Chocolate In My Peanut Butter

 

 

Now that I am in the fourth quarter of life, I don't buy candy like I used to.

For one thing, it is too expensive. 

When I was coming along, candy bars were usually a quarter. Back then, everything was a quarter, including used cars and split-level houses. 

(Note to my Gen-Z readers: No, split-level houses did not cost a quarter, even in Marietta, Georgia, in 1971. I'm joking. ) 

According to our lords in Artificial Intelligence, a standard candy bar is $3.45.  That's pretty hefty in my mind, especially when I'm at the age at which I'm supposed to know my A1C. I'm not sure if a less-than-standard candy bar costs less.

We should recognize that although M&M's and Hershey Bars are great, the GOAT of all candy is the glorious Reese's Cups. 

Reese's Cup is chocolate with peanut butter.  They taste good "chilled" -placed in the refrigerator. I especially like to do this to the small cups they sell at Christmas time. 

However, there has been some trouble in the Reese's Cup world. 

According to the AP, "The grandson of the inventor of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups has lashed out at The Hershey Company, accusing the candy company of hurting the Reese’s brand by shifting to cheaper ingredients in many products. Brad Reese, 70, said in a Feb. 14 letter to Hershey’s corporate brand manager that for multiple Reese's products, the company replaced milk chocolate with compound coatings and peanut butter with peanut crème."

First of all, how cool would it be to know your grandfather invented the Reese's Cup?

Secondly, "compound coatings" sounds like the name of an '80s hair band.  "Please welcome to Alex Cooley's Ballroom...Compound Coatings!"

This is a big deal because when I was growing up, the Sterling-Cooper ad agency produced a series of commercials that featured a young man with a chocolate bar running into a young woman eating peanut butter straight out of a jar.

The young man says,  "Hey you got peanut butter on my chocolate bar." While the young woman says, "Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter." From there, they both tasted the heavenly combination, and a million pounds and pimples were conceived. 

James Lileks says this is a perfect example of "encrapification", which is "the process by which everything gets incrementally worse."

Lileks goes on to say, "Every food, every experience, every aspect of daily life and commerce, encrapified by bean counters, hedge funds, cost-cutters, and other MBA types who make something worse so the bottom line looks better, and they get a bonus that sets them up for life."

We geezers say this all the time.  We used to have good music; now we have bad music. We learned this from our parents, who claimed to have music instead of the "racket" we liked. 

The halftime show at the Super Bowl is another example. They used to have Michael Jackson and Prince. This year, they had Bad Bunny, who sells a lot of downloads and performed exclusively in Spanish because of something that has to do with President Orange, and everybody should just shut up because you know you like to go hear operas in German. 

Movies. Really. When was the last time you went to the movies without having to take out a home equity loan?  When was the last time you saw a movie that was really enjoyable?

TV shows? Most of them start good and finish terribly.  

Hershey responded to Mr. Reese: "The company said the classic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup hasn’t changed and is still made with milk chocolate and freshly roasted peanut butter. The statement also acknowledged that as the brand has expanded into new shapes, sizes, and seasonal items, the company has made what it called “product recipe adjustments.”

I've noticed white chocolate Reese's Cups, heart-shaped Reese's, and Reese's cups shaped like the Easter Bunny. I guess there had to be some recipe adjustments.

But, for the love of all that is good and sacred, please do not change the taste of a Reese's cup. I don't know if I have a jar of peanut butter to walk around with while waiting for an errant chocolate bar.

Something Big. I Guess.

 

 

It should be apparent that I'm NOT the one you go to for new tech information. 

You've heard of "early adapters" of the latest and greatest tech thing?  I'm sort of a "finally get around to it" adapter.

In the early years of the cell phone, I had a little one. It fit in my pocket. It rang, and I answered it. One time I decided to go a little crazy, and I put the "Hawaii 5-0" theme as my ringtone. 

By the way, the "Hawaii 5-0" theme absolutely slaps, as the kids say today. 

That was pretty cool until I forgot to put the ringer on silent, and during a particularly reflective moment of our church's Christmas concert, my late great friend, Bill Wade, decided to give me a call. 

Nothing says Christmas like the "Hawaii 5-0" theme.

After that phone, I got a flip phone, which was the worst cell phone ever created.  However, the flip phone could text and take pictures in a very primitive way. 

Then I got a Blackberry, which I thought was pretty cool.  To show how cool it was, Karl Rove had a Blackberry.  You could text on it, and (this is important), you could have the Facebook and Twitter apps, so you could always be engaged with social media.  That might not have been such a great idea. 

Soon, I learned the Blackberry was like the K-mart tennis shoes that your mom would buy you because it sort of, kind of, looked like the Adidas shoes everyone at Wheeler wore, because we were not going to spend $30.00 for a pair of tennis shoes, Alan. 

Then one day, my wife and I walked into the 21st Century and got an iPhone. It drove Blackberry out of the market. I don't even think Karl Rove has one now. 

The big topic in tech is Artificial Intelligence or "AI".

What is AI? According to my deep research (Wikipedia) "AI" is artificial intelligence, which is intelligence that is artificial. It is computer systems that "perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception, and decision making".  

 

AI also helps you to spell better and pick out Netflix shows.

 
AI is supposed to do many of things. However, right now, it looks like the main function of AI is to make cat videos for TikTok and Facebook. 

 One video shows cat restaurant servers bringing food to human customers, which is a hoot because, as anybody who has been around a cat knows, they would never bring you anything unless they killed it themselves. 

