Boo who?

Around Halloween we were chatting about the UNICEF boxes, the cardboard boxes that some poor kids had to schlep around to go schnorring on behalf of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. I think I did it once. Sometimes in school they'd put the guilt screws on you, and you felt obliged to participate. Well, I figured that UNICEF boxes had gone the way of leisure suits and Pet Rocks. 

Nope.

It's back.

When I was a kid, living in the Five Boroughs, there were plenty of true believers among the parents. They had grown up under the threat of World War and nuclear holocaust, and they believed that the United Nations was an important means to bring countries together and do good throughout the world. Sure, the Communists were always on the march, and the UN reps were always fighting, but as long as the Soviets or the Chinese didn't actually declare war on the United States or Western Europe, then surely the UN was working. It was acting as a "cooling dish" to prevent hotheads from bumbling into war, and a meeting place to try to work out treaties in the presence of other nations, preventing a treaty-based honor system that would require half the world to go to war against the other half as in 1914. 

UNICEF was another helpful idea. It would show that the nations of the world could work together to help children, all children, everywhere, when disaster or famine or illness struck. The pennies, nickels, and dimes we collected along with our fun-size Krackels (yay!) and Hershey Special Darks (boo!) would help the UN perform this mission. 

I'm not sure where it really started to go wrong. Publicly wrong, anyway. It was as the Cold War was coming to a close. In 1988, the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the UN Peacekeeping Forces for "reducing tensions where an armistice has been negotiated but a peace treaty has yet to be established." By 1996 it had been noted that in half the nations the UN Peacekeeping Forces went, there was a "rapid rise in child prostitution".

Does anyone expect anything good out of the UN anymore? It seemed like its World Health Organization might be useful, but its reputation went in the garbage with just about every other major health organization during COVID. A genuine investigation into how the pandemic started and who started it would turn things around, but these groups would rather ride the train to hell than admit fault, rattle the Communist Chinese, or (worst of all) give the plebes any chance of vindication. All the UN is good for is condemning Israel and sometimes the United States, working with terrorists, and demanding that we beasts in the West take more rapists and murderers into our bosom (as if we don't have enough of our own). 

So no, I will never recommend anyone give to UNICEF or any other concern in which the UN is involved. I don't know how well UNICEF does what it purports to do, but the United Nations as a whole has never lived up to its promise, so why should UNICEF? There are better charities. 

The word books are here!

This doesn't matter to anyone outside the publishing industry, and only to about half of them, but The Chicago Manual of Style has coughed up an 18th edition, and made the front cover a friendly-but-eye-hurting yellow rather than their previous trademark orange.  

For those who don't know (and certainly needn't care), the manual is a big book, a list price $75 book, that standardizes everything in the book publishing process from the smallest punctuation to the largest production demands. Newspapers don't use it; they follow the Associated Press style guide. Medical publishers generally follow the AMA's style guide, I believe. I own those, too. And then there's Words Into Type, a sort of rival of CMS, but not given to as many editions. It's often used as a supplement, because there's nothing a 1,200-page cinder block of a book needs more than a supplement. 

The University of Chicago Press began dispensing publishing wisdom in 1891, as a sheet that contained the information for the publisher's compositors and pressmen, who had to deal with scruffy manuscripts from scruffy professors (or so I imagine). 

Even at such an early stage, “the University Press style book and style sheet” was considered important enough to be preserved, along with other items from the Press’s early years, in the cornerstone of the new Press building in 1903.

That sheet grew into a pamphlet, and by 1906 the pamphlet had become a book: Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of types in use—otherwise known as the 1st edition of the Manual. At 200 pages, the original Manual cost 50 cents, plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

It's the bible for most book publishers, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is for the headshrinkers, or the Pocket Pal is for graphics and reproduction guys. (You may insert your Pocket Pal joke here.) 

The CMS doesn’t change much between editions. The 17th was published in 2017. The last few have been busy keeping up with technological changes. And yet it's important to have the most recent one so that we're all quite literally on the same page. If I get into a fight with an editor or writer over the capitalization of celestial objects, I want to refer them to 8.143 (the 143rd section of chapter 8) to show that aurora borealis is set in lowercase. As you can see, the CMS plays referee.  

Despite this, I used to work at a company where the copy chief absolutely refused to use the 15th edition, demanding that we galley slaves stay with the 14th. I do not know why he had it in for the 15th, but he was not kidding. Down with the 15th! was his cry. Soon after I was laid off from that job, the 16th edition came out. I am still afraid the shock may have killed him. 

I haven't looked at the 18th much yet. I worry that they've decided to stuff it with a bunch of politically correct stuff -- how to handle newly coined pronouns, how to address someone who identifies as a wallaby, that kind of thing. It can’t be helped. At least the book remains a noble defender of the serial comma.

