On watching (and watching, and watching) "Ray Donovan"

I missed Ray Donovan the first time around. Although I'm usually a sucker for shows set in Boston, especially ones with a Boston-Irish theme, for some reason this one - although it was on for years: from 2013 through 2019 - flew under my radar.

I had heard of Ray Donovan, of course, but there was
something off-putting about it. Probably the presence in the cast of James Woods (Season 1) and Jon Voight (throughout), neither of whom I like. And it's not just for their right-wingery. James Woods I find weird and creepy. And Jon Voight I find weird and creepy. (I don't much like his daughter Angelina Jolie, either. I find her a bit - you guessed it - weird and creepy, too.)

Anyway, this winter, they brought back the show with a full-length movie to button up some loose ends, and it caught my interest. Plus I had the recommendation of my friend Joyce, who told me she thought I'd like it. With the caveat that the show was violent. (Understatement of the decade, that caveat.)

Despite my reservations, I decided to give Ray Donovan a try. 

Lots to catch up on. There were 82 episodes to get through before movie time. So I dug in and did a mini-binge, spinning through all the episodes in about six weeks. 

Despite it's obvious flaws, I did get caught up in it.

For one thing, the Boston accents were pretty good. I would expect as much from James Woods, a New Englander who went to MIT, but Jon Voight was a surprise. As Mickey Donovan, paterfamilias of Clan Donovan, his accent was good. Almost wicked good. So was his acting.

The overarching plot follows the "career" of the eponymous Ray Donovan, a South Boston tough who emigrates to sunny Californi-ay to become a Hollywood fixer, taking care of ghastly situations that actors and athletes find themselves in - and need a way out of. Along the way, Ray gets rich: fancy cars, posh home, pricey duds. 

Mickey Donovan is a Southie thug, too, recently released from Walpole Prison. He makes his way out to LA to reunite with Ray and his other sons, who'd both trailed Ray out to the West Coast. Terry is an ex-boxer with Parkinson who runs a boxing gym. Brendan (Bunchy) is a brain dead goon who's just collected a big payout from the Catholic Church for having been molested by a priest. Also conveniently in LA is Mickey's son Darryl, a surprise half-brother to Ray, Terry, and Bunchy.

The molester priest angle is just one of many topical kitchen-sinkers thrown in along the way. Thin, boring gruel. 

As for the cast, I was familiar with some of them: Woods, Voight, Hank Azaria (as a corrupt FBI agent), Elliot Gould (Ray's boss), Susan Sarandon (ruthless business exec), and a few players with smaller roles. (Susan Sarandon's another actor I could live without. This time for left-wingery and weird/creepy rather than right wingery and weird/creepy.)

Ray is played by Lieb Schreiber, and actor I wasn't familiar with but well, he sure is one hell of an alpha male stud. 

Most of the plot was reasonably terrible.

Most of the cast was reasonably good.

At any rate, I stuck with it.

In no particular order, here are my impressions:

It's no Sopranos. Last year, I rewatched The Sopranos in its entirety, and it was every bit as brilliant as I remembered it. The writing was terrific, the characters well drawn and interesting, and the melding of organized crime family drama with plain old suburban family drama was extremely well done. The acting was first rate. Was anyone ever, in the history of television, better than Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano?

The Sopranos gave us so many memorable scenes, so many tremendous moments. Sure, it was violent, but the violence didn't seem to be the point - at least not all the time. 

There were moments - often related to violence - that were so gripping and terrifying I could barely watch. When Sil drives Adriana to her death, well...Thinking of it still unnerves me.

And there were scenes that were outright, LOL funny. I smile just thinking of the episode where Christopher and Paulie Walnuts are stuck in the cold, in their broken down car, in the New Jersey Pine Barrens - with the only thing to eat the little packets of McDonald's ketchup and mustard that Christopher finds in the glove compartment.

In many ways, Ray Donovan is derivative of The Sopranos, starting with the ripoff of the family dynamics: "good" but enabling wives; bright, ambitious daughters; troubled sons. The normalizing of thuggery as business. The complex family interactions. 

It's just not anywhere near as good as The Sopranos. 

The violence is insane. I don't know what the body count was for Ray Donovan, especially as compared to The Sopranos. But the violence in The Sopranos seemed more organic. The violence in Ray Donovan is often gratuitous. Did the teenage rapper, the boyfriend of Ray's daughter, have to die? And, sure, kill the molesting priest, but did they have to kill a non-molester priest by mistake? Etc. Plus, Adriana aside, there's a lot more killing of women in Ray Donovan than there was in The Sopranos. We've come a long way baby, or nonsensical? 

And when they weren't killing people, everyone was getting beaten up. Especially Ray. Yet despite the savage beatings Ray endured, he almost always seemed to bounce back instantly. Beaten to a pulp? No problem! Right as rain in just five minutes.

The drinking, oh the drinking. Everyone drinks alcohol - mostly brown spirits - the way normal people drink water. Ray walks into a room - home, apartment, office - and pours himself four fingers of Scotch (no ice, no mixer) and guzzles it right down. I'm pretty sure that, if the Donovans were drinking like that in real life, they'd be dead. Or at least look like crap. But they all bounce back from the boozing the same way they do from the violence: instantaneously. Do the writers think that clinking glasses and saying Slainte (Irish for to-your-health) actually prevents the booze from taking over?

A lot of the Irishism is cheesy. Slainte, slainte, slainte. I'll see you and raise you Terry's scallly cap. Abby (Ray's wife) Donovan's family back in Southie runs - what else - a bar! As I always tell people. I'm a walking ethnic stereotype. My German grandfather was a butcher; my Irish grandfather owned a bar. So I get it. But couldn't Abby's brother lean on a shovel for the City of Boston? Couldn't her sister work for Gillette? How about a bit of nuance to the stereotypes. 

And the Catholicism, which played in the background in The Sopranos, is way overdone. (What's with that weird priest Father Tom intervening all the time? Bring me Carmela feeding Father Phil!)

Attention: Whitey Bulger alert! The character James Woods plays is patterned on Southie psycho Whitey Bulger. Okay. But did they have to make his girlfriend a Catherine? As in Whitey's GF, Catherine Greig. Did they have to give her a fluffy white dog, just like the one Catherine Greig had? 

Another ripoff of the Whitey Bulger is that the Donovans are always getting away with murder, as long as they dime someone the FBI wants more. I know that Whitey Bulger and his gang got away with a lot of killings because they were ratting out Italian Mafia members to the (largely Irish) Boston office in exchange for a blind eye turned to the crimes Whitey and Co. were committing. (One of Whitey's goons admitted to killing 20 people and got a prison sentence of just 12 years.) But Ray especially seems to be able to go back to the well again and again, trading heads the Feds want for heads the Donovans have taken - including the heads of several FBI agents killed by various Donovans.

