Ghost town in the making (My Corona...)

On Monday morning, I went to the gym. It was pretty much a ghost town. Now there are a number of reasons, which I won't get into here, that could explain why there were only a couple of people working out. But I can't help but believe that concerns about COVID-19 is one of them.

My gym is in the heart of downtown Boston, and when I walked out afterwards, the city seemed sort of deserted. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but there didn't seem to be as many people out and about. There's always plenty of energy in this area, and late Monday morning it just seemed to be lacking.

I went into the grocery store to grab a few things, and it wasn't as crowded as it usually is just before noon.

Or so it seemed.

On Tuesday, I worked my usual shift at St. Francis House, a day shelter for the poor and homeless. I was relieved to find SFH as hopping as usual. Or was I? After all, our guests are among the most vulnerable to outbreaks of anything. Many of them spend the night on beds in dorm facilities, we're they're cheek to jowl with hundreds of others, most in varying degree of ill health.

Given our population, we're all - including most of the guests - already pretty aware of health protocols. Hand sanitizer is all over the place. When someone who seems more germy than the norm checks in at the desk, we wipe it down with Clorox wipes.

A few weeks back, a fellow came in, pulled up his sleeve, and announced that he had scabies. His arm was a livid red and purple. It may have been my imagination, but I could swear I saw mites burrowing under his skin.

He wanted to take a shower, but I directed him to the clinic. When he left, my colleague sprung up and scrubbed the countertop down. I bee-lined into the restroom and did the near-boiling-water surgical scrub of my hands. I'd only handled a pencil that this fellow had held, and scabies is transmitted by far closer contact. Still, it was all pretty unsettling.

And now there's novel corona virus to worry about. And worry about it we all should all, given that the US Senate was just given a closed-door briefing at which attendees were told that anywhere from 70-150 million people could contract COVID-19 before this is all over. 150 million is nearly half the population. At a 1% mortality rate - and no one knows what the mortality rate is - that's 1.5 million fatalities. Yikes. Will they be sending wagons into the streets so we can bring out the bodies like they did during plagues of yore?

Anyway, I've become a lot more conscious of better habits in the last week or so, Lady MacBething it up with the hand washing. And then some.

Other changes, too. I was introduced to a new employee at SFH and he put his hand out. I smiled and told him I was now offering the Hawaiian greeting - the one that looks like hook 'em horns - or the Namaste head bow. Later, a colleague there went to give me a high-five, which is pretty much our standard greeting. I converted it to the fist bump.

One of my tasks is checking folks in, which means taking the card from the hand of the guest and running it under a scanner. I'm now either having the guest hold the card while I run the scanner over it, or - failing that - sanitizing my hands after I touch the card.

At my recent physical, my doctor asked whether I wore gloves and a mask when working with the homeless population. Yes, we wear gloves when preparing and serving food, but for our regular interactions, I told her that gloves (let alone a mask) would be a barrier, an implication that there's something about our guests that should be shunned. I won't be wearing a mask, but I'm thinkng of donning gloves when I'm handing pencils, Q-tips and bars of soap to our folks.

And I'm also thinking about stepping away from volunteering for a bit.

I'm not quite there yet.

My volunteer work is a big part of what I do. I have two days each week (one half-day, one full day) when I'm always there, and I tend to pick up a shift or two in clothing or the kitchen when they're in extra need of volunteers. Much of the work I do doesn't involve direct guest contact, but it's the direct guest contact that I enjoy the most.

In addition to being a volunteer there, I'm also on the board of St. Francis House. We have a board meeting next week, and I'm pretty sure that the coronavirus is going to be up for discussion. And I will have a few questions about what extra precautions are being taken. For employees, for guests, and for volunteers.

I know that we'll be facing a volunteer shortage. A good percentage of our volunteers are college students. They're all being sent home and will be taking all their courses virtually. (One reason Boston is turning into a ghosttown.) A good percentage of our volunteers are employee groups who come in regularly and irregularly. If these folks all start working from home, or if their companies stop encouraging volunteering, well, those groups will disappear for a while.

Then there are the retirees, a cadre in their 60's, 70's and 80's who make up the bulk of the weekday volunteers. Us retirees? We're all on the "more susceptible" side of the coronavirus equation.

I'll be making my decision after the board meeting, but I'm leaning towards taking a couple of weeks off. I believe I'm healthy enough to withstand a bout with COVID-19. The mortality rates are high for the elderly with multiple health conditions, which isn't the case with me. But I sure don't want to turn into Typhoid Mary for family and friends.

On the other hand, if half the population will end up getting it within the next year or so, why not just get it over with rather than sit home staring at the four walls.

And I really don't want to abandon ship. Who's going to sign folks up for the shower? Who's going to show new volunteers how to work the combo locks on the lockers? Who's going to know what kind of bagel Cyril wants (sesame) when he comes through the line? Who's going to wince at Phil's terrible jokes?

How will the large and vulnerable group of folks we work with withstand a pandemic?

Every once in a while, we hear about one of our guests who's died. Sometimes it's okay: George was pretty old, he had a lot of health problems, he died in his apartment. (Many of our guests are housed, but come to St. Francis House for services and companionship.) Sometimes those deaths are less okay: Andres was a drinker who froze to death last winter.

Are we going to start hearing about a lot of our guests being impacted? Is it prudent or chickenshit to bail out on volunteering with them?

Meanwhile, Boston's feeling ghost town-ish.

Not that I was going to go, but the St. Patrick's Day Parade has been canceled.  Conventions have been called off.  So's business travel. In person meetings. They're talking about canceling the Boston Marathon. About having the Celtics and Bruins play at an empty Boston Garden. About relocating baseball games to places where there's no outbreak reported. Yet.

Last night, I went out for a little early-evening spin. (Truth: I wanted a burrito from Boloco.) I walked by a few restaurants along the way. On a Wednesday night, nice weather, you'd expect them to be packed. But no. Mostly empty, and not in a half-empty/half-full kind of way. So, look for more and more restaurants to lay-off staff, most who likely can't financially withstand too much of a lay-off shock.

Of the areas in the US most impacted, Boston is right up there after Seattle, NY, and SF-Silicon Valley. No, we're not Wuhan or Northern Italty. But we have a number of cases, and these things take off fast. We've got great medical facilities, but they could easily become overwhelmed.

