[nesfa-reading-group] 28 flavors reference in “ Engine Summer”

[cjhi newcastle2.com]

I definitely remember 28 flavors as being part of HoJo marketing; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Johnson%27s#Early_years confirms this, but doesn't note that restaurants rarely if ever had all the flavors (unlike Baskin-Robbins, which always had the advertised 31 choices available). The restaurant chain is really most completely dead (there was a sole survivor for some years, but it finally gave up); Wikipedia asserts the name still appears on hotels, although with some of them being labeled "Howard Johnson by Wyndham" the name may fade. The symbol was always a bright-orange silhouette, of a fat man with a tray of pies and a boy pointing to one of them; I don't know where a water container would have come into it.

28!/(28-7)! is the number of permutations; the number of combinations is ( 28!/(28-7)! )/7! ~= 1.18 million.

/CHip
________________________________
From: reading-group <reading-group-bounces at lists.nesfa.org> on behalf of R. Luoma <malkin8244 at pobox.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2023 5:44 PM
To: NESFA Reading Group <reading-group at lists.nesfa.org>
Subject: Re: [nesfa-reading-group] 28 flavors reference in “ Engine Summer”


I think that the "28 flavors" refers to the Howard Johnson's chain (it seems still to exist);
while I ate at Howard Johnson's many times, I do not remember the "28 flavors" as part of
the Howard Johnson's image.

As for the seven scoops, if I remember correctly, the number of combinations
should be 28!/(28-7)! or about 5.9 billion.

... or did I misinterpret the question?

Did anyone recognize the orange water-container figure?

--
R. Luoma     malkin8244 [at] pobox [dot] com
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