Shoes Blues

Perhaps it's because I Was a Teenage Shoe Factory Worker, but I've always had a warm spot in my heart for those who work in what's left of the New England shoe industry. There used to be a lot of shoes and boots made here. Converse (think Chucks). Bass (Weejuns). Timberland. LL Bean. Frye. New Balance. 

The factory I worked in that one summer, H.H. Brown, made work and combat boots. We made chartreuse leather boots with red topstitching for nuclear plants. The thinking was that no one would accidentally wear such outrageously colored boots home from work. This was in 1967. In a few years, chartreuse boots with red topstitching wouldn't have gotten a second glance.

We also made paratrooper boots for the Vietnamese Air Force. They were way tinier than the combat boots we made for the U.S. Army.

I think the old H.H. Brown factory is now condos. (I will note that any number of old factories, churches, and schools in these parts have been turned into condos. Not that I'm moving any time soon, but I've always got a partial eye on a couple of converted Catholic churches, one in the South End (way pricey) one in South Boston (more affordable).)

As for keeping my eye on the shoes I buy, I'm not obsessive about it, to say the least, but I do like to purchase goods that are made in the U.S. (preferably by union workers, but that's another story). Unfortunately, most shoe manufacture takes place overseas. Still, many brands produce a USA-made line or two.

Averaging 5+ miles a day on my walks, I go through a fair number of shoes a year. Make that sneakers, because 99% of the time, what's on my foot is a sneaker.

Given my sneaker thang, and given that I like to by American, I always have a pair or two of New Balance on hand. Sometimes they're even ones that are made locally.

I like New Balance because they're good and sturdy, providing a lot of support, and they come in narrow widths. The downside is that they're kind of boring in terms of the colors that are available, especially in narrow width. For my more colorful shoe needs, I prefer Asics. They no longer come in narrow width, but they run narrow and, given that they're a tie-shoe, narrowness is less of a big deal than it is in non-tie shoes. 

Alas, it was just announced that New Balance will be closing its factory in the Brighton section of Boston. Sixty-three folks will be losing their jobs there. Before the holidays is a really awful time to get the word, but at least they'll have work until February. 

Chief executive Joe Preston said he went to the Brighton plant, at the end of Newton Street above the Mass. Pike, to break the news to factory workers on Friday morning. The company, whose headquarters offices are less than two miles away from the plant, is also cutting fewer than 50 non-manufacturing jobs in the United States. Taken together, these job cuts represent 110 or so employees out of a global workforce of 7,700, including about 3,500 in this country. (Source: Boston Globe)

Well, first off, kudos to Joe Preston for making the announcement in person. There are altogether too many instances of the big mahoff sending a minion, even if the big mahoff is just around the corner. Worse are those who let the workers know when they see it in the news, or - even worse - on social media. So I give Joe Preston credit for stepping up here.

The good news is that New Balance is adding up to 150 manufacturing jobs at other New England locations, including a new factory in Methuen Mass, which will be opening up in mid-2021. 

The displaced Brighton workers are encouraged to apply to these new positions. Preston said shifting work to Methuen from Boston puts it closer to its manufacturing plant in Lawrence, where the company also does research and development. In total, New Balance employs about 900 manufacturing workers today among the Lawrence and Brighton plants and its three factories in Maine.

Being able to work in Methuen is great and all, but it puts the workers on unemployment for half a year, and - if they lived close to the plant in Brighton - also sticks them with a 40+ mile commute.

But a job's a job, and there aren't a ton of them if you're a shoe factory worker. A shoe factory worker in America, at any rate. 

New Balance remains unusual in the industry because of its emphasis on US manufacturing, although the majority of its shoes continue to be made in Asia.

“At the core of it, the commitment of the company to domestic manufacturing is as strong as ever,” Preston said. “That may not seem like it today, but that’s an absolute fact.”

I'll take Preston's word for it. The next pair of sneakers I buy will be from New Balance, even if they are boring black or boring white. Promise. 

More than a day that will live in infamy...

Today's Pearl Harbor Day. The 79th anniversary of the "day that will live in infamy," the day that finally got the United States into World War II, a conflict that was - for whatever its absurd precipitating factors had been, going back to WW I, which has to have been the fool's errand of all fools' errands - a righteous war that wiped out fascism (at least temporarily, and in certain locales).

I take Pearl Harbor pretty personally, by the way, as it's the precipitating event that put my parents on the path to meeting. So in a way I can thank those Japanese Zeros sinking the U.S.S. Arizona for my very existence. 

So for today I was going to write about "what Pearl Harbor means to me." And then I happened on a post on the subject from 2011. It's as good as anything I was going to write for today's episode of Pink Slip. So, "We'll remember Pearl Harbor" - take it away!

And here's to Al Rogers, my father - dead now, almost 50 years - for answering the call when it came that December day so many decades ago...

Good to know at least one business is doing okay

I always have a real Christmas tree. At least always during the nearly 30 years I've had my condo and hosted Christmas Eve. Throughout the years, I've deployed different strategies for acquiring said real Christmas tree. Years ago, when I was carless, my sister Kath and her husband went with me to pick out a tree from the Belmont Lions Club. Belmont is a charming old suburb, and the tree sale was held in front of the charming old railroad bridge that skirts the edge of Belmont's charming old downtown. Picking out, picking up a tree there is like walking into a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. 

Funny how the brain works. I started to type Saturday Night Live there. No, SNL would be my brother Rich and his pals, when they were at UMass, deciding to open a tree lot one year. Easy money! Quick money! Beer money! Unfortunately, shortly after they opened up shop a major windstorm blew through Amherst, depositing their lot full of trees all over the surrounds, including in the street. 

Anyway, at some point my job moved to the burbs and I had to get a car, so I got my own trees. Sometimes from Belmont Lions, sometimes at Mahoney's Garden Store, sometimes at Boston Christmas Tree in Allston. Wherever I got the tree, whoever was there would tie it to the roof my Beetle and off I went. Dreadfully, one time at Mahoney's, exiting their parking lot onto Memorial Drive in the pitch dark, I went over the curb and messed up the Beetle's rocker panel. Now that was an expensive Christmas tree.

Then I didn't have a car again, so a couple of years, my brother Rich took me tree shopping. Here, I will say, I was relying on his car and not on his presumed expertise in things Christmas tree. We got my tree at various unmemorable places. 

Then it was just easier to use Zipcar to go out to Boston Christmas Tree, which I would do on a no-traffic Sunday morning a few weeks before Christmas.

That got to be a drag, so the last couple of years I got my tree at the Hill House (community organization) fundraiser tree sale, held just around the corner, in the former firehouse that was where Robert Urich lived on Spenser for Hire. It was easy enough to lug it home, especially if I had my sister Trish to help me lug. (As you can see, I'm most fortunate in that I don't have to rely on the kindness of strangers for much of anything.)

Trish wasn't around, so last year's tree was lugged home by a kid volunteering at the sale (i.e., dragooned into helping by his parents). I gave him a very nice tip for his troubles.

This year, thanks to COVID, Hill House doesn't appear to be having its sale. Just as well. Last year's tree was terrible - so dry, it must have been cut in June. Each day, when I went to fill the well, I used a shovel to clean out the mounds of dry needles surrounding the tree. By the time I took the tree down, it closely resembled a Charlie Brown-er.

So, the other day - my birthday, in fact - I walked with my friend Kyung (masked, of course) down to the EverGreen Seaport tree lot and picked out a very nice, very fresh tree. (I'd seen an EverGreen bicycle delivery guy on the streets. Good advertising.) They delivered it the next day, and - even though I am capable of single-handedly getting a tree of this modest size (a bit over 6 feet) in the stand by myself, if was so worth it to have Dave the deliverer do the honors. (Damn: I forgot to ask him whether he'd come via bicycle. Too busy talking Vermont with him. I recognized the 802 area code when he called to say he was nearing my place, so asked him where he was from. Not that far from where my husband grew up in Bellows Falls, where Dave has a close friend. Hey, I live alone. I like to blah-blah, and Dave was willing.) So there my tree sits, chillaxin and waiting for the boughs to drop. I plan on decorating it this afternoon.

