Postcards on the Edge

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

local businesses, like partisans in Total War, despite being vastly outgunned continue to fight . . .

By JERÉ LONGMAN

LONDON — When London was awarded the 2012 Summer Games, Dennis Spurr got into the spirit at his butcher shop. He put a sign outside, featuring the five Olympic rings made of sausages.

Eventually, the Olympic marketing police showed up. Remove the sign, Spurr was told. His store in Weymouth, England, where sailing will be held, was not an official sponsor. A law governing the use of Olympic words and images was being violated. He faced a fine up to $30,000 for referring to the Games using kielbasa, blood pudding or any of the more adventurous organ meats.

The sign came down. Then another one went up, featuring five squares made of sausages. The Olympic brand police came back. More legal action was threatened.

“They’re called Olympic rings, not Olympic squares,” Spurr retorted. The Olympic police were not amused. The sausage sign came down again.

“A civil rights group from Canada said they’d pay all my bills,” Spurr, 59, said by phone. “I didn’t want to cause trouble. Everyone is so serious. I’m just trying to celebrate the Olympics. I don’t think the sign helped me sell one more pound of sausage.”

The sausage case has come to symbolize the imperious way in which London organizers have attempted to protect the Olympic brand from ambush marketing. Until an outcry ensued, workers preparing for the opening and closing ceremonies could eat fish and chips but not sausage and chips or burgers and chips or just plain chips, unless they were served by McDonald’s, which holds exclusive French fry rights at the Olympic stadiums.

Even the parents of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, and their party supply company came under scrutiny. According to news reports, organizers asked for amendments to a Web site that featured an Olympic torch and a woman throwing a javelin under the headline “Let the Games Begin.” Much to everyone’s relief, the Union Jack Essential Party Kit passed muster.
“I can imagine the Queen intervening to post bail,” said Michael Payne, a former marketing director for the International Olympic Committee.

The Middletons got off lightly compared with the cafe in Plymouth, England, that was forced to quit serving its flaming torch baguette. The House Cafe in south London was ordered to remove interlocking Olympic rings made from bagels. And La Rose Florists in Stoke-on-Trent also had to dismantle affronting rings fashioned from tissue paper.

“We thought it was a joke,” Christie Marshall, 21, a worker at the florist shop, said of the order to cease and desist. “It’s crazy. But it’s their loss, not ours.”

Sebastian Coe, the chief Olympic organizer, set off a stir in a radio interview last Friday, saying that spectators probably would not be allowed into stadiums wearing Pepsi T-shirts, given that Coke was the official soft-drink sponsor. One reader wrote to The Telegraph of London, suggesting, “Everyone should just turn up naked, claiming, ‘We weren’t sure of the guidelines,’ and see what happens.”

Clarifications followed, along with ridicule. Individuals could wear what they wanted, as long as there was no group attempt to undermine the Olympic sponsors, organizers said. Jacques Rogge, the president of the I.O.C., assured that “common sense would prevail.”

The policing of marketing scofflaws stems from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which have come to be defined by their commercial excess and an infamous ambush marketing campaign by Nike, which was not an official sponsor.

“All this was designed to do was stop a major brand from getting a free ride and keep a city from turning the streets into a third world flea market,” Payne said. “It wasn’t intended to stop the local sausage maker from putting homemade sausages in rings.”

Payne, who is no longer with the I.O.C., devised the current Olympic marketing program, whereby 11 multinational corporations pay about $100 million each over a four-year period. Given that corporate sponsorships account for more than 40 percent of Olympic revenue, the I.O.C. and London Olympic organizers have a vested interested in protecting their sponsors, Payne said.

But when the ambush marketing rules are applied overzealously, Payne said: “It’s backlashing to the sponsors. People want to know, why are they being so suffocating and strict?”

Competitors, too, face restrictions. Michael Phelps wrote on Twitter last week that swimmers can no longer wear emblems of national flags on both sides of their swimming caps. He supplied photographs of his new cap, featuring the United States flag and his name on one side and a small logo for Speedo on the other.

“Smh,” Phelps wrote, meaning shaking my head.

