Proud alum of MCU?

There are actually quite a few colleges and universities in central Massachusetts.

In my home town of Worcester alone there's Holy Cross, Clark, Worcester Tech, Worcester State, Quinsigamond, and Mass College of Pharmacy. Just outside of town, there's Anna Maria. A little further outside of town, there's Nichols College. Fitchburg State. Mount Wachusett CC.

I'm sure I'm missing a school or two, but one of the schools I'm missing isn't Massachusetts Central University. Because you can't miss what doesn't exist to begin with.

MCU's non-existence, however, hadn't been keeping the "school" from selling credentials, mainly to foreign "students" who were looking to buff up their resumes with a "degree" from an American "university."

A few weeks back, the MCU's site was was up and running, touting itself as "a prominent distance learning university offering accredited degree programs for students and working professionals."

Then came an article in the Boston Globe exposing this ridiculous diploma mill, and the site disappeared. I did take a look before it got 404'd, and it looked plenty legit. As the Globe wrote:

The professional-looking website has all the hallmarks of a real college. It promises an “outstanding educational experience” that will prepare students for “dynamic careers,” with 95 percent placement rates. The website features a career services page, stock images of fictional faculty members, and says it is accredited by nonexistent entities. 

The site also included glowing testimonials from fake "grads." Fake course offerings. And a list of fake faculty members that, coincidentally, was the same as the list of fake faculty members at another fake uni - Houston University of Sciences and Technology - which still has an intact website. 

Fake faculty like Denver D'Souza. (Any relation to Dinesh D'Souza?) Laura Hubble. Kyra Simon. 

Naturally, kicking myself for not having grabbed the MCU brochure when I had a chance, I downloaded the HUST brochure, which included these words of praise:

Earning my MBA degree from Houston University of Science and Technology was one of the best decisions of my life. The online learning experience has been incredible and the online learning platform of HUST is perfect. Every professor has contributed to my education. Not only I have learned valuable skills in my field, but I have enhanced my career skills. I am very pleased with my experience and I would thank Houston University of Science and Technology for enhancing my career prospects.

This testimonial was anonymous, which strikes me as pretty damned lazy on the part of HUST marketing. They couldn't even come up with a fake name for a fake grad?

The State of Texas can do whatever it wants to do with HUST, but in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, our AG is taking a look. Of course, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had already filed a cease and desist, and had them take down their website in 2021, only to have it reappear. Guess it's time to change "Massachusetts" to another "M" state. I vote for "Missouri."

Anyway, these outfits are bad news.

When it comes to getting a "degree" from a diploma mill, it's pretty clear that if a student doesn't have to actually take any courses - because there are none - to "earn" that degree, and they go ahead and buy the fake credential anyway, well, shame on them. But these schools can still con honest students - they "tend to target first generation and veteran students" - into applying. The diploma mill pockets the registration fees before the students realize that there's no there there. 

As for those who go ahead and buy the diploma: it's not worth the paper it's written on, and I hope someone catches you out when you put it on your resume.

RIP, Jordan Neely. RIP.

Jordan Neely was a handsome and talented young New Yorker.(He was familiar to many subway riders for his Michael Jackson impersonation.)

Jordan Neely was also a homeless and mentally ill New Yorker.

Jordan Neely is now a dead New Yorker, killed on the F Train by a fellow passenger who thought Neely - who was supposedly ranting about being hungry, thirsty, and unhoused - posed a threat to riders. So the fellow passenger - Daniel Penny,  a 24-year-old former Marine - jumped up, jumped in, put Neely in a chokehold, and - with the aid of a couple of other passengers - kept him in that chokehold until he died.

I live downtown in a big city. I ride public transportation. I volunteer in a day shelter.

Not a day goes by when I don't see homeless folks. Rarely does a day go by when I don't have some interaction with at least a couple of homeless folks. 

When I'm out walking, and someone asks me for money, I generally stop to chat for a minute or two. I ask them whether know about St. Francis House (the shelter where I volunteer), and - if they don't - let them know about the services and hours. And I usually give them $5. Enough to buy a cup of coffee and a donut at Dunk's. Or anything else.

I know, I know. That's possibly aiding and abetting someone who's going to take the money and buy booze or drugs. But to me  - and to plenty of social workers, case workers, substance abuse counsellors I've spoken with  - giving someone money provides them with agency and choice. Which to me - and to plenty of the social workers, case workers, substance abuse counsellors I've spoken with - outweighs the negative that someone will use the money to buy booze or drugs. 

That said, I pick my spots.

If someone is obviously strung out or drunk, I tend to avoid them. Or - if I make that assessment too late to avoid them, and I'm near a Dunk's - I'll ask them what they'd like and buy them a coffee and donut. 

And if someone appears to me to be having some sort of psychotic episode - screaming, throwing things, banging on windows, kicking trash cans - I stay the hell away. I cross the street. I definitely DMEC. (Don't Make Eye Contact.)

If it looks like the person is a danger to themselves or others, I have been known to call 9-1-1. But who knows? I'm a civilian, and I sure don't know.

But I do know that the person screaming, throwing thins, banging on windows, kicking trash cans, could be violent. And if that's the case, I'm in over my head. Way over my head. DMEC, indeed.

I wasn't on the F-train when Jordan Neely died, so I don't know how he was acting, how scary he was. 

Were people cowering in their seats? Or where they being typical New York subway riders and ignoring him, sticking their heads in their phones, just hoping they made it to their stop before things got any worse? 

According to authorities and witnesses, Neely and the former Marine, 24, got into a verbal altercation that escalated into a physical fight and ended with the man putting Neeley in a chokehold. Neely lost consciousness and never recovered, police said. Investigators interviewed the former Marine after Neely's death but did not detain him.

...A witness told The New York Times that Neely had been screaming on the train that he was hungry, thirsty, fed up and "ready to die." (Source: USA Today)

Ready to die. 

Oh, boy.

Jordan Neely's death has been ruled a homicide. As of this writing, no charges have been filed against Penny. 

Oh, boy.

Many of those who are homeless suffer from mental illness. Maybe even most, because even those without severe diagnoses like schizophrenia suffer from mental health issues precisely because they are homeless. Who wouldn't be depressed and anxious if they didn't know from one day to the next where they were going to be laying their head down that night?

I think about the some of the folks I've come to know at St. Francis House.

J is brilliant and beautiful, and I love talking to her. She makes it her business to learn the name of every staff member and volunteer she works with, and she uses those names. I love talking to her. When she's good. When she's on her meds. And when she's not, she may be stuffing paper towels down the toilet because she thinks someone's coming out of it to get her. Or she's taking all her clothes off and screaming in the streets.

B is mannerly and quiet. Shy. Although he's in his thirties, I think of him as a sweet boy. He's a sweet boy until something sets him off, and then he's hurling a chair at someone's head. 

