Piss in haste, repent at leisure.

Shankar Mishra used to be Well Fargo's VP of operations in India.

Alas, on a November Air India flight from New York to New Delhi, Mishra somehow (allegedly somehow) peed (allegedly peed) on the 72-year-old-woman who was seated across the aisle from him in business class. Make that no class.

On an Air India flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Indira Gandhi International Airport on Nov. 26, Mishra was “completely inebriated” and urinated on another passenger, according to a police report, which cited a letter from the alleged victim.

“He unzipped his pants and urinated on me and kept standing there until the person sitting next to me tapped him and told him to go back to his seat,” said the woman, who was seated in business class one row behind Mishra, according to the report. (Source: Washington Post)

I've heard of drunks peeing on themselves. But being so drunk that you stand up in an airplane aisle and pee on a fellow passenger?  Without someone doing more than "tapping" him and suggesting he go sit down?

Seriously, folks, there are toilets on airplanes. And even though there may be a line in steerage, you generally don't have to wait - or wait all that long - if you're in business or first (both of which I've flown on plenty of occasions).

But I guess it happens, and this is by no means the only such incident that's been recorded. (Thanks google!) And then there was the notorious event a few years back when some fin-serv exec crapped on the drinks cart...(It always does seem to be fin serv, doesn't it?)

Anyway, yikes. (Yucks!)

Bad enough that the woman was urinated on by a drunken passenger. In the wake of the incident, she was treated piss-poorly by Air India.

According to the report, the woman said that her clothes, shoes and bag were “soaked in urine,” and that the flight crew “refused to touch them, sprayed my bag and shoes with disinfectant, and took me to the bathroom and gave me a set of airline pyjamas and socks.”

She requested another seat but was told none was available. After she refused to sit in her soiled seat, the woman said, she was given a jump seat — a small seat meant for short-term use by crew — for the remainder of the flight.

Another passenger “who had witnessed my plight” noted that it appeared there were seats open in first class, but the crew informed her that the pilot had “vetoed giving me a seat in first class.”

Air India also tried to mediate things by bringing Mishra - a bit sobered up - face-to-face with the women. Not something that she welcomed. (One of the flight's pilots and a number of members of the cabin crew are now in some kind of hot water with the airline. And Air India is reviewing their alcohol-on-flights policy. So there's that.)

When he met with his victim, Mishra went all crocodile tears, begged the woman not to press charges, and offered to pay for her stained belongings to be cleaned. Pressured by Mishra's performance and crew insistence, she took the money and agreed not to insist on Mishra's arrest.

A few weeks later, she had second thoughts. She returned the money and decided to pursue charges. (Meanwhile, Air India sportingly refunded her ticket.)

Mishra has been arrested and charged with a number of crimes.

He's 34 years old, married with a child, and had a good and responsible job.

The operative word is had.

He's been fired by Wells Fargo.

His career is in ruins, as is his reputation. And in a culture where shame still exists...I do feel a tiny bit bad for him. I'm sure he's beside himself, as, no doubt, are his family members.

Piss in haste, repent at leisure.

Peace*Love*Joy*Family - Just who are you?

The card was postmarked, in Boston, on December 19th. But it wasn't delivered, in Boston, until January 6th.

Still, better late than never. And, hey, January 6th is Little Christmas. So, Peace * Love * Joy * Family to you, too. Remind me again who your are.

The first name on the card was the Dad name. Let's call him Paul. 

I don't know a ton of Pauls, and none well enough to send me a Christmas card. 

I take that back.

I do know one Paul with whom I could conceivably exchange Seasons Greetings. But he's not a card sending friend. Plus he's Jewish. So, nah.

Then there was what I initially thought was the wife's name, a name I'd never seen before. Let's call her Terrileen. Which is not it, but she did have an "een" name I wasn't familiar with. (As an 'een' with two 'een' sisters, I thought I'd seen 'em all.)

The kids? Let's call them Amelia, Liam, and Eve.

They looked like nice kids, but none of them looked familiar. 

Paul was wearing a Red Sox cap in most of the pictures he appeared in. So that plus the Boston postmark: local. Probably. 

Still don't know him. (There are an awful lot of Red Sox cap-wearers in these parts.)

I wracked my brain. Nary a Paul in my extended family. Not someone I ever worked with. Not someone I volunteer with. Not my letter carrier. I already got his card.

I googled Paul and Terrileen, to see if I could find a couple by that name. I threw the kids' names in there, too. Nada.

Then I started looking more closely at the 13 pictures on the card.

Maybe Terrileen's not the wife. Maybe she's a daughter.

After all, the first, prime position - upper left corner - shows Paul alone, holding a cat. And most of the kiddos are pictured with Paul or with each other. 

The picture of the woman/girl in the fancy blue dress? It's not all that clear. Could be a wife. Could be a kid.

And whether there are three kids or four, I couldn't really tell. Liam's the only boy, and he rates more appearances than his two or three sisters. But the girls? I think there are three. The one with short curly hair in the band uniform; the other two with long hair. Yeah, I think there are three. But the one of the kid in the band uniform could have been Liam, smiling. 

There's only one picture in which Paul is with an obviously grown woman. Paul and grown woman, standing next to a small airplane. Why isn't she in any of the pictures with the kids? Maybe she's Terrileen, the wife-but-not-the-mom. Maybe she's Terrileen, the girlfriend. Maybe there are only two sisters, not three.

And maybe Paul is gay, a gay dad. 

