Remember When No One Cared Where Their Food Was From?

When I was a kid I didn’t care where my food was from as long as it wasn’t from off the floor. Food falling on the floor is one of the worst things that can happen to you in elementary school. In later years we would learn about the “five second rule,” which I once mixed up with the “five minute rule” and almost got left back for poor attendance. But in elementary school, if there had been a little more room on those menus magneted to every refrigerator in the land, the description of the lunches would say something like “Not Dropped On the Floor Sloppy Joe.”

At restaurants today it is taken for granted that food is not dropped on the floor, or that if it is, no one will tell you about it. Instead, the menus emphasize the geographic origin of the ingredients. Everyone wants to know if the vegetables are locally grown, or if the chickens were raised on local farms, enjoying the fresh local air and tasty local feed, taking in the local theater and shopping at the local boutiques, before their necks were wrung ever so humanely.

Wikipedia describes the local food movement as a “collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies—one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place.” There is a Taco Bell five minutes from my home that I’ve often relied upon, parking my car behind the dumpster so that my wife wouldn’t see it while she shops for fresh vegetables and couscous. But I don’t think that’s what they mean.

My first exposure to the local food movement was when my wife and I attended a farmer’s market near our home. The vendors had set up tables with their wares, and offered so many free samples of local tomatoes, local cheese, local bread, and local meat, that it was not long before I was looking for the local bathroom.

One table was offering locally made gourmet peanut butter. The options were far beyond the traditional chunky and smooth. There was chocolate-pretzel peanut butter, cookie-dough fudge peanut butter, jalapeño peanut butter. We were impressed. Then I looked at the price tag, and realized why choosy moms choose Jif. Panko-crusted animal-cracker peanut butter mixed with goat cheese and leeks may be great for dinner parties, but I had to conserve my cash for the parking attendant.

Local food, however, is about much more than nutrition and economics. There is controversy about what constitutes “local.” The United States Congress, in the 2008 Farm Act, defined “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product” as less than 400 miles from its origin. That means that “local” covers an area of 502,655 square miles, or, as Tom Hanks’s character in “Cast Away” would have put it, “twice the size of Texas.” Under that definition, I could secure a lot more free time by telling my wife I’m going out to run a few local errands.

I’m no member of Congress, but, to me, “local” implies that a chicken could have its head cut off and still be running around in my shopping cart when I’m swiping my frequent shopper card. Politics is truly the art of compromise.

But these lofty concepts and global disputes rarely affect my daily life. I eat whatever food I can find in the refrigerator or cupboard, with no thought of the journey it took to my gullet, and whether it paid tolls with E-Z Pass. The only time the local movement enters my decision-making process is when I’m at a restaurant, and I am given the choice between meats raised on local farms or meats from origins unknown. It is such a hard decision to make, that I already know I’m going to be reaching for antacids later on that night…antacids that are, fortunately, the most local food of all—right on the nightstand, next to my bed.

Posted on 20 February 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 26

Remember When You Couldn’t Buy Things Online?

When I send my mental archivist for some good ol’ Christmas memories from my childhood, she brings me back not caroling or egg nog or chestnuts warming on a hot plate that we picked up from QVC for three easy payments of $19.95, but rather images of long lines at Macy’s and Sears and a store called “A&S,” which I think stood for Aimless & Shameless.

My mother would drag my brother and I throughout the mall for the annual drag-a-thon, lugging a 30-gallon paper shopping bag with twisted rope handles that held our winter coats. All that shopping, and the only shopping bag I remember is the bag with the coats.

And even more than waiting in line, I remember the carpets of those legendary department stores, beige and not too rough when you lay your face upon it, being mindful of the fallen staples and people walking around with sugar plum fairies and God knows what else dancing in their heads. For following your mother around while she did her Christmas shopping was exhausting, particularly when we were not being energized by our usual line-up of televised cartoons and sit-coms.

One of the perks of being a kid is that you can lay down on the carpet of a department store and no one calls the security guard. But it’s only department stores that seem to share this understanding. The Metropolitan Museum of Art…not so much.

