Well, it's not the coronavirus, but...

I am now entering the fourth week of what I thought was a headcold, but which I learned on Friday was a bacterial sinus infection. Good to know.

It started out as a runny nose and plenty of sneezing. But nothing below the neck - no sore throat, no cough - and no fever. I didn't feel particularly sick or tired. I was just sick and tired of blowing my nose. As runny noses go, this runner was a marathoner.

I went through a box of Kleenex. Then two.

I did my usual: clear up congestion by slathering Vicks VapoRub on my nose and throat and taking a hot shower.

It seemed to be working. I was getting my five-mile-a-day walk in.Whatever it was seemed to be dying down. Sort of.

Then at the start of week two, I went to the dentist to have a permanent crown put in. When I got home about noon, I realized that whatever it was hadn't died down. It was leaping up and out like that creature in Alien.  Talk about Boogerpalooza!

I took to my bed, sleeping most of Monday afternoon and pretty much all day Tuesday.

On Tuesday, I called in sick for my volunteer work at a homeless shelter. Ditto on Thursday.

When I wasn't dozing, I was blowing my nose; disposing of wadded up, completely boogerized pieces of Kleenex; taking a VapoRub shower; or lying there with a hot compress over my sinuses, which were killing me.

Forget five miles a day. I was barely getting in a mile, a mile devoted largely to getting a fresh box of Kleenex.

But I was reading.

For sanity's sake, I had to swear off watching the news. I keep up via Twitter, which gives me the highlights - not that most of them are exactly highlights - and the condensed version. Up to date, but not submerged.

Here's what I've been reading:

Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, a brilliantly written book that recounts the murder of mother-of-ten Jean McConville by the IRA. It reads like a novel. Chilling.

Elevator Pitch, by Linwood Barclay, a beach-read thriller that went quickly.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, by Caitlin Doughty, who, after graduating from the University of Chicago, got a job working in a mortuary/crematorium.

Henry Himself, by Stewart O'Nan, a novelist at whose typewriter I worship. This is a prequel to Wish You Were Here and Emily Alone, two novels that chronicle the Maxwell family after the death of Henry Maxwell himself. I hate coming to the end of a Stewart O'Nan novel. If he could churn out a book a week for the rest of his life I'd be happy as a clam. If bivalves liked good books.

My Life as a Rat, by Joyce Carol Oates, one of my favorite writers. My Life was pretty good, but it was a bit too echo-y of her We Were the Mulvaneys, which was written more than 20 years ago. Both books center on large Irish-American families from which a young daughter is sent into exile. The exile was more believable and organic in Rat than it was in Mulvaneys. Still I found it odd that she revisited this theme.

NW, by Zadie Smith, which has been sitting in the bookpile next to my sickbed for years, and which I finally dug out. Love Zadie Smith, and I'm moving right along through this one.

On Wednesday of week two, I put down my books and made a trip to the local drugstore. (Gary Drug: a true local indepedent pharmacy. Not a CVS. Not a Walgreen. A true gift to our neighborhood.) While there, I broke down and got some NyQuil Plus. And some more boxes of Kleenex: one infused with aloe vera, one infused with Vicks, and one that claimed it could kill 99.99% of all germs. (Right.) I started handwashing a la Lady Macbeth.

Whatever it was finally started calming down.  Unfortunately, the nose-blowing wasn't going anywhere. But I was feeling fine. Other than the yuck feeling you get when you wake up in the morning in a bed covered in wadded up Kleenex.

I was back to my five miles per.

I wasn't sleeping round the clock.

I got back on track with my volunteering at St. Francis House.

Last Friday, I had a regular appointment with my primary care physician.

She me I had a bacterial sinus infection and prescribed Amoxicillin.

A miracle!

Boogerpalooza is not 100% over, but I am no longer blowing my nose 24/7.

Just to be on the safe side, to make sure I don't get reinfected, my doctor suggested that I wear a mask and/or gloves when I'm volunteering. I told her that I really didn't want to put up a barrier between me and the folks I'm handing a toothbrush or a tube of lotion to. They have enough cares and woes, let alone having a volunteer treat them as if they were Typhoid Mary.

I told my doctor that, while I'm there, I Macbeth it up with the Purell, but she said that I'd be better off using good old fashioned soap and water (while singing Happy Birthday) to get rid of germs if I came in any contact with one of our guests and/or an object that they've touched. Will do.

I'm halfway through the antibiotic course, and it seems to be working. My nose is no longer churning out factory-levels of snot. I feel great.

No, it wasn't the coronavirus, but I'm sure glad I'm pretty much done with it. Talk about the no-fun zone...

Rocket science

As far as I can tell, way too many startups are focused on building apps. Apps that are useful - at least marginally. Apps that are frivolous - but that just might catch on. Apps that are meant to make the world a better place - but as often as not make things worse.

And then there are a bunch of rocket makers that have attracted billions in venture money. These are companies that are, for the most part, focused on small scale rocketry and that aren't, for the most part, competing directly with the goverment and SpaceX, which build the big kahunas.

One of these rocket companies is Astra, a three-year-old startup based in California. (And located right next door to a Pottery Barn outlet. Not that this is germane to their story. Nor is it likely to matter to the rocket scientists who work at Astra, who are probably not the Pottery Barn market sweetspot. But how much fun to be able to meander around a Pottery Barn outlet during lunch? Years ago, I counted myself lucky to work near a Gap outlet - pretty much the only good thing about working at Wang Labs...) 

As for Astra: 

The company’s founders say they want to be the FedEx Corp. of space. They’re aiming to create small, cheap rockets that can be mass-produced to facilitate daily spaceflights, delivering satellites into low-Earth orbit for as little as $1 million per launch. If Astra’s planned Kodiak flight succeeds on Feb. 21, it will have put a rocket into orbit at a record-setting pace.(Source: Bloomberg)

Astra has attracted $100M in investment, which is not a helluva lot, considering what they're trying to do - and given that a lot of stupid app companies fritter away that kind of money on stupid marketing schemes.  

Astra is hoping to top that investment money by winning the Darpa Launch Challenge. (Darpa is the R&D wing of the Pentagon.) Darpa's offering  a $12M prize to a startup that can "send two rockets from different locations with different payloads within a few weeks of each other."

The prize is Astra's for the taking, as the two other finalists Richard Branson's Virgin Orbi and Vector Launch are out of the running. Virgin withdrew, and Vector went bellyup.

So I wish Astra luck getting their hands on that $12M.

I have no idea why I lit on this story. Maybe it was the fact that one of Astra's co-founders is a rocket scientist with a PhD from MIT. Maybe it's because I got a kick out of their near-Pottery Barn location. Maybe it's just as good a distraction as any from the meshugas of the "real world."

It isn't because I have any great interest in space. I don't. My father was the paper boy for Dr. Robert Goddard, father of American rocketry. That's about the alpha and the omega of my interest in anything to do with space.

