Author: admin

ClamHouse Rocks! A Back To School Primer

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YOU CAN TELL IT’S THE END OF SUMMER because since July 4th the CVS and Walgreens have been pushing their Halloween goods, teachers have been quitting their side jobs, and seasonal workers have been trying to figure out how to correctly collect unemployment until April.

That means it’s back to school time in the city, that magical time of year where students who are done harvesting on the family farm return to the schoolhouse equipped with new chalk and writing boards, eager to complete the three Rs.

Teachers are relieved to get a steady paycheck once again, and parents are excited to have something to busy their kids with for six-to-eight hours aside from Camp, the beach, wandering the town’s streets and parks, the beach, a neighbor’s pool, summer job, hanging out with cell phone in the house, the beach, protesting outside Market Basket, the river, or the beach.

Lesson: to every thing there is a season, and purpose, except in summer. During summer we’re just waiting until the kids can be busy again. Countdown to Columbus Day: six weeks.

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YOUR, YOU’RE, YORE & THEY’RE, THEIR, THERE – Gone are the lazy, hazy, crazy, Swayze days of summer – it’s now officially sweatshirt weather at nights, and probably a strange heat wave for the first few days of school. If you have kids ages zero to seven, this might mean you still stop by the beach after school or the weekend. Otherwise, the rest of us  are now slaves to anything school-related and weekends full of non-stop sports games and birthday parties at the bowling alley. Always the bowling alley, always.

In the adult world we operate on the notion that life is fifty-two weeks at a time, and you’re always working unless you take a vacation (who does that?). In school we think of life a grade at a time, or a semester or quarter at a time. Learning is somehow confined to 180 days, six and a half hours each, only from September to June. Fight the power! Learn alongside your kids if you can – have them teach you what they learned that day. Have them show you some new way of learning math or remembering history facts. Before long (you have until they’re like fourteen, right? Maybe twelve?), your children won’t want to tell you anything, so enjoy them while they’re young enough to talk about their day. You can always follow your kids’ lives on Twitter or Instagram because Facebook is now only for old people, and by old people we’re talking like the 24-64 demographic).

Lesson: Trick yourself into learning things by tricking your kids into doing homework with them. Doubleplusgood! Countdown to Thanksgiving: twelve weeks.

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Y=MX + B – It’s important to remember that you (and your children) have and will forget most of what you learn in school. Adults have forgotten about 70% of what they learned since three years old, even counting college and grad school and the years of television shows and movies they’ve consumed. And if they were paying attention? Still 70%. That’s right – educated humans will forget most of what they learn in 14+ years of school (that’s counting pre-school). Adult humans always forget how to be kind and not beat each other up, and rarely know how to share, and those were some of the basics.

Lesson: I totally forget. I knew it at one point, but maybe I have it written down somewhere in a notebook in the attic? Countdown to Christmas Break: sixteen weeks.

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FAILURE IS AN OPTION – That’s right. Any teacher, coach, or principal who says otherwise is totally wrong. Whether you’re a teacher, parent, student, or all three, don’t be afraid to fail. Fail big, fail often, but only after you’ve tried your bestest and then learned something. If you fail as a parent, you have time to make it right, even if your kids are grown. If you’ve failed as a student, there is always a chance or teacher or test you can do to regain your place in the world (or another road to travel to get to where you want to be). If you’ve failed as a teacher, start over. September is a good time for this.

Lesson: Life is very long, so you’ve got time to become the person you’ve always wanted to be, whether you’re a freshman in high school or a rookie parent. Countdown to February Break: twenty-four weeks.

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THE GOOD WILL HUNTING ANOMALY – Only 20% of you are going to run the world. Well, probably like 1% of 20% of 20% of you. That means the rest of us get to party and protest and out-learn each other, which is what we call society. HOWEVER there is this place that has ALL the knowledge in the world (aside from the library): this place of magic and wonder is called the Google.

