Kerrygold Abu!

When I was a kid, there were always small cans of Carnation Evaporated Milk in the larder. I'm not 100% sure what it was used for, but seem to remember my parents using it for coffee creamer. And my mother may have used it in some recipes. 

What I do remember about it was the Carnation Evaporated Milk came from contented cows. Or so we were told in Carnation ads.

What, exactly, a contented cow is, I couldn't tell you, but I'm picturing a dopey-looking, cud-chewing Holstein meandering around a pasture on a balmy, sunny day, until it's time to sashay into the barn so that Mr. Green Jeans can milk her.

Anyway, I don't remember anyone taking Carnation on for false advertising.

Kerrygold wasn't so lucky.

They weren't claming that the cows whose milk is used in their butter were contented - although, aside from the rain, I would imagine that Irish cows are plenty contented. The Kerrygold claim to fame was that their cows were grass-fed. 

I guess that whether cows are eating grass or not is a lot more provable than whether or not they're contented, contentment being pretty much in the eye and mind of the beholder. So there's that basis for a suit. But a fellow in California took legal umbrage to the grass-fed claims, and brought suit against Ornua Co-operative (which produces Kerrygold), saying that he'd been:

...“misled into purchasing Kerrygold products due to false and misleading advertising.” For several years, he bought Kerrygold dairy products, sometimes at a price premium, with the understanding based on product advertising that cows used to generate the milk for the products were only fed grass...“Rather than disclose the use of non-grass feed, as other partially grass-fed competitors do, Kerrygold deceptively implies that its products are derived from cows that are fed only grass,” (Source: Feed Navigator)

The plaintiff said he never, ever, ever in a million years - or something like that - would have bought Kerrygold if he'd known that those Irish cows were also gulping down soy, corn and other grains. Guess it wasn't enough that Kerrygold butter tastes great.

Ornua argued back that they never said that their cows eat nothing other than grass. And they've got a point. You may be what you eat, but just because you're a meat eater doesn't mean you're exclusively eating meat. Same goes, I suppose, for grass. And cows.

Admittedly, Ornua may have been implying that their Bessies and Bossies - or whatever they call cows in the Old Sod - were supping exclusively on the green, green grass of Ireland. But you can also argue that it may just have been a case of the plaintiff inferring.

Anyway, the judge in the case dismissed the suit, leaving Ornua contented. 

As for the plaintiff, he did want to turn it into a class action suit on behalf of all those duped by Kerrybgold - include me out - so maybe he thought that there'd be a few bucks to come out of the suit. But you do have to wonder what his game was. What damages did he incur? Why tie up the courts? Why not just stop buying Kerrygold, write Ornua a letter asking for a refund (or save the overseas stamp and email them), blast them on social media? A suit seems pretty frivolous.

Me? I'm always contented with Kerrygold, the butter of choice chez moi. Unlike blandly whitish American butters, Kerrygold is buttery yellow. And it tastes like, well, butter. What more can you ask for?

MLK Day 2020. (Bald is beautiful.)

MLK Day
It's Martin Luther King Day, and Pink Slip is observing it by partially taking the day off.

What will I be doing?

Although it's a day when volunteering is encouraged, I'm sitting this one out. I volunteered on Saturday. I'm volunteering tomorrrow. And on Thursday. So I'm good. (Obviously, I didn't give up virtue signaling for MLK Day.)

Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, will be talking about her book at The Boston Athenaeum, and I'm going to that. Until I saw an article on Trotter (and the Greenidge book), I wasn't at all familiar with the man, other than being aware of a Boston public school that's named after him.

Trotter was the founder of The Guardian, a black newspaper that achieved a national readership, and was an all-round activisit. Among other things, he led protessts against the spectacularly racist D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation. (You know, sometimes cancel culture is a good thing.)

Anyway, a writer friend of mine is introducing Greenidge, and I'm sure her introduction and Greenidge's talk will be great. And I'm happy to be doing something to honor Dr. Martin Luther King.

(As for The Athenaeum, founded in 1807 - and just up the street from where I live - it's one of the oldest independent libraries in the country. I'm a member, but don't do anywhere near enough hanging out in this beautiful and completely quirky place. (Note to self: start spending an afternoon or two a week at The Ath...))

For our next topic:

Bald is beautiful
My husband was bald. So was my father. As are both of my brothers. I'm good with bald guys. Bald is beautiful.

That said, I'm just as happy that male-pattern baldness affects, well, males. (Thank you, testosterone.) But that said, there's no reason why women have to have more hair than men, other than that it's what in our culture we're most used to. There is such a thing as female-pattern baldness, but, until old age, that's less common.But most women as they age will experience some hair loss over time. (Another note to self: check the bathroom sink.)

Then there's alopecia. Actually, male- and female-pattern baldness are forms of alopecia. But when we think about alopecia - if we think of it at all - we're likely thinking about total baldness - head, eyebrows, eyelashes.

Alopecia is an autoimmune condition, and affects both men and women. But African American women may be more prone to it than others.

One of those African American women is Ayanna Pressley, who's a member of Congress from Boston (and the most low-key member of The Squad, which also includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib). Pressley's's not my representative, but I'd be just as happy if she were. But in 2018, I wasn't all that happy with her. She primaried and took out Mike Capuano, perhaps the most progressive person in the House. Would that she'd primaried and taken out my Congressman, Stephen Lynch, who's more of an old-school lunchbucket Democrat rather than a progressive. But it was Pressley's time, and she beat Capuano and won handily in the general.

Late last week, just in time for MLK Day, Pressley revealed that she has recently lost her hair due to alopecia.  Here's a link to the video where she made her announcement - definitely worth a view, as has a lot to say about her hair specifically in reference to herself and her identity as a black women. And here are her "before and after" shots.

I told you bald is beautiful!

What would Mr. Whipple do?

Two upfront statements:

1. I'm not going to say that I wouldn't use Charmin toilet paper if it were the last roll of TP on the face of the earth. Of course, I would use it. The toilet paper I absolutely would NOT deploy if it were the last roll of TP on the face of earth would be Quilted Northern. That would be on the basis of their execrable ads, in which cartoon bears dance around singing "my heinie's clean." Especially the execrable+ ad in which the cartoon bear parents debate whether to pick their cartoon bear son's briefs up off the bathroom floor.  Then cartoon bear son saves them having to touch "it" by prancing in singing - you guessed it - "my heinie's clean."
2. I don't think Procter & Gamble's all that serious about the suite of toilet-related tech products they introduced at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. At least I don't think they are...

Anyway, I always enjoy reading about the weird and useless stuff that gets showcased at CES. And writing about it, too. (If only someone - that would be Google, which owns Blogger - could come up with an app that let me have consistent fonts in my posts. And don't suggest Word Press. I use Word Press for one client and one volunteer gig. It is admittedly better when it comes to fonts, but I've found that it brings other problems with it...)

