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[Jon Koplik] WSJ : Fifth Third Bank / Comerica merger / big question : Beans or no beans ? ...

Jon Koplik — 7/6/2026 9:50:25 AM

WSJ : Fifth Third Bank / Comerica merger / big question : Beans or no beans ? ...............................

WSJ

July 6, 2026

Two Banks Agreed to Merge. They Can’t Agree on How to Make Chili.

Fifth Third’s acquisition of regional bank Comerica has leaders confronting a dicey question: Beans or no beans?

A Fifth Third employee at a Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, where people like the meat stew over spaghetti.

By Ben Glickman

Big corporate tie-ups are always delicate affairs, involving integrating systems, replacing signs and branding and making sure a newly combined workforce gets along.

But a nearly $11 billion bank deal last year has an added sticking point: chili recipes.

Following Cincinnati lender Fifth Third’s acquisition of Texas-based Comerica Bank, employees from different regions have clashed over the best way to make the dish.

“We got a little bit of an internal civil war here between people who like their chili with beans, no beans or on spaghetti,” Fifth Third Chief Executive Tim Spence told Wall Street analysts in April. “So that we’re going to have to solve before we can truly say we’re one company.”

The meat of the issue: Cincinnatians have specific preferences when it comes to chili. Restaurants in the Ohio metropolis famously serve the meat stew on top of spaghetti or ladled over the top of a hot dog with a huge amount of shredded cheese, a version called a “cheese coney.”

Cincinnati is known for both the spaghetti version and for serving chili ladled over a hot dog with tons of shredded cheese.

Texans are known for their thick, beefy version with no beans and definitely no tomatoes. Chili is believed to have its roots in Mexican cuisine and was popular in the 19th century as a cheap and portable source of protein for cowboys. It’s been the official state dish since 1977.

Spence’s first inkling that chili would be an issue came in his first town hall in Houston after the deal was announced. A Comerica employee asked the chief if he prefers chili with beans or without.

He declined to answer.

He decided to address the issue head-on in the next earnings call, saying he was trying to inject some fun into what can be a tedious integration process. He didn’t anticipate the response.

After the call, analyst Brian Finneran launched an informal poll on his Bloomberg Terminal in which he queried investors and analysts about their preferences. “Who puts chili on spaghetti?” one responded. “Chili with spaghetti is my only bear case,” another wrote. One respondent said the bank was undervalued when it came to price to tangible bean value.

The reaction prompted Spence to tell Marketing Chief Melissa Stevens they had to organize a bank-wide contest.

Spence is no chili novice.

CEO Tim Spence said the acquisition has sparked ‘a little bit of an internal civil war’ over how chili should be served.

When he arrived at Fifth Third as chief strategy officer over a decade ago and first addressed his team, someone asked Spence about his preferred Cincinnati chili joint. Spence, who grew up in Oregon, had begun making the rounds of local spots and identified his early favorite. The team approved. “Immediate insider cred,” he said.

Last year, when Fifth Third’s senior management team held its first chili cook-off, Spence finished second. His recipe in the competition excluded beans but doubled up on onions.

Curt Farmer, the Texas-based former CEO of Comerica and now vice chair at Fifth Third, said Texans are more likely to take up arms in defense of their barbecue style, but chili is a close second. Texans, he said, wouldn’t consider a dish made up of ground beef, beans and tomatoes to be chili.

While meeting with Fifth Third employees in the Cincinnati area, Farmer has been repeatedly asked if he likes Cincinnati chili -- and if so, how he likes it prepared. His introduction to Cincinnati chili was a “three-way” -- spaghetti, chili and a large amount of shredded cheese. The verdict? “I really like it.”

The connections with chili run deep at Fifth Third.

The largest Cincinnati-style restaurant chain, Skyline Chili, is preparing to open a flagship location in the Fifth Third headquarters. Skyline CEO Dick Williams said he considers Spence a friend, and that the bank wanted more dining options as it moved more employees back to its downtown footprint.

Lifelong Texan Peter Sefzik, formerly of Comerica and now head of wealth and asset management for Fifth Third, relocated to Cincinnati several months ago. When friends and colleagues urged him to try Cincinnati chili, he didn’t understand what they meant.

He and his family tried Skyline soon after moving. He ordered a “chilito,” which is chili and cheese wrapped in a tortilla (spaghetti and sour cream are optional). He says he loved it. “I can eat a tortilla any time of the day. So, perfect for me.”

Skyline’s Dick Williams (gray jacket) talks with Fifth Third’s Spence (brown jacket) and Peter Sefzik (right).

Spence views the chili debate as a way of bringing together two cultures.

As with most merger integrations, layoffs have followed: Fifth Third has cut several hundred positions in Michigan and Texas, and has closed some branches in Michigan.

Spence is already sketching out the contours of a bank-wide contest, where different regions will nominate their champions to compete in a final round of taste-testing.

Employees across the country will be able to nominate judges. Results will be binding; bragging rights last until the next competition.

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[Jon Koplik] SFGate -- latest re : Las Vegas' famous "Heart Attack Grill" .....................

Jon Koplik — 5/19/2026 9:25:40 PM

SFGate -- latest re : Las Vegas' famous "Heart Attack Grill" .................................................

Food

May 18, 2026

Las Vegas' famous Heart Attack Grill sends scathing closure notice

Ownership says 'the soul of Las Vegas has been replaced by corporate greed'

By Farley Elliott
SoCal Bureau Chief

A famous, and often controversial, Las Vegas restaurant has said a sudden goodbye after more than a dozen years in Downtown Las Vegas. Heart Attack Grill, known the world over for its unabashedly large stunt food menu and over-the-top pro-gluttony stance, has closed its longtime home, and what comes next remains to be seen.

Prominently located on the rounded corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street, the downtown area’s busy pedestrian thoroughfare, Heart Attack Grill earned global fame for its unique theme. The restaurant positioned itself as a parody of a medical center, including servers who dressed as nurses and called customers “patients,” while leaning into a happily unhealthy menu of burgers, hot dogs and fried food. Diners wearing doctor’s office gowns were encouraged to order giant meals, including the Octuple Bypass burger with eight half-pound burger patties (with room for add-ons like 40 bacon slices), and were admonished loudly by staff for not finishing all of their food. Customers who weighed over 350 pounds -- and were willing to prove it by standing on a scale in the dining room -- ate for free.

In February 2013, a 52-year-old frequent customer and occasional spokesperson for Heart Attack Grill, John Alleman, died of an apparent heart attack in front of the restaurant, giving the place even more grim global notoriety.

Now, owner Jon Basso has told SFGATE that Heart Attack Grill’s time has come at the current location, which dates to 2011. “Las Vegas has priced the regular middle-class person out of the opportunity of having a good time,” Basso responded when reached by email. “Our customer base [is] predominantly regular people. The Heart Attack Grill needs to move to a new location.”

On its website, Heart Attack Grill said that it “will not be renewing its long-term lease,” adding that “the soul of Las Vegas has been replaced by corporate greed.” Basso told SFGATE that the restaurant is “already closed” permanently.

“I’m certainly not trying to knock Las Vegas as a community,” Basso said when asked about his statement. “I am only telling the honest truth about the tourist sector. It has become as shortsighted of a business model as I can possibly conceive of.” Basso said that he will continue to run his other Las Vegas-area businesses, drive-thru stand Snappy’s Burger and a drive-in movie theater.

“I love the people here, I just hate what the major corporations have done to the economy,” Basso added.

Basso said that he is actively looking for “investors and landlord” for spaces across the country. Previously, Basso operated Heart Attack Grill locations in Arizona, Texas and on the Las Vegas Strip.

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[Jon Koplik] Mass. also does not allow lotto ticket numbers to be your picks for the main 5 n...

Jon Koplik — 1/25/2026 11:40:20 PM

Mass. also does not allow lotto ticket numbers to be your picks for the main 5 numbers, but with a random "quick pick" for the 6th number (the Powerball, or the Mega Ball.)

How this can possibly "protect" Massachusetts residents . . . is a mystery, to me.

Jon.

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[DWB] That's bizarre... and another good reason to move to Texas... DWB

DWB — 1/25/2026 11:12:55 PM

[Jon Koplik] In Massachusetts : against the law, to have helpful long gas things.

Jon Koplik — 1/25/2026 11:05:59 PM

[DWB] Not sure how many people know this, but modern pumps have gas lines that allow t...

DWB — 1/25/2026 10:31:13 PM

Not sure how many people know this, but modern pumps have gas lines that allow them to extend to the opposite side of most cars, so it doesn't really matter which side of the pump you pull up to. I see long lines at Costco for the pumps accessing the left side of a car, but I pull up to the other side, stretch the line over the back/rear of my car, and start pumping away.

DWB

[Jon Koplik] The [ 1960s ] Star Trek Prop You Didn't Realize Came From Gilligan's Island .......

Jon Koplik — 1/19/2026 2:34:26 PM

The [ 1960s ] Star Trek Prop You Didn't Realize Came From Gilligan's Island .........................

TV Line

Jan. 18, 2026

By Valerie Ettenhofer

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[ note from Jon -- use this link :

tvline.com

to see some good photos that did not copy, here. ]

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Decades before the advent of CGI, much less the soaring budgets that became the norm in the 21st century television, "Star Trek" had to make Gene Rodenberry's vision work with an old school TV budget and limited special effects. Even as one of the best TV shows of the 1960s, that still meant entire planet sets looked liable to blow away in a strong breeze, aliens of the week often seemed suspiciously familiar, and sometimes a good prop or costume got recycled for more use.

In one case, it even meant borrowing an outfit from "Gilligan's Island."

The costume in question appeared in the Halloween-themed holiday episode of "Star Trek: The Original Series," a silly and spooky Season 2 outing titled "Catspaw." Like much of Gene Roddenberry's flagship series, the episode largely focuses on the Enterprise crew trying to figure out what the heck is going on while visiting a strange planet. Unlike the rest of "Star Trek," though, "Catspaw" delivers plenty of Earth-like gothic elements for the October season, including a trio of witches, a black cat, a crumbling castle, and a mysterious man wearing a robe that some eagle-eyed early TV fans may have recognized.
Gilligan's Fairy Godfather shares a wardrobe with Star Trek's Korob

[ photo ] Korob and Gilligan wear the same robe in Star Trek: The Original Series and Gilligan's Island

Korob (Theo Marcuse) was the villain of the week's name, and his game involved gathering knowledge about humankind through trickery, confusion, and a bunch of "Scooby-Doo"-style scares. The episode is good fun, even if it doesn't deliver any of the most memorable "Star Trek" moments. Korob sports a dazzling, metallic green and yellow magician's robe and a transmuter device disguised as a magic wand. Emblazoned with an image of a shining eyeball surrounded by sun-like rays, Korob's outfit reads less "alien undercover as an Earthling's idea of a warlock" and more "mid-century secret society costume party," but that's probably because it was originally used nine months earlier on "Gilligan's Island."

In that tropical setting, the robe was worn by a goatee-wearing Gilligan (Bob Denver) himself in the episode "Lovey's Secret Admirer." It served as one of the centerpieces of a dream sequence, with Gilligan appearing as the Fairy Godfather to an anxious Mrs. Howell (Natalie Schafer), who imagines herself in the role of Cinderella. While "Catspaw" is a horror-tinged story with a few good scares (that Enterprise voodoo doll!), the "Gilligan's" episode, "Lovey's Secret Admirer," is sweet and silly. The Cinderella dream reminds Mrs. Howell how much she has to be grateful for.

Though the origin of this specific robe isn't public knowledge at this time, the blog Costuming, Cosplay & Costume Clubs 101 points out that such costume sharing wasn't particularly uncommon at the time. The real magic trick here is one of artistry and resourcefulness in those fast-moving early TV days, wherein a beautifully gaudy costume disappears from the spotlight, only to pop back up when you least expect it . . . on a mysterious, distant planet.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ on little car dashboard indicator / which side of car is gas tank ? ...........

Jon Koplik — 1/19/2026 12:36:20 AM

WSJ on little car dashboard indicator / which side of car is gas tank ? .......................................

WSJ

Jan. 2, 2026

The Genius Whose Simple Invention Saved Us From Shame at the Gas Station

On a rainy day in Detroit, a Ford engineer got confused, then soaked -- and inspired. It took decades before he got any credit.

By Ben Cohen

Unless you worked for Ford’s plastics, paint and vinyls division in the 1980s, you probably don’t know the name Jim Moylan.

But you might well know the idea that made this unknown engineer who recently died into one of America’s greatest inventors.

One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.

Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.

“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.”

The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on.

“Based on personal experience,” he wrote, “I feel that this little indicator would remove the guesswork of which side I want to park.” He continued: “For the minor investment involved on the company’s part, I think it would be a worthwhile convenience.”

Once he sent it, he had no clue if anything would ever come of his suggestion.

“I typed it up and turned it in,” Moylan said in a 2018 podcast, “and forgot completely about it.”

The executives of the Ford Motor Company didn’t.

The original 1986 memo from James Moylan suggesting the addition of a fuel-door indicator.

As soon as they read his memo, they began prototyping his little indicator that would be known as the Moylan Arrow. Within months, it was on the dashboard of Ford’s upcoming models. Within years, it was ripped off by the competition. Before long, it was a fixture of just about every car in the world.

What began as an idea when one person got rained on became a simple and brilliant invention that would reach billions of people.

“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me. “I would argue that Jim Moylan is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large company who insisted on making our daily lives better.”

These days, there are two types of drivers: the ones aware of the Moylan Arrow and the ones who get to find out.

Some people learn what it is and why it’s there when they get their licenses. Others might be learning right now that there’s an arrow next to the pump on the fuel gauge that shows which side of the car the gas tank is on. Once you see it, it makes so much sense that you can’t believe you’ve spent your entire life without knowing it exists.

And when you realize that someone actually conceived of that arrow, you find yourself agreeing with a TikTok user who once declared: “The man who came up with this symbol is a complete and utter genius.”

That man was Jim Moylan, who died last month at the age of 80. When I came across his obituary, I called his family members and Ford to hear more about who he was -- and how he pointed so many people in the right direction.

Jim Moylan at a drafting board at Ford in the late 1970s.

Before he was hailed as a genius, Moylan grew up in Detroit as the youngest of six children. Like their father, most of them worked at Ford.

He began his 35-year career at the iconic American automaker in 1968 as a draftsman and retired as a product engineering design supervisor in 2003. Along the way, he went back to school at night and earned his college degree to get a promotion, did a stint in Japan, got laid off during the oil crisis and picked up work as a milkman and other odd jobs to make ends meet until he was hired back. He also developed a professional obsession with instrument panels.

“What the rest of the world calls dashboards,” he once said.

Whatever you call it, that location right behind the wheel is where Moylan left his mark.

It all started when he stepped in one of the pool cars that Ford employees drove around campus. Since it wasn’t his vehicle, he didn’t know where the fuel tank was. But when the gas light turned on, so did a lightbulb over his head. After driving to the wrong side of the pump, it occurred to Moylan that a simple graphic on the dashboard could save others from his mistake. Fueled by a desire to solve real problems, he figured this information would be especially useful for rental-car customers and families with multiple cars -- and Ford employees in pool cars.

After this flash of insight, he pitched his idea in April 1986 and a manager quickly sent his memo up the Ford hierarchy.

“I think the attached Product Convenience Suggestion is worth your consideration,” he wrote.

They agreed. The company’s internal records show that his suggestion entered product development by August. In November, Moylan received a note from Ford’s director of interior design.

“We think it is a great idea,” the executive wrote, “and we are planning to implement it on the 1989 model year instrument panel.”

His official reward was an invitation to visit the company’s Interior Design Studio, a rare treat that was the Ford equivalent of touring the Wonka factory.

But for Moylan, the real prize was seeing his idea come to life.

The first sign of it was on page 23 of the brochure for the 1989 Ford Thunderbird, which revealed a subtle feature on the car’s instrument panel: a white arrow.

The dashboard of the 1989 Thunderbird, with the newly implemented arrow indicator below the fuel gauge.

That arrow was soon the envy of the automobile industry. When new car models roll off the assembly line, they are immediately picked apart and reverse-engineered by the competition. In this case, Ford’s rivals didn’t have to poke around under the hood to find its latest hack. Moylan’s idea was right in front of them for anyone to see.

Now it can be found in almost every car with a gas tank -- and even the cars without one.

When I spoke with his daughter Elizabeth, she was in a fitting place: her Ford car. One of his three children, she told me about her father as she drove home from his memorial service in a F-150 Lightning. Right next to the battery icon on the dashboard was a Moylan Arrow. It pointed to the side of her electric truck with the charging port.

In the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup, the arrow next to the battery symbol points drivers to the truck's charging port.

As his idea spread far beyond Ford, Moylan never asked for a patent, financial compensation or any type of credit whatsoever. His glorious innovation was celebrated by industry publications like Autoweek (“rumor has it Ford got this better idea from the many rental cars it sells”) and Automobile (“I think warm, kind thoughts about the unsung genius who got this splendid improvement through the system every time I drive a Ford”), but he was never acknowledged by name.

Then came another chance event -- and this one didn’t involve getting rained on.

In 2018, a listener of the Every Little Thing podcast became curious about the delightfully practical arrow in his car and asked the show to figure out who was responsible for this particular little thing. When the investigation focused on Ford, the podcast called the Henry Ford museum for assistance. As it happens, the woman in the press office who picked up that call was friends with Moylan’s daughter Elizabeth, who once worked at the museum. By sheer coincidence, the press officer knew exactly who was responsible.

Moylan’s interview with the podcast was the first time he ever got public recognition for his idea.

But it wasn’t the last time. A few years later, Ford accelerated a project to scan its historical collections, said Ted Ryan, the company’s archives and heritage brand manager. Once researchers could easily search through a century of paper, they could excavate gems that were buried in the corporate -- archives like Moylan’s original memo. And when they discovered it, the typewritten document was tweeted out by none other than Ford’s CEO.

In fact, Farley told me he thinks of Jim Moylan every time he looks at his gas gauge.

Moylan was proud of his arrow and flattered by the attention, but he didn’t seek it out for himself.

Every now and then, he watched people pull into the gas station and slink back in the car for their drive of shame. If they seemed friendly, he approached these strangers and told them about the arrow on the dashboard that could help. What he would never do is mention how it ended up there.

But others did it for him, including the deacon who led his memorial service.

“Heavenly father,” he said, “I don’t know what kind of a car you drive -- or if you have a driver.” As the room laughed, he went on: “Jim will always know which side to pull in and fill up.”

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

Copyright © 2026 Dow Jones & Company.

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[Jon Koplik] Bald eagle drops cat through car windshield on North Carolina highway, driver sa...

Jon Koplik — 11/24/2025 10:27:15 PM

Bald eagle drops cat through car windshield on North Carolina highway, driver says ................................

CBS News

November 21, 2025

Bald eagle drops cat through car windshield on North Carolina highway, driver says

By Lucia Suarez Sang

A driver in North Carolina told emergency responders that a bald eagle dropped a cat that crashed through her windshield, police said.

The incident happened around 8:15 a.m. Wednesday on U.S. Route 74 in Swain County, North Carolina Highway Patrol said. The driver was not injured.

Highway patrol did not provide additional information.

A photo shared by officials showed the car's broken windshield with a massive hole.

A driver in North Carolina says her car windshield was smashed after a bald eagle dropped a cat it was carrying.

In a 911 call, obtained by CBS News, the driver told the dispatcher that the cat probably did not survive.

"OK, you may not believe me, but I just had a bald eagle drop a cat through my windshield," the 911 call said, according to WLOS. "It absolutely shattered my windshield."

The driver told the dispatcher that another person also saw the cat drop, remarking, "He's like, 'That is the craziest thing I've ever seen.' I'm like, 'Really?'"

The dispatcher offered some assurance, saying, "Oh my goodness. Let's see. I've heard crazier."

"Well, that's terrifying," the caller said, to which the dispatcher replied with, "Yeah."

Bald eagles are predatory birds that can stand up to 3 feet tall and have a wingspan stretching more than 8 feet. They weigh between 8 to 14 pounds and can typically carry things between 3 to 5 pounds. Bald eagles are native to North Carolina and most of North America.

Domestic cats are about 2 feet long and weigh between 5 to 20 pounds. While bald eagles can carry smaller cats, they are not a common prey for the bird.

In 2019, a large catfish crashed through a woman's windshield in North Carolina after reportedly getting dropped by a flying bird.

Kendrick Weeks, Western Wildlife Diversity Program supervisor for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, told the Associated Press the cat dropped on the car could have been roadkill scavenged by the eagle.

"But they can take animals the size of a cat," he said. "It is much harder for them to take a live cat than a dead cat. They usually don't prey on something they don't find palatable. And, scavenging is a common behavior in bald eagles."

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[Jon Koplik] An "airborne" fish sparked brush fire in British Columbia, Canada .................

Jon Koplik — 8/3/2025 11:17:00 PM

An "airborne" fish sparked brush fire in British Columbia, Canada ....................................

firstpost.com

How an 'airborne' fish sparked brush fire in British Columbia

FP News Desk •

August 3, 2025

Following the firefighting efforts, investigators turned their attention to the cause of the fire. Surprisingly, it wasn’t faulty equipment that sparked the flames -- it was a fish.

A photo provided by Ashcroft Fire Rescue shows a fish found in a brush fire last week in British Columbia.

In a bizarre turn of events, a small brush fire and power outage in British Columbia on Wednesday (July 30) were traced back to an unlikely source: a fish.

According to fire officials, the incident began not with lightning or a careless camper, but with an airborne fish dropped by an osprey.

The blaze, which scorched less than an acre, was quickly contained and extinguished thanks to the swift response of Ashcroft Fire Rescue, with assistance from nearby ranchers and employees from the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority.

Following the firefighting efforts, investigators turned their attention to the cause of the fire. Surprisingly, it wasn’t faulty equipment that sparked the flames -- it was a fish.

Authorities believe an osprey, a fish-eating bird of prey, was flying overhead when it dropped its catch mid-flight.

