Smart mouth

Toothwise, I've been pretty fortunate. I inherited my mother's super teeth, not my father's not-so-great choppers. Plus, I've always had excellent dental care. As an adult, I've had more than one dentist tell me that I had must have seen a great dentist when I was a kid. (Thank you, Dr. Leo Wigdor!)

Since the Dr. Wigdor days, I've paid enough attention to my teeth to keep them in tip-top shape. (Other than using my front teeth as cutting implements, which caused chipping and ended me up with veneers.)

I have been told that my teeth should last me for my lifetime, which doesn't sound like all that much until you consider that one out of five Americans 65 years of age and older have no natural teeth left in their heads.

To keep my teeth healthy, I use a pretty basic electric toothbrush for my morning brushing. Most mornings, anyway. But often enough that my dental hygienist is happy with the decrease in dental plaque. As I said, my electric brush is pretty basic. Smart, but not all that smart. All is does is rapidly brush and pulse every 30 seconds to get me to move on to another quadrant of my teeth.

Another thing that using the electric toothbrush has done is make me more aware of just how few seconds I was brushing when I used the good old-fashioned manual method. So now, at night, when I do my bedtime brusha-brusha-brusha, I spend a bit longer than I once did. (But, I must admit, not the full electric 30 seconds.)

I can't remember what I paid for my electronic toothbrush set up. Not much. And I've got enough brushing heads in store that I won't need to order any more for another three years or so, so other than whatever electricity it consumes, it costs me nothing.

And I don't spend all that much on manual toothbrushes, either, asI get a new one every six months when I go for my cleaning. Since I swap out every three months (more frequently if I have a cold), I do have to buy a couple new brushes each year. They'll either be Oral-B or, when I can find them, Lactonas.

My manual toothbrushes aren't smart at all. Devoid of IQ, I like to think of them as having admirable EQ. Brushing your teeth is, after all, dentally, spiritually, nostalgically, and emotionally pretty darned satisfying.

Anyway, between my electric buddy and my old-school regulars, I'm content with my toothbrushes.

So I'm not interested in spending $399.99 for anOral-B iO™

SERIES 10 smart mouth of a toothbrush, which sports these swell features:

Interactive Color Display

3D TEETH TRACKING with A.I.

7 Smart Brushing Modes

Bluetooth® Connectivity

Smart Pressure Sensor

iO Senser™ Smart Charger

Charging Travel Case

4 Oral-B iO Ultimate Clean Replacement Brush Heads

You can get a smarty-pants smart mouth Oral-B for a lot less - there's a pretty wide range of prices - but you don't get all the goodies. At the lower end, you don't get color (or even b&w) display to tell you whether you're brushing too hard or too soft. And only at the high end do you get the Smart Charger. (Whatever that means. My dumb charger seems to do just fine.)

The high-end brush also provides "guidance," which uses Bluetooth and A.I. technology "to coach you to your best clean yet." 

Put me in coach? Who really needs it.

And about that A.I. technology, the Washington Post has its suspicion. In April, Shira Ovide had this to say: 

Marketing materials for the $400 version mention “AI Position Detection” — which sounds like a straightforward sensor to detect which teeth you’re brushing and for how long. There’s also “3D teeth tracking with AI” to show whether you’ve brushed successfully.

I asked representatives of Procter & Gamble, which owns Oral-B, what exactly is AI about this toothbrush. They declined to comment.

If you’re jazzed about nightly grades for your brushing, you do you. But this toothbrush doesn’t seem to have AI even under the squishiest definition of that term. (Source: WaPo)

AI is definitely in its hype cycle, so we can expect to see a lot more products claiming AI-ness when all they're doing is using sensors.

AI or sensors, matters not to me. I need an AI-driven, sensor- loaded toothbrush like I need a hole in my head other than my already smart enough mouth. 

And the winner is...or not

Yesterday, my post was on a Vegas high-roller. Today, we'll travel to Florida and meet a couple of folks on the lower end of the gambling spectrum. 

Kira Enders and Dakota Jones decided to try to execute a get-sorta-rich-quick scheme by "crudely" taping together parts of two scratch tickets, and - stating that they had just tried to repair a ticket that had accidentally been ripped - they went in to Florida Lottery to claim a million dollar prize with it. It almost goes without saying that the scheme failed and the duo are now facing grand theft and intent to defraud charges. 

Here's how the criminal masterminds went about things:

FOX reported that Enders allegedly brought the ticket to a Florida Lottery office in Pensacola on March 1, and officials immediately designated it as a "non-winner." Enders also signed official forms at the time acknowledging that there could be legal consequences if she had tampered with a ticket, according to a report from the Sheriff's Office.

According to the Pensacola News Journal, Special Agent Richard Pisanti later received a call from Enders on March 7 asking about the status of the ticket. The investigator asked her to come to the Florida Lottery office on March 11, and both Enders and Jones, who drove her to the office, were "immediately detained and separated for investigation," per the outlet. (Source: People)

OK, Enders was so dumb and/or drugged out that she tried to pass off their fake ticket; and when she was told it was a "non-winner," she was dumb and/or drugged enough to sign a form acknowledging that she could get in trouble if she had tampered with the ticket; and she was dumb and/or drugged out enough to call to check on a ticket that had been declared a non-winner; and then the two of them were dumb and/or drugged out enough to drive right into the trap that Florida Lottery had set for them. 

When confronted with their crime:  

Enders allegedly asked Pisanti: "What, they don't go together?" per the affidavit, and Jones told the investigator that "they are honest people and they aren't into fraud."

Good to know "they aren't into fraud."

"Jones advised that he didn't know it was a crime to bring it to the lottery office but it was not their intentions to get over on the lottery," the affidavit reads, per FOX.

Right.

These two are clearly dumb and/or drugged out. As far as I know being dumb isn't a crime. And being drugged out, well, that's more misfortune and poor life choices than criminal, if you didn't crime your way into drugginess. 

So I can't help wondering why the Florida Lottery crew didn't just laugh Kira Enders out of their offices to begin with. Maybe Enders and Jones have been criming, and the po-lice were just looking for a chance to nab them. But, just based on the lottery ticket crime, I have to ask whether there's so little real crime in Florida that the state is going after these two boobs.

Why didn't the person at Florida Lottery just tell Enders that the ticket was clearly fraudulent. That she was a numbskull to try to "get over on the lottery." That she needed to knock off the dumbness and drugged-out-ness and not try something so idiotic again.

After their arrests, Enders and Jones each managed to bond out of jail. Not clear what happened at their May court date. Unless I'm missing something, these aren't hardcore criminals. They need help and, most assuredly, a kick in their dumb and/or drugged out asses. But do they need to go to jail? Maybe not...

Wanna bet?

I'm not much of a gambler.

Oh, I buy non-winning lottery tickets, but other than that...

The few times I've been to a casino, my limit was ten bucks. I'd use that ten bucks - in the form of a roll of quarters - on the slots. As long as I was "winning," I was good. But once I'd exhausted the ten bucks, that was it. (Reference to a roll of quarters pretty much dates my casino trips, as I understand that the slot machines are no longer coin opp.)

