Be afraid, be very afraid…(Damn, that technology can be scary sometimes.)

It’s not as if I don’t like technology.

Come on, I’ve spent the last 30+ years making my living in the tech biz.

It’s not as if I don’t embrace technology.

Come on, I’ve got the requisite gear: smartphone, laptop (soon to be replaced by a Surface Pro super-tablet), Kindle, special decoder-looking ring that I use for my Charlie Card (smartcard for Boston’s rapid transpo system), programmable thermostat (okay, so I haven’t actually programmed it yet…). And while I’m not “always on”, I spend an awful lot of time online.

It’s not as if I don’t understand technology.

Come on, I’ve actually ghosted articles that appeared in EE Times.

And yet, deep in my heart – or at least in part of one ventricle – there’s definitely an inner techno-worry wart. Maybe even a bit of a Luddite.

The latest thing to unleash that inner Luddite was an article on Bloomberg a week or so ago that warned that:

From Ancient Greece to Mary Shelley, it's been an abiding human fear: A new invention takes on a life of its own, pursues its own ends, and grows more powerful than its creators ever imagined.

For a number of today's thinkers and scientists, artificial intelligence looks as if it may be on just such a trajectory. This is no cause for horror or a premature backlash against the technology. But AI does present some real long-term risks that should be assessed soberly. (Source: Bloomberg)

AI has been around for quite a while.

Many, many years ago, a bunch of my colleagues fled the company we were all working at to join an AI start-up that was supposed to be capable of making the right business investment decision. I wanted to join them, but wasn’t artificial or intelligent enough to get an offer. (Formal word came back that I didn’t seem “ready” to leave the company where I was working; informal word came back that I’d asked too many questions, which led the hiring folks to determine that, in an environment that required true believers, I would be one of those ye of little faith types.)

Of course, it almost goes without saying that that start-up went out of business.

Since then, of course, AI has become a ton more intelligent.

Yet it still hasn’t gotten to the point where, when it comes to “’general’ intelligence”, it’s as good as one of us actual human beings. I.e., there’s still no such thing as a:

…machine that can independently solve problems and adapt to new circumstances, like a human.

Bravo, us!

Maybe AI can beat a humanoid at chess, but we’re still Number One when it comes to things like figuring out what to do when siblings are squabbling, spouses are aggravating, and the dog needs a scratch behind the ears. When it comes to things that require gut instinct, human experience, and emotional intelligence, which – so far – hasn’t leant itself to artificiality, we rule.

Which is not to say that AI won’t someday surpass us:

Experts in one survey estimate that artificial intelligence may approach the human kind between 2040 and 2050, and exceed it a few decades later.

Hmmmm. Wonder what the survey would have said if they’d asked AI machines themselves? Something to wonder about…

They also suggest there's a one-in-three probability that such an evolution will be "bad" or "extremely bad" for humanity.

There are some pretty big names that are worrying about machines going Frankenstein on us:

Elon Musk has warned that it could be "more dangerous than nukes." And Stephen Hawking has called it"potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history."

They worried that AI could get too big for its smarty-pants britches, to difficult for mere mortals to “understand or predict…more difficult or impossible to control.”

What could happen that’s so bad?

To use a simplified example: A self-learning AI programmed to calculate the decimals of pi might, as it became more intelligent, decide that the most efficient way to meet its goals would be to commandeer all the computing power on earth.

Swell. Satellites will fall from the sky, the grid will go down, heart monitors will stop monitoring, and I won’t be able to get my daily Daily Mail UK fix, all because some jerk of a machine wants to calculate pi  to well beyond the number of decimal places where even the most obsessive, nerdly kid would decide that the task was useless and boring.

What to do, what to do?.

… researchers in the field need to devise commonly accepted guidelines for experimenting with AI and mitigating its risks. Monitoring the technology's advance may also one day call for global political cooperation, perhaps on the model of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The bottom line?

There may be no immediate danger, but, in the long run, there’s every reason to be afraid, be very afraid.

Technology capable of calculating pi to infinity and beyond could end up doing some pretty awful things.

I know where I’ll be planted, but what about my plants…

I don’t have the green thumb that my mother had – Liz was a complete and utter plant lady. But I don’t have a gangrenous black thumb, either. If I had to characterize my thumb, I’d say it’s grayish-green. Or greenish gray.

While I was plant-free for quite a long while, I now have several plants that seem to be thriving on the kitchen windowsill.

Two are them were sent to me shortly after my husband died, the other – an oxalis – I had at the church where Jim’s memorial service was held. That was right after St. Patrick’s Day, and an oxalis looks like a shamrock, only a bit jacked up, so the florist recommended it when I asked for a shamrock.

The oxalis is the one plant I’d really like to hang on to, but if it goes, it goes.

And if when I go, and the oxalis is still with us, well, I actually haven’t given much thought to who gets it. Make that any thought. If it ends up in the trash, well, so be it. (I’ll probably stick to my guns on this. Unless, that is, we find out that plants have some level of sentience that has so far gone undiscovered. In that case, I guess I’ll have to make provisions. Afer all, I’ve grown rather fond of that oxalis in an inanimate, no exchange of emotion kind of way.)

Some folks, however, have developed true relationships with their fine potted friends.

Pittsburgh’s Ronna Scoratow – une dame d’un certain age, i.e., mine – is one of them.

She’s had her dearly beloved plant for over 40 years, even longer than I had my dearly beloved husband. Her plant is a 7-foot-tall lacy tree philodendron.

Ms. Scoratow has no children. Her siblings don't share her enthusiasm for indoor greenery. So last year she put a provision in her will granting $5,000 for a friend to use in caring for the plant. "It was interesting," her lawyer, James Wood, said when asked about that provision. "I've done provisions for pets but never a plant." (Source: WSJ Online)

As plants go, I do get how one could grow attached to a philodendron, since they have a tendency to get attached to whatever they’re around, twirling their tendrils around.

Personally, I’d rather have the more contained coleus or sansevieria. You get your greenery, and you don’t have to worry about it wrapping its metaphorical arm around you and getting you in a chokehold, as I can imagine a philodendron might be tempted to do. Especially if, in fact, plants are as sentient as we may well find out they are.

Whether they’re proven to be sentient or not, many plants apparently do know something we don’t.

Some plants live for centuries. A giant cycad has thrived in London's Kew Gardens for nearly 240 years….Bonsai trees are famous for lasting centuries. The National Arboretum has one more than 400 years old.

So while your plant I not likely to survive to infinity and beyond, it may well outlive you, as Ms. Scoratow believes that hers will.

The money set aside in her will isn’t the only amount that she has spent on her plant. In addition to its regular care and feeding – a bit of water, an occasional sprinkle of plant food, the odd re-potting event – she paid movers $370 to move her plant when she changed locations last year.

Would I have moved a plant?

Probably.

If it were going to set me back $370?

Well, maybe not.

By the way, Ms. Scoratow’s posthumous plant caring doesn’t extend beyond the philodendron.

She hasn't made long-term provisions for her other plants. "I don't have the same love with them. I don't know how to explain it. I don't want to be cold or anything." The others are smaller and easier to move, so she hopes someone will take them when the time comes. Her philodendron is special, Ms. Scoratow says, because "I've had that one the longest."

Even if her concern is limited to her one special plant friend, Scoratow is not alone. A Maryland couple interviewed in the article has a ponytail palm that they’re rather fond of.

They call it Gordon, after a friend who swapped it to Ms. [Karen] Upton 37 years ago for a Porsche steering wheel…Eventually, though, the Uptons may grow too frail to care for the palm. Mr. [Christopher] Upton, 62, said their exit strategy might be to take Gordon down to Florida and "set him free" outdoors..

Hmmmm.

I seem to be detecting a pattern. An understandable pattern.

As the old memento mori starts to click in when you’re in your sixties, and folks start giving some thought to where they’ll be planted, it’s no surprise that they start thinking about what’s going to happen to the things they’ll leave behind. Plants included.

Just a couple of degrees of separation from Bernie Madoff

I never took a course with him – he was in Operations Research* which, beyond the one required course, I avoided like the plague – but when I was a student at Sloan (MIT’s business school), Gabriel Bitran was a new faculty member. A lot of the folks I knew took courses with him.

Perhaps because he wasn’t much older than the students, I remember him as being quite popular. Because Sloan was so small at the time – maybe a hundred students, plus or minus, in our class; and very little hang around space that was shared pretty much equally by students, faculty, and admin – I’m sure I met him at some point or another, if only to say hello.

Well, Gabe Bitran, it seems, has gotten himself into quite the soup.

A couple of years ago – and I missed this one completely – Bitran and his son Marco, who’d been running a $500 million fund:

…agreed to pay $4.8 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that they lied to investors about their track record. (Source: Bloomberg)

Their Ponzi within a Ponzi unraveled during the Madoff debacle, because they:

…put money into “funds of funds,” which rely on investments by other hedge funds, and fed money to Madoff’s firm and Madoff feeder funds, according to prosecutors.

