Newest in Show

What have you been doing these past 10 months? Organizing your sock drawer? Learning to bake bread? Catching up on back episodes of "Game of Thrones?" While you were achieving a personal best on jigsaw puzzles with 1000 pieces, some others were inventing the latest and greatest gadgets and toys. And as happens every year around this time, they gathered together (virtually of course) to show off their wares. 

As always, the stuff premiering at the Consumer Electronics Show fall into several camps. There are those things that are updates to existing products, the latest iterations of a TV or phone or accessory. There are those that are groundbreaking, things that once you see them you think would be a great addition to your life. And there are those that, well, make you wonder who thought that would be a good idea. But since it can be a case of one man's ceiling being another man's floor, you decide what falls into which category.

Assuming masks will be here for a while, Razer showed off its concept product code-named Project Hazel. This "smart face mask" has active ventilation, a transparent panel in the center to show off your mouth, a microphone and amplifier to help people hear you better, and autosterilization. For low light situations it also has built in LED's to make your mouth visible. And of course it comes with its own recharging case so you don't have to run an extension cord to the peg by the backdoor.

You've probably become best friends with your remote these past months, and have likely run through a bunch of triple A batteries. If that's your story then perhaps the newest accessory from Samsung is up your alley. While it's latest TV's have even more K's (as in 4K and 8K, translating to even higher definition) they also come with solar powered remotes. Regular room light will also charge them, and there's a USB port so that even if you have a run of cloudy days in your family room your clicker will still be operational.

If you've been getting a lot of deliveries (and who hasn't) and keep going out to wipe down the doorbell button, the new touchless model from Alarm.com might be of interest. While it sports a wireless audio and video interface that allows you to see, hear and interact with someone on your stoop, this new model goes one step further. It includes a mat that says "Stand on mat to ring doorbell." Now your next delivery person doesn't even have to lift a finger to let you know they are dropping off your new shoes. Literally.

One of the things about CES is how companies figure out how to make non-tech items tech. Take Yves Saint Laurent's Rouge Sur Mesure. It's a canister that holds three different liquid lipstick cartridges. With the help of an included brush and the accompanying Perso app for your phone, you take pictures of your outfit and then customize a color to match. Perso then communicates with the canister and dispenses exacting amounts of each shade, which you then blend together with the included brush. So the red that goes on your lips is unlike any other in the room. Same idea with Ninu, except it blends together 3 scents for a custom fragrance. So now you can create something irresistible for your date, say a sultry something with hints of sea breeze and donuts.

If you've gotten into playing games as a diversion, then the new Infinity game table might interest you. It's a glass slab on legs that has a digital library you can access to call up boards and pieces for everything from Monopoly to Trivial Pursuit to Candy Land. It also has digital coloring books, and custom jigsaw puzzles based on your own photos. And because it is networked you can play or do puzzles with others on a matching table elsewhere. 

Robot butlers. Touchless toilets. Human sized drones. A phone that expands into a tablet, and a pet door with timers and a camera. Not to mention a Bluetooth speaker for the shower that is hydro powered and generates 100% of its juice from your scrubbing. It all helps to answer the question "What will they think of next?" Well, the answer is simple: they already have.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is always curious what else is coming. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Free Pretzels

I wouldn't call it a scam. It's not like I'm calling up random households and offering them a free lifetime Netflix subscription if only they'll give me their social security number. And it's certainly no crime. I'm not walking into a convenience store, and stuffing a jar of peanut butter down my pants. Indeed, I'm just asking a seller to deliver to me what I am paying for, a straight-ahead retail transaction. But no matter how you look at it, we seem to have created a system whereby Target will in essence ship me free pretzels for the rest of my life.  

It has its roots in the way we all shop these days. Nine months ago, if I was coming home after work and had some time to kill, I might stop by a clothing or computer or other specialty retailer. I'd meander up and down the aisles, occasionally picking up a new shirt or a cool accessory. No more. Accelerating a trend that has been well documented, online shopping didn't become just another game in town, it became the only game in town.   

