Friendly's Near Bankruptcy: Great Moments in History
29.09.11
Awww…not the ice cream!
Friendly’s, America’s favorite* ice cream-and-treats parlor, is preparing to file for bankruptcy protection as soon as next week, Deal Journal colleague Mike Spector is reporting.
(* Ok, we realize that Friendly’s probably isn’t the favorite of most Americans.)
The buzzards aren’t circling yet, of course. Bankruptcy can be a handy tool for companies to rework their operations, take a breather from their debt troubles, and emerge in fighting trim. Spector reports Friendly’s, if it files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, would try to sell the company.
But it’s worth taking a spin through Friendly’s colorful 76-year history. Feel free to enjoy this post as you thrust a long spoon into Friendly’s Forbidden Fudge Brownie. (Three scoops of chocolate ice cream, chunks of brownies, hot fudge, Swiss chocolate and sprinkles. Yum. Don’t you dare look at the nutritional information — 740 calories!)
1935:
Source: Wall Street Journal (blog)
Margaret Atwood: How a love of comics started a love of reading
15.10.11
In addition to being a comics reader, I was an early writer, and I drew a lot: drawing and reading were the main recreations available in the woods, especially when it was raining. Very little of what I wrote or drew was in any way naturalistic, and in this I suspect I was like other children. Those under the age of eight gravitate more easily toward talking animals, dinosaurs, giants, flying humanoids of one kind or another — whether fairies, angels, or aliens — than they do to, say, portrayals of cozy domestic interiors or bucolic landscapes. “Draw a flower” was what we used to be taught in school, and by that was meant a tulip or a daffodil.
But the kinds of flowers we really liked to draw had more in common with Venus flytraps, only a lot bigger, and with half-digested arms and legs sticking out of them.
I revisited my early non-naturalistic tendencies during a recent trip I took through my own juvenilia, or what survives of it. When I say “juvenilia,” I’m not talking about the precocious teenage poems of William Blake or John Keats, but about things I was doing in the mid- 1940s when I was six or seven. They centred around my superheroes, who were flying rabbits. Their names were Blue Bunny and White Bunny, and they were modeled upon two unimaginatively named real-life stuffed animals who did indeed go flying through the air, propelled by an age-old technology called “throwing.” But it wasn’t long before these feeble heroes morphed into two tougher creatures called Steel Bunny and Dotty Bunny, who flew in a more conventional superhero way, by means of capes. Steel’s cape had bars on it, Dotty’s had dots. So far, so clear.
Source: National Post (blog)
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