Green Plastic Grass

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates the occasion!

Easter morning is a time of tradition in most families, including ours. When the day arrives your thoughts naturally turn to the Easters of your childhood when–only after church, naturally–it was time for the Easter basket hunt, when hyped-up kids went tearing around the house in their best Sunday clothes searching for their particular flimsy, brightly colored Easter basket, enticed by the prospect of gorging themselves on Easter candy.

Of course, the hunting wasn’t over when you found your basket. That’s because the basket inevitably was filled with fluorescent green plastic grass that served as a convenient hiding place for a little foil-wrapped chocolate egg or a random jelly bean. If you wanted to be sure that you had found every last bit of Easter candy in the basket–and you surely did–the preferred approach was to remove the main hunk and orphaned strands of fake grass, shake the grass a few times to be sure that you had removed every candy item, and put it on the floor. At our house, this left the floor of the family room coated with a layer of green plastic strands.

The green plastic strands, like the tinsel used to decorate Christmas trees, were not easy to clean up after the frantic chocolate consumption was over. The strands nestled deep in shag carpeting and hid behind chair and sofa legs. At least the strands weren’t charged with static electricity, as tinsel was, but like tinsel the fake plastic grass was not vacuum cleaner-friendly. It typically would get wound around the rolling brush at the vacuum’s intake vent, causing the vacuum to stop picking up debris and overheat and requiring you to carefully extricate each green plastic strand.

Why green plastic grass, and not real grass–or no grass at all? Who knows? The ’60s and ’70s were the height of the plastic era. If future generations ever excavate American landfills, looking for evidence of what life was like in the days gone by, they’ll no doubt find lots of that green plastic grass, and wonder what in the world it was.

Mr. Microphone Messages

The ’70s were a curious time that left a mark on everyone who lived through them. People who were around at that time inevitably sported bad ’70s hair, wore bad ’70s outfits, and know that somewhere out there multiple bad photos provide evidence of those embarrassing facts. Deep down, ’70s survivors carry a lingering fear that some day those photos might be unearthed and shared with their current co-workers and friends–and no one wants that.

But the ’70s impact runs even deeper than just photographic proof of the worst hairstyles and fashion in the last 100 years. Our personalities and psyches have been shaped and scarred by the messages that the ’70s inflicted on people during that strange time.

Consider, for example, the commercial for the Ronco “Mr. Microphone” product, which you can watch here. Once you get past the hair and clothing–which is admittedly difficult–think of how that commercial might have distorted the sensibilities of an innocent yet credulous viewer. Was it considered appropriate, even welcome, to bring a Mr. Microphone to a party and start handing it around to loudmouth partygoers? Would frazzled parents really want you to give a Mr. Microphone to an already loud roomful of raucous kids? Did “professional entertainers” really use Mr. Microphone during rehearsals? And, perhaps most importantly, how would a young woman–who is never seen on camera, incidentally–react if some guy with a bad haircut passed by in a slow-moving convertiblel and said, in a voice amplified by the car radio: “Hey, good lookin’! Be back to pick you up later!”? Was that the kind of smooth banter that was expected of a participant in the ’70s dating scene?

To this day, if you say “hey good lookin’! Be back to pick you up later!” to people of a certain age, you’re likely to get a rueful chuckle and a shake of the head. The messages we received then are still there, buried deep, and no one can really say with confidence whether or not they continue to exercise influence on our conduct and behavior. In view of that, is it any wonder that younger generations think we’re weird and might have difficulty understanding our perspective on life and work?

Unchanging Places

Recently some friends from high school were in town–for a memorial service for one of our classmates, regrettably–and we decided to get together for lunch. They’ve long since moved away from Columbus, so I was trying to think of a place we could go that they would remember from our high school days.

This was easier said than done, because our high school days ended in the ’70s and pretty much everything in Columbus has changed dramatically since then. Most of the places we knew from that time went out of business, or were torn down entirely, decades ago. I could only think of one place that has survived: Tommy’s Pizza. It was a big hangout in high school, especially for pizzas before and after home football games, and it still occupies its traditional spot with the familiar towering “Tommy’s” sign shown above–so Tommy’s it was.

