Twitter

It is not often you see a metaphor walking into an office lobby, but when Elon Musk walks into Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink, he's acting out the "everything but the kitchen sink" expression. (Okay, it looks like a bathroom sink, but Elon was going for the "sink" part of the metaphor.)

The closest I ever saw anyone come to nearly carrying "everything but the kitchen sink," was when I observed a homeless on Park Avenue South at about 26th street as I was leaving work with an array of plumbing pipes around his head. He was carrying everything but the kitchen sink.

I'm waiting for Ben Zimmer of the Wall Street Journal to give us the origin of that expression. I think he's informed us of how "the whole nine yards" took hold in the language by telling us it was expression of soldiers firing anti-aircraft machine guns from the back of planes with an ammunition belt of 27', or 9 yards. "Sarge, I gave them the whole 9 yards."

Mr. Musk, depending on your viewpoint, is either an unlikeable fellow who has got his fingers in too many pies, or a comical tycoon who doesn't care what you think of him.

I love the fact that he was able to get Twitter for $44 billion. Not because of any cultural changes he might bring to Twitter, but because I admire that he settled on $44 billion rather than $45 billion.

How do these guys reach these numbers? Was the $44 billion already knocked down from say $50 billions that the board of Twitter wanted? No one buys a house at list price. They usually pay less, but sometimes in some markets they have to pay more to secure the sale.

I mean, could Mr. Musk have hard-balled them even further and completed the deal for say, $43 billion? A billion dollars less is significant change, even to a man like Mr. Musk. After all, one billion is a thousand millions. 

(I shared my posting with an in-law-relative and he had a very nuanced view of how the $44 billion sale price was reached. His view is: "I think he came to 44 billion because he smokes a lot of pot and he tried to get 4.20 into the per share price and the closest way to do it was $54.20 which became 44 billion." This well might be the reason.) 

Could Mr. Musk have completed the deal for $43 billion, and paid $44 billion, and distributed $1billion to all the current Twitter users? Somewhat like when a mutual company goes public, they need to reimburse the policyholders some cash. The number of Twitter users factored into the price, so shouldn't we get a piece of the sale?

There are those who are quite upset with what they speculate will be the changes at Twitter. It will for now become a private company, with no stockholders. Will The Donald get back on Twitter? Will Q-Anon and right wing loonies take over? Will all the Woke people drown out everyone else?

Since Mr. Musk borrowed heavily to put together $44 billions, there are people who are owed significant jack. They are not going to want to see Twitter be like a boat which is a hole in the water into which one pours money. Make no mistake. There are no stockholders, but there are creditors, and they want to get more than their investment back. In other words, he's got to make money somehow. And he won't do that if he pisses everyone off.

The video of Elon carrying a porcelain sink into the headquarters lobby, to make good on his phrase that there are those who are going to have to "let it sink in" that he's bought Twitter, looks like part of a skit from "Saturday Night Live." Will they ask him back now to be a host?

I'm sure there are those who are wringing their hands and wondering what are hey going to do now with their Twitter accounts now that a "Barbarian" is at the door. Will they go to Canada? Is that far enough away? Don't they have Twitter there as well? I think it's global, so my guess is that there are those who are in an ice station in Antarctica who could Tweet. Maybe even penguins can have an account.

My feelings are neutral. I think I've been on Twitter since 2010, do not post much, but do enjoy reading from a select body of those that do. It's never cost me anything to "join" Twitter. No credit card deduction appears on my monthly statements. It's free in the general sense that things are free once you've got a computer or a cell phone.

Aside from being a great platform to read from, Twitter has proved to be a great source of news items for the media to make use of when someone posts something idiotic, or usually controversial on the site.  No more beating the pavement or hanging outside doors to try and get someone's comments. The reporters do not have to leave their desks, because it seems there are those who can't seem to help themselves and who think there are those of us who really care what they think.

For now, I'm not at all worried about Twitter. But if they start to charge for it...

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Mona Lisa...Mona Lisa

The veteran NYT reporter Sam Roberts has drifted off the obituary and the NYC beats to give us a story about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 and some background narrative on the perpetrator and how the news rippled throughout the world. 