While Bitran père et fils were running GMB Capital Management into the ground – the fund lost more than $140 million over time, which is $140 million worse than money in a mattress – they were also paying themselves handsomely. (Surprise.)

The smoking gun on the Bitrans was some e-mail exchanges. (Duh! This is an MIT business school professor and he doesn’t get how e-mails can bite you in the ass. Yikes!)

“A person with experience and knowledge of the financial sector and a veteran professor of MIT should not have engaged in this type of behavior,” Gabriel Bitran said in an e-mail to his son in July 2009 that was cited by prosecutors. “I feel very embarrassed because we told them a story that was not true!”

Well, I guess embarrassed could be one way to look at. But, really, deeply ashamed and absolutely contrite might have been better.

For his part,

Marco Bitran said in a September 2009 e-mail to his father that “we are certainly sharing equally in this” and that “lots of problems were caused by my good intentions but very poor actions when it came to true honesty,” according to prosecutors.

“Good intentions but very poor actions when it came to true honesty.”

Huh? Talk about gobbledygook. This from someone with degrees from MIT and Harvard Business School. (I had to get this dig in . I’m not putting this all on MIT.) Tsk, tsk.

Oh, indeed, my intentions – make everyone a lot of money, especially me – were excellent, it was just that piss-poor execution. That and, oh yeah, lying through my teeth. And beyond:

After the SEC began its probe, the Bitrans took steps to shield their assets by transferring them out of GMB to other entities using the name of a family member who wasn’t aware of what they were doing, prosecutors said.

Mighty fine thinking there, boys, mighty fine. Bet that family member was just thrilled to death to be made part of the grand scheme.

Despite the fiasco that the Bitrans got themselves involved in, Marco apparently doesn’t share his father’s embarrassment. On his blog (which, admittedly, was last updated nearly a year back; but still well after he and his father agreed to the SEC fine), he brags:

..,Bitran grew an exchange-traded fund to $550 million in assets using models developed by MIT professor Gabriel R. Bitran and MIT graduate Shioulin Sam.

Well, he may be blogging from prison, because Gabriel and Marco Bitran, it seems, are about to each:

…plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and falsify documents and face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, according to agreements with prosecutors.

According to their lawyers, Gabriel “accepts responsibility” and Marco “looks forward to…putting [this matter] behind him.”

Say hello to Bernie for me.

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*I remember nothing about OR, other than that we had to do some computations – by hand – involving some type of matrix, something called dual simplex, and something called pivoting. That and a case study called “Red Brand Canners” about optimizing the production of canned tomatoes. So clearly my education wasn’t wasted on me.

Bosses ask the darndest things

The Guardian recently asked readers to send in the oddest (generally inappropriate) things that there managers had ever asked them to do.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of goodies.

On fellow reported that a friend was asked to break in his boss’ shoes for him. (Let’s hope the boss got blisters, anyway.)

Another person said that a colleague who was leaving the office because her water had just broken was criticized for “abandoning her job.” (This reminds me of a colleague who was laid off while pregnant and showing. When she told the HR person who was seeing her out the door that it was going to be difficult for her to find another job, the HR manager told her to wear loose clothing and pretend she was fat.)

One guy was asked to remove a dead cat from under the hood of the car of his boss’ daughter. The cat had been strangled in the fan belt. Which explained why the car hadn’t started…

Then there were the garden variety requests – like ordering flowers for both wife and mistress. (No small thing, apparently. I have a friend who works in high-end retail, and they have to be very careful about delivering anything, especially sexy lingerie.)

Anyway, it got me thinking about odd (generally inappropriate) work requests I’d gotten.

Numero Uno happened when I was a product manager, reporting to one of the few female VP’s in the company.

I was asked to come up with the plan for product enhancements, the market research, revenue outlook, and cost benefit to justify the plan, and the script for a demo for a rough prototype.

Great! Happy to do it. My product, after all.

Alas, I was told by my boss, I would not be attending the meeting at which all this was presented. She was going to be taking care of that.

Product managers, she assured me, had never been invited to participate in the meetings at which senior management decided whether or not to keep investing in their products.

I made a strong case for my presence – and for product managers in general – to attend the meeting, but she insisted that it was just not possible.

To add insult to injury, on the day of the big meeting, I had to surrender my PC for the day, as it was the only one on which the prototype demo could be run. So I had to spend the work day using a battered old spare PC squirreled away in a glorified storage closet.

Grrrr, grrrr, double grrrr, triple grrrrr.

As lunch time approached, my boss stuck her head into the glorified storage closet and told me, “I think I’ve found a way for you to get into the meeting.”

I asked her whether she wanted me to talk through the research, explain the proposed features, give the demo.

Oh, no, she told me, “Since it’s almost lunch time, I thought you could go out and pick up pizzas for us. Then, when you brought it in, you could just stay for a while.”

My jaw went completely slack.

I told her that if she wanted someone to fetch lunch, she could ask our admin, but there was no way I was coming into that meeting as the waitress. I went to business school precisely so I wouldn’t have to take food orders, hand out napkins, and serve the grub.

Furthermore, I told her that, as the only woman participating in that meeting, she shouldn’t have been the one jumping up to take the lunch order, either. (We both knew that she was always, but always, the one who did so.)

So there.

She was pretty much in shock that I wasn’t going to make the pizza run. “You’re usually so easygoing, I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Anyway, after the meeting she swung by to apologize, and told me I was right that she shouldn’t keep playing the good girl who took care of the hungry boys.

The only other odd work request had happened years earlier.

Before I went back to business school, so I wouldn’t have to be a waitress, I did scut work in the economics department of a large bank.

At one point, my boss – the chief economist – decided that he’d have everyone work on some research on the New England economy, specifically, the New Hampshire economy. And that he was going to provide this research to a senator who was running in the Democratic primary for the presidential nomination.

Although this was post-Watergate, and people were growing a bit more conscious of what you could and couldn’t do for a political candidate, none of us gave second thought to preparing briefing materials for the good senator.

Until one day, when it dawned on one of the senior economists that this might not be a good – or even a legal – idea. (She was a Republican, so probably wanted to rat the big boss out for helping a Democrat.)

Anyway, she stopped by the bank president’s office and – so she told us – presented him with a hypothetical, what if situation.

The president was able to quickly interpret the hypothetical, and was told, “You tell J that he’s got 24 hours to get every piece of paper that mentions anything about working for the senator out of the bank.”

This was on a Friday, so us trusted troops were invited to work on Saturday, purging the files. We put them in cartons, taxied them off to the chief economist’s condo, and shoved them under his bed. He then made Tex-Mex food for all of us.

Those are my top two. I’m sure there are others – make that I know there are others – but I’ll save them for another day.

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Thanks to my sister Trish for this idea.

The Internet of Things. (Wake up, baby, this is NOT all for the good.)

I have a “smart thermostat”.

I haven’t actually done anything particular smart with it.

It is set up so that it sends me an e-mail every time I make an adjustment. (Thanks for letting me know that I just turned “cool” off! It’s certainly possible that I could have experienced a senior moment between going downstairs to adjust the thermostat, and moseying upstairs to enjoy that “cool” being off. So I guess it’s good to get the information via e-mail.)

But I have yet to sign up for the really smart thing to do, which would be to turn on, or up, or down, the HVAC system when I’m an hour or so away from home. That way, I wouldn’t have to experience the complete and utter inconvenience of having to wait for a freezing 66 degree or sweltering 76 degree condo to get to just the right level of comfy cozy.

Other than that smart thermostat – which will get smarter only if I apply some of my smarts to figuring out how to remotely operate it – I’m just not all that into the Internet of Things or, as we in the trade say, the IOT. (Unless you count things like laptops, wireless routers, and Kindles…)

I say “we” because, while I personally have precious little to do with IOT, I do have a client whose business is involved in the technical underpinnings that support it.

I write their weekly blog post, and, in the past year or so I’ve written about smart cars, trucks, trains, medical devices, front door locks, basketballs, soccer goal scoring, and, yes, thermostats.

All part of the marvelous IOT, which Cisco is forecasting will grow, Carl Sagan style, to 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

Is all this smart IOT stuff making us any smarter, let alone happier, more productive, more secure?

Hard to say, but having every inanimate object around you suddenly smartening up is not without risk.

ONE NIGHT IN April a couple in Ohio was woken by the sound of a man shouting, “Wake up, baby!” When the husband went to investigate, he found the noise was coming from a web-connected camera they had set up to monitor their young daughter while she slept. As he entered her bedroom, the camera rotated to face him and a string of obscenities poured forth. (Source: The Economist.)

This hyper-vigilant dad had apparently not changed the factory-issued password, opening up the family to being punked by some jerk with nothing better to do than wake up babies and scare the bejesus out of new parents. (As if being new parents wasn’t scary enough, now they have to worry about being tortured by some remote Chucky…)

Unless it gives you a heart attack, having someone take over your webcam is probably not going to kill you. (Or course, having some creep with videos of what’s going on in what we once quaintly referred to as “the privacy of your own home” is not exactly a pleasant thought.) But someone seizing control of your smart car and driving you off the road could. As could someone who decides to amp up your heart pump, which was how the VP was killed in Homeland a couple of seasons back.