Once I did win $200 playing the slots, and that was definitely a walk-away-from-the-machine moment. 

The few times I've been to the track - and these times are in the way, way, way back - I pretty much stuck to the ten buck rule, placing $2 bets on horses I chose for their name or the color of the jockey's silks. If this strategy yielded any small success, I'd plow a few more bucks into betting on a few more ponies. But I never won very much at the track - nothing to compare to my fabulous $200 casino win.

I've also participated in Super Bowl squares and March Madness ladders. 

And back in my waitressing days, I played the numbers once or twice. 

This was in the era when many restaurants had someone in house - someone who worked in the kitchen or the bar - who had a side hustle running numbers. 

In the days before state lotteries, playing the numbers was a big deal. (You "played your numbers" and you won if your numbers came up in some published non-manipulable number - say, the last few digits of the national debt - that appeared in the newspaper.) 

Overall, gambling just isn't my jam.

But I do enjoy occasionally reading about gambling. And occasionally even blogging about it, as I did in April when  I wrote about Shohei Ohtani getting ripped off by his in-over-his-head gambling interpreter.)

So I was all in on an article I saw a couple of months ago in the Washington Post. I have to admit that I was a bit in over my head in trying to follow the convoluted plot of the story, which focused on a bookie-related scandal that's been roiling Las Vegas. Central to the scandal is one Mathew Bowyer, who was the bookie for Ohtani's interpreter. 

With all the avenues of legal betting - Las Vegas? Hello? - I was surprised to learn that there are still bookies, a profession I thought would have died out with the numbers game. But bookies, it seems, bring major league gamblers a number of benefits. Gamblers may be given a credit line, or better odds. And gamblers who don't want their name out there can gamble anonymously. 

Bowyer is more than a bookie. He's a card player, a baccarat sharp, a tournament golfer, "a dojo operator, day trader, landscaper, real estate developer."

Bowyer’s revenue source should have been a problem for the casinos hosting him. Federal anti-money laundering laws forbid the casinos here from allowing suspected bookies or other criminals from wagering at their tables. Nonetheless, employees up and down organizational charts at some of the largest properties on the Las Vegas Strip welcomed the action of Bowyer and his partners, according to interviews and confidential records reviewed by The Washington Post.

They comped Bowyer millions of dollars in discounted losses and perks, vouched for the legitimacy of his funds in internal correspondence and lifted restrictions on him for the promise of seven-figure cashier’s checks. They even gave his wife legal income for bringing in her husband’s action. All the while, they catered to him, comping penthouses and villas, shuttling him on casino-owned jets and pairing him with [NBA Hall o Famer and well-known gambler Charles] Barkley.

I'm not up on all the nuances of bookie-hood, but I guess that it's a bad idea to have bookies gambling because they're washing ill-gotten (i.e., illegal) cash that came from illegal sports betting. Or something.

Anyway, the numbers are staggering - especially to this roll of quarters gambler. And because of the money he brought them, some casinos were happy to have Bowyer in their shops, even if they were at least unofficially aware that, as a bookie, he was a no-no. 

Averaging $30,000 a hand at times, Bowyer lost up to $1.5 million in a single session. To keep his business, the Venetian gave Bowyer more than $3 million in “comps,” which can include forgiven losses, hotel rooms, jet trips and more....In total, Bowyer lost $3.6 million at The Venetian, according to multiple people with direct knowledge. Boyajian won more than $300,000 from the Venetian, which suspended his credit line last year because of his debt to other casinos and slow repayment, according to a person with knowledge of his gambling.

I realize that $3.6M ain't what it used to be. But, yikes! Imagine running up a tab of that magnitude at just one of the casinos you frequented. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, indeed.

Anyway, now the Feds and Nevada state gambling authorities are involved, breathing down the necks of the casinos that had dealings with Bowyer.

The whole thing is just plain crazy to me. Guess that's why I've never been much of a gambler.

We are not so not OK (Fourth of July, 2024)

I love the Fourth of July. I really do. Or I used to. 

Cookouts. Fireworks. Pops music. Uncle Sam. Red, white, and blue. Yay! BIG YAY!

But the holiday is no longer haunted by the pleasantly ghostly specter of righteous, tough-but-benevolent Uncle Sam. It's haunted - as it has been for nearly a decade now - by the ghastly presence of Donald Trump. 

What a depraved, malign, fowl, ignorant individual. The thought of him being elected again is unthinkable. And yet here we are. 

And WE ARE NOT OK.

We'll all be spending the next x months watching him trash our country and its institutions. Trash anyone he doesn't like, or has the audacity to say they don't like him. Lie like there's no tomorrow - which, come to think of it, there may well not be. Spew gibberish, physically and mentally deteriorating before our very eyes - a deterioration seemingly beneath the notice of the press that's too focused on Joe Biden's gingerly shuffling along in the orthopedic sneakers he wears to help with his peripheral neuropathy. (Note to readers: I, too, wear orthopedic, orthotically-enhanced sneakers to help me cope with my peripheral neuropathy.)

This post was written before the debate debacle. I hope Joe decides quickly whether he's in or out. If he stays in, he should have a full medical and neurological workup by a panel of neutral physicians and release the results. If what's ailing him is standard geezer slowdown and/or sleep apnea, fine. We'll get through it. If it's early stage dementia, thank you for your service, President Biden.

But if it's just standard geezer, then he needs to hit the road, give interviews, hold press conferences, demonstrate that he's okay.

The press should demand the same - full physical and neuro -  from the other guy, and one of the physicians can't be Ronnie Jackson. How about forgetting about Stormy Daniels - she's had her moment, and I'm grateful for it - and take a look at the newly surfaced allegations regarding Trump/Epstein. And while the press is at it, how about a bit more scrutiny given to Trump's utterances - the lies, the threats, the plans that others have for his adminstration (given that all he will be giving a shit about is revenge), the overall unhingedness...

This post was also written before SCOTUS ruled that judges should make decide on regulations, not experts who might, say, know something about science or whatever the domain in question is. And before SCOTUS ruled that having an overzealous prosecutor is more likely and more dangerous than the potential that a rotten-to-the-core, unbridled, sociopathic POS president will do whatever the fuck he wants, call it official, and have immunity, impunity.  

My bottom line is this: If DJT wins this November, we're screwed. Project 2025, anyone? How about throwing everyone DJT hates (Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Mark Milley, the Clintons...) into prison and put them in front of military tribunals.

If he's defeated, we're screwed, as he's likely to whistle up his goon squaddies to wreak some ego-satisfying havoc for him. 

Heads, Trump wins. Tails, we lose. 

Lisa Whittington (@LiLiWhittWhitt on Twitter) is an artist and this is one of her works:

The upside-down-flag is used to indicate that someone is in distress. The right wing has hijacked use of this flag (among others - they're oh so good at hijacking flags), but it's time to take it back. We are in distress.

This Fourth of July, we are not OK.

