1187 Flush the Janes

1187 Operation Flush the Janes

(New York) -- Four posts ago, we heard about cops on Long Island arresting the patrons of prostitutes.  The DA’s election year stunt was called  Operation Flush the Johns.  Now, the shoe is on the other gender:  women who buy counterfeit handbags and other goods in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Fake Pradas, LVs, Rolexes, etc. are almost as old a come-on commodity as hookers.  And connecting with people who want them happens in the same sub rosa ways.  A small, highly trained cadre of tourist spotters prowl the crowded sidewalks muttering or whispering to the out of towners, showing pictures of the merchandise, negotiating price and mysteriously producing the handbag or the watch or the perfume or the shoes from... somewhere.

This is illegal in several ways.  Forged stuff, some of it really authentic looking.  Street peddling without a license.  But the part that really sticks in city hall’s craw is the illegals don’t collect and pass along sales tax.

How do you spot a tourist in Chinatown?  First step: racial profiling.  The typical tourist is white, middle aged, overweight and bug-eyed.  Second step:  Tourists talk funny.  They wear Hawaiian shirts or “I Love NY” tee shirts and straw hats, things real New Yorkers -- even white ones would never use.  They amble and gawk.  They carry cameras at the ready. Sometimes they have maps.  (Usually not, these days.  Smart phones have taken over for maps even in Indiana or whichever flyover state these people come from.)

Don’t take this the wrong way.  We love flyover people who talk funny, wear funny hats and amble and gawk. If not for them, all of Broadway’s theaters  would go dark and LaGuardia Field would be a ghost town.

Tourists with fake Michael Kors or DKNYs are an important component of the local economy.  After all, where else can you get a $250 pair of Hudson Jeans for under 50 bucks?

Established merchants on Canal St. are all in a twist about these fakes.  Have been for decades. They rightly point out that they have overhead like rent, electricity and the occasional business license that the street peddlers don’t.

But the illegals bring in traffic and that traffic is what keeps the “Golden Dragon Trading and Noodle House” and 500 other businesses in business.

So move over, Johns.  Gotta make room for the new influx of Janes at Central Booking.

When the cop comes home after work and the kids ask him what he did today he may soon have to answer “I arrested two women from Cincinnati for possession of a controlled handbag.”

Shrapnel:

--MURDOCH DIVORCE SHOCKER.  Octogenarian Press Baron Sheds China Doll, 44, after 14 year marriage.  Was Wendi too old for Rupert?

--You can bet Wendi’s Louis Vuitton bag is not one of the Chinatown knockoffs.  She can well afford the real thing.  And after the divorce is final, you can bet she’ll still be able to afford the real thing.

--IBM has fired an undisclosed number of workers, most of them offshore.  The company stock closed up Thursday by more than

2 ½ Points.  Analysts were disappointed, one going as far as saying “they should have canned more people.”

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1186 Putting the Link in LinkedIn

1186 Putting the Link in LinkedIn

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a bother.  But these days, who knows?

No doubt you are familiar with the “networking” site LinkedIn.  It’s supposed to help you keep in touch with people from your industry.

They’re kind of a Facebook for job seekers or that rare bird, someone who is hiring.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and company are giving LinkedIn a run for its money and LinkedIn is retaliating by stepping up its obnoxion factor, sending more emails, promoting more widely, establishing groups of the forlorn jobless and telling you the data it has on you.

A new feature tells you how many people have viewed your profile in the past 90 days.  A still newer feature tells you who they are.  A common tell:  Art Glotz from Ding Dong Broadcasting viewed your profile.  Or: Stately Plump Buck Mulligan from Ulysses Ltd viewed your profile.

Okay, nothing wrong with that.  But here’s one that scares: “Someone from The Government viewed your profile.”  Uh oh.  Someone?  The Government? Who? And why?  The NSA?  Dick Cheney making random visits to fill his boring final days?  The IRS?

Is this real?  Is it a joke?

A lot of people think that the government is reading their emails and tracking what they view on the internet.  And Google says (a) not so and (b) we’re seeking permission to tell you what info we do provide.

Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond says that on his blog.

Facebook says on its Facebook page that it does not “cooperate with the (National Security Agency.)”

But what about LinkedIn?

Wessays™ has switched out of the Verizon system as a precaution, opting for a one-off service that probably is as forthcoming as anyone else in the phone data dump business.

Comcast declined comment on whether it supplies internet connection data to anyone.  But does it track your TV viewing habits?

EZ Pass knows everything about you from where you drive to the brand and size of your underwear. But do they share it?