Now that I've whipped you into a Chicago Manual of Style frenzy, you will be glad to know that you can buy merch.

The number on the back makes me laugh. Like you play third base for the Chicago Manuals of Style. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Monkey wrenches.

A company I work for was recently purchased by some firm you and I never heard of. While being tangentially in the same business arena, one is a publisher and the other one is an investment firm. 

Knowing the track record of the money mooks at places like Boeing in recent years, I am not optimistic. My main contact says that so far there's been a little departmental shuffling, but no major changes. 

I will be the first to admit that publishing is a mug's game these days, the overeducated spooling the unnecessary to the uninterested. It had reached a grand height in the 1990s, when Condé Nast built its new tower on Times Square, and has been in precipitous decline since. (Condé had its own tower by 2015.) Still, some ends of the business are attached to lucrative industries like finance and healthcare, so they have reason to continue to expect profitability. The company I work for is like that, so there's no reason to think it was bought to be sold off in parts, or to have the stock price run up and then dumped for profit by buccaneers of finance. 

However, there is every reason to fear that, once the dust clears, the new owners will move in the monkey wrench crew to improve things. 

These improvements are very much like artificial intelligence. They are forced onto the unwilling to perform functions that are unnecessary and wind up costing jobs for people who have performed well for years. The work is then outsourced or given to cheap hires that perform poorly. The bottom line is temporarily improved, the stock price rises, then clients flee as everything gets weird and shoddy. Then it's sold off for parts.

Improve Back Better

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of capitalism. The profit motive in a high-trust society like America has been until recently is the best means of raising people in large groups out of poverty ever devised.

I'm against stupid capitalism, however, where companies are run by people who neither know nor care about the actual business and everything goes to hell. I'm sure you can list a dozen examples of companies that died that way, usually the death of a thousand cuts rather than a staggering collapse. Often companies are just caught by surprise by technological advances. But in the end, it mostly comes down to a lack of the intelligence and devotion that made the companies great in the first place. 

If your company is bought out, as has happened to me in the past, I wish you very good luck. Keep an eye open for the monkey wrench crew, come to fix things. It's usually a sign to get the résumé together, if you haven't already. 

Eat the children!

Sometimes I wonder if people celebrating Halloween even want trick-or-treaters to show up at their door. The little kids, anyway. The yard decorations are absolutely horrifying, and a long ways from the stuff that was around even twenty years ago. 

The Angel of Death prepares to bite the head off a little girl

 

How can a ghost have stitches?
I always heard "Witches get stitches."
Or something like that.

Stack o' skulls and the Murder Clown
Acrobatic Team

I realize that compared to a lot of over-the-top yard displays, these folks are barely more than a papier-mâché pumpkin and a green witch Glitter Plaque. But I think when I was a little kid I would have had to at least screw up my courage, maybe shut my eyes and run to the front door -- less for the candy than from the greater fear of being labeled a chicken or a baby. 

Skeletons scared me when I was a boy, I can admit now, and no rational discussion of the utility and importance of human bone structure could cure me of it. I went through a phase where every time I had to turn a light on in a dark room, I anticipated a skeleton waiting for me. I never told anyone, and God help the kid with that same phobia today, because there are plenty of lifelike skeletons to be had for prank purposes. Fortunately, after a couple hundred skeletonless light engagements, I stopped worrying about it. But let's just say that having a vivid imagination is not an unmixed blessing. 

The other confession I have to make is, scary as this stuff is, it was nothing compared to the shooting gallery illustration. This "fun" bit of artwork was in an arcade, either in Seaside Heights or Coney Island -- I have not been able to find it online -- and featured an idiot man with a rifle barrel turned backward, as happened in Looney Tunes many times. But instead of just being blackened with gunpowder, the rifle had blown a hole in his head and a hole in the abdomen of the woman behind him. Both reacted with some surprise. I could not look at it; it would ruin my day if I did. The concept of "body horror" was not so well known then, but that was how it affected me. What made it really sickening (like, made me want to throw up the contents of my mind) was that it was supposed to be funny. 

Maybe I was the weird kid, I don't know. But to my credit, no matter how scared I was, I would get up to every door on Halloween to demand my candy. I could not back down in front of my peers. Plus, candy comes first on Halloween. The pumpkins and ghosts and the rest are really an add-on. You gotta get the good stuff.  

Battle of the cheesians!

Like a lot of Americans, my wife got through college with the help of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. The same is true for Canadians, except for them it was Kraft Dinner. Same powdered cheese product, different name. Beloved staple of families with young children, immortalized in the Barenaked Ladies' classic song "If I Had $1000000."  