I haven't seen K since before covid. A highly intelligent man, he would often tell me that someone or other sitting in the Resource Center was trying to kill him. He also told one of my fellow volunteers that he thought I was a spy for the CIA. (Needless to say, I didn't let him know that my late husband had actually worked for the CIA a kabillion years ago, when he was doing what he needed to do to avoid getting sent to Vietnam.)

I don't know what happened on that F-train, on that day.

How scary was Jordan Neely on that F-train, on that day?

How and why did Penny get into it - a verbal spat, push came to shove? -  with Neely, a spat that escalated to a deadly physical confrontation?

Did Penny start out by aggressively telling Jordan Neely to STFU, or did he start out offering a kind word that was rejected?

Would I have talked to Jordan Neely? Given him five bucks or a kind word or a Kind bar? Or would I have burrowed into DMEC mode until I could scoot into another car. A safe car. One without the ranting homeless guy.

(Would I have spoken up, yelled at Penny to back off once he had Jordan Neely down? That chokehold lasted a long time...)

I don't know what happened on the F-train, on that day.

All I know is that Jordan Neely is dead. The other guy may or may not be facing serious charges. 

And, oh yeah, I also know that there's got to be a better way to take care of those in need of our care. And, while we all can be doing a better job of taking care of our fellow man, we can't keep relying on the untrained kindness of strangers, however well-intention. Or on the untrained (in matters psychological) instincts of a stranger on the train to jump in and play the hero.

Sometimes, remote just plain don't work

For as long as I've been in Boston - over fifty years now - the public transportation system, the MBTA (a.k.a., the T) has been kinda-sorta-pretty-good-okay.

Even before I came here for college, I was a bit familiar with the T (then the MTA). 

I was a fan of the Kingston Trio, and joyfully sang along to Charlie on the MTA, which chronicled the hapless Bostonian who hopped on only to find that the fare had increased while he was in transit. Lacking the nickel he needed to exit the car when he arrived at his destination, Charlie was doomed "to ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston."  

So I knew that public transportation in Boston could be kinda-sorta f'd up.

But compared to Worcester - which had buses only - living in a place with rapid transit was a dream. 

And over the years, I've used Boston's public transpo plenty.

When I was in college, I used it to get around the city, and to get over the Cambridge. There was something called "Dime Time," when you could ride (during non-rush hours) for ten cents. A pretty good deal.

After college, when I lived and worked downtown, I didn't have to rely on it, but after grad school, I worked for years on the Red Line, first in Harvard Square and later at Alewife. So I was a regular T-commuter. The system was generally reliable. Generally. My rule of thumb was that if I positively, absolutely, had to be to work at a specific time, I needed to pad my commute time. Because you never knew when there'd be a delay. Or two.

These days, I'm occasionally on rapid transit, occasionally on commuter rail. By and large, T has stood me in pretty good stead.

And, as an elder, I enjoy a geezer pass, which entitles me to ride the rapid and commuter rails, buses and ferries, for half price. Not quite Dime Time, but pretty darned good.

Still, I realize that the T has turned into something of a mess of late. 

Equipment failures. Slow downs. Schedule collapses. Passengers injured when the Green Line plays bumper car. Or when escalators flatten and send people spilling. Derailments. Fires. Lines running at a fraction of the speed they should be running at. Manufacturing delays on new cars.

A man was dragged to his death thanks to a faulty door. Another fellow was killed when a rusting staircase he was climbing collapsed. (The staircase had been quasi-fenced off, but should have been removed.) 

Some of the stations are a mess. A hazardous mess. Within the last couple of months, there was a hit and a near miss at the Harvard Square station. A ceiling panel fell, narrowly missing a passenger. Then some sort of defunct but never removed air monitor dropped onto - and injured - a woman. 

A lot of the issues that the T has been experiencing seem to cry out for hands on, in person oversight by management. 

And yet, all sorts of senior managers don't actually live in the Boston area. 

The T’s chief safety officer owns a house near Chicago, where his wife works — and employees say he spends much of his time there. His deputy lives mainly with his family in Los Angeles. The T’s chief of capital projects rarely came to Boston before he was fired last month, instead attending meetings remotely from his homes in Wisconsin, Delaware, and Hawaii. Meanwhile, last year his chief of staff bought a house in Florida, where she lives with her husband.

The MBTA is facing an unprecedented crisis of confidence in its service, punctuated by slow trains, endless delays, and gruesome accidents. Yet, many top T managers live far from the troubled system they’re trying to rescue and some are rarely seen in person by their employees. A Globe review has found that nine senior managers have a primary residence more than 100 miles from the nearest T station — and some much farther. (Source: The Boston Globe)

I'm actually a fan of remote work, with a preference for the 3-2 or 2-3 model. This gives workers the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of working from home (no commute, throwing a load of wash in...), while also ensuring that the benefits of having folks work in person aren't lost (onboarding newbies, kismet moments, seeing things up close and personal...)

But some jobs, companies, and industries are better suited to remote work than others. And I'd suggest that, in an outfit like the T, there are plenty of jobs that work better in person. And we're not just talking bus driver here.

You'd think that those in charge of systems safety would want to be on the ground when there are accidents, when hazards are discovered, and not just rely on reports from underlings Zooming info at you as you sit on your veranda in Hawaii, admiring the bougainvillea. 

Just terrible for morale. 

When the new general manager, Phillip Eng, called his first staff meeting, it was full of no shows who decided to Zoom in rather than stir their stumps to meet the new guy in person. 

Not because of this - from what I've read, Eng is a practical person and not the vindictive type - but throughout the T, the remote work policies are being reexamined. Some senior employees have already been told that they need to show up in person at least three days a week. 

In an interview with the Globe, new general manager Eng... acknowledged that remote work can be productive, but said there’s no substitute for direct contact among T leadership and hands-on management of staff.

“We’re in a business of 24/7 operations,” Eng said. “There is an importance about face-to-face discussions, meetings not only internally, but for our staff to see that we’re present as well with third parties doing work and the vendors and the manufacturers that we rely on."

The pandemic crisis has passed. The T crisis is ongoing.

Good for Eng.

Where the wild things are

So much of the news lately has been about two-legged wild things, armed and insanely dangerous.

The old coot in Kansas City who grievously injured Ralph Yarl, who knocked at the wrong door when he was doing what 16 years olds with new licenses always do: picking up his kid brothers. 

The angry hilltopper in Upstate New York who killed 20 year old Kaylin Gillis who had the misfortune to be a passenger in a friend's car who, on a dark road, mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway.

The Texas cheerleaders who hopped in the wrong car - it looked just like theirs - and whose apologies weren't enough for the fellow whose car door they opened. He went after the girls and opened fire.

In North Carolina, a six year old's basketball rolled into a neighbor's yard. That neighbor opened fire on the little girl and her dad, seriously injuring the man. (The little girl suffered minor physical injuries, but one can only imagine the psychological trauma inflicted on her.)

The two jamokes in Florida who got in a road rager. Both of their kids were wounded in the crossfire.