Our visit was the first time I’ve been to Tommy’s in many years, and it was like going back in time. So far as we could tell, the interior was identical to what it was 50 years ago, with the same entrance, the same pick-up counter just inside the front door with the stacks of “Tommy’s Pizza” boxes and hand-lettered signage written on the round cardboard inserts that Tommy’s puts under pizzas before boxing them up for a carry-out order. The tables, chairs, and configuration of the seating areas all seemed to be unchanged, too, and so far as we knew the same waitresses were still taking orders and delivering hot pizzas fresh from the oven. And the pizzas we got were the same great, crispy, thin crust pies that Tommy’s has been serving since those high school days.

The sense of sameness and memory evoked by our lunchtime visit to Tommy’s was very striking, especially in view of the sad event that brought us all together in the first place. It was oddly comforting, and cool, to think that one place from our youth was still there, pretty much unchanged by the passage of time. Columbus has changed a lot, but I’m happy to report that Tommy’s Pizza is still there, just as it always has been.

The Frosted Pop-Tarts Period

I saw that William Post, widely recognized as the creator of Pop-Tarts, died recently at the ripe old age of 96. According to his obituary in Newsweek, in 1964 he was asked by the Kellogg’s Company to create a new product that could be made in a toaster. Within a few months he and his team came up with Pop-Tarts . . . and the kid breakfast world would never be the same.

Pop-Tarts were a staple in our household from the point Mom first brought a box home from the grocery store, which was probably shortly after they were introduced. (Our household tended to be a first mover when it came to new breakfast food options.) I liked the original unfrosted version–especially the strawberry variety, which the Newsweek article says was the original flavor–but my Pop-Tarts consumption really took off later, when frosted Pop-Tarts hit the market.

My favorite was the frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts. They came in a foil packet containing two of those rectangular pastry delights. I actually preferred them right out of the packet, without using the toaster. The delectable goodies had a hard icing crust that crunched and cracked when you took a bite, which provided a nice textural element to the whole frosted Pop-Tart experience. If you put them in the toaster, in contrast, the icing melted a bit, and you lost that. (You also risked taking a bite of superheated filling.) The stiff white icing coating was an excellent contrast to the rich, dark blueberry filling. Strawberry frosted Pop-Tarts were good, but a packet of two blueberry Pop-Tarts with a glass of cold milk made for a perfect post-high school snack.

Blueberry frosted Pop-Tarts entered the “forbidden foods” category, along with Frosted Flakes and Cap’n Crunch, when an adult metabolism made me start paying attention to my calorie intake, but the memories of the first bites of them live on. Thank you for the memories, Mr. Post!

The TV Year In Review

We’ve reached the point in the year where we’re seeing the retrospective, “what happened in 2023” stories. One of the traditional year-end articles identifies the most-watched prime-time TV shows of the year. That’s always of interest to me, as kind of a measuring stick of popular American culture and also how familiar–or, more accurately, unfamiliar–I am with mainstream TV viewing.

The Variety article on the most-watched prime-time TV broadcasts of 2023 has some clear messages. First, the National Football League is a mainstream TV powerhouse. Fourteen of the top fifteen most-watched TV broadcasts of the year were NFL games, with the Super Bowl, of course, topping the list. The NFL also was responsible for nearly half of the top 100 broadcasts, with 45 NFL games making the list. The NFL’s dominance in the year-long list is particular striking when you consider that the NFL season encompasses less than half of the calendar year. 

In short, there’s a reason why the NFL continues to spread out from its traditional Sunday afternoon setting to now feature broadcasts on Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night, and increasingly Saturday night. I’m sure the networks and streaming services would be thrilled if the NFL scheduled a prime-time game for every night of the week, and stretched the season out even longer.

Second, it’s pretty clear that many of the people who watch a primate-time NFL game on TV are going to watch other TV shows that night, too, after the game has ended. Many of the standard, series-type TV shows that made the list did so because they were strategically positioned to air following an NFL game broadcast. If you want someone to see your show, you’ll therefore want to beg the network to put it right behind a prime-time NFL game on the schedule–and then hope your storyline and characters grab the football game holdovers so they might watch your creation again without an NFL lead-in. 

