Where I’d live

I saw an article on Business Week.com on the 25 cities in the U.S. (out of 340 urban areas evaluated by the Council of Community and Economic Research) that are the least costly to live in.

Almost all of the cities were in the south, southwest or west, with a few Midwesterners making the cut.

Predictably, there’s a correlation between poverty and cost of living.

Predictably, there’s not one place on the list where I can even begin to imagine living, with the possible exceptions of Indianapolis and Springfield, Illinois. Indianapolis is at least a Big City with (presumably: I’ve never been there) at least some of the benefits of Big City life (including decent restaurants and anonymity).  In Springfield, IL – another place on the list I’d never been to – at least you can hop in your car, put your pedal to the metal and zoom up through the soy bean fields to Chicago in a few hours.

Of the cities on the list, the only one I’d been to – and that was just to drive through – was Fort Smith, Arkansas. But a $3.13 hamburger isn’t enough to get met to move there.  Ditto the half-gallon of milk for $1.67 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, or a $570 month 2-bedroom apartment in Paducah, KY.

No can do.

Of the cities on the list, the only one – other than Springfield, IL and Indianapolis – that seemed to have anything to recommend it was Pueblo, Colorado, which has nice mountain views.

The article mentioned the urban areas that are the priciest. These are Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, San Francisco, and Honolulu. Not coincidentally, these are all places I could live. Not that I’ve really thought about Honolulu, but if I had to pick the top 25 cities in the U.S. in which I would be willing to live, it would probably make the list. I wouldn’t have thought of Queens as a separate entity from NYC, either, but although I’ll take Manhattan, Queens is doable.

Anyway, coming up with 25 Pink Slip livable U.S. cities was actually something of a challenge.

The first tranche was easy enough:

1. Boston (Be it ever so humble…)
2. Cambridge (Wouldn’t have separated out from Boston, but if the list delineates between Manhattan and Queens)
3. Brookline (Ditto)
4. Manhattan (Where my husband would like to retire, although I keep explaining to him that you should retire someplace cheaper, not more expensive)
5. Brooklyn (Actually, I could easily switch Brooklyn with Manhattan; who wouldn’t want to live on Cranberry or Pineapple Street?)
6. Portland, ME (Best little New England city ev-ah)
7. Providence (A surprising gem, due to a renaissance largely brought about through the efforts of a corrupt, jail-bird mayor; and the fact that the city always had great bones)
8. Burlington, VT (A bit off the beaten track, but how nice to wake up looking at Lake Champlain every morning)
9. Chicago (My kind of town; perfect except for flatness,  lack of ocean, and – sorry, family members – an accent that’s like a screwdriver going through your ear)
10. Washington, DC (Other than the muggy weather)
11. San Francisco (Boston with steeper hills, prettier views and better weather)
12. Seattle (Other than the rain)
13. Portland, OR (Other and/or because of the fact that they drained one of their reservoirs after they caught some guy peeing in it, which seems a little overkill-y, given that all sorts of other animals pee and worse in it)
14. Minneapolis (How great is it to have a city with miserable weather where, if you pick you spots right, you never have to go out into because of all those connecting skyways, or whatever they call them?)
15. Austin (I’ve never been there, but I think I could make do nicely)
16. Philadelphia (Don’t really know the city very well, but it’s enough Boston-like)
17. Pittsburgh (Another place I’ve never been, but it has a certain appeal, and I have had recurring dreams about being at the confluence of the Alleghany, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, which must mean something)
    
    Hmmmmm…This is even harder than I thought it would be. Let me put my urban thinking cap on. Ta-da:
    
18. Syracuse (Don’t laugh: I’ve been there plenty of times and really and truly like it. Lots to do in and around, and I bet it’s on the lowish end of this list in terms of cost of living)
19. Queens (Because I already said I could live there, and it is so in spitting distance of Brooklyn and Manhattan)
20. Honolulu (Someday I actually might get sick of New England weather and, while Hawaii is pretty darned isolated, I’d prefer to get my warmth there than in Florida)
    
    Okay. I’m really wracking my brains now. Surely, there must be other U.S. cities I can see myself living in. I really don’t want to cheat and open this up to places like Paris and Prague. Or pre-riot Vancouver, even.
    
21. Cleveland (If I could live in Syracuse…)
22. Houston (I’ll take my friend John’s word for the livability, even though I know I’d have to spend all my time indoors, city next to the air-conditioner and asking myself how I ended up in a state governed by Rick Perry, which I probably wouldn’t focus that closely on if I were in Austin, even though that would actually be closer to where Rick Perry was most of the time. But the mind works in mysterious ways…)
23. Flagstaff (I’ll take one of those craftsman-style bungalows, please)
24. Madison, Wisconsin (Which, now that I think of it, I’d probably swap sight unseen with Austin)
    
    And as for the magic 25th city I could live in, I give you:
    
25. Worcester, Massachusetts (Been there, done that. And why not? It’s the Heart of the Commonwealth. And it’s always sunny in Worcester, isn’t it? Except when it’s grey and gloomy and snowy and rainy and icy. And the streets are paved, if not with gold, then at least paved. Most of them.)

I’m am hopeful, if not 100% confident, that I will never have to choose a place to live based entirely on how low-cost it is. I really don’t want to end my days in Ardmore, Oklahoma or Murfreesboro, Tennessee, even if it means that I occasionally have to open a tin of cat food or stuff newspapers in my shoes in order to stay in a cold, expensive, northern city, which almost everything on my list is.

Wait, forget that bit about using newspapers to stuff my hole-y shoes with. There won’t be any. Better make that “fast food wrappers.”

Summertime, and the Wiffle Balling’s easy

Tomorrow is the first day of summer, which means in just a couple of weeks it will be the Fourth of July, the day on which my father always declared that the summer season was now making its rapid downhill slide into autumn and was almost over. (What is it with the Irish?)

Personally, I’ve decided not to completely give up on summer until the first ice rain and/or we turn back our clocks, gaining one lousy hour’s worth of sleep in exchange for pitch black-ness at 5 p.m. Grrrr….

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

It’s SUMMERTIME, which means it’s time to celebrate things like watermelon, sun screen, and Wiffle Balls. The Wall Street Journal saw to that last one on Friday, paying tribute to the humble plastic ball and bat duo that has meant hours of entertainment and athletic derring-do since the 1950’s. Not to mention all that sibling bedevilment. Sibs who wouldn’t have even thought about clobbering that pesky younger sister or obnoxious older brother with a Louisville Slugger – okay: they might have considered it, but would never have gone through with it, even if completely and utterly provoked – had no problem playing family whack-a-mole using a plastic Wiffle Bat. After all, a cardinal rule of sibling torture is: First, do no harm. Or at least the sorts of harm that parents will really come down on. Not that I had any first-hand experience with Wiffle Bat attacks. Not I! Why our house when I was growing up was edenic, irenic, a veritable Peaceable Kingdom, a Quaker Meeting House. But I did hear occasional rumors of family life elsewhere that were less than Cleaverish, less than Donna Reedite. Families where the siblings actually went after one another. Tsk, tsk. Imagine the horror of getting whacked in the leg with a Whiffle Bat? Or having a Whiffle Ball pegged at said leg – bare to the shorts-line, since it was summer.

Ah, the Wiffle Ball.

Amazingly, Wiffle Ball’s are still made in the USA – in Connecticut, no less. By the third generation of Wiffle Ball makers in the Mullany family.

Wiffle Ball Inc. of Shelton, CT, has 15 employees – and “two injection-molding machines [that] hum along to produce thousands of Wiffle Balls every day.”

In fact, every single Wiffle Ball that will sail across backyards this summer was produced here. Just like every single Wiffle Ball that has sailed across backyards since the factory opened in 1959. (Source: WSJ article linked above.)

Over the course of time, the Mullanys have pretty much stuck to their knitting. The ball doesn’t change; the bat doesn’t change; and, if memory serves, the packaging doesn’t appear to have changed since I would have first seen these babies on offer at the Zayre’s in the Webster Square Plaza sometime in the late 1950’s.  The color of the bat, by the way, is trademarked: no one else can produce bright yellow plastic bats. Take that, China trade!

Over fifty years in business, despite no advertising and a product – ball cum bat -  that retails for less than four bucks. (What must it have cost, say, in 1960, when it was probably a May birthday gift for my brother Tom?  A dollar? Seventy-nine cents?)

Beyond the Made in America thang, you have to love the Wiffle Ball story.

In 1953, David Mullany was unemployed, but left the house each morning as if going to his job so that his family would think he was working. What they didn’t know was that they were all living off of a cashed in insurance policy.

Watching his son (also a David) and friends playing baseball, and trying to master throwing a curve, David the Father and David the Son put their heads together and, after a bit of experimenting, came up with a Wiffle Ball design that worked.

Trying to hit the Wiffle Ball is another matter, altogether.

Somehow, hitting a plastic ball with a plastic bat is a lot more difficult than hitting a baseball with a wooden bat (at least as hurled by pitchers when I was a kid. At least if you wanted the ball to move more than a couple of feet. Frankly, the best batting sensation when I was a kid was hitting a golf ball with a wooden bat. Those puppies could fly.)

Anyway, I never actually liked playing Wiffle Ball.

Not that I was much good at baseball, but at Wiffle Ball I sucked colossally.