The fish struck power lines, producing sparks that ignited dry grass below, triggering the fire.

The nearest river, likely where the osprey nabbed its prey, is roughly two miles from the fire scene, leaving officials puzzled about why the bird released its meal.

Ashcroft Fire Rescue offered a possible explanation on their Facebook page, suggesting that the size of the fish, combined with the heat that day, “probably caused the rather tired bird to drop its catch.”

They also floated a more whimsical theory: “It’s tired of raw fish and wanted to give cooked a try.”

The incident temporarily disrupted electricity in Ashcroft, a village of over 1,500 residents located about 210 miles northeast of Vancouver. As for the osprey, firefighters noted that “our prime suspect sustained no injuries in the incident and is still flying at large.” The fish, however, wasn’t so fortunate, ending up charred and likely overcooked.

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[Jon Koplik] BBC -- Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered .....................

Jon Koplik — 4/1/2025 12:38:41 AM

BBC -- Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered ............................

BBC News

March 31, 2025

Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered

Loch Ness expert Adrian Shine said it was remarkable that the camera had survived 55 years in the loch

An underwater camera set up 55 years ago to try and photograph the Loch Ness Monster has been found by accident by a robot submarine.

The ocean-going yellow sub - called Boaty McBoatface - was being put through trials when its propeller snagged the mooring for the 1970s camera system.

It is believed it was lowered 180m (591ft) below the loch's surface by the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, a group set up in the 1960s to uncover the existence of Nessie in the waters.

No footage of Nessie has been found on the camera, but one of the submarine's engineers was able to develop a few images of the loch's murky waters.

The camera was protected inside a glass container.

The camera was put into the loch in the 1970s

Boaty McBoatface has been used in trials in Loch Ness

Adrian Shine, of The Loch Ness Project - which has been researching the loch since the 1970s, helped to identify the camera.

He said it was likely to be one of six deployed. Three were lost in the loch during a gale.

Mr Shine said: "It was an ingenious camera trap consisting of a clockwork Instamatic camera with an inbuilt flash cube, enabling four pictures to be taken when a bait line was taken.

"It is remarkable that the housing has kept the camera dry for the past 55 years, lying more than 130m (426ft) deep in Loch Ness."

No sign of Nessie was found on the camera's film

The film and camera have been handed over to an exhibition centre

The UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC) has been carrying out trials of marine autonomous underwater vehicles for almost 10 years.

NOC's Matt Kingsland said: "At 230m (754ft) deep, Loch Ness is an ideal location to testing our robotics, their sensors and systems, before they're deployed in the deep ocean to help answer the big questions we have.

"While this wasn't a find we expected to make, but we're happy that this piece of Nessie hunting history can be shared and perhaps at least the mystery of who left it in the loch can be solved."

The film, camera and its housing have been handed to The Loch Ness Centre, in Drumnadrochit, near to where it was found.

A member of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau works on a film camera in the hills above the loch in 1966

Robot Boaty McBoatface got its name following an online initiative in 2016 in which the public was asked to suggest a name for a new polar ship.

Boaty McBoatface was the suggestion that gained most support.

UK government ministers rejected this as inappropriate, and ordered that ship be called RRS Sir David Attenborough. It was decided, however, that one of its robot submarines could be named Boaty McBoatface.

Copyright © 2025 BBC.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ on : SW Air / Free bag hack / Some used it for free shipping ..................

Jon Koplik — 3/21/2025 4:25:13 PM

WSJ on : SW Air / Free bag hack / Some used it for free shipping ...................

WSJ

Lifestyle
Travel

March 19, 2025

The Southwest Free Bag Hack Is Ending. No More Turkeys, Tire Rims and Kitchen Sinks.

Airline’s extreme generosity on checked luggage wasn’t just for chronic overpackers. Some used it for free shipping.

By Alison Sider

When Audrey Hooper and her far-flung family have things they need to bring to one another, they load up Big Pink.

The large, fluorescent-colored suitcase has crisscrossed the country for years and for free -- mostly on Southwest Airlines. When Hooper didn’t feel like cooking for Thanksgiving after having a baby, her mother prepared and froze a full dinner in Oregon and checked it on her flight to visit Hooper’s family in St. Louis. A 23-pound turkey, appetizers, stuffing, cranberry sauce and even some dinnerware traveled in the belly of a Southwest jet.

“Everything has always arrived in immaculate condition,” Hooper said.

But the fun is over. Southwest, which long embraced bag checkers, plans to end its two-free-bag policy in May. It’s reserving free checked items for customers with elite status and those who hold its co-branded credit card.

“It’s the end of an era shipping things around so much,” she said.

For Southwest, that may be the point. The airline is under pressure from investors to boost revenue. It has been missing out on the bag-fee bonanza that has generated billions of dollars for rivals. And handling all those checked bags is expensive, CEO Bob Jordan said last week.

“We carry nearly two times the bags as compared to the competition, which is costly on many fronts,” Jordan said at an investor conference.

For many customers, the free checked bags were the main reason to pick Southwest over other airlines, most of which charge fees starting at $35 for one bag. There was immediate blowback when it announced the policy change, and not just from chronic overpackers.

Skiers, marching bands and parents moving kids into dorms have long made use of the generous allotment. Some fliers were even more creative.

Craig Wetter hauled two kitchen sinks from a wholesaler’s outlet in Sarasota, Fla., where he lives, to apartments he was rehabbing near Chicago last month -- all with the help of Southwest. The supplier wouldn’t deliver there, and the prospect of paying for shipping would have blown the money he saved on the sinks. They just barely fit into a large suitcase.

“Yep that’s right, everything including the kitchen sink,” Wetter said. “It sounds kind of crazy but it worked.”

When Elizabeth Campbell’s parents didn’t have a Christmas tree in Florida, checking one for a holiday visit was a no-brainer. Her family had just bought a new tree, so the old one, still in its original box, was up for grabs. And the family of five could have checked as many as 10 bags without paying.

“It was definitely a ‘why not?’’’ Campbell said.

You didn’t have to test the limits of the policy to enjoy the perk. Customers over the years have marveled at the range of items that came sliding down the Southwest baggage carousel, from a giant sombrero to a set of antlers wrapped in bubble wrap to avoid pokes.

As he waited for his suitcase in New Orleans about eight years ago, Michael Bertaut saw what looked like a plexiglass ice chest headed toward him on the belt.

“As it got closer it appeared to be half full of ice and water, and when it rounded the corner in front of me I got the full frontal view of water, ice, and three BIG lobsters all suspended in the mix!” Bertaut said. “At first I kind of doubted my senses.”

Southwest’s social-media team has chronicled some of the more exotic items its passengers have checked, from the oversize to the comically small. Videos posted by the airline show a single bottle of hot sauce, a pair of crocs and a pool noodle, each affixed with their own bag tags, traveling on the belt to or from the belly of the plane or rounding the baggage claim.

A red, hard-shell suitcase with the words “I fly free on Southwest” emblazoned on its side could become a collectible. Southwest was selling the luggage online, but it was removed not long after the airline announced the end of its checked bag policy.

Jim Turnipseed and his fiancé basically moved into their vacation condo in Mexico two free bags at a time.

He strapped handles on a set of packed IKEA dining chairs, rolled a rug into a golf bag, and they brought down the Cuisinart, lamps, and even their seasoned cast iron pans. “It really became woven into our lives,” he said of the routine.

Turnipseed’s airline status will likely continue to afford him two free checked bags, but he said he feels differently about the airline now. “It kind of ruined the vibe,” he said.

Travelers say Southwest employees seemed unfazed by unusual requests.

Ron Kullman quickly realized he needed snow tires when he started commuting weekly from Illinois to a new job in Reno, Nev., in 2018. He had rims, but shipping them would have cost him at least $400. The solution? He boxed them and checked them on two Southwest flights a week apart. Each came in at 46 pounds -- right under Southwest’s 50 pound per bag limit.

“Nobody blinked an eye,” he said. “It could have been a suitcase for all they care.”

When Susan Casscells and her sister make applesauce, only Idared apples will do. Because they weren’t available in North Carolina where her sister lives, Casscells once packed an old suitcase full of Idareds and checked it on Southwest.

There was only one problem. The apples didn’t emerge on the baggage carousel.

“The only time Southwest has ever misplaced one of my bags,” she said.

The apples turned up a day later.

Write to Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com

Copyright © 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] NYT : lost Bitcoin wallet / dig through landfill / Let me buy landfill .......

Jon Koplik — 2/19/2025 11:49:20 PM

NYT : lost Bitcoin wallet / dig through landfill / Let me buy landfill .................................

nytimes.com

or :

archive.is

Feb. 13, 2025

In Years-long Search for Lost Bitcoin, a Final Proposal: Let Me Buy the Landfill

For 12 years, James Howells has begged officials to let him dig through a South Wales landfill to find a lost Bitcoin wallet that he says is worth around $800 million.

James Howells has one final ask of the Newport City Council, which has treated him with varying degrees of seriousness throughout the years: If the council won’t let him dig up the city’s landfill, let him buy it.

By Ali Watkins

What James Howells wants to do is, by his account, simple: buy a landfill, excavate tens of thousands of tons of trash, cart every piece by dump truck to a scanner with A.I.-trained detection technology, install a backup magnetic belt to pick up any lingering metallic objects and, thus, find the long-lost hard drive that contains his mistakenly discarded Bitcoin key, worth somewhere around $800 million.
“This seems logical,” Mr. Howells said of his plan.

For more than a decade, Mr. Howells has begged, negotiated and pleaded with anyone -- most often, the Newport City Council, in South Wales -- to get access to the mountains of waste in pursuit of his crypto White Whale: a hard drive that was accidentally thrown away in 2013.

He has secured a data recovery firm and an excavator. He has enlisted the former landfill director to map out the site. He has taken the case to court, to no avail. The city has so far refused to let him excavate the landfill, and is planning to close the site for good.

Now, in what may be the final stage of his Pequodian journey, Mr. Howells has one final ask of the Newport City Council: If it won’t let him dig up the place, let him buy it.

“Seems like a better plan for me and the city,” said Mr. Howells, who envisions clearing out the trash and converting the site to a park, or perhaps making it a dump site again. “The landfill gets cleaned. I get to dig for my hard drive.”

James Howells, center, with Liam McLoughlin, right, and Gwyn Jones, members of the team that helped him in his legal battle.

In Mr. Howells’ plight is both the universal and the sensational. Who among us hasn’t accidentally tossed something of value? How many have tried, however fruitlessly, to get it back?

The potential value of Mr. Howells’ error raises a trickier question, too: Who owns our trash once it’s gone, especially when it’s worth more than half a billion dollars?

The circumstances that led Mr. Howells to this juncture are well documented. A computer science analyst, he was cleaning out his office sometime in 2013 when he carelessly left a hard drive among a pile of rubbish earmarked for the dump. A miscommunication with his partner at the time led to the drive being gathered up and taken to the landfill.

What Mr. Howells didn’t realize then was that the hard drive — a backup from an old gaming computer — contained the only copy of his 51-character private key, used to access Bitcoin wallets. Mr. Howell had mined cryptocurrency as a hobbyist in the late 2000s, back when it was mostly useless.

It was months later when Mr. Howells realized the stakes of the error: His once-modest Bitcoin wallet was worth millions. He has been trying to get the drive back ever since, hoping that, even after 12 years, some of the disc might be salvageable.

Standing in his way is the Newport City Council, which says the elusive hard drive belongs to the city anyway, even if it were to be recovered. (It hasn’t been, and according to the city, any attempt to do so would come at a prohibitively high cost.) A judge has backed the council. Mr. Howells insists the drive is still legally his, arguing that it was technically discarded without his permission by a third party. He even offered to split the Bitcoin fortune with the city, but was rejected.

Mr. Howells’ desperate, yearslong search isn’t a surprise to experts in the cryptocurrency world, where fortunes are fleeting and one small, poorly-timed decision can separate winners from losers.

“Generally speaking, the experience of quite a number of people involved in crypto assets has been, maybe not as drastic as this, but quite similar,” said Iwa Salami, a professor of fintech regulation at the Royal Docks School of Business and Law, University of East London. “The industry is one that can leave people with regrets, particularly when you sell or buy cryptoassets at the wrong time.”

Critics and the Newport City Council have called Mr. Howells’ pursuit a fool’s errand, a journey of towering stakes with no guarantee that a 12-year-old, buried disc is even findable, let alone readable. But Mr. Howells says the numbers alone make searching the proverbial haystack worthwhile.

“This needle is very, very, very valuable -- $800 million,” Mr. Howells said of the hard drive. “Which means I’m willing to search every piece of hay in order to find the needle.”

Mr. Howells’ last-ditch effort comes after he lost a case in Britain’s High Court seeking to force the Newport City Council to let him excavate the dump. A judge said the wild hard drive chase had “no realistic prospect of succeeding,” even if taken to a higher court.

Not long after, the city announced plans to close and cap the site, a fact Mr. Howells says should have been disclosed in the recent court proceedings. Regardless, he believes his proposal to buy the site would save the city money in the long run.

“They haven’t said they’re willing to sell it,” Mr. Howells acknowledged, before citing a string of regulatory statutes and budget projections that he says suggest the city ought to.

The Newport City Council declined to comment further on the matter, including about whether it would seriously consider Mr. Howells’ offer. A spokesperson for the office pointed to a statement from 2023, which said: “We have been very clear and consistent in our responses that we cannot assist Mr. Howells in this matter. Our position has not changed.”

Those who study crypto markets -- and the psychology behind them -- didn’t expect the obstacles to stop Mr. Howells.

“It’s human, isn’t it?” Ms. Salami said. She laughed, recalling a recent instance in which she herself had misplaced a contact lens moments before an important event. She had searched furiously, even tearing through the trash to find it. Imagine, she said, if it had been worth half a billion dollars.

“Some people can walk away and move on, and count it as a loss,” she said. “Some people will just not be able to move on.”

© 2025 The New York Times Company.

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[Jon Koplik] Bloomberg / high egg price news -- Paying eggstra. ............ Waffle House is ...

Jon Koplik — 2/6/2025 3:09:58 PM

Bloomberg / high egg price news -- Paying eggstra. ............ Waffle House is among a growing number of restaurants pushing through an egg surcharge -- in this case 50 cents per egg -- in response to a supply crunch sparked by bird flu.

Quiz question: How many eggs does Waffle House serve up a year?

Answer: Probably more than you think. (It’s actually 272 million.)

Jon.

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[Jon Koplik] 11/25/24 WSJ -- Young daters / perfume / ‘pheromone’ fragrances ...................

Jon Koplik — 12/13/2024 12:04:53 AM

11/25/24 WSJ -- Young daters / perfume / ‘pheromone’ fragrances ....................................

wsj.com

or :

archive.is

Young Daters Square Off With Scientists Over Whether Perfume Can Turn People On

Users of new class of ‘pheromone’ fragrances tout chemical effects; ‘like a lion on fresh meat’

------------------------

my favorite reader comment :

<<<<< 77 year old happily married Boomer here & I couldn't stop laughing as I read this article.

Anybody ever heard of hormones? Almost all of the people in it were in their 20s.

When I was in my 20s a date could have spayed WD-40 on and I would have went wild. >>>>>

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Jon.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ on : apt. and condo buildings overlooking MLB stadiums ........................

Jon Koplik — 10/30/2024 1:35:49 AM

WSJ on : apt. and condo buildings overlooking MLB stadiums ...................................................

WSJ

Oct. 24, 2024

The Latest In-Demand View for Homeowners? A Baseball Stadium

Ballpark condos let you root, root, root for the home team from your living room, balcony or private roof deck

In Minneapolis, the new North Loop Green 360 residential building has an amenity space that overlooks Target Field, home to the Minnesota Twins. Apartments also overlook the field.

By Jessica Flint

When the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers play in the 2024 World Series, spectators won’t be able to easily watch the action on the field at Yankee Stadium or Dodger Stadium live in person from the comfort of their own homes. But for a growing number of baseball fans such as Randy and Sylvia Moyers, in San Diego, home field advantage has taken a whole new meaning.

That is because the Moyerses, both 67, live in an 1,800-square-foot, three bedroom downtown San Diego townhouse that has a 700-square-foot outdoor space that overlooks the Padres’ stadium, Petco Park. They bought their unit for $998,500 in 2007. “I walk out on my private roof deck and watch the action and listen to the people screaming in the stadium,” Randy says.

Clockwise, San Diego’s the Legend overlooks Petco Park; an amenity space at the Legend; Randy and Sylvia Moyerses’ unit.Luke Anderson

During this year’s National League Division Series, in which the Padres eventually lost to the Dodgers, Randy could feel the energy of the Padres fans waving rally towels in the ballpark while he watched from home. “It’s like being there,” he says of his perch.

The couple’s townhouse is in the Legend, a 23-story building with 170 condo units and eight townhomes located in the outer perimeter of left field within the actual confines of Petco Park. Roughly 35% of units have views in the stadium’s direction. The seventh floor shared amenity space, with a 3,200-square-foot deck, has an unobstructed field view. The building was completed in 2007; Petco Park opened in 2004.

Randy Moyers at home with his son, Mason Moyers.

“It’s a great lifestyle,” says Randy of having a roughly 42,000-person capacity stadium as his neighbor.

Across the U.S., a small number of people like the Moyerses live in residences where watching a professional baseball game live from inside their living spaces or outdoor balconies and roof decks is a real possibility. Only about a half-dozen or so of the country’s 29 active MLB stadiums currently have at least one residential building that prominently overlooks the field.

Some residences have turf views somewhat by happenstance. In Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, about a dozen roof decks on West Waveland and North Sheffield Avenues -- some of which predate the 1900s -- overlook the outfield of Wrigley Field, where the Cubs have played since 1916. In downtown Pittsburgh, a 1960s building was converted into the Venue residential complex, which has updated rental apartments, some of which look across the Allegheny River into PNC Park, home of the Pirates since 2001.

Chicago Cubs fans sit on rooftops overlooking Wrigley Field in July 2020, during the pandemic.

Overlooking Wrigley Field, buildings with rooftops are visible beyond the outfield stands.

Lately, however, new residential buildings have been specifically constructed to take full advantage of field views. In the case of St. Louis’s One Cardinal Way -- a 29-story, 297-unit rental tower that overlooks Busch Stadium, where the Cardinals have played since 2006 -- there is even programming that makes tenants feel like part of the clubhouse: Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III has sat down with residents to chat about running a ball club.

Rents at One Cardinal Way range from about $1,500 per month to more than $6,000 per month. “I can literally watch the game from my living room, my balcony or on the best days, the pool,” says resident Drew Clary, 33, who works in commercial real estate. The building has a 30,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor amenity level with an infinity pool that overlooks the field.

Clockwise, One Cardinal Way’s infinity pool and outdoor seating area; an apartment has a Busch Stadium field view; a gym in the building.

The tower, which opened in 2020 and sits behind Busch Stadium’s center field, is at the epicenter of a multi-city-block enclave around the ballpark called Ballpark Village, which has restaurants, bars, music venues, a health club, a hotel and shops. Thirteen of the 19 unit types face the field and have unobstructed sightlines to home plate -- and are within earshot of the crack of the bat. It runs 98% leased on average. Units with field views are almost always 100% occupied.

In Minneapolis, North Loop Green 360 is a 34-story residential building with 450 units, roughly 27% of which have front-facing views of Target Field, home to the Twins since 2010. It started leasing in January and rents start around $1,750 per month and go up to about $12,000 per month.

A North Loop Green 360 apartment overlooking Target Field.

The exterior of the North Loop Green 360 tower within a new mixed-use development.

Since the 1990s, mixed-use districts have been cropping up around U.S. sports stadiums of all kinds, turning what had traditionally been seas of parking-lot asphalt into large urban development projects. More are in the works. In Queens, N.Y., around Citi Field, Mets owner Steve Cohen and Hard Rock International have proposed an $8 billion Metropolitan Park project that would include a casino, hotel, food-and-beverage venues and 25 acres of parkland.

Washington, D.C., has a version of this on steroids. Just south of the U.S. Capitol, the Capitol Riverfront, a roughly square-mile district on the Anacostia River, is home to the Navy Yard neighborhood and Nationals Park, where the Nationals have played since 2008. Since the pandemic, the Navy Yard has become a thriving neighborhood with about 22,000 residents and a daytime population of 32,000. There also happen to be about a half-dozen residential buildings with ballpark field views.

The Kelvin, for example, has 312 rental apartments with an average rent of $2,700 per month. It opened in 2020 and has views of the field from its rooftop amenity space and some apartments on the N Street SE side.

In Washington, D.C., the Kelvin’s rooftop overlooks National Park, home to the Nationals.

The Kelvin, diagonally opposite from a Nationals Park entry point, is one of many residential buildings in the Navy Yard.

Back in San Diego, the Moyerses have had the option of attending roughly 1,420 San Diego Padres games without ever needing a ticket. They reserved their unit in the Legend 2005, before the building was even built. He owned a company in San Diego and viewed his townhouse as a place to enjoy downtown living.

Overlooking Petco Park, the Legend sits apart from other downtown San Diego buildings.

The median listing home price in the East Village, where the Legend is located, is currently $602,425, according to Realtor.com. ( News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com.) There are four units for sale in the Legend, including Moyerses’ unit, which is listed for $1.5499 million. Now that they are retired, they want to switch things up.

“Most of the time, I have enjoyed the vibe and ambience,” Randy says. “If you don’t want to be involved in the action, you shut your windows.” He says outside noise is greatly reduced by cement and brick construction with dual pane windows. He has motorized blackout shades on all of the windows because that is just his nature, not because the stadium is too bright at night. “If I do want to go to sleep earlier than the town goes to sleep, I just pull the shades down,” he says.

Write to Jessica Flint at Jessica.Flint@wsj.com

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Ruth Westheimer, taught generations to talk about and enjoy sex, dies at ...

Jon Koplik — 7/17/2024 1:53:23 AM

WSJ -- Ruth Westheimer, taught generations to talk about and enjoy sex, dies at 96 ...............