Athletes are also prohibited from posting on Twitter about sponsors that are not affiliated with the Olympics. And if an American runner wins a race in shoes sponsored by say, Adidas, he still must wear Nikes on the victory stand because Nike is the official supplier of the United States medal podium uniform. BP is also a corporate partner of the United States Olympic Committee, perhaps becoming the first official oil spill sponsor of the Summer Games.

At the recent European soccer championships, Nicklas Bendtner of Denmark revealed underwear bearing the logo of a betting firm and was fined $120,000 for this ambush marketing stunt. No one is quite sure what would happen with a similar display at the Olympics. Technically, it could result in a loss of the right to compete.

At his butcher shop in Weymouth, Spurr is in no danger of losing his right to make sausage. But he is again thumbing his nose at the Olympic marketing police with another sign, this one featuring five frying pans.

“So far so good,” Spurr said. He is also handing out plastic medals. If the marketing police return, well, any publicity is good publicity.

“We’ve got some handcuffs,” he said. “It would make nice pictures.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/sp...ef=global-home

[jiimbergin]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I better start learning up on this stuff......my parents hit 70 next year.

are you implying that 70 is old

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

are you implying that 70 is old

With me fast approaching my mid 40's...I'm hoping 70 is the new 50.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

With me fast approaching my mid 40's...I'm hoping 70 is the new 50.

as I approach 70 (my dear wife is already there), I believe you will find that is true. We are very busy, we travel a lot and find that, although we can not do all we used to be able to do, we do enough to feel truly alive!

[BadJuju]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

With me fast approaching my mid 40's...I'm hoping 70 is the new 50.

If 70 is the new 50, is 26 the new 6?! YAR!!!!

[davidstvz]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Well assuming 0 is always 0, 30 is the new 20, and 70 is the new 50... then we extrapolate the following:


X is the new Y:

x	y
0	0
10	7
20	14
30	20
40	28
50	35
60	42
70	50
80	57
90	64
100	71

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

So between 90 and 100 in gen-Y years social security kicks in.

Got it!

(just think if it was in dog years . . .)

On a serious note, in recent times severe economic distress has resulted in shorter life spans, not longer.

Think we're immune?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

So between 90 and 100 in gen-Y years social security kicks in.

Got it!

(just think if it was in dog years . . .)

On a serious note, in recent times severe economic distress has resulted in shorter life spans, not longer.

Think we're immune?

IIRC Russia's life expectancy, from the Soviet collapse as well as epidemic levels of heavy smoking and alcoholism, led to a sharp decline in quality of life and standard of living.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

IIRC Russia's life expectancy, from the Soviet collapse as well as epidemic levels of heavy smoking and alcoholism, led to a sharp decline in quality of life and standard of living.

No heavy smoking and drinking under communism?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

No heavy smoking and drinking under communism?

IIRC correctly, Russia/Soviet Union had some pretty bad smoking/drinking issues throughout it's existence.....and their life expectancy wasn't the best compared to say OECD countries.......but they seem to have taken a decent whack post Soviet collapse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Russia

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

My father, Charles Hasting Elwin Coles who did not look after himself, lived to 92. My bloodline, Elwin Coles is listed in Salt Lake City, and is shown to live to a greate age. My life stile is under the advice of Dr. Mercola, www.mercola.com so I reckon I already have an advantage over my direct peers; better exercise, understanding of nutrition etc.

With all that in mind and in my 69th year; I feel like a 35 yr old.

On that basis, I may get to 125.

[BadJuju]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

On that basis, I may get to 125.

Dorian...Coles?!

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Nice one, puts me in my place.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

every 4 year election cycle or so a series of articles are run that look at one of the backbones of our economy - people who actually do the necessary work with a sense of ownership. True, these pieces are shot through with patronizing propaganda but in our times any exposure is some relief . . .

Some days, Donna, at home, wondered how she could keep her diner open.

By DAN BARRY

ELYRIA, Ohio

A 1957 Buick Special, burgundy and white, its chrome strips reflecting like fun-house mirrors. A 1955 Pontiac Star Chief, bronze and cream, with a translucent hood ornament that glows in the dark. A 1963 Ford Thunderbird, the color of a vanilla shake, just waiting to be floored to some dreamlike drive-in.