And finally, the list confirms my increasing lack of contact with network TV. I’ll watch some NFL broadcasts, for sure, but I’ve never seen, and frankly have no interest in watching, most of the series whose episodes made the top 100 list–shows like NCIS, Bluebloods, Accused, Fire Country, FBI, Chicago Fire, Young Sheldon, or Next Level Chef. I didn’t watch the Oscar or the Grammy broadcasts, either. In fact, I would bet that in 2023 I watched less network TV than I have in years . . . and perhaps ever. It’s a far cry from a ’60s childhood where most evenings were spent camped in front of the TV, switching channels and watching whatever CBS, NBC, and ABC chose to broadcast that night. 

An Alternative Take On Retirement Planning

As we move closer to what we think will be the end of our working years, we inevitably start reading more about retirement planning. Usually such articles focus on the financial aspects of retirement planning, seeking to help you tackle the toughest question of all: how much do I need to have saved, really, to retire? In most of those articles you’ll see all kinds of formulae, investment tips, and planning concepts that will supposedly help you attain a financially comfortable retirement life.

CNN recently published an alternative take on retirement planning. The writer’s bottom-line point is that many Americans are too obsessed with accumulating retirement funds. Instead, he argues they should be focused on creating great memories and accumulating enriching experiences when they are still healthy and active enough to do so–and helping out their kids at earlier ages, when they really need the money the most. The idea is that the retirees can then reflect on those happy memories in their dotage, when their health might not let them engage in many expensive, physically taxing activities.

It’s an interesting perspective that is contrary to many articles that take the position that most Americans don’t save enough for retirement. But it reflects what I think is a fundamental point: there is no one “right” way to look at retirement. Some people will be comfortable with following the writer’s approach, spending more at earlier points in their lives, and saving less, like the grasshopper in the fable. Others will be like the ant, because they know that they don’t want to risk a retirement where they don’t have enough and are beset by money worries during their so-called golden years. Underlying both scenarios, and others along the spectrum, is knowing yourself and what you really want your retirement to be.

Once you realize that retirement is not a math test and there is no single correct answer, it becomes a little easier to accept that you can only do your best, based on your own circumstances and interests and self-awareness. That’s a liberating notion.

Happy (Inflated) Thanksgiving!

When I was a kid, before I’d developed a deep and abiding appreciation of the joys of televised football, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was the highlight of the holiday, right up there with sitting at the “kid’s table” for the family meal. And while I liked the marching bands and the appearance of Santa at the end, for me the parade was all about the giant balloons. I particularly kept an eye out for goofy, cross-eyed Bullwinkle J. Moose as he drifted down the narrow passageway left by the concrete canyons of Manhattan. The original Bullwinkle balloon, shown above, was a staple of the parade from 1961 to 1983.

If you’re a balloon person like me, you’ll be interested in seeing some of the examples of early balloons, which you can find here and here. The parade started in 1924, but the giant balloons were not introduced until a few years later. Some of the early balloons were pretty creepy, frankly, although I do like the pictures of the Popeye and Donald Duck balloons. Another favorite from the time when I actually watched the parade was the gigantic flying Underdog, which was about the length of a city block and was featured in the parade from 1965 to 1984.

Happy (inflated) Thanksgiving, everyone!

Legal In Ohio

Last week Ohio passed Issue 2, a citizen initiative that will effectively legalize marijuana in the state. The initiative, which was approved with almost 57 percent of the vote, will regulate the cultivation, manufacturing, and sale of marijuana to Ohioans over the age of 21, and also allow them to grow their own marijuana at home, with a limit of six plants per person. The law established by the initiative, which will take effect 30 days after the election, also sets a 10 percent tax at the point of sale for each marijuana transaction.

Because Issue 2 was a citizen initiative, the Ohio General Assembly can act to modify and amend the law. Ohio lawmakers are talking about doing that, including addressing important questions like how the tax revenue generated by the legal sale of marijuana–which one study estimates will eventually amount to hundreds of millions of dollars–should be used and whether additional regulations should be imposed on the new marijuana industry. Issue 2 establishes the “Division of Cannabis Control” within the Ohio Department of Commerce, which is supposed to “regulate, investigate, and penalize adult use cannabis operators, adult use testing laboratories and individuals required to be licensed.”  The Department has nine months to create and publish the regulations and issue the first set of licenses.

