Rookie Mama: It’s automatic, it’s systematic – Why it’s a smart home system

By Michelle Cote
The Rookie Mama

“Rosie is stuck” – Our Google Home device.

No sadder words had been uttered in a long time.

If you’ve watched the Wild Robot or Wall-E films, you’d understand our penchant for curiously treating our ‘smart’ devices as family.

Perhaps we brought this phenomenon on ourselves because we name the darn things and talk to them, or conceivably it’s due to their automation and task completion that has become such an integral part of our day-to-day, each playing its role among the wild in the fanciful Cote homestead.

Alarms, LED lights, music, water usage and conservation – we named that one ’Mario the Plumber’ – There’s a smart-commodity for every little thing, each designed to assist in its own way.

Xennials and Millenials may remember the quirky Disney flick ‘Smart House’, released nearly three decades ago – quirky in that the computerized-home-experiment-gone-wrong came in the form of the ‘Married… with Children’ matriarch as a ‘90s AI, to the tune of ‘Slam Dunk da Funk’ boy band soundtrack fame (If you know, you know.)

Despite all that, the dated movie still serves as a forerunner of sorts to today’s smart device life.

Its 1999 release ahead of all that futuristic Y2K panic may not be coincidence.

But I digress – Back to Rosie.

Rosie was our Roomba robot vacuum, who dutifully cleaned our floors each morning via automation for more than a decade.

Despite our seemingly impeccable floors, dear Rosie humbled us each day when we emptied out the daily dirt and dust – There was always lots of it.

Those older than the Xennial/Millenial circuit will recall her namesake from The Jetsons – Now that’s a robot ahead of her time.

Sadly, our Rosie fell beyond repair in recent months, and we knew it was time to send her to the robot malt shop in the sky, also known as the Roomba recycling program.

The boys and I sadly thanked sweet old Rosie for her service and shipped her off, even as she rallied and tried to whirr her wheels to life a last time, to no avail.

Days passed; we purchased a new, more powerful and bells-and-whistles-y robot vacuum whom after much debate was aptly named R2-D2.

As Rosie had been, R2 was automated to vacuum our home on a schedule.

And when my husband accidentally commanded our Google Home device to start ‘Rosie’ – rather than ‘R2’ – Google simply responded that she was stuck, a solemn reminder that our beloved robot vacuum of yore was with us no more, and somewhere far, far away where the wild robots are.

My husband and I weren’t instant embracers of the smart-everythings.

We’ve been hesitant to accept it, as we feared losing some autonomy.

There are enough brothers in this house; we didn’t need another Big Brother.

A few years ago, we found ourselves needing to upgrade our wireless internet, and these updates came with smart speakers by happenstance.

Not only did we come to appreciate this added bonus, but we found the speakers to be useful – they are great at settling debates, sharing random trivia facts and knock-knock jokes, after all.

Then, our new heat splits came with full thermostat control via phone app, and this has been staggeringly useful as well.

As a busy mama who never has enough free hands, the hands-free commanding of these simple directives has been extraordinarily helpful.

There’s no fancy feeling like asking my Christmas tree to turn off its lights on a December evening.

What futuristic world is this place?

These smart home devices are assistive, certainly.

But our family remains old-school at heart, and by relying on these devices for the mundane, we are all the more afforded the mini luxuries to do what matters most.

Being aided by these attainable and useful technologies that didn’t exist until recent years – certainly not affordably if they did – allows us to thrive in all the old-school things that matter most.

We spend time having meaningful conversation, reading paperbacks, playing board games, camping, swimming, cannonball-dousing, and taking part in the wonderfully tangible pastimes of which core memories are truly made.

We’re grateful for the technology of assistance, the Rosies, the Marios, the R2-D2s of the smart home world so we can do what we truly love.

And without further ado, you should have a dance party of your own to ‘Slam Dunk da Funk’ like it’s 1999.

You won’t regret it.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time! <

Insight: Friendship worth remembering

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

After my brother was born in 1957, our family moved the next summer from a smaller home in Gates, New York to a brand-new larger house in Brighton, New York. The Evans Farm subdivision had hundreds of homes and was a jackpot of places to go trick or treating on Halloween.

