Today I got an ice cream cone at the vintage Dairy Queen where Hillary Clinton probably hung out as a teenager – located near beautiful downtown Park Ridge Illinois on Devon Avenue.
Dairy Queen has always been something of a mystery to me – back in the 1960s people would stand in line for an hour in the hot sun to get a soft ice cream cone. It was such a profitable business that the owners would typically only be open during the summer and spend the winter down in Florida – often living in the same city together. Some eventually added “brazier” items (low quality hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, etc) to justify being open year round.
Today when I went in, there was the owner and 4 employees – I was the only customer. Times they have changed – admittedly it is after labo[u]r day, but I’ve not seen a crowd there when driving by. They have limited parking and not that many people walk any more.
What is your favorite DQ story?
I bought a chicken sandwich ad a DQ Brazier and got food poisoning. I have vomited maybe three times as an adult, and that was the last time. I thought I’d die. I never bought anything other than ice cream there after that incident.
I made the mistake once of eating undercooked chicken from something I bought. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.
Remember Stewart’s imitation chicken about 1/2 way through?
What year did K-Mart finally go bankrupt? lol 😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOKDK0g1Gno
No, I haven’t watched TV since 1996 😉
K-Mart was unraveling around 2001 – that made me mucho moola. They had been offering “free” Internet access from a service called Bluelight. I ran FindAnISP, a directory that listed paid Internet services (in addition to the free ones). The “free dial up” model imploded overnight and several million people were in a panic when their free service died. Easier than catching snipes in a sack
More to your point, that ad makes me angry for a different reason – it’s playing the chumps who were day trading. The $8 transaction fee is the bait – the broker makes the “spread” – the difference between the bid and offer. Back in those days, orders like that were being routed to places like Bernie Madoff on a process called “payment for order flow”. Your order would go there (or several other poorly supervised trading venues) – they would give you the worst price they could legally do, then split the profit. (and that assumes they don’t break the rules or the law)
If you bought / sold 1000 shares and they made a 1/4 point spread, that’s $250 to split up. The $8 fee is the woman at the carney letting you in the front door and not mentioning you have to pay to get out.
Piling into the bed of the coach’s pick-up after a a winning little league game for a trip to Dairy Queen is now illegal*. Many of the cheesy summer traditions are gone…. for our own good, you see.
*Where you are planning to move it is pronounced ee-legal. In a sentence: The new measuring standard for public behavior is, “It ain’t ee-legal”.
That is only if they can recall it. When it is ee-legal, they don’t recall it or anything about it. lol
You don’t know jack about pronounciation
Sheeet!
I can’t remember if the tech-genius’ (no sarcasm, I wish I had paid more attention) opinion who read Art’s blog: are we headed to a national, coast-to-coast and border-to-border wi-fi coverage in the US? I can see it making sense but I’m not tech literate enough to understand all of the implications. At some point the government might want to say, “oh what the hell, yes we grab every last tittle and jot from every electronic device and in an effort to quell the malcontents we will offer this because we cover the land mass anyway and we are recording everything anyway….” N’est-ce pas?
Amazon is going to try to do what you’re asking about. Right above existing WiFi is a channel currently used for a satellite thing that isn’t doing much. The owner of the spectrum is asking the FCC to let them repurpose it for higher powered licensed terrestrial spectrum that would be nationwide and used by Amazon. Since it is adjacent to existing wifi, existing wifi gear could use it with just a software update.
Google has been dabbling with a similar idea… 4G like Spint’s Clear are being more widely deployed.
The FCC is in the middle of trying to squeeze down the existing DTV channels to lower frequencies to free up more space. But a huge part of potential spectrum is reserved for military and NASA use
We’re not even beginning to consider the potential uses of wireless everywhere capability – a lot of it having potential for further eroding privacy.
Here is another interesting development, being field tested a mile from me at O’Hare
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57601518-94/boingo-kicks-off-hot-spot-to-simplify-wireless-connections/
A serious flaw with open WiFi like Boingo is that it is totally insecure by definition. Use a free wifi hotspot at a coffee shop or airport and you need to assume anything you do is compromised, including giving over control of any password you used (even without the NSA)
What Boingo (and a group of telcos) are doing is creating a secure framework to allow you to authenticate to any wifi hotspot without having to do anything – and silently divert your 3G/4G cell phone traffic instead through the McDonalds on the corner while you’re waiting for the traffic light to turn green, without losing your existing Internet sessions I wonder if Amazon knows about this?
You need to do everything through a VPN in Cuba to have any security. 😉