Plus, at least in our house, where toys did have a supreme tendency to get grody, Wiffle Balls and Wiffle Bats all ended up scarred and pilly.

Still, there was something about having a pristine, straight from Zayre’s, Wiffle Ball in your hand. Smooth, brighter than white.

Kinda makes me want to get me to The Connecticut Store and buy me a ball and bat combo.

But what would I do with it, exactly, except look at it and not-so-nostalgically recall how it felt to have a Whiffle Ball whipped at a bare leg?

Certainly, I’d get much more use out of a Wiffle Ball cap. But I need another ball cap like I need another hole in my head. Which I don’t. And if I’m going to get another ball cap – and, frankly, I probably am – it should be a Boston Bruins cap, providing I can find one in a style and color I like.  (Why, oh why, do the Bruins have to have that crappy black and gold color scheme. What would have been wrong with purple and white?) But while I hem and haw over a Bruins cap appropriate to my position as a front-running bandwagon fan, there is something goofily likeable about the Wiffle caps, is there not?

Goofy likability aside, if I’m going to buy anything at the Connecticut Store, it should probably be a Tuna-Mate. Connecticut invented, Connecticut made, the Tuna-Mate is used for draining tuna cans.  Talk about a must-have for tuna lovers. No more sharp-edged tuna can cover slit cuts on your fingers, no more tuna-finger mess and smell.

I know, I know, it’s not an iconic product like the Wiffle Ball. And they probably don’t sell millions of them each year. But is this a New England product or what? Practical, humble, unglamorous…If nothing else, it made me crave a tuna sandwich. I must away…

As for the impending summer season, I’ve got just three words: Play (Wiffle) Ball!

Policeman: “Hey, Boston, get back on the sidewalk.” Pink Slip: “But, Officer, based on the Pedestrian Danger Index, I know what I’m doing.”

A few weeks ago, Transportation For America published its 2011 Dangerous By Design report, which includes a Pedestrian Danger Index.

On the day the report came out, I was in Ireland, taking my life in my hands walking out Taylor Hill in Galway for lunch at the Ardilaun Hotel. The walk, which wended its way through a nice residential area, would have been perfectly pleasant if not for the occasional spots where the sidewalk disappeared, and, in its place appeared a brick wall or a building, flush up against the road. On which drivers were pell-mell zipping up and down the hill. Each time we’d reach one of these unpredictable spots, we’d decide that it was wiser to seek a sidewalk than it was to flatten ourselves against the wall and inch along the couple of dozen yards of Danger Zone. So we’d check, recheck, and sound check for approaching vehicles, then mad dash it across the road to get to the other side, where – at least temporarily – the sidewalk didn’t end.

At least, as proud Bostonian jaywalkers we’re used to mad dashes across streets which, like those in Galway,just weren’t built for car traffic.

As we were absorbed with the pedestrian perils of Galway City, we didn’t pay all that much attention to the Pedestrian Danger Index, other than to make a mental note that, amazingly, Boston is the least dangerous of the 52 metros ranked.

Mad dogs and pedestrians, stay out of the noonday Sunbelt.
If you’re a walker, you might want to stay out of the south and west: four of the “top 10” (in terms of pedestrian danger) are in Florida, two in Texas, and one each in California, Nevada, Tennessee/Mississippi, and Arizona.

The absolute worst: Orlando-Kissimmee.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be walkers anywhere near the Magic Kingdom.

Orlando’s Danger Score is 255.4; Boston’s a mere 21.6.

Needless to say, the news that Boston is the nation’s safest pedestrian city was met with plenty of hoots, and even a few hollers, around here.

We are, after all, a city that’s pretty well known for our jaywalkers. And it would seem to follow that jaywalking might be a tad more dangerous than standing rigidly on the street corner waiting (hah!) for the pedestrian light to appear. Instead, the metros that grew up in the car-and-driver error being more hazardous to your pedestrian health:

… reflect[s] the hazards of setting out on foot in sprawling cities built up in an era when planners focused on making roads wider and faster for cars — and where drivers are less accustomed to pedestrians. (Source: Boston.com.)

But there’s also some speculation that jaywalkers – precisely because they’re engaging in behavior that’s at least a tiny bit dangerous – are more nimble and more capable of avoiding oncoming traffic. Whatever the signs are telling us, we know when it’s okay to WALK, and when it’s better to DON’T WALK. We use our own judgment. Think situation ethics for pedestrians.

The odd pedestrian in a non-jaywalking city expects the WALK sign to mean everything is A-OK. Rules are rules, and they don’t anticipate the driver running the red light. Whereas Bostonians hope for the best and expect the worst.

And speaking of worst, we do seem to have the worst reputation, as far as jaywalking goes.

Many years ago, when in California, I believe in San Francisco – a pedestrian- and to some degree jaywalker-friendly city, I had just stepped off the curb to cross a street against the light, when a traffic cop hollered over to me, “Hey, Boston, get back on the sidewalk.”

(Not that cops in Boston never yell at jaywalkers. Once I was jayrunning across Beacon Street near the Public Garden when a policeman in a patrol car turning onto Beacon got on his speaker and blared “Lady, don’t you ever do that again.”)

On another SF trip, my husband and I were looking for a restaurant. There was a woman a few yards ahead of us, and we caught up to her to ask for directions. After she provided them, I asked her whether she was from Boston. (She did not have a New England accent.) She said that she had recently moved from Boston, but asked why we might think she was a former Bostonian.

“You’re the only one other than us who’s jaywalking,” I told her.

Anyway, I don’t jaywalk quite as much as I used to.

Too many jerks on cell phones not paying attention.

In fact, I’m more likely to double check even when I have the right of way.

Still, I have my favorite jaywalking spots.

The corner of Congress and State, for one. The light flow goes from Congress Street traffic, to State Street traffic, to pedestrian light. But most Boston pedestrians want that pedestrian light once Congress gets its red, as we don’t want to wait for everyone taking a left- or right-hand turn onto State. Sheesh….it’s not like we have all the time in the world.

Thus, the locals start crossing Congress once the through traffic on Congress gets a red light. Drivers making a turn from State onto Congress, beware.

Tourists, I note, tend to stay put on the curb.

My other favorite place to jaywalk is in Harvard Square, between the T-station and the Coop.

The traffic pattern there is a bit different than it used to be, but this spot is still good for a “critical mass” jaywalk, in which the pedestrians in a swarm decide that they’ve waited long enough and take to the streets. The look on the faces of the drivers with out of state plates when a couple of dozen folks step up into traffic against the light, against all societal norms, against all common sense, is worth the slight risk. And proof, indeed, that there is safety in numbers.

But, as I have noted, I am slowing down. I’ve even completely ruled out jaywalking after dark. I’m enough of a driver to understand that someone in a car may not be able to see you.

Meanwhile, as I stroll into old-age, happy to be living in a city where people walk, and where there’s an awful lot within walking distance of my home, I’m happy (if surprised) to learn that I will play out my hobbling dotage in the place that, at least in 2011, was the least dangerous place in the U.S. for a pedestrian.

O, Canada? No, Canada! Boston Bruins win the Stanley Cup!

Well, here in the Hub of the Universe, the Boston Bruins – “our” hockey team – has just won the Stanley Cup.

They did so by beating the Vancouver Canucks on the Canucks’ home ice, where the home team had won each of the three earlier games played there by one goal each: one game in the last 18 seconds of regulation play, another in sudden death overtime. Each game in Vancouver, up until the final one – which really counted -  was what we used to call a “squeaker.”

In contrast to their up-to-now performance in Vancouver, where each game was a near miss, on Bruins’ home ice, the Canucks were completely whipped: 8-1, 4-0, and 5-2. In two of those games, their $10 million a year goalie was replaced – the ultimate in sports humiliation. Each game in Boston is what we call a blow-out.

Last night, I was hoping for a Bruins-led blow-out on Canucks ice.

It wasn’t quite the blow-out I was looking for – my heart didn’t really stop racing until the Bruins scored that death-stake fourth goal late in the third (although I did call my sister Trish to ask “are you breathing now?” when the B’s went up 3-zip).

Anyway, after all these years, I’m happy (and relieved) to see the Stanley Cup back in Boston.

Since this post is about this series and the teams that faced off in it, I must admit that I have always been a bit perplexed/amused by the Canucks name. In Canada, apparently,“Canuck” is a term of affection. Growing up in Worcester, it was a derogatory term – think “Mick” or “Polack” or “Dago” – used for French Canadians. But, eh, it’s their country and their team.

The Canucks have been around for 40 years, and have never won the hockey big kahuna. Because of this, and because hockey is Canada’s game, and because Vancouverites are such avid fans, the Canucks believed themselves to be deserving of a win.

As if 40 years is an eternity to wait to win it all… Just ask any Red Sox fan, who twiddled their thumbs for 86 years between World Series victories. Or Chicago Cubs supporters who’ve been twiddling away since 1908. But that’s baseball, and this – even though it’s the middle of June – is hockey.

Even in hockey, the ‘we deserve it, it’s been 40 long years’ whine didn’t quite cut it. The Bruins, after all, hade not won a Stanley Cup since 1972, which by my quick mental arithmetic – look, Ma, no fingers – is pretty darned close to 40 years.

So, there.