These American-made wonders preen at the edge of Ely Square Park, some with tail fins audacious enough for spaceflight, others with open hoods boasting of the muscular engines beneath. Their proud owners watch from folding chairs like protective parents, ready to pounce at any violation of the code to look but not touch.

It is a midsummer Sunday in Elyria, and Donna Dove, the harried owner of Donna’s Diner, right here on Middle Avenue, has somehow managed to stage another classic car show. She arranges the event every year because she wants to enliven the bustle-free downtown, and because old American cars remind her of better days in a city that once helped to build them.
Better days behind us, she says, and better days to come.

Once the ideological tug-of-war of this presidential campaign comes to its final pull, the decisions made by the winner will become real in places like Elyria, affecting everything from city services to health care. If soldiers are again needed, some will come from here, where the names of those who served are engraved on park brick, near the soaring Civil War monument.

But if there were film in the oversize mock camera above the Loomis Camera store on Broad Street — the one that has been trained on the park for decades — it would capture the constant that transcends presidential politics: the shared determination to make it through this day and into the next.

It would record the fits of earnest energy along Middle Avenue, which faces the park: the hard-up workers, leaving the Minute Man temp agency before dawn for day jobs at a greenhouse in Oberlin, or a nursing home in Lorain; the civic-minded volunteers of Main Street Elyria, gathering to discuss how to revive downtown; the no-nonsense city laborers, polishing the city gem that is Ely Square.

Like characters out of a Thornton Wilder play — or maybe a short story by Sherwood Anderson, who once lived here — the denizens of Middle Avenue play out their roles under the watchful eye of that looming Loomis camera. The customers of Lorain National Bank, checking on savings, seeking loans. The clients of the divorce lawyer John Haynes, dividing assets, nursing wounds. And, at the end of the block, the owner of Donna’s Diner, taking orders, cooking food, trying to stay open.

Up Against the Wall

Donna opened her diner a dozen years ago, and did all right for a while, if all right means working six days a week and spending the seventh day shopping for supplies. But the recession, set against the steady decline of Elyria’s downtown, finally caught up with her this year. She’s all in — 401(k) gone, health insurance nonexistent — and very nearly out. Just paying the electric bill has become a monthly cliffhanger.

She is torn about what to do. Some days she tends to agree with a loyal customer known as the Judge: James M. Burge, the administrative judge of the Lorain County Court of Common Pleas. Over his daily routine of grilled chicken and cottage cheese, he has suggested that Donna close the diner and run the courthouse cafeteria for a captive clientele, no pun intended.

Other days, though, she resolves to remain open for her family of regulars, including the mostly older customers called the Breakfast Club. Where would Speedy Amos, the former Marine who fought in both World War II and the Korean War, get his morning coffee? And Bill Balena, the bankruptcy lawyer? And Jack Baird, the councilman? And Janice Haywood, from Brandau Jewelers, now closed, like so much else in downtown?

Donna, 57, is flirting with a third option that she is keeping to herself. But first she has to get through her car show.

This Sunday morning begins for Donna at 5:45, with the cooking of the bacon for breakfast and the ribs for lunch. Soon, she and various family members are hustling to serve eggs and coffee to the car owners who have already parked their precious commodities along the edge of Ely Square. But ratcheting up the morning tension is Donna herself.

The rule of the house is: When Donna’s unhappy, watch out. And she is unhappy.

The Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria barely mentioned the car show, so the turnout of car owners and visitors will be low. The city promised help, but didn’t deliver much. Donna spent $1,000 of her own money on trophies and door prizes and printed fliers, and will wind up being out $300.

One of her helpers has boiled eight dozen eggs — eight dozen! — instead of the three dozen requested. Another electric bill has arrived, with another late charge. Donna’s 21-year-old granddaughter, Bridgette Harvan, a college student who works as a waitress at the diner, is announcing to customers that she is pregnant — a boy, it turns out. Donna, who got pregnant at 16, has received this news with mixed emotions.

And the meal orders just keep coming.

