Trademark this

As I sit here writing this post, I've got the Red Sox on. In what I expect will be a frequent theme this season, the beloved Olde Towne Team is losing. 

Sigh.

Last year they finished last in their division and were pretty much awful to watch from the first pitch of the season to the final out. I'm not expecting much more this season, and have held off on getting tickets, other than a pair for the Patriots Day Game next week. I'm guessing this is one of those years when, if I want to see a game in person, I'll be able to wait until the last minute and go for a steeply discounted seat on one of the scalper sites.

Despite their abysmal showing last season, the Red Sox - one of the most highly valued franchises in Boston - raised ticket prices this season. The nerve!

But when it comes to showing their inner greedy child, the Red Sox never hold back. 

I'm sure they ran the numbers - they're good at that - and figured out that, as long as there are lots of limited-interest-"fans"/tourists willing to pay big bucks for the thrill of seeing a game at America's Most Beloved Ballpark, they can afford if a lot of true fans drift away. 

But ticket prices weren't the only way that the Red Sox have been going after The Big Gouge.  

Until they asked to withdraw their trademark application, the Red Sox (through MLB) were looking for protected use of the name - wait for it! - "Boston." (Other teams in on this swindle were "Seattle" and "Houston." Guess all the other teams thought it was just too dumbass.)

The league’s intent wasn’t to take possession of the city’s name, [Red Sox principal owner John Henry] said.

“MLB’s intent was to protect these clubs’ use of their city name in connection with professional baseball services and apparel, not an attempt to own the city name or prevent others from using the city name,” Henry said. (Source: Boston Globe)

Didn't want to take possession oof the city's name? Just its use in conjunction with the word 'baseball?' Sure sounds like a pure greed play to me. And it's apparently not John Henry's first ride on the trademark rodeo. Henry's group also owns the Liverpool football club, and in 2019 tried to trademark the word "Liverpool."

Trademarking the word "Liverpool." To borrow from the Beatles, this was not fab. Nor was it gear. 

At the time, the club said that move was purely “in the context of football products and services” and to stop people benefiting from the sale of what they described as “inauthentic products,” the paper reported.

What, pray tell, is an "inauthentic product?" 

Presuming it had a headhole and two armholes, and an opening at the bottom, wouldn't a football jersey with Liverpool written on it be an actual, usable clothing item? Every bit as actual and usable as a jersey that the team was selling in their fab gear shop?

Same goes for the Red Sox. 

If I want something "authentic," I can go shopping in the blessed store outside of Fenway. Or buy something inside the park. 

As I write, I'm wearing an official, "authentic" Red Sox fleece that I paid a kabillion bucks for a couple of years back at said blessed store. It's China Blue - a very pretty color. And from the sportswear company Columbia. So, high quality. 

But, stupid me.

It has no pockets, and is also a pullover, when a zip front would be much better. What was I thinking? 

Maybe I should have bought something less authentic but more useful from a street vendor. Or from a store selling shirts that look like baseball shirts or caps that say "Boston" but don't have an "authentic" MLB tag on them. 

If they're not using the stylized Boston Red Sox "B" - and, frankly, even if they are - I'm sure fans know whether they bought something from the Red Sox or from a civilian. And they likely don't care. 

Several law professors were interviewed for the Globe article cited here. Their reaction to the attempt to trademark the word "Boston:" "ridiculous...really absurd"..."kind of ludicrous"...

One said: "This is like if Dunkin' Donuts tried to trademark, 'Caution: hot liquid.'"

What's popping into my head here is Logan Roy, evil, scheming, greedy paterfamilias to the evil, scheming, greedy Roy children, and head of the Waystar media empire in the HBO series Succession. Logan has a catchphrase: Oh, fuck off. 

But I'll be more polite here. 

On behalf of Red Sox Nation, and sensible people everywhere, here's what I have to say to John Henry. TRADEMARK THIS!

MOLST

MOLST.

I'd never heard of it. 

MOLST.

Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment.

A few weeks ago, the call came from Long Island, where my friend Mary Beth was hospitalized. Her second hospitalization since February. She's been sick, very sick, for many years. Although I'm not local, I'm first on her list of healthcare proxies.

We are old friends, from college. So 50 year+ friends. She is one of the wittiest and more brilliant people I've ever known. She can also be a prima donna, high maintenance. But she always - whatever the circumstance - had the gift of making me laugh. Or, at minimum, smile.

I love her.

The call came from a case manager and a nurse. Deb, Mary Beth's second on the list, was also on the phone. Deb is local, and has been the one keeping an eye on Mary Beth.

More than an eye.

Mary Beth - like me a widow without children; unlike me, no close relatives around - has amazing friends/neighbors who live across the street.

When MB is in the hospital or a rehab facility - and she's been in and out of both for the past four years; pretty much ever since her husband died suddenly - it is Deb who visits most regularly, talks to the doctors and nurses. When MB is home, Deb manages the home health aides, who have been there 24/7 since last July. She does the grocery shopping. Runs errands. She pops over to see MB whenever she can.

I've told Deb that, if Mother Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi had a child, she'd be it. 

Deb is kindness personified.

Then there are Lori and Andrew. I can't even begin to get into everything that the two of them have done to help Mary Beth. Manage her finances, and all the other paperwork that comes along with just plain life. Take care of home repair and maintenance. Provide IT support. 

When MB was in her first major rehab stint, Lori and Andrew had MB's bathroom rehabbed, swapping out the tub for a walk in shower, getting a handicapped toilet put in. 

And lots of other stuff that I can't even begin to get into.

Plus, along with Deb, Lori is a regular visitor, and, along with Deb, make sure that holidays are observed, birthdays are celebrated.

It's this amazing trio who have enabled Mary Beth to stay in her home and out of a permanent facility. A nursing home.

MOLST.

Mary Beth was out of it. The hospital needed us to sign off on the MOLST.

MOLST is a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on steroids. It includes a DNR, but also whether the patient should be intubated, or have a feeding tube put in, if and when to use antibiotics. There there's the biggie: Treatment Guidelines. Deb and I checked with each other. We knew Mary Beth's wishes: comfort measures only. Return to the hospital only if pain control isn't working. 

We were signing our friend into hospice.

Home hospice. 

Home.

That's where she wanted to go. That's where she wanted to die.

So Mary Beth came home.

Without getting into the complexity of Mary Beth's health problems, she's had a cascade of them over the past two decades, many of them stemming from successful but ghastly treatment to cure her mesothelioma. Mesothelioma. 

The doctors at Sloan-Kettering once told her that, on the inside, she looked like an asbestos miner. 

Mary Beth had been a librarian. But she worked in some very old buildings, where the pipes in the basement were wrapped in asbestos. So, mesothelioma due to being a librarian.

At least that's the theory of the case.

