Do We Have Good Places to Eat in Gate City?

Over the weekend someone who'd grown up in Gate City, but lived in a nearby town as an adult, gave me a shock. "Apart from McDonalds Gate City doesn't have anywhere to eat any more, do they, except Taco Bell?"

Well.

As an alternative to McDonalds, in the same shopping plaza, there's that Subway where a sponsor of this web site, long dead, used to take me for lunch and discussions of bill reading strategy. I loved that dear old man in a niecely way, and haven't gone in there often without him. I think Subway is too much a big chain, not willing enough to let people forego the sauce and have more cucumber and tomato in their salad, but they used to do good gluten-free salads. 

Now in my personal opinion, our best restaurant--the all-around winner--is technically outside of town, but it's not in any other town and it gets its mail through Gate City. For quality and variety of food, cleanliness of building, period charm and atmosphere, fairness of prices, and a credible attempt at a Real Salad Bar, you drive briskly through Gate City and keep going west till you come to the Hob Nob diner out on Route 58. They used to grill the meat to your taste and have no problem serving just the meat and the veg on a plate. The menu had a nice selection of sandwiches from hamburgers to ostrich meat, side dishes including chili and corn bread, the salad bar, pie and ice cream and milkshakes, and juice as an alternative to soda pop or water. (They served tap water, but tourists used to think it must have been bottled because our local tap water doesn't taste bad--and has, in fact, been filtered and bottled.) They even hired carhops in summer--cute little teenagers who scampered around the parking lot serving customers in the convenience of their cars. Everything was straight out of the 1950s except the ostrich meat (vintage 1970), salad bar (1980), and, unfortunately, the prices. The prices were contemporary, but reasonable. That was before COVID. I've not actually been there post-COVID. That's a hint.

But if you're not driving and want to eat right in the heart of town, as it might be while you're dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, court, or some county office business, there are options.

Long John Silver's Seafood Shop was trendy in the 1970s. Meh. I have fond memories of eating there with a friend, also now dead. He was not much older than I and my feelings toward him were not niecely. That was before I went gluten-free. Just about everything on that chain restaurant's menu could and should have been gluten-free. Nothing, except the drinks, was gluten-free. Can't fix stupid. I've heard the restaurant's gone, or going, out of business. No loss. 

Hardee's...urgh ick...if they hadn't formed a solid clique of people who actually call themselves a club and get free meal tickets in the mail, that place would have died a long time ago. It's been long enough that I can laugh about it now...When I met the man known to this web site as my Significant Other, about twenty years ago, he asked, in the way of small talk, "What do you do?" I said, "I just got back in town and I'm looking for odd jobs." He said, "I can get you jobs...in construction!" It was a dare; he could tell that what I meant by odd jobs were things like teaching, typing, computer-ing, storekeeping, or tour-guiding. I said, "Yer on." So I signed on with a crew who were remodelling a house in Lee County. It was a delightful job. One day, I forget now why we were in Gate City early in the day, I was riding to or from work with the boss. He tried to maintain good relationships with all the other business owners in Gate City; he ate at all the restaurants in turn when he was in town. That day he wanted to eat at Hardee's. So I went in with him, looked at the menu, saw all the versions of meat and bread on it, and asked if they could do a sandwich without the bread, just put the meat and veg on a plate. They did. It wasn't great; it wasn't bad. I thought no more of it but the next time the boss was in Hardee's, he said, the help had said nasty things about being asked to prepare something different from what they always did prepare, by hand. They didn't want me to come back, he said. So then a few weeks later some other friend or relative wanted to use one of those free coupons at Hardee's. I looked at the menu. They were now advertising that they did special gluten-free meals without bread--for twice the price of the same meat and veg in the sandwich. I am not making this up. I seriously recommend that, while walking past Hardee's, all visitors make sure to spit ostentatiously on the pavement. But the place is still there. 

It should probably be required by law: Before opening a restaurant, the owner must demonstrate the ability to cook and serve anything on the menu "free from" any of its regular ingredients. And thank the customer for letting person try. Food bullies should not be allowed even to eat in restaurants.

Taco Bell. What can one say? Taco Bell is writer-friendly; there's actually a literary magazine for people who eat there to use the Internet, the Taco Bell Quarterly. Before glyphosate I liked the food, so now I expect I'd like the food again. Still...it's a big-chain restaurant sitting on the site of a delightful little old house-made-into-a-shop, which I miss. 

You're on Kane Street, passing the Hardee's and Taco Bell, Long John Silver's, Pizza Plus--I'm not sure about the status of Pizza Plus. All they used to offer were combinations of bread and cheese with various meats and vegetables on top. Some of my young relatives liked Pizza Plus and I nibbled on cheese-free bread sticks in there a few times. They had nothing to offer the gluten-free so I can't say I'l miss them if they're gone.

Then you come to a structure that looks like some sort of art, a building-sized concrete sculpture of a big carry-out box--in glen plaid?--with a hot dog, a hamburger, and a box of fries on it. It is an actual building. It's not a restaurant open to the public, but cars roll around it, order fast food on one side, pick up fast food on the other side, and park somewhere nearby while people eat. This is Pal's Restaurant, a locally owned chain. The menu is straight out of the 1950s. The hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, chili, shakes, and sodas are excellent if you like that sort of thing.

If you like that sort of thing but prefer to sit down while you eat it, on the other side of the street is the Campus Drive-In. It's not actually on the high school campus; high schools and colleges were a trendy decorating theme in the 1950s. My opinion is that Pal's and the Hob Nob do 1950s fast food better, but the Campus Drive-In is a local landmark and has its devotees.

Anyway, keep walking; better restaurants are ahead of you. There is a little place that used to be a gas station, on your right, just below the intersection with Jackson Street. They advertise barbecued pork as a specialty. They do other things. I've never gone inside the place but one afternoon, a few years ago, a friend who was a local business booster directed a friend of hers to fill a take-out box with a selection of chicken and vegetable dishes, take it to me, and get a verdict. They passed. 

If you keep walking, on the corner above the intersection of Kane and Jackson Streets you'll see what is now the Maple Tree Cafe. It's a sort of post-COVID makeover of what used to be the Roberts Family Bakery & Cafe where I used to write. If you're in town to meet with your lawyer, and your case does not involve pleading extreme poverty, the Cafe is a good place to have coffee and a snack. The post-COVID influence on the decor started out by building in more healthy distance by having a mini-bookstore in the cafe. Mini-mini...Booksellers are, traditionally, gentlemen and -women. We naturally prefer that you buy books from us but, if another bookseller has a book you want, we'll direct you to per store. 

Across the street is a murky place that attempts to appeal to Northern tourists with an Italian-type name (the place is owned by a woman with an English-type name), dim lighting, and cleaning-fluid-based beverages. For about twenty years those who want to attract more money have been saying that what Gate City needs is a place where alcohol cravers can sit down and drink alcohol with food. I've been saying that we need that almost as badly as we need another episode where a drunk driver runs over a Sunday School picnic. Italian food that requires the look of a Mafia den is probably dreadful. Good Italian food can be enjoyed stone-cold sober in broad daylight.

There is, however, a decent little Mexican place, further up Jackson Street, closer to the courthouse. It's changed hands a few times but I think it's still owned by real Mexicans. Food is cooked fresh, reasonably authentic, with a reasonable range of heat, and sold at quite good prices for that quality of restaurant food. They offer an authentic selection of Mexican cervezas and vinos. 

I, like most people in Gate City, don't really do restaurants. They're not an authentic part of our cultural heritage. Our ancestors raised most of their food on their own farms and cooked and ate it in their own 

homes. When they got tired of their own cooking, they visited friends and relatives and ate food cooked their way. The quality of locally produced food as served by local farmers or their children, even if they use the really old traditional recipes that over-cook, over-salt, and over-grease food, is much, much better than 1950s fast food. So who even needs restaurants, except, as a male client said to me a few years ago, as a place where people of different genders, who are married to other people, can talk at length and everyone can see that all they're doing is talking about business. And of course everyone knows that that tells us nothing about what they do next as they drive off, probably in separate cars, possibly to a motel in Kingsport. And there's a movement in the Baptist church these days for men to practice moral rectitude by not going to lunch alone with women, because of the possibility of going somewhere else after lunch. So we probably don't need any restaurants. 

But we have them. Lots of people like to cook, have been told they could open a restaurant, have opened one, and have found themselves fighting like cornered rats to keep the places open. Surely, they tell themselves, there must be some way to make their dream of earning a living by cooking pay...

So, back in the 1960s, the restaurant owners of then kicked, screamed, clawed, and bit when Route 23 was being rammed through the mountains. It would make it easy for people just to roll on into Kingsport and never shop or eat in Gate City, they wailed. 

