[It’s too hot to think, so I’m cramming in a few oddities, with the usual disclaimer: If some look familiar, most of them sit in my head for hours on end, so I can’t tell whether I’ve used them before or they’re making one of their periodic internal revolutions.]
A conjecture:
God and Popeye the Sailor are closely related.
Here’s God (Yahweh) in the Old Testament:
I am who am
Here’s Popeye in the 20th century:
I yam what I yam
Considering that E. C. Segar, who created Popeye as a comic-book character in the 1920s, and the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, who produced the 1930s Popeye animated cartoons, were Jewish, it’s likely that they would recognize such a spiritual brotherhood.
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What’s happened to the golden manufacturing companies of my youth? How many of them still exist, beyond a name bought by a faceless acquisitions group?
Let’s start with McCormick spices. These were once the upscale brand of cooking spices, usually kept at the right-hand end of the supermarket spice shelf, higher priced but dependable. Today, they hold close to a monopoly on those spice shelves, driving other brands to extinction in the average supermarket. If there is, by any chance, a house brand available, McCormick will be twice as expensive, flavorless piles of bottled dust.
3M – originally Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing – invented Scotch tape, and anything else they sold used to be an industry standard-. Over the years, 3M continually expanded; it now produces some 60,000 products, including health-care items and the N95 respirators used to challenge covid.
Much, if not most of their expansion came from buying, selling, or merging with other companies. I don’t know how they rate across most industries on quality, but the consumer line of Scotch-Brite sponges and scrubbers that dominates supermarket cleaning-tool shelves is crap – the fuzz pulls off the sponges and they disintegrate rapidly.
If you’re one those who worry about people getting too old to be effective (and if so, please shut up), could be it happens with companies too.
There’s a different but equally telling tale with Diamond matches.
At our family kitchen stove, we used Ohio Blue Tip matches, clearly the best in those days, with Diamond OK but not as sure-strike.
Diamond was the older and larger match-making company (today, still the largest). And as I discovered while writing this, Diamond was part-owner of Ohio during the 1920-30s, though Ohio became independent again in the ‘40s-’50s, when we were using them, until its demise in 1987.
Amazon offers “Ohio Blue Tip today,” but it’s not clear who makes them, even when labeled “Diamond”; I haven’t seen an Ohio match with my own eyes in over 50 years.
Ohio started with “Strike on Box” matches; Diamond and others later developed “Strike Anywhere.” Strike Anywhere matches are illegal in many areas because of safely concerns but are available in PA, notably at Sinclair’s Hardware in Dushore – the best hardware store I’ve ever set foot in. Sinclair’s boxes are Diamond Strike Anywhere.
Why am I wasting your time with matchbox minutia? Because I think it says a lot about the decline of consumer quality that parallels the expansion of consumer “choice.”
I’d been using the Diamond Strike Anywhere for some years, and they worked fine to set a fire safely. Then, maybe five years ago, I found I often couldn’t strike them even on the box. I started calling them Strike Nowhere Matches.
We had three boxes on hand, and I noticed that strikability varied depending on which box I picked up. I looked at the fine print.
The three boxes showed manufacturing dates from three successive years. Those from two years worked, the third ones didn’t. The matches in the working boxes were marked Made in Chile. The ones that didn’t were proudly Made in the USA. I recently, I bought a new box. They worked. Made in Chile once again.
Isn’t it depressing that we can’t figure out how to correctly construct our own simple products? But are they our products? I think the real problem is outlined in the recent history of Diamond, taken from Wikipedia:
“Private equity firm Seaver Kent acquired Diamond Match Company in 1998. Following Seaver Kent’s bankruptcy in 2001, Diamond was purchased by Jarden in 2003.Newell Brands became owner in 2016 after the merger of Jarden with Newell Rubbermaid. In 2017, Newell sold Diamond (except the cutlery line) to Royal Oak Enterprises.”
