Ouijazilla. (Oh, why not?)

Mostly it’s where my sister lives, but Salem, Massachusetts, is a town of many additional splendors.

It has charming neighborhoods, good restaurants, and the Peabody Essex Museum (a gem). It’s also home to some historic sites – the House of the Seven Gables – and some interesting old cemeteries. No, the witches aren’t buried there, but some of those who “tried” the accused are.

Salem is also home to a truly frenzied Halloween season, which extends pretty much from Labor Day through Halloween, making it a traffic nightmare for those who live there. (On the day itself, my sister works from home, as it is absolutely impossible to get in and out of the city.)

I’m not sure if it’s still there, but Salem Common was/is also the home of Ouijazilla, the world’s largest Ouija Board.

When I was in college, Ouija Boards were an occasional “thing.” Every once in a while, someone in the dorm would whip one out, and there we’d be in our flannel nightgowns, accusing the other person whose fingers were on the planchette of pushing it in one direction or the other. No one ever admitted to being a pusher, but somehow, the Ouija Board always managed to spell out the name of the fellow you were going to marry.  Ooooooooo…spooooooooky…

Since then, I’ve Ouija’d on occasion. And it is fun. Sometimes pointed fun. Once time, I brought my Ouija Board into work, and my colleagues and I relabeled in SWAMI. I can’t remember what SWAMI stood for, but it was the prop in some skit in which we offered it to our managers as a decision-making aid. All in good fun. (Hah!) I can’t remember how it was received. Probably not well.

That company was rife with antipathy towards management. As it should have been. I recall someone thumbtacking a brown paper bag to a bulletin board with a sign reading “Let’s see if you can manage your way out of this one.”

Another sign I recall. “Process? What process? We don’t need no stinkin’ process.”

This little company – chock full of really smart lackeys and really inept overseers – had been acquired and was in the process of being chewed up and spit out. Story of my career…Except that eventually I moved up from smart lackey to inept overseer.

So, big-arse Ouija Board.

Ouijazilla is the brainchild of one Rick Schreck, and the only way Rick’s last name could be any better is if it were spelled Shrek.

He built a 72 foot x 44 foot Ouija Board, which in mid-October he unveiled in Salem. The planchette – the device that moves around the Ouija Board to pick out numbers and letters – is similarly outsized. It take as a lot more folks than two nineteen-year-olds in flannel nighties to guide it around.

Schreck is also the vice president of an organization called the Talking Board Historical Society

…a non-profit group dedicated to researching, preserving and celebrating the history of talking boards.

We indeed live in a world of something-for-everyone variety.

Anyway, it was the Talking Board Historical Society – why do I want to call it the Talking Heads Historical Society? – that made the announcement about Ouijazilla:

To put this in perspective, because “size matters”, the finished board is as longer than a brontosaurus, weighs more than a six-ton elephant, and is large enough to park five eighteen-wheelers on it!

Yowza!

Ouijazilla hopes that it’s on its way to becoming the Guinness Book of Records holder.

But until that happens officially – and it will likely take a few months if it does happen – the owner of the current Guinness is tightly gripping his planchette over it.

Blair Murphy owns a “haunted hotel” in Pennsylvania.

Murphy helped turn the purportedly poltergeist-filled property into a major tourist attraction, with rooms such as the Vampire” and “Frankenstein” suites.

And on the roof, a smaller-arse Ouija Board.

Smaller-arsed, perhaps, but for the moment the grand champeen, at least officially, according to Guinness.

As an aside: what is there about Pennsylvania and theme hotel rooms?

Somewhere along the line 30+ years ago, while working for Wang Labs (where I was a still a smart lackey in a company full of inept overseers), I spent a couple of nights at a motel in Valley Forge, PA. While my room didn’t have a theme, one of my colleagues was in a medieval dungeon, another in a Poconos-style lovenest.

While my room was theme-less, it did have a feature that my colleagues rooms lacked.

After spending a trying day trying to convince prospects that it was worth their while to invest in a Wang mini-computer (readers: it was not), I made my way back to my (basement-level) room. Only to find that it was full of pink suds that had backed up from the nearby laundry room, by way of the toilet.

Ah, the joys of business travel.

I would rather have stayed in the Frankenstein suite, thank you..

Schreck’s Ouijazilla, meanwhile, has gotten the nod from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the world’s largest Ouija Board. But, believe it or not, Ripley’s not a record keeper, and in the grand scheme of boasts, it’s second tier. Guinness is pre-eminent.

Murphy is holding out hope that his title will remain.

His record could survive on some sort of technicality — perhaps having to do with a handful of advertisements on Schreck’s board, which was disassembled earlier this month.  (Source: Boston Globe)

But as Rick Schreck points out, he really doesn’t need Guinness’ permission to brag about having the world’s largest Ouija Board. No alternative facts for him! (As he says, “The numbers don’t lie.”)

While Blair Murphy awaits whatever happens with Guinness, he’s still the owner of the record for the world’s largest tarot card.

Wonder if Schreck will take the bait and make on of those. It’s not a talking board, but it is a predictor of the future.

Anyway, sorry I missed Ouijazilla. Maybe next time.

You no longer need a thumb to give the thumb’s down

I will be the first to admit that, when it came to hiring, I made a couple of mistakes that were real lulus. Once I brought an internal transfer onto my team, even though I knew he didn’t want the job and would be terrible at it. As it was put to me, I could hire this fellow or lose the headcount. Silly me. I took the guy. Net-negative.

There were other times when I hired folks even though their references were flashing WARNING signs. Big flashing WARNING signs. Nevertheless, I persisted in hiring them, assuming that my management genius would lay (figurative) hands on them and cure them of what was holding back their careers. What was holding back their careers was that they were all on the tail end of the nuts continuum. Alas…

On the other hand, my good hires were great. Exactly what I wanted in a direct report: good at their jobs, able to work independently, came to me when they needed help – but not for every little thing. In turn, for these types of folks, I was an excellent manager. I was hands off, supportive as needed, gave credit where due, and gave “my” people whatever level of visibility they wanted higher up in the organization. So, win-win.

Anyway, as a manager able to discern who was going to succeed and who was going to be a major royal PITA, I was a mixed bag. (That said, as a frequent interviewer for those who wouldn’t be reporting to me, but to would be directs to my colleagues or “superiors” [yuck: I hate that word], I’m certain that on occasion I was able to help someone dodge a hiring bullet.)

If I were hiring now – and the next hire I make will probably be for a home health aide – I might be able to take advantage of an “AI-driven assessment,” through which potential hires were ranked and received an “employability score.

HireVue is apparently the top dog here:

HireVue’s “AI-driven assessments” have become so pervasive in some industries, including hospitality and finance, that universities make special efforts to train students on how to look and speak for best results. More than 100 employers now use the system, including Hilton, Unilever and Goldman Sachs, and more than a million job seekers have been analyzed. (Source: WaPo)

HireVue has “proprietary technology that claims to differentiate between a productive worker and a worker who isn’t fit, based on their facial movements, their tone of voice, their mannerisms,”

There are plenty of doubters (including those from the AI world) that this approach works. These naysayers believe that using a system like HireVue is not just fraught with “pseudoscience,” but could be detrimental to “nonnative speakers, visibly nervous interviewees or anyone else who doesn’t fit the model for look and speech.”

Hmmm. I’m guessing that human interviewers might have an inherent bias against hiring “visibly nervous interviewees” or those who otherwise don’t “fit the model”. That said, a human interviewer may have a broader definition of who fits the model. Just say no to nosepickers, but overlook a quirk or two.

HireVue – not surprisingly – thinks its critics are wrong.

Loren Larsen, HireVue’s CTO argues that his system:

…is still more objective than the flawed metrics used by human recruiters, whose thinking he called the “ultimate black box.”

“People are rejected all the time based on how they look, their shoes, how they tucked in their shirts and how ‘hot’ they are,” he told The Washington Post. “Algorithms eliminate most of that in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”

One job-seeker interviewed by “the job-interview machine” had studied up on it in advance.

Nicolette Vartuli:

…answered confidently and in the time allotted. She used positive keywords. She smiled, often and wide.

Despite best efforts, she didn’t get past the initial screen for the investment banking job she was looking for. And she was left wondering why she hadn’t been able to wow the interviewing bot. Was she too loud” Did she not use enough big words?

No way of knowing what the algorithms picked up on.

Of course, it may well have been that she only had a 3.5, and had gone to UConn rather than Yale. And not that she didn’t display enough enthusiasm, or that she only used the word ‘conglomerate’ once.

But with HireVue, job seekers don’t have access to their scores, or any feedback on what they aren’t doing right. (Humans can override the results of the first “interview” round.)

The HireVue system is attractive to “employers with lots of high-volume, entry-level openings.” While HireVue is the industry leader, there are competitors out there. One uses a bot that text messages candidates with some (dis)qualifying questions. Wonder if the folks being interviewed via text know that they’re communicating with a chatbot?

