The Road Not (Usually) Taken

I know how to get to the grocery store. I know how to get to the train station. I know how to get to the hardware store, the Italian restaurant we like and the park where we go to outdoor concerts. For those trips I throw caution to the wind and set out un-GPS'd. Yes, it's possible that there is road construction or a broken water main or something along the way that will cause me to make a detour. But having lived in the area for over 30 years I have a pretty good mental map of the streets around us. Not that I have taken every road, but I have enough of a sense of direction that even if I deviate from the usual paths I can get myself there and back.

For other trips slightly further afield, however, I confess that I do succumb to the mindless efficiency of Google Maps. You might be a Waze or Apple Maps person, but it's all basically the same. Enter where you are heading, confirm where you are beginning, tap the "Start" button and off you go. Just follow the prompts and the little car on the screen gets you there with a minimal amount of muss and fuss.  

Depending on your destination the app might show you a few options, with one being the primary. The others might be a little slower but more gas efficient, or just different for the sake of being different. Regardless of which you chose you will still wind up at the same end point. Assuming the trip is about an errand and not about a vacation, usually that first choice is the best: get me there in the least amount of time with the least amount of aggravation. 

On this particular Monday, the destination was the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license. Over the years I had been there numerous times, and could certainly make the trip with no digital guidance. However, because it was just a bit out of my normal circuit, I plugged my phone into my car, popping up the usual options on the screen. Yes, the standard route up the interstate was the quickest and highlighted in blue. Normally I would have just gone that way. But it was a drizzly day, I had cleared my calendar, and had an extra hour before my appointment. So...

I took a left versus a right, drove past the entrance to the highway, took the spur instead of the main. The nice thing about GPS is that you are never really lost, you're just going a different way. For sure my speed was far less than the 60+ MPH I would have clocked on the highway, with the result of adding 8 or 10 minutes to my journey. But I also wasn't dodging trucks and tailgaters, and was less concerned about cops and speed traps.  At the very least it was a more scenic trip, as I passed lakes and vistas that reminded me of why we like to stick around where we live in the summer.

But as they used to say in late night infomercials on cable TV: "Wait, there's more!" As I wandered my way north, I passed places and sites I had never been to or seen. I found the entrance to a bike trail I had always wanted to try. There was a little bakery at a nearby intersection I had always bypassed, one I will surely sample on that upcoming bike ride, not to mention a local pizza place I also added to my mental catalog.

Eventually I got to the DMV with time to spare. As a bonus I ran into an old friend and made a date for dinner, AND I was able to read the eye chart without glasses. I went home a different way, this time pausing to admire an outdoor sculpture at the entrance to a farm, as well as what turned out to be an 1860 stone mansion built by Patrick Ryan, the man who built the Hell Gate Railroad Bridge in New York City, at the time the world's longest steel arch bridge. So all in all a good day. With apologies to Robert Frost, when two roads diverged, I took the one less traveled. And while it didn't make all the difference, it was a way more pleasant diversion.

-END-

Marc Wollin likes to keep his eyes open on more than just the road when he drives. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

One Six Oh Oh

With all the digital help today, it's pretty unusual to miss a significant milestone. You get a reminder for birthdays, be it for your wife, your kids or your golf partner. You get a pop up for Arbor Day and Flag Day, not to mention Greek Independence Day and Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. But I confess with all that is happening this summer I almost missed this one. And that's hardly surprising, as its celebrants are basically nil save for an audience of, well, me.

For you are looking at column number 1600.

At the rate of one a week, that's an unbroken streak just a dozen shy of 31 years. If you read the first column and kept going, and also invested in new company Dollar Tree at the same time, you would have accumulated approximately 1,200,000 words of miscellany as well as a +10,630% return. In either case you would have done better than putting your attention and money in things that went belly up including Netscape Navigator, Caldor, and yes, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts.

Some of you might be stopping by for the first time and are wondering what you might have missed. At the risk of blowing my own horn, we have indeed covered a lot of ground. There was a look at weathermen (#14 – "Chance of Being Right") and home improvements (#54 – "Whose House Is It Anyways?"). There were discussions about female crash test dummies (#155 – "Hit Her Again") and grooming (#324 – "Brush Till You Drop"). We touched on celebrity perfumes (#541 – "Sweet Smell of Success") and the best beds (#741 - "Going to the Mattresses"). I feel pretty safe in saying that we have ventured at least a mile wide, even if in this space we only have time to go an inch or so deep.

Note that I say "we." While the creation of this is a solo endeavor, I do so knowing (hoping??) that I have any number of fellow travelers. Some drop me a note when something resonates with them or to suggest a possible topic to explore. Others take a quieter approach, responding to a particular effort with a "like" or thumbs up. And many more keep to themselves, occasionally and/or irregularly remarking to me "that one you wrote about... what was it?... I liked that one!" All are welcome. In each of those cases I am sincerely grateful that my efforts have pierced the noise and commotion that I know I myself am inundated with every single day. 

I am often asked how much time it takes to create these. This one is an easy one to write, as I have all the material at my fingertips. Others, not so much. I invest a good deal of time and effort researching the underlying idea, stretching it this way and that, and crafting something I hope you will enjoy reading and might even find interesting.  Through that process I learn more about mail services or limeade or solar storms than one needs to live comfortably. From that I try and mine a few tidbits that support my thesis, while also enabling you to be a better cocktail conversationalist. Hopefully I am successful more often than I am not.

As a curious individual there is still so much more to look into, topics which fill some unexplainable urge I have to learn about, and which I love to share with y'all. In the hopper are the germ of explorations on how AI is stopping me from swearing, how cars need more buttons, as well as the implications of the clock in our den advancing every two seconds instead of one. Is any of that important? I don't know, but stick around as I try and figure it out.

I will end this note as I do with my usual Faustian bargain. Thankfully it is not as damning as the original, "I am a servant to great Lucifer, and may not follow thee without his leave." Rather I offer you this: if you keep on reading I will keep on writing. I promise to use all 26 letters (when I can), try to go where the waters don't usually trickle and attempt to put a smile on your face a decent amount of the time. And know above all else that you have my eternal gratitude for coming along for the ride. That said, let's get back in the car and hit the road once again.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford plans to keep this effort going, if you will have it. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Sitting Out Loud

If you go to a sporting event, you expect people to wear their opinions on their sleeves. Indeed, since your view of the action is likely significantly better if you were to stay home and watch it on television, the main reason to go in person is to cheer and react and get involved in the game. You can revel in the home runs, groan at the fumbles and malign the refs eyesight to your heart's content as long as your vocal cords hold out.