Mostly they get Boston right. Mostly. The Boston accents are pretty good, so there's that. And they get a lot of the details and local color right, too. But it's Dorchester Avenue, not Dorchester Street. Nobody who's spent more than five minutes in Boston would say Dorchester Avenue, let alone Ray Donovan. And Ray would say Dot Ave. 

Most of the characters on Ray Donovan are not sympathetic in the least. Other than brother Terry. Sometimes. But why did they let one of the few characters I actually like mispronounce Canobie Lake Park. It's CAN-a-bee, not Ka-NO-bee.

I give it three stars. Despite all the elements that I disliked about Ray Donovan, I stuck with it to the bitter end, gratified that Mickey finally met his maker. (Did they have to turn Ray's daughter Bridget into the killer?) 

They've left room for additional episodes. And I would watch another season. 

But would I rewatch Ray Donovan in its 82 episode + movie entirety? No way.

I could start rewatching The Sopranos tomorrow. 

Note to self: no lavender aromatherapy spray made in India for me

Sure, I have a can of Lysol spray around here, a bottle of Febreze. Sometimes there are bad smells to get rid of. Mostly, though, I just open a window for a bit. Fresh air: nothing like it.

I don't go in for scented candles, either. No vanilla eucalyptus for me!

And the thought of plugging something containing liquid scent chemical into an outlet makes me shudder. 

It's not as if I don't like things to smell good. Sometimes I get lemon or orange flavored scented liquid hand soap. And lemon or orange flavored scented cleaners. I love peeling an orange, cutting up a lemon, and releasing those wonderful smells. I love having my Christmas tree up. The smell of fresh balsam is almost heaven in my book. I love the smell of baking. And of bacon. I love anything lemon verbena: soap, hand cream, spritz...And when I buy myself peonies or roses - surprisingly cheap at Whole Foods - I seldom walk by the vase without inhaling.

Mostly, however, I'm just not into anything aroma that's not natural. I'm also not into anything Walmart. So I wouldn't have ever been in possession of any lavender-and-chamomile-scented aromatherapy room spray purchased there. Good

thing. Turns out, it could be a killer.

There was the 53-year-old woman from Kansas who went to the ER after spending a few days coughing and short of breath. She likely suspected covid. Turns out it was something even worse.

Then there was the 5-year-old boy in Georgia with a bacterial infection that spread to his brain and killed him.

A couple of others came down with mystery diseases but didn't die. One was a 4-year-old girl from Texas who was discharged but 3 months later was still wheelchair bound and unable to speak. The other, a 53-year-old man from Minnesota who was admitted after his family found him weak and in an "altered mental state."

They were all diagnosed with something called melioidosis, and the presence of burkholderia pseudomallei.

But where was it coming from?

Through incredible sleuthing (including genome sequencing), government scientists were able to ID source as the room spray sold at Walmart.

In August, the CDC issued an alert about the melioidosis cases. In October, the agency put out a news release announcing the cases were connected to a Better Homes & Gardens aromatherapy spray.

Consumers who had purchased the product was warned not to use it. (Source: WaPo)

You wouldn't have to tell me twice!

Anyway, Walmart stopped selling it, and:

On Nov. 2, Walmart recalled about 3,900 bottles of the “Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray With Gemstones” and five other Better Homes & Gardens products “due to the presence in two bottles of a rare and dangerous bacteria and risk of serious injury and death,” the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced.

Those gemstones weren't very righteous...

[The CDC's Julia] Petras warned that anyone who still has the product should immediately stop using it, place it in two resealable bags and return it to Walmart as soon as possible. The Consumer Product Safety Commission also recommends putting the bottle in a cardboard box and cleaning any surface the spray might have touched.

Yikes!

This reminds me of the protocol for one chemo regimen my husband went through. It involved wearing a pump for a couple of days, which continuously ran chemicals into Jim through a port in his chest. After 48 hours, it was my job to don my protective gloves, carefully pull the needle out of his port, make sure no chemo escaped, and package everything up in the elaborate hazmat packaging they sent us home with and Fed Ex it off to someplace in Michigan to be disposed of. 

So, yikes!

Those who return the product for destruction will receive a $20 Walmart gift card.

Which I guess is a good return on a product that cost four bucks. But still seems like it could have been a bit more, given the hassle of returning it for disposal.  

Kudos to the scientists who were able to solve this mystery and likely save more than a few people from serious illness and even death. (Can you imagine your 5-year-old kid dying because you sprayed a bit of lavender around? Beyond awful...)

Anyway, I'll be sticking to my general fatwa on spraying chemicals into the air. And when I do, I'll try to remember to open a window, too.

Yet another dive bar takes a dive

I'm not quite sure what the definition of a dive bar is, but I believe it mostly centers around a comfy, non-pretentious place where comfy non-pretentious people hang out. Although I've seen the insides of plenty of them in my day, I haven't spent all that much time in them in the last decade or so. My husband and I did a lot of walking, and walking often ending up for a drink and a bite in a comfy, non-pretentious place. (Bonus points if there was an Irish session going on - our Irish pubs were The Green Dragon, Mr. Dooley's, and The Druid.) Once Jim got sick, we did less walking around. And once he died, well, I still walk every day, I just don't pop into bars for a pop during my walks. (Even if Jim had lived, I suspect we would have aged out of stops at dive bars by now. I would have, anyway.)

Some of our favorites, like the Pour House, which had excellent burgers (for cheap; pretty good fries, too) has closed. Pandemic victim, I think. I'I also think it's reopening.

I'm not sure what put Tim's in the South End out of business. Great burgers, salads, and chili. The home-made dressing was served in old ketchup bottles. It was delish. We loved Tim's, and it was one of the few places in Boston - at least places I've been to - where there were equal numbers of white and Black folks. 

The Littlest Bar is gone, too, but I think that was a real estate thang. 

I'm delighted that something has gone in at the location of the old Red Hat. (Also good cheap burgers and fries.) But I'm less than delighted that they've rebranded themselves and are no longer the Red Hat. So no neon Red Hat sign. (Please explain to me why I couldn't find a picture of the Red Hat sign online!!!!)

But some of the old haunts we occasionally occasioned are still around. The Corner Tavern on Marlborough, just across Mass Ave. Not to be confused with the Corner Cafe in the North End. (Excellent paninis.) Bukowski's Tavern, which I wasn't wild about, but my husband enjoyed, is still in the running. 

There were a couple of Cambridge dive bars that I went to once in a while when I worked near Harvard Square (now over 30 years ago; gulp!). One was the Plough and Stars, which served excellent lunches - the only meatloaf other than my own and my mother's that I've actually liked, and where we'd often see singer-songwriter John Lincoln Wright sitting at the bar in his cowboy hat. John Lincoln Wright died ten years ago, but the Plough lives on.

