Buzz Buzz

In his brilliant piece "I'm a Modern Man," the great George Carlin riffs on what defines a man of the millennium. Every line is a keeper, so much so that it's impossible to excerpt any single one as the best. There's "I interface with my database, and my database is in cyberspace, so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive, and from time to time, I'm radioactive." Or "You can't shut me up, you can't dumb me down, 'cause I'm tireless, and I'm wireless." Or "I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading, I'm a high-tech lowlife, a state-of-the-art bi-coastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond."  No one else has ever come close to capturing that many buzzwords so eloquently in one go, and making sense at the same time.

But it's not just people that like to consider themselves "drivin' and movin', sailin' and spinnin', jivin' and groovin', wailin' and winnin'." Businesses like to occupy whatever space that they think points to them being on the leading edge, regardless of what their base activity is. And so whatever the "buzz du jour" is is how they self-identify. General Motors isn't a car company, they are a tech enterprise focusing on innovations that just happens to make vehicles. American Express isn't a card company, they are a customer experience firm that deals with clearing purchases and transactions. And Starbucks doesn't make drinks, they are a digital platform that uses data to enhance your beverage buying experience. 

This has happened for each of the major tech advances of the past several years. When smartphones became the way we used computers, every company became mobile. When Instagram and Tik-Tok became the preferred way to connect, all became social. And when data moved from being on your desktop to being uploaded and downloaded, all became cloud-based. And it's no different with the latest advancement, generative artificial intelligence, or just AI.

By itself AI has been around for a while, going back to 1950. That's when Claude Shannon of Bell Lads demonstrated a life-sized magnetic mouse called Theseus that could learn its way around a maze. Since then it has progressed mostly as a backend technology, good at detecting patterns, generating insights, automation, and prediction. What changed it from back to front was the advance where it could be prompted by natural language, and create a response in kind, which is what adds the adjective "generative" to the name. So instead of needing an army of programmers to code a system that cues up Al Green and Curtis Mayfield after you listen to Silk Sonic, now you can ask it yourself and get a similar response as if you're talking to a friend. 

Very obviously the companies that develop this and have their roots in tech can indeed say they are riding the AI wave. Amazon and Meta are joining OpenAI and Google in developing systems like ChatGPT and Bard that place them squarely in the lead. But other companies are also racing to, if not claim the mantle, at least add an AI accessory or two so that they don't look so old school. 

That means you see supermarket chain Kroger talking about how "Our rich history as a technology leader gives us confidence that we will continue to effectively use AI, including more recent innovations." Or Tyson Foods, the second largest global producer of chicken, beef and pork, mentioning how they will "continue to build on our digital capabilities, operating at scale with digitally-enabled standard operating procedures and utilizing data, automation, and AI tech for decision-making." Or Coca-Cola piloting a "Create Real Magic" marketing program to let consumers access both the text based ChatGPT-4 and its sister DALL-E program for images to create crowd-sourced AI-powered content for future campaigns. Don't you dare call them a grocery, a butcher or a beverage company: that is so 20th century.

There will always be a hip catchphrase, a new marker, some chic jargon which indicates you are riding the wave. And the cool kids want all to know that they have a rightful place at that lunch table. We've cycled through a bunch: dotcom, blockchain, quantum, metaverse, and the list goes on. But at least this week, if you are a company that wants users to think it is the place to be, AI is table stakes, or more correctly, the new black.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is still figuring out when to use ChatGPT. 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.

Gone but Not Forgotten

You know the feeling. You go the store with one particular item on your mind. Maybe it was a cracker that you had grown to love, or a particular shade of nail polish that you felt complimented your look. But no matter how hard you poke around, you can't seem to find it on the shelf in its usual spot. You ask if they moved it, or if there is any more in the back, only to be informed that the manufacturer has decided to discontinue it. Sigh. I know Russia has invaded Ukraine, monster heat waves are increasing, and Zuck and Elon are contemplating a steel cage death match. But now you're telling me I can't get my Trader Joe's 3-Seed Sweet Potato Crackers? The world really is going to hell in a handbasket.