It all sounds rather worrying, but so far there has been no known case of a cyber-attack in which a car has been forced off the road or a medical device misappropriated.

Phew! But, hey, it’s probably just a matter of time before something gets seriously and dangerously hacked.

While most of what “they” are after (other than the sheer sporting fun of waking up baby) is your passwords and the ability to use you as an unwitting spammer.

That is annoying enough, but what if a tech-savvy arsonist were to find a way of, say, taking control of home boilers and turn them up so much that they burst into flames?

I’ll have to take all this into account when I replace my appliances during my upcoming (some day, anyway) kitchen remodel.

Buying smart tech may be unavoidable, but I just may figure out some way to dumb it all down.

I don’t want a hacker turn all the lo-cal fudge pops in my freezer into mush. Or boil the bottom out of my teakettle, something I have proven I am capable of on my very own unconnected own.

Hackers could turn on my shower and flood the whole place. They could blast Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo at high decibel, so that my neighbors can be lead to erroneously believe that I actually watch this show. (I’d rather watch Extreme Couponers, thank you very much.)

Something to be said for embracing the inner Amish Luddite…

House calls

A few months back, I saw an article in The NY Times that I found a bit unsettling.

I filed it in my “possible topic” folder, and kept coming back to it.

Now, with the start of the school year looming – odd, how even when you don’t have kids and haven’t had any back-to-school jitters of your own for decades, early September always seems to be the start of something – I’ve pulled it out of the topics file, and am ready to take it on.

The article was about a progressive Manhattan pre-K-eighth school, Manhattan Country School, that serves a racially and economically diverse population. It also brings its pre-schoolers, who are 4- and 5-year-olds on field trips to one another’s homes.

“We knew we needed to talk about social class,” said Lois Gelernt, the teacher who came up with the idea. “It was opening up a can of worms, but if we were never going to talk about who we are and where we come from, the sense of community wasn’t going to be there.” (Source: NY Times)

Okay, it’s easy enough to make fun of the liberal parents who want to have “the conversation” with their 4-year-olds, but better the crunchy granola, do-gooding liberals than the callous jerks going nuts if their 4-year-olds fail the entrance interview for the pre-school that will set them on the Ivy track.

Still, there’s something disturbing about shepherding a group of little ones on a totally inorganic play date that maybe opens the eyes of some of the have kids, but that maybe also makes the have-nots feel a bit bad and embarrassed.

Not according to the Manhattan Country School:

“Four-year-olds have no value judgments about one house being better than another because it’s fancier,” said Sarah Leibowits, who teaches that age group and now leads the visits. “They don’t think that way. That’s what adults think.”

Maybe I was a bit older, but at a pretty young age, thanks to the compare and contrast between what I watched on TV and where I actually lived, I knew there were social and economic differences out there. Certainly by first grade, I had already hypothesized that Ozzie and Harriet must be Protestants because they lived in such a nice house.

I grew up in a blue collar-lower middle class neighborhood in Worcester. The “housing stock” was mostly three-deckers (some of which had shops in their basements or first floors), modest pre-war single family homes, big old run-down rattling houses that dated from when the neighborhood had been a lot less populated and a tad more prosperous, and slapped up GI-bill ranch and Cape Cod houses built in the 1950’s.

Those of us who lived in those modest pre-war single families or slapped up GI-bill homes had mostly started out living in a flat in a three-decker. Most of us had grandparents and aunts and uncles who still lived in deckers.

Plus or minus a bit, most of the families in our neighborhood lived at pretty much the same level.

Yet we knew there were differences.

The kids who lived on the other side of the tracks (literally) on Lyman Street were poor.

The people who lived in the beautiful old colonial – built in 1760 – that incongruously sat around the corner from our house must have been rich. (They were Protestants, so that pretty much sealed it.)

Relatively speaking, we were among the haves. Our gerry-built house had two bathrooms, my father wore a tie to work, and we had a lot of books. But the over and under in our hood wasn’t all that great.

Around Christmas, when we drove around to see the lights, we especially liked to go over to Worcester’s West Side, where the real rich folks lived. They didn’t go in for a lot of colored lights, glowing Santas, reindeer on the roof, plaster crèche scene.

No, they went for the ultra classy white candle in the windows, and a spot-lit wreath on the front door.

Ah, those rich folks had class! And nice, big comfy repro-Colonials and mock Tudors. Full of nicey-nice families, no doubt Protestants all, just like the nicey-nice families I saw on Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to  Beaver, Father Knows Best, Donna Reed. A Protestant ascendancy, if ever.

(It didn’t take a genius to figure out that even though religion never came up, The Honeymooners were Catholics. And a few years later, who were they kidding when they made Archie Bunker a Prod? Come on, if ever there were a Queens Irishman…)

I had a set of relations who lived in Newton, in a neighborhood that was hardly posh, but which was recognizably more affluent and upscale than ours. This set of cousins were the closest folks I knew who were as near to Ozzie and Harriet as you could get without actually being Protestants living in Hollywood. (It helped that these cousins, even though they were Catholic, went to public school.)

On the other side of the family, our Chicago cousins, the Dineens, lived, like us, in one of those slapped up GI-bill houses, in a neighborhood like ours that was teeming with kids.

Nobody in either of those neighborhoods had much by way of money, but there wasn’t much by way of stark poverty, either.

But you’d have to have been blind not to recognize a few differences.

The kids whose families didn’t have cars, or who had older models – this in an era when everyone seemed to replace their car every couple of years. The kids who came to school in shoes worn down at the heels, or whose parents looked kind of rag-baggedy.

I had friends who lived in three deckers that didn’t have heat in every room. They slept in bedrooms off of the dining room that had some kind of heating stove in it.

I remember playing at one girl’s house – a classmate that I wasn’t particular friends with, but with whom I played when the different neighborhood orbits came together. Her mother gave us glasses of water served in jelly jars. Now pretty much everyone had jelly-jar glasses. Welch’s grape jelly came in jars that featured cartoon characters on them – Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam. But the jelly jars that Theresa’s mother gave us to drink out of were not of the rim-less Welch’s kind, but were the lipped jars that regular old jelly came in. No one said anything, but I could tell by the look on Terry’s face that she was a bit embarrassed, ad we all felt a bit bad for her. But, hey, water was water, and the M’s had a ton of kids.

But I guess if you aren’t able to figure out who has what from the up-close and personal experiences that happen in the natural course of events, or go in for wild extrapolation from what you see on TV, which was my forte, making show-and-tell a movable feast is one way to go.

…[Teacher Lois] Gelernt specifically remembers an effusive greeting from a neighbor of a child who lived in the Bronx. He came out of a store and shouted her name; it turned out he was the local numbers runner.

On another visit, the small children sat in tall chairs in an oversize Park Avenue dining room as a father emerged from the kitchen with a snack of truffles. None of the students ate them.

Surely those truffles were a jest…

Part of me thinks I should be lauding the Manhattan Country School for not shying away from the fact that some kids know the numbers runner and other kids know where to get the best truffles.

Still, I can’t see what taking these kids on these little home visits actually accomplishes.

Maybe it’s that it’s all too official and contrived. A birthday party, an afternoon playing at another kid’s home, a parent explaining to their little ones that not everyone gets to vacation in Nantucket. That all makes sense to me.

But this approach almost seems like a way for the haves to make sure their kids get an opportunity to learn there are have-nots. (Hard to believe the have-nots would be clamoring for this.)

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, other than that this approach seems way too much like a trip to the aquarium or the zoo.

Clutter in the workplace

There was a piece in a recent Economist on how organizations need to wage battle against bureaucracy/clutter in the workplace, and it had me at ‘hello’:

PETER DRUCKER once observed that, “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” (Source: The Economist)

The essay (by Schumpeter; no, not that Schumpeter – he’s dead: it’s a nom de plume) went on to tease out the elements that slow organizations down.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been studying organizational complexity, for nearly 60 years. They have a formula for defining complexity that includes the number of management layers, the number of corporate objectives, and the number of co-ordinating bodies (whatever that means, but it sure sounds like it adds an unnecessary level of complexity to the mix). According to BCG’s calculations, organization complexity has increased by a factor of six since 1955.

The most insanely bureaucratic company I ever worked for was Wang Labs.

One the one hand, in terms of complexity, it was all rather simple: Dr. Wang made pretty much every decision even, it was rumored, on the weight and quality of the paper that data sheets were printed on.

Knowing exactly where the buck stopped should have simplified things, but it was working your way up to where the buck stopped that could bog you down.

Getting anything done at Wang was a colossal hassle.

Permission to go on a business trip required 4 to 5 levels of signature.

OK, your trip didn’t have to be signed off on by Dr. Wang.

But it did have to be okayed by Horace Tsiang, the EVP who was Dr. Wang’s right-hand man.

This was in a company that had over 30,000 employees, and revenues of $3B – back in the good old days, when those billions were actually in revenues (as opposed to “market value” funny money), and a billion dollars actually meant something.