Among the weird and useless stuff on display at this year's CES was a stunning trio of weird and useless stuff intended to deliver a "better bathroom experience from start to flush."

First up, the RollBot.

This is a robot that can be summoned up from your smartphone and roll on into the bathroom with a new roll of toilet paper. Now, there have been plenty of situations in which I have been caught out without there being any toilet paper available. 99.99% of those times have been in public restrooms, where I've found myself in a tp-less stall and end up searching through pockets and pocketbook in hopes of finding one scrunged up but still marginally usable piece of used Kleenex. And/or hollering to anyone around, in hopes that the woman in the next stall can hand me a couple of squares of toilet paper under the opening. 

The other 00.01% of the time is when I've been in the woods, or somewhere else in nature, and have just had to go. 

In neither of these situations would it do any good to Bluetooth up a delivery robot. Would it leave my home and find me - using built in GPS, no doubt - in a restaurant or on the Snail Trail in Provincetown so that it could deliver the goods?

Really and truly, is there anyone out there who doesn't have a spare roll or two of toilet paper in their bathroom? Or a fallback box of Kleenex?

And if you do insist on a robot, wouldn't it make more sense to have a general-purpose one that could not just fetch toilet paper, but could do a lot of other fetching as well. Special purpose toilet paper delivering robot? No need.

And yet of all the Charmin ideas, this seems to me the most viable and, ahem, useful.

That is, when compared with SmellSense. 

The predictive SmellSense is an electronic sensor monitoring system that allows users to plan ahead and check how the bathroom smells without having to experience it yourself. It's calibrated to detect carbon dioxide found in a "toot" or "two." SmellSense notifies via a GO/NO GO display on the status of the stench. It lets you know when you can go in without an offending nasal assault. (Source: Tech Republic)

As with the case of the missing toilet paper - although perhaps not as pronounced - most of my close encounters with bad smelling bathrooms has been in the public realm. In a home setting, you can usually rely on family and friends to give you a bit of a warning. Or figure it out for youself pretty quickly. 

So that leaves places like gas station restrooms. Are they going to install these? I think not.

Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and take care of business. 

If someone's going to improve public restrooms, they should have an claxon horn start screaming if somone pees on the seat or tosses a tampon (used, of course) on the floor and leaving it there. Or outlaw all Porta Potties, other than the upscale ones with multiple stalls, sinks and flushable toilets. 

And jeez Louise, if we end up with sensor-based systems to do our smelling for us, will the nose become a vestigial organ?

Whoever it is in the Charmin division at P&G, they must be having some fun for themselves. Thus the V.I.Pee which promises concertgoers:

... a "premium" experience "enhanced with Oculus Rift S VR" to transport a GOer missing out on any moment to the front row, "to never miss a beat on the seat." Joining the event virtually "right where you left off before the call of nature rolled in," making the bathroom "the best seat in the house." 

So, how is wearing Oculus virtual reality headgear going to do anything about the cleanliness, godliness, and rank smells that come with being in a public restroom? Do you just hang outside waiting for the SmellSense to give you the go ahead? Which will never happen in a Porta Potty, which is the faciliyt of choice for outdoor concerts. (Not that I attend (m)any.) Not to mention that SmellSense wouldn't warn you about the pee on the seat and the floor. Yuck on yuck!

Anyway, I'm guessing that Charmin was just having a bit of fun, tech-style. 

The Mr. Whipple ads were the first one that made me dislike Charmin and resist all calls to squeeze the Charmin. (I grew up in a Scott house, and I've maintained a lifetime worth of brand loyalty.) No, Charmin's not as bad as Quilted Northern, but none of these tech gadgets are going to get me to change my mind (or my toilet paper.)

Talk about a golden parachute

If you look at it one way, Dennis Muilenburg's career at Boeing was spectacularly successful. Thirty-five years ago, he started working there as an intern. Through luck, pluck, true grit, hard work, inspiration, perspiration, and no doubt some measure of at least a couple of the other things that go into the sort of career-building that elevates someone to the highest reaches in an organization - things like politicking, bootlicking, bullshitting, credithogging and backstabbing - he became chairman and CEO. 

Then, oopsie, a couple of Boeing Max 737's fell from the sky - resulting in the deaths of 346 folks - and all of a sudden it seemed that Muilenburg wouldn't be playing out his full career with the company. Not that he was directly responsible for faulty designs, poor quality assurance, anti-safety pricing practices. But it all happened on his watch, and he did preside over the cost-cutting and schedule-accelerating initiatives that resulted in plenty of dubious (and it turns out dangerous) decisions, and he did some pretty sketchy pressuring of regulators to let the Max 737's stay in the air (theoretically: the problem was they weren't staying in the air), so...

The first sign that those two crashes would be costly to Mueilenburg was his "decision" in November not to take his bonus - a forgone goodie-bag that was worth about $14M.

But there's costly and then there's costly. 

It may have been difficult to give up that $14M - end of year expenses are high for everyone. And it must have been tough being shown the exit door of the company you've been worth your entire adult life, which is what happened to Muilenburg: he was forced out. But once the first of the year rolled around, it emerged that while he was shoved out that exit door, the plane really hadn't left the ground yet, there was a bouncy castle for him to land on, and the parachute he'd been given was worth $62 million. (Sadly, he did have to forfeit a $14.6 million severance package.)

So it's no surprise that:

Family members of crash victims told The Washington Post they are “sickened” by Muilenburg’s payout, saying he presided over a profit-obsessed corporate culture that led the company to cut corners. (Source: Wapo)

The overall amount set aside for the families of the 346 victims is $100 million. Which is not a whole hell of a lot less than Muilenburg's walking away money, once you throw in stock options worth $18.5 million, bringing the payday to $80.5 million. 

The $100 million is the fund that Boeing has set aside for victim compensation. Litigation may result in payouts that up this dramatically, especially when you judges and juries start taking the Muilenburg package into consideration. 

Boeing has "listened" to what the devastated families have to say.

After reviewing the families’ comments, Boeing spokesman Mike Friedman said: “We are truly sorry and offer our deepest sympathies to the families and friends who lost loved ones in the accidents of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302."

Well, ain't nothing going to bring back the folks that died, but I'm sure their families could live without Boeing sympathies. Or with Muilenburg's, either.

In a video posted on Boeing’s website April 4, Muilenburg said: “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 Max accidents.” He added “I cannot remember a more heart-wrenching time in my career with this great company.”

I'm sure that this all was heart-wrenching for Muilenburg. He's probably a nice guy. A smart guy. A "good" guy. Who in a senior position - with the notable exception of the current occupant of the Oval Office - wouldn't be heart-wrenched at the thought of the outfit they presided over having responsibility for the deaths of so many people? 