Another video shows cats dancing around to Taylor Swift songs.

So I was surprised at a post by Matt Shumer, who owns an AI firm titled "Something Big Is Happening".  Read it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/something-big-happening-matt-shumer-so5he/

 Matt Shumer said today reminds him of February of 2020, when we heard rumblings about this "virus" in China that would kill everybody. You might remember it, I think it was called Covid.

The virus was very bad, and it killed John Prine, but there is a line of thinking that if somebody, like, oh, President Trump, had just done something (exactly what nobody has ever explained), maybe so many people would not have died. 

Shumer says in 2022, a mere four years ago, AI could not do simple math. (Finally, me and high tech have something in common.)  Now, AI can pass the bar exam.  AI won't make lawyers disappear, (dang) but Shumer advises that you better be aware of the changes that AI will cause. AI might actually do some work.

Shumer's thesis is simple: brace yourself. Things are going to change fast, so be prepared.  Forbes magazine says this: "His (Shumer) prescription is blunt: get ahead of it. Learn to use AI. Become indispensable. Invest wisely. Prepare for volatility."

The only problem this slightly less tech-savvy person sees is that learning to use AI, becoming indispensable, investing wisely, and preparing for volatility is just good advice anyway. 

I remember a lot of the latest and greatest things. The color TV. Microwave ovens. Calculators. All of these presented a challenge and would change everything. I remember during the dot.com boom, I heard that brick-and-mortar stores would go out of business.  Okay, maybe they were right about that.

AI is just a tool.  It can make things easier and make things more complicated. It depends on how we use it. 

So maybe it is not the end of the world as we know it. Maybe it is just another gadget that can make life better.  Or make more cat videos, we'll see. 

The News About Newspapers

What's the news across the nation?

We have got the information. - Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In

 

 

 

The big news this week was about a newspaper

 

The Washington Post downsized its staff by a third, including the sports and books departments. It was over 300 employees.

 

I know it stung. I was a survivor of a big lay-off back at the insurance company in '96. Looking back on it, it was worse to be a survivor than a victim. The survivors were advised to "work smarter, not harder," whatever that meant. 

 

By the time I was downsized by the insurance company in 2002, it was more of a relief than anything else. I got another job within a month, and nine months later, I was hired for the job I retired from in 2024.

It wasn't really surprising that it happened to the Post because the Post has been bleeding money for years. 

 

 Jeff Bezos bought the paper several years ago, even though he had no experience in making a newspaper profitable.  It turns out that even the most successful businessman on planet Earth can make a newspaper profitable in this Internet age without Wordle.

Because Bezos has so much money, the proglodytes yelped it was his fault that he had to lay off people from a business that depends upon readers and subscriptions when it had no readers or subscribers.  Charles C.W. Cooke notes, "Jeff Bezos was supposed to pay for in perpetuity as penance for having been a useful member of society."

 

The library at my college, Hooty U, carried the Post and I read it instead of studying.  When the internet came around, I could read The Post without going to the library.  They used to have a feature called "Live Online" in which you could post a question to Post writer or newsmaker. One day, Buddy Ebsen was featured and I posted a question. Ol' Uncle Jed answered it! I'm going to make sure that is mentioned in my obituary. 

 

The Post had many glorious moments. It was at its zenith in the early 70s when two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from the City desk followed up on the burglary at The Watergate.  Their reporting eventually led to the resignation of the President.  You may have heard about it.

 Some of the shine has come off those glorious days. In 2005, Mark Felt, a high-level FBI official, admitted he was "Deep Throat", the source of so many leads that Woodward and Bernstein used. He also admitted he didn't do it out of some obligation to save democracy, but rather because he wanted to stick it to Richard Nixon for not selecting him as the director of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died. 

 

There were other issues with the paper.  Such as Janet Cooke winning the Pulitzer Prize for a piece called "Jimmy's World" about a heroin addict who was eight years old. Problem: Not one word in the article was true. 

 

No matter. The Post had writers like Thomas Boswell, David Broder, George Will, and among others.  Even though I thought he was a mean-spirited loon, I enjoyed Herbert Block's (HERBLOCK) cartoons.

The Post was liberal, and they were pro-Democrats, but they were not snotty about it for the most part. At least back then.

But over the years, the Post joined up with the "progressive" crowd and became a national nag and scold. The "Democracy Dies In Darkness" kids chose to perform puppet shows for each other, until the center-right and right bounced. When Jeff Bezos declined to endorse a Presidential candidate in 2024, the "resistance"  did its usual: a spastic hissy fit. They canceled subscriptions, and the Post went into a coma. 

 

 I've always loved reading the newspaper. 

My first was my beloved Marietta Daily Journal. Soon, I graduated to The Atlanta Journal. They merged with their morning paper, The Atlanta Constitution, and became The AJC. 

I was a subscriber for almost thirty years. 

True, they were generally more liberal than I was (am). But they had Lewis Grizzard, Furman Bisher, and a great sports staff. Plus, they published Dave Barry's column with Jeff McNally's cartoon.

As time wore on, I began to realize it was odd that newspapers delivered the news to you by putting it in a bag and throwing it in your yard.  

 

I canceled my subscription when the only thing I could remember reading was the "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip. The AJC is now available only on the internet. 

Basically, what happened to The AJC is what happened to The Post. They waited too long to adjust to the changing times, and when they did, it was too late. 

Now, The Post will join its old sister publication, Newsweek, as a shadow of its former self. It is almost a shame Richard Nixon didn't see this day.