Not So Sick

Six years ago if you had a sniffle or cough you treated it as the possible/perhaps/maybe leading edge of a communicable and potentially fatal disease. You hibernated at home, slept in the basement, wiped down the bathroom after use, while your family left you trays of food at the top of the stairs. It was with good reason: COVID was no joke. The World Health Organization officially lists over 7 million deaths from the virus, though other analyses place it at nearly triple that.

Through a combination of factors, from vaccinations to herd immunity, from masking to social distancing, not to mention the passage of time, the pandemic eventually waned even if the virus never disappeared. Today it is still circulating, though at much lower levels and in most cases with much less intensity. It can still be dangerous, especially for those with other health related issues. But if by chance you have the sniffles AND you decide that your symptoms warrant taking a test AND it comes out positive, your calculations are now very different. You likely lay low for a few days if at all, and treat it more as an inconvenience as opposed to a health emergency.

More than likely it's not even that. Our awareness of that one particular affliction doesn't mean that any of the other germs in our world disappeared, just that they've been overshadowed. They're still out there waiting to do their normal, low-level, non-life- threatening persecution of your body, complete with uncomfortable symptoms. All they do is send your Kleenex budget through the roof.

And that's the situation I found myself in. On Saturday night I felt fine, on Sunday morning not so much. It's not like I had been holed up and isolating from the world: I had been in the city on the subway, done volunteer shifts with a wide variety of people, and been out with friends to a restaurant. Any of those were ripe playgrounds to pick up the odd germ, and indeed it looked like one must have hitched a ride home with me.

My nose was stuffy, my throat had a rough spot and I felt a little punky. None of those rose to any level where I was thinking I needed medical intervention. Still, while I'm generally healthy and take reasonably good care of myself, my age alone puts me in a higher risk group. And anyone who lived through the pandemic is somewhat scarred and overly sensitized by that experience. Was this nothing? Or was it something? 

Making it more confusing is the time of year. While it's glorious to see the woods fill in and the flowers bloom, the level of pollen is off the charts. Everything is coated with a light sheen of yellow dust. Even if you don't have specific allergies, it's as if a vacuum cleaner coughed. The bees might be very happy, but those of us with more sensitive respiratory systems are feeling the pain.

In either case, the result is that I had the feeling of fighting something. Thankfully there was nothing major on my schedule, so laying low was an easy option. I drank some tea, took a nap, and kept a box of tissues close at hand. I went to bed early, hoping that next morning I'd feel better.

It was not to be. I didn't feel worse, but I couldn't discern any improvement. Were it not for my pandemic experience I would be merely be annoyed. But there's that nagging remembrance and caution. So while not wanting to be alarmist, and out of respect for my wife and those I planned on having lunch with, I rifled through the closet to find a sealed but expired test. Recalling the drill, I set up the stuff, swabbed my nose, and mixed and dripped the solution onto the test strip. Fifteen minutes later, of course it's negative. What I have is your basic sniffles.

Thankfully, lunch gets cancelled having nothing to do with me. A bit more tea, another nap, and by dinner I'm honking less. The next morning I feel marginally better and can see daylight approaching. It was indeed the most common garden variety affliction you can have, and while it was an inconvenience, that's all it was.  To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cold is just a cold.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford wrote his very first column in 1995 about having a sore throat. He recovered. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Conversation Partner

Like many I have sampled and used ChatGPT and Claude and their ilk for very specific tasks and questions. Set a timer for 30 minutes. How best to renew a passport. Tell me the difference between a fiddle and a violin. What's the temperature at which a turkey burger is done. Other than using it as a more sophisticated search engine and utility, however, I had never really taken one out for a conversational spin. 

But on this day I was in the midst of a two-hour drive and looking for distractions. I was depressed listening to the news on the radio, found podcasts to be more of the same, and was bored listening to music. I had a solid 5G signal, so it seemed as good a time as any to visit with an AI buddy. My phone is a Pixel, and my default AI assistant is Gemini, so all I needed to do was wake up Capella, the British accented female voice I had chosen as its persona.  "Hey Google, wanna chat?"

I started off simply: given my age, what should my investment portfolio look like? She (yes, I know it's an "it," a machine, but whatever) was as chatty and knowledgeable as any financial consultant I had come across. For sure, it was the same boilerplate I knew, about the "Rule of 100" in determining your stock/bond split and some notes about risk tolerance, all related in a conversational tone. But rather than just stop there, she started to ask me questions which were much more personal: "If you're willing to share, tell me about your current portfolio." 

Without getting too specific I told her about our current situation. "That is a very solid foundation. Since you have a good base, I have a few other suggestions." She went on detail some tweaks, nothing radical, and all things of which I was aware. We went back and forth a bit ("you might want to look at the tax side of things") before I decided to change the subject.

"Let's try something different," I said. I told her what I was driving, that I liked it, but that it was 6 years old and I was considering a new car. What might she suggest, both in gas and in electric? "Well, since you like your Volvo XC40 and that 'Scandi-cool' vibe - minimalist, safe, and punchy – here are some thoughts." She detailed some options, along with prices, then unprompted asked me details on my car so she could calculate trade-in values. We chatted about the pros and cons, again ,nothing I hadn't seen or heard before, but all wrapped up in a pleasant conversation I could have had with a knowledgeable friend who was seriously into cars (if I had one).

