toys – Life In A Word

Finishing on a Low Note

I usually associate “finishing” with sporting events. Think about the finish line of a car race, the eighteenth hole of a golf tournament, or the ticking seconds of the clock as a football game runs out of time. In these scenarios, the finish can be a tense, hold-your-breath moment, triggering a burst of euphoria if your favorite takes the win. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to reflect on the completion of my Lego Grand Piano. Tense? Hardly. Held my breath? Not at all. Euphoria? Anything but. No, this finish feels a little forlorn.

Three thousand, six hundred, and sixty-two tiny pieces ago, I began the assembly of Lego’s Grand Piano, just about the closest gift to “perfect” my wife has ever given me. Piano is inextricably connected with my childhood – hours upon hours of practice and playing and determined progress at a tender age, eventually succumbing to other temptations of time. Piano introduced me to commitment, skill, and patience, even frustration and disappointment. My parent’s big, black grand sat patiently in our living room, beckoning me to play every time I passed by. The instrument was always perfectly tuned and sparklingly clean, thanks to my mother’s weekly persistence with a dust cloth. I can still hear her sweeping the eighty-eight keys from one end to the other – a delightfully musical moment.

Believe it or not, the Lego Grand Piano is the second gift of a piano from my wife. On our wedding day in 1987, she presented me with Korg’s “Sampling Grand”, an electronic keyboard with weighted keys and surprisingly realistic sound, much less expensive than the real thing. Thirty-five years later, the Korg still plays like a champ and still earns a spot in our living room. (Unlike the Lego version, the Korg was already assembled when I got it.)

The start-to-finish journey of my Lego Grand Piano has been a more enjoyable ride than I expected. When I opened the box last Christmas, I remember my jaw dropping a little, not only because I never saw the gift coming but because of the sheer complexity of the project staring up at me from the box That’s a complicated-looking instrument, I thought. That’s a ton of pieces, I also thought.

The unopened Lego box sat on my home office desk for a couple of weeks, looking elegant without even being touched. My curiosity eventually got the better of me and I finally had a look inside. Talk about intimidating. A 500-page instruction manual awaited, along with forty-odd individual bags of pieces. Even though this was a twenty-one-step journey, some steps involved “sub-bags” of tiny, tiny pieces, grouped separately so as not to escape! Was I really brave enough to dive into this mess?

The first chapter – shared with you readers on January 6th of this year (a date we Americans wish to forget) – spoke to my hesitation when I wrote an entire post about building the piano without actually building anything. I just poked around the box and marveled at the contents and felt pretty good about even opening up the box. But I did get started seven days later, and the subsequent journey was wholly satisfying and something of a weekly escape.

At first, I made several mistakes as the piano began to take shape. Since the pieces are small it’s easy to place them backward, or even mistake one for another. I also fretted when extra pieces remained after a given section of the build. (For the record, there were 38 extra pieces when all was said and done. I can fit all of them into the palm of my hand.) There were at least two instances where I had to disassemble several pieces to get back to the point where I’d done something wrong. Those moments were utterly unnerving and confidence-shattering (take your pick).

[Author’s Note: After weeks and weeks of building the Lego Grand Piano, it only now occurs to me I’m describing one type of keyboard while typing on another. Don’t you just love the coincidence?]

So let’s finish this post by revisiting “finishing”. What should be a moment of triumph feels a tad sad instead. After the first few weeks, the build of the Lego Grand Piano became a weekly treat, accompanied by some of my favorite classical music. Many stages were mini-surprises, not knowing what section I was building until the last piece was in place. And of course, sharing the progress with all of you was also fun. One reader admitted she would first scroll to the bottom of a post before reading my weekly topic. She couldn’t wait to find out how the piano was coming along.

So, here we are now, finally done. Next week’s post will feel a little empty without a reference to the Lego Grand Piano. By total coincidence, my daughter got married this past weekend, also the end of a journey (months of planning and all). My son just turned 30 yesterday, the finish line of his 20’s. And soon, my wife and I will point our cars east for our move to South Carolina, the finish of our days in Colorado. To be finished is to be sad? You bet it is.