Anyway, what with one thing and another, MB developed substantial mobility issues, alongside a raft of other problems. Things have gotten worse as time goes by, and all of a sudden she was a total mess, health-wise. She has been 100% bedridden since July.

Home hospice in Mary Beth's case meant not just a continuation of the 24/7 health aides, but also the addition of an overnight aide to help move her when the pain got too bad.

Sometimes when I called, she was too tired to talk.

Mary Beth had never in her life been too tired to talk.

Last Monday, I flew down to JFK, and Uber'd out to Long Island to visit her.

I hadn't seen MB since last August. She looked frail, but was 100% with it. 

I told here that, when she'd been out of it, I'd signed the MOLST. I asked whether she wanted to revisit it. She didn't. 

Our conversation was, as usual, free ranging: politics, families, movies, books, college memories. We talked about the royal family. She's team Will-Kate; I'm strictly Harry-Meghan.

One thing we have in common is that, although we both come from staunchly Catholic families and spent 16 years in Catholic schools, we're atheists.

I told her it was pretty ironic that she ended up in a Catholic hospice. 

Her response: good thing she wasn't going to need an abortion. 

Deb, Lori, and I had dinner. We talked - of course - MB. 

That afternoon, the hospice nurse stopped in and he told me that, while you really can't predict these things, Mary Beth's vitals were strong, and she was obviously still 100% with it. This would be the best she'd ever be, but she could linger awhile. 

That afternoon, Mary Beth started on morphine for her pain. 

On Tuesday, MB told me she'd been craving a corn muffin, so I walked over the nearby Stop & Shop and got her one - plus an extra for the next day. I made it just the way she likes it: cut in half, buttered, stabbed through in a few places so the butter could melt in, heated up. She picked up and licked every last crumb off her fingers.

We watched the arraignment. 

She told me that she wanted to die in her sleep.

I told her I'd be back down in a few weeks, and would bring her some homemade corn muffins.

I told a picture and texted it off to our friend Joyce, who lives in Dallas. 

I gave MB the proxy hug and kiss that Joyce sent her way. I gave her a hug and a kiss of my own. As we always ended our phone conversations, we both said "I love you."

On Friday, Deb called to let me know that the health aide had called to say that she thought Mary Beth had died. Deb sped over from work. Lori sped over from work. MB's body was still warm, but they couldn't detect any pulse, or any breathing. They called hospice to come and declare. Then they called the funeral home for the removal. 

Once MB had gone into hospice, I'd been in touch with the funeral home about the arrangements: cremation now, we'll do a celebration of her life later, hopefully when her brother Bill (whose been having his own health issues) and his wife can come up from NJ). 

While they all waited for the funeral folks to arrive, I spoke with Deb, Lori, and Andrew. We were all a bit crazy. After all this time, Mary Beth's death had come so fast...

I called Joyce, and we shared a little phone cry. 

On Saturday, I got my signature on the request for cremation form notarized and overnighted it off to the funeral home. I emailed MB's lawyer to let her know the news, and ask her what the next steps are. I'm the executor. (Last year, Mary Beth told me that she needed to redo her will. I found a lawyer and helped MB get her thoughts organized, etc. When we met - phone meeting - with the lawyer, she asked MB who the executor would be. Mary Beth told them me. So I guess I was...)

Yesterday, I thought about Mary Beth and our long friendship. 

She's the second 50-year friend I've lost. The first was my beloved high school friend Marie, who died a couple of months after my husband did in 2014. This is one of the main downsides of aging...

Mary Beth's life has been pretty miserable for the last few years. She may not be in a better place - remember, we're atheists - but she is no longer in pain. So there's that.

Still, I'm sad. Very sad. 

As we learned in Girl Scouts, "Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold." 

True, true, true...

Goodbye, my golden friend.

Hope I'm not called upon to fill in another MOLST anytime soon.

Happy Easter. (And, a bit belatedly, Rest in Peep, Bob Born. Rest in Peep)

Well, Easter is upon us, and visions of Easter baskets dance in my head.

Not that I'll be doing much indulging.

Sure, I love nothing better than munching on the solid ears of a hollow chocolate bunny and sifting through jelly beans to find the purple and white ones I like the best. (Don't know why. Unless you get pricey "gourmet" like Jelly Bellys, that have recognizable tastes like espresso and watermelon, all jelly beans  - other than the black ones - taste alike, with a mild, soapy taste reminiscent of sucking on a wash cloth. Something I weirdly like to do when I was a very little kid splashing around in the bathtub.) And, of course, Easter is not Easter unless I've bitten the head off of a Peep.

But, having gotten a bit pre-diabetic-y, I've been cutting back on sugar. I've even stopped putting sugar in my tea, and I've been having sugar in my tea since I was a five-year-old sitting at my grandmother's oilcloth covered table enjoying an afternoon cup with her. Alas, before I have something sweet these days, I check to see how many grams of sugar it contains. 

A Lindt milk chocolate bunny (3.5 ounces) contains a mind-boggling (and possible diabetic coma inducing) 55 grams of sugar. (The daily suggested max for "added sugars" for women is a measly 25 grams.)

Jelly beans (of the Jelly Belly persuasion) have  21 grams of sugar in a serving of 27 jelly beans. So, better than a chocolate bunny, but still scoops up that daily allowance pretty quickly.

Better still are Peeps, which only contain about 6 grams of sugar in a single chick. A suggested serving is either four or five Peeps chicks, which is awful lot of Peeps to ingest in a sitting - even for a sugar/Peeps junkie like myself. So, having a Peep isn't all that bad. It's just that I'd rather spend those precious allowed grams of sugar on really good dark chocolate.

Nonetheless, I'll be good to go biting the head off of a Peep, assuming that my sister Trish does her usual Easter thing and brings me a package of Peeps.

Of course, I have thought about coloring some eggs and having a sugar-free Easter egg. But, no. A hardboiled egg has no place in my ideal Easter basket. And besides, I buy brown eggs, and if you dye them - as I recall from my childhood - the colors are dull and murky. 

So forget church. Forget Easter bonnets. Forget Easter lilies. 

As I said, it isn't Easter until I've bitten the head off of a Peep chick. I haven't yet decided whether I'll swallow the head (maybe 1.5 worth of unwanted/unneeded sugar), or, like someone at a wine tasting, discreetly spit it out. In either case, I'm ready to take on a Peep chick. 

Whether you're a Peepster or not, I wish you a very Happy Easter. 

But I would be remiss to not note that there was some sadness this year in Peeps world. Ira "Bob" Born, former CEO of Just Born, the Born family business, died this past February at the age of 98. 

Quite an interesting guy, Bob Born.

Son of Sam Born, Just Born's Russian immigrant founder, Bob - whose c.v. included an engineering degree from Lehigh and graduate work in math and physics at MIT - was planning on becoming a doctor. But while waiting for med school to begin, Bob fell in love with candy-making.