The parents of a young man who Ed Pierce befriended 
years ago gave him three of their son's first-edition
Hardy Boys mystery books from the 1920s and 1930s.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE 

While in second grade in 1960, my mother walked around the neighborhood with me on Halloween as I was only 6 but soon to be 7 that December. She helped me to create my Halloween costume, a re-creation of Phineas T. Bluster, the Mayor of Doodyville on the popular Saturday morning children’s TV show Howdy Doody. I wore a yellow jacket with a red plaid vest with cotton balls my mom fashioned to resemble the white bushy eyebrows of the mayor.

As we walked from house to house down Glenhill Drive in Brighton, we turned onto Carverdale Drive and then left onto Del Rio Drive and into an older section of the subdivision. I rang the doorbell at the first house on that street and to my surprise, a tall young man opened the front door and grinned at me as he carried a dish of candy bars.

His mother and father soon joined him, and they all laughed at my costume. They asked my name, where I went to school and how old I was. The young man, who was their son, was incredibly shy and smiled a lot, but otherwise he had very little to say.

The young man's parents, Jeanne and Fred Dixon, told my mother that their son’s name was Franklin Dixon and that he was 26. As we started to leave, I turned around in their driveway and saw Franklin in the window waving to me. I waved back to him and when we reached the sidewalk, I asked my mother why Franklin didn’t say anything. She told me to mind my own business.

About a week later I was riding my bicycle through the neighborhood and rode past the Dixon’s house as they were outside raking leaves. I stopped and talked to Frank’s father, who told me that Franklin was mentally disabled and had been mute for his entire life.

He was an only child, and his parents had sent him to school when he was young, but other kids had teased him terribly and constantly made fun of him. Rather than subject him further to that, they kept him home and his aunt, a retired teacher, gave him reading and math lessons.

Some days after school when I finished my homework, I would get my baseball mitt and go play catch with Franklin. Or we would throw around a football in his front yard. He never said a word but laughed and smiled all the time.

The next spring, my teacher Miss Cross asked students in our class to choose a book from the school library to read and when we were finished with it, she asked us to stand in the front of the classroom and tell everybody about it. I chose the book “Quest of the Snow Leopard” by Roy Chapman Andrews. It was about an expedition into Tibet and the Yunan Province of China, and a killer snow leopard who escapes capture by hunters.

But while I was choosing that book from the library shelf, I glanced over at the books with authors whose last name started with “D” and spotted a series of books by an author with the last name of Dixon.

When I had read “Quest of the Snow Leopard” and during our next class visit to the school library, I checked out the only book in the F.W. Dixon series that was currently available. It was called “The Secret of the Old Mill.” I discovered that the mystery series was written by an author named Franklin W. Dixon and was about two fictional teen brothers who were amateur detectives, Frank and Joe Hardy. They lived in the city of Bayport with their father, detective Fenton Hardy, their mother, Laura Hardy and their Aunt Gertrude. They solve mysteries along with their friends Chet Morton, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, Phil Cohen, Tony Prito, Callie Shaw, and Chet’s sister Iola Morton.

One afternoon while playing catch with Franklin, I jokingly asked him if he had written the Hardy Boys book series since his name was the same as the author’s. He shook his head no at me. His father had overheard that and pulled me aside and told me that Franklin W. Dixon was a pen name used by a variety of different authors who were part of a collective team that wrote the Hardy Boys novels.

On Labor Day in 1961, Franklin set off on his bike to get an ice cream cone at a new Carvel shop that had opened on Monroe Avenue in Brighton. A distracted driver swerved suddenly and struck him from behind on Edgewood Avenue. He tumbled off his bike and hit his head on a large rock at the end of a driveway and died instantly.

Several weeks later, Frankin’s father knocked on our door, thanked me for being his son’s friend and gave me three of Franklin’s books, which were all first edition Hardy Boys books from the 1920s and 1930s. I keep those books in my office at home in honor of Franklin’s memory to this very day. <

Andy Young: There’s no accounting for taste

By Andy Young

Why do some people adore foods that others detest? I love beets and prunes, though perhaps not at the same time. The same goes for bran muffins, dried apricots, ripe watermelon, Pink Lady apples, and several other items I actively savor every time I have them. I cannot fathom how anyone could possibly dislike these culinary delights, yet I know plenty of people who wrinkle up their noses at just the mention of them. I think grape juice is fantastic, but others complain it’s too sweet.

