Meanderings, 14 October 2023

This has been a cooler week here, punctuated by some rain. We took our morning walks more bundled up. The crisp air freshens the walk. But even as Kris and I walk, the daily of the massacres in Israel interrupt our peace, and we pray and long for a resolution of justice, leading to peace in Israel — for Palestinians and Israelis.

Note: We are traveling this weekend and I got my days mixed up, posting Meanderings today (Friday) instead of tomorrow (Saturday).

Photo by Candice Seplow on Unsplash

Well done! Congratulations!

NEW YORK — The NBA has promoted Intae Hwang and Sha’Rae Mitchell to its full-time referee staff for the coming season.

Hwang is a native of South Korea who moved to New Jersey in 2020 with hopes of becoming a referee in the U.S. He worked seven games as a non-staff official last season and has also worked in the G League, the WNBA, the Summer Olympics and the Basketball World Cup.

Hwang discovered a love for basketball from a young age and became obsessed with learning everything about the sport while studying at Busan University of Foreign Studies after meeting a senior, Kirok Shin, who was a basketball referee, according to reporting by the Washington Post Sports….

Mitchell refereed 11 games as a non-staff official last season, and has also worked in the G League and WNBA. She also worked college games for five years, in the Pac-12, West Coast, Big Sky and Western Athletic conferences.

“We are thrilled to welcome Intae and Sha’Rae to our full-time staff,” NBA senior vice president for referee development and training Monty McCutchen said. “They have excelled in their performance areas and earned the right to officiate NBA games on a regular basis.”

Both will also work G League games this season, as all NBA referees with fewer than four years of service are asked to do.

Why?, many of us would ask.

Dr. Bret Ruby is a National Park Service archaeologist who drives a ruby-red Camaro with the license plate DR RUBY.* He is notably passionate about his work, which is why I felt a little guilty on a recent Ohio morning as he enthusiastically showed me around a historic monument that did not, honestly, look like all that much to me. We stood on a hill overlooking the Hopeton Earthworks near Chillicothe, Ohio, south of Columbus. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Native Americans built 800,000-square-foot geometric shapes in this meadow, an enormous circle and square aligning with the movements of the sun and the moon.

That is, obviously, very impressive. The problem was what had happened since then: centuries of erosion, followed by more centuries of farming and plowing, which meant that even from above, it took me a long time to see the square and circle down in that field. It mostly looked like a scrubby field with a gravel plant on the other side. Eventually I picked out a few straight lines of dark grass, a gradual curve at the far end of the meadow.

As we ambled down the hill, Ruby pointed out a swell in the landscape. “That hump there is the earthwork wall. That’s melted out from plowing. These walls were once 12 feet tall.” I nodded in admiration, and I did admire these walls, in theory. In the distance, a staffer drove a tractor; the NPS engages in “interpretive mowing,” Ruby said, using differing lengths of grass and a mix of native plants to distinguish the earthworks for visitors.

There was one visitor. She was walking her dog. This was supposed to be the United States’ newest UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Banning harmful chemicals in food:

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the California Food Safety Act, the first law in the U.S. to ban four harmful chemicals from candy, cereal, soda, and other processed food sold and produced in the state.

Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills) authored the law, which ends the food uses of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and Red Dye No. 3. 

These chemicals are linked to human health issues, including hyperactivity, nervous system damage, and an increased cancer risk.

All four additives are already banned by European regulators, with the narrow exception of Red Dye No. 3 in candied cherries.

“The Governor’s signature today represents a huge step in our effort to protect children and families in California from dangerous and toxic chemicals in our food supply,” said Gabriel, chair of the state Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection.

“It’s unacceptable that the U.S. is so far behind the rest of the world regarding food safety, he said.  “This bill will not ban any foods or products — it will require food companies to make minor modifications to their recipes and switch to safer alternative ingredients that they already use in Europe and so many other places around the globe.”

Two national non-governmental organizations, the Environmental Working Group and Consumer Reports, backed the California bill.

With one regret:

When Kip Turner first applied to a job with AT&T in 1973, he didn't expect that he'd spend his whole career with them.

Turner was 18 years old at the time and had just finished a year at Arkansas State University studying animal science. But, after seeing all the schooling required to become a veterinarian, he realized he needed to get a job "to even think about that" and dropped out.

His side job as a lumber truck driver wasn't cutting it, and so he asked his dad, a Southwestern Bell Telephone employee, whether he knew of any job openings in the telecommunications field.

In the summer of 1973, Turner drove to Little Rock for an interview and joined AT&T as a station installer.

Turner, now 68, has spent the last 50 years of his career with the company and will likely retire with them in the next few years. …

While many of those courses carry a college credit, Turner says one of his main regrets in his career is not leveraging AT&T's education benefits to go back to college. "I would have loved to have completed an engineering degree," he says.

An empire called Amazon:

Suavecito was the first product that Douglas Mrdeza listed to sell on Amazon back in 2014. He had ordered a bit too much of the specialty hair pomade for his barbershop in East Lansing, Michigan. He wanted to see whether he could offload some online.

It sold out. So, he ordered more. This time he paid Amazon some extra money to use its warehouse storage and shipping service.

"I did the calculation, bought what would have sold in a month and sent it in," Mrdeza says. "And it sold out in like a day."

He was hooked. He started selling more hair and beauty products on Amazon. Soon that part-time hustle became his full-time business, Top Shelf Brands. Within a couple of years, Mrdeza had more than 40 employees, ran four warehouses and was bringing in $10 million in revenue, he says. Soon, it was making $25 million.

"It was thriving, for sure," Mrdeza says. "We were all in."

None of it lasted. Today, Top Shelf Brands is bankrupt, its employees laid off and its warehouses shuttered. It's one of an untold number of third-party Amazon merchants that cashed in and then lost it all. And it serves as an illustration of their precarious position on Amazon, where everything can change from one day to the next.

Mrdeza's story is at the heart of a lawsuit that the Federal Trade Commission brought against Amazon in September. The suit, which was joined by 17 state attorneys general, alleges the company illegally used its monopoly power to stamp out rivals, which ultimately hurts consumers. The FTC says Amazon punishes third-party sellers that offer lower prices on other sites, strong-arms them into using its shipping service and hikes up fees indiscriminately.

How many would say Yes to this but would rather that others not know?!

Pretty much all my life I have been fighting against my instinctive introversion, and now that I have turned 65, I’ve decided to stop fighting. I hope people will see this as the legitimate prerogative of a senior citizen.  

When someone – anyone, except those I know very well indeed – asks me to have coffee or a beer, I am filled with a feeling not far from dread. But I have always thought that I shouldn’t give in to the anxiety; instead I have tried to push back. It’s just grabbing a cup of coffee and having a little chat, for heaven’s sake! I tell myself. You’re not being taken in by the Stasi for interrogation. So I make myself say yes, and I make myself go … and while I can manage to be friendly and engaged during the meeting — indeed, more than friendly, way too talkative, out of sheer nervousness — when we’re done I want to go home and sleep for a day or two. 

There’s nothing wrong with the people who invite me — indeed, they’re often interesting or even charming, which is the primary reason why I feel I should push back against my instincts. But it’s still taxing to push back. If I were invited to dinner by Bob Dylan or Thomas Pynchon, I’d think, Do I really have to? (But I doubt I can make you believe how serious I am about that.)