And the rest is history.

Among other notable achievements, the "Father of Peeps" mechanized the process for manufacturing those fabulous chicks (a process called "depositing"). His work took the process from a hand-crafted marshmallow chick taking 27 hours to create, to a manufactured Peep taking only 6 minutes to get just born. The Peep machine was invented in 1953, when Just Born acquired the original Peeps maker. 

The company's current machines, which are still based on Bob Born's design, now pump out 5.5 million Peeps per day.

Seventy years later, Peeps remain Just Born's most recognizable candy brand, the company says. Just Born makes around 2 billion Peeps each year, or enough to circle the globe two-and-a-half times. It sells the most at Easter, but also has versions sold for Halloween, Valentine's Day and other holidays. (Source: NPR)

As if making it possible to produce 2 billion Peeps each year wasn't achievement enough for any one life, "Bob Born also came up with the recipe for another popular Just Born candy, Hot Tamales." And, in his retirement, he didn't just loll around Florida golfing and watching out for alligators. Instead, he ran a literacy program.

Rest in Peep, Bob Born. Rest in Peep.

Ghastly

When I was in school, the only regular "drills" we had were fire drills, which happened a couple of times a year. (These revved up after a Catholic school in Chicago burned down in 1958. On my birthday, of all things. And the school had the same name as mine: Our Lady of the Angels. Nearly 100 kids were killed.) For fire drills, the alarm rang, we all marched out in orderly ranks, and stood in formation in the schoolyard until the all clear bell sounded.

Oddly, although I was a school kid from the mid-1950's through the mid-1960's - the height of the Red Scare - I have very little memory of the famous duck-and-cover drills that had kids poking their heads under their desks. 

I do remember one time when we marched down the hill to the church, which had a fallout shelter in the basement. 

And, certainly, the nuns were perpetually harping on the threat of Communists attacking the US and going after Catholics. They warned us that we might well be put in a position to become a martyr. If a Communist asked you whether you were a Catholic, sure, you could deny it and live. But if you said "Yes," well, a bullet between the eyes, and you punched your ticket to paradise. (I can't imagine that there would have been too many parents who'd want their children to answer "Yes." My father would have thought this was nuts and even my super religo mother would have been appalled. The nuns might not have concurred, but our parents would have come down on the side of Better Red than Dead.)

But, realistically, as scary as idea of a Catholic-hating Commie was, we knew that there had never been an American Catholic child martyr. 

The prospect of a school fire was more realistic, but even then, OLA Chicago was a one-off. And we were in a modern, one story school - the antithesis of rickety old multi-story OLA Chicago. We could all jump out the windows if worse came to worst. 

Today's kids know that school massacres are very real. That they happen. That they're relatively common.

Shady Hook. Uvalde. Parkland.

These kids know. They know they could be targets. They have to live with it. 

And, sadly, the response hasn't been to do something about keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of those under the age of 21 and/or with mental health issues and/or who've made threats on social media. The response has been to harden the schools.

Cops in the halls. Arm the teachers. Anti-ballistic backpacks. Active shooter drills. 

And then there's the Rapid-Deploy Safe Room System from KT Security Solutions, which has recently been deployed in a school in Alabama (to the tune of $60K per classroom). This product is a:

... “functional white board that can be customized to fit any classroom and expands into a fold-out room in under 10 seconds to serve as a protective shield, storm shelter, or additional meeting space inside the classroom...The device “provides ballistic shield for an entire classroom of students and staff” and can stop .308 caliber ammunition. (Source: Vice)

And a selling point is that a four year old can single-handedly deploy the safe room. (Shades of the black-and-white TV ads for Castro Convertibles which showed a four year old in a nightgown opening up the Castro sofa and converting the family living room into the guest room.)

KT Security Solutions "builds ballistic, rapid-deployment housing units for the military warfighter in our forward operating bases around the world." Founder Kevin Scott says that the impetus for creating the school safe room was Uvalde. 

Scott isn't happy that there's a need for his product, but, in the wake of Uvalde, he felt he needed to do something to save children. Although Scott may not be thrilled, he does see a good business opportunity.

There are currently two [school safe rooms] deployed and he hopes to grow the company quickly. "Our goal is to have a million classrooms in a year. That's what we want. There's three to five million classrooms around the United States."

Even if the price goes down with volume, this could certainly be a pretty lucrative business.  

Scott is relieved that the Alabama school is finding other uses for their safe room.

"The teachers said the kids actually call it the 'Calm Zone,' and they actually call it the 'Calm Cottage' now. She [Alabama teacher] leaves hers deployed all the time and it is a reward system that she has put in her elementary class where, when the kids do good things, they get a good grade, they read all their stuff, they do all their homework, they get a little free time on Friday in the Calm Cottage," he said. "They can go in there and do free reading, play little table games and things like that. So it's actually had the exact opposite effect of what you and I would have thought before we had them implemented."

"That's been a blessing that I didn't see coming," he added.

Unfortunately, the blessing I don't see coming is the nation gathering the will to do something about the rampant, Wild West use of guns in this country. 

What we're doing to our children is ghastly, just ghastly.

This is just plain sad (and not exactly criminal)

Sure, when it comes to my high school years, there were plenty of things I'd like a do-over on. Still, I very much enjoyed my four years at Notre Dame Academy. 

I was a good student. I had some excellent teachers. I got involved in all sorts of extra curriculars. I had a lot of fun. I made life friends. 

And yet, I was quite happy to graduate and get on with what I realized, even in the naive and dim-bulb state of my teen-age years - when I had next to zero clue about what I wanted to be or do, and absolute zero ambition to go about going after it - would be my real life.

So, while my high school career was a generally happy and successful one, and I look back fondly (mostly) on those years, I never thought of them as my "glory days." And I've always felt bad for those you idealized the high school experience, or who peaked in high school.

Thus, all I can do is feel very sorry for the poor young woman who, at the age of 29, forged a birth certificate so she could enroll in a high school.

Rutgers grad Hyejeong Shin only got four days worth of high school at New Brunswick (NJ) High School, before her ruse was uncovered by school administrators and she was revealed to be a late twenty-something, and not a teenager.  

And now Shin has been:

...indicted by a grand jury for providing a false government document and hindering her own prosecution. (Source: NY Post)

She has pled not guilty.

And, what, exactly is she guilty of?

Shin came over from South Korea at the age of 16 to attend boarding school. Fast forward more than a decade, and with a degree from Rutgers, she was lonely. Her attorney says that:

...she longed for an environment similar to her boarding school days surrounded by friends and hoped to recreate it at New Brunswick High School, ABC reported.

“At no time was anyone or any student in danger and this entire case is more about my client wanting to return to a place of safety and welcoming and an environment that she looks back on fondly and nothing more,” [Attorney Darren] Gelber told the station.