(Route 23 is still here. Most of the restaurant owners of then had retired from thirty or forty years of working and saving to open their restaurants, and aren't even remembered any more, though I do remember vividly where the Mill House and Liberty Bell restaurants used to be. When I rented a store space on Jackson Street, in between two later owners' use of it, that store space was where the Mill House used to be. (I had lunch in the Mill House, the first time I ever ate lunch in a restaurant alone, on grade eight's "career day." I don't remember what I ate.) I remember when most of the restaurants that now exist came to town. The Campus Drive-In and the Hob Nob have been around longer than I have. Pal's existed before I was born, in Kingsport, but opened the branches in the giant glen plaid boxes only in the 1980s.)

Then in 1980 the first effort was made to shut down the Friday Market. People were coming to town to trade there and were ignoring the restaurants and the regular stores, the restaurant owners of then screamed. The market was declared closed. People announced a real boycott of Gate City's restaurants and regular stores. The market reopened in time for strawberries to be sold.

Nobody messed with the Friday Market again during the next forty years, but while writing in the Cafe I learned that the restaurant owners still resented it. They wanted something else to be done with the space, something good enough to make people forget the Friday Market. 

Hello? Gate City is a farm and market town. It made an heroic effort to be a factory town, a hundred years ago, and you can still see where one of the factories used to be, but they're all long gone. If and whenever the Friday Market goes, I said, Gate City will become...not quite so much of an historical curiosity as Bray, because we'll still have the courthouse with the adjacent law offices, but similar to Bray. Which is still an interesting place on a tourist's itinerary, but which will never be mistaken for an actual town.

COVID happened. Friday Market traffic dropped. Efforts to recover from COVID began. The Weber City Fire Department, which is technically in a different town but I've never seen a tourist notice the difference, bought a shopping plaza and opened a bigger farm-and-flea market. Friday Market vendors moved. (Except for me, of course. I thought seriously about renting a place in Weber City to store my merchandise, but nobody really seemed to need the money and in any case the people I knew who had suitable places weren't what you could call close to the market, at least not in terms of carrying unsold merchandise after six or eight hours in the sun.) 

The restaurant owners, and "boutique-y" store owners, pounced. Mrs. Roberts, of the Cafe, had gone to a "splash park" in Tennessee with her grandchildren and thought that would be a wonderful way to fill up the space where our own Friday Market belonged. In town council meetings people demanded that a couple of food trucks that had started rolling around town be subjected to extra licensing fees, to make sure they weren't at any possible financial advantage over the restaurant owners. I've even heard wild talk about free drinks or free children's meals being offered to splash park patrons to entice them into our restaurants. 

Well, y'know what? I had already explained to Mrs. Roberts, at length and in detail, why attacking the Friday Market was just wrong, unbefitting a good Carson Republican like herself, and also doomed. I had, meanwhile, been working on other plans. An open-air market is not actually good for books. I think Gate City needs its Friday Market, and will have its Friday Market. I always had thought I, personally, needed a different kind of venue. People had said "If you don't want to take out a loan and make a big investment, just take a few books into Friday Market," and when better alternatives were not available I did, but I never once intended to stay there for long. 

When Mrs. Roberts had bought, and rented to me, the space where the Mill House Restaurant used to be, she said, "You'll find out"...what she meant was why I wouldn't make money there, although as it turned out I did. Now I say to her, "You'll find out." The splash park will be fun for a year or two. It will be little used, since local people don't need to go into town and splash in the same water other people are using when we want to cool off. It will lose money. The expensive gadgets will break down. The town council will end up reopening the Friday Market as one of several steps it will be taking to pay for the splash park. It will all cost me absolutely nothing, and I hope those who will be involved with it will enjoy it.

I think Providence has actually provided them with an opportunity for a safe and salutary learning experience, while most of the people who were earning significant parts of their incomes in the Friday Market have an opportunity to work in a bigger market with more traffic.

But if the splash park won't boost Gate City's restaurants very far, what will?

"Try to keep the customers they've got," the out-of-towner said. "That convenience store" (that we had passed) "is next to where the power company's headquarters used to be. In the morning you used to see all the company trucks stop at that store while the men went in for coffee. Now, of course, APCo has moved their headquarters to Kingsport. But those men don't stop there any more for coffee even when they're in town."

"They can get coffee closer to their headquarters in Kingsport?" I guessed.

"They go to a gas station in Weber City. Because X never liked cleaning the bathrooms. When the COVID mess started, she was the first to ask, 'Can we close the bathrooms?' They kept the bathrooms open but X wanted to keep them locked in the morning and make people ask for a key. Wanted to lock them up, a few hours ahead of closing time, after the last cleaning and not give people the key. I've seen her not let old people who could hardly walk, even after they had walked all the way to the bathroom and then back to the counter, into the bathrooms. Well, maybe they would have left a mess in the bathroom. Maybe they went out and made a mess in the parking lot. And you know they would not come back. Probably not come back to other places in Gate City, either."

"I have never minded asking for a restroom key," I said, "but I know some people do."

"Those linemen wouldn't ask a young lady about anything like that. And what they do, first thing in the morning, is go to the bathroom, wash their hands, then get their coffee and snacks for breakfast. So X just got rid of them, and who knows how many other customers. Now she complains because traffic is slowing down at the store."

"That is not the only problem that store has," I observed. "Maybe they needed to do some remodelling, but they went too far. They've tried to become 'upscale.' A convenience store is by nature downscale, and I don't see anybody actually buying the fancy snacks they have put in place of the old favorite junk food people looked for. I don't see people paying the 20 to 50 percent surcharge they've put on to all the old favorite convenience things they still sell, either." 

We got into quite a discussion of things some stores and restaurants in Gate City could try if they wanted to keep the customers they have.

1. Always have a restroom open to the public. Unless there is a specific temporary need to keep undesirable persons out of the restroom, let it be locked only when it's in use.

2. If you want to be a storekeeper, you have to sweep and mop the floor all day because people are too lazy to wipe their feet, and clean the bathroom when men leave spots on the seat and/or the floor, and put things back on the shelves where slobs fail to put them back in their places, AND say "Thank you, Sir" and "Thank you, Ma'am" whenever people pay for things. Deal with it. 

3. Absolutely no gossip. People drive to Kingsport to buy things even when the same things are available at a better price in Gate City, just to avoid seeing people who they know will gossip about them after they've left the store. 

4. Respect and appreciate all the customers--especially the ones who are poor, or old, or confused, or funny-looking. Some of these businesses have employees who've talked back to me because I'm not rich or because I walked into town rather than driving. B'y h...I can at least give them what they've paid for. Some people can't. What store employees need to know is that comfortably retired gentlemen like this former resident of our town, and arguably overeducated idle writers like myself, and our rich friends from the city, also notice things like, say, a certain bleach-blonde Lee County wench calling one of my former teachers, who happened to have grown old while Black, "honey" instead of "Ma'am." We notice. And we want to pull every yellow hair out of your head by its black or white roots. And we for sure do not want to support your store. That kind of thing has in fact been mentioned when I've asked rich friends from Washington to visit Gate City and they've declined.

You see somebody wandering around like a person who needs thick glasses and has misplaced the said glasses, muttering to himself, bumping into things, obviously no more aware that the prison pants fad is over than that it ever existed, but just not fitting into his clothes in the normal way, and finally stumbling into the bathroom, just too late by the look and smell of things...his name is "Sir" to you. And you thank him when he pays for a cup of coffee. And you shut your wretched yap-hole after he leaves, and keep it shut during and after the thorough cleaning the bathroom requires. Because in a place like Gate City you know that that wretched creature is somebody's grandfather, and he probably used to be a teacher or fire fighter or some such thing, too. Extreme respect.

5. In theory it's nice if you happen to "like" a customer. In reality it's not appropriate. The United States is a democratic republic where you, the store employee,  are considered the social equal of anyone else who is working for the minimum hourly wage at your age. At school you can sit beside people who have professional skills and own their own businesses. In social settings you can eat or play sports or watch birds with people who may even be rich. Your job, however, is not a social setting. On your job you need to focus on your work and not waste mental energy on emotional feelings about customers. Some customers, myself for one, don't want to receive special favors or attentions in a place of business. The ideal is not that you "like" customers, but that you wait on all customers, whether you "like" them or not, with equal honesty and civility. 

6. So, don't bother your head about who is buying what and why and for whom. If you think a product is bad, which is what I think about cleaning-fluid-based beverages, you shouldn't sell it. If you sell it, don't ask questions about people who are trying to help your business by buying it.

7. If you don't have wheelchair-using customers, hire a wheelchair consultant to show you why, and fix the problem right away. Wheelchair users should be able to understand that older stores have oldfashioned charm that should not be lost, even when it involves stairs...and store employees should be working to equalize the situation. If your store has lovely historic staircases and some of your customers love shopping on the upstairs and downstairs levels, for example, you might make those levels virtually available to wheelchair users via videos they can watch on the street level, sending you up or down to bring out whatever interests them for inspection.

