RIP, Circle Furniture

I was a big fan of Circle Furniture, a small local chain selling interesting, well-designed, decently made, and not crazily expensive furniture and home decor.

I have pine-green painted dresser in the den that holds my sweaters. 

During the pandemic, I spent entirely too much time keeping company with my 1920's vintage mahogany dining room set and chairs. I had never polished the chairs, and if you leaned back in one of them, you were apt to break the struts. I was just plain sick of the whole thing. So I masked up and headed to Circle to get a new cherry dining room table and some cool chairs that don't fracture when you lean back in them. I love my table and chairs, which actually go pretty well with the mahogany credenza that was the only piece of my prior set I kept. (A friend of mine has a niece who lives in a 1920's home and is also a furniture refinisher. She and her husband were delighted to take my vintage furniture off my hands.)

When Trump was elected in 2016, I realized that I was going to need a comfy chair for TV watching, so I walked over to Circle the Sunday after the election and ended up spending about twice as much as I planned on for a really comfy chair. 

There may also be an arm chair in my living room that came from Circle, but I'm not entirely sure.

One thing I loved about Circle was that it was family owned and operated. When I went in to buy the table and chairs, I met with the daughter of the owners. She was great to talk to and, it turned out, we'd both gone to business school at Sloan (MIT). 

But Circle was sold a few years back to a couple who apparently didn't know what they were doing. And they managed to overexpand and run the company into the ground. 

A company-wide email sent [on December 19th] told employees that all stores were closed until further notice. Then, on Tuesday morning, employees received an email confirming they’re being laid off. (Source: Boston Globe)

The Bah Humbug layoff date? December 23rd. But, hey, good news: your health benefits would stay in place until December 31st. 

All the Circle stores are closed, all the employees are gone, but it's not clear what's happening to those who'd ordered from Circle prior to the closing. Have they been treated as callously as the employees were? Are they getting their deliveries? Their deposits back?

Thankfully, my sister Trish is not one of them. She bought a gorgeous new couch from Circle last year and has fortunately had it in her possession for a few months now. Phew!

What I found most astonishing about Circle's layoffs, its precipitous closing, was that the company's president, Jonathan Boyle, didn't know anything about it. 

“They were having some financial difficulties they were trying to resolve and work around, but that’s all I know,” he said. “It’s not a great situaion."

Bizarrely:

Despite his executive role, Boyle said he was not privy to much of the company’s finances, which were handled mostly by the accounting team and the company’s owners. The decision to shut down operations did not come from him, he said.

Boyle has been working at Circle for nearly 40 years. He came up through the ranks, and was the lead operations guy, a job he was reportedly quite good at. But a company president who doesn't have access to the financials? Huh???

The holidays are the worst time of year to lose your job, and I wish all those who got a pink slip the best of luck. Good luck to those with outstanding orders, too. 

I also feel bad for the former owners - Richard Tubman, his wife Peggy Burns, his brother Harold Tubman. Circle was their family business, and had been around for more than 70 years. They were second-gen owners and operators, but the next gen - including Jessica Tubman, the Sloanie I met during the pandemic - didn't want to keep on keeping on there. So they sold the business. 

Peggy Burns, one of the company’s previous co-owners, left Circle Furniture about two years after the sale, but has kept close relationships with employees since.

“It’s our legacy, and we’re so ashamed of it,” she said. “This was devastating. I’ve reached out to people I know and we’re trying to help in any way we can … Who wants to tell people you don’t have a job a week before Christmas?”

You're so right, Peggy. Too bad the folks you sold to got so far in over their heads, and ended up doing something that comes off as supremely heartless. 

And RIP, Circle Furniture. Not in the market for furniture at the mo, but if I were, I would have gone shopping at Circle. 

M'm! M'm! Good!

Lunchtime when I was a kid usually meant soup and a sandwich. My mother was a scratch cook, and a fabulous soup-maker, but soup at lunch came out of a can of Campbell's. M'm m'm good.

I liked Vegetarian Vegetable. Vegetable Beef. Beef Barley. Scotch Broth. Chicken Noodle. Chicken with Rice. Tomato. It's been a million years since I've lunched on Campbell's soup and a sandwich, but I can still remember exactly what those soups tasted like. 