Go to an opera or symphony, however, and it's exactly the opposite. Traditional decorum dictates that you sit silently, only reacting at certain specific moments. Even if the soprano hits a high F, or the violin executes a particular difficult cadenza, the audience sits mute waiting for the end of the piece to express its appreciation and admiration. Indeed, it is even considered a breach of protocol to applaud between movements of a symphony, resulting in a few scattered claps here and there from the uninitiated after the scherzo, interruptions which are quickly squelched.

The continuum between those two extremes turns out to be the theatre. For long periods of history, going to watch a play or musical was, if not a contact sport, certainly a participatory one. Playhouses were rowdy and noisy places. In ancient Greece and Rome audiences cheered, hissed and threw food at the actors. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre effectively had a mosh pit in front of the stage where the audience stood and drank beer, while rich patrons bought seats on the stage to show off their clothing. They could even procure spots to preen above the stage in private spaces called the Lords' Rooms, effectively the first sky boxes.

It was German composer Richard Wagner who turned the tide in the 1800's, enforcing a strict policy of silence and darkness at his opera house to watch what he viewed as sacred art. High society quickly adopted those rules, and the mark of refinement became a quiet and respectful audience. Audiences were to be like children: seen but not heard (until the end).

But that has been changing. We live in a participatory world, where everyone everywhere can make their opinion known anywhere anytime. The internet has democratized reactions both good and bad, not to mention shortened the publishing cycle from days and hours to virtually instantaneous. 

Makes no difference the venue. Restaurants? Pages comments online, often contradictory, lauding or hating everything from the food to the service to the décor. Stores? Likewise, with reactions not just to the quality of the merchandise, but also the delivery process and the customer experience itself. Plumbers, dog walkers, tutors: if you pay for it (and even if you don't) you feel you have a right, maybe even an obligation, to register your point of view.

And it seems as if the theatre is no different.

However, we're not talking about reviews after the fact, but commentary during it.  At a recent show on Broadway we attended, the audience was anything but subdued. They reacted as if they were in their living room watching the show on HBO. They cheered certain characters, professed outrage at insults and offered several rounds of applause, even standing ovations in the middle of the show. 

To be sure there are shows that invite audience participation, with the current darling being Broadway's "Every Brilliant Thing." In a role originated by Daniel Ratcliffe and currently occupied by Tracee Ellis Ross, a solo performer engages the audience to create a list of things worth living for. A few years ago in a staging of "Jesus Christ Superstar" done live on television, the audience lined the thrust stage and Christ played to them as if they were indeed the rabble. And multiple interactive shows invite the audience to watch and be part of the crowd at a wedding or a murder.

First appearing in a cartoon in the British magazine "Punch" in 1846, it is believed to be an old Cockney stallholder's cry to customers: "You pays your money, you takes your choice." Updated for today, it might be more like "you pays your money, you get to have an opinion and proclaim it." Personally, I prefer to wait till the end and then render a judgment. For others, it seems that there is no time like the present.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford enjoys most types of IRL performance. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Margaritaville-less

I'm not sure who taught me the recipe, but it's simplicity itself. Start with a can of frozen limeade. Empty it into a blender. More or less fill the empty container with tequila, and add that as well. Triple sec next, but only half or a little less. Put the top on and spin it up to get it all mixed together. Take off the little cap on the cover, and start dropping in ice cubes. Allow each one to get crushed before you add the next. Keep going until the blender is filled. If you like, salt the rim of some glasses. And before you can say Jimmy Buffet, frozen margaritas for the gang.

It's highly adaptable depending on the situation. If you have the large size container of limeade, the proportions still work. If you have a smaller blender or want a smaller batch, halve everything. If it's too boozy cut back on the tequila, too thick add a little water. The biggest challenge will not be the drinks, but keeping the chip basket filled and the salsa bowl topped off.

And as of just now, finding the limeade.

In February Coca-Cola, which owns the Minute Maid brand and its line of juices, announced it was going to stop making frozen juice concentrates in the US and Canada. In a statement directly to news outlets the company said "We are discontinuing our frozen products and exiting the frozen can category in response to shifting consumer preferences. With the juice category growing strongly, we're focusing on products that better match what our consumers want." The production lines stopped during the first quarter, and the expectation was that inventories would run out about, well, now. Having stopped at three different grocery stores looking for the stuff and coming up empty, I can vouch for that timeline.

It's been a good run, with its start during World War II. In 1945 the then Florida Foods Corporation entered into a contract with the U.S. government to supply 500,000 pounds of orange powder to soldiers serving overseas. However, the war ended before the powder could arrive, and so the company looked for another outlet. A year later, the now renamed Vacuum Foods Corporation had figured out how to turn that powder into a frozen concentrate and started shipping it to civilians. They changed their name again to Minute Maid, was acquired by Coke, and expanded into lemonade, fruit punch and the aforementioned limeade.

That original frozen orange juice became a staple in households all over the country. Whether your preferred breakfast was a stack of pancakes or a bowl of cereal, toast with butter or a bagel with cream cheese, there's an excellent chance it also included mom taking out a tube of Florida's finest, dumping it into a pitcher and adding a few containers of water. Likely you had a flirtation with Tang because the astronauts did, but eventually you came back to the real stuff. Yet consumers' tastes are ever shifting, and the push towards fresh squeezed juice, not the reconstituted version, meant that the little orange cylinders were less and less in demand. And so we have the current phase out of all flavors, with limeade, never the cash cow, being collateral damage. 

To be sure, there are private label brands available at specific stores, such as Acme and Wegmans. But at least where we live those outlets require a diversion from our usual routes or a special trip. And with Coke, the 800-pound gorilla of the drinks market pulling the plug on their branded lines, there's a pretty good possibility that the overall market will contract. So even those alternatives may be on borrowed time.

Of course you can revert to the classic "1-2-3" recipe of one part sweet (triple sec, or if you're feeling flush, Cointreau or Grand Marnier), two parts sour (lime juice) and three parts strong (tequila). Add all plus ice to a tumbler, make like James Bond and shake, don't stir, and few will complain. But if want the frozen variety you'll need a blender, a lot of ice, and some tweaking to get it correctly slushy. Absent that DIY approach, should we decide the menu for our dinner party is fajitas, I guess I'll have to get in the car, make the drive, and hope the cans are with me. 

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford finds that few turn down margaritas on a summer's day. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Maximum Stuff

In what has become a normal errand for many, I had to return something to Amazon. Back in the beginning of our national romance with the company, as they were wooing us and we them, they would come to our home and pick up things that were too large, the wrong color or not working. But as our mutual courtship has matured from infatuation into a multi-year marriage, they no longer feel it necessary to make that effort, and indeed, we have to go to them. It recalls my wife's observation about our own relationship. In the beginning, if we were out of the city and heading back to her place in town, I would pull into the garage in the bottom of her building. She says she knew I was getting both comfortable and serious about her when I stopped paying for parking, and started driving around looking for a spot on the street.

