When the restaurant wants your phone number

Excerpts from an article in The Atlantic:

A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says, smiling. “We can seat you right away.” As she gathers menus, he absorbs the pleasant hum of a busy dining room, breathes in the tantalizing smells from the semi-open kitchen. Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?”...

Like pretty much everyone else, I am well aware that my information is strip-mined wherever I go, in more ways than I can count and in many that I will never know... Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”...

Most striking was OpenTable’s promotion of a feature, currently in beta, called Global Insights. Until now, as Vilkhu had told me, whatever data a restaurant collected through the reservation platforms remained confined to that restaurant or restaurant group. Global Insights, which is available to OpenTable Pro subscribers, is the first feature to jump that garden wall and allow other restaurants access to the same information—in OpenTable’s words, to “get an idea of how your diners behave at other restaurants across the OpenTable Diner Network.” With an account, any restaurant can identify big spenders, diners who tend to linger at a table, diners who order a lot of drinks, frequent late-cancelers, and chronic “no-showers."...

Curious to see what insights on me OpenTable might share with that hypothetical restaurant, I sent the company a request for my personal data....

Continue reading at the link.  My goal in blogging is to drive people to links, not steal content.

This is a "tannin icicle"

Sami drums

Half of my biologic heritage is from Norway, so this Facebook post earlier this year about Sami drums caught my attention.  Wikipedia has an extensive discussion of the history of these drums, but I don't have time to read, much less excerpt it, so for now I'll just embed the Facebook blurb.

Drum-related: Three-minute drum solo on a bodhrán

Skyrocketing prices for some technology company shares

The U.S. equity markets have been hitting all-time highs despite an ongoing war on Iran and relentlessly-increasing prices for gasoline, diesel, and other oil-derivative products like fertilizers.  The rise seems to be driven almost entirely by huge increases in the share prices of AI-related companies (producers of the technology and of the materials necessary for the "build-out" of the process) - justified in the minds of investors by the potential for enormous gains in productivity and profits at some time in the future.  The financing of these investments and the issuing of new shares to finance growth has sucked money out of other investments.  These developments are alluded to in a recent statement by the CEO if Sun Microsystems, reproduced here in a post from Facebook several months ago:

For old-timers like me, the numbers look crazy.  I'm old enough to remember the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, when the DJIA fell over 20% in one day.   I was an investor back then, and I've told people I "slept like a baby" through it (i.e. "woke up every hour and cried").

This ongoing and totally unjustified war by the U.S. and Israel on Iran is having widespread rippling effects through the world economy; the U.S. has been relatively spared but is unlikely to escape unscathed.  Full disclosure:  I established bearing options positions on the S&P index yesterday.  Further disclosure: I tend to be a "perma-bear" predicting market falls that typically don't occur.

The cost of water

Yesterday, The Guardian reported on rising costs for drinking water in the U.S.:

US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study.

Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.

In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

I've been keeping careful financial records since moving into this house 26 years ago, so I looked up our numbers.  In 2015 our house used 60,000 gallons of water at a cost of $158 (excluding stormwater and sewer as per above study).  In 2025 our usage dropped to 41,000 gallons (in part because we have mostly stopped watering the lawn and gardens) at a cost of $177.

Adjusting those costs for usage, in 2015 we were paying $2.60 per thousand gallons of water.  For 2025 the cost was $4.31 per thousand gallons.  That's an increase of about 70% in ten years.  Some of that increased cost may have resulted from the community replacing lead-containing distribution pipes in the circuits.  Presumably the rest results from their costs for salaries, maintenance, water treatment, and other infrastruture upgrades.  

The Guardian article has informed commentary on the reasons for the national increase, noting "corporate water abuses" (in years prior to datacenters), federal disinvestment, and climate change, and expecially the "major disparity between publicly owned and for-profit water systems."

Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations.

I'm not angry about our increase; I'm delighted that fresh clean (good-tasting) water is available at the turn of a tap.  I wonder if any readers here have similar long-term data.

A request for Photoshop assistance

I saw the above request in a Facebook thread.  I don't normally monitor Photoshop request sites, but I have enjoyed some responses I've seen in the past, including my post "When you ask the internet for assistance" in 2017, this "Photoshop battle" in 2018, and more recently "AI is the new Photoshop" earlier this year.  So I was delighted and not surprised to see these responses to the above request:

There are dozens more at the Facebook source; cyberspace abounds in amazingly creative people.

Addendum:  Here's another request with hundreds of responses -

- and there are of course many more clever requests/replies in that Facebook group.

Blue Planet III

Wow.  If you're ever going to click the fullscreen icon in the lower right corner, this is the time to do so.