Every year brings this kind of cruel reality to consumers with all manner of items. While it should be the most minor ripple in our daily lives, it causes surprising angst. That's because in a world filled with so much uncertainty these small bits of routine provide an anchor, something dependable to hold on to. Take them away, and it's one more piece of evidence that we don't have the control we thought we did.

This year has been no different than any other. Across the spectrum manufacturers are weighing products which aren't attracting the sales they need to in order to sustain them. That has forced producers to make strategic choices as to which production lines to keep running and which to shutter. And while emotion might creep into the equation, it usually comes down to the bottom line.

The list spans every genre. You can no longer get Dr. Groot Microbiome Scalp Fortifying Exfoliating Shampoo, Homestar Heavy Duty Cleaning Wipes or Scentsy Apple & Cinnamon Stick scented wax. All of these have their devoted constituencies, and their absence means fans will have to find other options. But the area that seems to have the biggest impact, where the disappearance of an item elicits the most passion, is not in matters of the head, countertop or nose, but the stomach.

From cookies to sandwiches to snacks, this year brings discontinuances sure to roil many. If you tried to eat healthier, you might miss McDonald's axing of their Egg White Delight breakfast sandwich. If you liked KFC's Popcorn Chicken, you will get the same taste but without the mouth feel, as they are being replaced with chicken nuggets in their mains and salads. And if your preferred afternoon pick-me-up was a Dunkin' Dunkaccino, you will have to order a hot chocolate and a shot of expresso and mix them together as the drink is no more. (The good news is there's no chance you will be subjected to the "Al Dunkaccino" fictional commercial from the 2011 movie "Jack and Jill," where award-winning actor Al Pacino proudly declares, "It's not Al anymore, it's Dunk.") 

With the summer heat taking root, two of the most acute absences will hit particularly hard. If you're a Klondike bar devotee, you may have to share your fav with your adjacent brethren. That's because the company announced they are discontinuing the Choco Taco. If you haven't tried one (and now it's too late), it's a chocolate crispy shell filled with ice cream. If you simply must have one, DIY recipes abound, using a taco shell or a bent waffle as the base, then coating it in melted chocolate and nuts and filling it with ice cream. A lot of work, but if you can't get that monkey off your back, it's your only option.

The other "crime against humanity," to quote one distraught consumer, is that Good Humor is discontinuing its Toasted Almond Bar. Whether you got it from the truck rolling down your street or from the freezer section of your local grocery store, the 60-year-old iconic treat is no more. Yes, you can still get a Chocolate Eclair or a Strawberry Shortcake, but if your taste ran to the subtlety of frozen marzipan, you are out of luck. You can add your name to the online petition demanding that it be brought back (over 2400 signatures at last check), but other than that, with apologies to John Donne, when the little white truck's bell tolls, it is not for thee.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford will be very upset if they ever discontinue chunky peanut butter.  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.

In the Pocket

I was never a big clothes shopper, but have gotten less so as time has gone on. At this point, I have made a pact with myself not to buy more stuff just because it's new. What I will do is buy an item to replace what I have when it needs replacing, or when I find I need something I don't have. It might be socks or a blue shirt that has hit more than its half-life, or maybe a packable rain jacket for travel.  But I have a big enough assortment of the basics to see me through this, and indeed several lifetimes, even if you might have seen that sweater before.

So when my go-to casual pants got holes in them, it was time to swap them out. I looked around, but they seemed to have been discontinued, not surprising since they were a good 10 years old. But in the process of returning something to Amazon at a big-box store drop-off I saw them on rack, and even better, on sale. There were limited colors and sizes, but I dug through and found 2 winners. Likewise, as the weather got warmer and I pulled out my summer shorts, I found my favs had seen better days. I poked around online, and eventually settled on an updated version of my preferred brand and style. As before, I ordered substitute pairs, culled the old offenders from my closet, and updated my wardrobe. In my world, this is what passes for haute couture.

In both cases the replacements were exactly what I wanted: basically, what I already had. To be sure, they were slightly updated with a little different stitching in one case, and an updated fabric in another. But in both instances there was one structural change that was hard to ignore: they changed the pockets. 