I caught up to some NYT editions I hadn't read when I went on vacation, and came across Mr. Roberts's October 8 piece yesterday.

Mr. Roberts tells us that October 8 marks the anniversary of the birth—and the death—of Vincenzo Peruggia, born in Italy in 1881 who passed away in 1925. Vincenzo is famous for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris, spiriting it to Italy, and then because the police finally got to him, allowing it to be reclaimed by the authorities and restored to its place back in the Louvre less than three years later.

The Mona Lisa smile has been sung about by Nat King Cole: "You're so like the lady with the mystic smile." It's been described with various adjectives but since I never thought much of the painting myself, I'll add that it is "wooden."  Proof of that is enhanced when Mr. Roberts tells that da Vinci painted what is probably one of the 10 most revered paintings in the world on "a  30-by-21 inch 18-pound poplar plank" of wood.

I saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in 1964. There was a healthy scrum of people also looking at it at the time, and there was a guard and a perimeter of velvet rope to keep onlookers back a safe distance. I don't remember if all that was before or after an agitated person having a bad day took a hammer to the glass and somewhat damaged the painting. The painting has been stolen or vandalized five times. During the museum's open hours, the artwork is always singularly guarded.

But back in 1911, Vincenzo Perrugia, a housepainter and glazier, who worked at the museum and who might have had a hand in then securing the artwork behind glass, hid somewhere, and when the museum was closed and the guards were not otherwise directly guarding the portrait, removed the 200-pound frame from the wall, slipped the portrait out, and with the help of a passing plumber, unlocked an exit door and made off for his hotel room with Mona under his worker's smock.

Vincenzo kept it in a trunk at his Paris apartment for two years before getting the portrait to another apartment he had in Florence, Italy. Unable to keep his possession of the painting a total secret, he wrote to an antiques dealer offering a viewing of the piece for $100,000.

Big mistake. The police arrested Vincenzo at his apartment, took possession of the artwork, and managed to convict Vincenzo of the theft, whereupon he spent seven months in prison.

Before the painting was returned to the French—the legal owners—the Italians took pleasure is having the painting make a tour of Italy. After all, part of Vincenzo's motive is stealing the painting was that since it was painted by an Italian, da Vinci, it should be in Italy, not France, despite who really owned it.

Aside from learning that the portrait is painted on wood, we learn that the subject is a Florentine noblewoman, Lisa Del Gioconda, the wife of a silk merchant. Mona it turns out is an Italian honorific for noble, or aristocratic. Lisa was not a peasant.

But was the painting really da Vinci's? The day after the theft the NYT reported what became worldwide news—that the Mona Lisa had been snatched from the Louvre.

The Times headline to the story tells us 'La Gioconda' is stolen...Masterpiece of Lionardo da Vinci Vanishes from Lourvre..." 

Is "Lionardo" a typo for "Leonardo?" Or, is all what Vincenzo did was make off with a poorly signed fake?

Can his case be reopened based on a technicality and his conviction purged? Stranger things have happened.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Just Back

Just back from what has lately become our annual trip to Cape Cod, to see my wife's cousin and her husband in Centerville, and to help the Commonwealth of Massachusetts meet its sales tax projection goals for the current fiscal year. Funny, but they never write to thank us for keeping Cape Cod green.

I once saw someone's doorway display the tough guy placard: "These premises are protected by Smith and Wesson." As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that my memory is protected by amnesia.

Upon sitting on the bench outside The Christmas Tree store in the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis and seeing my wife come out pushing a shopping cart with a few items, notably, and quite visibly, two packages, each with four lighted candy canes that were "on sale," I had to remark:

"Don't we have enough of those?"
"Don't you remember, last year you said you wanted to get two more packages so you could stretch them the width of the front yard?"
"No."
"Well, you did."
"If you say so."

Actually, we must not have really gotten too many things because it didn't take us very long to unload the car this time.

We never pass up looking into a bookstore, and there were two on Nantucket that we passed. We've been through here a few times before, so we weren't complete newbies.

