Never too late to exonerate the Salem witches

The Salem Witch Trials are certainly one of the more ignoble chapters in American history. Mass hysteria is never a good thing. In Massachusetts, more than 200 people were charged. They were mainly women and teenage girls, often indigent. Dorothy Good, a child of four, was among the ranks of those accused and jailed.

Of those charged, 31 were convicted. Many of them were executed by hanging. (Dorothy's mother, Sarah, was among those hanged. The child was "chained in a dungeon" for over seven months. When she was released, her father reported that his child had been driven insane. No surprise there.)

Over the (recent) years, those who were convicted have been exonerated.  But now:

More than 300 years [after the Salem witch hysteria], a group of advocates is pressing for recognition of victims like Dorothy, who have been left out of previous efforts to clear the names of those convicted or executed during the witch hunt hysteria of the Puritan era. Pardons and exonerations have largely focused on those executed in Salem, which leaves nearly 200 others unaccounted for, including those who were accused, imprisoned, indicted or lived elsewhere in the commonwealth. (Source: Washington Post)

The quest for exonerations is the work of the Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project. Their mission:

By clearing the names of the past victims, we honor the dead, educate the living, reduce the potential for future witch-hunts of all kinds, and send a message that we stand opposed to violence against persons accused of witchcraft. Exoneration is a way to show our respect to generations gone before us and provide comfort to the victims’ descendants. This is also an opportunity to learn many lessons applicable today. Through sharing the history of past witch-hunts, we learn how to identify and stop similarly oppressive actions in the present.

(For the record: I signed the petition and chipped in $25 to support their cause.) 

The witch-hunt justice proponents note that while actual witch-hunts and executions may be a thing of the past in America and Europe, they still take place elsewhere in the world. Not that we're exempt from mass hysteria. In the 1980's, there was the daycare panic, in which a number of daycare workers were wrongly accused of and imprisoned for molesting children. And then there's QAnon revving up satanic panic. Just before QAnon darkened our doors with their crazypants (and ultra-dangerous) nonsense, there was Pizzagate. Remember that one? Democrats were supposedly trafficking children out of a DC pizza parlor. One crackpot showed up with a gun to save the children...

There's also plenty of scapegoating going around: immigrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Muslims, et al. We're a nation on edge, made all the edgier because in the US, guns outnumber people.

But back to the exoneration: I'm all for it. It may mean something to the descendants of those accused over 300 years ago; it may make us think about present day parallels.

Too late is better than never at all.

Ghost influencer? Zero pay, but no demands

I am anything but a dedicated follower of fashion. 

If I have a fashion philosophy, it's never in style, never out of style. 

If asked to identify the fashion icons of my lifetime, the first to come to mind on the distaff side would be Audrey Hepburn. The simplicity, the chic. Wow! Whenever I put on a pair of black cropped pants, I think of Audrey - and wished I looked half as fabulous as she did in a pair of black cropped pants. I'm about the same height, but, alas, lack her beauty and slender. 

If I had to pick another, it would be Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Again, simplicity and chic. And what she did for the A-line dress...

I saw Jackie O' once, while I was clerking in Filene's, of all places. 

What she was doing shopping in such a middlebrow store, I'll never know. This was in the early 70's, when Caroline was in prep school in Concord. Maybe Jackie was picking up undies for her daughter or something. She certainly wouldn't have been shopping for herself.

Anyway, I was working the stationery counter on the first floor when I saw Jackie, pursued by a gaggle of women calling her name, determinately heading for the exit, not making eye contact with anyone. What struck me was how beautiful she looked. I had never thought that she was especially beautiful, but up close and almost personal as she was tearing by my counter, she was. And she was wearing an absolutely stunning full length camel haired coat and matching pants. Definitely not purchased at Filene's, upstairs or basement.

On the male side, the fashion icons that come to my simplicity mind are Cary Grant and JFK, both the epitome of timeless, sexy style. 

I have no clue who the present day fashion icons are. The Kardashians? George Clooney, who is sort of an heir apparent to Cary Grant, style-wise? 

Or are today's icons no-name influencers - no-name to me, anyway?

Turns out that there's another category entirely, that of ghost influencer, a role that's apparently filled by the daughter-in-law that poor Jackie never got to meet: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, JFK, Jr.'s wife, who was killed in a plane crash, along with her "pilot" husband and her sister, way back in 1999. 

By marrying into the Kennedy family - all that glamour, all that celebrity - Carolyn Bessette, who managed publicity for Calvin Klein, became an instant magnet for paparazzi. And an instant icon (which I guess is the old-fashioned word for influencer). In this role, she got to replace both her never-met mother-in-law, who had died a few years before the wedding, and Audrey Hepburn, who died the year before Jackie. 

Carolyn Bessette gave off the same vibe: casual elegance, simplicity, classic style. 

Although I didn't pay all that much attention to their goings and comings, I certainly knew that JFK, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy were something of the It Couple. And they were the It Couple even more so when you put them into a bit of historical context (which the NY Times has nicely done for us):

He founded George magazine; she had been a publicist at Calvin Klein. Together they embodied not only the next golden generation of a sprawling, mythic family, but also the apotheosis of the collision between fashion, pop culture, magazines and politics that defined New York in 1990s. Seemingly it was the last gasp of the monoculture, when discretion in both dress and demeanor was its own kind of currency and everyone agreed on who did it best. (Source: NY Times)

Fast forward and:

Little wonder that as fascination with that era reaches a new pitch, Ms. Bessette Kennedy has emerged as the ghost influencer of the season — one who has particular resonance as stealth wealth evolves into an embrace of more functional minimalism in the face of global chaos; disillusionment grows with the cesspool that the digital world has become; and the question of what exactly it means to be “American” takes center stage.

I wasn't aware that "fascination with that era" had reached "a new pitch." The 90's???? But I'll take the NYT's word for it.

But there we have Carolyn Bessette Kennedy as the "ghost influencer of the season."

There's a book that came out last month that's a paean to the woman, who now has a set of Kennedy-style initials of her own CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, that's a gusher to CBK's style. (There's another bio coming out next year. Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Is enough never enough?)

And the fashion brand Sporty & Rich, which I naturally hadn't heard of, but appears to be Ralph Lauren on price-inflated steroids, has been running an ad campaign that's a salute to "some of the most famous paparazzi shots of Carolyn and John." Like the bike-walking shot. Is it live or is it Memorex? I believe that's the ad and not the pap shot. 

Other brands are picking up on CBK-style as well, especially when it comes to the white shirt.

