Award Winning

Most people like it when someone else recognizes their efforts. It might be a small thing: your boss tells you you did a good job, a friend remarks on how cool your outfit is, a neighbor says she likes your garden. Those little affirmations bring a smile to your face, a puffing out of your chest and a warm feeling to your heart. And then there are the times when the results are stellar, going above and beyond, taking the effort from good to great. In those cases, it's possible the work will be recognized by a wider circle, with the result going beyond just an "attagirl" or a "you rule!" And in that instance, the award is, well, an award.

While it or may not be an actual goal, being singled out and handed a trophy as the best in anything is heady stuff indeed. Doesn't matter if the winner is an individual, a group or a company: it indicates to all who care that the named recipient gave their all. The most well-known examples are very well known indeed: everyone knows the names of some of the winners of the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys. And the best are recognized across all of those platforms: 21 people to date have won been honored with one of each, the so-called EGOTs. 

But that's probably way above your pay grade. After all, the vast majority of people and organizations will never be in the running for those high-profile honors. It's not that their efforts aren't exemplary and worthy of spotlighting, but rather the arenas they play in are more self-contained. But within those closed ecosystems the standouts are no less standoutish. And while the awards given there might not carry the cachet of the aforementioned statuettes they are rightly coveted and crowed about.

So while the English Professional Footballers Association just announced that Mo Salah had won his third Player of the Year award, Bonnie Pollack was winning the Milken Educator Award, the "Oscar of Teaching." Created in 1987 by Lowell Milken, the award is the nation's preeminent teacher recognition program, with nearly 3,000 educators being surprised with individual unrestricted $25,000 prizes. "Despite my students' request, I will not be splitting the money up evenly for them to share," she said, but she has paid off her car.

Likewise, the American Water Works Association just named Dr. Karl Linden the recipient of its coveted A.P. Black Research Award. A professor at University of Colorado-Boulder, his research "investigates advanced and innovative UV systems for inactivation of pathogens and degradation of emerging contaminants." Translation: he focuses on using light as a way to disinfect water. Like many winners, he credits the team with whom he works: "The work we have done together has truly changed the water industry, supporting public health protection, and it has been such a privilege to be a part of this inspiring One Water community."

Sometimes it's hard to name just one top dog. For the 17th year, Iowa Farmer today named 6 families as winners of the "The Way We Live Award." Each in their own way "demonstrated their dedication to agriculture and strong Iowa farm values." Typical of these was the Kutzli family, which operates Whitetail Farm, which specializes in vintage, antique and red-fleshed apple varieties.  In the fall, they sell the fruit, as well as use it to make wine at their Whitetail Valley Cellars Winery. Carrying on an ancestral Swiss faming tradition, their goal is to place quality above quantity. "Klein abver Fein," small but excellent.

The trophies don't stop coming, they just don't make it to the front page. The American Society of Human Genetics named Dr. Mike Talkowski at Mass General as the winner of its Scientific Achievement Award. The Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue WA published its Award of Excellence winners, including Carole Grisham for jewelry and Erin Pietsch for ceramics. And the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art announced that Nansledan, a development in Newquay, Cornwall, England, is the distinguished recipient of the 2025 Gindroz Award for Excellence in Affordable Housing. Congrats to all.

Like talent, excellence can occur anywhere and does; it's just that you usually don't hear about much about it. So while Billie Eilish might have swept the field with 4 Grammys in 2020, it was just last week that Pastor Mike Jr. won all 9 of his nominated categories at the 2025 Stellar Gospel Music Awards in Nashville. Say "Amen" to that.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is hoping this column will be nominated for something. It appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Lies, Damned Lies and Recipes

I dare say that both my wife and I are competent cooks. Still, over the years the responsibility for putting that skill to work in the service of weekday dinners has shifted. When the kids were growing up and I was more out and about working, it mainly rested on my wife's shoulders. I would pitch in when I could, but the onus of getting a family meal on the table on school nights fell mostly in her lap. That continued even after the boys moved on, since my projects usually required me to be away for longer hours than her work, and so it just made sense that she still handled the lion's share of the cooking. The pandemic shifted that, as we were both home all the time, and I started to take on more of the load. More recently, as I have streamlined my work schedule, the balance has shifted the other way, to where I am the default workaday cook unless circumstances dictate otherwise.  