But waiting in long mega-lines that wrap around Saturn is, of course, part of my memories of shopping in physical stores with my physical legs and physical wallet. I remember arriving at Macy’s one time with the intention of getting only a gift-card. It was late afternoon and the tension level was at least a Code Orange. I asked a security guard where the gift cards were, and he pointed to the register. The gift cards were indeed at the register, and leading up to the register was one of the aforementioned mega-lines. I asked the same security guard if it was really okay that I just step in front of all these people who had been waiting not-so-patiently, and he again pointed at the register, which I interpreted as a “yes.”

So I walked up to the register and grabbed a card, and started to address the cashier, and the man at the front of the line, holding four very large shopping bags bursting at the seams, said something to me that I cannot print here.

“No, it’s okay,” I said, waiving him off, “I’m just getting a gift card.”

When I got out the hospital I decided that it was perhaps time to do my shopping online.

My early forays into online consumerism were not success stories. I ordered a black faux-leather swivel desk chair so I could pretend I was Dr. Evil. But they sent me a burgundy chair instead. I’m doubt you’ve tried it, but it is very hard to look evil in a burgundy chair. So I called up the online merchant and they said to put the chair outside my apartment and that it would be picked-up and replaced with the chair I ordered.

I did what they said and they sent me a new chair. Unfortunately, the new chair was burgundy, too, and they had forgotten to pick up the old one. So now I had had two burgundy chairs in my apartment, neither one of which I could use. It looked like I was running a furniture store.

I’ve become much more adept and sophisticated since then. Last year, I ordered for my wife a digital camera. I typed in “digital camera” and the search engine returned so many results that I had to order more RAM for my computer to hold all the results. Luckily for me, that too was available online.

When I was finally able to view the results I saw that I didn’t know very much about digital cameras. Before I started my online search, I had thought that the only choice I had to make was the color. Apparently the color is the last choice you have to make.

The choices come in layers. First, what kind of a camera did I want? There was a “Point & Shoot,” a “Compact System,” and a “Digital SLR.” I looked around for a “Takes Pictures” kind of digital camera but I guess they had that one on backorder.

The second layer of choice is whether you want a standard, long-zoom, touch-screen, or waterproof camera. I was hoping to find one that could be dropped from the viewing gallery of any of the world’s great museums and still work…but again that option was not listed.

Then the third and, at least for me and my eyeballs, final layer of choices were the specifications. Megapixels, optical zoom, digital zoom, auto flash. There was even something called “burst shooting” which I had thought was available only with machine guns.

I downloaded all of the specifications of the different cameras into a spreadsheet and compared them. For days and nights I pored over the spreadsheets like an economist, trying to find the digital camera that would give my beloved the most Pareto-efficient picture possible along with a cute carrying case. Most of the data fit neatly into linear models, except for the option that allowed a photograph to be directly uploaded to Facebook without exercise of judgment.

Soon it was December 20, the last day for guaranteed Christmas Eve delivery while still getting the Super Savings shipping discount. My hands were shaking too much to type so I called up the store directly. And when I was I asked what I wanted to buy, I said, “A digital camera.”

“Oh, great, sir. We have plenty of those. What kind of digital camera would you like?”

This was it. The moment of truth. The moment when I put to use the superior knowledge that could be gained only from online shopping. I took a deep breath.

“Um, a pink one,” I said.

Happy Online Shopping, Everyone!

Posted on 12 December 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 22

Remember When There Weren’t Any House Shows?

Every Saturday morning, instead of going to synagogue like the Torah commands, I sit in my living room and watch my wife watching what I’ve come to call “house shows.” You know what I’m talking about. Shows where people decorate houses, renovate houses, buy houses, sell houses. Shows where contractors troll the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s, looking for the unsuspecting owners of living rooms and yards in desperate need of television crews.

The first house show that I remember was called This Old House, hosted by Bob Vila and his flannel shirt. At the end of the show would be an old residence, beautifully restored, like a Victorian or Neanderthal cave. I don’t know how the show began because the only reason I went to that channel was to watch Gummi Bears, and This Old House came on right before it, and in my haste I sometimes went to the channel before This Old House had ended. And as Bob Vila sat back on the stained porch he had just added to a Sumerian mud hut, I would say to myself, “How could someone stand to watch a show like this?”