8. Discrimination is not your friend. We are not a big enough town that anyone should even want to start excluding anyone else. "Oh, but isn't it nice to keep a store or a row or a whole neighborhood 'upscale' so that nobody really minds paying a little more...?" No. It is not. The nature of a business does tend to attract some types of people more than others. Bookstores don't attract a lot of coal miners but a good bookstore should be a place where a determined coal miner can educate himself to qualify for a different kind of job. A good hardware store should be a place where a rich lady feels secure enough to walk in and ask for PVC pipe, or a plumber's tool, or a plumber.  And a good town is walkable enough that, if people ride into town in a car and need to leave that car at the mechanic's garage for a few hours, they can still visit all the little "boutique" shops they wanted to visit.

9. Asking for protection from competing entrepreneurs is an indication that you don't deserve it. From the downtown merchants who feared competition from the Friday Market I heard, "But an open-air market attracts a different kind of people...they don't walk around town..." This is false. I worked the Friday Market, and I know. People buy food from a food truck rather than a big-chain restaurant because they don't like the big chains. They buy food from a food truck rather than a real, locally owned restaurant because the food truck owner has made sure to offer better deals on something or other. If you panic, "That food truck is going to destroy my business," you're locking into refusal to meet your customers where they are and offer them an equally good deal, so you can't keep a loyal customer base and probably won't keep a business. Getting rid of a modest, friendly, lovable Mennonite bakery truck will attract the attention of an unscrupulous foreign-owned ethnic restaurant chain, which will bury you. If you accept your restaurant's limitations and offer good deals on good food, on the other hand, you'll keep a loyal customer base. The food truck will take a few sales because it's offering something new and different, but then after a while your customers will want to see you and eat your food again. The food truck will probably build up a route that brings it here only weekly, or fortnightly, so there'll be business for all. 

10. No matter how righteous you feel about losing a customer, the bottom line is that Gate City loses customers because too many of us would rather feel righteous about losing customers than try to see their point of view and keep customers. Any customer you lose has relatives. Even if those relatives see your point of view at the time, they'll see the ex-customer's point of view, too. A lot of people stopped eating at Hardee's after that little display of stupidity on the menu. If you want customers, instead of going into ego defense mode about a request that you do something differently, take pride in being able to accommodate every customer's tastes or needs. Find topics other than religion or politics to talk about with people who disagree with you, too. And make peace with the grandchildren of your least favorite primary school teacher.

Some Favorite Things to Do in the Summer

Probably everyone's list boils down to the same thing: enjoy the weather... 

1. Putter in the not-a-lawn and orchard. Cut, prune, and dig up "weeds"...and eat them! Many of our native "weeds" make good salads. 

2. Unplug everything and read real books out in the sunshine. 

3. Sell books. 

4. Go to at least one Kingsport Fun Fest event, in July. 

5. Go to Duffield Daze, the Saturday before Labor Day. 

6. Eat fresh unsprayed fruits and vegetables. 

7. Dig watercress out of the spring. Watercress tastes much better in winter. It keeps growing in summer, and has to be cleared out to keep the spring branch from getting muddy and to keep the property owners cool during the heat wave.

8. Watch at least one child play a sport; listen to at least one child perform some kind of music. 

9. I've not done it lately, but one of my favorite things to do in summer is rent a kayak and spend the afternoon paddling.

10. And two more used to be tennis and square dancing, although, since age thirty, I've been too loyal to men with knee problems to enjoy either of those. (Is that a hint? Neither of those men is still alive.) 

And another one used to be hiking and sports with The Nephews, although they're now old enough to do those things with people their own age. Never mind. Seniors find ways to get our exercise.

Another Store to Avoid

Obviously this didn't happen today. I don't think I need to say when it happened, or where. The purpose of this post is not to embarrass a person for a situation that is probably temporary. It is to remind business owners to prevent shoppers having this kind of experience. The experience is becoming too common these days, and you need to take positive action to prevent it.

Well, for a start, I was feeling peckish and cranky. Grocery store owners need to be aware of this, and of what I can tell them about when to expect it.

It was some time this spring, while the tummybug was circulating in my part of the world. I wasn't sure what was going on. We'd been warned to expect a norovirus--the Norwalk Flu or "24-hour" tummybug. My quirky immune system does not build up resistance to those things. When they are circulating they usually just hit me like a train flying off a track. I spend a few hours just running from bathroom to bed, or maybe lying down on the bathroom floor waiting to recover the strength to get back to bed. But this time my symptoms felt milder, but they lasted much longer. I thought the whole experience might have started with a bacterial infection, since I'd bought Jif peanut butter. The company has really tried to keep Jif peanut butter gluten-, GMO-, and glyphosate-free and, I suspect as a result, has been sabotaged and had to recall batches of food products contaminated with different things. Salmonella normally infects humans or birds, not peanuts, but it's among the things that have turned up in sabotaged peanut butter. My quirky immune system usually deals with salmonella fast, but this time the gas and cramps and greenish froth didn't stop. At least once during the week I was around someone who had norovirus. I'd prepared for this by not eating for enough hours that there was nothing for the virus to purge upward, but I did feel a bit dizzy and sick at times, and the greenish froth continued to gush downward. The blog went off schedule due to time lost just lying back and feeling bad. What was going on? Why was my body not flushing out these tiresome tummybugs and getting back to work?

Finally I felt strong enough to take a walk around the neighborhood. I saw that, although the Professional Bad Neighbor has reportedly spent most of this year at home with "Long COVID," he'd made the effort to spray more poison around a Mountain Spring. The specific target was the Old English boxwood some long-gone neighbor had left behind. In some places this shrub is said to become invasive. Here it took much time and effort for the old lady to get a few shrubs growing, and for all my life they've been something for the rest of us to remember Miss Ethel by. Just because everyone else enjoyed their fragrance the Professional Bad Neighbor set out to kill the boxwood, and he may succeed. The glyphosate would undoubtedly be what aggravated the infection I had. 

Anyway a tiresome errand had to be done, putting an end to a prolonged bit of tiresome business I hope, and I trudged into town. I was low on groceries and thought I'd pick up a few little things in town before the next car pool to Kingsport or Norton. 

Theoretically the best bargains on groceries in my town are at Food Lion. That's if you don't think about how many cases of salmonella poisoning have been traced to Food Lion. That was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Food Lion was out of the question.

That currently leaves three other, smaller stores. One was off my route by a couple of city blocks; two were right along the way. I stopped at the first one of those two. 

Well, it's only a convenience store, not a real, small, independent grocery store like the Broadwater's, the Thriftway, or the Q.S.Q. stores used to be. I miss having a serious independent grocery store. In all three of the convenience stores most of the shelf space is devoted to "junkfood," with whole aisles for just candy bars, just potato chips, just soda pop, and just "energy drinks," and only one aisle for the whole selection of non-refrigerated foods normally eaten by adults. If they wanted to enjoy a small steady income these stores could stock a better selection of glyphosate-free canned vegetables like beans, peas, corn, and tomatoes, Zatarain's and Ben's rice mixes and plain Success Rice, Jif peanut butter, canned fish (but not salmon, which was my favorite fish before it became a horrible science experiment), canned chicken and turkey, cornmeal, basic kitchen supplies, and I could buy most of my groceries in my own town. They don't. They sell junkfood and then the staff go home and judge the adults who go in and buy junkfood, when that's what the stores have. How often I've gone in and looked for a can of beans or a pack of turkey baloney, and never even mind the onion, to go with my Fritos--but all they had in the store was the Fritos. Since Fritos have been 99% glyphosate-free lately and the potato chips have not, many's the time the store had sold out of Fritos and had nothing left but the potato chips, which is a pretty reliable sign that the people who prefer potato chips have tried them and been sick.

I went in to see what the store had. This is normally at least a nice way to rest my mind after doing tiresome errands and watching dangerous traffic. Come in off the street, out of the heat or the cold or the rain, and walk around quietly considering what to buy, and what else would go with it, and whether the price is reasonable or unreasonable or a good enough deal to make me consider buying something I usually don't buy. 

This was a good day to have hit this particular convenience store. Spring weather was back, redbuds and ornamental Prunus and beautiful dandelions and forsythia and one early azalea were all in bloom, I was shaking off the infection, it felt good. The store even had baloney. I don't normally consider paying as much for 4 ounces of beef baloney as I normally pay for 16 ounces of chicken baloney, but I did consider that the cats would be eating most or all of the baloney, anyway, since I'd be cooking it with beans and Fritos and the rest of the sack of onions I had at home.

And a horrible noise, like a low-range mosquito whining, rose above the pop music somebody was listening to. Some horrorcow was trying to chatter at me. "Are you finding everything you need?"  

For a minute, due no doubt to "spring fever," I actually forgot that this kind of noise never comes out of people one would ever want to speak to for any reason. I actually said, "Yeah," and continued shopping, ignoring tbe yap. 

