And you wonder why we need regulations

I grew up in a large family in a small house where the kids were in classrooms with as many as 50 classmates. So, a lot of colds.

To treat all these colds, my parents relied on a combo of remedies. 

One of the remedies was slathering Vicks VapoRub on the chest of the kid-with-a-cold, and keeping the Vapo in place - or protecting the kid-with-a-cold's PJs - by placing a scratchy square of an old woolen blanket on top of the Vicks. Vicks VapoRub could also be applied to the sides of the kid-with-a-cold's nose, or under their nostrils. Sometimes, in case of grave stuffy nose-ness, Vicks VapoRub was used in a vaporizer. 

Since kids-with-colds need sleep, another technique was conking the kid-with-a-cold out by administering a hot toddy. The toddy was composed of boiling water, an eyedropper's worth of Four Roses - my parents weren't big drinkers, but there was always a bottle of Four Roses around for social occasions that called for a highball - a teaspoon of sugar, and a squirt of RealLemon.

And then, for croupy colds, there was a dose of cough syrup: Robitussin or Cheracol. 

I'm pretty sure that, in treating all those all too common colds, my parents never spent a second worrying about whether the way they were treating their kids-with-colds was doing anything but good. 

But we were in the United States, where even in the 1950's and 1960's, the government was watching over what went into over-the-counter medicines. 

In the rest of the world, especially the poorer parts of the rest of the world, parents are not so fortunate. 

Last year, more than 300 infants, across three continents, died from taking tainted cough syrup, largely in countries that don't have much by way of safety testing in place.

The "substandard and falsified medicines" are found in countries like Gambia, Cameroon, Liberia, Uzbekistan. 

Unscrupulous actors sometimes substitute propylene glycol with toxic alternatives, ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol, because they are cheaper, several pharmaceutical manufacturing experts told Reuters.

The alternatives are more commonly used in brake fluid and other products not meant for human consumption.

The WHO's working theory is that in 2021, when prices of propylene glycol spiked, one or more suppliers mixed the cheaper toxic liquids with the legitimate chemical, [WHO's Rutendo] Kuwana said. He did not say where the suppliers were based, and added that obscure supply chains have made proving this difficult.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers, including those alleged to have produced the tainted syrups that have been found so far, typically source ingredients from external suppliers. (Source: Reuters)

This time around, fingers do seem to be pointing to India as the culprit.

Imagine living in a desperately poor country and having a baby who's coughing their head off. You do the best you can do, and that may mean using what little money you have to buy a bottle of something that you believe will make your baby more comfortable. And then...

Carping about oppressive government regulation is a pervasive indoor sport in America. I'm sure here are plenty of unnecessary and ridiculous regulations on the books. They're not all that hard to find, as those carping about oppressive government regulations well know. But I'm just as happy to live in a place where a parent giving their kid-with-a-cold a swig of Cheracol and putting them down for the night with a slug of watered-down Four Roses can do so without worrying about whether those kids-with-colds are going to wake up in the morning. 

I laughed. I gagged. (Oh, what those royals do to me.)

At my very core, I believe that the monarchy in general, and in England in particular, is a crock of ridiculous nonsense that has no place in the modern world. I may think it's a crock, but I do find it all very fascinating, in a laughing-gagging-rubbernecking-curiosity-gawking sort of way. When I come across the mention - and they do occasionally pop up in a People Mag sort of way - of a family like the von Thurn und Taxis or of Prince Albert Grimaldi of Monaco or of some pretender to some throne or other, it always makes me laugh a little and gag a little.

But most of my royal laughing and gagging is understandably devoted to the royals closest to the American consciousness, and that would be the Brits. 

The last twelve months, what with the death of the Queen, the elevation of King Charles, and the publication of Harry's tell-all bio, have certainly provided many opportunities to see the royals in all their glory. 

While much of my royal interest - as I do so love the laugh-gag combo - focuses on the tip of the royal pyramid, I also enjoy an occasional laugh and gag at all the British quasi royalty out there, all that hereditary nobility. All the dukes, earls, and dukes of earl that make up the royalish ranks. 

So I was naturally drawn to a recent article in the New York Times on Emma, the Duchess of Rutland. 

First off, the title cracks me up because the town of Rutland, Massachusetts, is a little rural backwater outside of Worcester, Mass. The sort of place that has farms, but not gigantic piles, like 356 room Belvoir Castle, which Emma, Duchess of Rutland, presides over. Who'd want to be the Duchess of Rutland?

Well, the Duchess of Rutland, for starters.

A farmer’s daughter from the Welsh borders, she moved to Belvoir in 2001 when her husband became the 11th Duke of Rutland, one of the most senior hereditary titles in England. He may have inherited a fairy-tale castle, but they were also landed with 12 million pounds (almost $15.5 million) of inheritance taxes and, in her words, “battalions of rats and staff who clearly preferred the former incumbents to us.”

In the years since, as both chatelaine and chief executive, the duchess has brokered filming and event deals, streamlined the operations of the estate and undertaken a costly restoration to safeguard Belvoir for the next generation. (Source: NY Times)

The Duchess of Rutland has been separated from the Duke of Rutland for the past decade. They both live at Belvoir (curiously pronounced Beaver), but with 356 rooms they really don't need to cross paths all that often. His digs are in Belvoir's Shepherds' Tower and hers in the Nursery Wing.

“It’s a very modern arrangement, yet very French 18th century at the same time,” Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and socialite, said in an article in Vanity Fair.

The duke, a vocal fan of Donald Trump and Brexit who has written several books on subjects like naval history, has lived at the castle with various partners in the years since the separation. For the last decade, the duchess has been in a relationship with Phil Burtt, the estate manager.

Anyway, although the house is not hers, and she won't have a claim on it if the Duke precedes her out the door of the mortal coil and Belvoir goes to her elder son, who's the next Duke up, the Duchess has taken it upon herself to keep Belvoir solvent.

Like many other castles, Belvoir has been opened to the public, tourists (many are Americans on coach tours) who pay a fee to look around what they let you look around, and wonder how anyone ever heated the place or ever managed to find their way around. 

At Belvoir, some even stay the night. The castle, which was a stand-in for Windsor Castle in “The Crown” and has been featured in movies including “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Young Victoria,” often hosts guests for weekend events and photo shoots. They can stay in sumptuous state bedrooms, several of which are newly renovated, including one that...is covered in hand-painted wallpapers. (Belvoir wallpapers are, naturally, available to order.)

The Duchess also lets organizations host events at Belvoir. Recent events: a Tough Mudder muddy obstacle course race, a flower show, and a Freddie Mercury tribute concert. 

There are shops at Belvoir, flogging everything from "branded clothing, home wares, gins, wines and cider" to that Belvoir wallpaper to hand-crafted guns and rifles.

The Duchess has also set up a charitable organization to pick the pockets of royal-hungering Yanks. The "American Friends of Belvoir Castle...will host an inaugural fundraising gala at the Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla, next year."

