Facebook groups my kids would join, if they knew how

I Only Like Pink Gum
Whose Birthday is Next?
You Were Yellow Last Time!
The Guy Who Lives in the Rooming House, and His Scary Hair
Are You A Girly-Girl?
Our Parents Make Us Watch The Simpsons. Yes It's A Cartoon But It's Really Inappropriate.
Fans of Artesani Park, Brighton
Can I Please Please Please Have A Dog? How Old Do I Have To Be? Ten? What Do You Mean, We'll See?
Root Beer: What DOESN'T Have Unkahol In It

1954 Jaguar Restoration - Complete!

This 1954 Jaguar XK120 belonged to my paternal grandfather who drove it while he was living in White Plains, NY. Following his death it was stored in a chicken coop in northern New Jersey.

When the farmer sold the chicken coop in the early '70's, my father removed it to the now-defunct farm where we were living, in Blawenburg, New Jersey, where it stayed until 1980, when the garage my father built in nearby Belle Mead NJ was finished.


In the 90's the body was detached from the chassis to be restored by a local guy. In Belle Mead, Paul and my dad removed the transmission and restored the clutch and the pressure plate and the gasket to the oil pan. The relevant parts were re-chromed in Philly.

In 2007 my father became convinced that the project would be completed at the cost of his own life, and the Jaguar bade farewell to New Jersey and was hauled to Paul's house in Westchester County NY on a flatbed truck. In 2008 Paul restored the interior, and spent a lot of time underneath the Jaguar (in his fetching blue jumpsuit) excoriating the British engineers who designed it.

From left to right: Paul Mullaney, David Mullaney, Ross Mullaney.
In May of this year it again became road-worthy.

In the video (COMING SOON!), Paul and our cousin Ross take it for a spin in Pound Ridge.

5 Star video from YouTube

Mireya and I rate this 5 out of 5 stars. We think Evelyn and Aunt Lynn might enjoy it.

Facebook For Forty-somethings

I signed up for a facebook account about 3 months ago because Dexter did. The first time I met anybody with an account was in 2006 when I took a course in marketing and was on a group project with a bunch of twenty-somethings. The two young women from the U.S. argued that Facebook was the place to network, while the young man from India preferred Orkut, which is owned by Google. I've since read that Orkut is very popular in India and Brazil.

Top Reasons to Be On Facebook:
1 - What Facebook's marketing collateral, if it had any, would promote - "Reconnect with old friends and acquaintances." E.g., a girl, now woman-with-MBA, that I went to junior high with recently found me on Facebook, and told me about an upcoming high school reunion. You can search for people who went to the same high school/college that you did -or had the same job you had. Looks like there are only 4 of us from the class of 1983 with accounts. Maybe more will sign up as their kids get old enough - or if they are buddies with coworkers in their 20's.

2 - Advertise your blog/organization/cause/event, for free. You can create a "group" such as the "Baroque Opera is Way Happenin'" group. As noted in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine mini-memoir of life-as-a-blogger by Emily Gould, if you post your blog(s) on your facebook page, your traffic will skyrocket. I am thinking about advertising our rental apartment by creating a page (not the same thing as a group, I guess) for the apartment itself and then linking the page to groups formed by local grad students (we had a great experience renting to two MBA students at Babson College).

3 - Keep tabs on your husband in a way that is less dishonest than surreptitiously checking his text messages. Dexter frequently changes the status-update (the "microblog") and this status often reflects something at work - I learned exactly WHO was stealing someone's lactaid and using it as coffee creamer. (At first when Dexter filled me in on the story I confused lactaid with Mylanta and was really grossed out).



4 - Scrabulous. An unofficial scrabble game that you play with Facebook friends. It's not nearly as much as a time-suck as other online games - you simply play your next word, and toggle back to real work (or more online timewasting). No need for the pesky math required in the real world to calculate the values of letters on pink v. blue squares - Scrabulous does all the work for you.


Top Reasons to Avoid Facebook

1 - The flip side of number 3, above. Dexter will be glad to know that I haven't dated in fourteen years. In 1994 technology for courtship included: 1) letters; 2) telephone; 3) notes in your work mailbox. I can't imagine dating now and being stuck with the decision of whether or not to "friend" someone I was about to go out on a date with. What happens if it doesn't work out, either immediately, or after a couple of months? When do you de-friend? Do you de-friend your ex's friends? And, most troubling, when do you change your "relationship status" from "single" to "in a relationship." If I don't send the girls to a Irish convent and/or an extremely conservative Amish community for their teen years, I will require they leave this field blank in the Facebook-type accounts they will inevitably have.

2- If you're a teacher, you need to think carefully about what you make public.

Cartwheels in May

Bianca has been working on her cartwheel. Here she is in Larz Anderson park, Brookline. might be fuzzy.

Day 1: Bianca as photojournalist

Thanks to the recent potlatch of friends Pat & Erika, Bianca is now the owner of a tiny digital camera. That's my thumb, for scale. The camera lives up to its claim in its manual: "The most convenient feature is that you can communicate with others face to face through Internet.The Mini Digital Camera makes your life more beautiful."

Unfortunately during the first 15 blocks of our trip on the bus through Brighton and Allston this morning, she took the maximum 20 pictures, and thus was not able to get a shot of the boarded up windows at Packard's Corner (intersection of Comm and Brighton Aves in Allston) due to yesterday's horrific car crash.


Here's a picture she took from the bus of Jim's Deli in Brighton Center (where I have had excellent breakfasts). Not bad for 20 miles per hour, with no viewfinder.

Alas poor zoris

It took me almost 30 minutes worth of search engine wrangling to find an image of the sandals I wore all summer when I was around 12 or 13.

Fredflare.com (thanks Annie) has nifty sandals for sale and as I was perusing the options, I had a sudden sense memory of the sandals of my mid-70's youth. They were flip flops that were slightly platform (about 3/4" high), had a woven straw base, and wonderfully thick black velvet thong straps. They cost about $2/pair at the Thrift Drug in the Princeton Shopping Center, where the "sank you very much" clerk with the lacquered hair worked. I think you might have been able to get red ones, although I could be making that up, but mostly they were black thong straps against a nice cool (it gets hot in New Jersey) tan base.




After googling flip flop+bamboo+70's, I found the term zori, and the winning search term turned out to be "zori sandals 70's" which led me to this page of "MI" an online Martial Arts magazine.

MI sells them, and I am so getting these, all the way from Australia.