Plus the Bruins, along with Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York, and Chicago -  are one of the Original Six teams in the National Hockey League. This, in itself, made them something of a sentimental favorite – if any Boston team, once the Red Sox won, would ever be able to claim the mantle of “sentimental favorite”. Canadians, of course, counter-argued that they invented hockey, and there’s been a medium-length drought since any of the Canadian NHL teams won it all. (The national team did, however, win the 2010 Olympic Gold.)

Predictably, when two teams are locked in the deadly combat of a championship series, there’s all sorts of online he say-he say name calling, bad blood letting (metaphorically, anyway), and trash talking. Not to mention blood-curdling accounts of how out of town fans are being treated – especially if those out of towners are nice Canadians in Big Bad Boston.

Thus, I read online of a mother and 9 year old child in Canucks gear dragged from a cab and assaulted, when in actuality what most likely happened is that some stupid drunk Bruins fan pounded on the window of a cab containing a stupid drunk Canucks fan. Yet when emotions run high… And I’ve no doubt that there’s been taunting, popcorn throwing, and beer tossing on both sides.  And I’ll admit it may well be worse on the Boston side of the equation. (But not necessarily: in the face of the ‘Nucks loss, there’s rioting in Vancouver.) Still, if a mother and 9 year old child had been pulled from a cab in Boston, information about the incident would be more than an online rumor. Even the Boston Herald – the local “no apologies” tabloid – would have run an “it’s only a game” editorial.

My personal contribution to the fray was this: I passed a couple of Canucks fans on the street the other day. I smiled warmly at them, and in my warmest and most good humored of voices wished them “Bad Luck.”

This has no doubt translated online to “verbal assault and over the top abuse by a mean old Boston lady.”

Anyway, the buzz in town about the Bruins has been fun, and it should continue sky-high for the next week or so. There’ve been lots of signs in window, lots of flags on cars. Finagle a Bagel had a Bruins bagel – plain with some sort of black-dye swirl in it. I took a pass. There’s been a Bruins jersey on the statue of George Washington in the Public Garden. And my personal favorito: the Make Way for Ducklings ducklings all decked out in black and gold. Mack, Pack, and Ouack are no different than other Bostonians in this regard. There’s an awful lot of wearing o’ the Bruins gear, which is somewhat new this year. Of the four major sports teams in Boston, the Red Sox – based on my informal walking around survey – have the most fans wearing something Red Sox related. Probably followed by the Patriots, with the Celtics a close third. Then there’s the Bruins.

They’ve certainly had their die-hards, but they haven’t been THE Team since the days of Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, et al., when they last won the Stanley Cup. And when Derek Sanderson had a song written about him:

Not too long ago, up in Canada land
There lived a little boy name of Derek Sanderson…
Hockey games aren’t won on dreams.
But Derek’s always been this way it seems.

When a hockey player has a song written (and sung) about him, you know that this has always been as much a hockey town at heart as it has been anything else. But winning teams do tend to bring out whole retinues of johnny-come-lately band wagon fans.

And I will admit to being one of them.

My primo sporting allegiance has always gone to baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular. First runner up probably goes to the Celtics, largely because my husband is a big basketball fan and historic follower of the Celtics, so we watch a lot of basketball games – including this year’s NBA finals, during which we rooted lustily for the Dallas Mavericks to beat the craven Miami Heat. Whodda thunk I’d ever find myself cheering on a team from Texas, but there you have it. (Congratulations, Mavericks.) I like football well enough – at least until I think about the head-butting violence and all those retired players with their brains destroyed, not to mention the martial music, militarism, and pomposity of the sport. If I never watched another football game in the course of my life, I’d live. In fact, during this year’s Super Bowl, we tuned out for a while during halftime to watch a show on the 2004 Red Sox, which we’d already seen a couple of times. Nonetheless, we stuck with it, still goose-pimpled and misty-eyed about The Olde Towne Team’s vanquishing the Yankees. So much so that we forgot to turn back to the Super Bowl until the fourth quarter.

As for the Bruins, I confess that I’ve been on the band wagon this year, an absolute front-runner (although I didn’t wait for them to hit the play offs to start following them, so I’m not the front-most of the front-runners).

Basically, I have only followed the Bruins with half-an-eye cocked their way since the Bobby Orr era.  So I can pick Cam Neely, Mike Millbury, and Ray Bourque out of a line-up. I know that Ray had to go to the Avalanche to win a Stanley Cup, and that he was the mensch – sniff, sniff – who gave up his number 7 jersey so that Espo’s number could be retired. I know who Milt Schmidt is. And Eddie Shore. I generally know how the team is faring, watch a couple of games during the regular season, and will catch a few Stanley Cup games, no matter who’s playing.

But this year, I’ve been (almost) all in, and have watched (and enjoyed) a lot of games.

So, band wagon maybe, but I am definitely not a Pink Hat.

This is the term coined for the nouveau Red Sox fans who glommed on to the team once they started getting good, driving up the cost and availability of seats at Fenway, even if they don’t know a damned thing about baseball.

Not so me with hockey. I know icing. I know high-sticking. I know pull-the-goalie.

And I’ve been glued to the playoffs.

Yesterday, I was distracted pretty much all day, sitting there hoping that the Bruins would win. Hopeing that they’d score often and early, and that the game wouldn’t be a cliffhanger. I hoped knew that Boston goalie Tim Thomas would win the Conn Smythe trophy as the series MVP.

Yesterday, I resisted the urge to head to The Garden and pick up a Bruins something or other, and rub the flying Bobby Orr statue for good luck.

But I’m sure that by the time the first puck is dropped next season, I will be in possession of something Bruinish, even though I’m not that fond – sorry, guys – of the color scheme. It will not be a pink hat, but I’m hoping that they have something available in blue. And I will have at least blown a kiss to FBO.

As for the Canucks, let me asssure you that 40 41 years ain’t nothing. When the Bruins won it all in 1970 – the year when Bobby Orr took flight – I was watching the final game on my family’s black and white TV. It was Mother’s Day, but I don’t remember my mother watching with us. (She was probably making us dinner. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma!)  My father was, watching the game. Less than a year later, he was dead.  That was 40 years ago this January. We all whooped and hollered when Bobby Orr went air-borne. Note the helmet-less players. They don’t make anything like they used to, but the current edition of the Bruins are tough, physical and engaging – just like the Big Bad Boston Bruins of the early 1970’s. Forty years – give me a break. It’s gone in no time. Snap of a finger, blink of an eye. Try waiting 86 years for something to come along. Now that’s a lifetime, mes amis Candaiens.

Gotta say this for the Canucks. Not that I prefer it to our, but I do like your national anthem. And nice touch, your playing “Love That Dirty Water” while the Bruins were taking turns skating around with the Stanley Cup.

O, Canada? No, Canada, I’m afraid.

Maybe next year.

Meanwhile, for the next while at least, Hockey ‘R Us.

One-hit wonders

My husband’s undergraduate degree is from Rutgers, and I was thumbing through his alumni rag when I cam across an article on James Cusumano, a chemistry major who – if I read the article (long since in recycle) correctly - had something to do with the 1950’s hit song “Who Wears Short Shorts?” before he went on to a successful career as a chemist.

But, in fact, when I started to fact check, it was no longer clear what exactly (if anything) Cusumano had to do with WWSS. He does not appear to have been a member of the Royal Teens, who sang WWSS, even though Cusumano was the right age and, like the members of the Royal Teens, a Jersey Boy, to boot. Anyway, as it turns out, although they were both chemistry majors of roughly the same era at Rutgers, Jim didn’t know James.

But, of course, I digress.

The real point behind bringing up “Who Wears Short Shorts?” and the Royal Teens is that the Royal Teens were One-Hit Wonders.

But I will digress once again to offer you this splendid You Tube of the Royal Teens appearance on American Bandstand.

A kinder, gentler time….

And to note the following: the short-shorts and blouse on the girl in the video, when compared to the sluttish teen outfits so often observed these days, are nearly as modest as garb one might find on the followers of Mother Teresa. As for the lyrics, for sheer simplicity and brilliance, I would say they have it all over, say, Lady Gaga, et al. Nifty dance steps, too. Who needs elaborate choreography to get the point across?

Which leads me to a fun article I saw the other day in The Wall Street Journal online about a few folks who’d struck gold in recent years, bringing to market tremendously successful products, whose success they were never quite able to replicate.

Not that they had to. All of them did quite well, thank you, with products that sold a boat-load and entered the collective imagination.

Seldom the faddist, I was surprised that I had personally contributed to the coffers of two of the four entrepreneurs profiled in the article, which certainly makes me proud to be a consumer and an American.

Magentic Poetry

Not that good poetry isn’t always magnetic, but Dave Kapell is a musician who invented Magnetic Poetry.

Not only do I have my own set around somewhere, I’m pretty sure that I gave a few as gifts over the years. Buying my own Magnetic Poetry kit also led to a companion purchase. As I had no desire to wax poetic on my fridge, I went out and bought a metal stand – the kind that you use to prop up documents that you’re keying into the computer via touch type, which, in this digital age, doesn’t seem to be called for all that often anymore. I used my Magnetic Poetry kit at work, and I’m sure I have it around somewhere. Or not.  I didn’t come across it in my recent office purge, which produced two colossal recycle bags, as well as a bulging bag o’ non-recyclable trash. But there is the one Fibber McGee cabinet in there that I haven’t yet touched.,,

Once he had his Eureka moment and decided to cash in on it, Kapell was able to get Borders and Barnes and Noble to carry his wares. Which is no doubt where I bought my kit as some point in the 1990’s.