As a person who is very project oriented, cooking fits squarely within that sweet spot. You need a goal, a plan, certain specific elements and a timeline, and off you go. In musical terms it's part classical and part jazz: you have a leader following a score with each piece playing its part, but you gotta be ready to improvise and follow the beat where it leads. Sometimes you make Bach, other times, well, it sounds more like a second grader with a violin

That approach is more the state of play these days because, like everything else, the barrier to entry is non-existent for both chefs and recipes. In the past you might have learned from your mother or an experienced cook, while recipes were tried and tested, handed down over generations and/or collected in tomes like "The Joy of Cooking." Now food influencers range from an experienced chef such as Gordan Ramsey with millions of followers, to a pay-to-play content creator such as Lorenza Nicholas from South Africa who charges $50 for a post promoting a product. Meanwhile punch in "apple pie recipe" to Google, and you get 241 million results, including ones that don't even use an apple. You better be ready to pivot as the butter sizzles.

Still, since good ideas can come from everywhere, I keep a running file of recipes from multiple publications and platforms. But the more you read, the more discerning you get, and the more discerning you get, the more you realize that most recipes are lying to you. They promise easy, fast and effortless when they are anything but. Or as Christopher Kimball, who created the PBS shows "America's Test Kitchen" and "Cook's Country" put it, "A recipe is a vague suggestion about how to do something. If you had the proper ingredients at the proper temperature, the proper cookware, you've read the recipe and you have enough time." The bottom line? "Cooking times and recipes are utterly totally worthless."

You get that if you read the comments. It's a great recipe if you substitute this, replace that, use a smaller pan, use a bigger pan, increase the temperature, decrease the temperature, cook it longer, cook it shorter. By the time you get even part way through, the caveats outweigh the original instructions. It's back to the musical metaphor: yes, there's chicken and onions and spices and a pan, but it's just a starting point. That casserole you make was never one that Beethoven had in mind.

Perhaps no better example exists than Sam Sifton's "No-Recipes Recipes Cookbook." In it, the founding editor of New York Times offers more than a hundred recipes that contain a list of ingredients without specifying amounts, and some general guidance on cooking. For instance, one includes the instruction "Make rice, as you do." Another says "Add a couple big glugs of milk and a couple drops of maple syrup." The point being: do what feels right.

It's a place to start, but you gotta start somewhere. For me, that generally means picking recipes based around what we have in the house that has been around the longest. I will open the freezer and see what has the oldest date, see what vegetables in the fridge are starting to lose their luster, and off I go. Tonight could be a shrimp and broccoli stir fry with lemon, or a white chicken chili. Should I set you a place?

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves play around with recipes. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

You! Yes, You!

By now we've all grown used to the constant barrage of forecasts, warnings, capabilities, pitfalls, cautions, examples, experiences, trials, offers and more about AI, and how it will take over and remake our very existence. This virtual companion is coming for your job, your kids' teachers, as well as your therapist. That said, most would agree with author Joanna Maciejewska's post that "You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Indeed, the first wave of AI that we all got familiar with was its ability to generate stuff out of thin air that felt very much as if it had been created by flesh and blood humans. We give it a prompt for an essay, picture or video, and off it goes. Now as we are getting more comfortable with it, we're starting to ask it to do more compound tasks: write this and then send it out and get reactions, or find this info, organize it and then present it back in a specific way.  For most of us, we only see the results when we ask for it or go looking for it. But it goes the other way as well: it can come looking for you.

That's what Greg found out. A longtime friend and associate, he's no stranger to technology and the ways of the modern world. As part of that, he is adept (as are many) at quickly weeding through his email inbox, deleting countless "targeted" notes to him which are supposed to capture his eyeballs, but which he sniffs out in a second with their generic come-ons. 

But then there was this one. The sender meant nothing to him, but the subject line caught his attention: "MPI WestField President's Award + Waldorf Events + Myuser." While the last phrase meant nothing, the first two were specifically related to personal things from his past. As such he opened it: "Hi Greg. Your recent President's Award from MPI WestField caught my attention – well-deserved recognition for someone with your event production expertise." Well, yeah, not so recent, but he did win that award a bunch of years back. And who doesn't like it when people recognize your accomplishments?

And so he read on: "That three-week orientation at the Waldorf+Astoria must have been quite the production to coordinate!" Again, a legit reference from a past project, and while not unknown, not something that would have been common knowledge. And it wasn't done trying to cozy up to him: "The real reason for my outreach, however, is about your real estate photography business." This was a sideline Greg started, but had never promoted, advertised or mentioned on any of his accounts. He did do some online research, but nothing traceable to him (or so he thought). 