This is a bad strategy. Pleasantly ignoring this kind of aggressive, bullying extrovert never works. One can't just make a polite noise, keep moving, and let them fade away. It would be pleasant if one could, but a word or a look encourages them, and they go into a sort of feeding frenzy, demanding more and more and more attention. Every time the mouth opens, more overt hostility will plop out. They really want to feel that they've set up some sort of battle and "won." They really need to feel that they have been, in an emotional sense, knocked down, trampled, and spread out on the bottom of a birdcage. The only way to keep them from making themselves unpleasant is to train them to expect that IF SOMEONE LOOKS AT THEM, THEY WILL BE PUNISHED. 

If a store employee keeps yapping at me long enough that I look at the face, the store owner is going to hear about it. And I want to know that I will never be seeing that face in that store again. Food Lion's spineless manager once promised me that a certain obnoxious employee would not be kept in a position where she has any contact with customers, but the last time I was there I found that person right at the front of the store with her bad attitude sticking out for the whole world to see. If an employee is bad enough that I look at the face, you need to print that face on a letter you send to the police, notifying them that the person is banned from your property.

Well, I didn't buy the baloney. I didn't like the price, and when the price tag on refrigerated foods is exorbitant you never know how long they've been sitting in the store's refrigerator, either. This was not the store where I picked up the allegedly "lunch-ready" turkey that had the big clumps of green mold showing through the back of the package, but that kind of thing can happen in any convenience store. Especially when people reach into the refrigerator, pick something up, and then put it back while moving away from an unpleasant YAP.

"But they're just trying to be friendly." Oh no they're not! Friendly people learn, normally around age two, to wait for someone to hold eye contact before they open their mouths. Up to about age six someone who starts chattering without eye contact being made may be just a spoiled little chatter-monkey, but that gets beaten out of children in schoolyards. When an adult's mouth starts making noises in the absence of eye contact, the person is looking for trouble. 

I've heard that whine about "Be friendly--start a conversation to make a sale," too, and seeing how people react to it was a good, firm, unequivocal reality check. How many times I've sat in a market, looked at someone until person stopped looking at merchandise and looked at me, and ruined a potential sale with a "Hey, hi, good to see you" line of...obnoxiousness. That is what it is. I honestly didn't intend to insult or belittle or intimidate anybody, or even push the person to buy more than person wanted to buy, but I was breaking the rule that THE CUSTOMER SPEAKS FIRST IF THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO SPEAK, so my prospective customers were quite right to stop shopping and move away from my booth when I chattered at them. Some store employees who speak before they're spoken to may actually suffer from extroversion. Others have only been told that they'd earn more money if they acted as if they had that condition, and have fully developed brains, but when nice people think they need to act like nasty people, who knows what they're going to do next. 

We need a good clear unequivocal rule. All store employees need to be told, when they're hired: "THE CUSTOMER SPEAKS FIRST IF THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO SPEAK." If they have normal healthy brains, all will go well after that. If they yap, after that, they need to become unemployed. They probably have no consciences and will fake disabilities and get on welfare, after which the example of Canada suggests that...hey, listen, maybe you know someone who can persuade them to go to Canada right now? 

This is not about any of the multitude of prejudices and preconceptions people have that may cause them to feel that they "like" or "dislike" other people on sight. It's about the fact that responsible adults remind ourselves, should we feel any tendencies to "like" or "dislike" people we don't know well, to avoid letting ourselves act on these emotional prejudices, which obviously have no rational basis and come from our memories of completely different people whom the new acquaintances resemble in some way. When we're mature enough to have grown-up jobs, we do our jobs without taking time to "like" or "dislike" customers. If I'd made the mistake of hiring a cashier who indulged in "feelings" about customers, I'd make person double-check the day's accounts "Just to remind you that your job's to make sure the numbers are correct, NOT to be looking at or thinking about or forming crazy emotional reactions to people!"

"But people are bound to react to the way other people treat them..." Yes, and when cashiers or stockers are allowed to indulge the fantasy that they're the featured attraction people come into a store to see, they're bound to feel disappointed most of the time! Nice people prefer not to receive a lot of attention, so they appreciate the nice, courteous customers who leave them to their work. It's the aggressive ones you need to keep away from the public. If they're married to someone to whom you owe a lot of money, you want to let them come in and clean the building at night, when there's no chance of their annoying people right out of buying merchandise.

Make them count, count, count until those emotional feelings go away. No matter how young they may be, numbers will entrain the left brain and put a damper on the misplaced emotions. Then the employees may be receptive to the truth: A grocery store, a convenience store, even a fabric store, is not a social opportunity for them to pretend they are celebrities that customers come to admire. It's a place where they are part of a mechanism of exchange that allows customers to feel satisfied about paying for merchandise. We like shopping in the real world, we prefer to hand our money to humans rather than unreliable machines, but at that point all social connection stops. Some store employees, not the ones of whom I complain, used to be my little school friends and some are my relatives, but we understand that when they're doing their jobs a raise of an eyebrow is as much as needs to be done to acknowledge the social connection. They are supposed to check the stock in the back, if necessary, and add up the purchases, when indicated, and make deliveries, if that is their job, and thank us for paying, exactly the same way they do people they don't know. No favoritism. No prejudice. Polite impersonal service for all.

After putting back the baloney, I moved to a different section of the store, further from the yap. That worked long enough for me to decide to buy the beans and the chips. Instead of the baloney, I could have bought some matches, the time to buy which is drawing near, or some other little snack, with the three dollars left in my pocket. I moved back toward the front of the store. 

Nobody was keeping what the Yap has for a brain occupied with anything other than that primal instinct to pick a fight, so the Yap started yapping again. I ignored the noise and put the beans and the chips on the counter. Noise continued to come out of the Yap but I resolutely watched the monitor, saw the prices add up accurately, pushed some bills through the slot and repacked my groceries.

"Did you find everything you needed?" came out of the Yap. ("Needed," as distinct from "wanted" or "were looking for," is a sneaky verbal attack.) I didn't find everything I wanted. I didn't even buy everything I would otherwise have bought, because the process of choosing between the conveniences of baloney, matches, or another snack was interrupted by the noise. Whichever of those things I buy, and whatever else I buy on the big shopping excursion, I will buy somewhere other than the store with that Yap in it. 

Every yapper always needs to be reminded: WHEN YOU'VE NOT BEEN "RECOGNIZED" WITH EYE CONTACT, ANY NOISES COMING OUT OF YOU ARE JUST NOISE. NOBODY IS LISTENING TO YOU. NOBODY LIKES YOU. NOBODY IS "SEEING YOU AS A HUMAN BEING." YOU ARE NOT ACTING LIKE A HUMAN BEING. YOU ARE ACTING LIKE A BADLY TRAINED DOG. 

Employers shouldn't have to deal with this kind of issues, but some employees really need to be taught: If you want to be seen as a human being who deserves any kind of respect, begin by respecting yourself enough to recognize what the back of someone's head is telling you. The angle of the back of the head does tell you what is more interesting than you are. Maybe it's the merchandise on the top shelf, the merchandise on the bottom shelf, maybe in a week like that week was it's the bathroom door. Wait your turn for the customer's attention. When people come into a convenience store to spend their pocket change on "convenient" food or kitchen stuff, the nature of the convenience store business is that they're going to be motivated by frugality not to buy much. It's in your interest to shut up and let their interaction with the merchandise motivate them to buy as much as they can possibly justify to themselves.

And purchases are not being made when customers just want to get out of the store and away from your stupid empty head and the obnoxious noises coming out of it. 

I'm not the young impulse-spending nest-builder Madison Avenue most wants to win over, but I am old enough, stable enough, set in my ways enough, that any storekeeper who makes a small effort to please me can count on me for a small steady income. All you have to do is stock things I buy, put a reasonable price on them--I'm willing to pay a little more at a convenience store than at Wal-Mart, but not twice as much--and instruct your employees that, unless I speak to them,. ALL they EVER need to say is "Thank you" when they take my money. That's it. That's all. I don't want to hear any gossip. I don't want to pretend your employees are my friends. I actually like stores that hire foreigners who don't try to speak English. All they need to know are the numbers and "Thank you." You can teach them the difference between "Sir" and "Ma'am" if you want to get fancy, but "Thank you" is quite enough--just make sure they don't try adding anything to it but "Sir" or "Ma'am." 

And you never want to let them interrupt the pleasant, restful, ruminative shopping mood. 

I didn't let myself get angry enough to look at the Yap, although the Yap was really pushing for it. I don't know what the repulsive thing looks like. It sounded female. I'd guess it was White, young enough to be my daughter, and it had probably spent some time on the uglier side of a city in the Upper Midwest, but I really try to ignore these things.

But the next time I want to pick up a few groceries in my own town, I'll be sure not to stop at the store where the shopping experience was ruined by that Yap. If I ever do feel a need to go into that store again, the next time I'll be braced for "battle" too, knowing that at that store I will not be allowed to enjoy spending a few dollars on a few groceries. For about forty years I've gone into that store with a reasonable expectation of enjoying shopping for a small convenient purchase. No more.

