Is North Korean even worse than we imagine?

It's hard for me to imagine a more repressive, stultifying, soul-sucking, terrifying, god-awful society than that of North Korea. And based on a recent reading of a New Yorker article by Ian Urbina on the country's forced labor program, North Korea is even worse than I've imagined.

Which is saying something.

North Korean workers are routinely shipped off to work in Chinese factories where they endure "beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be 'killed without a trace.'” They labor in a range of industries: textiles, seafood processing, construction, software. And there are an estimated 100,000 of them - likely an underestimate - imprisoned in fenced-in dorms, slaving away for next to nothing. Next to nothing for the workers, that is. More than a decade ago, it was estimated that North Korean "earned" as much as $2.3 billion from its Chinese program. Since then, they've expanded and citizens are also farmed out to Russia, Poland, Qatar, Uruguay, and Mali.

Not just anyone can get sent out of the country for slave labor. You need to be politically reliable, to lessen the chance of defections. If you have a family member who has defected, no dice. Younger workers must have parents who are still living. If the exported workers tries any funny business, their parents are punished. Another thing: given that North Korea's general population is "chronically malnourished," the general population tends to be short. But North Korea doesn't want to be embarrassed by having short people representing their country, so they look for workers who are over five-feet-one. Then there's a rigorous training/indoctrination process.

Urbina was able to ultra-secrectly survey some of the forced laborers. Here's what they had to say:

Workers are held in compounds, sometimes behind barbed wire, under the watch of security agents. Many work gruelling shifts and get at most one day off a month. Several described being beaten by the managers sent by North Korea to watch them. “It was like prison for me,” one woman said. “At first, I almost vomited at how bad it was, and, just when I got used to it, the supervisors would tell us to shut up, and curse if we talked.” Many described enduring sexual assault at the hands of their managers. “They would say I’m fuckable and then suddenly grab my body and grope my breasts and put their dirty mouth on mine and be disgusting,” a woman who did product transport at a plant in the city of Dalian said. Another, who worked at Jinhui, said, “The worst and saddest moment was when I was forced to have sexual relations when we were brought to a party with alcohol.” The workers described being kept at the factories against their will, and being threatened with severe punishment if they tried to escape. A woman who was at a factory called Dalian Haiqing Food for more than four years said, “It’s often emphasized that, if you are caught running away, you will be killed without a trace.”

Amazingly:

Jobs in China are coveted in North Korea, because they often come with contracts promising salaries of around two hundred and seventy dollars a month. (Similar work in North Korea pays just three dollars a month.) But the jobs come with hidden costs.

Much of the money is pocketed by intermediaries or reverts to the state. Workers are given a pittance an allowance, and are charged exorbitant rates for food and shelter. Most of their wages are withheld until the end of their contracts, and the workers generally end up with about ten percent of what they were promised. 

Workers usually sign two- or three-year contracts. When they arrive in China, managers confiscate

their passports. Inside the factories, North Korean workers wear different uniforms than Chinese workers. “Without this, we couldn’t tell if one disappeared,” a manager said. Shifts run as long as sixteen hours. If workers attempt to escape, or complain to people outside the plants, their families at home can face reprisals. One seafood worker described how managers cursed at her and flicked cigarette butts. “I felt bad, and I wanted to fight them, but I had to endure,” she said. “That was when I was sad.”

"Benefits" are few. Holidays, sick days? Forget about it. Workers sleep in crowded dorm rooms with dozens of fellow laborers. On the rare times they're let out, surveillance is intense. Mail is censored. 

Given that North Korea is such a rogue state, companies are not supposed to be using North Korean forced labor. There are US and US sanctions, there are regulations, but of course...

One factory Urbina looked into "has exported thousands of tons of fish to companies that supply major U.S. retailers, including Walmart and ShopRite." Not to mention McDonald's, Sysco, and the US military. 

China, by the way, considers approaching workers or snooping around worksites to be espionage. Not to mention that it usually repatriates any defectors back to North Korea, where the best outcome is that they end up in harsh labor camps.

Wherever they're dispatched to, the working conditions are terrible. Workers labor in Russian logging camps, under gulag conditions in freezing weather, without proper clothing. Construction shifts can last from 7:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. 

Impossible to imagine how worse than imaginable North Korea is. 

Stanley Cups Overfloweth. (Not THAT Stanley Cup!)

As usual with consumer fads, I've missed the boat - or the cup - with the Stanley Tumbler, the resuable water bottle that is apparently the current "it" bottle, designed to replace the disposable plastic water bottles that are gunking up our fragile environment. 

Hundreds of billions of plastic bottles full of water are sold every year, and most of them aren't recycled once the water is drunk. Instead, they end up incinerated, or in landfills, or - worse - in the ocean, where they make up a goodly portion of sludgey waste islands like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In another few years, I've read that there'll be more discarded plastic water bottles than fish in the sea. 

So any effort to replace all those Poland Spring et al. bottles with something that's built to last is a good thing. And that's why I bought a Hydro-Flask stainless steel bottle to carry with me on warm/hot day walks, which I try to remember to do so I won't be tempted to bop into a convenience store and buy a bottle of Poland Springs when I'm thirsty and a couple of miles away from home. 

A good thing, no? One less bottle in the Atlantic Garbage Patch. One less dead polar bear. One less swordfish with a body riddled with nano-plastic particles that will never decay.

Well, not so fast, especially when the virtuous reusable bottle is part of a whirling, swirling fad. As is the case with the Stanley. 

...the craze has sparked some less-than-sustainable behavior. People boast about owning dozens of them. When Target released special editions, including a much-coveted Starbucks version, it caused a mini stampede. (Source: Boston Globe)

2023 was the year of the Stanley. Thanks to clever marketers (sadly, I missed out on the marketing), spurious influencers (sadly, I missed out on the influencing), and super-exposure on TikTok and other social media platforms (sadly, I missed out on the TikTok-ing), Stanley sold an awful lot of tumblers last year. Revenues reached $750M - this in a company with revenues that were under $100M back in 2020. 

Whilereusables might seem like a good, eco-conscious investment - use it for three years and you've replaced 1,000 daily plastic water bottles. Sure, that sounds like a drop in the bucket. But when you multiple it by the 10 million Quencher water bottles that Stanley sold last year...

Alas, the popularity of the Stanley cups has a downside. People fall in love with a product, and they want more and more of it. (Ask me about Allbirds sneakers, why don't you.) And that overconsumption can negate the eco blessings if folks start collecting all the color and other versions of them. Remember, it takes materials and energy to manufacture these suckers. Steel plants burn coal...

Stanley is trying to putting more sustainable manufacturing processes in place. While the popular Quencher tumblers are "made with 90% recycled steel," the use of recycled steel is far less for its other products. "It aims to raise that to at least 50% by 2025."

