Tag: family

When Your Drive through Resembles a Lab from the Andromeda Strain


Definitely an “A” for Effort

When I dropped off Charlie at work this evening, I picked up some egg rolls and won ton soup at Seafood Wok.  (Nat got spring rolls and hot and sour soup)

This is actually the one of the first restaurants that I ate at once I moved up to the Baltimore and was living in a hotel before we got an apartment.

I rather like their fried dumplings and soups.

In any case, they had shut down for a while as a result of the pandemic lock-down, but now they have reopened as a pickup only restaurant.

They modified the vestibule of their  restaurant to provide a safe way for people to pick up their orders.

The new normal is profoundly weird.

I Hate Charcoal Briquettes

I like to grill, and I like grilling with charcoal.

I think that gas is a crutch for weak, and when smoking, I throw in some wood for flavoring.

Do to Covid-19, I’m trying to keep my traveling to a minimum, and the nearest store only had Kingsford® briquettes.

Chunk charcoal is made by taking pieces of wood, and heating them in a low oxygen oven to drive off all the non-carbon compounds.

Briquettes, on the other hand, are made from sawdust cooked in low oxygen ovens, and then combined with a binders (Lime and Starch) and a release compound (Borax) and pressed into a pillow shape in a mold.

Since I use a chimney fire starter, (Yes, I know, Amazon is evil, but if you buy from this link, they pay me) where you place paper at the bottom of a tube, and charcoal at the top of the tube, and set the paper alight, which ignites the charcoal with no residue in about 10 minutes.

This compares favorably to lighter fluid, where you need to wait about 20-25 minutes, and produces a lot more air pollution.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that when I use briquettes, there is about an additional 5-10 minutes of foul smelling smoke as the binders and release compounds burn off.

It does not effect the quality of the food, and when you add a few briquettes to an existing fire, the smoke is minimal, but startup is slower and nastier than chunk charcoal.

As an FYI, I grilled dinner for Sharon* for Mother’s Day.

I grilled steak for Sharon and myself, and burgers for the kids, who do not like steaks and roasts.

I also did up some zucchini with salt, pepper, garlic power, onion powder, and olive oil on the grill in foil pouches, and grilled some pineapple (add a small amount of kosher salt to draw out the liquid so that it can carmelize) for dessert.

And a good nosh was had by all.

*Love of my life, light of the  cosmos, she  who must be obeyed, my wife.

OK, This Sucks

Because of the economic implosion from the corona virus, my employer, Kingspan (Tate Access Floors) is cutting wages for all of its employees by 40% in April and May, and suspending its dividend.

Kingspan will continue to pay 60% to workers who have been locked down to those who are required to shelter in place, which is a rather humane approach to all of this.

Truly shared sacrifice is something to be supported.

Considering my “Pinko” proclivities, this is an opportunity for my butt to cash checks that my mouth wrote:

Kingspan will cut executive pay by 50% and implement a 40% cut for the rest of its 14,500 staff for two months due to unprecedented production and demand disruption from coronavirus, according to a letter to staff obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

………

Kingspan, which earlier announced it would withdraw its proposed final dividend for 2019 and had a strong balance sheet with more than 1 billion euros in cash and committed undrawn bank facilities, would also immediately freeze all spending that is not business critical, Murtagh said in the message to staff.

Needless to say, things will be tight for a while.

If the governor locks down the state of Maryland, as have the governors of California, Pennsylvania, and New York, I’ll work from home.  I have my work laptop at home, and can VPN in.

Do not expect updates, as I try NOT to blog about my work.

1⁄4 Century

On November 30, 1994, I married Sharon Rachel May, now Sharon Rachel Saroff.

It’s our 25th wedding anniversary.

Unfortunately for the single women of the world, I am still unavailable.

Fortunately for me, Sharon* has not (yet anyway) murdered me.

Lord knows that she has ample (no jury in the world would convict her) justification.

Here’s to women with exquisitely poor taste in men.  It’s how Saroffs find mates, I guess.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

What a Concept

We now have a term for the mediocrities who go from failure to failure with lavish funding because they are children of extremely rich parents, the “Glass Floor.”

This is pretty much where Rome was when it began to collapse:

In 2014, Zach Dell launched a dating app called Thread. It was nearly identical to Tinder: Users created a profile, uploaded photos and swiped through potential matches.

The only twist on the formula was that Thread was restricted to university students and explicitly designed to produce relationships rather than hookups. The app’s tagline was “Stay Classy.”

Zach Dell is the son of billionaire tech magnate Michael Dell. Though he told reporters that he wasn’t relying on family money, Thread’s early investors included a number of his father’s friends, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

The app failed almost instantly. Perhaps the number of monogamy-seeking students just wasn’t large enough, or capping users at 10 matches per day limited the app’s addictiveness. It could also have been the mismatch between Thread’s chaste motto and its user experience. Users got just 70 characters to describe themselves on their profiles. Most of them resorted to catchphrases like “Hook ’em” and “Netflix is life.”

After Thread went bust, Dell moved into philanthropy with a startup called Sqwatt, which promised to deliver “low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world.” Aside from an empty website and a promotional video with fewer than 100 views, the effort seems to have disappeared.

And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.

America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.

Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.

You know, this explains a lot:  Donald Trump, Dan Lipinski, Liz Cheney, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Jared Kushner, and Hunter Biden.  (also, those folks from Hyannis Port)

Get lucky with the right parents, and any sad sack can become a mover and a shaker.