All of this is pretty amazing for someone who has lived in Ohio for decades. When I was a kid, Ohio was a pretty buttoned-up place. “Blue laws” prohibited the sale of beer and wine by groceries on Sundays, liquor could be purchased only from state-controlled stores, there was no gambling of any kind in the state, and growing and using marijuana was completely banned. Now the approach to all of those activities has changed radically.

Why has Ohio decided to change? Perspectives on issues can and do change with the times, of course, but I think a significant part of the answer is found in the fact that, with the passage of Issue 2, Ohio becomes the 24th state to make recreational marijuana legal. In short, Ohio is right in the middle of the country on this issue–neither the first mover, nor the last–which is right where any native Ohioan would expect it to be. Ohioans are pretty pragmatic people. My guess is that many voters concluded that many other states have legalized marijuana and collected the tax revenues associated with it, so why shouldn’t we?

Strange Weeds

Our knowledge and understanding of the world is, of course, shaped by our past experience. We relearned that fundamental lesson recently when it came to something pretty basic: what is a weed, and what is not?

Native Midwesterners like us learn about common Midwestern weeds at an early age. When you are assigned to weeding as a youthful chore you quickly learn, if you didn’t know it already, that those bright yellow dandelions are weeds to be pulled, not flowers to be admired. Other weeds, like broad-leaf weeds and pricker bushes, quickly get added to your knowledge base, and when you’re old enough to live in your own home and try to keep a garden, your knowledge of the local weed spectrum and desire to keep weedy specimens out of your flower beds becomes even deeper.

But change your location to a different climate and location, such as the desert around Tucson, Arizona, and you quickly come to realize that your Midwestern weed knowledge is completely useless. Consider the plant above. We kind of admired it, with its waving arms that fluttered in the breeze like the tendrils of an alien being. Alas! It’s a weed, and a bad one at that: we were advised that if the weed wasn’t promptly removed it would quickly spread to the entire yard.

I never gave much thought to it, but I kind of assumed that weeds would not be a problem in the desert, because all of the tough, thorny plants that grow here would be native plants that are just part of the ecosystem. That assumption is flat wrong. There are unwanted plants here, just as there dandelions and other yard pests in the Midwest. We just don’t know which ones they are–yet.

The Boys On The Bus

The other day I was out driving in the afternoon when I stopped to let this school bus unload. It was a bus for grade school kids, and watching them file down the center aisle and exit brought back some memories.

For the first few years of my school experience, I walked to school, but when our family moved to a semi-rural area, we kids took the bus. Every morning, rain or shine (or freezing cold and snow), we waited with the other public school kids at the designated pick-up point, which was at the bottom of a small hill leading down to our neighborhood. When the bus arrived, we’d pile on. The wait for the bus was often cold, but the bus always seem to be warm–often overheated, in fact. On winter days, you’d take off your hat and gloves and scarf, and then try to remember to collect them when you finally got to school, but as winter wore on the school lost and found always became stocked with forgotten cold weather wear.

Once aboard, you’d try to find a seat with a friend and avoid having to sit next to the kid who didn’t seem to wash up properly. This was a challenge, because our stop was one of the later ones, and most seats were taken when we boarded. Girls usually sat up front, and boys headed toward the back–which typically was crowded with junior high school kids.

As the bus rolled down the country roads the chatter would begin, usually started by the older kids. I’m pretty sure the bus was where I heard my first “dirty joke,” which I pretended to understand because that’s what you did. I think it’s where I got my first really hard punch on the arm, too. You hoped it was a day where you didn’t get singled out for some kind of ritual hazing exercise and could just ride in peace, but that was really out of your control.

The bus was where you learned the power of peer pressure and the importance of not getting too upset about what other kids were saying about you or doing to you, because that just made you more of a target. You were on your own, and you needed to develop your own, personal strategy for dealing with, say, an older kid stealing your hat and starting to pass it around to his friends. Riding the bus was a daily lesson in personal toughness.

Interestingly, my memories of the bus are all about the bus ride to school, rather than the ride home. The “big kids” seemed to be a bit more engaged with the younger kids on the morning ride, as if they were gearing up for the challenges of school. On the ride home, fortunately, they seemed to just ignore the rest of us, letting us look forward to getting home and out of that yellow painted cauldron of power dynamics and youthful angst.