All this didn't come cheap. Between paying for a nicer tree than I would have gotten at Hill House, the delivery fee, the setup fee, the tip, and the overall Boston downtown premium for everything, I think I paid more for this tree than I did for my last four trees combined. Whatever. It's here, it's not shedding, and it smells great. 

When we were at the EverGreen lot, they didn't have much inventory. This was the first of December, which seems sort of early to buy a tree, but apparently everyone's getting in the mood early this year. EverGreen was anticipating a big delivery that day. They were in no danger of running out. At least not yet.

What are running out are fresh-cut trees - the ones where you go in person to a tree farm, pick your tree out, and have some guy with a chainsaw cut it down for you. Timber!

As a kid, I pined (hah!) to go tromping in the woods with my father to pick out a tree - which every kid on TV in the fifties seemed to be doing. Alas, my father was not exactly Nature Boy. He did have a couple of saws, but neither was a chainsaw. And he didn't have a hatchet, the TV implement of choice, as I recall. We got our tree from a lot. Some years, we got two trees: a big one for the family room, a smaller one for the living room.

Anyway, getting a fresh-cut tree is just not part of my lived experience, and I don't suppose it ever will be. 

But apparently my lived experience is not everyone's, and there's a run on fresh-cuts in these parts.

Whether people are looking to jump start the Christmas spirit or itching to spend time outside with their families after months of staying home, multiple Christmas tree farms in Massachusetts have reported being wiped out of cut-your-own trees, having only shorter trees left to sell, or being sold out altogether.

“I think people just needed to get out,” [Maple Crest Farm owner John] Elwell said of the busy post-Thanksgiving weekend, which he said brought 1,200 to 1,500 people to the West Newbury farm. “They wanted to experience the outdoors, and because everything is so limited, they haven’t been able to do any activities with the family. It was a chance to get out in the open air and not worry quite as much about COVID.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Maple Crest is sold out. They could cut more, but that would be cannibalizing next year's crop. Other farms in the state, as well as in Connecticut and New Hampshire, are sold out as well. Still others only have short trees (six-feet and under, so I'd be right at home) left. Most of the farms still have pre-cut trees, but there goes the thrill of dad getting to pretend he's a lumberjack. 

According to David Morin, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Christmas Tree Association:

...more people are looking for real trees this year, partly for the nostalgia factor, and because they have more time on their hands.

Morin likened the run on Christmas trees that happened over Thanksgiving weekend to people “panic-buying trees like toilet paper.”

Except that you don't have a closet full of Christmas trees...

The bottom line is that the bottom line is good for Christmas tree farms this year. A bright and shining star in this grim, dim year of COVID.

I'd like a word

I don't remember a time when I wasn't in love with words. This is not surprising, given that I came from a family of great readers and great talkers. No one ever had to tell us "use your words." Words were our currency.

The Reader's Digest, which I completely gobbled up as a kid (along with its poor, but blessed, relation The Catholic Digest), had a number of features that I enjoyed. "Humor in Uniform," tickled my fancy for some reason, even though my father's stories about his time in the Navy in WWII were funnier. (The only peril he experienced during his four years was while on a ship in U-Boat infested waters while being transported to Trinidad, where he spent part of his war before being transferred to Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. So he didn't experience any combat horror shows.) And I dreamed of experiencing (or observing) some little humorous incident that I could send in to "Life in These United States" and get to see my name in print. Plus earn $50, or whatever the going rate was.

But my favorite feature was "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power."

I don't remember what words I picked up from this little exercise, but each month I avidly looked through the new list of words they provided.

In high school, in addition to our grammar and literature texts, we used a book called Word Wealth. 

More fun with words!

My family played word games, too. We had the board game Keyword, rather than the "classier" word game, Scrabble. Which may be why I never became a scrabbler. Boggle was made for our family. And we fought for the honor to solve the Word Jumble published on the comic book page of the Worcester Telegram.

There was a TV game show at one point - I can't remember the name of it, but I think the host's name was Bill (but not Bill Cullen). The object of a game was to trick someone into believing the wrong definition of an obscure word. We played a homemade version of this, plucking words we didn't know out of the dictionary and making up a definition of it. One word I came across while grazing the dictionary was "prepuce", a word for foreskin that I have not since encountered. God knows what my 11-year-old understanding of this word once, but I believe I saw the word "penis" in the definition, so knew enough to avoid it. 

Ah, the dictionary. 

One Christmas, my "big" present was my very own copy of the Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Which meant that I no longer had to use the family's communal dictionary (a blue-covered version from the 1940's that had been my mother's; an avid crossword puzzler, she wasn't going to be without a dictionary). I remember sitting there, dictionary in lap, browsing through it. (It was in my mother's blue Webster that I encountered the word "prepuce.")

Senior year in high school, we had to write an essay that was the etymology of a word. Mine was "mouse." I don't know whether the words were assigned or we got to choose our own, but I'm guessing assigned. I just can't imagine I would have picked "mouse." The essay required a trip to the Worcester Public Library to access their Gutenberg-Bible sized Oxford English Dictionary. Great fun!

I remember that, at one point in Merry Olde England, "mouse" was synonym for prostitute.

Fast forward a few years, and I had my very own abridged version of the OED, a two-box set - a gift from my mother - complete with magnifying glass. I hadn't looked at it in years, so I gave it away a few years ago. 

Today, of course, dictionaries are online. This mostly works, but you never get the satisfaction of just flipping through the pages and letting your eye land on a new word.

Still, I do find myself occasionally hunting and pecking around Merriam-Webster.com, and I follow them on Twitter. (Whoever does their social media is quite good.)

Each year, Merriam-Webster looks at the stats on online lookups on their dictionary and comes up with the Word of the Year. 

Somewhat inevitably, the word of the year for 2020 is pandemic. I saw somewhat inevitably, because that word could just as easily been coronavirus or COVID. But pandemic it is. (Coronavirus placed #2.)

What else was on the list?

• Defund: thanks to the Black Lives Matter protests over police violence.
• Mamba: from Kobe Bryant's nickname, Black Mamba, for which interest spiked around the time of his death.
• Kraken: as in the popular meme "release the Kraken", which gained prominence when one of Trump's nincompoop - now there's a word! - lawyers threatened to release evidence of election fraud. Like the sea monster, Sidney Powell's Kraken turned out to be mythical.
• Quarantine: although I have to say that anyone who's been quarantined - as my family was when I was a kid, once for chicken pox (my sister Kath had a particularly virulent version) and again when I had scarlet fever - wouldn't need to look this one up.
• Antebellum: after the group Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A, an acknowledgement that for Black folks, the pre-Civil War period doesn't exactly evoke memories of hoop skirts and mint juleps.
• Schadenfreude: which I suspect will also be on next year's list as various members of the Trump family and/or Administration are indicted. This year, this word enjoyed had a few spikes. When it was announced that Trump had coronavirus, lookups grew by 24,800% in comparison to the same period lookups during 2019. 
• Asymptomatic: a word that now trips off our tongues, as we wonder whether that unmasked man who just passed by is a carrier. 
• Irregardless: regardless of whether you can look it up, this is a word (or non-word) that should never be used.
• Icon: as in John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (May they rest in power...)
• Malarkey: an old favorite. Thank you, Joe Biden, for bringing back one of my father's frequently used vocabulary words.

Oh, it didn't exactly increase my word power, but all in all, a pretty good list. Wonder what lookups 2021 will bring...

Dr. Frankenstein, I presume.

There are all kinds of wacky and scary things that scientists can do when they start monkeying around. 

Case in point: researchers in Japan and Germany have been noodling around with marmoset brains.

Well I 'll be a monkey's uncle aunt.

Now by primate standards, even by monkey standards - because monkeys aren't much when compared to apes - marmosets are no great shakes. They're primitive little things, with tiny little brains that aren't doing much by way of thinking or doing. Of course, they're not completely devoid of intelligence. After all, like humans, marmosets swing from branches on the grand and glorious primate tree.  Just don't expect your average marmoset to start communicating using sign language, or pick up a tool and start hammering away. They're. Just. Monkeys.

