Archive for October 6th, 2023

Biz news.

Friday, October 6th, 2023

I thought this was a mildly interesting business story, mostly because it starts out in one direction and then goes in another.

Molekule Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Molekule made (makes?) air purifiers. I remember a time when they advertised pretty heavily on some of the podcasts I listened to.

The claimed reason for bankruptcy seems to be wanting to get out of their office lease, because San Francisco.

Molekule started a seven-year lease spanning the entirety of the building in February 2019. The monthly base rent began at $209,231 with an annual 3% increase.
The bankruptcy petition alleges that the company abandoned its headquarters in May “out of concern for its employees’ safety” and attempted to negotiate with its landlord to terminate the lease.
“San Francisco’s homeless crisis created a dangerous environment around the SF Headquarters, especially in the area between the SF Headquarters and the nearest public transit stop,” Tyler stated in his declaration.

Except:

But three former Molekule employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the safety situation described in the filings was an exaggeration. Although there were issues with cleanliness around the office location, the former employees don’t remember safety being a primary concern while they worked there.

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According to the former employees, the office was only intermittently used after March 2020, and far from dissuading workers because of safety concerns, Molekule attempted to draw people in by installing a pingpong table and touting the effectiveness of its products in keeping the office clean and safe.

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One of the other factors in the company’s bankruptcy listed in its legal filing was a fractured partnership with Aura Smart Air, an Israeli air purifier company.
Aura’s failure to submit source code for a product known as Molekule 360 Hub led to the product’s suspension shortly after its launch and “severely impacted the Debtors’ revenue and growth strategy,” according to the bankruptcy filing.

What gets glossed over in the coverage: Molekule was a scam.

Wirecutter (back in the day when they were decent) called their products “Some of the worst air purifiers we’ve ever tested“. Molekule was forced to withdraw almost all of their advertising claims. Consumer Reports panned it.

How big a scam was it? Big enough that at least one of those podcasts went back and removed the ads, and any mention that Molekule was ever a sponsor, from their feed. There was at least one class action lawsuit which appears to have been settled.

So, yeah, at the very least, this looks like a dodge by a troubled company to get out of their lease by blaming San Francisco’s problems, not a legit example of the Bay Area’s ineffective government.

Posted in California Über Alles, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 6, 2023.

Friday, October 6th, 2023

Dick Butkus, one of the greats. ESPN.

At 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds, good size for his era, Butkus stuffed running plays up the middle. He was also speedy and mobile enough to drop back and foil opponents’ pass plays. He was cited as a first-team All-Pro five times and was chosen for the Pro Bowl game eight times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.
Sacks did not become an official statistic until 1982, so the number of times Butkus smothered opposing quarterbacks remains unrecorded. But he was considered to have intercepted 22 passes and recovered 27 fumbles while playing for the Bears from 1965 to 1973.

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Butkus was chosen by the Bears in the first round, third overall, in the 1965 N.F.L. draft and by the Denver Broncos of the American Football League in its second round. He went with his hometown team, a storied N.F.L. franchise owned and coached by the future Hall of Famer George Halas. In his rookie season, he intercepted five passes and recovered seven fumbles.
But the Bears fell on hard times during Butkus’s years. They won 49 games, lost 74, tied four and never reached the playoffs. In his last few seasons, Butkus played on with a badly injured right knee despite having undergone surgery. In May 1974, having retired, he sued the Bears for $1.6 million, contending that the team had not provided him with the medical and hospital care it had promised in a five-year contract he signed in July 1973. The case was settled out of court.

He also did some acting.

IMDB.

Joe Christopher, one of the original 1962 Mets.

He was a part-time player in 1962 — the perfectly awful “Amazin’ Mets,” as their manager, Casey Stengel, called them, had a 40-120-1 record that season — when he got batting tips from a Mets coach, the renowned Rogers Hornsby, who hit over .400 three times in the 1920s.
“He was sitting in hotel lobbies,” Christopher recalled in an unpublished interview in 2010 with George Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times. Christopher recalled Hornsby telling him that the secret of hitting was “don’t let the pitcher jam home plate” and “it’s not about contact, it’s impact.”

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In June, when he was hitting .307, he talked about getting a chance to play full time.
“I always knew I could hit, but nobody up here believed me,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I always hit well in the minors, but when I got to the majors nobody had any confidence in me.” He added, “They just wouldn’t give me a chance to play regularly. There was always that worry that if I went 0 for 4 I’d be on the bench the next day.”
He finished the season at .300, 16th best in the National League and only the third time a Met had reached that level. (The Mets’ Ron Hunt hit .303 that season.) He also led the Mets with 76 runs batted in and was second in home runs with 16.

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He had a career batting average of .260, with 29 home runs and 173 R.B.I.

Keith Jefferson, actor. IMDB.

Russell Sherman, pianist.

Mr. Sherman, who gave his last recital at 88, made his name performing virtuoso works such as Franz Liszt’s daunting “Transcendental Études.” Referring to the composer’s reputation as a showman, Mr. Sherman told The New York Times in 1989 that he was engaged in a “lifelong battle to reconstitute Liszt as a serious composer.”

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Mr. Sherman was in many ways an anti-virtuoso; he devoted much of his time to other interests, like poetry, philosophy and photography. In the late 1950s, instead of becoming a touring concert pianist, he left New York to teach piano at Pomona College in California and the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 1967, he began a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hired by its president at the time, the composer Gunther Schuller. Mr. Schuller, who founded GM Recordings in 1981, produced a Beethoven album by Mr. Sherman, who became the first American pianist to record the complete Beethoven sonatas and piano concertos.
On a GM Recording album, “Russell Sherman: Premieres and Commissions,” Mr. Sherman performed works composed for him in the 1990s by Mr. Schuller, Robert Helps, George Perle and Ralph Shapey. His recordings also include works by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Chopin Mazurkas, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas and Bach’s English Suites.

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Some two decades later, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Sherman’s “interpretive style, it should be said, is an acquired taste,” but that his “performances are usually illuminating alternatives to the standard view.”
Mr. Sherman resented these accusations of eccentricity. “I think of myself as a compassionate conservative” who responded “radically to the score and nothing but the score,” he told The Times in 2000. He suggested that listeners who disliked his interpretations lacked imagination.

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Mr. Sherman married Wha Kyung Byun, a Korean-born former student of his, in 1974; she began teaching at the New England conservatory in 1979. They sometimes celebrated their anniversaries by performing together.

Posted in Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed