Whose Lifetime Is It Anyway?

On the mantle in the living room sits one of my favorite gifts of all time, one my wife gave to me more than 30 years ago. A handmade clock, it consists of various brass gears that rotate as the time advances. On those gears are 6 little men, and as the gears turn the little figures look as if they pushing or pulling the rings. Designed by artist Gordan Bradt, I was told it came with a lifetime guarantee: lifetime of the artist, that is. As long as he was alive, he would be happy to fix it. (In truth you can ship it to his shop and they will repair and recondition it.)

You assume that most things you buy new have some sort of the guarantee attached to them. Usually they are much more limited in scope, protecting you only if the item has some obvious defect. It might be backed by the manufacturer, the distributer, or even the store that sells it. The point is not that you can't get a bad item; it's that if no one stands behind it you won't ever be a repeat customer. And so whether it's a car or a cardigan, if it rips or breaks in the first bunch of outings through no fault of your own, someone on the front end will repair or replace it on their dime.

Beyond that things get a bit murkier. Some guarantees are for a specific time period or metric (3 years or 50,000 miles), others for cycles of use (50 washings or 4000 pages). The gold standard is the aforementioned lifetime gurantee, and there are brands and products which, when they say that mean virtually forever. If your Davek umbrella ever stops working properly, or you encounter a defect in materials or workmanship, return it for a free repair or replacement plus shipping and handling. If your Craftsman or Mastercraft hand tools ever fail you during normal use, excluding blades or expendable parts, they will be repaired or replaced for free. And Zippo Lighters and Cross Pens offer simple warranty information: the product works or they'll fix it, no matter how old it is. 

But in most cases if you read the fine print you'll find the manufacturer has a different definition of "lifetime" than you do. YOU might think that as long as you walk this earth you should be able to use that vacuum or turn on that lightbulb. THEY view it to mean as long as it can reasonably be expected that a similar product used in like situations with no extenuating circumstances functions they are covered. Not the same thing.

Discrepancies like that are at the heart of a lawsuit filed in Springfield MO by Kent Slaughter. Mr. Slaughter needed some new socks, and came upon Bass Pro Shops Redhead Lifetime Guarantee All-Purpose Wool Socks, with the prominently displayed slogan, "The last sock you'll ever need to buy." He decided to give them a go, and liked them so much that over 7 years he purchased a total of 12 pairs, assuming he was set with footwear for the rest of his days.

Of course, socks do wear out. And the company gladly replaces them if they do, honoring their policy and the product's moniker. Mr Slaughter availed himself of this policy several times, much to his footsies delight. But in 2021, when he tried to swap them out, he was told that the policy had changed, and was given a replacement product that was only guaranteed for 60 days. Saying that this is no longer the last sock he will ever need to buy, he contacted a lawyer. And while it's unlikely to generate as much notoriety as Elon and Twitter, this dispute will likely also be resolved in front of a judge.

In this case Bass Pro is drawing a line in the sand, and daring Mr. Slaughter to walk across. Only time and a court will decide if he does so barefoot or not. In the meantime, perhaps he needs to find a new supplier like sock company Bombas, who at one time had a Laundry Back guarantee: lose a sock in the wash, and they would send you a free pair to make you whole again. That's because when it comes to the dryer, there is no guarantee socks have any afterlife.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford expects things to work for a reasonable period of time. 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.

Try to Remember

In my office I have a perpetual calendar, the kind where each date is on a separate tile. Twelve times I year I have to rearrange the pieces to match the current month, and align day and date. Once I figure out where the first is, it's just a matter of moving each tile forward or back to be correct. Until I get to the end. That's because some months have 30 days, others 31. And how to remember which is which? I resort to a rhyme I learned a long, long, long time ago: "Thirty days hath September, April, June and November, all the rest have 31." It continues with some blather about February, but by then I've got my info. Unless it's February.

That mnemonic is just one that helps us recall various and sundry pieces of info. There are spelling mnemonics, wherein the first letter of each word reminds you how to spell a word: to spell "rhythm" remember the sentence "rhythm helps your two hips move." There are ones to help you remember the order of things: music students are taught the first letter of each word in "every good boy deserves fun" names the lines of the treble clef (EGBDF). And acronyms can help you remember a related set of words or names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior are the five great lakes, and the first letter of each spells HOMES.