So I think my interest is because Astra will be working on small payloads. And a few years back, a smidgeon of my husband's ashes were part of a small payload into space.

My husband wasn't a rocket scientist, but he was a science guy, and he was keenly interested in the space program. One of his final wishes was that some of his ashes get launched into space.

We were sitting in the living room, a month or so before his death, talking about the places Jim wanted a tiny bit of his ashes to end up. Most are buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, but there are a few grains on his parents' grave, on the gave of his beloved aunt and uncle, on my parents' grave, on that of my Aunt Margaret (Jim just adored her). There's a bit of Jim in Galway Bay, in Connemara, in Central Park, in Washington Square. With a few more places still on the list.

Anyway, Jim at one point said, "I'd pay a million dollars to have my ashes sent into space."

Well, I told him, that's where we part company. "I'm not going to end up sleeping over a heating grate so that your ashes can go to the moon." I guess it was the brain tumor talking, because he immediately agreed that the million dollar thang wasn't a good idea. But I was happy to find him a way to get into space.

Which I did. 

And in October 2014, Jim got his spaceflight through an outfit called Celestis. He's in good company. Gene Rodenberry, producer of Star Trek went into space thanks to Celestis. As did the actor who played Scotty -  of "Beam me up, Scotty" fame. As did astronaut Gordo Cooper.

 Jim's ashes were part of a pretty small payload, and I'm glad we had the opportunity to get Diggy where he wanted to go - and for a lot less than a million bucks.

I think Astra is going to focus it's business on niche-purpose satellites. But I'm just happy that there's space in space for the little guy. Or the little guy's ashes. (Sixth anniversary of that little guys death's coming up. Time sure does fly...)

 

Putting the brass in brass balls...

The good citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are well familiar with the scandals surround the Massachusetts State Police. The most recent scandal has centered on a scheme in which troopers put in for overtime without ever having worked the overtime. This enabled them to pad their salaries in the here-and-now, plus contribute to the earnings that got toward figuring out just how lucrative their already lucrative pensions could be. The only effort required was filling out the lying paperwork, and faking up some citations that would make it seem as if they'd been working.

Dozens of state troopers have been caught up in this one, and they're losing their jobs and/or their pensions and/or receiving sentences. (It's not clear whether any have actually served more than nominal time.) But it's been pretty disgusting to witness the spectacle of first responders resonding first and foremost to their own duplicity and greed.

But the overtime scam is by no means the only scandal to surface of late.

There was also the case of the troopers who worked at the State Police Armory (which manages gun purchases and inventory for the staties) who were caught taking free guns from a firearms dealer who did business with the state. Gee, why would anyone find this at all amiss...

One of these jamokes, Robert Outwater (who took 10 guns from the dealer - let's not bother to ask ourselves why he thought he needed 10 guns; probably one of those 2A nutters arming up for the next civil war), has been suspended without pay since 2016. But now he's suing for his job back. And then some.

In order to get out of the hot water he found himself in, Outwater elected to cooperate with the AG. He agreed to cop to an ethics violation and to pay a relatively modest ($5K) civil fine - and have any criminal charges against him dropped - in exchange for diming his boss and another senior trooper. Now he wants back in.

In a lawsuit filed against State Police in Middlesex Superior Court last week, Outwater’s lawyer said the investigation by Healey’s office is done and argued his client should get his job back, and more.

“Trooper Outwater has been charged with no crime and found guilty of no crime," Boston attorney Patrick Hanley said in a statement to the Globe. “The State Police has not charged Trooper Outwater with internal misconduct, let alone found him guilty of such misconduct.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Oh, I see. It doesn't matter if a crime were committed. As long as you're not charged with a crime, you should be A-OK to keep on being a statie. Got it.

Me thinks it might be time for the MSP to charge Outwater with internal misconduct, even though I understand that, when it comes to defining internal misconduct, the Massachusetts State Police force has erected an credibly steep threshold to get over.

Hanley does plenty of boo-hooing on behalf of his client. 

“Yet the Department has suspended him for 41 months without affording him due process,” Hanley continued. "This lawsuit is simply an effort to put Trooper Outwater back to work and make him whole for the months the Department has suspended him without the benefit of due process.”

The lawsuit says State Police should be ordered to: lift the suspension; give Outwater back pay, including for overtime and details; restore his benefits; and promote him to the sergeant, a rank and pay increase he was bypassed for in 2018 while suspended.

So, is the overtime he's entitled to real overtime, or real fake overtime? And how do they figure out the difference? And don't get me started on details. These are the ultra-lucrative gigs in which local and state cops get to sit in their cars and fiddle with their phones while keeping a partial eye on road work and other outside construction/repair work. Of course, they may not even be sitting in their cars at all. There was one situation in which a state trooper parked his state police car at a worksite, took off for parts unknown (probably another job), and then came to collect the car at the end of the day. As I always say, a job worth doing is certainly worth not doing at all.

“Trooper Outwater’s alleged misdeeds are immaterial, where the Department has failed to follow its own investigatory and disciplinary processes,” Hanley added.

Ah, the case of the immaterial misdeed. 

In the suit, Hanley noted how the Outwater’s former armory colleagues who were charged “were permitted to retire and are now collecting their lucrative state pensions.”

Retired lieutenant Paul M. Wosny and retired trooper Michael G. Wilmot were each charged with a felony in October in East Brookfield District Court. They allegedly received free guns from a state-contracted firearms dealer and accepted personalized assault rifles from a gunmaker seeking business with the state.

I don't know whether they were allowed to keep those snappy personalized assualt rifles, but both of these bums were allowed to retire, and are collecting state pensions (which they may lose). So you can't blame Overwater for being a bit steamed. Still, looking for your back pay - plus non-worked overtime and details, plus a promotion - when you are an admitted wrongdoer, seems like way too much of a reach.

The analogy is imperfect, but I keep thinking of the old joke in which a man kills both of his parents and then throws himself on the mercey of the court because he's now an orphan.

I won't be shedding any tears for Robert Overwater. What made you think it was okay to take those free guns, huh? You screwed up. You had a good thing going. A well-paying job with an end-of-the-rainbow pension. A job in the armory where your life wasn't really on the line and where you weren't required to 'run to danger' on a regular basis. 

Maybe I wouldn't be this outraged if "all" he was looking for was his job back. But backpay for OT and details? And a promotion? Talk about putting the brass in brass balls.

Whatever happened to the simpler days of 'don't do the crime if you can't do the time'? 

All aboard!

I've always loved train travel.

When I was a kid, every other summer or so, we went to Chicago (where my mother hails from) to visit family. Some years we drove, other years we took the train. 

I remember snippets from all of those trips. 

Taking a taxi cab - a nearly unheard of luxury, one that I only knew about through The Taxi that Hurried, one of my favorite Little Golden Books - to Worcester's Union Station.