I’ll dive into another Lego build one of these days, I promise. Maybe I’ll even take you along for the ride again. In the meantime, I’ll flip the hidden switch and play the piano every now and then. I’ll also find an acrylic box in which I can display this magnificent project. After all, with my mother’s good habits in mind, I don’t want it gathering dust.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #21

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

The finále of the Lego Grand Piano assembly, as expected, was the build of the pianist’s bench and the placement of the sheet music onto the stand. Bag #21 – of 21 bags of pieces – was bigger than I expected. I mean, a bench is a seat with four legs, right? Not according to Lego. This bench raises and lowers with the little dials you see on the sides, to accommodate the height of our fictitious pianist.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. The Lego Grand Piano was designed by the guy you see below, Donny Chen, a 33-year-old piano teacher and tuner from Guangzhou, China. No surprise, Donny’s passions are the piano and Lego. He’s a lot smarter than I am, evidenced by this quote: “I’ve always seen toys as something to be imagined, not just played with”. Me, I just played with toys.

[Pianist’s Note: The Lego Grand Piano DOES play, I know it does. I just have to figure out two things. One, how did I manage to disconnect the cable to the sound box buried deep within the piano frame? Two, how the heck am I going to get it reconnected? That’ll take more time than I have today and is part of why I “finished on a low note”. But I’ll share a concert with you when you least expect it – I promise. “Stay tuned”.]

Running Build Time: 14.0 hours. Musical accompaniment: Jarratt and Reedman’s Hooked on Classics. Leftover pieces: 1

Conductor’s Note: Apologies to the purists but I just couldn’t resist this somewhat tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to the final chapter of the Lego Grand Piano. Hooked on Classics is a top-ten Billboard Hot 100 hit from 1981, a mashed-up perversion of bits of the world’s most recognized classical pieces… overlaid on a drum track. It was recorded by Louis Clark and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and bred several spin-offs (ex. Hooked on Romance) Hooked on Classics came along just as I was wrapping up my childhood piano “career”. I much prefer the originals of the several classical pieces in Hooked but maybe this peppy number is your cup of tea. Have a listen:

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Let’s Make Music!

At the request of several readers, I’ve decided to bring you along on the adventure of building the Lego Grand Piano my wife gave me for Christmas. I’m hoping this music-making journey amounts to a pleasing “concert” instead of an arduous one. More akin to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy than Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. No matter how difficult this “piece” ends up “playing”, I can assure you of one thing. It’s gonna take me a while; likely beyond when the snow stops flying in Colorado. 3,662 Lego pieces won’t snap together by my next blog post, nor the next one. I’ll give brief updates at the bottom of my other topics as I progress. Movements if you will, instead of the entire piano concerto all at once.

And with a tap-tap-tap of the conductor’s baton, the performance begins!

To start, we have an elegant 23″ x 15″ x 6″ cardboard box containing our unassembled piano. The box advertises the piano in three languages: English (Grand Piano), French (Le Piano a Queue), and Spanish (Piano de Cola). The box cautions I should be over the age of 18 and batteries aren’t included. Batteries? In a grand piano? But I digress…

The photos on the sides of the box tease the finished product. First and foremost, the piano really plays once I assemble the several thousand pieces. I don’t mean “play” as in a hidden music box with a digital soundtrack but “play” as in pressing the piano keys. And speaking of piano keys, Lego provides only 25. A real piano has 88. In other words, the beautiful music my grand piano plays will be more Chopsticks than Chopin. Makes sense because my Lego Grand Piano is only 12″ wide and 14″ deep. Suddenly my fingers feel fat.

When I remove that elegant box top, here’s what I see inside:

As expected, the Lego pieces are divided into small plastic bags. (On the left, that is. The right is a smaller box-within-the-box looking like a square piano. We’ll get to that in a minute.)

If I organize the bags so you can see them better, I come up with this:

The audience gasps, in awe of the complexity of the performance unfolding before them.

Okay, NOW I have concerns. First, the bag numbers start with “10”. Hey Lego, what happened to 1-9? Second, Bag 5 showed up among the double-digits like an orphan looking for a family. Pretty sure Bag 5 belongs securely in that black box to the right. Maybe Bag 5 was trying to escape.

At this point in the show, the phrase “missing pieces” tickles the pianist’s brain (but not the ivories).

I also find the set of bags in the photo to the right. I assume they pair with their partner-numbered bags when I get to that part of the concerto. But maybe they don’t. Maybe each of them is a little project unto itself.

Little beads of sweat populate the pianist’s forehead.