“It’s like this force holding me down,” Donna says. “ ‘Let’s see if you can get past this one. ...’ ”

But then, from the park’s gazebo, a band called Johnny Aces and the Wingmen launches into a version of “Cara Mia” that rings through the city square, and Donna’s mood brightens. More classic cars are pulling into downtown, people are stopping to admire this Buick and that Studebaker, and a moribund stretch of Elyria comes alive.

“The thing is, I did it myself,” she says.

Tail Fins and Chrome

A 1966 Ford Galaxie, sky blue. A 1956 Chevy Bel Air, blue and white. That 1957 Buick Special, with its requisite touches: fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror and an American flag at full-staff on the antenna. Their gleaming chrome can blind.
Cars matter to Elyria, especially cars like these. Beyond their evocation of open-road possibility, they have the aerodynamic brawn to carry one’s expectations through any wall, into the future. They remind the city of when thousands worked at the General Motors plant here; when automobile subcontractors peppered the city; when, a century ago, the Elyrian industrialist Arthur Lovett Garford produced a horseless carriage called, simply, the Garford.

Take the Breakfast Club, for example. Speedy Amos announces his Marine fealty on the license-plate frame of his Chrysler Concorde. Dale Price, retired from the telephone company, has a flapping American flag painted on the hood of his black Volkswagen Jetta. And Jim Dall, who ran the local Ford dealership for decades (a Ford banner for Distinguished Achievement, 1961, hangs in his garage), incorporates great pomp in the annual summertime unveiling of his 2002 turquoise Thunderbird convertible.

Donna at a sidewalk grill outside her diner at her annual classic car show in Elyria, Ohio.

But Donna outpaces them all. On a shelf behind her cash register are displayed 27 miniature car models, including a 1957 Ford Thunderbird and a 1959 Chevy Impala. In her driveway, she parks a 1975 black-and-white Chevy Camaro that, when she guns it, makes her feel 40 years younger.

And in her subconscious, the search continues for the car of her childhood: her mother’s 1963 Chevy Impala convertible, a buffed-red thing of beauty that — when its top was down — could blow away the daily woes of a troubled household.

But this magical convertible vanished one day to become Donna’s enduring symbol of the almost. Her mother says that Donna’s hard-drinking father got drunk in Cleveland one night and forgot where he had parked it, but Donna has always assumed that it was repossessed.

“We lost the car, we lost the house,” Donna says.

So, as if to reclaim that car, as if to resurrect the way things used to be — if only for a day — Donna arranges for this classic car show, an event whose defiant undercurrent is expressed by the revving-engine arrival of six more cars, including a 1955 Ford pickup and a souped-up 1971 Chevy Nova. Even Johnny Aces and his Wingmen cannot compete.

The automobile afternoon continues. The sprays of the park fountain cut shimmering arcs in the air, the passing freight trains sing of their burdens, and the characters of Elyria strut across the stage just outside Donna’s Diner.

Here, admiring the classic Fords and Buicks, is Pete Aldrich, 52, a Donna’s regular who, only a few months ago, was out of work and living a little rough, spending the occasional night in his car. Nearly every morning he’d hustle out of the diner for another job interview, no matter that his eyeglasses were missing an arm.

But his life has improved since then. He has a job as a sales representative for a restaurant-service company, an apartment a few blocks from Donna’s — and a pair of eyeglasses with both arms intact.

Here, lingering in front of Donna’s is Ike Maxwell, 59, once an all-everything football hero for Elyria, class of ’72, and now a downtown denizen with a brain injury from a baseball-bat attack three decades ago. Wearing shorts, white socks and sandals, he is shouting again, in his never-ending conversation with all of Elyria.

Donna makes a deal with him. Stop yelling and I’ll feed you. Soon Ike is sitting at a picnic table in the park, eating a roast beef sub from a plastic foam container, while someone nearby nods in his direction and says, “He could have been great, man.”

Here, eating a chili dog, is Holly Brinda, 54, the mayor of Elyria, her hometown. No matter where she looks, she sees an issue needing attention. If she gazes out her office window, she sees a homeless couple sleeping outside the First Congregational Church. If she walks through the city’s core, she sees vacancies.