Pushing up the curtain - shared between two seats - just a tiny bit so I could watch what was going by, only to have the soldier in the seat in front of me slam it down. ( I was 4 years old, and I was only looking for a half inch of daylight.Thanks for your service - not!)

The ice old water in those conical cups.

Dressing up for the trip - Sunday dress, patent leather Mary Janes, little white gloves - because that's how you traveled back in the day. At least that's how Catholics traveled. I remember my sister Kath and I being shocked by a couple of girls our age wearing green slacks and pastel shirts (one pink, one pale yellow), while Kath and I were in our matching polished cotton dresses - hers pink, mine turquoise - with their nifty little bolero jackets. We ended up playing Fish with these girls to kill time on what was a long overnight trip and, sure enough, they were Protestants. (We just knew it!)

Breakfast in the dining car.

Upgrading, over time, to roomettes, so that, rather than have to sit up all night in steerage, we could sleep on fold-down beds, and enjoy our own private toilet. I remember my father tipping the Negro porters who helped fold down the beds.

That place outside of Cleveland where wild roses grew all over the banks next to the tracks.

I loved those trips.

In my early twenties, I spent four months hitching around Europe, but my friend Joyce and I did end up taking a couple of trains. The train in Spain was especially memorable. We ended up in a car full of leering men, and we both got chigger bites. 

I've taken plenty of trains in Ireland, the most unforgettable being one from Dublin to Enniscorthy. The train had too many cars to fit in the Enniscorthy station, so you had to know which car to be in so you could disembark. We spent the journey trying to find someone who could tell us. We asked the conductor, who was mostly MIA. We asked the barman in the club car, who was clueless. We asked fellow travelers. At the last minute, we found two women who were getting off in Enniscorthy and passed the secret code onto us. Phew! 

I can't remember the last time I flew to New York City. Mostly, I take the Acela. Much less stressful.

I take commuter rail all the time - to my sister's in Salem, my cousin's outside Worcester.

The longest train trip I ever took was from Orlando to Boston, in the aftermath of 9/11, when the planes weren't flying. What an eerie trip. We left Orlando no knowing whether the train would get any further north than Richmond, and were relieved to learn that it was going all the way through. We made a frantic connection in DC to get on the Boston-bound train. The car went completely silent when we departed Newark and saw the black cloud, much of the length of Manhtattan...

Carol Burnett was sitting near me. There's always something...

Anyway, I really enjoy train travel, and hope that I live to see goodies like high-speed travel in this country. 

All that said, I don't follow train news all that closely. Still, a recent story on Bloomberg caught my eye.

Believe it or not, there's actually a private passenger railroad, Brightline, that's backed by private equity and runs trains between Miami and West Palm Beach.

It’s the first new private company to move paying customers between American cities by rail in almost a century. It's also far from profitable, behind on ridership projections and recovering from a canceled initial public offering. (Source: Bloomberg)

Although they're not quite making a go of it yet, Brightline sounds pretty nice:

The seats are wide and made of leather. Blue-jacketed attendants greet passengers. Drinks are free in first class. The company plans to extend the line to Orlando by 2022 and possibly on to Tampa.

They're also opening up shop on a route between Victorville, California and Las Vegas. Turns out that pretty much any driving route from anywhere in California to Las Vegas goes through Victorville. So the Brightliners are betting that folks would be willing to park in Victorville and chillax for the final 90 miles of their journey. 

The private equity firm is now sniffing about for similar deals that would enable it to stitch together cities that fit a simple criteria: too long to drive, too short to fly. Atlanta to Charlotte, Los Angeles to San Diego, Portland to Vancouver, and Dallas to Houston are among those it’s mentioned.

The timing seems right for all this. Traffic is insane everywhere, and planes are big polluters. And, thanks to awareness building by Greta Thunberg, people are now being shamed into no flying.

What's interesting is that, unlike Amtrak, which is a quasi-public entity, Brightline is a private initiative. So they don't have to live under the constraints that Amtrak does, which has to make sure that the train goes to where powerful senators wants it to go, even if it's a money-losing proposition. (I am fortunate to live on Amtrak's most lucrative route, the Northeast Corridor, where taking the train from Boston to NYC, and from NYC to DC, really makes sense. Brightline, by the way, would love to privatize this piece of Amtrak's business.) 

Fortress (its private equity backer) did get a bit ahead of itself in trying to rush Brightline's IPO.  It was way off in its passenger and fare revenue estimates. Plus it was dogged by:

....safety concerns raised by Brightline’s opponents in areas north of West Palm Beach, through which its trains will eventually pass. An analysis of Federal Railroad Administration data published by the Associated Press found Brightline had more deaths per mile than any other U.S. railroad. Most of the 41 fatalities were suicides, according to the report, and the railroad itself wasn’t at fault. That hasn’t stopped critics from calling Brightline “the death train.”

Forty-one people struck and killed by a train that doesn't go that far and that often? In just over a two-year period? Yikes!

The majority have been suicides, while most others involved impatient motorists, pedestrians or bicyclists who misjudged the trains’ speed and ignored bells, gates or other warnings. Drugs, alcohol or both have been found in many victims’ systems.  (Source: AP)

Florida man...

Meanwhile, Brightline is trying to make its trains run more safely. Plus it's making its train stations smell citrusy and it's coming up with a way to close that treacherous gap between the train and the platform that happens in so many stations. I am always worried about breaking an ankle, so props for making it so we don't need to 'mind the gap.'

Me? I'd like to take a good long train trip somewhere. Maybe someday...

Co-working comes to Staples

For some, the can't-resist is a shoe store. For others, it's a jeweler. Or an artsy gift shop. 

Me? I like to poke in stores in general, but my big three are bookstores, container stores (i.e., The Container Store), and office supply stores. 

Ah, office supplies!

Since I got my first back-to-school pencil box, I've liked nothing better than having a newly-sharpened pencil, a pristine pad. 

I love having a goodly supply of yellow pads on hand. Post-its. Pens. Pencils. Eraser caps. (I do Sudoku.) A cheapo pencil sharpener or two.

I like to make sure I have plenty of folders, including the clear plastic ones that ziplock - sealing in my papers for freshness.

I'm happy if I have a non-dried up set of markers, manila envelopes in multiple sizes. 

I like knowing there's pair of scissors in the kitchen, in the living room credenza, in my office.  A stapler on both floors of my condo. Ditto for rolls of Scotch tape. And box-sealing tape. Paper clips. Alligator clips. 

And ordering any and all of this stuff is just not the same as strolling around the aisles and picking and choosing. So I'm happy that Staples is trying to hang in there, keeping its retail outlets open. And it's doing so by offering co-workings space in many of its stores, including my Staples, near Boston's Government Center.

When I was last in there, around Christmas, they were refiguring things. Yes, in order to make room for the co-workers, they had to get rid of a ton of the product space. But I was pleased to find that I could still get the yellow pads and the pens I'd come in for. 