If there's such a thing as "looking gay", in the picture of Paul cradling the cat, he sorta kinda looks gay-ish.

If Paul's gay, I hope he has someone. Or finds someone. He does look very nice. 

Paul. Terrileen. Amelia. Liam. Eve.

Not their names.

So why not? 

Suppose they're time-wasters like me? One of them idly googling their names might have found this post. I don't want that. Don't want to hurt any feelings by speculating that Terrileen/Amelia/Eve in the band uniform might be Liam.

Anyway, the message on the card is wishing your family love & light this holiday season! 

Same to you, whoever you are.

The card is completely blank on the flip side. No personal message to the Maureen Rogers the greeting card was intended for.

There's always the possibility, of course, that the card was meant for me. Kinda sorta.

Maybe Paul, Terrileen, et al. pick a couple of randos every year to send a mystery card to, and then have a good little family chortle wondering what the recipient makes of the mystery missive. 

It goes without saying: no return address.

Anyway, belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Paul, Terrileen, Amelia, Liam, and Eve. Peace*Love*Joy*Family to you all. 

See you next year. 

The Embrace (Martin Luther King Day, 2023)

When I first saw the designs, I didn't know what to think, but I was leaning toward not liking it. But I figured it would grow on me. And, over time, each time I saw a rendering, I realized it had. 

Then, a week or so ago, I got to see the real thing.

I couldn't get all that close. The monument was still under wraps. But I got a sneak peak through the cyclone fence. (The monument was officially unveiled last Friday.) 

It's weird, a bit. But weirdly beautiful.

I like it.

It's called "The Embrace," and it's a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, who met in Boston when he was a doctoral student at Boston University and she was studying voice at The New England Conservatory. 

"The Embrace" is based on a photograph of the couple, well, embracing.

I'm sure that there will be some who roll their eyes at the thought of commemorating the Kings' love for each other, given the revelations that he had dozens of affairs while they were married. But revelations of the seamier side of his life shouldn't be used used to obliterate MLK's legacy. He was a brilliant leader of the Civil Rights movement who embraced non-violence - and was accused of being an Uncle Tom because of this embrace. King repeatedly put his life on the line, and, not yet 40, he died violently, gunned down by a racist assassin.

There are a few quotes that come to mind when Martin Luther King's name is mentioned.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.

Still hoping on all three of those, so I'll end with a fourth, lesser known quote:

Always fight with love.

Think I'll mosey on over to the Boston Common a little later to get a better look at "The Embrace."

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

I moseyed on over on Saturday. When I saw The Embrace unveiled, up close, I decided I really like it. 

The kidney ward in Nepal

The signs are all there. Warmer winters. Wilder storms. Species wiped out.

The natural world is changing in profound and mostly terrible ways, and our way of life (where our = developed and rapidly developing nations) - a way of life based on unceasing/unthinking consumption - is a major contributor to the changes.

One of the ways in which global warming is showing up is with the "link between exposure to extreme heat and chronic kidney disease."

Exactly how heat scars and cripples the microscopic tubes in the organs is still debated, researchers say, but the correlation is clear. (Source: Washington Post)

Not surprising, it's the world's most impoverished people who have things the worst. 

That link has been observed among workers toiling in rice fields in Sri Lanka and steamy factories in Malaysia, from Central America to the Persian Gulf. As the world grows hotter and climate change ushers in more frequent and extreme heat waves, public health experts fear kidney disease cases will soar among laborers who have no choice but to work outdoors.

More than 50 years ago, my father died after a many-year bout with kidney disease. Although he spent plenty of time working on his precious yard, my father's kidney disease wasn't caused by working outdoors in the blazing sun. He worked indoors.

Was his kidney disease genetic? Did his Uncle Jim - who died very young - have kidney disease? On the other side of his family, was it kidney disease that killed his cousin Francis X, who died in his forties?

Or was it triggered by rheumatic fever, acquired while my father was in the Navy?

Who knows?

But I do know that it kidney disease isn't a lot of fun. Over the seven years he lived after his diagnosis, my father had plenty of life left in him. But the disease was progressive, and he was in and out of hospitals throughout my high school and college years. 

Yes, dialysis and kidney transplants both existed back then (we're talking the 1960's; my father died in January 1971), but the treatments weren't as advanced as they are now. By the time my father was declared a candidate for dialysis, my understanding is that he would have been hooked to some sort of cumbersome machine 24/7. He and my mother decided that wasn't an option. So...

So, kidney disease is rotten.

And it's especially rotten when it mows down young men, forced by poverty to work in dreadful conditions.

This was brought home as I sat in the comfort of my nicely climate-controlled home when I read a recent article in the Washington Post about kidney disease in Nepal. 

Nepal is a very poor country, and because of its poverty, many of its young men work abroad, where they can make better money working dirty and dangerous jobs than they could with the meager wages they could earn if they stayed home. Work abroad is the lifeline for many direly impoverished families.

Suraj That Magar, now 28, was from one of them. Half the

families in his village have sent someone to work in nations in the Persian Gulf. Suraj, whose father died when he was six and who was raised by his older sister, left Nepal for Kuwait, where he found work installing windows in skyscrapers. His family didn't want to see him go, but there was no choice. His sister's husband made too little to support an extended family of eight. 

“No family wants their sons to go work in scorching heat,” [Suraj] said. “But we were in financial crisis, so everyone gave me their blessing.”

His sister took out an unimaginably large loan - $1,000 - to pay the recruitment agency. She told Suraj that if the work became too hard to handle, he should come home. 