But Ms. Brinda, in only her first year of office, also sees hope, in the global industries based in her city, in the local think tank that is Lorain County Community College, even in the clean-slate possibilities of this profoundly challenged downtown. When someone asks her what’s going on, she answers with unmistakable cheer. “All of it,” she says.

Finding a Way Forward

And here is Donna Dove herself: a small–business woman in northeastern Ohio who feels as though the faster she runs, the more she falls behind. Her diner, the business she always dreamed of, is a few bad lunch crowds from closing down for good.

Though she hasn’t made it public, she now knows what she is going to do. No, she will not shut down for good. Nor will she take the advice of a customer, the Judge, to move her business to the courthouse cafeteria. Instead, she’ll close the diner for a week or so, redecorate it, change its menu — add a macaroni-and-cheese bar, for example — and reopen. New and improved.

In a few weeks, she will be hobnobbing in the back of her diner with Mark Ondrejech of US Foods, her wholesale food supplier and unofficial business adviser. She will lay out her vision of a new menu, a new look, a new — Donna’s.

“Just so that it’s ...,” she will say, trailing off in search of the key word.

“Different,” Mark will volunteer.

“Different,” she will agree.

And then, one Sunday afternoon in late September, Donna will go to Office Depot to buy rolls of shipping paper, some tape, and two pieces of poster board. She will cover the plate-glass windows of her diner with brown paper, and write out the words for two signs, her black marker squeaking with each stroke:

CLOSED

Coming Soon

NEW Donna’s Diner

Re-opening

Monday Oct 1 7am

This small, modest diner, in a 19th-century brick building on the corner of Middle Avenue and Second Street, is not merely a business for Donna Dove. “That diner is me,” she says.

“I’m just going forward,” Donna adds. “I’m not looking back.”

This resolve of hers — this determination to reinvent herself — can sometimes seem particularly Elyrian. It is seen, for example, in Tianna Madison, an Elyria track star who would win an Olympic gold medal a couple of weeks after the car show. It is seen, too, in Howard Foxman, the owner of Loomis Camera, who will soon close his store after 62 years — that oversize mock camera will come down — but who, at 91, will continue his business, on eBay.

For now, Donna is keeping her plans to herself, as she supervises the final moments of a car show that has temporarily perked up the downtown of her city.

Soon the lead singer of Johnny Aces and the Wingmen is calling out the day’s trophy winners, and then summoning Donna to the bandstand to take a bow. She tends to loom large in her diner, but here, in the park’s gazebo, she seems smaller somehow. She is also not wearing her ever-present apron.

“One more time for Donna,” the bandleader says. “She works very, very hard.” Then, chuckling, he says, “Now get off the stage.”

The band closes with some Roy Orbison. A fleet of American-made beauties start their engines. And Donna Dove steps down from the stage to melt back into Elyria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/us...gewanted=print

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

redefining the mythology of the American middleclass . . .

A New Reality About What a Family Can Really Afford

By ALINA TUGEND

I’M finding myself having the same conversation over and over with friends whose children are applying to college. We want them to be able to go to the best institution they can get into, but we may not be able to afford it.

And we’re having a hard time pairing our expectations with the reality.

It’s not that we’ve been immune from the economic turmoil that has troubled the country. The magazine my husband worked at folded in 2009, and though we were luckier than most and he eventually found other work, it was a scary time.

We dealt with it by paring back on eating out, vacations and other nonessentials. But it wasn’t until we faced the reality of a college tuition bill that we realized how difficult it was to let go of the assumptions we’d had all our lives.

And we’re not the only ones. Consider the students graduating from college who expected the same kind of lifestyle — or better — than their parents had and the 60-somethings who anticipated a comfortable, if not luxurious, retirement.

“We have made an upper-middle-class income and are living an upper-middle-class life, but with how the economy has played out, we need to make more middle-class decisions, and we refuse to do it,” said a friend of mine, who asked that her name not be used because she didn’t want her friends to know her financial situation. “We live paycheck to paycheck. We’re in debt, but we can’t wrap our heads around not being able to” allow their son to apply to an expensive private university.

