, regional identities have to some degree disappeared.

Oh, they aren’t totally gone.

I was in Texas last week and a number of folks in the Dallas neighborhood I was staying in were flying the Texas flag.

Not that we don’t love our state: we do. And not that we don’t fly flags: we do that, too: US, Ireland, Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, Patriots. But, other than on a public building, I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen anyone fly the Massachusetts flag.

It’s just that a lot of the little things that marked your city, state or region as different have been lost in the giant homogenization of the world. Filene’s used to say Boston. Marshall Field used to say Chicago. No longer. We all shop at stores owned by Federated. Or at Target.

I still get a kick out of seeing a Dunk’s in a foreign location, like Dallas. But it also weirds me out. America doesn’t run on Dunkin. New England does. And my friends found Polar soda water for me at their grocery store. Polar? It’s made in Worcester, for crying out loud.

And then there are the regional linguistic peculiarities. Those little quirky regionalisms are dying out. We move around too much. We watch too much TV.

We used to say elastics. Now it’s rubber bands. Corner stores were spas. Porches on old wooden multi-family houses were piazzas. Bubblers were water fountains.

Part of this is self-defense. If you’re in, say, San Francisco, and ask where the bubbler is, you may be directed (as I was many years ago) to a mailbox.

Fortunately, some have managed to stay the course. No one from New England would order a milkshake if they wanted a concoction of ice cream, milk and syrup. We’d still ask for a frappe. Unless we’re from Rhode Island. Then we’d ask for a cabinet.

And then there’s good old tonic…

While other parts of the country may debate soda vs. pop, we clung for more than a century (since 1888, when the first use was recorded in print) to tonic as the catchall for any carbonated soft drink.

This despite the fact that “tonic” was already the name of a specific beverage, a clear liquid made of soda, sugar, and quinine, originally developed as a defense against malaria, whose flavor was so bitter that it actually improved with the addition of gin. (Source: Boston Globe)

It’s no longer used all that often – we came down on the side of soda: I’ve never heard anyone say pop around here – nevertheless, it persists, if not in usage then at least in understanding.

Or so Globe columnist Billy Baker found out when he went around asking for tonic.

What do you get in 2018 when you ask for a tonic in Boston? Would people know what I was talking about, or would I be looked at like I had three heads? The answers: Yes. And yes.

Billy went to Roche Brothers in West Rox. When he asked for the tonic aisle, an youngster drew a blank but an old timer working the cheese counter was able to direct him to Aisle 7. The aisle was full of sodas, but it also had tonic water. So, while I’m guessing the old timer knows tonic from tonic, the persistence of tonic wasn’t proven.

At a lunch counter around the corner from Roche Bros, a younger woman didn’t get what Billy was asking for when he ordered a small tonic. But, once again, an oldster:

…named Nancy Slyne came around the corner from the kitchen and stepped in for her younger colleague.

“Do you want Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite?” she said gesturing toward the fountain machine.

Admittedly, the younger woman had a pretty good excuse. She was from Albania. But yay, Nancy!

At a pizza joint, ordering tonic at the bar yielded a coke. At another lunch counter, yet another elder, Paula Ferzoco knew what Billy was asking for. He said tonic, she pointed him to a cooler full of Pepsi cans. Yay, Paula!

When I explained what I was up to, she laughed. “I used to call it tonic, but then I changed to soda because I was in Disney like 30 years ago and I asked for a tonic and they gave me tonic water.” Ferzoco said she knew what I was asking for, but it was rare to hear it nowadays.

At two renowned Boston watering holes, the bartenders knew the drill.

“What kind of tonic?” [Doyle’s] bartender Bob Donato, 65, said when I ordered. “You want Coke, ginger ale, 7-Up?”

The same happened at the Eire Pub in Dorchester, where an older man with a thick Irish brogue knew exactly what I was asking for, and said that people still ordered a tonic all the time, expecting a soda.

At Sullivan’s on Castle Island, an older fellow knew that Billy wanted a soda. A younger worker served Billy’s father a soda water when he ordered a tonic.

After his experiment, Billy Bake concluded that knowledge of tonic was mostly age-related. People of a certain age who are from around here – people like me and my ilk – know what a tonic is, even if, like Paula Z, we’ve converted to soda. Younger folks, on the other hand, think tonic is tonic water.

What’s next on the loss of local-ness front?

I really hope we don’t lose my personal favorite: the negative agreement. As in, when someone says “I like tonic,” you answer “So don’t I.” This used to drive my Midwestern mother batshit crazy. And if one of my sibs said, “I like driving Ma nuts”, there is only one answer: “So don’t I.”

What, me worry?

The other day, I got an email from my brother-in-law with this click-bait subject line: In case you don't have enough to worry about...

Well, personally, I never, ever, ever have enough to worry about. So I took the bait.

Seems that while we’ve all been worrying about whether a certain someone in the Oval Office will decide to press The Button rather than just send a tweet, we should have been worrying about the “elite squad responsible for safeguarding America's nuclear weapons.” Seems that, out in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a bunch of them have been using LSD, Ecstasy, cocaine, and marijuana.