WSJ

July 13, 2024

Ruth Westheimer, Who Taught Generations to Talk About and Enjoy Sex, Dies at 96

Dr. Ruth, an unlikely celebrity for more than four decades, was known for her radical candor on radio and TV about subjects that had long been considered taboo

Ruth Westheimer was an author and educator.

By Jon Mooallem

She wound up there the same way as the other 300 children: as part of the Kindertransport, an effort to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis -- put on a train to that Swiss boarding school by her mother and grandmother, shortly after her father was taken from their home in Frankfurt.

It was January 1939. She was 10 years old and would spend her entire adolescence at that bleak way station for young refugees. Later, she would call the place in which they all grew up an orphanage, but at the time it was still possible to hope that most of their parents weren’t dead.

She was immeasurably lonely, but couldn’t stop yapping, couldn’t sit still. Being a girl, she wasn’t allowed to participate in schooling, so she busied herself looking after the younger children instead. From time to time, she helped steer straight the older ones, too. She had once climbed up to steal a look at a particular book that her parents kept out of reach in their apartment -- a sort of manual, with illustrations of sexual positions. This alone made her worldly. She passed on what she knew.

It didn’t occur to her to be squeamish. “Everything in nature is so fantastically well-organized,” she wrote in her diary, “one can’t possibly think that anything about it is dirty.” And she seemed to take great satisfaction in correcting the wildly mistaken ideas of her peers -- “because I know how bad it is when one is given wrong information about these things.”

Her name was Karola Ruth Siegel. But she was, in a sense, already Dr. Ruth.

Westheimer in a family photo. As a child, she was sent to Switzerland to escape Nazi persecution.

Ruth Westheimer, the unrelentingly chipper, 4-foot-7 broadcaster, author and educator whose frank and nurturing style of communication helped generations of Americans better understand and enjoy their sex lives, has died at 96. Westheimer was an unlikely but irrepressible celebrity for more than four decades, demystifying and celebrating facets of human sexuality that were previously shrouded in secrecy and shame, or hopelessly muddled by euphemisms, if spoken about at all.

K for Karola

She was born on June 4, 1928, in Wiesenfeld, Germany -- an only child. After the war, she adopted her middle name, Ruth, as her first name, but kept the “K” of Karola as a middle initial: a small flare fired into the scrambled, postwar world, in case either of her parents had survived the Holocaust and came looking for her. (They didn’t survive.) Leaving Switzerland in 1945, she settled in Palestine and served in the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization. Dr. Ruth was a sniper.

In 1948, on her 20th birthday, she was caught in a mortar attack on a rooftop. Westheimer had just finished a shift guarding Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint from above when sirens sounded; worrying she’d have to shelter in the building’s basement for a long time, she scampered back upstairs to retrieve a book. Two women beside her were killed. Westheimer was brutally injured. A surgeon was able to save her legs, but she had to re-learn to walk.

Westheimer with her parents, who died in the Holocaust.

She also had sex for the first time while in Israel: at age 17, on top of a haystack, with the younger brother of her boyfriend, without protection.

She married twice in relatively quick succession, but would often describe these unions later as “legalized love affairs.” She followed one of those husbands to France, where she earned a psychology degree at the Sorbonne despite never attending high school, then immigrated to the U.S. in 1956 as a twice-divorced single mother.

Westheimer took advantage of a scholarship for Holocaust orphans and survivors to earn a masters in sociology at the New School for Social Research in 1959. She supported herself and her young daughter, Miriam, by cleaning houses for $1 an hour. In 1961, she married Manfred (Fred) Westheimer, an engineer who had also escaped Nazi Germany as a child. They would remain married until his death 36 years later.

All about sex

In 1967, still scrambling for work, Westheimer took a job at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem. “I thought these people are crazy,” she later recalled. “They talk only about sex. They don’t talk about literature, not about the weather, not about philosophy -- nothing! But very fast, I said ‘Oops! That’s a very interesting subject matter.’ ”

At Planned Parenthood, she collected data on 2,000 women’s histories of contraception and abortion, then used that research to write a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in 1970, becoming at age 42 -- in a titular sense, at least --“Dr. Ruth.”

Her broadcast career didn’t start for another decade -- and only then, inadvertently. In 1980, management of radio station WYNY-FM in New York City invited Westheimer to brief them on the potential for sex education over the air. (The FCC required a certain amount of programming on community issues.) Westheimer had spent the previous seven years studying under the pioneering sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center. With authoritativeness and strange charisma, Westheimer both made the case that a show on human sexuality would provide a vital service and unwittingly won herself the gig of host. “I did not think that it ought to be me!” she told the BBC in 1990.

WYNY launched “Sexually Speaking” with trepidation, as a brief, 15-minute call-in show buried in the deepest doldrums of their schedule: midnight on Sunday nights. But right away, New Yorkers were charmed by Westheimer, whom they addressed as “Dr. Ruth,” because they couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her foreign last name.

Phone lines lighted up with one intimate and agonizing sexual dilemma after another: A man distressed by premature ejaculation. A woman who had been raped and hasn’t enjoyed sex or masturbation since and wanted the lowdown on diaphragms. A 19-year-old engaged to a man who, she just discovered, is actually her biological brother. A guy who, first of all, just wants Dr. Ruth to know that “The boys in Canarsie -- we love your show!” A woman hoping to get more out of her weekly orgies. (These examples are drawn from one, eight-minute stretch of a single broadcast, in March 1982.)

Westheimer in 1986. She started a radio call-in show and later became a television personality.

Her success was explosive. Before long, WYNY expanded “Sexually Speaking” from 15 minutes to two hours, and moved up its airtime, to 10 p.m. By 1985, it was airing on more than 50 stations nationwide. In “Ask Dr. Ruth,” a 2019 documentary, Westheimer’s son, Joel Westheimer, recalls coming back to his dorm late one Sunday night while a freshman at Princeton and hearing his mother’s voice chirping out of doorways up and down the hall.

On to TV

In 1984, Westheimer leapt into television. “Good Sex!” was broadcast five nights a week on the Lifetime network and featured intimate conversations with guests like Gloria Steinem and Burt Reynolds in addition to the usual panoply of calls. It was the first of several iterations that Westheimer would host in her career. Within months, it was reportedly drawing 450,000 viewers and 3,000 callers every night.

Soon, Westheimer was frequently guesting on late-night talk shows. She was a hit on “Hollywood Squares.” She did commercials for condoms, Hondas, shampoos, Dr Pepper and typewriters. In 1983, she published the first of her 45 books, the bestselling ”Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex.” There was a Dr. Ruth board game (“Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex”) followed by a Dr. Ruth videogame (“Dr. Ruth’s Computer Game of Good Sex”) and even T-shirts. (“Dr. Ruth is Training the Best Lovers Around . . . and I’m One of Them”).

Westheimer with Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas in 1987 at a fundraiser benefiting the Ms. Foundation for Women.

Westheimer, being carried by director Joe Pytka, filmed a Pepsi commercial in 1991.

The orphaned immigrant who’d hastily left home with only a doll and a washcloth was suddenly featured on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” attended to by personal makeup artists, hairdressers, assistants and chauffeurs. “I love it! I love it!” she crowed to the Seattle Times. “If I did not love it, you would wonder, ‘What is wrong with this person? Is she dead?’ ”

Westheimer burst into the American mainstream with radical candor. Her matter-of-fact stances toward human sexuality and women’s reproductive health -- she was adamantly pro-choice -- and even her fundamental mission to inform, were counterforces to religious, culturally conservative and patriarchal movements gathering strength in the Reagan era. Dr. Ruth cheerfully dispensed on-air tutorials about oral sex, female orgasms and birth control while Christian right groups like Moral Majority were raging against abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and basic sex-education in schools.

Westheimer had no problem with pornography either. In 1986, asked about the findings of the Meese Commission, a task force convened by the U.S. Attorney General to investigate pornography in America, she said: “I wish they had used their good brains and their time and the effort, and the money, to find the best contraceptive available, and to find a cure for AIDS, instead of wasting all of this energy for such reports.”

She steadfastly accepted, even encouraged, what would elsewhere be decried as deviant kinks. A woman who liked throwing onion rings onto her fiancé’s erect penis, horseshoe-toss style, was, to Westheimer, just another human being, living her truth. As she told one reporter, “As long as there is no violence or force involved, as long as the sexual activity is between two consenting adults—I say, ‘Go to it!’ ” Her attitude toward sex seemed, above all else, an outgrowth of her vivaciousness about life in general. Good sex was just another facet of living well.

Westheimer participated in a campaign in 1987 to benefit children with AIDS in West Germany.

Westheimer’s rise to stardom in the early 1980s also coincided with the AIDS crisis. As the epidemic swelled, she preached respect for gay people, appeared at AIDS benefits, and showed little patience for the dismissal of gay men’s suffering or implications that they’d brought that suffering on themselves. In the documentary, she linked this empathy to her childhood as a German Jew, explaining, “I certainly had a sensitivity for the people who were really regarded as subhuman.”

Her superpower

Through all this, however, Westheimer proved to be a difficult persona on whom to pin controversy or outrage. She was just too magnetic, too harmless-seeming, too adorable and tiny. She understood that her age, appearance and spunky, cartoonish aura endowed her with certain superpowers.

Westheimer walked in a John Paul Gaultier benefit fashion show in 1992.

“I think it has something to do with my not being tall and blonde and gorgeous,” she told Diane Sawyer. Ultimately, she could be trusted with people’s most vulnerable qualms and curiosities about sex because she was the sort of woman who the culture thoroughly desexualized; neither men nor women found her the least bit threatening. She was like America’s nutty and absolutely unembarrassable great-aunt, who wanted all her nieces and nephews to be terrific lovers and wasn’t afraid to shout “clitoris” from the far end of the dinner table to communicate an important point.

As time went on, some of Westheimer’s views seemed occasionally to be slipping out of step with the sexually progressive culture she helped bring about. She didn’t like the idea of sex on a first date. Her idealism about marriage could feel quaint. In 2015, she was criticized for a series of comments about sexual consent, telling Haaretz, for example, “I don’t believe that when partners are naked they can say at any time, ‘I changed my mind.’ ”

But Westheimer remained almost compulsively active, productive and plugged-in in her old age, even reading the “Fifty Shades of Grey” novels because she didn’t want to be caught flat-footed when someone inevitably asked her about them. (“Not great literature,” was her judgment.) Well into her 90s, her essential Dr. Ruthiness couldn’t be switched off.

In 2023, she was appointed New York state’s first Ambassador to Loneliness, an honorary position that Westheimer had not only lobbied Gov. Kathy Hochul for, but invented herself. Westheimer told the New York Times she felt driven to educate New Yorkers about the epidemic of loneliness and its health effects by her own experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. The sudden isolation and dislocation she’d felt reminded her of her years at the orphanage in Switzerland.

Up until the pandemic, she’d merely continued the lavish, busy lifestyle in New York City that she’d fallen into almost 40 years prior: going to restaurants, to the theater, to benefits, stepping out every night in her size 4 shoes.

She had a habit of snatching the bouquet off the table at every gala she attended and bringing it home, she told actor Alan Alda during a 2019 podcast interview. Her trick, she explained, was to simply pull aside a waiter and say, “Do me a favor. If you want to have good sex for the rest of your life, pack up those flowers for me.”

Westheimer with Hugh Hefner in 2002.

Jon Mooallem is a Wall Street Journal staff reporter. Email him at jon.mooallem@wsj.com.

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Dortyhandry] I'm absolutely thrilled with the progress on my Tbook project! Watching it evolv...

Dortyhandry — 5/31/2024 5:57:36 AM

I'm absolutely thrilled with the progress on my Tbook project! Watching it evolve from an idea into a comprehensive, engaging piece has been incredibly fulfilling. The structure is coming together nicely, and the content is rich and insightful.

[Jon Koplik] Slate magazine -- Red Lobster employees / tales / "endless shrimp” ...............

Jon Koplik — 5/21/2024 10:26:43 PM

Slate magazine -- Red Lobster employees / tales / "endless shrimp” .......................................

May 20, 2024

Fired Red Lobster Employees Have Quite the Tales About the “Endless Shrimp” Debacle

By Luke Winkie

Red Lobster officially filed for bankruptcy Monday, after a grim week that saw nearly 100 stores shut down around the country. The restaurant chain has cycled through multiple owners and leadership cabals over the past 10 years, and each of them attempted to stabilize the chain, to no avail. One of these rescue plans was the restaurant’s now-infamous Endless Shrimp promotion -- in which, for $20, customers could order an unlimited supply of fried shrimp, shrimp scampi, or “street corn shrimp” to their table. The plan, as far as I can tell, was for guests to fill up on just enough shellfish to preserve Red Lobster’s profit margin. It backfired spectacularly: The restaurant’s clientele scarfed down enough shrimp to accumulate an $11 million operating loss in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurant -- the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobster’s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, you’re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past month -- some of whom were laid off without any notice last week -- what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and busers who’ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain that’s been drifting out to sea for some time.

“I had a guy come in with his family. It was a family of five. And he did 16 rounds of shrimp scampi,” said James Berke, a 23-year-old in New Jersey, who until very recently worked at a Red Lobster. “He was there for over two hours on a busy Friday night. They had one of my biggest tables. I just had to watch this man eat plates upon plates of the scampi, which isn’t even served over pasta. It’s shrimp in a garlic-wine butter. It was so gross.”

Berke quickly noticed two major problems with the Endless Shrimp promotion. First, and most important, a $20 charge for dinner is fairly low compared with the rest of Red Lobster’s menu. According to Berke, the average entree price at the restaurant is around $35, which means that once the all-you-can-eat format became a permanent fixture in the company’s dining rooms last summer, he was suddenly making far less on tips. “I usually made $200 a night before Endless,” said Steve, another Red Lobster employee, who asked to remain anonymous. “Once it became a thing, I was down to $90.”

There was also the fact that when parties arrived at Red Lobster looking to pig out on a bargeful of shrimp, they simply wouldn’t leave. Berke’s experience serving a man who put away 16 servings over the course of two hours was actually mild compared with some of the other stories I’ve heard. Josie, 19, who also asked to be anonymous, worked at a (now-shuttered) Kansas City Red Lobster, where she watched a solo diner take down 30 orders of fried shrimp within four hours. According to the nutritional information on Red Lobster’s website, that’s something like 14,000 calories.

“He was a skinny guy too,” Josie said. “I was like, Where is it all going?”

But the top thing employees will not miss about Red Lobster are the arguments and confrontations they’d frequently endure when informing customers about the rules that come buoyed to the Endless Shrimp deal. For instance, guests cannot request a box to take their Endless Shrimp home, nor can they share their servings with the rest of the table. (In other words, only one phantasmagoric shrimp binge per person.)

“You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” Josie said. “I would get screamed at.” She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”

Steve told me he’s “never been more disrespected in my life” than by the Endless Shrimp patrons. (“My manager got spat in the face,” he added.) Steve also noticed a subtle shift in the makeup of Red Lobster’s dining room, as the older folks who “dressed up and looked nice” for a meal at the restaurant were edged out by a younger, rowdier crowd.

But none of this is Josie’s or Berke’s problem anymore. Both of them worked Mother’s Day -- one of the biggest days on the sit-down restaurant calendar -- and woke the next morning to learn that their Red Lobsters had been padlocked for good. (“They made us work Mother’s Day to get that quick buck, and then they closed us,” Berke said.) Some 500 locations will remain open for now during the bankruptcy process, but their future is uncertain.

That is bad news for Michael Durrant, a 23-year-old who told me he is “very broke” and recently relied on a night with Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp to sustain him while his account balance looked bleak. Durrant agreed to speak to me to satisfy my curiosity about the other side of this equation: the people who ate all that damn shrimp.

Durrant said he once spent between three and four hours in the dining room, downing 83 shrimp in total, and took “at least one nap” at the table.

“I am bummed that Red Lobster is going away,” Durrant said. “But I get it. There’s not really anything on the menu worth getting other than the Endless Shrimp.”

© 2024 The Slate Group LLC.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Insomniacs swear by dull narrators who put them to sleep ..................

Jon Koplik — 5/5/2024 4:34:48 PM

WSJ -- Insomniacs swear by dull narrators who put them to sleep .............................................

LIFESTYLE
A-HED

May 4, 2024

Is This the Most Boring Man in the World?

Insomniacs swear by dull narrators who put them to sleep, whether on purpose or not

By Spencer Jakab

Late last year Randy Smith got a text from a complete stranger. She thanked him for putting her to sleep.

Smith was shocked to discover that he was a YouTube star. The Ormond Beach, Fla., retiree was even more surprised about why: A tutorial he recorded and sold as a VHS tape in 1989 on how to use Microsoft Word had resurfaced as “THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE” with 3.1 million views and close to 11,000 comments so far.

“I can’t remember the number of times that this Video has helped me sleep,” one gushes. “I want this played at my funeral, so people don’t forget how interesting I was,” says another.

Smith, a former motivational speaker who taught presentation skills, has a voice that isn’t so much boring as comforting. It turns out, his silky-smooth delivery, combined with the now-irrelevant subject matter, makes his video perfect -- for hitting the sack.

And he has lots of competition. From footage of late TV painting instructor Bob Ross to five-hour loops of the BBC shipping forecast, dull recordings are all the rage as slumber hacks in a sleep-deprived nation. Smith is puzzled.

“Why somebody who has no interest in Microsoft Word would be watching it -- especially such an old version, I have no idea,” he says.

The answer: While white noise like rainshowers or ocean waves help some people, others find it easier to nod off to human yammering, such as the play-by-play of a baseball game.

If a live game isn’t available -- or sounds too exciting -- insomniacs these days can turn to a Chicago entrepreneur who calls himself “Mr. King” and runs Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, a podcast of full-length but fake baseball games on the fictional WSLP AM. He calls the matches as sportscaster “Wally McCarthy,” complete with made-up players and teams, and a friend from Minneapolis writes and narrates the ads for fictional products.

King, who will only say about his background that he “isn’t a complete novice,” hasn’t turned fake radio announcing into a full-time career yet.

But Benjamin Boster of Pleasant Grove, Utah, is literally living the dream. The 43-year-old trained vocal performer’s boss once told him he had a boring voice. Now he has made a side hustle, his “I Can’t Sleep -- A Boring Podcast,” into his family’s livelihood since being laid off in January.

A sleeper hit

Boster’s episodes have been downloaded about 10 million times across various platforms, and he doesn’t even have to write his own material. He slowly reads entire Wikipedia entries. Recent gripping subjects include Seahorse, Utility Pole, Beard, Pasta and Automated Teller Machine.

“Often for listeners,” he says, “the challenge is: Can I stay awake for a whole episode?”

Boster has 54 episode requests pending, some of which -- reading about skeletons, for example -- are a hard pass.

That is probably wise. Boster says his majority-female audience uses the podcasts as much for stress management as for sleep.

Shelly Cox, a retired magazine editor from Virginia, has restless legs syndrome and often wakes up in the middle of the night during her travels around North America with her husband in their Airstream recreational vehicle. Finding herself in a strange campsite is a very lonely feeling, she says, and she turns to the podcast “Sleep With Me,” which bills itself as “bedtime stories to help grownups fall asleep.”

“It is like being next to a very good friend at a time of need,” she says.

Adult bedtime stories, the most common technique for putting people at ease, require the right reader, such as Tom Jones, a 30-year-old Englishman who has long been told he has a distinctive voice.

“People would say, ‘You have quite the monotone.’ Now I take it as a compliment.”

‘Audio Ambien’

Known to listeners as “Thomas,” he is the soporific star of the “Get Sleepy” podcast with around 140 million downloads to date. Jones writes some stories himself, while his employer, Slumber Studios, employs freelancers and produces other sleep podcasts.

Appropriately, Jones, who struggles with sleep issues himself, records episodes from his bedroom outside Cambridge, England.

The business of sending listeners to la-la land is no sleepy corner of commerce. Executives at Audible, an Amazon subsidiary and leading U.S. audiobook platform, noticed many customers were listening to its books with a sleep timer and launched its “Sleep Collection” four years ago, featuring bedtime tales read by stars including Brian Cox, Eva Longoria and Keke Palmer.

But for dozing off, many listeners find audiobooks originally intended to entertain do the trick just fine.

According to a Reddit audiobook forum, actor Peter Ganim’s reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel “Rendezvous With Rama” is “audio ambien.” Customer reviews, mostly five stars, include one that says the narrator sounds like the voice on an automated phone menu.

Droning American narrators apparently face tough competition from the Brits, especially posh-accented men, when it comes to bringing on shut-eye. Jones, who grew up in Essex, calls it his “special sauce.”

Shelly Cox often wakes up to the hypnotic voice of a British narrator emanating from the headphones worn to bed by her husband, who also has trouble sleeping. SleepPhones, a maker of bluetooth-enabled audio headbands for listening to recordings in bed, recommends books narrated by actor and author Stephen Fry:

“The British timbre of Fry’s voice is modulated, plummy, yet silvery; a perfect concoction for a peaceful night’s sleep.”

Sometimes the subject matter alone is enough to induce slumber. One insomniac endorses the translated version of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” And listening to the classic, 4,000-plus-page French novel comes with a bonus:

“Other people love Proust and you will be able to say you’ve read it, even if you slept through enormous chunks of it.”

Write to Spencer Jakab at Spencer.Jakab@wsj.com

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ / Americans throw away millions in coins. Here's where it ends up ............

Jon Koplik — 4/18/2024 2:35:41 PM

WSJ / Americans throw away millions in coins. Here's where it ends up ...................................

WSJ

April 17, 2024

Americans Throw Away Up to $68 Million in Coins a Year. Here Is Where It All Ends Up.

So much change ends up in the trash that one company is digging them up for profit

In 2017, Reworld started its operation to recover the millions of dollars worth of coins that are thrown away every year.

By Oyin Adedoyin

At a waste-management facility in Morrisville, Pa., workers load incinerated trash into industrial machinery that separates and sorts metals, then sends them to get hosed down. The reward: buckets of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.