Six months later, Suraj found himself on construction sites where he installed massive, one-ton window frames on skyscrapers rising from the Kuwait desert. Because elevators were not operational, he recounted, he had to walk several stories to access water. But with work schedules so pressing, most workers gathered around the water tank only during their one-hour break. On many days, the water would be gone before the break ended. Often, Suraj didn’t drink anything all day.

Through his hard work, Suraj was able to send his sister $150 a month, doubling the family's income. He began building a more solid house for the family, hoping to replace living in a mud-and-bamboo hut with the relative luxury of a concrete house. A propane stove would replace cooking in an open fire on the floor. 

Suraj avoided every hazard, except the one that quietly ravaged his kidneys.

One day in January, Suraj collapsed with dizziness and pain shot through his torso and swollen legs. When he checked himself into Kuwait’s Farwaniya Hospital, his Indian doctor took one look, Suraj recalled, and immediately sent him to the intensive care unit.

Suraj had severe anemia and developed a blood clot in his stomach. Before long, he lost consciousness and would need eight pints of blood replaced, according to his Kuwaiti medical records. The diagnosis: end-stage renal disease.

Suraj wasn't alone. A disproportionate number of those in the kidney ward were young men who'd worked abroad, laboring outdoors under harsh conditions.  

The Nepalese government provides some assistance to those needing medical help, but families still struggle, further impoverishing themselves in the hunt for a new kidney. (The Nepalese medical system sounds plenty familiar...)

Meanwhile, back in Nepal, Suraj and his sister are doing what they can to keep him alive. They're planning on selling the half-built house. Any plans Suraj had to get married and start a family of his own are on (likely permanent) hold. They're hoping they can somehow scrounge a kidney, scrounge a kidney transplant. That Suraj will once again be able to work.

“These epidemics of chronic kidney disease that have surfaced … [are] just the beginning,” said Richard Johnson, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado who is studying pockets of kidney disease globally. “As it gets hotter, we expect to see these diseases emerge elsewhere.”

Oh. 

Bring out your dead. Their body parts, anyway.

Megan Hess is going to prison So's her mother, Shirley Koch.

Hess has been sentenced to 20 years. Koch got 15.

They're looking at hard time because they've been illegally selling bodies and body parts out of their now-closed funeral parlor, Sunset Mesa, in Montrose, Colorado.

It is in fact (surprisingly) legal to sell body parts, and there's actually a body broker industry that supplies parts and the whole for a variety of purposes. 

You just can't do it without the permission of the next of kin. And you can't misrepresent where the bodies are going. 

“Koch and Hess neither discussed nor obtained

authorization for donation of decedents’ bodies or body parts for body broker services,” the Department of Justice said in a statement, adding that in some instances, the families had specifically declined to donate the bodies.

According to the plea deal, Hess told mourning families that their loved ones would be cremated, but instead sold parts of or whole bodies for scientific, medical or educational purposes as part of a body broker business she operated from the same premises as the funeral home. (Source: Washington Post)

Hess had quite a vertically integrated operation going there: funeral parlor, crematory, and body broker. 

This structuring of the business ensured that Hess “would always have a fresh supply of stolen bodies which she could later sell to unwitting customers” who were unaware the bodies had been stolen rather than donated, according to the government’s sentencing statement. 

Overall, Hess & Company stole roughly 500 bodies.

Among the victim stories, there was one woman who paid $2K for his father to be cremated. Come to find out, Sunset Mesa slipped her someone else's remains, while those of her father "were sold for use in a human body exhibit abroad."

Hmmm.

How'd you like to show up at a human body exhibit abroad and have the shock of recognition that the body on exhibit looked a lot like dear old dad. (By the way, I've been to a human body exhibit. It was at Boston's Museum of Science, and the bodies on show were plasticized. I must say it was fascinating. My husband and I took our niece, Caroline, who may have been 9 or 10 at the time. The exhibit is okay for kids, and I thought we had explained to Caroline what she was seeing. But about half way through, Caroline asked us, "Hey, are these real bodies?")

They're not the only body brokers to get into trouble. A man made a good faith donation of his mother's body to an Arizona body broker, thinking it was going to be used for Alzheimer's research. Come to find out, the body had been "used as a test dummy in an experimental Army IED blast. The ashes that were returned to him turned out to have only come from her hand."

Ouch.

Hess and Koch were also charged with dealing with diseased body parts - HIV, hepatitis - which can only be transported as hazardous materials, but weren't. These diseased parts were also misrepresented as healthy. 

Hess' defense was that she was in cognitive decline from a head injury she sustained as a teenager. (She is in her mid-forties.) Her mother's excuse was that she was just misguidedly trying to help her daughter make a go of her business. 

Whatever the not-so-mitigating circumstances, Hess and Koch deserve to serve some serious time. (And who can help but notice that these ghouls share their last name with notorious Nazis - Rudolf Hess and Ilse Koch? Jawohl!) 

Meanwhile, I have to say I find the idea of a body broker business pretty interesting, I guess in a weird and ghoulish kinda-sorta way.

I've always thought that donated bodies nobly found their way onto the autopsy tables of medical schools, not as bombs-away dummies for the military. Who knew? 

Thanks for the invite, Wayne LaPierre.

I have, on occasion, found myself on a somewhat surprising mailing list. 

Usually, I can figure out the breadcrumbs that got me there.