But while his heart may be wrenched, his wallet is intact. He's now financially set for a very, very comfortable life. 

In responding to the Max 737 debacle, Boeing's made a number of missteps. Here's hoping that Muilenburg's golden parachute is the end of it.

What's the Catch? I don't think there is one...

With so much of technology these days, whenever I hear about a new app, my reaction is generally "why". As in "Why are the best minds of this generation wasting their time solving problems that don't exist?"

But when I heard about Catch, my reaction was "Great! What took you so long?"

I worked in the "gig economy" for many years. I became a freelancer after many years in corporate. I had savings, a 401K, COBRA to ease me into covering my own health insurance...

But for someone just starting out, or relatively new to the game, figuring out how to figure out how things work when you're a company of one can be daunting. Enter Catch:

The startup’s focus: helping freelancers and gig-economy workers who don’t have benefits deal with the headaches of taxes, health insurance, and saving for retirement. (Source: Boston Globe)

Tagline: Benefits for people without benefits.

I like it. 

I also like their story. 

Catch was a struggling Boston/Cambridge startup, with one product (their system), ten employees, and 5,000 customers. But when they went looking for $5M to grow their company to the next level, they were getting zero traction with the Boston VC community.

“Andrew [Ambrosino] and I were nobodies,” [Kristen] Anderson [co-founder] wrote on Twitter recently. “No Ivy League. No previous exit, or failures of note. Great VC firms dragged us along.”

The duo were hoping to raise $5 million for the startup, Catch.

“We were turned down or ghosted by at least 50 VC firms,” including local investors such as Matrix Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

Even though there's a ton of money (much of it insane) out there, attracting capital has always been tough, even back in the day when investors weren't looking for unicorns that were going to earn them billions and before crazy ideas were more likely than sane ideas to become unicorns. At one point in my career, I worked for a small company, and we scrounged around for a while before we found someone to buy us. Admittedly, we were a bad-ish bet, but we were asked to make a number of pitches and almost got to the altar once or twice. So I know something of what Anderson and Ambrosino were going through.

And then they decide to apply to Y-Combinator, a born in Cambridge but now San Francisco-based outfit that specializes in providing small amounts of seed money - and training and guidance - to startups in their earliest stages. 

Applying was something of a Hail Mary: the founders were seriously thinking of shutting their company down.

And they had a well-thought out exit plan that wasn't based on screwing their employees:

“We’d already done the contingency planning of shutting down the company,” Anderson told me. They didn’t want to leave Catch’s 10 employees in the lurch, without a final paycheck and some severance. 

What's not to love?

Catch - because it alreayd had product, employees, and customers - didn't exactly fit the Y Combinator bill. But they were accepted, even though they're "tougher to get into than Harvard or Stanford."

Being asked to participate in Y Combinator doesn't guarantee success, but the program has a good track record, and being blessed by them does pretty much guarantee that companies will get a serious look from VC's. 

For Catch, the immediate payoff wasn't the $150K they got from Y Combinator (which got YC a 7 percent stake). It was the "seal of approval" that enabled them to secure $850K worth of life-saving money from some individual investors. 

The longer run payoff was being able to turn down a Boston VC firm that came through with a $3M offer, and forge a deal for $5M "from a group of California and New York venture capital firms."

Just after that, TechCrunch, the blog of record for the startup scene, wrote a piece calling Catch “one of the hottest Y Combinator startups.” At a dinner at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, Anderson was introduced to a VC who called Catch “the belle of the ball.”

Many of the Y Combinator startups end up staying in California, but Anderson and Ambrosino were committed to keeping their team in Boston. Anderson also appreciated that:

"There isn’t the rock-star status for founders in Boston that there is in San Francisco. It was very humbling. But it’s also one of the reasons I love being here. It reminds you that you’re not as good as you think you are. You’re here to do the work.”

Sounds like the Boston I know and love.

And that work? 

The latter half of 2019 involved “a lot of really unsexy, laborious work” on agreements with insurance companies and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services so that Catch could offer freelancers and sole proprietors health insurance in 38 states.

Excellent!

As for the Boston VC personality, there is something of a downer downside:

“Everyone in Boston, including VCs, starts with the premise of ‘Here’s why this won’t work. I’ve got 14 reservations about it,’ ” she says. “I’m hoping that Boston can suspend a little of its disbelief more, and let some portion of its founders succeed."

That sounds like the Boston I know and love.  (I am, after all, the one who wrote the risk analysis section of every business plan I ever worked on.) But I'm sure hoping that these founders succeed. They're local. And Catch sure beats yet another app that helps you animate cat videos.

All work and no Playmobil

Off-site. Kick-off. Team-building. Whatever they called it, I always had mixed emotions about these corporate events. On the one hand, you're given a "GET OUT OF OFFICE FREE" card. Sometimes covering a few days. If it was the annual sales kick-off, it sometimes involved a trip. Bermuda. Las Vegas. The Cape. Sure, a sales kick-off likely involved my trying to provide product information to a bunch of bleary-eyed salesfolks who'd been up partying until five minutes before my preso. Which was never much fun. And it was a bit of time away, and before the advent of email and laptops and mobil phones, you had no means to keeping up with your real work back at the ranch. So it was a break of sorts. 

On the other hand, any group event that dragged you out of the office was likely to involve some sort of ridiculous exercise or another. Naturally, much of the time at these meetings was spent writing stuff on flip charts - mission statements, vision statements, strategies, tactics, goals - only to see the flip charts rolled up tightly, secured with a couple of rubber bands, then hauled back to the office, where they sat in a corner somewhere until someone decided to toss them out or take them home and use as a DuraFlame substitute. 

But there was almost always something or other to get the creative juices going, or do some self- and/or team-exploration.

I went to one sales kick-off where we took a mini-personality test and were then grouped by color code. Not surprising, all the home office folks fell into peripheral categories: HR, was I recall, Orange; Finance was Green; and Product Management and anything to do with thinking and planning was Blue. I was part of Team Blue. The bulk of the attendees were sales people. And they all landed in the Red, or, as they announced, FLAMING RED category. With a few exceptions. We had one guy in the Blue section who was from sales, and was pissed off and miserable that he wasn't in FLAMING RED. Have at it, my friend. 

I'm not sure what identifying us by color coding was supposed to bring about - probably something having to do with 'it takes all kinds' - but all I remember is the FLAMING REDs jeering at the rest of us home office Orange, Green, Blue folks for being pussies. 

A year or so later - another company, another offsite - we took the Myers-Briggs personality assessments. I was an INTJ (borderline INTP). As very few people are INTJ's to begin with, and with INTJ's being something of a real rarity among women, this test confirmed what I had suspected all along: I'm an oddball. 