Fast-forward about fifteen years, and pretty much the only kind of show we watch in my house is a show like that.

I never understood the interest in these house shows. A show put together by professional contractors and designers. People that know how to knock down walls, pour concrete, and install plumbing. People that can rearrange entire homes in their minds. People that can draw a straight line. Homeowners, living in ordinary homes, with ordinary husbands who would rather be writing blogs than hammering nails, watch these shows and wonder why their homes don’t look like the homes on television.

Because the houses on these shows are far from ordinary. Kitchens with a backsplash made of tile reclaimed from a Pompeian mosaic dug out from two tons of igneous rock. New living room floors from hard wood reclaimed from that house that got swallowed up in Poltergeist. The only thing that isn’t reclaimed is my use of the remote control.

And the shows all have catchy names. One show that’s been getting a lot of playing time is called Property Brothers, where one brother is a real estate agent who shows the homeowners a few houses they like, and then leads them to a house they can afford, and the other brother helps stays up all night renovating it to look like the houses they liked.

I think a better show would be called Property Spouses. The home would be already bought, and it would be husband/wife team that would help decorate it. The husband would put in a leather couch and large television, and the wife would come in afterwards, replace the couch with a fabric chaise lounge and the television with a baby, and make the husband redecorate the garbage right out the kitchen.

Another show that gets a lot of playing time is called House Hunters. Here is a typical episode. A young couple puts on camouflage and grabs their rifles and heads out into the woods. A small cape cod, three bedroom, two bath, leans over a brook and takes a cool drink. The man is slow to unshoulder his rifle, but his wife is quick, sets her sight, and fires. Her aim is true, but the house heard the husband’s Droid beeping and turned, catching the wife’s round in the chimney. Panicked, the cape cod runs through the woods leaving a trickle of blood running down the outdated — but in good condition — vinyl siding. The wife and her husband set in pursuit. She gets off a few more rounds, but it turns out the home is a short sale, and the bank holds on to it until long after rigor mortis has set in.

But the house show that has become my favorite is probably DIY Disaster. In each episode, a pair of homeowners have an unfinished project, so they bring in a professional contractor to finish the project while the homeowners stand around drinking coffee. In one episode, a man had attempted to fill an inground swimming pool in the middle of the couple’s living room. But halfway through the project, he had gone insane from too many viewings of that “discount double-check” commercial with Aaron Rodgers, and was committed to an asylum with the pool only halfway dug out. Further complicating the situation was that to save time he had started filling the pool up with water as he worked, so that the halfway dug out pool was halfway filled with water, and the standing water had become home to many bugs and aquatic life.

Luckily, the host of the show arrived on the scene and was able to finish the project, using the aquatic life as independent contractors. The sea otters turned out to be natural talents, and were used in subsequent episodes, until a labor organizer got hold of them and had them balancing picket signs on their noses.

Posted on 5 December 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 16

Remember Old Fashioned Hand Dryers?

People debate evolution as it pertains to life on Earth, but there is no questioning evolution as it pertains to the hand dryers found in the restrooms of schools, restaurants, and rest areas off the New Jersey Turnpike. Hanging on the wall of some biology classroom there is a chart showing a slimy amphibious hand dryer crawling out of the primordial soup, a few matzoh balls still clinging to its metal chassis, and its fins and crank evolving into feet and a blower.

Yes, kids, the hand dryers that populate my sepia-toned memories of public school boys’ rooms in the 1980s have unadorned metal cranks that rolled out brown paper towel that could do anything except dry one’s hands. We would wet the paper towels and wrap them around our foreheads in imitation of the pop starlets of the day. One time my grandfather asked me why I was doing this, and I told him it was because the paper towels were not good for drying.

“Ah, you kids today are so spoiled,” he said. “I remember when we had to dry our hands on dried animal skins. Sometimes our hands would come away filthier than before, with grime and dried blood. Have you ever gone out to dinner at a five-star restaurant with the parents of the girl you’re dating, and come back from the restroom with dried animal blood on your hands?”