But, hey, you're in the lab, and one idea leads to another and the next thing you know, you've decided to make "monkey brains double in size by splicing them with human genes in a “Planet of the Apes”-style experiment."

They found that the primates’ brains soon became more human-like by developing larger, more advanced neocortexes — the area that controls cognition and language, according to the study published in the journal Science in June.

According to images released by the researchers, the modified monkey brains nearly doubled in size at around 100 days into gestation. (Source: NY Post)

So "primates' brains soon became more human-like", you say?

To what end?

Seriously, if we're going to get into this type of engineering, I'd rather they try to make humans smarter. Maybe try to identify what makes someone believe a ridiculous conspiracy theory, and come up with some tweak to make them see more clearly. Or at least to keep their stupid conspiracy theory to themselves.

On the other hand, if the perfectibility of mankind isn't possible, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to do some kind of "Planet of the Apes" thang and let the other primates run the show for a while. The feces hurling and shrieking might not be all that pleasant, but, hey, they might actually be able to do something about global warming. 

There may, after all, be something to what Dr. Cornelius read out from the sacred scrolls:

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death. (Source: Rotten Tomatoes)

Meanwhile, the marmoset experiment didn't fully play out. 

Ultimately, scientists opted to abort the monkey fetuses due to “unforeseeable consequences,” according to the release.

Wonder what those "unforeseeable consequences" were. Did the altered brains grow to big for the little marmoset skull to contain them? Or was it something more sinister? Did the scientists come into the lab one day and find that they were locked out, that there were tiny little marmosets in white coats holding beakers and making notes in their lab books? Did one of the marmosets look up, notice the human scientist, nudge one of their colleagues, and say in a snarky tone, "Dr. Frankenstein, I presume."

Doing business on great waters

Last week, a commercial t Guard were alerted the something had gone agley, but by the time they got to the site, all that was left of the Emmy Rose was a bit of debris and an empty life raft. They believe the distress signal went off automatically, and that whatever happened to the Emmy Rose, the four fishermen on her crew likely went down with her pretty quickly. The men were all out of Portland, Maine. All experienced. The weather was foul, but the boat was considered sturdy. The last anyone heard from the crew, the men were doing some emergency welding and the boat was taking on water.

Just another reminder how dangerous things are for "the men who go down to the sea in ships, that do business on great waters." Brave men, they.

As if things weren't tough enough for fishermen this year, what with the restaurant business they rely on to buy their catch so distressed. 

I know that the commercial fishermen on the Cape have been making the best of it, selling their catch directly to consumers. My Cape relatives have been enjoying the availability of dayboat fish. It doesn't get much fresher than buying fish on the pier shortly after it arrives. 

Harder, of course, for the oystermen.

One thing to cook your own swordfish or halibut if you can't get it in a restaurant. Quite another thing to shuck your own oysters.

Not that it's impossible. 

My brother-in-law has become a master shucker. Good thing, given that their good friends and neighbors have a "civilian" oystering license and are always bringing oysters over.

But mostly oysters are a restaurant thing, and there's nothing like slurping down a salty, tasty little oyster. (Just don't let yourself think about the fact that they're likely alive when they start their fateful journey down your gullet.) 

I'm also quite partial to fried oysters, and to oyster stew, but raw oysters down the hatch are the very best.

Oysters aren't to everyone's liking, of course, but I like them just fine. And am thankful to that "brave man who first ate an oyster." I'm with Jonathan Swift. That "brave (w0)man" would probably not have been me.

So here I am, hundreds of years later, enjoying oysters. 

In restaurants. 

My favorite restaurant on the Cape is Winslow Tavern in Wellfleet. It's just not the summer until I've dined at Winslow. This year, it was takeout a couple of times. I'm hoping that by sometime next summer it will be possible to sit out under the trees on the Winslow's front lawn. And I'm hoping they still have Oyster Happy Hour, where you can sample all sorts of different preparations of local oysters. 

While Winslow stayed open this year, eat out and take out, the restaurant biz on the Cape wasn't great. 

The pandemic has hurt many businesses since March, but it has been particularly painful for the oyster industry. Unlike other seafood harvesters that have managed to sustain their businesses through the pandemic by selling to supermarkets, large institutions, and in some cases directly to consumers, nearly all oysters are sold at restaurants.

“Everybody is suffering through this,” said [Bruce] Silverbrand, who grows 450,000 oysters a year. “We’re trying our best to limp through this and come out on the other side. Some of us will make it; some of us won’t.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Overall oyster sales in Massachusetts are down 50% from last year. Not. Good. 

This isn't a huge industry. It doesn't have thousands of employees. But the oystermen harvest 48 million oysters each year in Massachusetts. And they're hurting. The larger operations have had layoffs. The smaller ones are just hoping to survive some how.

There is a glimmer of good news. 

As a reprieve for struggling growers, the Nature Conservancy and the Pew Charitable Trusts this fall began buying 5 million surplus oysters to help restore oyster reefs, about 85 percent of which have disappeared as a result of overharvesting of the shellfish, disease, and pollution. Oyster reefs are mounds of dead and living mollusks that are considered crucial for providing habitat to other species and improving water quality.

The environmental advocacy groups plan to spend about $2 million on the oysters, spreading their purchases among about 100 shellfish companies in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Washington state. They plan to use the oysters to rebuild 27 acres of reefs at 20 restoration sites.

But it's not, of course, enough.

Oyster harvesters don't face the same dangers as fishermen going down to the sea in ships. They're not out there in the middle of the ocean trying to weld a tear in their hull shut while 20 foot high waves wash over them. Still, it's a tough way to make a living, and the pandemic is just making it tougher.

Here's hoping that for those doing business on great waters, by next summer, things will break their way. 

It's Cyber Monday, and if you're looking for the ultimate smart bed, get crackin'

Well, it's Cyber Monday, and if you're not all shopped out by Black Friday and Small Shopping Saturday... And especially if you're done shopping for everyone else and want to turn your shopping attention to the one you love best... And especially, especially if you feel that you - you special someone! - deserve a reward for surviving 9 months of COVID and want to treat yourself to a little something to get you through the next nine months...I give your the Ultimate Smart Bed.

Smart bed? I'm sure you're asking yourself just how smart does a bed have to be.

I mean, as long as the mattress is comfortable, as long as you can sleep, nap, loll, read, and do something else that I seem to have vague memories of, your bed is not really required to do all that much. 

Oh, when I had my first apartment my senior year in college, I had a bed - a cast off from my sister Kath - with a bookcase headboard that I admit was pretty handy. And the bed before my current lovely cherry wood sleigh bed - a cast off from my sister Trish, which was a cast off from Kath - I had a bed with pull out drawers for sweater and linens storage, which was also pretty handy. I still use my bed for a bit of storage: wrapping paper, my ironing basket, but I push them out of sight so if you looked in at my bedroom you can't see them. As for books, they're piled on the chair next to my bed.

But apparently there are those who want a bed to do a lot more for them. Thus the Hariana Tech Smart Ultimate Bed.

This bed is the ultimate enclosure system that comes with everything you need in a room, ALL IN ONE. It features a massage chair with a remote, built in Bluetooth speakers, a bookshelf, reading lamp, an air cleaning system and a desk for those who need a laptop in their bed. Never leave bed with a low battery, this has a built in charging station perfect for night owls. Access an ottoman for guests that is stored under the conditioning unit. If you would rather recline and watch TV, do not fret. There is a recliner attached just for you. Adjust the top headrests to get maximum comfort in your bed. This adult playground is revolutionary for many reasons. The frame is made of pine wood for long lasting quality. Available in multiple colored leather options. Only make one purchase, and everything you need is at your disposal.

Everything you need in a room? Really? Where do you keep your clothing? Or is the assumption that someone who lives in bed no longer has the need for anything, other than the odd top so they can looked clothed on Zoom? After all, this is a revolutionary adult playground.

Speaking of which, it doesn't look like it's going to be all that easy to get out of the revolutionary adult playground. I mean, maybe adult playgrounders never have to get up and pee in the middle of the night, but I prefer a bed I can swing my legs out of and make my way to the bathroom. Crawling to the foot of the bed, or scooting over the massage recliner, looks like a recipe for disaster. 