There were white artists’ shirts at Altuzarra, worn over full midi-skirts; crisp white shirts at Bally, paired with neat white pencil skirts; and asymmetric white shirts at Dior. There were long white shirts-cum-dresses at Peter Do, white shirts buttoned to the neck at Loewe and white shirts paired with the sort of boyfriend jeans Ms. Bessette Kennedy favored at Stella McCartney. That’s before you even get to the camel pencil skirts, another Bessette Kennedy staple, at Michael Kors, Gucci, MaxMara and Saint Laurent, to name a few.

No pencil skirt for me, but maybe I can iron that white shirt.  

Ms. Bessette Kennedy exists less as a person than an idea. 

Which may be a good thing, because an influencer who's a real person might expect to make a bit of coin, but a ghost influencer is just an idea. Zero pay, but zero demands. Maybe it is a good deal. 

Home sweet meth house home

Property prices in a lot of places are totally out of whack. I live in one of those places; another one is California, where a house in San Jose just went on the market for $1.55 million.

Of course, by California standards, a little bit over a buck-and-a-half for a 2,700 SQFT, 6BR, 4B house sounds almost like a bargain starter home for some lucky couple with one kid and the need for a couple of home offices. It almost sounds too good to be true.

Because, of course, it is.

 As prospective buyers (and lookie-lous) learned from Zillow:

“Home has inactive Meth lab and meth contamination, see County docs. noting Garage location, remediation process and subsequent costs associated,” the Zillow listing said. “Home has not been cleared of contamination and will be transferred to the new buyer in its current state. No access prior to property being cleared by Santa Clara County's Health Dept.” (Source: MSN)

Oh.

Turns out the previous owner, Peter Karasev had a few work-from-home businesses going. There was the meth lab. And then there was the bombmaking set up. I don't know how lucrative bombmaking is, but Karasev has been charged with blowing up a number of sites in the San Jose area, including several PG&E transformers.

Anyway, in addition to the base price for the house - which some predict will grow higher - the cost of remediation will have to be borne by the buyer. This can run anywhere from a few thousand bucks to over $100K. So the new buyer - who, remember, will be buying the place sight-unseen - may have to forget about pulling up the wall-to-wall and laying down hardwoods. 

Although I see plenty of drug users in the course of my volunteering, not to mention in the course of my walking around Boston, I don't know a ton about meth houses/meth labs. 

Oh, every once in a while, one blows up around here. But it's mostly something I associate with states like Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma where, in fact, there are more meth labs per capita than in places like Massachusetts. 

And once I may have heard one blow up, from a distance, over the phone. 

On behalf of a client, I was interviewing one of their customers, a techie using their products while working from home before most of us had heard of working from home. 

The fellow lived out in the wilds of Missouri, and while we were talking there was an explosion in the background. 

"Probably just a meth lab," he said. And we continued our convo. Just a meth lab.

What I have never given any thought to was the real estate implication of having a meth lab in the house, even if it doesn't blow up in your face. 

But it turns out that there are plenty of houses out there that were used for meth manufacture, and a by product of that manufacture is a ton of toxic chemicals embedded throughout the house. One ratio I saw was one pound of cooked up meth to five-to-six pounds of toxicity. 

So there's plenty of advice and debate out there about what to do if you're in a meth house. (Where would we be without Reddit?)

And you would, of course, have to remediate it into livability if you at all valued your life and happiness. 

Of course, sometimes you have to decontaminate for other reasons.

A billion years ago, my husband and I would sometimes pop in at open houses in the neighborhood, just to see what was up.

One in particular we were very much interested in seeing.

It was a one-family townhouse on the corner of one of the few alleyways on Beacon Hill. We had nicknamed the corner "Cat Piss Alley," because, well, the smell when you got near it was incredibly intense. 

Sometimes we'd see the owner - a doddering old geezer who would sometimes be strolling in the alley in his ratty old slippers, always with a cat or two tucked into his shirt.

After the doddering old geezer passed on to the Great Cat Reservation in the Sky, his house went up for sale. 

The open house was, indeed, an open house. 

Although it was winter, every window in the place had been thrown wide open. Still, the place was completely redolent of pungent cat urine. 

We wandered around the house, covering our noses, breathing into our gloves, stumbling through quasi-dark rooms and passageways, eyes watering. The house was larger than we had thought from the outside - almost a double house in how far back in went - and the lighting was a vintage, pre-appliance proliferation circa 1910 standard. It could support one 20 watt light per room, and that was about it. 1910 - which I'm guessing was the vintage, plus or minus a decade (probably on the plus side) of the doddering old geezer - was likely when the last reno had taken place, as the bathrooms and kitchen were similarly vintage. We were more than happy when we got back out into the fresh air. (A developer bought the place and reno'd it into pricey condos, in what must have been the gut reno to end all gut renos. I'm guessing they couldn't salvage any of those beautiful 1860 floorboards...)

I can only imagine what sorts of renovation this spot in San Jose will require 

You'd think that $1.55 million would be move-in ready, wouldn't you? Guess not when the property in question is a home sweet meth house home. And you want to buy into a biggish house in a nice-ish neighborhood in California 

World AIDS Day

I didn't actually know my colleague J all that well. But we were both part of a larger friend group at work, a bunch that hung out together at company events, went out for drinks after work, trekked into Central or Harvard Square for lunch, ended up at the same parties. And Peter, one of my closest friends at work - and still one of my closest friends period - was very friendly with J. 

This was in the late 1980's-early 1990's, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. It was in the news. On everyone's mind - especially if you were gay. Everyone I knew read Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On, a seminal work on the spread of AIDS. A few years later, everyone I knew saw the movie based on the book. 

Famous people were dying: Rock Hudson, Liberace, Freddie Mercury. And Ryan White, a kid from Indiana. A hemophiliac who contracted AIDS through a life-saving transfusion. Ryan White. An innocent who became the poster child for innocents dying of AIDS. As if the gay men, the drug users, deserved to die...

While I certainly knew it had my gay friends a bit spooked, I didn't personally know anyone who had AIDS. 

Until J was diagnosed.

Shortly after, a support group having formed, my friend Peter advised J and his partner, L, that they should open up their support group (largely gay mail couples) and invite a few trusted (female) souls to join the team. And so, along with my other closest work friends Michele and Nanni, I became part of the support circle for J and L.

And so I got to see up close and personal just how devastation AIDS was. And got to know J (and L) very well.

At first, it wasn't all terrible-terrible. 

I was mostly used as a backup, running to CVS for a prescription, taking J to an appointment when no one else was around, dropping off a meal. 

J and L decided to have a commitment ceremony, which was very sweet and touching, especially as J's declining health hovered over it. 