Even though a HireVue assessment may cover only a handful of questions, an interview “can yield up to 500,000 data points, all of which become ingredients in the person’s calculated score.”

Among those data points are “Facial Action Units” that measure “how excited someone seems about a certain task.” The system also measure word choice and tone of voice.

An individual’s data is measured against a benchmark of existing workers who hold a job. If someone measures up well against those who are succeeding in a certain job, they get a leg up on being hired.

Those who’ve bought (bot?) in claim that, with HireVue, time to hire speeds up, thousands of interview hours are saved, recruiting costs go down… Reading these results are giving me PTSD stemming from all the ROI studies I conducted over the years, all the metrics I got someone to agree to my estimates on…

Whenever I see a claim that “using your miracle product, we saved $1M bucks a year”, my first thought is “and you really have no way of proving that.” Just saying…

There are also non-metric “results.” Here’s what one HR person had to say about using an “AI-driven assessment.”

“The more digital we become, the more human we become.”

How so? (Can you quantify that???)

I have mixed emotions about this.

I’ve been rejected for plenty of jobs over the years, and maybe there would have been less of a sting if I knew that I’d gotten the thumbs down from a machine rather than from a human. But a machine tossing my resume because I didn’t pass a keyword scan is one thing. Having to “interview” with a machine is another. “Alienating” and “dehumanizing” are words that some interviewees used. I’m with them.

On Reddit, someone offered a tip for dealing with a HireVue interview:

“Glue some googly eyes to your webcam. It’ll make it easier to maintain eye contact.”

While I’m not 100% enthusiastic about growing old, it’s times like this when I’m happy to be well out of the career fray. Having to worry about gaming an AI “interviewer” by attaching googly eyes to my laptop….

Two thumbs down on that one. I’ve got the two thumbs to be able to do it, which could be seen by the webcam but not, I suppose, by the googly eyes.

Ah, progress!

As holidays go…

As holidays go, Halloween is a pretty good one.

As a kid, it meant being out after dark with your friends (and without adults: yay!), plenty of candy (something we seldom had around our house, other than at Easter or when someone brought a box of Candy Cupboard or Hebert’s chocolates for Thanksgiving or Christmas: yay!), and the next day off (parochial schools were off because November 1st – All Saints Day – was a Holy Day of Obligation. The obligation was going to Mass. Once you knocked that off, you had the day to yourself. Plus you got to lord it over pubs – public school kids – who were stuck in school: yay!).

As an adult, never having lived in a building where kids actually come trick or treating, I’ve enjoyed roaming around seeing cute kids in cute costumes and/or helping hand out candy at my sister’s in Salem, which is insanely Halloween mad. (And where – at least at Check Trish - there is always an ample supply of Butterfingers.)

This year, I plan on laying low.

The weather is supposed to be iffy, but if it’s okay, I’ll walk around my neighborhood, which, while nowhere near the madness of Salem, is pretty big on Halloween. We have lots of old houses, brick sidewalks, occasional cobblestones, gaslit streets, iron railings and grates…so it can be kind of spooky. Lots of people decorate their places, and there are always tons of kids coming in from everywhere.

This is one of my mornings to work in the Resource Center at St. Francis House, a day shelter providing lots of services – from the most basic up to housing and job assistance. The Resource Center is on the basic side. We sign people up for showers, computers, and the phone. Hand out toothbrushes and other toiletries. Issue new IDs. Direct traffic. And sometimes just lend an ear to our guests.

It may sound depressing, but it’s actually a lot of fun – most of the time. It’s tough seeing those who are in the throes of addiction, especially young folks. But most of the folks who hang out in the Resource Center are just down on their luck. Substance abuse. Mental health issues. Recent incarceration. Sometimes the trifecta. But what the people who come through our doors – even if they haven’t made bad choices (which plenty of them have) - all have in common is that they’ve all had bad luck.

And another thing they all pretty much have in common is that they like a treat. When we get fancy donated hotel toiletries, our guests get a real kick out of it. When we have some extra goodies around – packs of kleenex, little sewing kits – folks are delighted.

Today should be busy. Iffy weather brings people inside, and at the end of the month – when the disability or veterans or whatever checks have run out - we tend to be really busy.

Life has played enough tricks on our folks, so I’ll be bringing in some treats: a couple of bags of Halloween candy to have at the desk. I will include Butterfingers in the mix, but promise (myself) not to pig out on it.

While Butterfingers is my preferred Halloween candy, I’m also a complete and utter sucker for candy corn.

When I see it at CVS (late August), I always pick up a bag. I also like harvest creams – a mix of candy corn, pumpkins, moons, cats… But that’s hard to find these days. Mostly the best you can do (unless you’re ordering online or shopping at a pricey candy shop on The Cape, where I recently purchased a small bag of old-fashioned harvest creams) is a combo of candy corn and pumpkins.

When it’s just candy corn, I prefer things straight up, but there are apparently plenty of aficionados who use candy corn as an ingredient. Although I’m okay with candy corn as an add-on to something frosted, I’m a hard no on using it in something.

But in case you’re interested, here’s a roundup of recipes that include candy corn. Use at your own peril.

Happy Halloween!

It's a naive domestic Burgundybud without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption

Well, if you’re anything like me, you’ve been wondering where all the new jobs are going to be coming from, once AI is perfected and robots and algorithms take over most of what we all do for work.

But new jobs emerge all the time, and one of the latest is cannabis sommelier.

This job may not be a keeper. After all, it’s just a matter of time before a robot equipped with an olfactory sensor and the right vocabulary will be able to take over. But for now, a few of those displaced by technology may be able secure gainful employment as a sommelier of a different sort.

Cannabis sommelier is only one of the new jobs that the legalization of pot is opening up.

A by no means exhaustive list would include:

…hiking guides, wedding planners, lawyers, painting teachers, doctors, yoga instructors, marketers, and masseuses (Source: Boston Globe)

Some of these I get – lawyers help you set up your business, doctors prescribe medical MJ, marketers do what marketers do. I guess a wedding planner could come up with a pot-friendly venue and special party favors.

But what do hiking guides in this niche do? Or yoga instructors? Or masseuses? Do they work under the influence, or work with those who’re stoned? Same goes for painting teachers, although here I can see where a puff or two might free a would-be artist of some inhibitions and get the creative juices limbered up.

But back to the cannabis sommelier.

At a recent dinner party in – where else? – Cambridge, John Maden did his thing for party guests. For three hours,

…he directed the guests to smoke certain types of marijuana — with piney, citrusy, or earthy undertones — that he had picked to complement the five gourmet-chef-prepared courses.

Back in the day, folks didn’t need gourmet-chef-prepared courses when they got the munchies. Why, they just went to the nearest Stop & Shop, bought a box of Sara Lee frozen brownies, and ate them frozen. Or so I’ve been told.

But back in the day, there wasn’t such great variety. Piney? Citrusy? Earthy? Mostly there was bad or good. With seeds or without. I am, of course, exaggerating. In addition to bad weed and good weed, there was also Acapulco Gold…And there were certainly pot snobs.

Still, it seems as if pot has branched out since then. And the Cambridge palate has apparently gotten a lot more sophisticated along the way, too. Or not:

“We’re here to really enjoy some bud,” [Maden] said.

The dinner avec bud experience costs $165 per person. Which actually seems pretty reasonable. That is, if you want to toke up with a different variant of bud for each course. I’d probably have fallen asleep by the time the “first course, a watermelon-and-habanero red snapper crudo, with an earthy marijuana strain called “Black Cherry.” was finishing up.

Which – forget about the herb – would mean I’d have missed out on what sounded like some pretty good eats.

Maden is out to dispel the hippie image of pot smokers:

“The Cheech and Chong stereotype of the average cannabis consumer is not accurate in 2019,” Maden said. “But it’s still the perception that a lot of people have in Boston.”

Maden has an interesting resume that doesn’t seem Cheech and Chongish at all. It includes an MPA from Rutgers, a stint in the Peace Corps, and experience in marketing and product management. (Boston being Boston, I found on LinkedIn that we have a connection in common.)

He pairs the marijuana samples with the food not just on taste, “but also for the effect of the cannabis.”

He wanted the guests to experience a bell curve of a high, starting out slow with a strain of pot that would relax them and make them hungrier, then slowly increasing the energy level and headiness, before returning to the lower-vibe feeling.

So maybe I wouldn’t fall asleep with my nose in the snapper crudo.

The dinners, by the way, are run by Dinners at Mary’s, which is run by a woman named Sam Kanter. (Boston being Boston, I have two connections to here.)

Connections aside, I have to admit I’m a bit Canna Curious. Not to mention hungry.

Dinner at Mary’s to celebrate my 70th?

Tornado!