Mixed in with the lavatory tin lizzies were electric hand dryers. This marvelous invention was a white fixture with a stunted chrome proboscis and circular button by which one could trigger the stream of lukewarm air. The circular button looked at if it had once looked magnificent dressed in a shiny chrome finish. But that finish had been worn off by thousands of wet hands, forearms, elbows, and even feet banging the button. Did anyone ever gently push that circular once-chrome button instead of banging it? It was an unspoken that only real washroom users made a fist and pounded it into the button to start the dryer, like the Fonz starting the jukebox at Arnold’s.

The really funny thing about those old hand dryers is the word “dryer.” I don’t remember ever getting my hands dry on the first time through, or even the second. I would have to stand there for a good ten minutes, banging away the last flecks of chrome off that poor battered circular button while a line of irate men with wet hands formed behind me.

That would never happen today. Those hand dryers from the Industrial Revolution have been replaced by turbo-speed hand dryers that blow the skin right off your hands. And you don’t have to bang any buttons, either. The dryers are triggered by infrared sensors that can see wet hands before them as well as Taliban commandos in the Afghanistani night.

The configurations of the hand dryers are different, too. Instead of blowing air straight down, I’ve seen dryers that are folded over, and you place your hands inside a crease and the turbo-speed hot air dries your hands from both sides. In the future you’ll place your hands inside a teleportation chamber. The wet hands will be transported to a galaxy far, far away, where a swarm of miniature winged drier-fairies, that fly about your hands and dry them, not unlike the people that work at car washes. Once dry, your hands are teleported back to the chamber in the rest room. And you won’t find it strange at all that your hands are missing. Due to the principles of special relativity, no earth-time passes at all while your hands are being dried light years away.

The circular chrome buttons are a thing of the past. Somewhere in a junkyard there is a giant pile of circular chrome buttons from old-fashioned hand dryers. Families bring their children to play on the piles, and on the way home, perhaps at the obligatory stop off at McDonald’s, the children ask the parents how the piles got there.

And the parents smile, and maybe tell the children the truth, that technology changed so that people could have drier hands, and the circular chrome buttons had to sent out to pasture. But more likely they’ll tell their children that the chrome buttons got lonely, sitting all alone in this restroom or that, and congregate to one place where they could be together. Forever.

Posted on 28 November 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 16

Remember Trick-or-Treating on Halloween?

For today’s post I’m going to cheat a little and direct you to a piece of mine, “When Halloween Was the Ultimate Treat,” that was run in my local newspaper, The Times Union. It ran a couple of weeks ago, but I thought it would be better to post about it closer to All Hallows Eve. Plus it gets me a free post without having to come up with any original material, which is always a good thing. Especially on mornings in October when I wake up to snow on the ground and below-freezing temperatures and I haven’t planted my hydrangea bulbs yet. But as the clerk at Zack’s Guns & Ammo told me yesterday, “We don’t have to like it. We just have to live with it.”

Happy Halloween! Remember to stock up on Butterfingers this weekend.

P.S. I had a spike in page views on Wednesday. Anyone have any idea that might have happened?

Posted on 28 October 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 13

Remember When You Didn’t Have to Worry About Identity Theft?

Note: It was exactly one year ago that I came up with the idea of starting a blog where each post would begin “Remember When” and would discuss another technological change, pop culture death, or safety scheme by which I chart my age, much like the rings of a tree. Metaphysics tells us that time is an illusion. If that’s true, than it is one of the funnier illusions out there. I hope that my meager efforts here have at least pointed that out, and I sincerely thank everyone who has been patient enough to read these efforts, and those kind enough to say something nice.

The 21st Century has midwifed a number of routines into my life. There is the routine for organizing my garbage into categories of biodegradability. And there is a routine for corralling the power cords and chargers into a pile that can be seen from space. But the routine that has had the greatest effect on my life is the routine of annihilating each and every slip of printed material that contains my social security number, address, or name.