And, by the way, everything you need is NOT at your disposal. Where's the fridge? Where's the microwave? Where's the toilet? And the sink for 20 second hand washing? 

The base price is $2,999, and once you start adding on things like a speaker, a night stand, a USB port, and an LED light, well, you can get up into the $4K range pretty quickly. 

It will surprise exactly no one that the store selling this is in Las Vegas. But not to worry: they ship throughout the States. 

Other than the Swiss Army Knife, and, admittedly, my phone, I'm not a big believer in multi-function anything. I want my stove to cook, my fridge to cool, my TV to entertain me. 

I'm a big believer that, the more stuff any one thing can do, the more likely it is to breakdown. More to the point, in a couple of years, smart anything is going to look not so smart at all. There'll be chargers that are faster and cheaper. Bluetooth will be replaced by something better. Speaker tech will improve. This ultimate smart bed just screams built-in obsolescence to me.

If you like the smart bed, well, there's plenty more that's big yikes out there:

Talk about Star Trek bachelor pad!

Unfortunately, the lead time for the smart bed is 6-12 weeks. But fortunately, I guess, that'll still give you plenty of pandemic time to enjoy it. 

I'll be sticking to my current bed set up, thank you. It will never go out of style, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new duvet cover and pillow shams that will look lovely on my bed, but wouldn't quite work on the ultimate smart bed. 

To each his own. (And, sorry fellows, but in this case, I really do mean his.)

All that's left is finding something to order from the Vermont Country Store

Well, it's Black Friday. And once again, I will observe a tradition of long-standing and NOT go shopping. I won't be standing in line at a big-box store to save thirty bucks on a flat screen TV. I will not be rummaging around the Internet looking for things to buy. I don't do a ton of Christmas shopping to begin with and what I do is pretty much done. (By the numbers, I buy gifts for eighteen people, which looks like a lot until I break it down: four are folks I send a wreath or holiday centerpiece to; five are kids who get cash; two are charity Secret Santa gifts from a wish list. This leaves a grand total of seven people I buy gifts for that I actually have to think about it. Sort of. Because two of them are cousins I get the same thing for every year.) Anyway, I have one more Secret Santa thing to take care of, and that is it.

But I do want to find something to buy from the Vermont Country Store, because I would be devastated if I didn't get this catalogue.

If you're not familiar with VCS, it specializes frumpy clothing - think muumuus (I have none); practical items - think wooden clothes-drying racks (I have two); and Ghosts of Christmas and Childhood Past.

Teaberry Gum. Lemon Up Shampoo. The Bozo the Clown Bop Bag. Caroler Candles. (Okay, I have these.) Chenille bedspreads. (Don't need. My sister Kath just dumped my grandmother's vintage blue chenille spread on me. What I'm going to do with it is the question.) Fuller Brush carpet sweeper. Every variety of Lanz PJ and nightgown known to man. Make that known to woman. I can't imagine any man on the face of the earth being enamored of the idea of his beloved wearing Lanz. 

(The Vermont Country Store also sells some "intimate solutions", but these don't show up in the catalogue. Someone told me about them and, yep, there are a few there. I'll have a muummuu, the classic Lanz nightgown, and say, maybe I'll throw in an intimate solution. I think of the classic scene in "Bananas" where Woody Allen is at the drugstore, buying The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and, oh, let me just tuck in a copy of Hustler while I'm here.)

One Christmas, when we were kids, my sister Kath and I chipped in to buy our mother some Evening in Paris Dusting Powder. This wasn't her scent. She wore Emeraude. But Evening in Paris Dusting Powder was what they sold at Sol's Maincrest Pharmacy, so that's what we went with. It couldn't have cost more than a couple of bucks. A 1.6 ounce spray bottle of the perfume goes for $59.95 from the Vermont Country Store. You can get a 2.5 ounce bottle for $19.95. I recall the smell of Evening in Paris as being harsh and unpleasant; the smell of Emeraude quite nice. I'm not willing to test that memory on Evening in Paris, but maybe I'll buy me some Emeraude.

Did I mention that I completely adore the Vermont Country Store catalogue? Even though I have instructed my sisters to get out the butterfly net if I order a muumuu or some other dowdy article of clothing from it, I completely adore this catalogue. I'd even pay to subscribe to it.

Who wouldn't want to read the mash notes strewn throughout it?

This from Polly in California:

"I have always made my own flannel nightgowns, but have been unable to find good-quality flannel. I even searched in Europe. I don't know where Lanz found the fabric, but I doubt that I will be making my own nightgowns in the future - I'll just buy more of these."

Whoa! There's someone who actually made her own flannel nightgowns? Who wasn't Ma Ingalls? Yowza! 

My mother sewed a lot of our clothing growing up, but even she didn't make our nightgowns. (She did, however, attempt to make bathing suits for my sister Kath and me one summer. Epic. Fail. Among other things, the fabric was so heavy, and got so waterlogged, you were dragged down into the deep when attempting to swim in it. Hmmmm. Not that I could blame her, but was my mother trying to kill us???)

Sure, Sandy in Massachusetts is grooving on the king-sized Queen Victoria Metallassee bedspread, but it's mostly the flannel nightgowns that have Vermont Country Store fans in a swoon.

Thus, Merle in New Jersey gushes about the Eileen West nightgown, which actually costs even more than a Lanz ($89.95 vs. $79.95):

"I have it in every color you carry. It's beautiful, sturdy and roomy."

Looks like that one just comes in Peony and Purple, but there are plenty of other Eileen West nighties for Merle to choose from. 

Mostly it's women who write in, but Ned in Illinois admires the "unmatched" quality and craftsmanship of his Irish knit sweater. Maybe he's married to Liz in Illinois, who had high praise for the shimmering, stretchy bathrobe.

The tiny working accordion. The Kit-Kat Clock with the moving eyes. The pot holder kit.

So many wonderful, mostly kitschy, things to choose from.

I may not want it all. I may not really want any of it.

But I sure do want to keep getting the Vermont Country Store catalogue.

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

And happy 65th to my brother Rick! Sadly, nothing from the Vermont Country Store. As always, I got you a book.

Thanksgiving 2020

 This is usually my broken record holiday. 

Year in, year out, I pretty much have the same things to say. Year in, year out, I link to the prior year's broken record post.

This year, it's a not so broken record.

Oh, I'm still thankful the same things: family, friends, health, hearth, home. And this year, I'm thankful for the election of Joe Biden. (Admittedly, I'll be more thankful when and if Trump shuts up and stops fomenting civil war. What a terrible, and terribly depraved human being.) 

But it's not going to be the usual turkey-pie-family routine. 

Instead, I'll be celebrating - if that's the word for it - alone. 

I like family gatherings, and I like turkey, but I'm fine with alone. Introverts tend to be. And I'll be hosting a small non-Thanksgiving, very merry un-birthday gathering for family on Saturday. Birthday cake instead of pie, but that's a reasonably good trade off. 

I was thinking about making chicken and mashed potatoes for myself, but then I thought about what I've really been craving. With no baseball games this year, with no trips to Fenway Park, it's been quite a while since I've had a sausage and peppers sandwich. So that's the festive grub I'll be rustling up for myself. 

I'll watch a bit of the Macy's Day Parade. I'll take a stroll around the neighborhood. And then I'll go cook up my sausage and peppers. 

So much to be thankful for. And you?

Flash back to high school

The other day, my sister Kath sent me a link to an article she'd seen on a group of student snitches (I'm pretty sure that's the right word, but I think they're trying to hip it up by referring to them as tipsters) at Rice University who are reporting on fellow students (sometimes even friends) for COVID violations. Those reported have to appear before Rice's COVID Community Court (CCC), a student-run entity "the school launched this semester to adjudicate public health violations on campus."

Offenders get the plead their case before the student judges, which then mete out punishments.

Typical penalties include writing letters of apology, performing community service projects, meeting with advisers, and completing educational research papers about public health—not to mention the shame most feel after having been shown to have placed their fellow students at risk. A final punishment, a $75 fine, is available to the CCC, but the group has yet to levy that sanction because of concerns about its potential disproportionate impact on low-income versus high-income students. (Source: Texas Monthly)

Wow.