Most of the air men involved were from two security units at FE Warren: The 790th Missile Security Forces Squad and the 90th Security Forces Squad. (Source: AP reporting and source material, via ZeroHedge)

These units were responsible for guarding 400 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles  - you know, the ones that are available 24/7 from their underground silos out there in flyover country. The ones that can kill and awful lot of people.

Most of the drug use was when they were off duty – in the ringleader’s apartment, in state parks, and in Denver, where after dropping acid, the fellows went longboarding. As we used to say back in the day, oh wow.

Although it wasn’t on base when these guys were guarding the nukes, still…Especially with LSD, with its flashbacks. (I don’t actually know this first-hand, as I never dropped acid. Too scary, never wanted to be that out of control, etc. But I did have friends who used LSD and I remember quite distinctly spending a college Saturday with a friend coming off a bad trip. Among other stops along our way, we visited the Don Oreone Shrine in Revere, home of a 40 foot statue of the Virgin Mary. That was a trippy enough scene without being on drugs.)

During one courts martial, the air man on trial described their experiences using the drug. One described "bad trips" that led to intense feelings of paranoia. Others described pleasurable sounds, colors and sensations.

"Minutes felt like hours, colors seemed more vibrant and clear," [Kyle] Morrison testified. "In general, I felt more alive." He said he had used LSD in high school, which could have disqualified him from Air Force service; he said that his recruiter told him he should lie about it and that lying about prior drug use was "normal" in the Air Force.

I’m pretty sure that if “prior drug use” disqualified folks from the service, it’d be a lot harder filling the ranks. But it’s interesting that a recruiter advised him to lie. (Reminds me of when my 85 year old Aunt Margaret went to get her license and didn’t want to have to wear glasses in her license picture. I believe the guy at the Registry coached her. Or was it her eye doctor?) And as for those more vibrant colors and feeling more alive. Oh wow.

The drug ring – which included more than 12 members – was tripped up when one of those members posted a pic on Snapchat of himself using grass. This although the club had only two rules: no bad trips (don’t know how that one gets enforced) and no social media (which apparently wasn’t so enforceable either).

You know, given how tech savvy and experienced with social media the young folks are, you’d think they’d have a bit more awareness of how social media comes back, again and again, to bite social media users in the arse.

Surprisingly – to me, anyway – Nickolos Harris, the ringleader and drug procurer, got off pretty easily. Maybe he got off easily because there was some sympathy for the odd spelling of his first name. Or perhaps it was because, once they found Harris, he ratted out the others on his “team.”

Harris was eventually sentenced to five months confinement, as well as 15 days hard labor. However, thanks to his cooperation, he managed to avoid a punitive discharge - though he did pay a more than $5,000 fine in the form of forgone wages…

This does seem kind of light, given that this is the military. But what do I know about military justice? 

"I absolutely just loved altering my mind," he told the military judge, blaming his decisions to use hallucinogens and other drugs on his addictive personality.

I suspect that if I were in the Air Force, stationed out in the middle of nowhere, I would have “absolutely just loved altering my mind”, too.

The men acknowledged that, by taking the drugs, they had put their country in danger. Air man Kyle Morrison, another member of the ring, acknowledged during his court martial that he wouldn't have been able to carry out his duties if called upon to do so while under the influence of LSD.

Hmmmm. All things considered, not being able to carry out his duties might actually be a good thing, no? Depends on whose finger’s on The Button.

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A tip of the AF service cap – if I had one – to Rick T for sending this story my way.

Looking forward to all that free time come football season

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of pro sports.

I am first and foremost a baseball fan. Most evenings I’ll watch at least an inning or two of the Red Sox game. I watch plenty of games in full, and keep tabs on the playoffs, even if the Olde Towne Team isn’t playing. I’ll watch the entire World Series.

Basketball and hockey are my fair-weather sports. I can watch them both pretty intelligently, but I’m not likely to get truly into things if the Celtics or the Bruins aren’t doing well. Come what may, I’ll pay a bit of attention to the playoffs, whoever’s playoffing. But don’t watch all that much. I watched a lot more basketball when my husband was alive, as this was his first and foremost sport. I forget how much I enjoy hockey, until it’s in front of me. During my recent visit to Dallas, I watched a few (non-Bruins-involved) games with my friends, hockey being Tom’s first and foremost sport, his having played it in college.

And then there’s football.

As I’ve said (and written) more than once, football is the veal of sports. If I thought about veal, I wouldn’t eat it. If I thought about football, I wouldn’t watch it.

But I do, on occasion, eat veal. And I have, over the years, watched plenty of football.

It’s been sporadic, however.

While I grew up watching Sunday afternoon football (NY Giants; this was pre-Patriots) with my father, by the time I was grown up, I’d grown out of any interest in football. Too violent, too militaristic, too brain damaging, too exploitative of the many “supporting cast” players who end up with nothing to show for their careers (other than brain damage), too much of everything I no like.

My husband wasn’t that into it, either. So for decades, I didn’t watch any football. On Sunday afternoon, we took long walks. Or long naps.

And then the Patriots got good, and Jim and I started paying attention. And watching games. And it was good. And it was entertaining. And it was fun. As with veal-eating, I didn’t think about the aspects of the sport that had always irked me.

The first Super Bowl I ever watched was in 2002. Pats won! Yay!

