Yet another bit of advice on what to do when you're laid off

There's certainly no dearth of advice out there on what to do when you're laid off. Most of what I've seen is fine - if duh obvious: Create a résumé! Network! Use whatever outplacement services you're offered!

But there are a few crucial items that, at least in the articles I've seen, seem to be missing.

So I thought I'd fill in a few based-on-my-own experience blanks:

Google yourself:  If you don't already know whether and if your name comes up, find out now. Any prospective employer - even anyone you line up for an "informational interview" - will do it. If you come up empty, do something about it - at minimum, get on LinkedIn. If you come up full - but full of awful, embarrassing stuff - check out BrandYourself: these guys may be able to help.

Stay out of online gripe rooms for disgruntled ex-employees: When I left Genuity, I signed up for an ex-employee list serve. Mostly, I wanted to check out the rumors that the lay-off class of May 2002 wasn't going to get their severance checks because of the company's impending bankruptcy. But I was assuming that, in general, there'd be useful information passed back and forth on it.  Nothing could have been further from the reality.What was zipping around were a whole lot of venomous screed about management, conspiracy theories about how the lay-off selections were made, and incredibly depressing poor-me stories about folks who had been laid off the year before and were living in their parents' damp and mildewed basements...Stay away from these haunts. Misery loves company, but the level of misery in some of these places will just poison your brain.

Make lunch dates with employed friends (not at your former company): Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch? Call up old friends and set up a lunch get together. Nine times out of ten, they'll pay. Obviously, it would be really scroungy to keep going back to the same well - and fairness does dictate that, once you're back working, you spring for lunch for your unemployed pals. Still, it's a reasonable way to be able to go out to eat, without having to worry about eating into your miserable unemployment check. (It is not, however, without risk. There is some possibility that your employed friends are not aware of this practice.)

Avoid asking about/or listening to anything that has to do with office politics, stupid things happening at work, etc.: I worked for a small company called Softbridge for over nine years. To say I lived and breathed the place is an understatement. And then, I got dumped. More precisely, I was fired for getting into a knock-down, drag-out argument with my boss, the company's president, about how we were going to "position" the coming lay-offs at the post-lay-off all hands meeting. I earned my pink slip by throwing down this gauntlet: "You say what you're going to say, and I'll say what I'm going to say, and we'll see who they believe."

In any event, while I was still living and breathing Softbridge, I had gotten into the habit of having a first-thing-in-the-morning work re-hash/pre-hash session with my close friend and colleague George. I would be at work by 8, and George would call me on his commute in, and we'd talk shop.

The day after I got the heave-ho, George called me at home for his usual check in. As I started to listen to his (admittedly amusing) account of the prior day's events at Softbridge, a big, fat old 200-watt light bulb went off in my brain: I am no longer interested in this crap. It is no longer mine. And you know what, that light bulb was both illuminating and liberating. So I told George that, while I still wanted to be his friend, I no longer wanted to hear what any of the cast of characters at Softbridge was up to, other than the personal stuff like who had a baby.

Our friendship survived - and so did my psyche.

Truly, once you're out of place, you really don't want to get bogged down in the office minutiae. Sure, a day ago it was your lifeblood, but today: any scintilla of energy devoted to talking/thinking about the dumb memo that X sent, or the bogus thing Y did on the sales call, is a wasted erg.

Anyway, those are my ideas for those of you experiencing a lay off for the first time. And while I'm dealing out free advice, here are a couple of earlier posts on things to do if you're anticipating a lay-off. One practical, one not so (but probably more fun).

Dog-food-as-pâté? (Ain't this story just chopped liver?)

My brother-in-law Rick sent me a link to a post he'd seen on Business Insider that cited a study of an experiment in which people were asked to rate the taste of a couple of pricey canned pâtés along side of supermarket liverwurst, and spreads made out of Spam and Newman's Own dog food.

Given that 72% of the experiment's participants ranked the dog food as the worst tasting spread, the blogpost title - "Good Depression News! Dog Food And Pâté Taste The Same"was a bit misleading. But, hey, there's a recession on, and I hadn't yet seen any articles on retirees resorting to cat food, so the idea seemed almost fresh. And, with the old Honeymooners episode in which Ralph mistakes dog food for chopped liver in mind, the topic was sufficiently interesting to me that I clicked through to see the report on the full study, published as a working paper of the American Association of Wine Economists. (Once again, I am in slack-jawed awe of the infinite professional and organizational possibilities of this vast and varied economy of ours. Other than the wine economists themselves, who even knew that there was such a profession?)

The paper, by John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, is delightfully dead-pan academic, and is all footnoted and referenced up. Perhaps my favorite sentence in the study is:

Measuring the hedonic tone free of bias requires a double-blind trial (Goldstein et al. 2008).

As for the trial itself, people really could distinguish between expensive Trois Cochons pâtés and tricked out dog food. And even between tricked out dog food and tricked out Spam.

The aggregate taste ranking of the dog food was highly significant (see Table III). The ranking difference between dog food and Spam was greater than the P<0.05 threshold, and the difference was greater than the P<0.01 threshold for all other samples. Subjects' preference for the duck liver mousse was also highly significant. The only sample that was not ranked significantly differently than the duck liver mousse (at the P<0.05 level) was the pork liver pâté.

Personally, I'd just as soon eat tricked out dog food as Spam. I can only guess that the Spam spread tasted better because it was saltier than the dog food (which, by the way, was made of ingredients that were okayed for human consumption).

As a kid, however, I did love Spam, right down to the tongue-searing, chemical-sodium little zing that you got on the first bite. We didn't have it very often - my father spent 4 years in the Navy, and had eaten enough Spam to last a lifetime - but when Dad was away, we would beg my mother to make Spam and home fries for dinner. Yummy-yum-yum.

And, while we're on the topic of dog food, I did try a bite of Alpo once. I knew that some of what went into the making of dog food was ingredients that appealed to the olfactory sense of the pet owner. (Somewhere during business school, I'd sat through a presentation by some Arthur D. Little researchers who specialized in food smell/flavor. I cannot for the life of me remember what the course was.) Anyway, many years ago, as I was opening a can of Alpo beef stew for the family pooch, I decided to grab a bite. It may have smelled pretty good, but the taste was decidedly, disappointingly bland. The dog seemed to like it just fine, however.

Back to the study, while the participants weren't exactly wolfing down the dog food:

Only 3 of 18 subjects correctly identified sample C as the dog food (see Table IV). A Chi-Squared test did not support the hypothesis that the distribution of guesses was significantly different from random (X2=0.433, P=0.9797).

The authors attributed this to their having so convinced their "subjects that the experience would not be disgusting, they might have excluded the worst-tasting sample from their guesses."

The study notes that the experiment was conducted on December 31st, between 8 and 10 p.m., in Brooklyn, NY.

Hmmm. Sounds like a New Year's Eve party. Which is was, and the authors provide a helpful link to a description of the event, at which the subjects were asked to do blind tests to see if they could distinguish between red and white wine. And then to participate in the dog-food taste-off.

Somewhat disappointingly, even after drinking, most folks liked the "real pâté" better than the ersatz. And, given how we all love to catch snobs out, the rank order for the five spreads correlated perfectly with the price. Those hoping that they would be able to swap out expensive for cheap goods be warned: sometimes you do get what you pay for.

 

Bowled Over: why is Congress getting involved in the BCS?

Okay, Pink Slip generally avoids things political, but I need a little help here.

We've got wars going in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden is still OUT THERE. We are grappling with the blowback from an economy that was sustained for far too long by an over-mortgaged house of cards. Ice shelves half the size of Pluto are calving in Antarctica. Whether swine flu is a bona fide or media-hyped pandemic, we're all reaching for the surgical face mask every time someone in ear shot blows their nose. The noisome and ill-prepared boomers are reaching retirement age.

And the United States Congress has nothing better to worry about than whether the college football champeen should be decided by the current Bowl Championship Series or a revised playoff system?

Am I missing something here?

Anyway, I caught an AP report on Boston.com the other day that says that Texas Representative Joe Barton has "introduced legislation that would prevent the NCAA from labeling a game a national championship unless it's the outcome of a playoff system." Illinois Representative Bobby Rush - yes that Bobby Rush, the Bobby Rush of 1960's Black Panther Party renown - is co-sponsoring the bill.