I'm all for campuses trying to make sure their students are behaving sensibly with respect to COVID. From what I'm hearing about college kids, I understand that this is an all-but-impossible task, given that these kids are away from parental supervision, think they're immortal, want what they want when they want it, are self- and peer-absorbed, and don't believe that Granny or the nice nurse in the student health center could possibly die from COVID. Until they do.

So, good luck, colleges and universities that want to maximize revenues by giving the students the on-campus experience without turning their campus into super-spreader locations. And I don't blame the students who want to be on campus. Let's face it, most of what you get out of colleges happens in person. Distance learning and Zoom meet-ups are great and all, but there's really nothing like hanging around someone's room for an all night bull session. I do blame the students for being selfish little shits, however. And I'm not in the least enthused about the student Stasi and all their little informers.

Frankly, it's giving me a PTSD attack dating back to my high school and college era.

I went to a Catholic girls high school, and the student council was, for the first couple of years I was there, the enforcement wing for the nuns, making sure that infractions were reported and punished. 

Among the petty and ridiculous rules: no speaking between classes. So, while kids in normal high schools were chatting it up at their lockers, we were marching in single fine to our next class. If you were caught talking or even whispering, a student councilor could issue you demerits. You acquired enough demerits, you had to do something punitive, like stay after school and rake leaves near the tennis court. 

By my sophomore year, I was on the student council. Maybe we were no longer giving out demerits, as I don't remember doing so. But I may be repressing a memory of myself as the type of asshole who would have. (We wouldn't have said asshole. We would have said fink or rat fink. By my senior year, we'd have upped the name game to include bitch, but I really don't think that by that point the demerit system was still in play.)

A really terrible infraction was smoking in uniform. Even if you weren't on the school grounds. Because, of course, if a non-Catholic saw someone from a Catholic school smoking - a girl from a Catholic school - why, that would be giving scandal. Tsk. Tsk. 

Even in grammar school, I thought that this 'giving scandal' stuff was nonsense. Worcester's population was about two-thirds Catholic back then. To whom was a misbehaving parochial schooler giving scandal? 

Anyway, smoking in uniform was a colossally big deal, and at some point, a couple of my classmates were ratted out for being seen smoking at Leno's, a downtown coffee shop. 

I didn't smoke. I didn't drink coffee. Although I knew where it was, I don't think I was ever in Leno's, which had something of a racy reputation. On the rare occasion when we hung around "down city" rather than just transfer buses and go home, my friends and I went to Toupin's Bakery, a more wholesome spot. Where we ordered hot chocolate. 

I have no idea who snitched on the girls smoking at Leno's. Was it some prissy, purse-lipped parent? A Protestant stranger who was actually given actual scandal? Was it a fellow student?

I'm thinking this last one. Who else would know the names of the girls smoking?

I was a goody two-shoes, but, yikes, it wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years to report someone for smoking in uniform. But it occurred to someone.

And so, at one of my first student council meetings, there was a serious discussion of what the punishment should be. Suspension? Expulsion? Or this lulu: a ceremony at which the offenders were marched on stage and, in front of the assembled student body, have the school badge ripped off of their uniform jumper. That didn't happen. I don't remember what did. Maybe the girls had to rake more leaves than usual.

(My mother had a friend who'd gone to a high school run by the same order of nuns that I had. Terry told my mother that girls who had violated some rule or another - it may have been smoking - were stood on the auditorium stage while all their classmates marched past them and slapped them in the face. Nuns monitored the strength of the slaps, and if a slap was deemed to weak, called for a reslap. So I guess in comparison that even having your badge stripped off your jumper meant things had lightened up.)

I'm even more embarrassed to admit that I went to a college - my high school was a feeder for the college in Boston run by that same order of nuns - that, my freshman year, had a student honor council that ran a kangaroo court.

This is what happened to some of my fellow students (one of whom became a lifelong friend):

Someone brought a bottle of beer back to the dorm. Strictly verboten. Not a bad rule: who wants a bunch of kids sitting around a dorm getting drunk. It's just a rule that should be supremely judiciously and rarely enforced. Especially for trivial infractions. Anyway, a half-dozen girls shared the bottle. My friend MB, who didn't drink beer, took a pass.

A few weeks later, one of the students who'd been in the room was nabbed for breaking curfew. As she was being browbeaten about that, she was caught up in a plea bargain and ended up reporting her friends for the shared beer bottle.

Well after midnight, the girls were summoned from their beds and, still in their nightgowns with a coat thrown over them, and put in front of the senior run honor court. (Two of the judges were, in fact, prissy, sugar-spun girls who'd been seniors in my high school when I was a freshman.) 

Next thing they knew, the girl who'd brought the bottle in was suspended for the year and anyone who'd taken a swallow of beer was kicked off campus and sent off to a nearby town where they lived in a rooming house run by some Irish-immigrant relative of the nun who was the college president. 

I remember seeing the parents of one of the girls showing up on campus that morning - they'd driven pell-mell up from New Jersey - looking completely shell-shocked. Their daughter - I became somewhat friendly with her later, as she had been my friend MB's roommate - was the first in her family to go to college. I can still remember the look on her father's map-of-Ireland face. He was a Jersey City firefighter with a brilliant daughter. I remember her mother crying.

All this ended by the next year, when that last class where the majority of students were of the prissy-arsed sugar-spun variety had graduated. This was the late 1960's, and nonsense like this became NFW. 

Over the next year or so, the bullshit rules toppled. We could wear pants to class and off campus without permission. (Seriously, you had to get permission to wear pants off campus. I remember being stopped by a nun once because I was wearing a very cute pair of tweed culottes. She made an insta-judgment that they were not pants.) 

Curfews were extended. (They may have been eliminated, but by then I'd moved off campus.) Parietals - boys in the room - were allowed. 

Seriously, when half the student body was getting on buses to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, it was kind of hard for the nuns to keep it up with the thumbscrews. And there's no way they could find enough student judges to do their absurd dirty work and man their kangaroo honor courts. 

So, back to Rice University.

It's hard to believe that, in this day and age, they could find students willing to snitch, and students willing to judge. Pandemics, it seems, do strange things, and one of the strange things has resulted in the university encouraging students to:

...report coronavirus-related misconduct that makes them feel unsafe. Friends have turned in friends, usually without advance warning, for failing to wear masks and maintain social distancing. Most tips are submitted anonymously online, and they often include photographic evidence or screenshots from Instagram stories. In many cases, the rule-breaking is accidental. When confronted with evidence of an infraction, the majority of students are cooperative and apologetic, court members say.

Hmmm. If many of the incidents are accidental, wouldn't it have made more sense for the snitches to have just, say, used their words rather than their smartphones, and just told their fellow students - especially the ones they were friends with - to knock it off. 

Seems that, while there's quite a bit of support for the snitch-fest:

[Some] students worry that the court has begun to turn the idyllic, oak-shaded campus into one swept by paranoia and punishment. As French philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued, plagues create the ideal conditions for excessive surveillance. To keep tensions from flaring, the university has embarked on a campaign to destigmatize the reporting of violations and has promised that initial offenses won’t be recorded in anyone’s permanent records. [One of the student judges] added that the court has placed messages around campus arguing that reporting others is “adding to the greater good.”

Permanent records? Hmmm. Where have I heard that before? Oh, it was in high school - or was it grammar school - when the nuns were always rage spouting about things going on our permanent records. 

And I love those efforts to "destigmatize" snitching. How about not. 

Yes, we all need to be vigilant about COVID. I wear a mask. I socially distance. I don't eat out. I have a small bubble. 

I don't want to get sick. I don't want anyone I care for to get sick. I don't want a complete stranger to get sick on my account. Maybe I will get sick. Maybe after a quick trip to CVS I'll only wash my hands through one chorus of happy birthday. Maybe I'll be a spreader. 

I hope not, and I'm doing my best to make sure this won't be the case. And I want everyone else in the world to be careful, too.

But I really hate the idea of a university setting up a student spy and judicial network. This just doesn't sit right.

Again, what's wrong with a gentle reminder. Or, if someone's being a shit about things, trying to get their friends to apply peer pressure. Or rolling your eyes, scorning, and muttering about the scofflaws. Or avoiding them. 