Three giraffes

"I took this in 2025 in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, in the Oltepesi area. Three young giraffes were standing side by side on the savanna and looked back at me with great curiosity. Right behind the middle one stood a single umbrella acacia, perfectly lined up with its head and neck. The giraffe seemed to be wearing the tree, like a green hairdo or a fancy hat. Nothing was staged or arranged; it was a matter of being in the right spot at the right moment’"

Photograph: Dirk Koster/Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026

Via The Guardian, where this was one of several featured photos from the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards finalists for 2026.  (Image cropped for emphasis from the original)

"Send me a man who reads!" (International Paper advertisements of the 1960s)

These advertisements from International Paper ran in a variety of magazines in the early 1960s.  I encountered them in Reader's Digest, which our family subscribed to because it was the cheapest magazine subscription available via my high school's subscription-selling annual fund drive.  I clipped these ads out, posted them in various places, and saved them for decades until they disappeared during one of my moves between apartments as a young adult.

As an adult I've wanted to see the ads again because they were so influential on my high-school brain.  Some years ago I wrote to International Paper asking if any copies, prints, posters etc were available, but received no reply.  My current neighborhood library for understandable reasons does not keep hard copies of decades-old magazines.  I found these  two in a 2013 post at Reactor Fire.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to an anonymous reader who searched online and found this "doctor" one that was particularly meaningful to my 18-year-old self -

"Wild Grapes" (Robert Frost, 1942)

What tree may not the fig be gathered from?

The grape may not be gathered from the birch?

It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch.

As a girl gathered from the birch myself

Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,

I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.

I was born, I suppose, like anyone,

And grew to be a little boyish girl

My brother could not always leave at home.

But that beginning was wiped out in fear

The day I swung suspended with the grapes,

And was come after like Eurydice

And brought down safely from the upper regions;

And the life I live now’s an extra life

I can waste as I please on whom I please.

So if you see me celebrate two birthdays,

And give myself out of two different ages,

One of them five years younger than I look-

One day my brother led me to a glade

Where a white birch he knew of stood alone,

Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves,

And heavy on her heavy hair behind,

Against her neck, an ornament of grapes.

Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year.

One bunch of them, and there began to be

Bunches all round me growing in white birches,

The way they grew round Leif the Lucky’s German;

Mostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though,

As the moon used to seem when I was younger,

And only freely to be had for climbing.

My brother did the climbing; and at first

Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter

And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack;

Which gave him some time to himself to eat,

But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed.

So then, to make me wholly self-supporting,

He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth

And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes.

‘Here, take a tree-top, I’ll get down another.

Hold on with all your might when I let go.’

I said I had the tree. It wasn’t true.

The opposite was true. The tree had me.

The minute it was left with me alone

It caught me up as if I were the fish

And it the fishpole. So I was translated

To loud cries from my brother of ‘Let go!

Don’t you know anything, you girl? Let go!’

But I, with something of the baby grip

Acquired ancestrally in just such trees

When wilder mothers than our wildest now

Hung babies out on branches by the hands

To dry or wash or tan, I don’t know which,

(You’ll have to ask an evolutionist)-

I held on uncomplainingly for life.

My brother tried to make me laugh to help me.

‘What are you doing up there in those grapes?

Don’t be afraid. A few of them won’t hurt you.

I mean, they won’t pick you if you don’t them.’

Much danger of my picking anything!

By that time I was pretty well reduced

To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.

‘Now you know how it feels,’ my brother said,

‘To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them,

That when it thinks it has escaped the fox

By growing where it shouldn’t-on a birch,

Where a fox wouldn’t think to look for it-

And if he looked and found it, couldn’t reach it-

Just then come you and I to gather it.

Only you have the advantage of the grapes

In one way: you have one more stem to cling by,

And promise more resistance to the picker.’

One by one I lost off my hat and shoes,

And still I clung. I let my head fall back,

And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears

Against my brother’s nonsense; ‘Drop,’ he said,

‘I’ll catch you in my arms. It isn’t far.’

(Stated in lengths of him it might not be.)

‘Drop or I’ll shake the tree and shake you down.’

Grim silence on my part as I sank lower,

My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings.

‘Why, if she isn’t serious about it!

Hold tight awhile till I think what to do.

I’ll bend the tree down and let you down by it.’

I don’t know much about the letting down;

But once I felt ground with my stocking feet

And the world came revolving back to me,

I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers,

Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off.

My brother said: ‘Don’t you weigh anything?

Try to weigh something next time, so you won’t

Be run off with by birch trees into space.’

It wasn’t my not weighing anything

So much as my not knowing anything-

My brother had been nearer right before.

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;

I had not learned to let go with the hands,

As still I have not learned to with the heart,

And have no wish to with the heart-nor need,

That I can see. The mind-is not the heart.

I may yet live, as I know others live,

To wish in vain to let go with the mind-

Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me

That I need learn to let go with the heart.