The sole exception was food. Like many, our only in-person shopping experience was heading out to the grocery store. But unlike the wanderings through those other establishments, these were highly structured tactical missions. We plotted what we needed, and went in with a detailed list and plan, all designed to limit our exposure in public. To that end, we eventually switched our normal weekly stock-up outings from the larger mega-groceries to smaller specialty chains that had more limited stock, but what we viewed as less risky environments. Then maybe once a month or so we would venture to the big box place to pick up a few items we had a hankering for but were not available in the little cousin. All good, as long as we could live with running out of a certain brand of cereal.

Or for that matter, pretzels. For some reason, the chain we liked didn't carry your standard bag of twists. No Utz, no Rold Gold, no Snyder's of Hanover. And so at snack time I was crunchless. Then my wife realized that her small online orders at Target could include shelf stable items and since we hit the minimum there were no shipping charges. And so we clicked online yet again, and I looked forward to some sourdough thins the next time the urge struck.

A few days later a large box showed up. I eagerly opened it up, anticipating that salty, crunchy taste. And indeed, inside were two bags of the best that Pennsylvania Dutch bakers (or at least their namesake corporate licensees) could make. Just one issue. While UPS is really good at getting the box from here to there, they are not always as gentle as they should be. And so what was in the bag was less pretzels than pretzel parts. Not one intact unit in the entire bag. Even if you buy them straight off the shelf at the store you expect some to be broken. But not every one. 

We retreated online, where checking a box on the order form indicating damage resulted in an offer to ship us a new bag on them. Yes, same as would have happened if the goods had been a light bulb or a picture frame. But in what is a new trend with online shopping, we were told not to send the broken items back. Makes sense: the cost of shipping back small, low cost goods (or even those not broken but incorrect color or wrong size or whatever) makes no economic sense. More efficient, less costly and more customer friendly to tell the consumer to just keep the item and send a replacement. But whereas those aforementioned items when broken are useless, not so with pretzels. Whole? No. Edible? Yes.

And so two more bags showed up at the house. Again, nothing wrong with them from an edibility point of view, but there was as much pretzel dust in the bag as there were pretzels. And so another box check. And other 2 bags. And. And. And. And so as long as I am willing to eat pieces vs wholes, I am well stocked up. 

It's a shame you can't break Peanut M and M's.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes snacks that are salty or sweet. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Happy PD Day!

The first day of January is always worth celebrating. It's the start of the new year, a time when all things seem possible. It's when we reset the books to zero and start to count anew, whether that means yearly income, days we've skipped exercising or sins. And this year it carries particular significance, as it was when we could rip the last page off the calendar of the bummer of a year we have just endured. But it's also the date when certain published works of art, be they music, films or books, roll over and become fair game for any and all to use, change, adapt and generally play around with without a phalanx of lawyers ordering them to cease and desist. Forget happy new year; it's happy public domain day.

Copyrights in one form or another have been around in this country almost since the beginning, with the Copyright Act of 1790. Signed by George Washington, it protected books, maps and charts for 14 years, with a right of renewal for another 14. Subsequent revisions and additional legislation extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years, while works sporting corporate authorship like guides and handbooks are protected for 95 years after first publication or 120 years after creation, whichever is earlier. There was also a twenty year pad tacked onto individual works created before 1978, effectively bumping protection on them to 95 years.

The bottom line is that the first day of the new year brings a crop of works into the so called "public domain" where they are there for the taking. This year is a particularly rich one, as 1925 saw a number of notable artists and authors hard at work. On the literary front there was Virginia Woof's "Mrs. Dalloway" and Earnest Hemingway's' "In Our Time." In the world of film there was Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman" and Buster Keaton's "Go West." And if you turned on the radio you would have heard Irving Berlin's "Always," Gus Kahn & Walter Donaldson's "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" and the number one song of the year, Ben Bernie's "Sweet Georgia Brown."

But the biggest gem to become fair game by far is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Up until now, if you envisioned a line of Daisy Buchanan iPhone cases, or wanted to call the flagship vintage of your fledging vineyard "Jay Gatsby Pinot Noir," you would have had to get permission from Fitzgerald's estate and cut them in on the profits. No more. Now you could even go to Egg Harbor itself and open the "Tom Buchanan Power Gym" and you'd be in the clear.