The people next door used to put their garbage out in open, brown paper, rat-attracting bags. I left them a note and, when they persisted - and I never seemed to see them in person - I mentioned something to their landlords. I suppose that if they'd really kept it up, I would have filed a complaint with the City of Boston. But it never came to that. I don't believe in ratting out as the first course. 

Most were aware of the [student court] and said it was a necessary measure for policing student behavior. If you’re following the rules, their thinking went, you don’t have anything to worry about.

Nothing to worry about, you say? Ask anyone who lived in a totalitarian society - or any Black American - how that type of thinking works out.  

Do cruise ship bands still play "Nearer My God to Thee"?

I wouldn't be caught dead - or alive - on a cruise ship, so if I'm going to contract COVID, it's not going to be while I'm standing in the buffet line or scooting a puck down the shuffleboard court on the Love Boat. But there are many who live by the cruise. And some who live by the cruise are seemingly willing to die by it, too.

Cruising's been mostly in the past tense since COVID hit - at least once the last wandering ship was repatriated. But you can't keep a good cruise line down. Or even a bad one. And so it has come to pass:

The first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has reported that a passenger on board has tested positive for the virus, according to The Points Guy. (Source: People)

The first ship in the water, SeaDream 1, was a smaller one - it's actually something called a "superyacht" - and carried just 53 passengers and 66 crew members. And yet one of them managed to ship ahoy while infected. So after a couple of days at sea, the captain got on the intercom to announce that a passenger had tested positive. 

Reporter Gene Sloan was on board to document the safety measures that were being taken:

Sloan detailed that the captain asked all passengers and non-essential crew to immediately return to their cabins to isolate. The doctors on board then began systematically testing passengers using three rapid COVID testing machines. Everyone on the ship had already been tested several days before departing, the day of their departure, and again several days into the trip.

If I'd been on this cruise - or any cruise - I suspect that I'd already have been isolating in my cabin, but I don't imagine I'd be the typical cruiser.

For those who do like to get out of their cabin, there had already been a couple of island ports of call. They were cautious ones:

...passengers were only allowed to visit empty beaches and did not come into contact with locals as part of the effort to protect communities from potential infection.

This may have spared the islanders, but not the passengers. And now it turns out that Passenger Zero was the first of seven passengers who've now tested positive. Oops.

This was reported by Ben Hewitt, another "cruise journalist" on the trip. 

The voyage was meant to demonstrate that increased safety protocols, including regular testing aboard the ship, could allow cruise voyages to take place during the pandemic. (Source: CNN)

Maybe not.

"It's not a great development for the cruise industry," [Gene] Sloan told CNN via email on Wednesday from his cabin on board. "I think the hope had been that the rigorous testing that SeaDream was doing would keep Covid off its ship."

"Not a great development", alrighty. 

Anyway, the SeaDream was counting on testing to keep folks safe, and crew members were assuring passengers that, thanks to testing, "the ship was a Covid-free 'bubble.'" They were such bubble believers that neither passengers nor crew members wore masks. Then, with no explanation, a few days into the cruise - even before the 'return to your cabins' announcement was made - a mask policy was put into place. Wonder why...

Meanwhile, the CDC is working with the industry to help it resume operations on larger ships, and cruise lines are looking for volunteer passengers to go on shakedown cruises to work out safety protocols. The SeaDream experience - with a pretty high percentage of passengers contracting COVID - isn't helping any. After the COVID positives were reported, two members of Congress "called on the CDC to reinstate its no-sail order for cruise ships and reverse efforts to restart the industry's US operations."

All I know is, you won't find me among those "that go down to the sea in ships."

And it does leave me wondering whether cruise ship bands still play "Nearer My God to Thee."

Hull's Graves Light landgrab. (Or is it a rock grab?)

A few years back, I took a Boston Harbor boat tour with a couple of friends. I've been out in Boston Harbor many times, but what was interesting on this one was learning that someone had purchased Graves Light and was turning the lighthouse into living quarters, and renovating the oil house, attached by that catwalk-y bridge to the main event, and turning it into a guest house.

Like every other loner on the face of the earth, I've harbored many a fantasy of living in a lighthouse. Just not one that didn't really have any real estate around it, and that required climbing up a forty foot ladder to get to the door. That's heart attack territory, as far as I'm concerned. (At least now there's a bridge. When I first saw this property, I believe you got from the main lighthouse to the guest quarters via zipline.)

Still, I thought the restoration of Graves Light was a fun - albeit eccentric - project.

And then I promptly forgot about it.

Turns out that, even though he's now owned Graves for seven years, owner Dave Waller still hasn't finished his renovation. But the reno project has halted, thanks to a dispute that Waller finds himself in with the town of Hull, which is going after Waller for taxes that he doesn't believe he owes.

That's because, when Waller bought the lighthouse from the federal government, he was assured by the Coast Guard that:

...the lighthouse did not belong to any city or town.

That’s why Waller was shocked when, out of the blue, he received a property tax bill from the town of Hull last year.

“I called the assessor’s office,” Waller said. “They just annexed us.”

Since then, he’s been locked in a legal battle with the town to prove that the sea-swept ledge that the 115-year-old lighthouse was built upon is not part of Hull.(Source: Boston Globe)

The parties are now locking horns in Land Court.

I love Hull. For many years, my sister Kath lived in this odd and wonderfully funky little town that looks so very close to Boston, until you try to get there by any means other than by commuter boat. Hull is on a spit of land the swings out into Boston Harbor, and it's a total PITA to get there by car. Kath lived on the far end of the spit, and there were times during the winter when the roadway flooded and they were marooned out there. Still, they had a lovely old house on a hill overlooking the water. What a spot! 

But I'm kind of siding with Waller here. When the feds owned the island, Hull had made no claim on it being their land. But now that they think they can extract a few bucks, they're after it. 

I'm curious about just what services are providing to Waller that he needs to get taxed on. He's not getting trash pick up. He doesn't get plowed out. He doesn't need a pothole fixed. His kids aren't climbing down that ladder each morning to cross the choppy waters to attend school. 

I guess it's conceivable that Waller's family uses Nantasket Beach for the few minutes a day it's not water logged, but what's that worth? 

Nantasket is the beach of my childhood, as our family made an annual pilgrimage there for a day each summer to splash in the water, look for a starfish, buy Le Hage's "Oh, so good" salt water taffy, and go on a few rides at Paragon Park. But the beach has eroded over the years, and while I'm exaggerating about the few viable beach minutes a day, there has been been a ton of erosion and at high tide I don't believe there are any sandy spots available. And, besides, the beach isn't run by Hull, but by the state. So there.

But Waller's says his quibble is not with the taxes, or what he would or wouldn't get in return for paying them. He's more peeved by Hull's annexation of his rocky little piece of heaven.

The town maintains that "19th century maps and other documents...show the lighthouse is located in Hull." And that, furthermore, Graves Light can't just be no man's land."

"If it’s not located in Hull, where is it? We say that it’s located in Hull, and if it’s not in Hull, it has to be located in some jurisdiction.”

Might existential question you're asking there, Town of Hull.  

In addition to looking for the tax revenue, Hull wants construction permitting and inspection to come under their regulations. Waller has countered that all the work he's done "has been subject to oversight by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, the Coast Guard, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and other regulatory agencies."

Graves Light, by the way, has a nice little website. These days, it's mostly dedicated to squawking about the Hull "landgrab", although technically it's more of a rock grab. Among other , the website  shows a raft of the anti-Hull comments that attached themselves to the Boston Globe article I've cited here. And there's a nifty picture of the lighthouse streaming out the word SHAKEDOWN in large red letters. 

The Land Court "has asked both sides to consider the possibility of resolving the issue through mediation, and a status conference is scheduled for June 29."

I'm rooting for Waller. And I'm guessing that Hull will have spent more money going after Graves Light than they'll ever realize from taxes. 

Anyway, I've added another cruise on Boston Harbor to the list of things I want to do next summer, or whenever the COVID after time begins...

