Busy, Overwhelmed People

Juggles 5 text chains totaling 85 people

Once again the Wall Street Journal's A-Hed piece scores a hit. This one is about the 21st century parents who are overwhelmed with text messages and emails while trying to raise their kids and get them through the day scheduling all their schooling and after school activities. 

The drama increases when there are more children in the household. One kid is the baseline; two is twice as troublesome; three is four times as difficult as one, A household with four kids, and I know of one, sounds like they need a full- time coordinator and AI intelligence to keep things running smoothly.

The headlines go:

Chatty Parent Group Texts Swell
To Dozens of Messages at a Time

Moms and dads wrangle five or more
threads about playdates, sports, pinkeye

I don't know what alphabetical generation this is, but it's clearly a Facebook one that seems the need to tap out a messages or send photos of what they're having at a restaurant.

There's is a woman I worked with who is 20 years younger than me who can't seem to resist including photos of food, boxes of donuts and images of the front of restaurants her fiancé has taken her to for her birthday to me in her occasional emails. She tells me she knows I don't like pictures of food but she does it anyway. It's a disease.

The occupations of the people written about in the piece are all you need to know about the type of person who will ask a group of people how to handle pinkeye. No one seems to pick up a phone and ask the question of a singular person, like maybe Mom? No, they ask a coterie of people who they probably don't really know for medical advice.

The first person described in the story by Tara Weiss is "Jolie Hunt who got her first brush with the reach of WhatsApp during a recent messaging thread of New York City parents arranging a playdate for their first-graders." Ms. Hunt is the mother of two elementary-school children and chief executive of a communications consulting firm. Practice the advice you sell. 

WhatsApp is to no surprise owned by the Facebook Meta Platforms. Michelle Yu can field 57 messages a day from parents in three WhatsApp groups that revolve around her son, 5-years-old, and her daughter, 3. People who use the app complain that it becomes a part-time job. It is hard to have any sympathy for a group of people who are creating their own hell and jumping into it. 

Ms. Yu is the founder of a Washington, D.C. firm that helps companies ease parents back to work after leave. Yep, that's a profession. Bless her heart. You can make money doing that.

The woman pictured above, Vanessa Bennett, is co-author of "This is So Awkward" a book about adolescence. Her biggest fear is putting something out there that is the wrong comment in the wrong chain. World War III will I suppose break out. It's nerve racking.

Why join all these groups? FOMO. Fear of missing out on something they need to know, like when is soccer practice been rescheduled for. Ms. Bennett inserts herself into text groups that total 85 people! My wife and I never knew 85 people raising two daughter very active in swimming and running, and of course school.

Lauren Brody, pictured in her car with her laptop at the ready looks like she's in a patrol car ready to respond to the next 10-something or other. A siren and a spinning globe light on the roof would complete the picture.

Ms. Brody tells us, "I'm scared to take myself off [the lists] since it's a way of organizing the mental load around two different schools, two different grades and two different basketball teams."

Ms. Brody is a founder of The Fifth Trimester, an organization that promotes gender equality in the workplace. No wonder these people are nearly having a nervous breakdown.

Nancy A. Cheever, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills and an expert on smart phone addictions (emphasis mine) tells us it is impossible to know if a phone ping is a school emergency or just someone in a group chat sending a heart emoji, making texts difficult to ignore. "People judge notifications and alerts as all having the same weight." I see the problem. Turn the damn thing off altogether.

Nowhere in the lively piece is anyone a plumber, tradesman, roofer or a truck driver. At least there are people who have some sense.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The New Yorker

I never met Vincent Patrick who recently passed away at 88, a novelist, screenwriter...and true New Yorker, defined by myself as someone who can get you a diamond for what is truly a wholesale price because he knows someone, and who was educated in either Catholic or public schools in one of the five boroughs, and who can probably recall a childhood friend who eventually did a stretch at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, or was at least arrested.

I tried to make contact with Mr. Patrick in 2019 after I did a piece on horse racing and a horse that ran second, Kellycanrun, who produced a sizable place price for finishing second, even while a short-priced favorite finished first. A $26 place price is nothing to sneeze at.

Cashing in on a second place finish reminded me of the novel The Pope of Greenwich Village written by Mr. Patrick that was turned into a move starring Mickey Rourke (when he still had an acting future ahead of him), Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts.

Also in The movie The Pope of Greenwich Village was Burt Young, who just passed away as well. Mr. Young played a mob boss known as Bed Bug Eddie who meets his ending while drinking expresso with an additive. For some reason, Mr. Young's role in that movie is not in his NYT obit. Why anyone would write an obit and not take the opportunity to name Bed Bug Eddie is unknown to me. I'm beginning to think these NYT obit writers need to stop doing so much work from home and come in and talk to colleagues more.

The story in part revolves around two waiters of mismatched intelligence who go to Atlantic City with a hot tip who wisely play a horse to win and place, and come out ahead when Charlie, the Mickey Rourke character and the wiser of the two, distributes the betting money and doesn't go all in on the nose. This is called hedging your bet. His cousin Paulie, (5th cousin) is elated when Charlie tells him they're not broke for finishing second.

But the main part of the story is when Paulie gets the bright idea to crack a safe that contains mob money and ropes Charlie into the caper.

Mr. Patrick is described as a man who grew up with all kinds of grifters, gamblers and minor mobsters (his own father ran numbers) who with eclectic job experience met these type when he was a bartender in what is described as a Gramercy Park restaurant.

Now that restaurant is not named, but could have easily been Pete's Tavern on Irving Place at 18th Street. I've written about Pete's Tavern so often that I'm not going to repeat myself here, only to say that the photo used in Mr. Patrick's obit is from his dust jacket of The Pope Of Greenwich Village where he is clearly to the knowing eye standing in front of Pete's Tavern.

The knucklehead cousins who pull off the safe cracking with help are based on a real-life event of Crazy Joe Gallo breaking into Café Ferrara's safe in Little Italy in 1972 and hauling off with the Easter weekend receipts. No one was ever fingered for the job, but the strong suspicion was that Crazy Joe  Gallo pulled off the job

To the uninitiated in New York mobster lore, Crazy Joe was head of the Gallo crime family who made their headquarters on President Street in South Brooklyn. Jimmy Breslin's book The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight sort of adds a comic touch to the enterprising Goodfellas. Crazy Joe did keep a lion in the cellar of the social club, and did orchestra the murder of Joseph Columbo Sr. at an Italian Solidarity Day event in Columbus  Circle in 1971.

Joseph Columbo Sr. had started a sort of Anti-Defamation League for Italians to counter what he felt was the stereotyping of them as nothing but mobsters, despite the fact that he was head of the Columbo crime family and at odds with Crazy Joe.

It was the second year of the Italian-American Solidarity Day. The reach of the organization was such that all the pizza parlors in New York City were closed on that day! Imagine not being able to buy a slice of pizza for a whole day in the Big Apple. That was as bad as trying to buy a No. 10 envelope on Yom Kippur.

Joe Columbo was not attracting the kind of attention that other crime families relished, so Crazy Joe enlisted a fellow prisoner from his stretch in Sing Sing to shoot Joseph Columbo Sr. This fellow did, and was immediately killed by someone who kept him quiet. Joseph Columbo Sr. remained in a coma for many years, finally passing away in 1978.

In Crazy Joe's eyes, Columbo Sr. had to go. The '70s were full of mob rub outs in New York City Crazy Joe eventually got his in a famous shooting at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy in 1972, as he and his friends were continuing to celebrate his birthday at 4 A.M. His bodyguard flipped on him. One thing mobsters can be counted on doing is eating at all hours.

The Irving Place strip runs from 20th Street to 14th Street, between 3rd Avenue and Park Avenue South, and at one time had Paul and Jimmy's Restaurant, Sal Anthony's and Pete's Tavern. Only Pete's remains on Irving Place; Paul and Jimmy's is nearby on East 18th Street.