Storekeepers need to train all employees: IF THE CUSTOMER WANTS TO CHAT, THE CUSTOMER SPEAKS FIRST. No exceptions. No excuses. 

Morgan Griffith's Bills to Promote Computing and Manufacturing

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

Griffith Backs Legislation to Encourage American Manufacturing and Technological Leadership

Tuesday, May 19, 2020 – The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for the United States to secure critical supply chains and promote domestic manufacturing and technology.
As part of a legislative agenda to reassert American leadership in these areas and reduce dependence on competitors such as China, Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) today introduced the Advancing Quantum Computing Act and joined as an original cosponsor the Manufacturing API, Drugs, and Excipients (MADE) in America Act of 2020. He issued the following statement:
“We can’t depend on other countries, particularly competitors such as China, to guarantee American economic leadership, shield our stockpile of critical supplies, or secure the benefits of technological progress to our people. It is up to us to do that.
“Fortunately, America has always been a nation of builders and inventors. The bills introduced today with my backing will draw on that characteristic of ours. They will encourage the return of manufacturing to the United States, protect critical medical supplies, and pursue advances in technology, all while creating jobs and growing the economy in the United States.”
The Advancing Quantum Computing Act, introduced by Griffith, identifies how quantum computing can benefit our economy and identifies and mitigates risks to the supply chain.
The MADE in America Act, introduced with Griffith as an original cosponsor by Congressman Buddy Carter (R-GA) and others, provides a tax credit for companies making pharmaceutical and medical products in distressed zones within the United States.
"

Editorial comment: Legislative propositions intended to benefit the economy in Virginia's 9th District have often had unintended consequences. Let's hope these have been double-checked for loopholes that would allow future corporate abuses.

Friday Market Reopens

People certainly maintained a healthy distance in the Friday market this morning.

I saw several masks, a veil, and a bandana tied over the face rodeo-style. I took some requests for masks, and should be knitting some soon...stylish knitted cotton masks that will also work as neck warmers after the virus panic subsides.

I saw the front-page news story: In Scott County, Virginia, seven people have tested positive for the dreaded coronavirus. Two have died. Names aren't being released; all that's being reported is that people who die from coronavirus have been people who go into pneumonia and nearly die whenever they're exposed to ordinary colds or flu--geriatric patients, chemotherapy patients, and in the city AIDS patients.

Everyone set up their displays three or four car spaces apart. Without any planning or discussion, everyone looked at the parking lot where the open-air market goes on and thought, "We could make it easy for people to drive through the market, not getting out of their cars except to buy something." Even on its most crowded days the drive-through option has been one of the things that's made Gate City's market special. In the past people have taken adjacent car spaces in order to take advantage of as much shade as possible. Today people were organizing their displays so that people could drive around on the sides and see everything from their car windows. I was glad to see most of the older shoppers taking the hint. It was not possible to hear nearly as much of "the talk of the town" as I usually do. I did hear several people say that they were, like me, still waiting for their stimulus checks, having filed taxes. I didn't hear anyone affirm that they know anyone who's actually received their thousand dollars, although I do at least know...one.

This is socialism, Gentle Readers. This is what lovable old Bernie Sanders and cute little Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez wanted to do for you, but the virus beat them to it. (Oh yes, they blathered about guaranteed incomes...which would have run out fast, probably not reaching the majority of people in your neighborhood, just like the famous stimulus checks.) Now that you've experienced it under ideal circumstances--one lovely little spring vacation--picture having it in winter, too, and having it go on and on and on. I think the politicians who've called for socialism need to be planning their post-political lives now.

Anyway it was a nice balmy day with a cool breeze; more people bought books or gift items than bought bottled drinks--from me, anyway, and I didn't see anyone else selling bottled drinks. A few people just walked around not buying anything. Several people were, as usual, only really shopping for tomatoes. Several people seemed gloomy, but more as if they were fretting about where those stimulus checks had got to than as it they were ill.

Then just before closing time a certain disgrace to his parents' memory came out and sprayed poison all over a steeply sloping back yard.

Well, some vendors like to go to Nickelsville for the afternoon anyway. I had cyber-chores to do. I packed up and left. How much heavier everything had suddenly become. Other people were leaving too. They did not look happy although some of them, besides the fresh-baked-goods family and the vegetable man, had sold some of the stuff they were loading up.

I hadn't heard how many of them had been sick or ill earlier this week. I only really started to feel better after Wednesday's rain and somehow wasn't really surprised by the idea that, with our federal government allegedly caaaaring so much about keeping us all healthy, I wasn't going to be allowed to feel well this weekend either.

All the poisoners whine, "I spray poison only N number of times a year--how much harm can that do?" Well, if each of these people sprays poison just once a year, and (by chance, since no planning or regulation goes on) each of these people sprays poison in a different week, that's enough toxic waste floating around in the air to keep the whole town slightly sick all summer.

Some people who were in the Friday Market today are going to notice their senses of smell and taste diminished, their throats prickly, etc. etc. etc. That's not coronavirus. That's dicamba poisoning. If you were having a glyphosate reaction from earlier this week, the combined effect of the two poisons is guaranteed to exacerbate both reactions. Some people are going to be sick as dogs later this weekend. If they're really attached to the belief that "pesticides" are not toxic to them, they might convince themselves that, oh mercy, they caught someone else's tummybug at the same time they caught the dreaded coronavirus, oh woe, oh wail. It's not impossible that, in the process of getting tests and treatment for coronavirus and norovirus while actually having neither, they might manage to get both--on top of the poisoning they have as of the time I'm typing this.

It's not alway easy to tell whom we should sue for making us ill by spraying poison into the air because he's too lazy to pull up the plants he doesn't appreciate in his yard, but for anyone who became ill in the Friday Market today, it is. We all know his name. He really was ill at the time he destroyed his parents' business, so some of us might have been inclined to empathize too much about the fact that he really destroyed the business by using the best store space in town to sell drugs illegally.

It's funny how reselling surplus painkillers, which at most harms only the fools who willingly feed addictions to those poison pills, gets jail time for someone who's doing well to be out of the hospital and not destroying himself with those pills--yet actively poisoning the whole town is not yet recognized as a violent crime.

Gate City needs its Friday Market so desperately, right now...I think we need a local ordinance that spraying anything at all, even Deet, outdoors on a Friday morning should guarantee an immediate arrest, the hardest time the local jail has to offer, and a minimum six-figure fine.

Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter 2: Send This to St Louis

The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published weekly by Priscilla King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided that all sources of material are credited.

This week, Canadians start suing Bayer for glyphosate damage, a French town’s glyphosate ban is ruled illegal, US citizens are invited (sort of) to comment on the proposed USDA regulations for genetically modified organisms (GMO), and  I ask youall to consider ways to raise Glyphosate Awareness in Missouri and Illinois...and more, in more or less the order they came in. I’ve tried to expand on the good news in this issue.

1. DID AMERICAN COUNCIL ON SCIENCE AND HEALTH SELL OUT?

Andy Kroll and Jeremy Schulman report to Mother Jones that the American Council on Science and Health pursued, and received, donations from Monsanto. ACSH’s job is to debunk the “junk science” that people rush into print without adequately questioning the evidence if it supports their bias. The article identifies conflicts of interest this nonprofit educational organization is likely to encounter when examining scientific evidence that might affect any of numerous corporate supporters.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-council-science-health-leaked-documents-fundraising/

2. USE OF GLYPHOSATE IN PUBLIC PARKS

Last spring, you may recall, somebody in Fish & Wildlife argued that glyphosate has to be sprayed in public parks to control invasive nuisance plants like kudzu. Kudzu is indeed intimidating. More intimidating than kudzu, however, was the condition some rivers and beaches in the Northeastern States reached during the Industrial Era. The Anacostia River became so foul that only “sewer worms” could survive in it. What changed this was a combination of the export of heavy industry and, on the brighter side, the marketing of “River Cleanup Days” as public festivities. Don’t spray...par-tay!

How long does it take to clear seventeen (contiguous) acres of kudzu? Has anyone timed this yet? Kudzu attracts few pests, and the individual vines are small and pliable. The daunting feature of kudzu is how much vineage you have to roll up before you come to the root. Kudzu roots actually have medicinal value. Some people will indeed roll up the vines, locate the roots, and dig them up. When some Twit jeered, “With a bulldozer, maybe,” I joked about the possible use of an excavator in getting the roots up within a set period of time...in practice, people who harvest kudzu roots use hand tools.

Today an e-friend was complaining of privet (Ligustrum) as an invasive nuisance. Where I live, it’s not one. For one thing it’s useful. It’s a tough little shrub that holds soil on steep banks; it’s easy to prune and hard to kill; fresh privet prunings are pre-soaked skewers for grilling, and dried ones are good firewood; the soft wood is easy for crafters to practice carving; if I prune it back to three or four feet high in spring, by winter the cardinals can safely flit around in the new growth, eating privet berries and singing “Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!” For another thing it’s not all that invasive, in a damp climate. Soft wood absorbs water easily and, although privet resists most insects and fungi, when it stays damp long enough it becomes vulnerable to carpenter ants. If you have privet and wish you didn’t, water it lavishly, and smear a little grease or syrup on it to give the local carpenter ants the idea.