The way it works (or doesn't work) now is that the BCS folks use some combination of polls and computer rankings (who beat whom pair-offs) to decide who gets the bid to play in a national championship game.

The bias is, apparently, towards that big, national, semi-pro schools - Florida and Oklahoma squared off this year - and against the lesser-known, who-cares Old Siwash teams (like Boise State, which is riled up because, despite having had undefeated seasons, it never gets asked to The Dance. Sniff, sniff.).

Relying on an evergreen Republican boogey-man, the analogy that Rep. Barton uses is that the BCS is "like communism [in that] you can't fix it."

Rep. Rush uses the old bleeding-heart bleat:

""How is this fair?" asked the subcommittee chairman, Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, who has co-sponsored Barton's bill. "How can we justify this system ... are the big guys getting together and shutting out the little guys?"

Apparently, this pops up as a Congressional issue fairly regularly, often after a member feels that their team has been snubbed because they're not members of one of the major conferences that dominate/control the bowl picture. Which is how Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah has gotten involved. Hatch "has put the BCS on the agenda for the Judiciary's antitrust subcommittee this year."

Hatch's home state U is a member of the wound-licking Mountain West Conference. The MWC is not a member of the elite golden circle of conferences that are automatically included in an important bowl, or apparently likely to get tapped for the big kahuna playoff game. So it's hired a Washington lobbyist to plump for changes to the way the Bowl Championship Series currently works.

Even the President has weighed in on this. Last fall, as president-elect, he indicated a preference for an eight-team playoff system. (No word lately on his feelings. Perhaps he is more focused on somewhat more pressing agenda items.)

Maybe there should be a playoff system. The other major inter-collegiate sports have them - March Madness, the Frozen Four, the College Baseball World Series. But it seems to me that this is for the NCAA to take up with its members, no doubt in consultation with their deep-pocketed friends in the networks that televise college games.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why this is a matter that Congress should be spending time on.

When I was a kid, when something was getting blown out of proportion, we used the expression, "let's not make a Federal case out of it."

Pink Slip to Joe Barton, Bobby Rush, and Orrin Hatch. Let's not make a Federal case of who's the ranking college football team. Why don't you get back to your real work of partisan grandstanding, pork-barreling, and campaigning for your re-election.

May-Day! May-Day! The Yankees can't sell their pricey seats.

Not that I want to gloat about anything negative having to do with the New York Yankees...In fact, no one on the face of the earth wants to gloat less than I do about the Yankee's problems, the Dalai Lama aside. (I just checked out his website, and I was right. It's definitely a no-gloating zone.)

So, I will not spend even a New York nanosecond mentioning that the Red Sox beat the Yankees three straight last weekend. After all, the season is long, a lot can happen, and the Bronx Bombers have been known to get the better of The Olde Towne Team on occasion.

That occasion could conceivably occur early next week, when the Red Sox travel to the new Yankee Stadium for a pair.

It will be interesting to see if the prime location"Legends Suite" of the Bronx' $1.5B palais de base ball are occupied. It'll be easy enough to figure this out, even if the announcers don't mention it(which they will), as the seats are behind home plate and/or near the dugouts and thus are visible during much of the television broadcasts.

The Yankees, it seems, overreached when they priced those seats at $500-$2500 (that's if you take the season's tickets discount into consideration; a one-game purchase of the top seat sets you back $2,650).

I'm sure that the Yankees did market research before setting these prices, but I'm guessing that a lot of the cigar smoking, braces-snapping, Wall Street machers who said yes-yes during those focus groups are not doing as much swank entertainment as they were a year or so ago. Lehman, Bear Sterns, Merrill... Hey, it's hard even for companies that are still in business to justify this kind of spending, let alone those that no longer exist.

I'm sure the Yankees aren't thrilled to be taking a hit on these seats: money is money, and the Yankees bulked up their payroll this off-season. Still, these empty seats aren't likely to be causing a colossal financial problem for the fat-cattiest team in baseball: they still make huge money from their TV network, and from selling paraphernalia. Plus, they are briskly selling the "cheap seats", which, of course, aren't all that cheap. The days when you could take the family out to the old ball game for $20 (including the cost of peanuts and Crackerjacks for everyone) are long gone.

I saw a Newsday article that noted that professional sports made the decision quite a while ago to cater to the elite (often poseurs) at the expense of the passionate working-stiff fan. TV's the thing for the masses. The article cited Stanford economist Roger Noll who pointed out that, if these seats continue to go empty, the Yankees will find some way to offer group pricing that makes them more attractive. He predicted, however, that they probably wouldn't change prices outright mid-season, since that would tick off all the schnooks who actually did spring for the full price.  Next year, the prices will no doubt come down - the Yankees have as much as admitted they made a pricing blunder  - and:

In effect, Noll said, all the Yankees have done -- and the Mets, to a smaller degree with slightly less outrageous prices -- is give the rest of professional sports a warning "not to break the ceiling" with similarly dramatic boosts.

Well, it turns out Noll - typical economist prognosticator - wasn't quite right.  On Tuesday, the Yankees announced that they were slashing prices on the luxe seats, cutting them in half. They'll be making good for those who paid the original price, offering them refunds, credits, or more seats for "free."

The market is, of course, had already spoken: StubHub, which re-sells unwanted tickets from sesaon's ticket holders, recently had $500 Legends seats going for the "reasonable" price of $225, and face value seats of $850 going for $263. (Source: AP article.) These seats, by the way, get you into an upscale restaurant. No waiting in line for a dog and a Bud for those seated in Legends.

The economic ins-and-out of seat pricing aside, there's no one who's denying that seeing those seats empty every game has been small embarrassment to Major League Baseball; a minor irritation to Yankees fans who are at the games observing those choice seats going empty - it's not as easy as it used to be in the old days to wait a couple of innings and go squat in better seats; and a major embarrassment to the Yankees - who consider their franchise to be the ne plus ultra of  sports. Ne plus ultra should be selling out, not having seats go begging - if a $2,500 seat can ever be said to go begging.

The AP article also poses the question that the empty seats may have an impact on the field:

All those empty cushioned seats with teak armrests translate to less crowd noise, making Yankee Stadium a less-intimidating place to play.

Well, not that our boys intimidate easily, but here's hoping. The Red Sox roll into the new Yankee Stadium for the first time on Monday, May 4th. I'll be curious to see whether all those posh seats are filled for the occasion. Even though prices have been slashed, $1,250 is still a lot of money to pay to watch a ball game.

As for the outcome of next weeks pair o' games, I will be watching them closely, and hoping for the very Red Sox best. But, with the Dalai Lama, I will not be betting one way or the other on the results.

Fedtime 101 - it's there is you need it

Well, trust The Economist to find something interesting to write about. In last week's edition, it was a novel little consultancy that focuses on helping white collar criminals navigate and survive the prison system.

Talk about niche marketing.

Or maybe not so niche.

Business for Larry Levine of Wall Street Prison Consultants is said to be thriving.

His website is a complete and utter trip, juxtaposing pictures of an exchange floor next to those of prisons. His positioning couldn't be simpler: Specializing in stock and securities fraud Federal sentence reductions. Succinct and to the point.

Levine provides a long (prison) laundry list of crimes you may have been charged with: embezzlement, healthcare fraud, insurance fraud, offshore banking, RICO/racketeering...And he asks a couple of captivating - or pre-captivating -  questions: Going from the Exchange floor to the prison yard? And ARE YOU SCARED and CONFUSED?

Hard to imagine anyone heading into prison for the first time, especially us white-collar types, who wouldn't be scared and confused, so this messaging truly speaks to the prospect's heart, no?

Levine - who got into this racket from the inside out, having done time on a couple of different charges - has plenty of business savvy, including productizing and naming his services. As in, "Fedtime 101...a unique "SURVIVAL PROGRAM" on Federal Prison life."

Fedtime 101 - available at the low-low price of $999 - is a "telephone crash course designed to help you get out alive."  "Telephone crash course", you might ask. Seems that Larry can't consort with felons or he goes back in the clink. Here's his prison ID, which is kind of scary. Maybe just as well that you do business over the phone. (Actually, he somewhat resembles the Red Sox Kevin Youkilis.)