One more reason to become a vegetarian

We learned early-on in the pandemic that some groups were being hit worse than others. One of the hardest hit was those who worked in meat processing plans. Many who labor at this gruesome, difficult and poorly-paid work are POC - another group disproportionately impacted by COVID. For meat processing workers, then, a double whammy.

During last spring's pandemic rager, we heard all about this. And how the plants weren't responding all that well in terms of protecting their vulnerable workers. And how the meat-packing industry was declared essential because, of course, we need to keep bringing home the bacon.

What we didn't know was just how terribly the workers were being treated - not just when it came to important matters like PPE, safety in the work environment, spread protection, contact tracing, medical care (most of these issues we were well aware of) - when it came to the small stuff. Stuff that's not (really) illegal, stuff that can't (really) be regulated, but stuff that makes the workplace a nastier place to be. 

Thus we learned that at one Tyson Foods plant, which ordered its employees to come in to work even when there were heightened concerns for their safety, "supervisors privately wagered money on the number of workers who would be sickened by the deadly virus."

All this has come out through a lawsuit the family of a Tyson worker who died in April has filed against the company, alleging "willful and wanton disregard for workplace safety."

Isidro Fernandez is one of five workers (I've also seen the number six) at Tyson's Waterloo, Iowa plant who died from COVID. Out of a workforce of nearly 3,000 more than one-third came down with COVID. 

The lawsuit alleges that despite the uncontrolled spread of the virus at the plant, Tyson required its employees to work long hours in cramped conditions without providing the appropriate personal protective equipment and without ensuring workplace-safety measures were followed.

The lawsuit was recently amended and includes a number of new allegations against the company and plant officials. Among them:

In mid-April, around the time Black Hawk County Sherriff Tony Thompson visited the plant and reported the working conditions there “shook [him] to the core,” plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.

John Casey, an upper-level manager at the plant, is alleged to have explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus. Casey reportedly referred to COVID-19 as the “glorified flu” and told workers not to worry about it because “it’s not a big deal” and “everyone is going to get it.” On one occasion, Casey intercepted a sick supervisor who was on his way to be tested and ordered him to get back to work, saying, “We all have symptoms — you have a job to do.” After one employee vomited on the production line, managers reportedly allowed the man to continue working and then return to work the next day.

In late March or early April, as the pandemic spread across Iowa, managers at the Waterloo plant reportedly began avoiding the plant floor for fear of contracting the virus. As a result, they increasingly delegated managerial authority and responsibilities to low-level supervisors who had no management training or experience. The supervisors did not require truck drivers and subcontractors to have their temperatures checked before entering the plant. 

In March and April, plant supervisors falsely denied the existence of any confirmed cases or positive tests for COVID-19 within the plant, and allegedly told workers they had a responsibility to keep working to ensure Americans didn’t go hungry as the result of a shutdown.(Source: Iowa Capital Dispatch)

Where to begin on this. As noted, we knew about lax working conditions and worker exploitation. But having the managers and supervisors betting on how many workers would get sick? 

I'm all for betting pools at work. Super Bowl. March Madness. Due date for someone's baby. And I'm not against dark humor, either. Who hasn't at least considered throwing in on a celebrity death pool, guessing which famous person is up next? During the dot com era, Fucked Company, a website that was something of a gossip mill for dot.com natives, had a death pool on which companies would fold next. I was a regular visitor to Fucked Company, as my employer at the time (late 1990's - early oughts), Genuity, was a regular on their pages. 

But betting on the casualties in your own company? Sure, there's an element of whistling past the graveyard here, but there's something completely disgraceful about managers and supervisors betting on (against?) their underlings, who were dying. And they knew it. Why else were the more senior managers starting to avoid being on the plant floor? They knew. 

There is, of course, more. (When it comes to bad business behavior, there's always more.) 

Tyson put together a bonus plan, rewarding employees who had perfect attendance for three months with $500. Maybe $500 extra wouldn't incent you to risk your life, but for some poor, ill-paid immigrant scrabbling to hold family together here while sending a pittance remittance home, it would seem like a fortune. Enough to encourage someone sick but not that sick to keep punching in. 

Tyson execs also got in the act by lobbying Iowa's governor for liability protection against law suits, and to get her to put in place a policy that gave only the state - and not local authorities - the right to close down a business due to COVID. 

Needless to say, Tyson has a different interpretation of events. They were working within the appropriate guidelines...doing everything they could...just trying to keep feeding their fellow Americans...responding to the demands of the President to keep meat packing plants in operation. (I did read that Tyson has suspended the managers who ran the betting pool.)

I always associate Tyson with chicken (a brand I don't buy), but they pack a lot of pork, too. Their Waterloo Iowa plant processes "approximately 19,500 hogs per day."

There's bacon in my freezer. And pancetta (Italian bacon for spaghetti carbonara). And I've been craving sausages and peppers. But when you think about how Tyson's been treating its employees, well, it's one more reason to at least consider becoming a vegetarian.

How wonderful is Dolly Parton? Think COVID vaccine. THAT'S HOW WONDERFUL!

We knew last spring - in our darkest hour (or one of them: Trump's still not gone) - that Dolly Parton had donated a cool million to coronavirus research. Turns out that Dolly's money:

... supported the development of the [just announced] Moderna vaccine, which shows 95% protection from the virus....The 74-year-old country music icon’s donation has also supported convalescent plasma study at Vanderbilt – treating infected people with the plasma of others carrying antibodies against the virus – as well as the development of several research papers pertaining to the virus. (Source: The Guardian)

I'll be happy to get whatever vaccine they have for me when they start asking us geezers to roll up our sleeves and get injected. But Moderna believes it will be able to produce a billion doses by the end of 2021, so maybe I'll be one of them. Plus Moderna's just over the salt and pepper bridge in Cambridge - a hop, skip and a jump from where I live. I can walk over and get vaccinated. That said, I think I heard that Moderna's vaccine doesn't need to be stored at the extreme cold temp that Pfizer's vaccine does, so it will probably end up distributed in places that have less sophisticated medical centers. 

But I'm a Dolly fan, so it would be kind of fun to get a Dolly dose, wouldn't it? 

When Dolly's COVID-related donation was announced in May, Pink Slip did a bit of an ode to her. So we all know that in addition to her support for medical research, Dolly has plenty of other philanthropy going on. Her big thing is the Imagination Library, a literacy program that sends a book each month to kids, from newborn up until the age of five. The point is to instill a love of reading. To date, about 150 million books have been distributed by her organization. 

I already have a love of reading, instilled in me as a very young child. I don't recall ever not loving books. So I'll just say the Imagination Library helps instill in me even more love for Dolly.

Anyway, I wanted to say thank you to Dolly, so I made a small donation to the Imagination Library. And I went an ordered her new damned Christmas album, even though I don't need yet another damned Christmas album. And if I did, I'd want one that was made up entirely of classics. When I put on a Christmas album, I want to sign along. The last new-fangled Christmas song I liked is All I Want for Christmas Is You, which seems new-fangled to me, but which is - amazingly - 26 years old. Looks like I'll be learning some new tunes this year, but I don't imagine I'll be adding anything new to my personal playlist. 

Of course, all I really want for Christmas is COVID over and Trump gone. 

Thanks to Dolly, one of those is on its way to becoming a reality.

Congratulations, Kim Ng!

I am (im)perfectly happy with the career that I had. My work was generally interesting, I made decent money, and - most important - I had great colleagues (some of whom became great friends). Which doesn't mean that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have done something else. 

As a do-gooder at heart, think I would have been happy in the social services sorts of places my volunteer work takes me.

Giving money away by working for a foundation that gives money away to the social services sorts of places my volunteer work takes me also has a ton of 'what if' appeal.

I can't see me teaching kids, but college professor might have suited me just fine.

I like numbers. I like puzzles. I like solving mysteries. Maybe I should have been a forensic accountant. 

Politics is right up my alley, so I can envision myself working for an elected official. Chief of Staff for a Senator would have been cool. 

I know I would have been happier if my career had more directly involved writing. (I was in marketing, so I always wrote a lot, but it wasn't usually the main point of what I was doing.) So, I coulda-shoulda-woulda been a journalist. Or just bitten the bullet somewhere along the line and tried to make it as a writer, scrounging up a living and somehow keeping body and soul together. 