Sure, I'll do something patriotic of other. Read the Declaration of Independence. Dig out that powder blue cap with the discreet flag that's around here somewhere. Watch me some concert. Watch me some fireworks out the window. 

Hard to wish anyone a Glorious Fourth when we are so not OK.

How about a $30M fixer-upper

So, okay. The asking price for the mansion at 130 Comm Ave isn't technically $30M. It's priced to sell at $29.9M. Which still makes it the most expensive single-family house on the market in Boston today. But I think it will actually go for less, given that the majority of the buyers who have the scratch and the interest to take this place on are likely going to want to do some pretty extensive reno. As in get rid of the skulls that are the central design theme. 

Some of the reno would be cosmetic - just a matter of stripping some skullish wallpaper, rolling up a skullish rug, take the skullish painting off the wall - but someone's going to have to take a jackhammer and/or a sledgehammer to that shower floor. 

Seriously, just who's all this into the skull motif? Deadheads? Bikers? Ghouls? Funeral parlor owners? (The ritziest girls in my high school were the daughters of funeral parlor families. One of them got a Mustang for her 16th birthday, and this was back in the day when even the ritziest kids didn't have their own cars.)

The owner, VC Kevin Starr, purchased this house in 2015 for the mere amount of $11.6 and then dropped a few million renoing it to what is presumably Starr's taste. 

Yowza! I love the color blue, but that is some taste. Some of the rooms are a bit lower-key (i.e., to me: livable) - the Sotheby's listing is here - but I can't see myself getting any relaxing done in that blue room. (In the Boston Globe article I saw, there are other garish rooms shown.)

The Globe article said that Starrr and his family have decamped to calmer suburban precincts. (My guess his wife wanted something a bit more normal for the kiddos. I bet their new place in swanky Weston is a tad more subdued.)

The Commonwealth Avenue mansion is, from the outside, absolutely gorgeous, the location fabulous. 

And the specs are plenty impressive: 6 BR, 8 baths, roofdeck, and - amazingly - six parking spaces. (Parking places in this neck of the woods cost hundreds of thousand. I live not far from there, and a space around the corner recently sold for half-a-million.)

But I still don't know why anyone would want to gunk up such a beautiful spot with skulls, etc. 

You don't have to go all Gilded Age - brocade swags and whatever - but there's contemporary and there's contemporary. And 130 Comm Ave is one mighty excrescence of a contemporary.

There's a snotty expression I haven't heard in years - and don't believe I've ever uttered -  that was a staple putdown of my girlhood: All their taste is in their mouth.

Indeed. 

Birkin Bag class action? Oh, FFS.

You can get a Hermès Birkin bag for as little as $10K and change. Or swallow hard and pay $2M+ for a diamond-encrusted gold and crocodile (or is it golden crocodile?) miniature Sac Bijou Birkin which - if I've got this right - is a fully-functional Birkin bag designed to be worn as a bracelet.

But frankly, even if I were the sort of ritzy gal able and willing to spend $10K and change for a pocketbook, it wouldn't be a Birkin bag. No shoulder strap? Forget about it! Who wants to lug a bag around by those squinchy little handles. Sheesh.

Oh, if someone gave me a Birkin bag, I wouldn't say 'no.' As long as it was in a color I liked and didn't involve crocodile or alligator or ostrich, but just plain old-fashioned goat-lined calf leather.

Apparently, if I were the sort of ritzy gal able and willing to spend $10K and change for a pocketbook, looks like I might not be able to get my hands on one. 

This comes as a surprise to me, since when you google "birkin bag for sale" plenty of options pop up. 

But you can't buy one online from Hermès, and the Hermès boutiques where you can make your purchase only keep a few in stock at a time, and when new bags arrive, they fly off the shelves. 

But just whose Birkin-lovin' hands do they fly into? Not everyone who wants to get their Birkin-lovin' hands on one. And those poor deprived things are taking action. Class action.

Luxury leader Hermès has been hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging the company is engaged in the “unlawful practice of tying,” requiring customers to purchase ancillary Hermès products, such as shoes, scarves, and jewelry, before being given the opportunity to purchase a Birkin or Kelly bag.

Claiming the company violates antitrust laws and is engaged in unfair, anticompetitive business practices, the two plaintiffs leading the suit filed in a California court invite other frustrated consumers to join their cause so they will have the right to purchase these highly-coveted and super-expensive handbags in the open market. (Source: Forbes)

Not that I have any sympathy for Hermès - come on, a $2M fully-operating pocketbook that's so tiny all you can fit in it is a dime and a tic-tac and you have to wear it as a bracelet; not to mention those ugly-arse scarves with the stirrup design - but I have even less sympathy for those who feel so put-upon, so aggrieved, about not being able to score a Birkin bag that they need to bring their pissiness to court. 

Boo-f'ing-hoo. Don't these folks have better things to do with their time? Some power to the people! And do we really need the court system, which our taxes pay for, clogged with suits like this.

Sure, I'm sure there are plenty of snobby, snarky Hermès salespeople who reserve the short supply of bags that show up in their stores for their fave customers, who inevitably would be those who spend the most money with them. 

Given the Hermès price point, I guess this gives new meaning to that word "class" in class action.

Meanwhile, if you're so desperate for a Birkin bag, you can get knock-offs for as little as $125. 

What would you do?

Rogelio Villarreal is a Mexican doctor. One day, he was cruising around Instagram looking at stuff, and the stuff he was looking at included a pair of Cartier diamond-and-gold earrings. The price? 237 pesos (roughly $14 US). Who could resist that low, low price? Certainly not Dr. Villarreal, who recognized a bargain when he saw it. 

So he clicked on the image and purchased himself some 237,000 peso ($14K) worth of Cartier earrings for fourteen bucks. Make that 474,000 pesos ($28K) worth of Cartier earrings for twenty-eight bucks. Villarreal knew a good thing when he saw it, and ordered a pair for himself and another for his mother. 

Initially, Cartier tried to cancel the order altogether and compensate Villarreal with a bottle of champagne and leather cardholder to apologize for any inconvenience it had caused, Villarreal told CBS MoneyWatch. But Villarreal rejected the offer after deciding it was unsatisfactory, and instead raised the issue with Mexico's federal consumer protection agency. (Source: CBS News)

That was apparently enough for Cartier. They went and fulfilled the order, making Dr. Villarreal the proud possessor of two pair of earrings worth $28K. 

Villarreal is very active on social media. (From what I can see from my quick stroll through his Twitter account - which has quite a following - he's plenty in love with himself and plenty fond of both raunch and luxury brands. And a bit thin-skinned. He tweet-told someone who suggested he was wrong to keep the earrings to stfu.) 

Villarreal stirred up a bit of blowback, including from a Mexican Senator and social media moralist Lilly Téllez, who tweeted:

"Kids: What the buyer of the Cartier earrings did is not correct," she wrote. "It's wrong to be opportunistic and take advantage of a mistake at the expense of someone else, and abuse the law, even if it's in your favor, and outwit a business. It is more important to be honorable than to have a pair of Cartier earrings."