On the Google you can literally learn everything ever taught or learned in the history of ever. From Plato to plate tectonics, from embryos to empires, it’s all there. ‘Ol good Will Hunting from Cambridge once said something like, “you could get a $100K education from a $1.50 in late fees to the library,” and he was right except that most people don’t read and most people don’t even know where the library is. But you – yes, you! have the entire knowledge of the world in your pocket! It’s that rectangle thing with the broken face that you just can’t seem to fix. Install the Wikipedia or TED Talks or NPR app and learn something new every day. In fact, you could spend a whole year just learning from the Google and you would probably know more than most people on the planet right now.

Lesson: Use technology to supplement your learning, not just for pixelated adventures and Twitter. Countdown to Spring Break: thirty-three weeks.

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TIME IS RELATIVE – If you are living in Massachusetts, and reading this, and own a computer, and have finished at least eighth grade, and you and your children are relatively healthy, then, in the year 2014, you’re doing better than 98% of the world over all of time and memorial. Really. You’re better off than every empire and state that ever existed. That’s how awful the world is and history has been for regular people. And just think, Massachusetts is the best place in America (and most of the world) for education. THE BEST. AND Gloucester schools are amazing, as are their teachers and students. So there are no limits for any of us – those returning to school, taking time off of it, avoiding it, or starting it up for the first time.

Lesson: We’re too advantaged to waste one day. Well, maybe one. Well, maybe we can waste a few days, but only a few. Countdown to Memorial Day: thirty-eight weeks; Countdown to Graduation: forty weeks or so; Countdown to next year’s Back to School Special Primer: fifty-one weeks.

See you at the bowling alley.

No Snark Sunday: The One Where We’re Thankful for Market Basket

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I know Jim Dowd usually does a smashing job with No Snark Sunday, but I asked him if he was still up to do it after a long week and weekend full of work, and he just had that thousand-yard stare of a man nowhere close to achieving his to-do list. I decided to try my hand at it so he didn’t end up freaking out and pacing the end of the fish pier at midnight, mumbling to himself about school supplies and lag bolts.

I racked my brain about No Snark possibilities (School? Schooner fest that I missed because I’m always working?) and then Marty DelVecchio posted this simple picture on Facebook and I was like “bingo, fuckers, that’s what I’m doing.”

Basket's Back!

Basket’s Back!

He took this Friday, when shoppers were returning to Market Basket after the successful takeover by Artie T Demoulas.

We are a better community by having Market Basket here. It sounds completely odd for me to say that – despite being a business major and running my own LLC, I’m a super liberal anti-big-corporation kind of hippie punk mom. But, it’s true. Market Basket helps the middle and lower classes survive. End of story.

– They provide reasonably priced fresh produce. The huge problems so many inner cities face is lack of fresh produce for cheap (look up Food Desert), and that’s one of the huge causes of obesity and health problems. Locally, we have other amazing resources like Backyard Growers, Open Door, and the Farmer’s Market that filled the gap, but not every city is as lucky as ours. I don’t want to crap on other local supermarket chains, but in most cases you end up paying more for worse-looking fruit and veggies.

– Cheap Staples, too. Produce is only a small part – having cheap necessities like milk, eggs, cheese, pasta (their own in-house whole grain stuff is great), and sugar/flour literally changes the budget for folks without a ton of discretionary income. We all felt the pinch. The nuclear Clamfamily’s 2 adults and 2 kids usually means about $100-$120 in groceries per week, but outside Market Basket, this shoots up to nearly $200, unless you have the time to meticulously research loss leaders and sales and make several trips (spoiler alert: we don’t).  Our pantry was laughingly bare this week. We even ran out of canned beans. We’re terrible Doomsday Preppers, apparently.

– Jobs. This is a weird one, because it’s always been reported by major media that the Basket pays well and is a loyal employer, but I have heard firsthand from employees what their starting pay and benefits were, and they weren’t really remarkable. Also, a lot of the Gloucester Crossing employees who started the place up got moved to part time a few months in when the work load fell off and had to wait a long time to go back to full time. I am remiss to give accolades to anyone who doesn’t provide a living wage to living people and fosters underemployment. But, they do provide a good opportunity for teenagers to get a first job, and the company does do a great job of promoting from within. Folks do stay on for years, and apparently do move up in pay and benefits, and that’s far better than others.

