Del's Etiquette

Two things usher in the summer for me, getting our beach pass in the mail and on the car, and purchasing my first Del's for the year. The latter goes back to the 70's for me when we would chase down a Del's truck for a "35 cent small." Occasionally, my father would pull off the road on the way home from the beach when we spotted a Del's truck. We would dig into the seat cushions of the Ford Country Squire, looking for stray change to up our Del's size. Back then, the Del's trucks were staffed by long haired hippy types who were looking to make some scratch to feed their drug habit. By the 80's, the college kids took over manning the trucks. They were a lot nicer than the hippies. While the hippies often shorted us, the college kids piled it on.

Del's is a Rhode Island based frozen lemonade drink which is far more than a smoothie. Del's is ice and water in thermodynamic equilibrium. This is what separates Del's from shaved ice. Del's is made by a machine that adds just the right amount of energy to a mixture of water, lemons and sugar, cooled to the freezing point. A paddle stirs the frozen concoction to ensure that it remains a slush instead of freezing. The proper engineering term for Del's is a "saturated liquid-solid," which simply means some parts are freezing (solid) while other parts are melting (liquid). That's why Del's is much finer than shaved or crushed ice. Not even a double blend can make a drink as smooth as a Del's. And that's all the science I'm going to talk about.

Angelo DeLucia constructed the first Del's machine in 1946. In 1840, his great grandfather made frozen lemonade in Naples, Italy from snow insulated with straw and stored in caves. Today, Del's is sold worldwide. You can get it in Hawaii and Japan. The original shop is still in Cranston, Rhode Island. I used to live in an adjacent town, but I never got my Del's from the world headquarters. I thought I would pull my kids from their computers and make the short trek for our first Del's of 2017 from the original store. After the griping and moaning subsided, I got all of them, including my wife, Christine, loaded into the car. She complained the most,

"We're gonna drive a half hour for Del's when its 65 degrees outside?" Christine protested.

They all like Del's, but they acted like I was asking them to do chores or go to church. All I wanted was to see the first ever Del's store. I know, my bucket list is a bit shallow. I wasn't asking all that much, and besides there was Del's in it for all of them. Christine is from New York so I introduced her to Del's on one of our earliest dates.

"Can I have a straw?" she asked.

I quickly objected and rightly so. You don't drink Del's with a straw. It will drain the drink of all the fluid, leaving just the ice. The key to Del's is to shake the cup in your hand which melts the ice while keeping you cool. Maintaining thermodynamic equilibrium is very important for a proper Del's experience.

One time while getting Del's, my son, Aidan, asked for a plastic spoon.

"No son of mine puts a spoon in his Del's," I interjected.

I made it clear to Aidan that there would be no spoons as well as no straws. You can get a lid on your Del's if you are transporting it from one place to another, but in general a lid is frowned upon.

"How do you feel about a napkin?" Aidan asked.

A napkin is ok, I guess.

There are eight official flavors of Del's. Blueberry and cherry, peach mango. I don't care for any of these. In my day there was only one, lemon, and that was good enough for us. We were happy even though we didn't have any money or go on family vacations. We did have Del's though. Some of the flavors like blueberry leave your lips and tongue the color of the drink. The only new flavor I find palatable is grapefruit.

Grapefruit is adult Del's. Like beer grapefruit is an acquired taste. As a kid I thought grapefruit was what happened to orange juice when it went bad. My dad bought grapefruit juice because we kids hated it. We regularly polished off the orange juice whenever it was in the house. Buying grapefruit was the only way my dad could have juice with his bowl of Total.

I almost always "stop at the sign of the lemon," and I hope someday my sons will bring their children to see grandpa who will take them for a "35 cent small" which will cost twelve dollars and probably be a half caffe, latte, skim mango peach unicorn Del's. It will be purple but, change to mauve if you stir it.

And we'll be happy.

Editor's Note: Originally published on May 9, 2017.

A Glimpse into the Heavens

I recently read an article indicating that a class action lawsuit, filed by a big law firm with four names, accuses two telescope manufacturers of price fixing. According to the suit even though the companies enjoyed a 80% market share in the United States, they collaborated on a scheme to determine which products each company would manufacture and what price they would charge. The companies allegedly conspired to monopolize the consumer telescope market. The litigation affects at least a quarter of a million people. If true we've reached a new low as price gouging has finally found its way to astronomy.

Plaintiff Mr. I. Baban of Quebec bought a telescope for his son in 2016. He paid $68.97 for a FirstScope made by Celestron. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Baban paid an artificially inflated price through the defendants's anticompetitive conduct.