This got me to thinking about what I would do. 

I'm the kind of person who points out to the server that they didn't put the second glass of wine or the dessert on the bill. Who asks the grocery store cashier whether they charged me for the bag of cherries. 

On the other hand, if I find the error when I get home, I'm not all that inclined to pursue the matter.

A few years ago, I ordered a pair of sneakers from Amazon/Zappos. They never showed up. The picture of the delivery wasn't my doorstep. I walked up and down my street, looking at other doorsteps, and didn't find anyplace that looked anything like the spot where the sneakers had been dropped off. I waited a few days to see whether my sneakers showed up. And when they didn't, I asked Amazon/Zappos to send me a replacement pair. Which they did.

Fast forward a year+ and lo and behold, what showed up but the original pair. 

Did I bother to send it back to Amazon/Zappos? No to the no, mostly because I didn't want to deal with trying to explain exactly what I was doing. 

A bit similarly, I had an upstairs neighbor who, years after he moved away to god-knows-where (we weren't buds), got a box of fancy cookies for Christmas. I sent them back to the vendor, explaining that the gentleman no longer lived in my building. The next Christmas, another box of fancy cookies arrived from the same vendor. Once again, I returned them.

Christmas three? Third time was was the charm. I kept the fancy cookies, which were pretty darned good.

Anyway, I consider myself pretty honest, but not a hyper-scrupulous priss-ant who would walk six miles through a blizzard to the FedEx store to return the g.d. cookies. 

But I can't imagine a circumstance in which I'd pounce on a $28K error. 

Is this because I'm pretty honest, or because I wouldn't be looking at Cartier earrings or the like to begin with? 

Maybe both.

But mostly I would worry about the person who made the mistake, who let such a major pricing error slide by. I'd worry about a low-level worker, and maybe their boss, and their boss's boss, losing their job over this. 

Because I'd worry about some schnook getting fired, it probably wouldn't matter all that much to me whether we're talking about a big name company like Cartier, or My Local Jewelry Store. (That said, if those belated-arrival sneakers came my way from My Local Sneaker Store rather than from Amazon/Zappos, I would have called them or dropped the pair by.)

From a strict consumer point of view, Villarreal is certainly justified in keeping the earrings, rather than accepting Cartier's apology, champagne, and leather card case. (What's the opposite of caveat emptor? Is there a caveat seller?)

But this wasn't a company deliberately going out to screw the consumer. 

And from an honesty perspective?

Honestly, I'm pretty much in agreement with Lilly Téllez. It is more important to be honorable than to have a pair of Cartier earrings

Girl Scouts Forever

I was briefly in the Girl Scouts. Briefly. Very briefly. Not long enough to earn any badges. A very dispiriting experience. The only positive was that, on meeting days, we could swap out our green jumpers and white blouses for the GS green uniform.

My Brownie troop had been kind of fun. 

I had devoured the Brownie Scout books by Mildred Wirt. The Brownie Scouts At Silver Beach. The Brownie Scouts Tree House. The Brownie Scouts at Snow Valley. I wanted to be friends with Veve McGuire. So I was primed to be a Brownie. 

My troop didn't quite measure up, adventure-wise. But we got to hang out after school playing games like "Picking Up Paw-Paws" and doing craft projects like making angel Christmas tree ornaments out of construction paper and cotton balls. (No one had a clue what a paw-paw was, but we were all quite familiar with angels and Christmas trees.)

A couple of days after my sister Trish was born, I "flew up" from Brownies to Girl Scouts. This was in June, toward the end of the school year, and I was looking forward to my dream life as a Girl Scout when school started again in the fall. (Interestingly, Mildred Wirt also had a series of Girl Scout books, but I never read them.)

Alas, there was no dream life as a Girl Scout. My sister Kath - two years older - had been in an active troop. She earned a lot of badges and got to go to Camp Neyati. 

For some reason, Girl Scouts at our school petered out in seventh grade, when girls transitioned from the vaguely Protestant-y Girl Scouts to the Junior Catholic Daughters of America, which was some weird adjunct of the Knights of Columbus. (Uniform: crisp white blouse and shamrock-bright Kelly green skirt.) 

Anyway, by seventh grade, the "big girls" like Kath were out of the Girl Scouts, and us fifth graders inherited the troop. (I also became a JCDA. If you ignored the religious and K of C overlay, there was one excellent aspect of membership in the Junior Catholic Daughters in our parish, as we took an annual bus trip to Boston to see whatever was playing at Cinerama - some sort of  travelogue that provided a quasi "you are there experience." One I remember involved a stomach-churning video rollercoaster ride. On the way back to Worcester, we'd stop at the Eli Whitney House for ice cream. The Big Trip to Boston was a colossal treat, back in those far simpler, far less sophisticated times.)

As for the Girl Scouts, we were under a shadow from the get go, as two of the leaders (both mothers of friends of Kath and me) were stricken with cancer. Some high school girls tried to sub for them, but we didn't do much of anything. We didn't earn badges. We didn't sell cookies. We didn't march in uniform at the annual Little League parade. We didn't go to Camp Neyati, let alone Green Eyrie, the posh Worcester County Girl Scout Camp. 

We sat around despondently. Mostly I remember gossiping and singing songs like "Girl Scouts Together."

At the end of the year we had an exercise in democracy and voted to disband and get our dues money back. There was a tax on our exit. In order to get a refund on our dues - 10 cents a week, I think - we were required to purchase a Girl Scout World Pin, a blue and gold enameled pin signifying something or other.

I haven't spent a lot of time bemoaning my lack of a Girl Scout career, but when I hear about active Girl Scouts, I am occasionally wistful about the lost opportunity to learn things, to achieve, to sell cookies. I admire the Girl Scout success stories, and am maybe even a tiny bit envious of their experience.

But forget about that envy for the moment. I have nothing but admiration for a Virginia Girl Scout who recently achieved the GS equivalent of the Boy Scouts' Eagle Scout status. 

Kate Lindley’s “Gold Award” — the highest award given to Girl Scouts — was given to her to recognize the work she’s done to fight book banning in her community. But the Hanover Board of Supervisors, which has a history of “de-selecting” books, took all mention of book banning out of her personal statement when honoring the four girls who completed projects this year. (Source: Scary Mommy)

Lindley's capstone project was in response to her school system banning a list of books they deemed "offensive." To counter that offensive, she'd set up a couple of "Banned Book Nooks" in local shops (printing, donuts). She also created a website for those looking to find banned books.

Lindley has said that her project “exposes more community members to these titles, hopefully ending their demonization.”

The local school board wanted to honor Lindley's achievement, and that of the other three girls who'd won the Gold Award.  

...but when the school board read about each girl’s accomplishments, Lindley’s self-submitted description was altered to take out all mention of banned books.

Lindley had something to say about the snub:

“You bestowed upon me the greatest honor you could. Greater than that of any proclamation in your censorship of my Gold Award project," she said. “You have shown the world that you are afraid to call something what it is, be that a banned book or a ‘de-selected’ one.”