Put all this cloak and dagger stuff in a pot and stir in the latest Supreme Court decision allowing the cops to take your DNA and your only privacy is in the bathroom.  And we’ll see how long that lasts.

Shrapnel:

--What goes on during practice and rehearsal for those singing contest reality shows?  They start with a bunch of singers each different from all the others.  And by the finale, they all sound alike.

--Since much of today’s “music” has no melody and incomprehensible lyrics, it’s only natural for “singers” to “interpret” their songs.  Okay, in most cases.  But the National Anthem needs no interpretation and shouldn’t be subjected to vocal contortions from the stars of pop, country and soul.

--Commercials for pet medicines are starting to sound like commercials for people medicines.  Pictures of a happy, healthy dog or cat bookend a long and frightening list of possible side effects.  You can cure Fido’s heartworms and wreck his liver all with one small, easy-to-swallow pill.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1185 How Computers Keep Busy

1185 How Computers Keep Busy

If computers are so smart, why are they sometimes such dummies? Today’s object d’scorn is “auto fill.”

Google, Bing, Yahoo, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, have too much time and too much bandwidth on their hands.  And idle bandwidth is the devil’s playground.

So in order to keep their electronic selves on the straight and narrow, they give these programs something a little extra and supposedly helpful to do when they’re not sending your browsing data to the National Security Agency, posting “customized” ads on your websites.  They play guessing games with your search terms.

Let’s say you want to know the name of President Taft’s wife.  You start typing ‘William Howard Taft’s...”  and you find you’re on a results page that lists his ailments or his biography or his dinner menus.

Ever wonder what a 1956 Cadillac looked like?  That’s easy. Type the phrase in the search block and you come up with a page full of pictures... of engines.

When you look back at the search block, you see it went looking not for “1956 Cadillac,” but “1956 Cadillac Engines.”  Nice guess Mr. Google... but no cigar.  Removing the word “engine” from the phrase is almost as hard and takes almost as long as removing the real engine from the real car.

But when it comes to filling out forms, the game gets even more exciting.

You start to enter your email address and as soon as you type the first letter, the browser shows you it will do it for you if you just “click here.”  And it works.  But half the time it tries to cram all kinds of other stuff in the block.  Your address.  Your phone number.  All that stuff squeezes in much like when you try to squeeze yourself into that pair of pants you wore five years ago.  

The pants probably don’t close, or if they do they make you look like a sausage.  The email block is rendered useless and you have to get rid of the entry and start over.

Maybe some other security related agency can start requesting your info.  Distract the internet services that are trying to be so “helpful.”

Shrapnel:

--The unemployment creeps up a little and the stock market shoots higher... way higher.  So, let’s see: if everyone were unemployed, the market would be some number close to infinity.  There’s something perverse about this inverse.

--Is this competitive pushback against Bloomberg reporters supposedly eliminated ability to spy on its customers?  Thomson Reuters has just started advertising a cloud-based research service called “Endnote”  which competes with some of the features of the Bloomberg Professional Service and costs $19,800 less.  Next thing you know, they’ll be starting a news wire.

--Please keep Joe Galloway in your thoughts.  His wife, Dr. Gracie Tzu, says he’s lying when he tells you he’s “doing fine” recovering from a complicated illness and that he’s really only doing OK.  Joe’s one of the best guys who ever strung words on paper and the most insightful war correspondent since Ernie Pyle Bill Mauldin and Edward R. Murrow got real jobs.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1184 The New Televangelists

1184  The New Televangelists: Mehmet and Drew

“I am the great and powerful Oz.”

That’s a line from the Wizard movie.  But today it has a whole new meaning.  Mehmet Oz, MD is one of the new preacher men.  Another is David Drew Pinsky, MD, “Dr. Drew.”

These guys are all over the TV with a bedside manner becoming someone with a medical degree and the low key all knowing all seeing attitude docs often wear and patients both secretly revile and secretly revere.

They dispense advice and coming from their mouths, many people invest it with the force of commandment.

By all accounts, Oz is a first rate heart surgeon who actually operates one day a week when nothing more important comes along.  Like his daily syndicated TV medicine show.  

Drew is another kind of case.  His specialty is addiction.  But mostly he has a radio show with sex advice, a television show about whatever “big” story HLN is covering and an MTV show purportedly helping addicts.  Recently he announced he was backing out of the MTV deal because too many who appeared on it died soon after and he was “tired of taking all the heat.”

Don’t worry, though.  You can hardly turn on a TV set without seeing him on … well, something.

Oral Roberts may have been a pioneer in TV healing.  But never did he take personal credit for anything resembling a cure for anything.