While the concept was a one-hit wonder, Kapell – despite the slipping fortunes of the big-box-bookstores (see Monday’s post) – has kept the idea going with variations on a theme.

A zombie-themed kit is popular, he says, and erotic-word versions are perennial favorites.

Ah, perhaps if Congressman Weiner had access to the erotic-word version of Magnetic Poetry, rather than a Twitter account, the world would be a saner place.

A recent golf-lovers' kit, on the other hand, was a dud.

Perhaps if the erotic- and golf-kits had been combined in a Tiger Woods’ special, he’d have had something.

Kapell didn’t say how much he’s made with Magnetic Poetry over the years, but did acknowledge that it’s enabled him to follow his true love as a not-so-struggling musician. And indulge in this ukulele habit.

His house is decked out with a grand piano and a 70-piece ukulele collection.

Ah, perhaps if Congressman Weiner had had a ukulele to strum on…

Silly Bandz

Robert Croak was responsible for bringing Silly Bandz – the second product on the one-hit-wonder list that I’d purchased – to market in the States.

Silly Bandz are those colored elastic wristies in the shapes of animals, TXT-isms (OMG, LOL), and other things that were the kid rage a while back. I bought a few packs of them for my nieces when they (Silly Bandz, not the nieces) were at their popularity peak in the U.S. Today, the rising demand is elsewhere, but Croak has some other ideas up (and on) his sleeve:

The Slap Watch, which has an oversized, brightly colored silicone wristband; Rad Bandz, thick rubber bracelets imprinted with stylized words such as "Drama" and "Epic Fail"; and RadRingz, a colorful, two-finger ring—Mr. Croak calls it "half a brass knuckle"—with removable faceplates.

Croak was also a bit shy about revealing just how much he’s made off of Silly Bandz,

…except to say that the profits are in the "millions per year," and he's probably set for life.

Baby on Board

Until I read the article, I had not been aware that the man responsible for those Baby on Board signs that were once so ubiquitous is from Boston.

Michael Lerner was not the inventor of those signs, but, having just experienced a peril-filled drive on Boston’s Storrow Drive with his 18-month old nephew on board, he knew a good idea when he saw one a few weeks later.  That was in 1984, and by nine months into the business, his company, Safety 1st, was selling half a million of these signs per month. (A chicken in every pot, a car - or two or three -  in every garage, and a Baby on Board sign on every car window.)

By 1985, the first knockoffs started appearing, but Mr. Lerner had developed strong relationships with his retailers and was able to protect his shelf space. Sales really didn't start to dip until the parodies came, like "Mother-in-law in Trunk" and "Baby, I'm bored."

Safety 1st branched out into other child-safety products, like well-packaged electrical outlet covers, so I wouldn’t exactly call Lerner a one-hit wonder. His company’s sales grew from $7.7M a year in 1989 to $158M in 1999. He sold the company in 2000, and pocketed a cool $38 million, so he has some cash on board.

He’s now trying for another hit, this time with some sort of therapeutic band, which is sold through a start-up, True Power>.

The company, which has testimonials from several New England Patriots, claims the bands use negative ions to speed oxygen delivery in the blood, which in turn hastens recovery from injury and fatigue.

Put me down as a skeptic, but what do I know?

I never had a hit, let alone one that made me $38M.

Bumpit

The final product noted was the Bumpit, some type of push-up plastic head band that lets women create Snooki-esque big hair dos without having to visit a hair salon.

Kelly Fitzpatrick-Bennett is the inventor, and styles herself as the “chief executive optimist” of her company, which is called Big Happie Hair. Chief executive optimist? No wonder I’m not rich…

Bumpits are licensed for mass distribution by the same outfit that has made the Snuggie a household word. Although at its peak, Fitzpatrick-Bennett sold a million Bumpits a month, she’s now planning for more modest sales of 20,000 per.

"I was pretty realistic in knowing it would only have a year of good life and then it would just sit and stop," Ms. Fitzpatrick-Bennett says.

Which makes Ms. Fitzpatrick-Bennett sound like one quite practical chief executive optimist.

There may not be any honor among thieves….

There may not be any honor among thieves, but, for at least one of them, there was a certain amount of contortionist agility.

Two crooks were arrested in Spain recently for stealing goods from baggage stowed in the luggage hold of an airport transit bus in Barcelona.

The duo had an interesting M.O.

One of them placed a large bag in the cargo hold, then took his place on the bus. The large bag contained his packed in accomplice, all nicely folded up to avoid both detection and wrinkling.

Once the bus was underway, the bag-man Houdini’d himself out of the suitcase and, with the aid of a headlamp, rummaged through the stored bags to see what might be worth pinching.

When apprehended, the loot he’d managed to find on that trip was a GPS device and a laptop. This may not have been worth all that much on the secondary market, but things are tough all over. No doubt they were hoping for something a bit more lucrative – jewelry and/or currency – but you can’t be all that fussy. And maybe this was just an off day.

Whether this type of thievery was the path to riches, or just another lousy day’s pay for another lousy day’s work, it strikes me as a pretty hard way to make a buck. Or a Euro. Or a zloty.

The burglars were Polish.

I find it kind of strange that they were plying their trade in Spain, where the economy is well beyond terrible, rather than in Poland, which is faring pretty well.

Maybe they’d been working in Spain during its go-go years, and just preferred the weather there to what’s typically on offer in Poland. With all the jobs gone adios, maybe this was the only “work” they could find.

But, as I noted, this doesn’t seem like a particularly easy way to make your way in the world.

Suitcase-man has to work in the dark, in the heat, and in the diesel-smelling cargo hold, where it probably feels like you’re going about 50 mph faster than you would be if you were comfily seated about 6 feet higher up.

The other guy had most of the trip easier. He got to sit on a plush seat in an air-conditioned coach. But he also had to heave the bag containing suitcase man around. I don’t care how skinny suitcase-man is, I suspect that the bag was well above the standard 20 kilogram carried-on bag limit. Plus he had to deal with the suspense of not knowing whether suitcase-man was going to find anything good, and make the theft worthwhile.

They sure wouldn’t be thrilled to find what’s in my Tumi bag on a typical trip: two pairs of black pants, two sweaters, a half-dozen tee-shirts, a couple of scarves, undies for the week, and a pair of slightly less sensible shoes than what I wore on the plane. Throw in an eight-dollar umbrella, a couple of paperbacks, and some toiletries and, hey boys, knock yourselves out.

I suspect that the contents of my bag aren’t that much different than that of most travelers. Not to mention that if suitcase-man was going through luggage that was on its return trip, he was probably dealing with some dirty laundry. So, combine dark, heat, diesel fumes, and yucky underwear – all in hopes that someone has checked a string of real pearls, a Rolex watch, or ten-thousand Euros in small unmarked bills, not to mention having to contort yourself back into your suitcase once you were done with your snooping and looting – and methinks there are better ways to make a living.

Then again, that could just be me.

After all, the unemployment rate in Spain is well over 20%, and with that kind of joblessness, a young and rubber-jointed young man’s fancy could absolutely turn to thievery.

The unemployment rate in Poland, on the other hand, is less than 10%.

So you have to wonder why Krzysztof and Jouoastaw weren’t better off back in the mother country.

I guess they just liked the flexible working conditions on Spanish airline buses.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Source: AOL Travel News, which contains a link to a “tremendous diagram” from a Spanish newspaper that illustrates how the crime worked (or, in this case, didn’t work).

Bookstore-less. (Bereft.)

Late last week I heard the news that the Borders that I walk by every day – and make frequent stops at – will be closing in the next couple of months.

Watching most any store or restaurant go out of business is a pretty depressing process. If it’s a chain store like Borders, especially if it’s one you patronize, there’s the loss of the convenience factor, and the loss of jobs for those who worked there. If it’s a small, local store, it’s not just the convenience and jobs that are lost, there’s probably someone’s dream flying out the window. “My” card store, Copley Flair, a small (3 location) local chain closed this past year. I send a lot of greeting cards, so I was particularly bummed when it went out of business. Where was I going to buy my Christmas cards which, for the last few decades, I’d gotten half-price, the day after Christmas at Copley Flair? Fortunately, I already have my 2011 cards, but what am I supposed to do for 2012 exactly?

“My” Copley Flair was just across the street from “my” Borders, so it was a place I walked by every day, too. They had a great card selection, reasonable prices, and a frequent buyer program. I loved getting my tenth punch on my yellow and black polka-dot customer card, which meant a free card. Yea!

Now the only convenient card store is Papyrus.. Very nice cards, but pretty darned pricey – even with the buy three, get the fourth free deal-io they have going. Whenever I pick up a card and see $6.95 on the back, I have heart palpitations and a flash-back to the time when 25 cents was a lot to pay for a greeting card. Papyrus cards are also over-packaged: most come sealed for freshness in a clear plastic envelope. I suppose that this prevents them from becoming shopworn, yet it seems like complete overkill to me. Maybe they should just issue patrons surgical gloves to wear when handling the cards, in much the same way that shoe stores give out nylon peds.

Anyway, when Copley Flair closed I was very sorry to see them go.

