Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2025

Big management shake-up at Cracker Barrel’s corporate HQ

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Back in August, the US chain restaurant field saw a corporation decide that doing what their customers wanted was actually a pretty good strategy … after they’d tried the opposite and nearly gone the way of Bud Light:

Last week was the Red Wedding for Cracker Barrel.

Some senior people who were in the headquarters office last Monday weren’t there anymore as the weekend drew near, some old managers from an earlier corporate culture came back to rewind the clock, and the branding consultant that advised on the now-fatally-wounded rebranding effort was sent packing. The new logo departed. The redesigned stores were acknowledged as a failure and an embarrassment.

[…]

See what they said about the redesign? “We won’t continue with it”. The whole thing collapsed, a $700 million rebrand that slammed into a concrete wall and exploded.

It remains to be seen how much the rebranding of the rebranding will matter, and this is what Cracker Barrel stock looks like in the last month:

Now, a reminder: The New York Times columnist David French explained, just over a month ago, that the controversy over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding was an absurd fake crisis ginned up by right-wing idiots who were just pretending that something had gone wrong at the company. Along with the Sydney Sweeney thing, he concluded that we were watching some “completely frivolous and meaningless cultural disputes,” examples of the way “right-wing media both mobilizes its base and bends political reality”. If you believed that the Cracker Barrel rebranding was poorly done and would alienate the company’s customers, you were falling for an invented reality that was completely meaningless and frivolous.

Then Cracker Barrel fired a bunch of managers and its rebranding consultant, abandoned the rebranding, and apologized profusely, while its stock plummeted.

If you listened to David French, if you trusted the op-ed pages of the New York Times to explain the world to you, your understanding of the most basic outline of factual reality was flipped over, turned precisely upside down. He was only wrong about literally every single detail, completely missing what was happening, what it meant, and what would happen in the near future as a result of it. To listen to this idiot is to abuse your own mind, trapping yourself in the confines of an absurd house of ideological mirrors. He is inevitably wrong, completely wrong, reliably wrong to the point of absolute and unyielding madness.

September 9, 2025

QotD: The horrible 1970s

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It should be noted, though, that it really was kind of gross to be alive during the ’70s. You can’t unsee all those hairdos, medallions, and Day-Glo typefaces. You just kind of have to put your head down like a shell-shocked veteran and stride your way grimly through a happier age.

Colby Cosh, “Cinema: recently seen”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-08-19.

August 29, 2025

Memories of Bournemouth

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s nearly sixty years since my family emigrated, but I still have golden memories of the family trips to the seaside, although my family went to Scarborough, Whitby, and Redcar rather than the Bournemouth of Pimlico Journal‘s childhood:

“Harvester at Durley Chine” by David Lally is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

At every possible opportunity in the summer weekends of my childhood, my father would take our family down to the coast. Our route to the sea was normally through the medieval city of Salisbury, across the chalk downs of Hardy’s Wessex, and into the piney moors of the New Forest. The destination would nearly always be Bournemouth, the prim, stately model of the British seaside town, perched magisterially on Dorset’s sandstone cliffs, above a long golden strand lapped by the warm waves of the Channel.

Our favourite beach was at Durley Chine, where we could park (for free, greatly appealing to my father) among obscured mansions in the shade of thick-smelling conifers, and make our descent to the shore, where the chine gives way to the rows of huts that line the promenade, and a reassuringly lower-middle class Harvester restaurant. We would while away the hours on the sand until the sky was orange, my mother reading, my father swimming, and my brother and I playing whatever games we could devise, mostly involving the throwing of sand. The day would end with fish and chips under the pines, watching the sun sink over the jurassic cliffs past Poole harbour, the gateway to King Alfred’s stronghold at Wareham.

These were among the most precious times of my early life, and the sights and sounds and smells of that part of the world and the accompanying hazy, worriless bliss are cherished sensations. Though the beach is public, it was one of those places that felt special and individual to my family, as if we had somehow carved out our own summer fief on the crowded shore.

