Ivan and Hayley, tourists from hell

Every once in a while, some imbecile tags a building, or wall, or monument, or bridge in my neighborhood. 

It's generally taken care of pretty quickly. But it's never taken care of quickly enough for me. 

I am so not a fan of graffiti, and just hate seeing it on walls, buildings, monuments, and bridges - whether they're in my 'hood or not. Ditto when it comes to subway cars that are tagged. I'm sure that some graffiti "artists" are talented. After all, there is Banksy. But mostly I encourage those armed with a spray can to deface their very own personal buildings, walls, monuments, and bridges. And if you don't have your own subway car, by all means tag your bedroom walls. Mostly, I find graffiti brutalizing and ugly. 

And then there are the narcissistic maroons who need to immortalize themselves by carving their names into antiquities. As is the case of Ivan the Tourist, make that Ivan the Terrible Tourist, who, armed with a set of keys, was recently caught on camera scratching "Ivan + Hayley 23/6/23" into the side of the Colosseum. 

Come on, Ivan.

Spray painting "Chico 147" on a NYC subway car is one thing. Bad enough! Appalling! Carving your name in the 2,000 year old Colosseum is quite another. Worse! APPALLING!

Here's Ivan, the main miscreant, smiling into the camera of a fellow who filmed the incident, and who also reprimanded Ivan, asking "Are you serious, man?" Telling Ivan that what he was doing was fucked up, and that he was an asshole. All true! 

While Ivan is the principal miscreant, I'm not exempting Hayley, who I'm assuming is the blondie with the backpack, the go-along GF who did nothing to stop her BF. Just too smitten to be anything other than an accomplice.

They sure make a solid couple, and well deserve each other. 

Meanwhile:

Colosseum officials confirmed the vandalism and noted that a clearly marked sign nearby reads: “No climbing and writing on the walls.”

The Italian culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, condemned the act.

“I consider it very serious, unworthy and a sign of great incivility when a tourist defaces one of the most famous places in the world,” he said on Twitter.

Mr. Sangiuliano reposted video of the wall being defaced and said, “I hope that whoever did this will be identified and sanctioned according to our laws.” (Source: NY Times)

The chances of identifying Ivan and Hayley is probably pretty high. The amateur filmmaker posted his vid on Reddit and YouTube and it's been all over Twitter and other platforms. (Too bad the poster didn't put down his camera long enough to alert Colosseum security on the spot.) Someone is going to out this a-hole. Ivan may not be capable of feeling actual shame, but I'm hoping that, if and went these lovelies are doxxed, they end up on the receiving end of enough criticism that they'll be made to feel a bit squirmily uncomfortable. (Ivan gives off bro vibes, so I'm sure he'll be getting some high fives from his fellow idiot bros.)

But the chances of arresting and finding Ivan is likely pretty low. The vandalism occurred on June 23. Ivan is English speaking - so not an Italian - and is likely to be long gone. 

Too bad. The fine for this sort of vandalism can be as high as 15,000 Euros. There's also the possibility of jail time. Unlikely that this is ever imposed. Oh, I don't need to see Ivan spend five years in an Italian hoosegow. But how great if he had to spend a night or two in a Roman jail. 

Even if the section Ivan defaced was "built during a mid-19th century restoration," vandalism is still vandalism. And Ivan is a true vandalizing putz. And, when he turns to grin at the guy with the camera...Jeez. I'm not usually the resort-to-violence type, but the phrase "I'd like to wipe that smile off your face" did pop into my mind when I saw that smile on that face.

Ivan, while terrible, is not alone. Over the last few years, a few tourists have been nabbed and fined for carving their initials on the Colosseum. And:

Last year, a tourist pushed an electric scooter down the Spanish Steps in Rome, causing damage put at 25,000 euros (about $27,000).

Oh, FFS, the Spanish steps are for sitting on while eating gelato, not for rampaging up and down on an electric scooter.

As for Ivan, he's said to be English-speaking. I hope he's not an ugly American, but he could well be. And while it's not likely, I do hope he gets caught. He and Hayley are certainly tourists from hell. Hope they stay out of Boston.

And just don't get me going on the boobs who destroy bridges with their locks of love. I'm not anti-romance. Just anti-destruction of shared public spaces. 

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After I wrote this post, I saw that Ivan has been identified. He's a Bulgarian-born Brit. Ivan Dimitrov has written an apology letter to the mayor of Rome, claiming that he was embarassed, hadn't realized that the Colosseum was an antiquity (duh!), etc. It's not clear that the Italian authorities are buying Ivan's mea culpa.  I'm guessing there's no extradition with England for crimes of this lesser magnitude, but maybe there'll be an APB put out for him throughout the EU, so that the next time he tries to Brexit into the EU for a bit of sun, fun, and vandalism, he gets busted. We'll see.

Just can't take the race out of the Tulsa Race Massacre

A couple of months ago, it was the state of Florida going bonkers about "Critical Race Theory," which in Florida parlance apparently means any mention of race at all. So in their frenzy to make sure that little white kids wouldn't feel bad about something their grandparents, or great-grandparents, or wayer way back antecedents may or may not have done, some Florida school districts stripped biographies of Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks off their school library shelves.

I guess because it's kind of hard to read about Jackie Robinson breaking the baseball color line without risking some kiddo asking why there was a color line and/or being subjected to learning about the insults, cat-calling, death threats, beanballs, and spitting incidents that Jackie Robinson had to withstand because he was a Black man.

And Rosa Parks? Hard to tell that story without getting into Jim Crow laws as interpreted by the city bus line in Montgomery, Alabama.

