Maybe Kevin Bain didn't like his job anyway. So there!

Kevin Bain certainly has every right to his face mask screedeen:

No more masks. Any business that tells me to put on a mask (Whole Foods on Lomo Alto) in Dallas will get told to kiss my Corona ass and will lose my business forever. It’s time to stop this BULLSHIT.

If only he'd ended things there.

After all, who among us hasn't uttered the words "It's time to stop this BULLSHIT" and/or committed them to paper (physical or virtual). Or at minimum thunk them. 

Oh, ours might not have been used w.r.t. the facemask requirement. But we've thought/written/said it at some point. Personally, not a day has gone by since January 20, 2017 (American Carnage Day) when I have not thought, thought out loud, said in passing, or written these very words.

If only Kevin Bain had ended it there. 

Sure, a bit intemperate, more than a bit assholey - seriously, wearing a mask in a grocery store doesn't seem that big a deal - but within the realm of the permissable.

But, no, Kevin Bain likes the social media equivalent of hearing himself speak, so he felt compelled to continue on:

 Do I have to show the lame security guard outside of a ghetto store my CV19 test results? 

It's that use of the word ghetto, bringing with it just that subtlest whiff of racism.

Still, probably not a firing offense. He could always say he meant the white upper-middle-class swanks who shop at Whole Foods. That kind of ghetto. 

But, no, Kevin Bain had to keep on poison penning:

I will show him my Glock 21 shooting range results. With Hornady hollow points. Pricey ammo, but worth it in this situation. They have reached the limit. I have more power than they do….they just don’t know it yet,

Hmmm. Now, as they say, you're talking. And you're talking threatening. Scary. Unhinged.

Anyway, Bain's words made the Facebook and Twitter rounds. And his employer felt compelled to act. So Thompson & Knight, the law firm where Bain had worked for a number of years as the document services manager, pulled the trigger (metaphorically speaking) on his employment and fired him. Terming his post "threatening and offensive", the firm stated that it was "a complete violation of the values of our firm, including our commitment to the health and safety of the communities we serve."

In addition to firing Bain, Thompson & Knight said in a Facebook post on Friday that it has notified proper authorities. (Source: law)

Proper authorities? Is that legalese for the local police? 

Sho' nuff:

The firm said it notified Dallas police about the post on Friday. A Dallas police spokeswoman did not have details Monday about the report. A Highland Park police spokesman said the department was “looking into it." (Source: Dallas News)

Post in haste, repent in leisure?

I really don't understand how someone, in this day and age, thinks they can put something like this out on social media and not expect it to catch up with them professionally. 

Maybe Kevin Bain didn't like working at Thompason & Knight, anyway. Maybe some right-wingers will hire him for something or other. Too bad the NRA's laying off. They might have been happy to bring on someone with Bain's hollow-point brio.

In a different context, Martin Lomasney, a Boston political chieftain of the late 19th-early 20th century famously maintained that one should:

Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.

Apparently Kevin Bain wasn't familiar with Martin Lomasney. Too bad. It might have saved him a firing offense.

If they're acting like this over ice cream...

The other day I texted my sister Trish: "When this thing ends - or at least calms down a bit - I'd like to go for a ride. And stop for ice cream." (I promised her that I would not bite the tip off the bottom of the cone and let melted ice cream dribble out all over her car seat.)

We're not yet in the plan-plan stage on this. We don't know where. We don't know when. And I haven't decided what flavor I'll order.

This will, of course, depend on where we go, but I usually lean coffee Oreo with jimmies, maple walnut, or - if it's really summery - strawberry or peach. But there are very few ice cream flavors that I don't like. 

It's not that I've been deprived of ice cream - or at least frozen yogurt - during the shutdown. I usually have a quart or two of Giffords of Maine raspberry chocolate chip in the freezer. Maybe a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia fro-yo. If I decided to go all out, there might be a pint of Talenti pistachio. Gelato!

I've always been an ice cream fan, and when I was growing up there was almost always a gallon of something or other in the freezer. When my father took the family out for a spin, as we often did in the summer, we always stopped at the Cherry Bowl or Verna's for ice cream, or the Dairy Delight for soft serve (which was only worth having if you got the chocolate coating). 

In my book, a day without ice cream is like a day without sunshine. (I was going to say 'like a day without being able to get out of the house and mingle", but we're having too many of those days. So we'll leave it at "without sunshine.")

I'm not the only one around here hankering for ice cream.

Folks down in Mashpee, on Cape Cod, went all out swamping Polar Cave Ice Cream when they opened last week.

But with testy customers who just did not want to wait for their cones f-bombing the shop’s teenage staff and a flood of orders overwhelming the small team Friday, owner Mark Lawrence posted “STOP ORDERING” on Facebook and unplugged the phone.

The shop opened at 2 p.m. and “by 4:30 on it was just insane,” Lawrence, 60, said on Sunday.

When he finally turned the lock to the Polar Cave that night at 9:30, more than an hour after the planned closing time, Lawrence said on Facebook it was “the lowest feeling I have ever felt.” (Source: Boston Globe)

As his team adjusted to the new reality of social distancing, Lawrence asked folks to order ahead. He had one scooper working the online orders, three in the parking lot, and three doing the scooping. 

One employee, an 18-year-old who was running orders to cars, was trembling by the end of the night, he said. After hours of f-bombs and slurs, Lawrence said, the woman didn’t even want her pay or her tips; she just wanted to quit.

I know, I know. Nerves are frayed. Ice cream help soothe frayed nerves. Maybe cut those suffering from cabin fever a little slack. But as Lawrence pointed out, in the high season, folks stand in line for one hour to get into his shop. What's the big deal if you have to sit in your car for that length of time?

Meanwhile, Lawrence is figuring out how to reopen his business so that they don't have a repeat of the rager.

As for the f-bombed ice cream scooper:

“Right now she’s very fragile. It devastates me," he said.