So does Charlie's Eating and Drinking, a Harvard Square joint where the work gang would sometimes drift into for pitchers and burgers that we called "repeat-a-burgers," because they'd keep coming up on you all afternoon. I'm sure they've been replaced by now, but in my day, the toilet seats in the ladies' room were clear lucite with JFK half dollars embedded in them...

But TT the Bear's in Central Square is, alas gone. On the other hand, I see that the Cantab Lounge has reopened.

On the still open front, The Sevens on Charles Street, which has pretty good food (excellent chili) has survived the pandemic. While the food is good, the wine I found to be pretty terrible. It tasted like it was made from a powdered, Kool-Aid like mix.

And, while I never went there, a fellow volunteer told me that he'd recently stopped into The Tam on Tremont Street. A dive bar if ever.

Then there's the Beacon Hill Pub, which has been around for decades, sitting there on the corner of Charles and Cambridge Streets, radiating dive.

I have been in there exactly once, and that was before it became the Beacon Hill Pub. I think it was called Father's Four, one of a small chain of Father's (Father's, Fathers Too...) At some point in the mid-1970's, my friend Joyce and I - who did not frequent bars - decided we needed to get a bit more social than our norm. So we stopped in. Did we even last for a drink? All I remember is that the guys hanging out in there struck us as speed freaks. We weren't in there for long.

Then it became the Beacon Hill Pub, hangout out for the youngs. Nasty smelling, loud music, often a line out the door on weekends. A dump. A crummy joint. A dive. The picture
makes it look a lot more respectable and inviting than it does IRL. You can't see the beer kegs that are always out front, the vomit on the sidewalk. No thanks.

And if I don't get in there soon - which I won't - I will have missed my chance to hoist one at the Beacon Hill Pub.

As I was recently informed via text by my cousin Rob Kilroy, the Beacon Hill Pub will be closing, to be replaced by nice restaurant.

Yay!

By the way, Rob, in his day (pre-kids and suburban Dad-ness), was known to frequent a dive bar or two. In fact, one time, Jim and I were at The Green Dragon for a session when the door opened, and who popped in as part of a pub crawl but Cousin Rob. Old fogies that we were, and not wanting to contend with the pubcrawlers (too noisy), we were already forging our way out as Rob & Co. forged in. 

Needless to say, I won't miss the Beacon Hill Pub in the least.

Au contraire, as those who don't frequent dive bars might say, I may not go out to drink, but - especially now that it's getting post-covid - I do go out to eat, and I welcome another nice restaurant joining the many nice restaurants my neighborhood already enjoys. 

But for those who will miss it, you have my sympathies. It's tough to lose a place you love to hang out. And, as Boston gets upscalier by the minute, we could do with a bit more grunge -  even if I never see the dive-y inside of a dive bar again.

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

And a doff of the Pink Slip cap to Rob Kilroy. This one's for you. (And slightly belated Happy Birthday. Keep it up. Pretty soon you'll be as old as I am.)

NFT Vending Machine? I. JUST. CAN'T.

Trust me when I tell you that I am not a Luddite.

I'm no one's idea of an early adopter, but I'm not a techno laggard, either.

But Non-Functional Tokens (NFTs)? Your very own piece of art-by-vaporware, to have (virtually) and to hold (digitally)? I. JUST. CAN'T.

Apparently, however, SOME. PEOPLE. CAN. 

At least that's what Neon thinks. They've just installed:

...the first in-person non-fungible token (NFT) vending machine in New York City, aiming to make online art pieces as easily available as soda or a candy bar. (Source: Reuters)

To refresh my readers - even those who aren't Luddites - an NFT work of art is a digital representation of something or other. You can show it off to anyone you want on your smartphone, but if you want to hang it on your wall, you've got to make a physical version of it. And it's all - what else - tied in with cryptocurrency.

Got it?

Lots of celebs (athletes, entertainers) have gotten into the NFT businesses, selling digital pictures - often "arty" - of their puss, with maybe an autograph thrown in. You get to collect them the way you might have collected baseball cards as a kid, only you can't flip NFT's. Nor can you secure them to your bicycle spokes with a clothespin, so that when you pedal around the neighborhood, your bike makes a very satisfying clack-ing noise. 

Melania Trump has gotten in the grift act, and recently added an NFT to the bundle when she sold the hat she wore to meet President Macron of France. The NFT was of a watercolor of the hat. Unfortunately, Mel didn't get the exorbitant price she was asking, and tried to salvage her pride by buying it herself, behind the scenes, to make it appear as if there was interest.

Hipster artists love NFT's, too. 

Banksy - and is there a hipster-er artist anywhere - recently banksied a bundle by segmenting one of his works of art into 10,000 NFT's and selling the digital/fractional bits off to folks who couldn't afford a physical Banksy work in its entirety.

The Neon vending machine sells digital art, not digital Tom Brady or Gronk "cards." But it's a sale with a twist.  

The twist? You have no idea what piece of digital art you might purchase.

"It's the crypto curious, the people who tried to buy cryptocurrency or they were interested in buying an NFT, but they just hit too many barriers," Neon CEO Kyle Zappitell said in an interview with Reuters, of the vending machine's target customer.

Crypto curious. Oy! 

Located in a small storefront in Lower Manhattan's financial district with a sign outside saying "NFT ATM," it looks like a traditional vending machine, but offers QR codes that come on slips in small paper boxes. The drops range in price from $5.99 to $420.69.

Once the QR code is scanned, the user can see their new piece of art on any smartphone, laptop or tablet.

Unlike a classic vending machine that vends, say, a variety of snacks, the Neon NFT machine only offers two possibilities. You're either going to get an NFT of a color. Or a picture of a pigeon.

I may not be crypto curious, but I'm sure curious about someone who'd pay $420.69 - and is this supposed to be some hardy-har-har code for 4/20 (something of a national holiday for the cannibis crowd) and 69 (with its Beavis and Butthead dirty-little-snigger connotation) - for an NFT of a pigeon. Or a color swatch.

I realize that the rising generations want to travel light, but I just don't get the appeal of NFT's, other than in a kind of Pet Rock fad sort of way. Because that's how I think of NFT's: they're a fad, combined with gambling that the value for a few bytes of nothingness will increase in value. 

All the colors, by the way, are unique. According to Neon - which has gotten $3M in seed money from investo-gamblers - "there will only ever be 16,777,215 colors" on the Internet. I guess the thinking is that, if you can even sell 10% of those colors for $5.99 - let alone $420.69 - the investo-gamblers will handily make back their investment. 

Personally, I'm just as happy flipping through my Benjamin Moore fan deck, which doesn't have anywhere near 16, 777,215 colors, but has plenty enough for me to pick from when it comes to the bedroom and the downstairs hall. Hard enough to make a choice from the 3,500 colors BM offers, let alone from more than 16 million. 

