My Little Stasi

There's an app for that.

For years I have bitched and moaned about my prosperous but non-civic-minded neighbors who will have their driveways plowed and leave their sidewalks unshoveled, a direct and selfish affront to those increasingly few of us who actually walk to the bank, the post office, the library, the liquor store.

The public scold within was furious, but thwarted.  By the time I slip-slided my way to wherever I was going, the desire to rat them out had burnt itself out. Until the next time.

But the app-gods have listened and my town has introduced an app for snitching on the neighbors: B(for Brookline)ONLINE, available for both iOS and Android. The graphics look like they were designed by a second grader with a color crayon, but it functions like a proper little spy, um citizen reporting, device.

The scold in me is thrilled.  There's a handy-dandy checklist that includes unshoveled sidewalks, potholes,  and sidewalk obstructions.  The only thing that isn't on the list is rogue wild turkeys which we have aplenty, but which apparently aren't the responsibility of the Department of Public Works.  You can include a photo in your report, a report which can be anonymous.

The paranoid in me is less ecstatic.  There is something very unsettling about a cheerful, easy-to-use reporting system that allows anonymity.  What makes it more unsettling is that this is one of the most politically liberal towns in the United States.  I'll spare you the rant, but think what the Stasi could have done with an app like this one.

Become a Citizen Reporter! Be the eyes and ears of the town online or on your mobile phone. This feature allows citizens to submit requests, report issues (potholes, graffiti, broken street-lights, etc), check for other requests, and get a timely response from the town. Report online or download the smartphone app via the iTunes store or the Android Marketplace.

Here's Looking at You, Netflix!

Long ago, long before there was an internet, and faced with the dismal prospect of choosing between watching  It's A Wonderful Life or Candlepins for Cash, I moaned that, in spite of owning a state-of-the-art Sony Betamax VCR I just wasn't able to watch what I wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it.  Avoiding the stale leftovers of broadcast TV meant going out into the real world and driving to a video store where, one could only hope, they would have a comedy that didn't revolve around bodily functions or a classic drama that I hadn't already seen.

I will know that I  am living in the future, I proclaimed, when I can point the remote at the tube and choose from a menu of just about anything ever made.  Well, Prais the Great God Mammon, the future is here, more or less, and I am happy, more or less. Binge watching has never been easier, and although not everything-everything is available always-always, I can still manage to spend my allotted viewing time scrolling through the offerings, enjoying the plenty even if I can't come to a decision.

There are a few shows I make a point of keeping up on, though, and one that made the cut was Longmire.  I love this show.  Walt Longmire is The Law, sometimes aided by his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, barkeep and tracker, and his deputy Victoria Moretti, a transplant from Philly. There are no city streets.  No hipster irony. No terrorism plots.  No bureaucracy.  No scenes in abandoned warehouses. Just a smoke-free, yet complicated,  Marlboro Man versus the equally complicated bad guys. Sometimes the chase scenes are on horseback, or feature a waist-deep slog through snowdrifts, and above it all, The Big Sky.  It's an updated version of the TV Westerns that dominated the networks back when I wasn't old enough to stay up to watch them.

A & E produced three seasons of Longmire, and then pulled the plug, in spite of the fact that it had a more than respectable audience size.  Why give it the chop?  The audience was comprised mainly of those worthless undesirables: people like me who had aged out of the advertisers' pet demographic of 18-49.  I guess that's what happens when you put on a show that is realistic, but not "reality," or  is a bit more complex than Duck Dynasty.  And, of course, everyone knows that once you are over 49 it is a quick slide into housebound dementia on a budget that can't stretch to more than cartons of Depends and cases of Ensure.

But there will be a fourth season, thanks to Netflix, which has a business model that doesn't rely entirely on the "key demo," and I'll bet there are a few oldsters who will sign on to Netflix because of Longmire, and stick around for the other offerings.  Housebound dementos are a good market for Netflix, after all, since we need all the  entertainment we can get to while away the weary hours until oblivion, and we don't wish to be cajoled into buying more stuff that won't fit into those closets full of canned cat food, video tapes, and photo albums.

Join me as I raise a can of nutrition beverage and make a toast to my favorite time waster:  Here's looking at you, Netflix!

As for you, A&E, just go fight your Storage Wars and leave us old folk alone.

Bah, Humbug!