The colossal moron in Missouri - sporting a snappy tee-shirt bearing the logo of the US Concealed Carry Association - who, when he found the meat department in the grocery store closed, decided to pack up his own damned steaks. When he was told to stop, he unconcealed his carry and put a gun to a store employee's throat so he could get the steaks weighed and bagged.

With all this wilding going on, it's hard to worry about the animal world but, maybe it's the crazy in the air, but our furred and feathered friends are, increasingly, coming after us, too.

In quaint Nahant, on the North Shore of Boston, the town council was planning on hiring Federal sharpshooters to thin their coyote population. The town hadn't experienced a "dingo's got my baby" moment, but a little pupper had been dog-napped and done away with at the hands and jaw of a coyote.

Closer to home, a coyote was spotted a few months back in the Boston Public Garden, which is my front yard.

Wild turkeys, those nasty bastards, are everywhere. Recently, one deliberately flew into a letter carrier in Cambridge. Once it knocked him down, it started pecking at him. The postman ended up having to have a hip replacement.

The other evening, while out walking, I passed a Boston Animal Control worker who'd just parked and was walking down the street with a net. I asked what he was after, and he told me there was an injured goose. I didn't say what was on my mind, which was that I hoped he was too little, too late. We could use one less goose crapping along every path that someone walking in Boston would want to walk down.

A few weeks ago, my upstairs neighbors spotted a dead rat on their front balcony.

How did it get there, we all wondered?

Did someone find it on the sidewalk and hurl it up onto their balcony? You'd have to be pretty drunk or out of it to pick a rat up and shotput it up a flight. 

The other theory of the case is that a hawk - and, yes, we have a few hawks in the 'hood, mostly, as far as I can tell, preying on pigeons - swooped the rat up and then spotted something more savory. A pigeon perhaps. So the hawk dropped the rat.

Rats are, of course, all over the urban place, and every week or so I come across a flattened corpse. Yay! When I'm out and about at dusk, I often see them scurrying around. And they do tend to sup on whatever they can scrounge from trash bags put out a bit too early.

There are rat traps everywhere in the neighborhood. In front gardens. Up against trees. Pushed up against the side of buildings.

But coming across one perched on the side of the sidewalk around the corner - one with a plump rat's arse hanging out - was a new one for me.  

I spotted this on the Friday before Boston Marathon weekend, when the city was packed with runners and tourists. And since I live in a neighborhood where a lot of these runners and tourists are strolling through, I figured that the City of Boston might want to get this one out of sight.

The City of Boston did.

Within a few hours of sending them an email - pic attached - they had removed the offending trap avec rat. I received an email telling me that the rat was one of the larger ones they've seen. Since rats are so squishy, I'm not sure if this one was just too fat to get into the trap, or whether the trap was occupado.

In either case, rat be gone!

I guess we all just have to get used to living where the wild things are. 

I just hope Massachusetts manages to stay a relative oasis of sanity when it comes to guns.

I really didn't need to read this.

The pollen has been heavy this spring, and it's been bothering me in a way that it hasn't in years. I lost my voice - some days completely - for a week. So it's been a matter of slathering Vicks Vapo Rub on my throat before getting in the shower, and popping a daily Claritin.

Bad as the pollen's been, I'm thankful that it's not the chemical railway car spill in Palestine, Ohio. Or the fire in the plastics plant in Richmond, Indiana. 

And thankful that I don't work at the Michigan paper mill where 100 folks have developed something called blastomycosis, thanks to "a rare fungal outbreak."

Rare. Fungal. Outbreak.

That doesn't sound good.

I do have a bit of fungal outbreaking going on up close and personal: a toenail on each foot. 

Fortunately, the anti-fungal stuff I found online does seem to be doing the trick on those bad boys.

But the fungal outbreak, at least until sandal season rolls around, is out of sight, out of mind.

And it's nowhere near my lungs.

So far, there's one death reported, and nearly 100 who've been sickened (12 severely enough to require hospitalization), out of a local workforce of a bit over 800 folks. The plant was temporarily closed "as local and federal investigators try to identify the source" and so that the mill could undergo a deep cleaning. When employees return to work, they'll be offered N95 masks and voluntary testing. 

“Identifying the source can be difficult because the Blastomyces fungus is endemic to the area,” the company said in a statement. “There has never been an industrial outbreak of this nature documented anywhere in the U.S.”

Blastomycosis is an infection associated with the Blastomyces fungus, which grows in moist soil and decomposing matter, such as wood and leaves, and can become airborne if disturbed. (Source: NY Times)

The good news is that most folks who are exposed to Blastomyces spores won't get sick. But when they do, it's ugly and fluish:

Symptoms include a cough (sometimes with blood), fever, chest pain, difficulty breathing, night sweats, fatigue, weight loss, muscle aches and joint pain.

Sounds like the respiratory infection (non-covid: I tested continually) i had last December. And a bit like the current pollen attack. 

Even without this nasty outbreak, I don't imagine that working in a pulp and paper mill is exacting a dream job.

My college roommate's sister was married to a lawyer who worked for a while doing public service law in Berlin, NH, then home of a pulp and paper mill. Joyce and I went to visit them once, and although her sister's family lived out in the woods - we saw a black bear in their back yard - outside of the town of Berlin, you could smell the plant everywhere. And that smell was god-awful.

You could also see the effluent - a thick, roiling yellow-whitish brew - in the Androscoggin River, which flows through Berlin.

There are, of course, a lot worse things in the news. The high school clarinetist who knocked on the wrong door and got shot. The cheerleader who mistook a look-alike car for that of a friend and got shot. The young upstate New York woman who was a passenger in a car that turned into the wrong driveway and got shot. And killed. 

And that's just a few news highlights (lowlights?) that are top of news/top of mind as I'm writing this.

Still, it's awful to think about folks who work in dangerous places, usually for short money, and the risks they take.

I get that it's going to be pretty difficult to ever sensibly regulate guns, but isn't there something the EPA could do to make those who work in plants safer?

Maybe it's because I'm coping with pollen, but I really didn't need to read about blastomycosis. Hope we can put this one on blast. 

Whatever happened to a tiny plastic basket full of M&M's?

If you were a child in the 1950's-1960's, and ever went to a birthday party, you may recognize these fancy little pink plastic baskets. Throw in a handful of M&Ms and a stick of Beechnut gum (yes, a stick, not the full packet), and this was the party favor every child at the birthday party received. (Girl edition, anyway. I'm not sure what boys got their treats in. Maybe there was a fancy little blue plastic basket.)

Birthday parties back then, in those days when we were one step removed from Little House on the Prairie, were not particularly elaborate affairs. Most parties were on Saturday afternoon, and you put on your Sunday dress and patent leather Mary Janes and trucked over to the birthday girl's house, your gift - which I can guarantee costs no more than a buck (roughly $10 in today's terms) - tucked under your arm. The gifts were at least a bit "nicer" than the kind of clothespin-wrapped-in-a-rag doll that Laura Little House may have gotten. But not by much. 