On the other hand, many people love chocolate ice cream, but I don’t. The same goes for coffee, and also beer. But at least those beverages don’t drive me from a room. Anything topped with nasty, foul-smelling melted cheese does, though. I find that particular stench nearly as off-putting as tobacco smoke. Peanut butter is another stinky food item I could do without.

Certain condiments (ketchup and mayonnaise, to name two) render any food(s) inedible for me. Yet other people, including some in my own family, use more ketchup on their fries than I do of milk on my cereal.

Potatoes can be delicious mashed, baked, roasted, scalloped, boiled, French fried, or in soups, but the best and most convenient way to enjoy them is as chips. But let’s be clear; any chip that’s designed to taste like salt and vinegar, barbecue sauce, sour cream and onion, dill pickle, lime and chili, ketchup or cheddar cheese is, in my opinion, useful only as salty compost, or as crunchy bait for rat traps.

There is, in my view, only one appropriate flavor for a chip: potato. Period. The best ones, commonly known as “wavy” chips are the ones with big ridges in them. “Rippled” (small-ridged) chips aren’t as good; they’re too salty. Don’t ask me why; they just are. As for regular, ridge-free potato chips, they always seem a little greasy to me. They’re uninspired and uninspiring.

And on the subject of snack foods, what’s up with bagged popcorn? You’re supposed to pop the stuff yourself; that way it’s warm, and you can add as much (or as little) salt and butter as you want. People who eat bagged, pre-popped popcorn have no sense of taste or are just plain lazy. And don’t get me started about flavored popcorn.

At least four of the five senses play a significant role in how people decide what they are and aren’t willing to ingest. The exception involves hearing. I can’t think of anything edible that makes alluring or off-putting sounds, unless one counts the shriek that comes out of a lobster getting boiled alive. For those to whom texture (touch) is important, items like mushrooms and certain types of seafood are, if you’ll pardon the expression, untouchables.

Taste and smell are similar but can have very different effects when it comes to food. For me there aren’t many aromas more alluring than beef sizzling on a backyard grill. I haven’t eaten red meat in years, but I’m still drawn to the smell of it cooking. I find the fragrance that emanates from a steakhouse nearly as pleasing olfactorily as an orange-purple sunset is visually.

Finally, who in their right mind willingly puts hot sauce (or similar elixirs) on items they intend to eat? Hellfire Hot Sauce boasts of containing 6.66 million SHU (Scoville Heat Units). To me the only thing less desirable than eating something which scorches the esophagus en route to one’s digestive system is one that burns even hotter as it exits, a seemingly horrific sensation one can safely assume 6.66 million SHU hot sauce provides. <

Insight: 48 years and counting

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Seems hard to believe that this week it will be 48 years since I completed my U.S. Air Force basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Where has all the time gone?

Ed Pierce at Lackland Air Force Base during U.S.
Air For Basic Training in July 1977.
COURTESY PHOTO 

Members of our Squadron 3723 Flight 610 arrived in San Antonio back in June 1977 for eight weeks of learning about what it meant to serve in the military. That first night, we gathered outside our dormitory waiting for everyone’s plane to land and to join us so we could begin training.

A friendly sergeant who waited outside with us called our group “Rainbows.” He said that term was derived from the fact we were all dressed in different colored clothing, like every shade of the rainbow.

Once everyone was there, another not so friendly sergeant joined us and told us we were going to play a game called “Pick ‘Em Up, Put Em Down” to get us accustomed to taking orders. For the next few hours, we lifted our suitcases upon his command and put them down when he instructed us to do so. It was boring and monotonous, but I adapted and avoided being screamed at for not following a command.

At the end of that drill, we were instructed to proceed into the dormitory and choose a cot. We slept head to toe, alternating positioning with each cot. The gruff training sergeant then told us we had five minutes to use the restroom, remove the whiskers from our faces, and pop into bed. That was an easy one for me as I was clean-shaven and at the age of 23, I couldn’t grow much of a beard or mustache at all. A frantic shaving rush ensued and by the next morning when I woke up and looked around the room, I saw many of my fellow trainees sporting significant shaving cuts and looking like they had gone through a hamburger grinder.

The person sleeping in the cot next to me was called out after the sergeant looked at his pillow and face. He had more than 40 deep facial hacks from his razor and his pillow resembled the underside of steak packaging at the supermarket. He told the training sergeant that he was frightened by his command to remove his whiskers, and we never saw him again as he was discharged for military incompatibility.