But not half as sorry as I will be to see the downtown Borders shutter its operation.

When I saw the news the other day, I immediately dropped in and spent nearly a hundred bucks on books, boo-hooing all the way.

Having watched the Borders in Back Bay drop out of existence, I know what to expect from the liquidation sale, and it won’t be pretty.

I know we’re supposed to look down our noses at chains of any sort, and mostly I do. But Borders was pretty good

I don’t just buy a lot of greeting cards, I buy a lot of books, and I’d say that, at least once a month, I’d stop in at Borders and pick up at least a couple of them.

I might have just finished up what I had been reading, and not want to sort through my reserve supply of a hundred or so books. Or I might have just felt like taking a break from whatever it was that was sitting on the floor next to the bed. Maybe I was buying a few books to take on a trip – which was the case on my previous Borders visit, when I picked up a couple of novels and a history book to take to Ireland. Maybe it was to buy a gift. Books are my default baby present, not to mention what I pretty much always give my brother Rick for his birthday, and my cousin-in-law Dick for Christmas.

Borders had a pretty good selection, and the folks who worked there were incredibly nice and helpful.

Amazingly, with the demise of Borders, there will be no place in downtown Boston where you can buy a new book. (A couple of used bookshops remain open.)

So there will be no more casual, drop in, browse-and-buy book-buying trips for me.

Going to the Back Bay Barnes and Noble – which I don’t like anywhere near as much as a I like Borders – is a bit out of the way. If I’m going to go there, I might as well go to the Boston Public Library, which is on the way. Which is not a bad idea. I have been telling myself that I really should frequent the library rather than keep on buying books, which do tend to accumulate, even though my sisters and I are pretty good about keeping them in circulation.

The Borders in Cambridge is supposedly staying open, but if I’m going to schlepp to the Cambridgeside Galleria, I might as well go to Harvard Square, where the excellent indie bookseller, the Harvard Bookstore, is located. (I have always loved the Harvard Bookstore, but the bookstore in the square that I really miss is Wordsworth, which went out a couple of years back. In fact, when I read about the Borders’ closing, I had just begun to absorb the news that Wordsworth’s (little) sister store, Curious George, which sold children’s books and toys, is also closing. Maybe there’ll be something interesting going in in its place, although the recent retail history of Harvard Square suggests something wretchedly uninteresting and every-mall-in-America like.)

Rather than stop in The Square, I could always stay on the subway for another stop, and patronize Porter Square Books, another indie. Or head in the opposite direction – Go West, late-middle-aged woman! – and shop at the very fine Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner.

So I do have book-buying options open to me, at least temporarily. I.e., until the only way to buy books will be from Amazon, and/or the printed word is completely subsumed by the digital.

But it’s not the same as having a bookstore that I pass every day and can stop into for an impulse buy.

Why my Borders?

Oh, boo-hoo.

Kidneys, man, kidneys

There was a popular joke when I was a kid that had, as its punch line, “Kidneys, man, kidneys.” The set up was that a moron, when asked how he’d been smart enough to figure something out, pointed to his head and said, “Kidneys, man, kidneys.”

My other kidney story took place in a convention center ladies room where one poor woman was standing over the sinks with her breast pump expressing herself under what could only be described as sub-optimal conditions. A woman at the sink next to her asked her if she were undergoing dialysis. (Ah, yes, the well known portable self-dialysis through the breast technique…)

Other than that, kidneys are no laughing matter – at least not in my family. My father died of kidney disease at the age of 58. The last seven years of his life were off-and-on miserable – mostly on in the last year or so.

Anyway, I was intrigued to read about the 17 year old Chinese boy who sold one of his kidneys for a little over $3K.

Now, I have no idea what a kidney is worth, but it seems to me that, even for a 17 year old kid in China, it’s save-a-life value is a lot higher than $3K. But, of course, there’s the middle-man who’s doing the business development and taking all the risk, and he has to be compensated…

In any case, as PC Magazine has it, the enterprising (I guess) Chinese lad was willing to sell one of his because for an all American, all consumer reason:

“I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it," the boy told the Shanghai Daily newspaper.

The kid is now ailing:

It turned out that the Chenzhou No. 198 Hospital was not qualified to perform organ transplant. The hospital claimed they had no idea about Zheng's surgery because the department that did the surgery had been contracted to a Fujian businessman.

That damned outsourcing’ll get you every time.

The young knucklehead – surprise, surprise – did this without his parents’ permission.

The police have gotten involved, but the broker – surprise, surprise – is nowhere to be found. He’s vamoosed, and his cell phone’s been turned off. (Want to make a bet on whether it’s one of those throw-away ones to begin with.)

Although I’m probably too long in the tooth (and aged in the kidney) to be a donor, I can actually envision the circumstances under which I would surrender on of my kidneys. I’m nowhere near noble enough to give one up for a stranger, but I can certainly imagine doing so for friends and family. Admittedly, I’d have mixed feelings about it, and would likely harbor some secret hope that I wouldn’t be a match, but could still get the brownie points for making the offer. But if someone I loved needed a kidney, if I could save their life, I would certainly hope that I’d be willing to go under the knife.

But for an iPad 2?

I mean, maybe for an iPhone, plus a Mac, plus an iPad 2, plus an iPod, with guarantees for at least ten years worth of annual upgrades.

But for an iPad 2?

Oh, to be a Chinese teenager now that iPad 2’s in the air.

And they said that Harley-Davidson customers who are willing to get tattooed with their product’s name are the world’s most brand loyal consumers…

The article noted that they didn’t know whether the kid had gotten his iPad 2.

You’d think that Apple would come through for the kid, wouldn’t you? Although they no doubt wouldn’t want to set off a wave of similar organ barters.

Selling a kidney – risking your life – for an iPad 2?

Does this kid realize he can’t sell his other kidney for the iPad 3 he’s going to want tomorrow…

All I want to do is point to that kid’s head and say, kidneys, man, kidneys.

Not So Fine Art (you only think it’s an original Campendonk)

I’m not a huge Steve Martin fan, but I like him well enough.

As celebrities go, he’s got talent: he can be very funny, he’s a decent writer, and he’s a star banjo player. Plus he pretty much keeps his nose clean. Take that, Kardashian sisters!

So if I were going to have any sympathy for anyone who’s been a caught up in an art forgery scandal, it would be Steve Martin.

Not that he’s a direct victim.

Martin bought the painting for €700,000 at the Cazeau-Béraudière Gallery in Paris and sold it at a Christie's auction to a Swiss businesswoman for €500,000.

It was sold at a loss before it was debunked as a forgery, so I guess you can say that it was a bad investment before it became a worse investment. The work in question is "Landschaft mit Pherden," (Landscape with Horses) by Heinrich Campendonk, one of the lesser figures in [I took a course in Modern Art pretension alert] Der Blaue Reiter school. I actually kind of like the painting, although if I were going to go in for something by one of Der Blaue Reiter artists, I think I’d prefer something with a touch more blaue in it. (Info and picture source: Huffpo.)

Investigators said that the painting was most likely created by Wolfgang Beltracchi, the accused leader of a forgery ring that included his wife, sister-in-law and another accused forger Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus. Beltracchi's forgery ring is suspected of producing paintings attributed to Campendonk, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and others.

The family that forges together…

The forgers weren’t just skilled painters, they were also pretty darned good at working out fake provenances. Which I suppose you’d have to be if you really wanted to make a go as a forger. After all, you couldn’t keep showing up at Christie’s saying you found something in your grandmother’s attic gathering dust.

All this is part of a large and involved forgery scandal that’s been wreaking havoc and causing panic in the art world since last year.

More than 30 paintings, thought to be by artists including Max Ernst, Raoul Dufy and Fernand Léger, have been unmasked as forgeries, the Observer has learned. The fakes have duped leading figures in the art world into parting with at least £30m… The forger's strategy appears to have been to create compositions that would relate to the titles of documented works whose whereabouts are not currently known. (Source: The Guardian.)

Gallery owners, auction houses, collectors and the “experts” who’ve vetted the fakes have to be shaking in their bespoke boots over this. Apparently forgery scandals are nothing new, yet the stakes keep getting higher and higher as the prices of art works get bid up.

It does get me thinking about just what a curious “profession” art forger is.

You have to have some technical skill to pull it off, so what prompts someone to become a forger, rather than an artist?

Are they artists manqués with some technical capabilities but lacking creative vision of their own? Do you just wake up one day, throw off your beret, toss down your own palette, and decide that there’s more money in being a fake Heinrich Campendonk than there is in being the real you?

Or are you one of those with larceny in the heart to begin with, and figure that you’ve got a steady enough hand, were always pretty good at paint-by-numbers, and that the forgery business is safer than bank robbery or home invasion.

However pissed off an art gallery owner might be, they’re unlikely to shoot at you.

It also got me thinking about the intrinsic value of any work of art. But the intersection of mammon and the aesthetic is way, way, way too intense and brainy for the likes of Pink Slip.

Like most of those who like to have something on the wall, but don’t have a bottomless bank account, what’s on my walls are things that I like. And that includes works by Betsey Nelson, who happens to be my sister-in-law. (I don’t have any of her Southwest-themed works; I have two still lifes.)

It also includes several paintings done by guests of St. Francis House, New England’s largest day shelter for the poor and homeless. These are wonderful works for which I have paid a pittance to artists who are just happy to have their work and its worth (and their own worth) recognized and acknowledged.