Amazon gives you multiple options to make returns depending on the item in question and your location. It might be Whole Foods or UPS, Kohl's or FedEx. We've cycled through all of them depending on what other stops we have to make and what we will be close to. At this point the default option in our household is Staples, as there is one in the middle of my usual circuit. Experience has also shown that they also have very few shoppers, making parking and returns quick and easy.

Usually it's a quick in and out process. I walk through the entrance, go directly to the service counter, have the clerk scan the stuff, and walk right back out the door. But this time, because I had to kill a few minutes waiting to pick up a visitor from the nearby train station, I decided to wander the aisles. 

As a small business owner and a parent of long-ago school-age children, it's a store in which I used to spend a good deal of time and money. From office supplies to technology, from chairs to filing cabinets, from construction paper to glue sticks, they had it all. But as I did a slow amble around the aisles and looked at what was on the shelves, I realized none of it held any real interest. It wasn't just a matter of being able to get those things online at a better prices. The bottom line is that in terms of what they had, I didn't need anything. Ever again.

For sure I will still need to replace things that break or run out, whether it's paper or ink, a router or a mouse. But in general we have what we need. We have a closet full of basic office supplies, such as paper, pens and pencils. We have all the electronics we can use, as well as bags to carry the stuff when we travel. We've got wires to connect things and power supplies to charge. There will surely be new gadgets, toys that are faster or slicker, and might be fun to play with. But I no longer feel a requirement to be on the cutting edge; trailing from behind is just fine with me.

Indeed, it's a feeling I can extrapolate beyond this one particular store and its assortment of merchandise. Well beyond our office and its supply closet we have more than we need. Yes, we will have to replenish our supply of toilet paper. My socks are going to wear out. I simply won't allow us to run out of peanut butter and other rather important foodstuffs. But from the bedroom to the family room, from the kitchen to the garage, from the dining room to the living room, I would say we're good. We have achieved maximum stuff. 

The fact is we need to go in the other direction, and minimize our accumulations. When our first kid went to college we said it was time to start cleaning the house out at least a little bit. That was some twenty-odd years ago, and we're still backing off for a running start. It's not that we're planning on going anywhere soon, but after 30 years in the same place we are pretty well set several times over. Reduced to pure arithmetic, our possessions have multiplied, and we need to divide what we keep and what we give away. In our current state, subtraction is way more important than addition.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford keeps finding things he has that he no longer needs. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Bestest Ever!

Like most of the world I have been sucked into the World Cup. It's not something we Americans come to naturally, with other sports such as baseball, football and basketball baked into our childhoods. Indeed, other than the "soccer unit" that was part of the PE rotation in high school, the most first-hand exposure I had to it was when our kids were small and part of the local youth teams. My wife characterized them as the "lemming leagues:" regardless of their positions, all the kids just followed the ball around the field. 

But increasingly every four years we reacquaint ourselves with a sport that the rest of the world is crazy about all the time. Add in the intermediate 2-year intervals, when the Olympics take place and the US women or men's teams make a run at the gold, and it's almost like we really care. This in spite of the fact that we Yanks generally have no real knowledge of the rules or strategies of the game. 

It's not because we couldn't understand them if we wanted to. After all, we are marginally conversant in things like the infield fly rule and a false start penalty. If we can handle the convoluted rules of American baseball and football you'd think we could understand when a midfielder is offsides. But no. All we understand is that while everybody on the field is restricted to kicking the ball one guy in a different color shirt is allowed to catch it.

Yet primarily because we are the host along with our neighbors to the north and south the interest in this year's tournament seems heightened. Other factors, such as the expansion of the field to 48 teams, the appearance of generational talents such as Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, the timing in the gap between other major sports championships, not to mention the primetime broadcast and streaming slots of the games, have all contributed to record interest. Indeed, the US team's win over Bosnia and Herzegovina drew a record American television audience, reaching more than 33 million people, placing it among the most watched television events of the year.

What has also reached new heights is the commentary. Viewers of our traditional US sports are used to relatively even, and even critical reviews of what is happening in the contest. True, there are superlatives bandied about, but generally achievements and challenges are put in the context of the game, the team and the season. Unless it's the Super Bowl or the World Series, you generally don't hear lots of GOAT references

No so with this Cup. Maybe it has something to do with the task of filling the time when not much is happening. Maybe it's the quadrennial nature of the event, a period which, in today's accelerated cycle, seems as if the next instance is not four years hence but four hundred.  Maybe it is our collective lack of imagination brought on by not having to stretch to remember anything as opposed to simply looking it up on our phones. But follow along in any medium, and you would think that there will never be anything more amazing than what you are seeing.

Every scoring chance is a one-of-kind shot. Every defensive stand is the most courageous stop ever made. Headlines reflect the same: "Are we witnessing the greatest US Men's soccer team ever?" and "Harry Kane just played a game that will be talked about for decades." Sometimes it might be a legit observation, as when Alexi Lalas remarked on Cabo Verde going to toe-to-toe with Argentina, "We were nearly witnessing the greatest FIFA World Cup upset of all-time." But everywhere, all the time always the most amazing/bestest/worstest/greatest play/player? As put in "The Incredibles" by the villain Syndrome, "When everyone's super, no one will be."

When the tournament first started, due to a mix up with our account, the only way I was able to stream games was on the Spanish language network Telemundo. Not a speaker of the tongue, I turned the sound down low, let the commentary blend in with the crowd sounds, and just watched the artistry on the field. Some was truly amazing, some not so much, but it was still fun. I do confess, however, that when there was a score, I did enjoy Argentine sportscaster Andrés Cantor's call of the one over-the-top expression that sets the standard: "¡Goooooool! "

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford used to play goalie because it couldn't run very fast. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Paper Cuts

It was not an uncommon way to spend a Saturday night when our kids were young. We would go out for an early dinner, often to a diner or IHOP. Then we would head to Borders or Barnes & Noble and browse for books. Everyone got to pick out something they liked, be it fiction or history, comic or biography. And if the weather was right we would cap it off with a visit to a local ice cream place. In our world it was the perfect way to while away an evening.

Our kids are long gone from our home but we still enjoy Saturday nights out, though more than likely with friends, and usually at slightly better restaurants. Regardless of the season, ice cream at a local spot is still high on the list. What has changed is that after the meal and before the cones we no longer make a stop to add to our library. 

The fact is we couldn't even if we wanted to. The large chain establishments that sold books barely exist anymore. Borders went belly up in 2011, and while Barnes and Noble is in the middle of an expansion, it slashed its footprint around 2018 and only recently returned to our area. And while there are still some small independent book stores, they are generally not open late on weekend nights. Add to that the 9000-pound gorilla that is Amazon. While publications represent just 10% of its total today, when it started in 1995 it billed itself as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," and we are more likely to browse its virtual aisles. 