As for a color NFT, if I were to buy one - which I most assuredly will not - the QR code that comes randoing out of the vending machine would probably be a color I hated. Like pinky tan. (And I'm not wild about pigeons, either.)

Give me the choice and advanture of an old time vending machine any old day.

Do I want M&M Peanut or a Butterfinger? Will it accept the tattered bill I'm inserting? Will my choice start whirling out, only to stop dead halfway to release? Will I have to pound the glass to get it moving? Enlist some burly passers by to pick the machine up and give it a good shake? 

Where's the poetry, where's the fun, in a little box containing a slip of paper bearing a QR code?

Yankee Swap item maybe...

Ah, NFT Vending Machines...

All I can say is, stop the metaverse, I want to get off.

Even by dumb survey standards...

I'm a sucker for surveys, especially when they're favorable to Massachusetts/Boston - smartest, healthiest, wealthiest. But in the interest of fair play, I also pay attention to surveys that show "us" in a less favorable light - rudest, snobbiest, duddiest dressers.

When it comes to a survey on accents, however, I don't know quite what to make of it.  

I have no problem believing that, in a survey of 2,000 Americans, the accent voted "most annoying" is the Boston accent. If they'd asked me, I'd have said Southern, followed by Southern California (which I'm assuming is the Valley Girl accent). But they didn't ask me, so... Anyway, Southern ranked as the second most annoying, so I've got some company.

The Boston accent is annoying. Annoying if, by Boston accent, folks mean the "classic" South Boston (Irish) accent of The

Departed, Ray Donovan, Good Will Hunting, Mystic River, and "your cousin from Boston," as conveyed in ads for Sam Adams and Boston Dynamics (maker of those wicked smaht, wicked pissah robots). 

Us locals do drop our "r's" (c.f., smaht, pissah) and add in "r's" where they don't belong. (You don't have to be a Kennedy to say "Cuber." Have a listen to Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, why don't you.) We just don't do it quite as broadly (as annouyingly, as stupid-soundingly) as Sully from Southie, whose accent we make fun of it all the time.

We also make fun of posers who get that accent wrong, as happens so often. 

But here's a question for you. Why is Sully from Southie's accent - or, more likely, the accent of Sully from Braintree or Weymouth, or someplace else on the South Shore that his family fled to - the one associated with Boston?

Why not the Boston Brahmin accent, which is just a bit of a remove from The Crown? Is it that all the Boston Brahmin's have died out?

Or the just plain crazy Kennedy accent which I never in my long life as a denizen of Massachusetts have heard come out of the mouth of anyone who wasn't a Kennedy. (Okay, many of us do say "Cuber" instead of Cuba.) Ask not about the origins of that accent. 

Anyway, Boston being the most annoying accent wasn't the only interesting/weird finding of the survey (results of which I found on Preply).

The survey didn't just focus on intra-US accents, it went worldwide.

I wasn't in the least surprised to find that the most appealing accent in the world is British. 

But again, which British accent we talking about here? I'm guessing it's the plummy accent of The Crown and Downton Abbey, not Cockney or Liverpudlian, a.k.a. Scouser (gear, fab, fab, gear). Henry Higgins, not Liza Doolittle. 

Personally, I get sucked in by the plummy accent. If I'm watching a movie or play in which it's deployed, I can't for the life of me figure out if the acting's any good.

Anyway, Australian comes in second on the most appealing accent list. I actually find it most appalling, mate.

(British and Australian also came in one-two when it came to the sexiest accent. Again, Hugh Grant I can see (hear?). Crocodile Dundee? Sorry mate.)

Americans consider Welsh the worst accent. Huh? Do most people even know what a Welsh accent sounds like? Other than the old movie, How Green Was My Valley, there aren't a lot of portrayals of the Welsh accent to look to. Maybe they played them tapes. But who's got a problem with Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton? 

The Russian accent placed number 6 on the worst list. I'm guessing if they re-did the survey today, it would find itself in the top spot. Just sayin'. 

On the sexy scale, Welsh is considered the least sexy. Apparently, no one played them a tape of Richard Burton.

Korea placed second least sexy. (I can't be the only one who's hard put to conjure up a Korean accent. This one gets me a big 'huh?')

Welsh was also rated the least trustworthy accent. What does this even mean? Russia was third least trustworthy. Run this again and Welsh will be knocked out of contention, I'm quite sure. 

Americans find the British, Canadian, and Australian accents the most trustworthy. Anyone else think this is because they're all speaking English?

But, surely, trustworthiness lies in the speaker. Boris Johson trustworthy? Nyet! Justin Trudeau trustworthy? Da!

Welsh gets dumped on again when it comes to sounding smart; the Brits, no surprise, sound the smartest. The old school Oxbridge tie and all that.

Amazingly, Welsh, unlike Boston, was also ranked the least annoying. Not trustworthy, not sexy, not smart. But somehow, not annoying? Someone pleaes make this make sense to me.

I'm not even going to get into the results when it came to rating American regional accents, other than to ask how the New York accent gets ranked the smartest. Which New York accent is that? I say fuggedaboutit!

It was very entertaining to read through these survey results, that's for sure. But I have to say that, even by dumb survey standards, this one doesn't make a lot of sense. 

Among other things, how many people can discern the difference between Chicago accent and Midwestern to the degree that they can rank Midwestern the second smartest accent, and Chicago the third. 

Boston comes in fourth. I say ha, ha. Sure, the Sully from Southie accent makes anyone sound like a moron, but us Brahmin wannabes, we sound wicked smaht, even if we are annoying.

Cartier v. Tiffany (Does Macy's tell Gimbels?)

Over the course of my long life, I've had two objects from Tiffany's. One was a sterling silver bookmark, given to me one Christmas by a close friend in college with expensive tastes. It's still around here somewhere, nestled in its "Tiffany Blue" bag. I believe the iconic "Tiffany Blue" box is long gone. 

The other item was a corporate gift: an ugly glass paperweight with my name and the occasion of the corporate award-giving engraved on it. Useless, unless you needed a murder weapon. When I parted company with that company, I left it on my desk. I should have kept the iconic "Tiffany Blue" box. Apparently they're worth something on Poshmark and eBay so that folks can make pretend they have something from Tiffany's. Or try to palm off a gift they bought at TJ Maxx as something more upscale.

From Cartier's, I have nada, zip, zilch.

If their box is also iconic, I have no reason to know. 

Neither store plays any role in my day to day, unless I pass by on a walk and notice it. Which I don't. (Notice, that is. I do sometimes pass by.)

What I did notice was that Cartier is suing Tiffany, claiming that one of their employees decamped to Tiffany last fall, having "downloaded confidential information about Cartier’s own high jewelry business before leaving the company and then passed it to her new colleagues."