As I recounted in my posting of Vincent Patrick years ago, I was talking to one of the managers at Pete's Tavern, Manny, about my family's connection to Pete's. (I got dessert comped). He told me the story of the guys in Mr. Patrick's book, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Charlie and Paulie worked at Pete's, but then stole the recipe for the sauce and gave it to Sal Anthony's, a restaurant across the street from Pete's on Irving Place, up a nice flight of stairs from the sidewalk.

Given Mr. Patrick's upbringing and experience, the last thing you would select from a Family Feud category is that he eventually went to NYU and got a degree in mechanical engineering, and before setting off on a career of writing helped start an engineering firm that at some point helped a client build a better assembly line for building caskets.

Mr. Patrick was a true New Yorker.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

What Have We Got?

The title is pretty much the first words in any detective mystery show in any country where the chief investigating officer (CIO) comes across the body and asks those that have already gotten there, "What have we got?"  Generally, they might be holding a cup of coffee, or look like they just tumbled out of bed on the wrong side. If male, they haven't shaved in at least 5 days and look hungover. And they're always divorced, or about to be.

As much I prefer the British detectives, I do like to look around and see what other countries have to offer. And I've stumbled on a treasure trove of 11 seasons, each with 9 episodes, of Murder In... a French series that uses a repeating pair of female prosecutor and a CIO that so far flirt and tease each other, but haven't yet hit the sheets.

The series features other crime solvers, but the real stars are the scenery. And what scenery it is! It's a Michelin guide to the French countryside of small villages, tiny streets, fishing villages filled with small craft, gorgeous mountains and lush valleys with grazing cattle. The blurb for the series on Amazon Prime reads: A gorgeous collection of mysteries, each one set in a different picturesque region of France. "Enjoy French towns and areas you may have never seen before." Or known anything about for that matter.

Take the last one I viewed, Murder in Lozère. Lozère features the most magnificent series of caves and caverns and towering stalagmites that rival Howe Caverns, or anything else like that in the U.S.  So of course when the volunteer tour guide gets stabbed in the heart, the crime solving team of Elizabeth, the Deputy Prosecutor and Jeansac (Paul) dispatched from a specialist unit arrive on the scene.

Elizabeth is widowed, quite attractive, and a single mom raising a teenage son who is in boarding school. Her husband was a special forces pilot killed in some kind of mission that is still classified. She's a former cop who went to law school and fills the judicial role in France that requires a prosecutor to oversee murder investigations. She is Paul's boss during the investigations. 

Elizabeth arrives driving her Renault, playing classical music quite loud: Beethoven symphonies, music from Carmen, or the overture from The Marriage of Figaro. She's whip smart, and in the vein of making the female leads a little smarter than the male leads, pretty much outshines Jeansac, who is smart enough, but dislikes being shown up by a woman. Don't they all?

The beauty of the scenery belies the ferociousness of the crimes that occur there. The villagers are naturally suspicious of outsiders, carry grudges for generations over whose grandfather screwed whose grandmother, or what family was a nest of Nazi sympathizers.

I don't know, but my guess is the pairing of Elizabeth and Jeansac is a favorite in France. Even in rural areas, crime solving takes expected turns.

They need to establish a timeline for the victim's movements before they were killed. Did they find the cell phone, or laptop? Is there any CCTV or door bell footage from the area? Financial records must be subpoenaed. Who didn't like the victim? It doesn't help that nearly the entire town didn't like them.

There is always an autopsy, and always someone has to identify the body. What was the murder weapon? Despite the remoteness of these places, forensic people and a pathologist all appear in white suits.

DNA is of course important, and a rush is needed from the lab. Tell them that. Everybody has a database, and finger prints and DNA are either found in it, or not.

This being France, the principals drink wine and not tumblers of Scotch whiskey. They eat well, and discuss the case, or trade some sassy remarks that of course is endearing. Each episode in the series is one crime, discovered, and solved within 90 minutes. Despite the ruralness of these places and their charm, several people have usually bit the dust before the credits roll.