Who are these people? Well, they aren’t “people,” just “entities,” investor line-dancers who give not a rat’s behind about the products they produce. They’re like autocrats on the political stage, who, by coup or popular upheaval, assume the role of redemptor, then quickly repeat the autocracy they fought against.
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Lat week Linda and I cruised past a marvelous highway sign:
“Caution: Road Work Next 0 Miles.”
Think of it as “Zeno’s paradoxical road sign.”
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I have a strange bump on the very top of my head. It’s been there for a couple years, and my doc occasionally remonstrates that I should have it “looked at.” Personally, I doubt it’s worth anyone’s time to look at, but I couldn’t figure where it came from.
When I whacked my head against the edge of a kitchen cabinet a month ago, it bled – just a bit – and didn’t seem to want to heal properly. Later, a half-lost memory emerged from 50 yeas back, when I was working as the maintenance goof at my kids’ school, Miquon. One winter, the company making the heating-oil delivery somehow forgot about us. The heating pipes in two of the small buildings froze, burst and flooded.
One building was the art room. After I cleared the mess, I had to replace the vinyl floor tiling. This required hunkering down and shouldering the taller furniture around. I knelt in front of a five-foot-tall cabinet and gave it the old heave-ho. Something slammed into my head, and I saw every mental eruption ever documented; yes, like those comic strips where someone gets hit on the head and is besieged by multi-colored stars and flashing lines of force. There, surrounding me, lay the shattered, life-size, hollow plaster bust of a Neanderthal.
Well, shit, I’d seen that bust before, but hadn’t looked up this time to be reminded. Fortunately, our family is known for its rhino bones, so my skull did not crack, but I was bleeding like a stuck long pig. I trotted over to the little office building, where those on break yowled that I needed to get to a doctor or the hospital, quick. I waved them off and stuck my head under the cold-water faucet in the back room for 15 minutes, which brought the blood to a standstill. They were still horrified when I popped back out, dripping pink. So I put on a hat.
I didn’t go to the doc, and I didn’t have a fracture or concussion, though the paleo precursor must have weighed 20 lbs. But last week, I began to wonder… might a smallish bit of Neanderthalic plaster be attempting to escape my scalp?
You see, while re-flooring the front porch at our Baring St. house a few years later, I jumped off the side onto a pile of old boards I’d levered loose. I failed to account for the cut nails sticking up – the kind from the mid 19th century with square, blunt ends. It was summer, I was in sandals, and one of those little fuckers snarked right through the sole of my sandal and an inch into my foot.
As usual, I did nothing about it except hobble for week. With no after-effects until, a month later, I noticed a smallish bump on the bottom of my foot. A fragment of the sole of my sandal was exiting my foot. I shad have kept it.
That’s what came to mind about my head lump. If nothing untoward happens – and how often does even something toward happen? – it would be archaeologically delightful if my dome popped a shard of plaster Neandertal.
[Half an hour after writing the above, I’m sitting at the kitchen table and Linda tells me there’s blood running down my nose. This goddamned lump just couldn’t stand me writing about it!]
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Speaking of Neanderthals (which I do with true reverence – they invented art, for shit sake), another funny idea floated past:
Finnish and Basque are two European languages with no clearly identifiable antecedent. What if one was the original Neanderthal language, and the other was Denisovan – the latest hominid species to be IDed from the DNA of finger bones found in an Asian cave?
Nobody can say for sure that these two species didn’t have language, and given the increasing evidence of Neanderthal complexity, it’s a pretty reasonable assumption.
* * * *
“Cornhole games” at festivals and church picnics are a big thing up our way – maybe in rural areas across America, for all I know. If so, cornholing sure has changed meaning from what I remember.
Now it refers to throwing corncobs or beanbags though openings in a wooden or cardboard backdrop. But in the days of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, as one example, the hole referred to was not in a flat upright, but in a 3D human male leaning forward. And the hole itself was, umm, definitely animate, if sometimes uncooperative.
lickhaven 