While I saw the work-in-process, I haven't been back to see the new set up. So I haven't yet been able to:

Meet the new Staples: It’s not just an office supply superstore anymore, it is, the company puts it, a “destination dedicated to continued curiosity, growth, and development." (Source: Boston Globe)

Is it just me, or does "continued curiosity, growth and development" sound more like pre-school than it does like co-working space? 

To me, co-working space is about professionalism. Working out of Stapes sure beats trying to do work while sitting at a co-coffee table at Caffè Nero, hoping that the guy next to you won't slop his Flat White onto your laptop.

It's about community. One of the worst aspects of the gig economy is that you don't get the built in social life that comes when everyone's in the office together. Sure, some might argue that this is one of the best aspects of the gig economy, but to me, even if your colleagues don't end up being your BFF's - and I have made some of my BFF's at work - it's nice to have folks to grab lunch with, to catch up with at the water cooler, to share that sheet cake with when there's baby shower for someone in accounting. Sometimes it's nice to see the same old faces, day after day.

And coworking is about getting out of the house and giving yourself a change of scenery.

Bonus points in that, at Staples, yellow pads are within reach.

This re-work is all about Staples fighting for survival:

Staples built a leading national brand as the traditional stationery store on steroids. But in the three decades since its conception, the workplace — and how we shop for it — have undergone transformational changes. Cloud-based computing, telecommuting, and the ease of one-click ordering have diminished demand for big-box stores stocked with reams of paper. Now, in a dramatic effort to stay relevant, Staples is recasting itself as a place where you can co-work, record a podcast, stock up for your next Uber shift — or even get fingerprinted for a job.

If I wanted to get me some co-working space in my Staples, it would cost me $499 a month ($999 for a dedicated private office). Seems kind of high - it's a bit more than WeWork - but I didn't do a full compare-and-contrast. These days, I'm barely working, and if I want to sit and stare at my computer screen somewhere other than my condo, I can go the The Boston Athenaeum, a funky and beautiful private library that I'm a member of. 

There are, of course, things that Staples provides that The Ath doesn't:

Members and store customers can get free access to fancy AV-enabled meeting rooms that will also host seminars and workshops. And members can use podcast studios gratis (available to nonmembers for $60 an hour). Concierge services like legal, funding, or HR advice are available for small-business customers. And anyone can apply for a TSA PreCheck, a special state license, or a background check. 

Then again, Athenaeum members don't need TSA PreCheck. They're doing great research, writing great books, thinking great thoughts, listening to lectures by those who have done great reseaerch, written great books, and thought great thoughts  - and staring at their computer screens. 

Not clear yet whether Staples will succeed. There's plenty of competition around from WeWork and others. But I wish them well. 

In fact, I wish them more than well.

I want those Staples stores to stay alive. I really don't want to have to go online to buy my yellow pads, and I'm running low...

In defense of Jeanine Cummins

I haven't read American Dirt yet.

You know, the novel about a Mexican women who, fearing for her life, makes her way to the United States with her son to join the ranks of undocumented immigrants.

You know, the novel that got a 7-figure advance and is going to be made into a movie.

You know, the book the Oprah sealed with her approval.

You know, the book that got blurbed as The Great American Novel, a transformative work, the 21st century's Grapes of Wrath.

You know, the book with the barbed wire cover art, which has inspired fan-girls to have their nails done in imitation of. And which inspired the folks running one book party to tastefully include barbed wire in their centerpieces.

I haven't read American Dirt yet. But I probably will. And I suspect I'll find it a good read, even if it's not all that great.

There's been a ton of blowback about this novel. Plenty of it is legitimate literary criticism. And plenty of it is the argument that Jeanine Cummins had no right to write about Mexican immigrants because she's white, and escaping druglords is not her "lived experience."

I call BS!

Fiction is not memoir. Cummins is not pretending that this novel is based on her experience. It's work of her imagination, creativity, empathy, research. And she's got the right to write about whatever and whoever she wants to.

Cummins isn't, of course, the only writer who's come under fire for "cultural appropriation". If you're straight, you can't write from the viewpoint of someone gay. If you're white, you can't write from the viewpoint of someone who's black. If you're not Jewish, you can't write from the viewpoint of a Holocaust victim. The only authentic voice is an authentic voice. You're supposed to stay in your lane.

There are plenty of great writers who have stayed in their lane. A couple who come to mind are John Cheever and John Updike, who much of the time wrote in the persona of an upper middle class WASP male who screwed around with the wives of his suburban neighbors. But, you know, John Updike got out of the suburbs, in wonderful novels like The Coup.

And there are plenty of great writers who jump into whatever damned lane they want.

I worship at the altar of novelist Stewart O'Nan. He's a white guy. Among other things, he's written brilliantly from the perspective of African-Americans (Everyday People), an elderly widow (Wish You Wer Here, Emily Alone), and the manager - Hispanic, I think - of a Red Lobster (Last Night at the Lobster).

And why shouldn't he have?

Reading fiction can be for pure escapist entertainment. We want an a page-turner, an exciting plot. We don't expect anything but a good read. But if you're reading literary fiction, you're probably looking for more. Characters you can empathize with, identify with, learn from. Situations that help us better understand the human condition. That let us know that we're not alone in our experiences, our reactions, our hopes, our thoughts, our fears, our aspirations.

I'm pretty sure Kafka was talking about literary fiction when he said, "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Good writers can give us that axe. And it doesn't matter whether they've ever actually been stranded in an iced-in lifeboat on a frozen sea. If they can imagine it, it's theirs.

So critice American Dirt all you want. Heap scorn on the 7-figure deal. Bemoan the fact that we may not be hearing from enough Latinx voices.

But get off Jeanne Cummins' back. She's got every right in the world to put herself in the head of a Mexican immigrant.

Tag, you're it!

I grew up playing a lot of games that required no formal organization and little or no equipment. Kids spent a lot of time out doors back then. In the winter, you were sledding, skating or building forts. For the rest of the year it was DONKEY, kickball, dodgeball, jumprope, circle games (like Old MacDonald and Lady in the Castle), Simon Says, statues, Red Light Man, Hide and Seek, and tag (and it's offshoots, frozen tag and stoop tag). 

As far as I know, although it looks like jump rope may be on its way, none of these games have gone pro. Other than tag.

Yes, there's now something called World Chase Tag, which has its tagline - hah! - Don't Get Caught, and which is "dedicated to the promotion and enjoyment of the most played and universal sport in history: Chase Tag™. (Personally, I've never heard tag called Chase Tag, but if you want to trademark something, you probably couldn't get away with just plain Tag.)

World Chase Tag is definitely not your someone's-backyard-on-a-summer-night game of tag.