And his delivery doesn’t cut it when your schtick needs more polish in the never-let-them-see-you-sweat 21st century.

So, well-spoken, well-dressed, well meaning and -- we hope -- well informed talking hairdos practice medicine by remote control.

While they don’t prescribe on the air, they do advocate viewpoints and sometimes potions, some of them homemade, others from common and apparently harmless ingredients.

In the case of these two, Drew has lower potential to do harm than Oz.  First, his actual patients generally are addicts, and most of the rest of us aren’t.  So we aren’t going to run out and do whatever he says.  Second, the sex show is the same kind of advice as Dr. Ruth’s and unlikely to have any lasting side effects.  Third, the HLN show is mostly about the criminal of the day.  Drew may offer some psychological insight.  But it affects no one.

Oz is another story.

He frames his ideas in terms of war... the war between normal medicine and the witchcraft/voodoo/faith healer/homeopathic nether world of “alternative medicine.”

Juice “cleansers,” making pizza topping out of roasted cicadas, inhaling the fumes of rosemary to boost memory.  Those three are right off his website.

Maybe someday, the FDA will start testing and regulating stuff like pine bark and arnica, eye of newt and ground rhino horn.

Meantime, Oz and Drew will continue raking in the big bucks, charming the viewers and keeping the faith.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1183 Operation Flush the Johns

1183 Operation Flush the Johns

(Note:  adult content follows.  Reader discretion is advised.)

(MINEOLA, NY) -- Nassau County New York is a big bowl of stupid, and near bankrupt.  And they keep doing things that prove it.  The latest is a police sting called Operation Flush the Johns.

One hundred some men have their names, ages and towns put on a public list. Pictures, too. They are said to have offered undercover cops sums ranging from $50 to $100 for sex.  That bargain basement price range should have been the tipoff.

Okay. Prostitution is illegal.  But it is the world’s second oldest profession, right after gossip mongering which we now call journalism.  So if police fall over a massage parlor on their way from Dunkin’ to OTB sure, arrest the women, the men, the madam and probably the landlord.

Wasting money is the official Nassau County pastime.  You need look no further than the numbers of uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters and in laws either on the payroll or with county contracts.

You need look no further than the roster of cops who are paid over 100-grand. Or the way the crime lab was run.  Or the jail.

You need look no further than the disastrous handling of the New York Islanders desire to rebuild its home arena.  That dragged on so long, the team decided to pack up and leave.

Officials in Nassau tend to think of their jobs as if the titles ended in the phrase “-for-life.”  The current district attorney, Kathleen Rice has served a mere eight years, which is a pittance by community standards. But she’s running for another four this fall.  Her predecessor, Denis Dillon was in office for 30 years.  An earlier D.A., William Cahn, was in office for 12 years, his final term cut short by a short stay as the guest of the state.

Rice keeps trying to run for higher office and failing.  She has some unusual credentials:  she’s young and single.  And she’s the county’s first woman to hold the office.  Note, credentials, not qualifications.

Nassau’s finances are so bad the state seized control.  And they’re spending how much money collecting men who visit hookers? Count on all the “suspects” walking out the back door of the courthouse soon after they walk in the front.

How big a deal is this?  Well, DA Rice says it will help reduce trafficking in women.  Oh.

So, operation Flush the Johns gets a big splash in the papers (how do they think up those “operation” names.  Are we supposed to take something called “flush the johns” seriously?)

And a few weeks from now, all will be forgotten.  Except by the families of the men whose names are all over the papers.

The youngest among the accused is 17.  A guy that young in a spot like that is worthy of your pity, not your scorn.  The oldest is 79.  More power to him.

Shrapnel:

--Gov. Christie of NJ has managed to make everyone -- everyone -- angry by announcing October’s special election to replace Frank Lautenberg who died Monday at 89. One of the best reasons for liking Christie even if you don’t like his policies. Doesn’t let any grass grow under his feet either, as if any could.  

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1182 A Blonde Venti and a Lucky

1182 A Blonde Venti and a Lucky

It’s Saturday morning on East 57th near Park and Detective Lieutenant Melvin “Kojak” Nineberg is leaning against his Ford Crown Victoria which is running -- to the extent it ever does.

In his left hand is a container of coffee, in his right, a Lucky Strike cigarette, about half gone.

They call him “Kojak” after the TV detective because he’s bald as a bowling ball and no one would have any respect for a lieutenant named Melvin.

On the hood of the unmarked is one of those long metal tape measures that carpenters use.