Nothing makes me more truly, deeply depressed than wheeling a grocery cart past a display of cellophane wrapped fruit baskets to the accompaniment of Jingle Bells, arranged, it seems, to sound as much as possible like the Dead March from Saul.  It happened to me this very morning.  My eyes started to tear up and I had to use every bit of my elderly will power to keep pushing the cart along. I wanted to run for the nearest exit and stagger outside to think about something more cheerful,  like the amount of arsenic there is in rice.

This is how happy Christmas music makes me.

There is nothing worse than down-tempo Jingle Bells. Except maybe the Kenny G version of Oh, Holy Night in a coffee shop.  Or  Burl Ives singing Holly Jolly Christmas from the speakers installed on the outside of the shopping mall.  Or The Chipmunks singing anything.

It's all pretty grim.  While I love sitting around on Christmas Eve singing our adults-only version of Christmas in Killarney, I find public Christmas music to be the very worst part of the very worst time of the year. The whole ho-ho-ho of it makes me feel about a thousand years old, reminding me that not only don't I believe in Santa Claus, but that I don't believe in much of anything.  Except for the laws of gravity and the stupidity of our elected officials and their minions.

Until now, the only recourse was to stay home and shop online. But because we are now living in the future,  even that may soon be impossible.  When I signed on to Amazon this morning up popped an invitation to "Listen free while you shop." As of today, it's voluntary, but I foresee a time when it will be one more non-optional media horror show, like TV screens in airports, and elevator music.

I couldn't bring myself to click through to "An Amazon Exclusive Playlist to get you in the holiday spirit," so I have no idea what the musical selections include. You'll have to find out for yourself, if you dare.

And if you think I was kidding about the Jingle Bells, it really was playing at the same tempo as the Dead March, and, frankly, the Dead March is more cheerful.

Keep Away

No, not Keep Away the game we played in the street with a gang of kids and a beat up rubber ball, which you may know as Monkey in the Middle.

Rather, it's Keep Away as in "Get it out of here." The Keep in question is Keep.com, self-described (and the punctuation is all theirs) as:

                      Shopping made simple. Oh and beautiful, too.
                      Keep is your new shopping obsession. Join for free.

I would describe it as Pinterest with price tags, a socially networked time-suck with instant buying opportunities, devoted to insecurity and the impulse purchase.  I mean, would you be caught dead buying boots that didn't have more than single-digit likes? Didn't think so.

So far, the website looks like it is the shopping ground of very young women who all have the same taste in short skirts, tiny jewelry, high-heeled boots, and items imprinted with silly sayings about sex.  Not judging.  If it were populated by my demographic it would be filled with elastic-waist black trousers, I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up medallions, bunion-friendly ground grippers, and items with silly sayings about senility.  (And who says that we oldsters don't know how to spend money?)

For each item you can hit Like, Keep or Share.  If you click through on an item, you can Like, Keep, or Buy.  Alas, Keep.com is a shopper's happy place and there is no Trash option. You can also follow the person who "discovered" the item, in case you actually have to work for a living and don't have all day and night to pursue discoveries on your own. Oh, wait a minute, those intrepid discoverers are "tastemakers," and when they aren't curating, they are beautifully presenting.

Keep: Curated by tastemakers. Beautifully presented. Immediately shoppable. Totally addictive.

It's probably harmless enough, unless you have a limited budget and are prone to addiction, and I'm sure those who enjoy advertisements divorced from all that pesky content will find it worthwhile.  But it's just one more website with app that is doubtless employing dozens of bright young things in building yet more handbaskets for the Hell Express.

Like? Keep? Share? Next Stop Hell.

So join for free. Credit card melt down made simple. Oh and beautiful, too.

Oh, My Exploding Head!

A sure sign of aging:  the increasing frequency with which my head threatens to explode when I read the news.  (Another sign that I am really old is that I still read the news, sometimes in an actual paper printed on crinkly actual newsprint with smudgy actual ink.)

This morning the bearded ghost of Allen Ginsberg * stands on the breakfast table and HOWLS:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

     starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking 

     for an angry fix,

But that last bit sounded more like:

Uber-ing themselves through the Wi-Fi 

streets at dawn looking 

   for an awesome app

I was reading about a company which has 30 employees in 4 cities and what they do is provide app-based reservation services for a whopping 90 restaurants so far.  Who pays for the reservation?  Why, you do.  $5 bucks a pop.  You might even be able to make a reservation for a special meal only available to the cool kids who make their reservations through the app.  Sucker burgers with sap sauce?

You can include a picture in your in-app profile and the restaurant staff will greet you by name. Wow! Instant celebrity when the tattooed host at the Dude Food Blood and Bones Brewpub and Grill high-fives you at the entrance. That's probably worth the $5 right there.