The syllabus covers topics like how to prevent rape, the do's and don'ts of prison etiquette, how to avoid snitches, how to stay out of the way of gangs, and how to get a lower bunk pass. Hard to imagine anyone looking at trading in the bespoke gray flannel for the orange poly jumpsuit not coming up with the scratch to elect this course. Spend that last $999 before the Fed's get it!

Levine doesn't miss a trick: you can even buy a pack of "Financial Crisis Most Wanted" Playing Cards, featuring Bernie Madoff as the ace of spades, Ben Bernanke as the ace of diamonds, and Dick Fuld as the king of clubs. Only $5.95. And if you promise to tell two friends about the cards, you get 10% off of shipping - so I guess I qualify.

Imagine what Levine could have accomplished in the business world if he'd gone straight to begin with?

One of my favorite parts of this site is a list of happy customer testimonials that would do a B2B tech marketing professional proud. Here's one of them.

When I was sentenced to seventy months I was shocked, my overpriced lawyer who told me I'd get probation dumbfounded, and my wife was panic-stricken. We made phone calls, searched the Internet, and found practically no useful information about the BOP. When I self-surrendered, they put me in with killers, bank robbers, and other violent hardcore felons. As a first-time white-collar inmate doing time for sending a fax...I could of been killed. WhenI got to the BOP and met Levine, the education he gave me about the BOP was priceless. I only wish I could've taken his program before I came in. I can't thank Levine enough for  the peace of mind he's given me and my family. I'd recommend his services to anyone.

Daniel Berardi - 28048-112 MAIL FRAUD, WIRE FRAUD - Boston, MA.

Well, I chose Beradi's testimonial because he's from Boston, but I wasn't familiar with his rap sheet, but I was guessing he might have done a bit more than send a fax. I, after all, have sent any number of faxes and I'm not doing time in the Federal pen.

Info is just a google away, and I'm guessing that this is the same Berardi:

Daniel J. Berardi - Principal in Palm Desert-based BBH Resources, an investment arm of MX Factors. Sentenced in 2006 to five years and 10 months in prison for wire fraud and money laundering. Ordered to pay more than $11 million in civil fines and penalties.

This was a relative chump-change Ponzi scheme in which 500 folks were bilked out of $58.5 million. Honestly, Mr. Berardi, are you sure you just sent one teensy-weensy innocent little fax? Not that it really matters. I have on occasion, I'm sure, gotten customers to exaggerate a bit when I worked with them on case study/success stories. It's not exactly a Federal offense.  (Source for Berardi fraud info: Article in the Press-Enterprise.)

Personally, I hope to never have to avail myself of Mr. Levine's services, but it is good to know that, if you need them, they're a phone call and a PayPal away.

And I am truly grateful to Larry for one thing. Wall Street Prison Consultants has inspired me to at least consider coming up with a $999 course - DysfunctionalTechTime 101 - in which I could coach folks who are about to begin working at the sorts of squirrelly little tech companies I seemed to specialize in during my full-time career. The course could cover topics like  reading the non-public company's financials to determine whether the company actually does have any income; the etiquette and wisdom of asking tough questions at company meetings; tea-leave interpretation - just what those closed doors and that nervous laughter might mean (hint: it's not always lay-offs); how to cope with wishful thinkers.... There is certainly a full and rich list of possible topics. I could even borrow a few from Larry Levine: Dealing with Other Inmates, Avoiding and Spotting Informants, Calculating Release Dates. and Defusing a Confrontation. I do not, however, think I'd have to include Getting a Soft Shoe Permit (whatever that means) or How to Survive a Prison Riot.

I knew it all along

Occupational hazard, but I read a fair number of business books.

Most have been thrust upon me - at a corporate off-site, or through a publisher/publicist who wants me to blog about it. Even if the books generally aren't all that revelatory, and even if there is a depressing sameness about so many of them, most - even, I'll admit, the CEO puff-ographies - have something to say that's of interest, a decent enough point to make.

Having spent my full-time professional career largely in companies that are no longer among us, I've been especially interested in those books that purport to having divined the secret to corporate success.  But what can you make of classics like Tom Peters' In Search of Excellence, which profiled Wang as an example of the excellence he was searching for?

Sure, Wang - where I worked for a miserable 2 years, 7 months, and 14 days - had a brilliant founder and guiding force (An Wang), and some kickin' technology in its day. And, at one point in time (assuredly before I walked in the door), it may well have been excellent. But before In Search of was a decade old, it would have taken a business archeologist to go in search of Wang Labs, which had ceased to exist.

How excellent is that?

As I mentioned, most of the business books I've read do have something useful to say, but my experience has informed me that, while there are certain things (sins of omission, sins of commission) that will pretty much guarantee failure - and I have pretty much experienced them all - there's never anything I've been able to put my finger on that can actually guarantee success.  Even the companies I worked for that did the right thing at one point or another in their life cycle - were focused, had a coherent strategy and a plan to execute on it, had decent products, knew how to sell, treated and understood their customers well, provided value, etc. - didn't succeed. (Here my definition of succeed is not necessarily 'become a household name and make everyone rich', but the more humble and seemingly achievable definition of 'stayed in business long and well enough to go out on their own terms, and not get knocked down and acquired in a distress sale.')

The only thing I could ever put my finger on was that you really had to have some ration of luck (with timing being the biggest 'lucky-me' factor).

Now, it seems, there is a body of thought emerging that suggests that this is, in fact, the case.

This was discussed in a recent Boston Globe ideas column by Drake Bennett.  (And speaking of success and failure, The Globe's mothership, the New York Times Company, is threatening to close down The Globe in the next couple of days.)

Here's Bennett on books like In Search and Jim Collins' Good to Great,

While the particulars vary, the basic idea underlying the literature is the same: that the secrets of success can be divined by careful study of the institutional habits of the world's business all-stars - companies that set the standard for their industries, that thrive in tough times, companies that win the war for talent, companies that are built to last. In the imperturbable focus on core values of Hewlett-Packard or the restless innovativeness of Google or the ruthless accountability of GE, there are lessons for us all.

And here he introduces the revisionist theory:

But a few consultants and business school professors have begun to argue that much of this literature is, in fact, useless. Far from a science, they argue, the success literature is made up of little more than just-so stories in which authors use dramatic anecdotes - often drawn from previously published magazine profiles or interviews with the very executives whose performance is being examined - as evidence for "secrets" that amount to little more than warmed-over homilies. The critics accuse the success gurus of cherry-picking their evidence, of doing little to double-check their results, of circular reasoning, and of making elementary statistical errors.

Better yet, Bennett cites the work of Michael Raynor, a Deloitte Consulting researcher, who claims that if you really scrutinize the success of the companies studied in all these business-success books, what explains most of the success is plainly and simply luck.

Once a company has gotten lucky, it's easy to look back and ascribe their luck-based success to doing the right things - but maybe the unsuccessful, pathetically dysfunctional companies that didn't succeed were also doing things right. Why didn't they succeed?

In truth, I think that successful companies no doubt do have more than just luck going for them. And the companies I worked for sure as hell had more than bad luck going against them.  (I could write a book about it. Wait a minute. I did write a book.... ) But it was also generally the case that the companies I worked for lo those many years seldom experienced any good luck.

A lot of the bad luck seemed to revolve around having technology that was ahead of the market, and not having the wherewithal to create the market. Oh, sure, often we didn't have the wherewithal because we'd blown it on dumb stuff and no one would give us any more wherewithal. (Oh, boo-hoo.)

And there were other types of ill-luck: the economy tanked; a well-heeled competitor came in and ate us alive by underpricing to take our business; we ran out of runway; we were out and out screwed by something/someone/somewhere - some force over which we had no control.

I will have to take a closer look at Raynor's theories, and I thank Drake Bennett and the (possibly soon to be late and lamented) Boston Globe for introducing me to them. It certainly explains a lot, and I will now be able to sleep much easier at night knowing that I spent my career in companies that just plain flat-out lacked luck. (It wasn't me, after all.)

Hot dog! The 21st century's apples and pencils

I've been seeing all sorts of stories about folks who've lost their jobs and are saying 'to hell with it', and pursuing the sorts of work they've wanted to do all along: carpenter, graphics designer, DJ.

