Cookies!

Welcome, inquisitive reader, as once again we marvel in the technological accomplishment of NASA landing a rover on the Red Planet. Or at least, we would be marvelling at it, if we weren't distracted by the corresponding landing of the Mars doughnut at Krispy Kreme, which has pretty much dislodged the Perseverance rover from the news here:

Obviously this is big news, and the kind of achievement which really can't be overlooked. Amazing work, Krispy Kreme!

But that's not this week's primary topic, which is in fact the Girl Scout Cookie. Now, I'm not entirely sure what this is all about, but let me give you my perspective on it.

If I said to you that there was this tradition here called Girl Scout Cookies, what would you imagine it was? For me, it conjures up images of mis-shapen, homespun cookies made by 11-year-olds of all stripes, sold to make a few bob to fix the roof in the scout shed. But that wouldn't fit the American entrepreneurial spirit at all. Instead it's more like a Young Enterprise scheme: in normal times, Girl Scouts would secure their cookie supply and set up stalls in high streets to sell these things. But it's 2021, and there's a pandemic, so of course we've gone online: our local Girl Scouts dropped a leaflet on our porch which sent us to their website, where their very professional intro video advertised their wares, and we could then order the cookies we wanted for delivery.

Apparently the proceeds from the Girl Scout cookie drive go to local good causes and also "the military" which rather reinforces my own set of personal conspiracy theories. We recently saw the film JoJo Rabbit, and, well, maybe I'll just leave it there.

So anyway, you buy the cookies, and they're delivered by the appropriate Girl Scout, given parental permission and/or accompaniment. They're disappointingly factory-produced and American, but I feel we're going for quantity not quality here.

Pretty organized, isn't it? Anyway, I hope Liana and the local Girl Scouts are successful in their Enterprise scheme.

My latest skirmish with the USPS completed semi-successfully this week, with them (hopefully) having finally accepted that they need to deliver a parcel to the address on the box at least one time out of three. This long saga started with a parcel that genuinely was for me, which should have been delivered one Saturday, and was marked delivered but didn't actually turn up. I raised a complaint, and the parcel was finally delivered two days later... damaged. So I elected to return it, leaning on the services of my friends at the USPS, and for simplicity I reused the box it came in, which still had a label on it addressing it to me. Clearly you can just reuse postage again and again here, because two days after me handing this over at the post office, it turned up back at the house. It's somewhat ironic that when I wanted the thing delivered, they apparently couldn't find a way to do it, but when I wanted to send it back, there was some kind of magnetic attraction to the house.

What's clear is that the USPS is still operating more-or-less as it did in the 1930s, with essentially no automation. Amongst other general randomness, items posted at the same time to the same place can arrive more than a month apart, having taken radically different routes (I've sent parcels to the East Coast that have gone via Seattle).

But let's end on a positive note. Sometimes this country's lack of any kind of progress since the days of the New Deal has unexpected dividends, like the continuing presence of design items which in Europe would be considered intentional nods to retro. I give you, a giant milk bottle:

Firstly it's huge - guaranteeing bonus points this side of the Atlantic - but the curvature and ridges are straight out of Metropolis. There's something about this bottle that makes me smile every time I pick it up; sure, it's relatively impractical and the lid's a pain, but the design and simplicity of it genuinely do spark joy. Honestly, I like America really.