Mostly, we were into the Patriots. One year, we began watching a non-Pats Super Bowl. At half-time, we switched to a special on the Red Sox 2004 American League Championship run, in which they brilliantly came from behind three games to zip and beat the Yankees. We never did get back to the Super Bowl.

But if the Pats were in, the game was on in our house. And although I thought our TV was too damned large, I had to admit it was great for watching football.

During the last year or so of Jim’s life, when we couldn’t get out as much, we watched a ton of football. Mattered not who was playing, we watched Thursday night, Monday night, Sunday afternoon, Sunday night. We watched all the playoff games.

And it was good. And it was entertaining. And it was fun. As with veal-eating, I didn’t think about the aspects of the sport that had always irked me.

Once Jim died, I stopped watching quite as much. But I continued to turn Patriots’ game on with some regularity. I watched the playoffs. I watched the Super Bowls.

Last year, I watched the knee-taking movement with some interest, sympathetic to the largely African-American athletes who wanted to draw attention – very respectfully, I might add - to the way in which African-Americans are so often treated by the police. Naturally, this was a natural topic for Trump to jump in on. After all, it centered around African-Americans, who don’t for the most part belong to his fan base. And it was something he could tweet-storm into a big, divisive, frothing-at-the-mouth wedge issue. (These days, who needs a dog whistle?)

I’m guessing that, this coming season, the knee-taking would have run its course. Or just turned into a “thing” that some athletes did and some didn’t. Something no one really noticed. White noise.

But then the National Football League decided that, this coming season, they would levy fines on teams that allowed players to take a knee during the national anthem. Maybe they were worried about more tweets emanating from the White House. After all, the Tweeter-in-Chief has upped the ante from suggesting that knee-takers should be fired to suggesting that they leave the country entirely.

Maybe the NFL owners surveyed their fan bases and decided that enough of them cared mightily about those ungrateful, spoiled, largely African-American athletes disrespecting the troops or the flag or the country or whatever they thought those players taking a knee were doing. So maybe they didn’t want to piss this portion of their fan base off. Or maybe they even wanted to rev them up more. (“We’re on your side!”) Maybe they just wanted to deflect attention from the grim statistics on how many of their players end up with disastrous brain damage from taking all those hits, which is a lot more dangerous in so many ways than taking all those knees. Maybe they just wanted to suck up to Trump. Maybe they really like and admire him. (One more reason not to like or admire the NFL.)

In any case, I’ve had it with pro football – even if they do back off their latest announcement (which, the day after, was already being somewhat hemmed-and-hawed over).

I’ll keep an eye on where the knee-taking goes this fall. One owner has said he’ll let his players do what they want, and he’ll pay the fine. Maybe, in a show of solidarity, entire teams will stay in the locker room during the anthem - which is allowed if players want to make an invisible protest. (Last year, there were many shows of solidarity in which teammates locked arms, or placed their hands on the shoulders of those taking a knee.) And I’ll continue to read the Patriots gossip about GOAT Tom Brady vs. Coach Bill Belichick vs. Patriots owner Bob Kraft – the sort of dysfunctional workplace stuff I so enjoy.

But come Sunday afternoon, I don’t plan to be watching football.

If it’s nice, I’ll be taking a nice long walk.

If it’s not so nice, I’ll be taking a nice long nap.

Enough is enough.

So long, pro football, it’s been good to know ya.

Memorial Day, 2018.

Once again, Memorial Day is upon us.

Nothing to say that I haven’t said before in my first Memorial Day post, Decoration Day, way back in 2007, and my last, Broken Record and Then Some, just last year.

But, hey, there’s always something more to say…

The other day, while waiting at DFW for my plane to Boston, I was sitting next to a fellow with a very sweet-looking service dog (a Golden) from an organization that provides them to wounded vets. I asked if I could pet him (the dog, not the fellow). I didn’t get the guy’s name, but the dog’s name was Ross.)

Ross’ human companion was fine with it, so I patted Ross’ head and scratched his ears, and we – Ross’ human companion and I, not me and Ross - ended up chatting a bit.

Although he was in his thirties and had already been in the service, Ross’ human companion joined up after 9/11. He ended up in Iraq and got his knee blown away by an IED. Years later, and after serious time logged at Walter Reed, he was doing okay. But that knee didn’t flex all that well.

Anyway, Ross’ human companion had a tattoo on his arm that said First Cav (Cavalry), and I asked, “the guys who wear the cowboy hats?” (I was flashing back to the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now, the classic Vietnam War film from back in the 70’s. Which is no surprise, since everything I know about war – pick a war, any war – I learned from books, television, and movies.)

I was a bit embarrassed, but Ross’ human companion just laughed. “We call them Stetsons.” He then pulled up the sleeve of his other arm and showed me a tatt that looked something like this.

Ross and his human companion were called for pre-board, and that was that.

Here’s this year’s picture of the flags on Boston Common. These are placed each year at this time to commemorate the lives of all those from Massachusetts who’ve lost their lives fighting in an American war – good war, bad war; just war, stupid war; wars without end, amen – since the Revolution.

On this Memorial Day, here’s hoping that no one as crazy and amped up as the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now amps us into yet another war. E.g., by writing things like this to, say, a North Korean despot, “You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.” We really don’t need any more guys in cowboy hats Stetsons getting their kneecaps – or worse – blown up and out, let alone what the outcome would be if the nuclear dogs of war are unleashed.