The decline was awful to see.

As time wore on, things went the way AIDS things went. Bad to worse. 

Grotesque Kaposi sarcoma lesions. Tremendous weight loss in what was already a thin guy. Pneumonia. Psychosis. Dementia. 

Beyond awful. Well beyond.

But I got to know J and L, two wonderful, sweet, kind, decent men. (I even got to spend one Valentine's Day with J, at Peter's house, when L was out of town.)

And I also got to know J's amazing family.

J grew up in Puerto Rico, in a very conservative Catholic family. 

Now throw everything out the window that you ever heard about how conservative Catholic families from Puerto Rico treated their gay sons dying of AIDS

As J's life wore down, his parents moved to Boston to be near him. His brothers came to visit off and on, and one of his sisters-in-law left her young kids behind to stay in Boston with J's parents, as her English was better than that of J's folks. 

Part of my mission was hanging with J's parents and SIL when they needed a break from the hospital. I could definitely see where J got his sweetness, kindness, and decency. 

I got so spend some time with J the day before he died. He was in and out of lucidity, clearly in agony, covered with lesions - even on his beautiful face. Through it all, his piano-playing hands stayed beautiful, and it was an honor to hold and (very lightly) stroke those beautiful hands. 

For some reason - I think it was because I lived the closest to the hospital - I was the first person L called when J died at 4 a.m. He just wanted to talk to someone.

The service was lovely.

Fast forward, and the support group got together to do J's panel for the AIDS quilt. (The dynamics of this group, and how we finally - and it nearly took forever - figured out what to do has made for a very funny, oft-told story over the nearly thirty years since J died. If I ever write the story, it will be called The Quilting Bee.)

I haven't seen L in years. He remarried and moved away, but came back, with his husband, for my husband's memorial service in 2014. I keep up with him through our mutual friend Peter, so know he's doing well. 

I hadn't thought of J - or AIDS, for that matter - in a while. But today is World AIDS Day. The 35th anniversary of World AIDS Day, which was founded to raise awareness about this scourge. 

AIDS continues to kill about 1 million people a year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. But there are still over 10,000 AIDS death in the US each year. 

The good news is that most people who develop HIV do not acquire full-blown AIDS, and there are 1.2 million Americans living with HIV. Which is why we don't hear as much about it as we did when our gay friends were dying left and right. 

May the progress continue. 

And here's to J's memory. 

A.I. First? After you, please.

A month or so ago, I was reading an article in The New Yorker on San Francisco, and whether or not it's in a doomloop. 

A section in the article dealt withe the impact that A.I. is having on the market for downtown office space. A.I. may consume vast amounts of environment-destroying energy, but it also requires less office space. "The great promise of A.I., after all, is to obviate the need for labor."

One of the San Franciscans quoted in the A.I.  graphs was an entrepreneur and investor named Jeremiah Owyang who - and how Bay Area can you get? - "works out of an Airstream." Here's some of what Owyang had to say:

“The A.I. industry is currently, but not for long, composed mostly of humans, and these humans are a social bunch. I’ve been to meetups on the beach, bonfires. I’ve been to house parties. That is their life stage. This is when you get your partners, get your V.C.s.” Such human pleasures wouldn’t last, he said. Workplaces in the industry were transitioning to a model known as A.I. First. “A.I. First means you turn to A.I. before you talk to a human. A.I. First means you turn to an A.I. before you hire. If the A.I. doesn’t do it, you build it. If you can’t build it, then you hire someone.” He added, “That is a precursor of what’s going to happen to corporate America.” 

Turn to A.I. before you talk to a human? One of the great things about working in a physical office was being able to bug a colleague for help, to bounce an idea off someone, to ask someone you trusted for a bit of advice. Not to mention having someone around to bitch about management with.  

Turn to an A.I. before you hire? Will this model eventually turn into a world in which the only people with jobs are those who come up with ideas and those who build the A.I. models to execute those ideas. This leaves most of the human race out. Which leaves me wondering what us normies are going to do for work?

If the A.I. doesn't do it, you build it? Once again, the only folks with job security will be those who can create an A.I. that deprives someone else of a job. Swell!

If you can't build it, then you hire someone? But who'd want to work for a manager, for a company, that would prefer to have an A.I. do the work? 

All this assumes that A.I. is going to be perfected anytime soon, which sure means you have to trust the source of all the inputs the algo ingests in order to make its decisions. We use to say GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. 

Wish I had Alexis or Siri around to ask what they thought about all this. 

As for the Golden Gate Doomloop is going to keep looping and dooming? Yes. No. Maybe. Sort of. Probably not: people love cities, so San Francisco will figure out a way to survive, even if in "the downtown of the future...there will be a smaller, tighter, less worker-oriented place."

So happy that I'm out of the employment fray. And relieved to hear that the doom(loop)sayers aren't writing off cities quite yet.

O brave new world that has such non-people in it. 

The not so friendly skies

Ove the years, I've flown a fair amount, and, if I have on occasion given fleeting thought to the idea that the plane might crash, I've never actually thought that the plane might crash because the pilot's a psychopath. 

Even after, a few years back, when a suicidal co-pilot on a flight from Spain to Germany locked the pilot out of the cabin and crashed the plain into a mountainside, I wasn't on my next flight saying a little prayer that God is the co-pilot, not someone who might put their suicidal ideation into practice. 

You get on the flight and your assumption is that the pilot is going to be A-OK.  

So it was something of a shock to this quasi-frequent flyer's system when I read last month about an Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to turn the engines off in mid-flight.

Fortunately, Joseph David Emerson wasn't the pilot. Nor was he the co-pilot. But he was an off-duty pilot, hanging in the cockpit on an almost-ill-fated flight from Everett, Washington to San Francisco.

He was sitting in the jump seat, which:

...is located in the cockpit and usually occupied by off-duty pilots, NTSB, the FAA or air traffic controllers in instances such as commuting between airports. (Source: USA Today)

Fortunately for the 83 folks on board, and thanks to the pilot and co-pilot, Emerson didn't get all that far. 

During the flight, Emerson allegedly attempted to pull the fire extinguisher handles on the engines, causing a “credible security threat,” Alaska Airlines told USA TODAY in a statement. “The Horizon Captain and First Officer quickly responded, engine power was not lost and the crew secured the aircraft without incident,” the Alaska statement continued. 

And now Emerson has been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder. 

Wow.

The pilots on board were, as flyboys are, in my flying experience, wont to be, cool as cucumbers about getting Emerson out of the cockpit and out of nefarious commission.

“We’ve got the guy that tried to shut the engines down out of the cockpit. And he — doesn’t sound like he’s causing any issue in the back right now, and I think he’s subdued,” one of the pilots said on audio captured by LiveATC.net. “Other than that, we want law enforcement as soon as we get on the ground and parked.”

Not surprisingly, law enforcement was there waiting to snap the cuffs on Emerson when the plane landed. Local police and the FBI are both in on the case. In addition to the felony charges for those 83 attempted murders, Emerson:

,,,is being charged with 83 charges of attempted murder, which are felony offenses. He’s also facing 83 charges of reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, and one count of endangering an aircraft, which is a class C felony.

Initially, there were a couple of theories of this case.

One was that Joseph Emerson suffers from mental illness. The other was that or that he was just goofing around, really wasn't doing anything, pissed off the pilot and co-pilot, and found himself over and out. 

Within a day or so, the mental illness hypothesis was looking like a strong possibility. Emerson spoke of having a nervous breakdown, noted that he'd gone 40 hours without sleep before the incident, and said that he'd been suffering from depression for the past six months. He also:

...allegedly discussed use of psychedelic mushrooms, the complaint said.

...The FBI is investigating when exactly he allegedly took the mushrooms, according to a source familiar with the investigation. They're trying to figure out whether this was a psychedelic trip, a mental health crisis or something else, the source said. (Source: ABC News)

All this leaves me wondering how often pilots undergo psychological evaluations to make sure they're coping well with their sky-high pressure, stratospherically stressful jobs. Hope it's regularly, but understand that a pilot experiencing mental health issues might not want to admit it, fearing that they'd be pulled off the job.

Meanwhile, I'm just happy that most flights I'll ever be on have both a pilot and a co-pilot. The probability of both of them having a simultaneously mental health crisis is probably low Which doesn't guarantee that the mentally healthy pilot will be able to handle the pilot having a crisis. Still, it's something.

And I'm betting that things may become a bit stricter when it comes to someone sitting in the cockpit in a jump seat. 

Bottom line: oy!

These skies may not be quite as friendly (and sane) as I've been lulled into believing...

157 pieces of Le Creuset? Talk about too much of a good thing.

I'm not a great cook. I don't love cooking. I don't swoon over cookbooks. 

But I'm a decent cook. I have my specialties, and every once in a while I add new recipes to my repertoire. I have a few cookbooks on my shelves. 

And I have a pretty well-equipped kitchen. 

No, I don't have everything, but I have a lot of things that cooks use. A full, not-entirely-matching set of pots and pans. Wooden spoons. Two spoon rests (one on each side of the stove.) Spatulas. Other utensils. Two meat thermometers. Pyrex baking dishes. Meat loaf pans. A garlic peeler. Multiple graters. Etc. 

My absolute favorite kitchen item is my Le Creuset Dutch oven (5 quart, Caribbean). 

If I had to keep just one pot, that would be it. It's amazingly versatile and sturdy, and I use it all the time. I also have a Le Creuset cast iron enamel skillet (12 inch, Caribbean), which I use pretty regularly.

Counting the two lids and the one silicone handle cover (Caribbean), I own five pieces of Le Creuset. 

Which seems like plenty.

Which is not to say that, when I happen upon a Le Creuset something-or-other on sale, I'm not tempted to get it. 

But what do I need with a Le Creuset baking dish? I have Pyrex. 

What do I need with a Le Creuset spatula? I have Rubbermaids.

What do I need with a set of Le Creuset ramekins? I don't cook anything that demands a ramekin, although I supposed I could use some of those cute little ramekins if I wanted to make make cute little individual quiches.

And Le Creuset is crazily expensive. Plus crazily heavy. (I live in fear of dropping that Dutch oven onto my induction stovetop and fracturing the glass.) And I don't have any place to store it. And I really and truly am not enough of a crazy cook to warrant buying any more Le Creuset. And I'm not getting any younger, and Le Creuset ain't getting any lighter. (I rue the day when I will no longer be able to heft a Dutch over full of chili.)

There are so very many reasons why I would never in a million years be interested in acquiring the 157-piece Le Creuset set that Costco has been offering. Even if it were available in Caribbean, rather than red. Even if it didn't cost $4.5K. 

I'm going to have to go on record here and say that 157 pieces of Le Creuset that has be delivered to your house on a pallet is too much of a good thing.

Seriously, if you're enough of a cook that you want 157 pieces of Le Creuset, you likely already have mixing bowls, spatulas, and a Dutch oven. Etc. And, sure, the pie bird's cute. But a pie bird? And don't get me going on the gravy boat. 

I grew up in a meat and potatoes family (fish on Fridays, of course), so there was a lot of gravy on the family table. And fancy (holiday meal) and plain aluminum (daily supper) gravy boats. Gravy was served whenever there was a roast something or other, which meant Sunday and at least one other day during the week. Or when we had meatloaf, which also called for gravy.

But I'm guessing that the era of families sitting down to a big meal composed of roast something or other, accompanied by gravy (boated or not), is long gone. 

Gravy boats, I suspect, come out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, because turkey and gravy go together like turkey and stuffing. Like turkey and cranberry sauce. You just gotta have it. But that's twice a year when you'd want to drag out your Le Creuset gravy boat. 

Admittedly, I'm looking at that array of Le Creuset, and that small frying pan looks mighty fetching. But I have a small frying pan, which I use to make an omelet. And I got it at TJ Maxx for $13.99 a million years ago. 

I guess I'm just not enough of a passionista. Maybe if I were a gung ho cook, I'd think differently.

But, seriously, who needs all this too-much-of-a-good-thing Le Creuset. 

Not me. 

Which is a good thing, given that it's already sold out.

While you're contemplating the last of your leftovers

There are few things I like better than a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce, a pickle, and - to really max the carb load - a dollop of stuffing.  And since this is the last day when you should safely be eating leftover turkey, I hope you enjoy every scrumptious bite.

I don't think I'd feel quite the same if my sandwich was going to be made with leftover Tofurky, which is plant-based faux turkey. 

Not that I've got anything against vegetarians. I could easily be vegetarian, or vegetarian adjacent at least. And I don't have much against vegans, either, even though they tend to be pills about food items like milk, eggs, and honey. But vegan food can be quite tasty. (I have a niece who's a pescatarian, but who does some vegan cooking and baking, and does a great job.)

But if there's one vege-vegan-y food that I've never been drawn to, it's tofu.

I've always found it bland and slimy. If I need to find meatless protein, give me a tablespoon of peanut butter over a cube of tofu any old day.

Decades ago - when vegetarians were considered weird, and no one had even heard of vegans - my brother Tom went through a tofu phase, prompting a family wag (can't remember which one: we all have plenty of wag in us; it may even have been Tom himself) to coin the phrase "there's no fu like a tofu."

Anyway, the Thanksgiving-ish part of this is that I've never wanted any part of Tofurky. I'm all about the real deal.

Nonetheless, I was delighted last week to read an article about a Washington Post tour of the Tofurky plant, which is in Hood River (Oregon, as exactly no one will be surprised to read). 

Tofurky was first produced (discovered? invented?) over twenty-five years ago and since then has brought millions of "holiday roasts" to market. 

These days, when there are so many vegetarian and vegan alternatives, and no one rolls their eyes when someone announces they're a veg, Tofurky has become something of:

...a nostalgia food, hearkening for vegetarians and vegans an era when holiday main dishes were often expected to be meat-based. The roast is their rebuttal to Norman Rockwell’s iconic Thanksgiving turkey, with its own cachet and fame.

Tofurky was the trailblazer, setting the standard for a plant-based offering that still captured the festivity of the holiday season. These roasts, with their bouncy exterior and squidgy wild rice stuffing, some accompanied by a packet of gravy and even a vegan brownie for dessert, haven’t changed much over time, and that’s just the way devotees want it. Like the green bean casserole with canned mushroom soup — could you make it more “gourmet” and contemporary? Yes, but holiday diners want it just the way they remember it.

I'm all for holiday food nostalgia. For me, the can't do without nostalgic item is pineapple-raisin sauce at Easter. And I can't say I wasn't happy when my sister Trish made my mother's traditional creamy fruit, nut, and marshmallow "salad" for Christmas Eve a few years back. It was every bit as tasty as I remembered, but, alas, sweet enough to hurl anyone into a diabetic coma. So if that only gets repeated every decade or so, that's fine. (If Trish wants to go Christmas Eve nostalgia again, I'd prefer the kidney bean and meatball casserole, thanks.)

But I do get nostalgic food associations with the holidays. Just that mine wouldn't be for Tofurky. Which may be too bad, because it doesn't sound all that terrible:

The finished roast is not jiggly and bland like tofu. It’s savory, with good chew and something Thanksgiving-ish and autumnal imparted by the stuffing.

An interesting aspect of Tofurky is that, unlike many of the recent meat substitutes, it make no attempt to pass for real meat. Yes, at one point, it did come shrouded in fake "turkey skin", but that feature was tossed. 

The company has sold 7.5 million holiday roasts, and not because anyone has ever confused them with a burnished-skin, 30-pound Butterball.

Anyway, in early November, the plant switches its operations to focus for a few days on producing nothing but the roasts before returning to its regular production of meat substitutes, like tofu cold cuts. 

An interesting aspect of Tofurkey production, which combines the tofu-based masa (dough) with what sounds like a tasty wild rice stuffing (wonder if they use Bell's Seasoning in that stuffing), is that:

The whole process owes something to the Fig Newton. More than a century ago, James Henry Mitchell invented the apparatus that made the “oo-ee, gooey, rich and chewy” cookie a smash hit. It was a funnel within a funnel that allowed two separate mixtures to be pressed out around each other at the same time.

Another fun bit:

Employees cheer as finished Tofurky is packaged and prepared for shipment.

It's difficult for me to imagine that the folks working in a Butterball factory cheer when the creepy pop-up eye thermometer is stabbed into the turkey and the pasty, fleshy bird is shrink-wrapped.

Still, although I may someday try Tofurky out, I'd still rather have a good-old fashioned turkey turkey sandwich, even if that turkey was a Butterball. 

Pink Slip-less Friday

Forget Black Friday. This is a Pink Slip-less Friday. 

I'll be lolling around with a turkey sandwich, not shopping.

Thanksgiving 2024

Thankful for:

• Family. (Many are friends, too!!! Yay!)
• Friends. (Some are like family!!! Yay!)
• Dogs. (Their very existence makes living worthwhile.)
• Health. (Iffy ankle aside, I'm kinda/sorta rockin' geezerhood, healthwise. So far, anyway.)
• Medical care. (My doctor, dentist, and eye doctor are all in walking distance, and all still in their 40's. All are excellent. Bonus points for being young.)
• Home. (Sure, I'd like a rug under my dining room table, but I love the cool new lamp in the LR. Sometimes Wayfair does have just what you need. Or just what you want, anyway.)
• My neighborhood. (Beacon Hill. Lucky me. The Boston Public Garden is my front yard.)
• My City. (Oh, oh, Boston, you're my home.)
• NYC. Chicago. (If I had to pick another city.
• My State. (Guess I'm pretty much a homer, but this is it for me.)
• Maine. Vermont. (Maybe. If push comes to shove.)
• My Country.  (Sadly, not always. Still beats many alternatives.)
• Ireland. (If I had to pick another country.)
• Galway. (If I had to pick a city in another country.)
• Old sweaters. (Some go back 30+ years.)
• New sweaters, too. (Are sweaters my hobby?)
• Comfy shoes. (And Bombas socks.)
• The baseball season being over. (How 'bout those Red Sox?)
• Truck day. Pitchers and catchers. (It'll be February before you know it.)
• Music. (Still crazy after all these years for folk, folk rock, Celtic.)
• Books. (Not the reader I was before I started obsessing on the news. Now 1-2 a month, vs. 1-2 or more a week. Still, where would I be without them?)
• Work. (Especially now that it's 99.99% in the rearview mirror.)
• Volunteering at St. Francis House. (Gotta do something, and SFH is a great place to do that something.)
• Oranges. Cherries. McIntosh apples. Nectarines. Tangerines. Blueberries....(And nuts, too.)
• Pasta. (Especially the good kind from Italy that I buy in the North End.)
• Salad, and all the good things to throw in salads.
• Sesame chicken. Teddie's peanut butter. Scallops. Asparagus. Broccoli. Etc.
• Fried clams. (Other than the light and the baseball, I'm not wild about summer. But just about now I'm missing a summertime fried clam roll.)
• My Le Creuset Dutch oven. (If you only have one pot, this is the one to have.)
• Chocolate. (What's not to like.)
• Tea. (Barry's is best.)
• Prosecco. (Alcohol of choice, for those occasions that call for alcohol, which I must say occur nowhere near as often as they used to.)
• Sense of humor. (Where would I be without it?)
• Public transportation and Uber. (Love being car-free.)
• Other stuff...

Not quite sure who(m) or what I'm thankful to exactly, but plenty to be thankful for. 

