My wife Debbie recently downloaded an app from Walmart.  It’s designed to save you money.

If you shop at Walmart, you probably know that they offer to match prices from other stores.  If you bring in proof that a price you are about to pay or paid is lower someplace else, they give it to you for the cheaper one, or credit you the difference.

With today’s electronic infrastructure, they are now taking it to the next level.  It’s incredible and scary at the same time.  If you’re worried about what the government can do in terms of digging into your life, just download the price comparison app from Walmart and see how a major retailer can play with big data.

I’m not saying right off that it’s a bad thing.  The app saves you money.  It does the job it’s supposed to do.  But when you THINK about what goes into it, that’s when you start to wonder how far a company can go to mine information about your purchasing behavior and feed it back to you instantaneously.

Here’s what it does.   You buy something at Walmart.  The app then looks at all the stores around it to compare.  How the app gets all this information is anyone’s guess.  Do they have a human being that goes to every retail outlet within 10 miles and checks the price of every single item on the shelves, and inputs them into a handheld device so it can be beamed into the data banks?  I think not.  They would need hundreds of people and lots of time to do that.  There would also be lots of room for human error.

Instead, someone has invented the software that downloads and calibrates all that information.  It’s mindboggling.  The electronic interconnectedness is massive.  Not only must all the initial information from every comparable item from every nearby store be downloaded, but it also must be updated.  They must get the sizes of the products correct.  They must get the brand right.  Sales prices that change day-to-day or week-to-week have to be figured in.

Once the app is running, changing prices have to be incorporated. How many price changes on a daily basis are there in any given supermarket?

Walmart must have access to the data from all these other stores.  Which probably means every store has access to every other store as well.  Which means they’re all aware of what the others do, and also very aware of what you do in terms of your purchasing patterns.

Case in point when it comes to the app knowing about you came when my wife strolled into Walmart recently and her smart phone kicked on and sent a greeting from Walmart.  It probably told her to go to aisle 3 for a sale on fruit cups and aisle 12 to find the new deal on her favorite yogurt.  If the app doesn’t do it, it will soon.

The ability for companies to identify purchasing trends and other information about who we are as consumers grows with each previous level of technology.  It keeps compounding.  Start playing one game on your personal device, and they start sending you others.  Download one music app, and ten more come your way.

I’m not sure where it all stops, but I do want to know the answer to these two questions:  “Who invents this type of stuff?  Who captures the data and keeps it updated?”

I’d like to be in the back room, watching these people cackling away, cracking their knuckles, rubbing their hands in glee as they decide how to throw another scrap on the floor to see if we will devour it.  Sometimes we need to walk away hungry.

It’s easy to forget how joyful a hot shower feels.  Just getting this column means you’re probably living in the first world, and running water, electricity and heat in your household are a given.  You get used to the basics.

For the most part, the only time we think about our modern conveniences is when they are taken away from us.  Give us an hour-and-forty-minute blackout and we are frothing.  “I’ve got to reset all the digital clocks!  The ice cream is going to melt in the freezer!”

We shouldn’t get upset, but we do.  We should be thankful for the 99.9999% of the time our electricity hums flawlessly, but we don’t.

So we don’t appreciate things like a daily shower.  We make it part of our routine, and though we may sing at times or lounge leisurely on occasion, our tendency is to forget about the enjoyment it provides us.

This hit me recently when a cold spell dropped into town after months of typical hot, sticky summer weather.  When the air outside your home is almost as hot as your shower, you tend to tend to be less enamored with the daily cleansing routine.  You get in, get out, towel off, put on deodorant, get dressed, go to work.

If it’s warm enough outside, you sweat when you leave the house, so you crank the AC in your car.  All this builds your mindset into one that fails to respect the hot shower.  Complacency sets in.  You don’t care.  You expect it.

Then a cold day hits, like it did last week, unexpectedly.  My wife and I watched our younger daughter Skyler run in a cross country meet.  It wasn’t frosty, but it was 57 degrees (F) with a 15 MPH wind from the north, making it chillier.  The meet started very early Saturday morning, so no sun was out to begin the daily warmth.

We stayed for the varsity boys and girls races.  From the time we got there in total darkness until the time we left, we were outside for close to three hours.  The brisk air felt good after the summer furnace.  We’d both be liars though if we didn’t admit it felt good to get back into the warmth of the car afterwards.

Arriving home, our house was still very cool, as we’d slept with the windows open, embracing the breeze, for the first time in close to four months.  I went upstairs, turned on the shower, let it warm up, and jumped in.  Man, it felt terrific.