Phew. For a moment I read that as Mar-a-Lago, but that would be more the Brexit-Trumpist Duke's thang. 

One of the Duchess of Rutland's latest endeavors is a podcast. The idea was suggested to her by one of her daughters, Lady Violet Manners. (Such a straight out of Downton name...) In her eponymous podcast, Duchess, the Duchess of Rutland interviews her fellow duchesses. Buds like Lady Henrietta Spencer Churchill of Blenheim Palace and the Duchess of Argyll of Inveraray Castle, who apparently have a lot to say about running a stately home. Her core audience for the podcast includes Americans. 

Despite the podcast's success, the Duchess of Rutland is handing over the chore of running it to Lady Violet.

The duchess wants to focus on the estate’s commercial enterprises, including a retail village and farm, as well as a new YouTube series that delves into the history of Belvoir, rather than houses elsewhere.

Running the Belvoir pile is a pretty big job. Sure it comes with some perks, as she does get to live over the shop. But I hope she draws a big fat salary and doesn't have to hand over all the profits to that lout of a Duke.

As admirable as the Duchess of Rutland is in terms of her business acumen and drive - she is the very model of a modern alpha businesswoman - and I did enjoy reading about all this, the reading still did engender plenty of my standard Brit royalty reactions. 

I laughed. I gagged. 

Just as happy to live in a land where, for all the elites and nepo-babies doesn't have any royal royals.

Printer, you're the devil

I still have a printer. It's a cheapo black and white Brothers something or other. Whatever was on sale at Staples when I bought it a while back. 

I can't remember what I had before the Brothers, but it was a colored printer, maybe an HP, which meant those expensive colored printer cartridges. Back when I was making my living as a marketing writer, I sometimes goofed up and printed out a colored version of a brochure I was working on, and it would suck that expensive colored printer cartridge dry. An avoidable business expense. Could have printed in b&w, and not printed the pages that were all illustration. 

Anyway, when that colored printer crapped out, I just went with black and white. 

It's fine, but I barely use it. Mostly to print out invoices that our condo association receives online, but that we need to pay by check. (Don't ask why we can't do online pay, but we can't.) We recently went to self-manage, and I'm the keeper of the books. So every month, I have to print the invoices that come our way electronically.

Other than that, I don't really print much of anything.

I used to print out baseball tickets, but now I use the MLB app.

I used to print out concert tickets, but now I use the Ticketmaster app.

I used to print out boarding passes, but now I use whatever airline I'm flying's app. If something seems a bit funky there, I print an oldish school boarding pass out at the airport kiosk. 

I'm in a writing group, and I used to print out the stories to read and review. But since covid, most of the members participate virtually, so I do all my commenting and copy editing on the word.doc or pdf the writer submits.

I've read full novel-length manuscripts for a couple of my friends in the group, and I print them out at FedEx-Kinko's. 

Once in a blue moon, I have to print out a shipping label for some item I'm returning. 

But mostly I don't use a printer, and I doubt I'll replace my current one when it bytes the dust.

And if the Washington Post's any indication, I'm just keeping up with the times, as Americans are increasingly ink jettisoning. 

They recently devoted a week to articles on how costly and terrible printers are, and capped their series with a cri de coeur entitled We must end the tyranny of printers in American life.

Aux barricades - or at least aux landfill - with these suckers, these "soul crushers," these "parasites," these "nightmares."

I don't exactly love, or even like, my printer, but I'm not all that made maddingly miserable by it. But WaPo? 

Each document, photo, homework assignment, tax return and package return label we avoid printing is one step closer to a blissful future in which printers are nearly obsolete.

You might need or want to print stuff. Fine! Stick with your printer. Fax machines are horrible, but they’re still around.

Our collective ambition is to slowly kill off the parasite of printers. We can do this.

...Let’s send printers to Hades where they belong. (Source: Washington Post)

Yowza!

I can't remember the first printer I had, but I believe that, as long as we had PC's in the house, we had a printer. So, from the early 1980s. 

I do remember an early printer that weighed a ton and sounded like a jack-hammer when you were printing anything on it. And the very nice, expensivo, office-quality HP laserjet that succeeded it. 

That HP was a workhorse. Until it wasn't. And when it wasn't, we never got around to getting it fixed. We hung onto it for years, taking up precious storage space in our only decent-sized closet. A couple of years ago, when I decided to have Earthworm come and haul away all the old desktops and laptops that also crowded that decent-sized closet, the printer went with.

That high-end printer was replaced by a cheaper HP. Then something else. Then the Brother that sits on the file cabinet in my office. 

Hmmmm. One of these days, I'll have to see what all is in that file cabinet, given that I don't get paper bills and statements, and rarely print anything out.

My husband was a different story altogether. A regular old devil of a printer.

He'd see articles online that were interesting and print them out.

He took MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and printed out syllabi and readings.

He was a consultant who'd print out multiple versions of the reports he did for his clients.

He printed out the menus of restaurants we might want to dine at in another eight months or so when we traveled to Paris. (Multiple copies of the menus: one for me, one for you.)

After Jim died, I started to go through all the print outs he had stacked in the den. At first, I actually looked at what was in all those printouts - on the off-chance that something would be useful or important - but I soon realized it was all crap.

Jim wasn't a hoarder, but there was a surprising amount of room in the credenza, in the bookcase in the den, in that one and only decent-sized closet. For weeks, I tossed out a couple of recycle bags full of miscellaneous documents.

Then I sat back and relaxed, only to spy more piles o' paper under a dresser.

Even back then, in the heyday of printing, I didn't print all that much. These days, my printer barely gets any use.

Sure, printers aren't as useful and necessary as they used to be, but I  still can't bring myself to feel the antipathy that the Washington Post does. But what do you expect from someone who's still got a landline and a CD player...

Dr. Vainglory, I presume

Dr. Katharine Roxanne Grawe, an Ohio plastic surgeon specializing in elective (vanity) surgery, recently got her license lifted. (It had been suspended since last November.) The state medical board acted based on her Tik Tok livestreaming of the operations she was performing, and on some botched jobs reported by her patients. 

At the hearing, doctors on the board said that Dr. Grawe, known online as “Dr. Roxy,” had previously been cautioned about protecting patient privacy on social media. They also spoke about her treatment of three unnamed patients who had reported complications from procedures, including one whose surgery Dr. Grawe had broadcast a part of on social media. (Source: NY Times)

Dr. Roxy, an attractive forty-something bottle blonde (meow) appeared at her hearing wearing a low cut, cleavage baring blouse. And she was even more of a cleavage barer on her show. Because if you specialize in procedures like liposuction and Brazilian Butt Lifts, you have an image you want to convey, a brand you want to live up to. Who wants to see boring clunky Dr. Katherine Grawe with mousy hair, when they can get their work done by cool, hip and happenin' Dr. Roxy, star of Tik Tok and Instagram. She had a large following on her now-private Tik Tok, and 100,000 followers on Insta.