What else have I done at these events? Helped write and perform a company cheer (as part of a group that I can guarantee had zero experience with cheerleading). Sat back to back with a complete stranger to share innermost thoughts. (I cheated.) Escaped from an escape room (barely: I was teamed with two others and it turned out we were the biggest over-analytic wonks in the overall group, taking way too much time thinking things through while other teams just jumped into action). I tried (unsuccessfully) to build a helicopter out of Tinker Toys. (My team's rendering of a chopper was an abject failure. We were apparently the only team that didn't have the foresight to include a closet Leonardo.)

This Tinker Toy exercise came to mind when I read about Playmobil's efforts to get into the corporate market by bringing out a product called Playmobil Pro:

— “an innovative modelling system for professionals,” as the company had described it. The idea, apparently, was to bring Playmobil figures into offices so employees could creatively “role play” or “find new business solutions” or “visualize stakeholders” or “bring theoretical discussions to life.” According to the sales materials, the same toys you loved as a child now “can also be used by adults in the frame of a professional context to aid in prototyping, project management, creative workshops and much, much more.” The kit was developed in cooperation with such organizations as Deutsche Bank, Adidas, Daimler’s Joint Think Tank and the Barcelona School of Management. (Source: Washington Post)

Deutsche Bank? Do you suppose they suggested Playmobil figures who could do money laundering?

Anyway, in bringing out Playmobil Pro, Playmobil was trying to get a bit of Lego's piece of the action, as they've had a corporate system of their own for quite a while:

For at least two decades, Lego has been finding its way into corporate settings, and a whole methodology called Lego Serious Play has emerged. A corporate trainer, called a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator, brings a pile of Lego into a conference room and guides a team of employees through building exercises meant to spur new ideas and, according to the Lego website, “unlock imagination and innovation.”

Guess that Tinker Toy exercise I did twenty years ago was a knockoff. Maybe I would have done better with the helicopter if there'd been a Tinker Toy Serious Play faciltator there.

It should go without saying that, when I started reading about this, my eyes rolled into the back of my skull. 

But then...

Turns out that, unlike the Lego system, which I would have been wooden (plastic?) and terrible at, I rather liked the Playmobile Pro concept:

The Playmobil Pro kit has:

...drawers for figures, costumes, accessories, sticky notes and pens. Instead of the usual colorful Playmobil figures, the ones in the kit were completely white — without skin, hair, clothing colors or facial expressions. “The classic Playmobil figure has a smile, and maybe that’s not always great for business,” Seeger said. Earlier tests with an array of skin and hair colors had immediately seemed problematic for group dynamics across many different countries. “It quickly became apparent that plain white figures would distinguish Playmobil Pro,” he said. The kit comes with erasable pens that allow people to personalize the figures by drawing on them.

Plus costumes and accessories. And there's no trained facilitator making suggestions. It's more or less, a "here you go" approach, with folks using the figures to apply to whatever problem it is they're trying to solve.

Not that I have any desire to get back into a corporate setting, but take those characters and turn them into something? This is a writer's dream. 

And not that any of this - Lego abstractions or Playmobil little people - is necessarily going to make anyone anywhere make better business decisions. But as an off-site exercise, playing with Playmobil sounds like fun. Beats sitting back to back with a complete stranger and fibbing about deep, dark thoughts. 

More intelligence of the artificial variety

Early on in my brilliant career, a number of my colleagues (including my manager, someone who reported to me, and my best work bud Peter who was and still is one of my closest friends) joined a fancy AI startup in Cambridge. The product was a system  - which ran on a pricey LISP machine -  that helped businesses make capital budgeting systems. Basically, it was MIT/Sloan Professor Stewart Myers textbook in a box. It was going to replace the existing method of capital budgeting, which was basically using a spreadsheet to grub numbers (I believe Lotus 1-2-3 was the top dog at that time, Microsoft's Excel just being introduced) and then overriding the numbers with gut instinct, with gut instinct often worked out on the back of a cocktail napkin. And it was going to result in better decisions than the existing methods of capital budgeting. And it was going to cost a shit-ton of money. 

I interviewed there, but was weighed and found wanting and didn't get an offer. The company was known for hiring the best and the brightest, so I was a bit miffed - okay, I was a shit-ton miffed - that they turned me down. My wonderful friend Peter assured me that it was because during the interview process, I asked one too many pointed questions. I know he was just trying to make me less shit-ton miffed, but I had asked the head guy whether they thought there were many companies that were going to spend $150K to replace something they were doing on a cocktail napkin for free. So there was that.

In letting me down, I was told that they weren't going to make me an offer because they didn't feel that I was "emotionally ready to leave" the company I was working for.

Anyway, it does seem that I'm enough of a miff-holder to have been just delighted when this outfit went tits up. (I'll show you "emotionally ready.")

I haven't thought about this company in years, but it ear-wormed its way into may mind when I saw an article on a company, Cinelytics, that has an AI-driven system to help movie studios decided whether to green light a project.

And they just landed Warner Bros. as a client.

Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the system’s comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams.

...While the platform won’t necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warners’ hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates. (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

Ah, if only I had a dollar for every time I made the marketing argument that whatever software I was plumping for was going to free folks up to focus on higher-value tasks...

Anyway, AI has come a long way since the mid-1980's when the best it could offer was a textbook in a box. Nonetheless, Hollywood has been reluctant to adopt AI, as it "fancies itself as a town that operates on gut instinct rather than algorithms, for better or for worse."

Cinelytics found Tobias Queisser plays down the notion that AI will replace all that gut instinct magic - the sort of gut instinct that greenlights making a movie out of, say, Cats. (Which was Universal's fiasco, not Warner Bros.')

“Artificial intelligence sounds scary. But right now, an AI cannot make any creative decisions,” says Queisser. “What it is good at is crunching numbers and breaking down huge data sets and showing patterns that would not be visible to humans. But for creative decision-making, you still need experience and gut instinct.”

That gut instinct has held Warner Bros. in pretty good stead over the years. The Jazz Singer. Public Enemy. Now Voyager. The Maltese Falcon. Cartoon "stars" like Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. TV fare like Maverick and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Blockbusters like The Dark Knight and the Harry Potter films. 

On the other hand, maybe Cinelytics could have helped them avoid a megaflop like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which lost a whopping $150M. 

Hope AI never fully replaces creative decisions, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Meanwhile, I noticed that there's a Harvard Business School case on that software company that so miffed me. I think I know how I can get my hands on a copy of it. Might be a hoot to read all about it.

• 

Help Wanted: Meghan and Harry looking to become "financially independent"

You may have seen that Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are going part-time as senior members of the royal family. They're going to cut out a new, more "progressive" role for themselves as royals, split their time between the UK and North America, and work towards becoming financially independent.

On that last front, it's probably easier to forge independence when you start with a base of somewhere between $20 and $40 Milllion.