I hope all the things people are doing to "flatten the curve" so that the spread is spread out. I hope it turns out not to be as bad as it could be - maybe 7 to 15 million folks getting sick, not 70 to 150 million. I hope that no one I know gets sick, let alone dies. And that goes for my buds at St. Francis House.

I sure hate Boston turning into a ghost town.

Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it...

I don't remember when I first started shaving my legs and underarms. Likely in seventh grade, about the time I started my period. It may have been later. I was never particularly hairy to begin with. Even the hair on my head has always been baby fine. But "by 1964, 98% of American women aged 15 to 44 were regularly shaving their legs." I was one of them.

I actually don't know whether I had my own razor, or shared one with my mother and sister, but I remember it distinctly. You twirled the handle and "jaws" opened up. You then removed the razor blade from its paper wrapping and inserted it, and twirled the razor shut. Proceed to shaving, which featured nicking yourself, attempts to staunch the flow with wadded up toilet paper, and - finally - resorting to my father's styptic pencil to stop the bleeding.

Then there was something called Nair. Nair was a chemical depilatory that you slathered on your legs. After letting it set there for a few minutes, you washed it off. Voila! No leg hair. 

The problem with Nair was that it was more expensive than cadging the communal razor and razor blade supply, and my mother wasn't going to spring for it. Plus it smelled just awful. Worse than having a home permanent. And you didn't use it under your arms. 

By the time I was in college, I had my own razor, and I'm pretty sure it was something from Gillette, and something marketed specifically for women. And I'm pretty sure I bought it, and a stash of blades, at Spag's, a great - and, alas, defunct - surplus store where everyone who lived anywhere near Worcester did their shopping for back-to-school toiletries. 

But, alas, it wasn't a Gillette Milady Décolletée, which was introduced in 1915, advertised as"a beautiful addition to Milady's toilet table -- and one that solves an embarrassing personal problem."

I never gave much thought to body hair as "an embarrassing personal problem." Nonetheless, shaving was a weekly ritual, and it was a ritual that I never questioned. 

Hair removal, I learned from a recent story from CNN, has been part of our "gender dynamics" since pretty much forever. But the idea of the less-hair-the-better (for women, at any rate) really took off in the 19th century:

The modern-day notion of body hair being unwomanly can be traced back to Charles Darwin's 1871 book "Descent of a Man," according to Rebecca Herzig's "Plucked: A History of Hair Removal."

Darwin's theory of natural selection associated body hair with "primitive ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, 'less developed' forms," wrote Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College in Maine. Conversely, having less body hair, the English naturalist suggested, was a sign of being more evolved and sexually attractive...

By the early 1900s, upper- and middle-class white America increasingly saw smooth skin as a marker of femininity, and female body hair as disgusting, with its removal offering "a way to separate oneself from cruder people, lower class and immigrant," Herzig wrote. 

Immigrants, eh? Why am I now try to remember whether my mittel-Europa and all those great aunts shaved their legs and their armpits?

Anyway, fast forward to the Roaring Twenties and sleeveless flapper dresses with short skirts, and we're definitely in hair removal mode - with products (and marketing) aimed a women taking off. Stocking shortages and shorter dresses during World War II got more women shaving. And so it went.

Then, in the late 1960's-early 1970's, hair became more of a thing. Men were wearing their hair longer, and we sang along to our Hair albums:

Darlin', give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there hair, shoulder length or longer
Here, baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddy…

Ultra-long hair on men was never something I found/find particularly attractive. Ditto for super-hairy backs. I guess I'm with Darwin there. 

Anyway, while men were getting into long beautiful hair, there was movement among feminists to stop shaving their leg and underarm hair. Why cater to the patriarchy? Etc.

So I decided to stop shaving. But after about a month of trying to grow righteous, feminist hair, all I had to show for it were a bit of underarm fuzz, and a ruff of hair around my ankles. 

I used to say it resembled the ruffs that Popeye's Goonies sported, but just look at Alice the Goonie, an dher impossibly lush fur.

The bottom line was that my righteous feminist hair looked ridiculous, so I shaved it off.

Then there's the pubic hair thang. (I blush...)

I'm too old to have ever considered a Brazilian, but hair removal of the nether regions strikes me as weird and more than a bit creepy. So does what I read about the opposite situation with pubic hair in South Korea: some women have taken to transplants to augment what comes naturally. Club for Women. Oh.

And I'm too old to be worried about hair, something that - body wise - I have less and less of. Other than the stray "granny sprong" that sprouts over my lip, on my chin, or out of my eyebrow, I just ain't making all that much of it. As for shaving, what used to be a weekly ritual is now once a month. 

But what with next wave feminism, gender fluidity, body positivity, and all those other good things, some women are back to letting in all grow out. 

So I'll leave with a few more lyrics from Hair:

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it, my hair

Apple of my eye? Not really.

The iPod was released in 2001. I'm not sure when I got mine, but I was by no means an early adopter. If I had to put a date on it, I'd say 2004, which is when I started making regular business trips - driving - to Syracuse, NY. That's a long drive - over 300 miles - and radio isn't always reliable. I had a course on CD (Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition), which was quite good and informative. But mostly when I was on I-90, breezing by all those old industrial revolution towns like Amsterdam and Gloversville, I wanted tunes. 

So I got an iPod and loaded it up, mostly with Bruce Springsteen and the Irish singer Mary Black, so I could sing my way to Syracuse and back home again. 

That iPod is around here somewhere, but I haven't used it in years. 

It was the first and only Apple product I've ever owned.

My husband had an early-ish Apple II from early in the 1980's, but when it comes to personal computers, I've always been a Windows kind of gal, and over the years, between desktops and laptops, I've had 'em all. Leading Edge. Gateway. Compaq. Toshiba. HP. Dell. Sony. Microsoft. 

I'm one of the only people I know who doesn't have an iPad or Macbook or other Apple computer.

And I'm one of the only people I know who's never had an iPhone. 

Back when they came out, I'm not sure what I had. A Nokia flip phone? A Motorola? A Blackberry? (I had a couple of those along the way.) My last few phones have been Samsungs. And, even though I think there are more emojis on Apple for some reason, and even though overseas there are issues when trying to text between an iPhone and other sorts of phones, I'm fine with not being an Apple person.

Nothing against Apple, mind you. I admire the aesthetic, their marketing genius, etc. It's just that I've always felt their products were a bit pricey. And, in general, I can be an aginner.

