The Tax on Stupidity

Porn, child!

2008-11-12T17:00:00.006-05:00

Previously on The Tax On Stupidity:

...I became abnormally obsessed with escalator velocity...
...I pooped shitloads (ha! Get it?)....
...I drank a bottle of gin in one sitting. I think.

Back to Spain. Let's continue my list of insultingly presumptuous and ignorant observations:

6. You'll never be remiss
If you take an extra piss.

This isn't specific to Spain, but it is something I found myself pondering quite a bit whilst in Spain. If I do nothing else with this life--and it's safe to say I have not--I hope that couplet someday becomes a well-worn proverb, like "Beer before liquor, your ass will get thicker." Wait, is that how it goes? Come to think of it, I'm not so good with the proverbs. Anyway, some alternatives:

You'll never end up sadder
If you empty out your bladder.

Just one preemptive pee
Helps you live more happily.

This was eminently noticeable in Spain because we often spent entire days walking around without returning to the hotel. And when you spend an entire day roaming around haphazardly in an unfamiliar area, you quickly realize what a precious resource restrooms actually are. Or more to the point, you realize what a precious resource they are when you CAN'T FIND ONE and you're hit with the epiphany that you reeeeally should've used the restroom in the cafe you left an hour earlier. All of this is my way of saying that when you're traveling; or about to get in a car or train for a while; or definitely when you've been tailgating before a Bills game and you're heading to the Ralph, which seems like not that long a walk but trust me, it takes a lot longer than you might expect, especially when you get to the gate and find a thousand other drunk assholes waiting to get patted down by the two security guards (each of whom will only check those of the same gender); you will ABSOLUTELY want to pee one more time while you have the chance. I postulate that nobody has ever regretted using a restroom "just in case." Even the most disgusting port-a-potty is better than walking around with a bladder that looks like it's in its third trimester for an hour. Or pissing yourself.

Is anyone still reading? Oh well.

7. Porn! On! Network! TV!

So the first night we were in Spain, I was channel surfing. It was a little after midnight, and I was looking for news about how the Dow had completely nosedived (nosedove?) even though, you know, the fundamentals of our economy were strong.

Soap opera, crappy action movie dubbed in Spanish, soccer, hard-core 2-on-1 pornography, news...

Wait, what?

Yeah, at night the Spaniards show porn on network TV. Not on the pay channels or even on cable; the same stations that show the news in the afternoon and sitcoms in the evening show porn at night. And I'm not talking the soft-core Skinemax stuff, either. Normally in order to get this kind of porn you have to go to the back room of the video store blocked off by a purple velvet curtain with a bunch of pale, greasy loners who haven't showered in four days and who quite possibly have drawn up plans to kidnap the cute girl at the cash register. Or you have to spend thirty seconds on Google. Uh, not that I would know or anything.

The Rebel, fortunately, was reading and didn't notice me watching porn, so naturally I took the opportunity to change the channel with her none the wiser.

Except I totally didn't, and exclaimed, "Sweet! Porn!"

There are moments in every relationship where you hit a fork in the road. Sometimes the two of you gladly choose the same path. Sometimes you do it grudgingly. But sometimes, like Elsa and Rick in Casablanca, or Steve Perry and the chick with the "Brigitte Nielsen in Beverly Hills Cop 2" hairdo in the greatest video of all time,* you're forced to go your separate ways.

So The Rebel looked up, saw the porn that I was gleefully watching on Spanish network TV, and started laughing. Whew. Bullet, you have been dodged.**

Now, you might wonder how this is allowed, given that any kid could just stay up late and catch an eyeful of porn any old time. And that's a good question, one that I can't answer. Personally, I was more confused by the fact that news stands stocked their children's books right next to the tittie magazines. As with most countries I've seen (most recently, Brazil, Argentina, France, and Spain), they just seem less inhibited towards sex than we are, and I guess they figure that they should expose (ha!) kids to it, rather than shelter them from it and tell them it's immoral. Crazy foreigners. That probably explains why the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. is so much lower.

Oh, wait.