I am sure these clever youngsters over at Reservatronics (or whatever they call themselves) have visions of buy-out sugarplums dancing in their heads as they apply their energy, technological savvy, and desire to solving the immense problem of getting a reservation in a restaurant.

I really like my red-clad pocket pal of a phone, and I probably use as many silly apps as anyone my age, (that is, someone who remembers dial-up on-line access), but it is really appalling that so many folks are spending so much energy to solve minuscule non-problems.

I guess the enormous problems are just too enormous to be solved by a nifty little app.  The hard and messy solutions are never going to be acquired for mega-bucks either. And the beat goes on.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
                                                Allen Ginsberg: Howl, Part 2

*Actually, it was my bearded husband, Rick Teller, who stood beside the breakfast table laughing his head off reciting the Ginsberg lines. Thanks for the inspiration.

Apologies To My Ancestors

Dear Folks,

We've never met, but I feel I owe you an apology.

I'm pretty sure that when you boarded the old tubs in the old countries you were hoping for a better life for you and yours,  one that didn't involve stoop labor in a mucky plot of land.  If you imagined the life that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day live, it probably involved pens and paper, accounting books, and more than one pair of shoes.

I'm happy to report that my own quite privileged life has involved pens and paper, accounting books, and more shoes than anyone needs.  I hope you would be proud of me, even if the idea of the internet made your head explode.  I think you would like my house with all its indoor plumbing, central heating, and upholstered furniture, even if it isn't covered with transparent plastic dust covers at all times.

But I think you would be appalled at how I spent Saturday afternoon: on my haunches, grubbing through the dirt with my hands,  to harvest a crop of spuds.

Spuds that I had completely forgotten about. Spuds that I cultivated in the most haphazard manner imaginable.  I didn't water.  I didn't weed. I left the poor things to their own devices. And neglected though they were, they made it to the harvest, although as you can see from the photo some of them were fairly stunted.

So, my apologies, for reverting to the peasanthood you were only to happy to leave behind.  I hope your heads don't explode at my incompetence or the idea that I planted this garden for fun, not because I needed to eat.

Your humble and grateful descendant,

Kathleen

The Saucy Bits

More hoo-hah every day as celebrity after celebrity, both major and minor, trashes the hackers who got into their phones, pulled out nude photos, and, gasp!, put them out on the internet.  More viral than ebola! More evil than Satan! Oh, the rhetoric!

Yes, these women have a right to feel violated.  Yes, these hackers are certainly "bad actors," which seems to be the  trendy term for miscreants, and are worthy of a bitch-slap or two.

But, here I am going to launch into full oldster crank mode:  Take all the nude photos you want, selfies or otherwise, but remember that if it's on your phone and you are famous,  it's just hacker-bait. If you're sending it along, it's hacker-bait on someone else's phone. Haven't you figured that out yet?  Even old wrinklies have heard about hackers and identity thieves, and since we were brought up in the olden days we learned the difference between public and private, a distinction that has gone the way of the daguerrotype.

Meanwhile, spare us the self-righteous anger and go back to your acting:  good, bad or otherwise.

Done with Downton

Okay, I'm a mean girl at heart.  I laughed when Matthew flew out of his snappy roadster and broke his neck at the end of Season Three.  I knew it was coming.  I had read that Dan Stevens was done with Downton and on to other things.

I decided I was done with Downton, as well. I just can't bring myself to watch a show where I want to slap more than 50% of the characters, no matter how much I enjoy seeing their costumes. 

More fun than a barrel of suppurating donkey meat with a soupçon of fox flesh.
But not much more fun.

So, I wasn't one of the twenty gazillion watching the Season 4 premiere last Sunday night.  I'm not saying that if I come down with a case of stomach flu a couple of months from now, and the room is reeling, and I am lying there sucking on ice chips that I won't succumb to a Downton binge. But right now I am looking forward to new seasons of House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black on Netflix.

Netflix is so much more civilized.  They release all the episodes on the same day and we, the customers, can choose how we want to watch. Why, it's almost like living in the future. 

And while I'm at it, why doesn't anyone say that someone who sits down and reads a book over the weekend is "binge-reading." It's as though binge-watching were something shameful, like eating thirteen pints of Ben & Jerry's at one sitting. 

Foc.us? Foc.me!

No Forks in the Sockets
No Beans in your Ear
No Pistachio Nuts in your Nose
ETC.