Did I just say "nothing against Apple, mind you"? Tsk, tsk.

There may well be something to hold against Apple, and that's the issue about whether they put in software fixes to deliberately slow down iPhone performance on older models to force folks to upgrade to newer ones.

Apple has just agreed to settle a class action law that claimed that they did just that:

The proposed settlement agreement requires Apple (AAPL) to pay the owners of certain iPhone models $25 per affected device, totaling a minimum of $310 million and a maximum of $500 million, according to documents released on Friday in US District Court in San Jose, California. The amount each user receives could increase or decrease depending on how many claims are filed as well as any additional legal fees and expenses approved by the court, the document added. (Source: CNN)

$500 million is, of course, chump change to Apple. The company's market cap, as of last Friday, was $1.265 TRILLION. And they may find this a small price to pay to put this issue behind them.

The company has admitted:

...that it used software updates to slow down older iPhones, soon after angry customers and tech analysts flagged that the updates were causing diminished performance. Some of them suggested that Apple did so to force users to upgrade to the latest iPhone model, but the company said it was aimed at addressing issues with older lithium-ion batteries that would make the phones suddenly shut down to protect their components.

So maybe they didn't actually put the fix in to deliberately slow down the old iPhones to the point where people couldn't stand using them any longer. But I'm pretty sure that someone there kinda sorta knew that the slowdown caused by the supposed battery fix might lead some iPhoners to upgrade to something newer, shinier, faster and more expensive. 

Not good.

Built-in obsolescence is the name of the tech game. I typically hang on to my phones and laptops for about 3 years before they just plain wear out. Or until I just want something that runs faster. I get relatively high end models - a nice Samsung galaxy, a decent Microsoft Surface. And still they tend to run out of steam after a few years use. (Or I run out of patience and just want something with a bit more zoom.) I do know that I get a ton of use out of both my phone and my laptop. I don't record how much time I spend on them during a day, but it's plenty. So when the nag has to head to the glue factory, I never feel as though I haven't gotten my money's worth out of it. Still, I'd be plenty ticked off if I found out that there were deliberate attempts to diminish performance, rather than just the reality that things fall apart, there's a lot of wear and tear and/or a desire to have a more souped up model.

If I were one of those iPhone users with an older, dowdier phone - one numbered in the 6's and 7's, that I bought before December 21, 2017 - I might be inclined to file a settlement claim. I think I saw somewhere that the likely payout will be around $25. Still, $25 is $25. Which is more than I've ever been rewarded from any of the class action claims I filed. (Did I get $2 once???)

I'll be on the lookout for a class action suit on yesteryear iPods...

The rich are different than you and me

Well, last Friday I posted about how us little guys are preparing for coronavirus by buying up all the Purell and masks in the world. But I guess it's not all entirely bought up, as my sister Trish just saw that two 8 oz. bottles of Purell are still available for $380.00. 

When we're not on our futile buying sprees so that we can save our newly converted to obsessive handwashing selves, we're all ears for the assurances and hunches our trusted and genius president is offering about the pandemic. Aren't we fortunate that there's so much expertise rolled up into one man? As long as we aren't one of the thousands of cruisers marooned offshore on the Grand Princess, stuck in their cabins until further notice. Or one of the millions of older folks in nursing homes waiting for the Angel of Death to blow in. 

But while we the people are doing what we're doing to stay safe, those on a different economic tier have their own thing going.

Gwyneth Paltrow wasn't going to be denied a visit to Paris Fashion Week, so she flew - commercial, I surprisingly believe - wearing a mask. But not one of those tawdry, flimsy ones you get at the drugstore. With ever the eye out for something that she might want to stock on Goop, Gwyneth was sporting an Airinium, which goes for $69 and $99 online and in the MoMA Design Store. If only it weren't sold out. Admittedly, those prices don't put the mask out of consideration for most folks. What price health? Plus the Airinium looks chic compared to the lower-cost alternatives. And it does feature "five layers of filtration and an 'utrasmooth and skin-frendly finish.'" But, while I could afford an Airinium, I'd rather contribute the $69/$99 on ActBlue to some worthy candidate for public office.

Some of what the richie-riches are buying up are, like the Airinium, upscalier, stylin'-er versions of what the rest of us buy. There's the Byredo luxury hand sanitizer - "notes of pear and bergamot" for $35 a spritz. Or Olika's "hand sanitizer shaped like a modernist baby chick", which aren't crazily expensive. How not crazily expensive are they? Let's it put it this way, family members can expect one in their Easter baskets this year. Thanks, richie-riches. If the NY Times wasn't doing an article on how you're all coping, I never would have come across these. 

Although for most folks, the price of an Airinium, or even those bergamot hand sanitizers, is more or less within reach if not reason, for those filling the ranks of the fashionistas, the influencers - which, now that I think of it, sounds a bit like "influenzas" - and the just plain rich, there are plenty of ways to separate us from them.

Business executives are ditching first class for private planes. Jet-setters are redirecting their travel plans to more insular destinations. 

Some wealthy people have told Bloomberg News that they have been staying in their Hamptons homes and are prepared to jet off to cabins in Idaho if things get worse. And The Guardian reported that executives have chartered jets for “evacuation flights” out of China and other affected areas.

For some private jet companies, fear equals opportunity. Southern Jet, a charter jet company in Boca Raton, Fla., recently sent out a limited test marketing email with the tag line: “Avoid coronavirus by flying private … Request a quote today!”  (Source: NY Times)

Of course, you won't be avoiding coronavirus if someone else on the flight has been exposed. I'd hate to have forked over tens of thousands of bucks for a flight, only to hear a dry, hacking cough emanating from the cockpit.

While coronavirus is boosting the private jet industry, yacht rentals are also seeing an uptick in interest. Jennifer Saia is president of a Newport, RI-based yacht charter agency. 

“It totally makes sense,” Ms. [Jenniver] Saia said. “You’re keeping your family contained in a very small, should-be-clean environment. And going from your car to your F.B.O.” — meaning fixed base operator, or private jet terminal — “to your private jet right onto the tarmac. And from there, right onto your yacht, and not having to deal with the public.”

I've just finished watching the fabulous HBO miniseries Succession, which follows the intra-family maneuvering among the members of an ultra-ultra media empire family (think Murdochs), all jockeying for control of the company if and when the paterfamilias steps down. There's not one member of this family with one iota of likability, but for best nicknames ever, "Shiv" (short for Siobhan, the only daughter) makes the short list. 

