Kickstart: Jarts and other artifacts

If you're of the age when you remember playing with Jarts — plastic lawn darts with metal points — coveting a Cabbage Patch Doll and carrying a large boombox, then congratulations! Some of your favorite items from your youth are now considered worthy of a museum exhibition.

The bad news? The exhibition is called "Grandma and Grandpa's Attic."

Grandma and grandpa?

I'm sure the curators at the McKinley Presidential Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio, mean only the best.

The exhibition, running April 3 to Oct. 26, is intended to highlight items from the museum's permanent collection, covering artifacts from the 1890s to 1980s, each organized roughly around a generation: the Lost Generation, 1883-1900; the Greatest Generation, 1901–1927; the Silent Generation, 1928–1945; baby boomers, 1946–1964; Gen X, 1965–1980; and millennials, 1981–1996.

The Canton Repository notes that the exhibition describes the attic as "an 'in between space' for things that don't fit into your everyday life anymore but are too cherished to be thrown away."

OK, fine. But, again, grandma and grandpa? That's just rude.

Import numbers have soared in the U.S., which likely is linked to individuals and businesses stockpiling overseas goods in advance of expected tariffs.

In his latest Numbers That Matter column, Plastics News Economics Editor Bill Wood says he's having problems processing the sheer amount of import statistics coming in.

"The latest data on the U.S. trade deficit in goods is from January, and it shows that the trade deficit skyrocketed by just over $150 billion," he writes. "This is not an annualized figure. It is $150 billion just for the month of January."

And there are other anecdotes pointing to higher shipments at the start of 2025. The Port of Houston, for instance, says it recorded its biggest January on record, as "loaded imports rose by 10 percent compared to the same month last year, while loaded exports declined by 1 percent," according to a March 3 news release.

If you're looking for some context to the data, Bill and PN Editor Don Loepp will join forces at 2 p.m. (Eastern time) today for the monthly Numbers That Matter Live webcast, free for PN subscribers. Click here to register for the livestream, including time for questions, or check the replay on plasticsnews.com.

Apple Inc.'s plastic iPhone may have been a commercial flop, lasting just a few years on the market after its 2013 introduction, but a plastic-bodied Apple Watch may never even make it out of the lab.

Mark Gurman, a Bloomberg reporter who previously wrote about engineers testing the potential for a plastic watch, now says the company is backing away from the proposal.

Gurman's report said the design team doesn't like the look and the operations team finds it hard to make a suitable plastic case at the targeted price point. (His work was picked up by a number of other publications if you can't access Bloomberg.)