We marched as a group everywhere including to the barber shop to have our hair buzzed off, getting our first uniforms to wear or to the mess hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner. While being measured for a uniform, I was given pants two sizes too large but hesitated to complain out of fear that I could meet the same fate as what happened to the hamburger-faced trainee.

Rather than remain in the dorm on Sunday morning when we weren’t training, I joined many fellow flight members at church. Afterward several food trucks were in the parking lot, and you could unwind and just be yourself and socialize with your friends for a while there.

Our weekdays were spent marching around in 95-degree heat. On one occasion, the training sergeant noticed me at the back of a formation, and he pulled me aside. He told me that I better get in step or else I would face a “setback” or a return to day one of Basic Training. That was all it took for me to rapidly dedicate myself to always be in step during the three-mile marches.

In the classroom, we learned about the Uniform Code of Military Justice and basic hygiene principles, and what was expected of us as U.S. airmen. In the dormitory, we were shown how to make a bed using neat and sharp hospital corners. While demonstrating precisely what he wanted to see by showing us himself, the training sergeant yanked back the covers of a trainee’s bed to demonstrate but instead discovered a puddle of pee. That trainee was given a discharge for military incompatibility.

Each morning our dorm was inspected, and demerits were assigned for shoes under the beds not being aligned properly, messy lockers, filthy bars of soap, poorly made beds and uniforms not hung up the right way. Those demerits resulted in extra running drills for the entire flight or a smaller amount of time that we could use the telephone to call home after dinner once a week.

Eventually after weeks of racking up demerit after demerit, we came together and determined that we all needed to leave a bar of unused soap in our lockers. We instead all used a jug of liquid soap carefully hidden away in a shower vent. when we showered. A team of the best show aligners, best bed-makers, best locker arrangers, and best uniform hangers handled those tasks for everyone and there were no more demerits.

On Aug. 1, 1977, our training instructor bid us farewell and put us on a bus for tech school. My bus, bound for Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, pulled out of the dorm parking lot and then suddenly stopped. A trainee had given the middle finger to the training instructor out the rear window as the bus was leaving. He was removed from the bus and given a “setback” and had to do the eight weeks of basic training all over again. <

Andy Young: No kangaroos, but plenty of Stachelschweins

By Andy Young

I love getting unusual postcards, which my niece knows. That’s why, while traveling in Europe recently, she took the time to send me one featuring a yellow sign declaring, “No Kangaroos in Austria,” with the very recognizable outline of the Australian marsupial in its center.

The card made me smile, but it also made me wonder: how many of the locals, the majority of whom speak German, actually get the joke? After all, 97 percent of Austrians speak German; it’s the mother tongue of 93 percent of them.

What, I wondered, is the German word for this animal that to my knowledge is native to only one continent on Earth, and one that’s a very long way from Europe? But then, “Kangaroo” seems like a pretty uncommon word. How different could it be in other languages?

Well, thanks to an online translator, I now know that känguru is German for Kangaroo. It’s kangourou in French, canguro in Spanish and Italian, kangur in Polish, kinghar in Arabic, kangoro in Farsi, kengúra in Icelandic, and kanguru in Turkish. It’s also two symbols in Chinese that neither my computer (nor The Windham Eagle’s, apparently) has on its keyboard, although the approximate pronunciation is, allegedly, Dàishǔ.

But for my money, the languages with the best word for “kangaroo” are, among others, Swahili, Samoan, Hmong, Dinka, and Jamaican Patois, all of which refer to what we English speakers call a kangaroo as a “kangaroo.”

Another animal most Austrians would likely see only in zoos is what the folks in Turkey call a zürafa. This long-necked creature is a girafe to the French, a jirafa to Spanish speakers, a giraffa in Italian, a giraf in Danish, and a sjiraff in Norwegian. It’s a shame most standard laptop keyboards lack the capability of composing in Vietnamese, Greek, or Hindi, because the term for Giraffe in each of those languages is a real mouthful.

Thankfully not every word system is so complicated when it comes to identifying the animal with nature’s longest neck. For example, in German and in Filipino, the word for giraffe is “giraffe.”

If life were truly just, only linguists from the region unusual animals are native to would have the right to name these creatures. That’s why fair-minded people should refer to what we currently call a panda as a Xióngmāo, which is what locals call the adorable, rotund bamboo-munchers that exist in the wild solely in the mountainous region of southwestern China.