Production costs aside, there's the time it takes for the purchase of a sustainable product to be worthwhile, environment-wise. 

Researchers have coined a term to measure the amount of time a person must reuse an alternative before it fully offsets the single-use product it replaces: the environmental payback period. A 2020 paper found that for straws, coffee cups and forks, metal alternatives had to be used the longest — anywhere from a few months to a few years — in order to break even.

No mention of bottles, but it probably takes a while for payback to start paying back. (What's the expression about payback being a bitch?)

Then there are other good-for-the-environment products that tend to proliferate. Sure, I no longer take bags at the grocery store or CVS. I use one of my backpacks - I swear, I only have two and one's heavy duty while the other one's for smaller loads - or one my many nylon tote bags (which do tend to fray over time...)  

As for Stanley:

Some trend forecasters say the fad is already over. “Some millennials or Gen-Z are already embarrassed to carry a Stanley,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the trendspotting newsletter, After School. “And we know what’s going to happen,” she said. They’ll sit unused, gather dust on a shelf or in a basement, or “worst case scenario, they’ll end up in landfills.”

There's a new "it" water bottle on the horizon for the influencers to start guzzling from. Owala bottles are said to be taking off on college campuses. 

The good news, of course, is that people are growing more conscious about the use (and disposal) of those odious plastic water bottles. This is good news for the environment, even if we do end up with a bit of overconsumption of the new and shiny objects that replace them.

Sea glass community in an uproar

I like beach glass.

It's pretty.

I have a few pairs of beach glass earrings, a couple of necklaces and bracelets. All in "my" colors: lovely blues and greens. 

A few times, I've found a piece of beach glass while walking along the beach. Almost as exciting as coming across a sand dollar. 

But what I didn't know about beach glass...

For one, what I've always called beach glass is actually sea glass. Sea glass is found on the ocean; beach glass can be found by a lake or river. Conceivably, some of my earrings, etc. are beach glass, but since all of my sea glass merch is local, much purchased on the Cape, I'm going with sea glass. And puting beach glass way, way, way out of my mind.

So from here on out, it's sea glass.

Another thing I didn't know is that there are a lot of folks who collect sea glass. Who very seriously collect sea glass. 

And there's a controversy around the practice of seeding, a process through which broken glass shards are deliberately thrown in the water so that waves will do their thing: tumble the glass around, smooth out the edges, work some moisture in there to create the frosted look, and turn it into sea glass that can turned into jewelry.

Purists don't like seeding. They think it's cheating if the glass was just tossed in the drink last year vs. something that was formed from a 1948 Coke bottle that someone hurled out to sea in 1948. Although it may be hard to distinguish naturally-formed sea glass from sea glass that was seeded, the real aficianados try to determine a piece of sea glass' provenance. 

If there's a controversy around seeding in general, there's a really big controversy about seeding with marbles.

Most sea glass is flat; sea glass marbles are formed from actual marbles, and they're historically a rare find. (There are a number of theories as to why sea glass marbles exist, including that in the late 1800's they were used as bottle stoppers. Another likely source come from kids who used to play a lot more marbles than they do now, with some of those marbles games played on the beach.)

“A marble is supposed to be the most exciting thing to find beachcombing. It’s the ultimate treasure,” [New England sea glass hunter Dave Valle] said as he hunted a field of beach pebbles on a recent day, holding a walking stick with a spade fashioned to one end. “TheyS [seeders] say they’re leaving this for the future? It’s littering. And it sucks the magic out of it. Who wants to find a marble someone threw there?” (Source: Boston Globe)

I don't see the big deal between a marble thrown in a few years ago vs. one that strayed from Dick and Jane's marble game in 1935, but I'm not a sea glass purist.  

And Valle and other purists are mad as hell that finding a sea glass marble, thanks to aggressive seeders, has gone "from a once-in-a-lifetime find to once a day for some hunters."

Purists vs. seeders: the outrage is flying on both sides. Enemies attacking. People and/or topics banned from Facebook forums. 

Mary McCarthy is:

...a Maryland beachcomber who has written and lectured on the cheapening effects of seeding, who want the pressure to remain on until it becomes unforgivable.

“Its most significant sin is the loss of provenance,” she said. “Beachcombers find stuff on beaches that is there for a historical reason. They’ve done the research and know there was a resort or a ferry or an amusement park or a dump, and you find things that tell that story. Throwing marbles is Easter egging. It’s artificial.”

McCarthy travels to sea glass festivals all over the country, where she will examine finds to help people trace their story. “And I spend too much time informing people their precious marble was purchased two years ago at a Michael’s.” 

Sea glass festivals? Not sure what happens here. Much as I like sea glass, and my sea glass earrings etc., doesn't it all start to look alike after a while?

Anyway, seeders - especially marble seeders - counter Valle and McCarthy with arguments that "sea glass is a diminishing resource," with "the good stuff" having all been scooped up. Modern glass is just not as high quality as old-fashioned, 1948 Coke bottle glass. Marbles get that sea glass "frosty" look pretty quickly, especially in New England, and then make their way into their second life as vase fillers or pendant necklaces. (Somewhere around here, I have a sea glass marble pendant. I suspect - now that I know of its existence - that the marble was seeded.)

There's also a mid-ground of sea glass people who are okay with some seeding, as long as it's not overdone. 

The Internatonal Sea Glass Association has not, to date, taken an official stand on the controversy, although "it is strongly discouraged."

My goodness.

I don't know when the next time I'll be walking on the beach, but I'll be on the lookout for sea glass. And since I'm such an amateur here, I'doubt I'll know the difference between natural and seeded. 

But I suspect that the sea glass community will keep on keepin' on with their uproar.

Take that, climate change!

I'm a cranberry fan.

Once in a while, when I have a drink-drink that's something other than a glass of wine, I enjoy a Cape Codder (vodka, cranberry juice, and lime). Or two. 

Cranberry and soda, with or without a squeeze of lime is good, too. If I'm out for lunch and not having an Arnold Palmer or a Diet Coke or just plain tap, it's usually a cranberry and soda. 

I don't usually keep cranberry (or any) juice around the house - too much sugar - but I like cranberry juice. I also like cranapple and crangrape. 

Cranberry juice, however, is good to keep around the house if you're susceptible to UTI's. Just sayin'. 

Thanksgiving wouldn't be Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce - the kind with cranberries in it, not the jellied blob. (Shout out to my sister Trish's cranberry sauce recipe.)

A turkey sandwich wouldn't be the a turkey sandwich without cranberry sauce.

I like to toss dried cranberries in my salad.

I like Cranberry Bog ice cream. Yum! If I'm on the Cape, that's my go to. (That an Ryder Beach Rubble.)