Now, most of us could live quite nicely on this amount, but if you're living on two continents, have expensive taste in clothing, and like to travel... Plus you have college for Archie to worry about. Well, it all adds up.

They still get to keep Frogmore "Cottage" - at least for now - and a multi-million allowance from Prince Charles. So they won't be hurting hurting. But they do want to get out of the virtual parents' basement they live in and do their own thing, work-wise.

So what could they do?

Obviously, they won't have to work as waitrons, although how much fun would it be to have one of this duo waiting on you? And they won't have to work retail, either. Good thing. Even this last resort job source is drying up, given this week's announcements that a raft of Pier One's are closing, and that Macy's also going to shutter a bunch of stores.

So they'll be thinking bigger and better.

I don't know if Suits is still on the air, but I bet they'd love to have Meghan Markle back. Unless they killed her off.

I'm sure there'd be plenty of other acting opportunities for Meghan. But acting may seem a bit too tawdry.

Meghan does have a solid degree to fall back on. She went to Northwestern, afterall. She needs to get on Linkedin and start networking. I bet my sister Trish, a fellow Wildcat, would be delighted to connect with her.

She also did a guest editing stint at British Vogue, so maybe she'll do something literary-ish. Jackie O would be a good role model. After Ari O died, she went to work as a book editor.

Harry's career was in the military, so he could work as a soldier of fortune, I guess. Or a personal trainer, running one of those bootcamp fitness places.

The two of them could do some sort of lifestyle thing, maybe a less bat-shit crazy Goop (Gwyneth Paltrow's queendom).

Or they could focus on their charitable work, become experts on its domain - I'm not sure what they'll be focusing on, but they're setting up the Royal Sussex Foundation this year - and go around charging a lot of money to speak. If someone's willing to pay Donald Trump, Junior $50K to speak, and if someone's willing to have Ivanka speak at a technology conference (CES 2020), surely A-List celebs like Harry and Meghan can command a pretty penny - especially if they develop an expertise in whatever their foundation focuses on.

Anyway, Harry's so far down the line of succession - Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis are all standing in his way - that he ain't never going to be the king. So why not pull back from the bowing, scraping, public eye, ribbon cutting, pomp and circumstance and live your own life.

And who wouldn't want to throw the yoke of stuffy, hidebound royal life. Especially given that, as part of the royal troop, Harry and Meghan have no control over their lives, surrendur their agency and rely on handouts that could, in fact, dry up - by their standards, not ours: even cut-off from the royal largesse, Prince Andrew will not starve to death. Then there's the racism that Meghan has had to endure. And the fact that the press hounded Harry's mother to her death. Maybe they just want something that at least vaguely resembles a normal life for themselves and their kiddo. Who could blame them, other than the British press and royaled-up public, and all those fellow royals who never had the guts to get out while they could.

Good luck to the happy couple. Hope you find jobs that you like and are good at. Write when you get work!

What we're missing at CES 2020

Not that I'll ever actually be consuming any of them, but I always like to take a look at the new and exciting tech gadgetry introduced at CES (a.k.a., the Consumer Electronics Show). Because attending this particular trade show would be a hellscape to end all hellscapes (ginormous hellzapoppin' trade show + Las Vegas, baby), I have to rely on the kindness of the press to save me the trip.

This year, I'm relying on the reportage of The Telegraph (UK) to let me know what's up with respect to "bewildering parade of weird and wonderful gadgets" that CES always brings with it. 

The Bellabot food-delivery cat
Last year, PuduTech introduced a robot that delivered stuff in offices, shop floors, and wherever else there's stuff that needs to be delivered. This year, they've one-upped themselves with a robotic waiter. Now, we've all had experiences with robotic waiters, but this one is a meowing cat called BellaBot. 

Give it a scratch behind the ears upon receiving your order and it will purr with pleasure. But not for too long, with developers PuduTech saying that it “gets mad to remind you not to interrupt its job” in a mood swing worthy of a real moggy.

Why anyone would want their meal delivered by a moody cat is beyond me. I'd say the novelty wears off this one pretty fast. 

‘Smart’ litter trays
One thing that the BellaBot will not, of course, require, is a litter box. But for those with real kitties, "'smart' litter trays are all the rage."

LuluPet’s AI Smart Cat Litter Box, which is an honouree in CES 2020’s innovation award, is touted to have built-in stool and urine image recognition and "excretory behavioral algorithms". 

Umm, why?

Samsung rotating TV
Me, I'm cool with the typical horizonal display TV, but for folks who want to show off the vertical videos they've created on their phones for Insta or TikTok, Samsung's rotating TV would be just the thing. 

Lipstick mixer
L'Oreal has brought out the Perso lipstick mixer. 

It is a gadget that, when connected to a smartphone app, can mix up lipstick, foundation and skin-care products to your liking.

It can also connect to your social media accounts, allowing you to mix lipstick to match your favourite YouTube "influencer". 

Forget asking the "why" question. I give this one a big old "HUH???" 

Wearable subwoofer
This one turns your very own personal ribcage into a subwoofer. Something to do with virtual reality gaming.  Personally, I'd get more use out of the lipstick mixer or rotating TV. And since that use would be zero...

Samsung’s ‘SelfieType’ invisible keyboard
I'm a reasonably good touch typist, but I would think that a virtual keyboard would take some getting used to. Forget "look, Ma, no hands". This is "look, hands, no keyboard."  Where do you even begin. A hologram I get, but invisible? (And if you think the typos in text messages and Twitter are bad now...)

Smart bins
Knectek Labs is introducing a trash can (bin in Telegraph/Brit parlance) that's "self-sealing, overload-detecting and odour eliminating." And when the garbage can is full, you just give it a tap, "a sealed bag comes out" and a new bag has been put in place. When will we come to our senses about these nonsense applications of perfectly good technology? I detect overload by seeing when my can is getting full. I detect something smelly's in there by using my nose. I seal a bag by pulling the drawstrings tight. Do we really need to deploy sensors to do what humans are perfectly well equipped to take care of on their own? Sheesh. Just how onerous is to replace a trash bag?

Alexa-equipped showerhead
Kohler's Moxie is a showerhead with Alexa embedded in it. I guess it's useful for those incapable of singing in the shower unassisted. Or who can't stand to wait until they're showered and dried off before doing a regular old Alexa ask to find out that the Murmaids sang "Popsicles, Icicles."

Talking about teeth
I seem to remember at some point in the wayback being given a red pill that showed where you had missed spots when brushing your teeth. Well, Colgate's smart toothbrush senses plaque and keeps that plaque glowing until you've brushed it away. Not to be outdone, Oral-B "has released a 3D-mapping toothbrush, which shows where exactly someone hasn’t brushed." Maybe it's just me but, compared to the other gadgetry, a smart toothbrush sounds pretty useful.