Happy Memorial Day to all those who made it back alive. (And to their service pups, too.)

Goose alert, etc.

Yesterday was my first day back from a trip to visit friends in Dallas. While in Dallas, I did absolutely nothing of a touristic or cultural nature. Basically, after an early morning walk – the heat’s too fierce to go out walking much after 9 a.m. – we just hung around and talked. I was visiting my college roommate and her husband. Since they dated in college, I’ve known Tom just about as long as I’ve known Joyce. So, 50 year friends. A lot to talk about.

On those early morning walks, we mostly ambled around their neighborhood, a very nice section of Dallas. It’s an older residential area near the outskirts that has the wonderful feature of a lot of mature trees (and meticulous, very attractive landscaping for 99% of the houses). The trees provided much-needed shade for the rare person out walking. Alas, there were no sidewalks, and despite the signs reading “drive as if your children live here”, many of the drivers rampaged around like maniacs. Maybe that’s how they drive around their kids. (There was plenty of evidence of children: swings, play structures, signs cheering on what ever high school their kids went to, but we didn’t see much by way of actual children.) Not a walking neighborhood, with or without kids apparently.

One morning, Joyce and I ventured across the perimeter road (the width and speed of the Mass Pike, and, like the Mass Pike, no traffic lights) to check out a new development – built to your liking – that was going up.

The name of the development is the ultra-classy Da Vinci Estates, and the first house that’s gone up was a pile that appeared to be in the 8-10K square foot range. They grow ‘em big in Texas. There are nine plots in this development, and I think six have been sold and staked. It will be interesting to see on my next swing through Dallas what actually goes in there. Or it would be interesting if this wasn’t destined to be a gated community, so it’s unlikely we’ll get in to rubberneck.

But the thing that struck me was the wording on the sign  touting “MODERN PYRAMIDS.” I’m not all that up on ancient Egypt, but weren’t pyramids used as the final resting place of the pharaohs? Wouldn’t this be like advertising MODERN MAUSOLEUM? Then again, given the size of the one home we saw built, MODERN MAUSOLEUM might have been more apt, given that people refer to big old houses as mausoleums. At least where I come from.

Maybe the name pyramid was a warning to anyone attempting to cross that perimeter road on foot…

Me, I wouldn’t care to live in a pyramid, modern or otherwise. As for my post-mortem residence, it will be an ash plot at Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Anyway, it was great to be with Joyce and Tommy, whose home is gorgeous: ultra-modern (their architect won an award for it) and, at a relatively modest by Texas standards 4K square feet, neither a pyramid nor a mausoleum. But it was, as it always is, wonderful to get back to Boston.

After five days of 90 degree heat, it was especially great to come home to yesterday’s upper-60’s, sunny, blue sky weather.

The magnolias are mostly past-prime, but there are flowers abounding and, on my walk along the Esplanade, a park running along the Charles River, I was able to stop and smell the lilacs. This after passing some graffiti on the Fiedler bridge that read “Darma’s a bitch.” Only someone had scrawled a “K” over the “D” in the misspelled darma. I don’t think the correction was necessary, as I believe that both dharma and karma can be bitches. Just sayin’.

After my time in Dallas, it was also quite nice to see water, as in the Charles River. There are creeks in Joyce and Tom’s neighborhood, but Dallas is more sun-baked than water-world. (I asked my friends – Rhode Island natives – whether they missed the ocean. They looked at me like I had two heads. Of course they miss the ocean, and they were quick to let me know that the Texas Gulf Coast doesn’t count.)

Quite naturally, where there’s water there are also water fowl.

I didn’t see many ducks on the Esplanade but, alas, I saw plenty of Canada geese, which in the past decade or so have become an urban scourge in these parts. Talk about foul fowl. They may look lovely on Christmas cards when they’re wearing a wreath around their goose-necks, but in real life they seem to do nothing other than waddle around leaving turds that look like cigars all over their paths. Which, by some nasty coincidence, tend to be the paths that humans walk, jog, and bike on

In some years past, “they” – whoever “they” are, I don’t recall – have done things to keep the geese from proliferating. At first they took their eggs, but then the geese would just lay more of them. So they started covering the eggs with oil. This process managed to keep the mother geese happy, but kept goslings from forming. Win-win.

“They” – whoever “they” are – don’t seem to have been doing much of anything this spring, goose ZPG-wise. Every goose I managed to pass along my walk had anywhere from 3-5 goslings with it. They may look all sorts of cute and fuzzy now, but by the end of June there’s no doubt that they’ll join the ranks of the turd-producing waddlers.

Why can’t they be like their far-better behaved duck friends? In a couple of weeks, our ducks will be producing flotillas of ducklings – I’ve seen as many as a dozen trailing behind their mothers – but I don’t believe I’ve ever had a close encounter with a duck turd. I don’t imagine that they’re trained for it, but I’m guessing that our local ducks crap in water. Bless ‘em.

Bottom line: goose alert to anyone walking down by the banks of the River Charles, which is where you’ll find me on many of my daily strolls, avoiding goose turds. Happy to be back. Oh, Boston you’re my home.