Why not? If you've got severance and/or unemployment benefits and/or savings and/or can live on air or off of your spouse, why not take some time off to learn to juggle flaming batons, carve duck decoys, or bake dog cookies. Especially if you're in a career/industry that's imploded - finance, auto-making - it does seem to make some sense to spend a bit of time doing what you damned well please.

Sure, only about 0.0001% of the would-be whatevers will actually make any money pursuing the objection of their affection, but at least they'll have tried. And the recession will no doubt last long enough to allow everyone ample opportunity to train-up for a job-of-the-future in green technology and elder care, the only things that seem like anything near to a sure bet (especially the latter: too bad it's so ill-paid and depressing).

Not all of the 'why-not' jobs that folks are pursuing are as unlikely to pan out as, say, DJ-ing.  The WSJ, in fact, is a bit bullish on the hot dog cart business. (Note: access to this article may require a subscription.) Those who are newly unemployed, fearful of becoming unemployed, or just trying to grab their piece of the American Dream are snapping up hot dog carts:

Sales of carts, which start at about $2,000 new, have heated up in the past year. "Every model is...taking off," says Joel Goetz, owner of American Dream Hot Dog Carts Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla. Since January, he has sold about 25 carts a week, 15 more than usual.

From American Dream's site, we learn that:

Hot Dog Carts offer more opportunities than just about any other new business venture today...Hotdog Carts present one of the greatest opportunities to start your own business. It can easily grow as fast as you want and be as large or small as you need it to be. You can start your business with a brand new hot dog cart (with a big yellow "Sabrett Hot Dogs" umbrella), or with one of our quality inspected used hot dog carts (with a big red "Hebrew National" umbrella) (availability varies).

Well, I've always liked the Sabrett's Hot Dog carts, so that's where I'd head, although I have no idea what a Sabrett Hot Dog is. So maybe I'd be safer with a kosher, all-beef Hebrew National that wouldn't contain awful offal.

American Dream's not the only hot dog cart vendor that's seen an uptick in business.

For Nation's Leasing Services, "'business is really off the charts,'" and the company's revenues (most of which come from those little hot dog carts) have grown threefold over last year. Willy Dog, Ltd.'s sales have increased by 30% over the past two-years. So life is good, if you're a hot dog cart maker.

Not all the hot dog vendors are setting up (rolling up?) shop in big cities or tourist areas.

The Guajardo family from Bandera, Texas (pop. 957) was interviewed for the WSJ article. My first reaction was, 'just how many hot dogs can you sell each week in a town of 957?' Well, the answer, apparently, is plenty, if you've got a few honky-tonks where you can go vending on a Saturday night. The  Guajardos are taking home over $1,000 each weekend.

So far, both Guajardos still have their day jobs. For them, the cart is both their backup plan and the financing source for the college education of their four kids, all of whom help out with the cart.

One caution for prospective hot dog carters: with so many folks getting into the business, competition is heating up, and there are only so many desirable locations out there. No fun setting up shop in the abandoned warehouse district.

Still, it's not a bad little business - if you don't dwell that much on the provenance of the product you're selling.

Nobody seems to be selling pencils or apples, those Depression-era down-and-out staples. This is understandable. While the upfront costs of setting up a hot dog cart business are clearly higher than putting out a card table with a can of pencils or a bushel of apples on it, the returns are greater. After all, a hot dog with mustard-relish-onions, plus chips and a soda, is a bigger ticket item than a lone apple, let alone a lone pencil. (Other than Sudoku players and sketch artists, who uses a pencil anymore?) And stopping at a hot dog stand is a cheap, recession-y way to eat out. Not to mention that, anything purchased and consumed in the great out doors seems so much more healthful, natural, and organic than fast food grabbed and gulped in an overlit chain outlet.

The WSJ cited a statistic from the American Meat Institute's National Hot Dog & Sausage Council. During the summer months, American's ingest seven billion hot dogs. If I've got my 000's and US population estimate down right, that's about 2 dozen hot dogs per person.

While I like hot dogs as much as the next guy, I'm not doing my share here. I probably have anywhere from 3-6 hot dogs each year, depending on home many baseball games I get to. (I don't know about apple pie and Chevrolet, but baseball and hot dogs really do go together in the good old USA.) I may also get one from the permanent, not rolling, hot dog stand down by the Hatch Shell.

Personally, I'd generally rather have a disgusting, fatty, oily sausage with pepper and onions, but I only allow myself one of those suckers every other year. (Fortunately, I think that this is an on-year.) Mostly when I'm eating something shaped like a cylinder and sitting on a bun, it's a hot dog.

And now that I've read about what a good little business it is, I may be more inclined to stop at one of the vendors that I pass at the entrance to the Boston Common, or over on Washington Street. (No, wait, the guy I'm thinking of on Washington Street sells sausage and peppers. My mouth is watering. I must away....)

Filene's Basement's marked down, and maybe even out.

Well, go away on a meager, scrawny little 6 day vacation and come back to the news that Filene's Basement has been purchased by a liquidator that's now exploring its options on what to do with it.

Most of what I've gotten in The Basement over the last few years has been umbrellas, socks, and PJ's, but The B and I have a long history, and I'd hate to see it go.

In a time before there were Marshall's, TJ Maxx's, and "outlet malls" all over the retail map, for those of us fortunate enough to live in Massachusetts, there was Filene's Basement. The Basement sold "Irregulars", manufacturers surplus, and the end of season stock of big name department stores.  In addition to the mother church in downtown Boston, there was an outpost in Worcester. (When I was growing up, I believe that Worcester's was the only branch.) Having a Filene's Basement meant that I could occasionally afford a Villager sweater or a John Meyer of Norwich skirt.

Villager, John Meyer, Ladybug, Pappagallo - these were the ragingly preppy brands that were popular when I was in high school in the mid-1960's.  I went to what was (by Worcester Irish Catholic standards) a fairly ritzy and snooty girls high school, where most of the students were daughters of the Worcester Irish elite: doctors, lawyers, local pols, funeral parlor owners. I was there on scholarship and, fortunately, we wore uniforms. There was no way I could ever begin to compete, clothes-wise, with the funeral parlor et al. daughters. (Fortunately, I was more than able to compete academically.) We were only allowed to wear "real clothes" for a few days at the beginning and end of the school year, and I completely envied the "rich girls" their duds: colorful skirts with matching sweaters, matching two-toned Pappagallo shoes, and matching Bermuda bags.  I had a pair of Bass Weejun's. Having a pair of hot-pink loafers with yellow tassels was beyond my comprehension.

But I did want some of what the "rich girls" had.

So I frequented Filene's Basement, which was easy to do since I had to make a bus transfer in downtown Worcester on the way home from school.

At The Basement, I was able to buy a couple of Villager sweaters. So what if they were stamped "Irregular". So what if they were colors that looked completely and utterly rotten on me - dark olive green, orange heather. I also had a pair of Bermuda shorts that were Ladybug brand. The shorts had a white background with red flowers on them. Any Ladybug item came with a small stickpin with a ladybug on it, and I remember proudly wearing that pin on the white "poor boy" sweater I wore with those shorts.

I also scored a London Fog raincoat at the B - the same Peter Pan collared, navy blue one that everyone else in my class had.

The Basement was a high school godsend.

In college, I started shopping at the Boston Basement.

Again, it was the only place I could really afford to buy anything. Not that I wanted much. After a year of so in college, I was living in jeans, army shirts, and workboots. Who needed real clothing?

Still, I may have gotten the navy blue dress I wore to my father's funeral in The Basement...

For a while in my twenties, I worked downtown, and completely haunted The B. I recall the Bonwit Teller merchandise sales being especially good. One dress I very fondly remember was a white cotton knit a-line with blue and red floral sprigs on it. God, I loved that dress and hated to see it turned into a dust rag.

Sales like the Bonwit one were well advertised in advance, and eagerly anticipated. At lunch time, the stores would be completely mobbed. You'd just go in, grab as much as you could that was in your size, and carry your stash off to a corner to sort through it at a more leisurely pace than was possible if you were vying for merchandise on the racks or tables. If you were willing to stand around half-naked in front of strangers you could also try stuff on. (There were no fitting rooms for women in The Basement; just for the men.)