We also made the switch from paper to digital. Starting with my first Sony version to our current 11th generation Kindles, we swapped hard and soft covers for slim tablets that at last count have over 400 titles on each. Mind you, it's not so much a preference for the form and format – I still love the feel and smell of reading on paper – as much as a marriage of convenience. Besides simply running out of shelf space, the tablet enables me to carry multiple options when I travel in a fraction of the space. It also hurts way less when I drop it on my face as I fall asleep reading in bed.

All that means that our shelves are like a bug frozen in amber. Yet even as they ceased to expand I still loved our collection – the look, the smell, the colors, the shapes. They were a tangible representation of different worlds and ideas, covering a long history of crawling between the pages and losing myself. On our shelves are books I got from my dad and gifts from friends and family, not to mention a smorgasbord we acquired of fiction and biography, how-to and history. Our kids inherited the same bug, filling shelves in their rooms with their personal preferences, as well as pilfering select volumes from our main stash. And yes, between the two are well-thumbed copies of all seven Harry Potter novels, as well as several duplicates to cut down on the "My turn!"

Still, the time has come to start pruning that tree. Not that we have immediate or even not-so-immediate plans to go anywhere, but we know that sooner or later it behooves us to lighten our load. And in terms of volume and impact, the books are low hanging fruit: easy to pack, not accessed on any regular basis, not integral to our daily existence. And so I box up stories by Ken Haruf and biographies by Robert Caro, histories by David McCullough and thrillers by Jeffrey Archer. I hope they find a home with some inquisitive person even as I speculate they will more likely be sold for scrap by the pound. 

I won't lie: it hurts in a way that parting with a pair of old pants doesn't. We were brought up to treat books as revered objects, ones that offered us a chance to glimpse into worlds and minds that we admired. It's true that they were merely the carrier for ideas and not the ideas themselves; giving them away doesn't mean those thoughts are gone. Indeed, we have access to them almost instantly through a multitude of platforms, in a manner far easier than plucking a dusty tome from a shelf. Still, I'll keep a few as a way to remind myself of a more tangible way to visit a wider world.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford loves to read. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Chance Encounter

It's a paradox of today that we are both more connected and more isolated than ever before. Connected, because with just a few taps we can interact with anyone anywhere. In addition to family, friends and associates, there are those we know only as billy364 in Alabama and msgoldenhair in Albania. Isolated, because while our reach is infinitely wide it isn't very deep. Our interactions with those same people are generally limited and fleeting, with no development beyond a reflexive response. It's not as though we're going to have lunch once a month with bigbob301. Beyond an LOL or smiley face there's not much depth to the relationship.

So when I stepped onto the express train on the subway, the last thing I was expecting was to strike up a conversation with a total stranger. Even if you ride the tube just a few times you quickly learn the etiquette. Stare into space or look at your phone. Avoid as much physical contact as is practically possible. And beyond the occasional "excuse me" or "you dropped your glove," don't engage with others.

"Are you a fisherman?" asked the guy standing next to me near the door. He was dressed in shorts and a tee shirt and looked like a local vs. an obvious tourist, so his breach of decorum threw me even if the query was benign. "Nah, I just like these shirts." I was wearing what I call a travel shirt, but which many do prefer for angling: long sleeves, vented back, lightweight fabric, multiple pockets. He smiled: "Well, ya got the hat, too." Indeed, I was wearing a folding ball cap made of quick dry material. I smiled back: "It's good stuff for anywhere, as you never know how cold it will get in offices or airplanes, they wash easily, dry quickly, never need ironing."

I figured that was it, way more than your normal interaction. I assumed he would nod, then go back to reading the ads or pull out a phone to check his messages. But it continued: "Yeah I like to travel too. Try to get out 3 times a year." I raised my eyebrows: "That's pretty good. Where to?" assuming the response would be local or to visit kids. Nope, I was wrong. "All over. Bangkok, the Philippines, Europe. Depends on the weather." This guy was way beyond the Jersey shore for a long weekend.

We threw some destinations back and forth – "Yeah, we were there" and "That's on my list" – as we pulled into the next station. The doors opened, people surged out, and a new group surged in. He held his place by the door, while I was pushed across the car to the other side, a distance of six feet or so with four or five people between us. I assumed that was the end of it. But nope.

"We're aiming for Spain in a month, my daughter's going with us, while her mom is in Mexico." Of course he had to raise his voice a bit to be heard. You could see the people between us tense up as they wondered what the story was with this guy. But then I answered, and their heads swiveled. "Yeah, we were in Southern Spain in January. Great time!" "We're starting in Barcelona," he answered back. Me again: "Yup, been there years ago, that's a good bit north of where we were this time." Our audience now accepted that this was a conversation, and while we may have been annoying, we likely weren't dangerous. 

Over the roar of the train we continued: wine, weather, the best ways to get from one place to another. Some souls in the middle followed us like a tennis match, most just stared off into space, likely hoping the two us would stop jabbering. As with most things, though, it would eventually have to end. As the train slowed coming into the next stop, he nodded and smiled. "This is me. Safe travels on your next trip." I responded in kind as the doors open, and he stepped out going one way as I went the other.

No, I don't know his name or his politics, his favorite team or where he lives. Yes, I do know he enjoys travel, likes wine and enjoys swapping experiences. You can argue it was as superficial as many connections online. But this one came with a smile and a face, and that somehow made it sweeter.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford is happy to chat with anyone. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

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.

-END-

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?"

-END-

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!

-END-

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.

Forgotten Skills

It was the fourth day of a project in California, and I had driven between the hotel and the location at least six times, three times there and three times back. Not very far, it was a journey of maybe 15 minutes, barely 8 miles. There wasn't much to the directions: you turned right out of the parking lot, merged onto the main drag, and less than a quarter of an hour later turned left onto the access road of the facility where we were working. 

Still, force of habit had me plug my phone into the rental car so the map of the route popped up on the screen. It wasn't really needed, though one day I was rerouted to a side road because of "traffic." Turned out a light along the way had a slight glitch, leading to about 6 cars waiting patiently. Hailing from the New York City area, calling that traffic was laughable. 

On this morning, however, I plugged in as usual but couldn't connect. As I said, I was on the road, away from my usual instinctive routes, even if by now I knew this particular set of headings and didn't really need the guidance. No matter: I tried unplugging and replugging. No dice. The third time didn't prove to be a charm either. I'm embarrassed to say I sat there, contemplating if I should try and make the short journey without any digital assistance. One more attempt and it connected. Whew!

I've been driving for many years and was a boy scout long before that. I prided myself on my collection of gas station maps and my ability to get from one place to the next. But ever since mapping programs came out 20 or so years ago, that part of my brain has decided to take a holiday. Without the need to use it, and indeed learning that it was actually better to rely on the programs and let them route me around real traffic problems, it's a skill that has withered like a muscle after an accident.