At the party, you played a few games: Pin the Tale on the Donkey, Musical Chairs, and the one where you looked into a shoebox that held a bunch of common household objects, and, once the box was whisked away, you listed every item you could remember: spool, pencil, tweezers, thimble. The winner remembered the greatest number. (I won that one a couple of times!)

Winners of Donkey, Chairs, and shoebox received a small prize: coloring book, paper dolls, eight-pack of Crayolas. 

If you didn't win a prize, all you got to take home was the little plastic basket. 

After the games, Happy Birthday was sung, and the cake and ice cream doled out.

Then you walked home. 

Somewhere along the line, having a birthday lunch during the school day trended. I went to one at Kathy Shea's house, another at Ellen Walsh's. You didn't have to dress up for these parties. You just wore your school uniform. For Kathy Shea's, I think it was on a Brownie Day, so we all had on our cocoa brown junior Girl Scout dresses rather than our green jumpers. 

Lunch parties came with lunch - I remember gagging at the tuna sandwiches Mrs. Walsh made us. She put green pepper in them. Imagine that! But at a lunch party, between walking home and walking back, there was no time for any games, which may have been what the mothers were aiming for

The most memorable birthday parties I attended were those of the Shepherd sisters, Maggie and Susie. One had a pink theme: a pink frosted birthday cake and ginger ale dyed pink; the other had a blue theme: a blue frosted cake and blue-dyed ginger ale. I was out of my mind with the blue birthday, but for some reason, I was never able to convince my mother to frost my cake with blue. (My sisters have made up for this grievous childhood slight.)

Another memorable party was at the home of a fellow Maureen. I mostly remember it because her bedridden grandmother was in the bedroom off the dining room, where the party took place, and we all got to go in and say hello to her. I can't remember whether this was Maureen's Polish or Irish grandmother, but the old lady was muttering in some foreign tongue. Polish? Gaelic? All I knew was that it wasn't English. And I can still picture that grandmother lying there, pale, big watery blue eyes, wispy white hair splayed out on the pillow, knotted up hands holding a rosary.

Kids didn't have an annual birthday party back then. Yes, there would have been cake and ice cream after dinner, and the song would have been sung, but most of my friends had one birthday party for friends per childhood. Two max.

People had more kids - at least in our neighborhood - and in those days no one made all that big a deal out of birthdays.

How non big a deal were birthdays?

I don't think I've ever seen a picture taken at any kids' birthday party.

Over time - and we're talking a lot of time here - birthday parties became more frequent and more elaborate.

There was a clown. Maybe even a bouncy castle. The party might have been held at a bowling alley. Or a Chuck E Cheese. 

All the attendees got goodie bags that were a lot goodier than those pink plastic baskets with a few M&Ms in them. 

But those Chuck E Cheese fests, with the kids all winning tickets on the cheesy games and making their own damned sugar-fest goodie bags, are BIG NOTHING when it comes to birthday partay, if you look at what's going on in LA LA Land.

Take little William's sixth birthday party, with its 100 hundred guests. It took professional planners, working with 14 vendors, three months to pull off a fire-station themed event. Among other features: fire-hose backpacks, a custom ball pit for the kiddos to slide into, a food truck, a water ice vendor (I think this sounds like Italian ice), a ceramic fire-truck painting activity, plush toy Dalmations (from something that sounds like a Build-a-Bear style stand), and a real fire truck.

There was a beverage station with customized drink stirrers and signature to-go cocktails for the parents, including one called “What the Fire Truck.” (Source: Washington Post)

I could use one of those just reading about this event.

And the birthday boy won't have to rely on his own memories. There were both a photographer and videographer on hand to record everything going down at William's Glorious Sixth.

Astonishingly, there are no pictures of my Glorious Sixth. I say astonishingly not because it was my birthday, but because it was the day my preemie brother Rich came home from the hospital. And no one bothered to get the Brownie out and snap his entrance. (He remains the best birthday present I ever got.)

That birthday is also memorable because my mother hadn't been around to bake me a cake, and my grandmother hadn't yet blown in from Chicago to help out. I don't know why my other grandmother, who lived downstairs, didn't come through with a cake. But my mother's friend Jane, who lived across the street, came through with some cupcakes that her mother baked. And, bless you, Mrs. Gannon: my cupcake had bright blue frosting. 

Back at little William's party, at least one of the adult guests wasn't all that impressed. Rich Radford was there with his 4-year-old daughter Harlow.

Mr. Radford mentioned that the level of production was actually dialed back from William’s fifth birthday party, which was hibachi-themed and featured real chefs and pyrotechnics. “For instance, there are no fire dancers today,” he said.

Well, pardon me.  

But it looks like, for a certain set, LA birthday birthday parties are as elaborate and planned as weddings. 

“It used to be that over-the-top was looked down upon, but now over-the-top is applauded,” said Leesa Zelken, the founder of Send in the Clowns, a party-planning service in Los Angeles.

 Zelken's business started out as rent-a-clown. These days:

Every event Ms. Zelken now orchestrates includes multiple vendors. Her consulting fees start at $350, and soup-to-nuts planning packages begin at $14,500. “For an event that I just booked, we’re doing furniture rentals, a performer, a glitter tattoo station, a craft station, a pancake artist, a party manager and a lifeguard — because there’s a pool and we need to make sure no one falls in,” she said. “That’s a very midsize party.”

Pancake artist? Now there's a job for you. (My idea of pancake artistry is a pancake that isn't burnt on the outside and raw on the inside.)

Who and/or what's to blame for this party-gone-wild mentality?

Surprise, surprise.

Pent up pandemic party urges.  Social media, especially Instagram. The Kardashians. 

“So much of my Instagram feed is parties,” said Ellina Chulpaeff, a 31-year-old attorney. For her son’s first birthday, which she combined with a birthday celebration for herself, she executed an Italian theme. There were tablescapes accented with lemons and blue-and-white Italian-style ceramics, and a faux boxwood wall backdrop.

And, by the way, when did every celebration start requiring a theme? Isn't "happy birthday" enough of a theme? Or the simple pink and blue "theme" that Mrs. Shepherd pulled off for her girls?

Speaking of themes:

Frannie Hudson, an in-demand planner, threw a Ruth Bader Ginsberg-themed party for a 1-year-old in which she put doilies under balloons to mimic the justice’s iconic collar.

I suppose that's better than a Melania Trump-themed party, where all the 1-year-olds get a goodie bag containing a mini-"I really don't care, do you?" raincoat.  

Parties for the uber-wealthy can clock in at $75,000 or more (some families don’t have budgets, Ms. Zelken said), but other parents who hire professional planners might spend between $10,000 and $40,000.

And it goes without saying that the kids are getting in on the act, requesting themes, activities, and goodies that they've experienced at other kids' parties.