Don't we all need a jumpstart for our brains now and again? I do, especially when faced with a task like balancing the checkbook or finding the jack-o-lantern candleholder that I tucked away last Halloween.

But, don't we all remember our mothers telling us not to stick a fork in an electric socket?

If Ma were around today she'd be telling us not to stick electrodes into our brains.  Ma's no longer here so Trouserville will pick up the megaphone:  don't go sticking electrodes into your brains.

 In other words: no self-administered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

BEFORE tDCS

AFTER DIY tDCS

Yes, we are living in the future where scientific information  (much of it half-baked or in this case, half-fried) is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

There has been real research by real scientists in real universities to determine whether tDCS can help re-carve neural pathways for those with Parkinson's disease, for example. There are some indications that this may work, though some of the researchers  have fessed up to forehead burns. 

Enter the FDAWW (Future Darwin Award Winners of the World) who have taken this preliminary research and run straight to the hardware store with it. You can see them on You Tube hooking up 9-volt batteries to wires and sticking the wires into their brains.  Not as a Mr. Wizard science project they hope will get them an A, or because they are dressing up like Frankenstein for Halloween. No, they are trying to enhance their video gaming ability.  Duh! Double Duh! and a hearty WTF.

If you aren't the DIY type there's a company in the UK who will sell you a device  with the classy moniker Foc.us, for about $250.  I haven't checked it out, but it sounds like a gussied up version of the classic tin-foil head wrapper beloved of cranks everywhere. You might have to get on a waiting list, though,  since the first production run of 3,000 sold out faster than you can say scalp burns.

I guess there are a lot of people out there who listen neither to their mothers, nor to the inner voice that is shrieking "Sucker!"










If you want to read more about it check out Jump-Starter Kits for the Mind which appeared in the New York Times Science Section on October 28, 2013.  I know you have enough brain power to just click right through the advertisement that pops up first.

Bad Blogger, No Doughnut

That's right.  Haven't blogged here for weeks.  Will be all tricks and no treats for me come Halloween, no doubt.

Really, nothing has annoyed me enough to blog about it.  I am pretty sure the world hasn't gotten any better, so it must be that someone is pumping laughing gas into the ventilation system over here in Trouserville.  Or blame it on the meme:

See just how easy it is to waste time on the internet:  Keep Calm and Posters

Book Me No Book

Stevie! Stevie! Stevie!  Yah makin' me crazee!  I wanna read yah book.  Fuh real. Only I don't, um, wanna book-book.  I wanna stuff it on my Kindle. Only, ya know, the papah-back won't fit in the USB port.

Dear Mr. King,

I don't consider myself a complete fangirl.  I haven't named my dog, Cujo. I don't have a tattoo of Christine the demonic car across my shoulders. And while I have a niece named Caroline, she never  has and never will be called Carrie.  At least by me.

I have not read even a tenth of the 112 books you have published, but I admire your story-telling abilities and writerly discipline. The Shining, without a doubt, is the scariest late-night reading ever. Red-rum. Red-rum. Maximum creep factor. (The movie version just made me laugh out loud, but I'm not sure how much you had to do with that.) You also get personal cred for being a Red Sox fan and for your charitable endeavors. 

So, Stephen,  what's up with the latest book?

Looking for a little light reading for a late-summer evening, I hopped onto Amazon to purchase one of your most recent books, Joyland. Well, knock me over with a card catalogue; it's not available as an e-book. Huh-whuh?

I know you have your reasons.  They are right there in the book description:


"I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book." – Stephen King

Well, okay, there is a kind of a logic to that, and I get the noirish aesthetic angle. I loved paperbacks, too.  But right now I just don't want to buy an actual book.

Here's the deal:  I'm old. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. I don't want to go piling up stuff that my relicts will have to deal with. I like books that are invisible until I plunk the magic twanger and they magically appear, glowing in the dark.

Another thing is that it is summer.  The height of the tourist season here on lovely old Cape Cod. The nearest bookstore is miles and miles away, and, like I said, I'm old. I don't want to spend a half-hour trying to turn out onto or in from our lovely old Route 6. Talk about a clogged artery.  Nor do I want to spend over an hour making the ten-mile trip back from a possible fruitless outing to the nearest metropolis.

Yes, I could order it from Amazon.  I don't worry about the carbon footprint thing. The UPS truck is coming into this neck of the woods anyway. I order little things all the time in the summer--plastic storage containers, a watering can, a crochet hook--because I don't want to drive to a store which will be filled with tourists, one of whom has probably grabbed the last C2032 battery right from under my watery eyes. Or to a store that has the goods, but not in a version I can live with. I mean, really, do I look like the kind of gal who want to be using a baby-pink watering can? If this is the last watering can I ever buy, I want to like the color. 