Dr. Roxy, not surprisingly, wasn't practicing boring clunky medicine by fixing up kids with cleft palates or helping disfigured accident victims restore their appearance. Her practice was focused on optional vanity surgeries. 

And she was apparently more focused on her social media presence than the health of her patients, who were pretty much cast as extras for her social media extravaganzas. The VP of the Ohio medical board that recommended the revocation of her license characterized her behavior as providing "life altering, reckless treatment."

“These outcomes were not normal complications like those that exist in the routine practice of medicine, but were rather caused by recklessness and disregard for the rules governing the practice of medicine in Ohio,” [Dr. Jonathan B. Feibel] said.

He said Dr. Grawe’s social media presence “amplified her reckless behavior” and accused her of using it to grow her brand, not to educate.

Her desire to educate was the defense that Dr. Roxy offered. She said that:

...she made social media videos because she loved teaching and wanted to explain cosmetic surgery to people outside of the medical field.  

Loving teaching, sure. But loving the exposure, the follows, the likes, the customers, errrrr, patients her social media presence attracted. 

Among other things, Dr. Roxy took questions from her audience during her livestreams, which was presumably something of a distraction. 

One of the medical board's gripes with Dr. Roxy was that in 2018 and in 2021, the board had sent her warning letters, cautioning her about her social media work. 

In the second letter, the board secretary recommended Dr. Grawe take remedial education courses about plastic surgery and “professionalism/ethics.”

She did take some classes, but this didn't result in the board-desired outcome. She kept on broadcasting up until a few weeks before her license was suspended.  

I'm not a big fan of cosmetic procedures. On the one hand, sure, it's your life, it's your money, do what you want with it. On the other hand - which is the hand I favor - couldn't a plastic surgeon's talent, skills, education, abilities be put to better use helping people who were in need of more than a tummy tuck or a Brazilian Butt Lift. 

Dr. Roxy's license has been permanently revoked. And my understanding is that, once you've lost your license in one state, you can't just cross the state border and hang a new shingle out. She has the right to appeal, and the revocation may well be overturned. 

But given that there are plenty of areas in the country where there's inadequate healthcare - and, I suspect, there are plenty of them in Ohio - why not just tell Dr. Grawe that she's free to practice family medicine. Or work in an ER. Or a nursing home. Or a hospice. Just not squander her time and talent on liposuction, etc., however lucrative such procedures might be. No more Dr. Roxy on Tik Tok and Insta, and for a vainglorious doctor, that'd be a loss. But she'd still be a doctor, and, presumably, she became a doctor because she had a desire at some point in her life to help people. 

I'd be happy to give Dr. Grawe a chance. Hopefully, she wouldn't be too far gone around the narcissistic bend to take it.

The motto of her practice was "Let your beauty be magnified and your confidence soar with ROXY plastic surgery."

Maybe Dr. Grawe's got some inner beauty she could magnify yet. 

Actually, if we were really evolved...

I'm always interested in local companies that make good. 

iRobot: With my new Shark, I'm still in old-fashioned vacuum cleaner mode, but here's a shout out to some local guys: hey: yay!

Moderna: Next time I'm walking in Kendall Square I might just drop by and kiss your doorstep for coming up with the vaccine that's still keeping me from acquiring covid.

And Dunk's: Well, I may not be the donut girl I used to be, and when I do indulge, it's more likely to be with a Blackbird, but America runs on Dunkin. 

So I was naturally happy to learn about Evolv Technology, a Waltham-based company that makes weapons detectors. Actually, the weapons their technology detects are guns, as the Utica, NY, school system learned recently when a high school kid smuggled in a knife and used it to stab a classmate. (As a result, Utica uninstalled all of its scanners they'd purchased just a few months earlier for $4M.)

Ellenbogen, the company’s cofounder and chief innovation officer, acknowledges that the system has trouble identifying knives, but says it has proven successful at detecting guns and reducing the time spent in security lines. Each day, Evolv systems find 400 guns being taken into crowded places — rarely with criminal intent, Ellenbogen said. (Source: Boston Globe)

(As an aside: I don't care if you don't have a "criminal intent" when you're bringing a gun into a place you're not supposed to bring a gun into, you're an idiot, a bad (or at least stupid) actor, and a potential menace.)

Failure to identify a gun aside, if you're worried about school shootings - and, honestly, is there anyone in the United States with a child or grandchild who goes to school (make that anyone in the United States who knows anyone with a child or grandchild who goes to school) who isn't worried about school shootings - the ability to detect guns is a good thing.

No, it wouldn't have saved the kiddos in Uvalde, as the mass murderer there didn't placidly enter the school via a metal detector. Or the students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. Or the little ones at Shady Hook. Mass murders gonna' mass murder.

But it might have saved the lives of the four students in Oxford, Michigan who were killed by a classmate who had a gun in his backpack. 

And not that someone running amok with a knife is a good thing, the probability that the knife-wielder turns into a mass killer is far less than if the killer is carrying a gun.

Still, everyone's not happy with Evolv. The company:

...has come under scrutiny from major media outlets, including National Public Radio and the BBC, and a security industry watchdog organization has charged that Evolv sought to conceal the scanner’s limitations.

But business is good.

In a nation stunned by mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, and workplaces, demand for Evolv’s gear is soaring. Revenues jumped 136 percent last year to $55.2 million, and nearly 300 new customers signed up, compared to just 84 in 2021.

The company is not yet profitable, but is anticipating achieving profitability in 2025. Evolv is public (Nasaq) and "has more than doubled in value in the past year to about $6 a share."

All those schools, malls, and workplaces go with Evolv's machines, even though they're more expensive than other metal detectors, because of their reliability. Evolv machines use standard magnetic field methods, but also deploy AI software to detect objects, figuring out what's a gun and what's not a gun. And Evolv is also a lot faster in terms of throughput than traditional metal detectors, especially important for large scale venues processing tens of thousands of visitors. One scanner can process 4,000 individuals an hour. 

Evolv's customers in this area include Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium. So I've likely been through one of their scanners at Fenway. And I'll be going through another when I head to Gillette to see Springsteen in a few weeks. 

Anyway, Evolv makes for a nice local business success story.

But wouldn't it be a far better world if we were sufficiently evolved that we didn't need to worry about guns everywhere?

Talk about FAFO

There's even a name for them. Tourons of Yellowstone. And they have their own Insta and FB accounts.

Of course, the people posting aren't the tourons themselves.

It's the folks who spot these maroons and make them famous on social media.

The tourons are the folks who ignore the warnings and go play with the bear cubs. Pet the bison. Take a selfie with an elk. Step off the boardwalk to get up close and personal with a hot spring.