The police in New Brunswick have acknowledged that "they did not believe Shin’s attempt to attend high school again came from a desire to inflict harm to students, faculty or staff."

So how does this rise to the level of criminality? Why is a grand jury bothering with this case?

It's just plain sad that a 29 year-old would try to work through her loneliness by pretending to be a high school student. Other than taking up desk space, how is this any different than being a Furry or a cosplayer? Yes, kick her out of school. But where's the harm?

Shin and her attorney are hoping that she can avoid jail time by getting into some sort of pre-trial intervention program. (Which I'm guessing/hoping involves some sort of therapy.) Once her legal situation is resolved, Shin is heading back to South Korea, where I hope she'll find friends, family, and purpose, and an end to her loneliness. 

This is so sad.

At 29, I headed back to school. Only it was to business school, with other adults, not high school. 

My friends were building their careers, heading back to school after a few years in the work world, getting married, having babies, traveling, hanging out, coming out. I don't recall any conversation in which someone was wistfully looking back at high school, wishing they were there.

I wish Hyejeong Shin the best of luck, and plenty of good fortune. And I hope the NJ court system has the good sense to stop this prosecution in its tracks.

This is just plain sad.

The Mysterious Mr. Mota

There's never been a lack of colorful rogues coming out of Providence, Rhode Island. Think Buddy Cianci: the Providence mayor, radio talk show host, red sauce maker, reimaginer of downtown Providence, felon who spent time in federal prison for racketeering...

But Buddy's shuffled off this mortal coil, and now there's Michael Mota, who was profiled in a recent Boston Globe article. He hasn't been elected to anything in Rhode Island politics - at least not yet - nor has he been convicted to anything - at least not yet -   but his story is an order of magnitude more complex to understand when compared to Buddy's colorful, roguish meander through life. And he is nowhere near as lovable as Buddy Cianci once appeared to be, at least from the distance of a state away. 

Still, Mr. Mota is quite a character. And I had to read through the article twice (and visit his entry on LinkedIn) before I got the plot. Sort of.

For starter's, he's CEO of Skyline at Waterplace, a fancy event site in Providence. And CEO of Virtual Cons, "a global event & entertainment platform made for celebrities and their fans providing access and delivering engaging one-of-a-kind experiences." Often having to do with mobsters. (Mota worships at The Sopranos' altar.) 

According to himself - and who would know better? - he's a big crypto guy. And a music guy. 

If there's anything big happening in Providence, Mota is in on it. Or so he says. He's always on speed-brag about his accomplishments at Skyline and his mob-guy conventions, about all the celebs he knows. He's supposedly producing a movie about John Gotti, starring Armand Assante. He (Mota, not Gotti or Assante) was a VP of Alex and Ani, the once high-flying local jewelry company. He wants you to know about his doctorate - he likes to refer to himself as Dr. Mota. And:

He says unnamed overseas investors and others want to sink millions into his plans “because I am a smart guy, just so you know.” (Source: Boston Globe)

But this wannabe wise guy may not be as smart - and as clearly not as successful - as he'd like to think he is.

Skyline is way in arrears of the rent it owes the city of Providence. A holding company he runs is "defunct", it's value "worthless."

Mota’s doctorate comes from a diploma mill that provides honorary degrees for a price, the Globe’s research found. His work at Alex and Ani has been exaggerated — the company’s founder told the Globe he never served as its vice president.

And it isn't just the City of Providence that Mota's stiffing. He has creditors, investors, and vendors, stretching from Rhode Island to (ominously, if you've ever watched The Sopranos) New Jersey. He had actors from that show come to his mob-related conventions, and hasn't paid them. 

He has also made promises he hasn’t yet kept to the family of an actual mobster, John Gotti, whose “real story” he has promised to tell in a new movie, “Gotti 2.” And he’s angered other people with serious connections. 

Hmmmmm. One thing to stiff a lesser-Sopranos actor who only played a made man. Quite another to mess with someone associated with the Gottis, even if John Gotti is long gone.

I'm especially interested in Mota's aptly named Virtual Cons company. (The "cons" stands for convention, but it sure has a double meaning in Mota's case.)

Anyway, Virtual Cons doesn't seem to have done much since it's high point in 2021, when it hosted, among other events, "The Gangster & The Gentleman Cigar Dinner" and "An Evening at Tony's." This event took Sopranos' fans to the house where Tony and Carm lived to sup on food that Carm might have cooked in her kitchen there, if she'd been a real person. Some of the actors from the show were in attendance, including Aida Turturro, who played Tony's sister Janice. Wonder if she got paid...

And I wonder why these events seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth after 2021. Maybe there's not as much demand for mob-related whatevers as Mota thought there would be.

Virtual Cons wasn't just about those cigar-smoked events. You could also get into their Virtual Cons crypto. (Talk about an unfortunate - or just plain honest - name for crypto. The tokens, by the way, have Mota's image engraved on them.) 

2021 was also Virtual Cons' year for entry into the music biz. There, the first - and it appears only - music foray for the new music division was the record "La Thong" by Sisqo and JD Pantoja. How did I miss that one?

 Anyway, it looks like Mota's cons - virtual and IRL - may be catching up with him:

A judge in Providence County Superior Court is threatening to throw him in jail for blowing off payment agreements in one case. His own lawyer told the judge on Feb. 21 that Mota should file for bankruptcy.

Mota isn't having any of it. 

He told the Globe that he doesn’t owe anyone anything — and, if he does, he’ll pay them when he feels like it. At other times, he insists that the accusations against him about nonpayment are not true.

“How did I make it in life so far and I didn’t pay people? It’s just asinine. It’s actually insulting,” Mota said in an interview in October, his voice rising. “They don’t see the hours of work. They don’t see the lost time with my children. They don’t see the struggles.”

How did he make it in life so far if he didn't pay people? Huh? Is Mota not familiar with Donald J. Trump?

People should be grateful for the opportunity to do business with him, he added. “Now, do I have thoughts of grandeur? Absolutely. Am I gonna be successful? One thousand percent.”

Well, if Michael Mota says so...

Whatever else happens to him, he's still got his fancy house, a former Patriots' cheerleader for his wife, and all sorts of Sopranos and mob-adjacent memorabilia.

One is a Mota-version of a portrait of Tony Soprano (in Napoleonic rig) with his beloved but doomed racehorse, Pie-O-My. For this one, Mota had his face photoshopped on that of James Gandolfini (a.k.a., Tony Soprano).

Self-promoting con men aren't exclusive to Providence, Rhode Island. Self-promoting con men are something of a hallmark of American history.

Didn't Connecticut native P.T. Barnum tell us way back in the way back that "there's a sucker born every minute." And that was when the U.S. population was around 25 million. Today, it's over 330 million, so we're probably up to 13 a minute by now.

