Ask Alex - November 3, 2017

Ozone F. Baldwin

Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers.  Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.

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I got 18 questions this week, and while I tend to write these really fast (yea, hold the typo jokes...), I do have a day job so I have some practical limit as to how much I can actually tackle in a week. So, the rest will go into the queue and I will get to them when I get to them. I tried to get the especially topical ones out of the way this week, so hopefully that works for you bozos.

This week, Jenny is playing the role of Daryl in asking about a legendary Boston institution. Rex hates Manatees, or Florida, or both...it’s not entirely clear. Both Proper Opinion and Lady Sappho have questions about their hair, for which they are getting very different answers from me. Jimmy has a question about dumb Republicans, which leads me on a little Civil War aside that you can all feel free to not @ me about. Amy wants to know what she should be for Halloween and Yitzy wants to know what kind of candy he should eat. Hint: the stuff that tastes good. Finally, we are going to set you all straight on when “The Christmas Season” actually begins.

Somehow, along the way, I ended up talking about Fabio, penning a sequel to Pretty Woman and telling you about the worst animals. And...you better sit down for this...a landmark proposal on Christmas.

The Honorary Daryl Boston Question:

Submitted by: Jennifer
I was @ Yvonne's the other night & was reading about Locke-Ober. Women weren't allowed until '71. Do you think some were for entertainment?

Um, thanks for hanging out right in my hood and not even telling me, Jenny...

Tucked away in Downtown Crossing, Locke-Ober was one of Boston’s oldest restaurants, operating continually from 1875 until 2012 (the Union Oyster House, 1826, and Durgin Park, 1827, are still open, as are The Green Dragon and the Bell in Hand, which go back to Colonial times). Offering French cuisine and seafood in a lavish dining room stuffed with intricate mahogany details, it was a favorite haunt of Boston’s power players and visiting dignitaries for most of its history.

It was also, as Jenny notes, men-only until 1971 (two years before Harvard, for those keeping track), and dinner-jacket mandatory until 2011. Ultimately, that stuffiness was probably the restaurant’s undoing, as the demand for super-formal dining (especially in a location that I will generously call “not super formal”) just isn’t what it used to be. Even when eating haute cuisine, very few diners want to eat in places that require jackets, and fewer of them want to schlep into an alley in Downtown Crossing to do it.

For the non-Bostonians, Downtown Crossing is a funny spot. It should be one of Boston’s preeminent locations. It is located at the east end of Boston Common, between the Common and the Financial District, just north of the theater District and South of Beacon Hill. It has a couple of really high-grade hotels (the Parker House is at one end and the Four Seasons at the other and some historic buildings (like the Filene’s Building, Daniel Burnham’s only Boston project and now the frontage of the brand new, 60 story glass Millenium Tower).

It is also, however, the site of the city’s busiest subway station (which may or may not be in Alex’s Twitter Header!) and the intersection of the Red, Orange and Green lines. That makes it a most common landing spot for the less desirable elements that we like to pretend don’t exist. Since the Millennium Tower opened, and helped by the general improvement of any sketchy parts of Boston for the last 30 years, the area has gotten nicer, but it is still, and likely always will be, a little bit rough around the edges.

There are fewer and fewer un-nice parts of Boston all the time, and Downtown Crossing is certainly a far cry from the actual terrible parts in Roxbury and Mattapan, but it remains a very somewhat confounding one.

Yvonne’s, however, is phenomenal. I’m not entirely sure whether there is any relation to the previous establishment, but the name is clearly a nod. Frederick Childe Hassam’s famous nude painting of ‘Yvonne’ used to hang in the dining room at Locke-Ober, and the attached cocktail lounge was called Yvonne’s. After Locke-Ober closed, the new owners took a lease in the space, renovated and re-opened. The restaurant is stunning...they kept much of the original detail, including a spectacular gilded ceiling in the bar that is hard to look away from. And the food is phenomenal. The menu is maybe a little scattered, and it’s not cheap, but I have never met someone who had a bad meal in there.

I actually did a little bit of digging around Jenny’s question...were women allowed before 1971 if they were there as entertainers? At the most innocuous, this could mean lounge singers and at its most devious it could mean...well, a whole lot of other things. But the answer appears to be “no”. I asked a couple of old guys that ate there regularly  before 1980 and they claim that the restaurant never had singers or musicians, and was much too refined to have allowed anything more risque...heck, they don’t even think they allowed waitresses until the 1980’s!!!