Yes, I’m nervous. I hastily put the bags back into the box (which suggests I’m already going backward with this project). But I do want to see what’s inside that black piano-wannabe box to the right. Have a look:

Well hello Bags 1-9! I also found a few more of those partner-numbered bags. But check out the disarray in the photo on the right. Here we have three more orphan bags and, shockingly, a few pieces that escaped their bags. What’s going on here?

The audience shifts uncomfortably in their seats as the pianist hesitates.

Finally, way at the bottom of the box, we have the pièce de résistance (Spanish: plato fuerte; English: main dish). Well hello, Mr. Instruction Manual. Weighing in at a hefty 2.2 pounds and boasting 532 pages of mind-numbing steps, Mr. Instruction Manual is easily the heaviest item in the box. He’s the equivalent of the phone book of a mid-sized city. Furthermore, the plastic bag he came in included a little slip of paper shouting, “WARNING: To avoid danger of suffocation keep this bag away from babies and children.” Listen Lego, I’m not worried about babies and children; I’m worried about me. I might be tempted to use that plastic bag to suffocate myself if I can’t complete my Grand Piano.

The pianist makes it this far into the performance without any faux pas’s (English: significant mistakes), but then I choose to open Mr. Instruction Manual to a random page. Terrible decision! Have a look:

Is this not an intimidating drawing? (Why yes, Dave, it is.) Does it look anything like a grand piano? (Why no, Dave, it does not.) Furthermore, you’re looking at Page 221, so we’re not even halfway through the build here. I’m edging towards terrified, Lego. Those pieces look small. Those pieces look many. And who’s to say the numbered bags make the one piece I’m looking for (amongst 3,361 of its plastic pals) any easier to find?

The pianist still hesitates, his hands shaking noticeably held just above the keyboard.

I wanted to finish this post with a photo of the first couple of pieces snapped together… I really did. I wanted you to believe my music-making was officially underway. But let’s be honest, my peek into the box where all those bags, orphans, and escaping pieces live, and the sheer size of Mr. Instruction Manual have me backing away from the keyboard (figuratively, followed by literally). Sorry folks, tonight’s performance isn’t quite ready for prime time. This pianist needs to change out of his sweat-drenched tuxedo into more comfortable clothing for now. Let’s take an intermission, shall we?

The audience heads to the lobby.

Fantastic Plastic

On Christmas Day, any parent of small children will stifle a yawn, having built bicycles, dollhouses, and train sets the night before. After all, Santa doesn’t deliver unassembled toys. But hang in there a few years, Mom & Dad, because the building shifts from the giver to the receiver. Older kids want to create. In my generation it was Hot Wheels, Erector Sets, and Lincoln Logs. And one other toy surpassed all others for its ease of use and versatility. Lego.

My Christmas gift from my wife this year was a grand piano. Can you top that? Okay, so it wasn’t the kind worth five figures or special movers to get it across the threshold. My piano measures a mere 12″ x 14″ and comes from the Lego “Ideas” collection. When it’s finished it will have been built from 3,662 individual pieces. I can’t wait to get started.

A grand piano made of Legos means the simple interlocking blocks I had as a kid have come a long, long way. Lego Ideas sets are “products inspired by and voted for by Lego fans”. The collection includes a typewriter, a ship in a bottle, the house from the Home Alone movies, and the apartment from the Seinfeld sitcom. Every Ideas product involves thousands of Lego pieces to assemble. Every Ideas product was also completely sold out for Christmas on the Lego website.

Fifty years ago, Lego was blessedly innocent. All you had were small bricks in primary colors and if you were lucky, a paper set of instructions to create a simple house or a vehicle. Otherwise, you just built whatever your imagination could come up with. When my own kids were kids, Lego moved to product-specific sets like a T. Rex from Jurassic World or an X-wing Starfighter from Star Wars. Sure, they looked cool when they were built, but I was always skeptical because the sets removed creativity from the experience. You’d just follow the step-by-steps in the little booklet and voila – a T. Rex. But call me a hypocrite because this sixty-year-old can’t wait to build his step-by-thousand-steps Lego Grand Piano.

Lego has an interesting history – too many chapters to cover here. The numbers tell the story in a nutshell. The Denmark-based company is considered the largest toy company in the world. Their bricks have inspired movies, video games, building competitions, and eight amusement parks. Their factories have been churning out little plastic pieces for almost 75 years. And at last count, that pile of pieces surpassed 600 billion (or 75 Legos for every man, woman, and child on earth).