The Market Basket fiasco was also notable for giving my my first actual opportunity to write something kind of serious that got major hits – with swears, of course, but serious nonetheless. It was insane how quickly the whole Clam thing spread. A little bit of humor and gratuitous swearing is apparently how 200,000+ people like their news-related articles. It’s been absolutely fucking crazy. People I don’t know stop me in the street. People left dozens of comments, and emailed me personally, to tell me I was a great writer. Dudes, I just started writing in May when we started this thing. That’s crazytalk!

 

Market Basket’s Back: How The Little Guy Won For Goddamn Once In America

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After a tough couple weeks for Market Basket’s loyal customer base and employees who were on the brink of permanent unemployment, news broke late Wednesday night that the “deal” had been done – Arthur T Demoulas’s offer to buy the 51% of Market Basket owned by his cousin, Arthur S Demoulas, and family, was accepted.

There was an immediate outpouring of gratitude and elation, followed by feverishly written grocery lists. At home, the Clam family is out of peanut butter, cereal, flour, pasta, rice, chocolate syrup, all kinds of cheese, frozen veggie burgers, and pretty much all meat products except hot dogs. This last week was like when you’re 85% through the Oregon Trail and rations are meager as all fuck and you’re just going hunting every damn day for what you need to make sure your kids don’t starve. Alkali water? Lost the trail? Goddamnit, MECC, you cruel overlords.

JESUS CHRIST EVERY DAMN TIME

If you’re following along at home, this is actually a pretty incredible story that happened locally, but impacts globally.  Here’s why:

1. First off, the little guy won. This doesn’t happen in modern day America, aside from rare instances. Employees without the protection of a union were able to successfully picket for what they wanted – not even a negotiable end goal like salary or benefits, but a concrete thing – reinstate Artie T as CEO. That’s it. Nothing less. While it started slowly, locally, the Market Basket story eventually grabbed nationwide media attention. Our local discount grocery with the never-fashionable floor tiling and the kids with the ties on was all of a sudden A Big Thing.

2. The employees had the backing of almost every single customer. Boycotts aren’t often incredibly successful – in this study, 53 out of 144 publicly-owned firms conceded to boycotter’s demands. That’s a 37% rate. While I couldn’t find the data, I have a hard time believing that any of those 53 cases had the groundswell of bipartisan support that Market Basket’s did. And again, that’s publicly owned firms that ostensibly are very concerned about their public image. Market Basket’s privately held board and double-dose of egregiously godawful CEOS Gooch and Thornton, at first glance, seemed relatively unconcerned about their public image, what with the whole “we will fire whoever doesn’t come to work” thing. This was a mistake. Oh my fuck, was this ever a mistake.

3. The protests were epic. The inmates ran the asylum, for lack of a better colloquialism. At every store, there were huge banners of Artie T’s face, receipts taped EVERYWHERE from other grocery stores, and dozens of protesters outside every entrance. Boycotts happen, but has there ever been a boycott where the upper management was unable to keep their stores from being completely overrun by protest signs? Picket line’s usually not INSIDE THE STORE.

Picture courtesy of the Concord Monitor

Picture courtesy of the Concord Monitor

 

4. The family background behind the protest, as I have stated before in a thing that kinda went a little viral, is FUCKING CRAZY. The family is straight-up nuts and the fighting was a decades-long sawdust soap opera. Plus strippers and disbarred lawyers. People want a crazy drama background, and holy hell has the Demoulas family ever delivered.

Of course, *record scratch* the fairytale ending isn’t set in stone. Arthur T Demoulas bought the company and operations are returning to normal very quickly, but the devil is in the details of how Market Basket will be paid for. The purchase price was somewhere near $1.5 B.  ONE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS. DANG. Artie T and family put up $500m, leaving $1b to be financed – most likely through mortgaging properties. This is going to hurt profits – Market Basket’s key to low prices and relatively good employee benefits was their ability to be almost terrifyingly profitable – they carried so little debt. This is no longer the case. While some of their capital will be saved by not distributing willy-nilly to shareholders on Arthur S’s side like in the past, that’s still not a gigantic chunk of the difference.