Predictably, the bluenose prig who'd been instrumental in the local book banning initiative, and "who voted to remove the book banning language from Lindley's award recognition," had a pecksniffy response:

“If anyone wants to support an author whose message is about pornography to children then people have the right to do that," [Michael] Herzberg said. "As a board member, I have a right to say no that I don’t support that request and I also have the right to say yes I have the right to approve the substitute request so the Girl Scout could still get recognized for her Gold Award."

Nice way to tie Kate Lindley to "pornography to children." But I'm pretty sure that Ms. Lindley, Girl Scout extraordinaire will rise above it. And rise well about Herzberg. 

So congratulations, Kate Lindley. I have great hopes for you. Kind of makes me proud to have been a Girl Scout myself, no matter how meager my experience and achievements. 

Girl Scouts Forever!

Another reason I'm happy to be retired

Many years ago, I went through a long interview process with a local software company. It was for a relatively senior position (director-level) at a relatively small place. (Were there 100 employees? 200?More? I've forgotten...) Among the people I interviewed with were the co-founder/CEO and the co-founder CFO. I didn't like either one of them. 

The CEO was extremely condescending and a-holey. During our conversation, we somehow got on the topic of price elasticity and he snippily asked me if I could define it for him. (I'd been to a fancy-enough business school; my husband was an economist. So, yeah, I could define price elasticitiy.) 

The CFO was also something of a prick, and we got into a debate about what financial information should be shared with employees of a small, closely-held corporation. Needless to say, our opinions differed.

Shortly after these close encounters, I had a direct convo with the hiring manager, and we quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn't a good fit between me and them. I did know someone who I thought would be a good fit, and he ended up taking the job. 

I ended up knowing a lot of people who worked at this company over the years, which grew big, went public, made that CEO a billionaire philanthropist, etc. Most of them weren't all that happy working there; most of them didn't last all that long; most disliked the CEO. 

(I couldn't figure out what happened to the CFO, other than finding that he's still alive.)

Aside from me meet and greets with the CEO and CFO, another obnoxious aspect of the job is that when I first stepped in the door for an initial interview, I was asked to sit there and do a writing sample. (Was there a math quiz, too? I can't remember, but I think the writing sample had me coming up with instructions on how to use a toothbrush.) 

I found the process entirely off-putting. It's no wonder I didn't end up working there. There's no doubt I would have hated every moment.  

About that sample: Not that I'm afraid of anything to do with writing. It's just that I found this request insulting for a professional position, especially because I could have easily supplied some writing samples.

Sure, there's be no guarantee that what I would have handed them wouldn't be material written by someone else. (It's been known to happen.) 

Still...

Anyway, I can only imagine how offputting I would have found it if someone had asked me to do a project for them before bringing me on board, which is apparently becoming a fairly widespread hiring practice. 

I don't know how all this came about. Maybe because references have proven unreliable, afraid that if they say anything that might put the kibosh on an applicant, they'll be sued. 

Whatever's driving this trend, it's a-happenin' as I learned when I came across this: 

An employer [Twitter handle: M Stanfield] has sparked fierce debate after being so shocked a Gen Z job seeker refused to spend 90 minutes on a hiring test because it “looked like a lot of work” that he vented about the situation on X, formerly known as Twitter.

People who've job-hunted recently have probably quickly found out that getting hired is no longer as simple as submitting a résumé followed by an in-person interview or two.

The tweet read:

“Me: really enjoyed the call. Please see attached financial modeling test

“Gen Z applicant: this looks like a lot of work. Without knowing where I stand in the process, I’m not comfortable spending 90 minutes in Excel

“Me:…well…I can tell you where you stand now”

In a follow-up tweet, he posted that “if an analyst can’t hammer that out in 90 min, they’re not the right person” for the investment analyst gig going.

Speaking to Fortune, Stanfield—who declined to confirm the name of his company—said such tests are fairly common in his industry as they're used to identify the skill level of potential employees.

During an initial screening call “the steps in the interview process” were laid out in full, he added, and candidates were also told that the test in question “shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“If you want to get hired as an investment analyst, at least at my fund, you need to demonstrate your ability to analyze an investment,” he said, adding the task wasn't on a live project but an example situation. (Source: Fortune, via Yahoo Finance)

The article then devolved into a battle between olds suggesting that Gen Z's are a bunch of entitled brats who need to toughen up - M. Stanfield even suggested that they would have benefitted from getting into a few fistfights at a younger age - and youngs carping about the Boomer mindset, about old fogeys making unreasonable demands and being completely out of it.

I come down somewhere in the middle on this one.

I don't blame the interviewee for asking for clarification on where they stood in the interview process. And I don't blame job-seekers for being suspicious about providing free labor to a company. I've read about plenty of instances where a candidate has created a preso, blog post, or other deliverable and had an unscrupulous company use it without permission or compensation. 

On the other hand, if the candidate actually said something along the lines of 'that looks like a lot of work' - which may not have happened IRL - I don't blame the interviewer from knocking them off the potential hiree list. And the requirement that there would be a test for the position was clearly laid out. So it wasn't exactly a surprise pop quiz. (Can you define price elasticity...)

If hiring companies are going to demand these sorts of pre-hire tests, they should only give them to those who are finalists, or even about to be given an offer. And it does seem obnoxious to expect someone to spend 90 minutes on an unpaid task. So maybe the task could be shorter. Maybe, in this case, M. Stanfield could have had the candidate do a quick look at someone else's analysis (or a fake one) and come back with a first impression of what works, what doesn't.

And if someone's asked to create an actual work product, the hiring company might want to consider some small nod to compensation to those who don't get the job. Even a fifty-dollar Amazon card would recognize that the person had put in some effort. 

I'm no longer in the game, so this is never going to be my problem.  Just another reason that I'm happy to be retired. 

Periwinkle blue. And you?

When I was a senior in college, my roommate - and one of my closest friends to this day - gave me a velour bathrobe for Christmas. It was periwinkle blue. When I opened the box, Joyce said to me, "This is a color you should be wearing."

Fast forward a decade and 'getting your colors done' was a very big deal. So I had my colors done. I can't remember all the details - I think someone at work arranged for a 'color pro' to come in after hours and do color analysis for a bunch of us - but I definitnely had it done.

Sure enough, when they draped the periwinkle blue swatch so that it framed my face, periwinkle blue was my color. I was a Summer. Blues. Pinks. Violets. 

Turns out, those were the colors I'd always gravitated to, and this is probably true for a lot of people. You tend to wear the colors you look best in, the ones that make you feel good, the ones that get you the compliments. But I liked getting my colors done, as it explained some things. Like why I never, ever, ever wore the fabulous, deeply discounted, gorgeous camel-colored jersey dress I snapped up at Loehmann's. It sucked every bit of color out of my face and made me look like a cadaver. In contrast, on the same trip to Loehmann's I'd gotten a less high-end, less fabulous, polished-cotton shirt dress in China blue. Which I wore all the time.

