Sometimes there’s a news story that actually makes you LOL

There’s so much lousy news out there, it’s great to see an article on something that is just fantastically splendid. That is, unless you live in Boise, Idaho and found your house surrounded by goats eating every bit of flora that surrounds your house. But for those of us, safe and secure thousands of miles away, contently living in a goat-free zone. Well, stories don’t get much better.

What happened was that, early last Friday morning, more than a hundred goats got loose. These are working goats that are used to, well, working, getting rid of unwanted vegetation. Unfortunately, goats can’t distinguish between unwanted vegetation and things like front lawns, bushes and flower beds.

For Joe Parris, who typically covers politics and breaking events for a local TV station, getting to cover this story was a nice change of pace from focusing on the wildfires that have been plaguing the area. He got to have some fun live tweeting the sitch:

About 100 goats are on the loose right now in a Boise neighborhood. They are going house to house eating everything in sight. Nobody has a clue where they came from...updates to follow (Source: NY Times)

Within an hour or so after they were spotted, everyone did have a clue about where the goats had come from: a company wonderfully named WeRentGoats. Anyway, the company’s goat wranglers swung by with their trucks and rounded them up. Git along little goatie! (No time to understand ‘em, just push, prod, and land them in the goat carrier.) But not before they’d done a bit of damage:

The goat-renting company has insurance “and will be following up with neighbors whose landscaping was damaged,” said Haley Williams, a spokeswoman for the Boise Police Department.

There are, of course, some things that likely won’t be compensated for. Like goat poop all over the place

Mr. Parris said in an interview that the goats were friendly, and that he got to pet one. They weren’t very noisy, aside from the chewing. The smell, he said, was awful.

Despite the chewing, the goat poop, the smell, the neighbors took Goat-a-Palooza (Parris’ coinage) in stride:

…they seemed to be in a good mood about it. Children jumped up and down in excitement.

“You would assume the homeowners were upset that their lawns were being destroyed, but everyone was enjoying it,” Mr. Parris said. “Everyone was really happy about it.”

This isn’t surprising at all. Goats are pretty darned cute. And there must have been something magical to find your neighborhood being invaded by goats. The closest I’ve come is seeing that javelinas rampaging around in Tucson. I’m sure it’s a complete pain in the ass if they’re tipping over your garbage cans every night, but to look out the window and see a javelina family strutting their stuff. Well, for those of us accustomed to rats and pigeons, it was quite wonderful.

As for WeRentGoats, I’ve long longed to work on a product or for a company that’s easy to explain. WeRentGoats is right up there with my previous fave – We Clean Blinds.

We Rent Goats® does just what our name says. We rent herds of goats to remove noxious weeds from fields, acreage, pastures, open spaces, ditches, ravines, embankments… you name it and the goats can clear it.Our goal is to help you restore and protect your property—whether that means getting rid of non-native weeds that are ruining your acreage, or creating fire barriers around your home, ranch, outbuildings, or housing development. We even clear land around golf courses (and find a heck of a lot of golf balls in the process!).

Goats are superior to the alternatives. They’re better for the environment than chemical sprays. Bulldozing – imagine having enough weeds that you’d need a bulldozer! – requires a human to operate the bulldozer. Plus they don’t work so well on steep banks.

And apparently,

You can graze cows and sheep. But these animals don’t like most weeds. And even if they do eat them, they can’t digest most seeds.

Well, I wouldn’t have thought that cows and/or sheep would have been a weed-control option. But what do I know from cows, sheep or goats? Most of what I know about goats I learned from this story. That and I also know that they do yoga.

Anyway, after a completely relentless run of bad news on the local, national, and international fronts, it was just plain fun to read about the Goats of Boise.

And good luck to WeRentGoats. They’re going to have some explaining to do to clients and their insurance provider about how those little guys got loose to begin with.

Flight delay? Think I’ll go buy a Tempur-Pedic mattress

The other day, I read that Brookstone is going through a bankgruptcy and is closing all its mall stores. But it’s keeping its airport terminal shops open.

The Brookstones in Boston (other than the one at Logan) have been gone for a while. Not that I spent a lot of time or money there, but I sort of miss them. Or I miss stopping in and wandering around, which my husband and I would often do on our walks. Brookstone was pretty much the only store he didn’t mind poking around in, and we bought a few things over the years: our Tempur-Pedic mattress and pillows, an occasional odd-ball gift, and – most famously – a totally hideous massage chair that Jim loved.

The massage chair is long gone. Its demise pre-dated that of Jim by a couple of years. He had pretty much fallen out of love with it. I think one of the rollers may have broken and it wasn’t worth getting repaired. As I recall, some guy doing repairs in the building took it off our hands. I was delighted to see it go. A total eyesore taking up way too much space in the living room.

But I maintained the word association of Brookstone and massage. So recently, when I was looking for a foot massager, the Brookstone Shiatsu Foot Massager looked pretty good. Unfortunately, after I used it a couple of times, it just stopped dead in its tracks. So I sent it back and ordered another brand entirely, which seems to be holding up pretty well.

I suspect that Shiatsu Massager will be the last Brookstone item I ever buy.

Unless I’ve got time to kill in some airport and decide I want another Temur-Pedic mattress. (We did like the Tempur-Pedic for a while, and it had replaced a truly dreadful, sciatica-inducing local non-brand. But in the winter, the mattress turned to a block of cement and took a while to warm up and become soft enough to roll over in without worrying about breaking your hip. Not a good look/feel in a chilly bedroom.)

I must say I always wonder about airport shops.

There are so many of them, they must be successful. But I don’t get it. I can see patronizing bookstores and the shops that sell candy/magazines/tee-shirts/souvenirs/water stores. I “shop” at them all the time, picking up water, Mentos, and M&M’s. Maybe a copy of Vanity Fair. Bookstores in airports I’m very happy with. Back in the day, the only books available were potboiler paperbacks. These days, you can generally find a book or two that you actually want to read.

And I can see the “oops I forgot to” shops selling chargers, headphones, adapters and other don’t leave home without it items.

But other than these shops – and the stands selling pre-packaged sandwiches to take on your flight – I just don’t understand shopping in the airport.

You’re taking a flight to Seattle and you suddenly get a jones for a pair of Johnson & Murphy wingtips? And don’t you need to buy your luggage before you get to the airport? I guess your bag can get man-handled or eaten by the conveyor belt. The wheels could come off. So I suppose you could decide to replace your luggage on the spot. Still, does this happen often enough to make it worthwhile to stay open?

As for Brookstone, sure they sell some of those “oops I forgot” and/or impulse items. But a bicycle? A keyboard? A laptop stand? A lamp?

I suppose you order it delivered. Still, it seems like an odd way to shop.

Maybe these airport shops are for those who order from the airlines catalogues. They just associate flight with shopping. Or for those folks who used to order from Sky Mall. Maybe these airport shops are just loss-leaders. They’re for browsers who will kick a few tires on a bike, test-drive a massage chair, and then go and order online.

Just a guess here: sooner or later, those Brookstone airport outlets will go the way of the company’s mall stores. And Brookstone will be one of those things that old geezer sit around reminiscing about. What was the name of that store that sold all the expensive useless stuff? No, not Sharper Image. The other one.

Coming soon to Boston: “the Sam Adams of cannabis”

You see the trucks around all the time. Old-school hunter-green delivery trucks delivering the goods for a company with the entirely old-school name: Brookline Ice & Coal. These days, of course, most of the goods those trucks deliver are ice, rather than coal. Ice for parties. Ice for bars. Bags of ice sold in convenience stores. Dry ice. Ice sculptures. But I like seeing their trucks – and passing their HQ when I’m heading out to my sister Kath’s in Brookline.

Coal…

Not much used in these parts, these days. I believe our coal-fired electric plants have all gone bye-bye. I’m guessing the only use of coal locally is in coal-fired pizza restaurants.

I am, of course, old enough to remember coal.

We lived in my grandmother’s three-family house when I was a kid, and each of the flats had a coal-burning furnace, and its very own personal little coal storage room, in the cellar. And I remember the coal trucks making their deliveries, the rattle of the coal as it shuttled down the chute. It wasn’t delivered by Brookline Coal & Ice. We were in Worcester. Coal came from Claflin-Sumner.

Anyway, the sounds of winter when I was a small child were coal rattling down the chutes, and my father shoveling coal into the furnace and slamming the furnace door – a gate to hell – shut. (That and the chink of chains on the trucks and buses as they drove down the street during ice and snow.)

Coal was really good for one thing: eyes, mouth and buttons for snowmen. Rocks were an okay substitute, but there was nothing like coal. I always feel a bit bad when I see those snowman-making kits that include the little black fake coal pieces (and, god help us, a plastic carrot for the nose).