8. Vowels are overrated.

You know how the U.S. doesn't have an official language, and all the conservatives are up in arms about how we should make English the official language? Well, Spain is a good example of why we shouldn't bother, because Spain DOES have an official language (that would be Spanish, Pete), and the situation is STILL all fucked up. We visited three cities in Spain and all three spoke goddamn different languages. In Madrid, people spoke Spanish. In Barcelona, they spoke Catalan, which looks like Spanish mixed with Portuguese (which is itself fucked up, because (a) Portuguese sounds like Russian, for some reason and (b) Barcelona is on the end of Spain that DOESN'T border Portugal). And in San Sebastián, they spoke Basque, aka Euskara.

Basque is not related to Spanish. It's not related to Portuguese. It's not even related to French (the French border is very close to San Sebastián; and actually, the Basque region extends into France). In fact, it literally doesn't appear to be even distantly related to any other language on the freaking planet.

ACTUAL EXAMPLES:
English: Restaurant
French: Restaurant
Italian: Ristorante
Spanish: Restaurante
Basque: Jatetxea

Jatetxea! Holy crap! One thing you notice about Basque is a prevalence of "tx" in its words. Or at least its food-related words. The Basque version of tapas is called pintxos. The Basques serve a slightly fizzy sweet white wine called txakoli. And while we were at a jatetxea eating pintxos with a glass of txakoli, we had a dish called txirristra (which translates to "the slide").

Txirristra?!?! That word clearly has a fucked-up consonant-to-vowel ratio. And let me say, now that I've offended any Basque speakers out there--and I'm sure there are plenty who read this blog***--I don't mean to mock the Basque language. If anything, I find it both fascinating and completely awesome that there's this language smack dab in the middle of France and Spain that is completely unrelated to anything else on earth, let alone French or Spanish. It's just that, well, when you're visiting Spain and you already don't speak particularly good Spanish, the last thing you need is another absolutely unfamiliar tongue to worry about. It was bad enough that we were strolling around the Basque country with gastroenteritis, crapping the Rubicon; tossing the Basque language into the mix was an exercise in linguistic Pilates that I just wasn't equipped to handle. After four days in San Sebastián, with all the tx's and double r's and unaccustomed use of z's, I was convinced that if a Basque spoke his name in reverse he'd return to the fifth dimension.****

I think it's safe to say President Obama won't be naming me U.N. ambassador anytime soon.***** President George probably would have, though.

9. "First class" in Spain = "World Famous" here.

To get from San Sebastián to Barcelona, we took a train. They don't have high-speed rails on that route yet, so the trip was estimated to last ten hours. Well, we figured we'd take the overnight train and sleep the entire way, with the obvious stipulation that we'd travel first class. I had no desire to travel in a six-seater with no beds and four random strangers.

I bought the tickets online from RENFE, the Spanish national train network. Trying to navigate through the RENFE website when you don't speak Spanish is like trying to buy steaks at a crooked butcher shop while wearing a blindfold. You're bewildered the entire time, you can't be sure you're getting what you want, and there's a good chance you'll be covered in animal blood when it's all over. I finally determined that "first class" translates to "preferente" in Spanish. (In Basque, it's "ztxrrstrxjzkbrra.")

Well, we got on that train, and when we found our "preferente" cabins, not only were they the worst cabins on the train, they might've been the worst cabins on the face of the planet. It was just six visibly and smellably (not a word) filthy seats facing each other. No beds. No separate washbasin, which is what was advertised on the RENFE website. The damn thing looked like a flophouse for crack addicts working in the fertilizer industry. You know your room sucks ass when you say, without a hint of irony, "Well, at least there's no feces on the floor."

After that miserable train ride was finally, mercifully over, we looked at the actual first class cabins--the ones that did come with beds and private washrooms and complimentary breakfast, rather than our version of first class which were apparently converted livestock troughs and came with complimentary stench--we determined that the ACTUAL first class was called "Gran Clase." There was no option for Gran Clase on the RENFE website. I would gladly have paid more for the Gran Clase; I was simply never given the option. You hear me, RENFE? DUMB AMERICANS LIKE ME WILL PAY MORE for the ability to lie down and not smell like dog breath after traveling. Your website is truly preferente.

