Thieving elves?

I think those Keebler elves are up to something. 

This packaging has a kind of flair that makes me think of two of the Girl Scouts' most popular cookies.

To be fair, the packaging may be new, but the Keebler varieties are not. Keebler, which has a history dating back to 1853 and is now owned by Ferrero SpA (after being a Kellogg company for 19 years), has been making its fudge-based cookies for some time. But more to the point, Keebler was actually the first commercial bakery to make cookies for the Girl Scouts to sell. Keebler is still involved with the Girl Scouts, actually; its Little Brownie Bakery subsidiary is one of two companies that bake the cookies for the GS gang. (The other is ABC Smart Cookies.)

But are these knockoffs of the Girl Scout brands? I can't prove a connection, although Lifehacker says they are. The Fudge Mint Delights (formerly known as Grasshoppers) are indeed a type of Thin Mint, and the Coconut Dreams match up to the Caramel deLites (a.k.a. Samoas, depending where you live in the United States). But they are not identical. For example, the BusyBee blog did a taste test of the mint cookies a few years ago and found the Thin Mint slightly superior to the Keebler mint cookie. 

What does this all mean? I don't know. My wife was the Thin Mint fan in the family -- in the days B.F. (Before Fred) she and her roommate each bought two boxes of Thin Mints from people at work, not knowing the other was doing the same, and sat down to feast on four boxes. (Not all at once! or so she says.) But my wife thinks that Thin Mints just aren't as good as they once were, that something has changed, or got cheaper, and she won't bother with them anymore. And she thinks all Keebler cookies are poor. She much prefers the Back to Nature brand of mint fudge cookies, now owned by giant pasta company Barilla.

So let's hear your reviews in comments. 

I understand that the Girl Scouts have been distancing themselves from controversy in the last couple of years, and good for them, but frankly, I still think they are a lousy organization, if not completely woke then woke-adjacent. Why would girls want to join the Boy Scouts except that the Girl Scouts suck? The Boy Scouts got driven to bankruptcy, decided to let girls in, changed the name to BSA, then to Scouting, and now they suck even more than the Girl Scouts. The son of a friend of mine has had enough and quit -- and this kid was an ace away from Eagle Scout. He thinks it's a waste of time. The local Scoutmaster is a dummy, and the troops are disbanding one after another. It's pretty sad. 

Scouting may be dead, alas -- but as long as the Girl Scouts of America can make an excuse to do it, they'll keep raking in cookie money. I foresee a future when both organizations are as forgotten as the American Benevolent Legion, but people still buy Girl Scout branded cookies, not even knowing what a Girl Scout once was. 

🍪🍪🍪🍫🍫🍫🐛🐛🐛

P.S.: If, like me, you're curious how a mint-chocolate cookie got to be called a grasshopper, it may have gotten the name from the green cocktail of crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream, which dates back to 1919 (according to Eater). The cocktail was popular in the fifties and sixties, so the cookie likely borrowed the name. By now the drink is not so well known, so the word GRASSHOPPER does not immediately signify mint and chocolate. No wonder Keebler changed the name of the cookie. 

Where is the love?

Sometimes I wonder how humanity survived the eighties and the nineties. Not because of nuclear war or novel diseases or alien invasion or even Madonna. Rather, because men reached an apogee of confusion with women. 

A small sampling of pop songs of the era:

• Michael Penn: "No Myth" 
• Stone Temple Pilots: "Sour Girl"
• Marshall Crenshaw: "Mary Jean"
• Mark Oliver Everett (A Man Called E): "Looking Out the Window with a Blue Hat On"
• Deep Blue Something: "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

All these songs show a man in confusion about a woman, unable to understand what she wants, except she doesn't seem to want him. I'm sure you can add many more to this list, some by the same artists. 

The more I thought about it, the more it appeared to be a running theme. These are not just breakup songs; those have been around forever. They aren't even angry songs; there are plenty of those. These are songs where the male is in love, but baffled about the disaster befalling him.