For years, I was on a number of Republican mailing (and phone) lists. At that point, I was subscribing to the Wall Street Journal online. I'm thinking that's who sold me good name.

More recently, I've been getting mailings from ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. Huh? It's been a long while since I've subscribed to the WSJ...

And then there's the NRA...

The other day, I opened my (physical) mailbox and, what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a missive from Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA.

Dear Friend, Wayne wrote:

There has never been a more important time for you to accept the enclosed NRA membership card and carry it with pride.

Right now, hundreds of gun-hating politicians, judges, radical billionaires, and freedom-hating media elites are attacking your freedom with everything in their arsenal. They're attacking in the courts, the state legislatures, the media, and even the U.S. Congress.

Little does Wayne know, apparently, that I've been donating to some of those very gun-hating politicians. 

So how did they get my name?

I only donate to Democratic politicians. And I give to many causes associated with the Democratic Party/liberals: registering voters, transporting voters to the polls, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Union of Concerned Scientists, the Obama Foundation. The charities I support are politically neutral.

I subscribe to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Hardly centers of conservative thought. 

I read the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the New York Times. 

So the NRA is definitely barking up the wrong tree. But let 'em. Let 'em spend their marketing money chasing a donation from me. Because even with all the swell enticements, I'll be taking a pass - make that a hard pass - on signing up for the NRA.

For a discounted membership rate - $30 a year vs. $45; that's 50% off!!! - I'm entitled to three benefits:

• A credentials package with a personalized membership card that I guess is more official than the one they sent me.
• My choice of an NRA magazine - "month after month of eye-popping photography, information-packed reviews of the hottest new guns, gear and ammo, hundreds of hunting tips, plus all the news and strategies you need to defend your freedoms."
• An NRA Rip-Stop Camo Duffel Bag that, presumably, I can stuff with ammo and the like.

But I'm wondering about that eye-popping photography in their magazines. 

Personally, I get enough eye-popping photography when I see pictures of the grieving families of those massacred in the latest mass killing in a nightclub, grocery store, or synagogue. When I see the school pictures of the sweet little kiddos killed at Uvalde and Shady Hook. Pictures of the surviving youngsters streaming out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, hand over their heads, as if they've done something wrong. 

As for Wayne LaPierre looking for my money. Har, har, hardee har har.

Still, gotta wondering how I got on their mailing list. Did Hillsdale College dime me? Hope the NRA paid for the privilege. 

Corporate ice bath? No thanks.

I've done the business offsites where we play volleyball. Where we do a tug of war. Where we all take a personality test to figure out how we can get better at working together. Where we compose and deliver a cheer. Where we build something with Tinker Toys. Where we escape the Escape Room. Where we bowl. Where we paint our own version of a Van Gogh. Where we sit back to back with a colleague and reveal some deep down desire. Or whatever. Where we trustingly fell back blind-folded into the arms of a colleague. 

So very twentieth century. So yesterday.

Apparently, the current bonding thang is all taking a plunge into an ice bath. As happened when the execs of Daring Foods - a rapidly growing company that makes "plant based chicken" - decided they needed to put their heads together and figure out what to do about the turnover that was becoming as rapid as its growth.

There was one solution: Jump into an ice bath together. The executives spent six minutes in icy cold water, breathing through the pain. “After we all did an ice plunge, and our endorphins were through the roof and we all felt great about ourselves,” [Founder and Chief Executive] Mr. [Ross] Mackay said, they “ripped the Band-Aid off” and addressed the challenges they were facing. (Source: NY Times)

They took the plunge at Remedy Place, a "social wellness club" located, not surprisingly, in New York City and LA. 

Within the spalike setting, members are encouraged to socialize while getting treatments such as vitamin drips, lymphatic drainage massages and cryotherapy.

Hmmmm.

For the most part, I liked my colleagues just fine. Some of them even became life friends. But I can't imagine sitting around with any of them having lymphatic drainage massages or vitamin drips.

The closest I came, I guess, was when I got to go to my company's Winners' Circle trip to Hawaii. 

For some reason, the company decided to add some home office "winners" to the list of sales people who got to go to the big, swank reward trip to Lanai. My boss nominated me, and away I went to paradise. And, other than the few obligatory sessions that magically turned the entire boondoggle into a business expense for the company, it was paradise. 

But it was out and out weird to encounter colleagues bare-legged and bare-whatevered, in their little white terry robes, as we strolled in an out of the spa for stone massages and seaweed wraps. 

Of course, once you got into the spa, you got your stone massage and seaweed wrap in a private room.

No side-by-side lymphatic drain massage for us

Thank God!

Worse yet - to me, at least - Daring Foods also uses the approach on interviews.

Sure, I'd expect an organization that makes plant-based chicken to be a little more daring than the high tech outfits i worked for, but, but, but... 

Mr. MacKay even interviewed a job candidate there recently. “We did an IV drip and had a conversation for an hour,” he said. “We need someone who fits our culture, and this is a good way to find out.”

I'm all in favor of making sure someone is a good fit for the company. But an IV drip to get the job? I would have been permanently unemployed.

Across the country, companies are entertaining clients with foot rubs and sound baths. Team brainstorming sessions are taking place in ice plunges and infrared saunas. Meetings with current or potential bosses are happening over IV infusions. According to executives, employees and spas, companies and entrepreneurs are conducting more business than ever in places designed for wellness — and cutting edge treatments.

“The amount of meetings is actually absurd, considering this is a spa,” said Jonathan Leary, the founder of Remedy Place.