I remember when those furnaces were converted from coal to oil.

Why these thoughts of coal during the dog days of August?

They were prompted by an article in The Globe on a scion of the Brookline Ice & Coal fortune:

Mario Signore plans to lease a family-owned lot in Boston’s Newmarket Industrial District to build a marijuana growing and processing facility, called Green Line Boston. The goal is to create a Boston brand of locally grown cannabis.

“I saw this as an opportunity to come back and build something,” said the 43-year-old Signore. “I want to create the Sam Adams of cannabis.” (Source: Boston Globe)

First off, props for the name Green Line Boston, given that Brookline is on the T’s Green Line. Love it. And as for the “Sam Adams of cannabis,” well, gotta love that, too. I am, of course, assume he’s talking about Sam Adams the beer and not Sam Adams the patriot. Or maybe it’s both. In any case, I for one am looking forward to the emergence of the pot industry.

I’m pretty sure that at some point I’ll stop in at a modern-day head shop and get me a small baggy. I can’t remember the last time I rolled a J. Certainly, more than 40 years ago. Is it like riding a bicycle? I’ll know what to do with the Zig Zag papers the minute I have them in hand?

My purchase and use may well turn out to be a one-shot, relived youth event until I’m in need of medical marijuana. Still, I can see being a customer of Green Line.

Signore’s Sam Adams ambitions call for creating Boston’s first “pot cultivation complex,” and for hiring 30-40 individuals to work there. He’s looking for investment money, and:

He still has several [other] hurdles to clear.

Signore plans to make his pitch at a community meeting on Wednesday night at the Hampton Inn, in the Crosstown Center.

He needs to negotiate a host community agreement with Boston, and obtain a zoning permit and approval from the Boston Planning & Development Agency.

He’ll also need a license from the state Cannabis Control Commission.

If successful, Signore expects it will take about a year to build the new facility.

Signore said nearby business managers and residents tell him they appreciate that he doesn’t plan to offer retail sales. Helping his case: city rules require a half-mile buffer around pot businesses, which would exclude others, including marijuana dispensaries, from moving in nearby.

Well, they’ll be selling it somewhere. Maybe in the bars that use Brookline Ice, the convenience stores that sell bags of Brookline Ice?

Meanwhile, I’ve got a suggestion for Mario Signore. Why not use the same color scheme, font and logo as the family biz?

It’s already got the green thing going….You can’t see the logo here, but it’s a sort of stylized snowman holding a shovel. Go for it, Mario!

A flaw in the model (or, the world takes a pass on MoviePass)

This is one of my favorite business stories. (As told by my husband the economist, the joke’s title is “the dumbest ever graduate of Harvard Business School.”)

A fellow shows up at his 25th HBS reunion. He’s the CEO of a well-regarded company. He’s dressed to the nines, has a trophy wife on his arm, and has made a major, seven-figure donation to the school. Professors and classmates are scratching their heads. This guy was the dumbest person in the history of the school. No one in his class could figure out how he got in, let alone how he made it through.

One of his section mates asks him for the secret to his success.

“It’s simple,” the fellow tells him, “I make this gizmo for $1. I sell it for $5. And I keep raking in that 4 percent profit.”

His section mate just rolls his eyes. How is it that, after tearing apart all those case studies, this dope never managed to learn that selling a $1 gizmo for $5 brings you a profit that’s just a tad bit more than 4 percent…

The moral of the story: you don’t have to be smart to make money. You just have to know how to make money.

Whenever I read about some business model that hasn’t yet figured out that at some point you have to make money, I think about this story. Because, all those unicorns with insane valuations that made no money and then got acquired for even more insane multiples aside, at some point, if you don’t make money, you’re going to go out of business.

My all-time favorite example here is Kozmo. If you recall, their value prop was that they would deliver any object – even something as small and inexpensive as a latte or a Dove Bar – within an hour at no charge for delivery. Needless to say, Kozmo flamed out and became one of the poster children for the dot.com bubble.

More recently, there is (was? soon to be was?) MoviePass.

…an app that offers almost unlimited access to cinemas for $10 a month. The service, called MoviePass, pays cinemas full price for nearly every ticket that filmgoers use. By design, it loses more money the more people use it….

MoviePass has burned far more cash even than its executives anticipated since introducing the unlimited plan in August last year. It has attracted more than 3m subscribers and will lose “at least” $45m this month, according to a filing to the Securities & Exchange Commission on July 10th by Helios & Matheson, a data firm which bought a majority stake in MoviePass last year and now owns 92% of it. (Source: The Economist)

The bad news is that the heavy-duty movie goers have glommed on to MoviePass, while the types who might pay $10 a month for a pass but end up only using it at a break-even (or narrowly profitable) rate of once a month aren’t subscribing in anything that looks like droves.

MoviePass has some tricks up its sleeve, including “surge pricing”, raising its monthly price, and charging the studios to push their flicks, but this past week hasn’t been kind to this big dreams company.

Over the weekend, pass-holders couldn’t book tickets to the latest instance of Mission Impossible. On Monday, some pass-holders weren’t able to book any films at all. Oops! l

I’m writing this post on Tuesday evening, and it’s not clear whether MoviePass is going to last the week, leaving subscribers – some of them having paid for a year in advance – holding the bag. Or an empty tub of popcorn.

MoviePass said there were other ways it could eventually turn a profit. It claimed that it would be able to collect data on its subscribers and sell it to interested parties, something that became less attractive in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. It also claimed that it would be able to shoulder the cost of tickets by selling ads on its service and partnering with studios and exhibitors. These alliances would theoretically give them access to discounted tickets or potentially allow MoviePass to receive a share of concession sales. However, SEC filings last spring revealed those proposals hadn’t prevented the company from running desperately low on cash. (Source: Variety)

If only they’d had a not-so-bright HBS grad on board who could have told them about his 4 percent solution.

Fortunately, I’m pretty much a day tripper

I’m a regular Uberer, taking it at least once a week. It’s cheap, convenient, a lot less nerve-wracking than calling a cab and wondering if and when they’ll show up (yay, technology!), and I’ve had pretty good luck with my Uber drivers. I know they don’t make a lot of money – it’s even worse than driving a cab – so I always give the driver a good tip.

Although I occasionally take an Uber after dark, I’m primarily a day tripper.

And 99.99% of the time, if I’m Ubering, I’m in or around Boston. Never in Miami.

Oh, and I don’t go out clubbing.

So it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever get caught up in the vomit fraud that has been in the news of late. Vomit fraud occurs when an Uber driver claims that a passenger puked in their car, reports it to headquarters, and pockets a hefty cleanup fee. Not that I don’t think that Uber (and Lyft) drivers shouldn’t be reimbursed for cleaning up a mess if someone tosses their cookies (or worse) while in the driver’s car. (I will give the cookie-tossers a shout out for at least not driving while impaired. Ubering while impaired is a lot less dangerous.)

Uber’s policy stipulates that passengers can be charged a fee that ranges from $80 to $150 if they cause damage or make a significant mess in a driver’s vehicle. A user typically gets a notification saying that an “adjustment” has been applied to their bill, the alleged damage is given as a reason for the fee, and photos of the issue are included. (Source: Gizmodo)

But if the passenger is completely innocent…. That’s another thing entirely. One Uberer was charged twice in one night. Not saying that double sick-drunk couldn’t happen, but it’s not all that likely. Anyway, the guy fought it and got the bogus charges reversed. Another passenger canceled an Uber when the driver didn’t show. The driver charged for the trip anyway, and threw on a clean-up charge for good measure. One Uber driver was nailed for vomit fraud when all the pictures of “cleanup on aisle four” turned out to be identical. Maybe he was using one of those plastic vomit gags. (Gag.)

I’m sure there are plenty of actual nasty incidents. But vomit fraud? Come on. Kind of puts another kind of surge in surge pricing, doesn’t it. (And by the way, Uber backs up most drivers in the cases where a passenger fights back. Other than if you video’d your entire ride, or at least the part when you get out of the car and do a video-sweep of the back seat, I don’t see how you could prove your innocence.)

Apparently there are some drivers who feel it’s worth putting in false claims because there are a ton of people who don’t check their Uber charges and, thus, are unaware that they’ve been had.

Hard to believe. I don’t go over my credit card bills with any sort of fine tooth comb, but I look through them and it something seems off, I check it out. Mostly when something seems off, it’s because I don’t recognize the company’s name. And that’s because the restaurant or shop or whatever is doing business under a name I don’t recognize. Once in a blue moon, there’s an outright bad charge. One that comes to mind occurred a couple of years back, when I was charged $50 by a London-based escort service. Not me! And what kind of escort service charges $50? Seriously, what do you get for $50???

