I saw this and then found myself on the way to Popeye’s for a chicken sandwich.
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Somehow it occurred to me the Popeye and Olive Oil would have a Superman and Lois type dilemma (ie Superman’s finish wild cut Lois open) only in this case no way would Popeye would fit.
Irredeemably, there are no greens on the Popeye’s menu.
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Did y’all have a restaurant called Ground Round? Sawdust on the floors, free peanuts and popcorn, and they played tons of old black and white cartoons.
edit: wow, Ground Round still exists. Would have definitely lost that bet.
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I remember Ground Round in NYC in the 1970s.
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Ours had tea night in the bar for happy hour or something which was right before another bar a block away had .25 cent beers.
Haha yes. Our local Ground Round got turned into an Irish restaurant/pub with dining on one side and bar on the other. Eventually the restaurant dissolved into a strictly small banquet type place. On weeknights they ran poker tournaments and cash games where I learned to play my first live poker as a stupid high school/college kid after hours.
If I was done for the night I’d go to the bar side and grab a drink while waiting for friends to finish playing. Went there to celebrate my 21st bday and the bartender who I’d grown to know asked what bday I was celebrating. When I told her 21 she was very not pleased as I’d been going there for years prior to my 21st. I politely said to her that she prolly wouldn’t want to check the IDs of half the rest of our group then. Good times.
Just checked Google maps and it now appears to be a hibachi place.
Remember them in Minneapolis area during the 90s, went there as a kid. I always confused them with Old Country Buffet but I don’t think Ground Round was a buffet
Used to go to one in Nashua, NH with my now wife mostly for beers and wings or nachos. I remember the peanuts and popcorn but do not recall sawdust on the floor. My wife also says no sawdust on the floor. It’s been closed for a number of years now and replaced with a hotel.
The wiki says that throwing peanut shells on the floor was allowed/encouraged, so I may be mis-remembering the sawdust element.
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During the 1970s and 1980s, Ground Round was well known for its children’s parties, showing silent movies and cartoons on a big screen, a mascot named Bingo the Clown and for passing out whole peanuts where consumers were not discouraged from dropping the shells on the floor.
Either we went to a more civilized location, or they cleaned up their policy by the early 90s and went more for the standard bar and grill atmosphere because we had none of the bolded above except the free popcorn and peanuts and that was only if you sat in the bar area.
There was a place in Lowell, MA called Pollard’s that did the peanut shells everywhere. They were around forever but seem to be gone now.
But is Ground Round a burger?
My father, who is visiting me right now, concurs that Ground Round didn’t have sawdust, but we did throw peanut shells on the floor. This was in the 70’s-80’s.
This sent us down a “defuct Massachusetts businesses” tangent. Caldor, Lechmere, Jordan Marsh etc. Maybe before your time. He is now obsessed with trying to remember the name of some tiny discount women’s clothing store on Rt. 9 in Natick that my mother always used to make us go to.
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I remember all those. My oldest sister and my SIL both worked at Caldor. Woolworths was another one but I guess that’s actually still in Australia of all places. My wife mentioned Ann & Hope and Zayre.
I don’t know the store in Natick, that sounds like maybe a mom & pop one off?
I remember a clown at Ground Round. No memory of sawdust though.
Caldor’s logo was elite. Just found this site with vintage defunct-store t-shirts. Caldor, Spag’s, and Lechmere all pretty good. Was hoping for V66.
I would have thought Steve Harvey would be doing Family Feud for every country. That guy is a hustler.
I don’t recall seeing the phrase “rent seeking behavior” before I saw people talking about it here. After that, I was surprised how often the idea came to mind when reading or listening to the news. The trend is as insidious as it is pervasive. Direct economically aware push-back seems rare. There are some examples though. Recently, there’s this
On Wednesday, the five FTC commissioners unanimously adopted a policy statement supporting the “right to repair” that pledges beefed-up enforcement efforts and could open the way to new regulations.
“These types of (repair) restrictions can significantly raise costs for consumers, stifle innovation, close off business opportunity for independent repair shops, create unnecessary electronic waste, delay timely repairs and undermine resiliency,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. “The FTC has a range of tools it can use to root out unlawful repair restrictions, and today’s policy statement would commit us to move forward on this issue with new vigor.”
A twitter thread by @RealSexyCyborg brought a lot of stuff together for me. She takes an in-your-face approach to many topics, most of which I don’t know enough about to evaluate her opinions, but her technology expertise is undeniable. Thread focuses on 3D printing but she mentions a range of products and services.
Canon, HP, Stratasys, the big names- they wanted in. But they lost & we fucking won- we didn’t ekk out a little slice of the pie like Linux, @adrianbowyer’s RepRap derivatives won on a vast scale. We absolutely dominate. We kicked their asses so hard they’re scared to try again.
Summary
We’ve got this one little corner of hardware with no Jobs. no Edison, all Woz and Telsa. Our team for once. 3D printing is owned by the hackers the way nothing else is. And dealing with people who don’t get why it’s not injection-molded, cartridge taking, Big Box Store garbage- -why it does not have a massive markup for slick marketing and “genius bars”- is exhausting.
Look we get it- you want all your technology to be indistinguishable from magic, you don’t want to hack, or learn, or explore. You can go buy that- but why tear down others who want to?
VR, you know you’re fucked right? You’re going to have ads beamed straight into your eyeballs, tuned by the best AI Facebook can bring to bear on your distracted brain. And you’ll have zero choice but to play by proprietary rules if you want access to that entire medium.
Your phone? Is fucked. Binary blobs all over, locked baseband modem, no privacy protection, governments saying what apps you can use. General computing? @doctorow has written about the war on that and checkout what’s been going on if you think you’ll own your hardware much longer
Cars? Tesla set the model- pay to unlock features of the car you thought you owned but can’t do anything to. You think every other manufacturer isn’t pivoting to recurring income? You think your politicians paid by their lobbyists are going to stop them?
Software? Fusion360, Adobe Creative Cloud, John Deere tractors- a tradesperson can’t even own their own tools anymore. We’re all sharecroppers. Everything is rented.
But 3D printers- we OWN that shit. You got a $200 Ender-3? You’re 100% offline, 100% Open Source toolchain. You can 3D print everything from Gingery patterns for a full hand-scraped post-apocalyptic machine shop to an FGC-9 semiautomatic in case anyone tries to take it from you.
Every single thing we own is being taken, put in the cloud, and rented back to us. Willingly. Because no one wants to know how to do anything beyond a narrow scope. We’re a world of carpenters willing to rent sharp chisels and saws rather than learn to sharpen them ourselves.
3D printers- you know almost all come with a toolkit? So you can fix it yourself. You know how rare that is? No, you don’t throw it away. Ever. No, it’s not all glued together into a glass slab. You just, fix it. It’s all metal, you can fix it and run it indefinitely.
Millions of people do this, even if they’ve fixed nothing else in their lives. They live without instant returns, drop shipping, call centers in India and genius bars. They just, fix it themselves. And that can suck sometimes, but it’s overall a very, very good thing.
And again, if you don’t get that, don’t see why, didn’t have a problem with tying your Facebook account to Oculus, great- buy a Makerbot or something. But we’ve got this one thing left that we own- don’t put so much time and effort into tearing it down.
Anyway, really makes me want to get a 3D printer. I’m starting a list of ideas for stuff to fabricate.
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Rationally you’re right. Fuck em though is still my gut response