I spent a few days in mid-October visiting old friends in Dallas. It was a do-nothing, mostly uneventful break. Joyce and I took long walks each morning, before the heat. Then Joyce, Tom and I had lunch. Then we hung around. Then had wine. Then we had dinner. Then we hung around watching something sport-y on TV. Old friends with a lot of history behind us, so lots of laughing about the old days…

On Sunday, we we weighing going out to dinner rather than eating in – Joyce is a great cook – when Tom saw that they were predicting an early-evening thunderstorm. So we decided to stay in, and Tom went out to their market to buy some snapper for dinner.

By the time we were eating, the storm was definitely brewing. By the time we had the Cowboys game on, it was brewing even more.

Then came the warnings, interrupting the game.

The winds blew crazily, the rain beat against the windows, and the warnings – which came on every few minutes – told us that there was a possibility of a tornado. We followed along, each of us, tracking different weather info sites on our phones. Then that there was a tornado. Heading our way.

From the outside, over the din of the winds and the rain, we could hear the warning sirens.

Joyce and I took shelter in their downstairs, windowless bathroom. But only for a minute or so. Mostly we looked out the windows while staying away from the windows.

We knew we weren’t at ground zero, but it was plenty noisy out there.

And then it got noisier. Power flickered a few times, but never conked out. Following along on TV, we saw that the storm was heading nearby. Very nearby.

Turns out, it set down a mile or two away, right near the plaza where the store was where Tom had just gotten the snapper. Yikes.

Soon enough, the texts from Joyce and Tom’s neighbors started arriving, the neighborhood check in chain. Then the pictures started showing up on TV. Yep, there was the little plaza. There were the houses blown to smithereens. They named the streets. Joyce has a good friend that-a-way.

Yes, her windows had blown in and they were without power, but unlike some of her neighbors, Mary’s home was intact.

The Home Depot that Tom frequents was roofless, however.

The pictures of the devastation were quite something. Think bombed-out cities.

When a tornado strikes, we tend to think of it striking a trailer park. Or some area where people have little to begin with. Not this one. The neighborhoods hit were pretty well-to-do, solid middle class on up. Way up. One of the homes destroyed was that of Tyler Seguin, formerly of the Boston Bruins, now of the Dallas Stars. A $2M dollar place that now looks totaled.

Loads of folks without power. Roads closed. Etc.

On Monday morning, Joyce and I took our daily walk around her neighborhood.

Lots of broken tree limbs, and four (that we counted) downed trees, two blocking streets.

We spoke with someone less than two blocks away. She and her family had heard more than the sirens. Where she was, they heard the “freight train” sound as the tornado passed by. They were lucky. They just lost tree limbs.

I can’t say that I was ever frightened during this. We never saw the dreaded funnel, and we knew from the news that the tornado was tracking a bit away. Still, those winds and rains were mighty fierce. And another front blew through – even stronger to my ears than the first – between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.

I trusted Joyce and Tom’s home to survive. It’s solidly built. Then again, I suppose that Tyler Seguin’s manse was solidly built, too.

A few weeks earlier, Dallas had experienced some severe weather.There was a lot of damage to trees in Joyce and Tom’s area. And their friend Mary – she of the blown in windows – had lost a car when a tree blew over onto in. The poor thing!

That earlier storm had come with less early warning, so this time the weather folks were primed and ready.

Whatever they were doing, it worked. No one in Dallas was killed.

We don’t get a ton of tornados around here, and they don’t tend to be all that brutally destructive when they do happen. (Other than to the people for whom they are brutally destructive.) That said, there was a tornado on Cape Cod this past summer that did quite a bit of damage. And one out in Western Mass a couple of years ago.

And, of course, there was a major tornado in the early 1950’s that devastated a large swath of Worcester, Mass. I was pretty little – 3 1/2 – so I don’t remember much. It didn’t hit our part of the city, but there were heavy rains, and I remember water gushing down Main Street. And that we lost power and the ability to flush a toilet. So we had to crap in an old coffee can. (I remember my father removing my turd with a couple of paint stirrers and bringing it outside to toss into the field next to our house. My hero!)

But the Worcester Tornado of 1953 did kill nearly 100 people, including, as it turned out, the grandparents of a high school classmate of mine. Fast forward, and for a while there was a minor league baseball team called the Worcester Tornados. Which in some ways seems kind of tacky, but in another way seems quite apt.

Anyway, I guess I can say I’m a survivor of that tornado (an F-4: violent), and the Dallas (F-3: strong) tornado, too.

But are you really a survivor if the tornado just passes nearby, as opposed to right on top of you. Probably not. Still, I could do without surviving or not surviving another one. Might not be so lucky next time.

Tornados are gaining in frequency, but climatologists haven’t yet pinpointed why that is. I’ve got my candidate. We’ll see.

Serves. Her. Right.

With tiresome regularity, we read about some nitwit (some late and likely lamented by their friends and family nitwit) who has died in the service of attempting the ultimate selfie. (Thus turning it into the ultimate selfie.) Surely these nitwits are aware of Photoshop, which would allow them to create and Insta a pic of themselves on the edge of the Grand Canyon, hanging off of the Golden Gate Bridge, or whatever. Sure, there wouldn’t be the thrill of the “get”. But the nitwit would still be alive.

Then there was the recent incident in which some fellow proposed to his girlfriend underwater. They were staying in an underwater hotel room – yes there are such things – and he showed up at their window with a plastic-covered note asking for his girlfriend’s hand. He never got to hear her answer, as he drowned on the way to the surface. To add to the misfortune, his note read in part: "I can't hold my breath long enough to tell you everything I love about you.” Oof.

I actually feel a bit bad for this couple, but so many people get swept up into the desire to do something and present themselves in a unique way. That unique way, as often as not, is pretty risky business.

Of course, not everyone who engages in risky business pays the ultimate price.

But sometimes they do pay some sort of a price. And if you like taking sea cruises on Royal Caribbean, being banned from that cruise line for life may well be the penultimate price. Or at least the antepenultimate price.

The person who is paying the Royal Caribbean price is unnamed, but she’s a young woman who a fellow passenger spotted posing on “a narrow ledge outside of her room’s balcony.”

Fellow traveler Nick Blosic spotted the unidentified woman in a swimsuit pulling the pose during a Caribbean cruise onboard the Allure of the Seas earlier this week.

“While on my balcony, I saw the woman climb on her railing. It happened so quickly. Not knowing what her intentions were, I alerted the crew,” Blosic told CNN. “If I said nothing, and she was going to jump, that would be horrible.”

The ship’s security staff traced the woman and a companion she was traveling with. The ship’s officials removed the pair when the vessel docked in the port of Falmouth Jamaica, USA Today reported.

Both were banned from sailing with the company for the rest of their lives. (Source: HuffPo)

Plus the duo had to pay their own way home from Jamaica. And they may face criminal charges. Although if being stupid were a criminal offense…

At least this nitwit lived to tell her tale.

The consequences of an ill-conceived photo can be dire. Last year, researchers tallied 259 people who died while taking selfies over a six-year period. Causes of death ranged from drowning to falling to electrocution, their study said, and victims tended to be young. (Source: Washington Post)

“…the victims tended to be young.” Ya think? If there’s one thing us olds have over the youngs it’s the wisdom not to snap a supposedly “clever” life-defining/death defying picture.

I do take an occasional selfie. Like the one I took last February of the black eye I got in a kitchen fall. Or the one I took of myself on Election Day 2016 in my white shirt and Hillary cap. (Sigh.) But mostly I don’t have great selfie “platform skills.” I also lack the desire to see my face splashed across social media. And, oh yeah, have no audience that would be interested in seeing it, even if I did want to make a splash.

Speaking of splash, that nitwit posing on the upper-story balcony on the Allure of the Sea was just lucky that she didn’t make a splash.

Getting banned for life by Royal Caribbean? Serves. Her. Right.

Big swing and a miss for Brandon Taubman

The Washington Nationals are up two games to zip in the World Series. As it should be.

Their opponents, the Houston Astros, played a useful role in dispatching the New York Yankees to become the American League Champions. But I’m all in for the National League Nationals to win it all.

So far, so good.

The Nationals narrowly defeated the Astros in Game 1 (5-4), but completely cold-cocked Houston – 12-3 – in Game 2. Both games were played in Houston, so for the home team, it’s not a good look.

But anything can happen, and the Astros can certainly bounce back. But here’s hoping…NOT.

For the most part, I will root for the American League team, but this is the Nationals’ first time in the World Series in their particular franchise history. And the last time a baseball team in DC won it all was 1924, when Walter “Big Train” Johnson came in from the bullpen to save the day.

As a Red Sox lifer, I know precisely what it means to long for a long, long time for a World Series win. So I’m all in for the Nationals to be crowned World Series Champeens for 2019.

While I have pro-Nationals reasons to root for the Nationals, I also harbor a bit of animus towards the Astros. The team has a reputation for arrogance, for going out of their way to tick folks off, for being cheater-panters. (Sounds like the NE Patriots? Well, yeah, and I don’t like them all that much either.)

But the latest reason to dislike the Astros is the behavior of one Brandon Taubman, the team’s assistant general manager. Make that former assistant GM.