But I just don't want to order something I don't want. Not even if you want me to. I'd like to have my own choice of reading experience. 

Maybe I will get to read the book someday. Maybe somebody I know will buy it and pass it on. Maybe I will trip across a copy later on this year. But for now, I'm afraid it's NO SALE.

Sincerely yours,

Kathleen "The Codger" Rogers

McStemCell's

Yummers!

Scientists have managed to grow enough stem cell beef to make a couple of patties--to the tune of over $300,000--so I guess it won't be anytime soon that engineered burgers will be on the fast food menus of the world. I wouldn't read this report  on an empty stomach, or a full one, either.  Burgers with a "yellowish tinge" even though they've been tinted with beet juice? No, thanks. 


Of course, these were scientists in the UK, and it probably seemed like a good idea after all that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy going around a few years back.

Makes me happy that I am old enough to have eaten any number of juicy, thick, medium-rare burgers (accompanied by fries cooked in beef fat) without one iota of guilt and old enough that I won't be force-fed lab meat at the Sundowners' Club.

I don't know why this mystery meat seems more disgusting than any other edible.  If you've ever worked in a restaurant, studied a nutrition label on a salty snack, or read any of the scary bestsellers about the food chain, you know what I mean. Want to supersize that pink slime?

However, the test tube beef is getting a bit too sci-fi even for me.  I'm old and my head is filled up with all kinds of cultural rubbish, so all I can think of is a bloodied and battered Charlton Heston searching the back alleys of The Future (New York in 2022 which looks a lot like Kabul 2012) to find the secret* of the "tasteless, odorless crud" that passes for food:  Soylent Green.

*Spoiler alert:  it begins with the letter "P" and rhymes with "Creeple."

Chain Gang Geezers

Inspired by some scintillating local news, I'm publishing some more crime of my tips for seniors to follow up on a previous post:  Chain Gang Grannies.

While the carnival of the Whitey Bulger trial continues down at the Federal Courthouse, it's the sideshow that is the more exciting at the moment with the revelation that "Stippo" Rakes did not commit suicide because he was despondent over being deprived of a chance to carry out his bucket list goal of testifying against the Whitester.  He did not commit suicide at all but was alledgedly given a cyanide iced coffee by his old buddy-boy and dead-beat debtor, William Camuti.

Camuti, aged 69, seems to have dropped some enormous electronic bread crumbs as to his doings, which led to his arrest.

Herewith, some additional tips for felonious fogeys.

1. Remember that the Internet may be invisible but it is eternal. 

Okay, Gramps, you went down to adult ed where some whippersnapper taught you how to find out useful stuff on the internet. Guess you bunked class the day they covered that pesky history trail that keeps a record of sites you surfed.  No wonder you're shocked that some other whippersnapper will then be able to find out that in between trolling for "adult entertainment" and checking up on the Red Sox you were Googling cyanide poisoning for fun and profit. 

2. Trust people if you must, but under no circumstances trust your devices.

Forget NSA, your GPS knows where you've been.

All those handy little electronic slaves who keep you on track, tell you when to take your Metamucil, and remind you to buy a birthday card for your bookie? The ones who talk to you, whistle at you, and answer your every question? They are little blabbermouths, without conscience and without fear, and they will rat you out much faster than a crooked cop or a jilted dame.

3.  Know your beverages.


Here's one thing Camuti got right: chain restaurant iced coffee is so vile that it makes a practical delivery system for  poison. 

Rich, bold flavor, indeed. 

Fallen? Can't Get Up?

Do I have the guy for you! 

Fell while rushing to answer the phone which had fallen
behind the seat cushions of his Lazy-Boy recliner.

Sorry, I can't introduce you by name, but he does have a lot to say for himself, as you can see from the following transcript of his weekly call, provided by Xfinity Voice Mail because I may be in my elder years, but do you think I am demented enough to pick up the phone when the caller is unknown and unidentified? Let alone get sucked into the slimy vortex of a monitoring contract on a no-name plastic panic button.

Voicemail from (622) 259-8471

"collin(?) I can't get a type of system you seen on TV. Looks like the system is been recommended by thousands of hospitals and medical professionals. Let's see says here that the systems already been paid for. Looks like you're getting the system because you do yourself a friend or family member or maybe even someone(?) you know who's experienced a fall in the past so again. It's already been paid for. So there's no cost to you whatsoever. Also says here that the shipping has already been paid f..."