It will come as no surprise that Mota idolizes both Trump and Elon Musk. And feels similarly persecuted:

“I have a target on my back because I’m an entrepreneur doing a lot of things. People are always gonna come after me. People always come after folks that are doing something,” Mota told the Globe back in October. “If you’re doing nothing, then obviously no one’s gonna come after you.”

It'll be interesting to see whether Mota (or Trump and/or Musk, for the matter) ever does get his day of reckoning for putting the cons in Virtual Cons, and in everything else he's ever been involved with. But it's also interesting that, alongside his homages to Tony Soprano and The Godfather, Mota displays a picture of himself taken with the Dalai Lama.

That Dalai Lama...

Wonder if he ever ran into Buddy Cianci? 

Sure, it's always sweater weather in Ireland

My signature clothing items are scarves and sweaters. I like shopping for them. I have a lot of both. And wear them all the time.

I haven't done any counts, but I'm pretty sure I have more than a hundred sweaters, more than a hundred scarves.

This includes all seasons, and - especially when it comes to sweaters - a fairly elastic definition of what constitutes, say, a sweater.

Does my black cashmere three-quarter-length-sleeve boat-neck sweater (worn pretty much the same way I'd wear a shirt) count as a sweater in the same way that my blue floral intarsia sweater with buttons (worn pretty much the same way I'd wear a jacket) counts as a sweater?

Or the same fuchsia zip front Irish knit hoodie I bought in Dublin last fall does?

I love that fuchsia zip front, one of two Irish knit sweaters I own.

My other one is a bluish green button-front sweater I got in Galway a few years back.

Neither of my Irish sweaters is all that high quality. The bluish green number has been pilly since the get-go. I have plenty of other sweaters that are much nicer (and cost a lot more). But I like my Irish sweaters just fine, as I tend towards mostly liking things Irish, starting with music and literature, and drifting on down to foodstuffs. (No to Tayto Scampi Crisps, YES to Kerry Gold Butter.)

I had a mixed - but mostly positive - reaction to The Banshees of Inisheerin. I loved the actors, the scenery, the music, and the donkey. And loved the fact that the priest (a minor character) was the spit and image of my late cousin Charlie. But that thing with the fingers....

The only thought that registered with respect to the fashion was my reaction that no poor young woman living in a backwater's backwater in Ireland in the 1920's would have had two winter coats, as Siobhán did in the film.

I did not notice the sweaters, but then saw an article about Delia Barry.

Barry, who received a movie credit at the great and wonderful age of 83, was playing bingo when the NY Times caught up with her.

When not at bingo, Ms. Barry is usually knitting. Four of her sweaters appear in the Oscar-nominated film “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which is set on a fictional island in 1923, toward the end of the Irish civil war. These include a navy roll-neck and a red pullover with a distinctive long collar, both worn by Colin Farrell; a thick blue knit worn by Brendan Gleeson; and a purplish ribbed fisherman’s sweater worn by Barry Keoghan. (Source: NY Times)

Since the movie came out, Barry's story has "gone viral on Instagram and TikTok, where teenagers and 20-somethings have shown off their attempts to recreate her designs."

Delia Barry has been at knitting since she learned at age seven while in school in County Tipperary. Like many Irish people, she spent some time living in England, but made her way back home, to her husband's hometown in County Wicklow.

Ms. Barry knitted throughout her marriage, she said, but her commitment grew when her husband died in 2010, and she began knitting to raise funds for Greystones Cancer Support. “They were very good when he was diagnosed,” she said. She donated a portion of her film earnings to the organization. “You never know when you’re going to need them,” she said.

She spends a many hours a day knitting, which she finds "therapeutic."

“When you’re living on your own, it’s nice to have something to do,” she said. She knitted the sweaters for “The Banshees of Inisherin” during one of Ireland’s pandemic lockdowns, spending a week on each. “It kept me sane,” she said.

Barry is no stranger to show biz. Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, costume designer for Banshees:

...came across Ms. Barry’s work when she was sourcing knitwear for a 2017 television adaptation of “Little Women.” A woman working on the production knew that Ms. Barry had helped on other films, including “Dancing at Lughnasa,” for which she created knitwear for Meryl Streep’s character.

“Ireland is very small,” Ms. Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh said, laughing. “It’s all word of mouth.”

When it comes to knitting, Barry walks without a tightrope: she doesn't need a pattern. For Banshees, she used a magnifying glass to study photos of Irish fishermen that dated back to the 1920's. And she figured it out from there. (Interesting: once Barry finished a sweater, it was passed on to a group to be distressed so it wouldn't look brand new.)

Barry is enjoying the late-in-life attention, but admits that she would have preferred it to occur earlier, maybe 20 years ago. Nonetheless, she's glad of it, and is proud and happy to still be in the game. She's working with Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on another movie. 

“Because you get older, it doesn’t mean that you’re not useful anymore,” Ms. Barry said. “There’s a lot we can do, if we want to.”

Good on ye, Delia. I'm with you there. 

And I'll be with Delia Barry in rewatching Banshees. She'll be watching it again because when she saw it for the first time, she was understandably focusing on the "jumpers" she'd knitted, not on the acting, the scenery, the donkey, the fingers, or the priest who looked like my late cousin Charlie. I'll be watching the second time around to check out her sweaters. 

I'll be in Ireland in May. Maybe I'll see if I can up my game and find a Delia Barry sweater. 

Good Cheap Food (Goodbye, old friend)

I'm going through some things.

No, not in the sense that I'm going through some things, in a bad things happenin' kind of way. 

I'm going through stuff. As in tossing things in the trash, recycling, shredding, donating things that I no longer want and/or need.

In the last few weeks, I've brought 20 pounds+ worth of paper to the UPS Store, where Iron Mountain picks up stuff that needs to get shredded. Oh, I have a home shredder, but it's never been industrial strength, and of late it overheats and stops shredding after a page and a half. So I gave up and brought those old tax returns (hello, 2000!) and other items that had some personal info on them. Or my mother's personal info on it.

My mother died in 2001, and in opening file drawers that never get opened, I found all the checks she wrote the last year of her life. I had needed them when I filed her posthumous task return, and there were plenty of them. My mother didn't have a ton of money, but she was very generous with what she did have. 

She also believed in donating regularly. 

Instead of writing an annual $120 to a charity, she sent them $10 a month. Some of her charities got $5 a month. There was also a random check for $3. I suspect this charity had sent her address labels or a pencil, and said that they needed at least three bucks to cover the cost. Knowing my mother, she would have felt guilty using the pencil to do her crossword puzzle, and sent them the money. (Me? I use those address labels, whether I donate anything or not. As long as my name is spelled correctly. I toss the ones that say "Mureen.")

Then there were five official, embossed copies of my mother's death certificate. Stocking stuffers for each of her children? It felt weird tossing them, but out they went. (I did hang on to her last driver's license. Why? God knows.)