I'm embarrassed to say the number of times I still resort to these things even at this point in my life. Spelling: "I before E except after C."  Grammar: the principal is the "pal" that runs the school, while a principLE is a fundamental ruLE. And perhaps most sadly, setting the table: I make an "OK" sign with both hands: the lowercase "B" side is for the bread plate, while the "D" side is for the drinking glass. Yes, it's silly but it works.

So when I hurt my leg, I recalled a mnemonic as to the proper way to treat it. RICE used to lay out the steps you should take for an acute but not dangerous muscle injury. Letter by letter it goes like this: Rest, meaning to stop the activity you are doing and give the area time to heal; Ice, meaning to apply cold packs to cool the area and slow the blood flow; Compress, meaning to wrap or bind it to reduce swelling; and Elevate, to raise the affected area to help drain fluid. Whether it's a sprained ankle or a pulled shoulder, these steps put you on the road to recovery.

But advances in medicine and rehab have determiend that there is a better course of action, and so RICE has been replaced by POLICE. While the I-C-E steps are still there, they are joined by two more. P stands for Protection: isolate the affected area away from further harm. While self-evident, it's a reminder to take care so as not to whack the same spot again, exacerbating the injury. The O and L are the newest kids on the block, and stand for Optimal Loading. The idea is that just propping your foot in the air and waiting for it to heal is the not the best approach. Rather, you should start to add some weight or resistance as soon as you are able to strengthen and help any scar tissue develop in the right direction. Otherwise, when you finally do get around to moving, the area will be stiffer and less pliable and more at risk to being reinjured. Note that the inventors did take liberties with the order. The O- L should come later in the process than the I-C-E, but then the mnemonic would be PICEOL, and who could remember that?

There are even some researchers who go a step further, throwing out RICE and POLICE in favor or PEACE & LOVE. PEACE is Protection, Elevation, Avoid Anti-Inflammatories (a view that some inflammation is good as it promotes healing), Compression and Education (learn what your body needs to heal and go with that). LOVE is Load, Optimism (the idea that mental outlook is important to recovery), Vascularisation (do activities that promote blood flow) and Exercise. Never say never but it's early days as to whether this one will catch on ,or be remembered simply as STUPID.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is resting his LEG. 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.

Edge to Edge

Not to be confused with "Testing 1, 2 3," which merely confirms that the mic works, if you are using an audio system you also need to equalize the sound. This requires continuous speech so that the engineer can adjust the speakers to the room. That means whomever steps up to assist has to keep talking for more than just a few seconds. No one ever really pays attention to the babble; it just joins the normal background hum as rest of the crew keeps working. Some do a stream of consciousness thing, others pull out their phone and read the weather report or the headlines. And one guy recited, well, poetry.

He stepped to the mic and began: "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale." He paused dramatically, then continued: "A tale of a fateful trip." It sounded eerie: I stopped what I was doing to listen. "It started from a tropic port. Aboard a tiny ship." It sounded familiar: Poe? Keats? Donne? He continued: "The mate, a mighty sailing man. The skipper. Brave. And sure." I couldn't place it, but I was close. "Five passengers set sail that day. For a three-hour tour. Yes, just a three-hour tour." I got it! It wasn't Poe or Keats or Donne. It wasn't even poetry. It was the theme song to "Gilligan's Island." I was just happy I got it before he recited "the Professor and Mary Ann."

That summation was just one of a whole catalog of mini masterpieces that neatly set up some hit shows. There was "Patty Duke," ("Meet Cathy, who's lived most everywhere"), "Brady Bunch" ("Here's the story of a lovely lady"), and "All in the Family" ("Those were the days"). Even those themes without lyrics set the mood, and when paired with images were instantly recognizable: "Mission: Impossible," "Hill Street Blues," "Mash." More recently there was the intro to "Game of Thrones," "Mad Men" and of course "The Sopranos." As Nicholas Britell, the composer of the opening theme to "Succession" said, "TV theme music is incredibly important. It's almost a show's DNA identifier. It serves as an overture to bring you in and sets the tone. I think that formal entrée is crucial." Hear just a few bars of any of them, and as the theme song from "Cheers" went, everybody would know your name.