Working through and around the Wang bureaucracy was depressing and enervating.

There were, of course, ways around some things.

Those of us with software applications with a limited audience were known to bypass the normal product release process and cut our own disks – 8” floppies – and send them off to our customers. One of my colleagues went so far as to shrink wrap her product’s documentation, using a hairdryer and Saran Wrap, so that it would look more official.

But for other things…

When I was first at Wang, a guy in my group made a bet with me that it would take me 6 months to get a function strip printed. (A function strip was a piece of plastic that you used to overlay part of the keyboard. Product-specific roles for each of the function keys were printed on it.)

Well, he was almost right.

It took me only 5 1/2 months of continuous pushing and shoving to get function strips printed for my product.

Of course, by that point, we’d added a new function, so the strips were now partially obsolete.

Wang didn’t go out of business because of its insane bureaucracy, but it sure didn’t help matters any.

Meetings are another cluttering time waster.

The most meeting’d up company I ever worked for was Genuity.

You could start in on meetings at 8 a.m. and not come up from under until 6 p.m., with barely a bio-break in there.  While you may have had the opportunity to run to the lav, there was no time for meals, so first-thing meetings had full breakfast served; mid-morning meetings brought you coffee and donuts; lunch was served at noon meetings; and there were snacks brought in to mie-afternoon gatherings.

To say that nothing was accomplished at these meetings almost goes without saying, especially the ones that “featured” senior executives, which were characterized by sniping, subterfuge, backbiting, obstructionism, fief protection, and plain old garden-variety politicking.

Sometimes I just kicked back and enjoyed the show, but mostly it was god-awful and frustrating.

Genuity didn’t go out of business because of its insane meeting culture, but it sure didn’t help matters any.

After all, a fully meeting-involved day takes a toll on productivity and morale:

Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings.

Another form of clutter is e-mail.

Bain estimates that the number of external communications that managers receive has increased from about 1,000 a year in 1970 to around 30,000 today. Every message imposes a “time tax” on the people at either end of it; and these taxes can spiral out of control unless they are managed.

BCG. Bain. Must be fun working for an organization that gets to study and tsk-tsk bureaucratic, meeting’d up organizations. I think I missed my calling.

But yes, there are way too many e-mails flying around out there.

Two tips for not letting e-mails get in your way:

• Don’t read anything you’re cc’d on. (Do, however, read everything you’re bcc’d on: this could be good.)
• Limit your email read and response to a couple of set time each day.

Not that I’ve ever taken my own advice here.

Anyway, the best thing about working on my own is how de-cluttered it all is.

Sure, I have to deal with an occasional bureaucracy. Mostly it’s around how to get paid. (A few years back, one of my clients introduced a swell new system, “which will greatly benefit our suppliers.” I can’t believe that I was the only “supplier” who found that moving from a system that got you paid in two weeks to one that got your paid in 3 months (maybe) was a benefit.) Anyway, getting paid is a absolutely worth going through the bureaucracy for.

But mostly my work life is bureaucracy free, as the folks I directly work with take care of it behind the scenes.

I do meet with clients regularly, but they’re always purposeful meetings, focused specifically on whatever it is I’m working on.

No more mind (and butt) numbing meetings that don’t seem to have any purpose other than to make it look like the attendees are busy and important.

There’s no escaping e-mails, but, just like with meetings, I don’t tend to get added to e-mails strings just for the hell of it. Most of the work e-mails I send and receive are making or responding to specific requests.

So maybe the best way to de-clutter the workplace is to work for yourself.

Now if only I could get around to clearing the clutter off of my desk.

Parmigiano? Panama hats? Skee-ball? What’s in a name, trademarked or not.

A few weeks ago, I meandered across an article on the EU rattling its trade swords over use of words like feta, parmesan, and champagne.After all, they claim, Americans scarfing down feta, parmesan, or champagne made in the US would alternatively – i.e., if we knew any better – be consuming the real thing:  Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy; feta from Greece; and French Champagne.

Seriously, folks. I don’t know what the big hoo-hah is here.

I think most of us, even blindfolded, could tell the difference between freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, which we know is authentically from Italy because it’s got a red-white-and-green label (okay: we wouldn’t be able to see the label if we were blindfolded…) or because we paid $21.99 a pound for it at Whole Food -  and what’s sprinkled out of the Kraft Parmesan Cheese can.

But that real Parmigiano can get pricey, and sometimes all you want to do is sprinkle a bit of pale yellow, cheese-like substance on your spaghetti. And you don’t really give a damn what the source. It’s not like you’re going to convince yourself that the Kraft Parm is great. But it’s an either-ors thing. You’re either not going to know the difference, because you’ve never heard of Parmigiano-Reggiano (even though Wal-Mart carries it) and you wouldn’t pay the price differential for it even if you did; or you do know the difference, and can’t afford to pay the price differential; or you don’t think the difference is worth the price differential.

If you’re still following me here… (Hey, it’s Friday and it’s been a long week.)

As for feta, I don’t buy it that often, but I do occasionally get a Greek salad for lunch, and I’ve never noticed that feta tastes like anything much other than feta. This may be because I have lucked out and only frequent (or not so frequent) sub shops run by real Greeks who wouldn’t be caught dead on Mt. Olympus serving feta from anywhere other than Greece. Or it may be because, blindfolded, I couldn’t taste the difference between good feta (i.e., made in Greece) or bad feta (made in the US).

Champagne, well…

If we use the broadest of definitions of champagne – screw the terroir – to include pretty much anything that’s sparkling and white (prosecco, cava…), this is the one alcoholic bev that I would miss if I were told I had to give up booze. (God forbid.)

I used to be a French champagne snob, turning my nose up at anything that sparkled out of California, let alone New York. (The Buffalo terroir????)

But over the years, I’ve happily swapped out “real champagne” for the proseccos and cavas of the world.

Sure, given the choice, who wouldn’t choose Perrier-Jouet over Taylor Sparkling, if only for the flowered bottle.

But, as with the Parmigiano Reggiano vs. Kraft Parm, most people aren’t buying cheapo, faux champagne believing it’s a perfect alternative to champagne. They’re buying it because it’s cheaper and the difference doesn’t mean a thing to them.

So, for all the huffing and puffing. All the trying to force the issue by labeling that states that something not made there is “in the style of.” Or making us Americans rename products. (Kraft could just call it grated cheese – if, in fact, it’s cheese at all. Maybe grated topper would be safer…). THERE REALLY DOESN’T SEEM TO BE ANY REAL ECONOMIC LOSS TO THE COUNTRY OF ORIGIN.

Caveat emptor.

If it’s all that important, look for the label. (Or look at the price tag.)

Shortly after I read the article about EU coming after American expropriation of their names – what’s next? kielbasa? – I saw a reversal kind of story.

Panama hats, it seems, are not made in Panama.

Their terroir, in fact, is Ecuador.

I don’t believe that the Ecuadorians are arguing for a rename. Ecuador hat doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. I just think they want the Panama-hat wearing world to know from when cometh their topper.

And then there’s the case of Skee-ball Inc. vs. Brooklyn’s Brewskee-ball League for infringing on the use of their trademarked name.

Although I’m not interested in joining a skee-ball league – I’m just not enough of a hipster and/or bar denizen for that scene – I do love rolling a few games when I’m at an arcade. Next to Whack-a-Mole, I can’t think of an arcade game I like any better. So much fun rolling up the score, and how satisfying to see how many tickets you can accrue and turn in for swell prizes!

Anyway, I’m delighted that there’s a skee-ball league out there:

The national home is the Full Circle Bar in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where league games take place three nights a week. At the back of the pub are three skee-ball machines. Spectators sit on raised seating to watch and cheer. A “wall of fame” celebrates top-notch players with names like “Skeeopatra”, “Brewbacca” and “Skeebron James”. “Snakes on a Lane” is a star. The league runs on puns. It has three seasons, or skeesons, a year; each lasts about three months from kick-off to championship final…

The league has its fair share of hipsters, but they somehow restrain themselves from playing it ironically. (Source: The Economist.)

You have to ask why Skee-ball, Inc. would have gone after the Brewskee-ball league to begin with. Lawsuits are expensive. And, unlike skee-ball, are no fun.

I know you want to protect your trademark, but isn’t skee-ball kind of the kleenex of indoor sports?

Daniel Gervais, an intellectual property professor at the Vanderbilt Law School, thinks the league has a good argument. If consumers continually confuse a brand and a product, it could mean that a trademark has lost its uniqueness. The same thing happened to aspirin, the escalator and the yo-yo. Richard Idell, SBI’s lawyer, disagrees. “Skee-ball is not a generic term. It is not going to hold up in court. The machines are called ‘alley-rollers’.”

Fortunately, the suit – make that suits: Brewskee-ball League had counter-sued -  have been settled. In true hipster fashion, Brewskee “turned to crowdsourcing to help pay its legal bills.”