Cartier claims its investigation into the case has “opened a window into Tiffany’s disturbing culture of misappropriating competitive information.”

A Tiffany spokeswoman said in a statement: “We deny the baseless allegation and will vigorously defend ourselves.” 

According to the suit, [Megan] Marino was fired from her new job in February after Cartier informed Tiffany’s legal department about her conduct. But by then, more senior Tiffany executives had already gained “a substantial amount of Cartier’s confidential and trade secret information,” Cartier claims. (Source: MSN)

Along with Tiffany, Megan Marino is also being sued.  

Out of work. Being sued. I wouldn't want to be Megan Marino, that's for sure. And there's even more reason not to want to be Megan Marino.

According to a complaint filed in a New York state court in Manhattan, Tiffany hired away an underqualified junior manager to learn more about Cartier’s “high jewelry” collection, where pieces typically cost $50,000 to $10m.

Cartier, a unit of Switzerland’s Richemont SA, called Tiffany’s hiring of Megan Marino a desperate bid to revive its own high jewelry unit after it was left in “disarray” following several departures, reflecting Tiffany’s “disturbing culture of misappropriating competitive information”.  (Source: The Guardian)

So, out of work (fired, not quit), being sued, and being referred to as "an underqualified junior manager" in court filings. Cool.

Something tells me Megan Marino doesn't have all that brilliant a future in the high end jewelry biz.

Going to work for a competitor is tricky business. 

Naturally, the competition is where you're going to have your best opportunities. You know the market. You know the industry. You know the business. You're more valuable to them than you are to a company in an altogether different world. 

It gets tricky, of course, when it comes to what you know and how you know it.

There's what's in your head, of course. That's the stuff you can't help bring with you. You know the product flaws. The company strategy. The inside dirt. But what to use from all the stuff that's in your head, and how to use it? That's where it gets pretty murky.

Can you use your knowledge of your old company's product weakness to strengthen your new company's messaging and product? How can you not? 

Reveal your old company's strategy? That seems less clear cut. You really shouldn't share that insider information, but if you're sitting there in your new company talking strategy, it's pretty hard not to weigh in with what you know about old company's plans. 

As for sharing the inside dirt? Everybody likes a little gossip.

Personally, I'm just as glad that I was never in the position to blab old company secrets to the competition.

What's in your head is one thing. What you've downloaded and scooted out with it on a thumb drive is quite another. 

No other way to look at it: that's a no-no. 

And if Megan Marino did walk out Cartier's door with "company confidential" material, and gave it to Tiffany, she deserved to be sued.

But what if that "company confidential" material was a plan that she'd worked on, that was her IP (even though it was technically Cartier's IP if she created it while there). Maybe she just wanted that material for future reference: What goes into a good plan? What's a good process? What makes for good design?

Not so much a problem to have and to hold, to cherish and to keep. Just a problem if you shared and shared alike. 

It does sound like a now-rueful Marino did a bit of sharing.

In an affidavit accompanying the complaint, Marino said Tiffany was “more interested in hiring me as a source of information than as a High Jewelry manager”.

Is this an admission that Marino shared info? Sounds like it could be.

And given Tiffany's willingness to fire Marino once Cartier's lawsuit appeared on their doorstop, it sounds like this may be a case of 'seduced and abandoned.'

Knowing absolutely nothing about the law here, I'm going with - whatever Megan Marino is guilty of - she ought to sue Tiffany for firing her. And, if she hasn't already, she ought to be naming names.

Her profile no longer seems to be available, but the other day you could still find Megan Marino on Linkedin. But her positioning statement read:

Experienced Merchandise Planner with a demonstrated history of working in the global luxury goods industry.

Good luck, Megan Marino. I'm guessing you're going to need it. Maybe you did nothing wrong, and will be fully exonerated. Maybe you just had a teenie-tiny iconic blue box full of ethical lapse. But there's a cloud hanging over you that won't go away anytime soon. 

I believe that most employers would rather take a chance on a murderer than someone who had their hand in the till - or downloaded company secrets and shared them with the competition. 

As we used to say, does Macy's tell Gimbels? Most assuredly not. 

This is too bad, as I really do need to see Tennessee to complete my "state accomplit" list

Realistically, it's not as if I had high hopes for any visit to Tennessee. It's not that I was ever going to consider re-loing there, what with banning Maus and electing Marsha Blackburn and all. 

But I would like to scratch it off my list of states visited, as it's one of only four that I'm missing. (The others are Alaska, North Dakota, and Kentucky - and I might be able to count Kentucky, as I did fly in and out of there on a business trip to Cincinnati, so I was actually on the ground. Tennessee I've only been in to change planes in Memphis on a long ago trip to New Orleans.)

And there are Tennessee things I wouldn't mind seeing: Nashville, the Great Smokey Mountains, Graceland.

I just don't know what I'm going to do if the cockamamie legislation passes that will allow anyone with an "enhanced gun permit" to be designated some of the rights of law officers. Which might mean something if those "enhanced" permits really meant something. But, no. One's about as difficult to acquire as a permit saying that your llama is an emotional support animal.

Under Tennessee's gun rules, an adult civilian resident can apply for an enhanced gun permit, which allows for both open and concealed carry, by paying a $100 fee and providing an eight-hour handgun safety course certificate. (Source: ABC News)

There are 686,348 Tennesseeans with active enhanced gun permits - roughly 10% of the population. 

Although the legislation doesn't yet have any hearings scheduled and the assembly version has only one co-sponsor, it's already getting pushback, including from a police union who says it could ultimately lead to more gun violence.

Ya think? 

All we need is to empower more George Zimmermans, more Kyle Rittenhouses. Think of all these idiots, swaggering around cosplaying cops. 

Jonathan Gold, a Michigan-based firearms instructor and member of the non-profit Giffords Gun Owners for Safety, told ABC News the bill would encourage more vigilantism that would ultimately lead to more harm.

Ya think?

"I don't understand our regression to the old West, because this is what it feels like," he told ABC News. "I've studied the old West, and I don't think anyone wants to go back to the murder rate of Tombstone."

I've watched plenty of cowboy shows during my time, and, while we have terrible murder-by-gun rates in this country at present, I'm pretty sure they were worse back in the good old days, when the Cartwrights, Marshall Dillon, and Wyatt Earp were gunning down bad guys right and left - while only suffering an occasional "flesh wound," that they recovered from in minutes. ("He just winged me.") And where the sheriff was always cobbling together a posse of whoever was hanging around town with a six-shooter on his hip, handing out badges and swearing in Tom, Dick, and Harry to ride out and shoot to kill them some outlaws. 

Gee, what can go wrong if over half a million more gun owners think they're cops? Even police officers, who presumably have more than eight hours training, don't seem to be all that skilled when it comes to guns. I remember a few years ago in NYC there was a workplace shooter who'd gone into the Empire State Building (I think it was) to kill his former boss. While the cops were trying to apprehend him, they managed to shoot and wound 11 passersby. 