The problem that I have with all of this is that in 1977, after saving the money I earned from my paper route for an entire year, I purchased a telescope from the Sears Catalog for $59.99. Forty years later, telescopes went up in price by $9 dollars. Adjusting for inflation $60 in 1977 is worth $236.63 in 2016. Sounds like to me that Mr. Baban got a bargain.

This got me thinking about the telescope I had as a kid.

Not only did my telescope cost a quantum load more than Baban's it took five months to arrive by mail. Back then ordering from the Sears Catalog was like registering for a surprise. Most things took so long to come in that you often forgot you purchased something in the first place. When the package showed up, it was a complete shock.

My mother used to order everything from the Sears Catalog. When I went from a crib to a bed, the pillow my mother ordered took half a year to arrive. I slept without a pillow for so long that decades later I still wake with my head resting on the mattress.

Once she bought me dress shoes that took eight months to arrive. By then my feet grew well beyond her estimate. I still recall my mother jamming my foot into the shoe while insisting that they fit perfectly. Returning items back to Sears took longer than when they initially arrived, and more often than not, they wouldn't accept the return. My mother never sent anything back. She insisted I wear the shoes for my First Communion. After I hobbled up to the alter to receive communion then returned to the pew, Sister Ann asked me if I had to use the bathroom because I was "walking so awkward." Thanks to the Sears Catalog the first time I received the Sacrament of Holy Communion, I looked like I had to take a dump.

Most people think that the reason it took so long for our stuff we ordered by mail to arrive back then was because there were no computers, but that's not true. Computers had nothing to do with it. In the 70's the experience of consumers ordering from catalogs was so abysmal that workers had to try not to exceed our expectations. Back in the day Sears employees would leave orders for some crap at their desk for weeks. There was no incentive to clear one's inbox by the end of the day. Workers lived up to the lowest expectations because they could, not because they were incapable of processing paperwork more quickly. In the 70's we all accepted that no one gave a shit.

Not only did products ordered from Sears take months to arrive, often they reached us in an unusable state. When my telescope finally showed up, I was so excited that I assembled it straight away. After carefully following each step of the instructions, I inserted an eyepiece and looked through the scope. All I saw was a black circle. I checked the troubleshooting guide which advised me to remove the lens cap. The cap was still in the box. I checked that nothing was blocking the tube. My mother called Sears to ask them what we should do. She spoke to a guy named Ted, who informed her that,

"Telescopes are used to look at things in space, not things on earth."

My mother insisted that was the problem. My telescope could magnify the moon, but not a tree. I thought that this theory was insane, but I wanted it to be true because I knew sending my telescope back to Sears would mean I had to wait nearly another year before I could pursue the heavens. I tried lining up the moon that night but to no avail. In the end Sears took back my telescope, and after waiting months, they informed me that the model was back ordered. It final arrived two years later.

I used my telescope all through middle school. I saw the crater, Copernicus, on the moon as well as the rings of Saturn and four moons of Jupiter all with my telescope. I spent hours outside at night looking for difficult to see objects like Neptune and Pluto. My telescope wasn't powerful enough to find such faint heavenly bodies, but that didn't stop me from searching. I liked being out late into the night because it was dark, quiet, and most importantly, solitary.

Whenever I went out shortly after sunset to look at Venus, Mars or the moon, inevitably someone would stroll outside and want to take a look for themselves. Now fixed scopes like mine lacked a motor drive so you have to line up an object then watch it traverse the field. Locating something then lining it up was a cumbersome task especially under high magnification. After targeting an object, the first thing someone would always do, no matter how many times I warned them, is grab the eyepiece with their dominate hand then stick their eye up to the orifice. Touching a telescope, even minutely, knocks the target out of field. My father eventually learned this one restriction and enjoyed watching the moon drift by. I even got him interested in looking at maps of the moon to locate features with the telescope.

My oldest sister came outside once in response to my dad's detailed description of the lunar mountain range he found. She was a product of the 70's, smoking Kool cigarettes because they had the most tar. Sarcasm to her was a dialect. Unreasonableness, a way of life. She once elected not to swim in the ocean because “there’s fish in it.” When traveling by car she refused to go anywhere unless she got the front seat which allowed her access to the radio and the cigarette lighter. I lined up the quarter phase moon then told her not to touch the telescope. She watched the sattellite pass by, then scoffed,

"Hmmm."

And off she went back into her groovy, turn on, tune in, drop out world. Later after I counted over a hundred stars in the Pleiades asterism, I came in from the night. My father asked my sister,

"What did you think of the telescope?"