Deaths are surprisingly rare, considering the dangers of the wilds. In Yellowstone, only twenty or so tourists have died in the 151 years of the park's existence. But last year a young man was gored by a bison and died. (Happy 150th Anniversary, Yellowstone!) And a few years back another guy fell in a hot spring and dissolved. (I don't know which would be a worse fate.)

The latest nitwit to ignore all the warnings was a woman who just couldn't resist dipping her hand in the scalding, 175-degree waters of Silex Springs. She took off screaming about how hot the water was. 

There are hot springs you can bathe in. You can take the waters in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Or Budapest. Etc. Where the waters are a warm but temperate 100-ish. 

One second in water that's 155 degrees Fahrenheit will get you a scalding burn after one second. So, 175 degrees = worse.

Getting scalded is no fun.

When I was waitressing at Durgin-Park, a waitress pellmelling into the kitchen going the wrong way collided with me when I was carrying a bunch of cups containing scalding hot coffee. I can't remember how many cups I was holding, but at Durgin our parlor trip was carrying four cups in one hand, two cups piled on two cups, and another two cups (one on one) balanced on your wrist. The real pros could carrying another couple cups o' joe in their other hand, but I needed my other hand to take the cups off my wrist and put them down. 

At the time of this entirely avoidable accident - thanks, Flo - I was probably carrying three cups, as I only ever did the six cups at a time in practice sessions, never when actually working.

In any case, the scald was pretty awful. I wrapped my arm in ice and towels, but yowza, it hurt. Was it a second degree burn or just a first? Who knows. It's not as if I was going to seek medical assistance. Anyway, it was exceedingly painful. I missed a couple of days work (uncompensated, of course), and I remember that when I was trying to sleep, even the touch of the sheet on my scalded skin made my head pop off.

Back at Yellowstone:

An unidentified father-daughter duo forwent safety standards and walked around the boardwalk that sectioned off parkgoers from boiling hot Silex Spring in the Fountain Point Pot Area of the park. Hot springs, on average, reach around 175 degrees Fahrenheit in the National Park.

Cameraman Gary Mackenzie said he warned the duo to stay on the boardwalk, but the father reportedly replied: 'Whatever, man.'

'So, I hit record,' Mackenzie said. (Source: Daily Mail)

Mackenzie wasn't the only one warning daddy and daughter dearest. 

...A woman tells Mackenzie off-camera that the woman will 'regret' the decision as she clutched her dad's hand and leaned toward the spring.

After she dips her hand briefly into the crystal blue water, she quickly leans backward and scrambles to her feet, running away, screaming: 'It's hot! It's very hot!' 

Her cries of pain can be heard as she clutches her hand to her stomach and walks back onto the boardwalk.

Aren't parents supposed to protect their kids from harm, and not abet them in their stupidity? I guess that at least he kept her from falling in and dissolving. As the father-of-the-year said, "Whatever, man."

It could have been worse.

Last year - the 150th anni and the year of the bison gore - "a foot in a shoe was found floating in a hot spring," Yellowstone's Abyss Pool. Guess that beats a full body dissolve. Maybe.

I've been to a number of national parks, including Yellowstone, and they're magnificent. And they're also dangerous. 

At one park, I remember a winding perilous road posted for 5 MPH. That was a heart in throat drive.

Then there were a couple of accidentally close encounters with bears. If you haven't slept in a Karman Ghia after you spot a couple of cubs playing in the well of your tent, you haven't lived.

Ah, wilderness. 

But - with the exception of a dumb, dangerous, and colossally ill-advised hike up Mount Washington I was totally unprepared for - I pretty much heeded the warning signs and listened to the rangers advice. 

So who among us can honestly say that at some point or another they haven't done something incredibly dumb, dangerous, and colossally ill-advised at some point in their life? 

But putting your hand intentionally in scalding water? Talk about FAFO.

Not so tender chicken

I like nothing more than a good old scandal. I was going to write that I savor these stories, but this one is decidedly unsavory.

Eric Goldstein used to work for the NYC Department of Education's Office of School Support Services, where he oversaw the Office of Food and Nutrition Services. That's a mouthful, but it translates into overseeing the breakfasts and lunches that was served to the school kiddos in all those PS's. 

This put him in the position to be unduly influenced by purveyors eager to fill all those mouthfuls. Unfortunately, Goldstein proved susceptible to undue influence. 

A few weeks ago: 

...a jury in Brooklyn convicted Mr. Goldstein of conspiracy, extortion, wire fraud and taking bribes, agreeing with prosecutors who said that he had abused his official position. After the verdict was delivered, Mr. Goldstein, sitting in the well of the courtroom next to his lawyers, rested his head in his hands and stared down at the defense table. (Source: NY Times)

Here's what happened. 

Somma, a Texas-based food outfit had a contract to supply chicken tenders to the NYC public school system. 

Now anyone who's known a child for more than, say, 12 minutes or so, will recognize immediately that chicken tenders are one of the major food groups for children, perhaps sitting at the top of the food pyramid (if the top of the food pyramid is the "it" spot). Unfortunately, the Somma tenders were

anything but. Plastic and metal bits had been found in the "meat." And bits of bone. (One school employee choked on a bony bit.) 

Yummers.

Understandably, the Department of Education was going to chuck these upchuckable lunchables. 

So the heads of Somma asked Goldstein to step in.

Somma was already in cahoots with Goldstein, having already partnered with him on a company called Range Meats. Goldstein owned 20% of Range Meats, which - surprise, surprise - was awarded a contract to provide burgers to the NYC schools. Needless to say, the NYC Department of Education wasn't aware of Mr. Goldstein's side hustle.

When the burgers were first test driven, Goldstein hoovered down the sample and asked for seconds, bringing in other evaluators to try them out. Nothing like having a steak stake in the proceeds to whet your appetite. 

To get the nasty chicken tenders back on the menu, the Somma execs dangled tends of thousands of dollars in front of Goldstein. It would take a tough man to resist such tender temptation, and Goldstein apparently doesn't have that sort of fibre. 

With Goldstein's intercession, Somma got back in the school system's food graces. For a while anyway. The complaints of tainted tenders kept coming in, and the decision was made to dump Somma. Kind of the same thing that no doubt happened to all those plastic trays with the undigestible chicken tenders on them. 

Goldstein is appealing his conviction, and claims that, although the evidence looks kinda-sorta bad, it's all a misunderstanding, and that his behavior was on the up and up.

We'll see how the appeal goes, but I'm guessing Goldstein will end up doing time.

I can't help but think about how ghastly prison food is supposed to be, and chicken tenders, cheap as they are, are staples of the prison diet. 

Be on the lookout, Mr. Goldstein, for bits of metal, plastic, and bone. (No wonder he was resting his head in his hands.)

Honestly?

I don't know Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. I've never met her. But I've read her work, and heard her presentations. As part of my freelance writing work - now in the rearview mirror - I've written about and referenced these second-hand encounters for a client of long-standing. (Just did a quick check of my old documents, and her name comes up in quite a few of those old documents.) 