It was on Durley Chine beach, on 24 May 2024, that two innocent women, Amie Grey and Leanne Miles, were attacked by Nasen Saadi, a criminology student from Croydon of Iraqi and Thai heritage. Saadi murdered Grey and left Miles in critical condition, and was sentenced this year to thirty-nine years in prison for his crimes. The incident was part of an escalating pattern of violence, particularly sexual violence, in the Bournemouth area over the past few years, with the beach as the focal point, a pattern which had begun in July 2021 with the brutal rape of a 15-year-old girl by Gabriel Marinoaica, a young man from Walsall who dragged his victim into the sea to commit his attack. Another notable incident occurred eight months later. Afghan asylum seeker and convicted killer Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai (he had shot two fellow Afghans while living illegally in Serbia in 2018, before fleeing to Norway, where his asylum claim was rejected, then travelling to Britain and successfully claiming asylum by pretending to be an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old, despite being an adult) stabbed Thomas Roberts (a local man and qualified precision engineer who had recently applied to join the Royal Marines) to death outside a Subway in the city centre, in a dispute over an e-scooter.

The news stories become relentless from that point. Among many depravities are the sexual assault of a 17-year-old boy by a group of Asian males on 17 June 2023, accompanied the same day by an attempted assault on a 16-year-old girl outside the fish and chip shop on the seafront. A week later, two girls, aged just 10 and 11, who would have been in primary school at the time, were sexually assaulted while swimming in the sea. As far as I can tell, none of these crimes have yet been prosecuted.

Two months after the murder of Amie Grey, on 19 July 2024, a day of delirious warmth culminated in violent clashes between youths, many coming in from London, on the seafront — clashes which were filmed and circulated on social media. In the chaos, a teenage girl was sexually assaulted. Jessica Toale, the freshly-elected Labour MP for Bournemouth West, a seat which had been Tory since its creation in 1950, said after the events of 19 July that crime and anti-social behaviour had become a ‘huge issue’ in contrast to the safe Bournemouth she remembered as a girl, stating that ‘… parents had told [her] that they are concerned about letting their daughters go to the town’. These are almost reactionary words from a Labour MP, and reflective of the mood of anxiety and decline that seems to have enveloped the city, a mood founded on the series of despair-inducing events plaguing residents and visitors. On 30 June, disorder similar to that witnessed in July last year returned to the seafront, with police making arrests across the country in the aftermath.

A week later, on 6 July, a young woman was raped in a public toilet adjoining the beach. The police have charged Mohammed Abdullah, a Syrian asylum seeker living in West London, with the crime.

August 24, 2025

This is Westland Helicopters (1960s)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Helicopters History
Published 17 Jan 2020

Major rationalisation of the UK aircraft industry occurred during the 1960s. With the acquisition of Bristol Helicopters, Fairey Aviation and Saunders-Roe, Westland Helicopters transformed itself into Britain’s only helicopter maker with plants at Yeovil, Weston-super-Mare, Eastleigh, and Hayes, producing helicopters for all roles.

August 23, 2025

Another Bud Light moment: Cracker Barrel gets rid of the cracker

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t been to the United States for more than a decade — not for political reasons, just for financial ones … I haven’t had the money to travel since 2015 — so it’s at least that long since I visited a Cracker Barrel. On our usual driving holidays, we’d stop somewhere like a Cracker Barrel to get a big breakfast to tide us over to our next destination a few hundred miles further down the road. I’d heard that the food quality had dropped after Covid, but I can’t confirm that from personal experience. Here’s ESR’s take on the latest rebranding that has riled up the online commentariat and apparently tanked the company’s stock price:

Today I’m here to talk about why I dislike Cracker Barrel, but dislike the Cracker Barrel rebrand even more.

My first reaction to the outpouring of social-media sentimentality about the destruction of CB’s comfortable old-timey ambience was to stare and wonder if these boosters had gone entirely out of their minds.

Yes, CB was designed to evoke a sort of folk memory of what rural country stores used to be like. But it’s, at best, a gigantized, commoditized, kitschy simulacrum of what they were — Hee Haw as filtered through the mind of an urban-corporate bugman.

Exhibit A for this is the gauntlet you have to run through to get to the food — gift shops that are unrivaled for the utter tastelessness and worthlessness of the cheesy crap on their shelves.

Once you get to the food, well … they serve a decent breakfast. Everything else is bland, homogenized slop.