If only my phone had super-spidey robo-rejecting powers!  But no. The phone line this call is coming in on is not living in the future, so we can't prevent these intrusions, and I am sure what is id'd as a "Phone Number" is just random garbage so why bother to complain. I wish I could forward the calls to "Kevin," the actual real-live nincompoop who calls here frequently to offer us power-washing services, promises to remove our number from the list, and calls again in a couple of weeks.  

You may have noticed that the transcript from Mr. Fallen is a bit, um, incoherent. It's not an artifact of Xfinity's voice recognition system which is pretty good, but having actually listened to this voice mail once, I can tell you that Mr. Fallen really does sound like he is a bit, um, in the bag.

Or perhaps it is he who has fallen and can't get up. I hope so.  I hope he lays there until he mummifies. Or maybe he already has.

Medieval Teenage Assassin Nuns

My high school summer reading list was never like this: in Brittany in the late1400's a young girl escapes from an arranged marriage to a violent lout and is taken in by the Convent of St. Mortain (yes, that is "mort" as in "death") where she is trained as an assassin and then, disguised as a courtesan, sent on missions to save Brittany from the French by poisoning, knifing, and otherwise dispatching villains who've been fingered by Mother Superior.  

My English teacher, Sister St. Sourpuss, would be having a conniption fit, for oh, so many reasons. 

And here's something else to send her into a tailspin: I don't have to lug the book around getting sand and soda pop all over it, I can stick it in my ear, courtesy of Audiobook Sync which pairs a modern Young Adult novel with a classic and distributes them during the summer, courtesy of the publisher's marketeers. I just finished listening to the recent selection blurbed above, Grave Mercy,(Volume 1 of the  His Fair Assassin Trilogy, by Robin LaFevers) which is paired with a full cast recording of Hamlet. 


I know that I often climb aboard my ancient flivver of doom to spew nostalgia all over the 21st century, but here's a case in which things have clearly improved.  Yes, teenage nun assassins are a bit extreme but, hey, this is actually a fairly well-researched historical novel about the court of Anne de Bretagne, and I applaud stories about young women on a high stakes heroine's journey that doesn't end with a date for the prom.  It sure beats the crap out Cherry Ames, Department Store Nurse or Donna Parker, On Her Own which were considered appropriate "free reading" back in the day.  To those gals the mystery of the missing bracelet or a bad hair day were as challenging as it got. As for the assigned summer reading which included such gems as Mrs. Mike, all I can say is who would you rather read about: a bad-ass medieval assassin girl swanning around court in fancy dress  or a Mountie's wife swatting blackflies and rabid raccoons in East Overshoe, Canada? 

Don't tell Sister St. Sourpuss, but I'm off to order the next of His Fair Assassins, Dark Triumph.

"Go To Jail, Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Pass Go,

Do Not Collect $200!"


Back in the day there were no sweeter words in the world. Your Monopoly opponent drew the dreaded Jail Card and had to sit out a turn while you gloated and scurried to advance your own agenda.







Sorry, kids, no longer will you experience that particular thrill of schadenfreude, at least while playing the updated Monopoly Empire, Own the World's Top Brands. According to Hasbro's website Mo-Emp's neatsy-keen features are:

Buy and trade the world's top brands and be first to the top!

Cool brand tokens

Fast, fun gameplay

Watch the Monopoly Empire towers rise and fall

Yes, kids, you can spend your increasingly rare free time striving for world domination through consumer products. How patriotic! And how much fun will you have watching those towers rise and fall? Lots, I'll bet, since you are probably too young to equate towers falling with the fruits of jihad. No worries, though, since we are talking fast, fun gameplay there will be no jail.  

That's right, a no-holds-barred quest for power with no pesky time-outs for bad behavior or bad luck. A dream come true.

Much as I would like remain on the soapbox about the ethical subtext of eliminating the Jail Card, I won't.  I have some sympathy for those traditional game makers who have to concern themselves with "snackability." New games, or versions of old favorites, have to be quick enough to play in the ten-minutes of downtime a child might have between etiquette lessons and vocabulary boot camp. (You can read more about this in the recent Wall St. Journal article Toys for Tight Schedules.)

Unless you owned the Monopoly set, you
 were never ever in a million billion years
going to get to use the Scottie dog or the
racing car. 