I didn’t expect to be a Lego fan as an adult but then came the Architecture series in 2008, cool buildings like the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, and Empire State Building. I just had to have one, so last Christmas my wife gifted me the 1,032-piece United States Capitol Building. I didn’t clock how long it took to complete but I must’ve looked awfully confident in the assembly because now I’m staring down the more daunting Grand Piano. Maybe my wife wants me locked down in my home office for the next several months?

To underscore the popularity of Lego these days, the Architecture series alone includes 50 buildings and cityscapes, with more coming out each year (the Taj Mahal was released just last summer). These sets run anywhere from $50 to $250, with the discontinued ones setting you back three times as much. Sure, I’d love a Lego version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater” house, but I’m not going to pay $800 to a collector just to have one.

No discussion of Lego would be complete without a nod to custom creations. Our local Scheels department store has a larger-than-life Denver Broncos football player made of Legos, posing front and center in the toy department. The Church of Christ creation in the photo here didn’t forget seating for an 80-member choir (below the big yellow crosses). And the biggest custom creation of them all? A full-scale Lego replica of the previously-mentioned X-wing Starfighter, first displayed outdoors in New York’s Times Square. Try to picture 5.3 million Lego pieces and 23 tons of “toy” in the shape of a fighter jet. Or just check out the photos here.

Now that I’m done writing it’s time to break open the first bag of pieces to begin my Lego Grand Piano (and time for you to watch the ingenious stop-motion video below). I’ll use the stopwatch on my iPhone to capture the hours I consume to complete it. Er, days? Weeks? I mean, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither is a grand piano. You might want to check in with me next summer to make sure I haven’t gone bats.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia” and the Lego.com website.

Fine Print

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the movie, Jurassic Park. I’d read the Michael Crichton novel so I already knew the story, but I still couldn’t wrap my mind around that first dino scene, where a brachiosaurus casually munches on the uppermost leaves of a forty-foot tree. The gigantic creature was so lifelike I thought, “Where’d Steven Spielberg get a dinosaur?” In my defense, computer-generated imagery (CGI) was brand-spankin’ new back then. A ferocious T-Rex looking and moving like the real thing was still jaw-dropping in the 1990s. And I’m having the same reaction to the stuff rolling off 3D printers right now.

If you’re like me you haven’t paid much attention to 3D printing. You see some of the items a 3D printer can generate and they seem like child’s play. In fact, 3D printing reminds me of a 1970s toy called “Creepy Crawlers”. You had these tubes of colored goop you squeezed into metal molds, and then the molds went into an electric oven. The goop would grow from flat to 3D with heat, and suddenly the oven was spilling out all kinds of bugs and spiders you could drop on your friends. (There was also consumable goop called “Incredible Edibles”; products to compete with whatever the girls were making in their Easy-Bake ovens).

But I digress. Here’s my 3D printing naivete in a nutshell: I still think my 2D printer is the more impressive technology, cranking out high-resolution photos and perfectly addressed envelopes. I mean, whatever would I need a third dimension for?

Yep, I am seriously naive about 3D printing. The scope of this topic is mind-boggling if you really take the time to understand its potential. Here’s a good example. Picture a printer as big as your living room. Picture a printer cartridge of concrete instead of ink. Now watch the printer build your living room, one horizontal layer at a time. The printer can also build the rest of your house. Just add plumbing and electric when it’s done.

Without getting too far into the weeds, let’s define 3D printing for what it really is: additive manufacturing (AM). Here’s an easy way to picture the AM process. When you build a log cabin you lay out the entire foundation of logs for the house – with breaks for the doors – before you add the next layer of logs. You work your way up a layer of logs at a time, keeping those breaks for the doors, adding breaks for windows, pipes, and such, completing the structure with a sloping roof on top. Perhaps you add a fireplace in the process; again, layering bricks on top of bricks until you’ve reached the top of the chimney.

That’s pretty much how a 3D printer works. It “pictures” an object in horizontal layers and “prints” it from the ground up. 3D printing has been around longer than you think. 3D printers were developed as early as the 1970s (preceding your inkjet 2D printer!). The early versions just had to be manually programmed. Once we attached a computer and software, 3D printing really came into its own.