We can't really rule out the idea that someone threw a private party hosted by strippers and cocaine dealers, but that is going to have to remain purely speculative;-).

Submitted by: Rex
What the fuck good is a manatee? Why do we have them and why does Florida love them more than humans?

First of all, they’re adorable. They make for great stuffed animals, all fat and cuddly and seemingly gentle.

Also, they’re delicious.

As for why Florida likes them more than humans...have you met many humans from Florida? You’d think highly of the wildlife if that was your comparison, too.

True story: I had a friend in college who had a huge crush on a girl he had gone to high school with. For Christmas one year, he adopted her a manatee (she was definitely a world-saver), both as a friendly gesture and because he was really sweet but hopelessly inept with girls. Don’t worry, though, Alex sat him down and told him that there is absolutely nothing romantic about “I’ve been in love with you forever” confessions...if you like her, just get your fucking act together and tell her like an adult instead of wasting years of your (and, more importantly, her) time pining away in silence.

So he did, and she wasn’t interested, which I think kinda threw an unscalabe wall up in their friendship after that, so that was sort of awkward, I guess. But the best advice doesn’t always lead to happy endings, right? Right. Anyway, moving on...

To Rex’s unstated point, manatees really are stupid animals. They are a very inviting target for anyone or anything in search of a good meal, and they don’t have the sense to swim away from danger. I'm guessing that their primary defense is that most animals don’t have the courage to attack a 650 lb floating buffet, but you are bound to run into trouble if you exist as something that appetizing with no ability to protect yourself.

It’s not all that different than moose. Moose are so big that they adults don’t really have any natural predators. Even the bears that they share habitats with will generally leave adult moose in peace. The bear would have to be desperately hungry to try and kill an animal that big (for a Grizzly, the moose is a little bigger, for a Black bear, the moose is probably twice his size) and possesses a huge array of sharp bony things on its head to whack you with.  A polar bear could likely do it, but they don’t come across moose that often. Also, polar bears eat whales. THEY HUNT WHALES!

The downside to this lack of predators is that moose and manatees don’t really have the sort of flight instinct that saves most animals. If you’ve ever been swimming in Florida, there is a pretty decent chance that you’ve seen a manatee meandering his way up and down the coast. You will note that, when it sees you, it does...absolutely nothing. For the manatee, this behavior is fine around most animals. With animals that have invented guns and harpoons, however, this is not a great preservation strategy. Moose hunters will tell you that finding a moose can be hard, but once you have found him, he’s not that hard to shoot...they don’t run away as rapidly as, say, a rabbit at the sight or smell of things they don’t recognize (note: I may have made all of that up. Hard to tell sometimes.)

Moose at least have the good sense to live in places where very few people go (outside of moose season!). Manatees raise the “stupid animal” bar a little bit by taking their easy-to-eat selves so close to humans regularly. They are not, however, the most poorly designed animals...that has got to be the Giant Panda.

How have Pandas lived this long? It’s a species of animals that exists entirely on a diet that has virtually no nutritional value! They have to eat constantly just so they won’t die of malnutrition, and they have so few spare nutrients in their diet that they give birth to babies who have an incredibly low chance of survival because they are so poorly developed.

Adult pandas weigh about 200 pounds and give birth after about 100 days to a single cub that weigh about a quarter of a pound. Four ounces!!! By comparison, the jaguar may be the most evolutionarily well-built animal on earth (I think you all know about my bizarre love of jaguars by now) and they are more or less the same size as pandas, in the 200 lb. range. They are also ferocious hunters in the most efficient ecosystem on the planet and yet somehow manage to give birth after about the same gestation period to an average of three cubs that weigh nearly five pounds each.

So, despite hunting constantly and taking their food out of the least generous jungle on earth, female jaguars manage to pass somewhere on the order of sixty times the nutrient volume to their cubs during the same time period. Like manatees and moose, Pandas have no significant predators, which affords them the luxury of doing absolutely nothing but sit around and eat all day long. Somehow, they can barely manage that and they struggle perpetuate the species. They are like the PT Cruiser of large mammals.

Submitted by: Jimmy
How can members of the GOP, formed for the express reason of abolition, can fuck up Civil War questions so bad?

This question is in response to John Kelly’s interview with Laura Ingraham this week in which she asked him about removing monuments to both founding fathers like George Washington and Confederates like Robert E. Lee.