I don't really remember much about what she had to say, but I do remember enjoying reading her work and hearing her presentations. I remember I found them interesting.

Maybe too interesting. 

Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists have risen to prominence pointing out the power of small interventions to improve well-being.

The scientists said they had found that automatically enrolling people in organ donor programs would lead to higher rates of donation, and that moving healthy foods like fruit closer to the front of a buffet line would result in healthier eating.

Many of these findings have attracted skepticism as other scholars showed that their effects were smaller than initially claimed, or that they had little impact at all. But in recent days, the field may have sustained its most serious blow yet: accusations that a prominent behavioral scientist fabricated results in multiple studies, including at least one purporting to show how to elicit honest behavior.

The scholar, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, has been a co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on such topics as how rituals like silently counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can increase the likelihood of choosing healthier food, and how networking can make professionals feel dirty.

...Questions about her work surfaced in an article on June 16 in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues. One of Dr. Gino’s co-authors — Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School — told The Chronicle that the university had informed him that a study overseen by Dr. Gino for the paper appeared to include fabricated results. (Source: NY Times)

Several other papers on which Gino collaborated are under suspicion for phony results. 

 Yowza!

I understand the temptation to fudge the data to produce the results you're looking for. Especially if you honestly believe that the results you're looking for are right.

(I'm reminded of something my husband was told by his dissertation director when Jim - whose thesis was a model of Federal Reserve behavior in the 1960's (it's okay to yawn) - reported that he was having trouble his model. Jim's esteemed economist mentor told him that there was nothing wrong with Jim's model. The problem was with reality.) 

Gino is apparently not alone when it comes to goosing data sets in the social sciences.

One category of questionable methods, said Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology, is p-hacking — for example, testing a series of arbitrary data combinations until the researcher arrives at an inflated statistical correlation.

(I'm reminded of a just-out-of-business-school job I had helping build forecasting models for corporate America so that corporate America could predict demand. Or something. Anyway, when we were doing multi-variate analysis (it's okay to yawn), us amateur/semi-pro/professional modelers were all encouraged to throw in extraneous variables to the equations so that it made the models look better. This was called "fit pumping." We tried not to throw in variables that were completely preposterous. Mostly, anyway. I remember a colleague - and I can't really remember, but that colleague may have been me -  coming up with some sort of correlation between swimming pool installations and telephone line uninstalls. I was much happier to work on time series analysis, where you just looked at the one core data set and didn't bring in any explanatory/supposedly causal variables. No fit pumping involved.)

So I get the temptation to fudge. 

But talk about high risk behavior when you're a professor at the Harvard Business School, and are collaborating with colleagues at similarly high-visibility and prestigious schools. What was she thinking? That she'd never get caught?

And the fact that her research was around the topic of honesty, a topic Gino is considered an expert in. 

Several of the papers she worked on and provided data for have been withdrawn. Among them “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity” and “The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity."

Does all this prove her thesis that "dishonesty can lead to greater creativity?"

Gino is now on administrative leave from Harvard, and I'm guessing that, if the allegations are proven true, she'll be fired. She's in her mid-forties, and this sure seems like a career killer to me, at least when it comes to building a career in the upper echelons of academia. 

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up. 

Faith and begorrah, let's put these stereotypes to rest

In the mid-1800's,  the Irish - especially after they started fleeing the famine that devastated their country -  began immigrating in great numbers, they were the scary immigrants who were going to despoil America. Ignorant, scabrous, drunken papists. 

When depicted in cartoons - the pre-photography newspaper illustration - the Irishman was invariably shown with simian features, and often holding a bottle. 

Funniest thing. I've known an awful lot of Irishmen, women, and children in my life. Some of my best friends...Some of my best relatives, in fact... And I can't think of one who actually looks like an ape. 

Fast forward to the benevolent cartoon Irishman of the latter part of the twentieth century. He's no longer the ape-in-human-clothing that cartoonist Thomas Nast popularized. But, faith and begorrah, he's probably some version of the sly and ludicrous pipe-smoking, shillelagh carrying Boston Celtics' mascot. 

(I know that Pat Patriot, the old-school mascot of the New England Patriots isn't "technically" an Irishman, but there's no escaping the associating of the name "Pat" with Irish-hood. And the character - at least to me - had an unmistakably Hibernian look about him. A pugnacious, thuggish version of the Celtics' mascot.) 

And here we are, well into the twenty-first century, and it looks like the Irish stereotype is still among us, at least when it comes to A.I. 

When you type ‘Irish Man’ into a popular A.I. Image Generator, the results are, without exception, full of outdated and derogatory stereotypes. Every image generated shows a man that is ugly, aggressive, drunk, leprechaun-like or a combination of the above.

Artificial Intelligence showing us these misinformed images is a prime example of how many negative perceptions of the Irish still prevail globally. (Source: EPIC)

EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum, is located in Dublin - and I'm sorry I missed it on my May trip across the pond. (Next time for sure.) Part of their charter is working against these stereotypical portrayals' of the Irish. 

Since we first opened our doors, we at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum have worked tirelessly to challenge such stereotypes of the Irish. We continue to do so today, asking big tech why they still paint us in such a negative light.

Fair play to them! (As for A.I., well, that's a topic for another day.)

Talk about damaged goods

Back in the day (think Gilded Age), rich folks bought seaside "cottages" (think mansions) and private railroad cars to schlep them from NYC to Newport, or wherever else they summered. (I've toured the private car owned by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe's son, who was president of the Pullman Company. He used to to get from his home in Chicago and, later, Washington DC, to Hildene, his getaway place in Manchester, VT, comfortably ensconced in his private car. Nice perk!)

Fast forward and the big moneyed class is still buying second (third, fourth, fifth...homes), and they travel between and among homes (and the site of the sports teams they own) using their private jets. They also seem to buy an awful lot of superyachts. (Think Jeff Bezos, who - it was rumored - was going to have to dismantle a bridge in Rotterdam to get his super-duper yacht out of the shipbuilding yard. Ship ahoy!) 

And, while anyone can have a speedboat or two to use as a superyacht dinghy, it's a lot more fun if you have a superyacht to also have a submarine of your very own. 

Thus, in Gilded Age, Take Two, rich folks started buying luxury submarines, paying a couple of millionaire bucks for that little goodie. 

Given how much private submarines go for, you'd think that s submersible going for $800K would be a bargain.

Too much of a bargain, I guess.

First off, a submersible doesn't give you the full submarine experience. In a submarine, you're diving and surfacing on your own, while a submersible needs a mothership (such as a superyacht) to guide it in and out of the drink. So, for starters, it's a poor man's submarine.

Then there's the fact that the submersible for sale wasn't particularly luxe. And it's old. Vintage 1973. So almost the age of a used U-Boat. 

And this $800K submersible has been languishing on the market for five years. From the real estate market we are all, of course, aware that when your home is on the market for a while, the listing gets stale - and the asking price drops.