For years, I bought a non-trivial amount of my clothing at The Basement, and went there regularly, even when I was no longer working downtown. I still lived close by, and could easily pop in on a Saturday morning.

Most of what I got there was pretty good, although there was one dress I brought that was a complete failure. Once I got it home, I realized that someone with BO had already worn it and returned it. I really liked the dress - a "my color" purplish madras shirtwaist -  so I tried washing it out, but I don't think I wore it more than once. (If someone was going to wear something and sneak-return it, they could at least have used deodorant, ya think?)

The Basement was famous for its automatic mark downs.

Each item had a date stamped on it, and for every week or so that it remained on the floor, you got a 25% mark down. Once it was there for a certain amount of time, an item went to charity. I remember once trying to buy something that was beyond its "go to charity" date, and they wouldn't let me. I never really played the automatic markdown game - waiting an extra day or so to get the next 25% off -  but was always delighted when I happened upon a marked down item.

Over the years, Filene's Basement got less interesting.

It had a lot of competition from other discounters. Big name stores started to open their own outlets, like Sak's Off 5th. They started selling a lot of clothing that was made expressly for The Basement. (That's no fun!) The company expanded pretty widely, trying to go national, a business decision that didn't work out all that well for them.

And then The Basement's historic location, where it had been in business since 1908, closed down so that developers could put up a high rise mixed shopping-office-residential-hotel whatever on the site of the old Wm. Filene & Sons Department Store. The Basement relocated to Boston's Back Bay where it is no longer located in a basement. I don't think it has any automatic bargains there, either. I don't really know. I've been in there only once or twice, when I bought a sweater I ended up wearing once, and a Sigrid Olsen shirt that I've never worn. It's very pretty, but a bit diaphanous. I just wanted something Sigrid Olsen, but was never willing to pay the full retail price. (Hmmmmm. Some things haven't changed since high school. Of course then I'd have been willing to pay full price if I'd had it.)

Anyway, the wrecking crews came in and tore the old Filene's building down, leaving some of the facade, but mostly a big hole in the ground, surrounded by a cyclone fence.  The developers weren't able to secure funding, and there's no telling when they'll be able to do so. (Do we really need more office space and luxury condos in this economy?)

Part of the developers' deal with Filene's Basement was that, once the project was complete, The Basement would get to move back in and occupy their original digs.

Now the question is, will The Basement even be around to occupy its holy ground once more? Or will some sort of big box store usurp its spot.

Once again, I fear the permanent loss of yet another unique Boston institution.

Oh, bleccchhhhhh. Plus, I could use an umbrella that wasn't half blown out. It would be really convenient if The Basement was still where it's supposed to be...

The votes are in - nude hiking update

Last month I blogged about nude hiking in Switzerland.

Well, the voters in the canton of Appenzell Inner Rhodes have voted, and they've turned a thumbs down. Nude hikers in their canton will now be subject to a hefty fine.

Appenzell Outer Rhodes-ers haven't voted yet, so there's still a bit of time if you want to make a nature-nature hike. But you'd better hurry:

A similar legal move is expected in neighboring Appenzell Outer Rhodes with legislation being prepared against "this shameless behavior."

Looks like this canton is going to follow (birthday) suit.

Source: AP article on Boston.com.

I want, I want, I want

Late yesterday afternoon, we got back from our Big Trip to Paris with our nieces, Molly and Caroline.

Although we had our moments - let's face it, we're not used to having kids around 24/7 for almost a week straight; and there's a reason why people our age don't have kids (unless they're crazy) - everything went very well.  The girls are bright, curious, and fun to be with. And if the occasional giggle-fits could be irritating, hey, I remember what is was like to be that age.

This was my fourth trip to Paris, and it was tremendous fun to see it through young eyes, experiencing something so new and exciting for the first time. (Hey, I even liked the corny Seine boat tour.)

Now that we're back, here's what I most want (besides world peace, economic prosperity, etc.):

A bagel. A poppy-seed bagel. With chive creamed cheese.

Network news. (Although Al Jazeera could be habit forming, I did miss Brian Williams.)

The Red Sox. (The season's first series with the Yankees starts tonight).

Spring weather. (After a rainy first day, the weather in Paris couldn't have been more perfect. It's still cold and cloudy here. Bring on spring.)

Leaves on trees. (Yes, the trees are budding, but Paris was in full bloom. Bring on spring.)

Better towels. (The apartment we rented was great, but the towels were sort of thin, sparse and scratchy.)

Girl Scout Cookies. (Fortunately, there are two boxes of thin mints in the freezer.)

The mail.

The mail that includes a magazine, and not just donation pleas.

Light at night. (It was still light in Paris at 8:30-9:00. As far as I'm concerned, there's never enough daylight time.)

My comfy LL Bean slippers.

Ah....

Traveling's great, but...there's no place like the place where you part your comfy LL Bean slippers.

No post aujourd'hui

Back tomorrow.

Not much to report

This is our last day in Paris, so we're on the run: Bateau Mouche, and our last bit of POC shopping.*

Yesterday, the girls and I walked up to the first landing on the Eiffel Tower - about 300 steps. Better than waiting 45 minutes for the lift.

We all went to the Ile de la Cité to walk around and have dinner. This was the area the girls seemed to have liked best - ultra quaint and ice cream shops every ten feet. Alas, all the charming little French ice cream shops were closed by the time we finished dinner, so it was on to Haagen Dazs. (Ben and Jerry's was closed.) On the way back from the Ile, we spent a bit of time in the Marais. Not enough for me...

This morning, we walked the local open air market, where the highlight was some crazy guy - we'd seen him kicking a news kiosk - coming up behind be and leaning his head on my shoulder.

Well, allons-y. A toute a l'heure

________________________________________________

*Piece of Crap - which works in any country where tourist is spoken.

Flash Mob at the Louvre

Yesterday, I participated in my first flash mob.

Okay, it wasn't an official flash mob exactly - we didn't connect via Tweets. But it sure felt flash-mobbish to be racing around the Louvre with 50,000 other tourists, elbowing and jostling not just to see the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, and Venus de Milo - but to make sure that everyone in the mob (other than me, who is un-camera'd) taking a picture of each work of art with a digital camera.

My nieces both took picture of the crowd at the Mona Lisa, et al. all snapping photos, which if they weren't still abed, I might upload and include here.

Some of the tourist-photographers included a friend or family member in their pics. Here's Shoji with the Venus de Milo.  Or maybe that should be here's Han with Venus, as the Chinese seem to have overtaken the Japanese - or at minimum tied with them - for the most omni-present tourist groups. Seeing this volume of Chinese travelers was a first for me. Yet another example of China's success in building a middle class.

And another sign that the wwr (world wide recession) has not yet scuppered every one's travel plans.

Not that the Chines and Japanese were the only high-volume travelers at the Louvre. There were plenty of European groups, and a lot of drips and drabs Americans. (I didn't, however, come across any American's traveling in packs.)

But the Louvre was packed, and - even if you wanted to leisurely stroll around meditating on a Giotto here and there, it would be really difficult to do during prime tourist season (which this must be).  Pretty much all of the galleries were jammed, although the biggest action was at the Mona and other "must see" art.  Everyone was running around looking for them as if they were on a scavenger hunt, or trying out for an episode of The Amazing Race.

In their defense, the Louvre has all the hot spots mapped out, with ample signage. I don't remember this being the case when I was on my last treasure hunt there, 30+ years ago. I think then you were pretty much on your own with the generic museum map.

I remember Whistler's Mother's having been on my prior tour, but I see that she/it is at the Musée D'Orsay. Maybe she/it was at the Jeu de Paume when I was last culture-vulturing around Paris.

So, for your viewing pleasure:

What's actually kind of interesting about all the tourists taking pictures of famous works o' art is that they can get a postcard that is probably a much better crafted representation of it in the gift store. Plus if you buy the post car, you don't have to contend with all the negative space around the painting. On the downside, you don't get to see the cool frames - or get to photoshop your head onto Venus' body, either.

In any case, I found everyone snapping away at art works to be quite peculiar. I can only accept it when the photographer is 12 and under.