"Actually absurd" sounds about right. But that doesn't mean it's not happening.

“No one is interested in team yoga anymore,” said Kane Sarhan, a founder at the Well, a retreat with locations in New York City and Washington, Conn., which attracts companies from Boston. “It’s much more dynamic stuff like IVs, group support circles, sound baths, energy work.”

Mr. Sarhan said Fortune 100 companies and big financial firms are using the Well’s facilities for sales meetings, team events and client get-togethers.

“We’ve been teaching them tapping and palm reading,” he said. “People are exhausted and people have been sick. It’s the responsibility of leaders to help teams deal with it, and giving a discount on a gym membership or a quiet room in an office isn’t cutting it so they are coming to us.”

Tapping? Palm reading? Sounds kind of Seance on a Wet Afternoon-y.

Still, it would have been kind of fun to learn palm reading. Fun but a little dangerous. Imagine if you read someone's palm and figured out they were out with their long knives to get you!

...The most popular spot for meetings: the foot rub area. “I’ve seen dozens and dozens of meetings take place at foot baths each week,” Mr. Sarhan said, laughing. “People have their computers out on their laps.”

Sorry, but meetings in the foot baths?

Sure, it's fine to go for a mani-pedi with the girls, but hanging out having a foot rub with colleagues or a potential manager? 

Thanks, but no thanks. 

Guess I'm just not cut out for the modern world of business. 

Good thing I'm an old retired geezer.

Send in the federal sharpshooters

A few years back, I was taking a walk with my friend Peter near his home in Swampscott, a town on Boston's North Shore.  We were about to head onto the beach when a coyote ambled across our path. Although we didn't have a dog with us, we decided to cede the beach stroll to the ambling coyote.

Peculiarly, although I tend to associate coyotes with the west - drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweed, etc. -coyotes have been in Massachusetts since the 1950s. Now, they're pretty widespread throughout the state. Including in Boston and its environs.

I don't recall ever seeing coyotes in Boston - our gift from Mother Nature tends to the be wild turkey - but they're here.

And they're on the Cape, too.

My sister Kath used to have a home in Wellfleet, located on a nature preserve, and at night we could hear the coyotes howling. Aroooooooo!

It's generally not Coyotes 'R Us around here, but periodically, there are news reports about a cat or small dog being spirited away by coyotes.

But in the North Shore town of Nahant - a small, densely populated little burg just a hop, skip, and a causeway from Peter's home in Swampscott - things have gotten coyote ugly. 

No humans have been harmed by Nahant’s coyotes, estimated to number about a dozen. But after the disappearances of more than two dozen pets in roughly two years — and reports of three brazen, fatal attacks this year on leashed dogs accompanied by their owners — the town is ever more on edge. Its isolated geography — Nahant is essentially an island connected to the mainland by a narrow, 1.5-mile causeway — contributes to the sense of menace felt by some residents. (Source: Boston Globe)

Just because it's nothing as dramatic as "the dingo stole my baby," Nahant has not been having a happy time of it. 

So the town's Board of Selectmen voted last month to enlist the help of federal sharpshooters who are part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Federal sharpshooters who aren't in the military or Secret Service? Who knew?

The plan has relieved many anxious residents, some of whom now carry whistles and baseball bats on strolls around town, and dress their dogs in $100 “coyote jackets” covered with metal spikes to repel attacks.

There are a few different coyote jackets out there, and most of them come in pink and blue. At $100+, they're not cheap. But, of course, it beats seeing your pupper dragged into oblivion and beyond by a coyote.

“I love animals, and I don’t want to see them killed, but some child on a porch is going to get taken,” said Lisa Wrenn, who watched a coyote snatch her 12-pound Chihuahua, Penelope, off a leash last summer as she stood on her front stairs. Left holding the leash and empty collar, she never saw the dog again, she said.

I'm sure Lisa Wrenn wishes that she'd gotten some coyote protection for Penelope.  Sure, I'd rather see a chihuahua carried off than someone's baby. Still, I can't imagine the horror Lisa experienced. Or poor little Penelope, for that matter.

Not sure when the federal sharpshooters are due in town.

But I've got some advice for those critters. (The Nahant coyotes, not the federal sharpshooters.)

Go West, young coyote. And don't stop at Worcester. Git along, little coyotes, and don't look back until you get to the New York border. Even then, keep a-movin'. You know that Wyoming will be your new home.

Let the Twitter janitors go? Hey, I worked at a company like this!

Let the Twitter janitors go? Hey, I worked in a company like that! 

Elon Musk has been busy. What with the simul-destruction of Twitter and Tesla, when does that bad boy sleep? Among other tasks he's set for himself, he's going insanely deep on cost-cutting at Twitter. Which is something you just gotta do when you buy a non-money making company and saddle it with annual debt of $1B. 

First on the Musk hit parade was savagely cutting the employee ranks. Headcount will roll, he decreed. And it did. 

Then Musk trained his keen focus on non-labor expenses. 

Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. (Source: NY Times) 

The service providers Twitter has put the screws to - screws like skipping payments - included KPMG and Deloitte, which worked on areas like security, tax prep, and compliance. I suspect this isn't going over well with KPMG and Deloitte, or with the organizations Twitter was supposed to be complying with. Like the FTC. 

The company missed payments to and then renegotiated its contract with Carrot, a benefits provider for fertility services including egg and sperm freezing and in vitro fertilization, according to two people close to the company. On Thursday, Carrot notified Twitter employees that the fertility benefit amount would be halved in the new year. A representative for Carrot did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 75% of the employees have been laid off, this may not be impacting all that many folks. But it you were relying on this benefit...Yikes. 