Some editors stepped in and tried to save the day by redoing the Rosa Parks story so it wouldn't be quite so "offensive." In one - the most extreme - revision, Rosa Parks is asked to give up her seat on the bus, but she bravely refused. No mention of why Rosa was asked to give up that particular seat and move to the rear of the bus, thus stripping the bio of all meaning. (What was going to happen in that classroom if some kid asked about who was hassling Rosa and why? How was the teacher supposed to respond if they couldn't explain things like segregation in public transportation. Or, if anything else came up, about segregation in schools and in drinking fountains and in hotels and in housing. If they couldn't mention what a lunch counter sit in was for. Or why James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed as they tried to register voters in Mississippi. Or why Emmett Till was murdered.)

And now there's the Oklahoma Secretary of Education stepping into it with a clumsy remark about the Tulsa Race Massacre that suggested that it should/could/would be taught in Oklahoma schools without necessarily branding those who participated in it as racists.

Now, the Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most horrifying and shameful race-based incidents ever recorded in American history.

So on reading about Ryan Walker's comments, heads in the liberal chattersphere started to explode. Including mine. 

Here's what Walker said in response to a question at a Republican forum about whether teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre was, in fact, teaching Critical Race Theory, which is verboten in Oklahoma. (Verboten although poorly defined and poorly understood. CRT is an academic framework for thinking about racism and whether its systemic, but the rightwing outrage machine has conflated it with pretty much any thinking about or discussion of race. Thus we can't mention that Rosa Parks couldn't sit where she wanted to sit on that Montgomery bus because she was Black.)

“I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of the color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should. ‘This was right. This was wrong. They did this for this reason.’ But to say it was inherent in that because of their skin is where I say that is Critical Race Theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.” (Source: KFOR)

Walker - depending on how you want to look at it - either clarified his remark or backtracked given the pushback when, a few days after the initial affront, he said:

“I am referring to individuals who carried out the crime. They didn’t act that way because they were white, they acted that way because they were racist...I mean, the facts of the day really are not much of any question. Those individuals acted that day during the Tulsa Race Riot. They had evil, racist intentions and murdered people then our students should be able to learn from that history.”

I'm not especially inclined to give an Oklahoma right-winger the benefit of the doubt. And even by Oklahoma standards, Walker is right out there, advocating for the promotion of Christianity in the classroom and displays of the Ten Commandments in order to "restore morality," and dubbing LBGTQ themes "demented morality." Not to mention that this is a pretty mealy-mouthed, contorted hairsplitter of a walk back.

But I'll concede that he's was not originally saying that the Tulsa Race Massacre had nothing to do with race. 

So I'm just happy that students, in Oklahoma and elsewhere, will be allowed to learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre, and hopefully not in a distorted way. It sure wasn't taught when i was a kid. I came of age in the Civil Rights Era, so knew all about Jim Crow, Selma, the little girls bombed in Birmingham, Medgar Edgars, Fannie Lou Hamer, school desegregation, sit ins, fire hoses, and attack dogs. But I don't believe I'd ever heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre until a few years ago, and learned more about it in 1921, when its 100th anniversary was observed. (I posted about here.)

There's no getting around the fact there there are just some parts of American history that are just plain shameful. There's also a lot that's great. C.f., the Declaration of Independence; the fact that immigrants and their progeny really can become bona fide Americans; innovation and creativity aplenty. 

But the good, the bad, and the ugly. We can and should be teaching it all. 

In real life, IRL's BS caught up with them

Remember when IRL was a unicorn, a startup that before it hit the market - but after the "smart money" was pouring in - was valued at $1B?

Me neither.

In truth, in my own personal real life, I'd never heard of IRL until a few weeks ago.

But two years ago, they were riding in pretty high. 

In June 2021, they announced a chunky infusion of "growth round" capital from Softbank and others. 

And, voila, all of a sudden IRL hit unicorn status.

Here's what IRL - which is aimed at the younger, cooler folks, thus it's no surprise that I wasn't familiar with them - was up to:

The startup began its life as a tool for discovering real-world events — an industry that went to zero almost overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That could have been the end for IRL, but the startup quickly pivoted to prioritize the discovery of online events instead. Under COVID lockdowns, users could turn to the app to find things like livestreamed concerts, esports events, Zoom parties, and more.

IRL focused on pulling in popular online events from places like Live Nation, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and others.

As a result, IRL became more accessible because its audience was no longer limited only to those who had time and money to travel to real-world events.

That focus also helped the app to attract a crowd of younger users who are of the generation that doesn’t use Facebook.

“They essentially use Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok,” explains [founder/CEO Abraham] Shafi. “But there is no groups and events product for that generation,” he points out. (Source: TechCrunch 6.15.21)

And as in person events started to rebound, the company was right back in the physical events space.  

IRL was growing like crazy, with growth that was almost unbelievable: 400% growth over the 15 months prior to the Schedule C round. IRL had 20 million users - 12 million of them active on a monthly basis. And, with more cash in their coffer, the company was ready to start scaling and growing even crazier. 

Things started to cool off a bit in 2022, when IRL laid off 25% of their employees. That was only 25 folks, but Shafi was sure that they could scale, and order-of-magnitude up their user count with a lean, mean, fighting machine staff that was more adaptable and disciplined than the sluggards who were let go.

Do more together was the company's tagline, promising users that IRL would be your group messaging app, your place to discover groups and events.

Turns out that there weren't many "yous" out there. 

Turns out that almost all of them - 95% of all those "yous," those 20 million users - were "automated or from bots."

Oh.

Safi and IRL aren't the only companies who've goosed their numbers.