In all honesty, though, it may not be perfect, but this ending was the best-case scenario by far. The other options were:

– The stores closing altogether. This would first of all “suck balls” as the kids say, but secondly have a terribly negative impact on our economy – thousands of laid-off workers, plus the ever-expanding lower and middle class that relies on cheap, fresh food to maximize their budget. I don’t want to imagine a world without the Basket, do you?

-Employees giving up and the Arthur S side and its “management” team maximizing profits at the expense of employees and customers alike. The further erosion of worker pay and benefits ticks along and we as a society get used to it. Pete Seeger rolls over in his grave.

It’ll be interesting to see how the whole thing turns out – but the Clam has high hopes for Market Basket in the future. For now, I need a gallon of sour cream and seven pounds of steak to make up for lost time.

 

 

JAWS got rained out and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!

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Tonight was the finale of the wonderful movie series we’ve had down at the Harborwalk, and I left my husband at Midori with my kids and a bill for 2 Mai Tais and some spicy tuna rolls to go see JAWS. I have never seen Jaws. Clampadres, I was born in 1983, which probably explains a hell of a lot about my worldview (you know what’s awesome? Weezer. Weezer is awesome. Also, Cabbage Patch Kids. And Pete and Pete). My parents were like “blah blah violent movies probably bad for young kids,” therefore, I have never actually seen JAWS.

Looks totally legit and not fake in any way.

Looks totally legit and not fake in any way.

I was excited. I was a little concerned with the amount of small children present who were about to be horrified for life, but I was excited. As the movie started, I realized THE MOVIE IS RATED PG ARE YOU EVEN SERIOUS. You know what else is rated PG?

  • Frozen.
  • Muppets’ Most Wanted
  • Planes: Fire & Rescue
  • Tangled
  • The Incredibles
  • How to Train Your Dragon

You know, movies you bring your four year old to. Movies with Happy Meal Tie-Ins. Just normal every day kids’ movies. The 70’s were a weird time. Not that I’d know. I usually rely on Ol’ Man James Dowd to regale me with his tales of KC and the Sunshine Band and smoking in elementary schools and whatever else happened in the 70s, because again I was born in 198 fuckin’ 3.

So anyway, some girl gets eaten, a kid gets eaten, there’s an asshole mayor in pinstripes, and it’s all Chief Brody and his terrifying baby that’s totally 10 years older than I am now.

TERRIGODDAMNFYING

TERRIGODDAMNFYING

Fun times! And then… it starts to rain. And I’m like well, that’s some bullshit, but I am watching this movie. I crack up at Brody smoking a goddamn cigarette in the ER (is he on the Hard Merchandise? WE NEED THIS FISH!)

But by the time Quinn and Brody and NOAA dude are in the boat, it is POURING BUCKETS. I’m down to stay. Brooke is down to stay. We’re in this, motherfuckers. I hid under my chair. Can’t get me, rain!

And then they finally cut the movie, right as the fucking shark is surfacing right in Roy Scheider’s adorably chiseled fucking face. OH MY GOD.

shoulda bought a chum cutter, bro.

shoulda bought a chum cutter, bro.

But you know, part of my life is lugging sound and PA gear around, and that shit is not happy in rainy conditions or if you drop it on the escalator at the Museum of Science, so I understand and applaud their decision to cut it when they did. I’m super happy with how the movies went, wish I could’ve seen more, and can only hope it happens again next year. Thanks to all the wonderful people like Matt Coogan and Rob Newton and the dozens of others who made this happen. Seriously, you people rule!

Anyway, for those of us who haven’t seen JAWS before, this leaves us hanging! HOW DOES IT END? WHAT HAPPENS? OH MY GOD SAVE US CAPTAIN PLANET!

I came up with a few hypotheses for how the movie ends. I’m not sure, because again, I’ve never seen it, but these scenarios seem the most likely:

1. In an amazing plot twist, it turns out it’s been Brody killing people the whole time. Quint and the Shark team up to stop him.