If you're wondering what the "certain circumstances" that would allow the average "enhanced" permit holder to play cop:

State Sen. Joey Hensley, who introduced the state Senate version of the bill, told ABC News that the goal of the bill was to allow enhanced gun permit carriers to carry their weapons into locations where off-duty law enforcement enter, such as a store or restaurant that prohibits guns inside their business. Hensley said the bill would not allow enhanced permit holders to bring their weapons into courts or schools.

Not that anything seems to stop someone from bringing a weapon into schools. I guess now folks will have the okay to shoot up a stray copy of Maus if they come across it. 

"This is trying to open it up so that people who go to the extreme to get this extra permit can have the right to defend themselves in more places," the senator told ABC News Thursday.

Although Hensley pooh-poohs the idea that his bill is "meant to make civilians law enforcement members," actual law enforcment members aren't having any:

The state's largest police union, however, told ABC news that it is "adamantly opposed to this bill in its current form."

Because we all know that, once Joe Blow  - make that Pecos Bill - can carry in spaces where only law enforcement was previously allowed to carry, there are plenty of Joe Blows - make that Pecos Bills - who are going to start fantasizing that they're carrying a virtual badge.

After all, the mythology is that 'the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.'

Paul Kemp, the co-founder of the grassroots group Gun Owners for Responsible Gun Ownership, told ABC News he believes the Tennessee legislation is part of a growing trend around the country that is encouraging legal vigilantism.

Kemp said the bill's current lack of details would likely lead to confusion among civilians and law enforcement that could lead to more violence and legal headaches.

"I would find it difficult for law enforcement to distinguish between a civilian with an enhanced gun permit and a perpetrator or person they want to subdue," Kemp said.

Exactly!

I think if this bill passes, I'll have to take a pass on Tennessee. I'd hate to be chowing down on some BBQ near the Ryman Auditorium when some yahoos decide to replay shootout in the O.K. Corral.

Maybe, just maybe, this kid has some mental health issues

When I saw that the Red Sox had let Brett Netzer - a prospect I'd never heard of -  go for "a series of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-Semitic tweets," I was all set to gear up for a post along the lines of wonder what his backup career plans are...

And then I looked through the tweets and came away with the impression that this young guy may well be all of the above bad things. But mostly what I came away thinking that this young guy may well have some serious mental health issues.

Netzer is a 25-year old from North Carolina who was drafted by the Red Sox a few years back, in the third round. So, pretty high up.

He spent the 2019 season with the Sox Double-A club, the Portland (Maine) Sea Dogs, where he played regularly if unspectacularly. He sat out 2020, as minor league baseball was a covid casualty. And "he spent all of the 2021 season the restricted list for undisclosed reasons."

Hmmmmm.

His tweets were definitely career suicide, especially given that they went after Chaim Bloom, the Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer. Never a wise career move to trash the boss.  

Here's him having at Bloom:

"chaim bloom is a bad actor. dude went to hebrew school and studied the torah growing up but sold his soul to the sodom and race groups. good thing he is good at whatever he does in baseball," Netzer wrote in one of many tweets attacking Bloom, who is Jewish. (Source: CBS News)

Here's another one:

and if i remember correctly

- chaim bloom supports black lives matter, the organization, and the group of sodomy, lgbt pride. maybe there should be a word for ironic in Hebrew. (Source: @BrettNetzer)

Maybe it's all in the eye and ear of the beholder, but I don't think these are necessarily anti-Semitic. Netzer seems, in fact, to be questioning Bloom's adherence to his faith. Which doesn't make for anti-Semitism. More meshugas than anything else.

The racism and homophobia, well, Netzer owns that. 

ill go along with racist and homophobic, but anti-semitic? thats too far. bloom is a hypocrite and an embarrassment to any torah-following jew.

Is it possible that Netzer is himself Jewish, and is attacking Bloom's bona fides as a Jew, in much the same way some Catholics question Joe Biden's Catholicism, since he supports a woman's right to choose? (Bloom is observant, and went to yeshiva. Joe, well, he's about as Catholic as they come.) 

Netzer also gave a yep, that's me response when someone on Twitter asked whether he'd been hacked. So, forget the anti-Semitism for a sec. There's no way someone who's out as a racist and homophobe/transphobe is going to keep his job for long, especially if it's a job in sports/entertainment. (I do wonder how Netzer would have been treated if he'd been a phenom, rather than a guy who tried but never showed enough promise to make it to The Show.)

What there is on Brett Netzer's twitter time line is plenty of tweets that are unhinged. And getting unhingier over time.

His earlier tweets were mostly sports, with an occasional bit of weirdism thrown in. 

But then he got anti-vaxy.  And there's this:

...i am a million times more anti-christian than anti-anything else. the only bigger fraud than chaim bloom is jesus himself.

Seriously, you can no more get away being overtly anti-Christian in American sports than you can being racist.

Not that being an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-LBGTQ racist (who advocates for bitcoin) makes you crazy. (Nor does thinking all politicians are "scumbags.") It's just that there's something disturbing about his thinking, which appears to be deteriorating.

Easy to imagine that someone who'd spent most of his life trying to make it as a professional baseball player, only to get as far as Double-A - and then spend a year "on the restricted list for undisclosed reasons" - might be going through some things.

Sure, it could well be that Brett Netzer is just a loudmouthed, garden variety homophobe racist moron. It happens.

Or it could be something else.

I'm no psychologist/psychiatrist. Even if I were, I wouldn't be allowed to diagnose someone sight unseen. But maybe, just maybe... Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed when someone's in their twenties. Not that this is necessarily schizophrenia. It's just that there may be something going on with this kid that we don't know about. An "undisclosed reason," perhaps.

In any event, his career in baseball has more than likely come to an end.

Sad...

A good idea. Just not for this golden girl.

When my mother was 80, she moved into congregate living.

We would kid her, telling her that she now had her first "single gal" apartment. (She lived with her parents until she was married.) 

Mostly, we were all - my mother and her kids - relieved that we no longer had to worry about her getting shoveled out, getting the leaves raked, making her way up and down the steep cellar steps to do the laundry, etc.

Her set up was great. She had a very nice one-bedroom apartment, with plenty of storage, a small but full kitchen, and a balcony overlooking a pond. She had friends there, and it was just across the street from her parish church, where she went to Mass everyday and was involved in all sorts of activities. Her congregate living place

provided breakfast and dinner, changed her sheets, did the heavy laundry (sheets and towels), and did the cleaning. There was always something going on - movie night, a sing-along, a day trip, an event for families. 