You forget this feeling when month after month you leave the stall and start sweating again as you start to put your clothes one.  You forget how much fun it is to linger under the steady stream of hot water.  You forget that you don’t need to rush out of the shower every day.

It was a perfect storm, and I stood there letting the water wash over and over me, pounding me in the face, stinging the skin.  I probably looked like a lobster or ripe tomato when I got out, but a content one.

There was no lukewarm shower that day.  It was a vigorous, hot one. 

Most days, I save water by just wetting down, then turning off the tap to lather up, then rinsing off.  It’s a speed deal designed to get me out the door, and conserve resources by not using too much water.  After months, it becomes routine.

When the weather turns, you reawaken.  Sometimes, all it takes is a hot shower to get you humming.

At a certain point, you grow numb to fight scenes in movies and TV shows.  There are only so many ways to throw or take a punch, crunch a chair on someone’s head or fling a body through a window.

Crash, blam, kathoom.  Even the sound effects, like those used in comic books, get repetitive.

“Guardians of the Galaxy,” a huge box office success this summer, is a case in point for me.  Everyone I know who went to see it sang the praises.  The reviews were also sterling.

I didn’t dislike it.  But I didn’t jump on the bandwagon either.  I chuckled at the dialogue.  There were amusing scenes that made me smile. The music was hip.  They brought in a different brand of super hero, the swash-buckling pirate-type outliers.  All of that shook up the plot enough so it wasn’t another predictable dust pile.

My complaint was with the fight scenes.  Too many.  Too predictable.  Too much smashing and not enough inventiveness.  Certainly, Groot, the tree man played by Vin Diesel, had his moments, regrowing himself, his limbs engulfing opponents.  Kinda cool.

Still…..  There was too much slamming, kathunking and kaboooming for my taste.  Somehow, TV and movie producers need to figure out ways to shake this up and give us some novelty, or give us a lot less of the violence and focus on character development.

The second and third “Transformers” movies, the latest “Star Trek,” all the “Expandables,” have gone over the top and just wham you in the face.  It would be easy to extend that list four- or five-fold without a lot of effort.

If we’re going to smash things (and really, it seems like it isn’t all about people beating each other up, but about “things” getting destroyed that seems to take up so much space in the plot), why not do it with ingenuity?  For example, if you have a space movie, like “Guardians,” think about some way to introduce a different setting for the battle.

Here’s an idea:  Do a weight-less fight scene.  It makes sense for a science fiction movie based in space, doesn’t it?  Have the characters floating in the air, throwing punches that land with less then full impact.  With no gravity, the bodies would float across the room, and they could push off walls of their space ship or vehicle, or wherever the fight scene is being filmed.


The combatants could do acrobatic moves, flips and tucks, spin moves in slow motion, and you could actually believe that could happen.  It would be a nice addition – watching fiction that seems real.

To contrast with that concept, go the exact opposite direction:  Have a fight scene on a planet where the gravity is extra powerful.  In this scene, everyone would move in slow motion. 

Because gravity would impact their movements and ability to swing a punch or lift up a leg for a kick, you could focus on facial expressions or how the muscles and joints extend.  Slow motion would show the sweat flying off after a fist cracks the jaw.  Guys would get off the ground slowly.  Anything knocked down or broke would shoot to the floor like a vacuum cleaner was sucking it down.  Put lead weights on all the actors so they are forced to move in slow motion.  That will make it more realistic.

The best fight scenes are the ones you don’t expect. The lack of predictability is what makes them great.  Producers need to get crafty.   Using a little ingenuity would go a long way towards eliminating the big yawns when fight scenes come on the screen.

(Editor’s note:   This is the second in a two-part series on rekindling interest in baseball.)

In last week’s column, we laid out some of the big problems facing major league baseball, and its fans:  1) Games take too long, and 2) players keep jumping from team to team so it is hard to know who is on a roster from year-to-year and root for the team (and individual players).  This week, we touch on some simple solutions.

To keep players from jumping ship (whether being pushed or pulled) is the harder problem to solve because the model in almost all pro sports has become “win yesterday” and “money makes it happen.”  Not really.

Championships come about through a combination of factors, particularly team chemistry.  The support managers show for players who slump and the ways that the members pick each other up, play jokes and challenge their teammates to excel all combine into a winning equation.  Culture makes that happen, just like in corporations, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

It takes years to build, with leadership from the top, and engagement from the bottom, and the right incentives.  Maybe, just maybe some of the financial incentives for players should be tied to sacrifice bunts, double plays turned and bases backed up to prevent over-throws – all of which demonstrate that little extra something you give for your team. 