2. The shark is Quint’s father, who knew of no other way to get Quint’s attention than a killing streak. The film ends in a tearful embrace between the two.

3. Brody is already dead. Everything that’s happened since his drowning as a child has been this dream on the stretcher as they tried to revive him.

4. The shark is captured but it turns out it wanted to be caught so it could destroy the aquarium and kill its director, who had betrayed him when they worked together during the war.

5. The Shark is Russia.

Am I close? I’m probably pretty close. Whatever, I guess I’ll never know. UNTIL NEXT YEAR!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No-Stalgia

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We’re seeing a lot of these comparisons between what you had to do to get kids ready for school in the ’70s compared to what parents have to do today floating around ye ole Intertubes. Lest anyone get the idea that The Clam is written exclusively by with-it young hipsters, it behooves us to mention this particular Clameditor was alive during the ’70s. We actually attended elementary school in a few of the ’70s. Yeah, it was a simpler time, but so were the Dark Ages.

’70s and ’80s nostalgia always rubs us the wrong way. It’s always heavy-up on VW Beetles and flower decals, but forgets the much, much darker shit going down back then. I know the world seems crazy now, but trust me. Check out the Wikipeda page for any year in that decade and you’ll be faced with horror after horror. Here, for larfs just read the entry for 1972. Actually, just skip to May.

Way less this

The 70s were way less this

Way more this

and way more this

As is the Way of The Clam, we hereby offer our list of the top seven things from the ’70s we are NOT sending our kids off to school with.

1. Lead I’m sending my kids off to school with new notebooks, sneakers and pencils but greatly reduced blood lead levels from those we had in the ’70s. You wacky funsters today harsh on Fluoride and GMOs with a bunch of unsubstantiated arguments as to the long-term effects of each. When we were  kids, we stuck to the classics: Lead has been shown many, many times to cause permanent cognitive damage to kids and it’s been a known toxin for centuries. Yet it wasn’t banned in interior house paint until 1978 and was in everything from gasoline to solders to vinyl and water systems. Lord only knows how it’s going to affect us later in life.

2. Real social strife We’re as concerned here at The Clam about the militarization of police and the crazy-ass stuff going on in Ferguson as anybody. But when we were kids, this kind of shit happened all the time. Kent State, where National Guard troops opened fire on protesters with real bullets killing 4 and wounding 9 happened in the ’70s. 11 days later the police did the same thing at Jackson State killing two more. Here in Boston we had the busing riots. Just take a look at this bullshit going on less than 30 miles from here and try and convince us the ’70s were a better time:

Boston, the '70s

Boston, the ’70s

3. Carpet Bombing Another thing we won’t be packing alongside tree-nut free snacks and tahini sandwiches is the knowledge of our country straight-up indiscriminately bombing the crap out of a foreign land. Yes, the “drone war” gets a lot of attention for killing around 2,500 people in five years, many of them civilians. But the year we ourselves were scampering off to kindergarden in our Toughskins and Buster Browns, the US was dropping literally tons of bombs on the city of Hanoi, the capitol of North Vietnam. In the spate of less than two weeks we’d killed 1,600 civilians. The whole Vietnam War, which wrapped-up in 1975 killed about 4 million people. I know we’re still fighting wars all over the place, but it does seem like the overall body count is going down from the era of “peace and love” which is a good thing.

4. Terrible, Terrible Music Our favorite quote about pop culture of this era is “People of the Seventies thought they were living in a golden age of music. They weren’t. It turns out they were living in a golden age of film.” Yeah, there was some great stuff, but most of it was crap. And most of the great stuff; like the Ramones, the Clash, the Velvet Underground and the rest of the nacent punk movement came in direct response to the rotting possum carcass sausage that was being cranked out of the music industry. Tired of the Frozen soundtrack? How about “Billy Don’t be a Hero”? Or “Seasons in the Sun”? I could go on and on, but I’m happy to sing any Taylor Swift number driving the minivan over the horror that is this:

Update: We read this post to our wife and she kicked us in the nuts. “What about Led Zeppelin? Queen? KC and the Sunshine Band? Joni Mitchell? Marvin Gaye? Neil Young? Fleetwood Mac, Simon and Garfunkel, Bruce Springsteen, pre freaky-Michael Jackson 5?” Ok, ok there was great music. But Captain and Tennille unironcially dedicated to Henry Kissinger is what I’m saying and please stop kicking because pain.