When I was first put on notice that “[t]hou shalt not steal,” I pictured thieves taking loaves of bread, or a misguided youth absconding with someone else’s bicycle, or a particular sibling eating another particular sibling’s Halloween candy without permission and shamelessly leaving a pile of wrappers underneath the sofa. I never pictured crystal meth addicts diving through dumpsters in search of credit card statements and receipts.

But I picture it now.

My first shredder was advertised as being able to shred six sheets at a time. It cost $25, fit neatly underneath my desk, and worked fine for about two days. Then I tried to shred one of those credit card offers, around three inches thick, and the poor shredder seized up somewhere around the gummy adhesive for the fake card with “Your Name” on it.

The second shredder cost $50, was a stronger and shinier model, and was able to handle ten sheets at a time, plus credit cards, compact discs, and fresh mozzarella. And it would have worked out fine had I been able to keep up with all the identity-theft worthy correspondence that arrived in my mailbox. All I would have had to do was quit my job and spend sixteen hours a day shredding. But life being what it is, I let the junk mail pile up beside the shredder, another pile among piles.

My wife, of course, got sick of seeing all of the paper piling up, and would just tear the pages in half and throw them in the trash along with the chicken bones. Tearing the pages in half! You may as well FedEx your identifying information directly to the identity thieves. So I would find myself picking through the trash, like a cat, pulling out the halves of the documents with my name and scraping off congealed chicken grease.

Then I would take the stained halves of personal documents and put them in the shredder. The first few pages would go through all right, and I would relax a bit, but then the congealed chicken grease would clog up the blades and the shredder would seize up with a mechanical cough. The halves that I was shredding would protrude from the shredders locked-jaw like Steve Buscemi’s legs at the end of Fargo.

In addition, the halves and other documents that I did not get to place into the shredder are left in a pile, a pile that my wife later re-throws in the garbage, triggering another retrieval by yours truly, another ad hoc lecture by yours truly about the identity thieves lurking just outside the windows, and another trip by yours truly to the customer service line at Staples.

They say that third time’s a charm, and that is certainly true with respect to the shredders in my life. Sure, shredder number three set me back $200, takes up half of the basement, and when in use makes the house shake and lights dim. But it handles thirty sheets at a time, even those thick envelopes full of credit card offers and those airline promotions that look like real airline tickets to everyone except TSA workers. The blades are titanium and are arranged in a criss-cross pattern that virtually pulverizes whatever I run through them, including the large electric bill I’ve been getting every month.

And the poor, poor identity thieves are left with nothing but a cloud of paper molecules…and whatever they can find on the Internet.

Posted on 11 October 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 16

Remember Liner Notes?

One might be quick to say that an mp3, mp4, or mp79, or some other digital music file, is the equivalent of an old-time audio cassette (“tape”), or compact disc (“CD”). And one would be wrong, because the computer file lacks something that tapes and CDs always had—and not just a $17 price tag, or price tag at all. A purchaser of tapes or CDs got something other than two good songs, maybe one halfway decent song, and a bunch of drek. Tapes and CDs came with liner notes, and liner notes made the price tag totally worth it.

Liner notes were glossy booklets that contained notes about the artists and the production of the album, photographs of the artists performing live and smoking cigarettes, and sometimes the lyrics to the songs. Knowing all of the words to a song was like knowing a secret incantation, that when said would release the demons that gave the band members their talent and ability to play with sweaty strings of hair in their faces. I was never more impressed than when I saw a good friend sing along perfectly to “Back off B*tch [Explicit]” off of Use Your Illusion: Disc 1 from Guns ‘n’ Roses. He must have studied the liner notes for hours to catch each nuance of the piece.

But what I remember the most about liner notes—more than the lyrics, more than the photographs, more than the artwork, more than even the music itself—was the smell. That clean, sterile, plasticky, glossy smell that told my twelve-year-old brain that good times lay ahead. That smell would hit me the moment I pried open the jewel case, even though I never knew why it was called a jewel case, and that it certainly did not contain any jewels, unless you bought a CD by the artist known as Jewel, which I never did, and even if I did would never admit. Even now, years after I had to throw out all my jewel cases in the Great Scolding of 2005, I can close my eyes and imagine the smell of liner notes.