Earlier this year, there was the case of Charlie Javice, whose company, Frank, helped college students deal with the financial aid process. Frank was acquired by JP Morgan, which wanted to get its marketing hands on Frank's 400,000 users. Turns out that Frank was less than Frank about its users: 70% of them didn't exist. (I posted about this situation here.)

But claiming 20M users, 95% of which don't exist, is obviously a bigger goose than faking a measly 280,000 college stuents. 

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago - on June 27th - IRL shut down. As of midnight that day, the app no longer existed. Which, of course, didn't exactly inconvenience all that many folks, given that 95% of the claimed user base didn't exist. 

With IRL's shutdown, so went another unicorn. 

Hmmmm. Unicorn unicorns (the non-animal) don't actually exist IRL. But unicorn businesses are just rare, not non-existent. However, in this case, the non-existent label fits. 

IRL's disappearing act is a far cry from what Shafi was crowing about when he thought his unicorn was well on its way to becoming a bona fide success in real life. In his gushing post-layoff memo to last year's layoff survivors, here's what he had to say:

“Becoming one of these iconic, impactful companies is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics. In fact, probably more challenging,” Shafi wrote in the memo, which was full of similarly outlandish analogies. “Like the Olympics, we know most people don’t want to be Olympians. In the same way, not everyone will want to walk the path we are walking. But for those that want to push their limits and find out what they are capable of, this culture is for you.” (Source: Tech Crunch 06.26.23)

The only good news is that, whatever money's still in the bank will be returned to investors.

But there's not much that's positive about this one. 

Sorry, Abraham Shafi. No iconic. No impactful. No gold medal for you. Instead, there may well be legal action based on fraud.

All that BS about your users has caught up with you. Faking it only takes you so far. Your unicorn turned out to be nothing but a pony painted white, with a horn glued on to its head. 

A career you can age in

Retirement, apparently, is not for everyone.

As is the case of four men - no strangers to the criminal justice system, wise guys with ties to organized crime - who were charged a couple of weeks ago with the armed robbery of two Manhattan jewelers. 

While dressed as construction workers - presumably the kind who had no-show jobs on The Sopranos, not the sort who actually swing hammers - Vincent Cerchio (69), Michael Sellick (67), Frank DiPietro (65), and Vincent Sapgnuolo (65) allegedly clipped $2M in jewelry. 

A fifth fellow - just a kid - was also charged. Samuel Sorce (25) was supposedly the wheelman for one of the robberies. Guess the old geezers wanted someone with quicker reflexes, better eyesight, and a heavier foot as their getaway driver. 

Mr. DiPietro’s lawyer, Mathew J. Mari, said his client was not guilty. Mr. DiPietro did work in construction, Mr. Mari said, had led an “exemplary life” in recent years and believed that he and the others had been arrested because of their résumés.

“He said, ‘They’re just trying to pin it on us because we’re career criminals,’” Mr. Mari said. (Source: NY Times)

Props to Attorney Mari for use of the royal - or is it criminal? - "we"? 

Anyway, those résumés are a mixed bag - impressive, but not magnificently so - as far as criming goes. 

Spagnuolo has done time for manslaughter and has a couple of robbery convictions. 

DiPietro is bigger time on the unsavory index:

In 1999, he pleaded guilty to fatally shooting a grand jury witness who had testified about a Lucchese-related drug conspiracy, court records show. The victim was found in a car in a remote area of Staten Island after being shot four times in the head. Mr. DiPietro was sentenced to 19 years in federal prison and released in 2016.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli?

As an aside: how do you get a sentence of only 19 years for shooting a grand jury witness four times in the head. 

Cerchio, an associate of both the Lucchese and DeCavalcane crime families, has been in and out of the stir on robbery and racketeering counts, including a "scheme to rob trucks of counterfeit cigarettes."

So, is it less of a crime if you steal counterfeit cigarettes from less than honest characters who traffic in counterfeit cigarettes?

Sellick's c.v. includes a few stints in federal prison for armed bank robbery. He's also a jailbreaker who got caught.

While these men all seem old to me to be committing crimes, which generally is a young man's game, "organized crime has long been the province of older men."

Elie Honig, a former top federal organized-crime prosecutor in Manhattan, cited several reasons for what he called the “perpetual graying” of the Mafia. For one thing, it takes years to climb the ranks; rarely is a member inducted, or “made,” before he is in his 50s. For another, Mr. Honig said: “There’s no such thing as retirement from the mob. They don’t have a pension plan.”

I guess Uncle Junior on The Sopranos feigning (or not) senility, and real-life mafiosi Vincent "The Chin" Gigante roaming around NYC's Little Italy in his bathrobe, aren't that far off the mark. 

The old geezers of organized crime stay engaged when they should be getting the hell out of the way and letting Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z hoods get a bite of the apple. 

Defense of the aging jewelry-theft gangsters is so far revolving around mistaken identity. But defense of advanced age organized crime figures typically involves bathrobes, "walkers, wheelchairs and oxygen machines."

See youse guys in court. 

Never really thought of organized crime as a profession you could age in, but here we are. At least if they're convicted they won't have to worry about their lack of pensions. On the other hand, if cold blooded murder only "earns" 19 years in prison, stealing jewelry may only get these fellows a couple of months reprieve of their pension-less existence. 

Tip fatigue? Yep! It's exhausting. (Imagine how exhausting it is to rely on tips.)