But anglophones aren’t the only group arrogant enough to make up our own words for animals not native to where we live. The word “panda” literally translates to “panda” in, among other languages, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Turkish, Danish, Kurdish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Javanese, Japanese, and Susu, a tongue spoken in West Africa that’s one of the official languages of Guinea. Don’t use the word “Susu” in Indonesia, though. Its meaning there is different, and quite vulgar, apparently.

Common sense dictates that one should never startle a mofeta in Mexico, a mouffette in Quebec, a haisunäätä in Helsinki, or a skunk in Sweden, Germany, Samoa, and every English-speaking nation on the planet. Similarly, smart people know better than to pet an animal known as a yamārashi in Japanese, a dikobraz in Russian, a puerco espín in Spanish, a stachelschwein in German, a porc-épic in French, a kirpi in Uzbek and Azerbaijani, a pokio in Hawaiian, a porkopi in Papiamento, and a porcupine in English.

It’s too bad that porcupines live where my niece just visited, because I’ll bet “No Stachelschweins in Austria” postcards would sell like hotcakes in Vienna to tourists and locals alike! <

Insight: Take This Job and Shove It

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about working as a journalist in Florida was the sheer number of odd, bizarre and amusing stories to report about in the Sunshine State.

Johnny Paycheck had the only Number One 
country hit of his career in 1977 with 
'Take This Job and Shove It' which was 
played repeatedly during a radio station
prank on April Fool's Day in 1986.
COURTESY PHOTO  

In fact, the daily newspaper I worked for there at one time published a regular feature every day on the back of the local section of unusual articles of interest from locations in Florida.

One that certainly caught my attention involved a radio disc jockey in 1986 who decided he was going to show everyone how much he disliked his work.

At about 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 1, 1986, Charlie Bee was broadcasting his afternoon program of country music for WAPG-AM radio in Arcadia, Florida, east of Sarasota. Without any warning to listeners or radio station management, Bee suddenly locked himself in his broadcast studio and began playing “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck over, and over, and over at varying speeds.

He ignored hundreds of telephone calls from listeners, friends, the radio station manager and other disc jockeys to surrender his microphone and stop what he was doing immediately.

Not paying any attention to their pleas to stop, Bee continued to repeatedly play “Take This Job and Shove It” and adjusted the radio station turntable to the point that he could slow down the speed of the record or speed it up. No matter what speed Bee chose to play it, the repeated song angered everyone that day.

If you haven’t heard it, the song “Take This Job and Shove It” is about the bitterness of a man who has worked long and hard with no apparent reward. The song was first recorded by country performer Johnny Paycheck on his album also titled “Take This Job and Shove It.”

Paycheck’s recording was the top country song for two weeks in 1977. The recording spent a total of 18 weeks on the Billboard County Music charts that year and happened to be the only Number One country hit ever recorded by Paycheck.

The radio station switchboard was flooded with more than 250 complaints from listeners while Bee remained barricaded behind the doors of the program’s control room.

Stopping the song briefly to air his own personal grievance, Bee complained over the airwaves that April 1, 1986 just happened to be his 49th birthday and the radio station managers were making him work on his very own special day. Then he went right back to playing “Take This Job and Shove It” for listeners tuning in.

He also explained to listeners that he was "fed up" with not receiving an adequate salary and would play the song until his employers agreed to give him a raise.

Hearing Bee’s broadcast complaint and with the situation now having stretched to more than an hour, the station manager resorted to calling the police. The DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department and officers from the Arcadia Police Department responded to the radio station studios and sheriff’s deputies began to knock loudly on the barricaded control room door. They demanded that Bee remove the barricade, unlock the door, and stop playing “Take This Job and Shove It.”

The deputies were banging on the door so loud that it could be heard over the airwaves as Bee continued to play the record repeatedly.

The embattled disc jockey then proclaimed over the air, “This is my show and they’re not going to tell me what to do.”

With the situation at a stalemate, Arcadia Police Officer Dan Ford asked Bee politely through the barricade, “Charlie, don’t you want to go home now?”

With that, Bee took down the barricade and unlocked the control room door. With the tension seemingly resolved, Bee left the radio station studio with Officer Ford.