It's no different from other "talents" which I took for granted that have dissipated as technology has proven more adept than my head (a low bar, but still). I can no longer remember most phone numbers without extreme concentration. My ability to do division or multiplication in my head beyond the simplest sets of numbers has vanished. My penmanship was always atrocious, but it's gotten even more illegible as I have no need to write anything on paper as opposed to peck it out. That's not to say I am incapable of doing any of these things. Should my phone and the internet go up in smoke tomorrow I could still get from here to there, still recall a few phone numbers, still total a restaurant bill and figure the tip, still scrawl a note. I just wouldn't be able to read it.

It's been like this throughout history. Most of us are pretty bad these days at hunting or growing our own food, at constructing shelter, at making our own clothes. Mind you, these were not specialized talents, but rather everyday competencies people needed in order to survive. Over time certain folks proved better at one or another, and so leveraged those abilities to build businesses and provide that service. Farmers and builders and tailors sprung up, and it became beneficial for both sides, one to make money as the supplier, the other to get better quality than they could do themselves as the consumer. 

The difference is that those skills weren't lost but farmed out to others; we as humans didn't forget them but rather shifted them. Were you interested in any of those talents you could relearn them by apprenticing to the masters of those domains. This time feels different. By ceding brain power to technology, we are giving those skills up to black boxes that remain opaque. As long as they do our bidding, no worries. But if not...

In the movie "WALL-E" humanity has progressed to where robots and machines take over virtually every task. The remaining population is obese and spends their days floating around aboard spaceships in comfy chairs. We're not there yet (we can't float and don't have that kind of spaceship) but perhaps we should start to relearn how to remember a phone number. And more.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford uses his phone for too much. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Big Car

Even though I was flying out very early on a Sunday morning, I got to the airport with a solid hour and change before my flight. You never know when the traffic enroute will be an issue, or the security line will be long, or the gate will be a 20-minute walk from the start of the terminal. And while I hate to kill time sipping overpriced coffee, I'd rather do that than go screaming down the concourse slaloming in and out of people as if I'm Lindsey Vonn.

That said, IF you travel, and IF you aren't too worried about privacy, and IF you have a smartphone, and IF you take the time to check all the options offered in your travel related apps, getting from here to there has become more and more frictionless. You can have a car pick you up (there's a log of where you were and where you are going), you can get through security in a flash (they have a scan of your face, not to mention all your key ID numbers), and in some places get onto the jetway the same way. That all seemed to fall into place on this trip, save for a last moment of hesitation at the touchless TSA Checkpoint. As I walked up to it and the computer scanned my face, I saw the agent looking puzzled. He called me over to see the picture just taken as compared to the one they had on file. I understood his confusion: I looked like I had aged 20 years between them, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt and let me pass.

The hands-off approach continued at the other end. I met a driver who was waiting for me when I landed (again, they tracked my location step by step as I walked through the terminal), and my hotel enabled a digital key so I could skip the front desk and go straight to my room (they certainly knew exactly where I was). The next day I realized that it would be easier have a rental car as opposed to depend on a service. No problem: my account enabled me to pick out a vehicle in advance and go right to it. However, signing into the app I was asked to update my account with a new credit card. I input the info, assuming that was all that was required to get the "skip the line" treatment to which I had become accustomed. 

Not so fast. Before it was willing to grant me preferred status it presented a new box to click. The header was "Connected Cars." I assumed that it was a reference to me "connecting" my phone to the car's infotainment system, which enabled me to use my maps and listen to my music. That's fine, but best practice is to delete that connection and any data when you return the vehicle. I figured this was a disclaimer covering the company from blame and damages in case I didn't do that housekeeping, and someone subsequently stole my info. 

Nope, it was the other way around. It was asking me to agree to let them "connect" to the car I was driving. That would enable them to do things like remotely unlock the doors should I lock the keys inside, and respond to sensors that might indicate I was in an accident. That's all good. But it also gave them permission to monitor my speed, my braking and other driving habits, as well as any cameras or audio. "Vehicle and personal data are collected, used, retained & disclosed," it said, for business purposes. Big Car could watch my every move. That's not so good.

While I had no intention of mistreating the vehicle, plotting a criminal enterprise while driving or using it to overthrow the government, I didn't see a good reason to grant them the OK to sit on my shoulder for the subsequent 3 days and several hundred miles. Yes, I have Google and Apple and Amazon products, all of which are monitoring me in various ways, so call me a hypocrite. But this just seemed like a drive too far. I bypassed that option, which put me back in the general population. And so you'll find me standing in line at the rental counter like a non-connected human.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford rents very basic vehicles His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Qualified?

There is no secret that it is a tough job market out there. The turmoil in the economy, coupled with the adoption of AI to do routine and entry level work, has combined to make companies skittish about adding new personnel, whether it be for expansion or just replacing existing positions. That doesn't mean there aren't jobs out there to be had, just that finding ones that fit your skillset for which you are a good match has become far more challenging than it has in years.

As always the best way of connecting with those opportunities is by, well, connecting. Networking is and as always has been the best way to at least get through the front door. While the original way to do that was to meet and greet friends, classmates and associates at parties, social events, and industry gatherings, it was inevitable that it would move online. Multiple platforms have sprung up such as Glassdoor, Monster and Indeed, but all are sandboxes compared to the big playground that is LinkedIn.

Preceding Facebook's predecessor by a year, the company was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman along with other buddies from his time at PayPal and Socialnet.com. The first major site devoted to professional interaction, it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26 billion. Like it or hate it, it has become a de facto job board and networking site for over a billion people.

While Facebook, Instagram, and other social media are optimized for the life side of that ever elusive work-life balance, LinkedIn is focused for other side of the teeter totter. People go there to see prospective employee qualifications, post accomplishments, as well as offer career and work advice. But while keeping abreast of others professional trajectories is nice, the most valuable feature for many is the "connections" listing. There you can see how many degrees of separation there are between you and a company or job of interest, and plot a path to make their acquaintance.

The site also seeks to keep you engaged by scanning your own qualifications, then matching them to opportunities that others post. Like Netflix's "if you liked this you might like that" algorithm, it purports to align your skillset with employers looking for people like you. And so to keep users engaged it sends out a steady stream of "you may be a fit for this one" notices. 

Indeed, as I type these words another has popped up on my own feed, with the headline "New recommended jobs based on your profile and activity." To a large extent they get it right. My background in media production matches me with job postings from such companies as Disney and Comcast, as well as other legacy and new media brands. In some cases it's a bit of stretch: I am a tech/production type, and design is not my forte. So "editor" or "producer" are in the 8-point match range, while "creative director" is in the zip code but a bit farther afield. (If you have doubt as to my design chops, one look at my office should convince you I am not droid you are looking for)

But one has to wonder if the site's matching criteria are as tight as they should be. While I am certainly the inquisitive sort, a potential match for me as a Special Agent with the FBI seems a bit of a miss. (I did have a "Get Smart" briefcase with spy tools as a kid, but it didn't really help me solve any crimes). And while I am pretty good at backing my car into the garage at home, a job as Ramp Operations Crew at the airport wouldn't seem to be based on any skills listed in my CV. Still, I've broken just one tail light over the years so perhaps I have potential with larger craft. And who wouldn't like to wave around those red wands?