Turns out, there’s at least one Uber driver who doesn’t mind the occasional drunk and disorderly rider:

The cleaning charge can also be a legitimate way for Uber drivers with a strong stomach to make some extra cash. Uber driver Will Preston told Business Insider last year that he welcomes inebriated passengers after he realized that he could skip a professional cleaner, do the dirty work himself, and pocket the fee.

Wonder if he gives them a breathalyzer test before he lets them in his car?

I sure wouldn’t want to be an Uber driver. Not great pay, not great working conditions, knowing that your “employer” is raring to replace you with a self-driving vehicle, and people puking on your upholstery. I’m sure it’s tempting to tack on a fake fee, especially if a passenger has been drunk and/or obnoxious, even if they’re not sick drunk. After all, that backseat puker is out having fun, while you’re trying to stitch together a living driving drunks home. Still, charging someone such a hefty extra just because you can, even if they didn’t? That’s just wrong.

Ah, vomit fraud. At least it displaced bigfoot porn as the term du jour.

Jeez Louise, that’s a lot of cheese

I consume a fair amount of cheese. Toasted cheese (made with cheddar) is a go-to lunch. I like throwing some mozzarella into a salad. I have parmigiano/reggiano in the fridge for pasta nights. And what would pizza – which I have on occasion – be without cheese?

My local pizza comes from Upper Crust. If I’m at my sister Kath’s, it’s from Otto. If I’m at Trish’s, we’re talking Mandee’s. No chains for us!

But if we were ordering up from a major national chain – which, blessedly, we have no need to – the cheese on the big pizza pie would be from Leprino Foods, which holds a near-monopoly on the cheese used by pizza chains. (And if you ever burned the roof of your mouth on a Hot Pocket, that was Leprino’s cheese scalding you.)

The company started out as a modest shop in Denver’s Little Italy. The shop was founded by an Italian immigrant, but the success of the business is due to the genius of one of Mike Leprino’s sons.

The shop was going along, selling the produce Mike grew on his farm, augmented by home made cheeses and ravioli, when:

James, the youngest of five children, noticed his classmates spending free time at neighborhood pizza joints. After graduating high school in 1956, he started working with his father full-time and shared a revelation: "Pizzerias in this part of the country were buying 5,000 pounds of cheese a week," he recalls. "I thought, This is a good market to go after, so I did." In 1958, after larger chain grocery stores had forced the Leprino market to close, the Leprino Foods cheese empire started with $615. (Source: Forbes)

Good timing! Pizza was just taking off as a “thing.” And what an empire Leprino’s turned into.

His laser focus on large pizza chains has allowed him to control as much as 85% of the market for pizza cheese and somehow sell simultaneously to a set of customers — Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa John's and Little Caesars — that try to cut each others' throat in every way that doesn't involve where they buy their milk products. Dominating the market has its advantages: He's able to invest in technology that no run-of-the-mill dairy farmer ever could, resulting in more than 50 patents —and an estimated 7% net margin, which dwarfs the dairy-industry average.

Some may sneer. We’re talking “pizza cheese” here, not artisanal, handmade balls of fancy mozzarella from Maplewood Farm in North Bennington, VT. (Three guesses where the mozzarella in my fridge comes from…) But 85% market share; 7% industry-dwarfing net margin. Mamma Mia!

Jim Leprino had good luck with his timing, but he took scaling up his cheese business seriously. And got a bit lucky there, too.

Leprino realized he needed to learn the science behind making cheese on a mass scale. But with a young daughter at home and another baby on the way, he didn't have time for college. Instead, he hired Lester Kielsmeier, who had run a cheese factory in Wisconsin only to find out that it was sold during his stint in the Air Force during World War II, because his dad believed he'd been killed in action. "When Lester came, I went downtown to the junkyard and I bought a couple bigger cheese vats to make it look like we were really in the business," Leprino says.

So, if Lester Kielsmeier’s father hadn’t thought he was KIA…

Anyway, while Lester focused on scaling up and perfecting the cheese product, Leprino lasered in on the biz. He saw that they were dumping the whey they didn’t use in cheese, and found a market in Japan for it.

More than a half-century later, Leprino Foods remains the largest U.S. exporter of lactose, a by-product of sweet whey, and retains a large market share in Japan.

Leprino’s also developed a preservative mist that keeps the pizza cheese from crumbling when it’s thawed. (Thawed cheese? I’m betting the Maplewood Farm doesn’t use preservative mist on those tightly wrapped balls o’ cheese that have a sell-by date a week out…) Jim Leprino was also savvy enough to get some good deals going with the California dairy industry which in the 1970’s was growing and starting to rival those of Wisconsin and NY. So he ended up with a steady flow of milk, at a good price, into his vast pizza cheese vats.

There are plenty of other innovations along the way that turned Leprino’s into the monopoly it’s become – the entire story is a really interesting read. Not that those innovations make me sit up and say, “Man, I think I’ll order a Domino’s tonight.” I’m pretty fixated on that frozen cheese thing. But when it comes to monopolizing pizza chain cheese, this guy sure did it right. And Jimi Leprino didn’t give any of the store away either. Lester Kielsmeier, the man responsible for so many of the cheese breakthroughs, was never given any equity. I guess if you’ve survived getting killed in action, just having a job and a steady (and good) paycheck to look forward to was plenty enough. (Kielsmeier, by the way, lived to be 95 and worked up until his death.)

Jim Leprino is pretty shrewd, family-wise, too.

Leprino's succession plan is simple: He'll split ownership between his two daughters, Terry, 57, and Gina, 55, who have been on the board for years but won't take day-to-day roles. "I don't want them to be living a corporate life resentfully," Leprino says.

And that, my friends, is the truest indicator of Jim Leprino’s genius.

Jeez Louise, what a story.

Crack down on graffiti “artists”? GOOD!

Over the last couple of years, the state has been working to repair and restore the Longfellow Bridge, one of the connectors between Boston and Cambridge. The Longfellow  is lovely.That’s it in the foreground. (Another wonderful bridge, the Zakim, is in the background.) And those towers that look like salt shakers are what’s given the bridge its nickname: the Salt & Pepper.

I walk over it pretty often, and always fantasize about living in one of those shakers. I’ve got it all planned out, including a cut-in that a car could swing into to make a delivery, and the geraniums I’d put in window boxes. The towers aren’t occupied, or used for anything as far as I can tell. So why not? But it would be pretty odd living on a bridge with the T-rumbling over it 20 hours a day. And likely damp, dank, and dark. But the views…

The restoration of the Longfellow is complete, but the graffiti taggers just can’t leave it alone. Here’s an example of one of the brilliant works of art defacements that some a-hole left.

I don’t know whose mark this is, but I hope he’s among the three “high-profile graffiti taggers” that Boston PD recently arrested. (One of them is suspected of vandalizing the Longfellow Bridge.) Because they’re notorious reoffenders with long histories of defacing public property, they’re being charged with felonies.

“This is a habitual thing for these offenders,” police spokeswoman Rachel McGuire said. “These particular suspects create a quality of life issue in Boston.”

According to Massachusetts law, graffiti is punishable by up to three years in state prison for a felony charge and up to two years in a house of correction for a misdemeanor. A fine of $1,500 or three times the value of the property marked may also be assessed in both cases. (Source: Boston Globe)

GOOD!

I’m not a big law and order type. Although there are a couple of circumstances when I might be persuaded otherwise, I generally don’t support the death penalty. I think three strikes you’re out, which has put some guys in prison for stealing a $5 pair of socks or being in possession of a couple of joints, is absurd. I believe in prison reform. And I believe in second chances. As a volunteer at a homeless shelter, I’m around ex-cons a couple of days a week. Guess what? Most of them are actually just people, trying to get by.

So maybe three years in the state pen is too much time for someone who defaced a bridge. But graffiti vandalism is serious, as anyone who lives in a city knows. And it makes living in a city less livable.

I love when street artists ply their craft on blank walls in their communities. I like the decorated mail boxes. I like the work of the guy who replaced the late “Sidewalk Sam” and does chalk drawings on Boston Common.

But these graffiti guys?

I know art when I see it and this ain’t art. And it’s not even much by way of craft. I put these tags in the category of the kid who’s considered the best “artist” in eighth grade because he can draw Mighty Mouse and the Superman logo. Then I take points away because they’re destroying public property. And more points because their “tags” as a form of self-expression are really just a boring expression of their narcissism. It’s mostly ugly and detracts from the underlying beauty of what it’s sprayed onto. And there’s often a hint of menace in their work. Let them tag their own bedrooms. Have at it! Just stay off my bridge!