Making moving wheely easy
Wheel.me is a voice-controlled smart castor system that lets you move furniture around until you get it right. (Also for use on shop floors, in offices to reconfigure walls, etc.) This seems like a pretty good idea, but how often do people need to complately reconfigure the furniture placement in their homes? I have reconfigured my living room a few times over 30 years, but as of now everything's pretty much where it's going to be. And am I the only one who fears that this could turn into a sorcerer's apprentice scenario of furniture whirling and swirling around. (Yes, I know that the broom multiplied, but you get the point..)

Anti-snore pillow
When Motion Pillow hears snoring, "four airbags within the pillow gently inflate and deflate to adjust the user's head position to stop it." I was married to a snorer, but still wouldn't have wished this on him. I would have wished it on the woman I shared a room with at a company conference once. The colleague I was supposed to share with had to cancel, and my roomie was someone I didn't know whose snoring would have woken the dead. Because I didn't know her, I was reluctant to walk over to her bed and give her a shove. I spent one night sleeping in the bathtub - not recommended - and spent most of the conference taking catnaps between sessions.

Making friends with a tennis ball
I do not get the Samsung Ballie atall, atall. 

Its simple ball shape is equipped with an in-bult camera, its voice-activated and Ballie can roll around to help you with daily tasks and interact with your other smart home devices.

I don't quite get how this helps with "daily tasks." Then again, I am singularly lacking in tech imagination. And why do you need a robot to "interact with your other smart home devices." Why not just eliminate the middle robot and do the interacting yourself? Another case of 'what do I know?'

Anyway, NONE of these gadgets make me wish I'd been to CES2020. I'd say maybe next year, but that, my friends, would be a lie.

The next Manolo Blahnik? Worcester boy makes good.

Every once in a while, there's a feel-good career change story, and Chris Donovan's is the latest once in a while story I've seen. And to make it feel even gooder, Chris is from Worcester.

After graduating from Assumption College, Donovan went to work for the phone company. Now, if ever there's an archtype Worcester job, it's working for the phone company. Steady work. Good benefits. Pension. Security. I grew up in a neighborhood where a lot of people worked for the phone company. At that time, it was New England Telephone, which turned into Nynex, which turned into Verizon. Part of my escape from Worcester was motivated by not wanting to work for the phone company. Fast forward a bunch o' decades, and didn't I find myself working for an Internet Services Provider (Genuity) that became part of - TA-DA - Verizon.

In his heart of hearts, Chris Donovan was a shoe designer. (Which is, Worcester-wise, kind of interesting, as Worcester had shoe manufacturing back in the day. Nothing fashionable, mind you. I worked one summer on the assembly line at H.H. Brown Shoe, where we made combat boots and work boots.)

He began focusing on shoes when he was in high school, and the girls began wearing platform shoes - "sculpture"..."works of art." (The high school is an unnamed Catholic high school, but I'm guessing St. Peter's, which is where my sister Trish went. She would have been a year or so behind him, but the colorful, funky, chunky platforms she and her friends wore may have helped inspire Donovan.)

As he approached his 50s, Donovan began to question his life’s path. “You spend all your free time drawing shoes, why are you spending eight to ten hours a day trudging through life?” his husband Stephan Wierzbicki recalled telling him. (Source: Boston Globe)

And so he relo'd to Providence so he could go to night school at Rhode Island School of Design. Then there was a bout with prostate cancer. An "if not now, when" epiphany. Retirement. And a crash course in shoe design in New York City. The course instructor, Aki Choklat, who encouraged him to study at Polimoda, Italy's most prominent fashion design school. 

So, off to Florence went Donovan. Where he found his vision/voice.

In a design he submitted for an AARP-sponsored Project Runway contest, he used a gnarled trunk of a lilac bush from his yard in Fairhaven as the heel of a reimagined 1970s double-ring moccasin.

Project Runway host Tim Gunn loved it. “Have I seen this before? No,” Gunn marveled in an AARP video that got 5 million views. “Does the world need this? Yes.” Donovan won the contest, and the exposure offered an inroad into European footwear market...

He has an agent and a high-end factory manufacturing his designs. Museums are taking an interest in his work. And:

Now, as he has launched his first line of Italian-made women’s shoes, he’s being hailed by his mentors as the next footwear superstar, the next Manolo Blahnik.

He's also being compared to Salvatore Ferragamo and Christian Louboutin. Pretty heady stuff for a guy from Worcester who worked for the phone company. Glory for those with guts and talent!

I'm not the audience for Chris Donovan's shoes. Even if I were willing to pay $895 and suffer foot discomfort for the white and black crazy-arse bootie pictured above, I'd have two broken ankles within minutes. And I wouldn't want Medicare to have to pay for that. Not that I was ever a fashionista, but these days I'm all about the comfort and durability. If you can't walk 5 miles a day in it, no thanks. 

But many of his designs are gorgeous. And he even has flats, like this stunning number. If I were the sort of gal who'd pay $385 for a pair of shiny blue shoes, well, I'd consider this pair.

How can you not wish Chris Donovan nothing but tremendous success. Even if I'd find that most of his shoes wouldn't feel good on this old lady's long skinny feet, what's not to like about this feel good story. (Bonus points for being about a Worcester boy making good.)

How's this for corporate intrigue

With so much of what falls under the general heading of "awful stuff" in the news, it's nice to have an occasional distraction. Thus, I have been enjoying the story about Carlos Ghosn going on the lam.

The name Carlos Ghosn is unlikely to ring a bell. Even though I had read earlier accounts of his arrest in Japan for financial improprieties, it didn't ring any bell for me until the name was strung together with the words "former Nissan boss". Oh, that Carlos Ghosn. The Carlos Ghosn who:

...is accused of financial misconduct, including embezzlement and making an unauthorized multimillion-dollar payment to a Nissan dealership in Oman. He had been awaiting trial in Tokyo, released on $14 million bail in April. (Source: NPR).

$14 million? Sounds pretty steep. Bail for Bernie Madoff was only $10 million. On the other hand, Raj Rajaratnam's bail for insider trading was $100 million. Bernie's in prison for life, but Raj - after 8 years in the stir - got an early release is out on parole, having traded up from a prison cell (albeit a minimum security one) to his digs on Sutton Place. 

Bail for financial crimes is all about the flight risk, and apparenty Ghosn was prepared to walk away from $14 million. 

So fearing that he wouldn't get a fair trial in Japan, Ghosn rung in the new year by flying the coop.

It pays to be rich!

In his case the flying the coop meant being whisked out of the country on a private plane that dropped him in Turkey, from whence he scooted off to Lebanon, where he grew up.

Passport? You may well be asking why his passport wasn't confiscated. Well, turns out they - yes, that's plural passports - were. Most of them anyway.