These days, while there may be a can or two of Campbell's Mushroom on my shelf - there's a ham and noodle casserole, a childhood favorite, that calls for mushroom soup - if I'm opening a can of soup for lunch or dinner, it's going to be Progresso. Italian Wedding. Chickarina. Macaroni & Bean. 

Still, there's a place in my heart for Campbell's soup. 

But apparently not in the heart of the Martin Bally, the now former vice president and Chief Information Security Officer for Campbell's.

Robert Garza, an ex-employee, has filed a law suit claiming racial discrimination and harrassment against Campbell's. And in his suit, he takes a side excursion, alleging that Bally "said Campbell’s food is 'highly process food' for 'poor people.'" Garza pretty much had the goods on Bally. He recorded the conversation.

In the recording Garza shared with WDIV [Detroit], the person can be heard saying he doesn’t buy Campbell’s products because he doesn’t know what is in them.

“We have (expletive) that’s for poor people,” you can hear the male voice say in the recording, a copy of which was shared with USA TODAY. “I don’t buy (expletive) Campbell’s products barely anymore.”

The person went on to say that when he looks at a can of Campbell’s soup, he thinks it contains “bioengineered meat.”

“I don’t want to eat a (expletive), a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer, do you?” the person said. (Source: USA Today)

Well, who among us hasn't badmouthed their company's products? Nobody I ever worked with. The snidery towards poor people aside, this is actually pretty funny. I especialy loved the bit about "a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer."

But wait! There's more! (There's always more.)

Garza [also] alleges in the suit that Bally also made racist comments about Indian workers at the company, calling them “idiots” and saying he disliked working with them. Bally also told Garza he came to work high on marijuana edibles, Garza alleges. 

Of course, Campbell's doesn't want an employee - especially a senior one - making fun of their products. And Campbell's, of course, maintains that the chicken in their Chicken Noodle is not bio-engineered or 3D printed. But in terms of harm to Martin Bally, racist remarks and coming to work high seem to be more harmful than product jokes.  

Anyway, Bally has a reasonably impressive resume, and if he can talk his way out of Garza's claims, I'm sure he'll land somewhere. There's high demand for information security pros. And, in my experience, "they" - higher ups, no matter how awful they are - always land somewhere. But what a fool Bally was to be talking the way he did in front of an employee he barely knew. (Garza had only been with Campbell's for five months when he was fired.)

Maybe he'd had one edible too many on the way into work that day.

No word yet on the outcome of Garza's suit - other than Martin Bally being canned - but one source says that Garza was fired for cause. Garza maintains he was let go because he had filed complaints of racial discrimination and harrassment. 

I was thinking of running out and buying a can of Scotch Broth for old time's sake. Despite the fact that it contained lamb - mutton? - I loved this soup. Lots of barley and ultra salty. Alas, Scotch Broth has been discontinued. 

And so it goes...

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Image Source: Call Me A Food Lover

Frontrunner? Why yes, yes I am.

I grew up watching football. Fall Sunday afternoons meant sitting with my father watching the NY Football Giants, wearing Honolulu Blue, from Yankee Stadium. Coached byAllie Sherman, in his suit, tie, and snappy little fedora. Frank Gifford. Y.A. Tittle. Rosey Grier. Rosey Brown. Andy Robustelli. Sam Huff. Kyle Rote.

Back then, as folks of a certain vintage will recall, the NY Giants were New England's team. 

Even when the Patriots came around (1960-ish), they were a sporting afterthought. The American Football League was big nothing. The Pats didn't have a stadium. They played at BU Stadium, Fenway Park, BC's Alumni Stadium, Harvard Stadium. Their games were televised on Channel 6, a low-wattage outfit out of New Bedford. (The Giants were on Boston's Channel 5, a real TV station.)

The Patriots' mascot, in those pre Elvis-swoosh logo days, was Pat Patriot, a burly, dumb-looking Irishman - a rough and tumble version of Lucky, the Celtics' sly leprechaunesque mascot. 