Ah, the good old days when tipping was pretty straightforward and you knew the rules. Fifteen percent in a restaurant. Twenty percent if the service was extraordinary. Twenty percent for a cabbie. A buck (or two) per night for the maids in a hotel. Whatever you give your mailman. (And mine have always been male.) Whatever you give your hairdresser. (I tip a high percentage, pretty much still tipping the same amount, even though, having gone covid-gray, I no longer get my hair colored.) And tips for anyone delivering furniture or the guy who does the semi-annual HVAC service.

As someone who, in her youth, worked as a waitress and relied on tips, I've long been a reasonably good tipper with an up close and personal understanding that tips matter.

When I had my first tip job - summer of 1968, waitressing at Ted's Big Boy in Worcester - I loved getting tips. Every night (or afternoon - depended on what shift I worked) when I got home from Big Boy's, I emptied the pockets of my orange cotton apron on the kitchen table and counted the day's take  - which was largely made up on change. I recorded the results in a little red spiral notebook,

Big Boy's had a very modestly priced joint. 

Here's a menu from the Bob's - the Big Boy's mothership - from roughly the same era. Nothing fancy. 

Some days, I didn't bring home $10. A great day was $20+. My biggest tip was always the one I got from my father when, every once in a while, the family - my parents and the younger kids - came in for Sunday breakfast and sat on my station. 

I have no idea why I kept track of the tips. It's not like I reported them on my taxes. 

But I liked the fact that I was making more than enough to make up for the fact that I was being paid less than minimum wage, even for those hours of downtime when there was no one to wait on and we were required to do cleaning.

Later on in my waitressing career, tips let me and my roommate spend a couple of months camping cross country, and five months trekking around Europe.

So even though my tip-earning experience is way in the way back, I'm sympathetic to those who make tips.

These days, I tip at least 20% in a restaurant. My hotel maid tip has been upped to five bucks a night. And I tip Uber drivers a lot - anywhere from 25% to 100%. 

And I tip the pizza folks, and the takeout folks, and the ice cream scoopers, always throwing a few bucks into the tip jar, or - in the case of my pizza local - adding it to the bill when I order online. Mostly if I'm doing takeout, I'm picking up, but once in a while I have delivery. So of course I give them $10 for their trouble. 

But I do wonder when and how what was a nice-to-do - throw a buck or two into the tip jar for the college kids at the ice cream joint - has become an expectation, with suggestions of up to 25% or more for someone who hasn't done all that much, waiting-on-you-wise.

My wondering doesn't stop me from tipping. 

I don't do a ton of fast fooding or ice cream parloring, but I certainly don't begrudge a few dollars to workers who are largely immigrants or students. But I may be in a minority, as "tip fatigue" has set in.

Fewer consumers now say they “always” tip when dining out compared with last year, according to a new report by Bankrate, or for other services, such as ride-shares, haircuts, food delivery, housekeeping and home repairs.

“Inflation and general economic unease seem to be making Americans stingier with their tipping habits, yet we’re confronted with more invitations to tip than ever,” said Ted Rossman, Bankrate’s senior industry analyst.

Many feel the pressure to tip has increased over the last year, NerdWallet’s consumer budgeting report also found.

However, two-thirds of Americans have a negative view about tipping, according to Bankrate, particularly when it comes to contactless and digital payment prompts with pre-determined options that can range between 15% and 35% for each transaction.

“Now you have to go out of your way to not tip and that’s what a lot of people resent,” Rossman said. (Source: CNBC)

I understand that resentment. When I see 35% suggested for the pizza, it always strikes me as high - and a big nervy - even if, I were tipping in cash at the pizza place (my most regular take out place, where the immigrant workers are pleasant and hardworking), it would be 35% half the time. 

The good news for waitstaff at sit-down restaurants is that folks are still tipping here. But for "quick-service" restaurants, only about one-sixth of customers tip.

I get that "tip fatigue" has set in, and that "tip creep" has tipping showing up all over the place. Where next? Grocery store checkout? 

And I also get that even if the minimum wage is going up - in Massachusetts, it's $14.25 for non-tipped workers - no one's getting rich working at Dunkin Donuts. Around here, the workers in places like Dunks are mostly immigrants, putting in long hours to support their families. If we can make their lives marginally easier by tossing a few bucks in the tip jar, I'm all for it.

If we're finding "tip fatigue" exhausting, imagine how exhausting it must be to rely on tips to make ends meet. 

But couldn't we just start paying people working 40+ hours a week enough to live on to begin with? 

Now there's a thought...

Who you gonna call? GOOSE BUSTERS!

I make no bones about the fact that I despise Canada geese. Or at least the ones who congregate along The Esplanade, the park along the Charles River where I walk most days.

I could live with their denuding the grassy lawns, but the fact that each and every one of them produces a couple of pounds of poop each and every day, without regard for where they lay that crap down. Which is largely along the walkways. You walk along The Esplanade, your feet better have eyes. 

Canada Geese are just plain disgusting.

A few years ago, the powers that see to The Esplanade tried to control the population by oiling the goose eggs, which prevented them from turning into goslings. This tactic is apparently no longer deployed. I've seen at least two Mother Gooses with 18 goslings per, growing by the day and turning into prodigious shitters.

Ugh, ugh, a thousand times ugh!

But there just may be a solution, and that's deploying the Geese Police, which was featured (along with their pupper Cami) in a recent Globe article. 

Since 2014, Geese Police — Boston, a franchise of a New Jersey-based business, has used trained border collies like Cami in a “proprietary system of harassment” to scare away geese creating a nuisance in public spaces, according to [franchise owner Elliot] Oren.

By eating grass, leaving droppings everywhere, or being aggressive and attacking people in inconvenient places, geese can make upkeep of places such as sports fields or parks difficult.