Japanese authorities forced Ghosn to surrender his Lebanese, Brazilian and French passports to his attorneys. But he was allowed to keep a spare French passport in a lockbox at his home, under the condition that his attorneys keep the keys. It remains unclear how the well-known auto executive evaded detection at the Osaka airport.

First off, why was he allowed to keep a spare? Even under lock and key, it doesn't make all that much sense. Second off, someone who can afford to skip $14 million in bail and concoct a private-jet fueled plan to vamoose pretty much has the resources to come up with a fake passport, no?

Plus, Ghosn has been known to put on a metaphorical fake nose and mustache:

...Lebanese news outlet MTV reported: "The slightly built Nissan boss does have experience in disguises: when first released on bail in March, he walked out of the detention center disguised as a workman to avoid media."

Alas, the best part of Ghosn's great escape may turn out to not be fake news. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ghosn left his house in "a large box for musical instruments after a band had played at the family home." Too good to be true! Video footage shows him walking out on his own two feet. After which he hot-footed to Lebanon, where he's now making a very public case against justice, Japanese-style:

"I am now in Lebanon and will no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant, and basic human rights are denied," he said in a statement.

His supporters back him up, claiming that the case against Ghosn came about because some Japanese were miffed that he was trying to combine Nissan with French automaker Renault, which I guess offended their national sense of business pride. And likely their pocketbooks. 

Meanwhile, back in Japan, a number of people involved with Ghosn's flight - pilots and ground staff - have been detained.

And meanwhile meanswhile, Ghosn's back in Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan. He is, however, on the Interpol Red Notice list, which means he could be arrested if he attempts to go to a country that does have an extradition agreement with Japan. So he might be stuck in Lebanon for a good long time.

Anyway, a nice little diversion of a story. May justice prevail. (Wonder if Dog the Bounty Hunter works the Lebanon-to-Japan beat?)

Survey says: Chicago is ruder than Boston

I'm a sucker for any list, no matter how ridiculous. I'll even read through a twitter post of someone listing their "top ten albums" of the past decade - is the word album still in use? - and keep on reading even after I've figured out that not only am I not familiar with the albums - is the word albums still in use? - but I' never heard of any of the performers, either.

So naturally I jumped right in when I saw that Business Insider had come up with a list of the rudest cities in the country

The article was replete with an attempt to robe itself in some sort of scientific rigor. The margin of error is 2%... And there's this caveat: Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet.

Well, yeah, "generally speaking", someone who took an online poll would tend to be someone with access to the internet. At least for that moment in time. That's just science.

Anyway, they ask respondents to pick their choices for the 5 rudest cities in the United States.  Whatever that means. Then they state that the list they gave folks to choose from was of the 50 biggest cities. On that I will - not rudely at all - call BS. Providence and Hartford don't even crack the Top 100. And, may I point out - not rudely at all - that Worcester, Massachusetts, the Heart of the Commonwealth, is larger than both Providence and Hartford. So. There.

So, if you're heaving Providence and Hartford onto the list, why not Worcester? Is it because Worcester is the largest city that no one outside of New England has even heard of? (And even in New England, most people know it. What they don't know is that, after Boston, it's the region's largest city.) Can it be that Worcester would just not be considered rude by anyone in their right mind? Naahhh...

The number one pick? No surprise here. 34.3% of those surveys put New York in their Top Five Rudest. Coming in at #2? No surprise here, either. 19.7% gave Los Angeles the nod. 

And why wouldn't these two cities grab the "honors"? They're the two largest cities in the country. Most people are familiar with them. A lot of people have visited them. Thus, more folks will have an opinion, one way or the other, in a way they might not have about Providence or Hartford (each of them was only listed by roughly one-and-a-half percent of those surveyed. Which is still something of a surprise. That many people had something to say about these two small cities?)

Plus rudeness is pretty much associated with large cities in a way that it's not with say, Mayberry NC, where one wouldn't expect that there'd be a lot of folks who would diss Aunt Bee for her fuddy-duddy church hats, make fun of Opie for being a ginger, or push and shove to get into a free chair at Floyd's barber shop. 

Washington DC, although not that large a city, understandably made it's way onto the list as the third rudest American city. After all, across the spectrum, everyone seems to be hating on Washington DC, and it is at present home to the rudest person in the country. 

Things fall back into place with Chicago, The Second Third City, placing fourth.18.6% of those surveyed adding them to their roster of the five rudest cities.

While one would expect such a large city to make its way high up on the list of rude cities, if only by dint of its size and its very urbanness, seeing a city from the Midwest called out is a bit of a shock to the system.  Midwest nice and all that.

But I suppose when tourists from Podunk, Michigan find themselves jostled when they get to Chicago and start taking selfies in front of The Bean, they may find the city rude.

Boston, which came in at #5 (14.9% of respondents think we're rude), is, like Washington, DC, punching above its weight, population-wise. If they adjusted for population size, I'm guessing we'd notch ourselves up in the rankings a space or two.

Nonetheless, I'm completely gratified that people in general - at least surveyed people with access to the internet - consider Chicago ruder than Boston. As someone who's half-Chicago (my mother was from there) and has a lot of relatives in Chicagoland, I say "hah!" Not rudely, of course. Just "hah."

Coming right up: Ginny and Ginnette fan fiction

I gotta tell you, Twitter can be an absolute revelation.

Most of what comes across my feed is from the folks I follow, which admittedly means a lot of echo-chamber liberalish stuff - I mean, why give Sean Hannity a legitimate follower? - and some sports news and some cultural news and some other stuff. Including some ads in Spanish. (Porque, solo porque???) Plus a lot of cute doggo tweets, which serve as a reminder that dogs make some of the best people. And I also see whatever it is that Jack Dorsey's algorithms shoot my way,

However it came my way, this was a delightful tweet that popped up in my feed on Monday:

hayley (@hayleyghoover) tweeted at 1:26 PM on Sun, Dec 29, 2019: There’s a whole community on Instagram of adults who create elaborate storylines for their Barbie dolls and I’ve been following one for years and on Christmas Eve the Ken doll got murdered. (Link)

I've heard of fan fiction, in which folks use fictional characters in books they like (or movies, or TV shows) and make up their own storylines. Which I guess means that I could write a happier story for Hester Prynne - single mom! celebrity seamstress! - or insert myself as a character in Mad Men. Or something. 

But storylines for Barbie? Presumably - since we're talking Insta here - with tableaus set out in which Barbie gets to show off her wardrobe, car and dream house. And Ken. Until Ken gets offed.