Anyway, the Roy family travels exclusively by private: limos drop them off a few feet from their private helicopters and jets and, in one of the best episodes, the family gets together on an unbelievably luxe yacht (with helicopter landing pad) off the coast of Croatia. No coronavirus, for the Roys, although one might argue that they have their own bespoke virus to contend with. It may not come from pangolins - or wherever coronavirus sprung from - but whatever's epidemic in this family is nearly fatal in its own little way. 

Concierge medical memberships are also seeing increased interest, and - let's face it - who wouldn't want to avoid a trip to the ER if they could afford it. 

But others are going one step further: isolation bunkers:

...an heiress in Southampton, N.Y., built a medical isolation room complete with a ventilation system.

The word “room,” however, hardly captures it...it is equipped with a negative pressure system to restrict the circulation of pathogens, and is basically an isolated guest wing consisting of a bedroom and kitchen stocked with IV hydration, medicines, lab supplies, gloves, gowns, masks, oxygen and food, as well as a set of dishes and linens.

Maybe novel coronavirus is the big one that the survivalists, the doomsday preppers, have been prepping for. Maybe we're all in danger of being wiped out. Maybe the melting premafrost is going to unleash all sorts of billion-year-old threats that our fragile modern little selves just can't deal with. Maybe we are all doomed. If that's the case, I don't think it will matter much whether you've got a Airinium mask a la Gwyneth Paltrow, or are scooting around the world in private luxury. 

Personally, I don't think this is the big one.  If it is, I hope I go quickly. If it's not, well, let's just say I'll be happy when those Oilika modernist baby chick hand sanitizers do show up on my doorsteps. I just hope no mad-arse survivalist - rich or poor -  kills me for them.

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A tip of the Pink Slip hazmat suit - and, of course, a bottle or two of Olika - to my sister Kath for sending this article my way. 

Panic in the Year Zero!

The other day, I was chatting with one of my fellow St. Francis House volunteers, and he was crowing that he'd scored a box of 30 N95 facemasks at Home Depot. Or was it Lowe's. He'd be sharing, he told me. He was mostly concerned about his kids and grandkids. 

I didn't have the heart to point out that all of the experts are saying that facemasks are really not necessary or useful, other than for healthcare workers and those with the virus. 

Then my brother Tom called me from Washington. He doesn't live in the COVID-19 section of the state. He's way down on the coast, closer to Oregon, in a fairly isolated and low-population area. He's pretty sure that the coronavirus won't be coming their way, but he did assure me that he has a box of masks, and one super-duper mask. Tom isn't a hoarder. He's a retired engineer who builds stuff, most recently a new house, so he always keeps masks around for when he's blasting, sanding, concrete-ing, and whatever else he does. Even though he's got his supply because of his construction work, Tom is just as happy to have them around. Just in case the coronavirus creeps closer.

Me? I'm not in the market for facemasks. But - even though the health officials are saying they're useless - I might poke around the house and see if I have a few. I'm pretty sure we had some for whatever reason during my husband's illness. And I'm pretty sure I kept some around.

On the other hand, I was sort of in the market for Purell or equivalent. But good luck with that.

I haven't been seriously looking. Just checking in whenever I'm in a CVS or the local indie drugstore. 

I did nab the last two mini-bottles of fake-Purell at North Station last weekend, nobly giving one to my sister Trish.

Then the other day, I looked on line to see if the two-liter bottles are available, figuring I'd use it to refill the small bottles of hand sanitizer I keep in my pocketbooks, but if they're available at all - and mostly they're not - the price is way beyond what I'm willing to pay. When I had checked in the a.m., the 2 liter bottle was about $30. Later in the day, I found the same thing for well over $100. And yesterday I found 3 of the small pocketbook-sized bottles for $35. Huh? Wouldn't that have been about $5 or less just last week? Good thing shipping is free if you've got Amazon Prime. Still, war sure is hell, what with the profiteering and all.
On Wednesday, at the local indie hardware store - I'm really fortunate to live in indie-ville - they didn't have Purell, but they had a hand sanitizer that came in lavender or basil. I guess the basil was the manly choice - as opposed to lavender - but I don't imagine that anyone wants to smell like pesto. I suppose I could have hoarded, but I grabbed a mere two of the lavenders. 

What I need to do now is go poking around, checking out all my pocketbooks and tote bags, looking through all the bathroom drawers, and dig out all the small bottles of hand sanitizer I've accumulated over the years. I'm guessing by the time I'm looked through all the nooks and crannies, I probably have a dozen or more. Will they last me through the pandemic? Probably not, so I'll just have to keep Lady McBeth-ing up with good old soap and water.

That or make my own hand sanitizer. I've seen recipes online: aloe vera plus isopropyl alcohol, eye of newt and toe of frog. But, unbelievably, I've read that isopropyl alcohol supplies are running low, as folks stock up on that.

I have been paying more attention to handwashing lately, doing more of a surgical scrub and washing the tops of my hands, which seems weird. I must say that washing your hands for 20 seconds is an absolute drag. Not quite as bad as the interminable toothbrushing that the electric toothbrush calls for. (The reason that mine sits largely unused.)

And if "they" want us to scrub-a-dub for twenty minutes, "they" better make sure that there's hot water in those public taps. 

Back at North Station the other day, I unfortunately had to use the restroom. Oddly, the toilets at South Station aren't bad, but the ones at North Station just scream "typhoid epidemic." And when you go to wash your hands, the water feels like it was just piped in from the polar ice cap. If you do the 20 second routine (and I first wrote 20 minutes, because that's what it seems like), it's guaranteed that your arms get frozen up to your shoulders. 

Mostly I'm not too worried about the corona virus. I can easily stay home and avoid others. I have enough food on the shelves to last me through a reasonably long hibernation.

I do volunteer in a homeless shelter, which is one giant germ vector with a very vulnerable population, but I'm not worried yet. If our guests start coming down with it, and if we run out of the large bottles of hand sanitizer that are all over the place, I may skip a few shifts. 

A fellow came in the other day and showed me his scabies. That was scary enough. 

I'm glad I'm not on a cruise ship. I'm glad I'm not in a nursing home. I'm glad I'm not in Wuhan. And I hope when this blows through and over, it's not all that much worse than the annual flu outbreaks that also kill a lot of people - especially older folks and those who are already medically compromised. 