Happy Thanksgiving, 2024!

The 10th anniversary of the 50th anniversary

Today is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was going to write about what that day was all about for an almost-14-year-old Irish Catholic girl in Massachusetts, but then I looked back at what I'd written as we observed the 50th anniversary of that very dark day.

As blog posts go, I don't think I can improve on November 22, 1963.

Diamonds are the gift associated with a 60th anniversary, but that 50th anniversary post was, IMHO, pure gold.

Rent control, Fuggerei style

There aren't a lot of people living in the Fuggerei, a walled village within the walled city of Augsburg, in Germany.

In fact, there are only 150 of them, living in 142 one-bedroom apartments - LR, Kitchen, 1BR, Bath - in what bills itself on its website as "the oldest existing social housing complex in the world."

The Fuggerei has been around for over 500 years, but I just came across it a month or so ago. Now, I'm thinking of making a special trip to Germany to check it out.

The complex was established in 1516 by Jakob Fugger, a wealthy local banker who wanted to create affordable housing for workers who were trading in the farm for city life, and flocking to Augsburg. 

The annual rent was one Rheinischer Gulden, then roughly the equivalent of a month's rent, and today equivalent to $1.07. And the annual rent today remains the same. Not the same as in the equivalent of a month's rent. The rent is actually $1.07 a year - self-imposed rent control.

Talk about the ultimate in rent stabilization. 

Here were the requirements in 1516:

To live in the Fuggerei, the applicant must be of Catholic faith, low income, zero debt, and be “upstanding” in the community (whatever that meant). Besides these requirements, you had to promise to say three daily prayers for the Fugger family. Then there was the matter of the curfew

If you were caught outside of the walls after 10 p.m., you had to pay admission to reenter the Fuggerei. (Source: Night Daily)

Although the curfew has been relaxed a bit - and there's indoor plumbing and other modern conveniences - the requirements remain pretty much the same. (All residents have to take on some part-time task to support the community, at jobs such as landscaping or night watch.) And if you're wondering what the prayers are: one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and one Apostles Creed, which sounds kind of like a typical penance given to a kid when they're making their Confession.

The complex has duplicate red-roofed structures that are two floors, with an apartment on each, and by 1523 it reached 52 buildings. The Fuggerei eventually gained its own town square and a Catholic church, becoming a true settlement, instead of a walled-in neighborhood. Soon, local officials had to look to the future.

In 1521, Jakob gave the Fuggerei to his hometown, stipulating that the rules would be kept in place, and that the Fugger family would remain involved. (Today, the Fugger Foundation maintains the community.)

Over the years centuries, the settlement has been updated. Indeed, 75% of the buildings were destroyed by bombing during World War II. They were rebuilt to have the same external look and feel and the little town is utterly charming. Whatever the modernizations, some of its quirks have been preserved. 

Because of its age, there are still some odd features floating around, such as its doorbell pulls. With each apartment being identical, residents would accidentally go into each other’s homes. To resolve this, the construction team built unique iron pulls for every door.

Besides the iron pulls, there are still hand-pump wells scattered across the grounds. There’s also a cast-iron fountain from 1744, a few buildings with their original 16-century address numbers, and an ancient school, hospital, restaurant, beer garden, and church are still functional.

The Fuggerei apartments are on the small-ish side - 500 to 700 square feet - so okay, according to this tiny house girl, for a single person. A bit more challenging for a married couple but, hey, the price is right. And saying a few prayers a day, and contributing to community life, hardly make for an onerous burden when you're only paying a buck a month to live there.  

There have been some notable residents over the years. Mozart's great-grandfather, Frank Mozart, once lived there. And Dorothea Braun got caught up in the Augsburg witch hunt of the 1600's. The authorities coerced Dorothea's daughter into accusing her mother, and coerced a confession out of Dorothea herself, who was beheaded and had her body burned.

If you're ever in Augsburg, you can take a tour of the complex. The price of admissions is four Euro. Or about five times the monthly rent.

Prayer requirements aside, we could use a few more Fuggereis around here.

Can't wait to see the Fuggerei for myself.

What, me get suckered by a scam? Me????

I read (and write) about scams all the time. And, of course, I pride myself on my acuity, my brainpower, et all sorts of cetera smart-person things. So you'd think that I wouldn't fall for one.

And yet. 

The other evening, I was sitting there watching the news and answering emails from folks looking for help from Christmas in the City, a charity for kids I've volunteered with for years.

And then the phone rang.

From the Bank of America.

It said that right on my very phone. And the phone number was the one that was on the back of my ATM card. (C.f., spoofing.)

Apparently, as I was informed by "Justin," my credentials had been hacked by a gonif who'd gotten a hold of my social, etc., and was transferring money via Zelle, which is the funds transfer app used by BofA.

"Justin" coached me through a number of steps that didn't really make all that much sense. But, what the hell, the phone number was BofA's. 

Without ever asking for any personal info of the sort I'd want to keep confidential, "Justin" managed to scam me out of $1,300.

All along, I kept telling myself, none of this makes any sense. Why would I need to set up a couple of transactions to catch the fraudster? 

I kept asking questions, and the answers might have seemed absurd, but there I was, chumping right along. Even though my rational brain kept telling me this is a scam. Mostly, I was obsessing on the initial message, which was that my identity had been stolen.

"Justin" might have tried to con even more out of me, but my pushback was getting more agitated, so he transferred me to his "manager," a fellow named "Carlos."

Old "Carlos" got pretty testy when I asked a couple more questions. And when I told him I was going to call BofA, he got a bit snippy-snappy, telling me, I'd just end up back speaking with him.

Which, in fact, folks DID NOT HAPPEN. Because "Carlos" is no more working for BofA than 

After a half-hour wait to speak with someone, I got a very calm and efficient customer service rep who said that I was, indeed, a victim of fraud. But because I had reported it within the 24-hour transfer review window, the fraudulent transactions were canceled. (My understanding is that, if you fail to report it during the transfer review window, you may be out of luck - and your hard-earned money.)

Phew!

Sure, I was tired. It had been a long week. It had been a long day.

And I was (understandably) upset by hearing that my credentials had been stolen, that malefactors from the Dark Web were malefactoring in my name!

Still, I'm smart and "Justin" and "Carlos" sounded like morons from the jump - even though they used a few clever-ish techniques. (E.g., providing a phone number wrapped in letters, beginning and end, so that it didn't look like a phone number. Until it was the phone number that Zelle would send my money to.)

Nonetheless, I am embarrassed to admit, I was suckered.  (And I guess I have to rethink that "morons," as they managed to temporarily sucker me.)