Caged tiger at the prom? Excellent idea!

I wasn’t much of a prom goer, but I did go to the Assumption Prep (now defunct Catholic boys school) senior prom with a guy from the ‘hood I was friendly with. He was plenty smart, funny and nice enough. I went out with him a couple of times – whenever he needed a date. But there was no “like” there. (As it turns out, P was gay – a category that we were not generally aware of in 1966. Sadly, he died pretty young, I believe by suicide after losing his partner to AIDS. At least he got out of Worcester and found his way to San Francisco.)

In keeping with the practice of the time of borrowing the title of a popular song, the theme of the prom was Cast Your Fate to the Wind. Since we were all such sophisticated wits, our big yuck was rebranding the theme. At our table, at least, the theme was Cast Your Faith to the Wind. Which I’m guessing was precisely what happened within the next couple of years to at least half of the young folks sitting at that table at The Yankee Drummer Inn eating rubber chicken.

(In case you’re wondering, I wore a pale pink dotted Swiss empire waist gown and white patent leather flats, as P was my height and it just wasn’t done for the girl to be taller than the boy. I carried what was known as a colonial bouquet, with pink sweetheart roses, baby’s breath and a paper doily. Very sweet, as was P, especially in retrospect, as the entire event must have been torture for him. P wore a very pretty blue batik dinner jacket.)

Proms – at least back in the day, at least when you went to a prom at a boys school – featured a favor for the girls. Our was a tiger pajama bag. Pajama bags, for those unfamiliar with this particular item, was like a stuffed animal. Only unstuffed and with a zipper. When you got out of bed in the morning, you’d tuck your PJs into the bag and prop it in the middle of your bed.

I never used the tiger PJ bag, as it was a strident yellow-orange color, which clashed with my bedspread. I think my (much) younger sister Trish used it – maybe as a toy, stuffed with nylons.

When our table wasn’t repeating the Cast Your Faith to the Wind witticism, we made sly jokes about how suggestive a pajama bag was, what with the extraordinarily slight whiff of “sex” associated with PJs and beds. Racy stuff!

I hadn’t thought about that tiger in years. That is, until a Florida high school decided that it was a good idea to have a caged tiger at their prom.

The theme of this year’s Christopher Columbus High (like Assumption Prep, an all-boys Catholic school) was “Welcome to the Jungle.” So why not liven things up?

The prom, hosted at a hotel near Miami International Airport, featured several animals including a caged tiger, a lemur, two macaws and an African fennec fox. (Source: USA Today)

While this sounds like the kind of brain-dead idea that a bunch of high school boys might come up with, it seems that it was school staff who planned the event.

No word on the other animals – did the lemur leap? did the macaws caw? – but it’s reported that the tiger paced throughout the dance. Imagine the agitation on the part of all these animals, being subjected to loud music, flashing lights, and a couple hundred sweaty noisy kids jumping around (at least some of whom were some sort of high).

According to statements sent to multiple local outlets, Christopher Columbus High School said the tiger was never in danger or forced to perform, and handlers were with the animal at all times.

I read somewhere else that there were also two police officers on hand, just in case the tiger managed to free itself from its cage. How wonderful it would have been to have cops firing at a powerful, wild, hell-bent-on-escape tiger, in a venue replete with loud music, flashing lights, and a couple hundred sweaty noisy kids jumping around. Not to mention a no-doubt agitated leaping lemur and a couple of wildly cawing macaws. (I don’t know what an African fennec fox might have been up to. Probably no good.) Now that would have been a prom experience to remember. A lot more interesting than tittering about a pajama bag or jadedly re-quipping, “Cast Your Faith to the Wind.”

The school’s statement is posted on their website as Prom 2018 Statement. 

As a school community, we regret the decision to have had live animals at our prom. This incident in no way reflects our school’s Marist values and/or accomplishments of our young men nor our sensitivity to animal rights. We will immediately evaluate our current policies and procedures regarding all school activities and events. We can assure the Columbus community and all who have expressed concern, that we are sorry. We have learned a great deal from this experience.

I’ll just bet you’ve “learned a great deal from this experience.” What else are proms for?

And sometimes life is nasty, brutish, and long

The oldest women on earth has spoken. A bit short of her 129th birthday, Chechnyan Koku Istambulova has plenty to say. And ain’t none of it cheerful.

Poor Koku sure missed out in the joie de vivre department.

'I have not had a single happy day in my life. I have always worked hard, digging in the garden.

'I am tired. Long life is not at all God's gift for me - but a punishment.' (Source: Daily Mail)

Of course, there are plenty of reasons for that profound unhappiness. Koku was born in a poor and backwards – even by the standards of 1889 – village. She lived through the Bolshevik overthrow of the tsar. Watched Nazi tanks roll through her town. Was deported by Stalin – along with everyone else in Chechnya – to Kazakhstan, which was/is no garden spot. And as if Kazakhstan wasn’t bad enough, she was shipped to Siberia for more living misery, digging through the permafrost, trying to make her garden work. And as if Siberia wasn’t bad enough, she eventually landed back in Chechnya, which resulted in zero joy, even though Chechnya was her native land and Koku missed it when she was in exile.