The second episode I watched was Murder in...Batz. It didn't feature Elizabeth and Paul, but rather a CIO and a medical student who was a crime scene cleaner and an almost pathologist. Batz, is a tiny island off the coast of Brittany and is full of remnants of Celtic occupation. It is considered the World's End in France. The coastline is rugged and beautiful. Secrets are buried in Batz. Literally.

The shows seem to be produced by a variety of French production companies. The dialogue is in French, but the subtitles are easy enough to follow. Nothing is lost. "Fuck" seems to come through in any language.

I don't know how far I have to get into the seasons before Elizabeth and Paul succumb to passion and hit the sheets somewhere. Maybe it won't happen.

Nah, it's got to.

http://www,onofframp.blogspot.com

The New Math

The Wall Street Journal in another of their inimitable A-Hed pieces covers the finance logic that people convince themselves of when making purchases. I've always thought the best one was one that is surprisingly not mentioned in the piece: saving money.

Say the item is $100, but is now being offered at a 20% discount, marking it down to $80. The seller will tout, scream from the rooftops that you are saving $20. No, you're spending $20 less. You only save the $20 if you allocate your purchase at $100 and put the $20 in a saving account.

I was once buying some clothes in Saks and the sales associate was trying to tell me they had something on sale and I could save beaucoup bucks by buying it. I smiled, declined, and told him I couldn't afford to save that much money. He grinned.

I found it. I remember a quote from Thomas Jefferson on making purchases—another omission in what is otherwise a lively piece. The third president of the United States said: "Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you." You're not going to see that in ad copy for P.C. Richard's, Best Buy, or Apple. Of course the word dear might confuse a 21st century audience. It can mean expensive. On sale doesn't mean you have to have it.

The hook in an A-Hed piece is always the headline and sub-heading.

If Under $5 It's Free: the Logic of 'Girl' Math and 'Boy' Math
More consumers are sharing crafty ways they justify discretionary spending

The thought process is not new. Sharing it on TikTok and podcasts is. Elon Musk should have tried to buy TikTok rather than Twitter, or what is now X.

Math and financial mental gymnastics has been going on for a long time. Young and old, both genders. See Jefferson's quote above. But now we have a father and daughter on TikTok sharing a discussion on how it's worth it to add something you may not need to an online purchase in order to pass the threshold set by the vendor for free shipping.

The daughter Marley Brown, an 18 year-old freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst poster child for the new math, explains to her father, Austin, a finance professional, no less, that $50 for a sweater worn 50 times means that it costs $1 per wear, so therefore it's under $5, and ipso facto it is free!

I've never logged onto TikTok, but I'm sure Marley's father just grins and tells his daughter that she is only unit pricing the frequency of wearing the sweater with its cost; and she's shoving a mythical, optimistic denominator to get a cost-per-wear under $5.

The father, Austin knows his daughter like any attentive father of an 18-year-old and I'm sure explains this, plus the fact that by the looks of her closet she in not going to wear that sweater anywhere near 50! times. She's not going to school in Greenland.

Father and daughter strike a cute pose. I'm sure when it comes time for her wedding she'll argue that the wedding will be free since all the monetary gifts will cover the cost. If only that were ever true and the bride turned all the proceeds back over to dad. Having accompanied two daughters down the aisle I can safely tell anyone who will listen: THIS IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!

This type of thinking has a name: shopping riddles. If only Gracie Allen were alive today. Her Good Night Gracie explanations for anything, particularly how her family members are related to each other, would get move views than anything. She'd fit right in this era's newspeak rhetoric. I miss Gracie Allen, although I will admit that there are times I tell my wife she is Gracie Allen.

There is another account of someone who bought an exercise bike for $400 in order to help recover from ACL surgery. By his math, saying he's ridden the bike now 4,000 time (a dubious claim I'm sure) it is only costing him 10¢ per ride, and therefore the bike is now free. 

The beauty of reading a news piece online is the links they provide, in this case to two milennials on TikTok explaining how spending money can be viewed as making money. If this were true there would of course be no national debt. All that money that would be saved by spending it would be available to spend again. It is a delicious concept. We'd only ever need a single dollar bill because it would just keep itself in circulation buying more and more goods. 