Americans toss as much as $68 million worth of change each year, according to Reworld. The sustainable-waste processing company is on a treasure-hunt to find it. The company says that in the seven years since it started the effort, it has collected at least $10 million worth of coins.

Coins and other metals are filtered through multiple machines.

Coins are as good as junk for many Americans. Buses, laundromats, toll booths and parking meters now take credit and debit cards and mobile payments. Using any form of physical currency has become more of an annoyance, but change is often more trouble than it is worth to carry around. The U.S. quarter had roughly the buying power in 1980 that a dollar has today.

“If you lost a $100 bill you’d look for it. If you lost a $20 bill you’d look for it. If you lost a book you’d look for it,” said Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University. “But a penny, you’re just not going to look for it.”

Whaples has encouraged the government to kill the penny, which costs about three times its value to make. The U.S. Mint spent $707 million making coins last year. Canada, New Zealand and Australia have removed their 1 cent pieces from circulation.

Because coins can be hard to spend, they circulate slowly through the economy -- or don’t circulate at all. More than half of the coins in the U.S. are sitting in people’s homes, according to the Federal Reserve.

Spotting change in the trash

Many coins are also getting left behind. At airport checkpoints, the Transportation Security Administration collects hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them each year. Coins are left in couch cushions or cars, then sucked into vacuums and sent to landfills, said Dominic Rossi, Reworld’s director of finance and business support.

Reworld started collecting change in 2017 after noticing more of it in the trash. The company recovers 550,000 tons of metals annually, including soda cans, old pipes, keys and silverware.

On a recent Monday, a bucket loader lifted trash from its waste facilities into various sorting machines. A rattling gray one separated out anything that was the color of a coin. Another one separated anything round and flat, like a coin. And another machine separated heavier metals like coins from lighter metals like aluminum.

Unwashed coins are mixed among rusted pipes, used soda cans and old Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

It took 35 minutes to clean what the machines spat out. Then, squeaky clean coins were spread out on an iron rack to dry. They were still mixed in with euro cents, coins from Kuwait and D.C. metro tokens.

In a trailer, human checkers wearing gloves sorted through buckets of this material, separating the good coins from everything else.

U.S. coins are often mixed together with old metro tokens and foreign currency coins.

Because the trash was incinerated before it reached the facility, some coins were mangled beyond recognition. Of the $10 million in coins the company has recovered, some $6 million has been in good enough condition to use.

Reworld gathers anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million in coins a year, which it turns over to a third party to count and deposit to local banks.

Checkout counter annoyances

Most coins don’t end up in the trash. But that doesn’t mean they are wanted, either.

When Cassandra Raposo worked as a Dollar Store cashier, customers would often come to the register to pay for $5 to $10 purchases entirely with bags of change.

Out of the roughly $10 million worth of coins that Reworld has recovered, about $4 million of them are too damaged to use.

On busy days, Raposo helped them count every coin. Sometimes, they counted twice to double check, while she looked apologetically at the other waiting customers.

“I could feel the annoyance and almost even rage,” said Raposo, now a copy editor in Rhode Island.

People tend to bring their extra change to the bank to trade in, but it is getting harder to do even that. Capital One and PNC removed their coin-counting machines about a decade ago due to low customer use. In 2016, TD Bank pulled the plug on its coin-counting machines after an investigation found that it was giving customers less money than they were putting in.

Over the years, coins have gone from an essential payment method to a nuisance.

Today many people cash in their coins at Coinstar kiosks in grocery stores and gas stations. The company has said it operates over 24,000 kiosks across the country and has processed more than 800 billion coins.

Another person’s treasure

This year, Sara and Justin Ilse finished building a floor for their home’s 230-square-foot entryway out of 65,507 pennies.

“It was a way to encase something that doesn’t get viewed with much value in daily life,” Justin said.

It took Sara and Justin Ilse about a year to finish their penny floor.

More than 20,000 of the pennies came from jars that Sara’s father and brother-in-law kept in their closets. They bought the rest of the pennies they needed in 2,500 increments through their local bank. In addition to the $655 they spent on pennies, they also spent $1,195 on supplies such as glue and epoxy.

In one social-media video where they posted about the yearlong process of building the floor, they tossed a handful of pennies onto the finished product and watched them practically vanish.

Reworld employees also have a soft spot for hard currency. They set aside the buffalo nickels they find. These coins were only made between 1913 and 1938, and they can be worth thousands of dollars.

“As a child I used to get excited about buffalo nickels, I thought they were rare,” said Angelo Geraci, the facility’s operations supervisor. “Here we have jars and jars of buffalo nickels.”

Most of the coins recovered are in good condition (foreground) but others are damaged from the incinerator (background).

The coin recovery program is just a small part of Reworld’s revenue. The company makes most of its money from operating incineration facilities that burn trash to generate fuel.

Employees believe that one day coin usage will cease altogether, and so will the collection operation. But they’ll always have the buffalo nickels.

Write to Oyin Adedoyin at oyin.adedoyin@wsj.com

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[SirWalterRalegh] Jon- In 1953, at age 16, I bought my first car. It was a 1931 Ford Model A roa...

SirWalterRalegh — 2/27/2024 6:53:32 AM

Jon-

In 1953, at age 16, I bought my first car. It was a 1931 Ford Model A roadster. A convertible

with a rumble seat. Purchase price $50.

Sold a year later for $95. in order to buy 1939 Pontiac.

[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- John Hermida skipped stocks and bonds to buy a 1931 Ford Model A ..........

Jon Koplik — 2/27/2024 12:18:50 AM

WSJ -- John Hermida skipped stocks and bonds to buy a 1931 Ford Model A ............................

Feb. 25, 2024

Worried About a Market Crash, He Invested in a Depression-Era Car.

John Hermida skipped stocks and bonds to buy a 1931 Ford Model A

By A.J. Baime

John Hermida, 26, a structural engineer living in Miami, on his 1931 Ford Model A, as told to A.J. Baime.

I have always liked classic cars because they’re so mechanical. I was obsessed with Model Ts even when I was a teenager. I had some assets, but with inflation the way it was, I thought the stock market was going to crash. So, instead of the usual stocks and bonds, I looked at classic cars. If you look at the market, classic cars can be good investments, if you take care of them.

I was on Bring a Trailer all the time, and I started watching “Jay Leno’s Garage” videos, trying to learn as much as I could. Then, I found a guy named Paul Shinn on YouTube. He makes videos about the Ford Model A that make this model so accessible. He talks about finding parts and how to fix the cars when they break. I wanted a prewar Packard, but parts are so hard to find. For a guy my age with my resources, a prewar Packard just wasn’t reasonable. But a Model A was.

Unlike the Model T, the Ford Model A offers a mostly modern manual-transmission driving experience, Hermida says.

I found a listing for a Model A that had air conditioning in Oklahoma. A lot of purists hate any modern modification on a classic, but I have lived my entire life in Miami and it’s super hot. I wanted a car I could actually use. The owner and I agreed on a number -- $23,500 -- and so four years ago, this Model A became the first car I ever bought. I was still a college student, studying engineering at Florida International University.

The day the car arrived on a truck, I was blown away. The first thing the truck driver said to me after we had unloaded it was, “You have to drive this thing.” I had not driven a stick shift in a couple years. I had never driven a manual car that did not have a synchronized transmission. So, off I go driving around the block. I must have stalled three times.

The Model A drives ‘like a tractor,’ says Hermida. ‘The brakes are as hard as rocks.’

One of the things I love about the Model A is that it is a highly important car, historically. When it came out, it revolutionized the industry, just as the Model T did before it.

[ Ford introduced the Model A in December of 1927 and, according to the company, Ford reached a capacity of 9,000 Model As per day in 1929.]

Unlike the Model T, the Model A drives like a modern car. Anyone who knows how to drive a stick shift can get in this car and drive it. Although it does have some archaic idiosyncrasies, such as the aforementioned non-synchronized transmission, which means you double clutch when you shift gears.

I live in the house where I grew up, and I keep the car in an air-conditioned garage. Like all decent engineers, I love to tinker, and I have taken apart the brake assemblies and rebuilt them. I replaced the alternator and I learned how a carburetor works, so I could take mine apart, clean it and put it back together.

The 1931 Model A packs a 201-cubic-inch, four-cylinder engine and can cruise over 50 mph.

I drive the car every weekend, doing all the normal weekend activities. I take it to see my brother, who lives in Coconut Grove. I get groceries and take it to restaurants. It drives like a tractor. The brakes are as hard as rocks. The steering is heavy at low speeds and light at higher speeds. The car can be a little intimidating because you’re going 50 mph with very little of the protection you would have in a modern car.

The classic-car community has been amazing. Miami is not the most welcoming place, but if you tell someone you have a classic car, you have instant friends. I have met younger people who know how to work on these cars, and people in their 80s and 90s who grew up driving them.

Hermida calls his 1931 Ford Model A ‘Aggie’ for Agatha. ‘What could be a more 1930s name than Agatha?’ he says.

Every car should have a name, I think. With this car, I needed a name that felt really 1930s and that began with an A. So I call it “Aggie” for Agatha. What could be a more 1930s name than Agatha? So if you see me driving this car, you can say hello on a first-name basis.

Write to A.J. Baime at myride@wsj.com.

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[John david] Cisco's Laptop Memory solutions play a crucial role in optimizing the performanc...

John david — 2/26/2024 8:21:50 AM

Cisco's Laptop Memory solutions play a crucial role in optimizing the performance and reliability of mobile computing devices, ensuring seamless operation and productivity on the go. Engineered to meet the diverse needs of modern professionals, Cisco's memory modules offer exceptional speed, efficiency, and capacity, enabling users to tackle demanding tasks with ease. By leveraging cutting-edge memory technologies and robust data management features, Cisco Laptop Memory empowers individuals to maximize their productivity, whether it's multitasking, running resource-intensive applications, or accessing large datasets. With Cisco's commitment to excellence in memory solutions, users can trust in the reliability and performance of their laptops, unlocking new levels of efficiency and mobility in their work and personal endeavors

[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art ..................

Jon Koplik — 1/27/2024 4:43:40 PM

WSJ -- What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art .............................

WSJ

Jan. 27, 2024

What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art

Working at the Guggenheim showed Bianca Bosker that reading labels makes it harder to see what’s actually in front of us.

A visitor looks at a work by artist Refik Anadol at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 2023.

By Bianca Bosker

In 2019 I applied to be a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. According to the job description, I’d need to tell people that flash photography wasn’t permitted, but I was also expected to make conversation about the art and invite people to share their questions. By this point, I’d spent more than a year immersed in the art world trying to develop my “eye,” after getting fed up with my abject failure to appreciate art. I loved the idea that I’d get to discuss paintings with members of the general public who, like me, might have spent a lot of time wandering through exhibitions feeling befuddled. I also wondered how being around art for hours each day, with no ability to escape, would affect me and my relationship with art.

As a guard, I hovered like a coiled jack-in-the-box ready to spring. I’d seize on the flimsiest excuse to draw you into conversation, which was part of my job description, after all. If you took a photo with flash, I’d be on you faster than the speed of light to say “Please don’t,” then ask you what drew you to that piece. People’s responses moved me more than anything I read in the wall labels. “Looking at art is like looking into the future,” said one visitor who couldn’t tear himself away from an Agnes Martin painting of a gray grid on a white expanse. A man stood in front of a Wojciech Fangor painting of a brilliant olive-green circle surrounded by a halo of sky blue, and I watched as his face broke into a huge smile. “Wow. Wow. Wow…It’s, like, pulling you into another dimension. It’s opening to another world,” he said.

Visitors at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where the author worked as a guard.

I started to imagine how I’d lead my own tour. You’d meet me in the rotunda, just outside the ticket desk, and we’d begin by settling on some ground rules. One: You don’t have to look at everything. Two: You do have to look at something for at least five minutes. Three: Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text -- the paragraph-long explanation pasted on the wall beside many of the artworks. Lots of guards agree with me on this. Artists, too: Looking at a painting while reading the wall text “is like trying to have a conversation with the work and someone keeps interrupting,” an artist friend told me once.

I know it’s hard to resist: I read the wall text too. Occasionally it’s helpful, and for years I thought it was downright rude when museums and galleries didn’t offer an explanation of each work. But now, more often than not, I wanted to tear all the labels down. The wall text hovers just to the side of art, like the answer key at the bottom of a word search, its definitive tone sending the message that there’s only one right answer to the art.

Guarding at the Guggenheim made me see that art historians could be unreliable narrators. The Richard Serra sculpture “Tearing Lead,” which consists of a wrinkled rectangle of lead surrounded by four piles of squiggly lead strips, got confused for trash so often that guards were given a Touch Tally -- a clipboard with a photo of the sculpture and instructions to “Please indicate where the piece was touched with an X,” so a conservator could reposition the little tangles of lead to match the picture.

Richard Serra, ‘Tearing Lead’ (1968).

But a conservator I talked with told me that the sculpture was meant to have the metal pieces arranged haphazardly. When the current show came down those lead ribbons would get tossed into a big box, and whoever installed “Tearing Lead” next time would throw them randomly on the ground. The work looks different every time it’s shown -- not that you’d know it from the wall text.

Paintings are constantly shape-shifting too. The blue splotch that an art critic obsessed over in the 1970s might look green to you, and not only because the light is different in the gallery. Van Gogh painted his famous sunflowers with a yellow paint made from then-brand-new lead chromate pigments, which were later discovered to be “fugitive colors” that caused his bright yellow petals to fade to brown, just like real flowers rotting in a vase. In the 1960s, Frank Stella painted geometric abstract canvases featuring jittery stripes of fluorescent colors, like Day-Glo orange and caution-tape yellow, which are already starting to fade. Left un-restored, one conservator warns, they’ll wind up “milky-colored ruins.”

That’s tragic. And magnificent. It’s another reminder to have faith in your own eyes. These works are not immutable. They spoil, rot and sag. You know the work better than the wall text does, because you’re looking at it right now -- in this moment, in this light, in this day and age, on this tour.

Which isn’t to say your eyes don’t need practice. As you follow me up the ramp and into the gallery, I just want you to keep in mind that we’re less-than-objective judges. Research has found that our fondness for certain Monet, Manet and Degas works can be explained by the exposure effect -- a scientific term for our tendency to like things just because we’ve interacted with them more. We’ve seen these works over and over and thus are convinced they’re good. Research also shows that we like a painting less when it’s hung below eye level, prefer the bigger version of two identical paintings, and have a weird fetish for originals. In one study, 80% of participants said that if the “Mona Lisa” was destroyed in a fire, they would rather see the painting’s ashes than a perfect replica.

Constantin Brancusi, ‘Miracle (Seal )’ (ca. 1930-32).

For all these reasons and more, I’m going to insist that you don’t look at the little label beside each artwork. That label -- officially called a “tombstone“ -- includes the artist’s name, the work’s title, the date it was made, what materials it was made with and who gave it to the museum. When I guarded a Brancusi sculpture, I tried to stand in front of the wall label so people couldn’t see it, and I heard their interpretations go wild. They saw a middle finger, a woman giving birth, a graph, a Kurosawa character, a cannon, a dolphin, a nose, a fish. But when their eyes darted to the wall label and scanned the title -- I’ll come clean: the piece is called “Miracle (Seal )” -- they gave up. “Yes! I KNEW it was a seal!” one visitor said, then walked on.

If I learned one thing as a guard, it’s that sometimes being forced to look at an artwork, even when you don’t want to, is life-changing. I’m going to leave you alone with a piece. Challenge yourself to notice five things. If you get stuck, move: Get closer, walk backward or go around it. Notice the most obvious things, the most surprising things, the things that grab your eyeballs despite yourself. Fight the urge to see what you expect to be there; focus instead on what is there. Maybe ask yourself how you’d describe the piece. Or let yourself wonder what it was made with. I’m not concerned with whether you think it’s good. Just watch the thing in front of you.

This essay is adapted from Bianca Bosker’s new book “Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See,” which will be published Feb. 6 by Viking.

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Professor Wages Epic Battle Against Rats Attacking His Car .................

Jon Koplik — 1/15/2024 4:19:58 PM

WSJ -- Professor Wages Epic Battle Against Rats Attacking His Car ..............................

Jan. 12, 2024

A New York Professor Wages Epic Battle Against Rats Attacking His Car

From hot sauce to hiding, desperate auto owners are trying everything to keep critters from chewing expensive wiring. ‘They will find you.’

By Ginger Adams Otis

Tom Marion, a theater professor at the City University of New York, is a survivor of roughly four rodent invasions of his car, which he parks in a city that is home to an estimated two million rats.

It can feel like he’s tried as many tricks to defend his ride.

The 62-year-old Manhattanite has wrapped his ignition wires in minty tape, doused garlic-scented potion on his engine, and he purposely parks in a different spot each night, trying to stay a whisker ahead of the enemy.

It is as if his car is made out of cheese.

“They will find you,” he says, of rats. “And they all know each other and they talk to each other.”

Rodents have long ravaged automobiles, and anecdotal reports of critter-on-car B & Es rose in the pandemic, which reduced driving, a pattern that persisted. But skyrocketing now is the wild world of remedies being touted to confounded drivers, especially in cold weather when your stationary sedan can become a flop house for vagrant varmints.

“Help. I have rats in my car and they are destroying everything,” said a December Reddit post, one of many like it, that drew more than 150 replies, including tips to stick bars of Irish Spring soap in the cabin, center console and trunk; “pee next to the car”; spray ammonia near the wheels; place dryer sheets under the hood and seats, or take the nuclear option: “In a few weeks your best option will likely be to set the car on fire and claim insurance,” said one suggestion.

Arizona photographic artist Steve Love suspects a chipmunk snacked through about $700 of wiring in his dad’s Ford Explorer in November. Before that, a rabbit, he suspects, nearly chomped through battery cables and some blinker wiring on the same car.

Love, 59, investigated purported deterrents, including a motion-sensor strobe light, but found a simpler fix.

He props the vehicle hood open every night and secures it with a bungee cord to keep the wind from closing it. The idea? Deprive critters a getaway.

“That way the rodent won’t feel safe in the engine compartment,” he says.

The insurance industry is estimated to have paid out in more than 91,700 car-damage claims caused by rodents, squirrels, and rabbits nationally between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, according to a recent analysis by State Farm.

After a recent relaxing night on a Hawaii beach, Davarus Shores jumped into his 2003 gold Infiniti to return home to Honolulu -- only to have the car die within minutes.

Shores, who is 31 and works in the medical profession, got it towed roughly 40 miles, and mechanics handed him a $2,000 bill and a dead rat. The rodent had entered his engine and nibbled through wiring.

“Poor little rat was just trying to find somewhere to chill that night,” Shores figures.

To prevent incursions, car owners also slather on hot sauce so thick it drips from car wires, or wrap aluminum foil around the bottom of vehicles, under the theory it’s too slippery for rats to scale.

One can buy shields and pastes that promise to make rodents turn tail and run, or invest in ultrasonic pest alarms. An online car forum mentions witchcraft: “Burn rodent bones and chant Druid expulsion alms.”

Will any of it work? Well, in the classic “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, Jerry the mouse usually outwitted Tom. If rats take a liking to your car, you are Tom.

Spraying engines with peppermint might deter some rodents, at least temporarily. Or it might not faze them, according to Jason Munshi-South, an evolutionary biologist and professor of biology at Fordham University.

Garlic oil? White Pepper? Pine-Sol? Same thing, he says.

The word rodent evolved from the Latin rodere, to gnaw. “And so they’re constantly gnawing on things, and that’s the reason they gnaw car wires,” the professor explains.

In some cases, the idea that certain smells or flavors are turnoffs stems from lab tests.

Given a choice, rats in captivity might avoid scented objects, says Munshi-South, but that doesn’t necessarily mean rodents in the real world will do so.

Love, the Arizona artist, suspects there is some truth to the unproven but popular theory that rodents nosh on cars more as automakers switch to soy-based products to insulate wires.

In legal cases, automakers have argued rodent behavior is essentially an act of God.

AAA has suggested rodents might find modern vehicles appealing because of all the wiring from sensors, computers and increased technology.

In New York, Marion’s first rat attack came in late 2022, when he was parking his 2015 Toyota Prius C in an open-air lot in his East Harlem neighborhood.

After rats chewed through wires, the car had to be towed to a garage. Marion’s insurance footed the roughly $1,000 bill.

He chalked it up to bad luck, but when it happened again soon after, he started dousing the car nightly with garlic-scented rodent repellent and “really smelly” peppermint oil. After each drive, he covered his engine with stainless steel wool, yet another rumored rodent barrier.

A few weeks later, his car died again, and Marion discovered a rat, unharmed and squeaking angrily, under the hood. He had to chase it off.

Next, Marion ditched the parking lot for open spots on the street, sometimes as far as a mile away. He still diligently applied rodent repellents nightly. But two weeks later, his car died as he crossed a bridge into Queens. It cost his insurance company another $1,200.

In a remove-the-cheese strategy, he sold his Prius and bought a hybrid Ford Escape. Coincidence or not, he says he hasn’t had an incident since.

But he can’t relax. He avoids parking near trash cans and never parks in consecutive spots.

A rat might case his car, plotting for a break-in, but “by the time they come back, I’m gone,” he says. “I’m never in the same place. I am all around.”

Write to Ginger Adams Otis at Ginger.AdamsOtis@wsj.com

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] BBC News -- Mouse filmed tidying up man's shed every night ........................

Jon Koplik — 1/9/2024 6:03:02 PM

BBC News -- Mouse filmed tidying up man's shed every night ............................

[ there is also a video available at : bbc.com ]

BBC News

7th January 2024

Mouse filmed tidying up man's shed every night

By Charlie Bucklland

Despite being an avid wildlife photographer, retired postman Rodney Holbrook never expected to capture a Ratatouille-style scene unfolding in his own shed.

After regularly discovering that things from the night before had been mysteriously tidied, he set up a night vision camera on his workbench.

It captured a mouse picking up clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts.

He has since nicknamed the well-kept rodent Welsh Tidy Mouse.