Maybe they all think they’re going to end up like Banksy, the British graffiti artist who’s exhibited in galleries and is a multi-millionaire. But most of them are going to end up like Chico 158, or whoever the guy was who did the ugly tags on NYC subway cars in the 1970’s. A big fat nobody.

Maybe they’ll all plead down to misdemeanors. But I have no problem with these guys doing time.

My father had a term for professional baseball players who were on his shit list, and it was “no talent bums.” It seems to apply here.

Taxidermy? Not for me, but…

The other day, while walking across the Boston Common, I passed two fellows taking a picture of a squirrel that was flattened and spread-eagled on the walkway. Once home, I quite naturally googled ‘spread-eagled squirrel’ and learned that squirrels lie flat when they’re frightened, tired, or want to cool down. For this squirrel, with those two giant humans looming over it, on a muggy and hot day when there were a ton of tourists and eccentrics out and about to beg food from, this little critter might have been all three.

That squirrel and its urban kindred spirits, the rat, and the pigeon, and the odd wild turkey or hawk, are as close as I get to nature on a typical day. And I’d pretty much like to keep it that way. Still, it did enter my mind as I passed that bright-eyed and bushy-tailed little fellow that this might not be a bad, if somewhat unorthodox, pose for a stuffed and mounted squirrel. If I were interested in a stuffed and mounted squirrel.

If I were, I now know where to turn. Vincent Kersey lives in Western Mass, and a decade or so ago he hung out his shingle as a taxidermist. And for $350, he’d stuff and mount a squirrel for me. I crossed out stuff there, because what Kersey does is mount. And, if I’ve got this straight, there’s a difference between stuff and mount. Stuff is stuff, like my childhood comfy Sniffy.

Now Sniffy was never a real animal, so he wasn’t taxidermed. He’d probably look a bit more spruce if he had been. But, back in the day when Sniffy still had eyes and a nose, he was stuffed with whatever 1950’s toys were stuffed with: some sort of yellow-ish particulate foam, as I recall. Which was replaced by my mother at some point with pre-pantyhouse nylon stockings.

So stuffed is stuffed.

Mounted is attaching the skin to an armature created to replicate the animal’s body.

Anyway, I learned about Mr. Kersey from an article that quite wondrously appeared in The Boston Globe the very same day I observed that squirrel playing quasi-possum.

Squirrels were where Kersey got his start, but he took off from there. Since becoming a taxidermist a decade or so ago, he’s won many national and world championships, and he’ll work on  anything from big game like lions and hyenas to local fauna like bobcats and woodchucks. He makes rugs. And does all sorts of things with turkeys. Plus he has over a million flesh-eating beetles (harmless to humans, or so they say) that are used to strip the flesh off bones if someone wants a clean skull and antlers set up.

Kersey, a hunter, fell into taxidermy. But once he started down the path, he was hooked:

For the first time in my life, I enjoy every project that I do.

Bravo, Vincent Kersey! I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in my professional life who could make that claim. If we’re lucky, the good projects outnumber the bad, but I don’t know anyone who’s enjoyed every project that they’ve worked on. And that’s including folks like me who thrive on dysfunction and irrationality.

In case you’re interested, here (in Kersey’s own words) is how the process works:

“The hunter shoots the animal and takes it to the butcher who processes the meat for the customer. The skin gets salted, dried, and sent to a tannery, which turns it into leather. It gets shipped back to me and I prep it, sand it, and sew up any bullet, arrow holes or nicks. I’ll order glass eyes and ears and start putting it together. I use a styrofoam mannequin in the shape of the animal that has to be carved. The hide is glued and sewn onto the form. There’s a lot of air brushing and painting and some clay work to bring back the natural colors once an animal dies.” (Source: Boston Globe)

And it’s a living:

“In the right market, I can make a very comfortable living. This past hunting season, 120 deer came in — 80 black bears; two muskrats and brown bears from Alaska, as well as mountain goats and elk.”

I made my way to Kersey’s website, Three Arrow Taxidermy, and found it to be a paragon of clarity. Unlike on many of the tech websites I routinely visit, I was able to figure out right away exactly what his business is. I realize this is easier to do when you’re product/service is something concrete, as opposed to some sort of enterprise software, but still… Tech marketers could take a lesson here. (When I was a regular 128 commuter, I would occasionally see a van emblazoned with the motto “We Clean Blinds”. Each time I saw it, I would sigh and make a fervent little wish that someday, somewhere I would work on the product/service that was that straightforward and easy to explain…)

Beyond clarity and lots of interesting information, another plus of Kersey’s website is that he posts his price list! Way. To. Go.

That’s how I learned that a mounted squirrel – which Kersey would prefer not to do these days – would set me back $350. A javelina’s $1500. A wildebeest’s $4,650.

I’m not wild about big game hunters, of course. I’m not exactly a vegan, so it’s one thing to hunt and kill to eat. But who eats hyena and wildebeest, other than other wild animals and maybe people who are otherwise starving to death? (Maybe Lil’ Donny and Eric eat what they kill.) This reservation aside, I’m all for Kersey’s business to succeed beyond his wildest imagination. Anyone who enjoys the projects he works on that much deserves it.

Open office plans don’t work? What a surprise!

I’m pretty lucky.

I left the wonderful world of corporate for the freelance life before companies started implementing open concept floor plans. You know, the ones in which workers don’t even have cubicles anymore. Your desk is next to the next colleague’s desk, separated (in the best case) by an 8” high panel – probably frosted to let the light through. No physical, aural, visual, or psychological privacy.

The majority of my work years were blessedly spent in a private office. But I did log time in a semi-private office, and a few stints in a cubicle.

The semi-private was fine. My roommate had excellent technical skills and was pretty helpful when I had questions. We were friendly enough. But it wasn’t the ideal situation on either side, and we were both delighted when we each got a room of our own.

After the brief stint in the double, my time at that company (5 or 6 years) was spent in a private office, generally with a window. Yay! I’ve never worked with anyone who does not have a strong preference for a private office with a window. Never.

I left that company for a place that was primarily cubicles, and although techies at my level got private offices, senior product managers didn’t. It was dreadful. I could overhear every conversation within 10 yards of my cubicle, and the PA system, which paged employees all day, blared over my head. On my first day, I made a pit stop on the way home and got a Walkman with headphones.

Things got a bit better with the headphones. And improved even more when some fellows on my team found a cubicle door somewhere and installed that for me. (The company had stopped “investing” in cubicle doors a couple of years before I blew in, so only legacy employees had them.) My guys commandeered a cubicle door after someone in their area quit. Others in my area had made do. There were a couple of folks with beaded curtains, which made their digs look like a fortune-teller’s. And some people had put up cloth curtains.

The only “advantage” of this cubicle environment was that, on layoff days – and there were regular layoff days – people would stand on their desks and survey the floor. When they saw someone from HR swinging by a cubicle to drag the layoff-ee off into a private office so they could get fired privately, the town criers would holler out the name of the person who’d been tapped. “Alice is gone!” “They just came for Jay!”

At my next company, I always had a private office. Until I didn’t. After nine years, we were acquired by a company that mandated cubicles for everyone form the CEO on down. (The CEO, of course, had a private conference room next to his cubicle…) We were grandfathered into our private office situation, but when we had to move to another building, we were cubicled. The building we moved into was new, so we were able to design our floor and we made sure that there were plenty of meeting rooms – from phone rooms that people could use if they needed to work in peace to large conference room.

Although we did our best to make the new digs habitable, ain’t no one was happy to have been demoted from a private office to a cubicle. No one. Pissing, moaning, grousing were the norm.

At my next stop, I always had a private office which included enough room for a table where you could hold a meeting with four or five others. Sadly, most of the people who reported to me suffered in cubicles. My final corporate gig was in cubicle-ville, the hideousness somewhat ameliorated by working from home once a week.

At home, where I’ve worked for well over ten years, I have an office. It’s small, but it’s got a door and a window. And, since I live alone, really doesn’t have to be private. But it is.

I’ve worked with plenty of people over the years, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a preference – make that a strong preference – for an office of their own.

And yet, corporate space planners, HR-ers, whoever decides what the work-scape is, became ever so fond of those open offices. Not even cubicles. Open concept, all in the supposed service of communication and collaboration.

But a recent study by two researchers offers evidence to support what many people who work in open offices already know: It doesn’t really work that way. The noise causes people to put on headphones and tune out. The lack of privacy prompts others to work from home when they can. And the sense of being in a fishbowl means many choose email over a desk-side chat.