Janet Yellen, are you listening to this? It's sort of like the trillion dollar coin that was considered to be minted to eliminate the national debt.

If all this were true I should not have to make any mortgage payments for the house I'm living in since I've been here over 30 years. If you divided 30 years by the number of days in 30 years then... 

If only my accountant were Gracie Allen.

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com

Give Me an A

How many song titles do you think start with the letter A? How many start with the word All? Honestly, I don't know either, and don't even know where you might find this out, but I do know what's on my bathroom iPod, and I would have never guessed the number.

Yes, I still play music through an iPod, in the garage/workshop, in the shed and in the bathroom. I like to hear music. My wife calls me the noisiest person she knows, but I don't care.

Lately, I've taken to setting the bathroom iPod to play Songs. I wasn't really prepared to know how this would work. I've been using the Shuffle setting to play anything on the iPod randomly. This has been my favorite setting, to hear the unit select from the thousand of songs saved on the unit.

Then I shifted to playing all of one recording artist where there might be a fair number of say Linda Ronstadt songs. I add songs to my iPod through iTunes and mostly through copying CD content onto the unit. Lately I've discovered the Songs setting.

To my surprise, this plays the songs alphabetically. I wasn't initially aware of this until I heard four tracks of the Air Conditioner song, two by Christine Lavin, who I think wrote the novelty song, and two by Sutton Foster played in a row. Each recording artist has a "live" recording, and a studio version. I love that song. Listen to it, I think you'll like it.

Every time I hear the Air Conditioner song and listen to the lyrics I think it would make a great showstopper for a Broadway musical version of the Seven Year Itch, that great 1955 movie starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell about cooling off during a sweltering New York City summer with little air conditioning and the wife and kids vacationing in Maine while home along entertaining romantic fantasies about the blonde living upstairs.

New York City in the 1950s and 1960s had sweltering summers with air conditioning yet to become prevalent. People slept on fire escapes and used fans to try and keep cool. Movie theaters hung an air conditioning sign on their marquees to entice you to spend some time at the movies and try and cool off.

In the movie, Tom Ewell happens to have a Friedrich in his window and attracts Marilyn Monroe trying to cool off while Tom's family has headed up to Maine to get away from another New York City summer.

I digress. Back to my iPod playback order. Aside from all the sings that start with the letter A I've been astounded to realize how many of those songs start with All in their title. I think the first song with All in the title started playing back this past Monday, and here it is Friday and I haven't worked my way through those titles that start with All.

I've counted those that start with All. There 54! of them. There are 153! that start with A. I've downloaded recording artists of all stripes. The advantage to listening to songs in alphabetical order is that when there is a version by a different recording artist I get to hear multiple versions back to-back, like the four versions of The Air Conditioner song.

I've got All of You sung by Buddy Greco and Steve Tyrell; All the Way sung by Jimmy Scott and Tierney Sutton. Would you believe that Meat Loaf has a song title starts with All? Name that tune. The variety of recording artists is incredible. And I haven't yet gotten to B.

Do I have song titles that start with every letter of the alphabet? I'm not going to peek ahead. Are there any with Q? In a Cheers episode Sam Malone somewhat brags that his little black book is so full that he's even got several numbers for women whose names start with the letter Q.

I'm not in the bathroom that long in the mornings. A shave every second or third day; a daily shower,  brushing my teeth, and cleaning the litter box. I have no idea how long it will take me to work my way through A-Z playback.

At 74, I'm just wondering if I'll live long enough to listen to all of them. I expect to be through the 15! remaining All titles by  this time next week.

Miles to go...

http://ww.onofframp.blogspot.com

The New York Sweet Spot

Until maybe 20 years ago, I had never heard of See's candy. But I was going to a conference on the West Coast and someone at work asked me to bring back See's candy. What candy? "See's, it's famous out there and it's good." Okay, if you say so.

And it is good, if somewhat hard to get here on the East Coast other than through the mail. There is ONE Sees' s candy store on ALL of the East Coast, and it's on West 8th Street, just east of 6th avenue on the south side of the street. Specific enough for you?