I get this completely. After all, didn't I try to heavy-hint my mother into a blue frosted cake? All that wheedling for naught. Until Mrs. Gannon, without even knowing my heart's desire, came through with that blue-frosted cupcake. For that, I'll forgive her for making yellow cupcakes, not chocolate ones. 

Oh, what a world we live in.

Demolition Derby?

To me, there are few things more charming than the English countryside. 

I want to live in Maisie Dobbs' charming dower house on the grounds of Chelstone Manor. I want to tootle around in a roadster driven by one of the Cawleys - not the one who crashed himself to dead - and motor o'er hill and dale to arrive at Downton Abbey. And sign me up for a quaint cottage next door to the veterinarians' dispensary in Yorkshire in that fabulous little fake town in All Creatures Great and Small. 

Oh, I know all these quaint towns are full of cottages and pubs that are heavy on the quaint and light on the creature comfort. Low ceilings, damp walls. Not to mention that the residents of said quaint towns aren't all kind, generous, and personable. 

But the charming look? Hard to beat - and I'm not even that big a fan of Merry Old England. 

So I would have loved stopping with Maisie Dobbs for a ploughman's lunch at the Punch Bowl Inn in Hurst Green.

For centuries, the sandstone walls of the Punch Bowl Inn greeted passersby on a quiet English country road. Tour guides in Hurst Green pointed out the pub to village visitors: Legend had it that a notorious robber operated out of the pub in the 18th century before he was caught and executed. His ghost still haunts the place, they’d say. (Source: Washington Post)

Alas, I've missed the opportunity to pop in for an ale and some bread and cheddar. In June 2021, although "the pub was a listed building, a designation in the United Kingdom that protects structures of historical significance," the owner leveled it. 

Apparently assuming it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, the owner brought out the wrecking ball. Reduced the Punch Bowl Inn to rubble. Smashed it to smithereens. 

This came as a surprise - and more than an annoyance or mild disagreement - to the borough council. After all, the building was protected. Not to mention both a sentimental favorite to the locals, and a big selling point when it came to the town's tourist appeal. So:

The Ribble Valley borough council, which oversees Hurst Green, took legal action against the pub’s owner, Andrew Donelan, whose company demolished the building. In early March, authorities rejected an appeal from Donelan’s company and ordered them to rebuild the Punch Bowl Inn within 12 months — using the very stones from the pub’s rubble.

For his part, Donelan claims that the buildings, which haven't been in active use since he bought them a few years back, were too far gone to repair. Unstable, verging on collapse.

Not good enough!

Donelan and company were found guilty last December of flouting the law to destroy the pub. 

In March, an inspector denied an appeal from Donelan and confirmed several penalties, including a fine of about $83,000 and a strict rebuilding assignment. 

There are plenty of existing plans that show the layout, so the buildings will be able to be set back to right. This is, of course, a smaller scale operation than  than the rebuild of the cathedral in Dresden that was destroyed in the fire bombing during World War II. Or the repair of all the destruction to Notre Dame in Paris caused by the devastating fire there a few years back. But it definitely shows that these rebuilds can be done.

You can rebuild using as much as you can of the rubble. And recreate that missing bits, using the plans.  

The Ribble Valley Council wants to set a precedent that says that, if a property is historically protected, you can't just go ahead and destroy it.

“It’s encouraging when heritage crime, like the demolition of the Punch Bowl Inn, is taken seriously,” a Historic England spokesperson said in a statement to The Post. “Demolishing our cherished listed buildings without consent is a crime that impacts the whole community and we hope that this case serves as a deterrent.”

I'm all for it being a deterrent to any future Demolition Derbies in the works, if only so I can keep my fantasy of the English countryside going.

No plans to go there and enjoy it anytime soon. I just like the idea of it. 

Cheerio, and all that!

Design error? Whatty what what?

It will come as no surprise that I don't have a lot of respect or affection for Sarah Huckabee Sanders. 

When she was Trump's Press Secretary, I found her to be duplicitous, a willing conduit for Trump's incessant spew of lies. As Governor of Arkansas, I find her to be preposterous, posturing about social hot button issues when her state is rock-bottom when it comes to most measures of health and welfare. 

Sure, your state may rank 48th in health, and 47th when it comes to education, but by all means, let's crack down on drag shows.

Turns out she's not just duplicitous and preposterous, Sarah Huckabee Sanders can be downright ludicrous.

As in an application for positions "to serve on state boards and commissions to write explanations of what they admire about her leadership most." (Source: Raw Story)

The state was looking for was an up to 500 word essay answering this prompt:

 "What is an accomplishment of the Governor’s that you admire the most?"

In contrast, a question that asked "What book have you read that would best define your life and why?" only had room for a 250 word answer. 

Five-hundred words on Sarah Huckabee Sanders' biggest and bestest accomplishment?

Yikes!

I could probably come up with 500 words on her recent response to Joe Biden's State of the Union, in which she did manage to tell one truth when she said:

“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left; the choice is between normal or crazy,” she said.

Only Sanders was positioning the right as the normies. 

Yes, there are indeed crazies on the left, and there are plenty of ludicrous fake woke-y things going on out there, but when it comes to normal v. crazy... 

Come on, man, as arch normie Joe Biden might say. 

Anyway, I've been asked dumb things when I applied for jobs, but no one ever asked me to write about how fab the CEO is.

Turns out that the Sanders' administration has acknowledged that this silly question was out there, but chalked it up to a "design error."

"Design error"? How could something so ludicrous be a "design error"? Somebody wrote that essay question. That's not a "design error." That's a content  error. 

Oh, I guess if you asked some lower lever employee to come up with the application form - maybe someone young and naive; maybe someone who's just a true blue, natural born, dedicated ass-kisser - you could say that was a "design error." 

And I guess picking such a person could come under the broadly defined category of "design error." Sort of. It may just be me, but I usually think of including bad UI, clumsy navigation, paths to nowhere, etc. 

According to Sanders spokesperson Alexa Henning, that question was intended only for people applying for summer internships, not official positions on state boards. (Source: Raw Story)

 What? Whatty what what?

It would be okay for young folks applying for summer internships to be required to do some apple polishing? 

What? Whatty what what?

How about asking the young folks to write an essay about some great Arkansan that they admired? Sure, the most ass-kissing of the ass-kissing applicants would have found their way to writing about Sarah Huckabee Sanders or her father, the former governor, Mike Huckabee.

Or they could have picked Johnny Cash. If they were a bit righter-than right leaning could have thrown their application lot with a paean to Douglas MacArthur. 

Someone with guts, but who really didn't want the internship, could have written about Bill Clinton.

What someone admires most about Sarah Huckabee Sanders???

Stupid, stupid, stupid idea. 

Design error? Nah...

Just a really flawed way of thinking. Guess that what happens when you throw in with cults..

Leaving Pity City? You first, Andi Owen.