Speaking of the Cape, Chequessett Chocolate in Truro has a wonderful cranberry chocolae bar. (Chequessett, I heard, is temporarily closed. I hope it is just temporary. During the early days of covid, my sister Kath sent us all CARE Packages from Chequessett. A kathsend godsend.)

I like the color cranberry, which was popular when I was in high school. I had a cranberry parka, a cranberry madras skirt, a cranberry button down shirt, cranberry and black plaid luggage. Alas, cranberry as a color doesn't seem to be that widely used these days. (Has it fallen out of favor in the same way the name Maureen has? O tempora, o mores.)

Not that it has anything to do with Massachusetts - or cranberries - but I'm a big fan of the now defunct Irish group, The Cranberries. (RIP Dolores Riordan, the brilliant singer/lyricist.)

I like the fact that cranberries  are native New Englanders. I like that a lot of them are grown in Massachusetts. When it comes to agriculture, we're not known for much - unless you call Wellfleet Oysters agriculture - but we do have cranberries.

I'm always shocked when I read that Massachusetts is only #2 when it comes to cranberry growing. Weirdly - to me anyway - Wisconsin is #1. 

How can something so associated with summer on Cape Cod actually be majorly grown in Wisconsin? Ocean Spray - the cranberry growers co-operative that brings us so many great products -  is headquartered in Middleborough, Massachusetts, not Waukesha, Wisconsin. And the drink is called a Cape Codder, not a Milwaukee Slurp.

Anyway, I like the association of cranberries with my home state, even if we're just the first runner-up when it comes to cranberry production. And I'm alarmed that our bogs, thanks to climate change, are in jeopardy.

This has been going on for a while.

One of the reasons Wisconsin got to be #1 was that they have colder weather than we now do. Cranberry cultivation requires cold. And the ice that comes with frozen winters. Cold and ice cold have been in short supply here, as the climate shifts and we grow warmer. So cranberry growing has migrated to Wisconsin, and to Canada, over the years.

There is an upside to the downward slide in Massachusetts' cranberry-growing fortunes.  And that's turning our bogs into wetlands. (Or turning them back into the wetlands from whence they came.)

Wetlands, an area of land sturated by water, reduce the impacts of sea level rise and coastal erosion by acting as a sponge that can absorb flood waters. They can also mitigate climate change by storing carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Both make them a key strategy for Massachusetts’ battle to adapt to and fight climate change.

...So far, Massachusetts has completed six cranberry bog restoration projects totaling more than 350 acres. But another 18 restoration projects are already planned or under construction, according to the Division of Ecological Restoration. That would total more than 800 acres.

The seeds of grasses and shrubs that are necessary to re-grow the state’s lost wetlands are already here, lying dormant underground for more than 100 years.

“Once you bring them to the surface and bring back the right conditions, like water and sunlight, they explode back into heathy wetlands,” said Jessica Cohn, ecological restoration specialist at the Division of Ecological Restoration, which is part of the state’s Fish and Game agency. (Source: Boston Globe)

Cranberry growers have been handed a lemon, and they're turning that lemon into lemonade that will benefit all of us.

Sure, I'm sad to see our cranberry "industry" in such distress, to see our cranberry farmers - many running family operations that have been in business for over 100 years - going out of business. But I love the fact that some good's coming out of it. 

When our environment's under attack, what do you do? Stand up! Fight back!

Take that, climate change! 

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

Did I mention that Dolores Riordan is brilliant? See for yourself. 

Have a ball (python)!

If I were to have a pet, it would be a dog.

If I were to not have a pet, it would be a snake.

I'm not going to get into any deep examination of why I'm not wild about snakes - paging Dr. Freud - but I'm not wild about snakes. I find them exceedinly creepy. The eyes, the tongues, the no arms, the no legs. Slithering around. Let's just say I'm glad I live in a place where there aren't a lot of dangerous snakes. We do have timber rattlers and copperheads, but they're rare and seldom encountered on the streets of Boston. And if I swim in a local lake, I'm not in any danger of getting attacked by a cottonmouth.  (Could my feelings about snakes be the result of my Irish heritage? After all, St. Patrick did drive all the snakes out of Ireland...Way to go, St. Patrick!)

But plenty of folks do like snakes and keep them as pets. And a lot of the snakes being kept as pets, being collected even, are something called ball pythons. 

They're non-venomous, considered docile, and - unlike, say, a boa constrictor - they're relatively small, just 2-3 feet long (3-5 for females) vs. boa constrictors which range from 6 to 10 feet in length. Of course, they do eat mice and rats, so there's that. But as snakes go, they're fine as pets, if you like that sort of thing. 

And thanks to creative breeding, ball pythons come in all sorts of colors and patterns not found in nature, all part of a pretty big business of "designer" ball pythons. 

When it comes to designing colorful ball pythons, Justin Kobylka is considered the best in breeding. From Kinvoa Reptiles, his Georgia business, he's always trying to selectively breed "one-of-a-kind" ball pythons. These go for a lot of money, and Kinvoa is a multi-milllion dollar a year business. Even the ones that turn out to be not quite as unique as Kobylka hoped, still sell for plenty.

Ball pythons originated in Africa, and in the wild they are typically dark brown with tan patches and a pale underbelly. Those bred for their appearance, as Kobylka’s have been, often have a brighter palette, from soft washes of pastel to candy-colored bursts of near-fluorescence. Their patterns, too, have been transformed: a snake might be tricked out with pointillist dots, or a single dramatic stripe, or colors dissolving into one another, as in tie-dye. One captive-bred ball python’s splotches and squiggles show up only under a black light. 

...Arguably, no other snake, lizard, or turtle has been so sweepingly restyled by human effort. (Source: New Yorker)

The rarer the design - no suprise here - the more expensive. A colorful ball python can cost more than a giraffe, a lion, a tiger. (Note: an individual cannot legally own a giraffe, a lion, or a tiger. But zoos can buy them.) 

“I’ve had offers of over a hundred thousand dollars on a snake,” Kobylka said.

A snake worth that kind of money is not likely to be sold by Kobylka. His preference is to hold on to them in order to breed more and more interesting looking snakes. 

“But the way I operate, it’s important to keep those snakes for my future work. You actually lose money long-term if you sell the most amazing thing at the time.”

I have to admit that, having been intrigued by this article, I googled, looking for pictures. While I found them interesting enough, pretty even, the colors were largely yellows, oranges, brown... I thought I'd be finding designs there were really out there. I was envisioning a snake that looked like a tie-dyed Grateful Dead tee-shirt, a snake that was the same bright blue as my old VW Beetle. Alas...

The coolest ones I found were something called an "emoji python," that have a smiley-face pattern. 

Anyway, if you've decied that a colorful litle snake would make a dandy pet, note that "the standard life spanof a captive ball python is fifteen to thirty years."