Looked at another way, perhaps the site is trying to do me favor, by suggesting that my underlying talents would serve me well in branching out beyond my chosen career. Maybe I've been too parochial in my thinking, and not willing to consider the wider set of opportunities for which I might be suited. I used to do work for Kraft Foods, so maybe the job of "Cheese Associate" at a gourmet market in New York might be a good fit.  After all, it pays $23 an hour, and I know my cheddar.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford is not really looking for work anymore. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

The new smart watch I bought worked fine, but it "needed" a few accessories. A screen protector, an alternate band, and an extra charging cable to throw in my travel bag were a given. Wanting to give it a home each night, I poked around for a charging stand as well. But unlike the established models, this was a newer entry to the class from a niche manufacturer, and so the pickings were slim. 

I scanned a bunch of online message boards to see what others had found. Some pointed to a few bespoke 3D-printed creations on Etsy, but the shipping generally exceeded the cost of the actual item. Then I spotted one link from a user who had gotten a model manufactured for a similar watch which nonetheless worked. I took a look, and indeed, it seemed to be exactly what I wanted. To top it off it was listed at the bargain price of $2.70. Only one issue: it was in China.

Now, I do not profess to be an expert on global trade. Like most, I read the news and see the machinations about shipping and tariffs and blockades, but other than awareness I don't really know how it all works. For sure I see the effects as prices rise and fall, as the supply of certain items seems to dwindle, as merchants apologize for delivery delays or out-of-stocks. I know that China is a threat to us both militarily and economically, and that, whether you agree or disagree with the actions taken, goods coming to and from there are subject to all kinds of regulations and charges and penalties.

On the first issue, while it's possible this little 3-piece plastic nothing is a threat to natural security, I tend to doubt it. Yes, they could be hiding a virus inside a micro-miniaturized chip built into it that will infect my new watch, so that when I sync it to my computer it will reach through the internet and take down all of Google and Microsoft. Likely not. As to the second issue, between tariffs and the elimination of the de minimis exemption, I have seen how cheap little nothings get hit with prohibitively high additional charges. In one case the cost of a fun little keychain I found on the mainland to buy for a gift was just 59 cents, but it was saddled with a shipping cost of $59.41. I gave the person some candy instead. 

Back to the stand: while the price was right, there was the matter of the add-ons. Not expecting a positive outcome, I punched through to the "complete your purchase screen" so I could see the final tally. For sure, a tax was added; 23 cents. But on the line for customs and duties was big fat zero. Likewise for shipping: zip. So the grand total came to $2.93, expressed from Zhejiang, and guaranteed to be on my doorstep in 10 days or my money back. Hoping it wasn't a sting operation by the FBI to paint me as an undercover spy, I clicked "BUY."

Day by day, hour by hour, I got emails detailing the movement of my purchase. On April 4 at 23:03 it was being packed. It left the warehouse the next day, was received at the sorting center that evening, and was at the airport the day after that. It cleared export customs a day later, and was put on a plane at five in the morning. Some 16 hours later it landed on these shores, and a day later it cleared import customs. Eventually it got picked up by a courier, made its way into the US postal system, and showed up in my mailbox at 1:24PM on April 13, just 9 days after I clicked. The cost, including the product, advertising, processing the payment, taxes, duties, air freight from China, plus last mile delivery to my house in less than 10 days? A touch under three bucks.

Better minds than mine have done the calculations as to how this was a profitable sale. How this de minimus purchase escaped the regulations put in place just for this kind of transaction is probably explainable. And with all that is happening in the world, there is probably a reason that this supply chain was so smooth. Maybe someone can explain it all to me. But I think not.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford buys lots of little things. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Allbird in the Coal Mine?

Roughly forty-five years ago I moved to New York City to start life as a grown-up. It took me a while to find the best local takeout for pizza and sandwiches, and how to negotiate Chinatown. I had to learn the parks in my neighborhood that were devoid of tourists, as well as the best places to run that lacked traffic. And of course there were the logistics of city living, from how to use the subways and buses, to where to get a good bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. 

In the midst of all that my mom called to see how I was doing. A Jersey girl at heart and in practice, she always loved New York City, though her exposure to it was Radio City Music Hall, Broadway and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. To say her image of the city was a romanticized suburban one was putting it lightly. Still, she liked to read up on it and the high life she imagined it offered to her first born. In the midst of that discussion she passed on that she had just heard about the hottest clubs in town, to which I countered (with love), "Mom, no offense, but if you know about the hottest clubs in New York City, they are no longer the hottest clubs in New York City."

That recalled the famous quote attributed to Joe Kennedy, the father of JFK. The story goes that in the summer of 1929 Kennedy stopped to get his shoes shined on his way to his office. While the boy was buffing his shoes, he started giving Kennedy stock tips on which companies to buy. That led to an epiphany and his supposed utterance, "If shoeshine boys are giving stock tips, then it's time to get out of the market." Kennedy went back to his office and liquidated his portfolio, enabling him to not only survive the Great Crash, but to make a fortune by shorting the market afterward.

While research shows the story is likely more apocryphal than true, it's not wrong. Like my mom's tip, the point is that when people in the least likely position to know something authoritatively profess expertise, there's a good chance that whatever they are talking about is pretty much over and it is time look for the exits. Which brings us to current machinations of Allbirds. 

Founded in San Francisco in 2015, the company started out making sustainable, natural shoes on the crowd funding platform Kickstarter. Their variants were made of wool, and the company promoted itself as an all-natural, environmentally friendly brand. It expanded rapidly in both product line and reach, becoming a fad with well-known customers from Barack Obama to Leonardo DiCaprio. All that led to going public in 2021, with a valuation of about $4 billion. Almost immediately it started to crash, as complaints about its product and balance sheet led to lawsuits and management turnover. Fast forward to January of this year, when it closed all but 4 of its stores. Finally in March it sold its name, assets and intellectual property for less than $40 million, about 1% of its peak. For most companies, that would have been it.

But wait, there's more.

Barely one month after going belly up in the shoe world, the remaining corporate entity (which no longer owns the "Allbirds" brand) announced a new line of business. Rather than make eco-friendly footwear, they would pivot to their adjacent expertise of... wait for it... artificial intelligence. Rebranding itself as "NewBird AI," it raised $50 million from an unnamed institutional investor to acquire "high-performance GPU assets" to begin transitioning into a "fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service." Translation: it's going to buy and rent out AI level computing power to tech startups, competing with companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Though not an engineer, my assumption is that the amount of Merino wool in an Nvidia processor is low, but what do I know?