Without searching for anything specific, I bought a paperback copy of Carl Hiaasen's "Strip Tease," apparently one of his many books on the machinations of Florida citizens who manage to live just beyond imminent incarceration that I haven't already read.

I checked the copyright year and it says 1993. I didn't give it any immediate thought at the time, but as I make my way through the story of the lunatic politician who whacks someone over the head in a tittie bar—firmly believing that the very drunk groom-to-be is somehow bothering the stripper Erin who he of course is infatuated with, and who of course has a daughter who the courts have awarded custody to her cheating husband, who for a living steals and sells wheelchairs from hospitals and nursing homes to support his cocaine addiction—managing to nearly put the poor schmo in the morgue—I realize that I'm not going to read about anyone getting in touch with anyone via a cell phone, texting LOL, TTUL, or FOMO, or anyone who will be ordering anything from Amazon via the Internet, because guess what, it's 1993 and those kinds of things weren't happening then. It's almost like watching one of those Throne episodes where there's no electricity and everyone seems to have a sword.

To me, no one can economize on words as well as Mr. Hiaasen as when he tells us that Orly, the manager of the Eager Beaver tittie bar, wears enough cologne to "gas termites." The fragrance coming from the guy is more effective than Listerine on bacteria.

When Erin tries to trap her ex by setting up a pretext meeting to lure him into the open to buy stolen wheelchairs, the bouncer at the Eager Beaver, Shad, signs on to help her. He is a little confused why the ex, Darrell Grant, doesn't just steal cars. Why bother with wheelchairs?

Erin explains, "because he couldn't hotwire a goddam toaster." We all should pay attention to our abilities.

I'm only part way through the book. I'm still finishing up 'Prisoners of the Castle,' a story by Ben Macintyre about the POWs that were kept in a Nazi castle prison, Colditz, until the end of the war.

Years and years ago I remember reading an obit about the passing of one of the prisoners who was instrumental in getting a glider built under the noses of the guards. The plan was to launch it with two occupants by getting a bathtub filled with cement, attached to the front of he glider and get it to drop off a ramp tp give the glider the needed forward momentum to catch the updrafts to land beyond the prison walls.

I looked up the NYT obituary for that prisoner, Lorne Welch, who passed away in 1998 at 81. It was a pleasant surprise to see it had been written by the redoubtable Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr. who is still sorely missed.

As for Carl Hiaasen's book 'Strip Tease,' I will get back to it as the war is over for the prisoners of Colditz. It will only be then I learn the fates of Erin, the only decent dancer at the Eager Beaver, Congressman David Dilbeck, who seriously clunked the bachelor party bridegroom over the head, the resolution of the custody battle for Erin's daughter Alice with her ex husband Darrell Grant, the Congressman's fixer, "Malcolm Moldowsky, "Moldy," and his ability to make sure the electorate doesn't learn of Dilbeck's behavior until after the upcoming election, and perhaps best of all, whether Shad can successfully bring a phony product liability suit against a yogurt maker for the dead roach that was found in his yogurt, a roach that to no one's surprise if you knew Shad, that he himself placed there with precision. Perhaps you can fool some of the people some of the time

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com

The New Yorker

Years and years ago I used to read The New Yorker and enjoy the cartoons and the little quips they made at the bottom of columns after some rather funny, or non-sensical news stories. I don't know if they still do that, because all the waiting rooms I've been in recently pulled their magazine selections due to Covid to guard against spreading the disease even further through contact with finger-licked magazine pages. This might have been a good thing. But anyway...

Dr. Vincent DiMaio, 81, a pathologist sought out in famed murder cases has passed away.

I knew the name sounded familiar, and I was right. His father, Dominick, was a New York City Chief Medical Examiner whose name I would see on a sign on a brick building on the east side of First Avenue that was part of NYU Hospital. That name and Dr. Milton Halpern were the city's medical examiners I knew of as I passed the building. They were legends.

And so apparently was Vincent DiMaio. He came from an incredible ancestral line of physicians. The NYT obit by Sam Roberts tells us Dr. DiMaio in a memoir mentioned that "since the 1600s, all the men on my mother's side, with one exception, were doctors." The exception became a magistrate. Dr. Vincent's three sisters all became physicians.