No charges against Bee were filed over the incident, although the station manager terminated his employment as a disc jockey with WAPG-AM.

With the radio studio control room now empty, WAPG-AM disc jockey Bill Madison replaced Bee at the microphone and he dedicated his first song to Charlie Bee, playing “Take This Job and Shove It” one last time that evening.

When reached by telephone at his home later that week by a reporter, Bee said the incident arose out of sheer frustration.

“I was fed up and playing ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ expressed my sentiment exactly,” Bee told a Florida newspaper the weekend following the incident.

He refused to give any further details in subsequent newspaper articles, but his fellow DJ and friend Bill Madison eventually confessed that the entire situation and incident was an elaborately staged prank with which the police were cooperating.

Charlie Bee was never heard again on the airwaves of WAPG-AM after April 1, 1986, and it is unknown what happened to him thereafter.

Paycheck was sentenced to seven years in jail for shooting a man at the North High Lounge in Hillsboro, Ohio in 1985, and he spent 22 months in prison before being pardoned by Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste in 1991. He was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 1997 but died at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2003 at the age of 64 from emphysema complications. <

Andy Young: Who wants to be a Canadian millionaire?

By Andy Young

The primary purpose of the vacation I took earlier this month was relaxation. However, there was also some responsibility involved, since I believe providing some unique token of esteem for family members and/or special friends is a must. But everyone I’m close to already has all the coffee mugs, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, baseball hats and keychains they need, so this time around they all got postcards with $1.75 worth of Canadian postage on them.

Andy Young in his Portland  Sea
Dogs turtleneck in 1999.
COURTESY PHOTO

Personal note: if you’re one of my special people and haven’t gotten your postcard yet don’t panic. It’s probably being held up in customs.

I also wanted to get myself something, but I don’t drink coffee, I don’t need new clothing, there’s no space left on the outside of my refrigerator, I’ve got more baseball hats than Sybil had personalities, and I have more keychains than baseball hats. For me a souvenir has to be useful. Fortunately, given where I was headed, I knew exactly what I wanted.

When I was employed by Portland’s professional baseball team, I represented them in public wearing some appropriate article of Sea Dog apparel. During the summer I’d sport a teal golf shirt; for winter speaking engagements I’d wear one of my two Sea Dogs turtlenecks, either the black one or the white one, each of which featured the face of Slugger, the team’s mascot, just above my left clavicle. I loved those two shirts nearly as much as I did my Wile E. Coyote turtleneck, which a good friend had given me some years previously.

Turtleneck shirts serve multiple purposes. They’re functional on social occasions or at work and are also handy for cold winter days when snow removal becomes a priority.

When I changed careers and moved into education, I took those still-sharp-looking Sea Dog turtlenecks with me, transitioning them into serviceable school shirts. Inevitably though, like the Wile E. Coyote model before them, they began fraying at the edges and ultimately just wore out.

None of the generic turtlenecks I currently own stands out, which is why I realized I needed a brand new one with “Newfoundland and Labrador” or “Nova Scotia” or “Magnetic Hill” embroidered on the collar. It’d be perfect: a new, useful shirt that’d simultaneously serve as a memento of a unique and memorable trip. And how tough could it be to find turtleneck shirts in places that are nominally even colder and darker during their lengthy winters than Maine is?

The answer: extremely tough.

There were no turtleneck shirts with unique logos on them in St. John’s, Newfoundland; Saint John, New Brunswick; or Digby, Nova Scotia. No professional hockey teams like the Newfoundland Growlers, the Moncton Wildcats, or the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles had any, either. I searched every tourist-driven establishment on Water Street in St. John’s, which looks exactly like every souvenir boutique in Portland’s Old Port, Kennebunkport, Bar Harbor, Newport, Cape Cod, or every other New England coastal tourist-friendly locale but came up empty.

Disappointed, I returned home and visited Hadlock Field’s souvenir store in Portland to buy myself a consolation turtleneck from the Sea Dogs. But they don’t carry them there anymore, either!

Did turtleneck shirts go out of style when I wasn’t looking? Were they always out of style, but no one told me?

If there’s a north-of-the-border edition of “Shark Tank,” someone ought to go on it and pitch the idea of selling turtleneck shirts with unique logos or names of places on them. They’d make millions of Canadian dollars, I tell you!

Or at least dozens of them, once I make my next trip up there. <