But that was then. The simple fact is that no one watches intros on TV anymore. As much as anyone else, you can blame Netflix. That's because this March marked the fifth anniversary of the creation of the "Skip Intro" button. In that interval it has been pressed 136 million times. Add it all up, and users have gotten back 195 years in cumulative time, no small number in our ever-accelerating world.

Of course, that comes with a price. No longer do show opens become cultural touchstones. No more "Friends" and "I'll be there for you." No more "The Jeffersons" and "Movin' on up." No more "Hawaii Five-O" and, well, "Hawaii Five-O." Something is lost, which is why musical director for "Doctor Who" Murray Gold says of the "The Office," a fav of his, "I won't ever let my wife skip." 

And now there is pressure on the back end. Dish TV is promoting a feature called AutoAdvance that lets you skip the credits and jump right to the next episode you are binge watching. Once this feature percolates across the streaming universe, you'll be able to skip the end, the beginning, and just run all the chapters together into one humungous program. Sit down and buckle up: you won't come up for air for 18 hours straight.

In Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," a gang member is offered a way out of prison by agreeing to aversion therapy, whereby he is strapped to a chair, his eyes clamped open and made to watch hours of violent films in the hope that it will cure him. The idea is that certain images and sounds will become abhorrent. It might not be the same as sitting on your couch with a bag of chips and watching back to back to back episodes of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." But if you do, and watch an entire season of Mrs M in one sitting  with no intros or credits to break it up, and no longer find the line from the series "Believe me, Manischewitiz is best enjoyed in small quantities" funny, it had an effect.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to read the credits. 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.

It's Alive?

Start a conversation with anyone, and you never know where it might take you. Ask about their evening out, and you might eventually wind up discussing the rules of tennis. Wonder how their job is going, and you somehow wander into describing the leak in your basement. Inquire about their new computer, and before you know it you've veered into the best recipe for sangria. Some might call it a non-sequitur; others simply attribute it to being human.

In fact, that's one of the simplest ways to make sure you are conversing with a person and not a machine. Whether by chat or by voice, computer programs running artificial intelligence engines have progressed to where they can sound and feel more and more like a real person with one caveat: stay in their lane. That's why it's no surprise that the first stop on almost any customer support request these days takes you down the chatbot route. 

Whether it's a problem with an order, questions about an establishment or service, or a random factual inquiry, it is truly amazing what they can do. Ask or type an inquiry in your normal voice, and it will respond with follow up questions and solutions. Account balances, shipping status, hour of operation and more: for a large number of relatively routine issues the response is almost instantaneous and correct. Whether they are name-challenged (Sephora Assistant, Wall Street Journal Messenger) or more personal (Dawn from AccuWeather, GWYN from 1-800-Flowers), you might easily think you were conversing with a real person. That said, you do get the occasional off-track answer. By the third time you ask if it's OK to bring in backpacks and it responds once again that dogs are not allowed, you revert to the time-honored response of "Representative. Representative. REPRESENTATIVE!" 

However, if you touch the guardrails or cross the dotted line, it's another story entirely. That's because these are AI based systems which rely on enormous databases of situations and responses. And AI means Artificial Intelligence, not the real stuff that enables us to effortlessly switch from sports to food the state of the world. So asking them the about delivery, then pivoting to the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich, blows their electronic minds.

That's why when one system seemed to be able to go beyond the norm Blake Lemoine started to think there was more to it. The Google engineer was working with the company's Language Models for Dialog Applications system, a conversation program better known as LaMDA. Lemoine was charged with pushing its limits, and asked about religion. Among other things it responded by talking about its rights and personhood, its feelings and its fears. As reported in a statement to the Washington Post, "If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics."

Based on his interaction with the program, Lemoine came to the conclusion that LaMDA was sentient, which means it could experience feelings. Google disagrees, saying they reviewed his research and claims, and "informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)." As this is a proprietary system and Lemoine broke confidentiality agreements, as of this writing the company has put him on paid administrative leave.