Animal Crackers

We’ll be hanging out with some young children during our visit to Vermilion, and yesterday supplies were laid in to prepare for their arrival. They included a few boxes of Nabisco Animal Crackers, which looked pretty much like what the boxes looked like back when I was a kid (except for the nutritional information prominently displayed on the front of the box, which was not included until well after the reckless, uninformed ’60s ended).

It’s reassuring to see that animal crackers are still a staple of the young kid diet. I well remember sitting down at our formica-topped kitchen table with a big glass of ice-cold whole milk and a box of animal crackers for a wholesome post-grade school snack. You’d put, say, a lion in your mouth (although elephants were the best), take a slug of milk, let the milk interact with the cracker until the cracker virtually dissolved, then squish it against the roof of your mouth with your tongue to let all of the tasty animal cracker goodness immerse your taste buds. You could just eat a crunchy dry cracker, of course, but the immersion/dispersion method was universally recognized as the preferred kid option.

It was interesting to see the nutritional information related to animal crackers and to learn that the recommended “serving size” is 12 crackers. Hah! I sneer at any self-respecting kid who, once opening a box of animal crackers, would not consume the entire box. In reality, it was almost impossible not to, unless one of your siblings took a few. According to the nutrition information, that meant you were likely to ingest about 300 calories from your snack, with a meaningful input of sodium and sugar, too. Thank god the crackers don’t have any saturated fat and are a good source of calcium!

The Surreal Decline Of Cereal

When I was kid, I was pretty much a cereal addict. I ate large mixing bowls of every different kind of cereal, and reveled in the classic ’60s kid experience of camping out in front of the TV on Saturday mornings for hours of cartoons as I spooned down my Frosted Flakes or Apple Jacks or Wheaties or Cocoa Puffs. I like cereal so much that I really enjoyed a trip that UJ and I took with our grandparents that featured a visit to the Kellogg’s factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, where we goggled at the cereal making and packing machinery and topped off our visit with a Froot Loops sundae. In college, I shifted to a somewhat more adult cereal product: Frosted Mini-Wheats, moistened by milk to just the right combination of sogginess and crunchiness..

It’s been years since I’ve eaten a breakfast cereal. I’m admittedly unable to resist them, and in the interests of keeping my weight at a somewhat reasonable level, I avoid them entirely and never venture down the cereal aisle at the grocery store. But apparently I am not alone in my avoidance of cereal products. Sales of breakfast cereal have fallen so much that Kellogg’s–the brand that, to generations of American kids is synonymous with cereal–is spinning off its cereal operations and rebranding.

The linked article describes cereal sales as being in a “secular decline.” As a result, Kellogg’s has decided to split into two separate entities: WK Kellogg, which will sell cereal, and Kellanova, which will focus on snack foods like Pringle’s, Pop-Tarts, and Cheez-Its that have accounted for most of the company’s revenues in recent years. The outlook for WK Kellogg isn’t great. The company is hoping to achieve flat sales over the next few years as it tries to figure out how to spur cereal sales again. (In my humble opinion, getting the networks to broadcast Saturday morning cartoons again would help.)

Breakfast tastes have changed over the years. Cereal was a revolutionary development, and it was dominant during my youth, when the Kellogg’s brand, with its colorful rooster logo, seemed to roll out new cereal concoctions on a monthly basis. Now the morning meal of choice has changed again. But the unanswered question for me is: what do kids have for breakfast these days? A Pop-Tart, a handful of Cheez-Its, and a pumpkin spice latte?

The Kid Cell Phone Question

When should you get your kid a cell phone? It’s got to be one of the toughest questions for parents these days–a question that we personally never really had to deal with, from either the kid perspective or the parent perspective. Cellphones didn’t exist and were a kind of sci-fi dream when I went through my childhood, and hadn’t become ubiquitous until our kids were well into their teenage years. And even then, cellphones were still primarily phones, without all of the games and social media apps and internet access functionality that are a hallmark of modern cellphones.