Or if you're Michael Farris, you can finally publish the book you wrote five years ago, but the lawyers said had to wait. Farris wrote "Nick," the imaged backstory of the Nick Carraway, the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" without realizing the original novel was still protected. When he presented it to his publisher, he was told it would be too expensive to get the permissions needed to make it work. So he shelved the project, and waited till this year. And now he's making the rounds, knowing that Jay's buddy Meyer Wolfsheim, the guy whose had cufflinks "made out of the finest specimen of human molars" won't be coming for him looking for his cut.

Gatsby joins other well-known works that moved into the open including Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." Sure, before they were in the public domain you could have used any of them as the basis of your great idea, but it would have cost you. Now you can market Harry Houdini Hand Sanitizer, Molly Malone Masks or Wicked Witch Web Cams and keep all the proceeds for yourself.

And next year? Notable additions will include "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The Sun Also Rises." But with the BBC calling 1925 perhaps "the greatest year for books ever," it will be hard to top "Gatsby" and "Arrowsmith" and other works from Gertrude Stein and Theodore Dreiser. So time to craft the mish mosh you've always wanted to where Frankenstein shows up at a Long Island Jazz Age party and meets Zorro while Daisy chats with Paul Bunyan and Rosie the Riveter swaps stories with Dorothy from Oz. Could work.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford reads a lot. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

By The Numbers

Most years are filled with various things that rotate through the headlines and then disappear. Sometimes it's the weather, sometimes a takeover, sometimes a scandal, sometimes politics. But this past year? While the election was certainly a hot topic, even it waxed and waned. Only one subject stayed above the fold, and well it should: even counting various so called "world" wars, it's been over 100 years since a singular event engulfed every person on the planet and threatened to take it all down.

The all encompassing nature of the pandemic has meant marked changes to the way we live and work. We've had to learn a new vocabulary. And we've all become amateur epidemiologists and public health inspectors. But as much as any one thing, it has also turned us all into statisticians, as the lingua franca of the epidemic is numbers.

It was Galileo who said that the universe can't be understood unless you spoke its language, and that language was math. But he might just as well have been talking about our current situation. At its simplest it's a tale of aggregates: now many are infected, now many have died, how many are hospitalized. Added to those are more nuanced expressions, such as ICU capacity, transmissibility coefficient and case fatality ratio. It's gotten so that even those who can barely balance their checkbook can effortlessly discuss the impact of positivity rates on school reopenings.

But while we can't run nor hide from the statistics that rule our very day to day movement, we can be distracted from them. So if numbers have indeed become our second language, let's spend a few moments using this new found skill to appreciate some other aspects of our world. While some of these might leave you short of breath, I can guarantee it's only a temporary condition and you will recover quickly with no lasting effects.

Online shopping has grown to the point that estimates that there are over 2 billion people clicking and buying. When you consider that the global population is approaching 8 billion, that means that 1 in 4 human beings has had an Amazon package show up at their front door. While there are footnotes such as Africa having 17% of the world's population with fewer half able to access the internet, penetration rates in developed countries akin to US are approaching 90%. It's hard to think of any one thing nine tenths of any country can agree upon, other than the fact that Baby Yoda is cute.

And speaking of online entertainment, when people weren't buying they were watching. Not surprisingly, when staring at the screen became the only game in town, usage grew. Netflix is on track to have over 200 million paying customers, with its top originals series being "The Umbrella Academy," "Lucifer," "Money Heist," "The Crown" and "The Queen's Gambit." But as impressive as that is it pales besides YouTube, which has over 2 billion monthly users watching more than 500 hours of new content being uploaded every minute. No wonder you have having problems sleeping: so much to watch, so little time.