Throughout this encounter, my rational self kept telling my riled up, identity stolen self, that this was a scam. But I entered into some sort of zombie apocalypse fugue state and, even though my rational self kept telling me to hang the f up, I stayed on the call.

The only even vaguely similar experience I've ever had occurred when I was 16 and a newly minted driver. At 6:30 a.m., on my first solo outing in the family car, I dropped my brother off at the Tatnuck Country Club, where he was a caddy. There was one other car in the parking lot, a yellow something or other that belonged to Ron G, the assistant pro and caddy master.

As I made my turn in the (large, empty) parking lot, my rational brain kept telling me that, at the angle I was heading, I was going to hit Ron G's yellow something or other. And yet I could not stop myself from making the turn and hitting Ron G's yellow something or other. I was going about 5 mph, so I didn't really do any harm. And Ron G was pretty nice about the incident. I don't think there was any insurance implication. (Maybe Tom remembers.) 

After all these decades, I still can fully recall my fugue state, slow-driving the family Galaxy 500 (Black Beauty - all our cars had names) into the one and only parked car in the Tatnuck C.C. parking lot. 

So it was that, in a similar suspension-of-rationality fugue state, I got scammed. 

At least I was smart enough to realize it before any damage - other than to my wounded ego - was done. 

I will admit that, on occasion, I have been suckered out of $10 on the street by someone with a good story. Whenever I gave someone a few bucks based on what is patently - or at least likely - a lie, I rationalize it as at least I heard a good (sob) story. In fact, I would often tell the person that I didn't believe him/her, but was giving them the money because of their storytelling ability. The only time I got annoyed at someone when they approached me twice in as many days - in the very same place - with the same bullshit story. I told him he needed to get a new territory, or at least learn to recognize his marks better. 

Anyway, I now feel like one of those little old ladies who, next thing you know it, will be sending money to Nigerian princes. Or something. 

At least "Justin" and "Carlos" got nothing for their troubles. And the phone number for the Zelle transfer - BOA3033042412Z - will now be flagged (and, thus, unusable) in the Bank of America and Zelle.

I'm not quite going to say "if it happened to me, it can happen to anyone." Even though that's what I'm vain enough to be thinking.

Be careful out there!

Resorting to resort fees

One of the more aggravating aspects of modern life is the seemingly extraneous fees that get added on to ticket purchases. Convenience charge larded on to a ballgame or concert ticket you just forked over big bucks for? Whose convenience are we talking about here? Surely it's more convenient for the venue to deliver the ticket electronically rather than have a living, breathing human being print out - or grab from the stack - the tickets you just bought, put them in an envelope, and make sure they get to the mailroom. Where someone has to stamp the envelope and make sure it gets to USPS. Convenience fee my foot. Gouge fee is more like it.

Even more perplexing are the charges tacked on to a hotel room rate, often dubbed resort fees (even when the hotel isn''t all that much of a resort).

Resort fees are among the most loathed in the travel realm. These are usually mandatory fees that hotels apply to cover amenities such as access to a gym and the internet and less useful things like free local phone calls.

The Biden Administration lumps them in with other “junk fees,” including service charges on concert tickets, late credit card payment penalties and costs to check baggage on an airline.

“They add up to hundreds of dollars a month,” said President Biden, according to prepared remarks for his State of the Union address in February. “They make it harder for you to pay the bills or afford that family trip.” (Source: NY Times)

Not that they should be such a big matter of priority, but there are a couple of proposals scooting around Congress that will create some traveler protection and transparency about these little buggers - little buggers that may not be as big a nuisance as little bed buggers, but which are just as difficult to find out about in advance. You check in, and WOW! JUST WOW!

Things like local taxes, I get, but some of these other fees.  

I've often asked myself why the hotels (and the ticket sellers) don't just add those fees into the baseline cost. After all, we're not dumb. We figure out pretty quickly what the true cost is.

Here's the answer to why not:

Hotels charge fees “to keep their published base rates lower to compete with other hotels in online or mobile tools,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and the founder of Atmosphere Research Group based in San Francisco. “It’s annoying to the traveler because hotels are not being transparent and resort fees are unavoidable.”

Oh. So the hotel gets their rooms booked - good for them! - but ends up with a guest who's pissed off at you from the jump. Even before they get to the room and find hair in the sink, a lightbulb out, a brick wall view, and a par-tay going on in the next room. Even before they get to the room, lift up a corner of the mattress, and spy what looks suspiciously like bed bug scat.

I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing that resort fees tend to show up at hotels that are a bit higher up the food chain than Motel 6. So travelers are already prepared to pay a price that's not rock bottom. I may be wrong here, of course. The lower end spots might charge for spotty Wi-Fi or a little box of cornflakes and some rubbery bacon. But I'm still guessing - and I'm generally a reasonably good guesser - that there are more resort fees being charged at the higher-ups.

In any case, as ubiquitous as resort fees seem, a hotel industry trade associations claims that "only 6 percent of hotels charge them, averaging $26 a night." Small potatoes, maybe, but it all adds up to about $3B a year. 

As often as not, you're paying for something you may not want or care to take advantage of.

One swank resort cited in the Times article charges $50 extra for a basic like Internet access, but also include a welcome drink, yoga on the beach, and an hour a day use of a bicycle. Sure, I'll use the Internet access, and wouldn't say no to the welcome drink. Thanks/no thanks for the use of a bicycle to pedal down to the beach for some yoga.

That fee for beach yoga isn't the only oddball resort fee out there. I found a Washington Post round-up from last spring that called out a bunch of them.

One Chicago hotel - love Chicago, but "resort"??? - said their resort fee covered artisanal water. That artisanal water was Costco's Kirkland brand. Me? If something's supposed to be artisanal water, I want it to be hand-bottled by a monk in the Swiss Alps. (The Chicago hotel guest complained and they gave him a couple of bottles of Fiji water.)