Sure, there was a bit of bittersweet hanging over everything. Moving to congregate living meant that my mother was leaving the home where she'd spent her married life, where she'd raised her kids. Where she had all the stuff she'd accumulated. We all knew - my mother included - that this might well be the last stop. But we all loved it - my mother included. 

Sadly, less than a year later, my mother died. We all so wished she'd had more time in her 'single gal' apartment.

Well before she'd moved into congregate, once the last of her kids had moved out and my long-widowed mother was an empty nester, she experimented with sharing her home with a roommate.

She wasn't looking for extra income. Mostly, although she was still working and very active, with a lot of friends, my mother didn't like rattling around the house by herself. 

The house I grew up in wasn't all the big. But, in its prime, it was full and bustling. Even after its fully-loaded prime, until the last kid left for college, there was always someone around.

My mother was a secretary at Clark University, and her first roommate was a grad student - a young, very pleasant woman from Iran. My mother loved her, and we thought she was great. As was the fact that my mother had company.

Her second (and final) roommate was less of a winner. Michael, who was South African, was also a grad student at Clark. But he was something of an oddball. 

Maybe it was because he was a man, maybe it was just the weirdo vibe, or the South African accent, but Michael made my mother uncomfortable. 

So my mother, who was one of the most honest people I've ever known, told Michael that one of my brothers was moving back in, so she needed the "boys' bedroom" back.

We were all relieved when he moved on.

After that, my mother pretty much flew solo. Until she moved into her congregate living apartment.

I'm sure that there were times she was lonely, and when it woruld have been helpful to have someone around to take out the trash or shovel the walk. But mostly she did fine. She had a lot of friends, traveled, took classes, volunteered, and lived a full and active life. 

When she was considering congregate living, we talked about her moving to the Boston area to be closer to her children, but she had too much of a life going in Worcester and wasn't interested in uprooting.

I'm still a few years - probably a decade or so - away from having to think about my next living arrangement.

I love my condo, but there may come a point when I need to upstakes and move to a place where there's some level of assistance - breakfast and dinner, doing the sheets and towels - and some level of company. 

I'm pretty much a loner, so I'm good for now. But if there comes a point where I can't get out for my daily walks or my volunteer work, when I want to be around people.

But I don't believe that, even if I had a bigger place, I'd want to share my digs with someone else.

Which is not to say that it doesn't make perfect sense for someone who wants to stay in their home, wants/needs someone to help defray costs, and maybe just wants someone to be there to share a cup of tea, to - like my mother - welcome a roommate in. 

Which was the subject of a recent Washington Post article that highlighted some Baby Boomers who are going the Golden Girls route and finding roomies.

Sometimes, it's a matter of financial necesssity. Jodi Raffa has a large - 3 bedroom, 2 bath - home in Florida. Which became a lot less affordable when her husband died and her income plummeted. Jodi wants to stay in her home, so at 76 she's looking for a job. And a roommate. Or as they've now been dubbed, a boommate. 

“With the boomers aging, you see higher and higher numbers in shared housing,” said Rodney Harrell, vice president of family, home and community at AARP, pointing out that boomers are more open than previous generations to trying alternative solutions to the traditional aging trajectory.

The article found anecdotal evidence that the biggest driver for boom-mating is economic. 

As boomers live longer and retire without the financial safety net of employer-sponsored pensions, covering the rising costs of food, housing and insurance become major considerations. 

Debbi Campbell and Loretta Halter share Campbell's "rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village." They're not a couple. They were brought together by Halter's economic necessity, and Campbell's loneliness. (Her partner of 20 years had recently died.) Campbell had, thanks to the pandemic, retired a couple of years earlier than she'd planned on, so the extra money comes in handy. But mostly she was lonely. 

Before the pandemic, the two lived somewhat separate lives. Campbell lived mostly in the bedroom and Halter lived mostly in the living room. But when the city shut down, they developed a strong friendship.

“First, we started with the crossword and the jigsaw puzzles, and the TV, and it turned out well,” Campbell said. The ease of the later-in-life roommate-as-friend experience surprised her. “I mean, I’m one of those people who’s spent a good time of my life in therapy, mostly complaining about people I knew.”

..."I had not been desperate over money, but having a pandemic come, suddenly you have company where you wouldn’t have. And suddenly there is extra money for you from home sharing, which I wouldn’t have had. It was just a bonanza. I feel like the luckiest person of the pandemic,” she said.

Good on them, but I can't imagine sharing a 1 BR with anyone I wasn't sharing a bed with. Even then, I like a little elbow room. (I live by myself with two bedrooms - ones a den - and two bathrooms.) With a boommate, I would feel like a prisoner in my own home - because I'm pretty sure I would have kept hanging out in my bedroom. 

Most folks are open to the idea of sharing space:

In 2021, 70 percent of adults over 50 reported being open to sharing their home with a family member who was not a spouse, 51 percent said they would be willing to share with a friend and 6 percent would share a home with a stranger, according to a survey from AARP. Of those who reported they would not share their home at all, 23 percent said they would change their mind if they needed extra income.

To support all this, services are popping up to matchmake boomers - mostly with age peers, but sometimes with younger folks. 

Never say never. I can imagine sharing a home with one of my siblings - but we'd need to have our own bedrooms. Bonus points for own bath. I have a few friends I can imagine living with. Ditto for bedroom and bath. 

But the mode I'd prefer would be a separate apartment in the same facility. Like what my mother had with congregate living. 

As for sharing with a stranger? Ugh, no! Maybe you luck out and get a Mina. Maybe you don't luck out and get a Michael. NFW.

Still, I think boommating is a good idea. Just not for this golden girl. Maybe I'm just not golden enough. Yet. 

As if I needed another reason not to like the influencer "culture"

 As you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of Stand Your Ground laws, which seem to pretty much let anyone justify killing someone by claiming they feared for their life. As in George Zimmerman taking the life of Trayvon Martin, who was armed with nothing more than Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea.

Not surprisingly, the spread of Stand Your Ground laws - 27 states now have them - has been linked to an increase in homicide rates. (Source: CNN)

Yet if anyone's been justified in standing his ground, it's probably Rob Majury. He's a retired cop who, in 2020, shot a shotgun wielding 18 year old who blew a hole in the Majurys' front door. While his wife called 911, Majury chased after the kid, but tripped and fell. Majury went back to his house to wait for the police to arrive, when Eric Rohan Justin (in some accounts referred to as Eric Rohan Johnson), shotgun still in hand, returned to the Majurys. He was warned to put the gun down but, instead, pointed it at Rob Majury, who shot and killed Justin.

We can argue all we want about whether there's a better way, about whether Majury should have shot to wound rather than kill, etc. 

But I don't think there are a lot of people who, if someone had just shot a hole through their front door, and then - still armed - came back to complete whatever he'd set out to do, wouldn't have expected the worst and done whatever they could to protect their family. In this case, Rob Majury's wife and three kids. One of who is social media influencer Ava Majury. The young man who was killed by Ava's father was one of her fans.