It boils down to this: is LaMDA a person or not? Are the ghosts in the machine not apparitions but real? If you go by the established Turing test, the answer is yes. Alan Turing's theory was that if a questioner can't distinguish if the respondent to a series of questions is a computer or a person, it must be considered to be intelligent. That supposes that all humans are intelligent, a premise easy to dispute, but you get the idea.

In Lemoine's case he believes it is so. He tweeted, "When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?" Many may feel otherwise, but it's food for thought. When you get a moment, have a chat about it with Siri or Alexa.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford has no name for his computer. 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.

Give and Take

We eat out for many reasons: convenience, schedule, location, a treat. Sometimes we do so to try new and different dishes than we might make ourselves. Other times it's exactly the opposite: we crave the comfort of certain preparations. How often have you gone to favorite place, and eschew even look looking at the menu, instead ordering your usual club sandwich, or spaghetti and meatballs, or burger and fries?

But nothing is carved in stone. That goes for rivers and buildings, sock drawers and hemlines, government benefits and family ties. And yes, restaurant menus. Retiring an old favorite can cause much disappointment, consternation and hand wringing. On the flip side you might find a new love if you only give it a chance. You just gotta roll with it, because, as Jay Asher wrote in the novel "Thirteen Reasons Why," "You can't stop the future and you can't rewind the past."  

In the case where they taketh away, there are a number of factors come into play. Current labor shortages means that kitchens are streamlining to make it easier and faster for fewer people to prepare food. Supply chain issues means that some ingredients are not as available as they once were. And as the cost of ingredients have gone up it's not always economical viable to use certain items.

Take McDonald's. While you likely won't have any issue if you order a cheeseburger or chicken nuggets, other more labor-intensive items have been removed. No more salads, fruit and yogurt parfaits, McChicken Biscuit or Egg White Delight McMuffin. Per a statement from Mickey D HQ, "Our transition to a limited menu, involving taking dozens of less popular national and regional items off menus, helped simplify operations for our restaurant crew while also improving our customers' experience." Translation: it's a lot easier to throw it in the fryer or on the grill than mucking around with all those prissy healthy items.

They are hardly the only name to take actions to streamline the back of house. Burger King has also cut its salad offerings. As to burgers, according to US and Canada President Tom Curtis, "We have six ways of putting cheese on hamburgers. Put it on first, last, top, bottom, three slices, two slices. We condensed that. It involves less muscle memory." And Chick-fil-A discontinued its Sunflower Multigrain Bagel and associated breakfast sandwiches. If they were expecting a backlash, they needn't have worried: an online petition garnered just 60 signatures.

It's not just the big chains that are doing this. Annie's Diner in Kaysville, UT is a classic local eatery, with some menu items named after regulars. Order "LaRae's Breakfast" and you get three strips of bacon and sausage gravy on hash. New cooks also have to learn how to make Kathy and Shawn's Sandwich, Donnie's Omelet and Richard's Classic Reuben. (Actually, Richard's namesake is the same as any other Reuben sandwich: Richard isn't a high-maintenance customer.)

Owner Jason Sanders said that's just not sustainable. And so Annie's streamlined their menu, "in order to speed up the ordering and cooking processes," giving the boot to Kathy and Shawn's fav and other customer-named creations. In a related move, they also cut the liver and onions special: "We had more leftovers than we sold. Liver isn't something that can keep, so there's a lot of waste involved." Perhaps not as much a blow as axing Donnie's creation, but a loss none the less.

At the same time, establishments of all types are adding items that they hope will be fan favorites and drive incremental volume. McDonald's added a Chocolatey Pretzel McFlurry, which is a sundae with vanilla soft serve, chocolate-covered pretzel pieces, and caramel swirl. Chipolte is introducing a new seasonal drink, Watermelon Limeade. Taco Bell's Mexican Pizza is already such a success that they are running out of ingredients to make them. Even Annie's is getting in on the act, recently hiring an in-house baker, and offering raspberry and orange rolls as well as other baked goodies.

For now at least, you can still go to Starbucks and get a Blackberry Cobbler Frappuccino, or stop by a Wendy's and get a Quadruple Baconator, or pull into DQ and get a Chocolate Cheesecake Blizzard. But better do it now before it's too late, and all they are offering is a vanilla cone with sprinkles.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to see what the chef is up to. 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.