5. Rote memorization One thing that singes our stones is people getting all bent out of shape around “all the technology the kids have to have nowadays…” You know why? BECAUSE WE ARE LIVING ON THE CUSP OF A TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY, THAT’S WHY. In fifth grade we memorized facts and learned simple equations. We took quizzes and tests. They might as well have taught us to sew the oilskin fabric coverings of zeppelins for all the good that will do you today. Within our kids’ lifetimes’ products will be produced by nanoscale replicators and it’s very likely computers will be able to mimic most of the functions of the human mind. So, what’s the complaint about them needing a multi-function calculator along with the colored pencils? Think about the change you’ve seen in just the past ten years and then multiply that by an order of magnitude, then you understand the world our schools are trying to get these kids ready for. We are Amish compared to what they’re going to be seeing.

6. Unsafe everything I know parents today get a lot of grief from older folks for making kids ride scooters in helmets and wear seatbelts and not breathe the secondhand smoke on an eight hour car trip to Maine, but I’m not sure why we hate so hard on reasonable safety precautions. The oft heard “we somehow survived” meme is a weird construct. It goes: “We didn’t have all that safety stuff these kids do today and we survived, right?” Um…anyone else see the problem with that statement? There is a logical fallacy big enough to swallow a Ford Country Squire.

The front seat and the rear compartment had different climates

The front seat and the rear compartment were so far apart they had separate climates

Who the fuck does that statement address, both the living AND the dead? Is this a seance? It’s like saying, “Anyone who lost both upper limbs in a wood-chipper accident please raise your hands. Okay, I don’t see any hands so wood-chippers must be safe!” Talk about your sampling error. Those invoking the “we survived” proof are only able to do so because they are THEMSELVES obviously survivors, correct? There is no way the kids of the 70’s who DIDN’T survive can be represented in this affirmation, right? People who say this: were your parents using the lead paint chips as a salad topping? For fuck’s sake.

Ok, so let’s try this again: “When we were kids we didn’t have all that safety stuff, but we survived, didn’t we? I mean all of us except, for instance, the additional 50% of kids who died as the result of injuries sustained in car crashes because no one wore seat belts and are now buried in the cold, cold ground.” There. That’s better.

Not banned till 1988

Not banned till 1988

7. Alienation I don’t know about other kids of the 70s and 80s, but a lot of us were just left. We were free to roam around and learned a ton about how to get tetanus from old razor wire and which barrels of creosote down at the old factory were best for dipping your head into on a dare, but I dunno… Along with the freedom, which was great, there was a distance, a gulf between the kids and the adults beyond just years and roles.

At holidays we had kids’ tables. We were expected to go downstairs and play ping pong or watch TV while the adults upstairs drank and smoked. There was our music and their music. Until Star Wars there were our movies and their movies. That’s not how it is today. My kids and I play with Legos together, we listen to music together, we read some of the same books, play the same videogames and watch some of the same films. I’m not another kid to them, I’m a real-live authority figure who will turn off the wireless network if the dishes are not done in a heartbeat, thank you very much. But at the same time I won’t feel when I send my kids off next week that these are small strangers who also happen to live in my house.

For those of you who missed it, and I’m glad you did, life in the ’70’s was lonely for a lot of people. Outsiders, victims of abuse, gay folks, anybody different, really, did not find that decade or even much of the next a comfortable place. The communal sensibility of the ’60s had given way to atomized individualism, where you could be “yourself” as long as that fit into a narrow set of descriptors. We still have glaring issues around acceptance, but society  and most importantly kids today are significantly more tolerant than the supposedly “anything goes” ’70s.  As a grateful resident of the 21st century, I’m hoping empathy is something my own kids will carry to school next week, along with the new ergonomically-designed backpacks Grandma sent.