During the postgame clubhouse celebration after the Astros had won the American League pennant:

Three female reporters heard Taubman shouting “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so f------ glad we got Osuna!” after reliever Roberto Osuna’s rocky appearance in that game. SI reported that Taubman turned to the reporters when he yelled his comments. (Source: Washington Post)

In fact, it was more than “overheard.” Most who witnessed the outburst saw it as directed at those women. (It almost goes without saying that Taubman smoking a cigar at the time…) The Sports Illustrated writer – who was one of the reporters Taubman’s remarks were directed at -  described the scene as “offensive and frightening”

It wasn’t the f-bomb that was “offensive and frightening”. Anyone hanging around a locker room has heard worse. It’s that Osuna – the player Taubman was voicing such full-throated support for - is a controversial player who was controversially picked up by the Astros while under a 75 game suspension by Major League Baseball for domestic violence. (Again, shades of the NE Patriots and their recent catch and release with Antonio Brown.) Plus one of those three female sportswriters is a supporter of anti-abuse programs and was opposed to the Astros bringing Osuna on. She was, at the time of Taubman’s verbal assault, wearing a purple bracelet indicating support for victims of domestic violence.

One of the men standing with Taubman when he screamed – because over the course of a few days what some were characterizing as shouting was anted-upped to screaming -  at the women came over to apologize to them. Just not Taubman.

When the article on Taubman’s flamery came out in SI, the Astros went into arrogant deny, deny, deny mode, accusing SI of making the whole thing up. (Fake news! Fake news!)

Then Taubman issued his own mealy-mouthed self-defense.

He said something “inappropriate.” (Actually, he reportedly screamed the inappropriate a half-dozen times, from 8 feet away.) He was only supporting one of his players. He’s a husband and a father. He’s a “progressive and charitable member of the community” (Hoo boy!)

Amazingly, he didn’t throw in that he’s an Ivy Leaguer. (Cornell ‘07. Thanks, Linkedin!)

Then Taubman issued the by-now-familiar “if I offended anyone…” poor-me faux apology.

The Astros continued to (mostly) back Taubman, their GM (Taubman’s boss) saying there were “different perspectives” on the situation.

Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow said “we may never know” the intent behind Taubman’s outburst.

One of life’s little mysteries. Hmmmmm.

Luhnow also admitted “I think, from my perspective, clearly something happened that [Taubman] regrets.”

I always love that “something happened” thing-y. No one actually caused that something. No one was the agent. That something just kinda-sorta came about.

The one Astro person who came out strongly on the situation, their manager A.J. Hinch, termed the incident “unfortunate” and “uncalled for,” and said:

“For me, as a leader in this organization down here in the clubhouse, on the field, I take everything that happens in the clubhouse to heart,” Hinch said. “No one, it doesn’t matter if it’s a player, a coach, a manager, any of you members of the media, should ever feel like when you come into our clubhouse that you’re going to be uncomfortable or disrespected.”

But the hue and the outcry continued, and “something happened” that neither the Astros nor Taubman wanted. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred got involved, saying he was “really concerned” about the incident. And was awaiting results of the initial investigation before deciding whether to bring a Louisville Slugger down on Taubman and/or the Astros.

“We pride ourselves on providing an inclusive, harassment-free environment in all of the various aspects of our business,” Manfred said. “It’s a core value for baseball, and I think that we have to be tremendously concerned whenever we have an incident that attracts this much attention.”

None of this was exactly a career-enhancing development for Taubman, for sure.

He had been rumored as a possible GM for the Red Sox.  (They’re looking.) But I’m pretty sure that he’s been scratched from that consideration. There was rampant speculation that Taubman would be fired, and many calls for his suspension or dismissal.

Well, dismissal is what happened.

Yesterday, the Astros canned Taubman.

And the Astros put out a new apology, stating that the now realize that Taubman wasn’t being “overexuberant” in support of a player, but was, rather, vilely directing his comments at the women reporters.

Taubmann is 34. He had what I’m guessing would be to maybe a million baseball junkies the ultimate dream job. And now he’s in a nightmare of his own making.

I believe in second chances, but I’m guessing it’ll be a while before Brandon Taubman gets a second chance from anyone in the wonderful world of baseball. Who wants to be saddled with this jerk?

Big swing and a miss, bro.

The Glenlivet Capsule Collection: not my pod of tea, but still…

A few weeks ago, as part of something called London Cocktail Week, Scotch whisky distiller Glenlivet rolled out what they’re calling their Capsule Collection. The Capsule Collection is a limited edition suite of “glass-less” cocktails, three seaweed (swallowable and/or biodegradable) pods each featuring a different Glenlivet-based mini-cocktail: citrus, wood, and spice.

They’re not meant to be a full down-the-hatch cocktail, but rather as an ‘amuse bouche’, a fun little taster. The application, as Glenlivet tells us, is pretty straightforward:

”Enjoying them is simple, the capsules are popped in the mouth for an instant burst of flavour, and the capsule is simply swallowed. There is no need for a glass, ice or cocktail stirrer.” (Source: The Scotsman)

Needless to say, the announcement was met with a burst of Twitter doing what Twitter does: a kabillion tweets making fun of what appeared to be ‘alcoholic Tide Pods.’ Only not poison.

That was from the snark brigade. Add the shocked reaction of Scotch purist aficionados who are just horrified by this innovative but highly unorthodox approach to enjoying a glass of Scotch. Which I believe is meant to be savored in front of a roaring fire while you’re wearing a smoking jacket and staring at the deer head mounted over the Balmoral fireplace, hoping that one of Queen Elizabeth’s corgis doesn’t nip your ankle. Or something like that.

It has been decades since I enjoyed a glass of Scotch. On that occasion – was it really the night before my grandmother’s funeral?(excuse: I was in my 20’s) – I enjoyed a few too many. And that was the end of Scotch for me. Forty-years on, the smell still makes my stomach churn.

Perhaps because of this, my first impulse on hearing about the Glenlivet Collection was to join in the make-fun of the snark brigade.

But then I thought a bit about it, and although I won’t be amusing my bouche with them, I came to the conclusion: why not? If I didn’t despise Scotch, if my days of drinking any brown whisky weren’t far behind me (except maybe for rum in a rum coke), slurping a couple of teensy-weensy cocktail-eens down actually sounds like a fun way to explore a new drink without making a full commitment. Kind of like the teensy-weensy little spoon-eens they give you in an ice cream shop so you can do your flavor sampling.

The biggest downside seems to be the same one that plagues Tide Pods and dishwasher pods: they look so pretty that toddlers are lured into swallowing them. Since Tide Pods were introduced, there have been a handful of deaths of children ingesting them. (And then there’s the conscious stupidity of teenagers who until YouTube removed the vids were answering the call of the Tide Pod Challenge and making themselves sick by gobbling them down. Probably better getting sick drunk on Scotch – without alcohol-poisoning level overdoing it. Just sayin’.)

Miriam Eceolaza, director of The Glenlivet, said the ‘Capsule Collection’ embodies The Glenlivet’s new global campaign – Original By Tradition, he added:  “As a brand that celebrates originality, we are always looking to break the conventions that have determined how single malt Scotch has historically been enjoyed.

“The Glenlivet Capsule Collection does exactly that, and we’re excited to see how people react when they try our glassless cocktails. Our founder, George Smith, always went against the grain, bucking tradition and doing things differently. The Glenlivet Capsule Collection continues his pioneering spirit today.”

Booze pods may never become a thing – a thing like Jello shots, which they sort of bring to mind. Except that they’re a tad (hah: a lot) more sophisticated. But I think that, from a marketing point of view, it’s an interesting concept. Whether it will get folks to drink more Glenlivet is another story. (Include me out there, but still…)

And to think that I saw it on Acorn Street

I live in a neighborhood that has many charming streets on it. Chestnut. West Cedar. Brimmer.

My block on Beacon Street is not especially charming. Historic, yes: a lot of stately granite buildings – all originally single family homes; some of them still are – built in the 1860’s. And we’re directly across from the Boston Public Garden, which oozes charm. But, no, my block isn’t particularly quaint or adorbs.

It’s still a tourist attraction, however, thanks to Cheers, which anchors the far end and, after all these years, still manages to lure a ton of tourists, all of who want to take a picture of themselves at the precise moment I’m walking by.

But people want that pic to include the Cheers banner, or awning, or whatever it is that’s reminiscent of the show. They’re not looking for charm; they’re looking for show biz.

If they’re really looking for charm, they’re up the Hill and over a block, to Acorn Street.

If that doesn’t exude charm, I don’t know what does. (If you can’t see the photo, just google “Acorn Street Boston”.)

I walk by Acorn Street every once in a while, but I seldom walk on it.

The sidewalks are too narrow, and if there’s a surface that’s more difficult to walk on than cobblestones, I don’t know what it would be. Especially walking downhill. (Acorn Street is pretty steep.) And especially when it’s rainy. Or snowy. Or icy. Or leafy.