My father got sick. My father died. (Fifty-five years ago this past Sunday.) I drifted away from any interest in football, Giants or Pats. I went to college a 5 minute walk from Fenway Park during a couple of years when the Pats played there, but I couldn't be arsed to go over and watch them. Football remains the only "major" (male) team sport I've never seen in person. And have no desire to. 

For many years, football was just blech to me. Too violent. Too right-wing. Too militaristic. Too bogusly patriotic. Too sexist. (Those cheerleaders.)

I was first and foremost a baseball fan (Red Sox, of course) but I also followed the Celtics and the Bruins.

Watching football, I would tell people, was like eating veal. If I thought about it, I wouldn't do it. 

And then the Patriots got good, and all of a sudden I was, more or less, a football fan, Patriots Edition. And it was exciting. They were fun to watch. Whatever the sport, if the home town teams are in contention, the home town is buzzing. Winning all those Super Bowls, well, yay "us!"

It was my first foray into life as a frontrunner, jumping on the bandwagon when the going was good. (I'm a Red Sox anti-frontrunner. Although they annoy me no end, I'm with the Olde Towne Team through thick and thin.)

And then the Patriots stopped being good.

I could not have cared less about their fortunes, other than taking some malicious joy in their suckiness.

After all, I don't like Bob Kraft, the owner. I don't like Bill Belichick, the former coach. And GOAT-y as I know he is, Tom Brady was starting to get on my last nerve. His final play for the Patriots was a pick-6. Ha! Served him right for being about to become a turncoat and jump ship to another team.

Then there was the whole sordid Aaron Hernandez saga. 

During the Patriots' Golden Era, I had gotten used to watching football, so I still kept my eye on the playoffs. I watched the Patriot-less Super Bowls, forgetting within five minutes after the final whistle which team, exactly, had won.

And then, after stumbling out of the gate this past season, the Patriots got good.

So I started to keep an eye on them. I started to watch part of most of the games. I knew where they were in the standings. I liked Drake Maye. (Truly, who doesn't?) 

Even though the team was scorned for having a squishily soft schedule, they won their playoff games against teams (LA Chargers, Houston Texans) that were good enough to make it into the playoffs.

And all of a sudden, they were off to Denver to play for the right to play in the Super Bowl, their first SB appearance since 2019. (A boring game, as I recall. But they won.)

Largely because the Broncos' quarterback broke his ankle in their last game, the Pats were favored to win. And of course I was rooting for them - even though I knew that, if they did punch their ticket to the Super Bowl, we would be in for two weeks of non-stop local news focus on our boys, which I know from experience will be wretched in its excess. 

Well, the Pats beat the Broncos in cold, snowy weather that mirrored what we were experiencing back home. 

And so I'll watch the Super Bowl, hoping they win. If the weather is perfect and I have nothing better to, I will likely watch part of the victory parade But I won't buy any Patriots gear. Who wants to make Bob Kraft even richer? I'll be watching the game at my sister's house, and if there are Patriots cupcakes at the grocery store (there will be), I'll spring for those.

Of course, the bonus of being a frontrunner is that it doesn't really matter if "your" team wins or lose. Yes, I want the Pats to win, but a loss won't be soul-crushing.

I look at it this way: Win: gravy. Lose: shrug of the shoulders. I won't be reliving every play. I won't be tearing up. I won't lose any sleep. It's not live or die. Although, as a die-hard Red Sox fan, I know what it's like to NOT be able to easily shake a big loss off. And as a die-hard baseball fan, I know how hard it is when the season ends.

Anyway, football has been a good distraction from the dire non-sports news.

Am I a frontrunner? Why yes, yes I am. But give me a couple of months and baseball season rolls around. Will I be a Red Sox die-hard? Why yes, yes I will be. 

The Patriots' mantra this season has been We all we got. We all we need. Sports-wise, that will hold me until baseball season. 

LFG!

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Image Source: Wikipedia

Make that Charlie Avarice. (Fraud, glorious fraud.)

It's been nearly three years since I (virtually) ran into Charlie Javice. A decade ago, she founded Frank, a startup that helped students fill in financial aid applications. The idea was so hot, the execution so excellent, that, in 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired the company for a cool $175M. Not crazy billionaire bro unicorn money, by any means. But Javice's $21M take was pretty good walking around money for someone still in her twenties. Plus she had a cushy retention bonus. 