But is Kraft Mac & Cheese (as it is styled now) still the big boy on the block? The kids who used to demand it for dinner are adults now, and do they want something more out of a boxed side dish like this (or in a pinch, a main course)? 

That's what my wife asked when she heard about a product called Goodles, a new contender trying to take on the old pro. Goodles isn't the first to try -- Annie's Homegrown has been at it since 1989 (now owned by Nestlé) and corners the organic market. Goodles' gimmick is higher nutrition, though. Specifically higher protein.  

But is it really better than Kraft? 

We thought we'd find out. 

In the left corner, the reigning champion, Box Blue, Old Faithful, your childhood reliable... Kraft Mac & Cheese! 

And in the right corner, the Groovy New Guru of Goodness, the challenger... Goodles Cheddy Mac!

Right off the bat there is a price issue. At Walmart, the Goodles box cost $2.98, whereas the identical size Kraft box was a paltry $1.24. Is Goodles' quality enough to make up for the more than doubled price? Well, you note the award leaves in the lower left side of the box, indicating that Goodles is "Clean Label Project" certified -- in other words, it tested clean for pesticides and heavy metals and other stuff you may not want the kids to eat. 

Unfortunately, the part of the label that warns you that the food is larger on the label than in real life has to have some third-grade cutseyness attached, unlike the same thing on the Kraft box. 

"Enlarged to show YUM" -- this is not the last we'll see of that kind of stuff. 

On to the cooking! 

Both K and G cook up similarly, with 6 cups of water. Boil the pasta, drain (but don't rinse), add 1/4 cup milk and the inserted powdered cheese pack. Kraft calls for four tablespoons of butter as well. Goodles says no butter, but notes that if you want, you can add a couple of tablespoons for richer flavor. My wife said to go ahead and add it -- to give Goodles every chance to take on Kraft in the same weight class. 

I was quite surprised to see that the Kraft powder looked less phony than the Goodles powder, which was bright orange. My wife, looking at the pots, guessed wrongly that the more orange one was the Kraft. There may be a legit reason for that, as I will discuss below. She is convinced that Kraft's used to be more bright orange, like a Syracuse linebacker, and indeed she is probably right. They dropped the food coloring in 2016. 

Kraft

Goodles

While we wait for the tasting, here are the comparisons of the nutrition facts. Kudos to Goodles for listing every possible vitamin and mineral like it's a bottle of Centrum. We also see that has only 5g more protein per serving (15g) than Kraft (although with the optional butter it would be a smidge higher). But that is an issue with the kiddies. A grown man needs 52g of protein daily, but a kid between four and eight just 19, so 5g is not nothing to them. 

One curious factor when these products were prepared is that Kraft's box seems to make a lot more. Seriously, by volume it looks like a quarter to a third more food than the Goodles package. And yet the serving sizes and number of servings per box are comparable. I assume that the Goodles pasta and sauce are weightier, since these things and serving sizes are measured by weight rather than volume. 

Finally, the main event -- the taste test. What tastes the best?

And my answer is: The fun-size Twix I ate while cooking. 

But of the two contenders? They both taste good, but in different ways. I'd go with Kraft, but Goodles' product tastes more like real cheese. I think that the basic Kraft Mac & Cheese is made with something approaching American cheese, though -- it may have been a more fair test in that regard to use Kraft's white cheddar variety. Goodles' cheddar-centric flavor may account for the more orange color, and led my wife to prefer it to Kraft's. We agreed that the higher protein content probably made Goodles more satiating.  

But picky-eating kids usually prefer bland food, as in the Kraft classic. Such a dish, however, may be a canvas upon which one can create -- adding chicken or broccoli or something to get the kids to eat healthier. Of course you could do the same for Goodles. 

Either product would make a fine side dish. I'm not saying either is health food, though. They each left the pot and the wooden spoon with a very yellow, very sticky coating, the sort of thing that makes you think This is the kind of highly processed stuff that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics warned me about.

I'm going to ultimately give my award to the box that annoys me less. The Goodles' use of YUM puts it at a disadvantage, but look! Kraft getting out over its spiritual skis!

Seriously, I know your grandma probably made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for you, because she couldn't really cook, and that's a warm memory, but if you need a boxed pasta kit to feed your soul, get your ass in a pew. You need more help.

Does that make Goodles the winner? Not necessarily, because they use a unicorn on the box. Poor unicorn, once a medieval symbol of purity and light, now the unfailing sign of weird, smirky self-regard. Plus the word "community," which equals Communism Lite, and "love," which means "nothing we thought of as love until ten minutes ago." 

