Slug & Lettuce

I've noticed this pub the last two times I visited Bath in England.  I thought it was a Bath-only place, but then stumbled across another one in London a few days later.

Indeed, it's part of a pub chain with a sketchy history, as this Wikipedia entry indicates.

Anyway, the name is both cute, memorable, and slightly off-putting.

Some Fallen Mighty Retailers

Not long ago I posted about the once-dominant news magazine Time and that it's a shadow of its former self because the whole category of weekly news magazines has largely imploded here in the USA.  (Some argue that the Economist, a British version, is still doing fine, but I have my doubts about its viability in the medium-run.)

Then there are companies dealing in retail sales.  A few days ago I was driving through Tacoma on Interstate 5 and glanced at Tacoma Mall, noticing that the Sears store there had closed.  Sears has been in decline for many years now, even having sold some of its prime assets to bring in cash.  The Tacoma Mall store closing is just one of many such closings.

Yet 40 or 50 years ago Sears was a retailing powerhouse, having grown from being a major catalog mail-order operation to a bricks-and-mortar giant by mid-century.  Its clientele was Middle America -- upper Blue Collar and lower White Collar workers and their families.

While Sears was at its peak, newer retailing concepts appeared.  But these concepts were faster-moving from birth to decline or extinction, being more like fads or fashions.  What I find interesting is that many of these were hailed as transformative, waves of the retailing future.  And by implication, they might rule for many decades.

An example is E.J. Korvette, a discount clothing retailer that met with sudden success in the 1960s, even having a store on New York's Fifth Avenue.  Then there were the "Big Box," "category killer" stores of the 1980s and 90s.  Their strategy was to have huge selections of a single class of merchandise, providing potential customers the opportunity to fairly quickly find what they needed without traipsing all over town from store to store (remember, this was mostly pre-Internet).   An important example here is Toys "R" Us, that many observers thought would destroy all toy-selling competition.   Then there was Blockbuster, a leading renter of video tapes and compact disks of movies and did roaring business around the turn of the present century.

All those companies are defunct.  Stronger competition probably did Korvette in.  Walmart and the Internet are two factors in Toys "R" Us's failure.  Blockbuster's demise was probably triggered by the Internet.

The current hot retail paradigm is Internet-based sales facilitated by massive, efficient distribution systems.  Looks like this is The Wave of The Retailing Future.

Right?

Packing for a Journey

I've been re-reading Martin van Creveld's classic book "Supplying War" that deals with logistics.  At the same time I'm getting ready to start packing for a trip to England, so matters such as future needs, carrying capacity and transportability are clearly on my mind.

Given human variability on many dimensions, it follows that some people are skilled at packing for trips and there are others who are not -- even though they might be fairly frequent travelers.

Packing for a road trip is comparatively simple where only one or two people are involved and the vehicle is not tiny: there's usually enough space available to allow for overpacking.  Air travel is another matter due to constraints of weight and, recently, the per-item charges for luggage.

My sister, who favors out-of-the-way destinations is able to confine her items to a backpack and a couple of smaller shoulder bags.  It helps that she has no need to pack for dress-up occasions such as many cruise passengers have to face.

Then there is another lady I knew well who consistently overpacked.  A trip to Europe would have her fill two suitcases to their weight limit despite my consistent warnings that she was certain to buy gifts and personal items and needed some extra room to allow for that.  Usually what happened was that she would buy a small, cheap piece of luggage en-route to accommodate what she indeed bought overseas.  Another problem she had was deciding what to pack, having a large wardrobe to choose from.  Basically, she wanted to have a costume for every social contingency.  But at the same time had trouble dealing with possible changes in the weather, being fixated by what she saw through the window while packing, assuming that would be what she's experience on the trip.  I tried to be helpful by telling her what weather forecasts were saying, but this didn't sink in very far.  Therefore, she was constantly complaining that she didn't pack the items she really needed.  To me the oddest part of all this was that she never really changed her packing style despite the problems it had caused on many previous trips.

As for me, I like to think that I do a reasonably sensible job of trip-packing.  Even if that's so, almost inevitably I discover at some point in the journey that I had forgotten to include an item of real importance.  My upcoming England trip should be easy to pack for because the predicted weather there is close to what Seattle's weather has been recently.  For instance, that allows me to gauge how thick or waterproof a jacket I'm likely to need.  Of course, I'm probably still doomed to get something wrong.

No matter how good you think you are at packing, the length of the trip and future weather conditions conspire against getting it right.  Weather forecasts become increasingly unreliable more than a week ahead, so one must allow for a wider range of possibilities than indicated.  Another difficulty is packing for destinations with different climates.  Sometimes my late wife and I would visit Hawaii and the Bay Area, California around Christmas / New Year's, all on the same journey.  So we'd need to be wearing warm, water-resistant clothing for Seattle weather at each end of the trip, semi-tropical duds for the Islands, and fairly warm items for northern California.  Combining these needs with a limited amount of luggage space, requires a lot of careful thought along with the certainty that the result will be inadequate in some respects.

If you have a trip planned in the near future, I wish you the best of fortune when it comes to packing.

Time Magazine Sold Yet Again

Not long ago Meredith Corp. bought Time Magazine and now sold it to a California entrepreneur.

Even if I were filthy rich, that's something I would avoid.