Dr. DiMaio was a much sought after consultant for court cases, for both the defense as well as the prosecution. An out quote in the obit tells he was, "A gunshot expert who himself had been shot four times."

Further into the obit the reason for that perceived gunshot expertise is found in the following paragraph:

"He could bring firsthand experience to his expertise in gunshot wounds: He himself had survived being shot four times by his second wife in a fit of anger. They divorced."

Well, okay. But on what grounds?

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Financial Planning

You have to admire someone's attempt at securing their financial future, even if it wasn't with their own money, when with a contraband cell phone within a prison cell you can accomplish the following:

Open a bank account with Charles Schwab in the name of a billionaire.

Convince the financial giant to transfer $11 million from the billionaire's account to a precious metals dealer in Idaho to buy 6,106 American Eagle gold coins. (My guess is these are the $10 denomination coins, as opposed to the Double Eagle $20 coins.)

Hire a private security company to take the coins from Boise, Idaho to Atlanta on a chartered plane.

After delivery was confirmed, the inmate Arthur Lee Cofield, contacted the owner of a six-bedroom house on 1.4 wooded acres in Atlanta and offered to buy the property.

The deal was sealed with a $720,000 cash down payment, with the balance later paid in cash as well.

(The property is pictured above, and personally, it does nothing for me. I wouldn't have bothered with that one. But then again, when you're doing this from a jail cell, you might not get all the real estate listings.)

Mr. Cofield did have some outside accomplices who helped provide documentation in the form of a utility bill and a photo of the driver's license for the billionaire's name he was using, Sidney Kimmel, to get the ball rolling in opening the initial account with Charles Schwab. From there, one thing happily led to another, until it didn't.

The good news for the Feds who have cracked the case is that Mr. Cofield is already in prison serving a 14-year prison stretch in a Georgia state prison for armed robbery, and is awaiting charges for attempted murder in an unrelated case, also in Georgia. There is no manhunt underway.

None of this happened overnight. It started in June 2020 when the call was made to establish the account with Charles Schwab, and continued until the just announced indictment in 2022.

The real Sidney Kimmel is a 94-year-old "fashion mogul" who bankrolled several movies that had high returns. No mention is made how Mr. Cofield picked Mr. Kimmel out to impersonate, but it worked for quite a while.

Jose Morales, the warden of the unit that housed Mr. Cofield commented that Mr. Cofield "was a shrewd, intelligent individual who could con you out of millions."

The moral to the story is that as good as a con man as the 31-year-old Mr. Cofield has proven to be, he wasn't able to con his way out of 14-year prison sentence, or pending charges for attempted murder. 

If you're going to commit white collar crime, it's best not to do it while you're already in prison.

But I'm sure he had fun doing it.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Wrestler

Until I recently read Antonio Inoki's obituary the other day in the NYT, I wasn't aware he had been spending anytime, anywhere, alive and breathing. It was news to me.

Of course not to all. After the strangest professional athletic contest ever held, Inoki moved on to become a politician and world-wide ambassador for Japan. Who knew?

Anyone who is now entering their zip code at Joe Namath's bequest to make sure they're getting all the benefits they're entitled to with their Medicare coverage, will faintly recall the 1976 match at Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York between the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki and the world heavyweight boxing campion Muhammad Ali that ended in a draw, as Inoki flung himself to the mat, held onto the ropes, and kicked his way around the ring, only allowing Ali to land two punches while in the process bruising Ali's shins. In its own way, it was a match for the ages.

To understand the absurdity of how the match unfolded, consider Inoki's remarks a year after the match when he told the NYT: "I was doing my best to win. It wasn't a fake fight, or it would have been more interesting."

All through the 70s hypothetical matches between Ali and Wilt Chamberlain were being imagined. Wilt, at over 7' with a reach exceeding the wingspan of a Boeing jet, was constantly being thought of as an opponent for Ali. After all, Ali had now beaten everyone, so why not get inventive?

