The last Howard Johnson’s restaurant closed, ending an era of Americana, Washington Post, Nathan Diller, June 2, 2022

I knew this day would come.

It’s a long drive to Lake George, New York, and I’d been half-meaning to take it some day, to visit this “last Howard Johnson’s” restaurant which has now closed, probably for good.

The last “real” Howard Johnson’s, depending on how you define it, actually closed in 2016, in Bangor, Maine. That was the last continuously operating location, whereas the Lake George location had closed, been readied for demolition, and then rescued and restored as a passion project of sorts, with the rights to the brand retained via a line in the deed.

The actual corporate structure behind the Howard Johnson’s restaurants was gone by 2016 or even earlier; one article profiling the Lake George owner quoted him saying the iconic Howard Johnson’s ice cream had already been out of production for 15 or 20 years.

To my knowledge, there is not a single classic Howard Johnson’s building, with the original interior elements, still standing in a state of preservation. There are many abandoned ones that may still have some of that stuff inside, in varying levels of decay. It’s amazing that a chain that once numbered over 1,000 locations has vanished so completely, with not a single structure preserved in its entirely somewhere, as a piece of the American heritage. So it is that the most ordinary and ubiquitous pieces of commercial culture can turn into elusive historical artifacts. This is what I mean when I talk about old suburban buildings as ruins.

The clam strips and the salad bar were reputedly pretty bad, but I still kind of wish I’d made the drive.

Effective Zoning Reform Isn’t as Simple as It Seems, Bloomberg, Yonah Freemark and Lydia Lo, May 24, 2022

Identifying the land-use policies that most effectively add housing is harder than it seems. Mounting evidence indicates that one-off reforms such as eliminating single-family-only zoning aren’t adequate. To make meaningful progress in building homes, municipalities have to do more.

A lot of people see this as the government being a busybody. But a lot of the “do something” here is actually “stop doing something”—stop throwing up so many bureaucratic hurdles in front of people trying to build things.

America could never have built its most-loved places—or even, probably, its midcentury suburbs—with today’s thicket of land-use regulations, permitting requirements, public input sessions, veto points, and more. Our inability to build enough homes is of a piece with our inability to build pretty much anything quickly and for a reasonable cost.

Look at this:

There are several explanations for these results [ending single-family zoning not resulting in many new housing units]. In much of the city [Minneapolis], these small apartment buildings, even if technically allowed, were required to be less than three stories tall and have small overall square footage, limiting the desirability of potential new apartments. And assembling financing for these types of structures is notoriously difficult.

The busybodying, in my view, is the municipalities that regulate to an absurd degree projects that are ultimately pretty standard. It’s as if we force developers to reinvent the wheel for every single familiar, boring building. Why?

Reinventing the Eel, Eater, Claudia Geib, May 17, 2022

Eel farmers have to source all their baby eels from the wild — which, in turn, makes the annual American glass eel catch, when millions of tiny, wriggly, see-through baby eels swim up estuaries and rivers and into the waiting nets of fishers in Maine, one of the world’s most lucrative per pound.

Nearly all of these baby eels—which survive at a much higher rate in farming operations than in the wild, so this isn’t necessarily unsustainable—are shipped to China for farming. The company profiled in this piece is farming eels in Maine, right where they’re caught. They believe there’s a large market for traceable (environmental concerns) and high-quality (health concerns) farmed eel. Not to mention the fact that if the eels are actually caught in America, why not raise them here?

I remember reading awhile back that some fish are caught in the United States, shipped frozen and whole to China, defrosted and filleted, and then re-frozen and shipped back for sale in the United States. I understand that the unit costs of container shipping are extremely low, but nonetheless, this is the sort of thing that makes you (or, at least, me) wonder about globalization.

Why do cephalopods produce ink? And what's ink made of, anyway?, The Guardian, Mark Carnall, August 7, 2017

So we have eels and we have squids today.

Despite there only being around 700 living species of cephalopods, biologically, they have evolved an array of adaptations that modern science is still only just unpicking.

The most studied component of ink is melanin. Melanin is a natural pigment found across life, it is the pigment in human skin, hair and eyes and it gives ink its characteristic black or dark brown colour.

Did you know that? Useless knowledge is great; it’s a break from the feeling that everything you read/learn/do has to come back to your job or your professional interests. Now it wouldn’t be useless if I were a scientist, but I’m not!

Related Reading:

New and Old #44

New and Old #45

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