It's a small store that if you're walking fast you will not even notice it. It's been thee several years now, and when I can, I get off at Astor Place from the No. 6 train and start to walk west on 8th Street.

Eighth Street would be a decent definition of the start of Greenwich Village. When you get to 5th Avenue and look south you can see the Washington Square Arch in Washington Square Park. Double decker, open air tour buses glide through the area.

This is NYU country, and their banner flies from several buildings. You pass the street with antique names like MacDougal, Greene and University Place. But, then you find it, See's. A tiny storefront that every time I go there I think they're no longer going to there.

Once upon a time candy shops were prevalent in NYC. And I don't mean the candy stores in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens that sold newspapers and maybe had a bookie in the back. I mean a boxed candy place. Chocolates, not Baby Ruth bars.

There was Barricini and Loft's, two outfits that merged and eventually went away in 1994. There was Schrafft's. and Fanny Farmer. Fanny Farmer was a Midwest brand that was easily accessible from the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. There is a Neuhaus on Vanderbilt Avenue at the corner of Grand Central Terminal, a tiny store you can barely turn around in. There is La Maison du Chocolat in Rockefeller Center and Moynihan Train Hall; decadent, and outrageously expensive.

Belgian chocolate? Leonides on Madison Avenue. But these are so upscale that you might feel guilty  having one, just one, because these are expensive places. See's is for the hoi polloi.

Godiva made an appearance for a while; pricey, but they too eventually closed their stores. Of course you can buy boxed candy in Macy's and drug stores, but if you rely on Russell Stover or Whitman's  from  CVS you're not really eating good chocolate. Their stuff is awful.

If you watch Turner movies from the 1940s invariably there is a Lothario or Stage Door Johnny who is wooing a show girl with a box of long-stemmed roses and a box of candy. Candy and flowers. The way to a girl's heart and her bedroom.

The great poet Ogden Nash penned a faster formula for wooing and make up sex when he wrote:

The Ice Breaker

Candy is dandy,
But liquor is quicker

I was once on a subway with a colleague when I spotted a young man holding onto the pole who was carrying a small bag from Victoria's Secret and another bag from Godiva. I commented that if things go well for this guy, he should be very tired in the morning, My colleague agreed.

The usual combination was always candy and flowers. Once upon a time at the family flower shop my father got what was not a bad idea of selling Whitman's chocolate along with flowers. Whitman's  provided us with a rather huge peg board heart to display the boxes and started us off with a variety of gaily decorated boxes of chocolate, along with maybe 50 small boxes of Whitman's sampler chocolates that would sell for 25¢.

Sales of chocolate were not good. I don't think we ever even sold  out the first shipment. Eventually, I ate all the small boxes of chocolate and paid nothing for them. My father wondered where they all went. Silly question.

I'm currently reading Walter Isaacson's doorstopper of a biography of Elon Musk. He relates the story that when Elon was wooing Tallulah Riley, who would become his second wife, and who he would re-marry after their divorce, with a delivery of 500! roses.

500! roses. I have no idea what this would look like. We sold a dozen roses often, and I delivered them in a long, waxy cardboard box with the shop logo on it, with the stems sticking out of one end because of the way the roses were displayed in the box, but 500?

How were they delivered? With a forklift? And how did Tallulah put them all in water? Prop them up in the bathtub? I've never seen 500 in one place other than at a 28th street wholesaler as they were delivered in wooden crates.

The 8th Street See's is a true candy emporium. They get a fresh shipment every Thursday. There are loose pieces and like build a bear, you can build your own assortment. We like all dark chocolate soft centers and got a one pound box filled at the store.

See's is a pure West Coast candy. When you get off a plane in Arizona or California there are boxes of See's at the airport. The son of Mary See built a candy company using her recipes.

And who in whole wide world owns See's? The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet. But you knew that, right?

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The Shetland Islands

As much as I like obituaries I also like those British detectives miniseries on BritBox and PBS.