So, since I don’t want to break a hip, or end up with a bashed in skull, I tend to avoid Acorn Street.

But for those in love with seeing themselves on Instagram, those looking for the perfect engagement picture, those looking for the perfect background for an ad pushing luxury goods, Acorn is just dreamy.

On Acorn Street, the struggle for the perfect Instagram shot is real. On any given day, no matter the season, dozens or even hundreds of people from all over the world flock to this Beacon Hill alley, a private drive wedged between a row of 19th-century homes and fenced-in gardens. Tourists and locals alike pose before backdrops plucked straight from Longfellow: charming front doors, vine-covered brick walls, gas street lamps, and quaint cobblestones.

But in the Instagram era, the allure of Acorn Street’s postcard perfection has become so powerful that actually living here, on the other side of the shutter, can be a lot less idyllic, owners and residents of the dozen or so multimillion-dollar homes say. (Source: Boston Globe)

Talk about first-world problems.

Still, you can’t entirely blame the Acorn Street residents for being a bit ticked off. Folks leave trash behind. They make a lot of noise. They plunk their butts down on stoops. They peeping Tom the windows of anyone unwise enough not to keep the internal shutters shut. One couple took the street over for their wedding. One resident looked out their window and saw a selfie-stick pointing their way.

“Just think if you lived here,” said one fed-up resident, who refused to give his name.

Anyway, Acorn Street has become a big deal, tourist-wise. It’s used in ads. A visit is recommended on travel sites. And it’s a social media darling.

Some locals believe it might be the most photographed street in the country. (The counterargument would be Lombard Street, the steep, serpentine tourist grab in San Francisco. More folks may visit Lombard Street. Who knows? But, while Lombard Street is interesting, I’d give Acorn the edge when it comes to charm.)

Where Acorn Street people went wrong was in the 1980’s. There was a proposal out there to pave over this particular bit of paradise, but the residents decided to keep those cobblestones. (Broken ankle be damned!)

It’s probably those cobblestones that turn Acorn Street into such an attraction.

The Acorn Street Association is trying to figure out what to do with the tourists. They’re fine with those who just stick their heads down or up and take a quick picture at either end of the street. It’s the long photo shoots. The intrusion. It’s the “barefoot dancers hanging from the lamp posts.”

One of the options is charging people an entrance fee. (Acorn Street is a private way, and the residents own what’s in front of their houses.) Another is just outright forbidding any access to outsiders.

So far, the Association has tried a kinder, gentler approach: posting “no trespassing” signs; polite requests that professional photographers and videographers apply (and pay for) permits.

Residents are responding in a variety of ways. Swearing at tourists, threatening to calling the police, or – on the other end of the spectrum – welcoming visitors and filling them in on the history of the street.

Maybe I’ll swing by on my next walk. As long as it’s not a slippery day, I might actually walk up or down the street. (Note to self: wear your sturdiest sneakers.) What I wont do is take a selfie and post it on Instagram. With luck, no one with swear at me or call the cops.

Could things possibly get any worse for WeWork? Answer: Yes!

Things haven’t been working out so well lately for WeWork, the shared-office-space rental company.

After filing its IPO paperwork, the company started getting a teensy bit more scrutiny from the market. Folks were starting to ask impertinent questions like ‘how is this company ever going to make a profit?’

The pre-market valuation took a nosedive, from a heady $47B to a mere $10B.

Now $10B is still plenty of scratch, but when you’re thinking a paper value of $47B, and the paper value all of a sudden is $10B (less, by the way, than the amount of investment that has been sunk into the company; oopsie!), suddenly you’re feeling poor.

The IPO was at first postponed for a month. Then the CEO was moved aside. And now the IPO is on permanent hold.

Those visions of fat payouts that employees had been hallucinating? Goners! I’m can only imagine that morale is none too high in the open offices at WeWork. Not to mention the morale of Adam Neumann, the CEO who was pushed out. He wanted to be the world’s first trillionaire. He’s now worth about half of what he was a year ago. He’s still a billionaire, but a lower-end one. It’s only money paper…

But no matter how awful things are, we all live in the very real world that tells us that, in almost every case, things can get worse.

Last week, WeWork:

…disclosed a new problem on Monday: possible formaldehyde contamination of hundreds of phone booths at some of the buildings it leases. (Source: NY Times)

The problem stems, according to WeWork, from the manufacturer’s choice of materials. Still, it’s WeWork’s tenants who were making phone calls from them. WeWorks immediately identified 1,600 bad booths in the US and Canada, and is taking out another 700 “’out of an abundance of caution.’”

Phone booths sound so quaint and old-fashioned, but in the open-shared space offices WeWork rents out, they’re the only place where tenants can go to have a phone convo. Providing such space is a key part of their value proposition.

WeWork did react pretty quickly when tenants started complaining about odor and eye irritation, but just the idea that they’ve been renting out a toxic-y environment is not going to help them along. (Or further Adam Neumann’s quest for that trillion.)

Exposure to formaldehyde can cause respiratory symptoms, and eye, nose, and throat irritation, according to the agency, which considers it a probable human carcinogen.

How long’s it going to take before someone takes them to court over this one?

There was other recent bad news for WeWork, although not the sort of news that’s hazardous to anyone’s physical health.

Last week, the company said that another subsidiary, WeGrow, a for-profit private school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan that opened in 2018, would close next year.

The school, which has about 100 students and where tuition for 3-year-olds starts at $36,000, has described its mission as “elevating the collective consciousness of the world by expanding happiness and unleashing every human’s superpowers.”

Hmmm. How about a little less unleashing of superpowers and a little more attention to details like not installing cut-rate phone booths that make humans sick.

Anyway, doesn’t look like happiness will be expanding for anyone associated with WeWork anytime soon.

Git along little gita

One of the downsides of not owning a car is what to do about grocery shopping. Actually, the shopping isn’t the problem. It’s the schlepping.

I’ve done a little – very little – with online services, but a lot of what I buy is fresh fruits and veggies, and I don’t trust someone else to pick out fresh fruits and veggies for me. I’m also someone who examines the sell-by date on milk, and I don’t trust someone else to rummage into the back of the dairy case and check for the milk with the furthest out expiry date.

So I make frequent trips to the grocery store.

When I’m doing a big shop, I bring my backpack and my shopping bags. When I do a really big shop, I add in my old-lady grocery cart. But mostly I do a lot of small trips, which works out because my main grocery store is across the street from the gym where I work out a few times a week.

I haven’t tried it out yet, but my grocery store also has a delivery service which I will probably explore this winter. I can go in, load my cart up, bring home the perishables and let them deliver the heavy stuff.

This will help remove my fear that one day, with an overloaded backpack, I’ll keel over backwards on my narrow front steps while fumbling with the key and tumble over backwards and break my neck. Which actually wouldn’t be that bad a way to die, as long as you die and don’t end up paralyzed. But I’m not ready to go quite yet, and I’d hate to see my frozen yogurt melting all over the steps and sidewalk. So I think I’ll experiment with the home delivery.

What I won’t be doing is spending $3,250 for a gita to haul my groceries back home for me.

Not that it’s not nice looking and all. It’s just that $3,250 is a pretty hefty price to pay for a hands-off shopping cart. A shopping cart that doesn’t climb stairs, which means there’d still be the problem of dragging the groceries up a flight. Not to mention carrying the gita up those steep steps.

Never heard of the gita? Me neither. After all, it was just announced last week and won’t be available until November. Anyway:

…the “gita” (pronounced “jee-ta” and spelled with a lowercase “g”), [is] a brightly colored, carbon-fiber robot that looks like some futuristic mixture of an exercise ball and cooler, or perhaps a commercial-size rice cooker flipped on its side and strapped to a pair of rubber bicycle wheels.

Its only purpose: to follow you wherever you go, dutifully toting your belongings like a mini pack mule on wheels (minus the animal welfare concerns). (Source: Washington Post)

Well, I’m guessing that this description – rice cooker? mini pack mule? – isn’t exactly a PR dream, but, hey, we’re talking about it, aren’t we? So mission accomplished, if not in the most flattering light.

Anyway, the gita is a local product, Boston-bred at Piaggio Fast Forward, with Italian roots. (The company is owned by Vespa.)

Piaggio believes that:

…the robot will compete with last-mile transportation solutions like e-scooters and ride-hailing companies.

Ummm. I can see ride-hailing. You really might want to use a cab or Uber to get home with a load of groceries. But competing with an e-scooter? How do you carry 40 pounds of groceries on an e-scooter?

“We’re trying to unlock the value of walkability in American towns and cities with a device that will appeal to people that are primarily driving and taking Ubers for their short errands and trips,” [Piaggio CEO Greg] Lynn said, noting that, unlike e-scooters, gita won’t crowd busy sidewalks or put pedestrians at risk of physical harm. “And we’re trying to convince people that it’s mentally and physically healthier to walk that mile instead of electric scootering or bicycle-sharing it.”