Next time I’m in Williamsburg, I might just show up on league night and watch the action. To really go hipster, I might even put on a Panama hat. It’s no fedora, but still…

Quackser Fortune may have been on to something

When I was young and went to a lot of movies – there were not, after all, that many channels on TV and there were NO reality shows – one of the movies I went to see was Quackser Fortune has a Cousin in the Bronx.

This film starred Gene Wilder as a hapless Irishman who, like Molly Malone, wheeled a wheel barrow, through streets broad and narrow, in Dublin. Only he wasn’t crying “cockles, and muscles, alive, alive-o”. The one and only thing I remember about this movie was that Quackser was crying, “fresh dung.” (Charmingly pronounced, “fresh dooong.”) He collected it from horse cart droppings, and sold it to gardeners.

Have I thought of Quackser Fortune in years?

No.

But, upon reading a recent article in The Economist, I have now.

That’s where I learned that:

The BioEnergy Team, led by Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in Britain, are hoping to profit from working with the stuff too. They have developed a new technique to turn urine into electrical power—or “urine-tricity” as they call it. (Source: The Economist)

Apparently, the world population, collectively, takes a 6.4 trillion litre whiz each year, putting it right up there with wind and solar as an “abundant resource.” And it can even trump wind and solar’s near ubiquity by being something that’s always at, ahem, hand.

At the core of urine-tricity are microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which contain live microbes. When urine flows through an MFC the microbes consume it as part of their normal metabolic process. This, in turn, frees electrons. Electrodes within the cell gather these electrons and when they are connected to an external circuit a current is generated.

And the power output that can be generated by capturing fresh urine is triple that of the other sources of waste (food scraps, dead insects, etc.) that BRL experimented with.

Where earlier tests produced minimal power, urine had the vim to recharge commercially available batteries, including those in mobile phones.

Ah, the vim of urine! So full to the brim with piss and vinegar!

Of course, we’ll need to reconfigure our toilet eco-system to catch things midstream. Until then, I guess we can just capture our own and haul it in buckets to an energy station. This could be a drag, as the urine needs to be fresh – one week old, at the outside – which would require a weekly run. That could get boring fast. Or it could mean a new business for an enterprising lad like Quackser Fortune, who could roll his wheelbarrow around, hollering “Fresh Pee!”

And, of course, some enterprising Silicon Valley types will come up with an app in which Quackser shows up on your doorstep to collect your catch of the day as soon as he is summoned on his iPhone.

But the need for new toilet types, or for cadres of pee-collecting tradesmen, to emerge shouldn’t bean issue in areas where plenty of new toilets are being built. Given that:

…over 2.5 billion people around the world have no access to proper sanitation.

It seems that the toilet-construction business should be a good one to get into. (Not having access to decent sanitation is, of course, a major public health problem, and obviously requires more infrastructure change than just plunking down some new Totos.)

Anyway, being able to turn a profit on the by-product of proper sanitation might be enough to push some governments into investing in it.

Meanwhile, there are plans afoot to look at #2 as a potential source of power as well.

Yet another super-abundant resource.

Quackser Fortune, come on down!

What’s in a Word, Redux

Well, every once in a while – okay, maybe that was every once in a once - a reader asks me whether I ever follow up on any of my posts.

For the most part, the answer is ‘no’.

If a topic hits the news again, I may pick up on it.

But, no, I really don’t keep an eye on what happened to the smarty-pants Hanover, NH high school cheaters. Or the schnook who wore a Marine uniform to his high school reunion – a uniform that he’d never worn in his real life -  only to have some self-righteous classmate report him to the FBI for impersonating a Marine. Or the MIT admissions officer who lied on her resume.

Mostly it’s one and done.

But when my friend V₄A₁L₁E₁R₁I₁E₁ sent me a link to an article on the new additions to the Scrabble dictionary, I figured here was an opportunity to update an earlier post. (And for the record, I’ve never used subscripts in a blog post, so I don’t know if they’ll actually translate when I upload this. But, in spelling out V’s name, I was aiming for a bit of cleverness with Scrabble letters.)

So here goes…

Last April, I wrote about Hasbro’s contest, in which they asked Scrabble fans to help select the word, from a group of sixteen, that should be added to the Scrabble lexicon.

If I had voted, my picks would have been luckbox, lifehack, bestie, and ew/eww.

But I didn’t vote.

Instead, a whole bunch of geocaching aficionados got all revved up on social media and stuffed the ballot box, making the word geocache the winner.

Now, those who indulge in geocaching – treasure hunt via GPS, I take it – are not especially likely to be Scrabble players, which is apparently apparent from the fact that from a Scrabble playing point of view, the word geocache is a dud.

…there are 29,766 eight-letter words currently acceptable in Scrabble. GEOCACHE would rank 22,684th in terms of probability. Expert player Matt Canik noted that words such as CAZIQUES, XANTHOMA, and ZIGGURAT are about as likely to be drawn as GEOCACHE. (Source: Slate.)

Scrabble insiders would have preferred a more useful newbie, like ew. (Or, as a Scrabble insider would have it, EW. Scrabble is an UPPERCASE kind of game…)

EW may not have made the contest cut, but the new dictionary – out next week – will have a few new two-letter words: te (variant of the note ti), da (Irish for dad?), gi (karate outfit),  and po.

I’m quite happy to see that po has made it, as that is not just a river in Italy, or the name of the little red Teletubby, but the childhood nickname of my sister Trish.

Not clear what it means in the world of Scrabble. Could be the medical meaning – po, the abbreviation for per os, or by mouth. Maybe it’s short for po’ boy, as in the sandwich, or po-faced, as in disapproving. Or – sorry Po Trish – it could be for chamber pot.

There are lots of other new words  - Merriam-Webster, publishers of the Scrabble dictionary are adding about 5,000 of them – and the change has been long awaited, and is long overdue:

The dictionary's last freshening up was a decade ago. Entries in the forthcoming book that include texter, vlog, bromance, hashtag, dubstep and selfie were mere twinkles on the racks of recreational players. (Source: Huffington Post)

Since I knew most of these words, I approve. (Okay, I had to look up dubstep: some type of electronic dance-dance.)

Beatbox, buzzkill, chillax, coqui, frenemy, funplex, jockdom, joypad, mixtape, mojito, ponzu, qigong, schmutz, sudoku and yuzu.

With my impressive vocabulary and with my fingers on the beatboxing pulse of pop culture, I was pretty down with this list, too. Only coqui (a frog), ponzu (Japanese sauce), qigong (Chinese exercise), and yuzu (East Asian citrus fruit). Which just goes to show you how our culture is getting more universal and diverse.

There are, of course, going to be plenty of words that only a serious student of Scrabble would know and love: qajaq (Inuit root word for kayak) and quinzhee “shelter made by hollowing out a pile of snow.”  Hmmmm. Didn’t we used to call this an “igloo”? Well, we, of course – semi-literate, near Dead End kids that we apparently were – just didn’t appreciate that an igloo is made from blocks of ice, not a hollowed out pile of snow.

Sheesh! (Wonder if “sheesh” is in the Scrabble dictionary?)

Well, now I know that, if I ever have reason to hollow out a pile of snow for shelter, I’ll be aware that I’m making a quinzhee, not an igloo.

Meanwhile, Scrabble fans have 5,000 new words to be grateful for.

Go forth and Scrabblify!

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Thanks, V, for today’s topic.

Imagine what new avenues the drone will open up for Martha Stewart

Personally, I think she got a raw deal, and that orange should never have been Martha Stewart’s new black, but I must say that, when Martha was doing time, I was somewhat relieved.

No longer did I have to feel inadequate because I didn’t change the pillows on the sofa, the artwork on the walls, and the duvet covers on the bed each and every season.

I no longer had to worry about whether my gift would be received as lesser and less thoughtful if it came wrapped in paper that I got on the half-price sale at Papyrus the day after Christmas, rather than in handmade potato print gift wrap I’d hand stamped with potatoes into which I’d carved haute relief Christmas trees and reindeers.

I could quit fretting about eating in front of the news with a plate in my lap, rather than setting a gracious table decorated with water-filled glass cylinders stuffed with lemons and pomegranates, lit with hand-crafted Japanese lanterns, and featuring heirloom tomatoes from my garden and artisanal cheese from my goats.

So, yes, while Martha was serving time, I could kick-back and enjoy without feeling that, domestic-wise, I’m a lesser being.

Of course, Martha came back with a vengeance.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on which way to look at it, I had better things to do over the past decade than worry about keeping up with Martha Stewart.

But as I start to take on a home do-over project, Martha is, of course, much on my mind, and I have periodically begun asking myself the big question: What Would Martha Do?

Well, probably not what I’ll end up doing – I think she’s a bit puffier and more flowery than I am – yet for women of a certain age, Martha Stewart lurks behind every domestic decision, every domestic sin of commission and sin of omission.

And just when I had lulled myself into thinking that at least, on the technical end of the knowledge continuum, I probably know a thing or two more than Martha does – come on, what has she got to say about ARM vs. DSP processors, cloud security, file backup, etc? – I find that Martha’s been getting her geek on.