I’ve also got paintings and prints that I’ve picked up on my travels. And even some posters. (Nothing like a $200 frame to make a $10 poster look like a work of art.)

None of the art works that hang in my home are ever likely to sell for $2.8M at auction at Christie’s, but I can sleep well at night knowing that there are no forgeries among them, and that each one is, to me, worth far more than every penny I paid for it.

Pink Slip vs. Protobrand on New England’s top brands

An outfit called Protobrand recently released its list of the most powerful brands associated with New England.

I only sort of half-glanced at what they were up to, and decided to come up with my own list – without, of course, looking at their criteria. I am, after all, a lifer, a home-town-honey, so I figured it would be no sweat to come up with 25 brands that I personally, as a lifer and home-town-honey, associate with dear old New England.

Right off the bat, my thoughts went to the Big Four brands in this sports besotted region. Just walk around town a bit, and you’d have to be blind not to notice all the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and – after a bit of a hiatus – Bruins gear.  Slam dunk, these have to be on anyone’s list of the top New England brands.

Put them all together, and a more modern sports-related brand comes to the fore: ESPN. I actually thought the “E” stood for “Eastern”. It doesn’t: it’s Entertainment. And, yes, they do cover everything and everybody. So maybe it’s because of Bill (Sports Guy) Simmons’ connection with ESPN, but I think of this network as “ours.”

Back to the Red Sox – the primo New England sports brand – and my mind just leapt to the brand that sponsored their televised games during my early years as a fan: Narragansett Beer. God knows whether anyone still drinks it, other than at Fenway, where it is sold, but if there’s one consumer brand that says “New England Summer” to me, it’s ‘Gansett. (‘Hi, neighbor. Hi, neighbor.’ Wherever you go, people will say, ‘Hi, neighbor, Hi, neighbor. Have a ‘Gansett lager beer.’ Now. whether those words were ever uttered in real life is another story…)

Another proud New England sports sponsor – only this time for the Friday night fights on the radio – was Gillette. Sure, they’re now owned by P&G, but they’ve still got a big facility in South Boston, and it still says Gillette on it, so: New England brand, it is.

Sports, of course, reminds me of the iconic Converse Chucks (Chuck Taylors). Gotta be on anyone’s list. Who’da thunk that the goofy sneakers that boys wore when I was a kid – available in basic black and basic white (one step up from Henry Ford’s Model T choices), and high top and low cut – would be worn by hipsters and wannabes all over the world. If my brothers had saved theirs, they’d be fashionistas!

So, sports exhausted and eight brands down, I have two words for you. Actually, one word and an acronym: Harvard and MIT. And I’m not just putting MIT on there because I did some time there. New England = colleges and universities. I could go on, but these are the top two.

But we’re not all sports and academia. We’ve got our artsy side, too. Think Norman Rockwell, who, I understand is making a comeback. (Not literally. That would really be something.) Talk about an instantly recognizable New England brand.

And who gets small town Mainers better than Stephen King? I was laughing out loud while reading The Dome.

We also do highbrow: Tanglewood. And middlebrow: The Boston Pops. And easy listenin’: James Taylor, who gets extra points for having a song with my birthday mentioned in it. (“The first of December was covered with snow. So was the Turnpike from Boston to Stockbridge…” Rockabye, Sweet Baby James.)

(If you’re wondering why Steven Tyler isn’t on the list: I associate him with cadavers, not New England.)

But you can’t eat or drink culture, and New England runs on Dunkin’. I had a gift card, so I just downed a Starbucks iced coffee. Give me the Dunkin’ Donuts version any old day. Then there’s Vermont’s own Ben and Jerry’s. And Ocean Spray cranberries. And, since you must occasionally eat something solid, other than a Dunkin Donut chocolate honey dip: Trust the Gorton’s Fisherman. (Actually, a fish stick would taste pretty good just about now. Has it really been 40 years since I last ate one?)

We could eat off them off plates, or we could eat them out of a Paul Revere bowl. I have no idea whatsoever if these are actually made around here, but they should be.

And we would eat Gorton’s fish sticks and Ben and Jerry’s Fro-Yo while wearing tee-shirts and khakis from L.L. Bean. If it’s winter, we may chose to complete the look with Timberland boots. Neither of which brand, alas, is likely to be available in Filene’s Basement which, although it has lost a considerable measure of its luster and allure over the years, is still a store that I occasionally look into. (Mostly I just like the idea of it – which I would like even better if it were still in a basement, rather than in an above ground store. But there’s that unfortunate hole in the ground where the late lamented Filene’s (the extinct upper reaches, and the lower depths devoted to The Basement) used to stand. I used to “hit The B” once or twice a week. These decades, I might hit it once or twice a year, generally when I’m looking for an umbrella.)

How we going to pay for all this? From our money market accounts in Fidelity. Or, if we’re a bit more well to do, from State Street (which really only makes the list because I need a 25th brand, plus I just watched HBO’s Too Big to Fail, and, although State Street played a bit role, they still did get $2B in TARP largesse.)

So, how’d I do vs. Protobrand?

I guess I could have done better if I’d looked through their criteria first, and realized what they were after.

To make it onto the study, a brand had to:

1. Be headquartered in New England.
2. Have marketing direction coming from New England.
3. Have a significant portion of revenue coming from consumer markets, which excluded brands that operate primarily business-to-business, such as State Street and Boston Scientific.
4. Have a national footprint.

Plus they asked marketers from outside of New England. So it’s not surprising that we came up with different lists. Here’s theirs:

A bit of overlap: ESPN, Dunkin’, Ben & Jerry’s, Ocean Spray, LL Bean, Timberland, Gillette, and Fidelity.

I know Subway’s HQ is in Connecticut, but I really don’t associate them with New England. And GE says “Schenectady” to me, not Connecticut. I’ll grant you that Sam Adams is a more widely known brand than Gansett, but I’ll stick with my sentimental pick. Nice to see Tom’s of Maine on the list, even though I never quite like the flavor of their toothpaste.

Anyway, a fun little exercise coming up with New England brands. (Next time I’ll compile a list of defunct ones: Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Carling Brewery (“The best beer in the world comes from Carling. On the shores of Lake Cochituate. Da-da-dum-dum. New England.”)

Hey, Walmart, nice to hear from you

I don’t like to brag, but I get an awful of lot of e-mail.

I do have to admit that not all of it’s personally directed to me.

Even if I’m the only name that’s visible in the “To:” box, I have a hunch that some of it – maybe even the notes I get from Joe Biden – go out to an awful lot of folks. (Aside to Joe: If you’re reading this post, please drop me a line and let me know whether my hunch is correct here. I know you’re a busy man, so you don’t need to craft a full note up, just put “It IS personal” or “Sorry, but it’s NOT personal” in the “Subject:” line. Thanks, pal.)

Anyway, the other day I received – are you ready for this – “A Special Invitation from Walmart.”

Given all the junk email I log, I have to say I was capital-D-Delighted to find something in my mailbox that was both special and an invitation.

Talk about “You’ve got mail.” Cowabunga!

Once I opened the invite, however, I have to say I was a tad surprised to read that:

At Walmart, we value customers like you.

Maybe they’re being sarcastic here, or maybe they’re just trying to make me feel guilty, but I do find it hard to believe that Walmart actually values customers who, well, don’t actually spend any money with them. I mean, if they had 1 billion customers like me, their revenues for 2011 would be the same as if they had 2 billion customers like me. Which would be zero.

The one and only time I stepped toe in a Walmart was to buy some stuff for a customer event held in 2004. And that was only because it was convenient to where I worked. Frankly, I found it pretty darned depressing, but I understand that, since then, they’ll actually put in decent produce departments.

I’m sure if there were a Walmart next door I would drop in occasionally for paper towels or a bag of carrots or a flashlight. But there isn’t a Walmart next door.

In fact, I couldn’t tell you where the nearest Walmart is.

Without wheels, I just don’t get around much.

So I get my paper towels from PeaPod, my bag of carrots from Whole Foods, and my flashlights from the family-owned hardware store around the corner.

By now you may be thinking that I’m something of a bona fide, certifiable, world class snob.

Which, I must confess, I kinda/sorta am.

I understand that Walmart drives prices down and lets a lot of people stretch their dollar. So that’s good. And they do employ a lot of people. But I do suspect that in some purchase cases there’s a decline in quality. And most of the jobs they provide are ill paid and provide poor benefits. Which, I guess, places Walmart in the American employment avant-garde. (Hmmmmm. Let’s play this one out:  At the rate we’re going, the only people who’ll have any money to buy anything will be the rich, and they don’t shop at Walmart. Yep, we’re really in for it.)

And I do believe that Walmart, while certainly not alone, has contributed to the citizen-as-consumer mentality and our collective insatiable need for more junk.

No, they’re certainly not alone. But they’re sure the apotheosis of crapification.

Still, since they did send me a special invitation, I thought I’d give them a quasi RSVP and at least click through to their website.

After all, they almost asked so nice:

We want you to be the first to know about our wide assortment of new products, limited quantity special buys and featured values — available online and at your local store.