I understand why public health officials - the legit ones, not Mike Pence and the other Trump toadies - are being cautious. We don't want this one to take off like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions. (By the way, I read that one reason that epidemic was so deadly is that those in charge didn't want to hurt morale - there was a still a world war on - so they played things down. Sound familiar?)

And I understand why people want to be careful. Even if this virus will not kill most of the people it infects, who wants to be sick? I had a sinus infection last month and that was bad enough. But the Purell and facemask hoarding? Seriously, folks, stop panicking.

That said, the reason I was at my indie hardware store the other day was to pick up some toilet paper, which I heard there might be a shortage of coming up.

I didn't panic. I didn't hoard. I took only two rolls, and left dozens behind. 

Still, I guess I'm a bit guilty of stockpiling. But Purell I can live with out - there's always soap and water - but toilet paper? No way! (Note to self: check on soap supply...)

Zzzzzzzz...And, yes, there's an app for that. Lots of them.

Did "simple nervous tension keep you awake last night?"

Well, yes and no. I wouldn't say fretting about what Trump's up to, what Bernie's up to, whether I'll run out of Purell to ward off Coronavirus before the epidemic abates, and how there's no escape from speculation about whether Tom Brady is going to dump the Patriots is "simple nervous tension." It's complex nervous tension.

The truth is, I don't sleep as well as I used to. I usually wake up at some point to pee. Sometimes I just wake up, turn on the light, and read for a bit. Sometimes I'll check in with Twitter to check on the latest outrage. Sometimes I just can't sleep. And that does make me pine for the days when I turned off the light and was out like one.

Nowadays I don't expect to get in 7.5 to 8 hours uninterrupted sleep.

But nowadays, it doesn't matter all that much. 

Yes, there are at least two days a week when I have to be up at the crack of dawn to get to my volunteer work. But I don't have a job to get to. Mostly, I can lay in bed in the morning. On days when I have to get up - and didn't get a great night's sleep the night before - I can take a nap. This, of course, may screw up the coming night's sleep, but there you have it.

Back in the days when Sominex asked us about "simple nervous tension" messing with our circadian cycle, they had a simple answer:

Take Sominex tonight and sleep, safe and restful, sleep, sleep, sleep.

I've never taken a sleeping pill, but they've been on offer for a very long time.

But sleep  - or lack thereof - used to be a personal matter. Or a matter that went no further than the family: drowsy dad, grouchy mom, cranky kids. In today's world, employers, concerned that their workers aren't getting enough sleep to work at peak rates, are deciding that your sleep habits are their business. And they're deploying - what else - "high tech solutions" to help employees get their zzz's.

After several years of recognizing sleep’s role in productivity and controlling health-care costs, some employers are actively giving employees tools to do something about it, taking advantage of new hardware and apps to affect behavioral changes.

While experts applaud the attention being paid to workers’ sleep, some raise questions about privacy or how useful sleep data, if it’s provided without context, will be for many employees. (Source: WaPo)

Dayzz is a "mobile app that offers personal recommendations for better sleep."

Do we really need an app that sends you a reminder to turn off the TV you're watching while sitting in bed? Or an alert that if they're restless, they might want to get up and listen to some chillaxin' music?

Apparently the makers of Dayzz think so, and they back it all up with sleep coaches you can chat online with if all the suggestions fail. 

New Balance is one of the companies offering weary employees use of Dayzz. (Is one of the suggestions to lace up a pair of sneaks and take a nice long run?)

Black Rock is giving its prime employees Oura Rings, "a sleep and activity tracker." Now their portfolio managers are more aware about the impact of never turing their screens off.

Oura, which combines body temperature, resting heart rate and the previous night’s sleep into a “readiness score,” sends users a daily alert. It might tell them to “take it easy,” for instance, if the score is low after a late steak dinner with wine kept their heart rate high during the night.

Maybe I'm just more keenly aware than most, but does someone need an alert-sending ring to let them know that "a late steak dinner with wine" is going to oogy up their sleep? One of the worst night's sleep I ever had was one that topped off a late dinner with wine with an Irish Coffee. The combo of the whiskey downer with the caffeine upper... Talk about the no sleep zone. No app needed to warn me off that in the future.

But, hey, Twitter's Jack Dorsey sports an Oura Ring, so...

At least with Oura Ring, you just need to put a ring on it. Beddr has a sensor "users stick to their foreheads." Bet that works wonders for their sex life.  Ditto for Dreem, a "sleep headband that tracks brain activity." Sleep headband? Groovy!

All thse apps, of course, raise concerns about what employers might decide to do with the data collected by these smart apps - if and when they can get their lusting-after-big-data little hands on it.

Do you really want your employer to know how many times you toss, how many times you turn, and how many times you get up in the middle of the night to pee?

Then there's a 21st century problem if I ever heard of one. "Orthosomnia" is a disorder where patients develop anxiety by beoming "preocupied with improving sleep data from wearables."

As a Fitbit wearer for 3+ years now, I understand that the info you get from your wearables can be anxiety-producing. I calmed down a lot when I decided that missing my step goal for a day or two wasn't going to kill me. As long as I made up for it over the course of the week, of course. (Hah!)

I think Fitbit also provides some sleep-related data, but I just ignore it. Restless sleep is just my lived experience. I don't need to over analyze it.

Then there's the problem of workaholic work cultures, like ones that expect employees to participate in global conference calls, where you're in yesterday USA talking to colleagues in tomorrowland Australia. And everybody's working off-hours to be on those calls. 

Anyway, I'll sleep better tonight knowing that I don't work for a company that wants to start keeping track of my sleep. 

Zzzzzz to that!

G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria (Steinem, that is)

In May of 1969, Emmanuel College (my alma mater) hosted one of the first women's liberation conferences in the US. One might imagine that a Catholic women's college was an unlikely setting for something as radical and edgy as a gathering on female empowerment, but Emmanuel had a long tradition of social justice activism: Catholic Worker, civil rights...

When I was there, a number of students were involved with Cesar Chavez and the grape workers' union. My first political act was picketing stores that sold non-union grapes. Many, many students were involved in anti-Vietnam War protests. And we had a chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). And, yes, I was a member.

So, really not that big a surprise that Emmanuel would host a big women's liberation gathering.