Kojak takes a final drag on the Lucky and stamps it out, blows the smoke toward the Starbucks near where he’s standing, then turns to a visitor, points at the tape measure and says  “I am 25-feet, three inches from the door to that Starbucks.  I am legal.”

The visitor tries to explain to the officer that Starbucks can’t enforce that rule about no smoking within 25 feet of its door in New York or any other place that has legal smoking in the street.

“Mel,” says the visitor who can call him that because they’ve been friends since the fourth grade at Solomon Schechter in Forest Hills, “you can’t be serious.  I’ve known you since you had hair.”

“You know His Honor hates cigarettes.  I’m making a statement,”  he says,“ and if they see a jackbooted Nazi thug standing in front of a Starbucks smoking, they’ll think it’s OK.”

“It IS okay, Lieutenant. Plus you’re wearing a polyester suit and a pair of Payless loafers.  What, leave your jackboots at home this morning?”

The new regulation which took effect that morning really doesn’t apply to cities and towns that haven’t yet forbidden smoking on the corner.

But it sure is causing a dustup. Coffee and cigarettes go together like beer and pretzels... bacon and eggs... Abbott and Costello.

Kojak gets a call on the car radio and takes off.  As he scoops up the measuring tape and gets into the car he hands the empty coffee cup to his visitor.  It says “Central Market Deli, 115 E 57th Best Coffee in New York.”

Those of us who don’t like Starbucks to begin with say turnaround is fair play. So if any Starbucks comes within 25 feet of us, we’re going to call Kojak and file a complaint. Especially if we’re smoking.  Especially if it’s a Lucky.

Shrapnel:

(Note to readers:  We don’t allow ads on this site.  The following is posted voluntarily and probably in violation of 23 different copyright laws.)

--A delightful little Cheerios commercial may be the best TV ad since “Where’s the Beef?”  A little girl tries to make sure her dad stays healthy in this 30 second spot.  A tirade of racist reaction to the interracial family caused YouTube to disable the comments section.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1181 Crime and Punishment

1181 Crime and Punishment

The crime you commit is committing. Your punishment is your reward.

Usually, when you do something reward-worthy, you can expect a reward.  But not when your reward worthy deed is loyalty.  At least not all the time.

We’re forever hearing about loyalty.  Loyalty to country, loyalty to family, loyalty to neighbors; loyalty to employers.

Loyalty to country is returned by the government coating you and itself with fast drying cement.

Loyalty to family?  Most of us have decent ones if not somewhat dysfunctional, but then you get the kids who kill their parents or their siblings or each other or themselves.

Loyalty to neighbors: acknowledged by the guy breaking your riding mower and even then not returning it.

Loyalty to employers?  Expect a pink slip any day now.

But this is nothing new and this is not the worst of it.  The worst of it is a class of companies that “reward” loyalty by finding new ways to break the bank.  Your bank.

Let’s start with banks.  Have you seen interest rates lately?  They’re near nothing.  Okay, not great. But at least your money is safe.  More or less.  But when it comes to credit cards, the rate is … what... the best deals around are in the eight percent range.  The worst are almost 30%.  Even if you’ve had the credit card since JP Morgan personally ran the bank.  Loyalty for longevity?  Nah.

The thieves who issue “payday loans” where interest can be 200% a year -- that isn’t a typo -- are looking for ways to continue bleeding you now that their short term lending practice faces actual regulation.

Meantime the commercial banks have figured out ways to make payday loans at slightly lower but still disastrous interest rates that fly under the regulation radar.

This used to be called usury and you went to jail for it.  Now it’s “best practice.”  Makes going to Benny the Shark look like a good alternative.

Banks are not alone.  How about insurance companies.  We all know the goal of every insurance company is to never pay a claim. When forced to, they go down fighting.  Okay.  We understand that. But take note:  every auto insurance company is fighting for your new business with bargain rates.  Customer loyalty?  Doesn’t count.  Your rates go up most years even without your filing a claim.

Telephone companies:  You’re with your cell carrier for a decade and you’re locked into a contract.  You upgrade, and the costs go up.  You swap your land line for a home-based over the air service, sign your life away and then realize that your bill is slightly lower but you can’t call overseas anymore or your calls to toll free numbers aren’t toll free anymore -- they count against your allotments of minutes.

Auto dealers: You’ve been buying your new Plymouths from Jollie Chollie on Bruckner Boulevard for 30 years and now that they don’t make them anymore, Chollie has a “great deal” for “long time customers” on one of those aluminum foil two-seaters … just as soon as Fritz over in the Boblingen factory figures out how to keep the passenger side door attached during a crash.

Loyalty.  It’s a good thing.  But it’s becoming a crime.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013