{Side note: the devolution of Ingraham into Trumpism has been one of the more surprising media meltdowns of the last two years. Before the 2016 campaign, I would have told you that Ingraham was much smarter and more insightful that clowns like Hannity, Coulter and Limbaugh. She was much more reasoned and intelligent than any of those...or at least she seemed that way, right up until she went all in with Cheetoh Jesus. Now, she’s just another foxy middle-aged wingnut who sold out to the lowest common denominator and started spouting obvious falsehoods in service to the most toxic political ideology we’ve seen since segregationists in the mid 20th century.}

Anyway, Kelly, who I would have also called smart and reasonable until last week  gave an answer that almost couldn’t have been worse. He declined the obviously simpler path of defending Washington, the most important person in establishing America as it has existed since 1776.  No, that would have been too easy. Kelly dove right into the defense of a literal traitor.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country... But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Say what? I can appreciate where a military man like Kelly would admire Lee as a tactician, strategist and leader. His military career was exceptional and his battle achievements against larger, better-equipped forces are worthy of study. But for fuck’s sake, John, “honorable men” don’t fight wars in order to preserve their right to own other human beings and freely buy and sell those people and their offspring.

There are a million and one defenses of Lee and other Confederates - they were simply men of their times; they were really abolitionists but their duty was to state over country; their real objection was to Federal Government power creep; they weren't racist, they were just greedy - and each contains some kernel of truth. But generally speaking, those excuses are used to whitewash the moral underpinnings of the Confederacy.

Whatever else was in their minds, the unassailable fact is that the political leaders (made up of and elected entirely by white men) elected to secede from a country because they wanted to continue owning, buying and selling other human beings and they were pretty sure that the other half of the country was soon going to eliminate their right to own, buy and sell other human beings. Certainly not all of them felt that way, and a large portion of political leaders in the northern states (who also had the moral convenience of not relying on slavery for their economic livelihood) shared the slavers' belief structure. Abraham Lincoln himself could never be called an abolitionist: he was a unionist and nothing more. But ultimately, we are judged on our actions, and one group of leaders took up arms because they felt so strongly in favor of perpetuating a reprehensible institution and another took up arms because it felt strongly enough about eliminating it (it would be accurate to say that the south fought to preserve slavery much more than the north fought to eliminate it).

Lee was smart enough to know exactly what the war was about and fully aware that there were plenty of other "men of his time" who had reached the obvious moral conclusion about slavery. He was also smart enough to know that this was the decision by which his life would ultimately be judged, and that winning would mean that he created a country whose primary reason for being was maintenance of the right of some people to own other people. Whether through loyalty and duty to Virginia, distrust of Washington, DC or personal interest, he made his choice and he should be judged on that choice. Is it the only thing we should judge him on? No, but it is certainly the biggest moral test he faced during his life, and he failed.

Submitted by: Proper Opinion
I've cut my hair short ever since high school and it's the lazy man's choice now. Am I depriving people by not going full Fabio?

Submitted by: Jess
I cut my hair short over the summer and I’m wondering if I should keep it short or grow it long again.

Two different questions about cutting our hair short within about an hour of each other?!? What are the chances?

First, Jess’s question is easy, because both options are fine. Your hair looks good at both lengths, so you clearly have some wiggle room to go back and forth. We talked a bit about possibly going even shorter, which might be super cute (Jess is tiny like me and has a roundish face ending with an adorable little chin) but runs the risk of looking kinda “Mom-ish”. Which is TOTALLY COOL for late-thirty-something Moms, before you all yell at me, but a little old for a college student. I feel like you look a little bit older with short hair than long hair, but I should also note that the long-hair picture I was looking at was a snapchat with fake glasses, bunny ears and a hat...so, maybe that is skewed a little bit.

Long and short of it (SWIDT?) is that you should continue to play around with it. Be adventurous at the hairdresser while you are young and have the time and energy to maintain whatever style you go with. Cut it really short if you want, just to see how it looks. Grow it out, experiment with layers or bangs or colors or whatever. That way, when you get into your late 20’s and there is more pressure from annoying people like “employers” to have presentable hair, you’ll have a better idea what looks good on you and what you don’t like.

On the the boy hair question...I may have some bad news for you, Proper Opinion. If you let your hair grow back, you may find out that you have a lot less of it than you did in high school. You may not be able to pull off the full Fabio anymore (who, for being nearly 60, still has pretty thick hair). It is possible (likely?) that keeping your hair short has hidden the truth from you about your thinning hair...and growing it will do nothing but expose you to the cold, hard facts of aging. If ignorance is bliss, then short hair may be Xanadu.