Wondering whether it was the first one held, I went to the google, only to find that the Emmanuel gathering had been preceded the year before by one in Lake Villa, Illinois. Lake Villa! In the write up, it was described as a suburb of Chicago, and while that may - sort of - be the case today, in 1969 I'm guessing that Lake Villa was still The Country. Which is what we called it. My mother grew up in Chicago, and her family had a summer house on Sand Lake in Lake Villa, a tiny little farm and "resort" town 50+ miles outside The City. Every other year, our family vacation was to Chicago, but we spent most of our time in The Country at Grandma's lake house, across the street from cornfields and down the dirt road from a duck farm. By 1969, I hadn't been out to The Country since 1963 = after which the combination of the kids getting older and my father getting sicker, we no longer did our regular bi-ennial Chicago run. But I'm guessing that Lake Villa hadn't become a suburb that quickly. Anyway, I find it amusing that a seminal "women's lib" gathering was held there.

But, as is my wont, I digress.

I participated in that May 1969 conference at Emmanuel, even though my memories of it are largely sitting around in classrooms and conference rooms, just talking about and listening to, our experiences, and what we all wanted out of life.

I'm not 100% sure what big name feminists were there, but I'm guessing Gloria Steinem was.

It's hadn't thought about that conference in years, but it came to mind last week when I went to see the play Gloria: A Life at the American Rep theater in Cambridge.

And what a life Gloria Steinem has led.

Born in 1934, she had a pretty dysfunctional family life. Her father supported the family as a traveling antiques salesman. The family lived in a trailer that was toted around behind the family car. When the family finally settled down, it was in the wilds of Michigan, where her father decided to open a dance hall. When Gloria was 10, her parents split. She moved with her mother - who was mentally ill - to Toledo, where she became her mother's caregiver. At aged 10.

She escaped to Smith College, and then forged a career in journalism, at a time when women journalists were relegated to fluff articles, cooking, fashion... Gloria became well known for going undercover as a Playboy bunny, and writing an exposé of what it was like in the hutch.

She soon found herself as one of the founding mothers of the women's movement. And, among other things, founded Ms. Magazine. I was an early subscriber, and remember the excitement of getting my monthly Ms. fix.

It was all very eye opening and empowering for those of us Baby Boomers in the first wave of women who followed less traditional career and life paths.

The rest, as they say, is history - Gloria Steinem's with a Capital H, mine with a small h.

I met Gloria once.

A year or so before he died, my husband and I were walking on the Upper East Side of NYC when Jim spotted her. Jim was particuarly good at recognizing famous and semi-famous people. Some guy who played for the Knicks; Richard Anderson who played the Six Million Dollar Man's boss; Kurt Russell alone; Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Especially when we were traveling, there was always someone. On one trip to La Jolla, we had an especially rich celebrity-spotting day: Steve Garvey the ballplayer and Dolly Parton.

Gloria Steinem was easy to recognize - That hair! Those glasses! - and even I saw her right away.

Typically, neither Jim nor myself said anything to the famous names we saw, but we decided to say 'hello' to Gloria Steinem. Mostly, I wanted to thank her for all that she had done for those of us who came in the next decade or two after her.

She could not have been more gracious, and we ended up standing there on the sidewalk chatting for about 15 minutes about travel, dogs, The Cape... She then apologized and told us she was meeting some friends for dinner. "I have a good restaurant recommendation for you. Candle 79."

While the words "thank you" were coming out of my mouth, the words "Oh, we've been there. I hated it." were coming out of the mouth of my husband. And it was true. I was okay with a vegan restaurant, where we'd been dragged the year before by some vegan friends, but Jim wasn't too happy with a menu featuring the seitan. (Or, as he would have it, The Great Seitan.) I've been there since Jim's death, eating there with my then-vegan niece, and we had a great meal. But it was never going to be Jim's cup o' tea.

A part of Gloria: A Life dealt with the the book Our Bodies Ourselves, a book by women about women's health that was first published in 1970. (My friend Mary, who I went to the play with, still has her first edition, which was printed on newsprint.) To have access to so much information about us was amazingly liberating. We no longer had to rely on rumors, old wive's tales, partial information, and whatever we could get out of the doctors we saw (largely male, in those days).

Where did the idea for Our Bodies Ourselves come from? Why the Women's Liberation Conference of 1969 at Emmanuel College.

So I was kinda-sorta there at the creation.

The play was great, and I enjoyed learning more about the remarkable life of Gloria Steinem. There's still a long way to go, for the sisterhood to be as powerful as it has become is thanks in no small part to Gloria Steinem.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Testing, testing

The longest stint of my career was working for a small software company that, during the latter half of my nearly decade-long tenure, had one product: a tool that automated software testing. When the product came out, the market for testing software was new, and most software testing was done by hand. Quality assurance personnel walked down paths, walked through scenarios, trying to make sure they tested all possible nooks and crannies of the software. It was an exacting and tedious process, and QA folks were happy to have it automated. Even with a product like ours, which was unfriendly and unwieldy. 

But in marketing this product, I learned a ton about marketing - or at least about B2B (business to business) and T2T (my own coinage: techie to techie) marketing.

I learned that if you having a product that's more expensive than the competition, it isn't totally a bad thing. High price has a halo effect, conferring value on a product.

I learned that the value it conferred was worth an unearned and undeserved price premium of 10-15% over market. Anything more than that, and the market figured it out and went with a lower priced alternative. 

I learned that justifying your higher prices based on the fact that your cost structure was too high was a recipe for failure.

(Figuring how to market overpriced products and services stood me in good stead throughout my career, as for whatever reason I gravitated to companies that sold at the higher end of the price scale.)

I learned how to use the word "robust" without laughing. Okay, part of the reason we all laughed when we used the word robust was the "you must, you must, you must develop the bust" mantra of old. But the other part of the reason we had to resist laughing when we called our product "robust" was that we all know that "robust" was just a code word for "difficult to use."

And our product was spectacularly difficult to use. Unless you knew how to write code - and most QA people weren't coders - you would be hard pressed to do much of anything with our tool.

This led my company to develop a rather robust - hah! - consulting practice. We would sell a very pricey license to a company, and then send our consultants into write the code that would enable the company to actually get any use out of it. 

Having a product that was nearly impossible for anyone to use had one minor - but cherished - benefit. Just as having a high price automatically confers value, having a brutal to use product (i.e., a product that's "robust") confers that it's designed for really important, complex applications. So, if your software did something really important and complex you would, of course, need our really important and complex software to test it. Industrial strength testing, we'd say, for industrial strength applications.