“Usually who calls us is somebody that’s just had enough of geese taking over their property and making a huge mess,” Oren said. “We do parks, schools, colleges, cemeteries, we do a lot of office parks and golf courses. Pretty much anywhere that needs us, we’ll go.”

...Although property damage is a big concern when it comes to geese taking over public places, Joshua Dooley, a Canada geese expert at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said that the animal’s droppings are also a health risk because of avian influenza, or the bird flu, which can be transmitted to other mammals such as dogs. (Source: Boston Globe)

Boston's Geese Police is one of 14 franchises, that offer a humane and PETA-approved approach, which is basically harassment. 

Fine by me. 

Geese Police uses specially trained Border Collies, who have an instinctive “stalking” posture that terrifies geese as it mimics the approach used by predators. Geese Police steps up its frequency of harassment in response to this behavior, and will employ additional tactics designed to humanely prevent both nesting and hatching of new goslings. Geese Police uses harassment techniques that are approved by the USDA Wildlife Services and the US Fish and Wildlife Service...

Geese Police uses repeated visits at unpredictable intervals to simulate the presence of predators at the site. Initially, this may involve more than one dog and handler. Within a short time the resident goose population will have declined by at least 90%, as they identify the area as unsafe due to the presence of predators. 

Well, we missed the spring egg-hatchling season, but the company also focuses their work in the fall, during the migratory season. I guess harassing them in the fall provides the geese a reminder that this territory is less than inviting, and isn't worth a repeat visit.

Where do the displaced geese go? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Other than I wouldn't be thrilled if all they did was cross the river and set up on the Cambridge side of the Charles, where I often walk when I get sick of skirting the goose poop landmines. 

Surely, they can find a place with plentiful water and something to nibble on where there aren't that many people to gross out.

I just joined the Esplanade Association, and - along with my donation - sent them a note suggesting they look into Geese Police. 'Cause who you gonna call? Goose Busters!

Hope the Geese Police do esplanades...

The Fourth of July, 2023

Looks like last year, I wasn't feeling all the glorious about The Glorious Fourth. 

Back when I began blogging, way back in he wayback, I was a bit happy-dappier. The Fourth was, in fact, pretty Glorious.  

Today? Somewhere in the middle, leaning not-so-glorious, I'm afraid, given the hideous specter of a possible Trump presidency. Or, at any rate, his continued presence for the near future. Not to mention the goings on among the R's in Congress, particularly the House. And the SCOTUS "justices" on the take. 

A democracy? A republic? If we can keep it.

Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, I will probably read the Declaration of Independence. I will probably listen to The Pops. I will probably watch the fireworks. I will probably try to have a Glorious - or at least Glorious-light - Fourth. 

Bless me, Father

When I was a kid, we were dragged out of class every other Friday morning and marched down the hill to church for Confession. 

The good news was, it got us out of the classroom for an hour or so. The bad news: god-awful tedious and boring. 

I don't think anyone ever confessed to a real sin (actual or perceived). 

The one time I tried to get something off of my conscience, shortly after I made my First Confession (so I was 7 years old), the priest (Monsignor Lynch) sneered me out of the confessional. 

My sin was that I had bitten my fingernails, swallowed a bit o'nail, and went ahead and received communion, even though that bit o'nail - in my fevered little 7 year old mind - meant that I had eaten something and broken my fast. (Back then, I'm not sure if the rule was "no eating or drinking after midnight" or " no eating or drinking for three hours before communion.)

In my fevered little 7 year old mind, breaking the fast and then knowingly going ahead and receiving

communion was a mortal sin. In my fevered little 7 year old mind, my options were sitting there in the pew while all the other kids went to the altar, indicating to all that I likely had a mortal sin on my soul. Or going up to "receive."

I went up to receive communion. And spent the next week or so fretting about having committed a mortal sin. 

So, Bless Me Father, for I have sinned. 

I confessed to biting my nails, swallowing, taking the wafer anyway, and, thus, mortally sinning.

Monsignor Lynch's response: Don't be ridiculous. Don't bother me with such nonsense. 

Okay then.

So that was the last time I ever actually confessed to anything other than the rote, ginned up list that all the kids used: I fought with my sister. I talked back to my mother. 

Yawn.

When I was in high school, when the sinning - at least when it came to thoughts - was a bit more of a thing, I stopped going to confession. (As one of my friends said, once they equated the seriousness of murder with the seriousness of French kissing, they turned a whole lot of believers into doubters. Not that I French kissed anyone when I was in high school. Talk about in my dreams...)

The only exciting thing about confession was when one of the kids in the box was confessing a bit too loudly. Since it was a sin to overhear someone's confession - everything was a sin, by the way, including "walking on the holy grass" around the church, which we were told was a mortal sin, i.e., something hell-worthy - the kids in the pews outside the confessional would all start sliding down to get out of earshot. So very pious of us!

You tried to avoid Monsignor Lynch, as he always assigned Five Our Fathers, Five Hail Marys, and Five Glory Bes as a penance, rather than the curates who might just assign a Hail Mary or two. 

The nuns were, of course, on to us, and would funnel one-third of the kids into Monsignor Lynch's line.

Anyway, after reciting/flying through your penance, however many Hail Marys it entailed, the thing to do was say the Stations of the Cross. Which got you walking around the church, which beat sitting there trying to figure out what was going on in the stained glass windows.

Other than the time when Monsignor Lynch humiliated me, I never got a damned thing out of confession. 

Garbage in, garbage out, I guess.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been nearly 60 years since my last confession, these are my sins. 

But true believers, I do believe, do get something out of confessing their sins. Forgiveness. Guilt reduction. Free counseling. (You get what you pay for...)