World Chase Tag™ is the world’s leading Competitive Tag organisation. Over the past three years we’ve gone from casual Meetups in Hyde Park to international events which have received hundreds of millions of views. Our tournaments are contested by the best Parkour athletes and Ninja Warrior competitors from around the globe and our footage has featured on ESPN, Fox Sports, Channel 4, Fuji TV, CBS, BBC and many more.

"Parkour" and "Ninja Warrior" are pretty much all you need to know if you're wondering whether you can brush off your childhood skills and qualify. It gives me a headache just looking at them. 

How does it all work?

While the basics of tag remain the same -- one person chases an opponent in an attempt to touch them with their hand or "tag" them -- the league has introduced some rules to make it more exciting.

The "Chase Off" format -- the sports' most popular format -- is played by two teams with two teams consisting of a maximum of five athletes.

A match consists of a predetermined number of chases -- usually 10-16 -- which are 20 seconds in length. 

A Chaser and Evader -- one from either team -- compete, with the winning athletes staying on as the Evader. The loser is replaced by a teammate who becomes the Chaser.

A team is awarded one point when their athlete successfully evades their opponent for the entire duration of the chase and the team with the most points after the chases wins the match. (Source: CNN)

And the game doesn't just take place any old where. It happens on a 12M x 12M Quad that includes a bunch of interconnected platforms that the Chaser and the Evader scurry around at breakneck speeds. For me it would be more breakneck break neck, but that's why I'll never be a professional tag player.

Whenever I see something simple and just plain fun get codified and all ruled-up, I'm a bit torn. But if you're really good at jumping rope. If you're really good at Frisbee. If you're really good at tag. And you're competitive and want to make more than a game out of it, have at it.

Just us (little) chickens

I don't eat a ton of meat, and most of the meat I do eat is chicken. Even then, I don't eat nearly as much chicken as the average American consumer, who scarfs down 93.5 pounds of chicken per year. I have no idea what my consumption is, but I do know there's no way I eat nearly eight pounds of chicken per month. Two pounds a month? Maybe three?

I do consume chicken in the home, and have two excellent recipes (sesame chicken, and a spicy, peppery chicken dish). I also have a pretty darned good recipe for chicken salad, but it's a big pain in the butt to make - and isn't all that discernibly better than the pre-fab chicken salad from Roche Brothers. So...

One of my favorite dishes is chicken paprikash, a soup known in our family as goulash. I rely on my sister Trish to make this, and she does an excellent job. Her approach is superior to that of my mother in that she doesn't add in any of the yucky chicken bits. Goulash features farina dumplings which I think are delish, but which have been compared to lead weights.

So, I'm a chicken lover.

I've never had Popeye's and, sadly, the nearby Popeye's (near Fenway Park) closed recently. There is a Popeye's at Northeastern University, so maybe I'll pop there for a sandwich on one of my walks.

There are no Chick-Fil-A's nearby. Boston has resisted them because of their stance on gay rights - and donations to organizations seen as anti-gay. But the company has backed off a bit, and I think that one will be opening somewhere around here pretty soon. (A few years back, the company also went after an organic kale farmer in Vermont for using "Eat More Kale" as their motto. I can't remember how that was resolved. Nothing could get me to eat more kale, but I did buy a tee-shirt.) I once tried a Chick-Fil-A sandwich in the Dallas Airport. It was pretty damned tasty.

Whether the sandwich comes from Popeye's or Chick-Fil-A, there's a looming shortage of the prime ingredient.

Little chickens, whose quarter-pound breasts fit perfectly inside a bun, are proving essential to the war effort. In the process, they’re getting harder to come by.

A shortage of the smaller birds derailed the Popeyes challenge to reigning champion Chick-fil-A last summer, and most petite poultry are sold in grocery stores, not in chain restaurants. Now the supply will be further tested as more competitors jump into the fray. McDonald’s Corp., the world’s biggest restaurant chain, is testing new fried-chicken sandwiches in four U.S. cities with the added pop of MSG, a controversial flavor enhancer it says it doesn’t use in its national menu. Wendy’s Co. is going all in, spending $30 million to beef up its chicken supply chain. (Source: Boston Globe)

As anyone who's bought a chicken in a grocery store in the last couple of decades knows, chickens have been supersized. In 1925 - admittedly before I was buying chickens - the average broiler was a scrawny 2.5 pounds. Today, the average broiler weighs in at 6 pounds.

But consumers, it seems, want the tastier, more tender, smaller birds. And the chicken sandwich folks want them because they fit better on a bun. But with the shortage, all this is coming at a cost. Little chicken breasts "recently reached triple the cost of breasts from a “jumbo” nine-pounder, a historically wide difference, according to Russ Whitman of commodity researcher Urner Barry."

So, while Popeye's and Chick-Fil-A, McDonald's and Wendy's, play chicken sandwich war with each other, you may be asking where KFC fits in all this.

Last year, they introduced something called the Cheeto Chicken Sandwich. Much as I love Cheetos, the thought of eating a sandwich where fried chicken, drenched in Cheeto sauce, sits on a bed of Cheetos is, well, just the opposite of the KRC parent brand's name. That's Yum. To me, the Cheeto sandwich sounds Yuck. 

Anyway, looks like it's about time for the chicken producers to stop fattening up their stock and downsize a bit. 

EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING? Kinda, sorta...

Last Friday, I went online and bought tickets for a couple of Red Sox games. Tickets for the game I was most interested in - the Patriots' Day game - were going on sale at 10 a.m. And at 10 a.m., I was ready to pounce. But so was everyone else in Red Sox Nation, so I had to wait a bit.

Years ago, the Red Sox used to call this The Virtual Waiting Room. And The Virtual Waiting Room was the ante-room to hell.

After one particularly hellish wait, I did a Pink Slip screed about the experience. This was in December 2006, a couple of years after the Red Sox had won their first modern-time World Series. They were coming off a not-so-great-season (they finished 3rd in the AL East) but were still flying high off of the 2004 feel-good - make that great - season. They were still everyone's darlings (at least in all of New England if you subtract out the NY Yankees part of Connecticut). And it was really tough to get tickets. (Maybe people were prescient and figured 2007 was going to be another banner - not to mention trophy - year.)

Anyway, The Virtual Waiting Room was just terrible, and I didn't hold back. Among other things I had to say:

Just how long have I been with the Red Sox? A lot longer than [then Red Sox GM] Theo Epstein's been alive. And long enough to not only remember when Ted Williams' head was attached to his body, but to have seen him hit a home-run in his last season. (July 1960, Red Sox beat the Indian 6-4. We sat in the bleachers. You could look it up - the score, not whether or not we sat in the bleachers. Of course we did.) And as an old-timer, I wish that getting a ticket weren't the equivalent of gearing up for the Oklahoma Land Rush or the Running of the Bulls. Okay, in the Virtual Waiting Room you don't get trampled, but that's about the only positive I can think of about it.