Any contest such as that never materialized, but the match against Inoki did, held June 26, 1976 at Shea Stadium in front of 30,000 paying customers. If as P.T. Barnum said, "a sucker is born every minute," then 30,000 plus minutes had elapsed.

Aside from remembering the details of the match, I also distinctly remember the ride my wife and I took on the LIRR as we headed home while accompanying the Blarney Stone bartender Eddie Smith to the World's Fair stop on the Port Washington line. We would get off at Murray Hill, two stops east of the World's Fair stop you would use to get to Shea Stadium.

Eddie was carrying press credentials for the match, courtesy of a Black publicist Dick Edwards of New Age press. Dick was a frequent customer at the Blarney Stone on 32nd Street and Madison Avenue, as were my wife and I and countless others.

Eddie was a huge Muhammad Ali fan.  He had similar press credentials along with his good buddy P.J. Manning to the Ali/Jimmy Young fight in Landover, Maryland on April 30. 1976. For that fight, Eddie borrowed my Nikon to take pictures from his press seats. Eddie, who was the consummate talker, even managed to get into Ali's hotel room as part of the entourage that night alongside Ali's bed as the bare chested Ali lay there relaxing before the fight.

Eddie entertained Ali with card tricks and had someone else take their photo. The resulting image of Eddie alongside Ali's bedside graced the bar at another Blarney Stone  establishment, The Blarney Rock on 33rd Street, just east of Seventh Avenue, hard by Madison Square Garden. The photo is long gone from there, and I always wish I had a copy of it. I haven't heard from Eddie Smith for decades now. I did get my camera back.

Inoki was a distinctive looking figure, with a wide, jutting jaw that could remind you of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, or Scotty Bowman, the Hall-of-Fame head coach of the Montreal Canadians and Detroit Red Wings.

As ridiculous as the match with Ali turned out, ending in a draw with the fans throwing garbage into the ring, Inoki moved on to become a Japanese politician in the upper house, launching diplomatic missions around the world, and even helping secure a hostage release with Iraq in 1990 that was holding 41 Japanese citizens under the rule of Saddam Hussein.

It turns out Inoki was certainly alive before he passed away at 79 in Tokyo. Which proves that when you are no longer bouncing around a ring kicking at Muhammad Ali, people in this country tend to forget who you are and what you've been doing.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

For Those Who Pass By

My Australian Twitter-pal @justjenking re-posted the above image from a Tweet by @matthewshaer who offers this explanation:

A lot of my neighbors work for the CDC or the Emory hospital system - needless to say, Halloween lawn decoration season around here really rules. 

Also needless to say, Twitter has velocity. @matthewshaer is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and @justjenking is a retired OR nurse living in a NSW suburb outside Brisbane who has pivoted into a second career in journalism. I'm in New York.

I'm sure someone has by now put together a photo collection of headstones that convey black humor. I've had my own thoughts about a headstone I'd like to see gracing my future plot ever since I was at a funeral for my wife's Aunt Emma in Centerville, Massachusetts a few years ago.

Aunt Emma was everyone's favorite, but certainly lived by a strict set of rules. The one item I distinctly remember that was read from the list of instructions she left behind for her daughter Lorraine to follow as part of her eulogy was that she was not to be laid to rest on a weekday, or obviously a Sunday (which would have been a no-go in Catholic church anyway). Aunt Emma said that no one should miss school, work, or church on account of her funeral. Therefore, it was to take place on a Saturday. And of course it did.

Those kind of instructions have always left me thinking. I could formalize some similar desires. Whether anyone would follow them is another story, and likely one I may not get to know the answer to, but one of my thoughts is that nothing should be placed in the coffin other than myself, suitably dressed.

The coffin is not a toy chest. Keep the memorabilia topside and in a drawer someplace. Do what you like. I can't use it.

One of my wife's other Aunts (and a younger sister of Aunt Emma) used to keep a copy of a cartoon by Chon Day, I think, attached to the refrigerator that showed a headstone that read:

I Told You I Was Sick.

Eventually it was true. Aunt Helen became very sick with cancer and passed away decades before her older sister.