What followed was a more generic marketing pitch for outreach services, one which, had it been up front, Greg would have immediately ditched. Turns out the key was in that last subject word, a company called Myuser. They offer a service wherein they scrape the web for any and all information about a person, then use AI to craft an approach letter that seems like they know you. And they had trained their servers on Greg.

In thinking about it, much of what was there was hiding in plain sight. While the award was from 2017 and the production gig from 2015, Greg had mentioned them in a now abandoned Twitter/X stream. As to the research on real estate photography, while he usually poked around in incognito mode, certainly he might have left some breadcrumbs somewhere online. And as we've seen in countless examples, if it's out there someone can find it. In the past it might have been a conspiracy theorist sitting in a dark basement clicking around for a few weeks. Now, all it takes is a Myuser account, and a buck fifty per head with a minimum one-month order, and Greg is yours for the taking. Or as Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU put it, "It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public."

When Greg related this story to me, as with many, I was interested because it was something not in my world. But it turns out that "they" weren't done. The email to him closed with this: "P.S. Your work on that National Townhall with live audio streams in Pasadena shows you understand the power of technology in professional services!" That turned out to be a gig that I had hired him for to cover for me. Uh huh: guess it's only a matter of time till they come knocking on my door.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford, for better or worse, has left lots of online tidbits. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

New! Improved?

Doesn't matter whether it's clothing, electronics, automobiles or sporting equipment, there's always a new way or approach popping up to make it better. In most cases it's a modification of an existing item, tweaking a little bit around the edges to hopefully get a more improved product. We're talking Windows 11 over 10, Air Jordan 40 over 39, "Mission: Impossible" whatever version we're up to over the last iteration. In far fewer examples it's a radical reimaging of the existing space, that rare breakthrough that either succeeds wildly or fails miserably. Think iPhone vs. Google Glasses, Diet Coke vs New Coke, Elon Musk vs Elon Musk. 

And so it is in the world of state fair foods. This sub-genre of gastronomy is showcased around the country every summer. Heavily reliant on frying as a cooking technique, humungous as a portion and sticky as a topping, it varies fair by fair, though the basic building blocks and form are the same. It's all about cheese and sugar, turkey legs and dough, sticks and paper plates - often all at the same time – combined with their offshoots and cousins in new and different ways. Sometimes it succeeds wildly if inelegantly. Other times it's just a sloppy mess that isn't worth the 120,000 calories per serving. But as with any artistic endeavor, one man's Pizza Curd Cheese Tacos is another's Deep-Fried Tofuego Bites: beauty (as it were) is the eye of the eater.

You need look no further that the upcoming Minnesota State Fair to see this play out in real time. For sure there are the usual favorites and standard bearers, such as Australian Battered Potatoes (battered and deep-fried sliced potatoes with toppings such as spicy chipotle sauce, sweet chili and hot honey), Mancini's al Fresco (Italian egg scramblers, including their signature Messy Giuseppe) and Sara's Tipsy Pies (including Boozy Blueberry Lemon infused with alcohol). But because having just Sausage Sister and Me with their Twisted Sister on-a-stick (Italian sausage wrapped in breadstick dough) is never enough, this year there are 33 official new foods plus eight new vendors. And it is in this laboratory of progress that new icons are either born or licked off quickly.

What are the contenders? O'Gara's leaned on the Saturday Dumpling Company to create their new Pot of Gold Potato Dumplings, described as cheesy garlic mashed potato dumplings accompanied by a chive-onion dip. BABA's is showcasing its new Fawaffle, which is falafel batter pressed into the shape of a waffle, then topped with tahini butter, tomatoes, hummus, green sauce, and mint. On the sweet side the West End Creamery is showing Grandma Doreen's Dessert Dog, a coffee cake ice cream sandwich skewered on a stick and drizzled with house-made strawberry rhubarb jam. And going sweet and savory are Fluffy's Hot Honey Jalapeño Popper Donuts, which are yeast-raised doughnuts frosted with homemade jalapeño cream cheese, and topped with crumbled bacon, pickled jalapeños, and drizzled with hot honey. One man's ceiling, and all that. 