One of the many jobs I had over the years was working in an MIT snack bar when I was in college. (I didn't go to MIT for undergrad. I just worked there one school year.) Sometimes I worked the grill. (One of the big specialties was the Caliburger, which came topped with avocado - at the time, this seemed amazingly exotic.) Sometimes I worked the sodas (which included making frappes). And sometimes I scooped ice cream and made sundaes. 

We only had 4 flavors - pretty much the basics of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, and a floater that varied - and they came in 5 gallon drums. Well, when one of those drums had just arrived from the deep freezer, you needed a jackhammer to get at the ice cream before it had a chance to soften up a bit. Seriously, some nights you would have to use a spatula from the grill as the chisel and a scoop as a hammer to free up enough ice cream to complete a serving. MIT being MIT, which was mostly male at the time, it was considered great sport to figure out which ice cream was the most frozen and order that one. Then stand there and watch while the (generally female) scooper struggled with things. Ho, ho!

Mostly this was all in good fun. (Ho, ho!) But there were inevitably a couple of guys who were true aholes. Tired of waiting in line, they would snipe away while watching the performance, getting testy with the scooper rather than with the jerk who'd ordered the concrete ice cream. 

But you know what? No one ever screamed and no one ever hurled an f-bomb. (Admittedly, they didn't fly so freely back in the day.) Not even on the night of December 1, 1969, when the Vietnam draft lottery was held and a couple of guys came in whose birthday was drawn #1. (We also had a #366 or two.) 

Anyway, I feel bad for the scooper who had to put up with all these out of control adult a-holes. 

But things may not turn out all that badly for her. Her boss, Mark Lawrence, set up a GoFundMe , hoping to raise $15K to give to her towards her college fund. When I threw in my $25, it was up to $13,900. Yesterday afternoon, the fund was approaching $40K.

Seriously, folks, if people are going this crazy over ice cream, how are the going to behave when the COVID-19 vaccine becomes available?

I shudder at the thought of what that scene might look like.

Evil teengage genius

If times were normal, Ellis Pinksy would likely be looking forward to graduating from Irivington (NY) High. By now, he would likely have made his decision on where to go to college. He probably wasn't aiming for Ivies or equivalent. Sure, he was plenty smart, but what's plenty smart these days? Sure, he took at bunch of AP courses, but he was only in the third echelon of AP achievers at this high school. Yes, he ran track, but running track is no big deal.

Not Ivy material, but hardly local community college or University of Phoenix material, either.

In any case, I'm guessing he received a number of acceptances from some decent enough schools. And Irvington's a pretty affluent little town in Westchester. Thus, Ellis probably didn't have to look at what the colleges were offering in terms of a package. He's probably one of those  lucky kids who can afford to go wherever they get into. Especially given that he's had a lucrative sideline throughout his high school career. 

So in normal times, Ellis Pinsky (or his mom) would be renting his cap and gown, and Ellis would be starting to wear the sweatshirt from the college he'd be heading to this fall - at least in the privacy of his bedroom. Wearing it in public might be not too cool for school.

But these aren't normal times.

High school graduations are virtual. Colleges haven't figured out yet whether they'll be anything other than a virtual fall semester. And Ellis, well, although the court systems are running far behind, and trials and appeals always take time, it's at least conceivable that he'll be in jail by the time fall semester rolls around anyway. Or if not, the college he'd decided to attend may have rescinded their acceptance letter. After all, most have some sort of morals disclaimer in there...

Of course, there is innocent until proven guilty, so we have to take that into consideration. Plus the alleged crime occurred when Ellis was a minor. Still, plenty of reason to believe that no college in its right mind would want Ellis Pinsky as a big man on their campus. Or even a little one.

There's also the possibility that Ellis, like so many brightish young things who've figured the game out early, might have decided to put aside the idea of college altogether. (C.f., "influencers.") Who needs college when you've already got hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. Or, at any rate, stashed under your bed.

Here's what Ellis Pinsky, Irivington (NY) High Class of '20, has supposedly been up to. 

Michael Terpin [adviser to blockchain companies] claims his phone was hacked and his money stolen in 2018 by a ring led by Westchester County, New York, teen Ellis Pinksy as part of a “sophisticated cybercrime spree.” Terpin, the founder and chief executive officer of blockchain advisory firm Transform Group, is suing Pinsky, now 18, for $71 million under a federal racketeering law that allows for triple damages.

“Pinsky and his other cohorts are in fact evil computer geniuses with sociopathic traits who heartlessly ruin their innocent victims’ lives and gleefully boast of their multi-million-dollar heists,” Terpin said in his complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan. (Source: Bloomberg)

Pinsky allegedly began his short but sweet life of crime when he was just 13 years old, and in a mere couple of years he bragged to his buds that he'd manage to rip off $100M worth of bitcoins. 

Terpin has stated that, when he confronted Pinsky:

...the teenager sent him cryptocurrency, cash and a watch with a combined value $2 million. He claims this was an admission by Pinsky that he had stolen from Terpin.

It does sound like a bit of a guilty plea, but who knows.

My guess is the defense will be Pinsky's time-of-crime age, and the fact that his partners-in-crime were a couple of years older. Pinsky just a poor little lamb who has gone astray. Sniff, sniff.

No surprise that the cryptocurrency/bitcoin biz is subject to thefts like this. It's a lot easier for a bright but morally-challenged 13 year old who wants to show the world how smart he to find his way into hacking, in a way that he wouldn't have found his way into, say, a branch bank with a replica pistol and done a stickup - only to have had the inkbag explode on him. ('But, mom," tearful teen when confronted, "I don't know how it happened. I just found this bag in the bushes and when I opened it, I got this pink stuff all over me.")

Oh, Ellis Pinsky probably won't end up doing any time. But there'll be payback. At least some payback of as much of the virtual money he stole that they can recover. And likely a college acceptance rescind. I'd like to think so, anyway.

