While looking for more information on the whole Bank of Wal-Mart thang, I came across this interesting article at the Daily Kos. Apparently, Nashua is not the only place in which Wal-Mart has tried to weasel its way in by promising to replace the wetlands it destroys.... That doesn't suprise me. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find out that their wetland migration attempts have been less than stellar -- or honest. But for Wal-Mart to enter -- let alone win -- an award for destroying wetlands, doing a poor job of replacing them, and then lying about their success rate.... Weasels.... (My apologies to the various carnivorous mammals of the genus Mustela)

It's bad enough that Wal-Mart keeps forcing itself upon communities; that Wal-Mart is perfectly happy to force a locally-owned business to surrender its space and to fill in wetlands in order to add yet another of their stores to the area; that Wal-Mart sends out glossy marketing campaigns to local residents trying to gain support when their initial attempts are thwarted. But apparently Wal-Mart wants to get into the banking business too. Just what we need....

I received an email announcement from WalmartWatch.com today. I'd link to that announcement, but I can't find its text on their website and I think it's worth reading. Definitely food for thought. So I'm pasting it here.

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I didn't see much point in getting a Roomba since I don't mind vacuuming. Mopping is an entirely different story. I simply must have a Scooba.

Google says, "Use our product or else".

Google, the most-used Internet search engine, may consider making a bid for America Online to keep the company from switching to Microsoft Corp.'s search technology, a Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst said Friday.

Actually, this may be a smart move on the part of AOL given their falling market share....

Link

Saw this on Yahoo! News:

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.

When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet.

"It sounded almost like a firecracker," Clewer told Australian radio Friday.

"Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt."

Link

From Fast Food Nation:

One of the most widely used color additives -- whose presence is often hidden by the phrase "color added" -- violates a number of religious dietary restrictions, may cause allergic reactions in susceptible people, and comes from an unusual source. Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid) is made from the desiccated bodies of female Dactlyopius coccus Costa, a small insect harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The bug feeds on red cactus berries and color from the berries accumulated in the females and their unhatched larvae. The insects are collected, dried, and ground into pigment. It takes about 70,000 of them to produce one pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. Dannon strawberry yogurt gets its color from carmine, as do many frozen fruit bars, candies, fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink.

It's a drag when even supposedly vegetarian food ain't vegetarian....

Is it just me, or are companies getting more and more aggressive with their sales? Today, for instance, I received what undoubtedly is the first of many snail-mail offerings from ScanSoft telling me how fabulous OmniPage Pro 15 is and how I can "save more time than ever before" for $100 less than other mere mortals if I just act now. This mailing follows 5 -- count 'em 5 -- email announcements that have shown up over the past few weeks.

Before ScanSoft launched this campaign, it was Verizon Wireless that was harrassing me. Within a week, I got three different calls telling me what a wonderful customer I had been for the past 5 years (I had been a customer -- and a wonderful one at that -- for the past 7 or , asking me if I was aware that the plan I had signed up for no longer existed (I was thanks to the snail mail that preceded these calls), and suggesting that I might be interested in signing a one-year contract today for a plan that had 50 fewer minutes (thank you, no).

Do these tactics work on you? They don't on me. While it may be childish, I will cut off my proverbial nose to spite my proverbial face. I will not upgrade to version 15, and I just switched my cell service provider. The latter decision worked out quite nicely, it turns out. T-Mobile has thus far proved to be excellent in customer service, and I really like my new phone (RAZR V3). But even if I wasn't as thrilled as I am with T-Mobile, it would still be worth it because I do not appreciate being harrassed.

I wish that these big businesses would spend less time on pushy sales and marketing and more time on providing good customer service/support. Word of mouth from credible happy customers is a more convincing argument than anything you could could communicate to me via email, snail mail, or phone.

UPDATE 9/20: I received another email from ScanSoft today. That's 6. Sheesh....

UPDATE 9/29: I received another email a couple of days ago telling me it was my last chance, bringing the grand total to 7 for those of you counting at home. Then this afternoon I got note number 8.... If only it said "This time we mean it: This really is your last chance, and if you don't buy this product that we've so gently been trying to force upon you, then we're going to lose patience and go find someone else to bother." Alas, it said no such thing....

Greetings and salutations and welcome to Grain of Salt. I figured I should post an inaugural article if for no other reason than to be sure that all of my skin and template files are working. It took me a while to get things all sorted out: I couldn't find anything that I liked "out of the box," and I'm new to skins and templates -- well, to setting them up anyway. I am not new to blogging. At work I had asked for a blog. And my workplace being the supportive and accommodating institution that it happens to be, I got a blog -- all skinned and templated and ready to go without any effort required on my part. And I enthusiastically blogged and blogged... for several months.

The thing is, work blogging is, well, work. And if you are not the company's official evangelist -- which I'm not -- blogging becomes just one more thing that needs doing. And if you already have a plate filled with all of the things you were hired for -- which I do....

Thus, the novelty wore off and that blog went on hiatus. Eventually I'll get back to it, but you won't hear (much) about it here because Grain of Salt is to be a work-free zone -- something I believe I need as a workaholic telecommuter. If I'm going to stay in my home day and night writing, since that's mostly what I do for work, I need a place and a time to write about the things I find interesting and/or amusing and/or even somewhat disturbing; things that I can express casually without having to worry about getting it "perfect"; things that can and should be taken with a grain of salt, hence the title. As for solving major problems with potatoes....

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