In any case, "household reptiles" started to become a thing in the 1990's. 

Children raised on “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Jurassic Park” reimagined scaly pets as characterful and intriguing. Retailers started to see an uptick in iguana sales. New Caledonian crested geckos, believed extinct until 1994 and jeopardized today by wildfires and invasive predators, became well established in captivity. Snakes were pitched to prospective buyers as perfect for cramped urban residences: undemanding, hypoallergenic, and needing to be fed only once a week. 

And ball pythons - small, docile, plentiful, cheap; and, unlike goldfish, you can hold them - really took off as "starter pets." But things didn't get too exciting until breeders like Justin Kobylka figured out that this "ideal" snake pet "need[ed] a totally different paint job."

After all, you sell an interesting smiley-face emoji snake for a lot more than the $30 bucks you'd get for a boring brown-on-brown snake. 

Astonishingly:

An estimated six million households in the U.S. include at least one reptile.

Interestingly: 

Millennials make up the largest group of reptile owners, but snakes, lizards, and turtles have become increasingly popular with Generation Z. “One of our concerns is that technology will take kids away from this world,” a breeder observed. “Why would a kid today want to peer at a snake through glass, when they can put a V.R. headset on and play with dinosaurs?” 

So, just when I learn that designer ball pythons are a thing, it's inevitably threatened by technology. 

Looks like I'm rooting for snakes as pets? Who knew that was ever going to happen?

 

Thanks, Buddey. A grateful nation thanks you!

Look, I get why people who live in desperately poor regions would eat bushmeat to augment their meagre diets. If your children are swollen-belly starving, if they don't get enough protein, enough iron, I get that you'd provide them with every source of nourishment you could get your hunter-gatherer hands on. And you wouldn't give a rat's ass whether the meat that you're hunter-gathering - salting, drying, stewing, frying - came from a bat, an impala, a pangolin, or even a primate of the non-human variety.

But eating locally is one thing. Black market trading, smuggling possibly infected bushmeat into another country, is quite another. After all, bushmeat could be a carrier of the Ebola virus. So say no more.

There is, however, more to say. Even if it weren't for Ebola, the bushmeat trade - which is valued at billions of dollars annually - is destroying species and wreaking havoc with biodiversity. 

Plus - and apologies for any cultural insensitivity - I'm no Anthony Bourdain, willing to try anything once. The idea of munching on fried pangolin or monkey burger makes my stomach churn. I guess it's what you're used to, and I'm used to eating meat that comes swaddled in Saran Wrap and purchased at the grocery store. The Beverly Hillbillies may have relished Granny's possum stew, but as a meat eater, I pretty much stick to the basics: chicken, beef, pork, lamb - meat that comes from animals raised for human consumption. No, I don't eat a ton of meat. And if I thought about it, I'd eat even less. But when I do eat meat, it's going to be one of the Big Four.

Years ago, there was a restaurant in Boston's Quincy Market that served "normal" (i.e., Big Four meat and fish), but specialized in wild game, including lion and bear. I can't recall the restaurant's name - Wild Something-or-Other? - but my husband and I went there once. We ate normal, but the meaty smell of cooking lion, tiger, and bear - oh, my! - was overpowering, and Wild Something-or-Other never became one of our go-to's. 

So, I'm not the target audience for bushmeat.

But there are a lot of immigrants who, for reason of nostalgia, for longing for home, consider bushmeat comfort food. And the only way to get it is to have someone smuggle it in, or buy it on the blackmarket. I'm sure there are also those whose desire for bushmeat has nothing to do with nostalgia, but is a "just because" item of their desire "just because" it is rare, illegal, and risky to consume. But I'm guessing most of the consumers are from immigrant communities.

And I do get comfort food. A couple of times a year (including for my birthday), my sister Trish makes a family chicken goulash dish that I adore. And what I wouldn't give for a grinder from the now-closed Maury's Delicatessen in Worcester's Webster Square. (Unlike the Wild-Something-or-Other, the Maury's smell was divine.)

But I really don't like the idea of someone bringing bushmeat into the US, especially if they're bringing it in to Boston.

As recently happened, and which we know about because a suitcase containing dehydrated monkey remains was found at Logan Airport, sniffed out by an alert Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) pooch named Buddey. 

The bushmeat traveler flew into Logan from the Democratic Republic of Congo in early January.

During a preliminary baggage screening, Buddey drew attention to a particular bag.

When questioned by CBP, the traveler said it was "dried fish," and that's how it looked on the X-ray screen, the agency said in a press release. (Source: Boston Globe)

Dried fish? Hmmmm. CBP decided not to take the traveler's word for it. 

...when agents opened the bag, they found the "dead and dehydrated bodies" of four monkeys -- referred to as "bushmeat," which is raw or minimally processed wild animal meat. It comes from a variety of wild animals, including bats and primates.

It is often smoked, dried or salted, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that treatment doesn't render it noninfectious.

Following CDC guidelines, CBP destroyed the piece of luggage, and, presumably, the dried monkey remains.  

Ebola or some other ghastly disease averted! How often do we find ourselves cheering on the CBP, but Go Customs and Border Patrol!

While there is a $250,000 penalty for smuggling bushmeat into the US, the person bringing the dried monkey into Boston wasn't charged with anything - even though they lied about the monkey meat being fish. All they lost was their suitcase, and the opportunity for sharing a downhome meal with friends and family who hadn't been back home in a while. Maybe they weren't charged because the small amount - only four dried monkeys - was clearly for personal use, and the traveler was likely not part of some big profit-making bushmeat cartel.

Anyway, I'm happy that Buddey was on duty at Logan and able to ferret out the bushmeat. 

Thanks, Buddey. A grateful nation thanks you!

Remember when "million dollar smile" was a figure of speech?

I volunteer in a homeless shelter, and plenty of the folks I see there have lousy teeth. It's no surprise. They're poor. Many live on the streets. They haven't always led the healthiest of lives. They've abused drugs. They've abused alcohol. Their diets may not be the greatest. They've been in prison. They've been in fights.

Some have no teeth at all.

One fellow - an older guy - has a terrible underbite, and, while most of his lower teeth are missing, he does have a set of protruding lower fangs. His condition can only be described as disfiguring, and I'm sure it has impacted every aspect of his life. On top of that, I suspect he's in pain. Having that degree of underbite can throw your entire body off.

I've never spoken with him. I've only seen him come through the foodline, where there's no time to chat with anyone. I suspect he grew up in a rural area (I'm thinking in the South), where there likely would have been poor or no access to dental care. I may be wrong (and I may be being judge-y) here. If he comes into the Resource Center, where there's often an opportnity for a convo, I might find out where he's from. (A lot of our guests like to chat.)