Honeysuckle, chinaberry, phragmites and other invasive plants have uses. Even ailanthus will burn. If you want to remove them from a public area fast, you find the people who are willing to use the plants, for crafts or whatever, and offer those people some sort of prizes or benefits for digging up those plants. They’ll be gone.

There are just a few invasive nuisance plants, like Johnson grass (which looks like corn but is toxic to cattle), Bermuda grass (which became obsolete when Astroturf was invented), and Spanish Needles (the Bidens species everyone hates), for which nobody has ever found a use. Guess what? They’re the ones that thrive on glyphosate.

One of the more pleasant things we can do with Glyphosate Awareness is explore the uses of invasive plants and talk to local park staff about replacing poison sprays, which also endanger native plants of course, with public parties—which may increase the use and potential funding of the parks. Worked for Anacostia.

3. IS IT TRUE, WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT ANCIENT WHEAT?

Needless to say, the big corporations are not racing to fund studies of exactly how and why it’s possible that some people can digest “ancient” wheat better than “modern” wheat...or less heavily sprayed wheat better than more heavily sprayed wheat. But it’s true: Though all plants, even “organically grown” plants, in North America today are likely to contain enough glyphosate residues to harm people, once we get glyphosate banned, some people who currently have to avoid wheat are going to be able to enjoy hearty brown bread again. The “ancient,” more natural strains of wheat have a lot going for them. Though its high protein content is useless to us celiacs, the majority of humankind used to be able to digest “ancient” wheat.

News on this front may be slightly premature, but then again it may offer hope to some readers...Rodale has brought out a book about how farmer Bob Quinn is profitably raising organic kamut. https://amzn.to/2SFF7Lr .

4. COLOMBIA RULES OUT POISONING COFFEE

A Colombian court rules that spraying glyphosate on the coffee fields, in an effort to destroy coca plants, should remain illegal. I can’t drink Hawaiian Kona coffee. I can still drink Colombian. Hurrah. (I happen to be one of those who believe we should all buy as much of any wholesome export from the High Andes as possible, alpaca yarn and coffee and Peruvian Purple potatoes and so on, to give the poor indigenous population a wholesome alternative to raising coca plants.) https://m.gulf-times.com/story/636972/Colombia-court-keeps-ban-on-aerial-spraying-of-gly .

5. DR. LEONG EXPLAINS HOW VEGETABLES AREN’T KILLING GRANDMA BONNIE PETERS YET

Vegetables are good for us...if they’re not full of glyphosate, as most of them are, even if they’re supposed to be organically grown. I no longer dare to eat a commercially grown vegetable. (I’m not as malnourished as some town readers expect...I do live in an orchard, where I can still pig out on fruits and veg that have been exposed to very little glyphosate vapor.) But my blog buddy (and fellow celiac), Grandma Bonnie Peters, still eats vegetables. She is starting to act “old and sick,” which she dislikes; she can’t rely on her ability to write, type, or sew, since having a stroke. Crumbs, she’s over eighty years old! How is it possible that she’s still walking around? Dr. Kristie Leong has been tweeting the explanation. While glyphosate damages our internal “microbiomes,” the soluble fiber in fruits and vegetables restores our microbiomes. GBP is at least ingesting a partial antidote along with her poison. https://twitter.com/DrKristieLeong/

6. GLYPHOSATE WORKS AS BIRTH CONTROL, THOUGH IN NASTY WAYS

Here’s the summary of a long scientific study that documents how sons born to glyphosate-exposed mothers are less likely to have sons (or daughters) of their own: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-developmental-origins-of-health-and-disease/article/glyphosatebased-herbicide-exposure-during-pregnancy-and-lactation-malprograms-the-male-reproductive-morphofunction-in-f1-offspring/E24A0D5B1D43454DDED60401FC620B2B?fbclid=IwAR0CHkiNsm-FP2yG2yxhDR58triGynmNYqFGgT8Ove9ooZLalPxgPGKzD8E .

Meanwhile, although the precise causative relationship was not analyzed, studies show that glyphosate-exposed mothers are more likely to give birth prematurely, or “miscarry”—meaning “spontaneously” abort—or, when they do give birth to live babies, produce babies with fatal physical defects.

Pro-life people need to be aware that this makes glyphosate not only a form of birth control, but an ABORTIFACIENT. Whether you believe that abortion is murder (I don’t) or physical abuse of women (I do), glyphosate is long-distance abortion. Pro-life lobbyists should join the Glyphosate Awareness movement now!

7. A DATABASE OF STUDIES

Michael Balter thinks we need a database of studies. He’s right. The hashtag #GlyphosateAwareness is supposed, in theory, to compile such a database if people are willing to scroll through the banter, cartoons, trolls, etc., and sort out the formal scientific studies people have linked. In practice, it’s reached the point where scrolling all the way back to the original EPA dossier, in which Monsanto’s carefully cherry-picked studies to “prove” that glyphosate is not a primary carcinogen inadvertently confirm that glyphosate is toxic to the majority of living creatures studied, may crash your browser. We need a searchable online database that loads a manageable amount of data at one time. If you have data compilation and coding skills, you might want to tweet to @mbalter and @Olivefarmer about this.

8. PAULETTE DESCHAMPS FIGHTS TO RAISE GLYPHOSATE AWARENESS IN FRANCE

Background information: In France, and Europe generally, a total glyphosate ban is being disputed because the use of glyphosate didn’t go insane in 2009, as it did in the United States. Austria is upholding a nationwide ban and being challenged by the European Union. Paulette Deschamps, Madame le Maire of Perray-en-Yvelines, is upholding a ban for her little town, and being challenged by the French national government, whose president promised a total glyphosate ban and then backed down. https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/mayor-of-ile-de-france-town-vows-to-ignore-order-to-overturn-local-ban-on-glyphosate-herbicide-and-neonicotinoid-pesticides

9. BAYER’S FEEBLE RESPONSE

Bayer claims the company will do something to reduce its harmfulness...by 2030. Hah. That’s definitely long enough for glyphosate to kill most of the celiacs who’ve already reached the visible-blood-in-toilet stage. No ethical government or citizen can let them wait that long to drop the poisons, move on to robots, and start paying us damages. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/07/in-panic-mode-bayer-monsanto-announces-5-6-billion-for-new-weed-control/

10. “BUT IT’S NOT A PRIMARY CARCINOGEN, SO IT’S SAFE”

Basically anyone using this argument is incompetent. Glyphosate is probably not a primary carcinogen; it’s very hard to identify what is a primary carcinogen. Cancer seems to involve a balance between risk factors and protective factors, so there may not even be a truly primary carcinogen. So what? Hanging, drowning, shooting, fire, and plane crashes are not primary carcinogens! Here, scientific studies show that glyphosate is definitely one of the factors that increase individuals’ risk of developing cancer—if it doesn’t kill them in other ways first. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383574218300887

11. HOW (SOME) FARMERS CAN SAVE SOIL

Pesticide-addicted farmers whine that, if they’re not allowed to poison the soil, they’ll have to plough up weeds and lose topsoil. Research shows that in the kind of flat country that should be ploughed in the first place this is not true. https://littlevillagemag.com/how-planting-prairie-strips-on-iowa-farms-could-save-soil-water-wildlife-and-money-in-state-and-beyond/?fbclid=IwAR1EySAupV23FmrZzYa4uljMrkBNPGnC0NXlJGesehFJx5nMaay46KqN-hU

In steep hilly country, no, it won’t work. My parents tried ploughing, mulching, and composting the space right above the original row of fruit trees above the hedge, the first few years they tried putting a garden around our home. We all watched rain wash the mulch and compost down through the front and back yards, through the grass and wildflowers. We also saw that, although the field could be ploughed with a mule, it was too steep to be safely ploughed with a tractor. So that was when they made that field an orchard, which it still is today.

Hill farmers conserve soil by terracing—not digging into the topsoil and displacing the native plants, but laying solid layers of mulch on top of the topsoil. Some local farmers are getting good results putting rows of aged straw bales on hilly fields in autumn, adding compost or fertilizer while the straw ages in winter, then planting directly in the straw in spring.

12. SIGN THIS, SIGN THAT, SIGN EVERYTHING

We’ve all signed petition after petition to demand GMO labels, glyphosate restrictions, probably other things. We need to sign more. We need to keep signing them. Sometimes it’s the plethora of petitions that gets attention. Have you signed this latest one yet? https://advocacy.organicconsumers.org/page/8012/petition/1

Have you commented on the EPA’s current glyphosate docket yet? https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-2340

What about the FDA’s page for regulating and labelling GMO? Funnily enough, the link to the comment page from this page has been “temporarily” not working for the past three days. https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=APHIS-2018-0034.