In an open office workplace, study co-author and Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein said in a recent interview, “I walk into this space, and I see everyone wearing big headphones staring intently at a screen trying to look busy because everyone can see them.” The result can be that “instead of interrupting people, I’ll send an email.”(Source: Washington Post)

In one company Bernstein studied, the finding was that “workers spent 73 percent less time in face-to-face interactions. Meanwhile, email use rose 67 percent and IM use went up 75 percent.”

There’s a “natural human desire for privacy, and when we don’t have privacy, we find ways of achieving it,” Bernstein said. “What it was doing was creating not a more face-to-face environment, but a more digital environment. That’s ironic because that’s not what people intend to try to do when creating open office spaces.”

I doubt that this study will put a stake in the heart of open offices. They’re cheaper to erect than cubicles, let alone offices, and you can cram more people into a smaller footprint. And communication and collaboration remain among the buzziest of corporate buzzwords. Still, it’s good to have the academics confirm what anyone who’s worked in an office for more than a week or two can tell you: pretty much everyone wants to work in a private office. Cubicles are bad enough, open concept – that’s fine on HG-TV, but in the work world. Thanks but no thanks.

God Save Our Noble Swans

Every country has its own peculiarities, some more so than others. Into this latter category, England surely falls. Vegemite. Benny Hill. Eel pie. And then there’s Swan Upping, an annual July event during which swan uppers – you’ll note that some of them appear to be dressed like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island – travel up a section of the Thames, counting the swans, half of which are owned by The Queen.

Unlike Vegemite and Benny Hill, Swan Upping is not John-Bull-come-lately to the British peculiarity list. It’s been going on since 1168, making this the 850th anniversary.

Swans aren’t just any old bird; they aren’t crows, starlings, wrens or blue jays. Like peacocks, swans are beautiful and kind of ritzy. And a lot rarer than commoner birds like crows and wrens. Thus – what else- the royals took control:

From the 12th century, there began an elaborate system of ownership, with the crown granting special license to landed lords and special institutions, such as the universities, abbeys and livery companies, to husband the swans

The lucky few who were granted permission, and paid fees, marked their swans’ beaks with nicks of a sharp knife — hieroglyphs of triangles, crosses, dots and bands, which were recorded on rolls of vellum.

By 1378, there was an Office of the Keeper of the King’s Swans. By 1405, no one could own a swan unless given permission by the crown.

…Miscreant yeomen who poached a swan egg, or harassed nesting swans, or — heaven forbid — ate a swan could be punished by a year and a day in jail. (Source: Washington Post)

I don’t imagine that swan tastes all that different than goose or turkey does, but there is something about the thought of eating swan that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. Don’t know why that is the case, but there it is. Spare me the roast swan recipes.

Swans are strictly for looking at. There are two living in the Boston Public Garden, which is pretty much my front yard. And then there are the swan boats, also in the Public Garden, which are fun to ride on. So I take a swan boat ride every couple of years of so, just to glide around pond in the green, peaceful, and charming Public Garden. And gaze upon the pair of swans who make the Garden their home.

If I don’t care to eat one, neither do I have any desire to own one.

But the Queen apparently likes to get what’s coming to her, and that includes half the swans that get counted in the annual census. (The other half go to the Vintners and Dyers Guilds.)

Swan-upping isn’t just about making sure that the Queen knows how many swans she owns. 

“It’s all about education and conservation today,” [Swan Marker to the Queen David] Barber said.

It was swan uppers who discovered a few decades back that ingesting the lead pellets that fishermen used to weigh down their nets was killing the swans. Once the lead was banned, the swan population had a bit of a rebound.

But the conservation actually dates back to the royals’ largesse, and privileged folks wanting everyone to know that they were swan-worthy:

The aristocrats craved the status that a pair regal swans in the castle moat or manor lake could afford them. “It is rare to preserve such a big edible, easily caught bird in a heavily populated area,” [Oxford Professor Christopher Perrins] he said. “If it weren’t for the snob appeal of owning swans, we probably wouldn’t have them.”

Well, yeah, snob appeal. But don’t forget you could get a year in the hoosegow if you poached (and then poached) a swan egg. And if prisons are terrible places now, just imagine what they were like in the 12th century. (Hmmm. Now that I think of it, for poor people – the type who might have a hankering for an occasional dish of swan - prison probably wasn’t all that much worse than life no the outside.)

Swan upping, which entails grabbing newbie swans (cygnets) and tagging them, can be a pretty nasty business. Swans beaks aren’t that dangerous, but swans come equipped with a sharp claw hidden away in their webbed feet. And they’re pretty prolific poopers, too. So uppers need to contend with swan parents that don’t want to be separated from their offspring, and once you grab a cygnet, you’re likely to get shit on. Nevertheless, swan uppers persist in wearing swan-white pants, no doubt keeping a stiff upper lip all the way.

Ah, England.

Will the real Daniel Kalt please stand up

As it turns out, I have an appointment tomorrow with my financial advisor. That probably sounds grander than it is. Basically, I’m meeting with a very nice young man from the place where most of my retirement money lives. Jake will assure me that I’m going to be okay, even if I live to be 100. Jake will be there in person, and whoever the other guy is on my two-man tag team will be on the phone. I still haven’t quite figured out what the other guy’s role is, but whatever it is, the other guys seem to rotate in and out. And they don’t add much value, as far as I can tell. Unlike Jake, who is not only nice but smart and who seems to get me. I will, as I always do, ask for role clarification on what the purpose of the other guy is, after which the info will rapidly move out whichever ear is opposite the one it came in on.

I also have a small account at UBS, but it’s not especially material. At some point, I’ll grab what’s in there and take a trip.

‘But if I were a big macher client for UBS – a high wealth individual or a money bags corporation – you’d think that I might, on occasion, get to hear from Daniel Kalt, the bank’s regional chief economist and chief investment officer. Most likely, he wouldn’t be there in person, like Jake is for me. Or even on the phone like the other guy. A computer-cloned version of him would be:

Mr Kalt (49) is well-known in Switzerland as a commentator. Much of his job involves briefing UBS clients on the outlook for the world’s economies and financial markets. By cloning him using the computer gaming industry’s latest animation techniques, he could serve many more account holders. (Source: Irish Times)

In real life, the virtual Mr. Kalt is not yet meeting with clients. While they perfect things, he/it (or, since I’m “learning” German via DuoLingo, er/es) is used to advise the advisors. And he/it (er/es) isn’t all there yet. He/it (er/es) can give a briefing, but can’t answer even basic questions on Brexit. And apparently the lip synching is imperfect.

You’d think the Germans would be pretty good at that, given that they’re past masters at dubbing. When my husband and I were in Berlin for the Fall of the Wall – now nearly 30 years ago – we were lolling around the hotel room one afternoon, taking a break from dismantling the wall with my nail file, and one of us said to the other, “What I wouldn’t give to see an old Streets of San Francisco re-run just about now.” This will sound unbelievable, but it is 100% true, that when Jim turned on the TV, there it was, an episode of Die Straßen von San Francisco.

We were expecting subtitles, but what we got was dubbing. Which would have been fine if we didn’t know what Mike Stone (Karl Malden) and Steve Keller, a.k.a., Buddy Boy (Michael Douglas) actually sound like. Not to mention that this was the episode in which Rick Nelson plays a former rock star turned pimp. And whoever’s voice was dubbing the Irrepressible Ricky (as he was known when he played himself on Ozzie and Harriet) sounded nothing like Rick Nelson.

With the technical advances over the last 30 years, and the head-start the Germans had on making words and mouths worked together by dubbing all those old TV shows, you’d think that they would have perfected things in this arena. I know that I’d be sitting there, completely distracted by the cloned Daniel Kalt’s weirdly moving mouth, even if he did have some good answers to what up with Brexit.

But virtual advising is probably the wave of the future:

As digital disruption gathers pace, retail and private banks in Switzerland – the world’s biggest centre for cross-border wealth management – are travelling in two directions at once. To cut costs, they are automating processes and services, including using “robo-advisers”. But to increase revenues, they are also looking to provide high-value services – via humans – to their wealthiest clients.

Cloned advisers “might be a way to bridge that gap” and provide “a kind of high-touch service at scale,” says Matthias Koller, project manager at UBS’s Wealth Management Innovation Lab.

They can tear the other guy away from me, but I really hope that my financial institution doesn’t decide that I no longer deserve a real live human in the form of Jake. I do not want to talk with, take advice from, or make facetious remarks to a clone.

One ambition of the design team, which is working with IBM on Mr Kalt’s dialogue and conversation skills, is to build a better relationship between client and clone. On the screen, Mr Kalt can wink, broaden his smile – and fall asleep. The sensors could notice that I am not wearing a tie – and remove his, Mr Koller says.