How geeky is she?

Well, for her birthday last year, which she celebrated in Maine – no doubt surrounded by beadboard, hyacinths, and billowing white sheers – Martha, writing in Time, tells us that she:

…was given a drone fitted with a high-definition camera. After a quick introduction to the mechanics of operating the contraption and a few words about its idiosyncrasies, I loaded the appropriate app on my iPad and went down to the beach…

The view I was “seeing” on my iPad with the help of the drone would have otherwise been impossible without the use of a private plane, helicopter, or balloon. With any of those vehicles, I would have needed a telephoto lens, and all of them would have made an unacceptable commotion on the beach. What’s more, I would not have been in the photos!

Martha acknowledges that landscape designers of yore managed to get by without drones. Why think of,

…André Le Nôtre laying out the exquisite landscape designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte, and later the magnificent Château de Versailles, with no high hill to stand on, no helicopter to fly in, and no drone to show him the complexities of the terrain.

Well, Martha and I have that in common, because the minute she mentioned taking a look-see around her spread via drone, André Le Nôtre was the first name that came to mind.

My mind started racing and I imagined all the different applications for my drone.

And my heart started racing at the thought of Martha’s mind coming up with drone apps. She’s using it to photograph her “properties, a party, a hike in the mountains, a day at the beach.”

Will I once again be made to feel like a nothing if I don’t get a drone and start recording stuff on it.

I may not have properties to capture, but wouldn’t it be fun to come home after a walk to the mailbox and review and aerial replay of it? Or a trip to Whole Foods, returning books to the library, shuffling off to the gym?

I could actually turn them into tourist videos, a drone’s eye view of downtown Boston.

Rick Steves, move over.

Martha is not relying solely on her personal drone:

One of my farm workers used his drone… to capture amazing images of my 153-acre farm in Bedford, New York. Suddenly we could see with astonishing clarity the layout of the open fields, the horse paddocks, the chicken coops, the greenhouses, the hay barn, the cutting gardens and henhouses, the clematis pergola, and the long allée of boxwood…

When I read the words “one of my farm workers”, and I the only one thinking Cesar Chavez: Viva la Huelga!)

The shots of my farm were breathtaking and showed not only a very good landscape design — thanks to the surveyors and landscapers who worked with me on the overall vision, much as le Notre worked with Louis XIV — they also showed me what more I can do in the future, and revealed unexpected beauty.

Ahem, Martha, that’s Le Nôtre – capital L, and a circumflex on the “o” in Nôtre.

Tsk, freaking, tsk.

On the other hand, nice to know that even someone like Louis XIV Martha Stewart doesn’t always get the details right.

An aerial shot of the vegetable garden looked very much like my Peter Rabbit marzipan embellished Easter cake, which was designed without the help of a drone.

As it happens, I make the carrot cake for Easter dinner at my sister’s. I thought I was pretty splashy when I surrounded it with green-dyed coconut “grass” and jelly beans, but, once again, I am trumped by Martha Stewart.

Next year, Peter Rabbit marzipan embellishment. That’s in case I don’t have anything better to do, and/or I can’t find a drone to do some embellishment for me.

The Existential Trucker: I truck therefore I am

In the course of my business online travels, which involve a considerable amount of buzzing around looking at tech stuff, I came across the SARTRE Project.

My first thought was that this was something aimed at promoting the smoking of Gauloises.  Then I thought that maybe it was going to be about something cryogenic, and that perhaps Simone de Beauvoir’s head, like that of Ted Williams, had been deep frozen, in hopes of someday bringing her back so that us intellectual snobs would have to re-read her work and pretend to enjoy, or at least understand, her work, and that of her beau and fellow existentialist writer-thinker Jean-Paul Sartre.

Mais non.

This SARTRE – which is a near-acronym for Safe Road Trains for the Environment – is dedicated to improving trucking safety and fuel efficiency by finding ways for semis to travel in close formation convoys. (Sensing technology and automation improve the safety; decreasing drag by driving together improves the fuel economy. Similarly, Tour de France cycling teams travel in packs, called pelotons, or platoons.)

Anyway, WWJPSD?

That it is to say, What Would Jean-Paul Sartre Do at the idea of his name being thus appropriated.

Probably nothing, other than to roll over in his grave, which would land him in the grave of Simone de Beauvoir.

Not that there’s not a connection between existentialism and trucking.

You just have to google “existentialism” and “truck”, and you’ll find plenty of existential sort of trucking caps.

Like this Kierkegaard Trucker cap.

If you can’t quite read the quote, it’s: the truth shall set ye free, but first it shall make ye miserable. Which, apparently, Kierkegaard, never actually said.

Whether or not Kierkegaard ever actually said it, or just thought it, it makes for an excellent “true dat-ism”, that’s for sure.

But I do want to give credit where credit is due, but it’s hard to figure out where the credit should go, which is probably to Gestalt therapist Barry Stevens.

Or maybe not.

The saying is widely attributed to James G. Garfield, but it sure doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that a president in the early 1880’s – even one who ended up being assassinated – would utter.

Now this is the kind of boostery, man of the century thing that James G. Garfield would have said:

“There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It really matters very little whether they are behind the wheel of a truck or running a business or bringing up a family. The teach the truth by living it.” (Source: Good Reads)

Well, as an existentialist utterance, it doesn’t hold a candle to Schopenhauer’s:

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

And as a presidential – and existential – utterance, it can’t quite compete with William Jefferson Clinton’s:

That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.

Still, what it may lack on the existential front it more than makes up for with its shout out to those behind the wheel of a truck. So it all ties together quite nicely, no?

(I do have to wonder just how a truck driver in 1880 was behind the wheel of a truck, rather than holding the reins of a pair of Clydesdales hauling a wagon. But maybe there were steering wheels on those drays. Oh, the questions that come to one’s mind when one has nothing better to do than waste it…)

SARTRE truckers won’t have to settle for a Kierkegaard trucking cap, however. They can just as easily sport one like this.

Yo!

With or without SARTRE, I’m certain that truckers will keep on truckin’, while existentialists will keep on existing, or existentialisting, or whatever it is they do (or don’t).

Which reminds me of the words of caution that a colleague was given by his pastor when he left his home in Alligator Rassle, Florida, to study at MIT.

“Be careful up there, Ray. MIT is just crawling with existentialists.”

And some day the highways of Europe may be crawling with SARTRE-enhanced trucks. That’s assuming that the SARTRE Project gets into the being phase, rather than stalling, up to its hubcaps, in the quagmire of nothingness.

Hunter-gatherers: who’s for the paleo diet?

Forget gluten-free. Forget vegan. Forget vegetarian. (You have to be kidding…)

Nope, these days, the way to go is paleo.

I had vaguely heard of it. And I was vaguely associating it with Gwyneth Paltrow, perhaps because her last name has a paleo ring to it. Turns out associating Gwyneth with paleo is a BINGO. (Why am I not surprised?)

But it really rose to the fore of my consciousness when I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s account in The New Yorker on her week-long experiment feeding herself and her family on a caveman diet:

The Paleolithic diet—“paleo,” for those in the know—represents a new, very old form of eating, one confined to the sorts of food available in pre-agricultural days. These foods, as it happens, were not many. According to Sarah Ballantyne, the author of “The Paleo Approach,” a paleo diet consists of “meats, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds.” According to John Durant, the author of “The Paleo Manifesto,” even seeds are suspect and should be avoided. (A genuinely Paleolithic diet, Durant concedes, probably ought to include human flesh; however, he does not advise this.

Now there’s no doubt in my mind that the world would be a better fitter place if we down on processed foods, carbs, and sugars.

There’d probably be less obesity, fewer cavities, and diminished spare tires all around.

I suspect that if I cut out carbs (and chocolate) for a couple of weeks, I’d be a thinner person. But where’s the fun in that?

And there’s a reason why I crossed out better and replaced it with fitter up there.

The last time most of humanity followed, by necessity, a paleo diet, there were maybe five million people on the planet…With a global population of seven billion people, heading rapidly toward eight billion, there’s certainly no turning back now (even if paleo does, in fact, prevent zits). Pound for pound, beef production demands at least ten times as much water as wheat production, and, calorie for calorie, it demands almost twenty times as much energy. Livestock are major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions, not just because of the fuel it takes to raise them but also because they do things like belch out methane and produce lots of shit, which in turn produces lots of nitrous oxide. …Eating a pound of whole wheat, by contrast, is like driving less than a mile. All of which is to say that, from an environmental standpoint, paleo’s “Let them eat steak” approach is a disaster.

Swell! You’ll look better, but the world will go faster to environmental hell in a shopping basket.

And, come on, how long did the average hunter-gatherer get to enjoy his or her hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Twenty-five years? (Ah, but, they were twenty-five years spent as svelte and toned as Gwyneth Paltrow.)

Not content to just eat like a paleo – or come as close to authentic paleo as you can when your hunting-gathering involves tossing a plastic-wrapped package of grass-fed beef into your cart at Whole Foods – some folks are embracing their inner-Stone Ager and going whole hog.