Some school will let him in. And I do believe in remorse, forgiveness. I just wouldn't want any kid I know and love to end up rooming with this little d.b. Sorry, alleged d.b.

In any case, I bet he's the talk of the Irivington (NY) High School Class of '20 Zoomers...

Ave atque vale!

Here she comes again: Dolly Parton may be saving us all!

If there's anyone out there who doesn't love Dolly Parton, I don't want to hear about it.

What's not to like love?

She's brilliant, multi-talented: singing/acting/songwriting, and beautiful. She seems to brim with kindness and good humor.

All those wonderful songs she wrote and/or performed. Here He Comes Again (a superb sing-in-the-shower number). 9 to 5. Wildflowers. Islands in the Stream. (Done with Kenny - no relation - Rogers. One of my favorite tunes from back in the days when I took Jacki Sorensen aerobics with my sister Trish and our friend Michele. And if you're wondering just how much exercise you get with Islands, it was the cool down. Another great cooldown number was Elton John's Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues. Whatever happened to Jacki Sorensen? I loved aerobic dance classes!)

And then there's I Will Always Love You (which Dolly wrote and whose version I love, even though Whitney Houston's cover is probably better.)

Okay, I'm not that fond of her song Jolene.

But mostly, I just love Dolly.

I will also admit that part of my affection for her stems from having seen her up close one time.

It was 40-ish years ago in La Jolla, California. My husband and I were having lunch in the front courtyard of La Valencia, Hotel - a funky old shell-pink, grande dame (1920's built) hotel in downtown La Jolla.

It was a good day for celebrity spotting, something that my husband was unusually good at.

First, we saw Los Angeles Dodgers baseball player Steve Garvey, who at the time was much in the news for his marital issues - issues that were at complete odds with his squeaky-clean image.

And then, there was Dolly, "looking better than a body has a right to."

Even I, who was nowhere near the celebrity spotter Jim was, couldn't miss her. What struck me to most wasn't how tiny she was, or how big her breasts were, how blonde her hair. It was how outrageously beautiful she was.

She's also been amazingly philanthropic over the years, funding everything from medical research to children's literacy - she's given away more than 100 million books to poor kids - to dog adoption.

And now, here she comes again, donating $1M to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to support COVID-19 research.

Parton made the gift in honor of her longtime friend, Naji Abumrad, MD, professor of Surgery, to support research teams who are working urgently to perfect treatments and cures for COVID-19.

In an appearance on NBC’s Today Show, Parton commented on the gift going to support research for a bridge treatment that will save lives until a vaccine is identified. “What better time right now, we need this," she said. "I felt like this was the time for me to open my heart and my hand, and try to help.”

VUMC’s researchers are testing an array of already existing drugs in urgent clinical trials aimed at reducing life-threatening symptoms associated with COVID-19. In addition, investigators are focusing on entirely new therapies that could effectively treat and prevent the infection. Both strategies are aimed at providing a bridge for those infected, given a safe and effective vaccine is projected to be 12-18 months away. (Source: Vanderbilt)

There's so much fear and uncertainty out there. How long? How bad? And here comes Dolly Parton helping fund research that could keep hundreds of thousands of people alive while they come up with a vaccine.

Oh, Dolly, I will always love you.
-----------------------------------------------------

Anyway, everyone could use a little dose of Dolly in their day. Today, of course, it's I Will Always Love You.

Victory in Europe

When I was a kid, watching old movies every afternoon on Boston Movietime, my favorites were the World War II films. Purple Heart. Desperate Journey. Bataan. Guadcanal Diary. The Sullivans.

Most of these were clunkers, pure propaganda, overly romanticized, silly even.

One in particular I remember was about a German man who was used as a body double for Hitler. At the end of the movie, the man's wife tries to assassinate Hitler and ends up killing her husband.

Of course I loved it.

I also liked reading about the war. I loved Snow Treasure, a novel about some Norwegian children who smuggle the country's supply of gold bullion, using sleds, right under the Nazi noses and on to safety. And, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank.

The interest in World War II has been sustained throughout my adult life, with a particular focus on the European theater, and the Holocaust. I've read a ton - fiction and non-fiction, seen plenty of documentaries and movies, and visited some of the important sites (Omaha Beach, Dachau, Auschwitz, the Secret Annex - Anne Frank's home-in-hiding - in Amsterdam, the courtyard in Berlin where Claus von Stauffenberg and the other July plotters against Hitler were shot and killed).

It was such a terrible war, and - from our side - a necessary one.

So this, the 75th anniversary of VE-Day, is a big deal.

When I was a kid, World War II seemed so impossibly far in the past. Now I know better. I was born in December 1949. It was very, very, very close.

Almost every man I knew growing up was involved in that war. (And at least one woman: my mother's closest friend had been a WAVE. Ethel was a New Yorker who, like my mother, met her Worcester Irish boy during the war. Which is how those two big-city girls ended up in Worcester.)

My father's war was "easy" - if giving 4 years out of your life in service to your county is "easy". His most dangerous posting was in Trinidad. (Don't laugh! Trinidad was an oil producer, and a staging point for war efforts in Africa.) Getting there was what was most dangerous: the waters were full of U-Boats. And a captured U-Boat came into his base at one point. But he wasn't much in harm's way.

After Trinidad, he was stationed at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. (Okay: now you can laugh.)

While in Chicago, he met my mother. Their dates included football games and big bands at nightclubs. War isn't hell for everyone.

But the fathers of many of my friends didn't experience such a charmed wartime.

I have friends whose fathers were at Guadalcanal. At Omaha Beach. The Battle of the Bulge.

My brother-in-law's father was doing scary and dangerous things in China.

My cousin Ellen's uncle was one of the GI's who liberated Dachau.