So the behavior of one California restaurateur was pretty heinous.  

The US Department of Labor said an employee testified that owner Che Garibaldi, who operates two locations of Taqueria Garibaldi in northern California, hired a fake priest to hear confessions during work hours and “get the sins out,” including asking them if they had been late for work, stolen money from the restaurant or had “bad intentions” toward their employer. (Source: CNN)

On top of being pushed to confess to a fake priest, Garibaldi employees were - surprise, surprise - threatened with immigration if they reported that "the restaurant denied employees overtime pay, [and that] managers were paid bonuses from the employee tip pool."

Garibaldi and three other restaurant owners and operators were ordered to pay $140,000 in back wages and damages to 35 employees. The restaurant will also have to pay $5,000 in civil penalties.

The Diocese of Sacramento found "no evidence of any connection" between Father Fake and the real priests of their diocese. That's a relief. 

I hope they catch the bum. What an absolutely rotten thing to do. Sounds like a mortal sin to me!

What's up with the AMA?

All of a sudden, unbidden, my Twitter timeline is on blast from the American Medical Association (AMA).

I am not a member.

I am not a physician.

And even if I were a physician, statistically speaking, I likely wouldn't be a member of the AMA anyway. Fewer than 20% of MD's are.

But the AMA is a pretty powerful lobbying organization, and - if what I'm seeing fly by me on Twitter is any indication - a lot of their lobbying efforts go to going after nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, and other (not-so) allied medical professionals who've been performing tasks that the AMA wants to see reserved for physicians.

I clicked through on one of their tweets and came upon a post the AMA recently put out - Battlefield widens with hundreds of scope-creep bills introduced.

Battlefield widens!

Oooo. Scope creep! Scary!

So the AMA is working state legislatures - aux barricades! - to make sure that their club, with its exclusive membership, is protected. They have all sorts of studies showing that costs go up and quality goes down when and where non-physicians practice medicine. (I only gave one of their studies a glance, but, if I were a betting person, I'd bet that there's plenty of countervailing evidence.

Okay, I don't want an orderly performing brain surgery. At least on  me, anyway.

But in wide swaths of the country, there's a shortage of primary care physicians - and plenty of other specialties. And even if you have a PCP, or have already seen a specialist, you can wait months for an appointment.

So why not "allow pharmacists to test, treat and prescribe medications for conditions such as strep throat or a urinary tract infection"?

And why not let psychologists write prescriptions, as opposed to requiring someone in need of mental healthcare to see both a non-MD therapist and an MD shrink? 

And why not let an optometrist diagnose and write a scrip for pinkeye?

I love my PCP. She's an excellent physician, plus she's a good two decades younger than I am, so I'm hoping she'll see me out the door. (Additional bonus: her husband is my dentist.) But 99.99% of the care I require is pretty routine, and if the day comes when my annual is with a PA or an NP, so be it. Yes, I'd still want my most excellent of doctors to glance at my test results and see if anything jumps out at her. And if anything does jump out, I want to talk to her about it. 

But I'd be happy to see a PA or NP. Or have my local pharmacist take care of a UTI before I'm septic. Or have my PT guy prescribe a test. 

And I suspect the folks who live in "healthcare deserts" are just as happy to see a nurse, a pharmacist, a physical therapist if there's no alternative Marcus Welby available.

Maybe the AMA needs to focus its energies on the physician shortages we're facing, and coming up with ways to expand the ranks. Maybe we need larger med school classes. More med schools. Fewer years spent in med schools. (I've seen a lot about three-year med schools, and six-year undergrad+med school programs.) Ways to get medical care in areas and to populations that for the most part do without. 

Physicians, heal thyselves!

Good for Sadio Mané

I'm not much of a soccer fan. 

Sure, I know that everyone else in the world calls soccer football.

I know that teams in the UK's Premier League get relegated (demoted to a lesser league) if they don't perform.

I know that the American women's soccer team tends to be pretty good.

I'll keep a vague eye on the World Cup, and maybe even watch a bit of the final game. (I kinda sorta know that Argentina is the current champion.)

And I can name a few famous soccer players.  Cristiano Ronaldo. David Beckham. Lionel Messi. Megan Rapinoe. Pelé. (Only he's dead.)

But I'd never heard of Senegal's (and the German team Bayern Munich's) superstar Sadio Mané, even if he is one of the top footballers playing today and one of the greatest African soccer players of all time. 

I first saw his name when he came across my Twitter feed. 

Seems that Mané, who makes roughly 22M Euro each year, was spotted by fans carrying an out-of-date iPhone 11 with a cracked screen. His response?

"Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played barefoot, and I didn't go to school.

Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium, provide clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, and even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me."

He's also built a hospital in his hometown, donated big bucks to covid relief, and given laptops to hundreds of kids from his village.

Senegal is one of the poorest nations on earth - bottom 15% - and that's where Mané directs most of his philanthropy. Because of his generosity, he was the first person given the Socrates Award, which recognizes the humanitarian efforts of a bigtime footballer. 

It's not like Mané lives like a monk. He owns a few pricey cars, including a Mercedes and a Bentley. He has a couple of nice homes, and when one was broken into, the thieves made off with watches, car keys, and - yes - some iPhones. (Presumably with screens intact.)

It's not as if he's a saint. This spring, he was suspended for a game for punching out one of his teammates.

And it's not like he's the only philanthropic footballer. Rinaldo and Messi are both noted for their generosity. And pretty much any athlete you've heard of has some sort of charitable thing going. 

Given how much bigtime athletes make - and given that so many of them come from impoverished backgrounds - it's the least they can do. 

