Shameless Publicity Hound of the Year Award?

And the winner is . . . .

Ben Edelman, Harvard Business School professor and bush-league pundit in the hotsy-totsy consulting field of on-line fraud prevention and detection.

His consulting biz must be a bit on the lean side, though, else why would he engage in an on-line vendor war with a local Chinese restaurant over the discrepancy between the prices on an outmoded webpage versus the prices he was charged for  his stir-fried supper?

After the recent Grubergate debacle, I'd think that even a blowhard lawyer/economist would think twice before committing himself to the passive-aggressive warfare of snotty emails and complaints to the  Massachusetts Consumer Protection authorities described in today's boston.com article which reprints the correspondence between Edelman and Ran Duan of Sichuan Garden.

It has to be for the publicity, and he has succeeded quite well engendering such dreamy headlines as:

Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food

I'm sure his clients will be really impressed by his acumen and tenacity.   He also garnered a shout out from the GS Eleveator Gossip Twitter feed (@GSElevator):

Harvard’s Ben Edelman is a scumbag piece of shit…

(Actually, it is hard to imagine overhearing that comment in the GS elevator without the qualifier:  and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.)

Maybe Ben-Boy is simply jealous of Ran Duan, who is himself no slouch in the publicity department, having been featured in a Boston Magazine article earlier this year and been recently named "America's Most Imaginative Bartender" by GQ.  Is the whole thing just part of an esoteric pissing contest that hasn't been uncovered? Is Prawn-gate just the beginning of National Enquirer-worthy revelations?

There's no mention of what fortune Edelman received in his complimentary cookie, but it probably didn't say: You don't hunt mosquitoes with an elephant gun, unless you are a Harvard B School professor in which case you are exempt from the rules of common sense, not to mention common courtesy.

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.

Yoo-hoo, Cohasset, it's 2014

not 1914.

I used to live in the next town over from Cohasset, Massachusetts.  Cohasset was much ritzier than my little town, which wasn't ritzy at all. I drove through Cohasset on the way to a memorial service a couple of weeks ago, and it is still ritzy, in that rock-bound coast, black shutters on white clapboard way of many New England seaside towns.

It's citizens are moneyed, but not, apparently, very street-smart.  A rash of car burglaries, right outside of (gasp!) their very houses occurred over the weekend, netting the miscreants sacks of goodies including cash, phones, and electronics.  Most, if not all, of the swag taken from unlocked cars.

Cohasset Burglar Doing The Happy Dance

Duh, double-duh, huh-whuh!?! In the article I read in the Boston Globe, a shocked Cohasseter  claims "never to have heard of such a thing." Talk about a sheltered life.

No, I'm not blaming the victims, but come on, folks,  take a little responsibility.  First, your cars are sitting outside, not in your three-car garages.  Second, they are unlocked. Third, you leave your valuables in them.  Fourth, your town has little or nothing for kids to do of an evening.  What do you think might happen?

In the olden days, in my not very ritzy town, kids used to smash windows in cars and pry out the stereos which they peddled to each other, or took down to the Gut and tossed into the water for fun.   Back then, it might have made a bit of sense to leave the car unlocked, so as to avoid the smashed window, but mostly the larcenous little darlings didn't bother to check.

No one has bothered to steal a car stereo for years.  Thievery is a whole lot easier now, with all that free-floating paraphernalia most people seem to haul around, (the stuff you can easily gather up and take with you when you leave your car unlocked)  especially if your targets don't have the sense to realize that even in a cushy enclave, there may be somebody who wants their stuff.

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.

HOLY-WEEN? Holy Cow!

Hand me the black jellybeans and hold the holy water.

Just in time for Halloween, the Vatican has hosted a conference of exorcists.  What's on the program? How to vomit-proof your exorcist suit? I don't even want to think about a trade-show type marketplace.

In addition, the spoilsports of the Vatican have sent out the word that, come the 31st, good Catholic kids should dress up like saints, because it is Holy-ween.  (Actually, dudes, hallow does mean holy.)

This is old hat to me and my sister who were raised in the good old days of the Catholic School Hegemony that was 1950's Urban America, Worcester (Mass.)  Division. We had Halloween parties at school, but they were All Hallow's Eve parties because the next day was All Saint's Day, a Holy Day of Obligation (No school. Yay! Had to get up early anyway to go to Mass! Boo!).  We had to dress up like saints. This is what we refer to as "compulsory fun."

I won't go into the details--this was back in the day when costumes were home-made, with perhaps a purchased mask--but one year I dressed as my patron saint, Saint Catherine of Alexandria who was tortured to death on a wheel.  The only wheel I could find was from an old baby buggy, but needs must;  there was no way an actual torture wheel was in the budget and my father was no handyman.

My costume had a much higher neckline.

Actually, as a patron saint, I preferred the more intellectual Saint Catherine of Siena, but she didn't meet such a colorful end.  She only ate Communion wafers for years so she, duh, starved to death.  Not much of a nutritional role model, but she was otherwise a smart cookie and a few years ago I got to visit her mummified head in Siena.

Do you sense a theme here? The lives of the saints usually ended in some sort of torture, and we were spared no details. Machines of individual destruction included wheels (St. C of A), racks, crucifixes both right side up and upside down, griddles (St. Lawrence, whose reported last words were "Turn me over, I'm done on this side), and arrows (St. Sebastian, the painter's favorite pincushion.)  Methods of dispatch included burning at the stake, dismemberment, drawing and quartering,  severing of breasts, gouging out of eyeballs and tongues.  And, we were told, this sort of thing was going on right now in other parts of the world,  and if Sister Says It You'd Better Believe It.

That this pornography of pain was considered suitable fare for elementary school children makes me shriek. And if you think pornography is too strong a word, go google "St. Sebastian images." No wonder I was a nervous wreck, worried as I was about whether I would renounce my faith (direct path to Hell)  or submit to disemboweling by a Communist (immediate stairway to Heaven). Things got much easier when I realized I had no faith to renounce.  It's possible I believed in Santa Claus longer than I believed in Baby Jesus.

St. Sebastian, mild version, only two arrows and no gushing blood.

Note to the boys in the black cassocks (which make nifty witch costumes, by the by):  Focusing on the sad, demented, tortured, and gruesome lives of the saints isn't such smart marketing.  Not many kiddos want to grow up to suck on lepers' sores, like St. Damien.  Then again, maybe that's the type of sheep you are trying to attract to the flock.

This year, as most years, we'll be joining family in Salem, Mass. for the Halloween festivities.  The closest to a saints'  costume we'll see will likely be on a grown man dressed as a priest accompanied by a naughty nurse or a pirate wench.  We'll sit on the stoop and watch the traditional parade of goblins, ghosts, princesses, witches and superheros. The only vigil we'll be keeping will be over the candy bowl, because at my sister's house, located in the heart of Witch City, and visited by hundreds of sugar hounds, it's one candy bar to a customer.

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.