I have a friend whose uncle was a POW in a stalag. When the war was winding down and the German guards started fleeing, he picked up a discarded rifle and shot (and killed) one of those fleeing guards.

I've had friends who were Holocaust survivors.

Stories came out gradually, haltingly, over time...

Seventy-five years. A lifetime. A lifetime for us lucky ones.

The devastation of World War II is nearly unfathomable. The millions of soldiers killed. The millions of Jews, Gypsies, "undesirables" murdered. The millions of other innocents who died as collateral damage. The cities smashed to smithereens.

It's a tribute to humankind's abililty to learn, to choose the constructive path, to do the right thing, that Europe was rebuilt and has been mostly at peace during the past 75 years. Yes, there have been wars - the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars there, the Baseque separatists, the mess in Northern Ireland, ISIS terrorism - but it's mostly been peaceful.

Here's to those who paid the ultimate price to rid Europe of fascism; to those who survived but saw and maybe even did terrible things; and to those who, like my father, just gave up 4 years of their lives to do their bit to win the war.

VE Day. Worth celebrating.

Cutups: MSCHF makes some good mischief

When I heard that an art collective was cutting up a Damien Hirst print and selling it off in pieces, my initial reaction was WTF. Destroy a work of art! How dare they?

What next? Cut off the pearl earring from The Girl With? 

Then I read the article, and read a bit more about MSCHF, the group behind the sale, and now I'm all LOL. Make that ROFLMFAO. 

These folks are brilliant, hilarious, and - in the case of the Hirst cutup - spot on!

Here's what MSCHF did with the Hirst print - a signed copy of one of the artist's iconic works:

After paying $30K for it, they renamed it "Severed Spots" and cut all the spots out. They then sold them for $480 a piece. Even more brilliantly, they put the remaining white space ("Spotless Painting") up for auction and were able to sell that for $261,400. 

Although I can't imagine who'd pay all that money for "Spotless", it's likely someone gambling on it going up in value. And a critique of the fine art biz is much about what MSCHF was up to with this project. 

A manifesto published on the project's website describes fine art as being a "tailor-made vehicle for the affluent to store their wealth." It also criticizes collectors who buy artworks, only for them to be "stashed" in tax-avoiding freeports, "awaiting the day they might be brought to light once more ... to be flipped like a giant bill in a colorful currency arbitrage." (Source: CNN)

All that crazy money chasing art, not so it can be displayed in a museum and accessible to us hoi polloi. Not so it can be hung over the fireplace so that the acquirers can park their arses on the couch and enjoy - and gloat over - it in private. But so that it can be stored somewhere, out of sight but hopefully not out of the mind of the art market, while it appreciates in value. 

MSCHF also wanted to experiment with the concept of fractional ownership, which offers individual investors to buy into an art work on a share basis, hoping to cash in (cash out?) bigtime. 

From one owner to many - a distinction immaterial as long as the piece is destined for a storage locker in Gibraltar. The difference, of course, is that we’ve taken it literally and made a stop at the knife shop while we’re at it. (Source: Severed Spots Manifesto)

And that difference means that each of the fractional owners gets to actually gaze upon and enjoy their work of art. All for the low, low price of $480. Love. It.

"Severed Spots" is just one in a series of bi-weekly "drops" coming out of Brooklyn-based (where else?) MSCHF, which started out as an off-beat agency doing off-beat campaigns for on-beat brands, decided after a couple of years that it might be more fun to do their own thing. (By the way, the company's founder, Gabriel Whaley, is a West Point drop out. Fun fact!) Just what is MSCHF?

Categorizing MSCHF isn’t easy. Is it a marketing agency? Is it an e-commerce platform? A novelty “gag gift” product retailer? An artist collective? Some kind of meta-parody of the four that, like Schrödinger’s startup, is all of the above and none of them at the same time? No one description entirely adds up.

“It’s very hard to actually have a one-sentence [description] of what we are because we’re doing something so new in the space,” said David Greenberg, MSCHF’s 22-year-old head of strategy and growth. “A lot of startups go out and they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re DTC (direct-to-consumer) this and we sell underwear online or toothbrushes,’ or ‘we’re Uber-for-this,’ or ‘we’re Seamless-for-this.’ We don’t have anything like that to compare us to. The best way to describe ourselves is sort of just an internet culture brand that launches whatever we want to tell a story in any type of format.” (Source: Digital Trends)

Among the drops that MSCHF has made, the stories they've told:

A pair of custom Nike sneakers with soles filled with holy water from the River Jordan. An app that picks stocks to invest in based on your astrological sign. A bath bomb that smells like strawberry Pop-Tarts and is, somewhat morbidly, shaped like a toaster. A dog collar that translates your dog’s barks into a stream of swear words. And Puff the Squeaky Chicken, a chicken-shaped bong that squeaks when you smoke it.

Here's the link to their list of drops. And, yes, I've signed up for the early-bird special, to get a text on the latest. (I'm probably the oldest person to do so by about 40 years.) One of the drops is Boomer Email "a weekly newsletter where we forward unhinged email chains sourced from thousands of real, anonymous boomers." And, yes, I've signed up for that free goodie. And, no, I don't believe I'll spot any unhinged email chains coming from/going to anyone I know. There's Boomers (ranting nut jobs in their MAGA hats, out there protesting social distancing) and then there's Boomers (my mask-wearing friends and family).

But one things Boomers/Boomers have in common is that we're "olds," and  think I'm really going to enjoy seeing what these "youngs" come up with next.

I hope they make a ton of money doing what they're doing. If vapid "influencers" can rake it in, I'm all for rewards accruing to the creative and witty. 

If they offered me a fractional ownership in their company, I just might consider it.

Irish memories are long

My Irish forebearers weren't Famine Irish. They came over in the 1870's, 25 years after an Gorta Mor - the Great Hunger, when the potato crop, the staple of the Irish diet, was totally blighted - had devastated their country. One million souls perished; another one million emigrated. My tribes - the Trainors, the Rogerses, the Joyces - survived and stuck around for a while. But they were none of them well to do, and the ones who weren't going to inherit the family farm or marry the ones who were going to inherit the family farm had little choice but to emigrate.