One time a friend caught me smelling the liner notes of one of his CDs. He had gotten up to go to the bathroom and I thought he was going to be gone longer than he was. When he returned I had my snout in the middle of the booklet to his copy of Metallica’s black album, which we just called Metallica Metallica.

“Hey man, what are you doing?”

“Um, nothing.”

“Were you…smelling my Metallica Metallica liner notes?”

“What? Smelling your liner notes? No, man. That would be weird. I was just taking a closer look. Oh, wow, you know I never knew that Lars Ulrich uses Zildjian cymbals. The print on these things is so tiny!”

As my nose became accustomed to the smell, my eyes would drink in the images. And drinking is an apt metaphor. Because no matter how many assemblies they made sit through in school, where adults used every approach short of mass hypnosis to persuade us that drinking and doing drugs was not cool, the photographs and original artwork of the liner notes told a different story.

The other day I was my parents’ home, cleaning out that week’s “mystery box from high school,” when I came across my collection of liner notes, stripped of their jewel cases but otherwise in perfect working order. I removed the hardened rubber band and flipped through the liner notes one by one, stopping every now and again to explore a particular booklet, and all the while breathing in the essence of ‘80s, ‘90s, and today. And I rolled around on the floor, reliving the magic, my mother walked in and said, “Did you know that the original liner notes came with records.” She paused and smiled. “Remember those?

Thanks to Patrick Champ for the topic.

Posted on 26 August 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 10

Remember When Life Wasn’t Consumed by Facebook?

Have you ever been working really hard on something, and have someone who sees you working say to you at the peak of your frenzy, “You know, no one ever said on their death-bed that they wished they spent more time at work”? That may be true, but will anyone ever say on their death-bed, “I wish I had spent more time on Facebook”?

I have a ritual before I sign on to the Big FB. I say to myself, “Now, we’re just going in for three things: Wish happy birthday to absolutely anyone whose birthday prompt arises, re-poke any pokers, and RSVP to your brother-in-law’s ‘Second Annual Weekend at the Chicken Farm,’ and that is it. Got it? All right, we’re going in…”

But the moment I sign in my plan goes out the Microsoft Windows. I am grabbed, wrapped up in Facebook’s tentacles, entranced by the songs of its sirens. There’s no way to stop it. One moment I’m checking out the birthday quadrant, and the next moment I’m looking at ultrasounds of someone’s deviated septum. I retrace my steps, and I see how I went astray:

“All right, I signed in, and saw that it was so-and-so’s birthday, but there were those pictures of such-and-such’s new baby, and so I had to look at those pictures, and right underneath that update was an update from so-and-so about how he scored tickets to see Hall & Oates, and then, I saw that 43 of my other friends are fans of Hall & Oates, and one of their profiles I didn’t recognize, so I clicked on it and found that it was a complete stranger, but after looking at her other profile pictures I discovered that she is someone who I went to high school with, but has remarried, and so I check on her husband’s page, even though I don’t know him, and what do you know he likes a certain band, which is cool, even though I’ve never heard of that band. So I clicked on the link of some dude who commented on a photo of the husband of that girl I went to high school with….”

The recursion is maddening. I’m not sure if recursion is the correct word to use, but the point is I can’t retrace my steps. I get disgusted with myself and sign off Facebook in a huff. And then two minutes later I realized that I forgot to do on Facebook what I had initially meant to do. So I sign back on, and the cycle of wasted time and self-disgust begins anew.

I’ve heard reports that the average Facebook user spends six hours a day on Facebook. If you could put time in a bottle, how many bottles would that be, worldwide? Does it make a difference if you use plastic bottles? It certainly does if you’re an environmentalist. But most non-environmentalists only care that the bottle not contain any BPA, whatever that is.

Six hours a day for every person on Facebook. This cannot be as disheartening as it sounds. Perhaps many Facebook users live in places where there is not that much to do, and going on Facebook actually increases the productivity of their regional economy. But for most people, I imagine, Facebook is taking time that could be put to far more productive use, like helping in the community, spending time with family, or writing a blog.