Watch the following video of a 3D printer confidently layering a basket weave – it’s mesmerizing:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/5/5d/Hyperboloid_Print.ogv/Hyperboloid_Print.ogv.360p.vp9.webm

The products speak for themselves, of course. A shortlist of the more cutting-edge printed creations gives you an idea of where our world is heading:

Cakes and pastries – The “ink” is baked goods in one nozzle and frosting in another. Design it on your computer screen and then “print”. It’s like the Easy-Bake Oven on steroids. Only you don’t need the oven.
3D-printed confectionery from Ukrainian chef/architect Dinara Kasko
Bones – No, not some plastic or other polymer designed to replicate bones, actual bones. It’s called bioprinting – the fabrication of natural tissue using cells and other building blocks, and it’s coming soon to a clinic near you. Don’t worry how long a broken bone will take to heal; just replace it!
Buildings – Forget about building that log cabin one layer at a time. Your 3D printer will do the whole job for you (and it’ll still look like a log cabin). Your printer can also build sturdier houses out of concrete. This one’s on the market in Riverhead, New York, for $300K.
Vehicles – 3D printers have already created boats, kayaks, and most of the makeup of cars and trucks. Long ago I was impressed with the robotics of the Ford Motor Company, employed on a long assembly line to build cars one part at a time. A 3D printer can essentially do the same job standing still, no assembly line required.
You – I could speculate on the potential for a full bioprint but let’s avoid that scary future for now and just say, a 3D printer can create a figurine to look exactly like you. Think of it as printing a 3-D photograph.

If your mind is not blown by what you’ve just read, consider this: 3D is already passe. That’s right, we’ve already moved on to 4D printing. 4D – at least with printing – refers to materials that can change shape with time, temperature, or some other type of stimulation. A good example would be a printed window shade, sitting tight and virtually unnoticed at the top of the window in daylight but expanding to full cover as darkness falls.

Don’t know about you but this level of technology makes my head hurt. When I’m done with this post I’m gonna push “print” and generate a nice 2D copy for my files. Oh, and maybe watch Jurassic Park again.

Some content sourced from the 7/24/2020 Forbes article, “What Can 3D Printing Be Used For?”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Let’s Do the Twist!

My Amazon order history says a lot about my purchasing habits. I am a buyer of needs vs. wants. Pet food. Printer ink. Humidifier filters. But every now and then, a little something nostalgic sneaks into My Shopping Cart. Favorite childhood books for my one-year-old granddaughter. A balloon-launching catapult to make a Thanksgiving turkey fly (it didn’t). Italian chocolates from Perugia, also discovered during a year abroad in college. And just today – on total impulse – a Rubik’s Cube.

Rubik’s Cube – adding a few wrinkles to us baby boomers – celebrates its forty-fifth birthday this year. Back in 1974 when it was invented (and originally dubbed “Magic Cube”), the 3x3x3 trinket earned our attention for its mechanical magic as well as its almost-impossible-to-memorize solution.

To be precise, there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (that’s “quintillion”) possible positions of Rubik’s colorful squares. The Cube comes with neither instructions nor answers. Already solved in its packaging, you can’t help twisting it up into a mess of color. In our pre-Internet world, Rubik’s Cube required endless gyrations in search of the answer (instead of just, “Hey Alexa”). But there was something immensely satisfying about the resulting nine squares of single color on each of its six sides. There was also something tempting about peeling off the colored stickers and rearranging them instead.

Erno Rubik, a Hungarian inventor, was an architect and architecture professor “searching to find a good task for his students” when he completed the Cube’s first working prototype – a mess of wood blocks and rubber bands. A small plastics company took a chance on its manufacture and the rest is history. In the first four years alone, two hundred million Cubes were produced and sold.

I was in college (and also an architecture student) when Rubik’s Cube first hit the shelves. Its perfect symmetry and twisting ability to reinvent its colorful look went hand-in-hand with my interest in building design. I remember keeping a Cube on my dorm room desk – at first for mindless manipulation; later for successful solving. Not that I could solve it quickly, mind you. The world record – an average of five solves – is six seconds. The world record with one hand (???) is nine seconds. The world record using only your feet (again, ???) is twenty-two seconds. My solve is expressed in minutes, if not hours.

Few puzzles compete with Rubik’s Cube for sheer “can’t put it down”. But there are a few. One of my favorites was the wooden double maze, the box-like puzzle with the Etch-A-Sketch dials on the side, maneuvering the steel ball through the walled maze without dropping it through one of several holes. I devoted hours and hours to that puzzle, always sweating those final tricky turns to the finish. Another favorite: Marble Solitaire, where you hop-eliminated marbles in search of the perfect solution: a single marble standing proudly in the board’s center divot. Finally (courtesy of Cracker Barrel restaurants), how about “Triangle Peg Solitaire”, the hop-elimination puzzle with the colored golf tees? Thanks to that little game, my kids were supremely patient after the dinner order was placed.