“He would change his shirt, because you have a blue one. He would maybe want to build up a rapport with you.”

Dear Lord. I’d rather get an email from a real fake human than develop a rapport with a virtual reality character. But maybe that’s just me. There may come a day when I wouldn’t recognize the difference.

The assumption of [Koller’s] programmers, however, is that interactive animation techniques in three or five years’ time will have improved so “you can hardly differentiate whether it’s a real or digital person,” says Mr Koller.

I haven’t come across this phrase yet in my German lessons, but, as my mother would say, “Ach, du lieber strohsack.” (Oh my dear mattress, if you must know. If I have to work with a clone, maybe I’ll just stuff my money under meinen strohsack and hope for the best.)

Age-tech? Bring it on! Just not any time soon…

Any year now, I’ll be turning a corner and find myself an old lady.

Oh, they say that “age is just a number.” But when that number is approaching triple digits, well, there are some inevitables that come with it. For me, there won’t necessarily be mind-slippage, at least to any great degree. My mother only lived to 81, but she didn’t miss a beat. My Aunt Mary is 93 and is still in full possession of her entire set of marbles. The longevitiest of my family members – my grandmother Rogers – made it to 97. Although she did have an occasional mental hiccup, she was mostly all there.

But not matter the level of fit as a fiddle-ness you strive for and even achieve, things fall apart. At some point, however far in the future, the center cannot hold. And I will most assuredly die. As will everyone else.

This can, of course, take decades. We live a lot longer than we used to. If you make it to 65, odds are you’ll make it to 83. And a bunch of Boston startups are focusing on products that will make those decades full of inevitable difficulties, big and small, a bit easer on us.

Pillo, a startup in Boston’s Fort Point district, has developed a robot that sits on your grandparents’ kitchen counter, greets them in the morning, and gently reminds them to take their pills.

Another early-stage local company called Eversound sells wireless headphones whose volume controls let seniors with varying levels of hearing loss exercise or watch movies together.

And a third Boston startup, Rendever, has created immersive software that can transport housebound elders to the African Serengeti and the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, with the help of virtual reality goggles. (Source: Boston Globe)

I don’t need a robot to remind me to take my pills, thank you. At least not yet. But my hearing is not as sharp as it once was – a noticeable loss for someone nicknamed “radar ears” as a child. Not that I have anyone to watch TV with – oh, boo-hoo – but I’ll be a candidate for those headphones.

I wouldn’t mind going to the Serengeti and/or Machu Picchu without having to actually go there, but I’m a bit curious about what’s the difference between virtual reality travel goggles for old folks and those for everyone else. Do things move more slowly for us oldsters? Fewer scary bits? Machu Picchu from the ground, rather than from above? No sudden heart-stoppers?

Rendever does offer something that’s more personal for old folks:

Moving into a facility no longer means leaving everything behind. Allow residents to take a stroll down memory lane by revisiting their home, favorite park, or wedding site.

I’m thinking that these strolls down memory lane might prove a mixed bag. Looking through old pictures are one thing. Virtually walking through the rooms of you old home that you probably didn’t want to leave? Might that not make you sad? Those look backs are used for something called “reminiscence therapy”, which I guess is helpful for those with senility. Thus, I hope I never need any more “reminiscence therapy” than laughing at the pictures my cousin Ellen texts over to me, as she did the other day when she and my cousin Mary Pat were going through some old family pictures and found a couple of lulus. I loved the one of some of the Dineen kids, some of the Rogers kids, and my not-much-older-than-us Aunt Kay. We looked like the Dead End Kids,it they’d been straight out of Appalachia. 

Anyway, the tech companies listed above are part of the emerging “age-tech” cluster in Massachusetts.

I believe this clustering was pretty much kicked off by the AgeLab at MIT, which has been around for nearly twenty years. Shortly after it was founded, I heard Joe Coughlin, its founder, speak. The Lab’s work – using technology to keep the elderly up and running - was fascinating then. It’s even more fascinating now, given that I’ve aged into the demographic of interest.

As of a couple of weeks ago, there’s even a “global innovation challenge” – run by a consortium of the AgeLab, GE, and state government – “seeking to generate new ideas for technology-assisted aging.” The goal: make Massachusetts the “Silicon Valley” for the greying of our society, focusing on “emerging products and services that reduce social isolation and loneliness for the older population.”

To date, a lot of the focus of the overall old-folks tech industry has been on applications like remote patient monitoring, medication monitoring, and “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” devices. These are mostly “keep you alive” apps. The Rendevers and Eversounds of the world are about “making life better” apps.

Go for it!

If I’m going to live longer, I sure want to make sure I live better.

Not everyone sees the age-tech boom as an unalloyed blessing. Alexandra Suchman, a management consultant in Washington, D.C., acknowledges some utility in the plethora of devices coming to market. But she worries that many may be too complicated for older folks to use.

And she doesn’t see them as a substitute for human contact.

“Technology overpromises,” Suchman said. “People think they can design a robot or write some code that will solve all problems. But only people can meet the emotional needs of other people.”

I’m with Suchman. I’m delighted that there’ll be all sorts of wonderful technology to help me along my merry way out. And I’m delighted that a lot of it will be made in Massachusetts. But I’m pretty sure I’m still going to want the human factor to factor in.

Economists discover the downside of being a fan

As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I am well familiar with both the downside and upside of fandom.

Up until 2004, when The Olde Towne Team finally won a World Series for the first time in 86 years, I actually lost some occasional sleep rooting for these boys of summer. Over the years, I certainly shed plenty of tears. In especially tense circumstances, I would refuse to watch a game, choosing to get my updates second-hand while I sheltered in place in my bed with the covers over my head. This worked as long as my husband was here to provide those updates and let me know when and if it was safe to come out. Since Jim’s death, I have managed to force myself to look at the scary bits.

Since 2004, however, I’ve had less of a fear factor. Once the Red Sox won it all, and we had our “Ode to Joy” moment, the stakes were no longer as high. I enjoyed the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2007. I enjoyed the win in 2013. And I didn’t mind all those intervening loser-ama years all that much. This year, the Sox are on a tear that has lasted through mid-season. We’ll see how it all ends up. I hope they win. I hope the Yankees lose. Either way, I’ll live.

But I do know, up close and personal, the derivative thrill of victory and agony of defeat that come when you’re a sports fan. Mostly I’ve enjoyed my fandom over these many years – prime for the Red Sox, second order for the Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins.

Turns out that, on balance, “sports make the world a sadder place.”

Armed with 3 million responses to a happiness monitoring app, plus the locations and times of several years worth of British soccer matches, University of Sussex economists Peter Dolton and George MacKerron calculated that the happiness that fans feel when their team wins is outweighed – by a factor of two – by the sadness that strikes when their team loses.

…In the hour immediately after their team wins, researchers found a typical fan might feel about 3.9 points happier than usual – about the same boost as from listening to music. That’s more than offset by the 7.8 points of extra sadness that fans will feel in the hour after their team loses, an event that makes respondents feel about twice as sad as they would be after working, studying or waiting in line. (Source: Washington Post)

The economists were, of course, looking at soccer, a sport that on my personal happy-sad continuum doesn’t really factor in. If I’m watching a game, I’ll pick a side and root. And I’m sure that if the U.S. or Ireland made it to the World Cup, my rooting interest would be revved up. But, as Melania Trump’s jacket once asked, “I really don’t care, do u?”

Anyway, I’m sure that most sports fans aren’t going to look at the equation and decide to stop being fans based on the net negative it brings.

Sports fans focus on the upside. Even when our teams are terrible, we look for whatever little points of happiness that do exist, however infinitesimally small those little points of happiness may be. As a kid, rooting for some colossally dreadful Red Sox teams, I could still enjoy Ted Williams (or anyone else) hitting a home run. I liked it when the Sox had really good relief pitchers – Mike Fornieles, then Dick Radatz – at a time when having really good relief pitchers were as much a sign that you needed relief pitchers because you had god-awful starting pitchers as it was anything else. And over the years, whether at Fenway or plunked in front of the television, I enjoy watching baseball. I even enjoy listening to it on the radio.

But as I said, I don’t get as emotionally caught up in the sporting life as I used to, even when it comes to the Red Sox.The thrills and agonies dissipate with age, I guess, especially once your team has WON IT ALL.

Still and all, it’s a pretty interesting finding that the unhappiness outweighs the happiness that sports brings, at least statistically. Who knew?