The Trainors were from Louth, in the east of Ireland, just north of Dublin. The east wasn't hit as hard by the Great Hunger as the west was, which is where the Mayo Joyces hailed from. (The Rogerses were from Roscommon, stuck in the middle. Not sure how badly they fared, but, twenty or so years ago, while I was watching the PBS documentary series The Irish in America, I spotted a document showing a food chit that had been given to a Patrick Rogers from County Roscommon. (Shake hands with your uncle Pat, me boy...))

I know that things were rough in Ballintubber, County Mayo, home of the Joyces. I know because I read about it.

My husband and I were in Westport, Mayo, and the room we were in had bookshelves holding books about Irish history. Thumbing through one, I came across an essay written in the early 1850's by Father James Browne, the parish priest in Ballintubber at the time. He wrote of the famine, the deaths, how terrible it all was.

The name was familiar.

A couple of decades after the famine, Father Browne was writing something else: a reference letter from my great-grandmother, Margaret Joyce, attesting to her honesty and good character, so that when she got to Amerikay she'd be able to secure a job as a maid in a great and fine Boston Brahmin house. 

I've read enough about the famine to have at least a small grasp of just how devastating it was. Starved, skeletal bodies on the side of the road. Mouths green from the grass they'd been eating. Coffin ships to the States, full of sickly people dressed in near-rags. And throughout it all, Anglo-Irish landlords evicting tenant farmers and burning their houses down. And Anglo-Irish merchants shipping stores of grain to England rather than let it fall into the hands of the locals.

Somehow, the news reached the Choctaw people who, only 16 years earlier, had been marched from their ancestral lands across the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Thousands of them died along the way, many from starvation. In 1847, from their meager finances, the Choctaw raised $170—the equivalent of $5,000 in today’s money—for Irish famine relief. (Source: Article in Esquire by Worcester's own, Charles Pierce)

The Irish have long memories. Thos long memories are not always a positive. As in "The definition of Irish Alzheimer's? That's when you forget everything but the grudges." But even though there's no longer anyone in the country with firsthand memory of the famine, when it comes to responding to any international crisis, including famine, the Irish punch well above their weight, sending volunteers and supplies to help out that put most countries to shame.

And now, the Irish are paying native Americans back for their long ago generosity and goodness. 

Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in to the Navajo & Hopi Families Covid-19 Relief Fund since it began to go viral in Ireland, helping it burst through its target of $1.5 million (€1.3 million). (Source: Irish Times)

As of this writing, the fund has raised more than $2 million towards a revised goal of $3 million. 

It almost goes without saying that native Americans are hard hit by the corona crisis. Their community is poor - many homes are without running water - with limited access to healthcare. 

The list of donors to the GoFundMe page is dominated by Irish surnames, and many donors left comments to say they were giving in remembrance of Native American aid to Ireland during the Great Hunger.

Not really all that surprising, given Irish history and all.

Charlie Pierce ended his article by quoting Seamus Heaney:

“History says don’t hopeOn this side of the grave.But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed for tidal waveOf justice can rise upAnd hope and history rhyme.”

Can't top that...

I spy. (Who do you spy?)

The other day, I was on a phone call with a client. She has three kids under the age of 5, including a set of 2 1/2 year old twins. I asked her how working from home was going. As you can imagine...

She's worked from home in the past on an occasional basis, but almost all the time when she's done so, the kids are in pre-school/day care, or someone's there taking care of them. These days, those options aren't available. So she and her husband, who is also WFH, take shifts where each is responsible for the kids, allowing the other to close the door and work in concentrated fashion. More or less. Both of them are starting early, working late when the kids are down for the count - and I have emails to prove it - and basically making it work. (And that includes toilet training the 2 1/2 year olds.) They're both pros and able to get their jobs done. But I'm sure happy for her sake that her employer isn't spying on her while she's juggling the juggle.

If she were working in the digital marketing group for the High Plains Journal, her company might be keeping a close eye on her.  At the High Plains Journal (and, no, you're not the only one who's thinking "High Plains Drifter"):

Employees were told to create a digital avatar and spend their workday in a virtual office, replete with chat room cubicles and a gossip-ready “water cooler.” They were also instructed to keep their home webcams and microphones on and at the ready, so a spontaneous face-to-face chat was always only a click away. (Source: WaPo)

Even though they can be spectacularly counter-productive, I'm all for "spontaneous face-to-face chat." Sure, it's a time-killer, but a human one and, as in real office life, if you don't have time to get interrupted, you can always say so. But to have your webcams and microphones on at all time? No thanks? And if I feel that way, imagine how someone who's got not one, but two, 2 1/2 year old maniacs barging in multiple times a day to announce "I gotta go poop!" feels about always on. Amusing the first time, no doubt, but that would get old fast. 

In the weeks since social distancing lockdowns abruptly scattered the American workforce, businesses across the country have scrambled to find ways to keep their employees in line, packing their social calendars and tracking their productivity to ensure they’re telling the truth about working from home.

Jeez, a manager should be able to tell if someone in their group is getting their work done without perpetually tracking their productivity. Especially these days, as we all adjust to the new abnormal. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's found herself craving an afternoon nap, even when I don't really "need" one. Or the urge to get out and get what little air you can get through a mask. Or get to the store during an hour when you know it won't be crowded. Jeez...

Thousands of companies now use monitoring software to record employees’ Web browsing and active work hours, dispatching the kinds of tools built for corporate offices into workers’ phones, computers and homes. But they have also sought to watch over the workers themselves, mandating always-on webcam rules, scheduling thrice-daily check-ins and inundating workers with not-so-optional company happy hours, game nights and lunchtime chats.