Well, things have gotten better (ordering tickets) - and worse (the team, at least last year's edition). The Red Sox are still pretty popular, and taking yourself out to the ballgame at Fenway Park is still fun, but it's no longer quite as difficult to get tickets. They've won a few more World Series - 2013, 2018 - and we've gotten a bit jaded.

When you enter the ticket-buying area, here's what pops up:

EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING

Sit back. Relax. And stay right here for your chance to start your next great experience. We’ll do the work for you. In an effort to get tickets into your hands, the system selects true experience seekers like yourself at random to enter the site and purchase tickets.

IMPORTANT: No need to refresh. No need to go back. No need for multiple browsers.

You know, sometimes I'm embarassed to have had a career in marketing. Oh, I was in business-to-business (B2B0 technology, or techie-to-techie (T2T) which I'm pretty sure I coined. (And which no one other than I ever used.) So I didn't have to fluff things up about the overall "experience." I was a marketer in the great era of The Solution, when everything was a solution to something and the marketing was supposed to focus on benefits. The trouble with this approach is that pretty much every tech business application touts the same benefits: make money, save time, save money... You could look at websites and come away not knowing whether their appliction was used for accounting. Or customer service. Or logistics.

I always resisted this approach. While business people did want to know about the benefits (augmented with some faux return on investment analysis that, fortunately, no one ever looked back on once they'd actually used your product) so that they could sell interenally to get the beancounters to sign off on it, someone, somewhere in an organization - especially on the tech side - was going to know just what the application was for. As my friend V - one of the smartest and savviest marketing people I've ever known - was famous for saying, "There's always someone who's going to ask 'but what do it do?'" Indeed.

And everytime I cited a benefit, I insisted on coupling it with a point on how, exactly, the product helped achieve that benefit. Just wanted to keep things honest.

Anyway, I marketed, hmmmm, solutions, not experiences. (As an aside, at one company, we were pitched by a marketing consultant who was going to help us rebrand our product suite. Their suggestion: The Final Solution. I had to point out that this tagline was already taken...)

But now, it's all about the experience.

And when it comes to going to a ball game, I guess I am a true experience seeker.

But how does the system know that I'm a true experience seeker, and not someone who doesn't really give a hoot about baseball. Oh, I guess these folks are experience seekers in their own right, but I wish there were a way that they could divvy experience seekers up into a couple of groups - true experience seekers and whatevers - and pick more and more rapidly from the true believers group.

As it turns out, it was plenty easy to get tickets for a couple of games. I got great seats for the Patriots' Day Game - much my favorite game of the year, even though, in order to get to and from Fenway Park, you have to claw your way through crowds watching the Marathon, as the route goes near the park. Last year, getting home was a nightmare. We had to walk way far out of our way, as all the streets anywhere near the finish line were blocked off. It was cold and rainy, too. Plus the Red Sox, giving us a definite foreshadowing of how rotten the season was going to be, stunk up the place.

But back to 2006, before I knew the baseball fans were experience seekers, the Red Sox actually responded to my screed.

I got an email from the then VP of Marketing for the Red Sox Charles Steinberg, and in the thread, I could see that Larry Lucchino (then President and CC) had been copied and responded via Blackberry (remember when Blackberry was a solution? or was it an experience???).

Here's Larry:

Get back to her please and tell her we are determined to make. It better

And here's Charles:

...we must understand the path of the experience that this writer has published for the world to read....

For the world to read. (I like that...) And there was that early use of the word experience.

The upshot was that I got to work directly with someone in marketing to buy tickets for a few games without enduring time in the Virtual Waiting Room. The person I worked with turned out to the son of someone I went to high school with, of all things.

Even though the Red Sox sucked last year, and are starting out a bit rocky this year - they had to fire Alex Cora, their manager, who has been caught up in a sign-stealing scandal - I'm looking forward to being a true experience seeker a couple of times at Fenway.

As for Larry and Charles, they're now emeriti with the Boston Red Sox, but are running the Red Sox primo minor league team, which next year is moving from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Worcester, Massachusetts. Where they will operate as the Woo Sox. 

I will be doing some true experience seeking there, for sure. 

Mr. Peanut being killed off? I wouldn't bet on it.

As brand icons go, Mr. Peanut has enjoyed some rather enviable longevity. It - I almost wrote "he" there - has been around since 1916. Oh, it's - I almost wrote "he's" there - not the oldest brand mascot out there. The Morton Salt Girl ("when it rains, it pours") has been around since 1914. For once and for all, this answers the age-old question: which came first, the peanut or the salt?

Other "test of time" icons include the Campbell Kids (1904) and the Quaker Oats Man (1877). But some seem to fade away. I know that Bucky Beaver went the way of Ipana (a toothpaste that was brieflyl popular in the late 1950's). But is Speedy Alkaseltzer still a thing?  The Jolly Green Giant? (There was even a Top 40 song by the Kingsmen about the Jolly Green Giant. The Kingsmen were apparently quite versatile. They're the group that also brought us the mystery  lyrics - rumored to be ultra-dirty - "Louie Louie.")

As for Mr. Peanut, I like peanuts as much as the next guy, but I've never been all that enamored of Mr. P. There's something just plain creepy about those long skinny legs. And I suppose the shell is supposed to be clothing, but there is something weird about the entire look. Not Porky Pig only wearing a jacket weird. But plenty weird.

Anyway, the rumor is that we may not have Mr. Peanut to kick around for much longer. 

Kraft/Heinz, maker of Planters, the brand Mr. Peanut reps for, is dropping some pretty large hints - Brazil nut large, not peanut large - that, come Super Bowl Sunday, Mr. Peanut will be killed off. There's even a Twitter account ("The Estate of Mr. Peanut") that has confirmed that Mr. Peanut is a goner, having died in a fiery over the cliff crash. No word on whether any body parts could be salvaged, whether Mr. Peanut was able to become the center of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup or chopped up in a dish of Kung Pao Chicken. Just that Mr. Peanut is dead.

Kraft Heinz is obviously trying to create some Super Bowl buzz, with the brand manager announcing that she's hoping that "fans tune in to Mr. Peanut's funeral during the third quarter of the Super Bowl to celebrate his life." (Come on, brand manager, surely Mr. Peanut is an "it".)

These days, it's not enough for an icon to just be iconic. Today's advertising imperative is that the brand mascot creates some buzz - a lot of retweets, maybe even a meme - on social media.

Inc. is not a big fan of Kraft Heinze taking this "absurd" approach to social media:

...there's literally nothing more manufactured than a pre-planned marketing campaign featuring a tweet announcing the death of a made-up brand character just to generate buzz for a pretend funeral for said character.

 .. in a world where brands are increasingly defined by their most recent engagement on social media, the temptation is to generate as much buzz as possible by doing outrageous or extreme things. I'm not sure how else to describe the fake death of a fake mascot, but this is where we are.