In addition to the important paper stuff I shred, I donated a number of items to the Art Room at St. Francis House, where the artists can use old typewriter pads (Eaton's Corrasable Bond!) and Crane's résumé bond (cream and pale gray), construction paper (likely left over from craft projects done with my nieces when they were little), and an unopened package of Sharpies that I opened to make sure they weren't dried up. I also Uber'd four bags full of kitchen-ish stuff to Goodwill.

One item that I figured was unusable was an ancient cook book, the paperback edition of Good Cheap Food, by Miriam Ungerer, vintage 1974, price $1.50, which my mother gave me nearly 50 years ago. 

The pages are moldering, the spine broken. When you open it, the pages fall out.

But I sure got my mother's money's worth out of it over the years. 

That's where I got the quiche recipe that I must have made dozens of times. The cookbook, in fact, falls open to it.

I made a variation of it a few weeks ago when I had a friend over to lunch. (My variation: add roasted cherry tomatoes and shallots.)

It's also where I found my tried and true spaghetti carbonara recipe, which I've made so often I don't even need the recipe.

Another tried and true no-need-for-the-recipe recipe I found there: cannelini with tuna. 

I don't recall making many other things out of this cookbook. For the basics, I turn to The Joy of Cooking. (I used to also rely on a paperback edition of the Fannie Farmer Cook Book, but that one moldered into oblivion a few years ago. 

One thing I have made from Good Cheap is stone-broke hash, which uses canned corned beef. I hadn't made it in decades, but during the covid shutdown, I bought a can and made a desperation meal (or two) out of it. I had remembered it as pretty tasty. Not as good as my mother's scratch hash, made with the leftover corned beef from St. Patrick's Day, ground in the meat grinder that clamped on to the kitchen counter. Now that was delicious. The Good Cheap Food, version, not so much. I doubt I'll be making that one again.

As I was going through my things, Good Cheap Food fell apart in my hands, and out fell the page with a recipe for colcannon, which I had never made. 

The colcannon recipe I follow - which, in fact, I followed on St. Patrick's Day - is from a pub food cookbook my cousin MB gave me, and uses cabbage, which strikes me as more authentic than Ungerer's recipe, which uses spinach. I won't be needed it. I love the real deal, which is yummy. (Ample cream and butter help.)

The Good Cheap Food cookbook is so old and in such bad shape, that to open it is to invite an asthma attack. So I wasn't able to spend much time reading Miriam Ungerer's enjoyable, clear, and witty writing. 

Anyway, I won't say that I'll miss this cookbook. I pulled out the quiche recipe, so I've got what I need. (In truth, I know that recipe by heart, too. It's pretty simple - as are all the recipes for the wonderful, good, simple little meals in this book.) It was definitely time for it to go. Still, it was with a tiny bit of a pang that I tossed the book in my recycle bin.

Goodbye, old friend. You done me good.

This Stash guy is SUCH bad news

A while back, my local pizza spot got in trouble for cheating its workers out of overtime. I can't recall all the details, but it was along the lines of promoting workers - often undocumented immigrants - to fake management positions so that they didn't need to pay them overtime. 

Anyway, for a short while, I didn't have a local pizza spot, but the place got new owners and it's all good. (Pizza included.) 

But there's a new pizza scandal brewing in Boston, and it makes the Upper Crust issues of yesteryear look like big nothing. 

Once again, the case involves exploiting undocumented immigrants, but the owner of Stash's Pizza - Stavros “Steve”

Papantoniadis - didn't stop at screwing workers out of wages.

Sure, there was plenty of that. 

In court filings, it's alleged that "Victim 1", a fellow from North Africa, worked as many as 119 hours a week for straight-time pay. He also had to endure Papantoniadis insulting him for his Muslim religion. And then: 

Papantoniadis “in or around” 2007 allegedly kicked the man in his genitals with such force that he needed surgery, according to the affidavit, which said the man had a catheter implanted and that the pain continued to bother him until at least 2021.

At other times, the man alleged, Papantoniadis struck him in the face, choked him, broke his glasses, and “broke his upper and lower teeth,” forcing the man to get dentures, the affidavit said. Records indicate the man “lost or had all of his teeth extracted” in 2008, according to the filing. (Source: Boston Globe)

(Medical records verify that this man's teeth were removed, but don't tie the extraction to the abuse.)

Other victims were similarly deprived of overtime, had to put up with plenty of insults, and had to endure threats around their immigration status. There were sexual harassment, death threats.

One of the other victims:

...told investigators Papantoniadis would mention the immigration status of undocumented workers whenever they requested time off and would end such talks by saying, “[Expletive] immigrants, I’m not here for you.”

Another victim worked 365 days without a day off.

This isn't Papantoniadis's first run-in with respect to wage violations. 

He and Polyxeny “Paulina” Papantoniadis [in 2019] agreed to pay $330,000 in back wages and other damages to 150 current and former employees, DOL said at the time.

But wait, there's more. (There's always more.)

(Separate court filings in Suffolk Superior Court indicate that Papantoniadis pleaded guilty in 1998 to motor vehicle homicide and leaving the scene of an accident causing personal injury or death. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail with one year to serve and the balance suspended, records show.)

And he supposedly his having served time to add street-cred oomph to the threats he made to his workers.  

Back to that alleged “[Expletive] immigrants, I’m not here for you” comment.

Want to bet that if Stavros/Steve and Polyxeny/Paulina aren't themselves immigrant, then their parents were. Just bettin'...

But wait, there's more. (There's always more.)

A tenant who rented a flat in a three-decker owned by Papantoniadis claims that he was wrongly evicted because of making complaints about leaks and a broken toilet. 

That may not be illegal in any criminal sense, but it helps paint the picture of what a colossal POS this Stash guy is. 

When last I saw, Papantoniadis was in custody, and, if found guilty, looking at up to 20 years in prison and a hefty fine. 

Even if only half of these allegations are true, it'll serve him right.  

 

Yeez Louise, that's a lot of ugly sneakers

I'm the first to admit that, when it comes to popular music, I'm something of a fuddy duddy. 

Oh, I'm not a complete and utter fuddy duddy, but a minor league one nonetheless.

I'm not sitting around mooning over why Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis aren't more popular. I don't sing Patti Page tunes in the shower. (Okay. Once in a while, I may break out into Old Cape Cod. But I promise you I have never, ever, ever in a million years performed a shower warble of How Much Is That Doggy in the Window.)

I can make fun of Lawrence Welk and his full cast, from Myron Floren to the Luffly Lennon Sisters. 

And while I still enjoy many of the performers I loved 50+ years ago - Tom Rush, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Elton John - I like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles just fine. In a couple of weeks, I'm going to see Lewis Capaldi. 

But.....

But....