Up to a few weeks ago, I relied on PBS to deliver these episodes of Prime Suspect, Morse, Endeavour, DCI Banks and Ridley. I disdain the American cop shows like Law and Order and anything NCIS with their badge-on-the-belt-babes and their trite sassy dialog. Give me a cerebral DI or DCI detective anytime. Plus, there's the scenery.

I get Amazon Prime through my daughter's membership, and sometimes find something on their Prime Video, but I was always blocked from some selections due to not having a BritBox subscription. So, I've finally caved in and went for it; $7.99 a month doesn't seem like too much to add to the pile devoted to media and entertainment. It's infectious.

My Australian Twitter buddy campaigns for written correspondence. Jen King (@justjenking) collects post cards and postage form around the world. as such, she finds the Australian mail boxes quite interesting. And I do too.

She posts images of them as she travels around the country. It's a big country with strong regional characteristics. And the mail boxes reflect that. These pictured are from Western Australia.

Ms. King once posted a Tweet about mail boxes with knitted caps, which seems to be a thing they do in Australia and the U.K. The WSJ did an A-Hed piece on this practice. The mail box toppers make them colorful, for sure. I just wonder what a lot of rain does to them. Probably gives some women an excuse to knit more of them.

My new found Brit cop is Jimmy Perez in Lerwick, Shetland Island, Scotland. Perez in Scotland? In an early episode Jimmy (everyone calls him Jimmy) tells someone that when the Spanish Armada cracked up centuries ago there were Spanish people who settled on the islands. Thus. the surname.

Shetland is an archipelago of 100 islands in the North Sea, significantly north of Scotland, but considered  part of Scotland while being closer to Norway. Apparently there are only 16 of the island s that can claim anyone living on them. There are a lot of sheep in this place. Norse customs predominate the culture of the Islands, but the accent is pure Scottish.

Jimmy is a DI, detective inspector, seemingly the one in charge of the Lerwick police department. Lerwick is the biggest city in Shetland and sits on what they call the mainland, even though it's an island. Reporting to him is a DS, detective sergeant, a DC, detective constable, and the desk sergeant, Billy. 

Jimmy's boss seems to be the Fiscal, the in-house prosecutor who occupies space in the police building. Fiscal apparently in Scotland is like the DA, so to speak, who supervises investigations to make sure they're going to produce a good case in court.

Jimmy is played by Douglas Henshall, the island conscience. He's Gary Cooper in High Noon. Laconic, but fair. The one thing about tapping into these miniseries so late in their existence is that I've walked into seven seasons of Shetland. I've been significantly binging so much that I feel I've mentally acquired a Scottish accent.

Note:
I wrote the reference to High Noon before getting to the part in Season 7 when one of the characters having a late night drink with Jimmy sizes him up and says he reminds him of the sheriff in High Noon, Jimmy Stewart.

Jimmy listens intently, then tells the fellow that it was Gary Cooper in High Noon. I was chuffed.

Aye, ach, peerie, grand, wee, bairn are all words and expressions heard often. The series is based on books by Ann Cleeves, who is also the creator of Vera, another popular Brit cop, a DCI (detective chief inspector) who has a larger staff in the Northumberland and Northumberland City police and no apparent boss in England.

Since Northumberland is in the north of England some Scottish seems to seep into the vocabulary. Vera, a stout woman who might be a U.K. version of Peter Falk's Columbo wearing a rain coat and slouch hat, who favors words like "love" and "pet" is played by Brenda Bleythen.  She is not married, so there is little family drama coming from her end. Vera is so popular it is in its 12th season. Shetland has 7 seasons so far, and I've binged through 6 already and am part way through the last season.

Jimmy doesn't flash or wear a badge. Occasionally he flips out the badge and warrant card, but often just introduces himself as "Detective Inspector, Jimmy Perez." I've never seen an episode where someone want to see id.

And of course the U.K. police don't carry guns, There can be armed police, and you see some of it in Vera, but not in Shetland. I love it when they take a small battering ram and take out the front door. Makes you wonder why you bother with locks.