A-List techies release their inner children

Alas, I am not now nor have I ever been an A-list entrepreneur. The closest I ever came, I guess, was when I worked for a C-list entrepreneur and our company did some technology collaboration with Microsoft and Bill Gates before Microsoft and Bill Gates were all that big a deal. Our big C-list brag was that we were at Windows of the World when Bill Gates when Windows 3.0 – the first REALLY BIG version of Windows - was announced. Our recording technology – yay, us! – was embedded in Windows 3.0. If only we’d been smart enough to negotiate for a penny a copy for each instance of Windows that was sold, we might still be in business. Unfortunately, we were paid a flat fee ($50K as I recall) and all the bragging rights we wanted. That’s pretty much as close as I ever got to an A-list entrepreneur. Other than at the tech conference when I shared an elevator with Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy and we chatted a bit.  Of course, both those brushes with A-list fame are so far in the rearview mirror, those two Bills are A-list emeriti.

Anyway, not that I know/knew them, I can’t imagine either of those Mr. Bills getting “in touch with their inner child in private ‘songversations’”, which is apparently what the latest crop of A-listers are up to.

Tech elites who are looking for more than extra zeros in their bank statements are finding it in an unlikely place: so-called songversations, emotion-heavy gatherings that combine philosophical rap sessions with improvised music, run by a ukulele-strumming songstress who describes herself as a “heartist.” (Source: NY Times)

The “heartist” is named Jess Magic. And she’s not just a heartist, she’s a ceremonialist and a muse.

I truly believe that languages are living, breathing, growing whatevers. But did we really need the words heartist and ceremonialist? I think not.

Guess they’re differentiators. I mean, anyone can be a muse. But a heartist. Well, that’s something else.

And the techies swoon about the magic that goes down when Magic’s in the house, a “safe space” for those who’ve lost sight of the fact that there’s more to life than heading up the next unicorn.

Branded as “Soul Salons” they import the cosmic-explorer sensibility of Burning Man’s dusty playa into the cozy living rooms of prominent entrepreneurs, where they sing freestyle on topics as diverse as environmental degradation and heartbreak. Think of it as a free-jazz equivalent of an Esalen retreat.

As anyone who’s been anywhere near me at the gym, or gone on a road trip with me that lasted more than 10 minutes, knows, I really like to sing. I sing in the shower. I sing along with whatever’s on the CD or the radio. I sign at concerts. (You should have heard me when they did “Chicken Fried” at the Zac Brown concert at Fenway in June.) I don’t have a great voice, but it’s okay. Pleasant enough. I can carry a tune and, thanks to four years as a second soprano/alto in an excellent high school glee club, I can harmonize.

A song in my heart may be the one and only thing I have in common with Peter Thiel. At least when he’s in the presence of Jess Magic.

“I don’t know if you’d call this a breakthrough,” she said, “but I got Peter Thiel to sing along and Elon Musk to smile.”

Actually, I’d call it a breakthrough if she’d gotten Peter Thiel and/or Elon Musk to act like less of a shit, but I’m sure it was something to get them to sing and/or smile.

Ms. Magic, who seems to approach every topic with a sense of giddy wonder, as if she just fell in love five minutes ago, believes that her appeal is rooted in the spiritual hollowness so many business elites feel, despite their wealth.

“The finance and tech scene is still riding the waves of hypermasculine values,” she said. “Coffee to get through the day, alcohol to wind down, then sleeping pills at night to turn off the mind from all that they have going on.”

“People forget that they are human beings rather than human doings,” she added.

You’d think there would be plenty of opportunities for human doings to act like human beings. Playing with their own kids or the kids of non-A-listers. Walking their dog or the dog of a non-A-lister. Calling their mothers and letting them complain about their fathers’ snoring. Chatting with the person at CVS who directs you to a checkout station. Yelling at the ump at a baseball game. Singing along at the gym.

But I guess when you’re spending 24/7 pursuing tech-based mammon, you don’t get to do those pedestrian little nothings.

Enter the Soul Salon, which Ms. Magic calls “a play date for your inner child” and performs as a “gift,” she said (although guests are invited to “contribute in accordance with the value they feel they received”).

I will say one thing, if you’re going to ask people to pay based on the value they get out of something, you might as well do it with the ultra-rich.

The salons usually start with a theme — say, the emptiness of consumer culture. As key phrases arise, Ms. Magic will begin strumming and humming, weaving those lines of dialogue into a lilting melody. The effect is vaguely akin to Joni Mitchell performing freestyle rap at Davos.

As the extemporaneous song grows, others join in with musings of their own, call-and-response style. Not every captain of industry can carry a tune, of course, but that’s not the point. As Ms. Magic likes to say, “We don’t sing to be good, we sing to be free.”

I can only imagine what those call-and-response sessions must be like. Can I get a “platform”?

“One of the reasons why I do what I do, and why I am, honestly, on this planet, is to show up with such a level of vulnerability and sincerity and authenticity, that it almost gives people permission to let it go for a little while,” she said.

Sincerely, authentically, don’t these A-listers have any loved ones? Any friends? A dog? A cat? A goldfish? Anyone they can kick back with? Sit on the porch with and ask Alexa to play a little Springsteen so they can sing along to “Thunder Road”? Releasing your inner child (or inner human) shouldn’t be all that hard.

At least back in the day, Bill Joy was willing to chat with a nerd stranger on the elevator in a hotel in San Jose.

Blockbusted

This is what we used to do on Saturdays.

First, head to Fred’s video on Charles Street and rent a movie. Or two. Order pizza or Chinese. Put the first movie in. Watch it. Rewind. Watch the other movie.

It was all VHS. I don’t ever remember renting DVDs.

Some people didn’t rewind, since rewinding supposedly wore out your VCR. I think that Fred’s fined the folks who didn’t rewind – at least fined them theoretically – and did the rewinding themselves. But every once in a while, you rented a movie and found that the selfish jackass who’d rented it before you hadn’t bothered to rewind. Nor had Fred.

We’d watch whatever we rented – rom-com, James Bond, whatever - supremely enjoying the fact that we could enjoy a relatively recent movie without having to go to the theater. (The existence of Fred’s absolutely cut down on our trips to the movie theater.) Sunday morning meant walking back to Fred’s before it opened and putting the movies in the slot in the wall, sometimes using the video box in hand as a battering ram to push the boxes that were clogging the chute.

When looking for movies, we never cared about the latest. Give it a couple of months, and it was going to be available. We could wait. But when we lucked out, and something new and shiny was there for the asking, well…

When you went on weekends, Fred’s – a tiny little place to begin with - was always crowded. Nabbing a movie before someone else got their hands on it always gave you a little feeling of triumph.

Fred’s has been gone for quite a while now, done in by Netflix. By infinite choice at the click of a button. By everything on demand.

We didn’t have a Blockbuster anywhere nearby. Blockbuster was a “box store” kind of a place. Suburbs had them, not cities.

We had our own little peculiar and particular stores, like Fred’s. We also had Gary Drug, a terrific little independent drugstore where they knew all their customers and took really good care of them. And Charles Supply, a combination hardware and general store where they knew all their customers and took really good care of them. Fortunately, we still have both of them.

But back in the day, when we had a jones for a movie, we went to Fred’s, or to the place around the corner on Cambridge Street.

Like a lot of folks, we rented a lot of movies over the years. Before, like a lot of folks, we didn’t.

I hadn’t thought of video rental in years. And then I saw on the news the other day that the two Blockbusters in Alaska are closing in another month or two. That will leave the one in Bend, Oregon as the last store standing. At the Blockbuster high point, there were 9,000.

The longevity of those Alaskan Blockbusters made sense. Alaskans haven’t had ubiquitous Wi-Fi, and broadcast reception in plenty of places has been substandard. But modernity final caught up with Alaska. Leaving Bend, which is privately owned and just licensed the Blockbuster name. Blockbuster dump the last of the stores it owned a few years ago.

Sandi Harding, the general manager of the Oregon store, who has worked for Blockbuster since 2004, said there are no plans to shut the store any time soon.(Source: NY Times)

Ms. Harding is absolutely hands-on. She buys her movies at Walmart and Target, and sells candy she scoops up at Costco.

“We still have that core group of customers that know we’re local, are very loyal and come in every week,” she said. “Everyone’s tired of sitting at home on their phones and their laptops and not having any personal interactions.”

Bend, Oregon, must be kind of a magical place, as it seems to be just about the only place in the US where “everyone’s tired of sitting at home on their phones and their laptops.”

Good luck to Sandi Harding. May it ever be so.

Yep, I’m a liberal. (But I’m not all that white…)

A couple of economists at the University of Chicago business school:

…taught machines to guess a person’s income, political ideology, race, education and gender based on either their media habits, their consumer behavior, their social and political beliefs, and even how they spent their time. (Source: Washington Post)

Well, thank god they taught machines and didn’t do it themselves with their very own calculators and eyeballs. What are machines for, if not to guess race and politics?