The color analysis I had done was based on the Color Me Beautiful system. Folks took part in color session and/or bought the book, which was a wild best seller. (Just googled: over 20 million copies have been sold since the book was published in the early 1980's. A couple of people I know bought it.)

It is in no way a surprise that my friend Joyce analyzed my colors before color analysis was even a thing, as she always had a tremendous fashion sense. She had an uncanny knack for pulling outfits together from disparate pieces that I never in a million years would have felt went with each other. I always looked better when Joyce "dressed" me. (She went on to have a very successful career in the fashion biz, topping out as the head designer ready-to-wear buyer at Neiman Marcus. In her position there, she was a regular at fashion weeks in NYC, Paris, Milan, and knew all the major designers who, naturally, wanted their lines on the racks at NM.)

Anyway, although I do wear black on occasion, 95% of what's in my wardrobe is from the summer palette.

But I haven't thought a lot about getting my colors done until I came across an article in the NY Post on how "the hottest reservation in town is being told the colors you’ve been wearing for years are all wrong."

When I first saw the clickbait on this article, I saw the number 2,000, and thought that's what people were paying to have their colors done. That's not the case. But Seklab, a Midtown Manhattan salon that offers color analysis, does have a waitlist with over 2,000 people on it.  

In New York City, there are currently only a handful of businesses offering the service, and their appointments are going fast.

“It’s like booking concert tickets,” says Lizzie Heo, 32, co-founder of Seklab with sister Lily, 29.

The sisters book about five appointments a day, and when new reservations come available - which happens twice each month - they're quickly snapped up. A personal analysis takes 80 minutes, and costs $245. (My friend Shelly remembers getting her colors done when she turned 30 in 1984, paying about $40. General inflation would put that number at $120, but Shelly went as part of a group of five, and they were there - as she recalled - for about 2 hours. So $245 for 80 minutes for a personal appointment in New York City sounds about right.)

The Heo sisters trained for their business in Korea, where color analysis is very popular. 

Color analysis, by the way, has gotten more sophisticated over the decades.

Back in the day, you were a Winter-Spring-Summer-Fall. These days - based on Korean color analysis - each season has three subgroups. 

And old-school color analysis, with or without subgroups, could be faulty. 

One person interviewed in the article had had her colors done back in her teenage years (she's now 50) through "Color Me Beautiful," which declared her a winter (white, black, jewel colors). Seklab declared her a "light spring" ("Easter egg colors"), which she finds suits her much better. 

Interestingly, the woman who's palette changed was from a Korean background. It would not be all that shocking if it turned out that the original "Color Me Beautiful" system was more oriented towards caucasions. The Seklab Korean system may well be more nuanced. 

Seklab has competitors. At a House of Colour franchise in Brooklyn, it costs $585 for a two-hour private color analysis session. A color analyst on the Upper West Side charges $299 for a one-on-one. She's booked through July. 

I looked for local color analysts, and there's one in Cambridge where you can get your colors done for $400 for 2-3 hours. So the NYC numbers aren't out of whack at all. 

Now that there are 12 palettes (4 seasons x 3 subgroups), maybe I should get my colors done again. As long as I can still wear periwinkle blue...

I love a parade...

The estimated turnout for Friday's Celtics Victory Parade was over a million. I wasn't one of them, but I was somewhat adjacent, and I believe that number.

This was the 13th sports championship parade in Boston since the start of the 21st century. How fortunate we are in this sports-crazed region, how very fortunate indeed. 

I can't say that I've been to any of these parades, other than to walk along the back of the madding crowd and catch a glimpse here in there of the goings on. I don't exactly have to go out of my way, as the route always takes the parade within a five minute (if that) walk of my home.

For one of the Patriots celebrations, I did see Tom Brady and Bill Belichik going by on a Duck Boat. Brady waved in my direction. 

In 2013, when the Red Sox won the World Series, I was walking in the Boston Public Garden when the flatbed holding David Ortiz - for some reason, Big Papi wasn't riding in one of the Ducks - stopped directly in front of where I was walking. So I stopped, and over the fence, over the heads of fans lined up 10 deep, I sang along as Ortiz led the crowd in a chorus of Sweet Caroline, one of the Red Sox theme songs.

The one parade I'm sorry I missed was the 2004 blowout, when The Olde Towne Team won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. It was the Saturday before the election, and I was up in New Hampshire ringing doorbells for John Kerry. (At least Kerry won NH...)

Anyway, on parade morning, I worked my usual shift at St. Francis House, which is right off the parade route. A 15 second walk off it. And because SFH is embarking on a major reno project, they actual have some temporary space right on Tremont Street, along the route. The staff was invited to watch from there, and I could have tagged along. But I was tired. It was hot. And I felt like just going home and watching on TV.

Because the parade was not going to be going by for another 30 minutes after I finished up my shift, I was pretty sure that I would be able to cross Tremont Street and make my way home. But the crowd was way too deep, way too intense. I asked a couple of police officers if there was any possibility I could get through, and they looked at me as if I had two heads. (I only had one, and it was wearing a Celtics cap.)

So instead of walking directly home - which usually takes 10 minutes -  I had to walk 10 minutes to the Downtown Crossing T-station and take the T two stops. To get to Downtown Crossing, I walked along Washington Street, which runs parallel to the Tremont (on the parade route). It was mobbed with fans, all decked out in green, making their way to the parade, and I had to fight the crowds to get into the station.

I hadn't anticipated needing my T-Pass or a credit card, so I had neither on me. Fortunately, I did have four bucks, so I was able to get a ticket (alas, not my half-price geezer fare!) and a water, which was a good thing, as the platform, while not that crowded, was sweltering and I feared that I was going to pass out.

When I got off my train, the platform was crowded with fans who'd watched the parade from TD Garden and were heading home. Charles Street was also full of fans making their ways to, or retreating from, the parade. I couldn't tell which was which, as there were plenty of folks walking in both directions.

The T was running slow, and by the time I made it to my place, it had taken my 40 minutes. 

I did catch a distant parade glimpse, as from the corner of Charles and Beacon, I saw one of the Ducks and an explosion of green and white confetti.

Once home, I got to watch plenty of the parade from the cool and quiet of my den. 

While I'm glad I wasn't there sweating, overheating, feeling faint, being jostled by the crowd, I was happy that I did get to see so many of the fans as I made my way home. 

Sure, there were a ton of young people - teens, twenties - but there were plenty of families, too. There were even a few olds. Everyone seemed so excited, so joyful. Everyone - and I do mean everyone - was wearing something green. It looked like a warm-weather St. Patrick's Day Parade. Many had on newly minted championship gear. Some were holding signs. But what struck me the most was how diverse the crowd was.  Certainly by age, but mostly by race. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. And the crowd seemed to cut across the class spectrum as well. There were folks who looked like working stiffs, folks who looked like finance bros. 

Even where I was - out of the thick of it - occasional chants broke out.