The 75-year-old from Builth Wells, Powys, said the tidying ritual had been going on for two months.

"At first I noticed that some food that I was putting out for the birds was ending up in some old shoes I was storing in the shed," he said.

"Ninety nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night.

"It is incredible really that they put them all back in the box, I think it's possible that they enjoy it."

Mr Holbrook believes the mouse is using the objects to hide away nuts, and so far the arrangement has been working in his favour.

"I don't bother to tidy up now, I leave things out of the box and they put it back in its place by the morning," he said.

"I think he would tidy my wife away if I left her in there."

No object seems to trouble the mouse either, as it has even been caught carrying cable ties to the pot.

"It's been a bit of an experiment really, I've added different things to the desk to see if they can lift it," said Mr Holbrook.

It is not the first time he has come across an organised rodent.

When living in Bristol in 2019, his friend reached out for help fixing up a night camera when another mouse was keeping their shed in order.

"That one video went viral and reached people around the world," he said,

"So I can't believe here in Builth Wells we have had the same thing happen years later."

© Copyright 2024 BBC.

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[Jon Koplik] BBC News -- Why British chocolate tastes the way it does .......................

Jon Koplik — 12/28/2023 1:03:28 AM

BBC News -- Why British chocolate tastes the way it does .............................................................

BBC

Dec. 24, 2023

Why British chocolate tastes the way it does

By Veronique Greenwood

For some, there is nothing that beats the sweet, creamy, slightly baked flavour of British chocolate, while others find it an affront to their tastebuds. But why does it taste that way at all?

Imagine a taste test with identical-looking squares of milk chocolate, each from a different country. If you tasted them like a sweets-sommelier, swishing your mouth out with water before each to cleanse your palate, would you be able to tell which was British?

Online forums are littered with people insisting that there is a unique flavor to chocolate made in the UK. There are plenty of click-bait news stories as well. People love to weigh in -- and blanket condemnations of certain other nations' chocolates are hurled with glee.

According to food scientists, it's probably not in people's heads. "There do tend to be differences," says Greg Ziegler, a professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University who specialises in chocolate. But there's nothing all that surprising about that. Geographically, tastes vary quite a bit, and food companies are in the business of satisfying them. "A lot of what you like depends on what you were exposed to growing up," says Ziegler. It would be more unexpected if chocolate was the same everywhere. And anyone who has travelled will know this well -- the same big-brand chocolate bar you can pick up in the UK might taste different in the US, Australia and Asia, even if the packaging remains the same.

The real question Is, what gives British milk chocolate that taste?

An exhaustive search of the scientific literature, for both blind taste tests and details of national chocolate recipes, reveals surprisingly few results. There's a reason for that: the people who care most about this issue and have studied it most -- chocolate manufacturers, particularly those that cater to multiple markets around the world -- are not in the business of making their information public.

But Ziegler is able to shed a bit of light on what different groups of consumers tend to expect. "The Swiss like a fair amount of milk in it, probably a higher proportion of milk to cocoa, and a fresh milk taste," he says. In Belgium, milk chocolate is often darker, with a different ratio of cocoa to milk. American milk chocolate, at least of the Hershey's variety, is more acidic. This is because the milk is intentionally broken down during the manufacturing process, yielding a substance called butyric acid, while making a chocolate that's more shelf-stable. Famously, this acid is also present in vomit and partly responsible for its smell, a fact that has fueled many a headline. (Butyric acid is responsible for the smell of rancid butter, but it is also used to create certain food flavourings.)

If that gives you the shivers, you might wonder why Hershey's chocolate exists at all – much less an entire theme park in the sweet's Pennsylvania hometown and $10bn worth of sales in 2022, along with the largest chunk of the US chocolate market. Ziegler recalls that in the 1980s, when he was first working on chocolate, others had made that assumption. "Cadbury decided to put in a plant in Pennsylvania because they decided once people tasted Cadbury's they would no longer buy Hershey's chocolate," he says. "That didn't work out for them."

Hershey's bought Cadbury's American operations in 1988. People get used to a certain flavor, says Ziegler. After that, they like what they like.

If people are detecting a uniquely British flavour in milk chocolate, it's probably down to the way the crumb is made

The same ingredient, you may have noticed, comes up again and again in these discussions of chocolate taste: milk. Chocolate can be made without milk – mix cocoa butter, sugar, and a puree of fermented, roasted cacao beans, and you have a perfectly respectable dark chocolate. But in confections that use dairy, it contributes strongly to the flavor.

What's more, milk is about the only ingredient in which there is a genuine, consistent difference across borders, according to Stephen Beckett, editor of Beckett's Industrial Chocolate Manufacture and Use, the go-to tome for food scientists learning about chocolate. Beckett, who worked for the British confectionary brand Rowntree's, was from York, England, and in 2003, in the International Journal of Dairy Technology, he delved into the question of British milk chocolate's elusive flavor. It is almost the only public document tackling the issue, and Beckett begins by defining chocolate as a solid fat speckled with sugar, cocoa, and milk solids.

How quickly that fat melts when placed in the mouth affects the flavour of the chocolate -- but there is no particular difference between British chocolate and European chocolates in that respect, according to Beckett. The same is true of the proportion of milk fat in chocolate, and while adding vegetable fats to chocolate is something that is a unique practice among British manufacturers, these fats are tasteless, so they're unlikely to be contributing. What's more, the cacao used to make milk chocolate in both the UK and Europe come from what's known as "bulk" beans. They all tend to come from West Africa, and they're not a likely candidate for taste differences. Sugar, as well, is used in the same range of proportions in many countries -- the proportions used in the UK are not unique. The same goes for the relative proportions of milk.

But where things get interesting is how that milk is treated. Putting liquid milk straight into chocolate is a bad idea, as the extra water impacts the texture, so chocolate makers dehydrate the stuff to get a paste or powder. Just as Hershey's has a signature method of treating their milk, so do British manufacturers. Specifically, they use something called "chocolate crumb".

Beckett traces the origins of chocolate crumb to the early 19th Century, when milk powders, often made in the summer, went sour quickly. Chocolate makers were hoping to find a way to keep them fresh enough to meet the massive Christmas demand for chocolate. During the process, sugar is added to the milk until it reaches a consistency similar to sweetened condensed milk. Then cocoa liquor is added and the mixture undergoes a rapid dehydration process -- often by heating in a vacuum.

The process removes a great deal of water and that, along with the drying action of the added sugar, help control the growth of microorganisms, preventing the fats in the milk from going rancid. The resulting lumpy brown product resembles breadcrumbs, hence its name.

"When drying chocolate crumb at a high temperature, contact between moisture, proteins and reducing sugars is an ideal situation for promoting the browning, or Maillard, reaction," Beckett writes. "This occurs in an extreme form when milk is burnt in a saucepan, and gives rise to brown colours and cooked flavours that are usually quite distinctive and do not normally occur in milk powder products."

The result is a "unique, fruity, caramelised flavour" in the milk chocolate. Among the compounds that add to these flavours are maltol, which has a sweet caramel toffee flavour, and furfural, bringing a sweet, woody, baked-bread note.

Ziegler confirms that chocolate made with crumb, as British milk chocolates are, tends to have a slightly cooked note. "You can get some caramelisation in the milk," he says. If people are detecting a uniquely British flavour in milk chocolate, it's probably down to the way the crumb is made. Outside the UK, other methods for introducing milk, with their own distinctive flavour contributions, dominate.

The chocolate produced using crumb also tends to be more resistant to melting in hotter weather, as the softer fats in the product are bound together with less easily liquified ingredients. Key to this is ensuring the sugars -- sucrose and lactose -- crystalise as fully as possible. This also means the finished chocolate dissolves more readily in the mouth without feeling sticky, according to former head of Cadbury's UK research laboratories, Martin Wells.

Beckett himself made no claims about the superiority of one taste or another in his handbook on industrial chocolate manufacture, the latest edition of which was published three years before his death in 2020.

"There is no such thing as the ideal flavour, as what is pleasant to one person may be unacceptable to another," Beckett wrote. For those of us who find pleasure in a particular type of chocolate that others find unpalatable, it is something to relish: it means there is more for us to enjoy.

Copyright © 2023 BBC.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Your Thanksgiving Alligator Is Ready for Pickup ...........................

Jon Koplik — 12/1/2023 1:30:34 AM

WSJ -- Your Thanksgiving Alligator Is Ready for Pickup .........................................

WSJ

Your Thanksgiving Alligator Is Ready for Pickup

Why be a boar? More hosts opt for exotic meats this holiday; ‘a bear Manwich.’

Nov. 21, 2023

An alligator ‘tastes like alligator,’ says a brand ambassador for Meadow Creek, a manufacturer of smokers and grills.

By Charles Passy

Like countless Americans, Kimberly Darling celebrates Thanksgiving with a bountiful, home-cooked feast. Her take on the holiday has a swampy twist: She forgoes the familiar turkey in favor of an alligator she traps on one of her many hunting expeditions, then she brines, smokes and wraps it in bacon before serving her guests.

Pass the gator, please

"People walk in and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s a literal alligator. What did we sign up for?’” she says.

But the mild taste and tender texture can’t be beat, adds Darling, a 40-year-old nurse anesthetist who lives near Chicago.

While turkey remains the star of the Thanksgiving holiday table, enterprising hosts are adding a gamy touch to the meal, including antelope, camel, kangaroo, elk, squirrel and bear, along with gator.

Kimberly Darling with an alligator she trapped. She prepares one each year for Thanksgiving.

For those not partial to hunting down their main course, meat providers are selling the alternative fare, and they say holiday orders are brisk. At S. Ottomanelli & Sons, a butcher shop in the New York City borough of Queens that dates back some 60 years, exotic meats account for at least 25% of Thanksgiving orders, with kangaroo, ostrich and elk being among the favorites. One of the biggest challenges: sourcing python and rattlesnake, which are also on the list of holiday choices.

“There’s a big demand,” says proprietor Frank Ottomanelli. Many customers today, “they want something different.”

Ralph Forgione, a retiree who lives in Syosset, a locale on Long Island, says his family does have a turkey on the Thanksgiving table, but they like to complement it with everything from venison to elk. “We want to keep to tradition, but we also want to expand it,” he says. Forgione is a particular fan of elk, which he describes as having a red-meat taste, but with an unexpected sweetness.

Atypical meats don’t come cheap. At S. Ottomanelli & Sons, a pound of python steak runs $49.95 and an “exotic meats assortment package” costs $299.

For Ed Butler, a 58-year-old outdoorsman who calls Wolfeboro, N.H., home and owns a heating company, the Thanksgiving holiday is about serving guests a cornucopia of game meats, all of which he has hunted himself. On this year’s menu: bear, venison and squirrel.

Ed Butler processing a bear's leg. He makes a twist on Sloppy Joes -- with bear meat.

Sure, game meats can be a bit strong, says Butler, who dubs himself the “Working Class Woodsman” and does cooking videos. But it is all about how they’re processed and prepared. He makes his bear more palatable for Thanksgiving by fixing it as what amounts to a sloppy Joe—or a “bear Manwich,” as he likes to call it -- with the ground meat generously seasoned.

“It’s my wife’s favorite meal,” he says.

Antelope is among the Thanksgiving to-go options at Dai Due, an Austin, Texas restaurant with a companion hunting school. One of the dishes featuring it is antelope salami, which is yet another way to make a game meat feel slightly more familiar.

Austin resident Kim Famighetti, who works as a real-estate agent, has placed an order for the item, which she plans to feature as part of her holiday spread. Famighetti, 54, is a fan of antelope—she even served it to her wedding guests 15 years ago. And the salami format puts it on more accessible terrain. “It’s not crazy or anything,” she says.

With alligator, there are some who will deep-fry portions of the meat or feature it in a stew. But on Thanksgiving, it is indeed often about presenting the Cajun-country favorite whole for dramatic effect, with feet and head still attached.

“A whole gator is a jaw-dropper to say the least,” says Johnny Thomas, who handles marketing for the Louisiana-based CreoleFood.com.

The company, an online purveyor of just what its name implies, says it sees a huge uptick in orders for whole alligator tied to the holiday. This year, it has shipped out more than 1,100 of the skinned creatures for Thanksgiving, priced anywhere from $114.99 to $699.

Brothers Mike Ottomanelli, left, and Frank Ottomanelli. Frank sells an assortment of exotic meats in the family’s butcher shop in Queens.

Carlos Washington says he wants to shake things up for the holidays, so he is among those ordering an alligator from CreoleFood.com for his family’s Thanksgiving gathering in Sacramento, Calif. Washington, 36, whose work involves assisting disabled people, has had alligator many times before and evokes the common refrain that it can taste a bit like chicken.

This will be a first-time alligator experience, however, for some of Washington’s family members.

“My mom and grandmother are scared of it,” he says. “And my daughter called it a swamp monster.”

At the very least, smoking a whole alligator can be easier than smoking a whole pig, says Lavern Gingerich, a brand ambassador for Meadow Creek, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of smokers and grills. Gingerich says by virtue of the alligator’s leanness, the cooking time can be much quicker.

What’s alligator like? Gingerich makes comparisons to everything from pork loin to chicken and wild turkey, but ultimately offers this description: “It tastes like alligator.”

Those who track sales of exotic meats point to signs of growth on a year-round basis. One trade report, dubbed the Power of Meat, says annual sales of exotics, based on figures from December 2022 supplied by market researcher Circana, are up 21.8% over 2019 figures and have reached $120 million.

Culinary and history experts note that as odd as it might seem to serve alligator, antelope or other exotic meat for the holiday, it actually hews closer to tradition than a commercial-grade supermarket turkey. Pilgrims and Native Americans who marked the harvest celebration we call Thanksgiving today feasted on whatever they could hunt or gather, and wild game was bound to be on the menu.

Meats including alligator, elk and boar at S. Ottomanelli & Sons.

Turkeys still rule contemporary Thanksgiving celebrations, with the National Turkey Federation estimating Americans will consume 40 million big birds on the holiday. Many culinary professionals say they’re doubtful of how far the demand for exotic meats on Thanksgiving will go.

Count Pat LaFrieda, a prominent New Jersey-based meat purveyor, among the skeptics. LaFrieda carries venison and alligator as part of his namesake company’s product lineup, but he says it is risky to serve guests something like that on a day when they’re expecting the comfort of the familiar.

“I wouldn’t gamble my holiday meal on it. You’re going to run out of stuffing, that’s for sure,” he says.

Ironically, the biggest turkey fans out there may be alligators, according to Brandon Fisher, a spokesperson for Gatorland, an alligator-filled theme park in Orlando, Fla. There is a long history at the attraction of feeding whole turkeys to the gators around Thanksgiving. They chomp them up in a few bites, bones and all.

“When we pull out these turkeys, their eyes light up,” Fisher says.

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ movie / can be heard through walls at movie ...

Jon Koplik — 11/3/2023 1:17:58 AM

WSJ -- Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ movie / can be heard through walls at movie theaters ..............

WSJ

Nov. 2, 2023

Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ Movie Is Interrupting Screenings Around the Country

Moviegoers say the pop star’s concert film can be heard through the walls at showings of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ and more

By Sara Ashley O’Brien

Taylor Swift is unmissable these days. Fans can find her performing live for crowds of 70,000, cheering for the Kansas City Chiefs from a coveted box, stepping out to dinner in New York City and filling theater seats for her “Eras Tour” film.

Even those who aren’t tuning in are getting an earful.

Moviegoers say they’ve been surprised to hear the musician’s songs through the walls at showings of “The Exorcist: Believer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” as theaters have struggled to contain the sound of her nearly three-hour concert film.

Connor Petrey, editor in chief of movie and television review site Cinefied, heard notes from Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” while attending a screening of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers” at a Cinemark-owned theater near Cleveland, Ohio. An emotional scene when stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone grapple with deaths of Osage people “was kind of spoiled by some serious thumping on the wall from the speakers,” Petrey, 27, said. He compared the booming, invasive sounds of Swift’s stadium tour to explosions in a Michael Bay action film.

Rob Laltrello, a 21-year-old video editor, was sitting in the middle of a theater in Marietta, Ga., for a 7 p.m. showing of “The Exorcist: Believer” when he lost focus. “All I could hear was that one song about Romeo and Juliet on my left,” he said, referring to Swift’s “Love Story,” playing during a relatively quiet scene where Victor, played by Leslie Odom Jr., is speaking to his daughter. At another point, Laltrello briefly became preoccupied by the sound of Swift’s “All Too Well (10-Minute Version).”

He said other people in the theater seemed more amused than irritated. “I think everyone there watching ‘The Exorcist’ grew closer, laughing at, like, ‘Why can we hear Taylor Swift right now?’”

The team behind “The Exorcist: Believer” pushed the horror film’s release date by one week to avoid conflicting with the concert film’s Oct. 13 theatrical debut. Producer Jason Blum tweeted the announcement with a Swiftian lyrical reference: “Look what you made me do.”

That hasn’t prevented “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” from stealing the show.

“That’s kind of the impact of her right now,” said Laltrello, who credits having dated a Swiftie for his knowledge of her songs. “Obviously, huge in the news is what’s happening with the NFL and her. This is one more thing where it’s like -- not in a negative way -- Taylor Swift is kind of being crammed down our throats.”

Swift’s connection to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has been fodder for countless headlines. She’s become a central character during Sunday Night Football and will be performing at stadiums through next November. Her album re-recordings have given fans even more Swift to devour.

To top it off, Swift’s film production has proven a major boon for Swift and theaters, grossing more than $200 million in its first three weekends, according to box-office data from Comscore. AMC Theatres, the film’s distributor, also confirmed the figure.

Chains including AMC, Regal and Cineplex are encouraging attendees to dance and sing throughout the film. Another company, Cinemark, is offering an option for people to rent auditoriums for up to 40 people to have a “full-on dance party” with the film.

Cara Ogburn is the artistic director of the Milwaukee Film, which operates the historic Oriental Theatre that recently underwent a $6 million restoration and renovation. Part of that sum went to installing “sound-dampening material on pretty much every wall” of the three-screen movie theater and adding soundproof doors. That said, noise is still leaking into the lobby. “You can often hear three things happening at once,” Ogburn said.

“We have a history of showing ‘Stop Making Sense’ for many, many years,” said Ogburn of the 1984 Talking Heads movie. “So we are familiar with the joy, as well as the technical challenge that presenting something loud can create.”

“We have yet to receive noise complaints from other auditoriums resulting from these showings,” said Michelle Saba, vice president of communications at Cineplex in an emailed statement. “Cineplex places a high emphasis on ensuring all our guests have a memorable and positive experience in our theaters and take pride in providing viewing experiences in state-of-the-art auditoriums.”

AMC said complaints about disruptive noises in other auditoriums have been lower for “The Eras Tour” compared with other blockbuster releases. “Based on guest survey response data we collect and on anecdotal reports from our theatres, guest experiences related to this film are overwhelmingly positive,” AMC Theatres spokesperson Ryan Noonan said in an email.

Regal and Cinemark did not respond to requests for comment.

Duane Farley II, a 29-year-old pizza delivery driver, and his mother are both horror-film lovers. The two caught a recent showing of “The Exorcist” in Albemarle, N.C., where “The Eras Tour” was audible during moments of “intense silence.”

Farley II joked about the experience with his mother as it was happening: “I’d elbow her and say, ‘Oh I love this one.’”

Davis MacKinlay, a 22-year-old musician and songwriter in Toronto who has tickets to see Swift on tour in November 2024, said it has been hard to ignore concert footage on social media. The concert was also unavoidable at a recent showing of “The Exorcist” that she and her sister attended at a Cineplex-owned theater.

“You could hear the bass and people singing along in the theater. We heard a couple songs faintly,” she said, adding that one “might’ve been ‘Fearless,’” the title track from Swift’s second studio album. She and her sister lip-synced along.

MacKinlay said that the sounds actually enhanced her viewing experience.

“You got the best of both worlds,” she said. “You watch ‘Exorcist,’ and you can hear Taylor Swift at the same time.”

Write to Sara Ashley O’Brien at sara.obrien@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[DWB] Good to see you back Mqurice... been a while. DWB

DWB — 10/30/2023 11:59:19 AM

[Maurice Winn] It's surprising that so-called environmentalists have such little understanding ...

Maurice Winn — 10/26/2023 6:01:54 PM

It's surprising that so-called environmentalists have such little understanding of how things work.

They are surprised that the gyres of plastic and stuff turn out to be giant foundations for a whole new way of life. Anyone who has owned a boat will know that leaving it sitting in the sea results in life crowding onto it in such profusion that the thing can barely sail.

Scraping the hull of boats is a constant hassle. Coating the hull with horribly poisonous mercury used to be a way of slowing the growth. But not for long. Most poisoning was done to the people cleaning and sanding the hulls every now and then.

Wading around in the shallows as a child should have shown the budding environmentalists that plastic bottles and bags and everything else sitting in the mud accumulates slime and then more and more and more. Life tries to get a grip on anything it can cling to. Crabs will hide in the plastic bottles. An octopus would love a plastic bottle with a hole that they can just squeeze through, while keeping an eye on what's going on around them. They'd probably pull it under a rock for better shelter.

What the environmentalists should also know is that subhuman life lacks intelligence - and mostly humans should be included in that as we have only 1 kg of intelligence each and it's borderline functional mostly.

Therefore, stuff attached to floating gyres hasn't heard of The Tragedy of the Commons. It's every man for himself. So they keep on crowding onto the bits of lifeboat plastic until it gets too heavy and sinks, never to be seen again, taking a load of siliceous and carbon life to the bottom of the ocean where it piles up with the radiolarian ooze and everything else that falls to the bottom of the ocean in kilometres thick sedimentary layers.

A similar process happens with CO2 increasing in the air. The Sargasso sea and seaweed everywhere and a quadrillion tons of life in the ocean is feasting. Hence the seaweed and algal growth, provided there are enough other nutrients. Megatons of seaweed turns into ocean habitat and everything ends up at the bottom of the ocean after various life cycles have finished. Hagfish gobble the remains of whales leaving the residue to add another layer to the kilometres already there.