In the rush to get away from those homes where we live, work, play and shop, there looks to be a campus bound traffic jam come September 2021. Early Action and Decision rates have dropped for some top school as applications have increased but freshman class size has not. MIT's acceptance rate for next fall dropped to 4.8% from 7.4% last year, after seeing a 62% increase in applicants. Similar stories can be found at Harvard (7.4% from 13.9% with 57% more applications), Johns Hopkins (19%-28%-11%) and Duke (17%-21%-18%). On the other hand, now's the time to put your name into Colgate, Northeastern or Providence, as they report EA/ED rates of 61%, 53% and 54% respectively. It's like picking the right lane at the toll booth. They all get you to the bridge, it's just how easy it is to get through the gate.

There's lots more. While more than half the world's population uses social media, it's even higher in the US at 79%. While more people searched online for tutorials on how to cut your own hair, twice as many searched for "mullet" as "buzz cut." There was a 70% increase in people adopting dogs, so called pandemic puppies. And just guessing, but probably 100% of you reading this have now had enough.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford thinks there's a 50-50 chance you liked this. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Can/Can't/Miss

When you look back at the last nine months, we have all had any number of things that we wish we didn't have to endure. Of course, at the center of it all is the very real human toll. Even if you have been lucky enough to escape any health effects on you or your immediate family, the virus has gotten so pervasive that it's increasingly rare not to know someone who has been directly affected.

Beyond that, consider the changes to dining out, entertainment, work arrangements, education, travel, relationships: it's all just the beginning of a laundry list that only writers of dystopian fiction had even thought about. And yet today even the most outlandish constructs of some formerly unimaginable future seem not to have been prescient enough. C'mon: a world where we have to stay 6 feet apart, where we can only visit with others when we have a pane of glass between us, where sports teams play in an isolation bubble in stadiums devoid of fans with the world watching from the outside? Must be the latest Stephen King novel.

But in spite of where we were and are, sometime later this year things will start to settle down, if not return exactly to the way they were. If the past is any guide, odds are that almost immediately our recollections of this time will start to fade, and we may eventually look at it no differently than we do any other period in a randomly opened history textbook. So while we'll still in the midst of it all with its effects fresh in our lives it's instructive to look back on the last nine months and be amazed at what we can do, what we can't do and what we truly miss.

What can we do? Well, at the most basic level we were able to adapt and function. That meant taking the fringe novelty technology of video calls and making it the basis of every type of work and play. From the time it was introduced to the masses at the 1964 World's Fair it has been a means of communication that was as much promise as practical. For sure Skype was making some headway with college students talking to mom and dad, but most folks just picked up a phone. Then almost overnight the world discovered Zoom, and never looked back. Had this hit even 5 years ago, odds are we would have been much more isolated at every level.

Likewise, online shopping went from a growing game to the only one in town. Food, clothing, hardware, home furnishings, toys: no matter the items, you can click your way to them and have them delivered within days. The same for remote learning. Imperfect to be sure, and much work to be done to make access easier, more universal and more effective. But when the alternative is nothing, it's amazing that learners of all ages could be connected to their teachers to continue their education.

But there is also much we can't do. We can't wander. We can't travel. We can't get together to dine, to watch, to simply visit. How many times before this all went down did you say, "I wish we hadn't said 'yes' to going out with the Fitzpatricks to dinner and a movie, I'd rather just stay home tonight." Now you would give you right arm to have that opportunity. Or to stroll through a farmer's market and linger over a display until you found the perfect eggplant. Or to jostle with crowds to get the best angle on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Or to simply give a hug or get one. 

We miss all that and more. I think as much as anything I miss the random encounters and discoveries I used to have. I don't go anywhere so I don't chance upon new things. The little food stall I would discover on a side street. The chat with an Uber driver and the chance to learn his hidden talent. The wandering into a little boutique to find some small gift that you never knew existed, and you know the recipient never knew she wanted... until she got it. 

Whether you date our current predicament from the first cases at the end of 2019 or when it blew out the blocks on these shores in March, the rollouts of the various vaccines means that there is an ending in sight. And so while the exact timeline is still to be written, we are somewhere in the middle. And when it ends we'll surely say we'll take the lessons of this experience and reconstruct our futures from a more enlightened perspective. But as we turn the page into a new year, it will be interesting to see in one week or one year or one decade whether this all becomes a call to action, a memory, or merely history.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford wonders what the future will hold. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.