Having a product that was nearly impossible for anyone use occasionally brought us into humorous marketing situations.

We had sold a hefty license to AT&T, and the senior fellow who signed off on the purchase was never going to have to do anything with it. This senior fellow was a great guy. As I recall - and it's been 25 years or so - Mike M. did a client case study with us and was a press reference, always willing to talk about how great our product was and how AT&T had gotten such a remarkable return on investment using it. Gold!

Anyway, we did a lot of informational (read: sales) seminars, and the AT&T story was one we always talked about in our presentation. Most of those who came to our seminars were prospects, but we always invited local customers to come, too. They got a free breakast, got to learn about what was coming in future releases, talk to our client services guys, etc. 

At a breakfast seminar in Dallas, after I'd just gone through the AT&T story - including a glowing quote from Mike M. - I asked the guy from AT&T who was supposedly deriving all the benefits of our product to talk about his experiencing using it. "Oh," he told me (and the crowd of prospects) "No one at AT&T has actually used it yet." Okey-dokey.

While I learned a ton about marketing (good, bad, and ugly; the pitfalls, the pratfalls), I also learned quite a bit about software testing.  And one of the things I learned is that you have to do end-to-end testing of an entire application. You just can't test the piece parts separately and assume it's all going to work together once you turn those piece parts into a whole.

So if I know this, you'd think that engineers and quality assurance professionals at Boeing would know this.

But, no.

Boeing has been getting quite a bit of (earned, deserved) bad press of late for the shoddiness of their 737 Max, which has experienced a couple of fatal crashes due to software errors on Boeing's part.

And now we're learning that they also screwed up the NASA astronaut capsule they launced last year. 

A software error left the Starliner capsule in the wrong orbit in December and precluded a docking with the International Space Station. Another software flaw could have ended up destroying the capsule, if not fixed right before reentry.

A Boeing vice president, John Mulholland, said both mistakes would have been caught if complete, end-to-end testing had been conducted in advance and actual flight equipment used instead of substitutes.
“We know that we need to improve,” he said. (Source: AT&T)

Yes, John, you most certainly do need to improve. 

Wish I could recommend a high-priced, robust software testing tool for you, but my old company is long gone (acquired) and its testing tool put out of its misery. But there are plenty of them out there. Maybe you can ask Mike M. of AT&T for a reference.

Best of luck!

Artificial shrimp boats is a comin'

Okay. Cows belch and fart and do all sorts of things that degrade the environment. So we should cut down and out on beef. Impossible Burger, here we come. But cows that belch and fart are also the source of cheese and milk. So we need to cut the cheese and the milk out, too. Unless we want to go with vegan cheese. And almond milk. 

Chicken farms are also bad for the environment. Especially the water supply. And here you thought they were just bad for the chickens.

Then there's the little piggies. I like but rarely eat pork. I like but rarely eat pork sausage. But I do on more than a rare occasion like to bring home and cook the bacon. There's usually pancetta and/or "normal" bacon in my freezer, so I can whip up a spaghetti carbonara meal if needs be. Or have a bit of bacon with the omelet-that-turns-into-scrambled-eggs dinner. But bacon comes from pigs. And pigs create pig slurry, and while it can be used for fertilizer, sometimes the big slurry containment facilities fail to contain. Environmental disaster!

Since I try to have some shrimp in the freezer to thaw and throw on pasta or a salad or just directly into my mouth if needs be, I was hoping that shrimps were at least safe for the planet.

Apparently that's a hell to the no, too. 

Oh, shrimps don't belch methane. 

But shrimp farms tend to occupy coastal land that used to be covered in mangroves. Draining mangrove swamps to make way for aquaculture is even more harmful to the atmosphere than felling rainforest to provide pasture for cattle. A study conducted in 2017 ...concluded [that] a kilo of farmed shrimp was responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef. Eating a surf-and-turf dinner of prawn cocktail and steak, the study warned, can be more polluting than driving across America in a petrol-fuelled car. (Source: The Economist)

Not to mention that shrimp farms are filthy and disease-ridden (for the shrimp). Anyway, there goes my bucket list plan to drive cross country, stopping all along the way to sample the local surf-and-turf. And there goes tonight's dinner "idea" about thawing out some shrimp...Life is sure becoming a no fun zone!

But if you think that eating wild shrimp is a righteous alternative, think again. 

Not only are wild shrimpers overfishing and destroying the shrimp grounds, which will soon make wild vs. farmed a moot point. No, shrimp-fishing vessels are hell holes of the seas, rife with human trafficking and child labor. And:

When UN investigators interviewed a sample of Cambodians who had escaped virtual slavery on Thai fishing boats, 59% of them reported seeing fellow crew-members murdered by the captain.

And you think that you've had some terrible managers...

So a Singapore company called Shiok Meats is looking to get into the shrimp biz. 

The firm aims to grow artificial shrimp, much as some Western firms are seeking to create beef without cows. The process involves propagating shrimp cells in a nutrient-rich solution.

They're starting small, looking to make "shrimp mince" for Chinese dumplings, and use the by-product as shrimp flavoring for odious products like the Tayto Scampi Crisps they sell in Ireland. (Word to the traveling-to-Ireland wise: don't even think about it.)

Eventually it plans to grow curved “whole” shrimp—without the head and shell, that is.

There's just one problem. Fake shrimp costs $5K a kilo to produce. Even if you compute what that means in real, natural, wholesome, American weights and measures, that's over $2,000 a pound. I'm out.

I suspect that, before my life is out, I'll become a vegan - voluntary or involuntary. 

Sigh...

Where's the beef? Make that where's the beef coming from.

I'm not a huge consumer of beef. Once in a while, I'll have a steak - and one of those whiles is coming up tomorrow, as I head out to a steak house to celebrate a friend's birthday. And I really do like a burger now and again.

Last year, I tried an Impossible (non-meat) Buger, and it was okay. A bit too well done to my liking, but if you put enough toppings on it, it's fine. So's a nothing-burger. Decades ago, my husband and I were snowed in and didn't feel like braving the elements. We had hamburger rolls around for some reason. And condiments. Just no hamburger. So we concocted what we called Fake Burgers: hamburg roll with mustard, kethcup, pickles, lettuce, cheese and tomato. It actually tasted an awful lot like a McD Quarter Pounder.

I could probably convert to the Impossible Burger to meet my burger needs, and feel very virtuous about not contributing to the cow gas methane that's killing the environment. Or so I thought.

Turns out that even if you switch to plant-based meat, you're not likely to be saving a cow. 

For one thing, no one will miss my burger consumption:

Despite cattle ranchers’ deep fear and antipathy for plant-based meat, per capita consumption of beef has been increasing since 2015. U.S. beef sales reached an all-time high in 2019, with a similar outlook for 2020, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. And the debut of high-profile, plant-based burgers doesn’t appear to be a zero-sum game: Burger King’s parent company reported a 5 percent sales increase in its third quarter last year after the launch of the Impossible Whopper, the strongest growth since 2015. But sales of its beef burgers increased as well. (Source: Washington Post)

But it's not just that my "sacrifice" is outweighed by more people eating beef. There's also this: a lot of the beef that goes in to hamburger production comes "from Holstein or Jersey cows, which frequently are decommissioned dairy cows past their prime." And from male calves that used to go for veal, before we stopped cosuming veal. 

Well moo to that.

With the exception of a once-a-decade backslide, I've already bid adieu to veal. Looks like if I want to save the world from methane, I need to give up dairy. No cheese on my toasted cheese sandwich. No milk in my tea. No fro-yo snack in the evening.

Of course I can live without. But why is everything so damned hard these days?

Rocket Man, burning out his fuse up here alone

Flight is apparently in the air around Pink Slip. Just last week, it was the winged victory of Fred Reffet, who, wearing a "jet-powered wingsuit" took flight in Dubai. This week's contribution to Space Force comes courtesy of the recently-late "Mad" Mike Hughes, a daredevil who crashed last week in his homemade rocket, trying to prove that the earth is flat.

The plan: Float dozens of miles high in a balloon, then fly a rocket to the Karman line, the 62-mile-high barrier that separates the atmosphere and the cold vacuum of space, filming the entire way. “For three hours, the world stops,” Hughes said during a live stream, imagining the reaction. (Source: Washington Post)

The reality:

...his crudely built contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, Calif. He was 64.

...“Everyone was just stunned and didn’t know what to do,” [reporter Justin Chapman] told The Washington Post on Sunday. “They were silent for a long time.” 

Hughes’s support team went to inspect the crash site about a half mile away, Chapman said, and returned with the harrowing news: Hughes was dead, the rocket had pancaked, and the other three parachutes never deployed.  

On the daredevil continuum, I'm way on the end of the spectrum. 

The only horses I've ever been on are rocking horses and merry-go-round steeds. 

I've made a couple of trips to one of theose racetracks where you drive around in little cars. I got lapped repeatedly. 

One time, my husband and I were got on one of those summer toboggan runs at a ski resort in Vermont. He took off, and I followed behind, keeping one foot firmly on the slow-down pedal. That is, until sleds started backing up behind me, yelling at me to speed things up. So I had to ease up on the brake. 

I'm sure if I ever got on a Segway I'd end up with a broken hip and/or a broken skull. So I don't get on a Segway.

On a rented moped in Bermuda, I started to head the wrong way (i.e., the right way, the way we do it in America) into a 

rotary. On my way to correcting, I crashed into a stone wall.

I wasn't a particularly chicken-shit kid. I climbed trees. Crossed a steep (at least to a 10 year old) ravine on a downed tree trunk. Got in an out-sized baby buggy with a bunch of other kids and had someone send us down a hill. When there was an appliance carton to be had, I was one of the kids taking my turn to have it rolled down the steep front-yard banks and go crashing over the cement retaining wall onto the sidewalk. One of my favorite things as a kid was crawling under parked trucks, hoping the truck driver wasn't anywhere near. On sled or flying saucer, I liked going fast and loved it when my father iced the track that shot through the woods next to our house. I liked exploring creepy old garages, barns, houses. On our poorly footed backyard swing sets, I liked orchestrating things so that three kids were pumping all at once so we could get the legs of the swing set airborne.

But the older I've gotten, the less interested I've become in anything that's physically daunting. I'll never sky dive. I'll never dive off a diving board. I'd consider ziplining. Maybe. 

I'm just not an adventurer of the body. I'm more an adventurer of the mind. I like to read. I like to think. I like to do Extra Hard Sudoku. 

So, nothing like Mike Hughes, who, prior to becoming a rocket man, had done a 103-foot jump in a stretch limo. In preparing to jump the Snake River (a leap that Evil Knievel had failed at), he crashed a rocket. He piloted an earlier version of one of this garage-made rockets nearly two-thousand feet above the Mojave Desert, achieving a speed of 250 m.p.h. 

But his ultimate project was to get up high enough to prove that the earth was flat. (Something I believe he could have disproved on a commercial flight.) Instead, he demonstrated that that if you burn up your fuse up there alone, you may come crashing back down to earth. Sometimes death defying doesn't defy death.

For this last project, Hughes had a deal with the Science Channel to document it. Why something called the Science Channel would want to be associated with a flat-earther seems like a pretty good question. But while Hughes might have been mad, he was still open-minded.

“I expect to see a flat disk up there,...[but] I don’t have an agenda. If it’s a round Earth or a ball, I’m going to come down and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’m bad. It’s a ball, okay?’ ” 

And if you're wondering  how flat-earthers account for the oceans not sloshing over the sides, "many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in." So there.

But Mike Hughes was more than just a flat-earther. He really just liked pushing the edge of his own personal envelope. 

“It’s to convince people they can do things extraordinary with their lives,” he said. “Maybe it pushes people to do things they wouldn’t normally do with their lives that will maybe inspire someone else." 

Guess I'm just not the easily inspirable type.  

Anyway, it's easy to write "Mad" Mike Hughes off as a nutter, and consider his death a candidate for a Darwin Award. But, hey, he died doing what he loved, and there's something to be said for that. Maybe I'll die reading. Or doing an Extra Hard Soduku puzzle...

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

How long have I been shower-singing "Rocket Man"? It's not on my regular playlist, but it does come up occasionally when my brain starts to shuffle. So I've been singing it for years. It's also a wonderful sing-along tune when it comes on the radio. Let alone at an Elton John concert. (My one and only was last fall.) Anyway, when I went to write the title of this post, for some reason I googled the lyrics. It's "burning up his fuse up here alone," and not "burning up his fuel up there alone," which is what I've been singing all these years. Who knew? You really do learn something new every day.