If you worked in corporate America at some point in the later decades of the 20th century, or at any time during the 21st century, you may well have labored in a Herman Miller cubicle. Or the dismal equivalent: a no-privacy, uninspired, boring, dumpy "office" from a vendor like Steelcase. (Which at least had a name that kind of gave you a hint about the soul-crunching, coffin-style digs you were in for.)  Or, even worse than a cubicle, the no-privacy, uninspired, boring, ultra-germy "open office" environment.

Sure, some cubicles were less gruesome than this model.

But no matter how they tried to modernize and slick things up, no matter how hard HR tried to convince the peons that cubicle life (let alone open workspace life) was a good thing, I don't know of anyone who had to work in one who ever bought into that particular corporate myth.

MillerKroll (of which Herman Miller is a major component), along with Steelcase and a couple of others, has dominant share in the office furniture market.

But what with covid, and work from home and a general contraction of the office furniture market, I'm guessing that things haven't been all that rosy for the office furniture market the last few years - other than the bargain-basement, sharply discounted sale of unwanted gear.

So it's no wonder that MillerKnoll CEO Andi Owen found herself in the position of having to give a pep talk to the troops. 

But that pep talk turned into more of a widely-ridiculed harangue than a standard issue, cubicle-style pep talk. 

The standard issue words were focused on attboy-attagirl encouragement to throw all in on achieving the sales goals that would let the company finish their fiscal year in the black. But then Andi Owen segued into a nastier bit, criticizing employees who were (understandably) wondering about their bonuses. 

While in most corporations, bonuses vary from year to year, depending on results, employees do have a tendency to want them, and to expect something in their virtual stocking beyond a lump of coal.

I worked in some places where the bonuses were scrooge-like. At one company, the joke each year was whether the bonus would be enough to buy a raincoat. One year, I did buy a nice turquoise necklace and matching earrings with my $300. (Nearly $900 in today's dollars, so it's pretty much my fanciest jewelry.)

Sine places, bonuses were non-existent.

And I worked in other places where the bonuses were pretty lush, no matter how piss-poor the company was doing. In one company I spent a few years with, employees at my level were on the same bonus plan as the senior executives were. The bonuses weren't of the same magnitude, of course, but we all got the same percent of salary as bonus. Since the senior executives were the ones who okayed the bonus percent, those of us on the same plan could pretty much be guaranteed a nice fat bonus. As I recall, those bonuses ran at about 40% of salary, while employees lower down in the corporate food chain might get a 10% bonus. All this, of course, went up in smoke when the company (not surprisingly) went bankrupt. But it was fun (and lucrative) while it lasted.

Anyway, here's what Andi Owen had to say on her video call about expected bonuses at MillerKnoll:

“Questions came through about, ‘How can we stay motivated if we’re not going to get a bonus...What can we do? What can we do?’” Owen began in the viral clip of what appears to be an internal meeting. “Some of them were nice, and some of them were not so nice.”

...“I’m going to address this head on,” she continued. “The most important thing we can do right now is focus on the things that we can control. None of us could’ve predicted covid, none of us could’ve predicted supply chain, none of us could’ve predicted bank failures. But what we can do, is stay in front of our customers, provide the best customer service we can, get our orders out our door, treat each other well, be kind, be respectful, focus on the future, because it will be bright.”

...“Don’t ask about, ‘What are we going to do if we don’t get a bonus?’ Get the damn $26 million dollars...Spend your time and your effort thinking about the $26 million dollars we need and not thinking about what you’re going to do if you don’t get a bonus. Alright? Can I get some commitment for that?” (Source: Yahoo)

All pretty vanilla corporate exhortation. I.e., as bland, tired, and uninspired as the MillerKnoll product, with a a bland, tired, and uninspired nod to JFK's inaugural "ask not" speech. Only in this case, employees were charged not to ask about not getting a bonus, but to focus on what they could do for the company.

(Amazing to me that corporate leaders still make appeals to the "corporate good" when everyone who's spent more than five minutes in a corporate environment pretty much fully understands that this is pretty much a one way street. I.e., whatever the palaver about employees being valuable corporate "assets," when push comes to shove (and often even before push is anywhere near shove), most corporations do not give a rat's arse about their employees. )

As leaders are now coached to add personal anecdotes and elements to the mix when they speak to employees, Andi Owen told a little story from her past corporate life to take her presentation home.

...“I had an old boss who said, ‘You can visit pity city, but you can’t live there,’” Owen concluded. “So, people, leave pity city! Let’s get it done.” 

Pity city, eh?

Wherever it is, Andi Owen can no doubt afford posher digs. 

Owen, who describes herself as a “defender of equity and inclusion” in her private Instagram account, receives the bulk of her pay package in incentive-based compensation, like most CEOs. For the fiscal year to May 2022, this amounted to $3.9 million which came on top of Owen’s $1.1 million in fixed salary. (Source: Fortune)

Bonuses haven't yet been determined for fiscal year 2023, but I suspect that Owen's bonus may well be tied to MillerKnoll getting in that last $26M in revenue she was urging her folks to achieve. 

Just stop lolling around Pity City, when you can work harder for me. 

Now, there's a motivator for you! (Talk about a commitment to equity.)

Bonuses aren't guaranteed. Times are tough. Etc., etc., etc.

But just how is this supposed to keep folks all charged up about charging ahead?

Ask not what MillerKnoll can do for you. Ask what you can do for MillerKnoll so that I can get another big, fat bonus. 

How do these people make it into leadership positions to begin with????

Not another one

It's a fact of life that crimes are way disproportionately committed by men. Mass murder. Serial killing. Breaking & Entering. Assault & Battery. Drug possession. Drug dealing. Fare jumping. Disorderly conduct. 

You name it. 

Boys will be boys; men will be men.

Sadly, women have been gaining in many categories, and without seeing any actual data, I'm guessing that corporate fraud is one of them.

After all, fraud is non-violent (so more lady-like), and with more and more women in business, there's more and more opportunity for fraudsters of the female persuasion. 

Even in the way back, there was Enron treasurer Lea Fastow, who got caught up in that fiasco. As I recall - and Enron is now two decades in the past - she and her Enron CFO husband Andrew got to stagger there prison terms so that one of them got to stay home with the kids. 

And anecdotally, it does seem that a ton of the embezzlement cases you read about involve women.

Then there is, of course, the poster child for women in business gone bad: Elizabeth Holmes, who despite trying to weasel out of her sentence because she has two babies, was set to start her hefty sentence yesterday.

Just last week, I posted about two senior women at Magellan Diagnostics who have been indicted for fraud. (The Magellan scheme is something of a "Theranos light" situation. Like Theranos, the Magellan case involves fudging test results (Magellan: lead; Theranos: blood), but there was a lot less money involved. We'll see where that one goes.)

And now there's the criminal fraud case being brought against Charlie Javice. 