Paleo sleepers don’t use mattresses. (Wonder if they also sleep on stone floors, and avoid use of heat and AC?) When they wake up and head out for a run – not for purposes of hunting-gathering; they’ve found the hambone to gnaw on in their decidedly non-paleo fridge – they wear “minimalist shoes,” which attempt to replicate the barefootin’ experience that would be too chancy on city streets.

There are even signs of a paleo hygiene movement: coat yourself with bacteria and say goodbye to soap and shampoo.

I can pretty much guarantee that Gwyneth Paltrow has not kissed soap and shampoo aside. But with celebrities, you never know. I’ve read in a couple of places that Brad Pitt smells pretty bad.

I will not be taking on the paleo diet. If anything, I’d find myself veering in the vegetarian direction. Not that I’ll fully go there, either. The occasional hamburger, BLT and steak tips are just too darned good.

But maybe I’ll forage through the freezer and see what’s there in terms of meat.

I know that there is some grass-fed hamburger, purchased last winter when this was one of the few food stuffs that appealed to my husband as his life ended. There are some chicken breasts. Some bacon. Maybe some ground pork I used to make the spicy Chinese green beans that Jim liked.

At some point soon, I will be replacing my fridge as part of my kitchen do-over. (I’ve been watching too much HGTV, plus I need a project.)  So I might as well start working down the inventory.

I will ignore the gnocchi, the frozen lasagna, the last sheath of Girl Scout Thin Mints that I spied just the other day. I will spend a day or two as a paleo – a paleo with a George Foreman Grill, at any rate – and see if I start to look like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Gosh, I feel trendy already!

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Frank Lesser has an amusing take on all this over on Slate, with a Victorian Orphan Diet, a Founding Fathers Diet, etc.

Forget everything you know about “fine Corinthian leather”. (There’s new skin in the furniture game.)

I am in the early planning stages of a home make-over that will involve the acquisition of some new furniture.

I haven’t given much thought to what a new couch might look like, beyond the internal debate between blue and green. We’ll see what my design team (a.k.a., my sisters) comes up with.

One thing I do know for sure is that whatever ends up in my living room will not in any way, shape, or form resemble human skin. Which means that UK furniture designer Gigi Barker is off the list. Barker:

…has created a line of furniture made to look, feel and smell like human skin. (Source: Huffington Post)

I was going to say “shades of Buchenwald”, only to realize what a poor choice of word “shade” was, given the stories about lampshades made out of the skin of Holocaust victims. In any case, whatever there is that’s arty about upholstery designed to mimic skin, it is certainly a perverse and distasteful homage to the Holocaust.

Who would want such a thing in their home?

Especially given that it looks like the icky bits hanging off one of the folks featured on “My 600-lb Life”. Seriously. Can you see curling up on this with a good book? Taking a bit of a sit-nap on a rainy afternoon? Watching the old ball game and root, root, rooting for the home team?

Yuck. I say, yuck, yuck.

Not only the yucky look, and what’s got to be the yucky feel. But the color? There’s a reason why the color formerly known as Crayola Flesh does not show up on many decorators’ palettes.  

Call it peach. Call it pinky-beige. Call it beigy-pink.

I’ll call it like I see it: belly roll or beer gut.

And as for making it smell like skin – whatever that means:

The furniture has been infused with human pheromones and aftershave.

Old Spice? Hai Karate? Aqua Velva? English Leather?

Since you don’t get to pick your color or fabric, maybe you can customize the olfactory.

And just how do you maintain this furniture? Noxzema? Oil of Olay? Dove (“one quarter cleansing cream”)?

While the average sentient adult might avoid this furniture like a rash, kids apparently can see beyond the superficial. Or maybe it’s that they just revel in yucky stuff. (Heard any good poop joke lately?)

"Children have been one of the most interesting demographics in relation to the work," Barker said. "Without any of the hang ups we later develop, they are free to truly explore and interact with the work. Work regarding the human body is very personal and we all have a very immediate reaction to it so the reactions have reflected this."

Out of the mouths of babes comes plenty that’s wack, that’s for sure.

Me, I’ll take my hard-earned hang-ups, any old day.

By the way, when it comes to furniture, art don’t come cheap.

The stool alone costs about $775 and the skin chair will run you close to $2,550, according to WIRED.

Barker is expanding her line beyond furniture, and has made herself a skin-like dress. (Fashions inspired by Hannibal Lecter…)

When I was growing up, there was a factory in Cherry Valley (which sounds charming, but is actually a mill-town that is part of Leicester, a town outside of Worcester) that made something called “elfskin.”

As kids passing by – which we did when taking rides to the Cherry Bowl for ice cream or to St. Joseph’s cemetery to visit family members of the late and lamented variety – we would always comment about “elfskin” – just what it was, and what it was used for.

Whatever it was, I bet it came in better colors than Caucasian belly fat. And I bet it wasn’t infused with any pheromones, either.

It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s DeMoulas

Visitors to our fair (and, let’s face it, occasionally unfair) city, turning on their hotel TV’s to catch the local news, may well be scratching their heads as they try to understand the battle raging between Arthur T. DeMoulas and Arthur S. DeMoulas.

Friends, for all the shorthand we’ve embraced when we’re referring to them – ATD vs. ASD, Artie T and Artie S – most of us locals don’t really get what’s going on any better than you do.

But I can fill in a few blanks.

Artie T and Artie S are cousins, sons of the men (Mike and George) who built the Market Basket grocery store chain, which has its origins in the mom-and-pop corner store that their Greek immigrant parents owned in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Artie T and Artie S are not exactly kissing cousins, and their blood feud runs deep – at least back to the early death of George, after which, the Artie S faction holds that Mike (Artie T’s father) tried to screw George’s family (that would be the father of Artie S) out of their share of the Market Basket enterprise.

Got it?

Anyway, the courts found that Mike had indeed tried to load up his personal market basket at the expense of George’s heirs, and awarded them 51% interest the chain. But the kertuffling continued, and the battling DeMoulases have been in and out of the news for years – lawsuit this, allegation that. There’s even some Whitey Bulger/bad FBI agent stuff drifting around the periphery.

Over the years, despite the family feud, Artie T ended up running the company. He was CEO until the board ousted him (and a handful of other execs, presumably Artie T allies) in June.

Here’s where the store story gets really interesting.

Artie T was apparently much beloved by the Market Basket employees. To the point where thousands of them – along with Market Basket customers – have been demonstrating for his return.

And we’re not talking a handful of folks milling around carrying Bring Back Artie signs.

As of last Friday, there’ve been three rallies at various locations. One drew 2,500 supporters, another 5,000. The largest rally (Friday’s) brought out an estimated 7,000 to 10,000.

Since Artie T’s ouster, DeMoulas:

…has seen business collapse as customers have boycotted, managers have refused deliveries, employees have rallied outside stores, and stores have run dry of perishable products.(Source: Boston.com)

Politicians are getting in on the act, and Elizabeth Warren – for all practical purposes, as close as we have to a saint of the little people – was booed (in absentia: her name was mentioned) because she has not come out in support of Artie T.

What I find astounding about this is that the employees are showing such ardent support for their former CEO, who it seems was a man who put employees first, made Market Basket a great place to work, etc.

Speakers at the rally [last Friday’s] still expressed their distaste for the company’s past management and recalled stories of their leader-in-exile, Demoulas.

Seriously, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of anything like this.

I did a quick run-through of the CEO’s of the companies I worked for and most of them were charismatic a-holes, non-charismatic a-holes, or useless non-entities. The only one who inspired anything near affection among the ranks was Dr. An Wang, founder of Wang Labs.

I was a late comer to Wang, which was already in the midst of its downward spiral when I joined the company, but the old timers (and some of the new timers) really loved Dr. Wang. As far as I could tell, he was a pretty much a kindly genius, not much given to small talk, but someone to whom many employees were grateful because they’d done pretty well under his leadership.

The biggest gusher I saw directed at Dr. Wang came from none other than Cisco’s John Chambers, who held a senior position at Wang when I was there.

Not that I’ve got much of an eye for executive talent, but I did have enough exposure to John to get that he was the real deal. (I was part of a “let’s save Wang” strategy group, a member of the financial services team, and we got to meet on occasion with senior execs. I remember reporting back to my friends that John was the only one “on Mahogany row” who was worth a damn.)

At some point during my years at Wang, Dr. Wang was diagnosed with cancer, and the news that he was stepping down was broadcast over Wang closed circuit TV.

John Chambers played a prominent role in the announcement, and, in his southern boy accent, and in near tears, gushed all over Dr. Wang, who sat there stoically. (I believe his son Fred was at his side.)

I don’t remember exactly what John said, but to my ears it sounded like, “Oh, Dr. Wang, Dr. Daddy Wang, I hope you don’t mind my telling you that you have always been like a father to me. Dr. Wang, Daddy Dr., Dr. Daddy Wang. Oh, I do so love you, Dr. Daddy Wang.”