There are organized, 501(c)(3)-registered groups working on Glyphosate Awareness now. Some people may be comfortable working with them. I prefer to network with them at a distance because groups like the Institute for Responsible Technology, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, et al., though legitimate, have an overarching leftist agenda that can sometimes limit their usefulness to the people who need Glyphosate Awareness.

For example, although the Salsa Labs network that hosts IRT, where friends and I used to be consultants too, is very polite and never asks about anyone’s politics, I’m fairly sure they would not host a Republican rally. Sometimes D’s like to be alone to talk inside Democratic Party campaign strategy. That is their prerogative; even Little League teams like to separate when they practice baseball. Yet Glyphosate Awareness is most definitely for R’s too. I’ve seen R’s react to glyphosate more drastically than I did. Common glyphosate reactions include kidney malfunctions and learning disabilities. It’s possible that the Trump family stand to benefit from Glyphosate Awareness.

Why am I doing this Newsletter at all? I can ill afford to donate my time to a cause without being paid. One reason why we need this Newsletter is that IRT, FOE, EWG (Environmental Working Group), et al., send out flashy, cookie-infested Newsletters...the graphics may make their e-mails more fun for some people to read, but other people whom I know personally don’t want to open their e-mails. Another reason is that some Republicans want to be sure that, when they sign things or join things or support things in any way, their responses aren’t going to be piled in together with responses to Extreme Left petitions (as some suspected may have happened at Change.org). This newsletter is not only for them, but it’s the one where they’re welcome, too, and they’re safe. I don’t send out batch e-mails at all, I don’t aggregate responses to anything, and I encourage readers to be careful about people who do.

The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter has no overarching agenda. It’s for people who know that glyphosate is harmful to all living creatures and needs to be banned. That is the only thing on which we need to agree.

And of course it’s also for people who have only just heard, or who may still be skeptical, about glyphosate being harmful. I want you readers to share these Newsletters with friends who may still be spraying “Roundup” on their roses. Tell them they don’t need to tell you or me or anyone else what they learn, but a good place to start is by noting on the calendar when they’ve sprayed, and when each member of their family has a flare-up of some sort of “chronic problem”—maybe something sub-clinical, like extra-messy hayfever, unusual grumpiness, or extremely strong cravings to take another drink/pill/cigarette. Become aware. Then they can read as much more and become as “active” in the movement as they feel moved to be.

We met each other online. That means we’re people who have time to hang out on the Internet, maybe even chat on Twitter. That means we’re highly likely to be “retired,” disabled, students, or home care givers for people with disabilities. We have little time and less money. I live from odd job to flea market to hack-writing job, myself; I buy a few days’ groceries and don’t ask where the next load of groceries is coming from. So how are you, how am I, supposed to follow Gloria Steinem’s program for activists? (Remember, the one printed in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions—at least one letter to the editor per week and so on and so forth?) Do what you can. This Newsletter is not going to dock your pay if you spend a month with a sick relative and don’t write any letters to the editor. But it does encourage everyone to write those letters, sign and circulate those petitions. The more different perspectives, the better.

Especially in St. Louis, Missouri. If you know anyone there, please raise their Glyphosate Awareness! https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuit-analysis/bayer-could-benefit-from-home-advantage-in-st-louis-roundup-cancer-trial-experts-idUSKCN1UH10F . Missourians like to stereotype themselves as “The Show-Me State” where people want hard evidence. We have that. So show them.

Yelp Outs Self as Rubbish That Will Raise Your Blood Pressure

This web site has never actually endorsed Yelp.

For those who may wonder, Yelp is not a site that pays people to rave about their favorite local businesses, the way Associated Content did or the way Chatabout did. Yelp does advertise a "cash back" system (where Yelp writers get cash off their actual purchases at stores they write about) and some form of social rewards for those nominated as "evangelists for Yelp," which seems pretty tacky in view of the site's high-flown self-promotion. However, Yelp's actual mode of operation seems to work like this:

1. While writing for some other site, person looks up current web site for business person wants to recommend.

2. Google displays the (promoted) Yelp page for the business at the top left, the business's own site at the top right, so person may actually see the Yelp page first. Or person may be provoked by a preposterously unreal Yelp review--which is likely to draw the most traffic to Yelp, as writers' attention spans are probably long enough that we all remember to look for the business's own URL rather than Yelp's.

3. Person goes to Yelp and writes a review to provide some balance and get person's own blood pressure back down. Blood pressure surges occur when Googlers recognize, for example, raves about the cleanliness and fabulous bargains, from an alleged customer with a name like "Katie B.," at Yelp's page for what we know to be a stinking, price-gouging, salmonella-ridden store mismanaged by a lunatic with a name like "Katie B." Or we see rants from some alleged one-time visitor about the "rude staff" at a family business where the consistently kind, courteous, cosmopolitan owners, pillars of the church, etc., etc., have been known to employ a troubled 25-year-old foster child who apparently, shudder quake, said a swearword. Or, as yesterday, somebody posts what may or may not be a very unusual experience, or just an outright lie, about a business that has served a lot of people well for a long time.

4. This generates some traffic at Yelp, which encourages people to post reviews with pop-up lines like "With so few reviews, yours could be huge." A person might, as I did once many years ago, decide to devote a half-hour or an hour to reviewing every local business listed on the site.

5. Yelp used at least to display replies to the reviews that truly make visitors wonder whether some Yelpers are thinking about the right store. (Yesterday I stumbled across one that was showing for a chain store outlet in Tennessee, where a Yelper who claimed to live in California burbled "I like this store because it's so close to my home." Say whaaaat? How hard is it to change your address on Yelp if you have, in fact, moved?) A few stores generated some rant-and-rave exchanges. However, Yelp has decided to replace this feature with one that allows only the listed owner of the business to reply to reviews. How nice, considering Yelp's admitted goal of making big-chain stores look better than local independent ones. When unhappy small-town storekeepers (like one who's actually listed his store for sale by now) see only one review, some of them are likely to get all emotionally involved with blaming the person who gave them four stars instead of five...and they can't see any exchanges in which the writers of bad reviews admit, e.g., "I think I was actually thinking of a different store."

6. Yelp used, also, to hide individuals' reviews based on the claim that they didn't know who the reviewers were or how impartial they were, based only on people's online presence. I got that run-around, years ago when this web site's archive ran to less than a full ream of printed material. My reviews went live again, as best I recall, when Ronia Regal joined Yelp in order to follow me and when, around the same time, I sold the words to a picture book about chickens. Since then I've not visited Yelp within every single year, so don't know whether they've been suppressed and unsuppressed. Nor do I know whether RR ever visited Yelp again. Becket Adams did, and verified Yelp's bias.

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-yelp-protects-corporate-interests.html

This has changed into something...interesting. In a nasty, biased, even cyberbullying sort of way.

Whatever people may think about my social media presence, it is no longer possible for them to doubt that I'm a real live writer. This blog's been presenting a consistent personal narrative for years. I've written other books, guest-posted on other sites, and interacted in real time with thousands of people on social media. I'm read by thousands of people worldwide, wherever English is spoken, and not exclusively in English either. (This bothers me. When I was able to read priscillaking.blogspot.fr it looked weird enough in French; I have no way to imagine how bizarre it looks in Romanian, which, the computer says, is one of the most common ways it's currently being read...I wrote something for a Romanian site recently.) I have enough online presence and clout to annoy the everlovin' daylights out of Bayer, which may well be the last good thing I'll accomplish in this life; in any case I achieved it without investing a single penny or having, when I registered this screen name, a single active e-friend. I'm a real individual and a real American. Those who try to "verify" such things by encroaching on my privacy only make themselves look bad.

So the last few times I visited Yelp, my reviews were showing. Then, as mentioned, one of them annoyed a local character more than I'd intended it to--by having appeared at a particularly bad time for him, he claims. Now, during the month that review of his store was written, the review was suppressed, so I doubt the review contributed anything to the demise of his store. (I won't go into what-all did contribute to the demise of his store. Local readers remember; nobody else cares.) Apparently the man knew nothing of Yelp or of my review until last spring, when his sole Yelp publication consisted of a rant about my review.

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2019/06/status-update-yelp-is-seriously-whacked.html

It wasn't the sort of refutation of facts that Yelp claims to want business owners to post. The man did not deny that his store went out of business and is currently listed for sale. He was just upset that I'd given the store, when it existed, less than full marks, due to a fact that he admitted was true. I posted something that I meant in a conciliatory way. He posted something that showed that he didn't want to be conciliated. Now if he'd disputed my facts, I would have stood by them; if the facts had changed--if, for instance, he'd reopened the store--I would have conceded that. But the fact is that the store has not existed, as a place shoppers could discover, for many years. All the store's Yelp page was doing was bringing up bad memories and raising the blood pressure of a cardiovascular patient. So I pulled down both of my posts on his store's page, and suggested that Yelp purge the whole page. And there I intended my Yelp activity for this year to end.