I thought of this fellow when I read about Thomas Connolly, DDS, who, from his offices in NYC (SoHo: think edgy) and Beverly Hills (think buckets o' money), outfits

his patients with "million dollar smiles." Literally.

Dubbed the "Father of Diamond Dentistry" by Rolling Stone - perhaps the only dentist to be dubbed anything by Rolling Stone - Connolly has a lot of well-known patients. 

[He] reconstructed Post Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, eight platinum crowns and two six-carat diamonds replacing the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Just diamonds.

The total cost: $1.6 million. (Source: NY Times)

That was back in 2021, when diamond dentures weren't so much of a thing. Fast forward, and Connolly and his team "now perform diamond dentistry almost daily."

Post Malone is by no means the only big name patient Connolly's worked with. 

[He] has reconstructed the mouths of the rappers Gunna and Lil Yachty, the professional boxer Devin Haney, the baseball pitcher Marcus Stroman, the Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, the Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and others.

Admittedly, I've never heard of Gunna or Devin Haney. But those other Connolly patients are big names. (Amazingly, I have heard of Lil Yachty.)

And then there's the biggest of the big names, even if the biggest of the big names is only a two-letter word.

Yes, Ye - once known as Kanye West - hired Connolly to create the "six-figure titanium structure" that Ye began showing off a short while back.

You don't have to pay a milion dollars to get in a Connolly chair:

Full diamond teeth range from $100,000 to $2 million, and porcelain veneers with diamond insets from $10,000 to $75,000.

I'm guessing those $100K diamond choppers aren't much higher in quality than cubic zirconium. But $100K is still a lot to pay for a set of teeth. 

And I'm not going to criticize veneers. A while back - a long while: maybe 20 years, maybe more - I got veneers for my front teeth, which were chipped so badly that the bonding my dentist kept trying never held. I can't recall what I paid, but it was a lot. ($7K for four sticks in my mind.) So $10K in 2024 for a veneer with a diamond inset doesn't sound outrageous pricewise.

But dental diamonds? 

Sorry, but that does strike me as outrageous. As does having a multi-million dollar mouth. 

I guess it's a logical extension of the gold grills that rappers started sporting nearly twenty years ago. And even variations on the gold grills theme have been around for, like, forever. Archaeologists have discovered Etruscan "golden dental appliances" from the seventh century BC. 

And those modern grills have been sporting diamond inlays for a while now. Full diamond teeth though, that's something new. 

I don't get it. But I'm not supposed to.

Connolly insists that:

“This is not a gimmick...We changed the profession a little bit and pioneered something that was catching on and made it a little more mainstream.”

I guess "a litle more mainstream" doesn't mean full-blown mainstream...And, of course, it will never become mainstream among us old fuddy-duddies, just happy to be hanging on to our own teeth.

But spending more than a million dollars on your mouth does seem cra.

Much as I'd like to, I'm not going to engage in the sophistry of arguing that the money could be better spent on, say, dental work for the fellow with the underbite and fangs. Rich folks, celebreties, can do whatever they want with their money. And if they want to keep Dr. Connolly and the engineers and jewelers he works with employed, so be it.

Still, I can't help but think of the guys I see day in, day out, who'd like to have a few good teeth in their heads.

Just sayin'...

The Art of Bankruptcy

Louise Blouin and her then-husband John MacBain made a fortune in the rather unglamorous classified ad biz. They started out in Montreal with a car listing publication, and took it from there. 

Where they took it to was New York City, where they decided that they wanted to get beyond the lucrative but pedestrian and rather déclassé world of selling classified ads. They wanted to run with the big dogs, the rich dogs, the art world dogs. 

So the couple invested $13.5 million in La Dune, a splosh place on Long Island, and started getting serious about the game of lifestyles of the rich and famous. This was back in the late 90's, when $13.5 million still seemed like a lot to pay for property, apparently enough to get you in with the rich and famous.

Soon enough, the MacBains were sending invitations to prominent figures, including the financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, the diplomat Henry Kissinger, [painter Ross] Bleckner and the fashion designer Calvin Klein.  (Source: NY Times)

And who doesn't like a free meal served up at a splosh house on Long Island? Thanks to their largesse, the MacBains became salon-istas.

But snobs are snobs, and Ross Bleckner - and I'm betting some of the illustrious others they tried swanning around with - were a bit snarky about the parvenu MacBains.

Mr. Bleckner noted that it was hard to say no to these luncheons and dinners, because Ms. Blouin would provide a list of five available dates.

"Me and Calvin would be hysterical, laughing about it,” Mr. Bleckner said. “How do you get out of five dates? What were we  to say — ‘I’m going away for the whole summer’?” 

Note to Mr. Bleckner (who claims to be a friend of long-standing to Ms. Blouin): look down your nose all you want at Louise Blouins unsophisticated, perhaps even crass, beginner's invites, but "me and Calvin?" Seriously, "me and Calvin?" Tsk, tsk.

The MacBains ended up splitting, but Louise Blouin went deep into the art world, getting involved with art aucitons, art consulting, art publications. She set up the Louise Blouin Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to creativity and the arts. 

Post divorce, Blouin became romantically and professionally involved with one Simon dePury, a Sotheby's alum setting up an art consultancy+. He admits he was enamored in part by her moola, but, like Mr. Bleckner, Mr. DePury had a bit of the snide in him.

“Her power and success, not to mention the Marie Antoinette splendor of her lifestyle, were aphrodisiacal,” he wrote

With friends like this...

Anyway, it was pretty heady stuff. All this hobnobbing - artists! machers! oligarchs! - and a "net worth [which] was once estimated by The Times of London to fall between those of Madonna and the Queen of England."

And then, all of a sudden, it was all arse over teakettle, and Louise Blouin found herself tumbled into bankruptcy court, ordered to get rid of her Long Island manor, site of so many of those Marie Antoinette-y parties.

La Dune, which sits on four acres along Gin Lane in Southampton, N.Y., comprises two grand houses, a sunken tennis court and two swimming pools. It has a combined 22,000 square feet of interior space, with 19 bedrooms, 20 bathrooms, a home cinema and two gyms.

The property had grown in value over the years, and Blouin had added to it, tearing down a modest guest cottage and building a new one that gave the main manse a run for its money.

Blouin was hoping La Dune would go for a figure well in excess of $100M. (A comparable property had just sold for $112M). You might be asking yourself why a property that was purchased in the lates 1990's for $13.5M would need to sell for an order of magnitude greater, but there was the tab for the guest cottage and other property improvements. 

Alas,Blouin had taken out mortgages on it to fund her art world ventures. So she owed a ton o' money.

The judge order her to take an offer of $89M - buyers sure can smell desperation - and she's now underwater on the property.

Given the opportunity to continue to dish, Bleckner had more to say about Louise Blouin:

 “She was fun, she was beautiful, she was a great hostess,” he said. “Of course, I never really understood where the money was coming from.”