To add to Koku’s misery, she outlived all of her children, including a daughter who died a few years back at the age of 104.

But not one “single happy day” in her entire life? Yikes!

'Looking back at my unhappy life, I wish I had died when I was young. I worked all my life. I did not have time for rest or entertainment.

Hmmmm. I consider myself to be someone who has “worked all my life,” but there’s work and there’s work. And when work is pure, unadulterated drudgery without any “time for rest or entertainment”, well, I might “wish I’d died when I was young” too. But, Jeez Louise, grim as the story of Koku’s life is, you’d think there might be at least a scintilla of happiness in there. One perfect spring day when her kiddos were small and the family had an egg to share. Talk about depressing.

'We were either digging the ground, or planting the watermelons. When I was, my days were running one by one. And now I am not living, I am just dragging through.'

Man, not even being able to take some pleasure from eating watermelon. Of course, she just mentions planting them, not eating them. Maybe she had to sell her entire crop.

One of my husband’s favorite TV shows was the late 1970’s-early 1980’s sitcom Taxi, and his favorite character was Latka Gravas, who had emigrated from some fictional Eastern European hellhole. When talking about his childhood, Latka would say that it wasn’t that bad, even in those early years when his family lived outdoors. “We had the bucket. We had the chair.” (I have a tiny bucket ornament that hangs on my Christmas tree in honor of Latka and my late Christmas-hating husband. Jim’s favorite quote from Latka was this one: “The only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual.")

Anyway, Latka’s life sounds like an absolute fun-filled pleasure cruise compared to Koku Istambulova’s. 

I’m not one of those folks who want to live forever. Right about now, 90 sounds good for the endgame. But ask me if and when I hit 89. If I still have my health and mobility, if I’m not demented, if my home isn’t underwater (literally: I live on landfill), if my family and friends are still around in good health and mobile, and not demented, well, why not?

But 129 sounds like about 29 years too much for anyone, even for someone like me who’s led a pretty good life with plenty of happy days along the way. Let alone for someone whose highpoints were watermelon digging while Panzer tanks rumbled past.

Guess Hobbes wasn’t right about everyone’s life. Sometimes it turns out to be nasty, brutish, and long.

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A shout out to the wonderful Lauren Duca, who tweeted about poor Koku, and who “cannot wait for this feature film starring Kate McKinnon.”

Robots are people, too?

While we haven’t yet reached the technological singularity (when AI will just start getting smarter and smarter and surpass human intelligence: can’t wait), it’s no secret that robots are keep getting smarter and smarter. (While it sometimes seems that actual people are getting dumber and dumber, I don’t think that there’s actually any evidence that this is the case. Yet.)

Anyway, the robots, or their virtual, software-based cousins, the bots, are out there. And some of them – especially those nasty little bots; especially those nasty little Russky bots – are up to no good.

As robots/bots get older, wiser, and more malicious, the question arises about who’s responsible if one of them does something bad. Prosecutorially bad.

Under an ongoing EU proposal, it might just be the bot itself. A 2017 European Parliament report floated the idea of granting special legal status, or “electronic personalities,” to smart robots, specifically those which (or should that be who?) can learn, adapt, and act for themselves. This legal personhood would be similar to that already assigned to corporations around the world, and would make robots, rather than people, liable for their self-determined actions, including for any harm they might cause. The motion suggests:

Creating a specific legal status for robots in the long run, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons responsible for making good any damage they may cause, and possibly applying electronic personality to cases where robots make autonomous decisions or otherwise interact with third parties independently. (Source: Slate)

Oh.

The “robots wouldn’t have the right to vote or marry.” I agree with robots not getting the vote, even though they’d certainly be smarter than certain low information voters, that’s for sure. On the other hand, robots/bots could “decide” to make some truly terrible electoral choices. And the prospect of robots marrying is too ghastly to contemplate. Would a robot be able to marry a bot?

But robots are surely more like actual living, breathing persons than are corporations, and SCOTUS has declared corporations people. So who knows what’s going to happen in the long run.

At least with a corporation, you can identify who’s responsible and accountable for bad corporate behavior: the officers of the corporation. They can be fined, and even become imprisoned, if their companies play fast and loose. Because we know that, when it comes down to it, the “corporation” isn’t the actor. It’s the people running the corporation.

Who’s responsible when it’s a robot? The robot’s owner? The person who created the code that the bot used to smoke the entire power grid of the US?

With robots/bots “self-learning”, getting smarter and perhaps nastier, who’s responsible when they go rogue?

All this fretting about robotic personhood:

It’s a forward-thinking look at the inevitable legal ramifications of the autonomous-thinking A.I. that will someday be upon us, though it’s not without its critics. The proposal has been denounced in a letter released April 12, signed by 156 robotics,* legal, medical, and ethics experts, who claim that the proposal is “nonsensical” and “non-pragmatic.” The complaint takes issue with giving the robots “legal personality,” when neither the Natural Person model, the Legal Entity Model, nor the Anglo-Saxon Trust model is appropriate. There are also concerns that making robots liable would absolve manufacturers of liability that should rightfully be theirs.

My goodness, who knew there were that many models of just what defines personhood? I’m just as happy to sit here in blissful ignorance, without worrying a whit about the economic, legal, and philosophical underpinnings that need to be considered if and when robots get declared people.