Still, Mané stands out for the relative modesty of his lifestyle, and his generosity.

There's no doubt that what he's doing is helping give a better life to the desperately poor folks in the village he managed to kick his way out of. 

Good for him. 

The Birds

When it comes to birds, I'm neither a pure lover nor a pure hater. 

Come spring, I love seeing the first red, red robin come bob, bob, bobbin' along. 

I love waking up to chirping birds. I love seeing hawks flying over Boston Common. I love the occasional sighting of a colorful bird, like a cardinal or a Baltimore oriole. (My brother recently saw an oriole on the Cape. I'm jealous.) I love, and am always amazed by, hummingbirds. (How do those little critters survive???)

I love making way for ducklings. 

I love the raptor show in Tucson, Arizona.

I love that birds are dinosaurs. Or were. 

I like crows. I like watching swarms of starlings swoop around. I don't mind blue jays. Sure, they squawk, but they're a pretty blue. 

I get a kick out of seeing buzzards in the Southwest. 

On the other hand, unless they're in chevron formation, flying somewhere else, I despise Canada geese and the crap they strew far and wide, wherever they waddle. 

And pigeons? Don't get me going.

But whether birds are on my good or bad list, I hate the idea that, thanks in large part to human activity, we've lost 3 billion birds in North America since 1970. That's one quarter of our feathered friends. And that's a lot. (Source: American Bird Conservancy)

So I'm happy to learn about pockets of preservation.

I haven't been there in years, but I used to do an annual dune hike on the Snail Trail in Provincetown, where areas are staked out for the piping plovers when they're nesting. And if you get too close, you will absolutely be strafed by a protective plover parent. Yay, piping plovers!

And I am buoyed to learn that, over the past twenty years, thanks to conservation efforts, the population of roseate terns in Buzzards Bay on Cape Cod has doubled over the past twenty years. 

It's just that the conservation efforts are a bit creepy. 

Those efforts take place on three islands in the bay, including one that's aptly named Bird Island. Part of those efforts is the annual counting-of-the-tern-nests. Which sounds like a colossal nightmare. 

Carolyn Mostello, a biologist with Mass Wildlife, has been leading the charge for the past two decades. 

Not that there’s any real way to prepare someone for the sensory overload that is Bird Island. As Mostello steers a boat toward the 2-acre island just outside Marion Harbor, the sound grows from a dull roar to a shattering shriek, and with it the realization from the crew — five young student volunteers — that they are going to spend the next five hours trapped inside a Hitchcock movie, under constant attack from the common terns and endangered roseate terns whose nests they have come to count.

“The first day here, I thought I was going to die,” said Adriana Pastor, a Bates College student on day three as a volunteer. “I was honestly wondering if I would ever see my family again. I wanted to leave. But now, I kind of love it.” (Source: Boston Globe)

I don't imagine that I'd ever get over the "going to die" and onto the "kind of love it" sentiment. Part of the deal is that you end up covered in bird shit. The birds peck at your back. And, woe to you (and your eyeballs) if you look them in the eye. This gives new meaning to our family motto, which has long been Don't Make Eye Contact. 

For the count, the island is marked out in a grid, and the crew members line up a few feet apart and slowly walk through each section, counting the nests. To make sure they don’t count the same nest twice, they place a tiny piece of leaf in each nest to show it has been tallied, an action that enrages the birds, who don’t like anyone going near their eggs.

And you have to be super careful that you don't step on an egg or a hatchling. Even if I wanted to take part in the count, I believe that my size 11 feet would eliminate me as a candidate.

But crushing young 'uns and soon to be young 'uns underfoot is only part of the problem. Biologists have to contend with animal predators, like racoons, that swim the mile to get to the island to feast on the terns and their eggs. Right now, the biologists are trying to trap a mink that's been responsible for dozens of deaths. 

Not for me, that's for sure.

I'm certain I'd feel differently if the preservation efforts were being aimed at Canada geese, but I'm happy that there are folks like Carolyn Mostello and her student volunteers who are making Buzzards Bay a safe space for terns. 

You don't have to be a birdwatcher to feel that birds, for the most part, make the world a better place. 

Bali H'ai

I will confess to having lost precious little sleep worrying about those who gambled away their fortunes on the cryptocurrency humbug. And precious little time focusing on the details of the companies that aided and abetted the enterprise. 

Sure, I read a bit about Sam Bankman-Fried et al. All those big Stanford-MIT brains...

But I wasn't familiar with Three Arrows Capital, a crypto hedge fund, until I saw a NY Times article a few weeks back on what the fund's two founders have been up to since their company went kaput, "spawning the market meltdown that devastated the industry."

While Sam Bankman-Fried's been cooling his heels under house arrest, The Three Arrows guys have been whiling away the hours "surfing, meditating and traveling the world."

While investigators have been investigating, cofounder Kyle Davies took himself to Bali, where he painted and read Hemingway. (Why am I not surprised.) 

One clear evening, on a rooftop in Bali, Mr. Davies took shrooms with a group of crypto colleagues. “You look at the stars, and the stars are just, like, moving,” he recalled over dinner last month at a seafood restaurant in Barcelona, Spain, where he was vacationing with his wife and two young daughters. “You touch the grass, and it feels, like, not like normal grass.” (Source: NY Times)

Barcelona was just one of Davies' travel destinations Using Bali as his basecamp, h swanned around through Thailand, Malaysia, Dubai, Bahrain...

Not a bad life for someone who's only 36 years old. 

Last year, Davies and his partner Su Zhu were crypto "superstars."