And yet, I find that I dislike the rebranded look and feel even more. Because at least CB as it was gestured feebly in the direction of something authentic and American. The new look strips out all those vestiges — it has all the character of a generic airport lounge.

If you’re reading this and getting hot under the collar because I’ve impugned an experience that has sentimental value for you … look, I get it, okay? Old CB wasn’t designed for me, nor for anybody else who can unironically describe themselves as urbane, sophisticated cosmopolitans. But in its own pastiched way it had value, value which is now being destroyed.

Certainly the stock market thinks so. CB’s share price has been dropping like a rock — the rebrand is a failure even by corporate-bugman standards.

If the chain needed saving, the right thing to do would have been to double down on the attractive parts. Keep the local memorabilia on the walls, improve the menu, turn down the wince-inducing tackiness of the gift shop. Make it more like the mythical olden days, not less.

But no. Because the CEO is an idiot. I’ve been on a corporate board of directors and I’m here to confirm that if CB’s doesn’t convene an emergency meeting to fire her before the end of the week they are not doing their job.

July 26, 2025

VIA Rail’s premier passenger train, The Canadian

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Raymond J. de Souza discovers the aging crown jewel of VIA Rail’s passenger services, The Canadian, which VIA inherited from Canadian Pacific Railway when the country’s long-distance and intercity rail passenger services were merged into a single Crown Corporation in the 1970s:

Canadian Pacific FP7 locomotive 1410 at the head of The Canadian stopped at Dorval, Quebec on 6 September, 1965. The Canadian was Canadian Pacific’s premier passenger train before VIA Rail was formed.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.

What did I learn after four days and four nights, some 4,500 kilometres, from Vancouver to Toronto on board Via Rail’s The Canadian? Many things, as it happens.

I learned that The Canadian attracts train aficionados the world over for one of the last great rail journeys on one of the last great trains. The stainless steel rolling stock is 70 years old, the cars having been upgraded along the way, but still rolling as a living part of railway history.

Part of the cultural history Via Rail preserves is superlative meals thrice daily, served in fine style in the dining cars. Four dinners: rack of lamb, beef tenderloin, AAA prime rib, bone-in pork chop. Delicious desserts. Canadian wines and craft beers. Fish eaters and vegans also had options. The question arises ineluctably: Why is the Via Rail food between Montreal and Toronto so horrible?

Perhaps it would be too expensive; The Canadian in sleeper class certainly is. Expense was really the question in the 1870s.

“Could a country of three and a half million people afford an expenditure of one hundred million dollars at time when a labourer’s wage was a dollar a day?” asked Pierre Berton in his 1970 chronicle of that decision, The National Dream.

The cost of not building was greater, argued Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the price of remaining a sovereign continental country. Part of the financing was creative; the Hudson’s Bay Company gave Rupert’s Land to Canada, and Canada paid the contractors partly in free land.

Growing up in Calgary, I presumed that the greatest challenge was putting the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) through the mountains. And it is true that the most spectacular scenery on the route is the Fraser Canyon and the mountains of the Yellowhead Pass. (The Canadian now travels the northern route of the Canadian National (CN) Railway, not the original southern route of the CPR.)

Yet it was the Canadian Shield, thousands of lakes and muskeg atop the hardest rock on earth, that was the real obstacle. John Palliser, one of the 1860s expeditioners between Thunder Bay and the Rockies, reported back that while getting through the mountain passes could be done, the impenetrable land north of Lake Superior was the insuperable problem. And without getting around the Shield, Canada would be constrained, cooped up, with the prairies and mountains and west coast inaccessible.

VIA dome observation car on The Canadian in 2007. The best views are available from the domed seating on the upper level.
Photo by Savannah Grandfather via Wikimedia.

I’d always hoped to travel The Canadian at some point, but I was never able to afford the tickets at the same time that I had available time to travel, and there’s no hope I’ll ever be able to scrape up the money these days. According to VIA Rail’s website, the trip from Toronto to Vancouver would be between C$5860 to $9460 per person.

May 5, 2025

Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.

The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.

(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)

If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.

While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.

Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.

Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.

Still from The Battle of Britain

The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.

December 25, 2024

Drinker’s Christmas Crackers – It’s a Wonderful Life

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Critical Drinker
Published 17 Dec 2020

Join me as I review what may be the ultimate Christmas movie — the 1946 classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed … It’s a Wonderful Life.