This was not meant to be.

Someone on Twitter asked for help with a computer problem. I naturally thought of the local computer store that's developed a specialty in "vintage" computers, and has served me well over the years. I Googled their address.

Say whaaat? Yelp was giving this business one star? That's not a matter of personal preference or even business competition. That's insanity. This store has a niche that's not everybody's, but they own that niche; they're very, very good at keeping older computers running.

Yelp makes it possible to see the reviews they've decided to exclude from consideration when down-rating an independent business, so I verified that these were still there:

"
Belinda M., Kingsport, TN, 3.28.19: 5 stars

Charles & I have been using Compu World for computer repair  ~15 years and are very pleased with their work.  They are trustworthy with very reasonable pricing.  Highly recommend.

Priscilla K., Gate City, VA, 12.20.17: 5 stars

Where I go for Christmas! This store has or will find everything...the newest or the oldest, the flashiest or the cheapest, or any gadget in between. I clicked four stars for that, then added the fifth one because they both let me upload files from floppy disks to e-mail *and* chatted up my car pool buddy while upgrading my 1998 desktop. 

Small store, though. Everyone I've seen in there, staff and customers, has seemed the type who would help clear a path for any wheelchair user who came in, but it'd take them a while.
"

And here's what Yelp had decided to present as the only review worth consideration:

"
Vincent S., Kingsport, TN, 11.11.18 (First to Review): 1 star

these people ruined my macbook pro laptop. i had already formatted the hard drive and all i needed was operating system reinstalled. They said they cou!d do it. But after a week they admitted they didnt work on macbooks! finally after much back and forth over a 3.5 week period of me trying to get it back to take to someone that worked on macbooks. they told me that mine was one that had been recalled due to graphics card being bad. which was a LIE according to apple. when I finally did get it back the screws had been removed from back of it as 1 was missing.and another one was cross threaded.  So im guessing the one person that worked there who allegedly had one like mine, switched out guts with his which was more likely the one with messed up graphics or whatever they tried to say was wrong with mine. Not honest people and my job is to alert all  future potential customers about these people. Not only did they charge ,they charge me 100.00 for loading an operating system on it but said I had to use a cooler under it or no graphics will display on screenl.  and charged m,e 30l.00 for IT!!!!!! 
CROOKS!!!!!! I WOULDNT LET THESE PEOPLE WOIRK ON AN  AM TRANSISTOR RADIO.
"

Now I have no way of knowing that Vincent S. may not be a real person. I doubt very much that his guess about what happened to his Macbook Pro laptop is accurate. I'd believe that a mistake could have been made, because even wizards aren't always perfect. What I do know is that Vincent's experience is not typical. How I know this is because this store, Compuworld, is located about fifteen miles from my home. I have walked fifteen miles with a laptop in a case, but I'm not about to try carrying a 1998 desktop through fifteen miles of local whatever-is-least-convenient weather. So I almost always bribe somebody to drive over there with me. I've gone to Compuworld in the company of Grandma Bonnie Peters, Adayahi, Oogesti, Lisiwayu, Adawee, The Goth, and The Grouch: that's seven fellow computer users, and about as diverse a group as you could find. All seven have their own accounts at Compuworld.

And it's not the case that they all leap at any excuse to rush over there at once. They all do say things like "All the way to Colonial Heights? Can we wait another week?", and like "What I want is the new computer in the other store's window. Would you consider going there instead?", and like "The other store's on my side of town." They do not, ever, say anything like "I no longer trust those guys" or "I'm not satisfied with the last job they did." Even when they've said they didn't want to shop for anything electronic, and even though the store is in a row of businesses that include places that have seats and sell snacks, they always come into the crowded little computer store and look around. Frequently they buy something.

This is because, whether they are prim little church ladies like GBP or large hairy characters like The Goth, the wizards always seem to remember them and happen to have stocked more of what they're likely to want. And one of the guys actually chatted up The Grouch. I did not go into this on Yelp, but yes, he was the one the wizards managed to keep in a cheerful mood for two or three hours. You have to be local to realize how hard it is to keep The Grouch in a cheerful mood for two or three minutes, particularly if you are a small business owner and The Grouch isn't buying anything.

For comparison, Google Reviews gives Compuworld an average of four stars, based on the following reviews...Google links ought to work on a Google-hosted site, so I'm leaving them in.

"

Gena Prince

1 review

a year ago

Ron, the owner, is an awesome guy. He has always came when I have called him (which is about 40 minutes away) and have always done an excellent job. He has also went way beyond to fix the problem the office has had with what ever the issue is. We have also bought all of our office equipment from him and the prices are great!!! Would not trust anyone else to touch our computer systems. He is the BEST!!!!

Ben Vogel

4 reviews

a year ago

Went to have a screen replaced on my laptop with the replacement screen already in hand. Shop was quite messy with computers and parts scattered everywhere. After agreeing to do the labor, employee gave an estimate of "a couple days" for labor with no definite finish date. No confirmation or paper assurance or business card was given from this employee to contact him or to confirm the repair. This was on a Wednesday. Come Saturday after 3.5 full days to work on it and the laptop is still not repaired. On Monday, I receive a call saying the laptop is repaired. Was charged for 3 hours of labor, which is fine but could have been completed sooner. Repair was fine except for an issue with the screen not turning off when shut. It was not like this before.

Overall, they did the job I asked them to do for the agreed upon price, but it took longer than stated with no communication and was sketchy with no receipt or contact info after dropping the laptop off. A receipt was given after the repair had been done The repair left an issue that was not there before, which I will have looked at by another specialist.

Deborah Wilson

2 reviews

2 years ago

These guys are trustworthy, honest and do a great job servicing computers. They have helped me out numerous times on different issues. Very affordable too! Highly recommend them!

Janet Leigh

12 reviews · 10 photos

2 years ago

Good computer services. Owned by. Ron. Miller.

Shannon Jones

Local Guide · 2 reviews · 49 photos

a year ago

"

I read this idjit's bad review that was displacing two good reviews...I also looked at Vincent's profile on Yelp. He has only ever posted this one bad review. He has no "friends" on Yelp. He has no noticeable online presence, no link to a web site or social media account. How in blinkin' blue blazes is it possible for his reviews to impress anyone, even a bungled electronic algorithm, as more credible than, well, mine? The only way I can imagine would be through confusion with Vince Staten of the Kingsport Times-News. A bungled algorithm might achieve that level of confusion. Nobody who's read the Times-News would believe that that's the way Vince Staten writes. (For comparison, a link to Vince Staten's last blog post should be over on the right side of the screen somewhere.)

So, word-nerd and Perfect Virginia Lady that I am, I gave Yelp the chance to recognize and correct their egregious mistake. I e-mailed the site's headquarters to say that, if they wanted to suppress all my reviews in the interest of helping an old cardiovascular patient live longer, that was fine by me, but they ought at least to display the other Yelper's recent five-star review of Compuworld. I spelled out that although I'd clicked on a button to flag Vincent's review as "misleading," I wasn't asking them to purge his review, just to display it alongside one of the two reviews that reflect a more typical customer opinion.

This is what I got.

"
Hi Priscilla,

Thanks for writing back. After careful evaluation, we have decided not to remove Vincent S.'s content of Compuworld Systems. When reviewing user content, we look at a number of factors, including potential conflicts of interest, threatening or lewd commentary, and whether content has been posted to the correct business page. If a review falls within the bounds of our tolerance for strong language, appears to meet our guidelines and reflect the user’s personal experience and opinions, it is our policy to let the user stand behind their review.

Business owners can address concerns or misunderstandings via their Business Account by posting a public comment or sending a private message to the reviewer.

For further information on using Yelp, please find answers to frequently asked questions in our Support Center (http://www.yelp-support.com).

Additionally, one of the ways we try to help Yelp users discover local businesses is by using automated software to showcase reliable reviews. This means Yelp doesn’t recommend every review from every user and is automated so that it can apply the same standards to every business and every review. This is very different from other sites that tend to feature every single negative rant and positive rave. The software looks at dozens of different signals, including various measures of quality, reliability and activity on Yelp. What is recommended can change over time, and a review that is currently not recommended may be recommended on another day.

Because our recommendation software is automated, the Yelp Support team cannot manually override the software to recommend or not recommend a review. Our recommendation software is automated precisely so that it can apply the same standards to every business and every review without being overridden by someone's personal preferences.

We hope you'll take the time to watch our video about the Recommendation Software: https://www.yelp-support.com/article/What-is-Yelp-s-recommendation-software?l=en_US and visit our Support Center for more resources: http://www.yelp-support.com/Recommended_Reviews.

Regards,
Michael
Yelp Support
San Francisco, California

"

In other words, Yelp's criterion for a review's reliability is "How much of a point lead do this person's reviews, taken together, give to independent businesses over big chains?"

Let's all give Yelp zero stars.