Monthly Archives: June 2014

The Arc of Women Will Always Include Misbehaving Men

30 Monday Jun 2014

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Me, my sister Liz and my brother-in-law Phil (1943).

Me, my sister Liz and my brother-in-law Phil (1943).

BY ANITA JAFFE

Fifty years ago, my brother-in-law, Philip C. Lewis (pictured above), wrote and published a “playlet” called the “The American Dame”. It’s not a play with a plot, but a play with a singular theme that is read by different characters. His playlet traced an arc of how women have struggled for independence and recognition, respect and equal treatment over the course of history.

He even goes back to the Bible, referencing that within the story of Adam and Eve, Eve is set up because she is cast as the sinner; the temptress that causes Adam to fall from grace. He moves forward to the fight women waged to get the right to vote, and how the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1923, remained un-enacted in 1964 (and I might add is still un-enacted in 2014).

For some reason, my brother-in-law’s musings on the short shrift accorded women struck home when I read an article in The New York Times about how Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, was finally dismissed for treating his women employees like chattel. This 45-year-old man conducted an interview of a prospective employee wearing a towel. Would he have donned such attire if the prospective interviewee was a man? I highly doubt it. Would any woman CEO anywhere don a towel for an interview, male or female? No way!

Later, the DovMan forced his employee to perform various sexual acts, and there is no way anyone can say such behavior was consensual when the pressure to do as you are told is coming from the boss. That the DovMan is fighting to get his job back is laughable. Talk about a disconnect from reality.

But he is not the sole culprit. The article in the Times also referenced Dennis J. Wilson, the founder of the fitness clothing company Lululemon Athletica. He was attached to the following quote with respect to how his company’s yoga pants fit:

“Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work…”

It is fascinating to me, an octogenarian on my way to being a nonagenarian, that there are still corporate moguls running multi-million dollar companies who believe they have carte-blanche entitlement to treat women different than men, basically because they are not men. I am well aware that great gains have been made. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo are not oddities. Women have been and continue to break into the upper echelons in every field.

But the fact remains that the issue of women being seen for who they are, and not as objects for amusement has hardly been swept away. There remains a strain in society that still blames a woman when a man misbehaves. And that is not to dismiss the reality that there are also legions and legions of men who find the DovMen of the world abominable.

The Board at American Apparel did get around to ousting him The question of why it took so long is part of the issue and a different blog.

The Power Washer Blasts Fun

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Concepts, Men

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Before and After

Before and After.

BY BOB SMITH

Last weekend our next door neighbors had a guy power washing their house, patio, and outdoor furniture. It didn’t look like a particularly glamorous chore, but it was effective: sheets of brownish water cascaded from the house, and the place virtually sparkled when he was done.

I casually asked how much the service had cost, and they told me it was $650. But then I checked pressure washer prices online at Home Depot, and found I could buy my own power washer for about $400. Because I’m now retired, I saw no reason to pay a $250 premium for a job I could readily do myself. And if I do the job every year, I’ll save that much more.

So on Monday I bought a Ryobi brand power washer with a Honda gasoline motor that pumps out 2.5 gallons of water per minute, under 3,100 hefty pounds of pressure. And I quickly discovered that it also delivers something they don’t specify on the box: tons of fun.

As boys, my brother and I had high-quality magnifying glasses we’d salvaged from a never-used science kit Mom gave us for Christmas. If you held it at just the right angle, the lens focused the sun’s rays into an intense, white-hot beam that you could use to inflict a nasty pinpoint burn on your unsuspecting brother’s arm (precipitating more than one fistfight), or to start fires in piles of dead leaves. Or you could play God.

Magnifying glasses in hand, we would go out on a hot summer day looking for ants. Not solo meandering ants, but thousands of ants in a boiling pile, massed on a melting ice pop or glob of gum stuck to the sidewalk. If you held the glass five inches above the ants and got a good focused beam going, you could sweep it slowly across the pile, instantly crisping every ant in its path. As the beam advanced, the unlucky ants would give off a minuscule wisp of smoke, then twist, wither and fall under the writhing mass of their brethren.

“It’s a death ray!” Jim laughed gleefully. “It’s a laser beam from the sky, like if a flying saucer came by right now and started zapping us!”

While it sobered us momentarily, that image didn’t abate our enthusiasm for the grisly task at hand. Ants are slightly alien anyway, and there are millions of them, so mass murder seemed appropriate. It was exhilarating and empowering – just like my new power washer.

I hooked up the water supply, filled the tank with gas, and fired it up. The motor idled, deceptively tame, until I picked up the long metal wand and pulled the plastic trigger. The engine immediately belched to a high-pitched roar, and water jetted from the end of the hose with such force that the wand recoiled, dancing in my hands.

I tried it on the narrowest setting and the needle of water promptly etched ragged quarter-inch deep lines into the artificial wood of our deck. But when I dialed it down to a wider setting and directed the pulsing spray at the vinyl fencing around our back deck, the result was miraculous. Years of dirt and green mildew that would have taken tedious hours to scrub off by hand was blown away in minutes by the power washer’s brute force.