In the 70's we learned how to behave by watching sitcoms like Happy Days and Welcome Back Kotter. Most of the time the plots of these shows featured the cool kids ridiculing the less popular geeks. When the nerds did get revenge it usually involved insulting the alpha kids. Fonzie played by Henry Winkler would insult Potsie Weber or Ralph Malph with the often repeated comeback,

"Sit on it."

Vinnie Barbarineo played by John Travolta would tell Arnold Dingfelder Horshack,

"Up you nose with a rubber hose."

We'd laugh every time they'd repeat these signature snarky lines. Back then plots were all about being cool and not about being kind to your friends. So not surprisingly, a whole generation grew up incapable of saying anything positive.

My sister answered, "He doesn't give you enough time to look."

"You do know the moon is moving," I said.

She stared at me with a combined expression of disgust, displeasure and disbelief often employed when she was confused from both too little science and math in class and too much Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa and pot afterwards.

My interest in astronomy waned in high school as I moved to physics and eventually engineering. I hope that the telescope monopoly lawsuit is dismissed if a judge finds a lack of actual damages. Telescopes are certainly cheaper today as compared to when I was a kid. Demand is probably much lower as well. In the end, I can't help but think that this lawsuit is an effort by the cool kids to beat up on the nerds just one last time.

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em

That First Cigarette in the Morning

Back in 2017 when we all used to go to a central location to perform our jobs, I used to enjoy passing office buildings and watching the smokers freeze as they puffed away. After years of putting up with smokers in restaurants, at work, and in my family home, I was thankful that society collectively banished the suicide squad to a small part of company property where they smoked themselves into a hole in the ground that the reaper has been patiently edging them closer to for years. I miss that.

Back in the early 90's, smokers could light up just about anywhere. People smoked at work, in restaurants, on airplanes. It was terrible. Whenever my wife and I went out for dinner, we had to wash all our clothes afterwards. Even my socks stunk of cigarette smoke. When I was in eighth grade in 1978, my teacher, Brian W. McCormick, tasked us to write our own amendments to the Constitution as if we were a founding father. My first amendment was,

"No smoking in public places."

Mr. McCormick, a consummate smoker, was baffled by my proclamation. When he asked why I wrote that, I said,

"Because it stinks, and it kills people."

My oldest sister smoked Kool cigarettes. They were the cigs with the highest tar content, that is, the worst for you. That's why she smoked them, because she was cool. She used to expel smoke in my face for amusement. Later in life, my father freely admitted that allowing his daughter to smoke in the house was his worst mistake as a parent.

My thoughtful older sister gave me my very first cigarette when I was ten. Back in those days, every convenience store sold cigarettes to any kid at any age even though it was illegal. I tried to smoke the cigarette she gave me, but I couldn't bring myself to get through it. You have to be very delusional to think you look anything but stupid when smoking. Luckily, I tossed the thing instead of developing a life long habit.

"You don't understand. You're not addicted," a smoker friend of mine once told me.

I understand that chemical addiction is a powerful force, but what I can't wrap my head around is how you get there. You have to choke down quite a few cigarettes before you start feeling good from nicotine. After that, you're feeding the beast with little to no benefit. What is it about smokers that compels them to soldier on through the stink and cost, ignoring health concerns, the pictures of rotting, shriveled, black lungs wracked by the big C, to get to the dystopia of addiction?

The other day in a convenience store, the dude in front of me bought a pack of cigarettes. The clerk rang up $10.59. I almost wish I smoked so I could quit and save all that money. The guy also requested a "box" in lieu of a "soft pack." I never understood what the criteria is that causes someone to opt for the rigid box versus the more form fitting soft pack. He became very agitated with the cashier when he learned that they hadn't what he wanted. Ironic that a guy requesting "Marlboro box" was likely destined for an early box himself.

I often wonder what it's like working for the tobacco industry? It must be very depressing manufacturing a product that kills the user. In 1994, seven CEOs from the tobacco industry testified before congress in regards to the addictiveness of nicotine. All the executives openly denied that cigarettes are addictive, and that they cause lung cancer.

James W. Johnston, chairman and chief executive of R. J. Reynolds, expressed his opinion that every product from cola to Twinkies had risks associated with them. This prompted Congressman Henry A. Waxman, Democrat from California, to say,

"Yes, but the difference between cigarettes and Twinkies is death."