But wait! There's more (or less, depending on the way you look at it.)

The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said... At Twitter's San Francisco HQ has cut its floor space beyond what would be proportional to the draconian layoffs that have occurred. With people packed into more confined

spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

I never had to bring my own toilet paper to work, but I was at Wang for a couple of years while it was spinning into its death spiral, so I know what it's like to work when the cleaning staff has been greatly reduced.

Wang was a frugal company to begin with. Among other things, I stayed at hotels I didn't consider safe. On one trip to Cleveland, I wedged the desk chair up against the door to provide myself with a bit more security.

But when things got really bad, maintenance of the facilities was one of the first and most obvious things to go.

They removed one third of the overhead lights, making a dim and dingy environment even dimmer and dingier. They also removed half the lights in the parking lot.

They stopped picking up the trash from individual cubicles. You had to bring your trash to a large bin on your floor, but these weren't emptied all that regularly, and were often overflowing with coffee grounds and banana peels.

People became more and more careless. I found a discarded tea bag tossed in an aisle. On a staircase, I almost stepped into a gigantic hawked up loogie.

The bathrooms were a disaster. We joked about catching typhus. One of my male colleagues reported that, in a men's room stall, he came across a row of dried boogers lined up over the toilet paper holder.

Ah, what a charming stroll down memory lane. 

And however terrible Wang was, it has to have been a million times better a place than Twitter. At least there was no Elon Musk on the scene 

Snowflake Bentley, one ingenious Yankee

We haven't had much snow so far this season. Not that I'm complaining, but in truth I don't mind a little a bit of snow. 

I love being out during a snowstorm. Not a raging blizzard, mind you, where the wind is howling and little snowflake pellets are pinging your face. But a kinder, gentler snowstorm. The ones that make you feel as if you're walking around in a snow globe. 

Even better, I love being inside during a snowstorm, looking out, drinking my cup of tea, all comfy and cozy. 

And I love that snow storms are made up of snowflakes.

Seriously, there are few things in nature that are more beautiful than snowflakes.

I can still remember the thrill of catching a snowflake on a wool mitten and admiring its intricacy and beauty for that fleeting moment before it disappeared.

And one of the most wonderful things in the wonderful world of science is that fact that no two snowflakes are alike.

I'll confess to a lack of curiosity about how someone figured this out. If I had to venture a guess, I'd have said some nutty professor somewhere. 

Turns out it was a farmer from Vermont, who first snapped a photo of a snowflake -  or performed the late nineteenth century equivalent of snapping a photo - in 1885, when he was twenty.

[Wilson Alwyn] Bentley is credited as the first person to ever photograph snow crystals — commonly called snowflakes — up close. His painstaking process and hobby was perfected over decades using a homemade contraption involving a microscope mounted to a bellows camera. His passion for photographing snow earned him the nicknames “Snowflake” and “Snowflake Man,” the latter etched on his grave when he died in 1931.

And his life’s work formed the basis for the old adage “no two snowflakes are alike.”

“I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others,” Bentley said in 1925. “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated." (Source: Boston Globe)

His discovery was aided by his mother. She'd been a school teacher who brought a small microscope to her marriage, and later gave it to her intellectually curious son Wilson. 

Fascinated by what he saw under his microscope, young Wilson tried to draw snowflakes. Alas, the snowflakes melted too quickly to capture the detail.

But a camera could.

Trouble was, there wasn't a lot of spare cash around a remote Vermont farm in the late eighteen hundreds. 

As luck would have it, the Bentley family came into an inheritance and bought a camera with it. Jerry rigging the camera to a new microscope, and capturing the snowflakes on a chilled glass plate, did the trick. Talk about Yankee ingenuity. 

After that first successful photograph:

He would go on to photograph well over 5000 snow crystals (never finding two the same), and his documentation of this work advanced the study of meteorology in his time. His photomicrographs were acquired by institutes of higher learning all over the world and his writings on these subjects were published in many journals and magazines including Scientific American, National Geographic and The National Weather Service Research Journal. (Source: SnowflakeBentley.com)

Here's what Wilson Alwyn Bentley had to say about his early days as a stay-at-home explorer:

When the other boys of my age were playing with popguns and sling-shots, I was absorbed in studying things under this microscope: drops of water, tiny fragments of stone, a feather dropped from a bird's wing, a delicately veined petal from some flower.

But always, from the very beginning, it was snowflakes that fascinated me most. The farm folks, up in this north country, dread the winter; but I was supremely happy, from the day of the first snowfall-which usually came in November-until the last one, which sometimes came as late as May.

Talk about making the most of a brutal Northern New England winter.  

I just love this story. Almost as much as I love snowflakes.

But wait, there's more. 

Bentley died of pneumonia in 1931 - pneumonia caught while he was out and about during a blizzard, photographing snowflakes.

If ever there were a pure Vermont story, this be it.

Southwest's aborted mission to be "the most loved airline"

It's now over a week since the Nightmare Before Christmas Eve travel meltdown, and for all I know, Southwest Airlines is still digging themselves out. The debacle definitely seems to be turning in to a pretty nasty version of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Sure, the horrendous nationwide weather situation - deep freezes, blizzards, flooding - impacted all airlines. When it's 8 below and there's four feet of snow on the ground, it's sort of hard to get airborne. But Southwest was responsible for an outsized proportion of cancellations. During those horrendous days just before Christmas, Southwest was responsible for the clear majority of cancellations. The number 70% sticks in my head, but I couldn't find the citation. Whatever the number was, it was well out of whack with Southwest's domestic market share, which is 17.4%.