Among other amenities that WaPo found bundled under resort fees:

• A luxe Hawaiian resort - minimum room rate: $1,200 per night - tacks on a $50 fee that includes coconut husking for you. There were more reasonable items, like hula, paddleboard, and ukulele lessons, but shouldn't $1.2K per night already include a few of these goodies?
• A small NYC chain promises travelers - only $39-45 a night -  for "filtered water in all sinks and taps." (Maybe if they also filtered the showers and toilet tanks...)
• A pricey DC hotel charges $25 for extras that include a white noise machine. 
• Boston's Hyatt has a fee that provides guests a ticker for a  couple of bucks off a trolley tour (which they probably get for free from the trolley tour company), and also offers a cup of Boston clam chowder. (At least it's not that Manhattan clam chowder abomination.)
• In Portland, Oregon, there's a hotel that comes with free use of a pool table, and a free shoe shine (subject to availability) - free in exchange for the $26 a night resort fee. (Bet that hotel's money's safe with the shoe shine promise, given that most Portland travelers are probably wearing sneakers, hiking boots, or Birkenstocks. Maybe the Doc Marten wearers would be wanting the shoeshine.) 
• The Greenbrier in West Virginia has a $39 resort fee that entitles guests to use their walking and meditation trails. I guess the alternative would be walking in the halls and meditating in your room, but these trails sure seem like they should already come with.
• There's a resort in San Diego that has a resort fee that's strictly for the birds. In addition to the usual suspects - WiFi, pool towels, beach chairs - you can look in on the hotel's "bird exhibit, featuring macaws, cockatoos and a lilac-crowned Amazon parrot who are on display daily."
• An upper-end Holiday Inn in Orlando has a $49 per night resort fee that lets you participate in something that sounds a lot like criminality in training. The Bank Heist Laser Challenge lets folks, armed with laser devices, enter a room that contains the entrance to a bank vault. In the room, you can "masterfully maneuver the security beams at this bank vault to complete your mission of getting rich quick.” No word on what's behind the door. Do you actually get rich quick? Do you get your resort fee refunded> Inquiring minds...

Even though it's only a small percentage of hotels charging resort fees, if you want to avoid the 6 percent that do, there's this:

...the website ResortFeeChecker.com can help with its searchable database of hotels.

Happy travels! And if you can't get around the resort fee, enjoy that coconut husking.

The Internet really does change everything, including Ponzi schemes.

In the late 1990s, when we were experiencing the first wave of Internet madness, Bill Gates famously/supposedly said "the Internet changes everything." And ol' Bill turned out to be pretty darned right. It's hard to think of any crevice or corner in our lives that hasn't been somehow reached and impacted by the Internet.

Even if you take off your Fitbit and ditch your phone and decide to take a long, brooding walk in the dunes, there's a non-zero chance that there's a satellite capturing the scene and tossing it into the cloud for Google Maps. Or something. 

So it's no surprise that Ponzi-schemers are using the net to lure in folks hoping the make the quick, risk-free buck that Ponzi-schemers promise.

Matthew Motil was an Ohio laborer who apparently saw podcasting as a way to get out of lugging 2x4's around construction sites. That way out was combined with another one of the current "it" things: house-flipping. 

Now house-flipping doesn't exactly require the Internet, but podcasting, well, that's another story. And the podcasting helped him widen the net that enabled him to pull off - for a while, at least - his Ponzi scheme.

Alas for Motil, a couple of months ago, the SEC caught up with him, and he's now charged with defrauding 50 investors of $11M. 

The agency said in a news release that Motil, the host of "The Cash Flow King" podcast, encouraged investors to buy promissory notes that he said were backed by first mortgages on homes in Ohio.

Motil's attorney did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

The SEC said Motil told investors that he would generate quick profits for them as he renovated, resold, refinanced or rented out the properties they helped him buy.

Motil promoted the investments as low-risk and high-return, according to the SEC.

However, the SEC said that instead of investing the money, Motil used the funds to pay "returns" to other investors — a classic Ponzi scheme pattern — and also used money to rent a lakeside mansion and buy courtside season tickets to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team. (Source: NBC News)

Motil may be a Ponzi schemer, but with a scam value of $11M, he's no Charles Ponzi, whose Roaring Twenties swindle screwed people out of what would be $220M in total's value. And then there's Bernie Madoff. Matthew Motil may have styled himself as the Cash Flow King, but Bernie - with a defraud total of around $65B - is the all time Ponzi King.

Still, as schemers, embezzlers, and conmen go, Matthew Motil is plenty fascinating. 

For one thing, he's an author. And on Amazon, there's quite the author bio:

Dr. Matt Motil is a real estate entrepreneur, best-selling author, and host of the Cashflow King Podcast. He has worked with hundreds of investors from all over the world and helped them to grow massive wealth and passive income through remote real estate investments. After spending almost 20 years in the construction industry starting as a union laborer, working his way up to senior project management, he escaped the middle-class trap, utilizing rental real estate. Dr. Motil stopped teaching higher education when he realized he was simply helping people become better employees and now teaches people how to do exactly what he did, use real estate investing to fire their bosses forever!

My favorite part here is that "Dr. Motil stopped teaching higher education when he realized he was simply helping people become better employees and now teaches people how to do exactly what he did."

Stopped teacher higher education? Huh?

Reminds me of the guy running the Scientology intake meeting I went to with a friend one bored Friday night when we were in college. We could barely contain ourselves - the original ROFLMAO - when the guy running it said that "I'd of went through college in two years if I'd had Scientology." Clearly not an English major. (He also said that, because he was on his way to becoming an Operating Thetan, he could recognize that there were people in the audience who were hostile to Scientology. If he needed Scientology to figure out that my friend and I weren't prospective Scientologists, he definitely needed to go back to college.)

Then there's the Dr. Motil thang. What kind of doctor, pray ell, is Dr Motil a doctor of? And where did he get his degree. Probably at the same college of knowledge where he taught higher education.

His book is called Man on Fire: Lessons From a Perpetual Burnout on Creating Alignment for Success, which is thus blurbed:

Man on Fire is written for anyone that knows their life hasn't reached their fullest potential. Written by someone who has failed repeatedly on the path to alignment and success.Part autobiography, part how-to book, Dr. Matt Motil shares his journey navigating the road of a wanna-be real estate investor, perpetual burnout, and closet entrepreneur. Providing lessons learned along the road as an employee while constantly searching and striving for momentum that ultimately was only achieved after pursuing his passions in real estate.This book is filled with real-world examples of battling and overcoming the 9-to-5 grind, toxic coworkers, childhood illness, cancer, and countless failed attempts at gaining momentum to ultimately creating alignment, blasting through plateaus and designing a life worth living. Everything in this book is derived from first hand experiences gained through real life struggles.

Creating a Ponzi scheme is, I suppose, an example of blasting through a plateau. So's going to prison for running a Ponzi scheme. But that's probably not a design for a life worth living 

Naturally, Motil's book is self-published. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm likely going to be taking that route with the novel I'm working on. Maybe getting his book out is how he spent some of his Ponzi proceeds. That an paying off the educational loans for earning the right to call himself Dr. Motil.

Ah, the Internet. Imagine what Charles Ponzi could have done with it?