Meow! 

 “I haven’t made many mistakes,” Louise Blouin said soon after her compound in the Hamptons was sold out from under her in a bankruptcy auction. “You can’t judge someone because they have an issue once in their life. I’m sure Steve Jobs didn’t have a perfect track record.”

Well, it doesn't sound like her issues were all of the "once in a lifetime" variety. A decade ago, an art publication she helmed was failing and she was sued by a couple of employees she stiffed. She lost the suit, but has only paid them ten percent of what they're entitled to. Blouin also lost a suit brought by a printing company she failed to pay. And the there's a teensy problem with the IRS.

Given her general attitude towards business, it's not all that surprising that Blouin has gone bankrupt:

“The arts, for me, is philanthropy,” Ms. Blouin continued. “It’s not a business. So that’s how I perceive it. It’s helping others. It’s philanthropy, helping others through the arts. How do you use the arts for the creative process? How you use the arts for neurology and the development of your senses and all these things? It was never a business.”

"It was never a business?" Tell that to your creditors and the IRS. 

We hear yet again from the talented Mr. Blackner, this time about Blouin's attitude towards money.  

“She never seemed to be stressed. There are people who can live with a crushing level of debt and it doesn’t seem to bother them, because they just keep borrowing other people’s money to make more money. But in this case, that didn’t happen.”

For her part, Blouin claims that she's been victimized by predatory lenders, et al.

“This story actually needs to be told,” she said, “not for me, but for others, because it’s becoming more of a sport involving people that make money and work hard for it and others that steal money and work less hard for it.”

I suppose you have to have (metaphorical) brass balls to forge your way to the upper echelons of the cut-throat NYC art world, not to mention the cut-throat social world of the Hamptons. And Louise Blouin seems to be endowed with quite a set of (metaphorical) brass balls. 

To hell with bankruptcy, her failed businesses, the IRS. 

“I am one of the most successful women in the world,” Ms. Blouin said. 

Is it me or does she sound like the Trump on the art world? 

When the rains come

Visiting Dubai is not on my bucket list. 

Too hot. Too politically repressive. Sure, women can vote and drive, but...You can go to jail for throwing an F-bomb. (WTF?) I believe that poppyseed bagels are outlawed. There's the weird indoor skiing thing. And what's with those artificial, palmtree-shaped islands in the harbor? 

So, I was never going to go to Dubai anyway.

Still, I occasionally cast an eye on what up in the Emirates, and was, thus, fascinated by the recent floods there. Talk about what up. 

We're used to flooding stories in the news in the US, in the news locally. Just last summer there were dire floods in Vermont, and in Leominster in Central Massachusetts. When we have major storms, especially in the winter, spots along the shore are frequently flooded. Waterfront Boston gets flooded, too.

But Dubai is in the desert.

Yes, I know that it does rain in the desert. After all, my sister Kath spends half the year in Tucson. (Just not the months when they get torrential rains.) But this rain in Dubai, well, was of stunningly biblical proportions. Seeing all those snorkeling cars, all those highways turned to rivers. Just plain weird. 

While meteorologists had, a few days earlier, predicted the heavy rains, and they do get some crazy storms, the magnitude was somewhat unusual. 

On average, the Arabian Peninsula receives a scant few of inches of rain a year, although scientists have found that a sizable chunk of that precipitation falls in infrequent but severe bursts, not as periodic showers.

U.A.E. officials said the 24-hour rain total on Tuesday was the country’s largest since records there began in 1949. But parts of the nation had experienced an earlier round of thunderstorms just last month. (Source: NY Times)

So why now?

Initial speculation was the cloud seeding - goosing the atmosphere to get a bit of rain to increase the water supply - had run amok. But that was quickly discounted. (Sort of discounted. But, anyway, seeding is not likely to have caused the big kahuna of a storm Dubai experienced last week.)

Then there's global warming, which is a maybe yes/maybe not so fast proposition:

In their latest assessment of climate research, scientists convened by the United Nations found there wasn’t enough data to have firm conclusions about rainfall trends in the Arabian Peninsula and how climate change was affecting them. The researchers said, however, that if global warming were to be allowed to continue worsening in the coming decades, extreme downpours in the region would quite likely become more intense and more frequent.

Then there's the fact that even though modern Dubai is a relatively recently designed and manufactured city, it wasn't built for floods. 

Cities in arid regions often aren’t designed to drain very effectively. In these areas, paved surfaces block rain from seeping into the earth below, forcing it into drainage systems that can easily become overwhelmed.

I'm about 100% unlikely to ever experience flooding in Dubai.

Still sort of fascinating to know that if I were planning a visit, I might want pack as if I were going to Venice in the rainy season, bringing along a raincoat that actually repels water (not all do) and a pair of rubber boots.

Who knew? 

How sweet is this or what?

Okay. I wouldn't want to live next door to or across from Smith & Agli's Potbelly Manor, let alone live there. Frankly, it's an eyesore.

My house color palette is more subdued. I spent my early years in my grandmother's chocolate brown with yellowy-cream trim decker, and the rest of my childhood in a house that was charcoal gray with a yellow, and later red front door. My adult life has been spent in red brick buildings and, for the last 3+ decades, granite with (at present) a battle ship gray door.

I can't imagine living in a house painted a crazy (IMHO) color. 

I like a lot of stuff inside the house, but outside? I'm a keep it simple, keep it flora, kind of gal. The houses I've lived in all had grass, trees, bushes, and flowers. At Nanny's, we had a birdbath in the back yard; when we moved to our own house, we had a swingset, sandbox, and clothesline out back.

There was nothing in either frontyard other than grass, trees, bushes, and flowers.

My small condo building has a tiny "frontyard," with a Chinese dogwood, a bunch of plants, and a small bird bath/fountain. There's no backyard to speak of, but what's there, on the concrete slab, are plants, an outdoor settee and chairs, and a large bird bath/fountain.

I've never lived with statuary, objets - stuff - in the yard.

Of course, as a child, I wanted statuary, objets - stuff - in the yard. 

My favorite yard in the world was a couple of blocks away from the house of my Chicago grandmother's house. On our bi-ennial trips to Chicago, the first item on the agendance once we got settled in at Grandma's was to get my father to take us to the "Elf House." Its yard was full of elves/gnomes: sitting on swings in the trees, playing card games on toadstool tables, standing there smiling at us. Now this was a yard to die for!

But once I hit the age of aesthetic reason, my preference turned to nothing much in the frontyard, and what's there can be a riot of color if it's flowers, and subdued palette for anything else.

Which is not to say I'm not plenty enamored with Smith & Agli's Potbelly Manor.

First off, there's the color scheme, which looks like it should be located next door to or across the street from Barbie's Dreamhouse. Then there's all that glorious junk: "buoys, lobster traps, and nautical curios."