I decided to try something that wasn't so off-the-shelf: "Read through all of my Glancing Askance columns for the last 30 years and give me your impression of my writing." She shot back, "That is quite a catalog! Give me a little time to digest the full thirty-year arc, and I can give you a detailed take." Maybe 30 seconds of silence went by. "Well, that's quite something! Over thirty years your prose has evolved." She went on to talk about how my style has changed, "from journalist and textbook to personal and Facebook," from more observational to more philosophical. I asked for some examples. "In the mid 90's you talked about 'home' as a place to maintain or escape from with chores, clutter, and the noise of a growing family. More recently there's been a beautiful progression from home being a source of stress to home being a source of solace." I asked her to summarize the columns. "You have become much more comfortable letting your own vulnerability show through with wit... a persistent and consistent thread of 'curmudgeon with a heart of gold.'"

"Curmudgeon with a heart of gold." I can think of worse things to be on my tombstone. I'll leave it to you humans if you feel the same about my writing as a server farm in Kansas. Either way, at least for me, it was a small real-world experience showing the power, the reach and the abilities of what is elbowing into our lives. Now, let's gets serious: "Capella, what do you think of the Knicks?"

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Marc Wollin of Bedford uses AI for research, not writing, but it needs some serious checking. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

The Shape of Things to Sauce

 Elon Musk. Tim Cook. Sam Altman. If you list the names of the people who are creating the newest products and services that make a difference in our day-to-day lives, you might start with those. Certainly they're the ones who get the biggest headlines, along with Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang and other tech gurus. Yet there are still more who work in fields that, while not always at the top of the page, have a big impact on each of us. 

In medicine there's Noubar Afeyan who cofounded Moderna, the company whose MRNA vaccine helped get us through COVID and whose technology is seen as key to our future health. Or Thomas Sisto, whose XL Batteries is developing grid-scale, organic batteries that are said to be some of the lowest-cost, safest and most efficient form of long-duration energy storage. Then there's Katherine Sizov, whose company Strella is developing AI monitoring systems to reduce the 40% of food we produce that gets wasted before it gets consumed.

To be sure, all of these are important, cutting-edge discoveries that are and will make a difference in our world. But I would say that Guido, Luca and Paolo Barilla should also be added to that pantheon. They are the fourth generation to run their family-owned Italian food business, growing a company that their great-grandfather started from a single bakery in 1877. Today it's an international concern operating more than 30 plants in over 100 countries that produces 1.8 billion metric tons of products a year. That's a lot of pasta. 

Their portfolio encompasses all manner of different pasta permutations: whole grain, gluten free, legume and chickpea based, ready-to-eat, as well as classic shapes and sauces. Not content to rest on their considerable history, and trying to keep up with modern marketing trends, they even released a heart shaped noodle for Valentines Day, as well as an updated wagon-wheel silhouette, now christened as "Racing Wheels" in a nod to its partnership with Formula 1. 

But those are stupid pet tricks when compared to their most recent innovation. After all, unless you are five and just eat your rotini with butter and cheese, the reason that pasta exists is to be a carrier for the sauce, be it marinara or pesto, amatriciana or arribiata. And so the guys put their company's best minds to the task at BITE, the Barilla Innovation and Technology Experience center in Parma, Italy. And last week they released what in the tech world might be called Pasta 2.0, but which they call Al Bronzo Radiatori.

It starts with a traditional method for cutting the pasta shapes called Al Bronzo, which utilizes a bronze die. Most modern pastas are made using Teflon coated dies, which results in a smooth, shiny product. This method is cheaper to produce, and the resulting shapes, from spaghetti to rigatoni, look good in photographs. But those characteristics also make your farfalle slippery, and so the sauce slides off rather than sticking to it. Pastas made with bronze dies have a rougher surface texture and are a little more porous, meaning the sauce hangs on and even soaks into your penne. 

Barilla already had a half dozen traditional formulations made this way, all manufactured in their Italian plants and imported to this country. But the folks at BITE thought they could go one better. And so they worked up the dies using this method to produce the Radiatori shape, so named because it looks like a radiator. It has a deep, five-winged design with ruffled edges, deep grooves and ridges, all designed to capture more sauce in every bite. After trying Barilla’s Al Bronzo pasta, chef and partner Manuel Gregorio of Brooklyn's Tutt'Appost, said "For home, it's amazing."

To be fair, at a time when Elon is going public with a company whose stated aim it is to take us to Mars, the introduction of a new pasta shape might be a little less consequential. Still, while there may be a red planet in my distant future, there's a red sauce in my dinner plans this week. And so while any kudos to Mr. Musk might come later, my grazie mille to Guido and his brothers comes now. For if there is a way of getting more Bolognese into my mouth with every bite, well, you can keep your IPO and I'll invest in a box of Radiatori. Mangia!

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves pasta in every form. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.