I repeat. How does something that carries a couple of shopping bags compete with an e-scooter or bicycle share? There are a ton of bicycle shares in my area, and I’m seeing a lot more people on e-scooters. But I can’t think of one instance in which I’ve seen anyone carrying anything other than a small backpack while riding on them.

So from a messaging point of view, well, duh, guess I just don’t get it.

And speaking of not getting it:

The company’s motto: “Autonomy for humans.”

I realize that self-driving is overtaking earlier meanings for autonomous. Is autonomy taking on new meaning as well? Freedom from carrying grocery bags? And isn’t “autonomy for humans” already, like, a thing? And you, like, develop it as you mature – you don’t buy it for $3,250.

Always the possibility that I’m missing something there…Not to mention that I’m missing something here:

Jeffrey Schnapp, Piaggio Fast Forward co-founder and chief visionary officer, said moving around the world with your hands object-free means a pedestrian can more fully interact with their environment, whether that means being more curious or socializing without distraction.

Hmmm. When I go grocery shopping, I want to get home and get my fro-yo into the freezer. I’m not curious about the squirrels on the Common, nor am I interested in socializing with folks looking for Cheers.

“We see gita as support for someone’s daily life and an extension of yourself, but we also see it serving as a type of connective tissue among friends,” Schnapp said.

“Extension of yourself”? “Connective tissue among friends”?

I can see this being of moderate utility as an assistive device, especially if they can figure out how to get it to climb stairs. Other than that, it’s mostly got me asking ‘what’s robotic for FFS?’

Basically, the gita looks to me like a pricey robot that can carry a couple of grocery bags.

Just exercising my opinionated autonomy here…

My kind of town, Chicago is. (And maybe Pittsburgh could be.)

Pink Slippers will know that if there’s one thing we like to blog about, it’s lists – especially those that confirm my biases. E.g., Massachusetts is the smartest state.

I’m not the only one in the family.

My Chicago cousin Ellen just asserted her bragging rights by pointing out that Chicago was recently chosen the Condé Nast Best Big City (Readers’ Choice) in the U.S., making it a three-peat for the Windy City.

Congratulations, Chicago!

It couldn’t happen to a nicer city. Apparently.

Among the reasons cited for Chicago’s getting the W is the fact that, “no matter where you go, some of the most pleasant people you'll find anywhere.”

My guess is that the Condé Nast Readers’ Choice-makers didn’t make it to every place in the city, as I’m pretty sure there are pockets where the folks can be downright unpleasant. Just sayin’. But also sayin’ that there is really something about Midwest Nice.

My mother hailed from Chicago, so I’m half-Chicago, but it really is one of my favorite cities. Fabulous architecture, a magnificent waterfront, interesting neighborhoods, good walking, terrific museums, great food. Plus it gets props from me for being both a Boston-style crazy-about-sports town, and for its vibrant literary heritage. Oh, yeah, and I have some quite excellent relatives there!

Other than being flat – where do kids go tobogganing in the winter? – and the painful to these ears accent, I could happily live there. (It’s my absolutely favorite city to see on House Hunters on HG-TV.)

Midwest nice was a real thing in this year’s Top Ten, as Minneapolis came in second. The poll was apparently taken prior to Trump’s recent campaign rally, during which Somali refugees (among many, many others) were jeered by the frothing audience, which also got off on “the president’s” orgasm-mimicking reenactment of a conversation between the two FBI agents who were caught out making fun of the Trumpster during the 2016 campaign. So much for nice, and this wasn’t it.

Anyway, I’ve been to Minneapolis a few times on business, and rather liked the city.

Boston came in third in the polling. No mention of nice, even though we are, as far as I’m concerned. What does get mentioned in the Freedom Trail – but not the fact that Boston’s a wonderful walking city in general. It mentions Fenway Park (and “Sweet Caroline”), but not The Public Garden, The Common, The Esplanade, The Greenway, The Emerald Necklace, and any of our other wonderful parks. It mentions “slurping up oysters”, which certainly is a thing – and a thing that I enjoy on occasion – but not what a great town this is for ice cream. Can’t have everything, I guess.

The remaining places that made the Ten Best Big Cities list are:

New Orleans (4)

Washington DC (5)

San Diego (6)

New York (7)

Pittsburgh (8)

Honolulu (9)

San Antonio (10)

Props to these discerning readers for picking a quite a few cold-weather cities!

Other than Honolulu, where I’ve only been in the airport, and Pittsburgh, I’ve been to all the cities on the list, and enjoyed them all. I’m just a city girl at heart, and rarely meet one I don’t like at least something about. Okay. Newark. And I’m spending the weekend in Dallas, which – other than being the home of old friends – doesn’t have all that much to commend itself. (New York City is my all-time, hard-to-beat favorito.)

Pittsburgh’s making the list I find interesting. As a Big City, it’s one-ninth the size of Chicago, and less than half the size of Boston, but it packs a Big City enough punch to make the list.

Folks still call it Steel City, but Pittsburgh’s recent revitalization has brought loads more than new jobs to this post-industrial city. You could spend a whole weekend brewery-hopping—there are at least 20 within city limits—and exploring a dining scene that involves way more than slapping fries on everything (though we recommend that, too). Start your journey in the Strip District, home to some of the city’s best restaurants, like Gaucho Parrilla Argentina and DiAnoia's Eatery, and drop in at the Heinz History Center, where you can return to your childhood via the original set from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. (Source: Condé Nast Traveler)

Well, maybe not my childhood, which was spent in the original Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood (that would be my father’s born-bred-died ‘hood) in Main South Worcester. But I’m a fan of both Mr. Rogerses (even though the original is still the greatest).

One of the reasons I find Pittsburgh an interesting pick is because, for whatever reason – maybe the fact that I’ve had recurring dreams about being at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers – Pittsburgh is on my bucket list. Heinz History Center, here I come!

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

A doff of the Pink Slip chapeau to my cousin Ellen for sending this one my way.

‘Last wave of job cuts’? Wanna bet?

Oh, it’s only one percent of their workforce, so no big deal. Unless, of course you’re one of the one percent. No, this isn’t the one percent that everyone would like to be part of. We’re talking one percent of the Uber workforce who just got their pink slips.

This time, it was Eats employees, performance marketing, and the group focusing on self-driving car development.

I’m guessing this latter group may have felt secure, as autonomous vehicles are the wave of the future. Especially the future of Uber, which is ultra-hyped on the concept. The company has plowed over $1B into development over the last couple of years, and hauled in an additional $1B in investment last spring. When it does start to work out, self-driving cars will enable Uber to get rid of its ultimate pesky human factor. Forget riffing 350 employees. Uber’s out for ridding itself of its 3M non-employees – all those independent contractors who suck so much money out of the company coffers, and who are always agitating for things like benefits and security. Out, out, damned workers!

For now, Uber will have to settle for jettisoning 350 folks in what they’re characterizing as the “last wave.”

Over the summer, Uber had a couple of other rounds, getting rid of 835 employees.

Again, it doesn’t sound like all that much. Unless you’re one of the folks getting the heave-ho.

Here’s the announcement that went out to the survivors:

“Days like today are tough for us all, and the ELT [Executive Leadership Team] and I will do everything we can to make certain that we won’t need or have another day like this ahead of us,” [Dara] Khosrowshahi wrote in the email. “We all have to play a part by establishing a new normal in how we work: identifying and eliminating duplicate work, upholding high standards for performance, giving direct feedback and taking action when expectations aren’t being met, and eliminating the bureaucracy that tends to creep as companies grow.” (Source: Tech Crunch)

If I had a dollar for every similar email that came my way during my career in tech… Well, I might not be rich but I’d have enough to pay for a decent meal. And if I had another dollar for every time that, as a manager, I had to write or utter something along the lines of we “will do everything can to make certain that we won’t need or have another day like this ahead of us,” well, I could throw in a nice glass of wine or dessert.

And, for most ELT’s, layoffs are tough. Most people don’t want to see others suffer. And most people don’t want to admit to the failure to execute that generally results in layoffs. Sure, sometimes layoffs are for strategic reasons, but as often as not they’re driven by the Benjamins.

But there might be some members of a company’s “executive leadership team” who find layoffs just fine and dandy.

I worked once with a spectacularly turdish individual who, after remotely laying off a fellow who was in a hospital NICU with his newborn son – an infant who was touch and go at the time, announced to us that he had very much enjoyed the experience.

Uber is kinda-sorta saying that their layoffs are a strategic paring down:

“As you know, over the past few months, our leaders have looked carefully at their teams to ensure our organizations are structured for success for the next few years,” Khosrowshahi wrote to employees. “This has resulted in difficult but necessary changes to ensure we have the right people in the right roles in the right locations, and that we’re always holding ourselves accountable to top performance.”

Hmmmm. If I had another dollar for every time I heard that need to make sure “we have the right people,” I could leave an extra large tip on that meal. And take an Uber home.