Companies, of course, are quick to say that they're doing this to keep morale up.

But some workers said all of this new corporate surveillance has further blurred the lines between their work and personal lives, amping up their stress and exhaustion at a time when few feel they have the standing to push back.

All this when whatever research there is suggests that the workers-from-home are, in fact, working longer hours, not shirking.

But spies gotta spy.

Several [employee monitoring] companies allow managers to regularly capture images of workers’ screens and list employees by who is actively working and their hours worked over the previous seven days.

One system, InterGuard, can be installed in a hidden way on workers’ computers and creates a minute-by-minute timeline of every app and website they view, categorizing each as “productive” or “unproductive” and ranking workers by their “productivity score.” The system alerts managers if workers do or say something suspicious: In a demo of the software shown to The Post, the words “job,” “client” and “file” were all flagged, just in case employees were looking elsewhere for work.

Advice to job-searching work from homers: USE YOUR PERSONAL DEVICE FOR THIS SORT OF ACTIVITY. And, no matter how desperate you are for work, do not under any circumstances take a position with InterGuard.

InterGuard’s system can also record all of the workers’ emails, instant messages and keystrokes, and takes pictures of workers’ screens as frequently as every five seconds, which managers can review as they please. “You could literally watch a movie of what that person did,” said Brad Miller, chief executive of the system’s Connecticut-based parent company, Awareness Technologies.

Glad I'm not working for the manager who wants to watch a movie of my workday. And, by the way, I doubt that most workers are always online. You might actually be reading something that's on - get this - paper. You might be - get this - thinking something through. Or doodling your way through a problem or organizing your thoughts by scribbling stuff down on - get this - a pad of lined yellow paper (notepad, regular, or legal-sized). Does all that get captured in the movie?

And how about all your nose-scratching and facerubbing, which, of course, we all know we're not supposed to be doing. (It's okay if you've just done your double Happy Birthday scrub-a-dub, isn't it?) Who wants that on full display.

Because there's screen capture, but there's also you capture, as all good Zoomers know.

Needless to say, business is going gangbusters for these employee monitoring companies. 

Here's a few things Brad Miller has to say about what his company does. It would be "financially irresponsible" NOT to do this. 

“It’s silly to say, ‘I just trust them all,’ and close my eyes and hope for the best,” he said. Some workers have grimaced at the surveillance, he added, but most should have nothing to hide: “If you’re uncomfortable with me confirming the obvious [about your work], what does that say about your motives?”

And what does it say about you, as a manager? What about your motives. Sorry, but this guy - whatever his motives - sounds like a complete and utter tool.

Sure, with half the workforce - what's left of it - working from home for the time being, there are going to be plenty of shirkers. I'm guessing that most of these gold-bricking shirkers are going to be the folks who were gold-bricking shirkers when they were in your physical workspace. Shame on you as a manager if you haven't done something about them.

In a time of such incredible anxiety - about our health, about the economy, about our work, about the future, about the world we now inhabit, about the environment, about our survival as a democracy - this is not the time to be adding spyware into the anxiety-producing mix.

Glad no one's spying on me. 

The Milkman Cometh

Growing up, we had a milkman.

The green and yellow Blanchard milk truck came two or three times a week, and the milkman left milk and cream in a wooden milk box outside the door. 

The first milk I remembered came in glass quart bottles and was unhomogenized. The cream rose to the top, and you had to shake the bottle vigorously to homogenize-it-yourself. 

Sometimes the milkman came into the house, especially on Saturdays, when the milkman was likely to be one of my father's cousins, Matt or Ned, who moonlighted on weekends as milkmen, or his cousin-in-law Phil, whose family owned the business. (Phil was married to Ellen, sister to Matt and Ned.) The "boys", in their grey-striped overalls, would come in and sit down at our breakfast table for a cup of coffee and a chat, and I just grew up assuming that the milkman sat down with their customers.

Even when the milkman wasn't a relative, he sometimes came in for coffee and a quick visit. Harry was a pleasant fellow who, on occasion, would do some fix-it thing for my mother. My mother was pretty handy - far more so than my father - but there may have been times when she was kid-harried and needed someone to make sure the washing machine was draining. 

And if you're thinking what you're thinking about Harry and my mother, I can guarantee you that anyone who knew my mother is either guffawing or howling with laughter. Because the Rogers kids didn't look all that much alike - oddly, my brothers both look like my father but not like each other; and my sisters and I look nothing alike, but have voices that are so similar, especially on the phone, that we used to torture my mother into guessing which one of us she was talking to - we did plenty of kidding about being the milkman's children.

But the only romance going with the milkman was on the part of my sister Trish who, as a toddler, insisted on kissing Bill, the milkman who replaced Harry, good-bye when he left. 

The fact that we patronized Blanchard's made us the odd-family out on our street. Pretty much everyone else got their milk from Hillcrest, and I envied them for their snappy trucks, which came in a rainbow of pastel colors. 

There was one BIG advantage to having Blanchard's and that was the fact that we were related. This meant that the Rogers' kids had the privilege of being able to hop into the back of the milk truck and snag a chunk of ice to suck on. And let me tell you, there are few treats on a hot summer day that can rival a fist-sized chunk of diamond-glittering ice, coated with a scrim of diesel fuel. Yummers!

And then there came a point - not sure when or why - when we no longer got milk delivered. Did Blanchard's go out of the milk business? Last time I looked, the family ran a diner and catering business. For all I know, they left the milk business years ago. 

Maybe it was about the time when my mother got her driver's license and started doing grocery shopping in person. (Prior to that, she called in her list to the neighborhood market and every Friday afternoon, they delivered it in a station wagon. We also had bread delivery from Cushman Bakery, which sounds kind of la-di-da, but the bread was standard 1950's white-bread whitebread.)

We weren't the only ones moving away from milk delivery. It's been dying out for decades. But now, well, coronavirus changes everything, and milk delivery's having its moment. 