Limited quantity special buys?  Available online? What’s not to like? (Although, frankly, this would have made more sense  if they’d said “we want you to be AMONG the first to know,” rather than “THE first to know.” Come on, Walmart, who do you think you’re dealing with here? Some kind of Gullible Gus? Why would you want a non-customer to be “the first to know”? Shouldn’t you be rewarding loyalty?

Anyway, I didn’t have all the time in the world, but I did check out what they’ve got on clearance.

Well, my first thought was: these guys are good.

After all, the first clearance item – of the 1,862 they had on offer that day -  that caught my eye was a Tom Brady shirt. Did they know I’m a band-wagonner Patriots’ fan?

But then I dug down a bit further, and most of the clearance goods were stuff like Kobe Bryant Laker shirts, NASCAR pajama bottoms, and University of Arkansas bedding sets.  Not that I’d be in the market for a Tom Brady anything – much as I worship at the Brady altar -  but Kobe Bryant? NASCAR? University of Arkansas (Wooo, Pig, Sooie )? AS IF…

Plus there was no Tom Brady shirt on sale offer, to begin with. Fraudsters! Talk about bait and switcheroo. Lure me in with Tom Brady, and deliver a bright pink Brett Favre Vikings shirt, marked down from $12 to $10. (If you buy two you can rub them together and start a bonfire if you get cold watching a Vikings game. Which, if you’re watching a Vikings game, will no doubt happen.)

As I read through the communiqué from Walmart, I became increasingly skeptical about it’s being something that was personally directed to me, and that it, indeed, was a “special invitation.”

What tipped me off was this:

This email is a Walmart advertisement.

Which actually makes me kind of sad, in a way.

I suppose I shouldn’t take it personally that the so-called “special invitation” isn’t all that special.  It was, after all, a pretty high quality invitation. No, it wasn’t on Crane’s high grade stock, but when was the last time you got a “special invitation” that was copyright? That tells me that they value what they have to say. (Hope they don’t come after me for copyright violation. This seems like fair usage to me, but, then again, I’m not an IP attorney.)

On the whole, given that I do get an occasional unwelcome, almost spammish e-mail, I’m happy to have heard from Walmart. I’m even thinking of forwarding my special invite on to Joe Biden.

Pointe du Hoc

This being the 67th anniversary of D-Day and everything, I started to think about my visit to Normandy, which occurred about five years ago.

We were in Paris for a week, and, through Farouk, the concierge in our hotel, we hired a driver to take us up to the battle field.

It hadn’t occurred to us to ask for someone who spoke English – I guess because Farouk, who had an Irish wife, was so fluent. And for $500 (What were we thinking? Okay: it turned out to be a 10 hour day, and gasoline prices are high in Europe…), we thought we’d be able to communicate with our driver, But this was not the case.

We were able to have a bit of a back and forth, between his 10 words of English and my single (present) tense but decent vocabulary French (which was not the driver’s first language: he was Pakistani). And he did get us to all the places we wanted to go. Still…

It wasn’t the driver’s fault that the weather was miserable.

When we left Paris it was overcast; by the time we reached Caen it was raining lightly; and by the time we hit Omaha Beach it was pouring, and the winds were whipping in off the Channel. The weather was too much for my husband, who, after we’d seen a bit of the Beach, mostly stayed in the car. But I soldiered on: umbrella blown out, water proof jacket proving to be not so, soaked feet, mud-splattered pants.

The weather was not unlike what it was on D-Day itself.

And if I were miserable, knowing that at any moment I could hop back into the warm and cozy car, and point and grunt that we wanted to get back to our very nice hotel in Paris, imagine what it must have been like for those young  American Rangers rappelling up Pointe du Hoc with German soldiers shooting at them?

After we walked the beach for a bit, and I peered over the edge of Pointe du Hoc, we somehow communicated to our driver that we wanted to go to the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, where about 10,000 soldiers lied buried.

This is the classic World War II cemetery: boys from every where, a hodge-podge of ethnic names, a mash up of ranks.

For the most part, if you’re middle class and above, our wars since Vietnam have been somebody else’s business. And not that you’d wish World War II – or any war – on anybody, but they sure don’t make wars like they used to. Our idea of shared sacrifice these days is us doing the sharing and someone else doing the sacrificing.

Case in point on who used to go to war: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., a 56-year old President’s son who was in the first wave on Omaha Beach. He died (of a heart attack, not directly from the War) a month later, and is buried at the Normandy cemetery.

The trade-off that we offer our military men and women is giving lip service to the notion that they’re all heroes. They’re not. Which is not to say that they’re not brave and patriotic. Even in a bleak economy where there are precious few decent opportunities for working class kids, and the economic motivations are substantial, my guess is that most of those who sign up factor some measure of bravery and/or patriotism into their equation.

Wars don’t kill as many soldiers as they used to – at least the kind of wars we’re fighting these days. There are more soldiers buried in Colleville-sur-Mer than have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. But that’s scant consolation if it’s your son or daughter who’s been killed.

Our driver had dropped us off at the cemetery, and then just disappeared.

We expected him back in an hour, but he didn’t show.

Worse come to worst, we told ourselves, we could have someone working in the cemetery office call Farouk, who presumably could get a hold of the driver.

As we were making our way towards the office, our driver showed up, and we headed back to Paris.

It was miserable there, too.

Chilled, wet, muddy, tired from the longest day of our trip, and still sorting through all that we’d seen at Normandy, we had an American in Paris meal: Quarter Pounders and fries from the nearest McDonald’s.

Here’s to those who died at Normandy, who never had the luxury of hotel stay in a comfy and pricey Paris Hotel overlooking the Arc de Triomphe.  You done good.

Big Mac Attack: 25,000 and counting

The other day, I was grazing through an Economist when I saw a small article on an initiative by some health activists to get McDonald to stop selling Happy Meals and retire Ronald McDonald.

Personally, I find advertising aimed at small children exceedingly odious. I think that the gimcrackery contained in each and every box o’ Happy Meal is a blight on the world, since it will take about half a millennium for the plastic to decay, all the while sending bad ju-ju chemicals into the ground. And as for Ronald McDonald? The Economist article noted that the word for fear of clowns is coulrophobia. ‘Nuf said.

Still, it really is up to parents to clamp the lid down on Happy Meal consumption – Just Say No! – or at least force their kids to take the little plastic (bio-degradable?) baglet of carrots rather than the fries, and a carton of waxy-tasting milk rather than the bottomless cup of soda, isn’t it? And as creepy as I find Ronald McD, doesn’t he also have all those nice houses where parents of kids with cancer can stay when the kids are in the hospital? So creepiness aside, Ronnie ain’t all bad.

But what really caused me to nearly cough up one of the unsalted almonds I was munching on while reading was the mention that one Donald Gorske of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, had reached a Big Mac eating milestone.

Over the past 39 years, Gorske has managed to consume 25,000 Big Macs.

I can count on one finger the number of Big Macs I’ve consumed in my life, so the thought of 25,000 of these suckers fills me with shock and awe.

No, if I’m going to Mickey D’s, I’m going with the more calorically modest Quarter Pounder without cheese (410 calories vs. 540 for the Big Mac). Or, better yet, the entirely more modest original burger, for a meager caloric intake of 250 cals. Of course, unlike Don Gorske, I take fries with that.

So while those fries aren’t as healthy as, say, those salt-free almonds, unlike Don Gorske, I don’t indulge in a McDonald’s splurge all that often. In fact, over the last 39 years that Gorske has been frequenting – and I do mean frequenting – McDonald’s, I suspect I’ve averaged somewhere between 2-5 trips per year. Five is on the high side, but if it’s correct, I’ve been to McDonald’s a bit under 200 times over those years. Factoring out the times when I’ve had something chickenish or saladish there, or even – confession approaching – had a chocolate shake and fries, the maximum number of Quarter Pounders I’ve downed may be somewhere in the 150 range. In truth, this sounds too high. I’m guessing the more likely total is around 75.

Which is not to say that right now I wouldn’t mind tucking into one. (With fries.)

It’s just that….I won’t.

And for a Big Mac, I never. (Too gloppy-sloppy for my taste.)

Needless to say, this record has garnered Gorske an extra helping of 15 minutes of fame. (His first portion was served up in Super Size Me.)

Anyway:

"I plan on eating Big Macs until I die," the Fond du Lac, Wis., man said. "I have no intentions of changing. It's my favorite food. Nothing has changed in 39 years. I look forward to it every day." (Source: ABC News/AP.)

Gorske, who is 59 is, by the way, healthy – not overweight and with low cholesterol, to boot. He averages two Big Macs per diem, and doctors attribute his good health to the luck of the genetic draw. Another by the way: he doesn’t do much of any exercise.

He does, however, have his very own entry in Wikipedia.

Gorske’s long love affair with the Big Mac began when he was 18 and got his first car. His first stop? McDonald’s, where he lunched on three Big Macs. (Okay, he was a bottomless pit 18 year old…) He was so enamored of them – and his new wheels – that he dropped in two more times. Total for the day: nine Big Macs. Talk about a mouthful (and a gutfull).

The man doesn’t lack for eccentricity, that’s for sure:

At first, Don kept all the boxes of Big Macs he ate in the back of his car. He met and proposed to his wife, Mary, at a McDonald's in 1973….He says his taste buds have always fluctuated in sensitivity, so he often eats a Big Mac without being able to taste it.

Well, this taste bud’s for you: I think you can count yourself lucky for not being able to taste a Big Mac. But if you can’t taste something, why bother to eat it?