...known for their trading acumen and bold predictions about the market. They were fixtures on the crypto podcast circuit whose influence allowed them to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from leading firms and make big bets on the future of the industry.

When their hedge fund failed, a large swath of the industry was dragged down with it.

The ensuing crisis drained the savings of millions of amateur investors and plunged other companies into bankruptcy.

Darn the luck for those schmucks, but Davies and Zhu (who's also 36; the two were classmates at Philips Andover and Columbia) are sitting pretty. Meditating. Gaming. Surfing.  

Unlike the other crypto superstars (like Bankman-Fried) who are being held accountable, facing lawsuits and jailtime, others appear to be getting away with things scot-free. While Three Arrows "owes its creditors $3.3 billion," Davies and Zhu seem to have gotten out in time. They both say that they'll never need to work again. (Note that Davies and Zhu are under investigation.)

Although they may not need the money, at 36, both Davies and Zhu still have a bit of chutzpah and juice left.

In April, they unveiled Open Exchange, a marketplace for traders who lost money in last year’s crypto implosions. Customers will be able to buy and sell claims to the bankruptcy estates of defunct crypto firms like FTX and possibly Three Arrows itself.

In pitch documents sent to investors in January, Mr. Davies and Mr. Zhu code-named their new company “GTX,” an alphabetical successor to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s failed exchange.

“I just thought it was very funny,” Mr. Zhu said. 

Emphasis on the chutzpah. (Funny peculiar or funny haha, as we used to say.)

While their investors were absorbing their losses and licking their wounds, Davies and Zhu continued to live large. 

“You eat very fatty pork dishes, and you drink a lot of alcohol, and you go to the beach and you just meditate,” Mr. Davies said as he recounted his travels. “You have these magical experiences.”

So far, one of the 'magical experiences,' hasn't been arrest. Pretty much the only consequence that Davies and Zhu "suffered" was loss of a superyacht (the Much Wow) they were going in on halfsies. But investigators are still investigating.

Let 'em, I guess.

Mr. Davies said he was ready to move on from Three Arrows by the end of last summer. “I really spent so much time meditating in Bali that I’m really just pretty zenned out,” he said.

Davies and Zhu are kicking around some business ideas. A chicken cloud kitchen restaurant in Dubai Filmmaking. Getting into AI. But if nothing pans out, they've made their nuts and can stay retired.

Meanwhile, not surprisingly, Bali has no extradition treaty with the United States.

Musk-Zuckerberg cage match? (Never thought I'd be cheering "Go, Zuck")

In what has got to be the most tech bro bit of idiocy evah, Elon Musk has challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. And Zuck has apparently accepted.

Elon Musk, who frequently posts jokes and provocations on Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion last year, responded this week to tweets about a potential competing service by Meta, run by Mark Zuckerberg, by saying, “I’m up for a cage match if he is.”

On Instagram, the social network owned by Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg responded with a screenshot of Mr. Musk’s tweet and the caption, “Send Me Location.” (Source: NY Times)

Gauntlet thrown. Let the games begin!

Hoo boy! (Hoo bro?) Hard to figure out who to root for if this one comes off, but I'm going to have to go with Zuckerberg. 

No surprise that Musk is being his usual puerile idiotic self:

A Meta spokeswoman said Mr. Zuckerberg’s response “speaks for itself.” Twitter’s media office auto-responded to a request for comment with a poop emoji.

A variant of Godwin's law holds that the first person in a social media debate who makes a comparison to Hitler/Nazism loses the debate. 

I'm proposing Rogers' law: The first person to use the poop emoji needs to sit down, STFU, and stop tweeting/insta-ing/whatever-ing.

So my money's on Zuckerberg.

Oh, the poop emoji's just part of it.

There's the fact that Zuck has taken up jujitsu, and is even competing. Musk, on the other hand, claims that he "almost never works out." (Musk is, however, bigger than Zuck, and claims to have been a street fighter when growing up.)

I'm hoping that, cometh the cage match, Zuck's training beats Musk's ability to throw his weight around. 

But, oh these tech bros. 

More than in other sectors, tech leaders have been known to embrace conflict in public forums, said Katy Cook, author of “The Psychology of Silicon Valley,” who described the industry as a “male-dominated, emotionally primitive” environment where leaders are rewarded for displays of hypermasculinity.

“When you get a taste of power via some of those ways of behaving, it tastes good for a lot of people,” Ms. Cook said.

My career was spent in a "male-dominated" and often "emotionally primitive" environment.

In one famous incident, a colleague who was unhappy that our company had made an offer to someone he didn't want hired put his fist through the wall. We had to find a picture to cover the hole until we finally got around to fixing it.

The wall-puncher - with whom I always got along and pretty much liked, other than for this incident (I was pissed and called him a shanty Irishman, which would never hold in today's work world) - went on to a highly successful career in tech. 

The guy he didn't want to hire ended up doing very well at our company, and became one of my closest work friends. For many years, my work husband. (We were out of touch for a couple of years, but recently had a catch-up conversation and will be seeing each other soon.) 

Back to Musk v. Zuckerberg. 

There's now a proposed location: Las Vegas. (Where else?)

And, although Zuck is an "aspirational MMA fighter," who's developing some physical chops to go along with that big brain, Musk has tweeted:

“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing.” (Source: The Verge)

I find Zuckerberg creepy and weird, and I'm no fan of Facebook. But Musk is creepier and weirder. And a ton more dangerous. I'm on Twitter, but Musk has been turning it into a crazed rightwing and conspiracy theory playground. (Among other things, he's going all gaga over RFK Jr.) 

Never thought I'd say it, but "GO ZUCK!"