Since the coronavirus crisis has pushed more consumers away from going into crowded — and sometimes poorly stocked — grocery stores, local dairy farms are seeing huge increases in the demand for their home delivery services. And now, they are scrambling to find more trucks, drivers, and products, to get customers off of growing waitlists. (Source: Boston Globe)

One local dairy saw its business increase from 300 to 1,500 in a matter of weeks. Plus a growing waitlist with 300+ names on it. 

Just like I'm (probably) letting whatever sort of grayish melange my hair is going to be grow in during the duration, a lot of folks who've always wanted to try milk delivery are giving it a whirl. 

Dairies are hiring: Milk Man Person Wanted.

It remains to be seen whether demand will die down when the pandemic does, or whether it becomes yet another item that gets delivered. At which point, does an Amazon drone replace the milk delivery guy?

Whatever happens, the dairies are milking the trend for all it's worth.

But I betcha there aren't any kids jumping on the backs of those trucks begging for a chunk of diesel covered ice.

Where's the beef? Why, in my freezer

I am by no means a vegetarian.

In fact, there's nothing I'd like better right this very moment than biting into a nice, juicy hamburger. And if I really wanted one, and was willing to eat it on an English muffin rather than a hamburger roll, I could pull a packaged of neatly wrapped and labeled ground beef out of my freezer, nuke defrost it, and cook myself up a nice, juicy hamburger.

What's so novel about this it that, while I am by no means a vegetarian, I'm mostly an in-house vegetarian. Protein-schmotein. I get mine for chick peas, kidney beans, peanut butter. I might have the odd chicken best languishing in my freezer, or a package of bacon. But that would be about it. 

Meat I have when I go out to eat which, back in the day when people actually used to - get this - eat in restaurants, I did once or twice a week.

But that was then, and this is now, and like most people - I'm taking a wild-ass guess here - I've been doing a bit of panic buying.

First it was toilet paper and paper towels. When I realized I had only a dozen rolls of TP on hand, I scoured every store within walking distance. At store #7, which happened to be a Walgreens, I scored a 9-pack of the Walgreens house brand. Not that I've used it, but when this is all over, it will be part of my security "pantry". Fortunately, the TP crisis has passed, but just in case, when I spotted Scott at the CVS the other day - where it is now in plentiful supply - I bought a 12-back.

On the way out of the store, a young woman asked where I'd found it. I happily pointed towards the back aisles. "Thank God!" she shouted, taking off pell-mell. On my walk home, an older woman spied the toilet paper peeping out of my tote bag. "Where'd you get the toilet paper?" CVS, I told her. She was carrying a CVS bag, and she looked puzzled. So I realized she was coming from the tiny little CVS on the corner, not the good sized one in the plaza with the Whole Foods. I told her where to find it, and assured her that it appeared to be in full stock.

While I was there, I also nabbed a 6-pack of Bounty paper towels. So now I have two-dozen rolls of the quicker picker upper. 

Knowing this is quite comforting.

The reason I was out the other morning was for a meat run.

Why, you might ask, would someone who doesn't eat that much meat need to be making a meat run?

The answer in my case is two-fold.

The only person I see socially these days is my also single-and-lives-alone brother. So we get together for dinner once a week at my place while otherwise living in isolation. 

My brother is a meat and potatoes man -  no surprise for someone who grew up in the meat and potatoes environment begotten by having a German mother and an Irish father. Other than fish on Friday, the dinner table motto might as well have been Meat and Potatoes "R" Us. So when I'm cooking for him, there'll be meat involved. (Tonight: pork chops, potatoes, green beans, and homemade applesauce.)

The other reason was pure panic setting in when I read about how the pandemic is endangering the meat supply chain, thanks to all those horrific meat-processing plants that are advanced COVID-19 zones.

I tell myself that the upscale, Bell & Evans chicken I buy, the grass-fed beef, is not coming from those nasty meat factories. That the animal products I eat sit around in Barcaloungers eating sprouts until they voluntarily decide to get decapitated and gutted, at which point, a kindly older chicken or cow escorts them to their doom, assuring them that a grateful nation of meat eaters thanks them for their sacrifice. (Convince me I'm wrong here.)

Anyway, the truth is that if I really thought about it, I'd probably become a full-time vegetarian.

But first, I'll need to cook my way through the meat that is currently stuffing my freezer.

I must have 10 pounds of chicken breasts in there, and nearly that much in ground beef. (For whatever reason, I never think to buy steak, which is something I will occasionally eat out, but never in.) I have pork chops. A couple of packs of bacon. And - God knows what I was thinking - a couple of slabs of ham steaks, which I guess I'll serve up at some point with cole slaw (my mother's most excellent recipe) and pineapple-raisin sauce (which always accompanied ham at my house growing up, and that of my Aunt Margaret, the only other place I ever ate it). Oh, and just in case the seafood supply is endangered, I have a giant bag of frozen scallops. 

A part of this supply was purchased just the other day. I had to make room in the freezer by removing the two loaves of Irish soda bread that had been earmarked for my sister Kath and my cousin Barbara. (Sorry, ladies, I will bake some more when the clouds lift.) And I had to take out an orange-chocolate pound cake. (I always make a few extra at Christmas, as they freeze well and make a nice hostess gift.)

So I have the meats - for now.

Wonder what the next panic buy will be...

Meanwhile, even with my meat-stuffed freezer, I'd happily forego meat for a while if we could improve the lot of workers toiling in the meat industry. Take a look at our overall industrial food supply system to improve conditions throughout. Shut these plants down until a safer environment can be guaranteed and/or double or triple worker pay for the duration and beyond. Get cracking on better meat subsitutes. We may not have wet markets like China, but when your read about our food system, well, it's all pretty scary. 

Now, I must away to cook those pork chops.

Baseball for dummies?