Speaking of 12 and under, kids sure are free riders for a lot of things here.  I think that the Louvre is free to anyone under 26. (Imagine!) I don't think we had to pay for the girls at our other museum-ish stop yesterday either: Napoleon's Tomb.

All I can say is, they don't make monuments to dead emperors the way they used to.

There was also a little excitement at Les Invalides, which fronts the Napster's tomb: flag at half mast, lots of security.

I was able to piece together from the radio on in a cab that Nicholas Sarkozy was there for something or other to do with the Resistance. (You can pick up information, even if you do only understand every tenth word or so.)

From le google, I learned that Maurice Druon, a French author and political figure who had written the words to the Resistance's anthem, had died, and that his funeral was held at Les Invalides.

We saw a couple of WWII vintage soldiers walking around (slowly). One had lost an arm, and - from his gait - may also have been missing a leg. So sometimes people do actually give and arm and a leg for something that they care deeply about.

We had lunch at the upscale Cafe L'Esplanade - which was sprinkled with American tourists, but mostly full of chicly dressed French folks staring down their haughty noses at the American tourists.

Bah!

They made me want to eat at McDonald's! Which we did for dinner. The local Mickey-D's was flash mobbed - and not with homesick Americans, but with French 20 somethings looking for frites.

So zere.

C'est fou: Louis Vuitton key chains

This week, I'm in Paris with my husband, and our nieces Molly (12) and Caroline (11).

Based on the trip so far, you'd never know there's a global recession on.

For starters, our Air France flight was overbooked. They were offering 400 Euros, plus overnight accommodations, to anyone willing to get on the next day's flight. We weren't. Nor were any of the kabillion Acton-Boxborough High School students on their April break trip.

In the line at passport control on Saturday morning, the American ex-pat behind us said that, in 35 years, he'd never seen such a mob scene of Americans at the airport.

Our first day - Saturday - was cool and showery, and we just walked around for a few hours, managing to avoid tourist areas, and just soaking up the atmosphere. For the girls, who refused to wear uncool rain jackets or hats, or carry an uncool umbrella, this also meant literally soaking up the atmosphere. Ah, to be 11-12!  I, meanwhile, with my baseball cap, hooded rain jacket, and umbrella, remained perfectly dry and comfortable.

The high points for the girls on our first jaunt was the ubiquity of pharmacies. (They are everywhere.) And the availability of Haagen Dazs ice cream. (Let's hear it for an American export!)

The area around the Eiffel Tower has been crazily thronged. We haven't gone up yet - the lines have been too long - but as it is about a 5 minute walk from our apartment, we will drift over at some point and make the trip.

We did try to go on a Bateau Mouche tour of the Seine, but - after waiting in line for half and hour - the boat loaded up with about 1/3 of the passengers, said nothing to the rest of us, and took off mostly empty. They happily gave us our money back, but we were left thinking w.t.f.?

So far, our boat trip having been thwarted, our touristic things have been Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Champs Élysée.

I must say that Notre Dame is magnificent. Whatever the original looked like, nearly 1000 years ago, I'm sure that anyone's first trip in was met with shock and awe. Definitely easy to see how The Church and the royals managed to keep the peasantry in check.

We didn't climb to the top of Notre Dame. 400 steps just sounded like a bit too much, especially for someone like myself that has such a fear of heights, I wouldn't want to be a the top, anyway.

We did do the 284 stairs at the Arc de Triomphe, which was worth it for the panoramic view of the city.

As we walked down Les Champs Élysée, the girls asked to go into the Louis Vuitton store.

Cannily figuring that the one thing they could possibly afford with their supply of Euros was a key chain, we looked at those first.

Alas, the least expensive were in the $350-400 range.

We still poked around, looking at $2,000 pocketbooks, and $4,000 men's high top sneakers with the Vuitton logo on them. (As you can imagine, but husband was sorely tempted...)

Most of the people in Vuitton - which was mobbed - were, like us, Looky-Lous. However, there was plenty of commerce being transacted, and the clerks were all busy selling bags, watches, shoes, etc.

I told the girls that they could probably get knock-off Louis Vuitton anythings on eBay. (Yes, I know that the luxury goods companies are up in arms about trafficking in their brands. But seriously, folks, the consumers in the market for a $19.95 key chain were never going to buy the real thing now, were they? And then there's that bit about imitation and flattery...)

Anyway, we are off to the Louvre. Fortunately, I was able to get tickets at a FNAC (electronics) store, so we won't have to wait in line to join the hordes of American tourists racing through to see the essentials: Mona Lisa, Whistler's Mother...

Au revoir for now.

April in Paris

Bon jour, mes amis.

I am on a long planned, long awaited trip to Paris with my husband, and my nieces Molly (who is 12) and Caroline (who is 11).

We are renting an apartment near the Champs de Mars, with a view of the Eiffel Tower from the living room. As of this writing, I've only seen the place online, but oo-la-la. C'est magnifique - or so it seems on the Internet. Sure, I know that, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Or a chien. But this apartment does seem very nice. Plus the guy who owns it only advertises in Ivy alumni mags, and I'm pretty sure that if you screw over one of the 10,000 men of Harvard, or a Princetonian (you know, that "prince" isn't in the name for nothing), you don't get to advertise there for long.

Just the thought of Paris makes me want to don a beret, light up a Gitane, and start doing an Apache dance with a dark and dangerous swain in a striped tee-shirt. (Actually, if we're Apache dancing, I guess the swain gets to wear the beret.)

Just the thought of Paris makes me wish I knew more French than the memorized 'ou est la bibliotheque' ALM dialogues that are still running around my head, 40+ years after I learned them. But thanks to that high school French, my French is sufficient to limp around and make myself primitively understood, relying, quite crudely, on one tense and frequent lapses into the English word for whatever it is. 

I do retain full, multi-tense fluency if my part of the conversation comes from one of those long ago memorization sessions. Thus, if we have a flat tire, broken leg, or malfunctioning record player, I'm all set. Ditto (ditteau?) if I leave my glasses at the opera, or need to get in a discussion about the inevitability of hot dogs for lunch on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, while I can generally make myself understood, I can seldom understand more than every other word of what is rattled back at me. Quel dommage!

Anyway, I truly love Paris, and am looking forward to introducing it to the girls.

There's supposed to be broadband access in the apartment.

If so, I hope to get a post Parisian off each day.

If not, Pink Slip should be back on Friday, April 24th.

Unless I decide to stay to hell with it and stay, 'netless or not. (Note to my sister Trish and brother Rich: I will make sure you get your daughters back.)

Until then, à bientôt.

Domino's Delivers a Pink Slip to a Couple of Real Lunkheads

If you haven't seen the video, it's probably too late. But you still may have heard of the two hapless, clueless, and now jobless Conover, NC, Domino's workers who put a prank video about food prep up on YouTube. (Source for info in this post: NY Times.)

Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer are no kids, by the way - they're in their early 30's. But they're now not just jobless, they're infamous for their crude humor and their profound idiocy for not realizing that:

a) Material like this goes viral really quickly.

b) Domino's is not exactly an outfit known for their robust sense of humor.

Sure, they're also 15-minutes of fame famous, but where do they go from here, job-wise?

Okay, the will no doubt get to be interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel and other shows of that ilk. But that's when they get out of jail - they were arrested for violating some defiling of food statute (a felony rap) - and Domino's is considering suing. Although I don't imagine he'll get much out of this duo. What do you suppose a food-prep at a North Carolina Domino's makes per hour?

Here's their mug shot. I don't suppose there'll be a movie deal out of this, but Noah Wyle could play Setzer, no?

Anyway, what these kitchen-eers did to merit all the negative attention was show Setzer shoving cheese up his nose, then putting it on the sandwich. Along with snot. Not to mention a slice or two of farted-on salami. Here's a bit of the clever narration:

“In about five minutes it’ll be sent out on delivery where somebody will be eating these, yes, eating them, and little did they know that cheese was in his nose and that there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami,” Kristy said. “Now that’s how we roll at Domino’s.”

Recall, please, that these folks are no 10 years old. They're in their thirties.

Not that this sort of antic is unheard of in the food service industry.

As someone who logged a lot of hours as a waitress, I saw a few rather disturbing things. At one restaurant where I worked, the cooks were know to fry up cockroaches and served them on the fisherman's platter. Extra protein!

