As is the case with many Americans of a certain age, I have memories of a public school cafeteria that included dour workers in hair nets scooping organic material of some sort onto plates we took to long tables, after tossing a nickel at the “milk lady” for a small carton.

Still, lunch period was a coveted part of the day. If politics entered into it at all, it might have been between my friend Tommy and me. His parents were Humphrey supporters. Mine

First there was the threat from the president: “I’ve preserved more than 3 million acres of public lands for future generations.

“And I am not finished.”

Then there was the tentative reassurance from Utah’s governor, who last week said of the president, “I would expect that he’s not” going to “blindside” the state by declaring another national monument.

Last year it was Target and Neiman Marcus. Today’s it’s eBay. The giant retail and auction site has announced that a database of its customers’ personal information was hacked.

So much for the idea that online merchants are becoming safer than old-fashioned brick-and-mortar stores. Apparently, they’re all dangerous. And so much for any sense of the security as we enter the brave new world of commerce.

As someone I know wondered out loud the other day, “Does anyone really believe it won’t be possible some day to hack a smart car and force people to drive off a cliff?” In spite of the James Bond quality to such an idea, the answer is no. Few people discount that possibility.

We are, as a nation, well aware of the risks technology holds — risks that could threaten commerce, employment and the

Spring is sprouting everywhere in Utah, and so are my observations about current events. Here are a few:

Firing squads: Efficient, painless and just plain nutty. That sums up the arguments for bringing back death-by-firing squad in Utah.

Utah is hardly the death-penalty capitol of the United States. Texas has that honor, having executed 515 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the punishment in 1976. Utah has put only seven inmates to death during that time, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. And yet three of those brought much more international attention to the state than any of the hundreds in Texas, because the condemned chose the firing squad.

As unfortunate as it is to the people of Ukraine, and perhaps to the rest of the world as well, Russia’s rediscovered sense of aggression may be just the thing the United States needs to revitalize its space program.

That would be a good thing.

The benefits of space exploration — a story woefully under-reported — saturate modern life, from the smartphones in our pockets to the medical procedures that cure our ills. We can only imagine what lies ahead if

This is the week we begin to learn whether Utah drivers are smart enough to claim they were merely looking at their phone’s GPS app when an officer pulls them over on suspicion of texting while driving.

That would get them off, but I’m guessing most people who such things are too, well, distracted to pay attention to the news.

Before this week, all a driver had to do was deny texting. “Officer, I was merely changing my Facebook status,” was good enough.

Benedicto Kondowe, a soft-spoken education expert from Malawi, met with me a few weeks ago to explain what it’s like to get schools up and running in his home country.

Each class has about 200 or more students per teacher, he said. Rather than meet in some traditional school building, they assemble under a large tree somewhere to temper the heat and the rain.

And yet, despite conditions we would consider intolerable, he was passionate about the value of this effort. For the past six years, Kondowe has led 81 civil society organizations in his country in a joint effort to secure the right to a quality education for all his nation’s children.

I thought about Kondowe as I read about schoolgirls being kidnapped in Nigeria by a group whose name, Boko Haram,

A headline on NBC’s website caught my eye this week. It said, “You don’t need to die — just be like Utah...”

I have traveled enough to know that Utah tends to be misunderstood by many outsiders, if they have any reason to try to understand it at all. It’s the kind of place that can elicit fierce loyalty or, on the other hand, comments to the effect that one would rather die than move there.

Which lends a bit of irony to the NBC headline.