Then there's the real killer, metaphorically speaking. (Or not.) The most recent owner of the Antipodes is none other than OceanGate, most recently in the news for the implosion of their latter-day submersible, the Titan. 

No, OceanGate didn't build the Antipodes. But, they own it, and used it for expeditions (albeit more modest that diving to the floor to ogle the remains of the Titanic. Having any association with the OceanGate brand isn't going to help matters any.

So the broker who's been kinda-sorts trying to unload it for the past five years is ready to cry 'Uncle.'

"I don't want to have anything to do with it," Steve Reoch, an expedition-yacht broker who sold his first boat in 1979, told Insider just weeks after another OceanGate sub, the Titan, catastrophically imploded on a mission. (Source: Insider)

Can't blame Reoch if he wants out. If he couldn't unload it before OceanGate became a household word, just imagine trying to sell it now. Seriously, who would buy a used OceanGate submersible? Every moment spent in that submersible you'd have your ear trained for the telltale creak that it and you might be under an awful lot of pressure. 

Anyway, if the $800K price tag is out the window, what might you do with the submersible if you could get it on the cheap?

I guess you could put it in your garden as a convo piece. Maybe use that front section as a greenhouse sort of thing. It's 13 1/2 feet long, so might make a cool little playhouse for the kiddos. Or you could just use it on the surface, tow it around behind your superyacht, taking in the scenery. Maybe get up close and personal with sharks and/or dolphins. 

For any of the above scenarios, the price would have to be pretty close to zero.

A far cry from $800K. 

But talk about damaged goods...

"You're a grand old flag, you're a high-flying flag"

On the Fourth of July, with nothing better to do in late afternoon, I turned on Turner Movie Classics and caught a bit of the ridiculously corny James Cagney film Yankee Doodle Dandy, the heavily fictionalized biopic of George M. Cohan, the songwriter-performer who wrote all sorts of ridiculously corny American songbook songs.

Naturally, I sang along with "For It Was Mary," "Over There," the eponymous "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and - of course - "Grand Old Flag."

Earlier in the day, when I'd served breakfast (grits) and lunch (hot dogs and potato salad) at St. Francis House, I wore a light blue ball cap with the flag on it.

In donning my flagged apparel, I was a bit concerned that someone might take me for a jingoistic, white nationalist - the RWNJ's having done such a good job of co-opting the use of the flag. (Fortunately or unfortunately, they've somewhat diluted the field by also flying Trump 2024, Fuck Joe Biden, Don't Tread on Me, Confederate, and even Nazi flags.) I thought about taping a little note onto my cap indicating that I was "Baptized a Catholic, but born a Democrat" or maybe "LWNJ," but decided to tough it out.

In any case, I like the flag just fine, and am happy to see people flying it, especially on holidays.

My sister Kath has the flag that draped my WWII vet father's coffin and, when she had her house in Wellfleet, she used to put it out on Memorial Day, the Fourth, and Labor Day.

I have a small American flag, one of the flimsy little ones they give out in Boston's Downtown Crossing on the Fourth. It's in a vase in my kitchen alongside the flimsy little Ukrainian flag I got at a Slava Ukraini rally in the winter of 2022.

So, yeah, I'm mostly happy to be an American and like the flag well enough. If I had a house, I'd probably put a flag out on patriotic holidays. Partly because I'm mostly happy to be an American and partly to take ownership of the flag metaphor back from the RWNJs.

But I sure wouldn't want to live any place where I was forced to fly the Stars and Stripes. So I guess I won't be moving any time soon to an under-development 55+ community (1776 Gastonia) in Gastonia, North Carolina, that will be requiring all of its residents to fly the flag all the time. 

"We're handling the American flag like an architectural element," Brock Fankhauser, the owner and founder of Great American Homes, said. "We are installing it similarly to a fixture."

Fankhauser said each resident will be given an American flag upon moving in and will have agreed to display it in front of their homes at all times. Though, Fankhauser stressed his community is not associated with any particular political party.

"I've also said it's very important for us to distance ourselves from any political movement, any political party, and any political figures," he said. "We are completely detached from that." (Source: WCNC)

I could see it if they issued everyone an American flag and encouraged them to, say, fly it on those patriotic holidays that call for flag-waving. Or if the community decided it was part of their decor and flew a bunch of flags in public places, like baskets full of petunias hanging from the light poles. 

But forcing everyone into 365 days of flag flying seems kind of un-American to me. 

And what about when the flag gets old, frayed, and dirty.

Years ago, the local Post Office had a flag out front that got so filthy from car exhaust that it was the red-brown-and-blue. It looked terrible. Eventually, after enough of us complained, they replaced it with a fresh flag.

Who'll be paying for the replacement flags for the Gastonia 1776 residents when the originals they're issued wear out? Are you on the hook to buy your own? And if it's your responsibility, does the replacement flag have to be the same as the original? If you don't like the original - for all I know, they'll be distributing cheesy looking polyester flags made in China, not heavy duty cotton flags made in America, the nice ones where you can see the stitching, the ones that look like they were crafted by hand by one of Betsy Ross's great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters -  can you upgrade on your own. Or does the covenant have specific size, fabric, and country of origin requirements?

As I said, the whole thing seems un-American to me. 

Good thing I wasn't planning to decamp to Gastonia anytime soon.

Meanwhile, hey, it's my flag, too. "Forever in peace may you wave."

No surprise here (at least to me).

For more than 20 years - first as a professor at Tuck (Dartmouth's business school), and later at USC - David Kang has kept track of the colleges and business schools that the CEO's of Fortune 500's attended. And he was shocked by what he found. 

“The results were stunning,” he told Fortune. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate.

But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.” (Source: Yahoo News)

My parents always told us that the Rogers kids were not like everyone else - this when we wanted, say, to stay out playing late with all the other kids in the neighborhood, or go swimming at Coes Pond (which they considered dirty, which it probably was; the one time my sister Kath and I were allowed to go there with friends - late grammar school/early high school - Kath ended up with an ear infection) - and here is a case where my parents, decades after the fact, are proven to have known best. When it comes to thinking the "Ivy Leagues would dominate" the Fortune 500 corner offices, I never would have predicted it at all. In fact, that's a finding I would have found stunning.

Maybe the fact that "no college" came out on top surprised me. (But not if I really think about it. "No college" may had only seven or eight mentions, but those mentions were one more than graduates from specific schools like Ohio State or Texas A&M.)

Anyway, I'm not stunned by the lack of Ivy League undergrads among the ranks of Fortune 500 CEO's.

I know plenty of folks who have Ivy League undergraduate degrees. Some of them (probably most, now that I think of it) are lawyers. Some of them are doctors. Some of them are management consultants. Some of them went into finance. Some went into social services or teaching or politics. Some went into the arts. 