Trouble was, Javice had pumped up the number of students Frank was helping. By a lot. By more than an order of magnitude. 

JPMorgan sued for fraud, federal prosecutors got involved, and this past September Javice was sentenced to seven years in prison for her fraud, glorious fraud.

Curiously, given that she had screwed her employer, Javice had some employment deal where JPMorgan Chase was required to pay her legal bills. And what a tab Charlie (who, I can't help but mention, has a hedge fund father and a life coach mother) rolled up while futilely defending herself.

Here’s what Charlie Javice did: She spent money on luxury hotel" upgrades, extravagant meals and cellulite butter, a personal care product that some people use to treat their skin, as a lawyer for the bank said in a hearing on Friday. (Source: NY Times - 11.14.25)

Additional detail is emerging about those expenses. Lamps. (The lawyers didn't have lamps?) Nutritional supplements. And: 

A $581 dinner for two. Nearly $1,000 in laundry fees for one. A Cookie Monster toddler toy. And however many gummy bears $529 gets you. (Sourec: NY Times - 12.22.25)

Her failed defense included lawyers who have represented the likes of Elon Musk, Harvey Weinstein and Sam Bankman-Fried. And she racked up over $70M in bills - tens of millions more than Elizabeth Holmes spent on her failed defense. One of her lawyers charged $2,025 an hour. Yikes on yikes!

A spokesman for Javice claimed that she "followed JPMorgan’s written policies both as an employee and during the legal proceedings." And noted that she didn't incur these expenses personally. Her attorneys - and she had over 100 who were billing - did. (Bet those policies have been tightened up a bit. If nothing else, they must have tightened up on paying for tightening up cellulite butter.)

When JPMorgan saw the legal bills floating in, they started pushing back, and she's now likely to be on the hook for reimbursing the company for those legal fees. (Along with returning the money she made on the sale of Frank, and the overall $175M JPMorgan paid for the company without doing its due diligence very diligently.)

I really don't get fraudsters. Do they really think they'll never get caught? 

Way back in the early 1970's, when women were increasingly joining the work force and entering non-traditional professions, there was a popular fragrance named Charlie. The models the ad campaign used were young, breezy, kicky women, meant to appeal to young professional women. Whenever I read Charlie Javice's name, I can see Shelley Hack (one of the models) confidently swinging down the street, heading into the office. 

And here we are, fifty years later, reading about Charlie Avarice Javice, fraudster and legal expense gouger. 

As another ad campaign had it way back in the dawn of the Ms. Magazine era: you've come a long way, baby. 

2025 is in the books

I used to be a great reader. 

As a kid, I read a book a day. Six was the maximum number of books you could take out of the Worcester Public Library (Main South Branch), where my father took us every Friday evening to check out our books for the week. He would have my mother's library card with him, so he could take out a dozen books. 

What we all got from the library was augmented by book clubs. For the kids, my family subscribed to Vision Books (a series about saints and other renowned Catholics) and some American history series. When I had fifty-cents, I beelined to Woolworth's and picked up a Bobbsey Twins book or, as my reading tastes became more sophisticated, a Nancy Drew. 

My parents were "members" at various times of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the high-quality paperbacks The Time-Life Reading Program (which I think was a bit up the literary foodchain from the Literary Guild.) I still have a couple of books from The Reading Program, including a 1964 re-issues  A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, in which my mother has written my father's name, A.T. Rogers. I think I'll put it on my reading list for 2026.

There was also, if memory serves, and Ellery Queen mystery book club. And the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

By the time I was in junior high, I was reading those book club books (other than Ellery Queen) alongside the books I was reading for school.

Throughout my adult life, I'm guessing that I averaged 2-3 books (plus or minus, mostly plus) a week. We're not talking War and Peace here, but literary fiction, not-so-literary fiction, biography, history, mysteries, detective books (just not Ellery Queen), and on occasion pure, unadulterated junk. 

But within the last decade or so, my reading tapered off. I was spending more time watching (and fretting over) the news. I was perfectly capable of watching 8 straight hours of MSNBC, with the same stories presented over and over again from slightly different angles. Then I found myself doomscrolling on Twitter (and more recently Blue Sky).