There are many things I simply don't understand. Becoming addicted to cigarettes is a big one. Young people, trying to look cool, are better at it then us older folks. A recent survey by a Swedish company reveals that millennials have the highest smoking rate. I'm on the downside of life, that is, there is less ahead of me than behind. Young people think they're going to live forever so they do stupid things like smoking, parkour, and anthropology. They don't comprehend consequences like lung cancer, broken necks, or six figure debt for a useless college degree.

My father started smoking and drinking coffee because to take a break from work in 1950, you had to be doing something. He would sit in the employee break room of his factory job and quietly meditate. Once his boss passed bye and asked,

"What are you doing?"

"Taking a break," my father explained.

"Well, smoke 'em if you got 'em," his boss directed.

He quit smoking in 1964, the year I was born, when the surgeon general announced the first health warning associated with cigarette smoking. Forty five years later, Congress manage to pass the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act giving the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco products. For years tobacco was not regulated as a drug even though nicotine, a potent and highly addictive narcotic, occurs abundantly in tobacco. That wasn't good enough for the tobacco industry, though, which actually increased the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. For years, the fast food industry has been accused of putting things like excessive salt in their products to make you feel hungry. The cigarette companies have been drugging smokers for decades, and the government has only recently given itself the power to regulate them. I doubt I'll see smoking eradicated like the disease it is in my lifetime, one thankfully not shortened by patronage.

It's money and the power that comes with it which keeps the cigarette industry afloat. Cigarette companies are pushers selling a legal narcotic that could never be introduced into our society today if it wasn't for the historical widespread use by unwitting users. I'm at an age whereby everyone I know who smokes is no longer getting away with it. I always encourage young people to quit smoking and universally, they respond with mild irritation at my persistent attempts to prolong their life.

When college students were asked what was the most important issue facing their generation, top on the list was "legalized marijuana." As marijuana becomes legal for recreational use in many states, I wonder what will be the health effects of smoking unfiltered pot on the next generation? Heroin use is on the rise as pot smokers graduate to the next level of illegal substance abuse. The potheads in high school used to say,

"You use only two percent of your brain so who cares how many brain cells you kill with drugs."

I think smokers use less than that, and nicotine kills the part that's already in use.

Editor’s Note: Orginally published on March 28, 2017.

Professional Phonies

Back in the early 80's, I was in college working towards a degree in mechanical engineering. We had a lounge on the top floor of Whales Hall. By today's standards, it looked more like a crack den than a place you would go to relax. There was a table and chairs as well as a beat up old couch that you'd expect to see in a frat house.

One day, a guy dropped off four brackets on the table that he had just finished welding for a project. A senior engineering student picked up each bracket and inspected the welds carefully. He determined that one of the four brackets was "dangerous." This prompted other engineering students to dive in and offer their critique. Through it all I kept my eye on the one bracket that was deemed unsafe. Being a freshman and low on the pecking order, I waited for the room to clear before I took up each bracket.

I couldn't find anything different in any of them. In fact, they all had incomplete welds on inward corners which would result in stress concentrations. I didn't know this at the time because I wouldn't take a strength and materials course for another year. Either way, they all looked the same to my untrained eye, and actually due to the incomplete welds, all the brackets were unsafe. What I didn't know at the time was that I had encountered on that day my very first professional phony.

After I graduated, I was hired by a defense contractor making submarines. I worked with this guy named, Alex. Alex had a masters degree in engineering from the same school I went to. He was short, bald and a pompous ass who believe he would never meet his intellectual superior. He hated my friend, Mike, a former grinder in the shipyard, who had put himself through night school to earn an engineering degree. Alex didn't like Mike because he felt "yardbirds don't belong on the hill." The engineering offices were on a slope, overlooking the dry docks. Unfortunately for my friend rode the same van into work each day with Alex.

One morning, Mike was working on his math homework in the van when Alex looked at what he was doing. Unable to get the answer in the back of the book, Mike continued to toil away. Alex asked to see the problem. Before long, he challenged Mike to come up with an answer for the ride home. Mike and I became good friends over our time. He learned quickly that I was pretty good with math so he asked me in the morning to help him with his math problem. He knew his solution was correct since he substituted values for the variables and ended up with an identical number for his versus the book answer.

The first thing I did was to inspect the text for the date when it was first published which was ten years ago. I told him,

"The answer in the back of the book is right."

In all the years of study I had under my belt thus far, I never encountered an incorrect math solution in a text that had been around for that length of time. There's just too much revising to let something like a math error in a calculus book go unnoticed. Mike's answer differed by a negative sign and would match that in the back of the book if two terms could be cancelled. Mike explained,

"I have a term in the numerator that is reversed in the denominator, otherwise I would be able to cancel them."