Then I turned to the picnic table and benches, which are pressure-treated wood that I’ve never bothered to stain or varnish in the decade we’ve owned them. The salesman rightly said you didn’t have to because the wood, even unfinished, doesn’t rot like untreated wood. But it does become “weathered” over time, which means (thanks to the rampant growth of all forms of mold), it turns from its original cinnamon brown to an ugly, blotchy black/greenish gray.

Enter the power washer – wand of watery death for mold spores living on wood.

If I set the spray width just right and held the wand close enough to the surface, I could blast paths of greenish mold off the wood with a single pass. Once again, I held incredible power in my hands.

Only no ants or other potentially sentient creatures were injured or killed this time around (unless you consider mold spores intelligent life). Giddy with power, I sprayed every square inch of every bench; every table; every piece of grimy vinyl in the yard. I even cleaned the concrete sidewalks.

It was great being a boy again.

Summer Ode to Joy Fulfillment

26 Thursday Jun 2014

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I love lying on the sand sans towel.

I love lying on the sand sans towel.

BY JULIE SEYLER

It’s official. Summer, for us on the east coast, has arrived. It was a long haul, with a lot of false starts, but with the solstice on Saturday June 21 it appears it has decided to stay. This is when beach nuts rejoice. It means lugging umbrellas, chairs and wheelie carts filled with cherries, chips and beer down to the ocean, scrabble games and frisbee games along with the time to catch up on all those books that escaped over the winter.

But most important it’s about diving into the ocean and rolling in the sand and making sure sunscreen is applied so thoroughly that not an inch of UVA rays reach the dermis. white faceYep, I am thrilled to be donning my mask every sunny Saturday and Sunday until September, (and I do know that sunscreen should be applied all year long but no need for the thick layer).

To return to the beach club where I have gone every year for the past 20 years and see everyone in their place is like old home week. It’s comforting that we reappear on cue with opening day, even while we are still waiting for the restaurant that was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy to be rebuilt. The pool is there beckoning for lap swimming and the old snack bar guy is back making the best tuna fish sandwiches ever and you can still nab a glass of wine at the highly modified tiki bar.

A day at the beach always delivers complete joy fulfillment, but the fact is, the options for joy fulfillment in summer are endless.

Corporations Cop Out on Kids

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

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June 25, 1938. FDR signs into law the Federal Labor Standards Act.

June 25, 1938. FDR signs into law the Federal Labor Standards Act.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Back in 1974 I was an unpaid intern at a newspaper. This was an academic internship arranged by my college and for which I received college credit. Although I certainly provided valuable services for the newspaper, the primary reason I was there was to learn about the newspaper industry and see if it was something I might want to do after college. I learned a lot and found I loved the work.

As it turned out, my internship led to my first post-college job because the managing editor of the newspaper where I applied for a job knew the managing editor at the paper where I had interned and the latter said some good things about me and I got the job.

Because of my positive experience with unpaid internships, I encouraged my children to do them as well. They both did several unpaid internships in college. But unlike me, their college internships did not lead to paid jobs. Instead, they led to more unpaid internships. And that’s when I found out that not only are the drugs different now from when I was in college, internships are too.

In the 21st century, American businesses have turned from being educational partners with universities to being exploiters of free student labor. Horror stories abound, particularly in the media industry, of young people forced to do menial tasks for free in the remote hope that having an internship on their resume will have some value to them. There’s no pretense of educational value other than learning how greedy and immoral American employers have become.

The last time corporate America was this greedy was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Workers provided services for pennies an hour and were happy to do it. But many fair-minded people in Congress were upset by the unfair bargaining position of employers over employees and they reacted with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This landmark New Deal legislation set a minimum wage and also a maximum work week of 40 hours, after which a premium overtime wage was required.Corporate America accepted this new burden because there was a level playing field and all businesses employing U.S. workers had the same burden. In addition, many employers saw it as simply the right thing to do.

Over the years, some businesses have become greedier and have tried repeatedly to work around the minimum wage laws. They have exploited every loophole (such as unpaid internships) and in recent years have even tried to have the FLSA repealed. My daughter worked for over a year for a large multinational corporation as essentially an employee without pay. It was called an internship, but there was absolutely no educational value and no connection with any educational institution. Clearly she should have been paid at least the minimum wage.

Being on the right side of 50 gives you the ability to see trends over long time periods and the trends for employees are not good. Ever since Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controller’s union in 1981, the balance of power has been flowing to employers. The minimum wage has stagnated and the number of unpaid interns has skyrocketed. Meanwhile corporate profits are at record highs.

It will take decades to reverse this trend, but there’s something we need to do right away. We need to pay people in their 20s a fair wage for valuable work done for a business. We need to ostracize businesses that steal from young people by asking them to work for free. We need to have state and federal labor departments that vigorously enforce the state and federal minimum wage laws. We need to stop looking the other way and pretending these internships are bona fide. It’s the least we can do as parents and as moral Americans.

The Three Mudketeers

23 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Confessional

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Mud selfie

Our selfie(s).