Not that an old white woman is the audience, but I don't care for/appreciate/get rap. And while I understand that a lot of folks consider him a genius, I don't care for/appreciate/get Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West; latterly known as Yeezy - I think). 

And if I don't enjoy his music, I really don't think much of his fashion. 

I don't know if he still has his clothing line, but my reaction when I first saw it was something along the lines of this is some fugly stuff. (Insider info: One of my closest friends was a lead buyer for a very high end retail firm. I won't name names, but think Dallas. The store did business with Kanye - they were somewhat forced into it [I can't remember the deets] - and he was difficult to work with. And not many of the dedicated followers of fashion who dropped tens of thousands of dollars a month at the store would have been caught dead wearing anything "designed" by Kanye.)

If his clothing line was fugly, well, bring on Yeezy footwear, the latest of which looks like an unhappy meeting of Crocs and Edvard Munch's The Scream. And they certainly don't look like they'd offer the kind of support this old lady needs. Talk about ankle-breakers!

But Yeezy sneakers are popular. If no one wears them, collectors collect them and scalpers scalp them. And they cost a ton more than Crocs.

A few years ago, I was walking up Newbury Street and passed a large crowd gathering in front of a store. I asked one of the waiters what he was waiting for. I thought at first that he told me that Kanye West was coming, but then I figured out that it was some new edition of Yeezys that were hitting the shelves. 

Yeezys have helped make Ye richie rich. And they helped swell the coffers at Adidas, which had a deal with Ye that went south when Ye started spewing crackpot antisemitism, Adidas - a German company - was pushed to drop their arrangement. Which stuck the company with a Yeezy inventory worth $1.3B.

Stored in warehouses around the world, the sneakers are a reminder of the once-fruitful tie between Adidas and Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye. Since the first Yeezy Boost 750 shoe dropped in February 2015, his Yeezy brand became a defining force in the sportswear industry and an incredibly lucrative cornerstone for Adidas. (Source: NY Times)

Since January, Adidas has been headed by CEO Bjorn Gulden, who's been spending some of his get-acquainted time trying to figure out what to do with all those Yeezys. 

Mr. Gulden said he and his team were still weighing their options, including the idea of potentially selling the inventory and donating the profits “to do something good.” He said the shoes most likely wouldn’t be destroyed.

Getting rid of the Yeezys is complicated.

Selling the inventory puts the coveted sneakers into the market, and Ye is contractually entitled to his share of the profits. Giving the inventory away puts it to "good use," and there goes Ye's share (yay!), but there goes any profits that would go to do-gooding. 

Destroying the sneakers seems totally wrong-headed. Surely, there are direly poor folks throughout the world - some of them perhaps (blessedly) completely unaware of who Ye is and what cra stuff he stands for - who could use a pair of colorful Scream-Crocs. Not to mention the toxic sludge that would be produced by shredding/burning/whatevering those puppies. 

While Adidas is grappling with plenty of other issues, the Yeezy line was a "cornerstone" of their business, contributing as much as half-a-billion to their bottom line. 

“Losing the Yeezy business is so hard,” [Fulden] told reporters on Wednesday, praising the creativity of the collaboration on multiple levels, including the design, marketing and its use of social media and apps.

“There is no other Yeezy business in the market,” he said. “The people who think you can just replace this with something else — you can’t.”

I'll take Gulden's word that you can't just slot in another big name for Ye and get the same results. But maybe the next time around, they can come up with something that isn't quite as ugly. 

Where the wild things are

There are plenty of wild things on the move, making their way into places like, say, New England. Even alligators are on heading north. Fortunately, by the time they arrive, I'll likely be gone, so I really don't need to worry about the alligator jaws of death snapping at my ankles and dragging me into the Charles River.

Urban and close-in suburban areas in Massachusetts are increasingly where the wild things are. Hostile and aggressive wild turkeys are attacking people all over Boston and its environs. Coyotes have been spotted in my neighborhood. Black bears are becoming commonplace in suburban backyards. Moose lumber down the streets. 

Joro spiders the size of your palm! Colorful spotted lanternflies! Here. They. Come.

Nobody actually saw the deed, but one theory on how the dead rat ended up in the second floor balcony is that a hawk spied a tastier option and dropped it there. 

Thanks to global warming, Canada geese are, unfortunately, not on the move. Why fly south for the season when you can spend a pleasant enough winter in Boston without having to bother to get into a V formation and exert yourself to fly south? They're here, they're everywhere, get used to it. And they're crapping everywhere. It seems to me that they manage to crap their weight each and every day, covering my preferred walking routes along the Esplanade and in the Public Garden.

While they're not the nasty aggressors that wild turkeys are,  last summer one hissed at me as I walked by. 

I will say that I felt a little foolish telling a goose to fuck the fuck off. Nevertheless, I persisted. 

And now this:

A special breed of hybrid super pigs from Canada have started to travel south into the northern United States.

The pigs pose a threat to native wildlife and may prove tough to eradicate. (Source: Prevention)

These super pigs are a human creation. Farmers crossbred domestic pigs with wild boars in order to develop a breed that would be better able to withstand Canada's winter cold. Then the market price dropped, and some farmers decided to let their super pigs go free. 

And now they're heading south, invading the US through our northern border. So far, New England is blessedly not in their sights. But they're on their way to Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan. 

And it's hard to get rid of these suckers.

“That they can survive in such a cold climate is one of the big surprises of this issue,” Ryan Brook, leader of the University of Saskatchewan’s Canadian Wild Pig Research Project, tells Field and Stream.

The cold-hardiness of the hybrid pigs means they survive well. That means other native species don’t. Brook elaborates:

“Wild hogs feed on anything. They gobble up tons and tons of goslings and ducklings in the spring."

They can "gobble up tons and tons of goslings" you say? Make way for super pigs. 

Unfortunately, super pigs also wreak havoc on crops. And they're wily enough to avoid hunters. They adjust to the presence of hunters by switching to a nocturnal lifestyle. The groups they travel in break up, and/or they change the patterns of where they hang out, so hunters have a more difficult time locating them. 

The best strategy at reigning in the super pigs has been employing the Judas Pig concept, which straps a GPS collar onto a pig to lead game officials to other pigs. Deception may be our only hope.

Pigs are plenty smart. Maybe even super smart. So maybe they'll figure out the Judas Pig thing. 

Anyway, since I don't need to worry about their destroying any crops, I'd be fine if they came to Boston and took on the Canada geese. I'm guessing they'd be smart enough not to crap on my sidewalks. 

A not so lovely bunch of coconuts, Part II

Way back in 2020, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) - a group which, as often as not, I find a bit on the extreme side - revealed that monkeys (pig-tailed macaques) in Thailand were being forced into labor picking coconuts. 

Animal lover that I am, I didn't like this one little bit. 