December 13, 2024

QotD: Nostalgia, or “they were better people back then”

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s the thing about nostalgia: It assumes constant material progress. One can debate the origins and etymology of the term “nostalgia” – back in the 16th century, I think it was, they used it a few times to describe what we might call PTSD among soldiers – but it’s really a modern phenomenon. A Postmodern one, in truth — I’m talking late 20th century here. Humans have always longed for “the past”, but until the middle of the 20th century the “past” we longed for was mythical – the Golden Age, as opposed to our current Brass one.

The Golden Age was better because the Golden Men were better, not because their lives were materially better. There’s a reason all those medieval and Renaissance paintings show “historical” figures in contemporary garb, and it’s not because the Flemish Masters didn’t know about togas. Though they assumed the men of the Classical Past were better men, they assumed material life back then was pretty much the same as now, because it was pretty much the same as now. One can of course point to a million technological changes between the Roman Republic and the Renaissance, but life as it was actually lived by the vast majority of people was still basically the same: Up at dawn, to bed at dusk, birth and death and community life and subsistence farming, all basically the same. A world lit only by fire.

The modern age changed all that. At some point in the very near past, we started assuming tomorrow would look very different from today. And I do mean the very near past — there are probably people still alive today who remember people who assumed that tomorrow would be pretty much like today. Because, then, our lives are so materially different from even the very recent past, we tend to assume that our nostalgia is for material things. It’s very hard to put a name to something like the feeling “I wish we could have family Christmases again, sharing that one joke we had about how Uncle Bob always sends you goofy socks.” It’s very easy to put a name to something like “vinyl records” or “the Bob Newhart show” or “Betamax tapes”, so we use those as synecdoche.

In other words: Even though we could actually recreate the material world of 1983, and even though we think we want this, we don’t. We wish we could live like we lived in 1983, but very little of that has any relationship to the material culture of 1983.

Severian, “Nostalgia”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-19.

December 12, 2024

CHEVROLET with Cartoonist Rube Goldberg: Something for Nothing (1940)

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 27, 2013

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg creates a little animation to explain how fuel is converted to power in the modern automobile engine.

CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!

December 9, 2024

Public wash-house Liverpool (1959) | BFI National Archive

Filed under: Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BFI
Published Dec 12, 2017

Admire the industriousness of the Liverpool women who transport huge bundles of laundry to and from the local wash-house every week, crammed into old prams or balanced skilfully on their heads. The wash-house doubles as a social hub for the women, with a cafe and creche facilities. At the time of filming, this one in the Pontack Lane area was one of 13 remaining original public wash-houses in the city, although new more modernised buildings were under construction. Liverpool’s last working wash-house closed in 1995.

The peppy documentary not only looks at the modern wash-house, but introduces the story of Kitty Wilkinson, “the Saint of the Slums”, who pioneered the public wash-house movement in Liverpool during the 1832 cholera epidemic. John Abbot Productions, who made the film, specialised in sponsored non-fiction films from the late 1950s to the late 1970s.
(more…)

December 5, 2024

Look at Life – The City’s for Living In (1968)

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 19, 2020

Traffic was still an issue in the 60’s. Residents discuss how they can divert to traffic from the city. This film features great archive of city traffic in the late 60s

October 23, 2024

The Last Surviving Giant Passenger Hovercraft

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tim Traveller
Published Jul 2, 2024

In early 1968, Britain launched a revolutionary new form of sea transport: the giant SRN4-class hovercraft. They are the largest passenger hovercraft ever built, and they could fly between England and France in just 30 minutes — three times faster than anything else on the water. So why don’t we have anything like them any more?

MORE INFO
The Hovercraft Museum: https://www.hovercraft-museum.org/
The museum’s “Support Us” page, if you’d like to help them out: https://www.hovercraft-museum.org/sup…

October 6, 2024

Look at Life – The Big Takeoff (1966)

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 19, 2020

The 1966 airshow. Prince Phillip attends via helicopter.

October 5, 2024

The Woodworker (1940) – Vocational training film

Filed under: Education, Tools, USA, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 10, 2013

http://archive.org/details/Woodwork1940

Woodworking in mills, construction and cabinetmaking.

CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!

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