Ours not to reason why…

He claims that since he ate his first Big Mac, there have only been eight different days in which he did not eat a single Big Mac. One of these days was the day his mother died, and he did not eat a Big Mac to respect her request. Other days included a "Snow Day" when McDonalds was unable to open due to snow, a Thanksgiving, days he was traveling and could not find a McDonalds, and various days Gorske had to stay at work past midnight.

Now, to guard against those snow days and other emergencies, he keeps a stash of Big Macs in the freezer. I bet those glop burgers taste really swell when unfrozen. (Did I mention that what I don’t like about the Big Mac is that gloppy sauce?)  Yum! But maybe they get consumed on the no taste bud days, so it doesn’t matter.

Gorske keeps count of his Big Macs in a special notebook that is always on his person. And, while he no longer keeps the cartons in his car, he does save every receipt. You never know when those’ll come in handy.

The Cougar Industry.

Well, we asked for equality and I guess one area where women are getting what they asked for is with respect to May-December “romances.” After all, men have had, throughout the history of man and womankind, their share of old goats who traded in a 40 for two 20’s (ha-ha). The image of the walrus-mustached, white-thatched tycoon with the knockout blonde on his arm has certainly been around for at least as long as The New Yorker has been printing cartoons. And anyone want to start a pool with me guessing the date when Arnold Schwarzenegger will appear in public squiring a leggy young thing. (Let’s make it more interesting: you have to guess the date and the year of birth of the leggy young thing.)

We’ve come a long way, baby. At least I guess we have.

Cougars, it seems, have come into their own.

And let’s just say that these days, you can’t have any kind of little old trend – in this case the “cougar predator lifestyle” - without an entire economic apparatus growing up around it.

Thus, I give you the Cougar Industry. (Actually, it’s Business Week that’s giving it to you. I’m just the channeling medium.)

Sorry to say that I missed the National Cougar Convention, which was held at a Manhattan nightclub. Then again, I wouldn’t have wanted to stand in the way of Aalsa Lee. At 73, she may not have all that many more opportunities to make a run at the Miss Cougar America title, which she won, beating out over thirty not so young lovelies, including crowd fave “Jerzee”, she of the “very dark, unhealthy-looking tan” and the “extremely short tie-dyed skirt adorned with peace symbols.” (All she is saying, is give piece a chance….)

The Cougar lifestyle has now been with us for ten years.

I'm not quite sure exactly what defines a Cougar, but I don’t think it’s just when there’s a few years difference in ages. I guess it’s when the woman is old enough to be the mother of the object of her affection. (Or, as the article states, perhaps “"cougar" is simply the label society assigns financially independent divorcées.”)

"There is a new archetype that's emerging," says Amy Luna Manderino, the reigning Miss Cougar International. "There have always been free-thinking, vital women over the age of 40. The difference today is our numbers have reached a critical mass."

I’m all for free-thinking, vital women over the age of 40. In fact, I do believe there’s been critical mass of them for quite a long while. That is, if you define the free-thinking women category as broader than those who prefer to play with boy-toys.But if you constrain the definition to those who think young men, there’s apparently an entire “transcontinental economy” designed to cater to their every Cougar desire.

…conventions, dating sites, tourism, and other cougar-themed business ventures. Miss Cougar America is part of a larger pageant hierarchy that includes Miss Cougar Miami, Miss Cougar Las Vegas, and Miss Cougar Sydney…The greater cougar industry has expanded into books (Dating a Cougar, Hot Cougar Sex, A Christian Cougar), television (real-life cougar Courtney Cox's Cougar Town and the reality-TV show The Cougar), and even the big screen.

There’s also a new movie out – Cougar Hunting – that follows a bunch of young guys “on a quest for older women.”

The old me wants to say “as f-ing if”. But the new me – even though, as a married gal who’s a bit long in the fang, I don’t qualify as a cougar – says that, once media constructs are constructed, they sure do have a way of becoming reality. Especially once – ageism rules! – the age of the cub-desired cougar is drifting down from true older gal, like Aalsa Lee, to thirty-early-forty something. And it’s apparently the cubs that are driving the surreality in which the cougar hunting is a “very hot economic trend in the dating world.” And in which Ms. Manderino has:

…already identified six categories of cubs, including "fetish cubs," "mama's boy cubs," and cubs who simply want a story to tell their friends.

“Mama’s boy cubs”?

Sorry, my stomach is roiling. Waste basket, please.

Lucia Demasi, who recently took over Urban Cougar, is enthusiastic about the company's outlook. She is hoping to increase current traffic from 35,000 to 100,000 visitors each month. "In the Jewish tradition," Lucia says, "you become a man with a bar mitzvah. For everybody else, maybe it'll be a cougar."

Today your son’s a man. Mazel tov.

Soon, Urban Cougar will offer VIP memberships, Lucia says, for $7.99 to $12.99 per month.

Or you could save up for the:

Norwegian Cruise Line provides a Cougar Cruise to the Bahamas. (Three- and five-night packages range from $150 to $500.) More modest cross-cultural options include a $195 two-night Celtic Cougar deal at the Irish Cottage Boutique Hotel in Galena, Ill.

I can honestly say that I never thought I would see the words Celtic Cougar, Irish Cottage, and Galena, Ill. used in combination. I do believe that my mother and my aunt Mary took a trip once to Galena, Illinois. Hmmmm. They said they were looking at the old Victorian houses. Wonder what really went on there.

Give me interior design licensing, or give me death

The Economist had a recent piece by “Schumpeter” on the high proportion of professions that are regulated/licensed, on a state by state basis, in the United States. Flower arranging, hair braiding, manicurists. You name it, it’s regulated somewhere.

Now I am one of those nanny-staters who actually believe that we need some regulation and consumer protection. Completely unfettered business gives us poison toys from China, exploding Pintos, and the Love Canal.

Yet it seems as if something as eye-of-the-beholder, and do-no-harm as flower arranging doesn’t require all that much by way of licensing and regulation. As Bob Dylan told us years ago, you don’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows. And you don’t need a professional florist to stick stems in an oasis in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Other professions, especially one where the motto first, do no harm should apply – electrician, dentist – I’d just as soon see licensed, thank you.

One licensing bizarrity that Schumpeter called out was Florida’s licensing of commercial interior designers. (No license is needed for residential interior designers, so you can use Hilda next door to do you up if you like her flair with coral and zebra prints.)

Florida is one of only three states to license interior designers – the others are Nevada and Louisiana. (Now that I think about it, Nevada probably should make designers get a license. Can you imagine what Nevada would look like if amateurs could design interiors?) To tear down some bureaucracy, and to free things up for new business formation, Florida did try to pass legislation deregulating commercial interior design.

Not surprisingly, those who benefit from restricting the pool of those who can design office space and hotel lobbies, i.e., the cartel composed of those who already have licenses, came out of the decorator woodwork to oppose the repeal. And they won. The legislature caved, and one still needs a license to practice this specialized craft.

As reported in the Miami Herald, the designers had some pretty interesting things to say when they importuned Florida’s worthy lawmakers to leave the regulation in place.

“Buildings do not burn. Interiors do,” Gail Griffin, a professor at Miami Dade College’s School of Architecture and Interior Design, told the House Appropriations committee Wednesday.

In other words, an unlicensed interior designer might well paper those office walls with dangling strips of newsprint that had been soaked in gasoline, and accent the décor with piles of kindling, matchbooks, and campfire instructions.

Bad things can happen to good buildings. Has nobody seen – and heeded – The Towering Inferno. Still…

I would like to have witnessed Ms. Griffin’s full testimony, which included this:

“Do you know the color schemes that affect your salivation, your autonomic nervous system?” she said. “You don’t even have correct seating. And somebody chose that for you.”

Personally, I was not aware that color schemes affect salivation. I thought that things that smelled good did. But I will start trying to become more observant about what color combos cause me to slobber and which ones give me dry mouth. Is it too obvious that it would be greens and blues that cause you to drool, while a desert color scheme produces cotton mouth?

As for those legislators not having correct seating, why the State of Florida must have broken a law and gone with an amateur designer, like Hilda next door. Or maybe they just let an admin negotiate the whole thing with the chair manufacturer.

One designer – of the 90 who spoke at the hearing – had an even more compelling reason for not deregulating designers.

“Part of my job is to ensure the finishes that I select cannot be made into weapons,” Terra Sherlock, a licensed interior designer from Tallahassee, told lawmakers. “We do that in jails, and we do that in schools.”

Fabrics don’t kill people. People who turn fabrics into weapons kill people.

And speaking of dangerous fabrics…wait there’s more. Interior designer Michelle Earley made the case for her colleagues as near medical practitioners, who are able to:

…avoid fabrics that contribute to the spread of hospital-acquired infections.

“By not allowing interior designers to be specialists and focus on the things they do, what you’re basically doing is contributing to 88,000 deaths every year,” she said.

If 88,000 lives in Florida alone could be saved by licensing interior designers, what are we waiting for? This is even more than the 20,000 or so lives saved nationwide by wearing seatbelts each year. I had no idea.

I am writing my state representative forthwith and ask that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts joins the rank of those progressive titans - Florida, Nevada, and Louisiana - and start regulating commercial interior designers. Lives are at stake here. Oh, the humanity!