If this had been anywhere near me when I was a kid, I would have been perpetually pestering my father to walk or drive by so I could ogle it. 

But beyond the eye-popping color, beyond the frontyard riot, Smith & Agli's Potbelly Manor is "a nonprofit pig rescue dedicated to improving the lives of pigs and other farm animals in Rhode Island."

Owners Audrey Agli and Liz Smith put it plainly: They simply love pot-bellied pigs.

“They’re the smartest, most lovable animals,” Smith said.

“They really aim to please you,” Agli added. (Source:  Boston Globe)

While they're only housing a couple of them at the moment, over the years, Agli and Smith have cared for hundreds of potbellied pigs. Turns out that these porcine cuties "are the most throwaway animals."

One problem is their size. People buy them thinking that they're little cuties, - hypoallergenic! affectionate! litte guys! And then those potbelly pigs grow to somewhere between 50 o 150 pounds. 

Keeping the resident two potbelly pigs company are a couple of steers, a few goats, a llama, a bunch of pigeons, a dozen rabbits, ducks, and chickens, and eight cats. (No dogs? What are they thinking? I don't care how cute and affectionate those potbelly pigs are, they're not doggos! Sure, one of Smith and Agli's piggos is a therapy animal, but, let's face it, most dogs are therapy animals.)

But doggo quibble aside, how sweet is this story, how sweet is this house?

Agli and Smith are a couple of women of a certain age (my age or thereabouts, I suspect) who've spent the past 40 years together, and who are spending their golden, retirement years giving shelter to unwanted animals. (One of their steers was found wandering around Providence.)

Running Potbelly Manor isn't easy. It's pretty much a 24/7 operation that stays afloat with the help of donors and volunteers. You can virtually tour the place, meet the animals, and make a tax deductible donation here. 

What a sweet little story, what a sweet little purple house. When I was a kid, this would have been a house and yard to die for - especially if they'd added in a couple of card-playing gnomes.

Fake obituary pirates? These guys ought to be walking the plank

I am a long-time reader of obituaries. 

It's genetic.

I believe I inherited the obituary-reading gene from my father, an avid reader of  the "Irish sports pages," and I've taken up the cause. (Unlike my father, who was a regular wake and funeral goer, I don't attend one unless I knew the person or someone in their family really well. Other than the four years he spent in the Navy during WWII, my father's entire life happened in same neighborhood, and he knew a lot of people. Plus back in the day, wakes and funerals were more of a thing. I went to more as a kid than I do now, that's for sure.)

But I do read obituaries, and every once in a while I look in on the family undertaker, O'Connor Brothers in Worcester, which is located in the parish I grew up in, and where most parishioners "went out from." Over the years, O'Connor's remit has expanded beyond the mostly Irish-Americans they once took care of. (When we shopped for my mother's casket 20+ years ago now, there was an emerald green one on offer, with a shamrock emblazoned on the satin insert). Now I notice a lot of Vietnamese names, Greeks, Albanians, Hispanics. They take care of a lot of African-Americans, too. But they still do plenty of locals, so I've been able to inform my sibs when a neighbor has died. Of course, most of that generation is gone, so now it's us.

Thus, I was recently able to let my sister Trish know that one of her high school classmates had died at the age of 65.

On occasion, I graze through the obits on Athy's website, as well. I went to high school with one of the Athy's, and they seem to have cornered the market for the order of nuns I had throughout my schooling. Most of the retired nuns in "my" order live in a retirement community in Worcester, and once in a while I come upon some nun I had back in the day.S

Sometimes I google an obituary for someone I see mentioned on the news or on Twitter. And, of course, I read plenty of obituaries of prominent people in The Globe, The Times, The Washington Post. 

I'm the curious type. (Or it is nosy? Or is it morbid?)

Most obituaries, whether they were published in the local newspaper or on a funeral parlor's website, end up on Legacy.com, a long-time obituary aggregator. 

But of late I've noticed that there are a whole raft of sites that come up, rando sites that aren't the usual obit sources: funeral parlor, local newspaper, and Legacy.com. 

The one I've encountered most frequently is echovita, which is always "sad to announce" that someone has died. Sometimes they publish parts of the public obituary verbatim, but sometimes they freelance a bit. I read that they've listed someone's pets as "close friends" without bothering to say that they were her dogs. Another obituary claimed that a young person who died in an accident had been murdered. Spin off versions of that obituary embroidered the story, making the young person (a Georgetown undergrad) a famous actor or singer. There've also been obituaries written for folks who are still live.

Sometimes the click-bate obituaries overdramatize a situation - everything's a tragedy, whether there is anything tragic beyond the sadness of loved ones - and use quite florid language. Some of the ones I've seen sound like they're written by someone who's not fluent in English; some of the ones I've seen sound like they were written by a poorly skilled bot. Some are, in fact, written by AI. (Bad AI, not good AI.)

Families aren't happy when the obituaries they've lovingly crafted get bowlderized. Friends stumble across the crazy obits and end up confused. They may leave a condolcence note that the loved ones never end up seeing. 

Echovita and other online obit companies make money off of the sales of memorial trees, flowers, or candles. And by running ads on the obituary pages, whether the ads are something the decedent's family approves of or not.

The memorial trees, i.e., seedlings, do get planted, but I don't know how flowers or candles work. Maybe they just show a bouquet - kind of like an NFT - or a lit candle, to show that someone cares. The seedlings get planted mostly. Less scrupulous companies just pocket the cash.

One of the problems is that, when people opt to plant a tree, they're cannibalizing donations to a charity that the family has listed.

Anyway, it turns out the "obituary pirating" has become quite a thing:

Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money. (Source: Wired)

Some of the crazily concocted obituaries - they're "shoddy," they're "janky" - have begun showing up on YouTube, narrated by English speakers, Urdu speakers, other language speakers. Far afield from the territory beyond which anyone would be interested in the obituary of, say, someone who had grown up in the Main South neighborhood of Worcester.

And, in fact, there aren't a ton of viewers looking at any one of these "shoddy," "janky" video obituaries - often showing a narrator sitting in his home, showing "corny slideshows or candles and photos of the deceased surced from social media."

But it's a numbers game. It can be lucrative if there are enough views in the aggregate.

Despite their shoddiness, the obituary YouTube channels are sometimes amassing enough followers and views to meet YouTube’s Partner Program requirements and start making money off advertisements. 

These bogus obituaries are plenty distaseful and insensitive - I'd like to see these pirates walk the plank - but they're probably not illegal. 

They used to say "sex sells," but I guess "death sells," too.  

Me? My reading will stick to checking out O'Connor Brothers and Athy's to see who's checked out, and reading an occasional newspaper obit. 

Guess I'm just old fashioned that way. 