But I can’t talk about this now because my Fabio Googling has uncovered possibly the greatest story I have ever read. On March 30, 1999, Fabio attended the opening of a new roller coaster at Busch Gardens in Virginia. Bringing some celebrity cred to the rollicking new Apollo’s Chariot ride, the Italian beefcake thought that he was in for just some easy appearance money and a quick little thrill ride. All went according to plan, with Fabio taking the inaugural ride alongside nearly 20 young women dressed in all white. It was a perfectly run of the mill press opportunity...until Fabio crashed face first into an unsuspecting (and immediately dead) Canada Goose.

Thankfully, the bird hit the front of the car first, which took some of the force out of the blow to Fabio’s beautiful, beautiful face (you laugh, but a Canada Goose at 70 MPH would likely have killed Fabio), but it was still enough to cut his nose badly enough to require a couple of stitches and splatter everyone around him with blood. The pictures are, well, kind of impressive...and Fabio, being the man’s man that he is, seems to have taken it a lot better than the blood-speckled broads with him in the car. Contemporaneous reports indicate that Fabio handled the whole thing with grace and good humor.

Also, right after he was hit, he looked at the dead bird and reportedly said…”It’s wings! I Can’t Believe They Don’t Flutter.”

Submitted by: Amy
What should I be for Halloween???

The best part of this question is that Amy sent it at 10:06 am on October 31st. There’s nothing like a well thought-out, deeply detailed plan to put together a really world class costume! As my high school chemistry teacher was fond of saying “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance” or, some days “Poor Planning Produces Poor Performance”. He was so well-prepared, he had two different 5P acronyms lined up…

So, maybe this is more of a “next Halloween” question. And, boy have I got some ideas! You could be a princess, or a slutty princess. A pirate. Or maybe a slutty pirate. Or a skanky pirate. Or a sexy princess. Or a mermaid, which is probably impossible to make not-slutty. There are all kinds of superheroes. Oh, and slutty superheroes!

Or a hooker! But a sensitive, down-on-her-luck hooker with a heart of gold and a super nerdy little boy who she will do anything to support...including working the streets. And then that hooker meets a wealthy businessman who is totally not the kind of guy who meets hookers but did so in this completely accidental and non-creepy way. Like, his car got stolen and right before he was going to get mugged by some local hoodlums, she speaks up on his behalf and tells the hoods (who have a deep respect for her cuz everyone knows she is really the moral conscience of this little piece or urban blight) that he is with her. And he is so taken by her kindness, and her movie-star beauty (that no one can see because she has a boring haircut) that he tries to give her money as thanks.

And when she won’t accept his pity payments, he asks her to dinner as thanks where she reluctantly tells him about all of her hard luck, which was totally not her fault but that she never let get her down and then as a means of proving that he is a substantial human being and not just a rich playboy looking for another bedpost notch, she asks him to help her save a building in her neighborhood that a ruthless developer wants to buy so he can build a condo high rise, evicting the noble poor old ladies that live there. He agrees and then...PLOT TWIST!!!...realizes that his own company is the developer!!!

Will their now 18 hour-long relationship survive? Is there room in the bottom-line world of the developer for the empathy of this hardened but optimistic lady of the night? I dunno, but I just registered that with the Screenwriters’ Guild, so don’t even think about stealing it

You’ll have to see Pretty Woman 2: Electric Boogaloo to find out!!!

Submitted by: SpookySnarkySkeleton
Christmas begins at midnight tonight and goes to MLK Day, right? @Lady_Sappho & @BlazerMc88 back me up on this.

No. Stop it. All three of you, go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done. This is fucking insanity and it has to stop.

While my reputation as Scrooge McMisfit is pretty well established, I think it is somewhat off base. I love Christmas. I love the whole season, with the lights and the decorations and the food...oh, the food!!! I’m going to eat my face off on cookies and chocolate from the day after Thanksgiving until the Christmas leftovers run out. I love Christmas so much, in fact, that I am willing to devote an entire month to the single Holiday. A whole month!!!

What I am not willing to do, however, is ignore Thanksgiving, which is objectively the best holiday. We have invented a holiday that gives us a four and a half day weekend, involves only limited preparation-related stress, and amounts to doing little more than eating and watching football. Is there anything more American than that? I know that July 4th is the day we roll out the flags and the fireworks, but Thanksgiving is really the greatest holiday representation of America. This insistence on starting Christmas on November 1st does nothing but diminish a day that deserves as much amplification as possible.

But, I actually have a suggestion that I think solves a lot of problems: we need to move Christmas. I propose that we move Christmas to the last Saturday in January, with the bank holiday celebrated on that Friday.