Maybe companies will figure out a way to have employees do their work on Facebook. I’ve alluded before to the possibility of suing people on Facebook. Perhaps meetings and projects could be done with fan pages. Products could be ordered and memos sent. Even those little office birthday parties…well, we know Facebook has got the birthday thing down.

But what would those people who work on Facebook do to waste time? They could not very well waste time on Facebook, because Facebook would be their job. By definition, you can’t waste time at work by working. The Facebook workers would have to sign off, and turn off the monitor or shut the laptop, and pick up a stack of paper, and start filing.

And at 5 o’clock, the Facebook workers would put on their coats and hats, and go to a cafe, where they would meet real people, and talk face to face. They would sip their coffee and nod, and smile, and make all of the tones and gestures that give spoken language its vitality. And after they drain their cups, and catch-up on each others’ lives, these Facebook workers would sit back and reminisce about the days when people socialized over Facebook.

Do you stick to the grocery list when shopping at Facebook? Or do you find yourself wandering the aisles as time ceases to exist?

Posted on 15 August 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 28

Remember When You Had Never Heard of a Debt Ceiling?

Two days ago, when I started procrastinating over writing this post, it seemed like everywhere I turned I was hearing about the United States’ debt ceiling, and whether Congress would raise it or subject the country to a lot of letters from collection agents. For weeks now I’ve been picturing the Representatives and Senators walking around stooped, the ceiling of the Capitol Building pressing down on them like that Floor 7 ½ in Being John Malkovich.

I do not know any stories about the debt ceiling. But I do know a story about a ceiling.

When I was around ten years old, slime was a popular toy. Not the kind of slime you find on week-old turkey cold cuts, or the kind that rained on anyone who said “I don’t know” on You Can’t Do That On Television, but the kind that was pliable and sticky for maximum destruction.

The slime would stick to any solid matter it touched. One morning my mother came downstairs to see me cutting clumps of my own hair out after a particularly educational experiement with the slime’s adhesiveness. Another time the slime led to a hasty farewell to our family’s cherished VCR. But the most memorable experience was how my brother discovered the slime’s aerial properties.

My brother and I took an annual trip to Florida to see our paternal grandparents. They lived near Fort Lauderdale in a senior community that had a swimming pool and a lot of women named Rose. Of course we loved our grandparents and savored every game of Po-Ke-No and story about the Great Depression. But the best thing about spending a week with grandma and grandpa was that we went out for ice cream every night.

In that year of the slime, my brother brought a specimen onto the plane. Had he done that today I am sure the full body scans would have detected the item, and my eight-year-old brother would have been interrogated for hours in a small room. But in those days the only thing the airlines cared about was that we not kick the seat in front of us.

My grandparents’ house, like most houses in Florida, had a ceiling. I never noticed it that much until my brother tossed his smuggled slime up in the air hard, so it stuck to the pebbled white ceiling. We could not reach it, even after stacking the hassocks atop one another, and our 78-year-old grandfather had to get up on a ladder and pry the slime off. He was not pleased, and asked that my brother not do again.

Not two hours later, the slime was again stuck on the ceiling. My brother was fully engaged in brinksmanship. Again our grandfather had get on the ladder, again he had to pry the slime off his white ceiling that now had two greenish stains, and again he scolded my brother.

“If you throw that slime on the ceiling again,” he said, “we’re not taking you out for ice cream for the rest of the week.” From his face we knew this threat was serious. My brother loved ice cream even more than mischief, and to even hint that the nightly ritual could be compromised was like threatening to remove one his limbs.

So he was good for the rest of our time there. Mostly good. He still splashed the wrinkled octagenarians at the community pool with his cannonballs in defiance of the large sign that said, “No Cannonballs.” And he still gave my grandmother a near-coronary by getting a little too friendly with the neighborhood lizards. But the green slime from Long Island remained in its clear plastic egg, and we got our ice cream every night during that vacation.