10. Coldplay sucks.

Walking around Barcelona's Barri Gòtic, a.k.a. the old, medieval part of town, we stumbled upon a bar which advertised that it would be showing NFL football that night. FOOTBALL! Even better, they were showing my Bills play the Chargers (note--this was way back when I was laboring under the delusion that the Bills were actually good). We made a note to go back and watch the game, since we'd been in Spain for well over a week by then and I was getting desperate for some good ol' NFL action. We were staying in a different part of town but for the ability to watch football, I was willing to make the trip.

So at 7PM Barcelona time, 1PM Eastern Standard Time, we journeyed back to the same bar and settled in for some choreographed violence interspersed with meetings, a.k.a. football. After an interminably long commercial break, they finally started showing--FOOTBALL!!! YEAH BABY, FOOOOOOOOTBAAAAALLL!!!! GO, FC BARCELONA, GO--

Wait, WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!?

Despite their claims to the contrary, this bar was showing fùtbol, not football, specifically the FC Barcelona-Athletic Bilbao game. WHAT?!?! YOU FUCKING LIARS!!!!! I ran outside to look at the sign again, and yeah, it boldly said "NFL football, Bills/Chargers," not "We're thinking about showing NFL football, Bills/Chargers, but we're a bunch of lying bastards and we're showing soccer instead."

Listen, I like soccer. In fact, I like soccer about as much any American possibly can like soccer. I'll even call it "football" when I'm hanging around soccer fans. But dammit, when I want to watch NFL football, I want to watch NFL football. Soccer is a lot of things, but the NFL ain't one of them.

Finally, after searching on my iPhone for a while, I determined that it wasn't actually the bar's fault--there was a power outage in Buffalo and NOBODY could get the game. So the bar showed the soccer game instead.

"Okay, fine," I thought. "This game is almost over; once it's done and the power goes back on in Buffalo, they can switch to the Bills game."

So I patiently waited--by "patiently" I mean "not patiently, frantically reloading the Bills score on my iPhone every other minute despite the sick-to-the-point-of-perversity data roaming charges"--until the FC Barcelona match ended. The second it did, I started staring at the bartender, using the Jedi mind trick to get her to pick up the remote and switch channels since there was still a full half left to go in the Bills game. Which she did--she glanced at the screen, saw the soccer game was over, picked up the remote, and changed the channel....

...to a COLDPLAY CONCERT.

This bar claimed it was going to show NFL football, and instead it showed soccer and a cocksucking sonofawhoring holy dammit Christmas Coldplay concert. Are you fucking kidding me? In what universe does Coldplay stand in for football? In what universe does Coldplay stand in for ANYTHING other than the soundtrack of a Very Special, Virginity-Losing Episode of "Dawson's Creek"? I disliked Coldplay even before this debacle; now, I hope they get trampled by a herd of rampaging aardvarks.

11. Endings are hard.

It occurs to me now that I have no neat package-wrapping way to end this entry. I should really work on crafting satisfying conclusions, you know? The End.

* Have I linked to this video before? Why yes, yes I have. And I will continue to link to it until its singular kickassedness has spread to all the corners of the globe. I used to dislike Journey, then I started liking them ironically, and then I got to the point where I so thoroughly liked them ironically that I just liked them, period. "But G-man," you may be saying, "this makes no sense, because Journey is, how you say, lame." I will stipulate that Journey is lame, but allow me to further hypothesize that Journey can be both lame and also fucking balls-out awesome at the same time. And if you disagree, then I hate you and hope you swallow a bug.

** In hindsight, The Rebel's reaction should not have come as a surprise. Not because she's obsessed with porn, which, as far as I know, she isn't. It shouldn't have come as a surprise because she tends to be less prissy than one would expect from a Southern belle. True story: a few years ago we visited New Orleans for JazzFest. We arrived in the morning around 10, and immediately went to Central Grocery for a muffaletta. Well, the soda machine was broken, so naturally, The Rebel suggested we hit the frozen daiquiri place next door--if you've never been to New Orleans, they have these frozen daiquiri places all over, where they have a line of machines with differently flavored frozen drinks, most of them made with grain alcohol. They should really call them Hangover In A Cup, only you get the added bonus of brain freeze while you're drinking them.