Cited in Ann Patchett's "Whistler," and reprinted here in toto (it's in the public domain) from LiteraryTheory and Criticism, where there is relevant contextual information about the poem being a companion piece to his "Birches."  Boldface added to my favorite phrases.

"The Secret of Secrets" (Dan Brown, 2025)

In the 18 years I've been writing this blog, I've reviewed 139 books to add to the "recommended books" category of TYWKIWDBI.  I suppose a majority of them have been somewhat obscure works that I wanted to bring to the attention of the readership, but some have been popular titles, including Booker Prize winners and other best-sellers.  Such is the case with The Secret of Secrets. Author Dan Brown rocketed to fame with his series of Robert Langdon thrillers.  This is the sixth book in that sequence, and a Netflix series (without Tom Hanks) is currently in  production.

The book is an easy read because Brown writes well.  He mixes action and problem-solving with an abundance (or sometimes a superfluity) of factual information about the subject matter and the physical locations of the action (in this case Prague).  But another characteristic of his writing this time seems to be the inclusion of a boatload of product placement.  For example:

"Langdon finished dressing, finally feeling warm in his heavy chinos, turtleneck, and thick Dale sweater." 

"They met at Faukman's favorite table in Manhattan - the back booth at Trattoria Dell'Arte - where authentic Italian cuisine was served in a room decorated like an artist's studio..."

"Langdon would have much preferred his usual Vesper martini with Nolet's Reserve gin."

In none of these situations were the details relevant to the storyline.  My wife and I counted over 250 such examples.  I understand that the location of the Four Seasons Prague hotel next to the river was salient for an early action, but the next several dozen times he could have returned to "his hotel" rather than specifying the name (one wonders whether the author has been granted lifetime upgrades to suites for future visits).  I don't remember whether such brand-name specificity was prevalent in Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code, and I understand that product placement is done routinely in movies and perhaps in other best-sellling books, but in this case it became a bit annoying.

I did appreciate some of the technical and historical information, one snippet of which I'll copypaste here rather than typing the text:

Readers are invited to offer mini-reviews and opinions in the Comments.

Addendum:  Dan Brown denies using product placement in this interview (hat tip to reader Bob)

There are two types of sumac

This is one of the most interesting things I've found today and it was worth a quick browse (only fast-forwarded a couple times).  Despite having grown up around sumac since my Minnesota childhood, I never learned (or have forgotten) that there is a world of difference between "poison sumac" and "staghorn sumac."  

Addedium: A tip of my blogging cap to an anonymous reader who offered these links -

Sumac Foraging and Preparation

Sumac vs. Zaatar: What's the difference?

Three-minute drum solo on a bodhrán

"The Maguires at the launch of their debut album, Little Giants and Other Oxymorons at Temple Bar Tradfest in January 2017.  This clip features a bodhrán solo from Seán Maguire, just 11 years of age at the time, followed by a set of reels from the band."

The instrument was totally new to me. Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia entry:

Composer Seán Ó Riada declared the bodhrán to be the native drum of the ancient Celts (as did bodhrán maker Paraic McNeela), suggesting that it was possibly used originally for winnowing or wool dying, with a musical history that predated Christianity, native to southwest Ireland... However, according to musician Ronan Nolan, former editor of Irish Music magazine, the bodhrán evolved in the mid-19th century from the tambourine, which can be heard on some Irish music recordings dating back to the 1920s....

The drum is struck either with the bare hand or with a lathe-turned piece of wood called a bone, tipper, beater, stick or cipín.  Tippers were originally fashioned from a double-ended knuckle bone, but are now commonly made from ash, holly, or hickory wood...

...a pitch-varying technique that enabled the bodhrán player to closely follow the cadence and melodic phrasing of the tune being performed. This approach marked a significant technical advancement in bodhrán playing, shifting the instrument from a predominantly rhythmic role toward a more musically responsive one. 

Much more at the link.

A very unusual door

The overall image is a bit distorted from using a wide-angle lens indoors, but it does show that a wooden bar has been fixed diagonally across the lower portion of this door.  Its purpose is totally obscure - until you open the door...

Found in the Awful Taste But Great Execution subreddit, where there is often some totally bizarre material.  The discussion thread for this post has some salient comments re design and building codes.

U.S. map of named highways in 1927

Apologies to the owner of this image, because I saved it in 2007 without noting the source.  This is obviously not a map of all highways, but rather of the ones that by the 1920s had received "names."

Of personal interest to me is #33 on the map - the Yellowstone Trail - which begins in Boston and passes through Minneapolis on its way to Yellowstone Park in Colorado, then continues on to the west coast.  My family home during my high school years was on the Yellowstone Trail, but I had no idea at the time of the significance of the name.  I'm planning a detailed post in the future, and just wanted to leave this here for now.

Addendum: possible source for the map here.