I call it a draw. Maybe next time Annie's Homegrown can leap in off the top ropes and make it a free-for-all. Get Bernie the Bunny to do a throwdown on both these guys. 

Scary time.

For little American kids, the journey from the start of school in the fall to the next big event, Halloween, takes approximately eight years. Not so for adults. 

Hallowhine

As wise person once noted that life is like a roll of toilet paper; the further into it you are, the faster it goes. There's no better example than seeing how quickly life moves for adults than children. As I've noted here before, how could it be otherwise? For a man of fifty, one year is 1/50th of his entire life; for a kid of four, it's an entire quarter, and he doesn't even remember the first half. The kid would have no way to understand the internal reference of time's passage that an older man has. 

That's the scary thing about time -- you don't have to be Einstein to see that it's a relative phenomenon. No wonder even the ancients tried to invent timepieces. No one could agree on how long anything took. 

"You said this would be over in a short time!"  

"It was! Wasn't it great?"

"It sucked! And it lasted for ... a very LONG time!"

"If only we had some means of knowing how long things took, we could see who's right."

"There's the passage of the sun."

"It's cloudy."

"Well -- I'm right and you're wrong and it lasted a WHOLE LOT of time!"

I was thinking about relativity recently, Einstein's little killjoy for universal exploration. Before he got all smarty-pants about the speed of light and everything, we could think that if we only could make something fast enough, we could get to other stars in no time. Then Albie is like, "Wait, there's a speed limit! No going past C." And we were like, "Oh, man! At that speed, the next galaxy is more than two million years away!" And he's like "Sorry, dude. Better pack a lunch."

But it gets worse. Now we know that time would pass differently for the people moving near that speed than for us on Earth, moving at Earth speed. What kind of craziness does that lead us to? It's why space-faring capitalist companies like in the Alien movies would never work. You'd launch from Earth as an employee of Earthy McEarth Enterprises (EME), and by the time you got to your destination, EME had merged, failed, the pieces bought up, a new company planned, created to fanfare with various funding rounds, had an IPO, got absorbed in an LBO, the main company failed, tried to get a government handout, crashed, and everyone is dead because the sun went nova. 

Don't be fooled by so-called Universal Time. It doesn't apply to the universe. Is it ever the same time all at the same time throughout the universe? If at my house it's Monday, August 15, 2033, 8:09:12 a.m., is it something different all over the place? I can't understand it. 

Well, one thing young and old can both agree on with time, and that's when it's something fun, it's over too soon. And that's true on whatever planet you happen to be on. 

Dips and drips.

As long as there have been people and language, there have been ways to call people losers. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. 

English has a very impressive list of synonyms for losers. For starters, Merriam-Webster gives us disaster, failure, catastrophe, disappointment, bust, flop, washout, bomb, fiasco, has-been, mess, lemon, miss, dud, shipwreck, debacle, clunker, turkey, débâcle, bummer, fizzle, clinker, frost, also-ran, dog, hash, shambles, botch, near miss, nonevent, nonstarter, muddle. That doesn't include others like never-was, failure to launch, useless, trainwreck, wet match, doofus, wet lettuce, dip, and drip. Also, fill in your own favorite. To the connoisseur they have their differences; a turkey is more annoying than an also-ran, a bomb more of a spectacular loser than a near miss. Whether they tried and failed or failed from lack of trying, or even (like the has-been) have enjoyed past success, they have this in common right now: failure. 

Still, there is a lot of overlap between failures and other kinds of problem people. A doofus and a goof might have a lot in common, but it seems that while both are dopey, the goof may be lovable and even stumble into luck. A jerk is often not a loser, but like a bomb, is dangerous in proximity. 

It's funny to me that Merriam-Webster has many words for loser that imply spectacular failure, like catastrophe and shipwreck. Usually we see loserdom as a chronic rather than acute condition. A fiasco may pull things together for another try, but a loser can never win. We may avoid them in real life, but we like them and kind of root for them in the funny pages. Charlie Brown is the best example, but since 1965 the Born Loser has been sharing his hopeless case with the reading public.  

I thought about adding Joe Btfsplk of Li'l Abner to this list, but he's not a just a loser, he's a jinx -- a man whose loserdom is so bad that it extends to those around him. 

Always have some sympathy in real life for the losers you may meet. Sure, some do nothing but loaf, smoke weed, or krex and moan, but others keep plugging even though it's hopeless. Tenacity is a virtue. Besides, the most loveable loser many of us know is staring back out from the mirror, brushing his teeth (and doubtless finding a new cavity). I have read recently that from 1947 to 1950, Jackson Pollock painted in his “drip period.” My drip period has lasted from approximately nursery school to the present day.