With somewhere near four hundred million sold, Rubik’s Cube is considered the best-selling toy of all time. Its inventive design landed the Cube in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1982. The Cube also garnered “Toy of the Year” in eight countries, including Germany, France, and the U.S.

Inevitably, there were attempts to advance Rubik’s design, such as a 4x4x4 version (“Rubik’s Revenge”), or pyramid, dodecahedron, and hexahedron shapes. But going completely off the rails, look no further than GoCube – a thoroughly high-tech update to Rubik’s. GoCube is also 3x3x3, but rimmed with LED lights, and contains wireless smart sensors, an embedded gyro, and an accelerometer. Download the GoCube app to your phone (of course there’s an app), and watch your twists on-screen instead of on the cube itself. The app guides you to the solution (if you so choose), creates alternative mosaic-looking puzzles, and run reports on solving speed and efficiency. You can even wage virtual head-to-head competitions. All for “only” $119.

“The Pursuit of Happyness” (courtesy of Warner Brothers)

I’m sure Erno Rubik (and Will Smith) would pooh-pooh GoCube as too much of a good thing. I would agree. The app-driven, light-up, hundred-dollar GoCube is over the top, with zero nostalgia to boot. On the other hand, Rubik’s Cube cost me $4.59 on Amazon. That’s a sweet deal, and a cheap way to learn how to do the twist all over again.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”, and the Wall Street Journal article, “Never Solved the Rubik’s Cube?…”

Loose Lips Sink Sips

Twenty years from now, my granddaughter will wander into my home office as a young adult, just for a look around. She won’t find much of interest on the desk or the cabinets (if we still need desks or cabinets twenty years from now), so she’ll direct her attention to the things on my shelves. Besides photos and books, she’ll find mementos from times and places past: greeting cards, concert programs, sports tickets, autographed items, and so on. She’ll also find items no longer necessary in her world, like a newspaper (from the day I was born), a paperweight (will anything be on paper anymore?), and a few music CD’s I can’t seem to part with. To this last group of items, perhaps I should add a drinking straw.

“Grandpa?”, she’ll say when she spies it, “What’s the narrow little tube with the colored stripes?” “Oh”, I’ll smile and say, “That’s a straw. People used them back in the old days to suck drinks out of their glasses.” She’ll ponder that for a bit and then ask, “Why wouldn’t they just drink straight from the glass like we do today?” Good question, granddaughter. Then I’d pull up a chair, and explain the tragic tale of the drinking straw – the humble roots as a durable replacement for rye grass; the evolution into kid-friendly varieties like bendy, Crazy, candy, and spoon-ended (for slush drinks); the proliferation into seemingly-essential varieties like miniature (cocktails), “extend-o” (juice boxes), extra-wide (bubble-tea), and trendy doubles-as-a-stirrer (Starbucks). Finally, I’d talk about the straw’s fade into obsolescence – the promoted shame over “one-time-use” products, the YouTube-sensationalized horrors of polypropylene impacts to the environment, and the headlines and bans and laws which would ultimately exterminate the little suckers.

Perhaps my granddaughter would pose another question: “Why the fuss over a little piece of plastic, when so much else in the world deserved equal-if-not-more attention?” Exactly. I asked myself the same question when I sat down to write this piece.

No matter where you stand on the drinking straw debate, it’s a great example of the power of social media to elevate a topic to a level of importance beyond what it might deserve. According to those in the know, straws account for a tiny portion of the plastic waste in landfills and oceans. But they have our attention, don’t they? As Plastic Pollution Coalition CEO Dianna Cohen puts it, “We look at straws as one of the gateway issues to help people start thinking about the global plastic pollution problem.” “Gateway issue” – I like that. The straw is simply the catalyst, easing people into an awareness of a much more significant problem.

As for the demise of drinking straws, we’ve moved from opinion to discussion to debate, and finally to laws and bans to discourage their use, yet we’ve hardly reached a resolution. An effective replacement for the plastic straw simply doesn’t exist. Paper straws durable enough to last the life of the drink don’t decompose much faster than plastic. Paper straws cost five times as much, so the restaurant industry will have to swallow hard. Reusable straws have their merits (ex. metal, glass), but unless restaurants budget them to the bottom line, we’re facing a massive change in behavior. You’re already leaving the house with your car keys and your phone, but hey, don’t forget that reusable straw.