Those are simplistic examples, certainly, but I’m confident a supremely intelligent General Manager could figure out appropriate ways to drive culture through a combination of financial incentives and “team” goals rather than just individual ones.  That would help keep people around because they’d “want” to play for your franchise rather than solely seeking out the highest pay or biggest market, like New York.

It would not be perfect because no system ever is, but you’re starting to see teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals and Baltimore Orioles achieve success by building up their farm systems and keeping their players more connected as a unit to each other.  The extra time makes payoff more sweet.

Game length and dead zones within each contest are a bigger issue though.  Games take too long.  And, within the game, there are too many moments of dawdling and delays that lead to distraction.  Case in point is a batter stepping out of the box repeatedly, or the pitcher shaking off signals from the catcher, or throwing to first base three consecutive times.  Each of these activities bore us.  They don’t add anything to the game.

Beyond that, we have managers setting “matchups,” bringing in a left-handed pitcher to face a lefty batter, a right-hander to face a righty, sometimes making several moves an inning.  Each relief pitcher has to come in from the bullpen, warm up, and then have a nice little chat with the pitching coach and his infield before he hurls the first pill.  It’s ridiculous.  So here’s what to do:

1.       For any given batter, a pitcher can only throw to first base once; every other time is an automatic “ball” for the batter.

2.       Play six outs per inning so there is less time transitioning the players on the field.

3.       A batter may step out of the box once during any given “at bat.” After that, any time he does that, it’s an automatic strike on him.

4.       From the time the pitcher gets the ball from the catcher he has xxxx (Major League Baseball can fill in this number) seconds to pitch or it is an automatic “ball.”

5.       Home run derby for tie games.  Think of the excitement.

6.       A relief pitcher must face at least three batters once he enters the game.

Forward this column to the Major League Baseball Commissioner.  All these changes are simple and easily implemented.  Then we can move onto the next issues of the season being too long and the games on late at night, so our kids can’t watch them.  That will take some more thinking.  

(Editor’s note:  This is the first in a two part series on how to rekindle interest in baseball.)

Love turns to indifference when your passion fizzles, the desire to work at something goes away and the good things that existed disappear.  That’s how I feel about major league baseball.

Back in the late 1980s-early1990s, my love for the game turned into indifference.  In the ensuing years, I’ve come to dislike major league baseball.  That is sad.

I grew up a baseball nut.  We lived outside New York City in New Jersey and the Yankees were hot. Naturally, they became my team.  They went into a tailspin right at the time I became immersed in baseball cards, backyard softball, little league, watching games on TV and doing to the stadium in the Bronx, eating hot dogs and stomping on huge paper cups to make the popping sound reverberate off the rafters.

Our parents would drive us into a game or two a year, and I even remember in eighth grade my best buddy and I riding our bikes to the local bus station, taking it across the river to NYC, catching the subway to the stadium, then returning home afterwards, and never giving it a second thought.  Think of how many kids would do that today unescorted by adults, or how many adults would let their kids even entertain the thought.  The world has changed.

That was part of being a fan.  My buddy and I both wanted to play for the Yankees, and he almost lived his dream, making it up to the Double A level of the minor leagues.  I continued to play baseball for several years, then fell away from it as other boys grew strong more quickly than I did.  But my love continued.

I continued to root for the Yanks, from their horrible years in the 1960s, into the early 1970s until finally some players started to show a spark that led to a rekindling of the Bronx Bombers – Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Danny Cater, Ron Guidry, Thurman Munson.  If you don’t follow baseball, those names are mix of players that came up through the Yankee farm system, and some that came through free agency, which started to kick in during that period.

Free agency helped the Yanks get a few more championships, but also sowed the seeds of discontent for me, as players and owners battled on a couple of different years, leading to strikes and shortened seasons.  Slowly, I faded away.

Players jumped ship.  Rosters back in the 1960s were 25 players, and from year to year only a few names changed.  Today, it’s easy to have 10 new players a year on a team.  You lose interest when you can’t follow the people you care about.  You cannot turn over the roster and expect fans to cheer and clap.  They’ll spend half their time reading the programs or uniform backs just so they can figure out who is on the team.

But the shifting player alignments aren’t the only problem. It’s also the slow play. Games take forever. What was once two-and-a-half hours to play a game is now three or more.  You could fall asleep at many contests.

Add your drive time, parking, getting to your seats, the game itself and driving home and you need a least 5-6 hours to consider attending.  Super diehard fans will go.  But for many it’s a yawner.  Something has to change.  The powers that be can do it.  Stay tuned for next week, when we make some easily implementable suggestions for the new baseball commissioner.