And the festivities, or lack thereof, continued well into last week, when Southwest's proportion of cancelled flights got even worse.

Southwest accounted for about 90 percent of Wednesday’s flight cancellations by U.S. airlines and about 99 percent of Thursday’s grounded flights. Other carriers appear to have recovered from the storm, posting typical numbers of cancellations, according to data from the tracking service FlightAware. (Source: Washington Post)

Turns out, Southwest's troubles, and the troubles of the hundreds of thousands of travelers - lost luggage, extra expenses incurred, refunds in limbo - who were booked on Southwest, had less to do with the rotten weather conditions and more to do with Southwest's setup.

The issues partly stem from the carrier’s unique “point-to-point” model, in which planes tend to fly from destination to destination without returning to one or two main hubs. Most airlines follow a “hub-and-spoke” model, in which planes typically return to a hub airport after flying out to other cities.

When bad weather hits, hub-and-spoke airlines can shut down specific routes and have plans in place to restart operations when the skies clear. But bad weather can scramble multiple flights and routes in a point-to-point model, leaving Southwest staff out of position to resume normal operations.

The vast snowstorm last week exposed other vulnerabilities in Southwest’s network. Inadequate computer systems made it difficult to shift crews to where they were needed most. In addition, Southwest lacks agreements with other airlines and could not rebook passengers on competitors’ flights, forcing many people to wait days until Southwest clears its backlog. (Source: NY Times)

Pretty interesting, given that one of Southwest's differentiators has been its operational efficiency.

Another big differentiator: Southwest pride itself on being friendly. In your face friendly. As in sing-along whether you like it or not friendly. As in, jeepers, let's have some fun on this flight. As in ukulele lessons for everyone. 

After all, part of their mission is "to be the world's most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline."

Most loved? Give me the cattle car treatment we used to get on the old (long gone and occasionally lamented) Eastern Shuttle on its Boston-LaGuardia route any old day. Just get me there, and let me travel in peace.

Delayed and canceled flights are always stressful. I remember plenty of mad airport scrambles, in the pre-Internet, pre-smartphone world, to grab a new flight. I remember sitting in at the gate for interminable hours, waiting to get on a plane. Or sitting on a plane on the tarmac waiting to take off. Or get off.

The only good cancellation I remember was one to Frankenmuth, Michigan. 

Sure, I would probably have gotten a kick out of seeing a bit of a Bavarian-themed town, but if my flight is going to be canceled by a snowstorm, I'd rather have it be canceled while I'm still in Boston, than get stranded in Frankenmuth, Michigan. (Especially given that, as it turned out, we didn't get the business we were after.)

But getting delayed or stranded over Christmas, when all you want is to get home for the holidays, especially with kiddos in tow? How terrible!

The whole mess has gotten Southwest scrambling to try to live up to its love mission. With little luck so far. Customers are understandably and rightly pissed.

So Southwest is taking a big reputational hit and, of course, a hit to its bottom line. And it now has the Feds breathing down their neck, as Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has called for an investigation into why all this is happening at Southwest.

Meanwhile, competitor airlines, including United and Frontier, are looking like the good guys by capping fares on routes that both they and Southwest serve. If there's any love left in the wonderful world of holiday travel, it'll flee Southwest for United and Frontier, which will attempt to accommodate the Southwest refugees without gouging them. 

One big Bah Humbug of a holiday for Southwest Airlines, I'm afraid.

Hope that, now that we're into the new year, all the tuckered out, beleaguered Southwest travelers have gotten sorted out and are back where they belong. 

Liar, liar. George Santos is completely on fire.

Well, today's a big day in Washington, DC, as Congress will be sworn in. 

And big bad day for the country, as the Republicans are taking over the House and, in the thrall of their growing, vocal, and power-flexing extremist members, are promising to spend the next two years investigating anyone and everyone who's ticked them off. Joe Biden. (Hunter Biden.) Merrick Garland. Doctor Fauci. The members of the January 6th Committee. They'll probably be dragging Hillary Clinton back in. Just because they can. 

Why govern when it's more fun to go on a performative revenge tour? Let the spittle fly.

It must be a particularly exciting day for those coming into Congress for the first time.

I'm wondering whether Representative-elect George Santos, who represents a district on Long Island, will be one of them.

After all, even by the lax standards when it comes to political resume accuracy, Santos is at an almost unheard of Pinocchio

level.  

You name it, Santos has lied about it.

Where he went to school. What degree he earned. Where he worked. His family background. 

On Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted to lying about having graduated from Baruch College and making misleading claims that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He also acknowledged that he was not, as he had claimed, making substantial income as a landlord. (Source: NY Times)

Not enough to lie about having a degree from Baruch. Santos said he had studied at NYU. No record there. He also claimed he attended the prestigious NY prep school, Horace Mann, but had to leave because his parents had a financial reversal of fortune - part of his fabricated persona as someone who came up from nothing and realized the American dream. No record of Santos ever having attended Horace Mann.

Then there's the BS about his work history. His employment history is a lot more pedestrian and less lucrative than anything that would have happened at Goldman. As a young man, he did, however, allegedly earn a few bucks embezzling from one of his mother's patients (she was a nurse) in Brazil.

His lies about his family history are particularly weird.