Finally the time came to take our leave of our grandparents, and fly home to the land of snow and homework. We packed our suitcases, stuffed our still-damp bathing suits into plastic bags from Publix, strategically placed the porcelain ashtrays with palm trees on them that we’d gotten as souvenirs, even though no one we knew smoked. And in the deepening afternoon, as we were about to get in the car for the airport, my brother took out his plastic egg of green slime, removed the contents, and tossed the slime up onto the ceiling, where it stuck as faithfully as ever. And my brother shot my poor old grandfather a look that said, “What do I have to lose now?”

I just read that a tentative deal to raise the debt ceiling has been reached among the great compromisers on Capitol Hill, who say they can save $4 trillion by switching to paperless sex scandals. Clearly there is some connection between that deal and my story about my brother throwing the slime on my grandparents’ ceiling: the gaming, the line between real and empty threats, the intergenerational battles. And someone is wearing a smirk that says, “What do I have to lose now?”

Posted on 1 August 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 13

Remember When People Read Only Physical Books?

These are dark days for the physicality of books. Sales of physical books are falling further and further beneath the sales of the light and snappy e-books. Brick and mortar bookstores are closing across the nation. Wood and straw bookstores have been blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Depressing news indeed.

The first book I ever remember reading was Make Way for Ducklings. It was a big, dark green hardcover with a gold seal on the front. I used to take it to bed with me, and hold it under the covers. That was my habit with all my favorite books growing up, and it was not until I was sleeping with Introduction to Statistical Mechanics in 11^th grade that my parents felt the need to intervene.

I was always very careful about my books. I had certain rules. A college classmate once wanted to borrow my copy of Utopia. I agreed to let her take temporary possession, but only upon her following my rules.

“Don’t open the book any wider than absolutely necessary, so that the spine does not crack.”

“Okay.”

“And try not to hold the book too much. Unless you are actually reading it, the book should lie flat on a hard surface, not too close to an open window, in case of rain, and not too close to a radiator. Heat can ruin the laminated cover.”

“Okay.”

“And if you absolutely must carry the book somewhere, hold it in your hand, but only if you can refrain from bending it. A lot of people have that tendency, I’ve noticed, during periods of stress or excitement. If you feel like you are entering one of those periods of stress or excitement, put the book inside of a backpack or satchel, but be very careful. Place it in the bag so that the spine is down and parallel with the ground, so that the corners do not get smushed by the sides of the bag.”

“Um, okay.”

“The best and safest place for a book,” I continued, “is a boofshelf. But bookshelves have their own pitfalls. For example, if there are too many books on one shelf, do not try to squeeze the book in between a small space. Otherwise the friction from the adjacent books as you try to squeeze it in will cause the book’s front and back covers to fold over, and once that happens…” I shuddered. “Just be careful, all right?”

She gave me the book back the next day. “I just couldn’t handle all the rules. I’m going to the bookstore now.” I caught her reading Utopia at the dining hall the next day, with the cover folded over. I shielded my eyes and ran out the door, appetite lost for the evening.

I was not a fan of the Kindle when it first came out. I remember telling my mother how stupid the device sounded.

“I mean, who wants to read a book on an electronic device? You don’t even get to turn the pages.”

“Oh, I think it sounds really cool. How much is it?”

“$349.”

“Well,” my mother said, “I’ll split it with you if you want one.”

And that how I ended up with a Kindle for $349. And I admit, it was pretty cool for a while. I downloaded hundreds of free books—Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare—and marvelled at the library I held in my hand.

“Look, Dad,” I said to my father, “this Kindle holds hundreds and hundreds of books!”

“How many of them have you read?”

“That’s not the point.”

But in the end he was right. I found that reading from the Kindle did not yield the same satisfaction as reading from a physical book. Percentages and locations were sterile metrics compared to page numbers. And somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling that because the book really wasn’t there, but was just a temporary arrangement of electrons, that I was not really reading the book, and that when I shut the Kindle off for the night, and the words disappeared from the screen, the meaning would disappear from my brain as well.

So I’m back to reading physical books. Sure, they’re heavier, and more expensive, and take up space that certain household members believe would be better spent on vases and bowls of plastic fruit. But in this crazy and forgetful world, physical books assure that knowledge, meaning, and beauty are eternal. Just so long as the spine is uncracked.

Posted on 28 July 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 21