We went up to Cape Ann today. It had been a couple of years and I'd kind of forgotten the roads, so we used her phone's directions and I think it led us the long way around a couple of times, but eh, it was a nice drive, except the part in Gloucester (which is too big for its crappy infrastructure and always has a traffic problem) -- the routes I've taken in the past avoid Gloucester for a reason.

We followed the usual ritual, in accordance with the ancient scrolls: We went to the Clam Box and had fried clams and onion rings -- her the extremely pricey local Ipswitch clams with the big gooey bellies, me the much cheaper clam strips, not because I don't like to go local, but clam bellies have a texture issue for me and I am not enough of a clam aficionado to be able to taste much difference, especially when breaded and fried.

Then we went to Halibut Point and climbed on the rocks and very carefully did not get any ticks, and then we went to Benson's, which had the blackberry ice cream that they make only for two months a year with the fresh local blackberries.

And it only rained a little bit on the way home. So. A good day.

I have stumbled upon a Kerfuffle. I do enjoy a good kerfuffle once in a while, especially if it is a kerfuffle I am not personally involved in. This is kind of a sad kerfuffle, though, because there is no winner.

I know you probably don't pay much attention to bowling. I don't either. Most of us don't. That's part of the point.

Bowling's been in bad shape for years. There were only two big makers of lanes and equipment, Brunswick and AMF, and when I was a kid and league bowling hadn't died off along with its players, a bowling alley would have a buy-in with either one of the other. Like a fast-food place is either a Coke shop or a Pepsi shop, except that often Brunswick or AMF actually owned and operated the facility.

Both companies also made other things. Brunswick only ever made recreational equipment of various kinds, but AMF at various times made all sorts of things, including nuclear reactors (briefly) and motorcycles (they owned Harley-Davidson for a while). Both ran into troubles when bowling began to decline, about the time I was born (no connection! honest!), and by the 1980s the holding-company and private-equity squeeze-it-till-it-bleeds-then-strip-the-corpse-for-parts mentality had begun (around the time Reagan got elected, and there is a connection there).

AMF's bowling division was repackaged as AMF Bowling Companies, inc. so that it could be bought by a group of vulturesprivate investors called Commonwealth Ventures. Its name was changed to AMF Bowling Worldwide, it was bought by Goldman Sachs, it had an IPO, its stock tanked and was eventually delisted, went into Chapter 11, was bought by private equity, went into Chapter 11 a second time, and was eventually bought (plus or minus a joint venture with an Italian company that only involved bowling equipment, not facilities) by a company called Strike Holdings LLC, operating Bowlmor Lanes. The new business was Bowlmor AMF. They dropped the AMF a bit later, and then changed their name to Lucky Strike Entertainment.

Brunswick no longer exists as a business. Like Pillsbury, there is no company, only a brand, and at present it is only being used on bowling equipment being made by a capital-management firm that bought the brand when Brunswick came apart into components and each was sold off separately. The physical facilities (all the various companies mentioned here prefer to call them "bowling centers," which may be the term of art, but it is a term I dislike) were sold to ... Bowlmor AMF.

Bowlmor AMF has rebranded as Bowlero Corporation. But they are also Lucky Strike Entertainment. And they are also AMF. And though they don't use the Brunswick brand in their facilities, if they did, that'd be them too. If go to a Lucky Strike or Bowlero or AMF branded facility, you're giving Bowlero your business. And they also own the Professional Bowlers' Association.

And this has not gone over well with the Serious Bowlers. The problem is that Bowlero doesn't really want the Serious Bowlers. They don't think they can make money off them. They are looking for the party groups; the people who come to drink and eat and socialize and want some other activity to do while they do those things. Their prices are exorbitant; their alleys are lit like a disco, which the serious bowlers hate because they can't see what they're doing; they don't maintain their lanes and equipment worth a shit (so I'm told), because most of their customers don't know better and don't care; and they often use string pinsetters, probably because they don't want to pay for real pinsetters or the (highly skilled) personnel to maintain them. String pinsetters are much cheaper. They are also not real bowling.

OK. So let's accept that Bowlero is evil. They are private-equity types with private-equity brain who don't actually care about the product, just "squeeze it dry." Every quote, every statement I can find seems to indicate that they're horrible people. No apologies for them will be found here.

But.

Bowling is dying. Bowling has been dying for a long time. As I say, even when I was a kid in the 1970's it was very obviously dying. OK, my mother was in a bowling league for a few years when I was very small, but I think she mostly did that so she'd have a separate social group and a life outside of the house. I don't think she was ever very invested in the bowling part. The people who were actually into bowling as a sport were not my mother's age. They were grandparent age, not parent age. Or at least, that's how it felt at the time.

Bowlero is evil ... but, on the other hand, the CEO of Bowlero could, with justification, stand up and say "Hey, we're keeping bowling alive, you old farts. I know it's not the way you want to keep it alive, but you couldn't sustain it thirty years ago, and there's even fewer of you left now. Bowling, the way you think of it, was already doomed. You just don't want to admit it."

And after all, you could argue that if bowling had been in better health, AMF and Brunswick would never have reached the point where they were dismantled for parts and left to die in the first place. I mean, you can't really say "Bowlmor took a successful business and destroyed it" when they were actually picking up something at fire-sale prices which had been in and out of bankruptcy twice, y'know?