Uber is, of course, losing money hand over fist. And they did need to make sure they had another money to keep investing in ballot battles to make sure that “its drivers remain 1099 independent contractors.”

If drivers are made real employees, costs are predicted to increase, which will make Uber less attractive to riders. Presumably.

I’m actually a big – if not a fan, then a -  user of Uber. Last week was well above average, as between Wednesday and Sunday, I took 5 Ubers – but if I’m going anywhere that’s not walking distance or easily accessible via the T, I’m ubering.

I would be happy to pay more for a ride, and would maybe adjust the tip down a bit, since I’m a pretty big Uber tipper. But even if it gets to the same price as a cab, you just can’t beat the convenience of summoning up a driver from your smartphone. If the cabs ever get that convenient and reliable, I’ll be back.

As for Uber, the email from Khosrowshahi ended with the usual peppish talk: we’ll be stronger moving forward, etc.  If I had a dollar for every one of those pep talk emails I received over the years, I could order a couple of CD’s on Amazon when I got home (via Uber) from that pretty decent dinner.

The email to Uber employees mentioned an All Hands to be held the day after layoff day.

Me? Forget the dinner, wine/dessert, Uber ride and CD’s. I’d take all the money and pay it toward not having to go to that All Hands meeting.

Which, of course, reminds me of the oddest thing I ever heard at a post-layoff All Hands.

Bizarrely, on a day in which a couple of thousands of employees had been frog-marched out to the parking lot holding their meager carton of personal items, the CEO of this (now deservedly defunct) company said something along the lines of “I’m not aware that any employees have actually left.”

The next day, a completely ridiculous email sailed out, telling us that, of course Mr. CEO knew there’d been layoffs. It’s just that, as long as they were collecting severance, the folks who’d been laid off were still “with us in spirit.”

Indeed.

Good luck to the Uber-ites, but I’m guessing that this won’t be the “last wave of job cuts.” There’s always another wave where that one came from.

Poor baby

If you’re not familiar with Jacob Wohl, allow me to introduce you.

Wohl is a 21 year old far-right conspiracy theorist and troll. He’s also known for tweeting about overhearing liberals in “hipster coffee shops” raving about how great Donald Trump is. (This bit of nonsense, of course, became a meme with far more clever tweeters dragging on Wohl, who has, I believe, been banned form Twitter.)

Wohl is quite the little Trumpian go-getter. By his late teens, he’d already banned for life by the National Futures Association, and he has a couple of other securities fraud charges hanging over his head.

He’s also the co-creator (with lawyer Jack Burkman) of a series of smear campaigns that have been aimed at Robert Mueller and a bunch of Democratic politicians. Although there is one floating around about drug dealers w.r.t. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, the smears are generally about things sexual.

Not that Wohl would have any first-hand (other than first hand) knowledge there. If ever there were someone destined for ‘incel for life’ it’s this dude. Ordinarily I’d feel bad for someone like this, but in this case, Wohl has made his nasty little twin bed and deserves to lie alone in it until the end of time.

As I noted, most of the smears – all of which have been insta-debunked – are about alleged assaults (Mueller, Pete Buttigieg) and/or unseemly sex lives.

One of this recent press conferences – the venues at which Wohl and Burkman announce their “finds” – featured a ripped ex-Marine who claimed he’d been in a BDSM relationship with Elizabeth Warren. This claim was instantly discredited, including by the sexcort site Cowboys4Angels the Marine supposedly met Warren through. They put out a statement that the Marine was not up to their gigolo standards and that, in any case, Warren wasn’t a client. The Marines also issued a statement saying that the bogus Cowboy4Angels stud hadn’t – as he claimed – been in action (of the war variety) and had never received a Purple Heart. Sur-prise!

Whatever you think of Elizabeth Warren, she has a great sense of humor, and shortly after the “big reveal” she tweeted out that, as a University of Houston grad, she’s a proud cougar.

Shortly after bringing forward their bogus allegations against Warren, Wohl and company went after Kamala Harris.

To support their allegations that Harris was involved in an extra-marital affair, they trotted out one Sean/Shawn Newaldass, a would-be actor, who thought he was auditioning a role:

That’s because Newaldass had met Wohl and Burkman by replying to an ad posted on Craigslist seeking a “male actor” for “performance art.” When he showed up at Burkman’s Virginia home and delivered his lines alleging an affair, Newaldass was under the belief that the press conference was actually an audition for a Spike TV show. He said he had no idea that Harris was a politician. Indeed, he assumed she was a fictional person.

“I thought I was acting for a role in a movie, like a role in a TV series,” Newaldass said. “I thought everything was staged, I’m thinking everyone is an actor.”

Newaldass insists that he believed that everyone at the event, from Wohl and Burkman, to the reporters asking questions, and a heckler dressed as a corncob, were all actors. Wohl promised Newaldass $500 to appear at the event—money that Newaldass said he still has yet to receive. (Source: The Daily Beast)

Oh, Sean/Shawn. You poor baby!

Sure, it’s time to get your head out of your newaldass and start paying attention to the political sitch in this country. Never heard of Kamala Harris? Thought she was a fictional character? Really?

But mostly I feel for this fellow. Lied to by the the dirty rotten scoundrel team of Wohl and Burkman, and then – of course – stiffed. Which is pretty much the MO of the entire Trump operation, so no surprise there.

One might start to believe that Wohl and Burkman are perfecting their performance art. The lines they gave Newaldass to read were positioned as a “script”, not a statement. But true to their overall ineptness:

Newaldass initially received a statement from the pair making a series of different sexual allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden — apparently because Wohl or Burkman mixed up their smears and attached the wrong file to the email. After he asked Wohl for clarification, they sent the Harris statement instead. Newaldass began to practice what he thought would be his lines.

Wonder if Newaldass was familiar with the name “Joe Biden.” Sigh.

But Wohl and Burkman kept the ruse up, “talking up [Newaldass’] future Hollywood career.

Newaldass said he left the event with promises from Burkman and Wohl for future opportunities in Hollywood, and even the prospect of an entire TV series and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Newaldass began to think about how a role on a hit TV show would enable him to provide for his family financially.

“So that’s what really sucked me in, thinking, ‘Man, I can take care of everybody,’” Newaldass said.

Sure, Newaldass had been a bit confused when reporters – he thought they were actors – began asking him questions. There were no answers in the script and, apparently, he doesn’t do improv.

While Newaldass left with visions of Hollywood fame and fortune dancing in his head, by the time he got home, folks were all over his Instagram account calling him a liar.

He’s embarrassed, and he probably hasn’t moved his acting career forward all that much.

Guess he’ll have to keep his day job as a personal trainer.

Anyway, I feel bad for Newaldass. Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are malignant scum. I don’t know what the laws are about libeling famous people, but there really ought to be a law against hiring people to make false statements about another person. I did hear that, in the case of the attempted smear on Mueller, the FBI is looking into it.

If the smears don’t catch up with these two, maybe Wohl will finally get nabbed – as in sent to prison nabbed – on one of his security fraud charges. What a pathetic little weasel he is.

There is an upside for Kamala Harris: Newaldass now knows who she  and is leaning towards voting for her.

Soap opera, horse opera

Growing up, I watched a lot of cowboy shows. Which got me to think a lot about the Old West. And to think about how I used to think about how it might have been if I had been able to just plunk myself down in the middle of it. Which I spent a lot of day-dreaming time doing when I was a kid.

I wanted to be friends with Annie Oakley. And I wanted to be the girlfriend of the Range Rider’s sidekick, Dick West, the All American Boy. (Perhaps the only time I wanted anything to do with an All American Boy.)

As I got a bit older, I wanted to be a calico-clad pioneer girl, wagon-training across the prairies in the family Conestoga wagon. Sometimes in my Wagon Train fantasies I wanted to be the pesky but adorable little girl hanging around Flint McCullough, scout extraordinaire, who would be happy to take a break from scouting out marauding Indian parties and potable water to tell me stories and give me arrowheads. Other times, I aged myself up a bit and was Flint McCullough’s girlfriend.

It was harder to picture myself having a role on Rawhide, which took place on a perpetual cattle drive full of dogies gettin’ along, and completely lacking in women. But, hey, Rowdy Yates was cute, and the cowboys did get to town on occasion.

Then I had a major crush on the dark, brainy, brooding Cartwright brother – Adam – on Bonanza. I went so far as to buy Pernell Roberts’ album. (Roberts played Adam.) In my defense, he did have a reasonably good voice, and he sang folk songs.

Every once in a while, however, I would have to grapple with the fact that none of these heart-throbs ever managed to change their clothing.

Oh, once in a blue moon, the Cartwrights had a soiree on the Ponderosa, and “the boys” put on clean white shirts and string ties.

But, day in, day out, when they weren’t whooping it up on soirees, or putting on presumably-clean duds after having their annual metal bath-tub baths, none of these guys ever changed clothing. Ever.

For years, Flint McCullough wore buckskins. Adam Cartwright was a man in black.