For a guy (at least this one), pockets are as important as the underlying outfit, maybe even more so. I will stipulate, for purposes of this discussion, that women have a whole different set of issues in this area. For years they have been discriminated against with fake pockets, shallower pockets or even no pockets. But they have purses, so that skews the discussion. Still, when an individual of either sex wants to leave the house with a minimum of extra, well, baggage, pockets are as critical as the garments themselves.

While pockets have been a normal part of clothing since the 1600's, they have certainly morphed and changed over time. Keys have gotten smaller, watches have moved to the wrist and not a lot of folks need to carry tins of snuff anymore. On the other hand, we do need a place to put Tic-Tacs, credit cards and key fobs. But if there's one item which had forced a reengineering in pocket expectations (if not technology itself), it's that which has remade all of our world: the cell phone.

Most would no sooner leave their house without pants than they would their phone. Indeed, you can leave much of the other stuff behind, as in many cases phones have replaced money and access devices. But unless you want to tie up your hands or clip it to your belt, you have to slide that candy bar somewhere. And some designers have acknowledged that challenge, making at least one receptacle deeper, or even inventing a new holder to ferry your device. Indeed, I found a phone pocket in both my new pants and shorts, an addition so handy that I might never buy another pair without one. On the other side of the coin, other pockets got shallower (sides on the pants, rear on the shorts). But sometimes you gotta give to get, so I am committed to roll with the punches.

In college some friends made a short film about a future phone that was implanted in a person, so nothing to carry. Tap your left temple to answer, your right to hang up. Had they patented that idea and been able to bring it to fruition, they would be worth billions. Someone eventually will, and on that day, pockets will become obsolete. But until then, you'll have to pry mine from my cold, dead hands. Unless my hands are already in my pockets.  And in that case, never mind.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to have places to put things. 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.

The Second Arrangement

There were big discoveries this week. Sure, there was the one about low level laser therapy being effective in treating tinnitus, the discovery of a new species of eel in the Palur Canal in Odisha, India, and the unearthing of seven 12,000-year-old flutes made from the bones of a small waterfowl in Northern Israel. Those pale, however, next to the discovery and release of "The Second Arrangement," the erased song from Steely Dan's 1979 "Gaucho" sessions.

To be fair this was earth-shattering news only to a very small set of fanatics who track all things having to do with the seminal band. As devoted as any Taylor Swift or Giants fans, they listen, dissect and continue to discuss the music and lyrics of a group that stopped touring for 20 years, but who made 9 albums over nearly three decades. To be fair, there's lots to talk about: their lyrics are cryptic and their music is complex. Pejoratively classified as "yacht rock," they none-the-less have the identifying characteristics of crystalline production and harmonic sophistication that help to define the genre. That classification, however, is somewhat at odds with their name, which came from the term for a steam-powered dildo mentioned in the William S. Burroughs novel "Naked Lunch."

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the group's nucleus, were famously perfectionists about their music, which led to them giving up touring in 1974 and becoming a studio band with a rotating group of top session musicians. It was during a session for "Gaucho" that they laid down the beginning tracks for "The Second Arrangement." Producer Gary Katz and chief engineer Roger Nichols liked it enough to lobby for it to be a single from the forthcoming album. But then one morning an assistant engineer thought he was using a test tape to record and calibrate test tones for the recorder. It was only after he hit stop and heard a few seconds of what was on the tape that he realized that he had just erased the master. And with no backup, the song was lost.

Becker and Fagen re-recorded it, but were unhappy with the second take, and decided to just drop it. Save for one live performance of it in 2011, it was lost to history. Or so it was thought. Seems that standard procedure was for Nichols to make a rough mix, dump it to a cassette tape, then bring it home to listen. He did just that, tossed it into a drawer and there it lay for more than 40 years.

Nichols died in 2011, and his adult daughters took possession of his material. It took them years to go through it all, but in 2020 they came upon the tape. "The tape was really old and actually falling apart," Cimcie Nichols said. As the daughter of a recording engineer, she knew that she might only have one chance to play it before it disintegrated. She put it aside amidst the pandemic, her divorce and a move out of LA, eventually also discovering a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) with a version of the song. She finally got them to a studio that could handle the extinct formats, posted the results and Danfans went wild.

