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I am not a starbucks fan...can't stand the coffee but I would appreciate a warning sign about their chosen anticultural view...I would be happy to go across the street to DD's.
The business man invests his own capital ,takes the risk and should be left to his own success or failure..
Funny, this weeks lecture about western heritage at Hills dale dealt with Plato's description of democracies...it was like it was written today! including the erratic nonsensical speech and rhetoric.
If a snowflake saw it, he'd probably weep while running off to a safe zone to meditate with his coloring books.
Now there were signs that wound up offending me when I walked off a hot summer street in St. Petersburg, FL,into a Howard Johnson's Restaurant way back during the mid-60s.
The signs photogenically advertised a menu of about 20 maybe more different wonderful looking ice cream flavors that made me drool.
Me dino asked for about the most exotically tasty one on the wall, whatever that was.
A slightly younger than me kid behind the counter with a bored blank face advised that they only served vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.
I repeated what the kid said with shocked dismay.
The kid only stared back with a bleak uncaring expression.
I remember choosing strawberry because 1. I really wanted something cold and wet in my mouth and 2. strawberry was as exotic as Howard Johnson's could get while dying out as a chain.
In 1925, he bought a small soda shop in the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts. He enhanced the quality of the ice cream by buying a recipe from a pushcart vendor for $300. It doubled the butterfat of the product and used only natural flavorings. He used hand-cranked makers in his basement and by 1928 was grossing about $240,000 from ice cream sold in the store and nearby beaches.[2]
Johnson expanded operations by opening more stores and started selling food items such as hamburgers and frankfurters at his original store. In 1929, he opened a second restaurant in Quincy. This sit-down outlet had a broader menu and laid the groundwork for future expansion.
In 1935, Howard Johnson teamed up with a local businessman, Reginald Sprague, and created the first modern restaurant franchise. The idea was new in that day: let an operator use the name, food, supplies, and logo, in exchange for a fee. The business of "HoJo" chain restaurants rapidly expanded and he also entered the lodging industry.
Howard Johnson had his two children also begin working in the business. His son Howard Brennan Johnson and daughter Dorothy Johnson beamed down together from highway billboards proclaiming that "We love our daddy's ice cream" at the time when they were six and eight years old respectively.[3]
Later life Edit
Johnson was married four times, siring at least two children. He had a 60-foot (18 m) yacht and collected paintings. His hobby was "to talk and eat food." His favorite food was ice cream, which he stoutly — he was 205 pounds (93 kg) — maintained was "not fattening." He ate at least a cone a day, and he kept 10 distinct flavors in the freezers of his seven-room Manhattan penthouse and at his home in Milton, Massachusetts.[4]
Johnson retired in 1959, leaving the company to his son, Howard Brennan ("Bud") Johnson. The older Johnson continued to monitor his restaurants for cleanliness and proper food preparation. He would be chauffeured in a black Cadillac bearing the license plate HJ-28 (his initials and 28 ice cream flavors) while performing unannounced inspections of the restaurants.[4]
During these visits we'd take in extra sights like a world's fair in New York, the Statue of Liberty, museums, Cape Cod.
Sometimes we'd only go to places like Washington DC, Miami and in one trip toured Silver Springs, St. Augustine and an alligator farm in north Florida.
Now that I've beaten around the bush, there was one thing constant, Dad always wanted to go to a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge, which of course included a Howard Johnson's Restaurant.
After about five years of this, Mom got tired of always going to Howard Johnson's and started to complain about it. So Dad was gradually being weened off the Howard Johnson's mystique.
About this time I bought a Mad Magazine. In it there was a two-page comic about a car traveling family with a father, who with hypnotized looking eyes kept repeating "Howard Johnson's, Howard Johnson's, Howard Johnson's~"
Don't recall anything else about that cartoon. I handed it to my Dad while he was reading the newspaper and walked off. I retrieved the magazine later from the lamp table beside Dad's favorite chair.
We never went to another Howard Johnson's.
The lampooning from mad during those days was
Nothing was off limits and no political agenda that I recall.
In one of the last ones I bought in the late 60s, Mad was making fun of radical left college students.
Still etched in my memory is the drawing of an angry-faced pretty young lady pounding away on the typewriter of a student newspaper..