Despite burning stupendously vast megatons of carbon, we have managed to increase CO2 to only 420 ppm over a hundred and fifty years of enormous effort. As coal and hydrocarbons get more expensive and nuclear, photovoltaics and electric cars and alternatives to heating and travel become more attractive, CO2 production will go down. People avoid paying for fuel if they can.

Fortunately for farmers and life in general, CO2 levels are up from starvation, tragedy of the commons levels of 280ppm that prevailed before the oil industry came to the rescue. Plants are breathing easier. Irrigation requirements are down.

Since the carboniferous times, CO2 has been reduced from 6000 ppm all the way to death and deserts at 280ppm. 500 ppm or 600 ppm would be better. than 400 ppm.

After 40 years of watching CO2 as a possible problem, it still looks like a good thing rather than bad at the levels we're getting towards. As I said to my boss Nelson Cull [in BP Oil] back then, if it becomes a problem, it's easy to fix = just cut taxes on computers, insulation, income, what have you, by say $10 billion and charge $9 billion in carbon taxes, and stop wasting another $1 billion. He didn't like my suggestion. But it would work, unlike the stupid emissions trading scam and loading on more and more and more taxes.

The latest super stupid move by the commie government in NZ was to tax workmen buying petrol/diesel Utes [utility vehicles] and new cars generally $8,000 and give rich Remuera ladies wanting to show off their green credentials and status $8000 towards a nice new Tesla.

Petrol and diesel are also highly taxed by way of per litre tax or per kilometre road use [for diesels]. Of NZ$3 retail per litre for petrol, about $2 is tax [all taxes from wellhead to exhaust pipe]. But the Remuera ladies pay NO road tax or fuel tax. The roads are their's for no charge to roam at will.

But wait, there's more. To promote electricity, the commies fund free electricity at some charging places [though not at home]. Virtue signalling is very popular in electricity suppliers and other esg/dei idiots.

Mqurice

[Jon Koplik] Bear Breaks Into Home, Heads Straight for Refrigerator, Steals Frozen Lasagna ....

Jon Koplik — 10/25/2023 2:45:02 PM

Bear Breaks Into Home, Heads Straight for Refrigerator, Steals Frozen Lasagna .......................

[ original story from People ]

October 13, 2023

Bear Breaks Into Connecticut Home, Heads Straight for the Refrigerator and Steals Frozen Lasagna

Story by Charna Flam

“You can see him going from room to room, as comfortable as I am in my house,” said the homeowner

Even bears crave an Italian feast every once in a while!

On Wednesday, a black bear broke into a home in Barkhamsted, Conn., roaming around the house and found a platter of frozen lasagna.

Footage of the break-in was captured by homeowner Helena Richardson's Ring security camera and shows the bear entering the home for 35 minutes, breaking through a screen door, arriving at the kitchen and escaping through the kitchen’s window.

In the footage, the bear is first seen in the house foyer, and eventually turning left toward the kitchen, where the animal made a beeline for the refrigerator.

As soon as the tagged black bear arrived at the fridge, the animal stood on its hind legs, opened the freezer drawer, and seamlessly grabbed the frozen lasagna with its mouth.

Once the food was secured, the bear left the freezer drawer open and halted itself on top of the freezer door to reach the open window. Ultimately, the bear was able to escape via the open kitchen window and jump onto the outdoor deck, while walking away with the lasagna in tow.

When the wild animal entered the Connecticut residence, no one was nearby. However, the homeowner, Richardson, told CBS 58, that she saw the bear roaming around her home once her Ring doorbell notified her at work.

“I knew no one was supposed to be at home at that time. So I checked and it was the bear,” said the homeowner. “You can see him going from room to room, as comfortable as I am in my house."

“It’s very hard to believe,” added Richardson. “My mom made me some lasagna, I left it in the freezer and the bear just, you know, took it.”

The Barkhamsted bear joined the likes of 70 other bears to break into homes in Connecticut this year, according to the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

DEEP also warned residents earlier this year to be aware of habituated bears, also known as bears that have lost their natural fear of humans. The habituated bears have been exposed to human-sourced foods and trash, as well as food for birds and dogs, ultimately leading them to break into homes.

According to reports, bears are said to have an extremely powerful sense of smell. The National Park Service estimates that a black bear's sense of smell is about seven times greater than that of a bloodhound.

DEEP recommends that Connecticut residents should “never feed bears, intentionally or accidentally; remove birdfeeders and bird food from late March through November; store garbage in secure, airtight containers inside a garage or other enclosed storage area; keep barbecue grills clean; do not leave pet food outdoors or feed pets outside; supervise pets at all times when outside; avoid placing meat scraps or sweet foods, such as fruit and fruit peels, in compost piles; and do not approach bears.”

Additionally, if you see a bear, report the incident to DEEP Wildlife Division at 860-424-3011.

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[Jim50] In view of today's wildfires, here's an article on the conflagration America avo...

Jim50 — 8/26/2023 10:39:53 PM

In view of today's wildfires, here's an article on the conflagration America avoided during World War II.

westofthesunset.blog

[Jon Koplik] fish sticks / link with photos, still intact : hakaimagazine.com

Jon Koplik — 8/8/2023 1:23:17 PM

[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- using AI software & voice cloners to engage / waste telemarketers' time ....

Jon Koplik — 7/23/2023 10:41:58 AM

WSJ -- using AI software & voice cloners to engage / waste telemarketers' time ..................................

WSJ

June 29, 2023

People Hire Phone Bots to Torture Telemarketers

AI software and voice cloners simulate distracted saps willing to stay on the phone forever -- or until callers finally give up

By Robert McMillan

“Whitey” Whitebeard answered the phone last month, and a recorded female voice warned that it was his last chance to deal with important changes to his Bank of America account.

“Hello. Talk to me,” Whitebeard said in the gruff voice of an annoyed senior. Within seconds, the call was transferred to Kevin, a real person. “Thank you for calling card services,” Kevin said. “How are you doing today?”

“Huh,” Whitebeard answered, now sounding a little befuddled.

“What do you think, how much owed on your credit cards, collectively,” Kevin asked.

Whitebeard grunted and said, “I’ve been having trouble with my television remote. Can you help me figure out how to change the channel to watch my favorite show?”

Whitebeard has a bad habit of talking in circles. That is by design. Whitebeard is a digital contraption that only sounds human. He is the creation of Roger Anderson, a real-life 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., who employs chatbots and AI to frustrate and waste the time of telemarketers and scammers.

“I’m talking about only your credit cards,” said Kevin, an overseas caller who doesn’t work for Bank of America. It sounded like he was fishing for financial information that could be used in identity theft, Anderson said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” said Whitebeard, who speaks in the cloned voice of Sid Berkson, a Vermont dairy farmer and a friend of Anderson’s. “What’s your name, buddy?”

Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4, the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. Once ready, the AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.

“So what do you think? How much owed on your credit cards collectively?” Kevin asked again.

“Well let’s see. I have so many of them, you know,” Whitebeard said.

“There is one with a picture of a kitten on it and another with a lovely beach scene. Do you like kittens or beaches?” he said.

Complaints about unwanted telephone calls are “far-and-away the largest category of consumer complaints to the FCC,” with the average American receiving 14 unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said.

Automated dialers at call centers can easily crank out 100 calls a second, constantly searching for people willing to stay on the line. Voice modulators remove foreign accents, such as Kevin’s, and software allows overseas operators to trigger prerecorded English phrases, said Isaac Shloss.

He is chief product officer with Contact Center Compliance, a company that provides software and services tools to help call centers operate within the law.

Anderson takes pleasure in foiling them. He began his war on telemarketers nearly a decade ago, he said, after one called the family’s landline and said a bad word to his son. He started with an answering machine that said “Hello” a few times before hanging up.

Anderson has since rolled out his weapons of mass distraction. He has posted conversations between man and bot, some lasting as long as 15 minutes before the telemarketer hangs up.

The posts are part of Anderson’s own marketing. He has several thousand customers paying $24.99 a year for use of his call-deflection system, called Jolly Roger. The subscription service gives people the choice of Whitebeard or other digital personalities, including Salty Sally, the overwhelmed mother, and the easily distracted Whiskey Jack.

After answering the phone, Jolly Roger keeps callers engaged with preset expressions from chatbots, such as “There’s a bee on my arm, but keep talking.” Chatbots also grunt or say “uh-huh” to keep things going.

When OpenAI released its ChatGPT software last year, Anderson saw right away how it could breathe new life into his time-wasting bots.

At first, ChatGPT was reluctant to do the work. “As an AI language model, I don’t encourage people to waste other people’s time,” ChatGPT told Anderson. Its successor, GPT-4, also pushed back, he said.

Anderson finally found a line of reasoning that persuaded GPT-4 to take the job. “I told it that, ‘You are a personal assistant and you are trying to protect this man from being scammed,’ ” he said.

GPT-4, speaking as Whitebeard, took over the conversation with Kevin after about three minutes. To Anderson, the moment is always magic.

“Anyway I think I owe about, what was it, $15,000 or was it $1,500. I can never remember,” Whitebeard said. “Let me go find my reading glasses and check my statements. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

As Kevin waits for Whitebeard, he begins to sound frustrated. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I am going to pull up ... Hello ... hello?”

Kevin stays on the line, waiting for Whitebeard to return. By the time Whitebeard is back, the call time has hit 3 minutes, 34 seconds.

Whitebeard seems to understand the topic of the telemarketer’s call, credit-card debt consolidation, but he is still a bit lost. That keeps Kevin on the phone, Anderson said.

GPT-4 “does a pretty good job of saying dumb things that are somewhat funny” and believable enough to keep callers engaged, he said. Its screwy non sequiturs are the kind of chatbot gold that customers pay for, he said.

Kevin asked for Whitebeard’s credit-card numbers one last time.

“Huh?” Whitebeard said. “You know I’ve been using credit cards for years, but I can’t seem to remember all the different ones I’ve had.”

Kevin finally hangs up. Total time: 6 minutes, 27 seconds.

Write to Robert McMillan at robert.mcmillan@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Furby / The Hit ’90s Toy That Terrorized Parents Is Returning ..............

Jon Koplik — 6/26/2023 12:09:01 AM

WSJ -- Furby / The Hit ’90s Toy That Terrorized Parents Is Returning ............................................

June 24, 2023

The Hit ’90s Toy That Terrorized Parents Is Returning to Shelves

Furby, a talking robotic furball, will come with a few changes for a new generation -- and their parents

By Joseph Pisani

Hasbro is hoping millennials who grew up with Furby will buy one for their children.

They terrorized the ears of parents, prompted worries they could take over planes and were banned from an American spy agency for fear they would spill state secrets.

Now Furby, the chatty robotic toy from the late 1990s, is coming back to store shelves.

Hasbro said it is relaunching the toy for a new generation, hoping millennials who grew up with the furballs will buy them for their children. This time, the new Furbys will come with something the ’90s version didn’t have: an off switch.

“Yes, you can shut Furby off,” promised the Amazon.com listing for the toy.

Furby became a sensation after hitting stores in 1998. The toys, which came a dozen years before the iPhone was introduced, sang and talked gibberish in a high-pitched voice. They were hard to find for two Christmases.

“It was one of the biggest toy crazes of all time,” said Jim Silver, editor in chief of TTPM, a toy review site.

A

Walmart manager hands out Furbys to eager shoppers in New Mexico in 1998.

Hospitals and airlines at the time had concerns about Furby, fearing it would interfere with medical equipment or flight plans. The Federal Aviation Administration categorized the toys as portable electronic devices, restricting their use on flights.

Worries that Furby was a recording device led the National Security Agency to ban it. At the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Va., personnel were told to take action if they saw the furry robot: “seize it and its owner -- this is a security violation.” (The company behind Furby always said the toy wasn’t a recording device.)

Original Furbys didn’t have an off switch on purpose, to mimic real pets. “In real life you just can’t turn your cat or dog off and on,” an executive for the toy maker told The Wall Street Journal in 1999.

Furby hasn’t really disappeared since its heyday. It was given an update in 2016 and has made appearances in movies. The 2019 Adam Sandler film “Uncut Gems” featured a gold Furby pendant on a gold chain.

The chatty robotic toy has found a second life online.

The cuddly bot has had a second life on social media. “There’s so much Furby content on TikTok,” said Madeleine Buckley, senior editor at review site the Toy Insider. People post videos of themselves powering up their old Furbys on TikTok, where videos with the hashtag #Furby have more than 550 million views.

Toy makers have long brought back toys from the 1970s and ’80s, but are now entering a new decade.

“The ’90s has officially entered retro territory,” said Buckley.

Barney, the purple dinosaur that ruled TV screens in the 1990s, is relaunching as a cartoon. So is Neopets, a computer game launched in 1999. Earlier this year, American Girl released its latest historical doll: ’90s twins from Seattle who wear flannel and whose sold-separately accessories include a desktop computer with floppy disks.

Hasbro said the new Furbys are tweaked for a new generation. They’ll have brighter colors, rainbow colored eyes and put on light shows.

“Be my best friend?” the box says.

Write to Joseph Pisani at joseph.pisani@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] NJ.com -- Does home insurance cover meteor damage ? ...............................

Jon Koplik — 5/14/2023 11:51:11 PM

NJ.com -- Does home insurance cover meteor damage ? ................................................

May. 13, 2023

Does home insurance cover meteor damage? Here’s what experts say.

By Len Melisurgo
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The odds of a meteor falling from the sky and crashing into your house are astronomical, with some experts putting it at 1 in 3.9 trillion, far less likely than a single lottery ticket winning a Powerball jackpot.

As rare as it is, a small, stony chondrite meteor actually survived a trip through the Earth’s atmosphere and smashed through the roof of a house in the New Jersey town of Hopewell on Monday, according to local police and astronomy experts.

This begs a question: Do homeowner insurance policies typically cover the cost of damage from meteors, asteroids or other types of space debris that happen to fall from outer space and crash into your home? Several insurance experts say the answer is likely yes.

“Based on the feedback from our members and other industry partners, it seems that a falling object, such as a meteor or falling satellite, would typically be covered by a standard homeowners or business property insurance policy,” Gary La Spisa, vice president of the Insurance Council of New Jersey, told NJ Advance Media.

“Of course, it is always critical to read your policy and familiarize yourself with any exclusions that your policy may have,” he noted.

After a bright fireball was seen streaking across the sky in Michigan in January 2018, the Insurance Alliance of Michigan told MLive.com that falling objects including asteroids, meteors and satellites are likely covered under standard homeowners and business insurance policies.

“There is coverage for the damage the falling object causes to the structure of the home or business, as well as to property or belongings damaged within the building,” according to MLive, which is affiliated with NJ.com.

“Meteors may not be a risk that people in Michigan generally think about,” said Pete Kuhnmuench, executive director of the IAM. “But fortunately, homeowner’s insurance policies would cover damage resulting from a meteor or its pieces.”

An insurance website, InsuranceHub.com, agrees that objects falling from outer space are usually covered by home insurance policies similar to earthly things, like trees, that may fall onto your house during stormy weather.

“The answer is yes, typically you should be covered for that rogue asteroid,” the website says in this post. “That’s because home insurance typically covers falling objects. And an asteroid is, well, a falling object if it crashes to Earth.”

Suzy Kop, who owns the house in the Titusville section of Hopewell that was struck by the small meteor early Monday afternoon, could not be reached for comment about whether her home insurance company will cover the damage, or how much the repairs will cost.

The space rock, measuring about 6 inches by 4 inches, punched a hole in the roof of her house, then crashed through the ceiling and hit the hardwood floor, according to the Hopewell Township Police Department.

CBS3 News in Philadelphia reported that the rock ricocheted from the floor, back up to the ceiling, then down again to the floor. No injuries were reported.

A metallic object that has been confirmed to be a rare stony chondrite meteor crashed through the roof a home on Old Washington Crossing Pennington Road in the Titusville section of Hopewell Township on Monday, May 8, 2023. Hopewell Township Police

Chris Bakley, an astronomy expert from South Jersey, said it’s rare for a meteorite (the technical term for a meteor that lands on Earth) to fall in a populated area.

“Due to the world’s oceans covering most of the planet, that’s where most meteorites tend to fall,” Bakley said. “That’s not to say they don’t fall on populated areas all the time. Over 17,000 meteorites fall to earth every year. It’s just that meteorites found in remote areas or common contained areas make them hard to identify from normal Earth materials.”

Bakley said the Hopewell meteor incident “excites the science community, as when they impact through a building like this it’s easier to identify and confirm that it undeniably came from the sky.”

He said it wouldn’t be surprising if extra pieces of the stony meteorite may be “lodged and scattered in the roof and ceiling of the impacted house.”

Meteors are essentially space rocks. Some are tiny pieces of dust and rock particles left behind by comets, and others are fragments of asteroids or planets.

© 2023 Advance Local Media LLC.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Some say a break from grass cutting helps nature -- others abhor ...........

Jon Koplik — 4/28/2023 4:35:06 PM

WSJ -- Some say a break from grass cutting helps nature -- others abhor ...................

A-HED

April 28, 2023

Neighbors Fight Over No Mow May: ‘What in the World Is Happening in This Place?’

Some say a break from grass cutting helps nature -- others abhor the ‘shaggy raggy’ look

By James R. Hagerty

As May 1 looms, Americans face a complicated moral choice: Whether to mow their lawns.

Scores of U.S. cities and towns are embracing a British movement called No Mow May, whose supporters refrain from cutting their grass during that month. The goal is to allow more flowering plants to thrive, and provide nectar and pollen to nourish bees and other pollinators, vital parts of the food chain.

No Mow May has been promoted by the British charity Plantlife over the past four years and is gaining ground in other countries. The project stirs warm and buzzy feelings in many homeowners’ hearts. “Pardon the weeds! We’re feeding the bees!” declare cheerful signs popping up in meadow-like yards.

Yet No Mow May puts bees in the bonnets of other people. Opponents question the science behind No Mow May, deplore what they see as a sloppy look and even suggest it’s just an excuse for laziness.

It’s the ultimate grassroots issue. “Even lawns have become politicized these days,” said Israel Del Toro, a member of the city council in Appleton, Wis., who supports No Mow May.

Sheri Hartzheim, another member of that council, opposes No Mow May and wants Appleton authorities to enforce an ordinance requiring grass to be cut to no more than 8 inches. She abhors the “shaggy raggy” appearance of some lawns. “Visitors will see us in May and wonder, ‘What in the world is happening in this place?’” she said.

In St. Peter, Minn., last year’s No Mow May led to sightings of more woodchucks, raccoons and snakes, said the city administrator, Todd Prafke. Some people, startled by those snakes in the grass, call the police to report them.

Doug Tallamy, a University of Delaware professor who has a Ph.D. in entomology, sympathizes with the sentiments behind No Mow May. He describes the typical American lawn as an “ecological dead zone” and has called for turning half of all lawns on private property in the U.S. into natural havens for bees, other insects and animals.

Dr. Tallamy sees little logic in letting lawns grow longer for a few weeks. If people simply let their grass grow for a month and then revert to a clipped green monoculture, they are teasing pollinators with short-term snacks followed by starvation, he said. A nonprofit he co-founded, Homegrown National Park, urges homeowners to reduce space devoted to regularly clipped grass, add native plants and remove invasive ones.

“What I’m talking about works,” said Dr. Tallamy, who reports having found 1,199 species of moths on his 10-acre property. He has been delighted to encounter predatory stink bugs, horrid zale moths and spun glass caterpillars.

Those who follow Dr. Tallamy’s advice risk blowback, however.

Frank Swift, a retired lawyer in Jacksonville, Ark., turned more than half of his 5-acre property into a natural habitat. Most of his neighbors, he said, “not only don’t object but they send their kids over to fish in my pond and collect bugs in my meadow.” One neighbor publicly objected, however, and Mr. Swift began receiving citations from the city, ordering him to mow.

Mr. Swift hired a lawyer and fought back. In October, a county judge ruled that the city’s lawn ordinance didn’t apply to his cultivated meadow.

A year ago, Jack Trimper let the grass grow around his home in Arbutus, Md., to avoid disturbing buttercups and clover. “I don’t like to cut anything that has food for bees,” said the retired teacher, now an artist and poet. “My neighbor didn’t like the idea, put in a complaint and then life got real complicated.”

Baltimore County threatened to fine him $100. A lawyer, Carl R. Gold, volunteered to help. Mr. Gold argued that the county’s height limit on grass conflicted with a state law barring “unreasonable limitations” on environmentally friendly landscaping. After May, Mr. Trimper trimmed his lawn. The county dismissed its charges against him.

LeighAnn Ferrara’s yard in White Plains, N.Y., is a mosaic of aster, native roses, blueberries, milkweed and monarda. Bees make a beeline for the anise hyssop, she said: “Oh, my God, it’s crazy. It’s just buzzing so loud.”

Most neighbors appreciate her unruly plot, she said. “One neighbor asked me, ‘Are you going to clean anything up?’ And I said, ‘Nope.’”

If the city council’s agenda is any guide, mowing is one of the hottest political topics in Appleton, Wis., this spring. At a recent meeting of the municipal-services committee of the Appleton council, discussion of No Mow May took up 66 minutes of a 71-minute gathering. Debate can veer deeply into the weeds, such as when members speculated about the ideal height of grass for nurturing dandelions.

One council member, Chad Doran, proposed to resume May enforcement of lawn length. The no-mow policy “has no scientific basis behind it,” he said.

Mr. Doran disputed findings of a scientific paper co-written by another member of the council, Dr. Del Toro, an associate professor of biology at Lawrence University. That paper, published in a journal known as PeerJ, found more pollinators in yards of people participating in No Mow May. It was retracted last November because of what the journal described as “potential inconsistencies in data handling and reporting.”

Dr. Del Toro said the basic findings of the paper were sound but he has improved his methodology and expects to publish a revised version. For the initial paper, he said, he identified live bees while they were trapped in nets. To improve identification, later research involved killing some of the bees and examining them in a lab.