So we each ordered a medium one--I think I got a Hurricane and she got a margarita--and these "mediums" were the size Big Gulps. Yeah. It was maybe 10:45am, our very first moments of our very first day in New Orleans. Then the bartender said, "You get a free shot with that, too!" And as I said, "Holy crap, I really didn't need to get myself blasted at ten-freaking-forty-five in the morning on the very first day," The Rebel exclaimed, "Cool! I'll have a Blowjob!"

Yeah. That's my girl, right there.

*** According to Wikipedia, there are a little more than one million Basque speakers in the world. There are six billion people in the world, so that means 0.016% of the world speaks Basque. And since I estimate there are 6,000,000,000 minus 5,999,999,997 people who read this blog, that means 1/2000th of a person reading this blog speaks Basque.

**** That's right, a Mr. Mxyzptlk reference. 'Cuz that's how I roll, bitch.

***** Regarding the election: WOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Getting a Hamjob

2008-10-30T19:16:00.008-04:00

The Rebel and I just got back from Spain, where we visited Madrid, San Sebastián, and Barcelona over the course of two weeks. It's the absolute height of arrogance to presume one can even superficially understand an entire country based on a two-week visit, so of course I'm going to do precisely that. I'm Amurrican, dammit, we're number one! Lemme list a few observations, beginning with what is by far the most profound and interesting:

1. Spain has the slowest freaking escalators I have ever seen.

We flew into Madrid's Barajas airport, terminal 4, which was designed by Antonio Lamela and Richard Rogers (this means something to people who understand architecture, which is a Venn diagram that would not include me), and looks like a giant Cirque du Soleil backdrop. I don't mean that as a dig. It's beautiful, easily the best-looking airport terminal I've ever seen. It's also absurdly, terrifyingly ginormous, and when you've just gotten off an overnight flight--in coach--that followed a four-hour layover in JFK,* and on this flight there were kids screaming the entire time, and I do mean screaming, like "cats stuck in a running blender" screaming, after all this the only thing you want out of an airport is the ability to exit as quickly as possible.

The sheer grandiose size of Barajas makes this impossible, architectural beauty be damned, and after you've walked what seems like the distance from Marathon to Athens just to get out of your gate, you then, in order to get to Customs, have to deal with the slowest freaking escalators ever seen. It's like the Spaniards set the escalators to "mosey." And since you're in Europe, nobody would ever think of walking on an escalator (Europeans have two, and only two, things in common with obese Midwestern tourists: one, they don't budge on escalators, and two, they still chain-smoke), so you get to fester in your own just-spent-twelve-hours-traveling B.O. moving at whatever the opposite of the speed of light is. When we finally returned to D.C., I was so accustomed to molasses-speed escalators that the Metro escalators looked like goddamn belt sanders by comparison. It wasn't just the airport escalators in Spain, either. Museum escalators, department store escalators, all seemed to move so slowly that walking up the stairs was the quicker option no matter how out of shape you were. Which brings me to number two.

2. Madrid is the least-fat city I've seen outside of Asia.

Around my third day in Madrid, I realized I had yet to see a fat person. NOBODY was fat. It wasn't until a day later that I finally saw a fattie (a tourist, naturally), and even he was just pudgy (he was a Spanish tourist, not an American one). Or, to be blunt, "average" by American standards. (Or, to be even more blunt, "anorexic" by "jackass tourists at Woodley Park blocking the sidewalk as they wait for the bus to the Zoo because the tubby bastards refuse to walk three blocks" standards.)

Most of this was probably because we visited during off-peak season and thus didn't see very many tourists in Madrid (Barcelona, which was still pretty touristy, was another matter completely), but that still raises the question of how the locals of Madrid were so non-fat. I imagine smoking has something to do with it, since a good third of the people there smoked, but that doesn't explain the two-thirds who didn't. Besides, if it were simply a function of smoking, then the sections of America with the highest smoking rates (the Midwest and the South) would logically be the thinnest. They ain't.