Traditionally popular love songs fell into the categories of Desire, Devotion, or Desolation: I want you, I love you, I lost you. The songs I'm thinking of are a subset of the last. Torch songs can be found anywhere, but usually the torch bearer knows what's happened: she fell for someone new, she had enough of my garbage, she decided to trade up, whatever. But beginning in the eighties, and especially in the coffee-shop nineties, men were getting utterly gobsmacked by these women. She's leaving and I have no idea why this is happening.

I think there are some reasons these kinds of cris de coeur arose when they did. For one thing, after women's lib (as it was called in the seventies), men started to wonder what women actually wanted from them. Kind and sensitive? Witty and adventurous? Gentle and loving? Or was the old strong and silent still what they liked the most? Confused men trying to be what their women wanted made for cases where no one could behave like themselves, so the guys couldn't grasp why nothing ever clicked and everything just fell apart one day. 

Another possibility is that couples moved much faster into intimacy than they had in the past, giving the illusion of solidity without the actuality of it. Not surprising that one person in the relationship might be much more committed than the other, thinking that, having made it to home plate, the couple had achieved something solid. 

Traditionally the subsequent broken heart in such situations would be the basis of female torch songs, but by the eighties we heard it from the boys, who had a sense they had screwed up but more of a fear that they were screwed up.  

Anyway, that's my theory of this subset of the breakup song -- the What Did She Want? song -- that arose in the eighties. I know there are more than I listed above, and maybe examples that preceded the era mentioned. I'd be happy to hear your additions to or even rebuttals to this theory. It won't break my heart.

Tires me out.

I know it's not like this in every state, but in New York you have to get your automobile inspected once a year. It's not a big deal, and I think it isn't a bad idea. People are often not aware that they may have problems that may be more expensive down the line -- or even dangerous. Plus, my car's inspection generally coincides with its need for an oil change. 

Of course, if the Oil Change light comes on before that, I do what anyone would do -- put in a quart and reset the idiot light. I ain't got time for all that blinkin' and flashin'.

As usual, my car passed inspection -- or would have, but for the rear tires. Those showed signs of serious wear. The mechanic passed me anyway, but said I should get them replaced. Since he didn't have to give me the Passed Inspection Sticker but did, I was now honor-bound to seek out new tires. 

How old were the tires, anyway? I couldn't quite remember. But I realized I had a way of knowing. The last time I got new tires, only a couple of months had passed before I was run off the road by a total idiot and ran into a spoon, which ruined my new front tire. Sure enough, I blogged about it at the time. I was surprised that all that had happened seven and a half years ago. My memory of changing out the tire for the spare and discovering the spoon wedged deep in the old one will be fresh forever. 

Rich guys have people to change their
spoon-wrecked tires. 

That was the weekend of the Supermoon, and it seemed to be bringing me Supercrap Luck. Can you believe it's been that long already? November 2016 seems like some mythical land, a happy place where no one had ever heard disgusting words like "COVID-19" and "Antifa" and "Soros D.A." A place, however, where twisted metal spoons might lie around in gutters, waiting to leap out on unsuspecting tires and burst them like a grape tomato on an archery target. 

On the whole, I think I got off lucky with just a couple of new tires on this inspection. Any engine problem would likely cost more. The thing is, as a freelancer, I have a habit of looking at any expense in terms of a bad assignment I completed to get the dough. "I spent countless hours on that stupid job, and now I have to blow the whole check on tires?" (Yes, Fred, that's how adulthood works.)

As for the spoon that busted my tire in 2016, I still have it. Sometimes you want to have visual aids when you tell a story that loopy.

J.R.R. meets E.B.

Would have been a very different book either way. 

Heart wrenching.