Oddly enough, I had a friend in business school who is an artist - why he took the sidetrip to business school is another story - who does a lot of work with toys and small objects. Somewhere around here, I have a b&w print he gave me of one of his works: a white Barbie doll being beaten by a black GI Joe. Given the unsavory content, I've never actually hung this up. But, hey, I knew it was art when I saw it. And if I've got my googling right, it just might be the most valuable artwork I own. By an order of magnitude. 

But back to Insta Barbie and her dead doll of a husband. 

When you google "instagram barbie kills ken" - and in the tweeted out story, it's not Barbie killing her Ken - you get nearly 6 million hits. ("ken doll murdered" yields a piddling 1 million and a bit of change hits). Whatever it is, there's apparently a lot of it going on out there.

Anyway, I'm not on Instagram. Or Pinterest. I'm not a photographer. I don't have any interest in either Barbie or Ken. Especially not in Ken. At least Barbie got to be an astronaut and an obstetrician and a professor. With a cool house and a cool car. Ken's just a bland and wooden (plastic, actually) dullard. 

But there may be some Boomers out there who wouldn't mind reading about (rather than looking at pictures of) the adventures of Tiny Tears. Tiny as an infant. Tiny all grown up. (Did she/it become - gulp! - me???) 

How about Ginny and Ginnette, and their big sis Jill (a wholesome, non-buxsom, pre-Barbie)? I had a Ginny and a Ginnette, but Nettie was my preferred dolly. (Probably because I wrecked Ginny's hair trying to comb the curls out, and my mother replaced her brunette flip with blond braids that I was less able to destroy. But then she no longer looked like a Ginny doll.) Why here's Nettie now, and this could even be my Nettie, as this snowsuit outfit was one that I owned. So it could be my Nettie. Except for the fact that, other than my stuffed dog Sniffy (now 66 years of age) and a double-runner skate salvaged from my mother's basement, my childhood detritus was long consigned to some landfill or other. And except for the additional fact that, in attempting to make Nettie's eyes even bluer, I colored them in - including the whites - unfortunately, with a magic marker. 

Perhaps my Ginnette fan fiction could be a horror story about those blue eyes. Hmmmm.

I may be onto something. Fan fiction revolving around dolls of the 1950's and early 1960's. Saucy Walker. Betsy Wetsy. Patty Playpal. Chatty Cathy. Maybe I could do a mashup with popular TV shows. Saucy Walker and Beaver Cleaver end up as hippies on a commune. Patty Playpal crashes the Triple-R dude ranch to become the only girl on Spin and Marty. Or I can insert these dolls into off-shoots of the books I loved. Chatty Cathy helps Nancy Drew solve another modest little crime.

Monetize the entire thing. Make the big bucks. Figure out how to add pictures to it, and sell stuff off of it, and become an influencer.

I'm on it!

 

Looking for a squirrel to kill for lunch?

A few days on, the Christmas Eve leftovers were wearing pretty thin. And in self defense, I had to bag up all those cookies and stow them in the freezer. Out of sight is not exactly out of mind. I still know they're there. But they're not in my face - which makes it way to easy to stuff them in my face - every time I go into the kitchen. Which I tend to do more than usual when I know there are cookies in them thar hills.

Anyway, I nearly wept with gratitude when my brother took me out to lunch last Saturday, and I had enough of that delightfully non-Christmas Eve leftover to have a delightfully non-Christmas Eve dinner.

I'm more than happy to be back to my completely unimaginative but normal normal, eating-wise.

That unimaginative normal most decidedly doesn't include squirrel, even though they're so fat, slow and bold I could probably grab one in the Boston Common and shove it in my backpack before it realized that I wasn't one of those suckers who feed them.

So I probably wouldn't make a good dining companion for Maine's Daniel Vitalis "who was once a big influencer in the raw-food vegan movement and is angling to become an even bigger one in the modern hunter-gatherer movement."

The Boston Globe recently caught up with Vitalis when he was out hunter-gathering, "rifle in hand, looking for a squirrel to kill for lunch."

He told the reporter that they taste like chicken. Chikcen wing, to be specific.

Ah, thanks but no thanks. Way to rodent for me.

And I say that with full respect for a social media savant who, for 200 episdoes, authored the "ReWild Yourself" podcast, and now has a new initiative going: "a full-scale multimedia brand he has just launched called 'Wild Fed,'" which includes a podcast and an Internet television series."

I, of course, would not have been a candidate to rewild myself, given that I was never wild in my eating to begin with. The closest I've come to wilding is eating a fish that was caught by a fisherman I actually saw for myself - if not catching the fish, then selling the fish. This has happened in Maine, in the Greek Islands, in Ireland.

That and picking and eating wild blueberries and blackberries on occasion.

Food, [Vitalis] believes, is the most direct way to get people reconnected to their wild selves, something he believes people desperately need and want. And by zeroing in on food, Vitalis has an opportunity to continue thinking about a topic he has been in an ethical wrestling match with for most of his life.

I don't know about you, but I do enough walking around the city to have come to the realizatoin that there are plenty of people who have, in fact, "reconneced to their wild selves." And it's something that those folks most definitely don't need, however much they might want it.

A long-time vegan, Vitalis converted back to believing that humans need animal food. And rather than just head to the local supermarket, and pick up a plastic-wrapped package of meat, Vitalis went DIY. And he really went with it.

Now his home in Bridgton, in the lakes region of southern Maine, looks like a vegan’s nightmare. Everywhere you look, there are skulls and pelts and guns and rods, and the basement is filled with all sorts of tools for the modern predator, along with three deep freezers full of his kills, one each for deer, bear, and fish.

That's not just a vegan's nightmare, by the way. All those skulls and pelts, guns and rods... That's a me nightmare.

Nothing against meat, mind you. Just everything in moderation.

Vitalis clearly knows how to be a thoroughly modern hunter-gatherer. His new video series costs subscribers $49 per season.

For an additional $200, people can sign up for an interactive nine-week program that includes extended cuts of the show and live access to Vitalis through Q&As and forums.

He's an influencer on Insta, and has a vanity license plate: HNTGTHR. He understands that this all seems a bit weird, given that when people think hunter-gatherer, they're thinking primitive man or Big Foot.

“I get that,” he said. “But there needs to be somebody who gathers this into the modern world, and I care more about getting this message to soccer moms than I do about living in a teepee.”

I'm down with his decision not to live in a teepee in the Maine woods, but I can't see the average soccer mom going out hunting for squirrel.

On the squirrel hunt the Globe reporter went along for, Vitalis came up empty. Not to worry. He had some recently bagged squirrel back home in the freezer, and his wife whipped it up with some wild rice for a nutritious (I believe) and delicious (dubious) lunch.

Sure, it's good and honorable to take care of your own food needs, but most people live in cities, and it's just not feasible for us urban dwellers to grow, hunt, and gather what we put on the table. Even if half the city of Boston could probably survive for a week on the squirrels that live large on the Boston Garden and in the Public Garden.