I have no nostalgia for those cute little Monopoly tokens of yesteryear, (oh, okay, maybe the iron), and even back in the day the plutocratic Monopoly Man was a bit dated.  The battle against product placement everywhere has everywhere been lost. Time-stressed multi-tasking is a way of life even for toddlers. We all live in Snack World.






But it seems a little sad that a lot of today's kids just don't have the time, even if they had the inclination, to loll about on an old blanket in someone's backyard and play Monopoly for hours. Yes, kids, there was a time when the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" meant sugar-soaked fun, when sun tan lotion was meant to attract rays not repel them, and when "Go directly to jail," didn't sound like the tagline for yet another TV show.

Happy To Be An American?

Yes!  Proud to be an American? Hm-m-m-m, let me think about that one.

I am grateful as can be to my not-so-distant ancestors who emigrated from the bogs of Ireland and the beet fields of Mittel-Europa when they did, arriving in the US where they made good, enabling me to live a life of privilege and prosperity.  Mostly, I love America. I can do without the Kardashians, but they are undeniably an All-American success story. 

I won't go on and on about all there is to love about the United States, from the Constitution and the BIll of Rights  to ice cream, apple pie and hotdogs for all, from sea to shining sea, although the rockets' red glare gives me a headache.

I especially like the First Amendment even though it means hearing some mighty stupid political remarks from time to time.



But back to the question of  whether or not I am proud to be an American. Today, the answer is "not so much." Bad enough that our phone calls and emails are being spied upon continually by the paranoid and sneaky gnomes of the NSA.  Bad enough that the weasels of Washington try to convince us that all this prying is a for our own good, as though we are a bunch of pre-schoolers who don't know enough to run out and play in the traffic. But the vomit icing on the garbage cake has got to be the monitoring of the mail.  

Under the Mail Isolation and Control Tracking program the exterior of every piece of mail processed, all 160 million pieces of it, is photographed.  In addition, the Mail Covers program allows any law enforcement official to request that postal workers record all information from the outside of envelopes and parcels before it is delivered. 

All this surveillance might explain why it takes so long for a birthday card to get from Boston to Philly, and perhaps why a Priority Mail parcel sent to me on June 14 has yet to arrive, but there is something offensive about monitoring that doesn't require any oversight whatsoever.  Yes, practically speaking, I could give a rat's ass if the government records the fact that I subscribe to the New Yorker or receive too many catalogs for old-age products, but why should there be a record of what banks I patronize, what charities I contribute to, or who sends me a Christmas card?

I knew that privacy is a thing of the past, a quaint little something that we could once take for granted, but there is a difference between being generally characterized by the zip code where you live and being specifically identified by drones whose job it is to spy on its own citizens for the United States government. 

That doesn't make me proud at all, it just makes me sick.

Chain Gang Grannies

A Trouserville Public Service Announcement

Fellow agesters, before you take up a life of crime, and end up as a Chain Gang Grannie or Grampy, make sure

1. you have enough marbles left to plan the caper

2.  you are still nimble enough to make a clean getaway

3.  that if you are going to steal a car, choose one that is large enough for your baggage

Don't follow the sad example of the fellow in Australia who, after purchasing a knife at Kmart, went into the parking lot and held a young woman up at knife point, but couldn't make a getaway before the police arrived because he couldn't get his walker and groceries into the car in time.

Oh, dearie me.  He's 0 for 3.

Here's another couple of tips:

4. If you are going to drive around stealing porch plants and garden gnomes, don't assume that your victims have poorer eyesight than you do, or at least rub some mud on your number plate.

An elderly man on a crime spree in Canton, Ohio, drove around taking things from people's porches and lawns, until one of his victims saw him in the act and wrote down his license plate number.

5.  Don't scoff the law in Great Britain.

According to an article in The Daily Mail, police there arrest 40 senior citizens a day for such heinous crimes as "overfilling a wheelie bin" or rollerblading to endanger.

6.  If all else fails, follow the example of the elder statesman of crime, Boston's own Whitey Bulger:  Don't trust anyone, and if you are caught just keep lying and laughing. 

The Handbasket File

All official Trouservillians have that file, as in "the world is going to hell in a handbasket." If you don't have one yet, don't worry, it's issued with your Medicare card. Or, if you are natural born crankypants like me, you've had one for years.  Although I abandoned the physical file years ago, the items keep on coming.

Today's entry: Cronuts.  

Just seeing the headline in my sister's email, I assumed it was a new term for crazy-cranky old ladies:  Crone + Nuts. Turns out it is a cross between a donut and a croissant, and in the Big Applecore folks are standing in line for hours to purchase what amounts to a blob of flour, sugar, and grease.  