More likely, straws will simply disappear altogether. As we speak, we’re in that awkward middle-ground where straws are still an option in restaurants, but more and more establishments (and entire states) mandate the customer must ask for one. From there, you can make the easy leap to guilt-by-association – as in, sure you can have a straw, but do you really want to be seen using one? The only resolution in my mind is to do without, like we do hot coffee, beer, and wine. Time to drink everything straight from the glass.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”, and articles from Business Insider, Eater, and Sprudge.

Disc Chalky

Woodstock Candy (“Let Sweet Flashbacks Sprinkle Down”) assembles collections of vintage candy and sells them on Amazon. The “nostalgic retro mixes” tailor to the buyer’s age, as in “30th Birthday Box” or “65th Birthday Box”. For those in my decade, Woodstock tosses in classics like Chuckles, Red Hots, Sugar Daddy’s and Smarties. Also, a few Pixy Stix, a Candy Necklace, and a long strip of those colorful Candy Buttons. Finally, buried quietly in the back of the box: one small roll of Necco wafers.

Four months ago, the Wall Street Journal alerted those of us with nostalgic sweet teeth of the fate of Necco wafers. More correctly, NECCO – the New England Confectionery Company – would shutter if it didn’t secure a buyer. Apparently, no one came to the candy counter, because the factory closed its doors late last month. The consumer reaction was immediate – on the order of the Hostess Twinkies frenzy. Rolls of Necco wafers flew off the shelves. Frantic calls to candy stores demanded entire boxes be placed on hold. One Necco devotee offered his 2003 Honda Accord in exchange for the company’s remaining product. You might call it “disc(o) fever”.

The Necco wafer/disc is an underappreciated candy of years gone by, though admittedly my affection for the confection is not what it used to be. Necco’s are packaged in rolls of about thirty, in an assortment of eight flavors, including clove. Clove. Even the flavors sound dated. A Necco wafer looks and tastes like a disc of chalk (drywall?), with a hint of flavoring to make it seem like food. Eat a dozen wafers and your hands and clothes are covered with edible dust. Eat a dozen more and the flavors all start to taste the same. What used to be a satisfying crunch now feels like a threat to my dental work.

Why was I drawn to Necco wafers, when my back-in-the-day 7-Eleven store included an entire aisle of more appealing candy? Maybe I just like little discs. My father used to drive my brothers and I to some of his building sites, and I quickly discovered the concrete littered with dozens of metal coins. These were “slugs” – today called KO’s or “knockouts”; the quarter-sized remains of partially-stamped openings in electrical junction boxes. I collected hundreds of them – God knows why (but I was a kid, so I didn’t need a reason).

I also collected coins – more specifically quarters, because quarters were big money in my day, and translated into just about everything in that 7-Eleven aisle. Quarters could also be stacked into paper wrappers; perhaps my precursor to a roll of Necco wafers.

At the same time in life, I had what was probably the coolest toy around. It was called a “Rapid-Fire Tracer Gun” (if you were really cool you had the Star Trek version). The Tracer fired little round plastic discs, spinning them out of the barrel so fast they hurt when they hit skin. They even made a Tracer Rifle for more accurate shots. The Tracer had a spring-driven magazine, so you could queue up a whole pile of plastic discs. Or Necco wafers.

Necco wafers aren’t nearly as appealing as some of the stories behind them. A hundred years ago Necco’s were carried by Arctic explorers and handed out to Eskimo children. Their “suspiciously long” shelf life (Necco’s are sugar, corn syrup, and not much else) allowed them to be stored for months; then consumed by Union soldiers during America’s Civil War. And therein lies the significance of the NECCO factory closing: the wafers have been around since 1847.

If I still don’t have your attention, consider this: NECCO also manufactures Sweethearts, the heart-shaped romantic-message-stamped equivalent of the Necco wafer, distributed by the billions on Valentine’s Day. Think about that: no more candy hearts bearing “Kiss Me” or “Love You” or “Be Mine”. Instead, just inedible greeting cards and meh grocery-store chocolates. But don’t despair – I think the factory closing is just a hiatus. The Hostess Twinkie came back and so will the Necco wafer. It’s already underway, so join the movement: #SaveNecco.