Thomas Friedman Writes for the International House of Pancakes Menu

This article is part of the The Great Authors Series series.

Picking a favorite pancake is a lot like picking the right tie for a meeting. In certain cultures more importance is placed on the tie you wear than on the suit or even what you're saying. I wore a blue tie when I asked a Palestinian widow what she thought of Israeli pizzas and a paisley red tie when I asked an IDF commander why nobody reads MAD Magazine anymore. "It's because we're passing over the cusp of the digital age," said Ari Rabin. That was when I realized that was what we were: cuspers. We were on the cusp, going through the painful process of shedding all the analog, but not purely digital yet. I folded Tab A to meet Tab B and that was when I saw an image of two eggs, two bacon strips or pork sausage links, and IHOP's golden hash browns, along with my favorite pancakes, the CINN-A-STACK. I wiped CINN-A-STACK juice from my mustache and the Palestinian widow admitted she liked pizza, proving once again that we are all on the cusp together.

There is something about Dubai that doesn't quite sit right with me. You can see the wealth everywhere you look, but it's the sort of wealth a rap music man might wear, not the wealth of an old-money WASP giving spankings at secret society meeting in the Hamptons. Money is real, or is it? I was reading a blog about how kids are using bitcoins to try to rebuild an all-digital library for their ESL school on the border with Mexico when I realized that kids are the future, just like self-driving cars. Those cars are going to be telling us where to go and who we can talk to, but once in a while you're going to want to grab the wheel for yourself and say, hey, just for a day, it's me time. That's when you bust out the Rooty Jr. Perfect for kids of any age, it includes one buttermilk pancake crowned with your choice of cool strawberry topping, warm blueberry or cinnamon apple compote, and whipped topping. Comes with one scrambled egg, one strip of bacon and one pork sausage link, ready to drive right into your mouth at under 600 calories. By the way, those kids lost all their bitcoins trying to buy guns on Silk Road, which means our future is a meaningless joke and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

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– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)