Last year, I decided to start reading more and set a goal of a book a week. I made it, thanks in no small part to reading my favorite childhood books, the Betsy-Tacy-Tib series, which chronicled the turn-of-the-twentieth-century lives of three girls in Mankato, Minnesota, taking them from kindergarten through marriage and motherhood. Wonderful books, all, but easy enough to plow through in a sitting or two. No wonder I could read seven books a week as a kid!

For 2025, I doubled my goal to two books a week. And I made it.

Oh, I had a couple of gimmes in there, mini-books that took less than an hour - way less - to breeze through: On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder), A Child's Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas). But they were counterbalanced by a 700 page biography of the British writer Barbara Pym. (An old favorite. I think I'll reread her this coming year.)

Mostly, I read fiction.

Last year, I read books by writers I like but had lost track of, in including the three Paula Spencer novels by Roddy Doyle, which brilliantly chronicle the life of a working-class Dubliner. A couple of books by Curtis Sittenfeld (Show Don't Tell, Romantic Comedy), a couple by Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Whereabouts). And a John Sayles (To Save the Man). Having loved Demon Copperhead, I picked up another novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered). I reread Tillie Olsen (Yonnondio, Tell Me A Riddle). I'd forgotten how much I had enjoyed Anne Tyler, once she outgrew her quirky-character phase (Three Days in June, French Braid). I, of course, laughed out loud reading Fever Beach (Carl Hiassen). 

T

Thanks to the Boston Public Library, I found a bunch of new writers. No one too memorable, but I'll be looking for more by Christine Sneed, Joshua Moehling, and a couple of others.

On the non-fiction front, I depressed/scared myself with Sarah Kendzior's The Last American Road Trip, Rachel Maddow's Prequel, and Brian Goldstone's There Is No Place for Us.

On the non-depressing, non-scary non-fiction front, I adored Stanley Tucci's Taste, about how he grew up to be a foodie. (I mad crush on Tucci, so I knew I was going to love this one.)

I went through my bookshelves to pick out books I've had waiting to be read for years. Some for decades. 

Thus I discovered Carlos Eire's brilliant memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, and went out and got its follow on, Learning to Die in Miami. 

I finally got around to reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and Killers of the Flower Moon (David Gann). I've seen the Killers movie (didn't like it), but I'll be putting Crawdads on my watch list. 

By far the worst book I read last year was Robin Cook's Bellevue. Poorly written. Ridiculous plot. Wasn't a big Cook fan to begin with, but I had it lying around for some reason. Never again!

I'm signing myself up for another two-book-a-week year, starting out with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai) and The River Is Waiting (Wally Lamb). Slow going so far, as I had a raft of New Yorkers to catch up on. However slow a start, in 2026 I will get to 104 books again, even if I have to find a couple of minis in there. 

Word nerd

My mother was anti-swearing. The strongest language I ever heard her use was "Jesus, Mary, Joseph," which she only deployed on the occasion of one of her children showed up on the doorstep with blood gushing from their head or a limb dangling. She always claimed that resorting to language she considered vulgar or coarse was the hallmark of someone with a limited vocabulary.

Well, au-fucking-contraire to that. Thanks to all my reading, and a long-standing interest in words, I have a fairly extensive vocabulary. Which I use in collaboration with words that would have made my mother's eyeballs bulge and head explode.

Growing up, I was always trying to expand my vocabulary. I avidly read through the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" feature in the monthly Reader's Digest and was always on the lookout for ways to insert new words into my conversation. (Which I'm sure my 10 year old friends really appreciated.)

Every once in a while, I'd curl up in an armchair and read through my mother's battered, blue-covered 1940's era Webster's Dictionary looking for new words. I pretty much stopped that practice once I came upon the word "prepuce," which 12 year old me didn't understand particularly well and which, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with any way to introduce it into conversation. ("Hey, was your baby brother circumcised? That means his prepuce was clipped." Not that I would have known what circumcision was - other than observing the holy day that was the Feast of the Circumsion, about which the nuns didn't get into the details - let alone that prepuce was another word for foreskin, which I wouldn't have known either.)