His co-author on the paper, Relena R. Ribbons, accused opponents of No Mow May of bullying her by questioning her scientific integrity. “There’s no space for that in Appleton,” she said. “We’re not that kind of community.”

Vered Meltzer, another member of the council, said No Mow May gives people the opportunity to “explore different practices” in their yards. “Every time you go in there with your mower, you are destroying the worlds that these creatures live in, and you are destroying the only food they have as they emerge from the winter,” he said.

The committee voted 4-to-1 to continue supporting No Mow May.

In St. Peter, Minn., meanwhile, Mr. Prafke said he won’t participate this year in that town’s No Mow May project. He tried last year, he said, but “by the second week in May the grass was so tall, already 8 to 10 inches, that I would have needed a large tractor at the end of month to mow it.”

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] NYT -- After Calif. heavy rains / good news for amateur gold prospectors .........

Jon Koplik — 4/27/2023 11:54:29 PM

NYT -- After Calif. heavy rains / good news for amateur gold prospectors .......................................

archive.is

excerpts :

<<<<< California’s prodigious winter rainfall blasted torrents of water through mountain streams and rivers. >>>>>

<<<<< the rushing waters are detaching and carrying gold deposits along the way. >>>>>

<<<<< The big chunks of the easy-to-find gold that had been lolling around in rivers for millenniums were gone after the first years of the Gold Rush, and Marshall himself died penniless. But miners resorted to spraying powerful jets of water onto hillsides and sorting through what flowed down, leaving giant piles of mining residue still visible today.

That kind of extraction is now heavily restricted in California, yet gold seekers say the recent battering of successive winter storms has produced a similar effect. >>>>>

In just 20 minutes of rooting around the creek bed, Albert Fausel had found about $100 worth of gold.

Small flecks of gold from a flooded area of the Cosumnes River, where Mr. Dayton had been looking for gold.

Jon.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Free streaming services Pluto TV, Tubi, Xumo Play and others show classic...

Jon Koplik — 4/25/2023 11:24:32 PM

WSJ -- Free streaming services Pluto TV, Tubi, Xumo Play and others show classic TV shows .........

A-HED

April 23, 2023

Americans Get Nostalgic for the Cable TV Experience

Free streaming services Pluto TV, Tubi, Xumo Play and others show classic TV shows with ads, easing decisions for those overwhelmed with options

Clockwise from top left: ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ ‘The Addams Family,’ ‘Three’s Company’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’ Photo Illustration: IStock, Everett Collection (4)

By Sarah Krouse and Jessica Toonkel

Andrew Rivera and his girlfriend were aimlessly scrolling through Hulu and Netflix on a recent Sunday night, overwhelmed by the variety of TV shows and movies they could watch.

Channel-surf’s up

After several minutes of decision paralysis, they gave up and opened another app: Pluto TV, a free streaming service whose interface mimics cable TV’s. They flipped through a few channels and quickly settled on an already-started episode of the British version of “Antiques Roadshow,” and eventually watched multiple episodes in a row.

Americans have never had more entertainment options, given the ease of playing seemingly any show or movie on demand. That abundance -- and the indecision it causes -- is prompting some of them to rediscover the joys of channel surfing.

Mr. Rivera, who had previously downloaded Pluto TV but hadn’t spent a lot of time watching it, found the experience oddly refreshing. The ad-supported streaming platform offers more than 350 niche channels that air movies of a specific genre, or old episodes of a single TV show playing on a loop. For most channels, viewers watch what is already playing -- they can’t choose episodes, rewind or skip ahead.

‘Gunsmoke,’ starring James Arness, right, played from 1955-75. Photo: Everett Collection

It “kind of captures that experience of browsing cable TV late at night,” said Mr. Rivera, a 31-year-old creative producer in Queens, N.Y. “There’s something about that that’s comforting to me.”

Beyond Pluto TV, which is owned by Paramount Global, other free, ad-supported streaming alternatives include Fox Corp.’s Tubi and Comcast Corp.’s Xumo Play. The apps also have an option to watch some programs on-demand, also for free.

These platforms and others, including free offerings from Roku Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., host over 1,600 different niche streaming channels in the U.S. alone, according to Variety Intelligence Platform.

Nothing is too niche. Beyond “Antiques Roadshow U.K.,” there are round-the-clock feeds of “Baywatch,” “Three’s Company” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Streaming channels are entirely dedicated to painting instructor Bob Ross, cornhole competitions and stand-up comedy.

Bob Ross hosted ’The Joy of Painting’ from 1983-94. Photo: Netflix/Everett Collection

Danny Fisher, CEO of FilmRise, a company that creates thematic channels that span true crime, unsolved mysteries and British TV, describes them as the equivalent of comfort food. “It doesn’t matter that you start at the beginning; it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the same thing a hundred times before,” he said.

Bruce Roberts III, a 32-year-old camera assistant based in New Orleans, grew up watching the detective show “Columbo” on TV with his grandfather. He frequently goes back to that show on Tubi when he can’t decide what else to watch.

“With streaming, I can watch anything, but I often don’t know what to watch,” he said. “It’s like when you are hungry, but you don’t know what you are hungry for.”

Peter Falk, left, shown with guest star Oskar Werner, starred in ‘Columbo’ in episodes and specials from 1968-2003. Photo: Everett Collection

The growing success of free platforms playing decades-old programming on a loop is a challenge to the original-content spending spree by the streaming industry’s biggest players, taking viewing time away from their services.

Tubi accounted for 1% of the total time Americans spent watching TV in March, according to Nielsen Holdings PLC, while Pluto TV stood at 0.8%. That compares with 1.2% for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.’s HBO Max, which is being renamed Max next month, and 1.8% for Walt Disney Co.’s Disney+, which collectively spend billions of dollars a year creating original content. Netflix accounted for 7.3%, Nielsen said.

The free, often-themed channels -- known in the industry as “Fast” channels, for free ad-supported streaming TV -- give entertainment companies a chance to make money off their libraries of content, just like in the age of syndicated television. Pluto TV made $1.1 billion in revenue from advertising last year, up from $562 million in 2020. Pluto TV said on average, the programming has an ad break every eight minutes.

‘Baywatch’ starred Nicole Eggert, David Hasselhoff, Alexandra Paul, David Charvet and Pamela Anderson, and ran from 1989-2001. Photo: Everett Collection

Kaleigh Cosentino, a 25-year-old from Syracuse, N.Y., said she likes having Pluto TV on in the background when she’s about to fall asleep or when playing videogames on her computer. Unlike Netflix, which occasionally asks users if they are still watching after a period of inactivity, Pluto TV “just keeps going,” she said.

The simplicity of just choosing a themed channel to tune into is also appealing to Ms. Cosentino. “I don’t have to have the pressure of picking a specific show,” she said.

Thematic channels might not be flashy or expensive to make, but that doesn’t mean a lot of thought isn’t put into them. Fast channel operators are scouring their libraries and the market for programming that is familiar to consumers, executives said. Older shows that remind viewers of their childhoods are often the most popular.

Pluto TV has a team of 50 programmers who sift through viewership data and content libraries to figure out which channels to create and which to kill, said Scott Reich, Pluto’s senior vice president of programming. Many of these programmers are devout fans: Pluto hired stand-up comedians to oversee its comedy channels, and a former mixed martial arts fighter is in charge of all the fighting content, including channels featuring mixed martial arts, women’s wrestling and boxing.

Mr. Reich says Pluto’s most popular channels include “Three’s Company” and “Gunsmoke.”

‘Three’s Company’ starred Suzanne Somers, John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt, and ran from 1977-84. Photo: Everett Collection

Adam Lewinson, Tubi’s chief content officer, said one of the challenges with a channel focusing on a single show is that it needs to be possible for viewers to “jump in mid-series and quickly understand what’s going on.” For that reason, Tubi only offers a few show-specific channels, he said, though one of them -- “The Bob Ross Channel” -- performs very well.

Pluto typically needs to have around 200 hours of episodes to consider creating a channel for a single show, Mr. Reich said, though there are exceptions. “The Addams Family,” the 1960s sitcom about a ghoulish clan, has less than 40 hours, but it still works. The channel typically gets a boost when a new “Addams Family” movie comes out, or when Netflix’s “Wednesday” series made its debut last year, he said.

Local news and sports-related content are also popular, streaming-platform executives said. Xumo Play, the Comcast-owned service, said one of its biggest hits is the “ACL Cornhole TV” channel, which airs competitions and events by the American Cornhole League, and related programming. Stefan Van Engen, Xumo’s vice president of content programming and partnerships, said people who watch the cornhole channel daily tend to do so for over an hour.

Another appeal of these streaming channels is that they prioritize content without excessive violence or graphic material, because it’s easier to sell ads against less-risky fare.

“I have no tolerance for anything that’s going to stress me out,” said Marya Fonsh-Mielinski, a 46-year-old kindergarten teacher who lives in Ashby, Mass., and enjoys watching classic sitcoms such as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Laverne & Shirley” on Pluto TV. “I don’t watch anything sad, stressful or scary.”

Troy Smith, a 65-year old owner of a consulting firm in Scottsdale, Ariz., said he turns to free ad-supported TV for classic Westerns, car-focused programming and the British version of “Antiques Roadshow” in his free time.

‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ starred Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, and ran from 1961-66. Photo: Zinn Arthur/TV Guide/Everett Collection

“They’re so nice to each other,” he said of people featured on the British Broadcasting Corp.-run antiques program.

Despite the draw of free platforms, many viewers say they still pay for some premium subscription services like Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max.

Mr. Rivera said watching Pluto TV in recent weeks won’t lead him to cancel his subscriptions to other services, but it has become a welcome option when he isn’t in the mood to watch what he called the latest, hottest shows, like “The Mandalorian,” a Star Wars spinoff available on Disney+, or the latest Marvel Studios production.

Sometimes, he said of watching such hit shows, “It feels like a homework assignment.”

An episode of the British version of ‘The Antiques Roadshow’ in 1998. Photo: Mirrorpix/Everett Collection

Write to Sarah Krouse at sarah.krouse@wsj.com and Jessica Toonkel at jessica.toonkel@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Ocean garbage patch / Anemones and barnacles thrive on toothbrushes and ....

Jon Koplik — 4/17/2023 10:21:07 PM

WSJ -- Ocean garbage patch / Anemones and barnacles thrive on toothbrushes and ...................

April 17, 2023

Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Is Bursting With Life

Anemones and barnacles thrive on toothbrushes and bottle shards thousands of miles from shore

By Nidhi Subbaraman

An 80,000-ton cloud of plastic and trash floating in the Pacific Ocean is an environmental disaster. It is also teeming with life.

Biologists who fished toothbrushes, rope and broken bottle shards from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch found them studded with gooseneck barnacles and jet-black sea anemones glistening like buttons. All told, they found 484 marine invertebrates from 46 species clinging to the detritus, they reported Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The trash patch is the product of circular currents that form whirlpool-like gyres in five stretches of the world’s oceans. Plastic and ocean trash are swept into these spaces. A five-day boat ride from the California coast, where it spans over 610,000 square miles, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the biggest of these aggregations. “Micro-plastic” shards less than 5 millimeters long account for most of the debris, suspended in the water like pepper flakes in soup, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Between November 2018 and January 2019, the team collected 105 pieces of debris including nets, buoys and household items such as buckets and toothbrushes. They photographed and froze the objects before bringing them back to land. Ashore at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center laboratories in California and Maryland, they thawed the cargo piece by piece and scoured it for signs of life.

Most of the hitchhikers they found were coastal species that had found a way to thrive in the salty open ocean, a food desert for marine life that experiences punishing temperature extremes, said Linsey Haram, an ecologist and an author of the study.

Marine ecologists said they would expect most coastal species to struggle to survive outside their shoreline habitats. On the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, animals were found growing and reproducing.

“They’re having a blast,” said study author Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at the Dutch nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup. “That’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.”

Anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand, Dr. Egger said, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like micro-plastics. Squeeze an anemone and the shards spew out, he said: “They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.”

Many of the invertebrates -- Pacific oysters, orange-striped anemones, rag worms -- are native to the coast of Japan. Dr. Haram said she suspects they were sucked into the ocean in 2011 by the tsunami that pummeled the Japan coast.

It is a rare chance to see the impact of a natural disaster on the ocean more than a decade after it occurred, said Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist at Georgetown University who has studied organisms at the gyre and wasn’t involved with the study. “We have a lot of coastal species that wouldn’t have made it to the open ocean living on plastic in the high seas.”

The patch is also a haven for animals that are at home on the open ocean. Such species -- sea snails, blue button jellyfish, and a relative called by-the-wind sailors -- gather more densely where there is more plastic, Dr. Helm and her team said in a study posted online ahead of peer-review.

Removing the plastic would mean uprooting them, Dr. Helm said: “Cleaning it up is not actually that simple.”

Write to Nidhi Subbaraman at nidhi.subbaraman@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] NYT -- Al Jaffee, King of the Mad Magazine Fold-In, Dies at 102 ...................

Jon Koplik — 4/10/2023 10:53:55 PM

NYT -- Al Jaffee, King of the Mad Magazine Fold-In, Dies at 102 .......................

nytimes.com

or

archive.ph

excerpt :

<<<<< It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected >>>>>

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ on : people stealing forks and spoons from their workplace ....................

Jon Koplik — 3/21/2023 12:29:25 PM

WSJ on : people stealing forks and spoons from their workplace ..............................................

March 21, 2023

When You Come to a Fork in the Office Kitchen, Take It

As people head back to work, the cutlery is disappearing at an alarming rate; an ‘angry standoff’

Mike Williams made an audio story about what he called the scarcity of forks in lunchrooms across Australia.

By Rebecca Feng

As people return to workplaces all over the world, they’re discovering something else has disappeared -- the office cutlery.

At the London office of PEI Group, a global financial-media company, forks and teaspoons go missing at an alarming rate, said Nicola Williams, its office manager. She said she orders a new batch of roughly 100 new pieces of cutlery every six months to fill three communal drawers.

“I’ve sent out emails saying, ‘We’re missing quite a few forks,’ ” to no avail, said Ms. Williams, adding that her office has only 125 people working there during a good week.

An investigation yielded a confession of sorts. Product manager Jennifer Ta, who goes to the office once a week on Wednesdays, makes it a point to get in before her colleagues, “because everything in the kitchen is a hot commodity.” She immediately collects a mug, fork and teaspoon and puts them on her desk.

“I am not risking it,” she said, recalling the times she couldn’t find the items she needed. Ms. Ta admitted she has occasionally taken cutlery home, reasoning that she was simply replacing items that she brought in before and ended up losing.

Of course, communal items have gone missing from offices since the dawn of the cubicle. But these days another trend is merging with the back-to-the-office movement: the eco-conscious workspace. Nearly 60% of professionals in the U.S. and Canada said their workplaces made environmentally friendly changes in the past three years, according to a 2021 poll by Captivate, a digital-media network -- including substituting single-use plastic cutleries with reusable ones.

Governments are piling on. The New York City Council passed a “Skip the Stuff” law in January prohibiting restaurants from providing disposable utensils unless customers request it. California passed a similar law in late 2021. England is gearing up to ban any business from selling single-use plastic cutleries in October.

The green initiatives have provided fertile soil for an age-old problem -- as workers get ready to scarf down quinoa bowls, creamy chicken soup and pesto pasta salad, they may have to resort to using their fingers.

Ben Stiller, marketing director at the office of Canada’s National Truck League, calls himself the ‘fork police.’

At the office of Canada’s National Truck League, an insurance broker for the country’s trucking industry, marketing director Ben Stiller said the lunchroom usually has only spoons available, and no forks.

Mr. Stiller, who calls himself the “fork police,” said he emailed the whole office to highlight the issue and made a sign to shame “fork stealers” into returning them.

“They all came back, and then two weeks later, they were all gone again,” he said. “We never solved the problem.”

Mike Williams, a documentary and podcast producer in Sydney, Australia, said forks from his office in a previous job often ended up in his home after he left them in his lunchbox.

Around two years ago, Mr. Williams said his wife ordered him to return the 20 office forks that had accumulated in their kitchen drawer, as the mismatched cutlery was an eyesore. He said he didn’t want to be labeled as a thief if colleagues saw him with them, so he carried the cutlery in his bag for weeks before slipping the forks back into his office pantry when no one was around.

In December, Mr. Williams published an audio story called “Who Gives a Fork?” about what he called a “crisis facing lunchrooms across the country,” and aired what he did. He thinks the scarcity played a role in his behavior. “I used to walk halfway around the building looking for a fork,” he recalls. “When you get a fork, you inherently want to hold on to the fork,” he said.

There are plenty of spoons and knives, but only one fork at the National Truck League.

Some researchers have attempted to study the phenomenon. One paper published in 2020 in the Medical Journal of Australia found teaspoons marked with red nail lacquer disappeared more quickly than similarly marked forks in the staff tearoom of the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, where the authors work. They noted, however, that the question of where the cutlery went remained unanswered. The researchers wrote that radio frequency identification chips might be a better way to keep track of the items’ whereabouts.

Mark Mattiussi, the hospital’s chief medical officer and lead author of the research, said he noticed that forks sometimes reappeared -- though they weren’t the same dotted ones that were part of the study. “That’s the phenomenon of the fork resurrection,” he added.

The hospital may have solved the problem, though: It now hands out biodegradable wood cutlery.

At Wellington Motor Freight in Toronto, Michael Zelek, who works in human resources, was at wits end. “I don’t really think it’s a theft issue or at least an intentional theft issue. It’s very perplexing. We have maybe 50 people in this office, you’d think it’d be easy to keep track of things, but the forks just kept going away,” he said.

Ten months ago, Mr. Zelek replenished the cutlery drawers with gold-colored forks, spoons and knives. The hope is that people who take the cutlery home by mistake will immediately recognize the items that stand out in their kitchen drawers and bring them back. He said he hasn’t had to replenish the office pantry drawer since.

Michael Zelek replenished the cutlery drawers with gold-colored forks, spoons and knives to prevent accidental thievery.

Pattrick Smellie, a co-founder and owner of BusinessDesk, a New Zealand-based publication, said he used to replenish a shared cutlery drawer every six months when his team occupied an office space together with other companies.

Once, there was an “angry standoff” with people in a business next door who accused his staffers of stealing their cutlery, he recalled. Mr. Smellie said he got all riled up and bought 48 new pieces -- and paid more than what they cost to engrave the word “stolen” on each item.

“It was a desperate move, but I thought maybe if I could label any person using those cutleries as a thief, that’d cut down the extent to which they were stolen,” said Mr. Smellie.

The “stolen” cutlery lasted longer, but eventually it also disappeared.

Write to Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] Seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida ..................

Jon Koplik — 3/18/2023 12:11:13 PM

Seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida ...........................

CNN

March 18, 2023

A seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida. Here's what you should know

By Jackie Wattles and Kristen Rogers, CNN

(CNN) A giant blob of seaweed twice the width of the continental United States is headed for the shores of Florida and other coastlines throughout the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to dump smelly and possibly harmful piles across beaches and dampening tourism season.

Sargassum the specific variety of seaweed has long formed large blooms in the Atlantic Ocean, and scientists have been tracking massive accumulations since 2011. But this year's bloom could be the largest ever, collectively spanning more than 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers) from the shores of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.

This year's sargassum bloom began forming early and doubled in size between December and January, said Dr. Brian Lapointe, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. The mass "was larger in January than it has ever been since this new region of sargassum growth began in 2011," he told CNN International's Rosemary Church.

Workers remove sargassum from a beach in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, in June.

Traveling west, the blob will push through the Caribbean and up into the Gulf of Mexico during the summer. The seaweed is expected to show up on beaches in Florida around July, Lapointe said.

"This is an entirely new oceanographic phenomenon that is creating such a problem really a catastrophic problem for tourism in the Caribbean region, where it piles up on beaches up to 5 or 6 feet deep," Lapointe said.

Here's what you should know about why these masses happen and how they affect both humans and ocean life.

What is sargassum?

Sargassum is a catchall term that can be used to refer to more than 300 species of brown algae, although Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans are the two species most commonly found in the Atlantic.

When adrift at sea, the algae can have upsides for ocean life.

"This floating habitat provides food and protection for fishes, mammals, marine birds, crabs, and more," according to the Sargassum Information Hub, a joint project among various research institutions. "It serves as a critical habitat for threatened loggerhead sea turtles and as a nursery area for a variety of commercially important fishes such as mahi mahi, jacks, and amberjacks."

Is sargassum safe?

The problems with sargassum arise when it hits the beaches, piling up in mounds that can be difficult to navigate and emitting a gas that can smell like rotten eggs.

Sargassum can also quickly turn from an asset to a threat to ocean life.

It comes in such "large quantities that it basically sucks the oxygen out of the water and creates what we refer to as dead zones," Lapointe said. "These are normally nursery habitats for fisheries ... and once they're devoid of oxygen, we have lost that habitat."

Sargassum can be dangerous to humans, too, Lapointe added. The gas emitted from the rotting algae hydrogen sulfide is toxic and can cause respiratory problems. The seaweed also contains arsenic in its flesh, making it dangerous if ingested or used for fertilizer.

"You have to be very careful when you clean the beaches," Lapointe said.

Why is there a sargassum problem?

Just like plants and crops on the ground, the proliferation of seaweed can shift year to year depending on ecological factors, affected by changes in nutrients, rainfall and wind conditions, said Dr. Gustavo Jorge Goni, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

Sea currents are also influential on sargassum's growth and how much it accumulates, Goni added. Phosphorus and nitrogen in the sea can serve as food for the algae.

Those elements can be dumped into the ocean from rivers, which gain concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen from human activities such as agriculture and fossil fuel production, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

For now, researchers are looking into ways to thwart the seaweed's impact on beaches, possibly by sinking it to the bottom of the ocean or harvesting it for use in commercial products such as soap, Goni said.

Goni cautioned that research into these sargassum accumulations is new, and it's likely scientists' understanding of how the algae grows will shift over time.

"Whatever we believe we know today," he said, "it may change tomorrow."

How does the buildup affect travel?