Certainly, before I gave such vaunted status to machines, let alone software, I’d vote for creating a demi-personhood category for sentient beings, like doggos and pygmy chimpanzees.

I don’t know what John Frank Weaver, a Boston attorney who works on AI law and author of Robots Are People, Too – and here I was thinking that my blog post title was original -  thinks about doggo or bonobo (pygmy chimp) personhood, but he does think that we should be figuring out just what status robots have.

Weaver has written about what it means to give robots various aspects of personhood, including the right to free speech, the right to citizenship, and legal protections (even for ugly robots). As you can guess from the title of his book, he himself recommends limited legal personhood for robots, including the right to enter and perform contracts, the obligation to carry insurance, the right to own intellectual property, the obligation of liability, and the right to be the guardian of a minor.

Okay. I’m nodding along until I get to “guardian of a minor.” A minor human, or a minor robot? The inquiring mind of an actual human would like to know.

Meanwhile, while I’m fretting about whether dogs should be given some of the rights of personhood – so many dogs being so colossally superior to so many humans – I do have to point out that robots are dogs now, too. If you haven’t seen the Boston Dynamics pup, check it out here. (See Spot run!) All I can say is that, if humanoid robots are going to get personhood, surely dog robots should too. Arf!

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*I initially read this as “robots”

The All-American Language Lab

This map’s been around for a few years, but there’s something pretty fascinating about it, no?

It makes sense that, in California, Nevada, and Hawaii, the third up language is Tagalog. Lots of Filipinos in those states And lots of Vietnamese in Washington and Texas make sense, too. Washington is West Coast, and I remember reading about Vietnamese shrimpers/fishermen in Texas. But who’da thunk that it would be the third most commonly spoken language in Oklahoma and Nebraska?

And what’s with Oregon and Russia?

It’s interesting to see where the native tongue is a native tongue: Navajo in Arizona and New Mexico, Yupik in Alaska, and Dakota in South Dakota. I like that a lot. But compare and contrast South Dakota with North Dakota, where the third most popular language is German – one of 16 (if I counted correctly) where that’s the case. I knew that the Midwest and Plains states were loaded with Germans. And I’m pretty sure that Lawrence Welk was from North Dakota. But, given that the last great wave of German immigrants was probably in the immediate years after WWII when the Germans who’d made it over during earlier waves brought over a bunch of second-cousin displace persons, where are all these German-sprechters coming from? This last wave was 60-70 years ago, so who’s out there speaking all that German?

By the way, I know about DPs because a lot of them ended up sleeping on my German grandmother’s couch in Chicago. When we visited Chicago – an every other year routine – there was always a landsmann or two buzzing in and out of Grandma’s house on North Mozart. Nephews, cousins, fellows from her home town. Most of the ones I recall were men, but I’m sure there were women among the people by grandmother sponsored. (The only woman I remember was the French wife of one of those German cousins. They’d met during the war.)

Anyway, I’m guessing that when German is the third most spoken language, all that means is that there aren’t a lot of folks in the state who speak anything other than English or Spanish.

I see that the third most spoken language in Illinois is Polish, rather than German, and that Polish outpost floats in the sea of German. Not much of a surprise – lots of those Central Europa types immigrated to Chicago. But I would have thought that there’d be more Germans than Poles. Maybe this reflects more recent immigration patterns. I know that there are a fair number of newby Polish immigrants in the Boston-area. (Don’t know if it’s still the case, but for a while there were a number of imported Polish priests around here. One of them said the funeral Mass for my cousin twenty years ago. We were all a bit weirded out that someone with such a pronounced Polish accent was officiating at a parish so Irish-y that the statue of St. Pius X that adorned the front entrance resembles JFK.) Anyway, maybe the Chicago Poles are newcomers.

The Midwest outlier, however, isn’t Illinois. It’s Michigan, where Arabic comes in third. Hamtramck, outside of Detroit, used to be a majority-Polish Catholic town. It’s now homing in on becoming majority-Muslim. Hence the Arabic. Or it’s Minnesota, where Hmong is third-most-likely to be spoken. That’s because in 1975, when Laos was more or less destroyed, Minnesota welcomed in a lot of Hmong refugees.

After German, French is the language placing third in the most states: 11 in all. (Twelve if you count French Creole in Florida.) Four of the French states are in New England, which comes as no surprise, given the French Canadian population of these states. Massachusetts and Rhode Island, however, have Portuguese as their third. Lots of Azores/Portugal folks – think the Gloucester, Provincetown, and New Bedford fishing fleets. And there are a ton of Brazilians in the Boston area these days, too.

Back on the French front, Louisiana is one of the Francophone states, as anyone who’s seen The Big Easy will understand, eh cher? But what’s up with West Virginia? French? C’est vrai? (French for ‘huh?’)

For those of us who know folks from Philadelphia or who are familiar with Frank Sinatra, Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen’s mother, it’s no shocker that Italian is the third language of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

And anyone who’s spent more than a New York minute in Manhattan will get why Chinese is spoken there.

Two states speak Korean: Georgia and Virginia. Why not?