The Halloween headstone pictured above got me to thinking that I could leave instructions as to what I'd like my own to say, and that I could make those instructions known way ahead of time and share them with the living before the last thing I'll do. Go public, so to speak. So here are my sentiments—pick one, I like them both—for all who pass by to see.

I Got Most Things Right

I'm Not At All Happy About This

BTW, any day of the week is fine with me.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Banana Ketchup

There is such a thing? Yes, apparently in the Philippines. And if you look hard enough, even here in the States.

I wonder if there are Greek diners in the Philippines where when you reach for the upside down bottle of Ketchup for your hamburger or French fries, you are actually going to get banana ketchup to come out of the bottle.

And there's a reason it might be banana ketchup, and you can read why that might be when you catch up (Ketchup?) to one of those "Overlooked No More" obituaries in The New York Times.

Started a few years ago, The Times obituary desk is sort of making up for the women who might have been overlooked over the years for a tribute obituary because there was a bias toward just reporting about deceased men.

Thus, we have an obituary for Maria Orosa (1893-1945), credited with inventing banana ketchup because tomatoes were hard to grow in the tropical Philippine climate, and tomato ketchup was expensive to import.

Maria was educated in the United States, entering the country when she was 23 as a government-sponsored scholar. She earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Seth Mydans's obituary tells us: "Banana ketchup, which she created in the 1930s, is smoother and more viscous than the tomato version, making it a bit harder to shake out of the bottle. The concoction—made of local saba bananas, sugar, vinegar and spices, with a dash of red coloring to make it look more like the imported version—is now a staple on the shelves of Philippine grocery stores." 

After her studies, Maria returned to the Philippines to help her country become self-sufficient in food production. She joined the government's Bureau of Science, "soon leading its home economics and food preservation divisions."

Banana ketchup became mass-produced in 1942 and became so popular that Heinz introduced its own version in 2019, saying it was doing so "in honor of Maria Orosa."

I'm not the one who does the grocery shopping, so I don't know if the banana ketchup product is on the supermarket shelves in the stores my wife shops in.

If we find it, I'm willing to try it. I just doubt that any Greek diner I happen to go to will have a bottle of it alongside the tomato ketchup.

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com

Friday with Sue

When I left the house yesterday afternoon carrying my two-piece not custom made pool cue in my Action carrying case, accompanying my daughter Susan to her car, I was hoping the neighbor next door who was headed for his Jeep carrying an armful of shirts would spot me carrying my not custom made two-piece pool cue in my Action carrying case and wave and ask me the question I was dying to be asked: "You play pool?" He didn't notice, and therefore didn't ask.

In the late 60s when I met the Piermont brothers Dave and Dennis in the city we would go out drinking. We were of legal age then, which then in New York was 18. We went into a bar on 57th Street and 9th Avenue, on the corner, The Horse's Tail, whose entrance was lit by a blinking neon sign that showed a horse's tail swishing back and forth. Nowadays this would be called a "dive bar" but we weren't picky.

That I remember, since we only went there once, it was a round, or oval bar. When we entered at what would be considered an early hour, there were no other customers. We weren't "proofed" and ordered what we then were drinking, Dennis a Tanqueray and tonic, myself, maybe a beer, maybe a Dewar's, and Dave, something with Seagrams Seven. I'm really not sure. The bartender made a face on seeing us, but listened to the orders and filled them. Dennis, the one most eager to make small talk with the bartender, noticed an array of bowling trophies by the cash register and asked the bartender, "Do you bowl?"

Maybe this was a question he had been asked many times before, maybe not at all, but he had a ready answer. He sucked his teeth, slowly wiped his hands on his apron and told us, "I bowl like old people fuck. Not well and not often." Clearly the trophies weren't his.

This was great. He was at least talking to us, and obviously I never forgot his eloquence. So, if my neighbor were to ask me if I played pool I was ready to smile and give him the same answer that the bartender gave us over 50 years ago. I would of course substitute "play pool" for "bowl."

And since life is not over, maybe someone will still ask me if I play pool when they see me carrying my two-piece not custom made pool cue in my Action carrying case. And maybe I'll feel safe to give them the answer I've been dying to give. I'll be ready. 

http://www.onofframp.blogpot.com