We may not be playing baseball quite yet in the States, but Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League, which has four teams, has thrown up their first pitch, called their first "Batter Up!" But because they are socially and healthily conscious, their teams are playing to empty stadiums.

It must be decidedly odd for ball players - even those who play for crappy teams that don't attract a lot of fans - to play to an empty house. From my own limited experience, I know that performing before a non-crowd can be unnerving. My one instance was a presentation I was supposed to give at a trade show, held in the middle of winter in Chicago. Now holding a trade show in the middle of winter in Chicago may not be the wisest thing on the face of the earth, but my company was game. So off I went with my PowerPoint preso, all geared up to talk about automated software testing. (Twenty-plus years later, I just stifled a yawn...) 

Not that the topic was a big draw, but a reasonable number of folks had signed up for my session. Alas, the weather outside was frightful, which gave plenty of the potential attendees an excellent excuse to skip the show entirely - or at least stay snuggled all safe in their beds until later in the day.

Anyway, two people came to my preso, and I really felt ridiculous standing up there on stage, miked up and holding a clicker to advance my slides. 

So I took off the mike, put away the clicker, and went and sat  down with the two brave attendees who'd stood up to the elements to talk software testing methods. (Still stifling that yawn...)

So in my own modest little way, I know that it's really hard to perform when there's no audience. 

But the Rakuten Monkeys wanted something there, so they've
put some mannequins in the stands, and they're even sporting Rakuten gear. Go, Monkeys! While they don't look all that excited to be there, it does appear that they're at least enough into the game to partcipate in a one-armed wave. 

Dummies, especially ones as lifelike as these fans, can be expensive. So the Monkeys are augmenting the crowd with cardboard cutouts. They may not be practicing social distancing, but they are wearing masks. As for fandom, they're also wearing the colors, carrying signs - presumably urging the Monkeys on - and carrying those fun noisemaking sticks. Shake, rattle and roll, folks! Or non-folks. 

I do have to wonder what happens when there's a rain delay. After the groundskeepers spread the tarp over the infield, do they head into the stands to collect the cardboard cutouts? Or do they drape clear plastic ponchos over them so they can sit the delay out?

Unfortunately, cardboard shakers don't make much noise, and noise is such an important part of a ball game. At Fenway, the noise is a combo of fans yelling, the organ played by Josh Kantor, and other music: clips from whatever the players pick as their walk on song; tunes by the Dropkick Murphys; the eighth inning "Sweet Caroline" singalong; and - if the Sox win - "Love that Dirty Water."


Not sure what they generally do for music in Taiwan, but the Rakuten team has installed some robots to beat the drums for their team. 

Alas, in the first game where the real fake crowd was deployed, it was all for nought, as the Monkeys lost in extra innings to the Chinatrust Brothers. (The game went 4 hours-plus: and I thought Red Sox-Yankees games went long.)

I can't help but think that there's something missing.

Where's the loud-mouth drunk who's rooting for the other guys and who is, invariably, sitting right behind me. And screaming in my ear?

Where's the other crazy but not drunk guy who's sitting beside him. Two of my favorites: At a game against the White Sox during the year the White Sox had brought back a ridiculous retro uniform that, as I recall, featured squared off hats and some type of baggy capri pants, there was a guy screaming "Put on your John Wayne trick-or-treat suits" at the White Sox players throughout the game. Huh?

And another favorite: With good, opposing team side, box seats for a game against the Indians, there was the guy who would not stop bellowing at the Indian players, "Go back to the Windy City!" Huh and huh? Screaming "Put on your John Wayne trick-or-treat suits" would have made just as much sense.

Where's the quiet guy sitting next to me wearing a baseball cap with a cloth penis protuding from the crown? And what's that about? Conversation starter? Way to meet girls? Guess not, he's always at the game alone. The protuding penis does make for a nice forewarning, however. Don't make eye contact!

Where's the jerk being tossed out for reaching into the field of play and interfering with the game by grabbing for a live ball? 

Where are the drunks in the bleachers being frog-marched out by security or - better yet - Boston PD?

Where are the hotties for the guys in the bullpen to ogle?

Where are the fans blowing up beachballs so that they can start tossing them around in the stands, making me miss, miss, miss Red Sox reliever Bob Stanley who would use the bullpen rake to stab and deflate any beachballs that wafted into his space.

Where's the guy at the end of the row who has to go out for a beer or to take a leak at least once an inning, and who always manages to block a good play?

And speaking of blocking a good play, where are the boobs who start a wave when the Sox are up in a tight game with men on base? How many times do I have to tell them that if they must cretinously persist with the wave, they shouldn't be starting it off when the Red Sox are at bat?

Where are the Sports Bar vendors? The peanut vendors who can hurl a bag of peanuts 20 rows up? Of course, they're not there because cardboard cutouts, dummies, and robots don't consume any Sports Bars or peanuts.

It's not all god-awful with fans in the stands.

Where's the sweet family taking their kids to their first game? Where's the nice out-of-towners who are surprised that Bostonians can be nice? Where's the middle aged guy there with his ancient dad? Where are the kids selling the 20-20 raffle tickets? (And how come I never win? My cousin Ellen won big money at a Cubs game, and she doesn't even like baseball.)

Where's everyone standing and screaming when one of our guys hits a dinger? Or makes a great catch? Or when there's an outrageously bad call? Or that most excellent of baseball occurrences: a bench-clearing brawl.

I miss baseball terribly, and I'm looking forward to its return - even if, as is speculated, the teams will be plenty in empty stadiums. But what a weird and eerie experience it will be watching one of those empty stands games. Makes me wonder whether the Rakuten Monkeys don't have the right idea. Forget the drum-playing robots. (Have Josh Kantor on the organ instaed.) But by all means bring in the cardboard cutouts! Baseball for dummies!

Just play ball!

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Thanks to my brother-in-law Rick for sending this one my way.