A shoe company plunges into the AI marketplace. If that doesn't raise a few flags as to where we are in the AI timeline I don't know what does. What's even harder to fathom is that some "unnamed institutional investor" thinks there is a chance for success. But stranger things have happened. Or as Yogi Berra commented when he found out about a Jewish man being elected mayor in Dublin, Ireland, "Only in America."

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford has given up trying to judge good ideas. Or not. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

A Better Fry

There's no shortage of depressing news. Gas prices? Up, and look to be that way for quite a while regardless of any settlement between the parties involved. AI? Good stuff, as long as a) you check carefully all its results for accuracy; b) you doubt everything you see lest it be generated vs. real; and c) you don't let it take over your accounts or your security or anything. Politics? Rather than being the art of coming together to improve people's lives it's devolved into cults and blood wars. Sure, we were able to send 4 people to orbit the moon, but that's just 4 people. To paraphrase the immortal words from people as disparate as Peter in Matthew 19:27, and Mr. Green in Guy Ritchie's 2005 film "Revolver," what's in it for us? 

What we need in these times is a feel-good story that cuts across party and class, nationality and ethnicity, sex and age. It has to affect each of us directly and individually, not in some abstract way that merely promises a better tomorrow. Thankfully in that quest there are scientists who are working on something other than Instagram improvements and better bands for your Apple Watch. Their results were just published in the journal "Current Research in Food Science" with the title "Predicting the quality changes during microwave frying of food biopolymers by solving the hybrid mixture theory-based unsaturated transport, and electromagnetics equations." In English they've figured out a way of making French Fries healthier.

We're talking food with near universal popularity, one that a recent 2025 survey reported garners the favorable view of about 82% of Americans. At the same time, there is also widespread recognition that they are not the healthiest item on the menu, as their high-calorie, fat, and salt content is associated with increased risks of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. So forget mouse traps: if you could figure out a way to make French Fries healthier, you can bet the world will beat a path to your door.

The scientists focused on the fact that, when you dunk potatoes in the fryer, water in their pores keeps the oil out for a time. But as that water evaporates the oil starts to soak in. If you could keep the water there for longer, the crisping could continue with less oil being absorbed, making them at least a little better for you. To keep that water in the potatoes longer they experimented with a combination of microwaving the spuds while frying, a method they call, well, microwave frying. According to a review of the study in Prevention magazine "Microwave frying also seems to create a thicker crust with less cooking time, leading to less oil," said Sandra Zhang, a registered dietitian nutritionist at Tufts Medical Center. "Microwave-cooked fries are then thought to be healthier because they will have less time sitting in frying oil and less oil content while preserving similar crispiness."

To be clear, this method makes the fries healthier; it doesn't make them a health food. Additionally, you can argue about the relative nutritional value of potatoes vs other similar starches such as corn or rice. But turn them into a side for a Big Mac, and you lose the battle: a small baked potato has 128 calories, while the same amount of fries has over 400. And that doesn't count the salt and other chemicals that high-temperature frying creates. Still, one has to bow to the reality in the ubiquitous consumption habits we have: Americans consume over 4.5 billion pounds annually, or roughly 17 to 30 pounds per person. And so while they may never rival blueberries, salmon or spinach, any movement in the right direction is good.

The bad news for implementation is that some new equipment will need to be designed and installed in food processors and restaurants. The good news is that the technology already exists, and so adoption is more a matter of desire and economics. As we've seen with the move to sugar-free over regular soda, and multi-grain and whole wheat over white flour, whether or not we push for healthier preparations will be driven by consumer demand. In the meantime, as associate professor Christen Cooper from Pace University says in the "Prevention" article," If you have fries every day, try to switch to baking or air frying them. If you eat fries on occasion, have the real thing."

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford prefers onion rings over fries. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Post Pre

Multi-tasking and random access may be fine for some, but for better or worse I have a very linear mind. I do best when I can see things on a continuum and do them in a particular order. I'm happiest if I can start at one place, move through whatever steps are required, and get to an eventual end point.  Doesn't matter if it's cooking, repair projects or exercise. Those who can juggle multiple things at one time, be it conversations or crime dramas, have my admiration even if they might lose me along the way.

The wider world is no different. Trying to understand all that is happening is difficult unless I (and perhaps other simple-minded souls) can place the current state-of-play on some kind of timeline. It's true the delineations are not always neat or definitive, but they can be instructive and helpful as a way of understanding the bigger forces at play. One can even argue that doing so is not just retrospective, in the sense of recording and reporting for the history books, but might also play some role in nudging us in certain directions. After all, if you say the world is no longer pre-AI but thick in the middle of it, you might be more likely to take ChatGPT out for a spin. 

This is easily seen in technology: we are "post" smartphones, iPads and search engines. That doesn't mean that they are gone, just that they have lost their shine. At one point each was cutting edge, and only the cool kids and tech-nerds were using them. Now each is so ubiquitous as to be wallpaper. We don't even think about trying new iterations because each seems to have matured and reached the limit as to what it can do. And so rather than use Google to list vacation spots, we ask Gemini to design a week-long trip to Ireland. However, we (or at least me) are "pre" the "agentic" version of the same, where we make Claude our agent, hand it our credit card and say "book it." It's starting to happen in some situations, though you best check that it's not snagging you a reservation in Little Italy as opposed to Real Rome.

You can apply the same sorting to almost anything. Take finance: we are post ATM's and credit cards, while deep into alternative payment platforms and tap-to-pay. You can argue crypto should be in that "today" bucket, but other than as an instrument for speculation and dark money exchanges (read that as "criminal"), no one has figured out an actual use case for it. While it has its proponents, most of us can mark everyday adoption and ubiquitous use of our bitcoin wallet as "pre", and the whole thing may explode before it ever gets there.

It's no different in other fields. In medicine we're post organ transplant, pre cloning replacements in the lab. In space we're post orbital outpost and pre Mars settlement. We are post electric cars and pre flying ones, post plant-based meat and pre the manufactured variety, post solar and pre fusion. And depending on what side of the fence you are on we're either post or pre our best years as a country, and your perception will likely flip at the next election.