As a word lover, I was probably one of the only students in my freshman high school class who was delighted that one of the required texts was a book called Word Wealth.

Yes, I was definitely a word nerd. I still am.  While I no longer curl up with dictionary hoping to find me another "prepuce," I love acquiring new words, even if I seldom end up using them.

Still, there are some words that I have a complete and utter problem with.

Although I finally know what it means - rudimentary, not fully formed - I can't tell you how many times I've looked up the word inchoate over the years. My inability to understand this word's meaning may stem from the trauma of having pronounced it in-CHOAT the first time I attempted to use it. Even though I was likely using the word correctly with respect to its meaning, stumbling only over the pronunciation, my mistake may have triggered some type of verbal PTSD that I only recently recovered from.

Although perhaps not as extensive or varied as mine - he read science, not literature - my husband had a decent vocabulary, and one of his frequently used words was labile. Whether Jim meant it in the scientific sense - unstable, continually undergoing breakdown - or in the everyday sense - open to change - it's a word that I get when I hear it in context. But presented with the word labile? Get me to a dictionary! I never remember what it means.

Opaque tights were popular when I was in high school. And here I am, 60 years on, having to stop and think for a moment whether it means clear and see-through or obscure and hard to understand.

I so want to be able to use the word jejune - not in conversation, but in the written word - but for the life of me, its meaning eludes me.

Sigh...

And not that there'll be any pay off, I must away to a book that may increase my word power, my word wealth.

Any takers for antidisestablishmentarianism?

Battery Up!

My husband's brother Joe was a wondrous tinkerer, always cooking up some invention to save time, money, energy. A natural engineer, Joe joined the Marines after high school and never bothered with college. He spent his working life as a machinest at Pratt & Whitney, maker of aircraft and gas turbine engines. The shop floor was his playground, and whatever he learned there he used in his garage tinkering. And vice versa.

One thing he invented was something or other that let him get 60 - or was it 100? - miles per gallon. I have no idea what it was that he did, and it may not have been completely legal. Nonetheless, Joe didn't spend a lot on gasoline. My husband and his brother weren't close, but we saw him once in a very blue moon, and there were always stories about his tinkering exploits.

This month is the first anniversary of Joe's death. He outlived his younger brother by eleven years.

Because I didn't know Joe at all, I don't think of him all that often. But when I read about a tinkerer named Glubux, Joe Diggins came immediately to mind. 

Nine years ago, Glubux began posting on Second Life Storage, an internet forum dedicated to squeezing as much life as possible out of used batteries. 

If I had no idea what Joe Diggins was doing, I have perhaps less of an idea of what the Second Life Storage folks are up to. But I do know it's about sustainability and not filling our landfills with the toxic waste that comes from discarded batteries. So, in a world where the cretinous U.S. president is kvelling about clean, beautiful coal and rampaging through environmental regulations, it's good to know that someone out there is looking out for our fragile planet.

Anyway, here's the Glubux has been up to:

Nine years ago, he posted about his DIY project, one that involved connecting used laptop batteries to solar panels, with the aim of achieving self-reliance when it came to electricity.

Over time, he amassed more than 1,000 secondhand laptop batteries that he ended up installing in a separate warehouse, about 50 meters from his home. In the beginning, battery discharge rates were uneven due to differences in the cells, causing some to drain faster than others, so Glubux started taking apart the laptop batteries and arranging the cells into custom racks.

Scienceclock reports that Glubux’s ingenious setup has been running continuously for the last eight years, and not a single battery cell has failed since. That is a remarkable statistic, considering the DIY nature of the project. (Source: Oddity Central)

Glubux has greatly increased his energy-producing capacity and he fully self-supports his electricity needs. 

Naturally, we all don't have the physical or intellectual capacity to replicate this operation. Not to mention that there aren't 1,000 used laptop batteries per household out there. (Sure, there are plenty. I'm pretty certain that I've contributed a good dozen or so over the years to landfills - and that's just the personal laptops, not any corporate ones that were retired. I do hope that gleaners managed to glean something out of all those laptops before they got buried in a landfill in Upstate NY or wherever.)

But I laud that fact that someone's doing something about limiting e-waste. 

Battery up!