They must have been grubby. They must have smelled. They must have smelled bad.

By the time I was growing up, people were clean. Everyone bathed or showered daily. After a certain age, you used deodorant. And you changed your clothing daily, too.

Okay, throughout grammar school and high school, I wore a green jumper to school every day. And I had one jumper per school year. But the white blouse, plus the socks and undies, were always clean.

And most people just didn’t smell.

Historically, of course, this was not always the case. C.f., the old West.

This all came to mind when I saw a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on soap, which the author Amanda Foreman writes “represent(s) one of the triumphs of civilization.” Preach, sister.

I would have thought that soap was a relatively recent phenomenon, but “the Babylonians knew how to make soap as early as 2800 B.C., although it was probably too caustic for washing anything except hair and textiles.”

Ancient Egyptians had soap, too. (Wash like an Egyptian?)

Soaps were harsh, back in the day, so Greeks and Romans avoided washing with them, “until Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in 58 B.C. introduced them to a softer Celtic formula.” A “softer Celtic formula?” Is that like Irish Spring, which I cut up in chunks and toss into my closets to keep mice away? (And remember the early Irish Spring ads, in which the winsome lass tells the laddie, “Manly, yes, but I like it, too.”)

Back in the day, way back in the day, Rome was the center of the soap-making universe, but once the empire fell, “soap-making moved to India, Africa and the Middle East.”

Soapa Europa? It was largely discredited, “associated with paganism.”

I like that, and may try out a few new bon mots: clean as a pagan; cleanliness is next to paganism. This may have legs. Clean legs.

Fast forward to the 14th century, and the Crusaders started bringing back stuff from the Middle East. Rice. Lemons. Dyes. Mirrors. And soap.

Not to mention “a taste for washing with soap and water, but not in sufficient numbers to slow the spread of plague.” Oh.

During the Renaissance, soap had something of a renaissance.

Southern countries had the advantage of making soap out of natural oils and perfumes, while the colder north had to make do with animal fats and whale blubber.

Good to know what my antecedents were washing with, if they washed at all. Whale blubber. Seriously.

In truth, they probably didn’t wash all that much, as soap was costly and those ancestors of mine weren’t exactly upper-crusters.

But thanks to advances in science and manufacturing, soap got cheaper and better.

Soap went into widespread use, and was one of the drivers behind the emergence of the advertising industry. With the advent or radio and, later, TV, soap manufacturers starting aiming their soap offerings at women – bet if there’d been any women other than Annie Oakley on the scene, those cowpokes would have changed their shirts more often – and thus was born the soap opera.

I never was much of a soap opera fan, but oh those horse operas. I don’t think soap was used to advertise any of them, however.

Anyway, I suppose you can get used to anything, but I’m happy for cleanliness. And for soap. And grateful to my sister Kath for sending this WSJ article this way.

Happy holiday– or not

Well, another Columbus Day has rolled around. Not much of a holiday, is it? It’s a federal holiday, but many states in the west and south don’t observe it to begin with. If you look at a map, it appears to have been most widely adopted in states with a significant Italian-American population. Boston still has a parade. It was yesterday, but I had other things to do so I didn’t go.

I’m all in favor of ethnic pride, but our Italian-American friends may want to rethink tying their pride to Christopher Columbus.

A number of states – and a lot more cities – have switched from Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. And I’m down with that.

In Massachusetts, Cambridge, Somerville, Amherst, Brookline and Northampton have made the switch. Interesting that both Cambridge and Somerville, while pretty woke cities, do historically have a lot of Italian-American residents. And it’s on the legislative calendar to make the change statewide, which may be an uphill battle, but you never know…

Last year, in my post I came out in favor of swapping out Columbus Day for Indigenous People’s Day. (We all know how much sway my opinion holds…) And I still wouldn’t mind seeing an Immigrants Day, which I originally thought would be a good replacement for Columbus Day. Maybe we can start celebrating immigrants on Thanksgiving? Kind of citing immigrants as something we’re thankful for? And the Pilgrims were early-on immigrants…

Me? I’ll be quasi taking the day off. Then again, that’s how I roll most days.

Whatever you’re celebrating today – or not – happy holiday – or not.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you want to go on a Celebrity Cruise? Huh?

When I first heard the Ave Maria playing in the background of an Amazon commercial, I was admittedly weirded out. What’s that doing there? Doesn’t it belong more appropriately at funerals? (It’s a staple at Roman Catholic funerals, for sure.) But then I paid a tiny bit of attention and saw that it was an ad for Prime in which dear old dad – wearing headphones to listen to Schubert’s Ave Maria – is noise-canceling out his rock-band-y kids. Personally, I wouldn’t be chillin’ with the Ave Maria – too much Catholic school PTSD, too many funerals – but to each Prime customer their own. (Not that I’m in these circles – or anywhere near them – but when googling I did see that this generally anodyne ad was met in Catholic circles of the more sensitive nature with shock and offense.)

Anyway, having really paid attention to the Amazon ad, I was no longer weirded out by it. That or the Celebrity Cruise ad that uses White Rabbit as its theme knocked the Amazon-Ave ad way out of weird contention.

If you don’t count the overnight ferry I took from Bangor, Wales to Dun Laoghaire, Ireland in 1973, I’ve never been on a cruise that took longer than a couple of hours. My impression is that cruisers skew older, or are for those traveling in family packs. And although those older cruisers are now mostly Boomers, who would be well familiar with the songs of Jefferson Airplane, I’m guessing that even if they had done some tripping in their past, at this point in their lives they’re not looking for a psychedelic experience.

They’re looking for a game of Trivial Pursuit, dinner with the captain, cocktails before dinner, a massage in the spa, and the next on-shore excursion.

But in the ad we hear the unmistakable, head-spinning intro – unmistakable to anyone who had a turntable and a stick of incense in 1967 – to White Rabbit. And Grace Slick belting out the lyrics:

One pill makes you larger.
And one pill makes you small.
And the one that mother gives you.
Don’t do anything at all.
Go ask Alice.
When she’s ten feet tall. 

And there is a lovely young red-headed woman, in a demure green (not Alice-blue) dress, falling down a dream rabbit hole and into the Celebrity Cruise experience.

Oh, man! Oh, wow! What a trip!

Take it for yourself! (Oh, man! Oh, wow!)

Some of the more druggy aspects of the original are left out.

Our latter-day Alice doesn’t get the call from a hookah-smoking caterpillar. And ain’t no one admitting to having some kind of mushroom. Nor do we hear that logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.

But we do get to hear what the doormouse said. Which is “feed your head.” Which I understand is something that happens early and often on cruises.

Still, it seems completely and unreservedly weird to use White Rabbit as the theme song for a cruise that’s not oriented toward getting a bunch of old hippies – the kind we used to call oh-wowers - in tie-dyed shirts to sign on for a way-back cruise where everyone sits around the piano bar singing along to Grateful Dead songs and munching on has brownies. (Oh, man! Oh, wow!)

For Celebrity, it may be part of a larger theme. Last year they introduced something called the Magic Carpet. This is a tangerine-colored platform that runs up and down the side of the ship while people drink and dine. (Oh, man! Oh, wow!)

And the use of “tangerine” as the color for the Magic Carpet? Is that a nod to Tom Wolfe’s early-sixties essay – “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”? Sure, it was about custom cars, not drugs. But as anyone who was there can tell you, orange (along with chartreuse and hot pink) was a signature color of the 1960’s. (Oh, man! Oh, wow!)

Or perhaps it is another druggy nod, this time to Steppenwolf’s Magic Carpet Ride:

Well, you don't know what
We can find
Why don't you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride

Errr, no thanks, Mr. Steppenwolf. Think I’ll stay right here with my Friendly’s mint chocolate chip cone. And no, thanks, I never accept a funny cigarette from a stranger.

My cousin MB is a veteran and inveterate cruiser. She and her SO just got back from a cruise to Canada, and are heading out shortly on a jaunt around the Mediterranean and a repositioning cruise back to the States. (I’m not entirely sure what this next cruise entails. MB and Dan do at least a couple of long cruises every year and they’ve been everywhere, including Antarctica.) Anyway, I’ll have to ask them what they make of the White Rabbit ad.

Meanwhile, I was going to say that I bet Grace Slick never went on a cruise ship. And then I saw this: A 70’s themed Rock & Romance Cruise 2020 that features, among others, Jefferson Starship (the follow-on group to Jefferson Airplane). Grace Slick is no longer with Starship, but this is plenty close enough.

Who else is on this cruise? Rita Coolidge, Cheap Trick, Todd Rundgren, and – dear Lord! – the group America. The group that gave us Horse with No Name, quite possibly the worst song ever written. One thing to put up with Sister Golden Hair Surprise. But Horse with No Name. I’d have to find me that hookah-smoking caterpillar, or it’d be “cruiser overboard” for sure.

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--------------------------------------------------------------For anyone interested in Jefferson Airplane performing the full version of White Rabbit, here you go. Oh, man! Oh, wow!