Well, tsk tsk. But when I looked - last Thursday - the tweet confirming Mr. Peanut's passing had gotten 111K likes, 27.5K retweets, and nearly 9K comments. (I glanced through a few of the comments, and my fave asked the question "Open or closed shell funeral?") Many commenters professed (or tweeted) their sadness (#RIPeanut), while a number were happy to see Mr. Peanut roast in hell. Harsh!

So if Kraft Heinz was looking for attention, bravo. They've gotten plenty of it. And going into the third quarter of the Super Bowl this coming Sunday, the buzz may well be with them. 

Me? I've watched too many cartoons and soap operas to buy that Mr. Peanut's dead. I've seen too many times when Daffy's bill gets slapped off, his feathers get blasted off, only to have Daffy appear miraculously intact. Too many "identical twin" died soap operaa episodes. Nope. Mr. Peanut is NOT dead.  It - I almost wrote "he" here - will miraculously appear at its - I almost wrote "his" here - funeral to inform us of its - I almost wrote "his" here - survival. If Mr. Peanut does survive, I'm hoping it - I almost wrote "he" here - has the deceny to put some pants on.

75 Years after the liberation of Auschwitz

By the time the Russian Army got there, most of the surviving prisoners had been evacuated, forced to march west to other concentration camps in brutal winter weather when they were ill-clothed, ill-shod, ill-fed, and - it goes without saying - ill-treated. Those left behind were even weaker and sicker than those who were sent on the death march. There were only 7,000 of them. Many didn't survive liberation. Overall, more than 1 million people - most of them Jews - perished at Auschwitz.

I follow the Auschwitz Memorial on Twitter, so I know that today they're observing - I almost wrote 'celebrating' - the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. A number of survivors will be gathered there. Given their age - the youngest would be in their mid- to late-eighties - this is likely that last time that survivors will take part in any such memorialization of the Holocaust.

Most of what the Auschwitz Memorial posts are pictures and brief biographical snippets of some of those who were at Auschwitz - those who died there (most of the little bios) but some who survived.

And so we learn of little Shlomo Harschel, a 4-year old Dutch Jewish boy murdered in the gas chamber. Of Margot Rothensies, a German Jewish student deported to Auschwitz in 1942, when she was 20. She "did not survive." Neither did Feiga Tabakman, a hatter from Gdansk. She was 27. Bakers. Bookkeepers. Lawyers. Restaurant owners. Teachers. Clerks. Doctors. Boxers. Sales representatives. Tailors. Artists. Little kids, babies. Anne Frank's mother, Edith, died of starvation at Auschwitz, a few weeks before its liberation. A few months earlier, her daughters had been transported to Bergen-Belsen, in Germany, where they died of typhus in February or March of 1945. So near and yet...

I've been to Auschwitz.

We walked under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. We walked through the barracks. We walked through the museum.

For me, the most heart-wrenching thing in the museum was a child's apron. A little white apron, made of heavy cotton, with pretty patch pockets in a red and blue flowered print. Maybe for a three or a four year old. Hand made. I thought about the mother, older sister, grandmother, aunt lovingly making that little apron...

I've read a lot about the Holocaust - history, fiction, survivor accounts - but top of the list of the ones that stick with me the most would be the diaries of Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. Klemperer was a "privileged Jew", his privilege by way of a WWI Iron Cross and his marriage to a Christian. In February 1945, one of the last Jews in Dresden, he had at last been called up for deportation. Then there was the Dresden firebombing, which enabled Klemperer to escape and survive. He kept a daily diary from 1933 through 1945, and if you want an accounting of the lobster-in-the-pot-of-water way in which madness and evil completely took over Germany, this two-part work is for you.

For Auschwitz-related books, I'd recommend If This Is Man by Primo Levi, who was at Auschwitz on the day of its liberation. (Levi also wrote the brilliant Periodic Table.) And Tadeusz Borowski's short story collection, This Way to the Gas Station, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski was a Pole, non-Jewish, who spent time doing forced labor at Auschwitz. Having survived the war, he killed himself a few years later by putting his head in the oven and turning the gas on. His short stories are breathtaking. (Levi died in his late sixties after a fall. His death is disputed: it may or may not have been a suicide.)

For a symbolic understanding of the Holocaust, I'd recommend Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I know that this memorial is controversial, but to me - like the Klemperer book - it evokes how it happened. When you first approach, it's light and open. There may even be people perched on the blocks. But the further into the memorial you go, the darker it gets, and the more difficult it is to easily extract yourself from it.

Just a few thoughts on a day when it's not a bad thing to think about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, the 20th century's great cautionary tale...

"Daddy's Favorite"

On my mother's recipe card, she has written FRUIT CAKE, but it was always called "Daddy's Favorite", and I made it the other day.

I made it because tomorrow is the 49th anniversary of my father's death, and I've been thinking about him more often lately because of this.

I made it because my brother was coming over to dinner the other night.

I made it because I really like it.

In terms of serving it to my brother, I could have saved myself the trouble. How did I not know that he didn't particularly care for it? I knew my sister Kath likes it, and that Trish doesn't. I guess I just assumed the Rick was a fan because he doesn't have a particular sweet tooth, and "Daddy's Favorite" (despite the 2 cups of sugar that goes into it) isn't especially sweet. And because Rick - although he's a blue-eyed blond (okay, he's gray now) and my father was black-haired with hazel eyes, and although Rick is a lot taller and bigger in general than my father was - is my father's spit and image. (Oddly, both my brothers look exactly like my father, though they don't look anything alike. Go figure.)

I did make it up, dinner-wise, by serving meatloaf. My mother's recipe, more or less. She used Saltines crushed to crumbs using a rolling pin; I use pre-fab breadcrumbs. Also, I used the pan she used for meatloaf - an aluminum rectangular baking pan (the same one I had earlier used to bake "Daddy's Favorite") - because in our house, mealoaf wasn't really a "loaf". It was cut in flat squares, like a lasagna. Like a cake. Like "Daddy's Favorite."

The meatloaf was quite good. "Daddy's Favorite" even better. I put half of it in the freezer, but have been enjoying the rest as a grab and gulp, or with my tea. I gave a couple of pieces to a friend who came by the other day.

"Daddy's Favorite" completely hits the spot, and that spot is made even better because I used my mother's hand-scrawled recipe, her mixing bowl, and her aluminum baking pan.

There is nothing like seeing something in the handwriting of someone you love who is no longer on earth to get you going. (When I come across something my husband has written - especially if it's in his famous red ink - I still tear up, even six years after Jim's death. Jim, by the way, was a big fan of my mother's meatloaf. I can't recall where he stood on "Daddy's Favorite.")

I don't know the ur source of the "Daddy's Favorite" recipe, but I do have a theory.

A few years ago, I was in Ireland with my sister Trish, her daughter Molly, and our friend Michele. We were in Galway while Molly was finishing up her semester abroad. One afternoon, when Trish was helping Molly move out from her student digs, Michele and I went out for a walk and came across a little artist gallery-tea room. We browsed a bit and, since the day was gorgeous, decided to sit outside and have a cup of tea.