Javice is the Wharton School grad who in 2016, when she was still in her early twenties, founded Frank, a company that helped ease the process for students filling out financial aid applications. Although she'd experienced a few bumps along the way, in 2021, Javice sold Frank to JP Morgan Chase for $175M. (Those bumps along the way? According to Wikipedia - and have they ever let me down - the US Department of Education claimed in 2017 that Frank was misleading customers, letting them think that the outfit was connected to the U.S. government, as a result she had to make changes to Frank's website; and in 2018, she got in a wage theft wrangle and had to pay $35K.)

Charlie Javice made $21M on the sale to JP Morgan Chase, and was looking at an equal payday as part of a retention bonus for staying on.

Turns out JP Morgan wasn't going to be all that interested in retaining Javice. They started to smell a data faking rat who had provided them with a fake list of customers to get them to buy her company, fired her in November 2022, and filed a lawsuit against her.

Part of what had driven the application was JP Morgan's interest in developing relationships with younger consumers. All those millions of Frank users were natural prospects.

Turns out that, when JP Morgan tried marketing to them, they found that millions of the emails were fake, and all those prospects never even existed. 

And now it's not just JP Morgan chasing Charlie Javice down:

The Department of Justice filed criminal fraud charges, which were unsealed Tuesday [April 4], against Javice, Frank's founder and former CEO, alleging she "engaged in a brazen scheme" when she sold her company to JPMorgan Chase in 2021.

The Securities and Exchange Commission separately announced its own fraud complaint against Javice on Tuesday, seeking a variety of punishments including civil penalties and a ban on her being a corporate officer.

Both federal prosecutors and the SEC accused Javice of defrauding JPMorgan into believing Frank had 4.25 million users, when in reality the number was less than 300,000. (Source: ABC)

It's one thing to marketing fudge a bit. Eighty clients can become "nearly 100." But to claim your user base is more than an order of magnitude greater than it is? Wow, just wow.

Paying $175M for 4.25 prospects is a far cry from paying $175M for fewer than 300,000 prospects.

Javice pushed back on the JP Morgan claims. 

She denied in court filings in February that she ever fabricated or misrepresented user data and merely told JPMorgan that her platform "had engaged with at least 4.25 million students."

"Engaged with?" I'd love to see what's in that number. 4.25 eyeballs on their website? 4.25 students at the colleges and universities they targeted? That "engaged with" sure was doing a lot of heavy lifting. And didn't JP Morgan poke at that number at all? Nah, Javice says. They just plain didn't do any due diligence, and that during their negotiations, Javice had warned her acquirer that student privacy requirements shouldn't be violated

Shame on JP Morgan if that's the case. How negligent not to have drilled down on that 4.25 number; how stupid not to have figured out whether those privacy stipulations would prevent them from marketing to the Frank users, which was, of course, a big point behind the acquisition. But it doesn't seem like much of a defense.

JP Morgan doesn't seem to think so. They maintain that:

...when Javice provided a spreadsheet with a column titled "FAFSA in Process" it indicated that more than 4.25 million students had opened accounts with Frank and provided detailed personal information to support that.

And then there's the Feds:

Federal authorities think the fraud went beyond a mislabeled spreadsheet column and that Javice tried to get her director of engineering to fabricate a data set. Javice then went to an outside data scientist to generate the fake data, according to allegations in prosecutors' criminal complaint against her.

 We'll see where this one ends up, but it looks like Charlie Javice may have had a bit of larceny in her heart.

Who knows? Maybe she'll end up cellmates with Elizabeth Holmes, or one of the Magellan Two.

We've come a long way, baby, but I'm not all that thrilled that one of the categories we're reaching parity on may well be business fraud.

Yet another obsolete profession.

Back in the day, if you needed a phone number but weren't home with access to your 12-pound phone book, you could dial 4-1-1 and get the number from someone working in directory assistance. If you wanted a long-distance number, you dialed 555-1212. 

And, of course, back in the day, we were actually dialing. 

I think you can still dial those information numbers, but I think they charge you for what was once a free privilege. So I didn't give it any sort of a whirl to test things out.

Whatever they charge for tapping the expertise of directory assistance workers - and for all I know, it's all automated through speech recognition - I don't imagine there are all that many jobs left in the directory assistance profession. 

Same goes for adjacent phone-related profession: switchboard operator. Why use a human when if you know your party's extension, you can access it directly through phone tech. 

Theaters no longer have projectionists to change the reels, because there are no reels to change.

I can't remember the last time I saw an elevator operator, who were a staple in the department stores of my childhood

How about cab drivers? How many of them are still out there who don't moonlight and daylight as Uber and Lyft drivers? 

And then there's another profession that's becoming obsolete.

That is, if ticket scalping was ever a profession.

Anyway, if it whether or not it ever had been a true profession, part of the game-day experience of going to Fenway Park (or likely any sports venue, especially urban ones) was running the gauntlet of scalpers jumping at you from Kenmore Square to Fenway. Got tickets? Need tickets? Got tickets? Need tickets?

These days, those fellows - and I can't recall ever encountering a woman scalper - are few and far between. 

Of course, there are still "legit" ticket resell companies, like Ace Ticket and StubHub, where you can get tickets if you're willing to pay crazy prices. (Or if you're willing to wait until the last minute and take a chance that you can get a sharply discounted ticket for well below face value.)

The teams are getting in on the act, too. Seasons tickets holders can put seats they're not going to use up on their team's website. (I don't know if they can sell tickets for anything above face, however.)

Just don't get me going on Ticketmaster for concerts. Yikes!

But we're talking sports here; we're talking baseball here; we're talking Fenway here. 

And on Opening Day, there were actually a few scalpers trying to make a buck. 

Ticket scalping is ostensibly illegal, but, as The Boston Globe noted, scalping is illegal like jaywalking is illegal. It's not exactly enforced. A Globe request for information found that only three citations have been issued in the last five years.

Ticket resellers are supposed to be licensed, but that's for outfits like Ace. Then there are the regulations about how much a reseller can charge:

There are also rules about how much a ticket reseller can charge: no more than $2 over face value, but crucially that doesn’t include service fees, which may include “costs attributable to resale” such as postage and long distance phone calls. (Source: Boston Globe)

Not to mention costs that are somehow "attributable" to whatever the market can bear. 

What's buggy-whipped ticket scalpers is the advent of the Ace Tickets of the world, and the digitization of tickets.

Although from the pictures in The Globe, I saw that the scalpers had physical, paper tickets, it's really difficult to get those paper tickets. 

If you buy online from the Red Sox (or any other baseball team), you have to have MLB Ballpark on your smartphone. I know that you can go to Fenway and get a paper ticket, but I'm not sure how you get your hands on them if you don't live in the city. I'm guessing it can be done via phone for those few and far betweeners who don't have a smartphone. But they make it a PITA.

And paper or digital, venues are making it more difficult to create counterfeit tickets that look like the real thing. For baseball tickets, the barcode isn't issued until a day or so before the game. With Ticketmaster, you get a barcode, but it's wavy, so that someone can't take a pic of it.