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Our hosed-down, post-race selves. Photo by Cameron Sackett.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

This past Saturday at 10:30 in the morning, I ran out of the gate through the hoses. I clamored up the first of the triple pits and slithered down into the waist-deep muddy waters with dozens of people underneath and above me. I alternated running and walking (for hours) with crawling through big dirty pipes, and under big dirty ropes. I hoisted over huge muddy barrels and tight-roped over a pit on a rope bridge. I swung and was tossed into a six-foot deep brown and rocky pool and clung for dear life on (and ultimately slid off of) a spinning wheel of ropes over a mini river of brown muck, before wriggling like a worm, and emerging with a bloody elbow, through a rocky, muddy, sewer-like tube, to the finish line.

Bring it on, MuckFestMS 2014. For three years now, I’ve been on team Mudketeers in the 5K for multiple sclerosis. (We started with six, this year we hovered around 20.)

The three-mile run in the South Mountain Reservation (amped-up with 19 man-made obstacles with names like Skid Mark, Big Balls, Spill Hill, and Muck Off), has manifested into a special, girlfriend, in-the-trenches, tradition for me and my two dear friends, Maura and Deborah.

We check our competitive natures, and any desire for a personal best, at those Triple Pits. We brave the onslaught of obstacles, the wet rocks, the hills and dales of the woods, the Dragon Crawl (nailed it), Mt. Muck-imanjaro (have yet to attempt), in tandem. We are one – all in honor of Maura's husband, Lee.

We’re in our mid to late 50s, and no doubt, amongst the oldest of all the participants. And even though it seems to be that we are always the last of the Mudketeers to cross the finish line (we know our limits), I’m betting no one has more giggles, grunts, endorphin-rushes, hugs, high-fives, bruises, jumps up and down, and gushes of pure love than we three.

Last year, I got stuck in the mud early on and ripped a muscle in my thigh while clawing my way up a mud hill.

“Go on without me,” I yelled. “I’ll be OK!”

But not to be a stick-in-the-mud, and thanks to my friend, who gave up going “all-out” for me, and stayed by my limping side, we were able to finish together. (There’s free beer at the end.)

This year Deborah tattooed my cheek for me, and Maura cleaned my bloody elbow.

So once a year, us 50-something girls get to be warriors, to play dirty, and to challenge mind and body to the core. We think of Lee, drink to Lee, wait for each other, pull each other up, encourage each other, scope out for each other (“Stay to the side!”), give hugs, share tears, cheer each other on, and dance across the finish line. As one.

The Little Brown Spots in Computer Upgrades

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

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apple 2


BY JULIE SEYLER

I love Apple products. Their architecture and design is sexy, sleek and practical. But when I read about Yosemite and Continuity, the latest operating systems soon to be installed on my devices, certain aspects made me wince. Not that Apple’s speedy little shortcuts, which will assist in ever easier ways to multitask, aren’t savvy, but it’s the other side of the apple that sometimes feel just a little rotten.

In iOS 8, the mobile device keyboard has been expanded to improve what is called predictive-typing suggestions. When a user is typing, the keyboard tries to predict the next word the user will type to help save time. It can also predict responses to incoming messages — for example, if a spouse asked, “Do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” the messaging app will provide potential responses to pick from: Dinner, a movie, or “I don’t know.”

Now I can’t fault a device that cuts down on typing on a 3 millimeter keyboard, but I don’t want my computer to predict what I am thinking or what I am going to ask or what I am going to answer. I feel as if my brain is being co-opted by my phone. It’s invasive that this inanimate object can predict my behavior based on my past predictability. Pretty soon I won’t even have to wonder what I’m doing tonight.

Then there is HomeKit. Here, the computer takes care of directing your home appliances to turn on, turn off or turn down:

One tool will allow Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, to communicate with these devices — saying “Get ready for bed” could dim the lights, close the garage door and lower the thermostat.

Just think how much time will be saved when you never have to remember the ideal room temperature or are spared the annoyance of trotting back to the kitchen to turn off the light after you’ve snuggled into bed. The computer has it all taken care of, but the uptick is a little less hands on control over the day to day minutiae that on some obscure level likely keeps the memory juices flowing. The more the computer does for you, the less you need to think about it and there goes one more synapse down the rabbit hole. (Remember the days when we all knew our best friends’ phone numbers by heart?)

Apple also announced the introduction of HealthKit, an app that will track your every move to help make you more physically fit. Big brother in your computer notating the miles you clocked and the carbs you ate, whether your blood pressure is high and your glucose levels low. It is absurd to criticize this because it’s all about helping YOU have a healthier lifestyle while it simultaneously keeps score of your vital signs. This is a win-win should you ever end up in an emergency room where your complete medical record is only a phone away.

Nonetheless, I can’t shake the feeling that bit by bit and inch by inch, we are being conditioned to readily tolerate the 24/7 monitoring of our head, heart and home from the inside and out.

The ever expanding smartness of computers is not new news. But what’s really fascinating is how spot on Woody Allen was in his 1973 movie Sleeper. His vision of the future was filled with people who have embraced a world where robots cook for them and clean for them and almost think for them. Even intimacy is achieved with a device. Hopefully the Orgasmatron will always remain a figment of a screenwriter’s brilliant imagination.