Ohtani's misinterpreter

Like every other baseball fan in America, I was hoping against hope tha phenom Shohei Ohtani, the 21st century's answer to Babe Ruth (Ohtani's a slugger who also pitches), would sign with my team. Alas, and not surprisingly, in December Ohtani inked a 10-year, $700M deal with the Dodgers. It makes sense. They're West Coast, closer to Ohtani's native Japan and in an area with richer Japanese culture than you'll find in Boston. And, unlike the Red Sox, the Dodgers are willing to spend the big bucks to get the players they want. (C.f., Mookie Betts. Sigh.)

I dislike the Dodgers almost as much as I despise the Yankees, so I'm hoping they never win a World Series. Still, you have to admire their desire to shoot for that particular moon - especially if you're a fan of the sort of team that refuses to play the money game. (C.f., Mookie Betts. Sigh.) The sort of team that refuses to play the money game, other than when it comes to raising ticket prices, which they've done the past couple of years despite last place finishes. 

But. I. Digress.

Ohtani has been much in the news of late.  There was the pre-signing speculation. The big buck contract. The first games of the season, featuring the Ohtani Dodgers, which were played in South Korea. (There's growing interest in baseball in both Asia and Europe, and MLB markets mightily in both regions to boost brand awareness and sell stuff. A lot of stuff. Ohtani, of course, tells a great story in Asia.)

But there's also a not so great story involving Ohtani.

In late March, word began drifting out that Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani's trusted interpreter and all-round sidekick, was involved in some major league improprieties of the gambling variety. While the Dodgers were off in Seoul playing the San Diego Padres:

...reporters began asking about suspicious wire transfers from Ohtani’s account that had surfaced in a federal investigation of an alleged bookmaker. Mizuhara never informed Ohtani what was happening, Ohtani later told reporters. (Source: NY Times)

Originally, there was great concern that Ohtani himself might have been involved in the gambling. Despite the fact that Major League Baseball seems just fine with gambling now that sports betting is legal - the betting sites do all sorts of advertising during games, and MLB makes oodles of money selling their data to the the tech outfits that work hand in glove with the online betting parlors (as do the other professional sports leagues) - athletes betting on games is strictly verboten. 

Over 100 years ago, the Chicago White Sox turned into the Chicago Black Sox when players were found to have thrown the 1919 World Series. And players aren't allowed to bet on games even if they're not playing in. Pete Rose, a Hall of Fame caliber player of near-yore, was banned from baseball and the Hall of Fame for betting on games he wasn't involved in. 

MLB so didn't want any whiff of gambling, any taint around showpiece player Shohei Ohtani, who the League (and the Dodgers) are banking on.

Fortunately, as it turns out, Ohtani had nothing to do with any gambling. All he's guilty of is getting duped by someone who was his main man, his go-to, his friend. And Ippei Mizuhara has, not surprisingly, been fired by the Dodgers (and likely unfriended by Ohtani on any social media). And (as of April 11th), Mizuhara has begun negotiating a plea deal.

Mizuhara was plenty slick and able to pretty easily take advantage of Ohtani's lack of English, lack of famliarity with America, and supreme focus on playing baseball. Mizuhara was allegedly "able to change the settings on Ohtani’s bank account so Ohtani would not receive alerts and confirmations about transactions."

And Mizuhara, as it turns out, is an all purpose liar, and not just a thief who siphoned $16M out of Ohtani's bank account to cover his gambling debts

While the team was still in Seoul, and just before the Dodgers dumped him, the Dodger brass had Mizuhara speak to the team.  

He told the team that he had a gambling addiction and was deep in debt, and that Ohtani, his close friend for years, had paid the debts.

While Ohtani doesn't speak (much) English, he understands enough to recognize that Mizuhara wasn't telling the truth. He confronted his interpreter, who confessed that he'd stolen the money. Mizuhara now been charged with bank fraud, and has a mighty combo of Feds -  the IRS criminal division, DHS, a California-basedUS Attorney - crawling up his ass. 

Thus the plea negotation.

The good news is that Shohei Ohtania was not involved and has not been gambling. And some quasi good news in that it doesn't appear that Mizuhara bet on baseball. 

Still, $16M is an awful lot of gambling debt.

And $16M is an awful lot of money not to notice seeping out of your bank account. I'm pretty sure that moving forward, given that Shohei Ohtani is worth an awful lot more money than he was when Ippei Mizuhara began robbing him blind, there will be a few new safeguards put in place to keep something like this from happening. 

As it happens, there's an interesting local side note. Mizuhara was originally brought into the big leagues by the Boston Red Sox who hired him to translate for Hideki Okajima, who pitched for the Sox and was a member of the 2007 team that won the World Series. (Ah, those were the days.) Mizuhara later returned to Japan, which is where he met up with Ohtani.

Meanwhile, I'm rooting for Ohtani to have a fine year, up until the post-season, when I hope the Dodgers do a playoff nosedive. I hope he doesn't let the crimes of his misinterpreter impact his game. 

Patriots' Day 2024

I have always loved Patriots' Day, and I can't say why any better than I did ten years ago when I wrote this post. 

A big part of my affection for Patriots' Day is that the Red Sox always play at home, and have an early (11 a.m.) start time. One of my favorite things to do is get tickets for that game, make my way out to Fenway - threading my way through growing Boston Marathon crowds and the security checkpoint (instituted post the 2013 terrorist bombing), seeing the wheelchair race leaders speeding through Kenore Square - and then making my way back home, fingers crossed after a good game.

Alas, good games have been in short supply of late in Red Sox Nation, and ownership is increasingly and royally pissing me and a whole raft of other lifers off. The final straw came when, after yet another sub .500, last place season, they had the colossal nerve to raise prices.

So getting Patriots' Day tickets this year was a big NFW. And I'm mad at the Red Sox for making this the case. (Thanks for nothing, Red Sox owner John Henry.)

Nonetheless, I hope it's a beautiful day for a ball game and the Marathon.

I'll work my shift at St. Francis House, then - as long as the weather is reasonably good - I'll wander around taking in the sights: the runners, the Swan Boats, the tourists, the buds on the trees. Maybe I'll even make myself a sausage-and-peppers sub to make up for not getting one at Fenway. Maybe I'll top it off with some Cracker Jack, maybe even a Sports Bar. (Sports Bars are a not particularly good waxy chocolate covered slab of vanilla ice cream. I'll indulge if I can find somewhere to buy a single bar. They're definitely not worth buying an entire boxfull, unless I can find someone to unload them off on.)

And somewhere along the line, I will celebrate by reciting one of the few poems I know by heart, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn, which commemorates the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which ignited the American Revolution. 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.*

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Happy Patriots' Day to all who celebrate. (And my sympathies to those who don't.)

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

*Obviously, the current bridge is a replica.