There are cronuts scalpers who turn around and sell them at a profit.  There are knockoffs: doissants.  And I am sure Mayor/Chief of the Nutrition Police Bloomberg is frothing at the mouth about this latest threat to the health of his city.

After all that standing on line, they can only purchase two because the management has decided to ration them, presumably to avert the Great Cronuts Massacre of 2013 in which thwarted patrons slug each other and the management with whatever the trend-obsessed New Yorker has to hand or foot--designer handbags, iPads, dog leashes, spike heeled Manolos. Or maybe it's just a clever marketing ploy to create scarcity and, thus, cachet.

Okay, maybe I'm old, but I don't get it.  No matter how rare, or how tasty, no baked good is worth waiting in line for.  In my Cape Cod town there is a bakery (closed two days a week) where demented vacationers wait for an hour or so in a line that features voracious green flies, but not so far as I know scalpers, to get a baguette or a croissant.  What for?  The bragging rights? The bread is decent, but it's not the only decent bread in the county.  

If you live in NYC, where a lot of folks live in apartments the size of storage lockers, maybe it does make more sense to stalk a piece of pastry to flaunt your up-to-the-minuteness.

I also think that Americans just like to make a competition out of anything.  If you can't get on to a reality TV show,  you can make your own little drama by scoring the most scarce and trendiest sugar bomb and boasting about it.  

"Those crumbs all over my pants? Oh, that must be the Cronut."  

"Excuse me while I lick my fingers.  Those Cronuts are a bit sticky you know." 

"Oh, yes, we scored a dozen Cronuts . Would you like to buy a raffle ticket? Only a hundred dollars. We're starting a vacation fund. We hear there's a great little town on Cape Cod where you can wait in line for baguettes. "

I'll wave to them as I drive by on my way out of town.

Oh, No! FOMO!

The only thing I miss about my twenties is my hair.  I had a stress-inducing job as a middle-school teacher, a job for which I had training but for which I was completely unsuited.  I had 175 pounds of ugly fat and a beard in the form of a stress-inducing and unsuitable husband. (To be fair, there was stress, if not blubber and a beard, on both sides.) But my hair was long and shiny, unravaged by dye jobs and age, and I could cut the split ends myself for free.

So, no--coiffure aside--I don't long to be twenty again, especially when I read about the poor millennials and how they suffer from plagues that were unimaginable in my day, plagues like FOMO.

Glued to their devices, they are unable to maintain eye contact with the world, or enjoy much of what little fun they can afford, because of "Fear of Missing Out." Like the inhabitants of the Second Circle of the Inferno (that would be Dante's Inferno, not Dan Brown's), they cannot settle on anything, and are blown hither and thither by the winds of social media. 

William Blake's version makes it
look like they're being flushed through an intestine.

What are they so afraid of missing out on? Gossip about the Kardashians? The latest episode of Game of Thrones? A drink at a bar with people who are so much more fun that the ones they are with? BIngo. Those who are dissatisfied with their lives for larger reasons (student loans, dead-end jobs, living in their parents' basements) are afraid of missing out on social opportunities, and, phone in hand, they are powerless to stop scrolling and trolling, even though it may make them feel worse.

Talk about life skills that have gone the way of white gloves and wide-legged suits. Does it never occur to these poor little things that if they paid more attention to who they were with and what was really going on they could turn off the phone?  They could decide for themselves, with their own psyches, without, gasp, the services of an app, who was boring, who was interesting, who was worth spending time with. 

Wowie Zowie!  In the olden days, we had to figure it out and deal with it on our own. Since we didn't have to actually see or hear our not-so-faraway friends and acquaintances getting shit-faced without us, or twistin' the night away, or generally jackassing around, we were free to imagine that they were moping around the hacienda or stuck with Aunt Prissy at the family BBQ. Even on those occasions when we had to suck it up, and try to be cordial to those around us, even if every cell in our bodies was screaming "listen:  there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go", we didn't have to feel bad about it because we couldn't check out that universe on Facebook, twitter, Instagram or whatever;  we could let it go and worry about it later, or more probably, not at all.

The beauty of Geezerland is that I can selectively live in the future, or the past.  Not only do I have no Fear Of Missing Out, I actually experience LOMO, or Love of Missing Out. I quite enjoy the empty mailbox, the quiet phone, the white spaces on the calendar. Best of all, there's no app needed. No app. Just nap.