Those are just some of the contenders for your stomach. There's also the Croffle Cloud, croissant batter done in a waffle iron, topped with whipped cream, fruit puree, and a cloud of cotton candy. Or how about the Tandoori Chicken Quesarath, which is an Indian riff on a quesadilla, but with paratha bread topped with tandoori chicken, then layered with a blend of Monterey Jack and mozzarella cheese and a mixture of sauteed onions, mixed bell peppers, jalapeños, corn, cilantro, and green chilis.  And if you want in on the pickle juice craze, you can try the Dill Pickle Iced Tea, garnished with a rim of chamoy, Tajín, salt, and dill. Check, please.

It remains to be seen if any of these will survive till next year, let alone achieve the lofty status of the favorites of the Fair, such as the Juicy Lucy, a hamburger patty with the cheese cooked inside rather than on top. It's a tall burrito to climb, but will the Triple Chocolate Mini Donuts, made of chocolate mini doughnuts with chocolate icing and chocolate sprinkles and chocolate chips in a bucket rimmed with chocolate icing make the cut? See for yourself: the fair starts on August 21 and runs for two weeks, so you best book your tickets now lest they run out of Pimento Cheese Puffs.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to see new food combinations, usually. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Turn Turn Turn

In the words of Carole King, did you feel the earth move? Not earthquake-like, whereby stuff is shaking and falling from shelves, but speeding up and slowing down, kind of like the moving walkway at the airport jerking every now and again? It happened. Or was it just another Y2K-like moment, when the tech geeks raised a huge red flag that caused all of us mere mortals to run around like chickens with our heads cut off, and all for naught?

Let's back up.

Of the very few things in this world we can count on is that every day when we wake up the earth is still spinning. For sure, there are innumerable dystopian tales where something affects that motion. But absent any super-duper alien weapon or an asteroid hitting London, that daily cycle will repeat itself for the foreseeable future. It is true that the earth is slowing its turning, but it will take billions of years for it to have any noticeable effect. And probably by the time it becomes an issue the sun will explode, making the earth's speed the least of the worries for whomever is left at that time. Bottom line: on the list of things to be concerned about, Netflix chiding you for sharing your password should be far more worrying.

However, it turns out we are experiencing some anomalies in that rotational speed right now. On July 10 we spun a bit faster, making it the shortest day of the year so far, clocking in at 1.36 milliseconds less than the usual 24 hours. Likewise, July 22 was 1.34 shorter, while August 5 is expected to come in 1.25 milliseconds light. In the grand scheme of things, that acceleration is nothing to worry about from an extinction perspective. A variety of factors, from the pull of the moon to seasonal changes in the atmosphere to how the liquid in the planet's core is sloshing around all contribute to how fast we spin. Climate change is also a factor, as the spreading of water from the formerly frozen ice caps changes the weight distribution and how we turn. But none of it is life altering, so there's little chance in the short term of your glass of iced tea sliding off the table.

Your electronics, however, are another factor. That little variation makes a difference in the atomic clocks that provide the measurements for things like GPS and navigation. If they're not exact, your Google maps might direct you to the pet store as opposed to Target, or worse, off the bridge as opposed to on it. And so just as we have a leap day every 4 years to align the calendar to our orbit around the sun, at irregular times scientists have added a leap second to smooth things out. Since 1972 when the practice started, 27 seconds have been added, with last occurring in December of 2016.

The key word there is "irregular." Unlike leap year, which occurs like, well, clockwork, leap seconds are inserted as needed. And that means that systems can't always account for them. After one was inserted in 2012 Reddit crashed, while some systems at Qantas Airways went haywire, causing long flight delays across Australia. And after the 2016 addition systems at Reddit, Gawker and Mozilla all went blooey. Now that we're seeing more speeding up, there is talk of taking time away, a so called "negative-leap-second." Does that mean your future cell phone payment might happen in the past? Possibly: no on has any idea what might actually happen if they put it into play.

As such, the experts who keep tabs on these things are saying we should do away with those random fixes entirely by 2035. That doesn't mean the problem will go away, just that we'll avoid tinkering with the clocks for a bit. It does mean that at some point in the future they may need to add a bunch to make up for it. And so there is a very good chance your great-great-great grandchildren may suddenly feel more mature when a leap hour is inserted into their lives.

But that's a ways off. Until then, engineers are hoping that some software "smears" will cover over the issues, and no further seconds will need to be inserted. As the production engineering folks at Meta posted "we are supporting a larger community push to stop the future introduction of leap seconds - which we believe will be enough for the next millennium." Translation: Waze should still be able to get you to grandma's house, for at least a little while. 

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is fascinated by time. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.