The timing of the cellphone decision is a matter of lively debate among parents, children, and pediatricians and child psychologists. Parents might like the idea of being able to be in touch with their child at all times, and especially in case of an emergency–but also will be leery that the cellphone brings with it social media and its potentially all-consuming grip on young minds and personalities. Many kids will want a cellphone because “all of my friends have one,” and because they want to be able to text and see what pictures their friends are posting. And pediatricians question the impact of cellphones on child health and obesity–with kids staring at their cellphones, indoors, when they should be outside running, jumping, and playing–while child psychologists wonder about when kids are really mature enough to deal with potential cyberbullying, social peer pressures, sexual predators, and the myriad other risks lurking in the social media universe.

A small town in Ireland–Greystones, in County Wicklow–took an interesting approach to this issue: the parents got together and agreed that they wouldn’t let their children have cellphones until they reach secondary school, which in that area happens around age 12. The parents hope that by agreeing among themselves to hold off on cellphones until that point they will avoid the “everyone else has one” argument by their children.

It will be interesting to see whether this approach is adopted by other towns–and, if so, what kind of impact it has on childhood obesity and mental health. It also poses an interesting issue for parents, who presumably don’t want to be caught by their kids constantly staring at their cellphones rather than engaging in conversation or outdoor activities with the rest of the family. Who knows? Perhaps childhood cell phone bans could have a positive ripple effect on the entire family. I think we’d all be better off, mentally and physically, if we spent more time away from the cellphone screen.

A List Too Long

I’m a member of a Facebook group for members of my high school graduation class. It’s a good use of the Facebook social media platform, one that allows you to wish people happy birthday and helps you find out what has happened to people you knew 50 years ago.

Recently a photo montage was posted for the group of classmates who have died. It’s a regrettably long list. Our class was a huge one–the biggest in the history of our high school, if I recall correctly. The AIDS epidemic felled a number of our classmates back in the ’80s, and more recently we’ve received the sad news of more passings. Our class has reached the danger years of the mid-60s, when many diseases can take their toll.

It was a sad experience to watch that Facebook slide show. In a class of more than 800, I knew some of the people well, and some I really knew not at all; some of the deaths I knew about, while others were a grim surprise. I thought of some of the interactions I had with those I knew, and for the people who did not look familiar, I wondered if we may have been the same homeroom, taken a class together, or walked by each other in one of the long hallways–but we all definitely shared the space in a distinct place and time. The montage featured a lot of high school yearbook photos, and it was difficult to think that those fresh-faced, clear-eyed kids, in their frequently bad ’70s haircuts and outfits, are no more.

William Shakespeare’s verse in Cymbeline is apt:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

The Gag Of Shag

Some rooms live on forever, carved into memory like etchings on glass. Such is the case with the family room of our home during my high school and college days. It was a monument to all things ’70s, with sharp-edged chrome and glass tables, black, brown, and white-striped couches, a game table, a wet bar, white brick, and a burnt-orange swivel chair that had an unfortunate tendency to tip over if you got out of it too quickly.

And underneath it all was black, brown, and white shag carpeting. Not just any shag carpeting, either: this was ultra-shag, with long, loose tendrils of woven artificial material that were perfectly designed to allow any cookie crumble, Frito shard, or other article of food (or, in the case of our poorly housebroken teacup dachshund, other droppings) to nestle deep within the lurking fibrous mass. And once any such item hit the floor, it was impossible to find in the confusing array of black, brown, and white. Fallen items disappeared like predators hiding in thick jungle grasses. You quickly learned that you did not want to walk barefoot on that family room carpeting for fear of what your feet might encounter, and vacuum cleaning became a loud voyage of discovery, with satisfyingly heavy thunks marking the retrieval of another long-buried item from the thicket.

Why did Americans buy shag carpeting during the ’70s? How did carpet salesmen convince a nation of seasoned consumers that ridiculously long, difficult to clean, multi-colored wall-to-wall carpet was the best complement to the awesomely broad color palette that marked home decorating during that curious decade? Did the carpet peddlers tout the warmth of shag, or did they simply point out to the credulous buyers that everyone was buying it? Or, did they sell our Moms, instead, on the fact that shag carpeting of many colors best hid the inevitable spills, stains, and food drops that were a mainstay of large families in those days?

From time to time now, 50 years later, you encounter places that still have shag carpeting. It still has that greasy, not-quite clean quality, and it remains a disgusting trap for the unwary. It’s hard to believe that it once swept the nation — well, not really, because it couldn’t be swept at all, but you know what I mean.