I've said this before, and will say it again: The reason for Time Magazine's existence is no longer valid.  It was founded 95 years ago with the purpose of summarizing the week's news.  The target audiences were (1) big-city people who were too busy to follow the news on a daily basis and, more importantly, (2) people not in New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago where newspapers did not cover news as completely as in the cities mentioned.

When I was a lad in Seattle -- way over there in the upper left-hand corner of the country -- Time was my main source of information about big-city (especially New York) arts and culture, not to mention foreign affairs.  I recall eagerly waiting for the Thursday mail delivery so that I could get my weekly fix.

Then came 24-hour radio news stations and, a decade or so later, national editions of The New York Times.  Now we have cable news and the Internet.  So I have no reason whatsoever to wait around for a weekly news magazine.

I haven't regularly read Time since some point in the 1980s and thumb through one in waiting rooms maybe once very few years.  Which means I have no idea what Time contains nowadays.  Probably features and commentary, and not the sorts of news it carried years ago.

But I can find features and masses of commentary on the Internet.  Again, no real reason to buy a copy of Time unless its content is utterly unique and valuable -- something I doubt will happen, no matter who owns it.

Paying More to Gamble

Years ago, the state of Nevada had some reputations that don't apply much any more.

It used to be where a couple could get a quickie divorce and then almost immediately get married to someone else.  Many states now have no-fault divorce laws, so getting divorced is far easier than back in, say, 1950.  Marriage chapels were once all over the place, but seem to be less common today.

Then there was the reputation of getting cheap lodging and good, inexpensive meals at casinos.  The idea was to entice gamblers using some not-quite loss-leader pricing.

I remember stopping off at Harold's Club in Reno where the hotel gave me a small roll of nickels for the slot machines.  I'm not a gambler, but just for the hell of it did use up their nest egg along with some of my own.  Then quit and went up to the restaurant at the hotel's top floor for a nice roast beef dinner.

All that was when Nevada was just about the only place in the country where gambling was legal.  Then it was legalized for Atlantic City, New Jersey.  And now almost every Indian tribe of consequence has a casino, so serious gamblers don't really need to go to Nevada to lose their money.

One way Las Vegas fought back was in the form of huge hotels with architectural/decorative themes.  For instance, there's the Excalibur that caters to families with its knights-of-old theme.  The Luxor next door was ancient Egyptian, though the decor has been dialed back.  The Venetian even has a canal with singing gondoliers.  The Paris evokes Paris, though it too backslid a little.

Some casino hotels have large shopping areas.  Planet Hollywood's is rather average, but Chrystal's in the City Center complex is very upscale.  Venetian, Palazzo and Caesar's have a mix from mid-line to luxury.  The Bellagio and Wynn's have small, luxury shopping areas.  And so it goes.  The same applies to restaurants.

The latest move to making every aspect pay is parking.  My late wife had a las Vegas time-share and we'd be in town Thanksgiving week.  We'd drive to the Bellagio and drop the car off at the valet parking, paying a few-dollar tip on its recovery. We could have self-parked in a casino garage for free, but this was more convenient.

I last was in Las Vegas in 2015 but returned briefly a few days ago.  Now the Bellagio charges hefty rates for valet parking and fees not very much less to use the garage.

I suppose top-echelon gamblers get some "comps" on this.  But I now find the town too expensive for casual visiting.  You have to go there with the idea of at least semi-serious spending even if you aren't into gambling.

Country Roads in Days of Yore

During the past month I've taken several road trips across the mountains to eastern Washington.  One thing I noticed is that the state highways I followed in many places were quite nice two-lane affairs that could be driven at near-freeway speeds.

They had wide shoulders, a useful safety factor.  Their paving was in good condition.  There were plenty of cuts-and-fills that helped isolate the roads from their terrain.  Perhaps the most interesting detail was that towns were bypassed -- especially smaller towns.  Because of that, motorists had fewer reduced speed zones and traffic lights to deal with, again speeding up a journey's flow.

Contrast this with many such roads of 60 and more years ago.  Those were built cheaply, conforming more to the terrain.  They were narrower (as were cars back then) and had small or nonexistent shoulders.  They went through every town, each a potential speed trap.

And some did not go from place to place directly.  Instead they went along borders of farmers' lands, tracing their way confined to a grid pattern.

Finally, since there were few superhighways, state and federal highways had to accommodate all the traffic -- cars, busses, trucks, military convoys, etc. -- that had to get from place to place.  That potential congestion is much less on many modern country roads and highways.

All it took was decade after decade of small improvements.

I'm Back

I haven't posted in several months because ...

Well, I prioritize my Car Style Critic and Art Contrarian blogs.  Plus I travel a fair amount.  And then there's life to be lived as external factors emerge such as last week's high school classmates annual get-together.

I feel kinda guilty about non-blogging here.  So I came up with what might be The Solution.

It seems that towards the end of many afternoons I run out of internet-related things to do.  Worked on posts for the other blogs.  Read all that interested me on the blogs I follow.  Finished gathering images of automobiles for the styling blog.  But at this point I'm tired and am not in the mood for coming up with topics for Retired Blowhard.

The answer to this problem (I hope) is to create a System.

The system involves making a list of potential topics every so often while having my afternoon Starbucks.  Flip open a paper napkin, pull out my ballpoint pen and begin thinking and associating.  Today, with no distractions, I came up with 20 subjects by the time my "tall drip" was drunk.  Then I write in the afternoon when I've run out of other things to do yet have a topic available.

My idea is to post something once or twice per week unless I'm on the road.  I hope this works.  But no guarantee.