When my dad died, my mom sent me a heavy box with a selection of his tools. He'd had quite the workbench. At the time I was living in an apartment and I neither needed a lot of tools nor had the place to store them, so I begged her to sell the bunch and not send them all to me. Well, within a few years I became a homeowner and regretted the timing that robbed me of most of my father's collection. 

My dad had some great stuff. 

All his hand tools had been used a lot, and it showed. He could do any kind of work within reason (he did not go too deeply into electrical work because he did not want to die before his time). The tools Mom sent me are more solid and better made (in the God Blessed United States of America!) than many of the tools I've bought since.  

While I was dealing with the sink trauma a couple of weeks ago—still unresolved, because I got busy, and sick—I had a closer look at this wrench. Exhibit A from my dad's collection, if you will. 

This is a pipe wrench, not a monkey wrench, the monkey wrench having a flat top and no teeth, meant to turn lug nuts. Nor is this a Crescent wrench, which has the C shape, its jaws in a direct line from the arm. 

The origin of the term monkey wrench is obscure, although it may have come from a supposed resemblance to a monkey's face. As you can see, this pipe wrench does not look all that monkeyish and is intended for use on small pipes. 

It has a number 8 on the head, signifying that it is an eight-inch wrench (at full head extension) for 1/8- to 3/4-inch pipes. The handle has a loop, indicating that it probably hung on a wall with a line of other pipe wrenches in numerical and size order. I don't recall Dad having the whole set, though, and I certainly have no order to my own tool bench. It's a disaster. 

I have no indication of how old it is, but a closer look shows me where it originated: 

Crescent Tool! So despite not being a Crescent wrench, this is a Crescent company wrench, you see.

The Crescent Tool Company was established in Jamestown in 1907. Jamestown is in Western New York, near the Pennsylvania border, about as far from Rochester as it is from Cleveland or Pittsburgh. Jamestown was the home of a large number of furniture factories, in part because of access to great amounts of furniture-quality wood, and indeed called itself the furniture capital of the world until 1945. It was not well-situated for heavy manufacturing in that era, though. But a thriving tool company? Why not? 

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the wrench factory was still going after 117 years?

Ha! Ha! Silly human. New York hates things that cause prosperity like icky manufacturing. Western New York is as rust-belty as any Rust Belt state.

Crescent now part of Apex Tool Group, along with SATA, Campbell, Weller, and other tool outfits, and Apex is owned by Bain Capital. You may recall that Bain was the Worst Company in the Universe™ in 2012 when co-founder Mitt "the vulture capitalist” Romney was auditioning for another a job. 

Bain bought Apex in 2013, but the Jamestown Crescent factory shut down before that, in 1984. How do I know the date? Because if you worked there, you might be entitled to compensation! If you put in four weeks on a summer job 40+ years ago and have cancer now, you may be able to help a law firm get money!

Asbestos is not a joking matter -- and yet maybe it's a shame those old Jamestown furniture factories hadn't been built with it. The Jamestown Royal Factory burned in 2021, and the Crawford Furniture Factory burned in 2022. 

So where do they make Crescent products now? Apex uses lots of factories in several countries for its tool lines. I read online that Crescent wrenches have been made in China since 2011, but that report is unconfirmed. Could be Mexico, or Canada, even somewhere else in America—or so Bain hints. Are they just throwing us a sop? 

Oh, who knows. No one ever tells us anything unless they think we'll like it, so hardly any company tells us anything anymore. 

But my dad’s little pipe wrench was made in Jamestown, New York, in the good old USA. I miss my dad, and I miss a lot of things about that America, a place that made things that worked, that made things that lasted.

New products!

As you undoubtedly know, going to the market is one of the highlights of my week. When I was a wee tot I liked going to the supermarket with my mom, and there's still something quite satisfying in it. Perhaps it's the hunter-gatherer in me. 

But often we gather things, or at least take a gander at things, we perhaps shouldn't. Here I am with a new edition of What's New In The Store, a.k.a. What The Hell Is That Thing? 