Then there's sports...

As a lifelong fan, wouldn't it have been fun to work for, say, the Boston Red Sox? No, I'm not enough of a wonk to have been in any strategic or operational position, but community outreach or marketing might have been a good place for me. 

On the other hand, strategic and operational is an excellent place for Kim Ng, who was just named the General Manager of the Florida Marlins, the first woman GM in any of the men's professional sports leagues. (And the first Asian-American, to boot.) 

She is, not surprisingly, supremely qualified. 

First off, she's both super-smart and something of a jock. She graduated from the University of Chicago (thus: super-smart) and she played varsity softball while there (thus: something of a jock).  Admittedly, Chicago isn't exactly an athletic powerhouse. (When was the last time you heard anything about The Maroons?) But if you're playing college sports, you're plenty competitive. And if you played softball, you know how baseball works. 

After college, Ng stayed in town and worked for the White Sox, where she became Assistant Director of Operations. This was followed by a stint with the American League. She then worked for the Yankees as Assistant GM. Then it was on to the Dodgers, where she held the same position. For the better part of the past decade, she's worked for Major League Baseball as SVP of Baseball Operations.

So, supremely well qualified.

But as we saw in 2016 when another supremely qualified person got passed by (thanks to the peculiarities of the Electoral College), being supremely qualified isn't always enough, especially if you're a woman. And/or a minority.

And for the longest while, it wasn't enough for Kim Ng:

...Ng, a former assistant GM for the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, had interviewed at least four times for GM openings beginning in 2005, only to fall short each time. (Source: Washington Post)

Finally, though, supremely qualified is enough, and Kim Ng has just hurled a baseball through the glass ceiling of pro sports management. 

...the natural pinnacle of the recent trend of women making significant inroads in a sport that was once closed off, if not downright hostile, to them.

I'm so happy for Ng that I can even forgive her for having grown up a Yankees fan. 

Props to Marlins owner Derek Jeter (yes, that Derek Jeter) for making diversity a hallmark of the way he runs his team. And while the Marlins have often been a laughing stock, I will note that the finished this past season above .500 (unlike the Red Sox) and made it to the playoffs (unlike the Red Sox).

So congratulations to Kim Ng! 

Bet she won't be sitting there in twenty years with much by way of career regrets...

On rewatching "The Sopranos"

There hasn't been much "must see TV" in my life since I was in seventh grade, living from Thursday to Thursday, pining for the moment I could watch dreamboat Richard Chamberlain on Dr. Kildare. These days, of course - other than for sporting events, elections, and tragedies - technology has pretty much rendered the notion of "must see TV" obsolete. But when The Sopranos was on, I absolutely knew what my husband and I would be doing on Sunday night at nine. Over the course of six seasons, running to 86 episodes, I only remember missing one in real time, and that's when we were somewhere in Europe.

I'm not usually a big fan of violence - and there was plenty of gore in The Sopranos - but I was very much an admirer of The Sopranos. The writing was brilliant: rich, interesting, gripping, and plenty of times LOL funny. The acting, especially on the part of the leads James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, but pretty much the entire cast, was fabulous. Up to the writing. Equally brilliant.

So late this past summer, I started rewatching the series in its entirety, putting it on a few times a week, onesie-twosie. Sometimes threesie. 

Some of the episodes I recall with almost photographic memory: Tony Soprano taking his daughter Meadow on a college tour (a combination of horrific violence and hilarity). The death of Christopher Moltisanti's girlfriend Adriana LaCerva, which had me hollering at the TV for Adriana not to get into the car with Silvio.

Other episodes and scenes seemed new to me. I didn't remember at all the family time Tony and Carm spent with Janice and Bobby at their vacation home on the lake. And did I remember that Bobby was a train hobbyist? Not really, but what a nice touch for this sweet, doomed guy.

Not surprising, of course, that I didn't remember everything. The show aired from January 1999 through June 2007. A lot of water under that bridge.

What I did remember was just how much I loved The Sopranos.

The writing? Wow! Combining what's pretty much a standard-issue Mafia story with a brilliantly realized serio-comic story about family dynamics, and doing it so deftly. The sibling squabbles that never grow up or old, the mouthy teenagers, the aging parents (and uncles) who are pure PITA. The little family dramas were just superb.

And I got a kick out of Carm's flirtation with Fr. Phil. (Which ended when she caught wind of her friend Rosalie's flirtation with him. That Fr. Phil sure slimed around.)

I loved the New Jersey Napoletano argot. Gabagool (capicola). Goomar (mistress). Jamook (idiot). Stugots (testicles: the name of Tony's boat.)

And the frequent malapropisms that came out of the mouths of uneducated (but often quite wily and intelligent) characters. "She's like an albacore around my neck." "Create a little dysentery among the ranks." "You know, Quasimodo predicted all this." (Just don't tell Nostradamus.)

There's a ton of eating, and I was there for it. Even though I'm not a huge fan of gabagool, those subs from Satriale's looked delish. As did the food served at Vesuvio. And by Carmela, morning-noon-and-night to her family. Marone, that family could eat. (Tony was pretty hefty, but how did Carm and Meadow stay trim?)

A friend recently sent me The Sopranos Cookbook, and let me tell you, that rigatoni with broccoli is better than the version I made up many years ago. As are Olivia's mushrooms.  

So much about the show just plain worked. Treating organized crime as a regular business, with problems with managers, with negotiations with partners, with dealing with competitors, with griping employees. (Why did that guy get made a captain before me?)

The acting, as noted, was great, and I really enjoyed the fact that for the most part the main actors weren't familiar to me. I'd seen James Gandolfini in a movie, and I was familiar with Edie Falco and Lorraine Bracco. But most of the actors were local New Yorkers and New Jersey-ites. What a boon this show was for Italian-Americans. The casting was superb.

Over the years, a number of Hollywood A-listers took cameo roles, sometimes playing themselves (Lauren Bacall, Ben Kingsley), sometimes playing a character (Hal Holbrook, Annette Benning). It was fun spotting them. Even more fun: spotting folks who became famous later. I was watching one episode and said to myself (as I'm the only one here), that bellman sure looks like Lin-Manuel Miranda. Sure enough.

Fittingly, Nancy Sinatra and Frank Sinatra, Jr. both appeared as themselves. A nice NJ Italian connection. As was using Frankie Valli of Four Seasons fame to play a minor mobster. Jersey Boys!

These days, I don't know if they could get away with it, but there was a ton of casual racism and sexism (just how many pole dancers did the Bada Bing employ?) scattered throughout. But I'd like to think it would still be "allowed", as it seemed so authentic to the characters and the time. Sometimes I winced, but mostly it did work for me.

What worked less well was Tony's relationship with his shrink, Dr. Melfi. I understand that she was fascinated by this complex, yet completely sociopathic (or is it psychopathic) person. Still, at some point sooner than the second to last episode, one would hope she would have dumped him. (Of course, there would go a powerful arc of the series, so I guess it has to stay. I just thought that once he physically attacked her, she'd have been done with him. And I really didn't like the Sharon Stone-y thing that sometimes went on between Tony and Dr. Melfi, all those times she was sitting down opposite Tony in a mighty short skirt. Come on, Jennifer, put on a pant suit.)

Throughout, there was an awful lot of look-away violence. (I do literally look away from it.) But that's what you get when you're dealing with mobsters.

Knowing the ending was coming, I almost didn't watch the last episode. When it was aired, the ending was a bit ambiguous, but the show's creator recently let the cat out of the bag. Yep, in the end, Tony gets his.)

There's a theatrical prequel in the works. Gandolfini's son is getting his shot. He'll be playing the young Tony. I'm looking forward to it. 

But I'd also like a sequel. I want to now whether Carm stays in that big, gaudy house. Does she make a go of her real estate business? Does she tone down her wardrobe? Does she ever come to terms with being married to the mob?

Does Meadow go to law school? Does she marry Patrick Parisi? Do they fully escape the family business? 

What happens to A.J., a fundamentally sweet doofus? How does he end up?

How does Uncle Junior die? Where's Janice? Does Sil ever come out of his coma?

Guess this is what "must see TV" is all about.