Twinkie defense 2

As follow-up to yesterday’s story on the possibility of iconic snack cakes (if there be such a thing) disappearing from the shelves due to the bankruptcy filing by Hostess, NPR has helpfully suggested ten uses for Twinkies.

I think you could also use them in place of clay pigeons for skeet shooting. I bet they’d make a very satisfying splat when hit.

What are your ideas?

Twinkies defense

This has already been a tough month for childhood icons: first Kodak filed for bankruptcy, & yesterday Hostess has filed. The snack cake giant blamed having to pay out on contractual obligations to current & retired employees as the primary reason for its financial woes.

Of course. Because it can’t possibly be producing a product line of food-like items without recognizable taste or ingredients that practically define the term “empty calories” in an age where they’re being banned from schools & family kitchens alike couldn’t possibly be a contributing factor.

I mean—take a look at the 37 ingredients in a Twinkie. There are only 14 I recognize as food-like products I could purchase & consume (including two kinds of corn syrup & baking soda; & I counted the glucose just to be generous.

(For those not acquainted with the Hostess line, here’s the premise: some sort of cake or sponge lump surrounding a wodge of rubberized cream-like substance, frequently with a hard shell that purports to be icing, but definitely doesn’t melt in your hand.)

As a kid I lusted after Sno Balls®. Coconut is my downfall, & I thought they were the absolute bomb. (Look, I had no point of reference. My mother was not what you might call a baker. A huge thing for us was to get day-old glazed doughnuts from the Helms Olympic Bakery outlet store.) Mom never let me have them, so it was a big deal for me to use baby-sitting money to buy a packet on the sly.

A few years ago I bought a package as a special treat. I couldn’t even finish one of them; the coconut tasted like the spongy frosting tasted like the “chocolate” cake tasted like the crème filling. I didn't try it, but they probably all tasted like the plastic packaging. 

Evidently I’m not the only person to have reached that conclusion; hence yesterday’s filing

Regarding the stated reason for bankruptcy, let me just make one observation. It’s very interesting that corporations don’t seem to have any difficulty finding the money to meet their contractual obligations to senior management, but never have enough to do the same for the people who actually make the products or deliver the service.

Snack on that.

Connecting or not

I was talking with James, the guy who cuts my hair, the other day. He’s a Bay Area native—grew up around Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, now lives in Milpitas and the salon is in Los Altos.

So he’s got a broad perspective on the area. And, while he’s not a technocrat himself, he’s certainly adopted all the tech that has engulfed Gen-XY.

I often ask him about local spots for exploration—where’s a good area to live, where do I find a good park, etc. I do the same with my physical therapist, who grew up in Burlingame and now lives in Redwood Shores.

It was the latter’s recommendation that found me at the Copenhagen Bakery and Café for breakfast just before New Year’s Day. The eggs and bacon were fine, I perused a free local newspaper from a stand right outside and there was good people-watching also for free. (The folks behind the counters were somewhat less than personable, but there you go.)

However—the café did not have Wi-Fi. Which I though passing strange. I mean—a place where you sit down over coffee, in the Silicon Valley (okay—on the northern edge of it), And no Wi-Fi? Really?

As it happened, I hooked into free Wi-Fi from the Sephora store across the street (also a little strange—retail with an open network? Don’t they want you buying eyeliner and D&G perfume instead of checking your emails?). So I wasn’t reduced to reading the sports section of that free newspaper.

When I commented on the experience to James he agreed that it was odd. Then he said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Yeah, because we can’t possibly sit down anywhere without being entertained.”

Oh. Um. Right.

This ties into one of my ongoing TLP resolutions: Pay attention. You can’t be fully mindful of your beautifully poached egg if you’re checking Facebook, or plugged into “Morning Edition”, or emailing some idiot at work. Especially if you’re doing all three at once. Nor can you thoroughly attend to framing that work email if you suddenly notice that you’ve got crumbs in your keyboard.

Thinking about it, having that laptop or tablet out is really kind of a defensive positioning—don’t talk to me, I’m busy; I’m focused on something that’s more important than what’s going on around me. More important than where I am.

But really—what is more important than where you are, where you are at this moment?

What is more important than biting into one of the seven types of toast you can have at Copenhagen Bakery, topped with a splodge of some sort of homemade-looking deeply blue berry preserves, and experiencing the crunch of the toast and the explosion of deeply blue slithery taste in your mouth? What is more important than noticing the people around you—what they’re eating, how they’re conversing with one another, whether they seem to be regulars? What is more important than filling your lungs with the aroma of just-baked bread that permeates the room?

So—what to do?

Font of ignorance

Last month, after I posted the doorway exchange on Comic Sans, I did a little research.

It seems there’s quite the passionate campaign to ban Comic Sans.

The movement (if you will) is going on for 13 years, now, dedicated to the proposition that a typeface should be in accord with & support the message it is communicating.

I certainly agree with the principle, but I doubt it will succeed in turning the tide of people unacquainted with spelling, grammar, punctuation or other fundamentals of language who think that because Microsoft gave them a couple dozen fonts they’re free to slap anything up on the page they feel like.

Corpus delicti 2

Following up on the story about the discovery of a body on Sandringham estate on New Year’s Day, the deceased has been identified as a 17-year-old Latvian immigrant to Cambridgeshire, Alisa Dmitrijeva. She was last seen on 31 August; reported missing by her family a week later.

Still no report of cause of death.

I feel for the young woman’s family (although I wonder why it took a week to report her missing) and think about the life cut short—what might Dmitrijeva have accomplished, whose lives might she have touched, had she lived?

But I’m also curious about who would leave a body on a royal estate. Okay—it’s gone undiscovered for three to four months. But the wooded area is used with some regularity to shoot pheasants, with beaters walking through it to scare the birds into the air so they can be blasted in their thousands by people with too much time and money on their hands who call it sport.

(Oh. Wait. <ahem> Right—better.)

One could reasonably predict that the corpse left at Sandringham would be found at some point. And that when it was it would make news and focus a lot of law enforcement resources on finding the killer.

There are so many places s/he might have chosen where there might be a much better chance that the body might have gone unnoticed.

So I keep going back to the question: why there?