While I was watching on TV, the crowd seemed to burst spontaneously into Sweet Caroline (which, though most closely associated with the Red Sox, has become something of an all-purpose Boston sports song - along with Dirty Water and Shipping Up To Boston). This was on Boylston Street, where my niece Caroline was watching the parade from, but the singing didn't take place where she was standing.

It was just plain fun to watch the parade, even on TV. It looked like such a wonderfully exuberant blast. 

One-million+ people, and there were only two arrests. Amazing! It's not like there wasn't any drinking. My niece Molly works along the early part of the parade route, opposite Boston City Hall, and she reported that after the parade passed by, the area was loaded with discarded nips. But mostly the crowd was friendly and, if crazy, remarkably well-behaved. 

The joy-fest is ongoing.

Yesterday, while taking a walk in Back Bay, a good proportion - maybe one-quarter - of the people I saw were still wearin' o' the green. As I neared Dick's Sporting Goods, the proportion grew - conservatively - to 99.9999%. And there were a ton of people lined up to get into Dick's. I asked one of the folks what they were waiting for. It was to see Al Horford, at 38, the Old Man of the Celtics team, and a fan favorite. (He's mine.) 

I asked the fan to extend my congratulations to Al, and he assured me he would.

Things should get back to normal now. 

On the sports front, we'll be fretting about why the mediocrity which is the 2024 Red Sox has suddenly gotten kinda-sorta good, taking series from both the Yankees and the Phillies (the teams with the best records in the MLB). 

Those who closely follow the Patriots will be wondering how long they'll be wandering in the championship desert, which seems to many to be quite unfair, given that they've only won six Super Bowls since the turn of the century and the expectation that there will be more has verged on entitlement. 

Bruins fans will be counting down the days until the first puck drop, hoping that some Celtics magic rubs off on them.

And the sportswriters and the fans are already speculating about the Celtics repeating in 2025 and beyond. Could this be another Bird-McHale-Parish era? Could this - gulp! - be another Russell-era team. (They won 11 NBA titles.)

Me? I'll be wearing my Celtics cap for a bit longer, then reverting to the Red Sox. 

But I do think I'll be paying more attention to the C's the next time around.

The Celtics are a very likeable team, and I'm likeabling them quite a lot. 

Maybe next year I'll suck it up and watch the celebration up close and personal. After all, I do so love a parade. 

And I thought driving to Lowell was a supercommute

My career in technology product marketing was split between companies in Cambridge, where I could commute via public transpo, and companies in the burbs. Where I - ugh - had to drive.

Commuting even to the near suburbs was a drag, especially to Burlington, where I worked on 128, where I got caught in the always-ugly Route 3 and Route 93 chokepoints. But pyschologically, commuting to Lexington (about 12 miles) and Burlington (roughly 18 miles) wasn't all that awful. Lexington? Piece of cake. Theoretically, I could have walked it. (Theoretically.)

But I also spent time further out. Andover (23 miles or so, for two-and-a-half miserable years). Lowell (30 miles or so, for two-and-a-half miserable years). 

These commutes were ghastly, and not just because of the drive. The truth was that, when I got to work, I was seldom happy to be there. Both were ghastly experiences, and how I lasted two-and-a-half years each at these companies now seems unfathomable to me. Although I did make good friends at both of these stops, which I guess is what made those tenures fathomable.)

When I commuted to Lowell, I had to get a dental guard, as I found that, as I neared the office, I started to grind my teeth in time to whatever was on the radio. 

And one night, when I was returning home from Andover, when I'd stayed a bit late and was heading out at 7:30 or so, I started driving the wrong way on the road that was going to put me on Route 93. Fortunately, there was no one coming my way, and I was able to course correct. I'm pretty sure this was a virtual teeth-grinding episode.

All of my suburban commutes were supposedly reverse one, going against the traffic that was heading into Boston. But while heading out to work was quasi-reverse, coming back into Boston was always a cluster. 

I pretty much learned every alternate route, every side trip, every back road. This may not have trimmed any time off the commute, but had the benefit that I was usually moving. As opposed to sitting in traffic on one main route waiting to merge into traffic on the next main route. 

But my commuting trials and tribulations were nothing compared to what Kaitlin Jorgenson goes through. Her commute is 544 miles, which is more than the combined mileage of all four of my suburban commuting stints.

For the past 12 months, Jorgenson has commuted by plane every other week to her job at the Scott J. Aveda Hair Salon in the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Source: CNBC)

Jorgenson used to live in Brooklyn, but she moved to Charlotte to be with her BF after her landlord jumped her rent by $700 a month. Another compelling reason was that after the pandemic, she came to the realization that she "wanted to go somewhere [she] could be closer to nature and have more space...that didn't cost a fortune."

But after a long time in NYC, she'd forged a great career for herself and didn't want to have to start over, building a new client base. Not to mention that stylists in NYC make a lot more money than they do in Charlotte, NC.

For Jorgenson, commuting four-plus hours by plane twice a month was a much easier pill to swallow than spending more to rent the same 400-square-foot apartment she’d outgrown — and lose the clients she had spent a decade working with.

She was able to switch her schedule, which was only three days to begin with, to every other week. (She now works 12-hour days.) And fortunately, she has a friend with a spare room near her job that she rents. All in all, even with plane fare, etc., her expenses are $2,000 less per month than when she was living in Brooklyn. 

Jorgenson is a super-supercommuter, but there are a lot of folks out there with a daily commute of 90 minutes or more, and the numbers have grown since Covid-19, when:

Companies embraced flexible work models, and people fled major cities.

They may have fled the major cities, but that's where a lot of the jobs remain. So they spend a lot of time getting there and back.

“It isn’t a new concept, think about all the businessmen in suits who fly with a single briefcase for one-day meetings,” says Jorgenson. “I just think the younger generation is learning how to make supercommuting work for our lives and ambitions.”

And I had a hard-enough time un-supercommuting to Lowell and Andover. 

Reservations 'R' Us. There's gold in them thar rezy hills.

Back in the day, when I dined out - with some frequency - at fancy restaurants, I don't remember ever having much of a problem getting a reservation. Maybe I wasn't going to any "it!" places. Maybe at the time, it just wasn't that big a deal. 

Using a phone - maybe even the your hotel room - you called, as we so quaintly did before there was Resy and Open Table, and made your reservation. And if they couldn't accommodate you at the time and place you wanted, you just moved on to the next place on your list. 

These days, when I do go out for dinner (lunch doesn't tend to be a problem) at a nice place (which isn't all that often), sometimes I can't get a reservation. Again, on to the next.

I am not, of course, doing much dining out in NYC.

Yes, Boston does have restaurants that people desperately want to go to. I'm just not one of those people. New restaurant? Meh. Michelin star? This is Boston: as if! But even if it were to come to pass that we got a Michelin star, I'd take a pass.

Now that I'm an old, I'm no longer as adventurous as I once was. If I'm dining out, it's typically at one of handful of old favorites. Guess I'm just one big dining yawn.