He had this,

( a - b ) (other terms)

( b - a ) (more terms)

I showed Mike that if he factored out a negative one from one of the terms, the remaining terms would be the same, and he could cancel, that is,

( a - b ) = - ( b - a )

Substituting,

- ( b - a ) (other terms)

  ( b - a ) (more terms)

Simplifying gave the answer in the back of the book. Mike was elated. That afternoon on the ride home in the commuter van, Alex announced,

"The answer in the back of the book is wrong."

"It's right," Mike responded.

Mike offered his superior solution which circulated about the van along with Alex's inferior answer. Each rider concluded that Mike was correct. When Alex got Mike's paper, he looked it over then exclaimed,

"Your solution is not in standard form."

That was the best Alex could come up with to save face. Everyone knew he was wrong. The solution in the back of the book was certainly the most simplified answer. Alex might have had a masters degree in engineering, but he messed up on some basic algebra. Alex turned out to be the second professional phony I had encountered in my life, and the first in industry.

A few years later, I had gotten a masters degree in computer science and was working for a small company making software to register motor vehicles. It wasn't Google, but there was certainly ample opportunity to make a difference. The company was coming off a big software project failure and hired me and a few other people to architect a solution which would be reusable in future projects.

A manager got his personal friend, Gary, into the company. Gary had a grey beard and man bun. He also wore sweat pants and a t-shirt to the office. Gary never really accomplished anything at work. He arrived late and left early and always worked from home on Fridays. He was suing a roofer, claiming that after they roofed his house, Gary and his wife had to move out because of mold. When he did come into work, Gary spent most of the day on the phone with his lawyer. On Thursdays, he called around the local colleges to find out if they had a sponsored speaker for Friday night. He was never interested in the topic of the talk. Instead, he focused on the hors d'oeuvres. Gary would get on the phone and ask what and when food would be served. He and his wife would show up in sweat pants and raid the plates of little niblets then leave without bothering to attend the lecture.

In meetings, Gary would ask the "why do you do that" question. As he listened to the answer, he would turn his mouth down and bob his chin left and right as if to convey,

"I wouldn't have done it that way."

The truth is Gary was clueless. I'm not sure if he could actually write software because in the month he worked for us, he hadn't done anything. One time Gary cornered me and began to ask a bunch of technical sounding questions. He began bobbing his head as I answered. He picked up a marker and began scribbling a schematic on a whiteboard in attempts at explaining some delusional idea that he had. It looked something like this,

A colleague, Joe, made his way down the aisle. Since Gary said a few words that could have been construed as being in the area which Joe worked in, I exclaimed,

"This is Joe's area of expertise."

Gary lassoed Joe as I made my get away, but before I got out of earshot, Gary pointed to the scribble on the whiteboard and said,

"So Joe, what do you know about this?"

Joe, trying to shake the feeling that Gary might be a threat to other human beings, answered,

"That? It's a scribble."

Gary talked until Joe's ears bled. When he finally got free, Joe swung by my desk and said,

"Thanks a lot asshole."

I felt bad, but I also thought Gary was nuts and not having paid much attention in the Psych 101 class I took years ago, I felt I didn't have the skill set to deal with a poser like Gary.

Gary began calling human resources to make a case that he was underpaid. He would get on the phone and argue about all the things he was promised including his own office and a $20,000 bump after a month. We all worked about fifty hours a week on this new project. Gary hadn't worked a full week since he was hired. My boss collected all of us together and announced that we had to start working on the weekends, everyone but Gary because he had his pending litigation to contend with. I couldn't take anymore of this, so I confronted my boss who vehemently defended Gary saying,

"Gary completed all his items on the schedule. Have you?"

This was true, but Gary had only three things to do, and all three were "make work tasks" that didn't advance the project. I was on the schedule for more than half the project deliverables, and no I wasn't done. My boss dismissed my complaint. After a month, Gary angrily argued with the head of human resources about his appalling work conditions. I heard Gary raised his voice which got him fired. I was glad to see Gary go even if my efforts at exposing his worthlessness likely didn't factor in at all. Gary was the third phony I had encountered in my life, and the first in computer science.

My wife, Christine, once went to a seminar in which Jack Welch was a keynote speaker who talked about his book, Winning. Welch unloaded this sage advice,

"Hire smart people."

The real problem is that phonies are good at appearing smart, and the true dumb people are the managers who can't tell the difference. I'm no Jack Welch, but what I've learned over the years is if you need to be told to hire smart people, then they shouldn't have hired you.

Editor's Note: Originally published on April 11, 2017.