So, right off the bat, it makes Thanksgiving stand better on its own. There is no rush to get out to Best Buy right after you finish the pie so you can get the best Black Friday deals (psst: you can get the same deal in two weeks!!!) and we can savor the four day Thanksgiving weekend for all that it is worth. I also think it improves New Year’s Eve, which is no longer right in the heart of the Christmas hangover. We can now get through the inherent hecticness of year-end without throwing in the most involved holiday of the year while we do it. Every business that closes its year on 12/31 (which is most of them) would benefit from having their employees unencumbered in the last two weeks of the year.

You know what else? It is going to dramatically improve the whole month of January. As it is now, we rush through December with all of the lights and decorations and music and celebration, and then right after New Year’s, we head into the darkest, coldest, most depressing time of the year with absolutely nothing to break up the monotony or look forward to. Spring Break, if you have kids who get it, is 10 weeks away. Even in states that do a February and April school vacation, you have six or seven very long, terrible weeks where nothing fun happens, unless your team is playing in the Super Bowl.

So, now we move Christmas to the weekend between the NFL Conference Championship games and the Super Bowl. Lights can go up anytime after Thanksgiving, really, which increases the amount of time that we get to enjoy Christmas lights during the darkest time of the year. There is very little else going on at that time of year, which will ease the shopping and planning pressures.

And now, look where we are when Christmas is over? The days are already starting to get longer and spring is a manageable time away. If you live in the South, you have maybe four or five weeks before Spring shows up, and even up here where we suffer through the cruel and frigid never-ending tail end of winter, we’re not that far from seeing at least seeing some signs of life (True Fact: March and early April in New England are the worst. The fucking worst. It seems like winter should be over, and it’s not even close.)

So, no, shut up with your Christmas shit until next month. If you want a two month long Christmas season, then you need to support my just-launched quest to relocate Christmas to late January. #Alex’sNewChristmas.

Submitted by: Yitzy
What could possibly have hurt someone so badly that they can no longer appreciate the cheerful goodness that is candy corn?

I dunno...a root canal? Type two diabetes? Morbid obesity? There are a lot of really terrible things that come from eating candy corn, and any one of them could be the culprit. And sure, those things can come from eating pretty much any candy, but there is a pretty obvious difference: other candy isn’t fucking gross.

You know how bad candy corn is? It tastes worse than actual corn. They’ve created a candy version of a vegetable and somehow managed to give it a flavor that is objectively worse than the vegetable it is mimicking!

“Hey Mr. Hershey, I have a great idea! You know how there is cotton candy? And you know how it tastes pretty good? What it we made it so it tasted worse than actual cotton? Like, maybe we could make it from tree bark and dung beetle carcasses?”

There are several reasons that candy corns exist. First, they are not sticky and do not melt or spoil, so they make really good candy dish candy.  They are also small, so you can get a lot of individual pieces out of a single bag. You can place them out in a dish and allow lots of people to share them. I mean, it’s still a little gross that people are putting their grubby fingers in a bowl of candy and then all kinds of people are sharing the candy, but it is a whole lot less gross than, say, pouring a bowl full of caramel and having people scoop it out with their fingers. If you don’t want to generate tons of wrapper trash, it’s hard to make most chocolate candies work like that.

Candy corns are also seasonally colored. They’re yellow and orange...they just look like Fall. So, even if you don’t eat them, they make for a good seasonal decoration if they are sitting in a bowl on a table. So, there are perfectly good reasons to buy candy corns.

Only, no, there aren’t, because there is nothing a candy corn brings to the table that you can’t get from a bag of Halloween M&M’s, which taste infinitely better. They accomplish everything you get from putting candy corns in a bowl for everyone to see and share...only they taste like M&M’s instead of plastic saccharin chews.

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Alex’s Random Old Song of the Week

My kids were listening to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” the other day, and we got onto the subject of Romeo and Juliet. This led into a lot of directions, like “Why is this the love story that we use to describe all other love stories? They both end up dead, you know. That’s a pretty terrible ending.” Or, "Which one is the Montague and which is the Capulet?" (Seriously, you don’t know, just admit it. Juliet is the Capulet, which you can remember because that is a terrible name...your first and last name shouldn’t rhyme.) And finally, that there are tons and tons of songs that reference Romeo and Juliet...and the best of all of those songs? How about Dire Straits.

And now you just say, “Oh Romeo, yea, you know I used to have a scene with him.”