Of course, we each have our own timelines as well, ones that are more granular than global. I am at that awkward stage of post ambitious yet pre retirement. On a more personal level my vision is post 20-20, my knees post flexible, and I'm way post sleeping through the night. The good news is, at least as of this writing, I am pre non-spicy foods, pre mechanical assistance to walk and pre always needing a sweater. I don't believe I will ever be post nap; the only pre for that activity may be length and frequency. And depending on the situation, who I am with and the way I feel that day, I am both post and pre acting my age 

With all that's happening in the world, some say we are becoming post hope and post optimistic. While I'm not ignoring the bigger picture, it's easy to fall into that hole and wallow in it. And so I will do what I can, while at the same time remembering that I am pre the next concert, pre the next lunch with friends, and pre my next ice cream sundae.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford is always trying to classify things. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Robo Be The Judge

 Let me say at the outset that I'm not a baseball fanatic. I have no favorite team, can't recite any statistics, know the names of just a few storied players, and have only a passing knowledge of the state of play today. That said, like most American males who grew up in the sixties, I do have some familiarity with the game and rules. I played in Little League, eventually coached the same, watched games on TV and have gone to the occasional one in person. Yes, I did watch Game 7 of last year's World Series, because how many times does that happen, and it was a great contest even if you had no dog in the fight. I would characterize my relationship with The Show as I do with all sports: mild interest and curiosity. Certainly I don't have the same level of commitment to it as I do to naps and chunky peanut butter.

Still, it's hard not to be aware of the seismic change that happened this spring, as robo umpiring has been introduced to the majors. Officially called the "Automated Ball-Strike System" or ABS, it's the same technology used in tennis, soccer and others. It relies on a series of high-speed cameras spread around the stadium that track the ball in space. As needed, those images are compared with a preset set of parameters: in tennis, it's the lines on the court, in soccer it's the goal line. In seconds, that image can be shown to the officials and indeed everyone watching the match or game, to see if a ball is in or out, a goal or not. 

The challenge in baseball is a little different as the strike zone varies, based as it is on individual players and not a physical line on the field. While the width hasn't changed (17", the width of home plate), prior to ABS the high and low was defined as follows: "the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap." In short, letters to knees, but the wiggle room was obvious, not to mention the umpire's judgement. 

No more: ABS defines that zone empirically as being between 27% and 53.5% of a player's listed height, regardless of how they crouch at the plate. And players couldn't just report how tall they were. They were measured a minimum of two times by lasers and by hand. All measurements took place between 10AM and noon, with players standing straight up with no shoes or baseball caps, and with the measuring tool pressed against the head if a player had thick hair. No fudging the results as you do balancing on the edge of your bathroom scale in the morning.

So far it's been a success, though players, managers, officials and fans are still getting used to it. It's likely that, as with all technology, the more it gets used and accepted, the more it will spread beyond professional sports to us civilians. Just as the space program helped to popularize and normalize everything from cordless power tools to freeze-dried foods to GPS, it's only a matter of time before a robo judge and its unyielding standards gets applied to our day-to-day routines. 

All those things you used to slant in your favor will now be subject to an empirical measurement. The alarms will go off if you even approach the express lane at the supermarket with more than 10 items. Amazon won't let you select a bathing suit if just you "hope" you'll fit into it. And that bathroom scale balancing? Forget it. You'll just walk in to brush your teeth in the morning, and your weight will pop up on the mirror. Cue the gnashing of teeth now.

It is worth noting that, at least at this point, in the big leagues the human behind the plate gets first crack at the call, and the automatic system is only invoked if the pitcher, catcher or batter thinks the ump blew it. In fact, in one early game, Umpire CB Bucknor was challenged 8 times in a single game, with 6 calls overturned. That presages the obvious, a time when the equation flips, and the machines take over with the humans checking them if needed.

You can bet that life will eventually imitate sport. Blanche DuBois may have depended on the kindness of strangers, but soon enough you won't get that chance. You can smile and plead all you want, but before long when you tell it to the judge, you'll have to make sure you are speaking into its microphone.

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford was an enthusiastic, though not skilled coach. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Try to Remember

I've had to prove I'm human, and I've had to prove I'm me, and the good news is I passed both tests. Because of that prowess I have been permitted to engage with the wider world in terms of buying things from merchants, signing up for offers from various institutions and registering for different group opportunities. And I get it. Each of those operations wants to keep at bay the army of bots being fielded by greedy scammers, diabolical political powers and enemy states trying to gain access. After all, we can't let a bunch of derelicts in WherethehellamIstan take down the economy by placing an order for 10 million lawn sprinklers from Amazon.

But as we are reminded on an almost hourly basis, AI is coming for us all, and it works as well for evil as it does for good. And so it's only a matter of time until ChatGPT and its ilk can fake being a person by selecting all the pictures that have bicycles, or sorting the flowers from the bushes. Of course, it can already do that way faster than I can, but its lack of a physical hand to move the little squares around on my screen is a limiting factor. For now. 

As to the mechanics of proving I'm me, I still have the edge, at least for the moment. In one grubby hand I have my keyboard, and in the other, my phone. When I type on one it sends a code to the other. Match the two up, and unless Claude is sitting behind me holding a mouse to my head, I can verify that the person in the middle is indeed moi.

Go a little deeper than a simple verification, however, and we start to hit a problem. That's because the older I get, the bigger the data set is that defines me. More experiences, more connections, more stuff in my life, all of it adding up to the picture of who I am. By its very design, AI excels at crawling and extracting bits and pieces from that information. But I am exactly the opposite: as my dossier gets bigger and bigger, I not only have issues accessing that information, I'm lucky if I remember any specific piece of it at all. Yet that was the challenge that confronted me when I needed to move some accounts around. On a theoretical level I think it's great that the bank didn't want to just take my word for it that I am me; on a practical level that's where the rub occurred.

I was presented not with pictures of buses on the street or a texted code to my phone, but a series of queries based on, well, me. Given the public data points that are floating around out there, it's not hard to scrape the internet and come up with a series of challenges which I should have been able to confirm or deny. Certainly, Grok or Poe or Gemini could parse it seconds, scanning the many years of phone numbers, motor vehicle records, and LinkedIn listings that might contain a passing mention of my name. But me? I can barely recall what shirt I wore on Monday, let alone where I lived in 1969.

But that type of thing was asked of me not once, but half a dozen times. "Was the color of a Toyota you once owned brown, green, or blue?" Uhm, it was never really washed, so hard to recall. "Which of these six phone numbers was once yours?" I can barely remember my number now, let alone one from 1982. "Did you know any of these five different people?" Maybe. "Which of the following corporations have you ever been associated with?" Either my dementia is more advanced than I thought, or "none of the above" is actually the correct answer to that one.

Thankfully, I have retained just enough knowledge about myself (at least at this point) to pass the exam. Going forward, however, I will have to study up before I contact the bank again, and go through old photo albums and yearbooks to jog my memory. That said, if they really wanted to confirm it was me, they should as ask me the stuff that swirls much more readily in my head: song lyrics, joke punchlines, movie one-liners: "Have fun storming the castle!"

-END-

Marc Wollin of Bedford is sure he is who he thinks he is, he just can't prove it. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.