But in NYC, folks are a lot more committed to seeing and being seen than they are in Boston. People in general eat out more often than in other cities. And in general it's harder to score a reservation at a place that's hot, or just got a great review, or was awarded a star, or where the A-list folks committed to seeing and being seen have been spotted (and there are a disproportionate number of them in NYC). At such places, it can be nearly impossible to find a table. 

At some spots, when blocks of reservations are released, they're snapped up immediately. Some restaurants set aside a couple of tables for walk-ins, but if you're a nano-second too late, you may be informed that there's a three hour wait. (As if.)

The difficulty of getting a NYC restaurant reservation has given rise to a new entrepreneurial opportunity. 

To sidestep the reservation scrum, particularly at a hundred and fifty of the city’s buzziest restaurants, a new squad of businesses, tech impresarios, and digital legmen has sprung up, offering to help diners cut through the reservation red tape, for a price. In the new world order, desirable reservations are like currency; booking confirmations for 4 Charles Prime Rib, a clubby West Village steakhouse, have recently been spotted on Hinge and Tinder profiles. (Source: The New Yorker)

(Side note: at this point, The New Yorker article did a bit on the most exclusive NY restaurants by decade. The Sign of the Dove was their pick for the seventies. Well, during the seventies, my husband and I had an incredibly dreadful lunch there. Our table was the size of a dinner plate, or maybe, if I'm being generous, a charger. And all these decades later, I can still taste the vichyssoise, which we immediately renamed "cream of rock salt." We probably had a reservation, which we made by phone.)

Among the businesses spawned by the reservation "crisis" is something called Appointment Trader, "an online marketplace for people to buy and sell reservations." They're not just in the restaurant rez biz, they'll book shopping appointments and doctors' appointments. (Where were they when we needed them for vaccine appointments in 2021?) Anyway, people who want to make a little coin sign on to be sellers, and away they go. "Appointment Trader cleared almost six million dollars in reservations" last year, and the owner/founder rakes in a commission of 20-30 percent. 

One of the sellers is Alex Eisler, an applied math and computer science major at Brown, who:

Regularly uses fake phone numbers and e-mail addresses to make reservations. When he calls Polo Bar, he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do different accents. I have to act like a girl sometimes.” He switched into a bad falsetto: “I’m, like, ‘Hiiii, is it possible to book a reservation?’ I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Which just about covers Brown tuition.

Another seller, who claims to have made $80K last year, said:

“It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Hmmm. Maybe I gotta get off doom-scrolling on Twitter, trying to figure out when the end of the world as we know it will occur, and start making some NYC dinner reservations. 

What am I waiting for? LFG!

And the winner is...

The twenty-first century has been very kind to Boston's sports fans. This century, no city has more championships across the four major professional sports (football, baseball, hockey, basketball).

In 2002, the Patriots won their first of six Super Bowls. They're tied with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most SB wins. For those of us who remember when the hapless, lowly Patriots were nicknamed the Patsies, these six wins are nothing short of astounding. 

When it comes to football, I'm admittedly a frontrunner of a fan. I only started avidly watching the Pats when they started winning, and mostly stopped watching when they folded.

But when it comes to baseball, well, I'm a better or worse kind of fan and, as much as I might piss and moan about the Olde Towne Team, I watch at least part of every game. As I've said many times, I may have been baptized a Catholic, but I was born a Red Sox fan.

If all they'd done was win the World Series in 2004 - after an 86 year wait - that would have been plenty enough for me. But they did it again in 2007, in 2013, in 2018. (Sure, it sucks to see them mired in mediocrity, as they surely are despite just beating the Yankees and the Phillies (the two best teams in baseball) two out of three. But we'll always have those four great World Series wins, none greater than 2004.)

Not having won the Stanley Cup since 1972, in the days of Esposito and Orr, the Bruins won it all in 2011. (I don't watch a lot of games, but I do follow the Bruins. I keep up by reading the sports pages. I always know where they are in the standings, and tune in once the playoffs start.)

And in 2008, the Celtics won the NBA Championship - the 17th in their stellar history. That year, they won on June 17th. 

And this year, damned if they didn't do it again this year on June 17th. Their 18th banner will be flying over the TD Garden, putting them one ahead of the (hiss-boo) LA Lakers as the team with the most NBA Championships.

As with the Bruins, I don't watch a lot of games, but I do follow the Celts. I keep up by reading the sports pages. I always know where they are in the standings, and tune in once the playoffs start. This year, I even went out and bought a cap. (My husband was a big Celtics/basketball fan, and when he was alive, I watched a ton of games.)

This edition of the Celtics has been a fun team to watch. Bonus points that their coach is a local kid who grew up in Rhode Island. 

After a disastrous, blown-out performance in the the fourth game, it was comforting that the Celtics - up 3-1 - had a reasonable lead through game five, so I could watch without experiencing heart palpitations and an anxiety attack. 

I watched wearing my cap, and for extra good luck, I brought my $3, grocery-store, St. Patrick's Day but still alive shamrock into the den to hang with me.

My cap, my shamrocks: looked like it worked out.

What's most enjoyable about having your team playing for the championship of their sport is how it brings people together.

For the last couple of weeks, the Celtics have been the talk of the town. Lots of Celtics gear out there, lots of wearin' of the green. You pass a couple of folks standing around, and they're talking Celtics. You go into a store: Celtics talk. You're waiting on the corner for the walk sign to pop, how about those Celtics!

Turn on the news, and the Celtics story leads. And most of the newspeople are wearing something green. 

I've been wearing my cap when I've worked lunch at St. Francis House (the homeless shelter where I volunteer; if you don't wear a ballcap, you have to wear a lunch-lady hairnet, which makes everyone look like a nutter), and the guests have gotten a kick out of it. Lots of the staff and some of the guests have been been decked out for the Celtics, too. 

As have the Make Way for Ducklings ducklings statues, who've been wearing Celtics shirts since the finals began. The ice cream truck outside the Public Garden, where the ducklings live, has been flying a Celtics banner. There's a giant sign hanging from the Massachusetts State House bearing the Celtics' slogan: It's Different Here! (Whatever that means: it's different everywhere. But I guess there is all that history, all those banners. Bob Cousy. Bill Russell. Satch Sanders. The Jones Boys. Tommy Heinsohn. John Havlicek Dave Cowens. Cedric Maxwell. Dennis Johnson. ML Carr. Larry Bird. Robert Parish. Kevin McHale. Bill Walton. Ray Allen. Kevin Garnett. Paul Pierce. Rajon Rondo And now, Jaylen Brown, Jason Tatum, and (yea for old guys) Al Horford.)

It's just plain fun to have a winner, to have that buzz, to have the parade.

No date yet for the Duck Boats to roll through Boston. We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave, and the city really doesn't need one million fans - many of them drunk out of their minds - raging around Boston when it's 98 in the shade.

I might walk out to see a bit of the parade, which I usually do, given that it passes within a five-minute walk from where I live. The next week or so, everyone around here will be on a high. (Wish Jim were here to enjoy it...)

Congratulations, Boston Celtics! Greatest basketball franchise ever! 

How fun when the winner is your guys!!!