I’m sure John was being quite sincere, and that he really did love and admire Dr. Wang. But it didn’t get him the CEO job. (I think it went to Wang.) John moved on over to Cisco. (Good move, John.)

Anyway, until the DeMoulas Demonstrations, this is as close as I’ve come to witnessing a public display of affection aimed at a CEO.

Artie T has announced that he’s putting together an offer to buy Artie S out.

The Market Basket board has said that they will consider it.

Meanwhile, I’m just wowed by the outpouring of support and affection for Artie T.

Who’d a thunk it?

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Wonder who’ll play Artie T and Artie S in the movie? Any thoughts?

That’s ATD – the benevolent looking baldy – on the left and more hirsute and sinister looking ASD on the right. Maybe Frank Langella or F. Murray Abraham for Artie S? Roberto Benigni, of Life is Beautiful fame, for Artie T?

Endangered species: jobs that are slip sliding away

In the extremely unlikely case that I will be coming up with another career for myself any time soon, thanks to CareerCast and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’ll know which ones to avoid. That would be the ten jobs on the list that are forecast to experience the greatest declines by the year 2022.

If I’d had my heart set on becoming a tax examiner/collector, well, boo-hoo to me. There will be 4 percent fewer of them out there. Why is that, you might ask? According to the article, this decline will be predicated on federal, state, and local governments coming to their senses and simplifying the tax code. I’m guessing it’s because automated tax preparation applications are catching a lot of the errors that the taxman used to find.

Thanks to Kindle, online everything, and – I’m freelancing here – the general decline in literacy caused by communication in selfies-only - there will be 5 percent fewer printing workers. Which is kind of too bad, as this means a decline in printer’s devils, which has to be one of the best job titles ever.

Sadly, I would probably not be able to find work as a drill-press operator, as their ranks will decrease by 6 percent. Probably just as well. Given my mechanical aptitude, I’d likely drill press my thumb out of existence.

I would say, alas, I will never be a flight attendant (down by 7 percent), but coffee, tea, or me, a plastic smile, and a polyester uni were never going to me anyway. There’ll be fewer stews because there will be fewer airlines and fewer flights. (Fewer flights? Does that mean that they’ll be cramming us in as strap-hangers. Yikes!)

It’s not just the printer’s devil’s job that’s going to hell. Less printing means less demand for paper. So those brawny lads, the lumberjacks, will see their ranks topple by 9 percent. (And if I thought I’d lose a thumb as a drill press operator, I’d likely manage to whack a personal limb off while in the process of whacking an arboreal limb off.)

I’m sure I’ve done so since then, but the last time I actually remember talking to a travel agent was in 1976, when one was explaining the “bicentennial nightly” fare that was some kind of steep discount on the red-eye.  They’ve still managed to hang in there – and will for specialty travel – but we will be saying Bon Voyage to 12 percent of them by 2022.

Since it’s the only job on the top (bottom?) ten list that I actually would have wanted to have, I’m sorry to see newspaper reporter go. But come 2022, there’ll be 13 percent fewer Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lanes, intrepidly asking “Who, What, When, Where, How” for the Daily Planet. (Oh, how I wish this had been my profession, so I could more properly mourn its passing.)

No more meter readers, I’m afraid – down by 19 percent. No great loss – who wants to wait around for the meter reader? – unless, of course, you’re a meter reader. Or someone holding one of the few decently paying blue collar jobs out there. (Will someone tell me what exactly it is that people who used to be meter readers, lumberjacks, and drill press operators are actually going to do?)

Farmer is also going to be a thing of the past, with 19 percent fewer of them. Thank you agri-business! I was actually surprised to see that the median salary for the Old McDonalds of the world was $69K. Then I ran the numbers in my head and figured out that they were probably making about $13 an hour. Not much reward for risk of weather, market fluctuations, pestilence, exposure to chemicals, danger from machines, manure...

The most dire outlook is for mail carrier, with hiring predicted to decline by 28 percent by 2022. Like everyone else, most of my bills and statements now come electronically. Moving forward, I plan to have all of them arrive that way. But in 2022 I still hope to be getting magazines, cards, and the occasional physical object through the USPS. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

But what if there are no appointed rounds to complete?

See you in the funny papers. (On not going to Comic Con.)

Well, looks like I missed Comic-Con International in San Diego (sexual harassment and all – although, in truth, the description of the “bad stuff” sounds like it could have occurred at half the tech shows I went to over the years, and 90% of the financial services trade shows – think models teetering around in 4 inch heels and popping out of French maid outfits on all fronts ).

And I don’t plan on being any where near next week’s Boston Comic Con.

But I’m just a no-fun kind of gal, not into fantasy, costumes, role play, super heroes. (As they used to say, a hero ain’t nothin but a sandwich. Except in Boston, where we’d have to say a sub ain’t nothin but a sandwich, or a hero ain’t nothin’ but a sub, or something like that…)

Anyway, Comic Con’s being in the news got me to thinking about the role that comic books have played in my life. Which is minimal.

Sure, if you didn’t have the 50 cents for a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book, but you did have a dime, you might head over to Sol’s Pharmacy and pick up a Little Lulu or an Archie  or a Dennis the Menace.

But mostly, they were something that, as fifties kids, we knew we were supposed to go for, but didn’t.

No, they were not in the same category as the pogo stick, another item that TV kids all seemed to have, but which I never saw in real life until I was well into my adulthood – and well passed the age at which it might seem like a reasonably good idea to hop on and give it a go. But they just weren’t around.

(Another pogo-stick like item was the odd beanie, as worn by Jeff’s friend Porky in the Tommy Rettig episodes of Lassie. While we did see kids wearing coonskin caps (hard to avoid at our house, given that one of those coonskin cap wearing kids was my brother Tom), but this cap of Porky’s and other so-called fifties kids who were clearly the conception of someone who’d been a kid in the 1930’s or 1940’s. Well, get out of here on your pogo stick, pal. Say hello to Slip Mahoney and the other Dead End Kids when you see ‘em. And leave a hand free to take your comic books with you, why don’t you.)

Anyway, comic books were never my thing – or the thing of any of my friends.

Yes, it was interesting to read the the ads in the back – sea monkeys, body building, space shoes – but for those of us committed to the written word, comic books were kind of boring.

I wanted a book to be a real book.

Give me the long form and let me imagine what Nancy Drew and her pals the girlie Bess and the mannish George looked like when they sped around in Nancy’s roadster. To some of us, one word is worth a thousand pictures, I guess.

I guess I got my funnies fill by reading the funny pages in the daily and Sunday newspapers.

I followed the soap-opera, serial strips, like Apartment 3-G, about the working gals in NYC (no, not that kind of working gal: Margo was a secretary, Tommie was a nurse, and LuAnn was a teacher) and Gil Thorp, in which the brush-cut wearing Coach Thorp dispensed sage advice to teens, and always took time out to wish us a Merry Christmas. Then there was Dondi, the little war orphan who never aged, although the war he was orphaned in  shifted over time from WWII, to Korea, to Vietnam. (If it’s still going, it must be Afghanistan or Iraq. Good thinking to have picked a black haired, black eyed kid, rather than a little blond, blue-eyed Dutch boy who wouldn’t have outlasted WWII.) I also read Gasoline Alley, if only because they had a character with the wonderful name of Moon Mullins.

I similarly read the funnies where each strip contained it’s own self-contained story: Dagwood and Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Maggie and Jiggs, The Kazenjammer Kids, (wordless) Little King, and the (similarly wordless, I believe) Caesar, which featured a dog. Some time during the first grade, I remember telling my friend Bernadette about one of the Caesar cartoons that I found especially amusing. Only I pronounced his name “Kay-zar”. Which Bernadette corrected: she was nearly a year older than I, plus had a brother and a sister who were in college. So she was in the know about advanced pronunciation, etc.

I also liked the single picture/caption cartoons that ran in the dailies: Little Iodine and Dennis the Menace.

As I got a bit more sophisticated, I added Pogo and B.C. to my repertoire. And as I got a bit more sophisticated I grew to despise the pietistic, unfunny, and exceedingly repetitive Family Circus.

And then, of course, back in the adult day when I still read a physical newspaper, there were Doonesbury, and Calvin and Hobbes, and Dilbert.

But comic books? Nah?

I think that at one point we inherited a pile of early-fifties comics that had belonged to my older cousin Robert. My Aunt Margaret was in the habit of occasionally going through his belongings, boxing up anything she decided he’d outgrown, and depositing them on our doorstep. Thus, we became the owners of what was a tremendous collection of baseball cards that might have been worth something today if we had left them neatly boxed and catalogued. Since half the players were no longer active, who cared? We attached them to the spokes of our bikes with clothes pins, which made a wonderful clacketey-clack noise as you pedaled around.

If we did, indeed, take possession of a stack of late 1940’s – early 1950’s comic books, we no doubt pillaged them, as well. What we didn’t tear through likely went to the Boy Scout newspaper drive. (Recycling was not invented yesterday.)

All this musing brought on by Comic Con.

Getting old, getting old…