Anyway, the Domino's Duo posted their just high-larious video on YouTube, and within a couple of days it went viral, with over a million viewers. I also handed a major PR issue to Domino's (which, parenthetically, they handled quite nicely, loth as I am to give Domino's credit for much of anything).

Setzer and Hammonds deny that they actually delivered the despoiled food, but that probably doesn't do much for anyone who had anything from Domino's to eat recently. Stomachs, I'm sure, are churning from coast to coast - and especially in Conover, NC, where I'll bet there are plenty of folks scratching the Domino's phone number off the list of take-out joints magneted onto their fridge.

Ms. Hammonds apologized to the company in an e-mail message Tuesday morning. “It was fake and I wish that everyone knew that!!!!” she wrote. “I AM SOO SORRY.

I'll bet you are, Kristy, but not as sorry as you're going to be when you look for your next job, I'm guessing.

You know, virtually everyone in this country uses working in fast food when they talk about the most downside job they might ever have to hold.

A few weeks ago, I read about some fallen hedge fund manager who claims that he was making half a million per, but is now making $8/hour delivery pizza. He's not the only one I've heard make a similar statement.

Well, the good news is that there are a couple of fast food openings in Conover, NC. 

The bad news for Setzer and Hammonds is that they can't even hold a job at Domino's.

Where do you go down from here? Chicken factory?

Talk about a bad career move.

The ball on Bee's back is bad. (Fa love Pa.)

On of the all time great, ROTFL, completely over-the-top ridiculous movies is The Day of the Dolphin, starring George C. Scott. I can't recall the full plot line, but George C. is a researcher who's trying to teach dolphins, Alpha (Fa) and Beta (Bee), to speak. Speak English that is. (I believe that dolphins already chatter away in some sort of language or another. Dolphinese?) Meanwhile, some no-good-nik is trying to train Fa and Bee for a nefarious purpose that involves strapping a mine to Bee and having her swim under a ship and blow it up.

When George C. gets wind of the bad guys turning Bee into a suicide bomber, he sends Fa off to warn Bee off, explaining to Fa that "the ball on Bee's back is bad."

The movie also has a romantic moment of sorts - a bit of touching male bonding (or is in inter-species bonding) - when Fa tells George C.,"Fa love Pa."

Anyway, I thought of this movie yesterday when I saw The Lede, the The NY Times blog, which featured an interesting piece on a story reported by Xinhua, China's official news agency. Xinhua claims that a school of dolphins recently thwarted a Somali pirate attack on Chinese freighters. The Times blog points out that the photos don't exactly show any Somali pirate boats being held at bay by Flipper et al. Nonetheless, with the current grim news of Piracy in the Gulf of Aden, it's refreshing to have a little feel good story.

Of course, I do have to ask myself how the dolphins knew that the Somali pirates were the bad guys and the Chinese merchant marines, and the Chinese navy that was escorting them, were the good guys. (Having an inquiring mind can sure be irksome.)

The Lede went on to mention a 1980's US Navy program spent millions of dollars attempting to train dolphins and sea lions to guard a nuclear sub base. The Lede said that program was abandoned, but there appears to be some ongoing military action, at least according the folks at Spawar, which has a quasi-official looking site dedicated to the US Naval Marine Military Program. According to the site, dolphins saw action in the Iraq war.

The Lede also noted a rumor that dolphins armed (flippered?) with poison dart guns escaped their holding area in Lake Pontchartrain during Hurricane Katrina, and posed a danger to swimmers. The Navy claims that they accounted for all the Louisiana dolphins, which is no doubt good news to those enjoying the Gulf Coast waters.

But dolphins equipped with poison dart guns - now there's a thought.  I guess it's not just the ball on Bee's back that could be bad.

Keep me out of here! Canada's megabucks "self-exclusion" lawsuit

Gambling is one vice that I cannot imagine I could ever get hooked on.

Sure, I buy lottery tickets every once in  a while, quick picks for MegaBucks and MegaMillions. I usually forget to check the numbers until I find the slips wadded up, a month later, in my wallet. I rarely get even a one number match, although I did win $75 once.

I've been to casinos a few times, but I'm only ever willing to play the slots and spring for one roll of quarters - one and done. One time in Reno, I won a couple of hundred bucks, and a by-stander was really shocked by how happily I walked away from the lucky machine.

"Are you kidding me," I said. "I just spent ten-bucks and made two-hundred. This will be the best investment I've ever made in my life."

I've been to the horse track a couple of times. I'm strictly a two-dollar window kind of gal, and pick my ponies based on their names and/or the color of the silks their jockeys are wearing.

I make "I'll bet I'm right" bets with my husband all the time. Unfortunately, although I mostly win, he never pays off. Maybe I'd have more luck if we made bets for less than a thousand dollars.

Although I will never be one, I do feel badly for compulsive gamblers, which in some ways has got to be worse than alcoholism or drug addiction.

So I was interested to learn of a Canadian law suit, in which Peter Dennis, an admitted gambling addict, is suing the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation for $3.5 billion because they failed to keep him the hell out of casinos after he'd signed up for a "self-exclusion" program authorizing casinos to prevent him from entering their premises. (Source: CANOE.ca.)

Under the voluntary self-exclusion program begun in the mid-1990s, problem gamblers could sign a form authorizing the province's gambling facilities to use their "best efforts" to keep them out or remove them if they sneaked in anyway.

The proposed class action filed [by Dennis and his wife] in Ontario Superior Court and served on the gaming corporation this week suggests the program was a sham that profited from the most vulnerable gamblers.

Dennis supposedly signed up for self-exclusion in 2004 - after he'd blown about $350K on the slots. (Canadian or US, that's a lot of rolls of quarters.) Even after he signed up for self-exclusion, however, Dennis continued to frequent gambling facilities, and racked up another $200K in losses.

As a result, he lost his homes and his job. (He'd borrowed money from a client, which can never, ever be a good idea.)

Among other things, the suit alleges, the corporation was lax in allowing people on the list in, failing to train staff properly to enforce the program, and not implementing technology to detect those who sought entry anyway.

I had never heard of these self-exclusion programs - need to know basis, only, I guess - but apparently they're big in Canada, where 12,000 have signed up for it. There are few such state-run programs in the US, as well.

Well, unless you have sophisticated technology that can detect who's coming and going, I don't really see how a self-exclusion program could work. Would you have to bio-metric everyone trying to come into a casino? I don't see how that would fly with most people who want to do a bit of gambling?

And if someone were so addicted to begin with, I can imagine that they'd figure out some way to get around it  - like sneaking in, or taking up another form of gambling. Peter Dennis could easily have come across the border from Ontario and gambled his brains out at one of the casinos in upstate NY, for crying out loud.

The whole self-exclusion thing sounds sort of ridiculous to me - talk about the nanny state. It's easy to see how this sort of thinking could extend to all sorts of addictions: 'stop me before I eat-drink-shop again.' Sure, maybe it would help a teensy-weensy bit, but it seems to me that if you've got a major addiction, you need to be relying on more than a 'save me from myself' program.

I'll bet - but not all that much - that this case won't get very far - at least not as far as a $3.5B payout to the plaintiffs. I also bet - though, again, not all that much - that the self-exclusion programs will tighten up their "contract" so that those who sign up have to initial the "best efforts" wording, or explicitly sign something that says "I acknowledge that this is my problem and that you're just trying to help." Or maybe they should just do away with the programs entirely. Other than a step in the way of acknowledging that you have a problem, they just seem like a screwy idea to me.

On the other hand, I really can't fathom what it must be like to be addicted to gambling in the first place. Bad enough I've lost 20% of my IRA. I can't imagine how I could live with myself if I'd blown half a million feeding quarters into a one-armed bandit.

Sub-primed nuns suing State Street

Apparently the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary have decided that while forgiving may be divine, it's strictly for the Divinity Himself.

The good sisters claim that they lost more than $1m because State Street Global Advisors "promised to invest conservatively but instead put their assets into risky investments." (Source: AP Article.) So they're suing the bums. The article I saw didn't specify what damages they're looking for, but I'm sure that it's something more modest than suing State Street's pants off. (Sorry: I just couldn't resist.)