I really don’t know why I found this little map so interesting. Guess it’s because, if you squint a bit, you can see something of the history of immigration to the U.S. More or less. Plenty of British Isles immigrants over the years. And lots of Irish in that immigrant flow as well. Thanks to the British occupation of Eire, the Irish contributed little to the Tower of American Babel. Our English wa already baked in.

In any event, I had fun looking at the All American Language Lab. It’d be even more fun to look at what they looked like in 1900 and 1950. Spanish probably wouldn’t have been Number Two, other than in California, Texas and a couple o other states. But I’m too lazy to track down those earlier maps. If they show up in my Twitter feed, however, I’ll be so there.

Where’s the beef? In the carnivore’s freezer.

It seems like only yesterday that I was putting down my bowl of ice cream to chuckle about the Paleo diet. You remember Paleo? Think only foods that Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble would have put on the table: meat and fish, fresh fruit and veg, eggs and nuts. Strictly hunter-gatherer – no grains, which need to be cultivated – no processed foods, and no dairy, because I guess there were no domestic cows for Wilma and Betty to milk. And Fred and Barney were getting their meat from animals like hyenas and not bothering to milk them on the fly. Or from animals like dinosaurs, that don’t produce milk.

Odd as Paleo struck me – I ain’t never going to give up my grains, thank you – it made more sense to me than vegan. Sure, vegans can have grains, which is an improvement on Paleo. And I’m cool with the vegetarian aspects. What I don’t get about vegan is thinking that it’s exploiting a chicken to take an egg, a cow to spritz some milk, a bee to nab some honey. If you have the chickens in your backyard air-conditioned chicken coop, and know that they’re cared for, etc., how exploitive is it to ask them to produce an egg or two for you?

But, hey, I couldn’t stick with Atkins or South Beach for more than three days before falling off the no-carb wagon and landing, mouth wide open, in a big old bowl of pasta.

And then there’s the carnivore diet…

…a regimen that involves eating only animal products like meat, offal and eggs, and no plant-based foods. It’s an extreme version of the low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet – which trains the body to run on fat rather than carbohydrates – that has become popular in recent years. Proponents of the diet say it reduces inflammation and blood pressure while increasing libido and mental clarity. (Source: The Guardian)

I like meat and eggs just fine. But offal? Oh, how awful.

I wouldn’t refuse liver if it were the last food on earth, and I do occasionally eat pate. But kidney? Isn’t their function to filter out impurities? And don’t they come with a whiff of urine?

Sweetbreads I tried once: too rich for my blood. Brain I ordered by accident in Paris. I recalled from high school French that veau meant veal, but I forgot entirely that cervelle was brain. It actually didn’t have much taste, but it looked kind of like chewing gum that had been extruded through the space between my front teeth.

As for tongue. Big gross beef tongue. Little pink lamb tongue. Really weird duck tongue. Yuck of yucks.

And no plant-based foods? No apples. No oranges. No peppers. No pears. No pistachios. No tomatoes. No potatoes. No broccoli. No grapes. No peaches. No cereals. No asparagus. No cukes. No bread. No blueberries. No walnuts. No rice. No thanks…

One of the adherents to the life of carnivory is Shawn Baker, a surgeon who eats roughly 4 pounds of steak a day. Which is about the amount of steak I consume in a year. Baker admits.

“It can be monotonous eating the same thing over and over again, but as time goes by you start to crave it.”

I tend to be kind of a boring, monotonous eater. After all, I’m somone who ate a baloney sandwich on white bread with kosher dill pickle every Monday through Thursday for all four years of my high school career. (On Friday’s – fish day – I ate a PBJ.) Yet I don’t think I could hack eating steak all the time.

But Baker likes the simplicity of it. No meal planning, no thought going into what’s to eat, quick in-and-out grocery shopping. All you need to know is where the beef is. Sort of like wearing the same outfit everyday. (What to wear today? Jeans and a sweater. That was easy.)

It did not surprise me in the least that:

…the all-meat diet has been embraced by a cluster of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, who describe themselves as “bitcoin carnivores”.

As Michael Goldstein, a “bitcoin and meat maximalist” has it:

“Once someone has grown capable of seeing beyond the lies and myths that experts peddle in one domain, it becomes easier to see beyond them in other domains as well.”

Should we all be spending more time on Reddit and with InfoWars? Will that help us grown capable of ferreting out lies and myths?

While all sorts of wonders are attributed to the carnivore diet, many are skeptical. One such skeptic is Stanford professor of medicine Christopher Gardner, who has this to say:

“Are these T rex? African lions? Or humans? Assuming [you are referring to] humans, this sounds disastrous on multiple levels,” he said.

The lack of dietary fibre in an all-meat diet is likely to wreak havoc on the bacteria in our colons, known as the microbiome, he said. “Growing evidence suggests that in the absence of adequate fibre, the bacteria in the colon consume and thin the protective mucus lining, which then leads to impaired immune function and inflammation.”

Well, mucus-consuming bacteria is a bit more medical-ness than I needed. But it does seem logical that all meat wouldn’t be all good for you. There’s also research that suggests that consuming more meat is bad for your heart. Then there’s:

Factory farming of animals is also linked to antibiotic resistance in humans and is a huge contributor to the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

You’ve convinced me. No carnivore diet for this gal.

Think I’ll go have a cookie and a glass of milk.