Sorry for the poor picture. What we have here is a room-temperature ice cream bar, not just dehydrated but hyper dehydrated, like the so-called "astronaut ice cream" on steroids. Those of us who remember that unusual but tasty treat were saddened when we found out that the stuff was not good in space because it was too crumbly, and crumbs are a menace to equipment in low- and zero-G environments. 

The bar you see above dispenses with the astronaut hoopla and goes right for the tongue: crunchy and flavorful, concentrated goodness for any time or place (except outer space). It comes from an outfit called Sow Good, although it is not made from pig milk. I don't know why they call it that. Maybe it's "sow" as in "sew." The whole things is weird. They make freeze-dried candy, and they made this freeze-dried ice cream bar. I could not resist trying it, even though it was pricey -- I forget how much, but more than five bucks. 

 

As it turned out, it was pretty good, with a strong fruit and ice cream flavor, like an Atomic Dreamsicle. Probably not worth the price. But as of this writing the company has dropped its ice cream line to focus on its candy products. Maybe they found out people don't want to pay six bucks for dry ice cream when they can get the real thing for a third of that price. Well, it was tasty, and I wish them well, and hope for their sake they can work that price point down. 

Now that you're in the mood for food, how about: 

Uh, yeah. "Smell funky? Get Skunky." Skunky is a pack of 25 rinse-free sponge sheets, useful for camping, for travel or water emergencies, for the nearly bedridden (you still gotta be able to move to some degree), or anytime you might get slimed and need to de-stink yourself without a bath or shower available. I think the name needs work, although it did get my attention. 

I did not buy a pack to field-test it. I didn't have to. I've been getting Scrubby Dog Bath Mittens for years, and they work the same way -- just add a little water. They came in very handy for the late, large mud-loving dog Tralfaz. I don't think Scrubby and Skunky are made by the same company, but it's the same principle.  

I think Skunky would be helpful for campers and for people who can't shower and don't have health aids to help. I don't camp and I'm not that far gone -- yet. 

We'll end with these beauties, which people Of A Certain Age will be shocked to see making a comeback:

Yes! Wooden salad bowls! They roamed the fruited plains of our great nation unhindered throughout the 1970s and 1980s, then suddenly seemed to go extinct around the time MTV stopped being a music channel. Scientists thought they were gone forever, but no! Like it or not, they have been spotted in the wild! By the time you read this, you may have a set of six with the big bowl and a large fork and spoon for serving in your cabinet! Resistance is futile!  

Vote the Fuzz Line!!

After several heavy think pieces, I need to decompress this whole blog and think of something cheerful. 

Like, the presidential campaign.

Now, I know what you're thinking. But wait. Here's my pitch. 

What do we have running this year? A feeble old crook and a man so tarnished by his enemies that it may be impossible to overcome. Plus a wacky independent with a dead brain worm and probably Jill Stein, the Harold Stassen of the Green Party.

I say: Vote Izzy. 

Yes, my dog Izzy. Why? Because he loves all Americans, not just the ones who vote for him. He really does like everybody, unlike my previous dogs, who were a bit more selective. And as I've noted before, all the people like him, unless they have an issue with dogs. That's why Izzy is America's Sweetheart. Plus, he's as handsome as you could want. Lookit dat face! 

Killer slogan

The Constitution doesn't demand that candidates for president be human. But, you may say, isn't Izzy too young? Candidates have to be at least thirty-five. 

Well, he just turned three. By normal accounting that would be twenty-one in dog years. He's a large size dog, though, so the chart runs older for him. So he's ... addition, carry the one, divide by pi ... 

All right, all right, he's just twenty-eight. Ask yourself, though: Can we really wait another four years to put this nation back on the right path? Of course not. 

Besides, lookit dat face! 

So remember, if you're not voting as I am, then just pencil in Izzy. He'll give you a lick on the nose for it! I'm not sure any of the other candidates running this year would. Well, maybe the incumbent.