If the suit gets to court, we'll find out whether the nuns got naively greedy, or their financial advisor conned them by downplaying the risks of investing in subprimes, and perhaps preyed on the nuns' commitment to social justice by up-playing some do-gooder angle about putting poor people in homes. Having looked at the Sisters of Charity of the BVM's homepage, I would bet any appeal to social justice would have worked. Like many other orders of nuns, they may not be doing as much teaching these days, but they do plenty with the' least of our brethren' communities.

Looking at the nuns pictured on the order's web page, I can't help but think that they all look so pleasant, earnest and harmless.

Have the crazy nuns of my childhood all died out? Or was this order of nuns just Midwest nice?

My education was at the hands of nuns who all seemed to be one of two types: kindly, patient, good, understanding paragons of nunny-bunny-ness, a la Sister Benedict from Bells of Saint Mary's; or blatantly cruel and completely demented harpies. And let me tell you, when you got stuck with one of the dementos, you learned how to keep a straight face, you learned how to cope with the completely arbitrary, and you developed a keen sense of the absurd.

I will say that all of these skills have kept me in good stead during my business career, as have my ability to write a clear sentence and do arithmetic in my head. Still, my education was decidedly something of a mixed bag. I remember grammar school largely as alternating currents of sheer boredom and sheer terror.

That said, I do have quite a bit of sympathy for these aging religious congregations that no longer have the droves of younger nuns coming along to support them. Nuns taught "for free", and went without marriage and children, with the expectation that they'd be taken care of in their old age.

These days, with the nun shortage, this bargain is getting tougher to live up to. Still, many congregations are fortunate in that they have some wealth, often from prime real estate that was given to them somewhere along the line: mother houses, novitiates, schools run by the order (rather than owned by a parish).

Wherever the Sisters of Charity got their nest egg, it would probably be pretty difficult to replace a million dollar loss. If State Street representatives were deliberately misleading, they ought to pay up. But if this was just a case of financial naivete...Well, sorry, S'tah. You got played, but so did an awful lot of other folks. (If this whole crisis isn't one loud wake-up call for developing more widespread financial and economic literacy, I don't know what is.)

Anyway, because they look like a bunch of nice old nuns, I hope the Sisters of Charity of the BVM do get their money back.

I'm also on their side because, in 1937, the Sisters of Charity of the BVM offered my mother a scholarship to Mundelein College in Chicago.  Because my grandparents didn't believe in college education for girls, they wouldn't let my mother go. Another part of their claimed "reasoning" for keeping my mother out of college was that the scholarship was only half-tuition. This always struck me as completely bogus, given that they were willing to pay two years worth of tuition at a secretarial college for my mother. Whatever the reason, not being able to go to Mundelein (then a women's college, now part of Loyola University) broke my mother's heart.

After she died in 2001, I found the scholarship letter among my mother's papers. (I still have it.)

So, after all these years, thank you to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary for recognizing that my mother was very bright and completely deserving of a college education.

And good luck in court.

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

A tip of my flying-nun head-piece to my friend Joanne for alerting me to this story.

We're Number 9! Worcester named 9th most livable city in the US

Well, I have to say I was just bit surprised to hear that Worcester - yes, that Worcester: Wuh-stah, Wormtown, the Heart of the Commonwealth - ranked number 9 on a Forbes list of livable U.S. cities. My first thought was: what were the criteria? Clearly, availability of interesting places to shop; number of steep hills impossible to drive on during icy weather; and percentage of high school seniors who agree with the statement "I don't care where I go to college, as long as it's somewhere other than Worcester" weren't part of the statistical mix that went into this pick.

In fact, the cities were chosen by assigning ratings to:

Five-year income growth per household and cost of living from Moody's Economy.com, crime data and leisure index from Sperling's Best Places, and annual unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Here are the vitals listed for Worcester, with the rankings vis a vis the 379 cities evaluated in parentheses:

Metro Population: 787,000
Income Growth: 3.5% (No. 145 of 379)
Cost of Living Index: 106.1 (No. 147 of 379)
Culture Index: 98 (No. 7 of 379, tie)
Crime per 100,000: 2,334 (No. 29 of 379)
Unemployment: 7.8% (No. 13 of 379)

I love the "Culture Index" rating - whatever it means.  Cambridge may have ranked higher than Worcester overall - it came in 7th - but Worcester had 'em beat on culture. Cambridge was number 11th in this category. Take that, Cambridge snobs! (Of which I would be one, if I lived in Cambridge. Which I would, in fact, like to do someday. Hopefully before the polar ice cap completely melts, the Atlantic Ocean rises, and the Flat of the Hill (where I live in Boston) doesn't revert back to from whence it came, reclaimed by the sea. If and when that happens, the value of our condo will plummet, and Cambridge will be oceanfront.)

As with most/all such rankings, they're wildly interesting but fundamentally arbitrary and a little dumb. Although I can't argue with Portland, Maine's landing at Number 1. This is one very nice little city, and every time I visit I'm reminded that I could live there quite nicely. Yes, Portland strikes me as very livable.

As, in fact, does Worcester. Likable, lovable, and livable.Although I don't particularly want to live there, I don't think it would be a bad place to live. And it's an excellent place to be from.

What it does have going for it is, in fact, culture. Among other things, the Worcester Art Museum is a complete gem.

It also has some beautiful neighborhoods, none of which I ever lived in, with some beautiful old houses that are a lot cheaper than equivalent beautiful old houses closer to Boston. Not that Worcester's that far from Boston: 50 miles - just a breeze down the Mass Pike.

Worcester also has great restaurants, few traffic jams, lots of colleges, and a minor league baseball team, the Tornadoes, peculiarly named after a devastating 1953 storm in which nearly 100 people were killed, including a baby that was spun out of his mother's arms as she ran for safety.

So Worcester's Number 9!

Bravo! This is so much better than being named an All American City, which Worcester seems always to be vying for. (I am such a snob: the very hokeyness of wanting to be named an All American City makes me cringe.)

So, where else besides Portland, Cambridge, and Worcester is up there in the Forbes list?

Take a look at the Top 15:

1. Portland, ME
2. Bethesda, MD
3. Des Moines, IA
4. Stamford/Bridgeport, CT
5. Tulsa, OK
6. Oklahoma City, OK
7. Cambridge, MA
8. Baltimore, MD
9. Worcester, MA
10. Pittsburgh, PA
11. Denver, CO
12. Harrisburg, PA
13. Madison, WI
14. Peabody, MA
15. Little Rock, AR

What immediately stands out, of course, is the striking absence of places in the sun. The only southern city is Little Rock, and there's nary a choice from the West Coast. (Modesto, California, by the way, figured dead last.)

I'm sure that commenters on Forbes are all in a flap about this, but I say: to hell with them. Maybe this is just a make-up call for all those great places lists populated solely by cities south of the Mason-Dixon line and/or built in the desert. These lists are obviously based on criteria as arbitrary as the ones used by Forbes, and likely include measures like number of days when you could play golf, average driving distance to a Wal-Mart, and frequency with which a complete stranger gets in your face with a smile and a big hearty 'how are ya?'

Anyway, I haven't been every place on the list, but I must say that Tulsa has never sounded appealing to me. I always imagine it smells like oil. And I am surprised to see Bridgeport on the list, given that every time I travel through it on Amtrak on the way to NYC, I always think a) how weird that they have a jai-alai fronton, and b) what a dump. I guess Stamford must have swung more than its weight on this pick.

Peabody, Massachusetts is a very nice little city, but I really don't think of it as being a metro of its own: it's a suburb on Boston. (I suppose that you could make the same claim about Cambridge, but Cambridge just seems like more of an autonomous stand-alone.)

I like the Midwest picks on the list. I've never been to Madison, but it does seem like a very nice city. And, call me deluded, but I've been to Des Moines a couple of times on business, and I really liked it. My main problem with Des Moines, other than the screw-driver-in-the-ear Midwest accent, is that it's too damned flat.

But I still can't get over that Worcester's Number 9!

If I know my homeys, there's a spring in the steps being taken these days on Main Street, more than a few "how about that?"'s being exchanged when the after-Mass crowd goes out for coffee and danish, and a toast or two being made at Breen's to the good old Heart of the Commonwealth.