Anyway, the machine will peg me as a liberal because I don’t own a fishing rod, a reel, or lures, or hooks. Not that I have anything against fish or fishing. I eat fish. I’ve been fishing. Okay, that fishing was when I was a kid. But I guess I’m just an easy to spot liberal. It’s not just the fact that I haven’t gone fishing. I drink alcohol on occasion. And I buy novels. The one thing I’m illiberal on is that I do on occasion buy ranch dressing.

As for brands that mark you as a liberal, of the ten brands that liberals apparently don’t use. I’m a liberal all the way. Arby’s? No thanks. Maybe if the choice was between Arby’s and Roy Rogers..  But, ah, no.

I’m not choosy enough to use JIF, either. I’m a Teddie’s girl, and when i get “normal” peanut butter, it’s Skippy. (JIF? I didn’t even know if was still available.)

I don’t eat at Applebee’s, own a Chevy, or buy Tyson products. I do eat chicken, but it’s apt to be whatever the house offers or, if I’m feeling flush – and ultra-liberal – I go for Bell & Evans.

The other items on the brand list – Sonic, Wranglers, Dockers, Little Debbie’s snack cakes, and Cool Whip. No, no, no, no, no. Sonic I’d be okay with, it weren’t for their annoying ads. And I’ve got nothing against Wranglers or Dockers. It’s just that, for whatever reason, my husband didn’t wear either brand. As for Little Debbie: a colossal waste of calories. If I’m going to eat crap that’s bad for me, well, there’s plenty in line ahead of Little Debbie’s, starting with Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and ending with a Drake’s Devil Dog. And  I will note that my politically liberal mother did use Cool Whip. I’m just not all that big on whipped cream. If I do make strawberry shortcake – the one dessert that absolutely demands whipped cream – I whip it up from scratch.

On the whiteness end of things, I’m a little less predictable. I don’t watch “American Pickers” or “The Big Bang Theory” (although, as a liberal nerd, I suspect I’d like “The Big Bang Theory”). And I fall down on the biggest indicator of whiteness: owning a pet. Oddly enough, the second biggest consumer product predictor of whiteness is owning a flashlight which, I guess, is correlated with home ownership, and whites are more apt to own their own homes. I don’t actually get this. Rent, own, camping, squatting. I’ve always had flashlights. Who doesn’t have a flashlight????

But I really don’t come across as white when it comes to social attitudes. The best social attitude predictor of whiteness is that you “approve of police striking citizens.” Say what??? I’d like to see how this one was phrased. There are plenty of circumstances in which I’d say, strike away. On the other hand, tasering an unarmed guy sitting on the sidewalk complying with police directives….

Second up: gun ownership. Third up: pro death penalty. Fourth: own a rifle. Fifth: voted for a Republican for president. (As if…) I’m a little whiter the further down you go. I don’t believe gay sex is wrong; I don’t believe premarital sex is wrong. (While we’re at it, while it’s not on the list, I don’t believe premarital gay sex is wrong, either.)

In terms of income identifiers, it used to be that purchasing Grey Poupon that predicted a higher income level. Today, it’s owning an iPhone. Chalk it up to my just being a “Never Apple” kind of gal.

The researchers find that, across almost every dimension, America’s cultural divide has remained constant. Yes, high-income households buy different things from low-income ones, and white Americans and black Americans watch different television programs and movies. We’re divided. But we always have been and, despite popular narratives to the contrary, it’s not getting worse.

“What’s really striking to me,” [Chicago economist Emir] Kamenica said, “is how constant cultural divisions have been as the world has changed.”

But there’s one exception. And it’s a big one. The ideological difference between conservatives and liberals is wide and growing.

“This is not a new phenomenon,” Kamenica said. “For the past 40 years, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more each year. On every topic, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more than they used to.”

I guess if the machine and the economists say it’s so, it’s so. But I would like to say that it seems to me that the real gap that’s emerging is between Trumpists and non-Trumpists. Nicolle Wallace. Steve Schmidt. Bill Krystol. Evan McMullin. Michael Steele. They’re all pretty conservative, and I’ve found plenty of common ground with them.

Oh, well. What do I know? I’m just a non-fishing pole owning liberal who’s white enough to own a flashlight, but not quite white enough to own a gun.

Ah, I love social science.

Build-A-Bad-Promotion

When my nieces were young, I did some time in Build-A-Bear, the shop where you can make yourself a tarted-up stuffed animal. It was actually fun letting the girls pick the skinned plush carcass of their animal of choice, watch it get stuffed and sewn up, and pick an outfit out for it. Cute enough. I enjoyed it. But I remember it as pretty pricey – especially when you considered the quality, which was not exceptionally high.

Anyway, someone came up with what I’m sure they thought was an excellent promotional idea: a Pay Your Age sale. I.e., to get the basics – a stuffed animal with no extras – you only need to pony up three bucks for a three year old, six bucks for a six year old etc. (There must be a break-even age, of course. Surely, if I wanted to build myself a unicorn or whatever, I wouldn’t have to pay $68 for it.)

Word started circulating excitedly on Twitter a few days ago that “Build-A-Bear” was about to have a huge “Pay Your Age” sale. For one day only, the cuddlies would be sold not for the usual price, but for the dollar equivalent of the age of the lucky child, as long as the child was present on the premises. (Source: Wapo)

As a promotion goes, this one actually sounded like a pretty good one. After all, it’s the add-ons that add to the cost, not the bare-naked bear. All those enticing sounds, smells, costumes, and accessories? It goes without saying that any kid is going to want plenty o’that.

But apparently Build-a-Bear, which has claimed to sell “smiles” rather than products  - pardon me while I, as a marketing pro, gag; just like Revlon selling “hope” and not lipstick – underestimated the lure of this promo.

On Thursday, smiles faded at the company’s stores across the U.S., Canada and Britain after a big Build-A-Bear sale drew such large crowds — with lines up to a mile long and waits of 5 to 7 hours, sometimes for nothing — that the great stuff-your-own-bear company had to stuff the sale.

There is nothing on this good earth that I’d wait 5 hours in line to purchase, even at an extreme discount. Let alone a stuffed bear in a fireman’s outfit.

In Leeds, England, the police were called in.  One shopper described the situation as “chaos.” In Charlotte, NC, the words were “Black Friday-like frenzy.” In Raleigh, it was “carnage”, with “mobs of kids (and moms) in tears.”

So Build-a-Bear tweeted out an alert:

Per local authorities, we cannot accept additional Guests at our locations due to crowd safety concerns. We have closed lines in our stores. We understand some Guests are disappointed and we will reach out directly as soon as possible.

If I don’t like products being referred to as “smiles”, and lipstick as “hope”, I really and truly despise customers being referred to as guests. One thing if you’re in a hotel. Stretching it, but okay. After all, you are sleeping in their beds. In your very own-for-the-night private room. At a Build-a-Bear you’re in a swarm of other people, with the pestery-kid-to-adult-ratio of 3:1, all gearing up to put a tutu and a baseball cap on a pink dinosaur. You are not a guest. Guests don’t stand in mile-long lines for 5 hours. Those are customers.

And nutso customers at that.

I understand that you don’t want to disappoint the little ones, but this is a perfect example of being able to offer those little ones multiple life lessons. First lesson: it’s really a dumb-ass waste of time to wait 5-7 hours in line, under a broiling sun, to purchase something that the kid won’t give a stuffed rat’s ass about within 24 hours of stuffing the rat. Second lesson, courtesy of the Stones: You can’t always get what you want.

Build-a-Bear had to jump into (re)action, offering their turned away “guests” a $15 voucher.

Inevitably, Twitter did what Twitter does best: deliver some hilarious posts on the situation:

Gotta love Big Mouth Princess@BigMouthPrincss, who tweeted:

NASA now reporting they can see the queues outside Build A Bear Workshops from space.

And multi props go to local news guy from Boston’s very own WBZ:

“My kids love Build-A-Bear,” tweeted one David Wade. “When I saw they were having a ‘pay your age’ promotion I thought to myself: ‘I’d rather have someone cut my chest open with a spork and insert a plastic heart that makes a fake heartbeat noise’ than be there for that. It was a good call.”

Excellent instincts, David, excellent instincts.

I don’t imagine that Build-a-Bear will be running this promotion again anytime soon. But marketer to marketer, let me offer this: how about a Pay Your Age deal tied to the kid’s birthday? Maybe do it by the month, and have it be the Pay Your Age for the year before, just to let the parents think they were getting a deal. You’d spread the crowds throughout the year, and you’d probably sell a lot more of those add-on plastic hearts.