“When we had these kids 18 years ago, we started saving for college,” she said. “We moved to an expensive town so they could soar and achieve and go as high as they could.” Then, her husband lost his job and took a while to find a new one.

“The economic landscape has changed, but we’re still rooted in our attitude that we had when we had these kids 18 years ago,” she said. “It’s so hard to realign our attitudes with the economic reality.”

And she knows that she and her husband are not doing their children any favors if they end up heavily in debt and have no money for retirement.

My friend is not alone in grappling with this dichotomy. Findings from the 14th quarterly Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor Polls released in October, which explored perceptions about upward mobility among Americans, found that nearly half of those surveyed say they had more opportunity to get ahead than their parents did.

But only about one-third said they believed there would be more opportunity for their children than in the past. The poll surveyed 1,000 to 1,250 people, depending on the question, by phone.

“The majority believe they will get ahead and live the American dream in their lifetime,” said Joan Walker, executive vice president for corporate relations at Allstate. “But they worry whether that dream will be available for their children. Americans understand that risk has been transferred from institutions to individuals and the future is very uncertain. Now, it’s not so much about getting ahead, but holding steady.”

Jennifer Turner, who lives outside Harrisburg, Pa., has younger children — 6 and 8 years old — so the tuition dilemma is still distant on the horizon. But ever since her husband lost his job at a stone quarry in 2009 and started his own auto body repair and refinishing shop, times have been tough.

“I grew up on a dairy farm and money was always tight,” she said. “We had secondhand clothes and didn’t eat out. Those things aren’t bad, but I thought we would be able to do more.”

She attended a four-year college and foresaw an easier life than her parents had.

“But we’re living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “We’re trying to stretch it and sometimes it doesn’t stretch.” After-school activities like dance for her daughter and wrestling and gymnastics for her son are a thing of the past.
Will her daughter be able to attend college?

“If she does really good in school and gets scholarships and works,” Ms. Turner said.

But after resisting the idea for a long time, she said she was finally coming to terms with the reality of her life.

“We may not be able to do what other people do. I see commercials for Disney and would love to be able to give that to my kids,” she said. “But I need to accept that I can’t, instead of fighting it and being resentful.”

The expectation that life will just continue improving generation by generation is also part of the thinking of those now in college and in their 20s.

“There is a tension between continued self-confidence and the reality of the economy,” said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (Free Press, 2006).

Studies have shown, she said, that 60 percent of high school seniors expect to attend graduate or professional school after college, but only 10 percent actually will. Compare that with 1976, she said, when only 30 percent believed they would continue on to postcollege education. So the number actually attending has remained steady, but the number anticipating such higher education has doubled.

Some of that information is from a study called Monitoring the Future, conducted since 1975 from the University of Michigan, which each year surveys 8th, 10th and 12th graders on a variety of subjects.

One glimpse shows how the thinking has changed over the years. In 2011, 56 percent of high school seniors expected they would own “much more” or “somewhat more” possessions than their parents when they were older. That figure has decreased since 2000, when it was 62 percent. But is still almost 10 percent more than the 47 percent who answered affirmatively in 1976.
“The continuation of high materialistic expectations is surprising,” Professor Twenge said, although she noted that it was a little too soon to tell how the recession had affected this younger generation.

“For some material goods, the expectations might come more in line, such as cars and houses — you’re not going to have a new car all the time,” she said. But she said that she didn’t think we would see many changes in the belief that the younger generation felt owed a good college education or a well-paying job.

Or that we, as parents, owe it to them. Right now, in our household, college is the continuing conversation, and although my husband and I have tried to be realistic, I realize that we’re not really facing the hard facts.

I spoke to Keith Bernhardt, vice president for college planning at Fidelity Investments, who told me about online research his company did this year involving 2,300 parents of children 18 years and younger.

Only about a third of those parents of college-bound teenagers were considering all the financial ramifications of college, including the total cost, the impact of college selection, graduating with debt and how the major their children chose could affect their job prospects and earning potential.

Of those, a little more than a third opted to send their children to less expensive colleges.

We’ve discussed some of these issues, but not all. As my friend said, we just don’t want to admit there are real limits.
“You can call us in denial,” she said, “Or you can call us cockeyed optimists.”

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com