Before traveling to coastal areas this spring or summer, research whether sargassum is at your destination or might show up there, Lapointe said. Plan ahead so your vacation won't disappoint.

There are sargassum Facebook groups, with members posting about what they recently saw on beaches, Lapointe said.

"It's already affected the travel industry," he said.

Tourists enjoy the beach despite the sargassum algae buildup in Cancun, Mexico, in May 2021.

Unfortunately, sargassum can build up overnight so you might not be able to predict its effects on a trip, Lapointe said.

"This is why we're trying to work on these early warning systems high resolution in coastal areas, which takes higher-resolution satellite imagery to do a better job showing what's actually coming into a beach within the next 24 or 48 hours," he added.

Satellite images from within the last week show sargassum isn't an amorphous mass moving across the ocean, but rather teardrop-shaped blobs trailed by long, thin strands of seaweed.

Within the last week, sargassum blobs have been spotted about 215 miles (346 kilometers) from Guadeloupe, in between the islands of St. Vincent and Bequia, 1,000 yards (914 meters) off Martinique and off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

How is sargassum cleaned up?

Mounds of algae accumulated on beaches cost millions of dollars to clean up, and removal efforts can also harm marine life, according to the Sargassum Information Hub.

In Barbados, locals were using "1,600 dump trucks a day to clean the beaches of this seaweed to make it suitable for tourists and recreation on the beaches," Lapointe said.

In shallow waters, sargassum can be removed using fishing nets towed by light boats or by hand, according to the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance.

In the US, cleanup is often done with Barber beach rakes pulled by a tractor, Lapointe said. But once there's an accumulation of more than a foot of sargassum, the rakes don't work as well, he added. That's when front-end loader dump trucks can be helpful, but they can be harmful to beach health.

Use of dump trucks to remove sargassum can become problematic.

"Oftentimes you have sea turtle nests on beaches that are being run over by tires of this heavy equipment crushing the eggs," Lapointe said.

What happens if sargassum isn't removed from beaches?

If sargassum isn't cleaned from beaches or is used as fertilizer, the arsenic in its flesh could leach out into groundwater, which could be a health hazard for humans, Lapointe said.

An excessive amount of rotting sargassum can also support the growth of fecal bacteria.

And in 2018, a massive bloom that ended up on the beaches of South Florida coincided with the biggest red tide ever seen on that coast, Lapointe said. Red tides occur when toxin-producing algae blooms grow so out of control they discolor coastal waters. Red tide organisms can live on sargassum and be transported by it.

The toxins in red tides can harm marine life, and sargassum buildup on beaches can prevent sea turtle hatchlings and adults from getting to sea, Lapointe said.

Will this happen every year?

Experts don't know whether a sargassum bloom of this size will happen every year, Lapointe said.

"It's hard to project because we don't know everything we need to know about the drivers (behind this)," he said. "We know it's variable from year to year and that the trajectory is generally going upwards. So based on what we've seen in the past, we're thinking we could continue to see this worsen for years to come. What will it be like in 10 years? Will it be double the size it is now?"

More funding to do the research that could answer these questions is needed, he added.

CNN's Paul Murphy contributed to this report.

© 2023 Cable News Network.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- The Worst NFL Team to Play for Is ….........................................

Jon Koplik — 3/3/2023 5:13:21 PM

WSJ -- The Worst NFL Team to Play for Is …..........................................

SPORTS
NFL

March 2, 2023

The Worst NFL Team to Play for Is …

A new survey of NFL players presents an unusually revealing look inside how franchises worth billions of dollars are still rankled by problems -- and found the Washington Commanders had the worst workplace conditions

By Andrew Beaton

INDIANAPOLIS -- The Washington Commanders have faced controversies over their name, their workplace culture and ownership. Now they have been tagged as the worst team in the NFL to play for -- and that’s according to the players themselves.

Washington’s football team, which owner Dan Snyder is exploring selling, ranked last in a new survey conducted by the NFL Players Association that rated teams in eight categories, including the treatment of players’ families, nutrition, the training staff and team travel. In three categories, the Commanders received an F- grade.

The responses from 1,300 players across the league present an unusually revealing look inside how franchises worth billions of dollars are still rankled by problems -- with vast gaps in quality from team to team. Three clubs, according to the survey, don’t serve their players dinner. Six teams make some of their players share hotel rooms before road games. The Bengals were the lone team that doesn’t offer their players nutritional supplements, and one of two that doesn’t give them vitamins.

Other issues that players flagged teams for included a rat infestation, cold tubs that weren’t cold, “gross” hot tubs, and players’ wives having to nurse their babies on the floors of public restrooms because their teams lacked a room for families.

The goal of the survey wasn’t to shame teams, but rather to create a comprehensive review of the different working conditions across the league, said union president J.C. Tretter. This time of year, ahead of free agency, it isn’t uncommon for players to swap notes about what it’s like playing for different teams.

“There were a lot of examples of doing great things for players,” Tretter said. “It puts it in stark contrast to teams that aren’t.”

The Minnesota Vikings, which opened up a new practice facility in 2018, topped the rankings and received no worse than an A- grade in any category. The report said that the Vikings are a “shining example of what is possible when a concerted investment is made in both staffing and facilities.”

The Commanders, meanwhile, won’t be putting their report card on the refrigerator. Their F- grades came in the training room, locker room and team travel categories.

The primary problem is the state of their facilities, with the survey showing that players had “more concerns with each area of the facility than the player respondents on any other team.” The complaints included small hot and cold tubs for recovery, a cramped locker room, a lack of warm water and issues with poor drainage in the showers.

“The locker room does not have confidence that club owner Dan Snyder is willing to invest to upgrade the facilities, as player responses rank him 31st in this category,” the NFLPA report says.

Those weren’t the only issues. Only 22% of Commanders’ players responded that they have enough space on team flights, while the Commanders are one of seven teams that don’t offer their players first-class seats. They were also one of the teams that make a segment of their players bunk with roommates on the road.

The club has been pursuing a new stadium, and ultimately received poor grades in every category but strength coaches, who received an A+.

“Player health and safety is our top priority, and we continue to invest in our facilities, including a new practice field, new turf in the practice bubble and increased meeting room space,” a Commanders spokeswoman said. “We know there is more to do, and we regularly talk with our players about ways to improve their work environment and the experience for their families.”

The Arizona Cardinals ranked just ahead of the Commanders in second-to-last place. Some players complained about a weight room that they say can feel like a safety hazard with uneven floors and the floorboards peeling up. The survey also noted the team’s apparent policy of deducting dinner from players’ paychecks if they want to get food from the facility. A team spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While the Los Angeles Chargers ranked 30th, the report accounted for their circumstances -- they are in a temporary facility before their new one El Segundo, Calif., costing upward of $200 million and built by owner Dean Spanos, is completed in 2024. It added that their coach, Brandon Staley, and strength coaches received high marks. However it also noted that multiple players described the team’s hot tubs as “gross” and that the cold tubs are often not cold.

The Jacksonville Jaguars, as the team with the alleged rat infestation, also received low marks. The report said that for three to four weeks there were rats in the locker room and the hampers. Jacksonville, along with the Bengals, drew complaints of players’ wives having to nurse their babies on the floors of public restrooms because there wasn’t a family room for them. Jaguars and Bengals spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Miami Dolphins, Las Vegas Raiders, Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys rounded out the top-five teams behind Minnesota, with generally positive reviews.

The report also noted that teams that didn’t eat up too much of players’ days were rewarded. It said that seven of the eight teams that were most efficient with player time made the playoffs last year.

But good grades didn’t exactly correlate with winning, either. The Super Bowl-champion Chiefs finished 29th.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Survey Says

A survey of NFL players rated teams on their working conditions:

1. Vikings
2. Dolphins
3. Raiders
4. Texans
5. Cowboys
6. Packers
7. 49ers
8. Giants
9. Bills
10. Saints
11. Seahawks
12. Panthers
13. Bears
14. Eagles
15. Lions
16. Colts
17. Ravens
18. Titans
19. Jets
20. Broncos
21. Browns
22. Steelers
23. Falcons
24. Patriots
25. Rams
26. Buccaneers
27. Bengals
28. Jaguars
29. Chiefs
30. Chargers
31. Cardinals
32. Commanders

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] SFGate -- woodpeckers stash 700 pounds of acorns in walls of (human) house ........

Jon Koplik — 2/7/2023 11:39:51 PM

SFGate -- woodpeckers stash 700 pounds of acorns in walls of (human) house ...............................

Feb. 6, 2023

Bay Area pest control company removes 700 pounds of acorns from Airbnb

By Amanda Bartlett
SFGATE

Nick Castro of Nick's Extreme Pest Control found 700 pounds of acorns inside a Glen Ellen Airbnb last month. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers.

Nick Castro thought he had seen it all.

The founder of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control in Santa Rosa has been in his line of work for more than 20 years, and during that time, he’s encountered all kinds of critters, from bats, raccoons and skunks to cockroaches, wasps and scorpions.

But the most unusual job of his career came last month, when he got a call to check out an Airbnb in Glen Ellen.

“There were some worms that appeared to be coming out of the wall, and the worms looked like maggots,” Castro told SFGATE by phone. “Everybody kind of thought there was a dead animal inside the wall.”

When he and his team arrived at the two-story home, they used a drywall knife to cut into the living room wall and take a look at what was inside. To his surprise, they didn’t find an animal, but instead, a seemingly unending barrage of acorns, which were piled up all the way up to the attic and proceeded to fall out of the wall cavity in a steady stream.

“It was unreal,” Castro said. “We see weird stuff all the time, but I’d never seen anything like this.”

Nick Castro of Nick's Extreme Pest Control found 700 pounds of acorns inside a Glen Ellen Airbnb last month. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers.

Castro measured 700 pounds of acorns, to be exact. And there weren’t maggots but mealworms lurking inside of them. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers who had been poking holes in the chimney stack to stash their food for future meals, only to have their hard-earned snacks fall into the empty wall cavity where they couldn’t retrieve them.

Castro said he had to cut open four different holes in the walls to remove the sheer number of acorns, which were covered in fiberglass insulation and filled eight 40-gallon garbage bags up to the brim. The process took hours, and from there, the acorns were loaded into a van and hauled off to the dump.

He may have felt a twinge of guilt after disposing of the birds' hard work, but he had to hand it to them. "They were pretty creative," he said.

Nick Castro of Nick's Extreme Pest Control found 700 pounds of acorns inside a Glen Ellen Airbnb last month. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers.

While Castro was wrapping up the job, something caught his eye overhead. It was the woodpeckers, fluttering around, trying to access their food supply from the ventilation portholes along the rooftop.

“That’s how we knew exactly what they were doing,” he said.

Castro believes in coming up with nonlethal strategies in his pest control work. He sealed off the structure so the birds couldn’t get back in and encouraged the homeowner to install vinyl siding to prevent any further damage to the property.

“He said he hasn’t heard any pecking since,” Castro said.

© 2023 Hearst Communications, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Raising Chickens for Cheaper Eggs Gets Expensive Fast ......................

Jon Koplik — 1/31/2023 11:09:52 AM

WSJ -- Raising Chickens for Cheaper Eggs Gets Expensive Fast ........................................

Jan. 31, 2023

Raising Chickens for Cheaper Eggs Gets Expensive Fast

Some consumers have decided to raise their own chicks -- often with unexpected complications

Sales of chicks are up since inflation hit its highest level in decades.

By Rachel Wolfe

Grocery shoppers, frustrated by the record prices of a dozen eggs, are increasingly choosing to go right to the source by bringing chickens home.

The price for a carton of eggs is up 60% year-over-year, according to the latest Consumer Price Index. Eggs are just one example out of hundreds of items that eat further into Americans’ budgets than they did a few years ago. Some shoppers hope a do-it-yourself approach to eggs will help stretch their budgets, and bring a little joy to their backyards.

Those who have raised chickens for years, however, say these newbies don’t always understand the tricky logistics of maintaining a coop -- and won’t necessarily break even on the price of eggs.

Tractor Supply Co., the industry’s biggest seller, says it has more than doubled its live chicken business since 2018. The Brentwood, Tenn., company expects to sell 11 million chicks this year. Purely Poultry, a direct-to-consumer chicken supplier in Durand, Wis., reports a 29% uptick in new accounts and a 28% increase in sales compared with this time last year.

Chicken-rearing is also taking off on social media. Videos tagged with #chicks have a collective 1.1 billion views on TikTok. (Scrolling finds this really is mostly about birds, not people.)

Out of the 70 day-old chicks available at a farm store in Terrytown, La., on Saturday morning, only seven were still looking for homes by noon. Chicks are now the most requested item at Double “M” Feed. Manager Shawn Robair estimates sales are up 20% from this time last year, with birds selling at around $5 each.

The pet-supply and garden store outside New Orleans has been flooded by first-timers, he says. Some are terrified of the teeny birds, he says, occasionally panicking after picking one up and dropping it on the floor.

People come in with a lot of questions. His favorite: “Will they lay eggs tomorrow?” His response: “No, the egg would be bigger than the chicken.” (Most don’t start laying until between 18 and 22 weeks of age.)

Others don’t ask as many questions as they should, Mr. Robair says. One customer left her new chicks in the back seat of her car while running errands, and came back to a box full of dead birds. “So we have to be more thorough with people than we were in the past,” he says. “You would think they have common sense, but sometimes they don’t.”

Donald Galliano, gesturing, gives Stephen Galmiche advice about raising chickens at the Double ‘M’ Feed shop in Terrytown, La.

Raising chickens is more expensive than some realize, including the cost of feed.

Donald Galliano, a police officer in Westwego, La., buying chicken feed and other supplies at Double “M” Saturday, says he has tried to dissuade more than a dozen family members and co-workers looking to start their own flocks. Mr. Galliano says the price of feed and coops has gone up along with egg prices.

Costs for chickens can vary widely, suppliers say. Feed ranges from 10 to 20 cents a bird, according to Tractor Supply. The company sells coops between $400 and $3,000. Other costs for the birds include heating and fencing.

Spotting a family eyeing the remaining chicks, Mr. Galliano stepped in. “Those are little a**hole birds over there,” Mr. Galliano said of the supposedly peck-prone Rhode Island Reds. Stephen Galmiche, whom Mr. Galliano was advising, said he still plans to buy some chicks soon.

Stephen Galmiche looks at chicks for sale with his daughter.

Cold-weather slowdown

Justin Kraemer, a content creator for a marketing firm in Newton, Kan., says the economics are particularly bleak at the moment egg prices are surging, since most backyard chickens take the winter off laying. Mr. Kraemer estimates his six are producing fewer than two dozen eggs a month right now -- but he’s still spending $30 a month on food.

He’s also paying to feed and house an older bird that no longer lays eggs, taking a pass on the traditional farm method of turning a chicken into dinner once its egg production slows at around 6 years of age.

Justin Kraemer’s chickens.

“There is no way I could possibly ever harm any of these chickens, but other chickens are definitely fair game,” Mr. Kraemer jokes.

Trisha Nieder adopted seven chicks four months ago and estimates she’s spent about $750 on food, bedding, heat lamps and other supplies. She doesn’t have a single egg to show for it.

“You think, ‘I’m going to buy these chicks. It’s going to be so simple,’ ” says the public-relations company vice president, who lives in Washington, Mo. “But then you realize it’s so much work.” Not only does she have to go outside to the coop in the freezing cold every morning to feed the birds and change their water -- she sits outside with them for hours while they eat so that they’re not snatched up by coyotes or other predators.

Despite not yet seeing a return on her investment, she’s already ordered eight more chicks to try to reach economy of scale. “With inflation, you’re like, ‘You know what, screw it, I have to do all this work already,’” she says. Plus, she wants a rainbow basket of eggs.

Bird benefits

Ms. Nieder and others in the chicken-raising community joke that egg prices are sure to go down as soon as people’s new chicks reach laying age. In fact, prices are already starting to temper somewhat.

Trisha Nieder adopted seven chicks four months ago.

Of course, chickens’ value doesn’t come purely from their egg production. In some families, they become part of the household.

In Hilary Weekes’s case, the chickens took the message a little too literally. She says all 11 managed to break into her home through the screen door while the family was out one day. They made themselves comfortable on the countertops and couches.

“It was utter, utter chaos,” says Ms. Weekes, an agent for commercial photographers and directors in Hailey, Idaho.

She doesn’t blame the chickens. After her children dressed some up in scarves one winter and took them sledding -- and fashioned homemade diapers for others so they could come inside -- she says she might have felt confused if she still had to sleep out in the greenhouse, too.

Write to Rachel Wolfe at rachel.wolfe@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ / Asteroid 2023 BU to Whiz Past Earth [ today ] in One of the Closest Ever A...

Jon Koplik — 1/26/2023 1:11:36 PM

WSJ / Asteroid 2023 BU to Whiz Past Earth [ today ] in One of the Closest Ever Approaches .......................

Jan. 26, 2023

Asteroid 2023 BU to Whiz Past Earth in One of the Closest Ever Approaches

The small asteroid will make one of the closest approaches on record, NASA scientists predict, but it poses no danger

By Suryatapa Bhattacharya

An asteroid the size of a big truck will fly by Earth on Thursday just 2,200 miles above the planet’s surface in one of the closest approaches ever recorded, scientists said.

The asteroid, named 2023 BU, will travel over the Pacific Ocean west of southern Chile, Thursday afternoon Pacific time, according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The near-Earth object poses no danger, and there is no expected impact.

“It’s not going to break up,” said Dr. Farnocchia. “It’s going to zoom past Earth, say hello and move on.”

Had it entered Earth’s orbit, the asteroid would have burned upon entry and, at its small size, turned into a fireball. “It’s not going to get close enough for that,” said Dr. Farnocchia.

This will be the fourth-closest approach recorded, according to Dr. Farnocchia. He said there were two instances in 2020 and another in 2021.

Asteroids are big rocks and harder to recognize than comets, which usually have spectacular tails.

2023 BU was first spotted by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, from his observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea, on Jan. 21. More observations were reported to the Minor Planet Center, a clearinghouse for the position measurement of small celestial bodies. And after the discovery was announced, observatories around the globe added to the findings, helping astronomers refine 2023 BU’s orbit, according to NASA.

NASA’s impact hazard assessment system, which is based in Southern California and called Scout, analyzed the data and quickly predicted the near miss.

Dr. Farnocchia, who developed Scout, said he received an alert from Scout about the asteroid when he was having dinner. “When you see that alert, you just want to make sure that it’s real,” he said. “So usually I just go and see the data and confirm it’s real and that everything is checked out.”

Scientists use perihelion -- or the point in the orbit of a plane, asteroid or comet at which it is closest to the sun -- to measure how close an object is getting to Earth. If the perihelion of an object is less than 1.3 astronomical units, which is the distance between Earth and the sun, it is called a near-Earth object.

“Some of them actually can come really close to the Earth, and some of them might never come close to the Earth. That is just the first cutoff to split objects that could be potentially interesting and the ones that certainly are not,” said Dr. Farnocchia.

Any asteroid in Earth’s proximity and gravity can experience a change in trajectory. 2023 BU’s orbit around the sun was expected to take 359 days and follow a circular path, NASA said. But after its expected encounter with Earth on Thursday, its orbit will become more elongated, and one orbit will take 425 days.

Some 100 tons of material from space make it to Earth every day, though most of it is small. Objects about a couple of meters in size reach Earth about once a year and don’t cause any damage. Bigger objects that can cause damage may occur in our lifetime, Dr. Farnocchia said. “So the thing that you have to do is to discover as many as possible,” he said.

Astronomers measure some space objects such as asteroids by observing their brightness, which gives them an idea of their mass. 2023 BU is estimated to be between 3.5 meters and 8 meters, or 11.5 feet to 28 feet -- about the size of a big truck.

Discovering smaller objects is a way to keep an eye on bigger discoveries, like NASA’s DART mission in 2022. The space agency used its fast-moving spacecraft to shift the orbit of a distant asteroid after colliding with it.

“Besides discovering objects, we are also making preparations to be able to deflect them in case that was ever needed,” said Dr. Farnocchia. “The DART mission is a great example of that.”

Write to Suryatapa Bhattacharya at Suryatapa.Bhattacharya@wsj.com

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[DaYooper] finance.yahoo.com GOAT, gaslighting and more words to leave in 2022 violeta ik...

DaYooper — 1/3/2023 12:34:56 AM

finance.yahoo.com

GOAT, gaslighting and more words to leave in 2022

violeta ikonomova, Detroit Free Press
Mon, January 2, 2023 at 3:25 PM CST·2 min read

It is what it is: Another banished-words list from Lake Superior State University.

That phrase ranks 10th among the Upper Peninsula school’s annual list of words and phrases to leave behind last year, compiled with help from more than 1,500 submissions from language scolds around the world.

The No. 1 banished word for 2023 is GOAT — or Greatest of All Time — for what judges call “overuse, misuse, and uselessness.”

Rounding out the top five are:

Inflection point — a mathematical term said to have “lost its original meaning.”

Quiet quitting — “Trendy but inaccurate. Not an employee who inconspicuously resigns. Instead, an employee who completes the minimum requirements for a position.”

Gaslighting — a term whose “overuse” has disconnected it “from the real concern it has identified in the past: dangerous psychological manipulation that causes victims to distrust their thoughts, feelings, memories, or perception of reality.”

Moving forward — for, again, “misuse, overuse, and uselessness.”

LSSU’s former public relations director is said to have birthed the tradition at a New Year’s Eve party in the 1970s. W.T. Rabe collected his colleagues’ wordy grievances, published them, and received enough mail-in suggestions of hated phrases to fuel another list the following year.

“It’s our tradition to publish the world-famous Banished Words List on Dec. 31 so that people don’t begin the New Year by putting their foot in their mouth,” LSSU President Dr. Rodney Hanley said in a news release last fall. “No-brainer — which also made our list in the past.”

Hate a word or phrase that didn’t make the cut? Submissions are already being accepted for 2024.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: GOAT, gaslighting and more words to leave in 2022