You can hear both the 20-minute lofi-cassette (which also included an early mix of "Were You Blind That Day," the track that became "Third World Man") as well as the higher quality DAT of "The Second Arrangement" on Cimcie's YouTube page. The audio files serve as a background to home grown videos that show the sisters listening to the tapes for the first time, as well as archival shots and videos of the band, the girls' father during recording sessions and other shots of the Nichols family sorting though stuff. Also shown is a framed copy of the sheet music for the song along with the cassette itself, which they are planning on auctioning off to pay for the costs involved, as well as a documentary about their dad's career.

Perhaps it's not as startingly a discovery this week as scientists confirming that ancient horses had toes instead of hooves, or that hummingbirds are drinking alcohol when they suck up that older sugar water. But if you're the kind holding out hope for a copy of the Beatles "Carnival of Light" or Green Days "Cigarettes and Valentines," have faith: second chances (or in this case, arrangements) do happen.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves music new and rediscovered. 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.

Beware the Alphas

Using a collective term to define a group risks being insensitive, prejudicial and playing into the sin of stereotyping individuals with gross generalizations. And still we do it because it's easy and useful, and more often than not, has no malice attached. Sometimes it's based on generally accepted criteria, such as gender, religion or nationality, though all of those have proven not to be as black or white as they once were (no pun intended). Others are based on specific factual markers, like college graduates, pickleball players or even column writers. And still others are made up for convenience to create a non-natural cohort, one whose boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, inexact and even porous: think soccer moms and metrosexuals, or conservatives and liberals.

To this last category add generations. Marketers, cultural commentators and the like have settled on labels to define a set of affinity groups based on when the underlying members were born. Never mind that within each group there is a nearly infinite variety of backgrounds, styles and approaches to every task and view presented. Researchers say that that infinity is not as big as it might seem, and in fact there are a large number of defining characteristics shared amongst those in the pool. 

Those proclivities and touchpoints have been well documented for each of the named tribes: Lost, Greatest, Silent, Boomers and X, Y and Z. With the noted caveat that variations do exist, and that you may not see yourself as driven as other Baby Boomers, or as independent as other Generation X'ers, on the whole you and your brethren share distinct commonalities. And that makes creating these artificial groups of some use to plot potential trends.

As might be expected, it's all about influence and power based on economic, political and social ranking, with the focus on which gang has or doesn't have that mojo in a given arena. While it is a continuum, it is hardly a straight line, but rather one that bobs and weaves and ebbs and flows as society changes. But if there is one constant in the entire exercise, it's that it eventually flows from old to young and keeps on going. And that means that the future is not about the so-called Millennials or even Zoomers, but their eventual replacement, the Alphas. 

Defined as those born after 2010, the oldest are barely bar and bat mitzvah age, and so have yet to begun to make any substantive mark on the world. That said, like each of the other cohorts, social scientists say they share certain traits. Perhaps most elemental, born into a digital world, and having their pre-Wonder years shaped by a multi-year global pandemic, they have a most malleable sense of, well everything.

To them, devices, tools and appliances are not exclusively devoted to any one pursuit. Likewise, home and work, not to mention leisure and education, are (or can be) accomplished in virtually any space. Materially they have more "things" than any prior generation, and see all of them as disposable and replaceable vs. durable and permanent. That also means their attention spans tend to be shorter, as they are comfortable toggling from one state or thing to the next. Their lives define multi-whatever. 

Their social orientations are similar. Their family lives include a high percentage of what used to be called "non-traditional family structures" as those are increasingly the norm. Friendships are defined by online as much as in-person interactions, and likely include individuals from far outside their immediate geographic area and social group. That means diversity for them is not an aspiration but the status quo. It also means they see economic inequality very clearly; whether they will decide to do anything about it is an open question.

How this will play out is anyone's guess, as they are just starting to become an economic factor, and politically are years away from making an impact. But it's just one more step. Generational researcher Mark McCrindle, who coined the term Generation Alpha, sets its upper limit as those born before 2024. Which also means that we are reaching the end of this cohort, with the as-yet unborn Betas just down the road. But in the meantime, if you want to know where the world is going, you best check in with your nearest 13-year-old.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is a Boomer, with all its privileges and baggage. 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.