Jeez, it's bad enough worrying about whether human laborers - including children - in many of the Asian countries that produce so much of what we eat, wear, and use are treated terribly: paid a pittance, working under unsafe conditions, living in squalor. Now we have to worry about whether monkeys are being used as slaves?

Most animals (pretty much any and all other than sponges and coral) are to some extent sentient. They feel pain, they experience emotion. But there's sentience and then there's sentience. So, no, I don't think a chicken's life is as valuable as that of a human. But as you climb up the evolutionary chain and get closer to homo sapiens, the sentience gets more sentient.

Monkeys? Okay, they're not as close as our great ape brothers and sisters - common chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans - but they're right up there. In terms of sentience, in terms of intelligence, they're head and shoulders above chickens. Which is why they're being dragooned into picking coconuts when they should be gamboling around in treetops. (Source: Pink Slip)

Based on PETA's investigatory work, Costco, Target, Wegman's, and Walmart (among others) agreed to stop stocking the monkey-picked coconut milk brand. 

Despite the success of the PETA boycott, it looks like there are still monkeys out there laboring in the Thai coconut fields, rather than swinging in trees, grooming each other, hurling feces at each other, and whatever else monkeys get up to in the wild. 

And now HelloFresh - providers of meal kits - "has said it will no longer sell coconut milk sourced from Thailand." 

PETA maintains that the use of forced monkey labor in Thailand is widespread. The Thai government counters that "the traditional practice of using monkeys to harvest coconuts is almost nonexistent in industry."

Looks like the truth may be in the middle. 

Vincent Nijman, anthropology professor and head of the Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group at Oxford Brookes University, who has researched the welfare of coconut-harvesting macaques in Thailand, said the practice is largely confined to the southernmost part of Thailand...

It is probably the case that such monkeys are based on small farms catering to local consumption, he said, rather than farms that produce coconuts for exports.

“The total volume that potentially could be picked by macaques is small, certainly in light of the total number of coconuts that are being picked,” said Nijman. “The vast majority of coconut and coconut products do not come from farms where pig-tailed macaques are employed.” (Source: The Guardian)

Nijman has found that the monkeys who are still working aren't well treated. He also researched what kind of "employees" the pig-tailed macaques (all 3,000 that he estimates are involved) make. What he found is pretty interesting.

Not surprisingly, young macaques aren't the ideal coconut picker. They want to swing in trees, get groomed, snuggle with mom macaque, and hurl feces. (Apologies if I'm defaming macaques. I have no idea whatsoever whether they're feces-hurling primates or not.)

Mature macaques aren't ideal, either. 

"...once [they], especially the males, become fully grown they become more difficult to work with, there is only a few years’ window during which you can work with the macaques,” 

The males are "more difficult to work with," you say? Whouda thunk it?

Anyway, there's lots of turnover in the macaque labor ranks, which means that there's a continual need for pig-tailed macaques to be kidnapped from their lives in the wild. With a "workforce" of only 3,000, we're just talking about several hundred macaques a year. Still, the trauma and terror inflicted on these poor little guys is pretty darned awful. Of course, the trauma and terror experienced by human coconut pickers is likely very real as well. But at least they - presumably - have some agency (however minimal) and aren't chained, whipped, and caged, as the monkeys are. 

Me? I'm just happy that I don't drink coconut milk to begin with, so I'm freed from having t worry about whether the coconuts were picked by a pig-tailed macaque who'd prefer to be somewhere else, doing something they want to do.

Sort of like human workers, no?

St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go

One of the most odious characters (non-political variety) on the American stage at present has got to be Elon Musk. Egomaniac. Narcissist. Creep. Conspiracy theorist. Manipulator. Weirdo. Putz. 

He may be the Richest Man in the World (for the moment, anyway). 

But, yuck.

He's doing his best to wreck Twitter - and the country, while he's at it. The reliability of Tesla cars is suspect. 

Okay, between it's spaceships and its satellite business, SpaceX is quite an operation. But does the world really need a company that indulges the urge of rich dweebs who want to play astronaut? On the other hand, if Elon Musk wants to be the first pioneer to plant his freak flag on Mars, well, be my guest. 

Anyway, Musk is clearly wealthy enough to turn pretty much any dream into a reality. And his latest dream is apparently creating a company town.

Ah, the company town. Utopian. Paternalistic. Exploitive. 

Company towns "offered" employees a place to live in. You lived in a company-owned house, shopped for whatever the company wanted to stock at company-owned stores, worshipped at company-set up churches, played in company-owned parks, and sent your kids to company-run schools.

What could possibly go wrong?

When I think "company town," I go right to the coal towns of yore - and of Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1950's hit, "Sixteen Tons."

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Of course, I'm sure that Elon Musk has something cooler and more elegant in mind that a rundown mining town where workers die young of black lung disease. That is, if they aren't killed in some sort of gruesome cave in. 

For one thing, his town won't have the Kentucky holler company store:

The workers also didn’t receive adequate compensation and were paid in scrip rather than regular money. Scrip was a currency that workers could only use at the company store which often drastically increased its prices by about 20% more than other establishments outside the compound. (Source: Gizmodo)

No, Musk's Snailbrook, Texas, will be a swell place to live. 

According to the Journal, Musk’s plans include building a place for his employees to live and charging them roughly $800 per month for one and two-bedroom homes, with the caveat that they would have 30 days to vacate the premises if they were laid off or quit. Although the plans are still in the works, it seems like a good time to ask: Is this even a good idea? 

Yes, indeed, this is a good time to ask whether this is a good idea. And for me, the answer is a big, loud NO. (Two little characters, with a lot of room left in a Tweet to expand on things.)

For months, we've seen how Musk runs things at Twitter. Firing people cruelly and often arbitrarily. So, bad enough you lose your job when Musk thinks you looked cross-eyed at him, so you have to go. You not only lose your job, you've got a month - a month during which you're likely unemployed, and thus not such a desirable renter prospect - to get out of town. 

And just think of Elon Musk's being in charge of the school curriculum. (History: In 2020, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, but rabid leftists engaged in rampant voter fraud, denying Trump his win and America the privilege of having DJT in charge for another four years.)

Would he dictate what plays and concerts could be held in the Snailbrook theater? Would he want to control what books were on the library shelves. Or would there even be books. How old school. Would he dictate what goods are on the supermarket shelves, perhaps only stocking those that turned the greatest profit? 

Maybe all he wants to do is subsidize rent. But when it's an autocratic, despotic ahole doing the subsidizing, you'd have to be worried about getting evicted if he turned on you.

Admittedly, there's precious little that Elon Musk could do that would turn my opinion of him from negative to positive. Even positive-light.

Maybe if he gave away 99.9999% of his fortune to provide universal healthcare, or affordable housing, or work on environmental issues, or gun violence.

Setting up a company town ain't one of them, whether it's in Texas or on Mars.

Ain't no one should have to sell their soul to the Musk company store.