Barmbrack was on the menu.

Now I've been to Ireland many, many times, but had never had brack, so I decided to order it to have with my tea.

And once I took a bite, what to my wondering mouth did appear?

Turns out "Daddy's Favorite" is barmbrack. Who knew? Not me, for sure. And those who might have known - my mother, my Aunt Margaret, my grandmother - are long gone.

Anyway, I'm guessing that the "Daddy's Favorite"/FRUIT CAKE recipe likely came to my mother by way of my father's mother by way of her mother. So I'm thinking it's Ballymascanlon, Co. Louth barmbrack we're talking here.

If you want a nice little cakey thing to go with your tea, here's the recipe:

1 lb. raisins
Pour 2 cups boiling water over raisins. Cool.  (Underlining is my mother's.)
Add 2 tpsp. baking soda to the raisins and water.

Mix:
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons shortening. (Not specified, but I use Crisco, as my mother did.)
2 eggs

Add:
Raisins and water. Mix well. (Here's my mother's aside - verbatim: I usually add first the water and hold the raisins until I have added the flour. I followed my mother's instructions.)

Add:
3 cups fluor. Mix well.
1/2 cup walnuts.

Bake for approx. 1 hour, either 350 degrees or 375 degrees depending on your oven.

Use 13x9" greased and floured pan.

My notes: I baked at 375 degrees, but this was more due to using a metal pan (vs. glass) than anything to do with my oven. It was ready a bit before one hour.

I'm about to put the kettle on, and have myself a piece (or two) of "Daddy's Favorite."

I will think about my father.

For a number of years now, my sibs and I, when talking about our father, have said things like "if Dad had lived he'd be dead already." Which for a number of years now would be true. If he were alive, he'd be 107.

But how rotten, how cruelly unfair, that he was only allotted a stingy 58 years. That he was sick off and on (progressive kidney disease) for 7 years before he died. That he left my mother in a heap of grief, and 5 bereft kids  - 23, 21, 18, 15, 11 - who'd been fearing his death each time he ping-ponged in and out of the hospital during  those 7 years - without the wonderful, decent, generous, quick-tempered, hard-working, wickedly funny, imaginative, feisty, story-telling, athletic, backwards-skating, vibrant father who loved his children fiercely. When my father died, we felt like orphans.

My father never did make it to Ireland, but he was a tea drinker, and I like to think of him, sitting in the front yard of that little gallery-tea house in Galway, ordering his cup of tea, ordering a side of brack. And lighting up when he recognized his grandmother's recipe.

We only heard my mother's side of the conversation, but if my father was away - he was a salesman, and traveled on business; and in the last 7 years of his life also logged plenty of hospital time - my mother's last words to him before she hung up were always "I love you, too, kid."

Well, he wasn't kid to me, but "me, too." Still miss you after all these years...

More fun with career damage!

Yesterday, I posted about two young GM engineers - lunkheads, both - who lost their jobs after they took a couple of the Corvettes they were working on out for a 100 m.p.h./120 m.p.h spin.

There are, of course, a lot of different ways to damage your career.

Another one popped my way last week by way of Twitter. I don't follow Bradley P. Moss, an attorney who focuses on national security issues and has plenty of things to say about the whistleblower and Trump. But some tweeters that I do follow do follow him, so there he was, showing the world a couple of email threats he'd received from one Eric Ziegler.

Now these sorts of attacks are pretty common Twitter fare. But when folks send over-the-top attacks - as in you're a liberal so you are "pretty much fucking deranged in the head"..."can't wait to see you die from a mental breakdown" - to those that they have political disagreements with, they tend not to use their corporate email and signature.

Not Eric Ziegler. Say it loud, say it proud. I'm Inpro's Director of Corporate Development and General Manager of their Charlotte office. And I, apparently, approved this mesage, and its followup, which were vile, moronic, and vaguely threatening. Wonder what Ziegler has in mind when he mentions "a cure to eradicate"? Inquiring minds of the liberal persuasion sure would like to know.

Moss clapped back at Inpro Corp, as did a number of Tweeters. Here's Moss's clap:

I understand your company has hosted events for the president, and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone their political views. I simply want to ensure you are aware this is how one of your management team is using his company email: to send me hate mail (Source: Twitter)

Anyway, when I first saw this, I went to look for Ziegler's LinkedIn, found it, and then figured I could come back again for another look. Ah, no. When I went to find it the second time, alas, it was removed. So I figured Ziegler had gotten - at minimum - his wrists slapped.

After all, his company may be big Trump supporters, but they do claim a philosphy that suggests that this is not the sort of behavior that the company - which is headquartered in Wisconsin and makes "stuff" like window, door and wall treatments, bathroom stalls and elevator interiors that go into commercial buildings - would welcome in its employees. 

Because our employees are such an instrumental part of ensuring that success, we hold them to a high standard of conduct. Inpro has no tolerance for hateful acts, discrimination, unethical behavior or any other forms of misconduct that does not reflect our corporate philosophy and values. We constantly work to foster a culture of service, respect, innovation and responsibility. We are committed to the ongoing pursuit of these values in our actions with our customers, employees and anyone in the communities we serve.

We are grateful for those who have worked with us and who have had the opportunity to let us demonstrate our culture firsthand.

I can't imagine that any company would condone Ziegler's behavior. Unlike the two knuckleheads I wrote about yesterday, who may have had a lapse in judgment and just given into that temptation to zoom around in a Corvette, but who may be decent individuals, Eric Ziegler's mini-screeds suggest a person with character flaws, a toxic jerk who I can't imagine anyone would want to deal with.

Both of the GM employees who took the Corvettes out for a high-speed spin were fired. Their resumes suggest well-educated, high-skilled guys - engineers who'll probably get picked up somewhere. They just won't be working at GM. A career speedbump, but likely not fatal. Nor should it be, IMHO.

But what about Eric Ziegler? Other than the disappearing act for his LinkedIn profile, did Inpro actually do anything? Did he lose his job?

A closer look at the company, and one finds that the chairman is also named Ziegler. And there are a couple of other Zieglers there, too. Common enough name. Sort of. I'm guessing Eric Ziegler has got friends - maybe even a dad - in high places in the organization. Which is generally a foolproof strategy if you're going to behave like a fool. 

Moss says that he wouldn't ordinarily "out" a-holes who send outright nasty and quasi-threatening messages. But when this guy used corporate email, and included his credentials in the note, well, that was a bit too much for Moss. 

I suspect Ziegler gets to keep his cushy job and cushy title, courtesy of daddy dearest. (Who, I suspect, gave sonny boy a cheerful-earful about his stupidity.) But would you want to do business with this guy? I sure wouldn't. And I bet there are plenty more like me out there. Supporting Trump may not be a dealbreaker, but this level of toxic douchebaggery sure is.