Jimmy's wife died. This of course lets the plot lines give him some female company. But it usually doesn't develop into any permanence since Jimmy holds a lot in and sometimes winds up suspecting the woman of being part of the crime. This doesn't turn out to be case, but they feel wounded, and don't appear again in the next season. Jimmy gets the girl now and then, but he doesn't get to keep her.

Jimmy has a young adult daughter who is really his step-child since the woman Jimmy married had the daughter with another man, who is somewhat Jimmy's sidekick, Duncan Hunter, played by Mark Bonnar. Duncan is in every season, but often in trouble. He's Cassie's biological dad, and Jimmy is the one raising Cassie, who goes off to "Uni" in Glasgow eventually. Cassie like to tell everyone that she's got two dads who love her.

The Brits always have great casting. Shetland is populated with its share of freckle-faced, red headed adults and children. The opening theme is a mournful violin playing a Scottish sounding dirge.

The varied setting for these Brit crime series gives them great appeal. There is a view of Northumberland City in Vera that shows the bridge that is a double for the Sydney Harbor bridge and the Amtrak railroad bridge in Astoria, New York, that brings trains from New England and upstate New York into Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

Shetland is something else from a scenery point of view. Few trees, brown hills. Even the grass looks a bit brown. The whole place looks like an Andrew Wyeth paining.

Nearly every scene features water. If you don't have water view in Shetland you're living in a cargo container. The building pictured to the right is Jimmy's home. On the water, of course. Keeping the crackers fresh in that place has got to be tough.

That's pretty much what every place in Lerwick looks like. Stone, stone, stone. Everything is a small castle.

Jimmy's favored clothing is jeans, colorless shirt, a sweater and a pea coat. He's got a tie on at the funeral for his mother. He's from Fair Isle, one of the many Shetland islands, a dot of land at the southern end of the archchipelago, home to 70 people and lots and lots of sheep. Fair Isle is also known for a great spot to watch bird migrations. That is if you're thinking of going.

Everything in Shetland is connected by ferries, big and small, small planes and short runways. It is a rugged looking place and leads you to understand why the Scots invented golf. They needed something to get themselves outdoors, because if you go by looks, you'd stay under the covers your whole life.

Jimmy and his team of course solve crimes. His sergeant is "Tosh," the nickname for Alison Macintosh, a young woman who looks more like a kindergarten teacher than a cop. But of course she's good. And she's not a badge-on-a-belt babe.

Jimmy gets results through forensics of course, and also through his stare, his 1000 yard blue-eyed stare that gets more people to blab up their guilt than you can believe. It save a lot of time and of course insures a good case for the Fiscal.

That Fiscal thing is really something different. The word apparently comes from Latin of course, fiscus, treasury. In some countries, like the U.K., the Fiscal is also the local prosecutor, and in Jimmy's case it's a woman who sits in an office at the municipal building at a desk in front of a lot of law books. The municipal building of Lerwick, holding the police station as well, is seen at the left. Everything looks like a dungeon.

Aside form all the differences in Brit cops and U.S. cops, and the stunning scenery, are some truly unique structures in that scenery that make the place so outstanding. 

One of the episodes takes the team to Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland islands. Not in a scene but what you can get when you Google Unst is the famous bus shelter. The what? Yep, a tourist highlight is a look at Bobby's Bus Shelter, outfitted with a sofa, lamp and TV. 

Turns out some kid named Bobby rode his bike to the shelter to get the school bus and somehow they outfitted the place in his honor as a mini motel room. I kid you out.

But I think the best takeaway from all these BritBox cop episodes a cake box in Aith, Shetland.

That's right, on the shore road in Aith, with the sea on one side is a cake box refrigerator (Cake Box Fridge) that you can take cakes, pies and cupcakes from and pay for on the honor system.

It reminds me of the time on a dark day from Saratoga racing my friend and I took a side trip to Cambridge, NY where the nuns of New Skeet make some of the best cheese cake and fruit cake you'll ever have. 

In the vestibule which you can enter without a key, is a refrigerator filled with their famous cheese cakes, normally distributed through their website or Hannaford Supermarkets. You can take something and leave the money in the off hours. I kid you not.

A Brit cop beats a badge-on-the belt cop any day.

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