While the influencer culture is generally less physically harmful than Stand Your Ground laws, I'm not wild about it either.

There's something I find appalling and/or idiotic about young folks whose ambition is to become an influencer. 

And yet, many of these young folks can make a lot of money for their "content," shilling for brands.

Ava Majury began posting videos on Tik Tok when she was 13, her shtick being lip synching. 

Ava is a very pretty young woman, and built up a Tik Tok following of 1.2 million. She also has hundreds of thousands of followers on Snapchat and Instagram.

Unfortunately, not all of them are kids who just want to see a cute girl lip synching. Some of them are out and out creeps, pervs, bad guys.

Eric Justin/Johnson was one of those guys.

He allegedly sent Ava hundreds of messages on social media. He even paid her classmates for information about the TikToker, according to her family. (Source: WFLA)

So, Eric Justin/Johnson was obsessive and delusional and, at least once he got his mitts on a shotgun, a bad guy. But how about those POS classmates who sold nformation about Ava. Talk about depraved. 

Ava's parents also made a tactical mistake:

...they allowed their daughter to sell Johnson [Eric Rohan Justin] two selfies for $300.

Not gonna blame the victim here, but what a colossal lapse in judgement. I suppose they figured what the heck. Her pictures are all over Instagram, anyway, so why not monetize. Still, letting your 13 year old sell pictures of herself - however innocent - to some rando. Ugh.

Then he started asking her for explicit photos, the family said.

“I had an opportunity to actually text this person and said ‘Hey, she’s a minor and you need to not contact her anymore,’ and we notified the authorities,” her dad, Rob Majury, 51, told NBC.

But Johnson was not deterred. Last summer, he arrived at their doorstep with a gun and started firing shots through the front door, the family said.

And that's where and how Eric Rohan Justin/Johnson met his death.  

After the shooting, the family moved and Ava began homeschooling.

“Everything has changed,” her mother told NBC.

“More security on our end, more reviews with accounts, more checking in. Just trying to be normal for Ava,” her father said.

What didn't change for Ava was her social media presence.

“It became such a part of her personality and her being, that to take it away would maybe harm her more,” her father explained.

Awful as this story is "standalone," there's more: another stalker, this one in her highschool. This kid (a juvenile, so no name) had been in contact with Eric Rohan Justin/Johnson.

A video shared by another classmate showed him shooting a gun at a range and prompted Ava to begin homeschooling out of concern for her safety. Her family’s lawyers filed a stalking case in Collier County court.

The family hopes to obtain an injunction for protection Monday so she can return to class. (Source: Foxnews)

Ava and her parents are speaking out about becoming parents and kids on social media becoming more savvy about social media, being on the lookout for signs that someone out there watching you is unhinged and/or evil.

Good for them, but maybe it's just not a good idea for a child (e.g., a 13 year old) to be sharing online with anyone other than people they know. Of course, in this case, some of the kids Ava knew turned out to be sleezy non-friends who sold pictures of her and her phonenumber to her stalker. 

Cautionary tale for parents whose 13 years old are clamoring to become social media stars. 

Is this a great story or what?

Every once in a while, a little story comes across my radar that is just so sweet and good. And what with the Ukraine situation, and the general right wing nuttery, and he never ending covid, and the crapoid weather (sleeting on top of snow as I write this), I really and truly appreciate a little sotry coming across my radar that's just so sweet and good.

So here it is:

In late March, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will open an exibition, Guarding the Art which:

...will feature works from the BMA’s collection, across eras, genres, cultures, and mediums, selected by guest curators from the BMA’s Security department. As guest curators, the officers will collaborate with leadership and staff across the museum to select and reinterpret works. In addition, the team is working with renowned art historian and curator Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, who is providing additional mentorship and professional development.

In response to the BLM movement, many organizations jumped in on becoming more diverse and inclusive, and, predictably, the outcome has often been more lipservice than anything meaningful to do with diversity and inclusion. But this program sounds like it has some chops.  

The Museum invited all 45 of its security guards to participate, and 17 of them decided to do so. 

The 17 officers who elected to participate are Traci Archable-Frederick, Jess Bither, Ben Bjork, Ricardo Castro, Melissa Clasing, Bret Click, Alex Dicken, Kellen Johnson, Michael Jones, Rob Kempton, Chris Koo, Alex Lei, Dominic Mallari, Dereck Mangus, Sara Ruark, Joan Smith, and Elise Tensley. The group reflects a broad range of backgrounds and interests with officers who are also artists, chefs, musicians, scholars, and writers.

The "guest curators" have been working with staff from throughout the Museum to pull this together - an opportunity for the guards to make a real contribution to their organization, while also learning about curation, design, education, conservation, and marketing. They're being guided/mentored by those with expertise in these arenas, but they're also making real decisions and doing "real stuff." Plus they're receiving some additional compensation for their efforts. 

Kellen Johnson is working his way through Towson University, where he studies vocal performance. Here's the patining that Kellen chose:

It's "Normandy Landscape", a 1928 work by Hale Woodruff, a Black artist. (Kellen is also Black.) I've never heard of Hale Woodruff, but now I have. And I really like his work. 

Kellen's passion for music informed his choice. "I asked myself, 'if these paintings could sing, what would they sound like?'" That one sang Mozart to him. "Made me think about walking along a row of trees on a darkish day." (Source: NPR)

Overall, the guards from sixth-century pre-Columbian sculpture, to a 1925 French door knocker, to a 2021 protest painting."

The protest painting ("Resist #2" by Mickalene Thomas), which includes an image of James Baldwin, was chosen by Traci Archable-Frederick. 

She wanted her choice to "address the ongoing protests and racial tensions in the U.S."... "Everything I want to say is in this piece," Archbale-Frederick says. And she quotes James Baldwin: "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Elise Tensley, herself a painter, "wants museums to take women's art more seriously. (You go, Elise!) She chose "Winter's End" by Jane Frank from the museum's collection to showcase. She had never seen it in a gallery."

The job does have its benefits - you get to work in a serene, calm, and safe (mostly) environment - but I don't imagine museum guards are all that well-compensated. And the work is probably not all that stimulating or engaging. Not to mention that museum guards ar taken for granted 99.99% of the time, noticed only when they warn someone not to touch a painting.

With this program, the guards got to stretch their creative powers, their brains, their organizational skills, etc., in new ways. Talk about job enrichment. 

I love this idea, and hope that other museums take it up, as well. 

There are so many jobs that are considered "low-skilled." But they don't have to be. 

Here's to companies that try to make work more interesting and challenging, not just for the "hi-pos" (high potential employees) clambering up the corporate ladder, but for those who may not ever make it to the lowest rung. 

And here's to the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the 17 curating security guards. Congratulations!