CNN also reviewed more instances of Santos providing additional false history of his family’s background. In one interview, Santos said his mother’s family’s historical Jewish name was “Zabrovsky,” and later appeared to operate a GoFundMe campaign for a pet charity (which he falsely claimed was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) under that alias. Genealogists CNN previously spoke with found no evidence of Jewish or Ukrainian heritage in his family tree.

In another, he said his mother, whose family has lived in Brazil since the late 1800s, was a White immigrant from Belgium...

Santos also denied that he falsely called himself Jewish, claiming he “never claimed to be Jewish” but jokingly said he was “Jew-ish” to the New York Post. He also falsely claimed that his grandparents “survived the Holocaust” and fled Europe to escape Jewish persecution. But CNN found that Santos called himself an “American Jew” and “Latino Jew” on multiple occasions. The Republican Jewish Coalition disinvited Santos from appearing at any of its events because he “misrepresented his heritage.” (Source: CNN)

There are plenty of other lies/potential lies emerging as the saga plays out.  

Santos, for his part, as pooh-poohed the idea that he's a liar of the pants on fire variety. Au contraire. His claims, he says, were nothing but minor "embellishments," "a poor choice of words."

Actually, his embellishments were an excellent choice of words if all you really wanted was to get elected.

Santos has also defended his résumé lies by pointing out that fudging the details on your résumé isn't a crime. 

But what might be a crime surrounds the $700K that he lent his campaign. Where'd the money come from? Was it a legitimate donation or something illegally funneled through his work? And how did he go from earning $55K a year to making millions on a couple of smart/lucky deals the next?

And it's also not exactly (legally) kosher to solicit political donations based on lies. 

The Nassau County DA, who - like Santos - is a Republican, is investigating Santos, and has vowed to prosecute if she finds a crime. 

Federal investigators are also taking a look. 

I rarely agree with Tulsi Gabbard, the crackpot erstwhile Democrat who left the party for the greener pastures of Fox News. 

She interviewed Santos and called him on his parade of lies.

“These are blatant lies,” Ms. Gabbard said. “And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.” (Source: NY Times)

What a bum!

O Brave New Year!

I grew up watching the New Year's Rose Parade from Pasadena. Even though I was watching on a black & white TV, there was still plenty of oohing and aahing about the bee-yoo-ti-ful flower-covered floats and the pretty cowgirls on palominos.

The parade is, of course, a lot better in living color. But at my age a lot of the oohing and aahing has been replaced by shock and awe at the nutty effort that goes into creating those bee-yoo-ti-ful flower-covered floats. And the pretty cowgirls on palominos? They seem to have been replaced by zaftig middle-aged bleach blondes who look like their next stop is the Republican National Convention.

Nonetheless, I'll probably put the parade on for a few minutes later this morning.

I was surprised that the parade wasn't on yesterday, on New Year's Day. But it turns out that the Rose Bowl football game - a bowl game that doesn't factor in to this year's college championship playoffs - will be played today. And/or observance of Sunday proprieties. And/or the NFL scheduled Thus the parade is today and not on New Year's.

Other than the Rose Parade and, I believe, the other bowl parades (Orange? Sugar?) of my childhood, and the follow-on games, I don't remember all that much about New Year's Day when I was a kid.

It was a Holy Day, so we went to Mass. And the next day - unless, like this year, the holiday/Holy Day fell on a Sunday and was observed by government and business on Monday - meant back to school.

Did I stay up on New Year's Eve to listen to Guy Lombardo and countdown to the big calendar turn? Not that I remember. I do recall being excited in 1959 that we were heading into the sixties. 

As an adult, New Year has never been all that interesting to me.

I think I've gone out once or twice. Some years, I've watched the First Night Parade that passes nearby. And/or watched the kiddie fireworks from Boston Common, which I can sees out my front door.  Some years, I just go to bed early. My late husband liked to watch the Three Stooges Marathon. Those were definitely early-to-bed years for me. (Nyuck, nyuck, nycukc.) Some years, I go to my sister Trish's, as I did this year. And we even made it to midnight.

Mostly, New Year's Day means take the tree down - it went out with this morning's recycle - and gearing myself for the long, cold, dreary month of January.

I may make a half-baked resolution, but typically the only resolution I ever stick to is the implicit resolution I make to ignore any resolutions I've made.

Still, I enter 2023 guardedly optimistic that, on the personal front, I will get more writing in. More reading. (Stay the f' off of Twitter.) That I'll clean out all my cabinets, drawers, and closets and haul whatever I don't need and/or want off to Goodwill. That I'll do a bit more travel than I did during he peak covid years. (Assuming 2023 doesn't turn into a peak covid year.)

And I'll try to stop worrying about what 2023 will hold for the country, for the world.

How will Ukraine fare? The immigrants who, despite all, keep coming to this fractured, fractious, unwelcoming nation of ours? Will The Law finally catch up with Trump and his minions? (I don't need to have Trump in prison. I just need him to STFU.) Will the weather get crazier? Will there be more bomb cyclones? Will covid finally play itself ou?

And what about the Red Sox?

Sure, this is more personal than earth-shaking, but for anyone who lives in New England, living and dying by fortunes of the Olde Towne Team, what happens with the Red Sox produces a pretty universal threat. 

Will I hold fast to my boycott, or get sucked back in to paying ticket prices that are among the highest in baseball, to watch a last place team devoid of star power?

O Brave New Year! 

I wonder what wonders it will hold for us.