Sure, this may be an artifact of where I live and who I rub shoulders with, but I don't know a lot of folks who crawled up through the ranks of Exxon-Mobile or Walmart to grab the brass ring of CEO-dom.

And my understanding of the undergraduate recruitment process is that students who want to succeed in business - i.e. go to a prestige B-school and make a lot of dough - vie for post-college jobs at a high-end management consulting firm (like Bain) or a high-end financial outfit (like Goldman). 

Or they're going to make a go at being an entrepreneur. Or taking a flyer on some startup in hopes that it would turn into a unicorn and make them enough to retire by thirty.

Decades ago - we're talking mid-1970's - I had a crappy office-temp job at a manufacturing company in Boston that made blue jeans. (I probably didn't have to say mid-1970's here, because mid-1970's was probably the last time any clothing was manufactured in Boston.) I can't remember the name of the company; it wasn't a brand I knew of. (I wore Levi's or Wrangler's.) But it's tag had something to do with the American flag. Anyway, I was talking to one of the managers one day - a fellow a few years older than I - and was shocked to find out that he'd graduated from Harvard.

What was he doing at a down-market dungaree company in Boston? Why wasn't he in law school or med school?

I'm guessing now that whatever it was called, it was a family business, But even back then I found it "stunning" that a Harvard grad was working there. 

Fast forward, and I'd still find it stunning to discover many folks with an Ivy League degree working for CVS, Caterpillar, Ford. (Less stunning to find one at, say, a Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or the like.)

In any case, it's good to know that:

A fancy degree isn’t required for business success, and top-tier corporate executives usually don’t have elite educations...

“It’s an extraordinary testament to the vitality of this country, the incredible range of universities that these people went to,” Kang said. “It’s a country that has a massive economy, and many of these companies in the top 500 are not white-shoe law firms, they’re pharmaceutical, they’re manufacturing, et cetera.”

Which is not to say that an Ivy League undergrad won't help you claw your way to the top in other careers.

Just look at the Supreme Court.

John Roberts, Harvard/Harvard Law. Sam Alito, Princeton/ Yale Law. Neil Gorsuch, Columbia/Harvard Law. Ketanji Brown Jackson, Harvard/Harvard Law. Elena Kagan, Princeton/Harvard Law. Brett Kavanaugh, Yale/Yale Law. Sonia Sotomayor, Princeton/Yale Law.

Give another hoya and a chu-chu-ra-ra* for Clarence Thomas, who went to lowly Holy Cross, but gained ground by getting his law degree from Yale.

Only Amy Coney-Barrett, considered the most under-credentialed supreme in recent memory, graduated from the relatively unknown Rhodes College, and got her law degree at Notre Dame. (Her being on the Court is somewhat stunning, but she did have impeccable political leanings, which made her a darling of the Federalist Society, which pretty much rubber stamps the judges when conservatives are in charge.)

So, if you want to become a Supreme Court Justice, you've got a better chance to achieve your goal if you've gone to an Ivy. (And an upper echelon Ivy like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, at that. If you only manage to make it into Cornell you're probably better off aspiring to be a Fortune 500 CEO.)

But if you want to be a Fortune 500 CEO, YAY Good Old State U! (By the way, Jack Welch, late of GE and this world, got his undergraduate degree at UMass and a PhD from Illinois.)

And that's a good thing. (State U. Jack Welch wasn't necessarily a good thing.)

Generally, if someone is “resilient and smart” and works very hard, it doesn’t matter if they go to Harvard or a state school, Kang said. If anything, he added, going to a school that affords them less privilege will force them to “learn more business and people skills” earlier. 

Indeed!

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

* Personally, I would never give another hoya and a chu-chu-rah-rah for Clarence Thomas, but, having grown up in Holy Cross' hometown of Worcester, Mass, I do happen to know the college's fight song. 

Bye Bye Birdie

Elon Musk acquired Twitter last October for $44B; the company is now worth $15B. (So much for the theory that Musk's a genius.) Since buying the platform, Musk has rampaged through it with narcissistic ferocity and Trumpian ineptitude. He cut back on content moderation. Deliberately or not, he promoted rightwing accounts and conspiracy theories - some promoted by his personal account. The number of users declined, as did traffic. Lots of employees got laid off; lots of employees left because of his heavy handed rule and cruelty. Musk stopped paying a lot of his bills. Like his rent. 

Yes indeed, Twitter under Musk has been a hot (and not-so-hot) mess.

I'm a Twitter user, but not much of one. My 867 (give or take) followers (including my big name followers: Nancy Sinatra and Joyce Carol Oates) puts me above the average (707), and I follow 1,158 (give or take) tweeters. I've never been much for tweeting, but when I started using my dormant account in 2020, during the election season, I was a heavy and regular commenter, which is how I accrued those 867 followers.

When I was active, it was mostly fun to vent with fellow travelers. On Twitter, I reconnected with a couple of former colleagues, and with a grammar school classmate I hadn't seen in nearly 60 years. Sometimes my comments got a lot of play. (My record - I believe it was something about Bill Barr - got over 1,000 likes.) Once in a while, someone responded to one of my comments with a vicious attack. These attacks gave me pause. Unlike the attackers - who were all anonymous - I use my real name and the city I live in. Would this crazy AR-wielding MAGAt actually come after me? Fortunately, I'm such small potatoes, I'm sure that no one would consider me worth the trouble or the bullets. 

There are a number of tweeters I follow because I like their take on things political. These include presidential historian Michael Beschloss, Congressmen Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and a couple of legal eagles (Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe and Andrew Weissman, who was part of Robert Mueller's crew). I follow some media folks, like Rachel Maddow. And I follow some Red Sox and Boston-related accounts. And a few writers (e.g., JCO and Stephen King).

Because of all the meddling Musk has wrought, the accounts I like to follow don't show up as regularly on my timeline as they used to. Instead, I have to seek them out, or wade through a bunch of right-wing nonsense that Musk has elevated. 

I don't comment as much as I used to, but I still go onto Twitter throughout the day to check on the news. 

But if Twitter went away tomorrow, oh well.

Twitter - the platform - is probably not going away tomorrow, but the Twitter brand, thanks to imperial whim, is no more.

Twitter is now called X, which is Musk's go-to letter. (He even has a child named X Æ A-12, who goes by X.)

Not clear what Tweets will be called. I've seen Xs and I've seen Xeets. My guess is everyone will still call them Tweets, and say that they're tweeting, as opposed to X-ing.

The rebrand is part of a longer-range attempt to turn Twitter, errrrr X, into an app that does everything. As newly minted CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted/x'd/xeeted (which sounds likes excreted):

"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities. Powered by A.I., X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine."

Can't wait to do my banking at the House of Musk. Not.  

On their way to rebrand, they've also gotten rid of the little blue Tweety bird that's been around since the creation. It may not be as universally recognizable as the Coca Cola logo, but anyone on social media sure knows the little blue bird. 

Alas, poor Tweety, it's being replaced by the ultra-inspired X:

Yawn. 

