The Tin Lizard

Facebook, The Wave Of The Past

Have you seen the recent reports suggesting that the venerable social website Facebook (Yup! Venerable!  What is it, maybe 10 years old now?) is no longer of much interest to younger people, but is growing only amongst older users?

I don't find this surprising.   After all, the "young'uns" have always trended toward the fresh, the new, the thing of the moment.  More to the point, maybe, they also gravitate to things -- be it hair styles, music, or modes of communication -- that adults, especially their parents, don't share.  No doubt that's been Facebook's downfall among teens -- too many parents are right there online with them, maybe not always getting the joke, but watching what the kids are doing and saying.   

For some reason, parents have not hesitated to do this, not stopping to consider how they might have reacted in their own callow youth if their parents had read their diaries, or listened in on their phone calls.  That too is understandable, though.  The reach of the internet is greater, and in our eccentric contemporary society, there are reasons to be concerned.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, himself once a "young person," pretty much put his brainchild on a downslope by trying to make the site ever more inclusive, with ever-increasing numbers of users.  That's what I would call the commoditization decision -- most new products and technologies end up sanding off the sharp edges of whatever first made them unique and noticeable.  

The reason, whether you're pushing site memberships or Triscuits (which now, in accord with the law of the market, now come in a variety of flavored versions), is that you can't make the big bucks if you don't make your product's appeal as nearly universal as possible.  That, of course, means lowest common denominator.  And it means that it's hard to keep a product's name fresh and appealing.

Youth's search continues.

Coffee Wasteland

No one who's had coffee in any other country of the world can doubt that we in the U.S. have absolutely the worst coffee anywhere.  The problem is that our coffee tends to be weak to the point of gagginess.  That was true in public places for years; the gourmet coffee shops like Starbucks improved matters somewhat, but never overcame the inexplicable fondness of the American public for coffee so thin you can see the bottom of the cup through it.  

Even the most humble restaurants and coffee shops in Europe can produce a fine, flavorful, intense, cup of coffee; not even the best of them can in the U.S. Fine French places where a meal can set you back $150 or more per person just seem unable to produce a decent coffee; likewise the best Italian places in the country, asked to serve an espresso, will bring you something that comes nowhere near the "real thing," although sometimes their tablespoon of espresso will prove almost near what a good cup of "regular" coffee should be.   I guess it would be more correct to say, not that they can't, but that they won't, because people here reject coffee that tastes like coffee.

After many years of bad experiences in American restaurants, I just stopped ordering coffee in them.  But at home ... at home, it was still possible to make your own.  But maybe that's disappearing too, as a possibility, if you want to make coffee for more than one or two people.

I did some early pre-shopping for a replacement coffee maker lately.  I looked at many types, brands, and models, most of them in the supposed 8-to-10 cup capacity.  Now,  a "cup" in coffeemaker terms is defined as a tiny 5 ounces. Every morning I typically make five (5!) cups so that my wife and I can have about 2/3 of a mug apiece.  And that in itself is ridiculous.   But five of those "cups" requires 5 to 6 tablespoons of coffee.  A full pot would require 10-12 tablespoons.

The problem with coffeemakers now on the market:  Their baskets (for the grounds) are not large enough to contain the amount of coffee needed.  A dozen tablespoons in my current machine will mean that often, the coffee is blasted all over the coffee maker by the hot steam rising to drip through the grounds, creating a real mess that's difficult to clean up.  Believe it or not, the baskets on many of the newer makers now on the market are even smaller, even though their capacity may claim to be bigger.

Don't buy these ridiculous contraptions.  It's another case of a product that can't perform the function for which we buy it. 

And those new things - Keuring and Nespresso to name two - that they're marketing so heavily now?  Well, all you need to do is think about those wonderful machines they have started putting in hotel rooms for your convenience in producing colored flavorless water.   They have a pre-measured amount of coffee that they claim will make two cups.  We find that by using two packs at once, we can get ONE decent cup, which we split.  Don't count on any better performance from the latest gadgets.  All they can do is make bad coffee more expensive.

 

Good News On Media Restraint

So often, the news that's deemed fit to print is bad news.  But if it's true, as reported today by Paul Farhi, that nearly all the big media, and even some smaller media, are really planning to stay away from Newtown Connecticut this week on the one-year anniversary of the school shootings there, that's good news for a change.  

That would be a big change, but I suspect a welcome one, and not just for the people of Newtown.

Again, if it turns out to be true. 

 

Icy A Problem

One of the minor entertainments of the past few days, as a major blast of ice, snow, and freezing temperatures made its way across the whole country, was to watch the endless preoccupation of the news media with weather reporting.

A subset of that was the occurrence of several multi-car pileups on major highways around the country.  One in particular attracted my attention:  A film clip (by the way, who are these people who are always standing around these days with a phonecam, photographing completely uneventful scenes until something suddenly happens?) ...

Er, as I was saying, a film clip of a pile-up occurring in Wisconsin.  A few cars involved at first, with more and more careening into those first ones.  It's tragic, because I believe people died in that pileup, but ...

People seem not to behave very sensibly.  In this particular clip, one person was seen out of his vehicle, wandering around on the highway amongst the bumper cars sliding around.  Maybe he was dazed from an impact.  More to the point, it was evident that those who later joined the fray were all traveling at a very high rate of speed - far too fast for prudent driving on a sheet of ice.  Did they know they were on a sheet of ice?  They may not have known for sure, but they ought to have been expecting it.  This was the epitome of reckless driving (not "aggressive," ladies - and sadly, not "wreckless" either) .

In our Washington DC area, people originally from places like Wisconsin like to pooh-pooh the idea that two inches of snow here can shut down traffic.  There are many reasons why that is so, but the northerners like to brag that they "know how to drive in winter."  The Wisconsin film certainly puts paid to that fiction.  Unless of course all those recklessly speeding drivers just happened to be people originally from Alabama?

 

Postscript for regular readers:  If you thought you missed posts recently, you probably didn't.  There haven't been any since Thanksgiving.  Looks like the transition to chilly weather kept the cold-blooded Lizard deep in his burrow for a while.  But T.L. seems to have acquired a glassed-in heated terrarium or something, and has promised more frequent dispatches in future.

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