Snack cakes

Updated

Personally I don’t care that much, though I did like Suzy Q’s. If another company buys the rights to make and sell Hostess snack cakes, it’s inevitable there will be complaints that they aren’t like the Old Twinkies. There are recipes for Hostess products which are probably better than the originals. But they won’t be the originals. People are particular about their snack cakes.

UPDATE 21 November: Bill Waddell in The Anatomy of A Twinkie says the problme is management, not labor. Anecdotally, today the Hostess shelf at the grocery story was bare except for several dozen Hostess Fruitcakes. Now I myself like fruitcake, and Hostess fruitcakes aren’t bad. I might have bought one or even two, but they’re kind of pricy for what you get, and anyway I’ll make fruitcake myself shortly.

I seems like if President Obama cared about the bakers, he could have the Department of Agriculture buy Hostess fruitcakes at a supported price, distribute them to the poor for Christmas, and stockpile the rest in caves in Missouri. Then the bakers could keep working, and the poor could eat cake.

UPDATE 24 November 2012: ‘Vulture Capitalism’ Not Responsible for Hostess Demise

Perception and reality in Beirut

• “A Lebanese minister has threatened to sue the makers of hit US TV series Homeland for misrepresenting Beirut in a recent episode of the show.”
• “A huge car bomb has killed at least eight people and injured 78 in Beirut, Lebanese officials say.”

Disappointment

They’re going to occupy the Caucasus! Oh, wait, it’s caucus. Dang.

Heffalumps And Woosels

They’re black! They’re brown! They’re up! They’re down!
They’re in! They’re out! They’re all about!
They’re far! They’re near! They’re gone! They’re here!
They’re quick, and slick, and insincere!” — From Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, lyrics by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman

Stalag 17, 1953

Stalag 17, about US Airmen in a German POW camp, is a good-enough story ruined by tedious repetitive jokes, mostly about Betty Grable. William Holden does a good job as the camp’s black-market-operating cynic. Otto Preminger is the iconic German camp commandant. It’s not the actors’ fault, the humor is just moronic. And I say that as someone who likes The Three Stooges.

Some sources online say Hogan’s Heroes was so similar to Stalag 17 that there was a lawsuit about it. If so, the TV series did it right. Skip Stalag 17 and watch a few episodes of Hogan’s Heroes instead.

Hot Stuff, 1971

Hot Stuff is a short animated cartoon I remember seeing on Curiosity Shop, a children’s educational program from the early seventies.

The dialogue is exactly what I remember (“No! Not the fork!”). The animation seems different, but I may be conflating it with something else. For a long time I searched for this without success thinking it was Fire! by Michael Glyn, made in 1969.

I was only able to get this by asking a librarian. If you go the the cleaners and say, “I lost my ticket, but it’s a blue sport coat” they can’t do much for you, and may well show a bit of annoyance. (Surprisingly, they don’t sort them by color). If you go to a librarian and say, “I’m looking for that one video with the fire demons and the toaster,” they’ll keep at it until they track it down.

Hot Stuff, by Zlatko Grgic, is a nine-minute educational cartoon from Canada, designed to promote fire safety. It’s pretty funny. The site, by the National Film Board of Canada (Office National du Film du Canada) has other good stuff too, for different age groups.

Mad Men, 2007

We started watching Mad Men with season 1 episode 1 the other evening. Mad Men is an HBO AMC series about Madison Avenue advertising men in the early sixties. The photography is impressive, and they’ve clearly paid a lot of attention to getting the atmosphere right. Along with the angular architecture, Brylcreem, and sharp suits, that atmosphere includes lots of whiskey and a truly extraordinary amount of tobacco smoke.

Don Draper is preparing a campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes, and having a hard time of it because of recent news coverage about the health risks of smoking, and government restrictions on tobacco ads. Everyone knows the health risks are real, so you could say the cynical Mad Men and tobacco executives don’t care who they kill to make a buck, but they themselves all smoke constantly. The psychological implications of this are explored somewhat obliquely. I look for this to be tied in to Don Draper’s past. (No spoilers in the comments, please.)

The first episode hit pretty heavily on the position of women in business and society. This probably isn’t inaccurate, but the emphasis on it is anachronistic. Racial and ethnic bias are secondary themes, and naturally homosexuality, because every show has to include a moral lesson about how wicked it is to think ill of homosexuality.

This episode wasn’t slow in a bad sense, but it moved at a measured pace, and seemed quite thoughtful. One episode in an evening is probably about right. I look forward to the next show.

Back to the future

You can buy a 4TB hard drive, but what do you do with a 4TB hard drive? Well, four terabytes is 2000 HD movies, so obviously you can have your own TV channel. With advances in technology, it finally becomes possible to enjoy TV like it was in 1968.

First set up a server in the basement with one or two of those four-terabyte monsters, and connect it to your TV. Fill the drives with movies, TV series, whatever. How to do that and where to get the content are left to the reader. Obey every rule, even if it is an unconstitutional product of political corruption.

Next, install software and write a script to serve shows at random, or by whatever plan seems best. As as result, you turn on channel 2 and there’s an episode of I Love Lucy, or Mad Men, or maybe your own home network premiere of Back to the Future.

See, sometimes you just want to watch some TV. You don’t want to browse through your dvd collection, then worry the disk out of its case and stuff it into the machine. That’s a whole other level of commitment. You don’t want to pick through fifty or a hundred channels, because that’s mindless channel-surfing, and there’s nothing on anyway. You just sit down with a beer after work and there’s something on TV, and no commercials.

If you’re a good programmer you could fix it so changing the channel resets the random number and plays something else, but don’t give yourself more than three or four channels. If you find yourself surfing through six or more, you’re doing it wrong. This isn’t a Celebration of Choice. You just want to watch some TV, and this, that, or the other is what’s on TV.

Manny’s first day