I've got a hunch I'm not going to be long for Twitter X. What'll I do with all that free time?

Water, water everywhere

After 30+ years living in an old - really old - building, I am no stranger to water raining down on my (inside) head.

Some of the leaks were more memorable than others. 

Early on, a woman was living in the flat above ours. She had
weekend custody of her 9-year-old son. The woman was a very heavy (pass-out drunk) drinker, and one afternoon she was passed out drunk and her son (understandably, a little brat) deliberately overflowed the tub. Which came streaming down through the light fixture in our foyer. Swell.

Then there was the Great Flood of Ought-Five, when the folks who owned the top floor unit ill-advisedly (we warned them!) left their heat on at 55 degrees in some pretty brrrrrr February weather when they weren't home. An uninsulated pipe that was flat-up against an exterior wall sprung a leak. The top floor unit suffered about one-hundred bucks worth of damage. As for the rest of us, well...Thanks to the cascade, our damage came to about $50K and we were living at a hotel or squatting for a bit with my sister Trish for a about six weeks in total. 

Our unit is an upside-down duplex. Living/dining room, kitchen and one bath on the first floor; bedroom, den, office and the other bath down below, connected by a narrow, winding "servants' staircase."

I've lost track of how many times that staircase has been flooded. 

It always started at night. At 2 a.m., my ears prick up to the drip-drip-drip. So it's out with the towels and the buckets and an a.m. call to the plumber to repair the ancient pipe that had sprung a leak somewhere above us. After multiple patches to the ceiling, we finally had a trap door put in so that it's easier for the plumbers to get up in there and see what up.

The leaks on that side of the unit generally stay on the staircase. And, let me tell you, it ain't easy getting up and down a narrow, windy staircase when you have giant plastic buckets every few stairs, and towels, towels, everywhere. But one time the leak made it down into the only good sized closet in our unit. Unloading that closet and figuring out what we could salvage was a pure, unadulterated treat.

This is a five story building, and the pipe leaks can happen anywhere along the line in the water, sewage, and roof drain pipes. They can impact any of the units on their way down, but, if there's a leak, it will always show up in mine. 

Sometimes the leaks are in common pipes; sometimes they're in a unit-specific place: sink, drain, toilet. 

We've seen 'em all.

I don't know how old the old pipes are in here.

The main part of the building went up in 1861, before there was indoor plumbing. So I'm guessing that some of the plumbing was plumbed in here in the late 19th century, when running water and toilets became a thang. 

I live in the back forty: a section added to the main building in 1919. So the pipes that got piped in then are over 100 years old.

Over the years, many sections of the pipe infrastructure have been replaced. I think we should be more proactive about making sure the pipes are alright. We have had a crew in here that snaked cameras down them looking for cracks, etc. So we fixed those spots. It's probably time to set that up again.

As for the latest flood sitch, this is not the first time that the lower level bathroom and my office have had water gushing out the light fixtures. (That combination of electricity and water is one of my very favorite things.)

Maybe ten years ago, they were testing some roof fix by flooding the repaired zone. The test failed, as we figured out when the waterfall fell on my office. 

We've also had ground-up water seeping into our unit's lower floor during hurricane level downpours. There's a pump around here somewhere, that my husband used to man, but we haven't needed it for years, since an outside sump pump was put in. Which is a good thing, given that Jim's no longer with us to man that pump and I don't like using it. (Understatement.) Thankfully, the backyard sump pump has so far stood up to whatever Mother Nature's pouring on. If we had a Vermont style flood, however...

Then there's the occasional sewer backup, that comes up and out of the downstairs toilet and shower. Ugh, ugh, a thousand times ugh. Bring on the bleach. We experienced a few of these over the years and, in each case, when the roto guys came in to root out the connection to the city sewer lines it was determined that the problem was flushed baby wipes clogging up the works. 

We knew the culprits. The OCD woman with the little French bulldog whose butt she wiped. And the home health care aides who took care of an elderly fellow who spent the last couple years of his long (99 years) life in pretty infirm state.

There hasn't been a baby wipe problem since OCD moved out, and the elderly fellow died.

Which gets us to the latest affront on the water front.

On Friday night we had a violent rainstorm. 

I was watching the second to last episode of the wondrous series The Last of Us. (I was late to the party, but am glad my sisters convinced me to watch it. I was under the impression that it was all going to be about oogie zombies and violence - and there's plenty of both - but it is actually a brilliantly told story of an imagined dystopia. IMHO, the series would work just as well absent the oogie zombies. The male lead, Pedro Pascal, is a god. And Bella Ramsey, who plays his young companion, is a revelation.)

At a key point in the episode, I heard it. Drip. Drip. Drip. DRIP. DRIP. DRIP.

Site of drip, drip, drip: downstairs bathroom, through the overhead light. 

Thirty seconds later, site of second DRIP, DRIP, DRIP: my office, through the overhead light.

I know the drill: buckets, paper towels, check to see if upstairs is also involved. Then call my personal 9-1-1, my friend Joe who is a fellow unit owner, but who does not live here. (Joe is an engineer by training, but his family has always owned extensive commercial property. Joe and his sibs all learned how to diagnose and repair just about anything. Our condo association is self-managed, and Joe is our main go to when things gang agley. Even when it's not a condo issue, but a personal, my unit problem, I always ask Joe's advise on who to call, what to tell them, etc. Nine-times out of ten, Joe takes care of the problem himself. Because of his family's property, he also knows the best plumbers, electricians, etc. If we need outsiders, Joe pretty much manages things. Without him, I truly could not live here.)

So I called Joe. He said he'd be right over. The minute I hung up, I tried to call him back, but he didn't answer. So I texted him to wait until morning. The storm was just awful - thunder, lightning, gushing rain to beat the band. I knew I could manage the bucket brigade of one, and that Joe might as well wait until it was light and sunny out. 

He showed up anyway, took an initial look, and did an initial assessment. 

His first theory of the case was that the building had another lighting strike - we had one a couple of weeks ago, which triggered the circuit breaker for my fridge and caused a five-minute blackout of my cable circuit - which hit a roof drainpipe and then moved lightning-quick through the building to crack the pipe the runs through the ceiling of my bathroom and office on its way to draining into the city's roof runoff drain system. 

But then he poked around a bit, and the new theory is that the flashflood overwhelmed the gutter that runs over my office and bathroom, and found some areas of weakness where the gutters meet - or, in this case, don't meet - the building's wall. 

So, we're getting the pros - Joe's pros - in to make the fix. Then I'll have to get a painter in to patch and paint the bathroom and office ceilings. I think that the lighting fixtures can be salvaged. But: What. A. Drag.

Note to self: never, ever, ever again live an old building. Never, ever, ever.

Meanwhile, guess I'll let a smile be my umbrella. Or an umbrella be my smile. Or something like that.

Glad it's not Vermont-level flooding, but I'm so sick of water world...