The one big benefit of using an agency is that you're protected against fraud. Ace Ticket's CEO had this to say:

“It’s buying a Rolex watch on the street versus a Rolex watch dealer,” he said in a phone interview.

Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but I'm not the CEO of Ace Ticket.  

Meanwhile, halfway through this post it occurred to me that "scalping" and "scalpers" may be words that are going the way of the buggy whip. After all, they're a reference to Native Americans cutting the scalp off of an enemy, so those words may be something that Native Americans understandably find offensive. Hmmm. The Globe article does use scalping, but - not to be too PC - I think I'll switch to "ticket hawking."

Anyway, the Fenway ticket hawkers are well aware that they're dinosaurs, losing their turf to the online agencies and the overall digitalization of everything in the world that can possibly be digitized. But if they're still out, they're still making money. Just not as easily as in the good old days. 

“In the ‘80s, there was tons of money to be made,” said one man asking the crowd if they needed tickets. “No StubHub, no Seat Geek.”

He lamented how much it costs for beverages inside Fenway, and, gesturing toward a team box office, remarked: “They’re the real scalpers.”

Okay, this guy used the word scalper. And I've got to agree with him that, given the price of refreshments at Fenway, he's got a point that, whatever you call price gouging, the Red Sox do it. 

Anyway, if there's still money in ticket hawking, it's not the lucrative game it used to be. 

One of the big changes, of course, is that fans can look online at anytime and see what the market is for tickets. If a ticket hawker asks them for $X, the fan can see immediately what a similar ticket would cost through an online agency. Consumers these days have information that they didn't used to have access to, and that gives them more negotiation power. Also, a ticket from an agency can be immediately transferred to the fan's phone, and which is guaranteed.

The article I saw followed a fan who came ticketless to Fenway, hoping that - given the weather (the windchill that day was about 30), and given how awful the Sox were in 2022 - he could get in last minute for cheap. 

He talked to the ticket hawkers, then checked online. He was able to get a pair in the bleachers for ten bucks a piece. 

Sure, this represents a loss for the agency, as they no doubt paid more than ten bucks each for those tickets. But an agency's loss is spread over thousands upon thousands of transactions, most of which make them money.

A lone wolf ticket hawker has fewer transactions. He's on his own. And nothing's going to make his situation better anytime soon.

Not much of a future for ticket hawkers, I guess.

To protect and serve? Really?

A familiar trope of the family dramas of my childhood was the boy having to "man up" and shoot the rabid family dog. I guess it was supposed to teach us - including us city slickers who lacked both guns and rabid dogs - that life was tough, that life was unfair. And that at some point in our lives, we (especially the boys) all might be called on to do something shattering, something emotionally devastating, for the greater good. 

Old Yeller, anyone?

Fast forward all those decades, and we get the sad story of a nine-year-old little girl in California who raised a goat as part of a 4H project for the Shasta District Fair. As part of the program, families purchase goats (kids?) for their kids, and the kids (humans) learn about how to take care of animals - and what farmers and ranchers do. Which is raise animals for slaughter. Part of the deal is that the animals are auctioned off and transitioned from pet to food. 

But Jessica Long's daughter became so attached to her goat, Cedar, and so distraught at the thought of Cedar being killed, that Long decided to go ahead and violate the rules. 

She what-the-helled it, and kidnapped Cedar from the fairground barn. Cedar had already been auctioned, so Long offered to repay whatever the lost revenue would be. 

Of course: Rules are rules. Long's family knew what they were signed up for. And all of us meat eaters have to live with the fact that there are actually living, breathing, and - let's face it - at least somewhat sentient creatures that have to lose their lives so we can enjoy a BLT or some chicken nuggets. Or whatever it is that's made with goat. 

And it's not like I'm a big fan of coddling children, and wrapping them from the facts of life. (I went to my first funeral at the age of 8; I went to my first wake unaccompanied by a parent at the age of 11.) Kids are resilient. Kids are aware. Kids are tough. 

But, but, but...This is a little girl. A very little girl who had lost three of her grandparents in the past year, and who found solace through raising Cedar. 

The Shasta District Fair wasn't having any:

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,” [Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Melanie] Silva wrote back to Long in an email reviewed by The Times dated June 28, 2022. “Also, in this era of social media this has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.” (Source: LA Times)

So instead of attempting to find a resolution that was kind and compassionate, or at least give the Long family more time to adjust, the Shasta District Fair, after tsk-tsking Jessica Long, called in the sheriff's office. Armed with a search warrant, detectives put out some sort of caprine APB and drove over 500 miles around Northern California in their goat hunt for Cedar. (The Long family had found a home for Cedar on a farm. They live in a residential area and could not keep the goat with them.)

Echoing language used when law enforcement search a home for drugs, the warrant allowed deputies to “utilize breaching equipment to force open doorway(s), entry doors, exit doors, and locked containers” and to search all rooms, garages and “storage rooms, and outbuildings of any kind large enough to accommodate a small goat.”

Oh, FFS. Or as a lawyer involved with animal rights had it:

“It’s shocking,” said Ryan Gordon, an attorney with Advancing Law for Animals. “It’s a little girl’s goat, not Pablo Escobar.”

This situation is coming to light now because Jessica Long is suing Shasta District Fair officials and the county:

... arguing it committed an “egregious waste of police resources” and violated her and her daughter’s 4th Amendment and 14th Amendment rights protecting them from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process. Long and her attorneys allege the dispute was a civil matter she was willing to resolve.

But the Shasta officials were hard-assing it from the outset, telling Long from Day One that they were going to call the cops on her. (Remember, they weren't just ticked about the rules violation; they were aggrieved about the "negative experience" that they'd had on social media. A boo anda hoo.)

Side note: the person who had purchased Cedar at auction was fine with not going ahead and slaughtering the goat. 

And another side note: a child in California is allowed to back out of a contract within a reasonable time period.

But, for the Shasta Fair, that mattered not.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Shasta Fair officials. 

What a group.

At minimum, they should have waited for things to play out, rather than rush right in and get the goat. Or they could have made this moment to improve their process. Maybe they should spend more time with the 4H children explaining that their animal would be slaughtered for meat. Maybe they should offer a couple of options: raise your goat for meat, or raise your goat for milk and cheese. (Not that I know much about animal husbandry, but I guess this option would only apply to girl goats. Not clear whether Cedar was a B or a G.) Or raise the goat and let it go on to frolic on a goat farm, helping make more goats. 

In any case, sending in armed police men to seize a little goat seems like a pretty over the top response. Who and what are they protecting and serving here? How about they spend their time looking for bad guys. 

Maybe adults should be the adults, and not take their rigid fantasies about how to toughen up little kids out on those little kids. Nine-years-old. FFS.

And, by the way, if Old Yeller had to go - which he did - maybe, if they make a contemporary version of it, the mother can send the young Travis into the house and shoot the damned dog herself.