I had 2 story lines that, to this day, I remember - One was in one of my uncles magazines stashed at Grandma's house (small version, probably out of the mid 50's) which featured Alice in Nazi-land (a parody of Alice in Wonderland), the other was from the late 60's / Early 70's - it's parody was The Sound of Murder... how the Gangster charism of the 20's and 30's became the bankster charism of the (IIRC) 70's... And somehow I remember the words to a couple of the songs, one of which was...
Do, we call it income now
Heist, the meaning is unclear
Kill is now a wall street term
Slug, a baseball term, I hear
Rod, a metal curtain bar
Thug, a thing that we don't know
Hood, a thing that's on your car
Which brings us to our Dough.
Thanks Suzanne it sure brings back memories of a less hectic era. Spy vs Spy showed how stupid the kakistratic games really are. I also thought how clever the back page was when you folded it and a different message was revealed
In his basement. Today that would happen only at great expense due to the looters regs.
I state that in my book, by the way.
PC is anti free speech.
Freedom of speech!
Mutually agreed. Ratings equal advertising dollars finely tuned to the demographics. The NFL ,MLB ,
NBA and others negotiate with the networks for content and viewers.
If others quit watching , like I have ......then the ratings may drop. I have many more fulfilling
Beneficial activities including the gulch that give me value than spending every Sunday glued to the tube. To each their own.
From an article "Chitchat is also an important social lubricant, helping to build empathy and a sense of community. It is much harder to snap at a taxi driver for going the wrong way if you have just exchanged pleasantries. “Children learn empathy not just by how we treat those closest to us but also by how we acknowledge the strangers around us,” adds psychologist Richard Weissbourd of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They “notice if we appreciate the server in a restaurant and say hello to the mail carrier—or if we treat them like they’re invisible.” Small talk, he notes, “can humanize others across the usual divides.”"
In settings like parties or events, Dr. Epley recommends starting with the 10/5 rule taught to many hotel and hospitality employees: When you’re 10 feet away, make eye contact; at 5 feet away, say hello. One surefire strategy is to pay a compliment: “I like your bow tie!” People overestimate the social risks involved in small talk, says Dr. Epley: “Most people not only want to talk to you, they’ll wind up confiding things they may not even tell a spouse.”
I do admire their courage, because they definitely will offend around 15% or so of their customers.
"In God We Trust" is the official motto of the United States. It was adopted as the nation's motto in 1956 as an alternative or replacement to the unofficial motto of E pluribus unum, which was adopted when the Great Seal of the United States was created and adopted in 1782.
I also pity our society where such a stand is a big deal.
How many trials do we need before the average DB1 can get this treatment.
A Swiss co...will do it for 100K...I just don't have it yet. They may come to the US, but consensus has them coming to LA instead of NY...go figure.
I will find a way... one way or another. I fear that any day now, I will come home to find her in a coma. I have managed to pull her out of the wool many times over the past 25 years... just don't know how much longer my luck will last.
I have been trying to get her to do some exercise in the rare event it goes high...or I kid her by saying...just call someone to chew them out!...when the sugar comes down...just hang up...job done! (it Works for B types)
PS...we bought her a meter and sending unit that tells her where the sugar is all the time; (now covered by medicare) but still sometimes is gets away from her...frequently during sleep and she can eat, drink herself to exhaustion trying to get it back up again...it's maddening.
Seriously, I have to force myself to keep driving every time I see a DQ. I don't give a rat's behind about their political views but that ice cream (specifically theirs) has a long and storied happy place in my memory, where it needs to stay.
The sign, of course, is just a sign of the times. Speaking to one's principles is important and just might go a long way to finding our way back to more sensible times the Free Market Way instead of force from a mob with a minority view on things.
Similarly, she had no objection to Christmas. That holiday tells us to rejoice and be merry, not to weep and repent.
I actually consider it an insult that a religious person of any stripe would understand atheists SO little that they would think this was even a blip on the radar.
When Watergate ruined Nixon the dems made the most of it as being the better option adopting the environmental and social reforms.
Today they just put their head in the sand like an ostrich.
Splitting a gut right now...
Would feel with that comparison....alas I figured their heads would be buried. I forgot about the self appointed injustice warriors. LOL