Honestly, I kinda think it's the tapas that does it. Or more accurately, the "tapas tour." In Madrid you go to a tapas bar, have a drink and one or two tapas--a few bites, really--and then you walk to another bar and repeat the process. See, each bar has one particular dish that they're known for, so you just focus on that dish when you're there, then go someplace else and get whatever the specialty is over there. Not only are you combining some walking with your eating, you also give more time for your stomach to let your brain know that you've eaten (this ain't something I made up--for whatever reason, it takes the brain twenty minutes to realize the stomach is full, which is why it's so easy to stuff yourself silly without realizing it, and is further evidence that if the human body really was designed by some higher power, then that higher power did a piss-poor job of it).

That's the only explanation for their unusual thinness I can think of, because it's obviously not the food itself that keeps them thin, inasmuch as the food was usually either (a) fried, (b) swimming in oil, or (c) topped with jamón ibérico de bellota, aka ham, although calling it "ham" is like describing Olivia Wilde as "not entirely unpleasant to the eyes." Oh, God, the jamón. They take a special breed of pig that feeds on acorns as it freely roams the oak forests of southwestern Spain, then they cure the legs for three years. The result is an unbelievably rich, smoothly textured ham, with velvety bands of fat that melt in your mouth like the finest butter. It's like prosciutto di Parma, except that by comparison, prosciutto di Parma tastes like something you'd use to pad a jockstrap. They sold the jamón everywhere, too, as in scads of hanging legs of jamón, coquettishly winking, teasing, fondling me until I'd burst in exuberant ham-gasm.

It's somewhat possible I've shared too much.

Where the hell was I? Oh yeah--the food. My conclusion is that they've simply adopted a style of eating that just happens to keep the pounds off, because the food itself is, well, incredible, but at the same time, in no way does it qualify as low-fat or low-calorie. Which leads nicely to point number three.

3. Never gorge yourself on foie gras the night before a six-hour train ride.

Our last night in Madrid, we did one last tapas tour in the neighborhood of Chueca. So at one tapas bar, I ordered something that looked fairly innocuous on the menu, which was a serving of pâté and foie gras accompanied by bread. Well, this thing came out, and it was friggin' huge, an entire dinner plate's worth, with three ice-cream-scoop-sized globs of pâté and foie gras, and the two pieces of bread were supplemented by, for some mystifying reason...potato chips.

I have no idea what it is with Madrid and potato chips. Every place we went, they had potato chips. At one cafe, we ordered hot chocolate (another Spanish specialty--just hunks of pure chocolate that they've melted into a gloriously unctuous chocolate goo--fucking awesome, I tell you), and goddamn if they didn't serve it with a bowlful of potato chips. At another bar, I ordered something called patatas fritas, thinking they'd be like the kickass patatas bravas you can get at Jaleo, and they gave me...a giant bowl, like a mixing bowl, of potato chips.

Anyway, we ate as much of this mound of pâté and foie gras as we could, which wasn't much because we were already an hour into our tapas odyssey, and also because three ice-cream-scoops of foie gras and pâté is a fucking lot of foie gras and pâté. I mean, nutritionally speaking, it's like eating three ice-cream-scoops of lard. So yeah, that ended up being our final stop on the tapas crawl.

Well, you'll never believe this, but shoveling heaps of meat butter down our gullets didn't sit too well. A few hours later, the Rebel was puking frenetically and vociferously, and I was emitting, uh, copious amounts of type seven on the Bristol scale.** And, whoopty-doo (heh--I said "doo"), the next morning we got to hop on a train to San Sebastián! Six hours, already nauseated, riding backwards! Huzzah!

Some background here. San Sebastián is in the Basque country, in the north of Spain. It's a small city of around 185,000 inhabitants, and although it's a gorgeous town--it sits on a cove, with a beach, surrounded by mountains, and bisected by a river, and let me note that many cities that tout their natural beauty only have one of those features, let alone four--the main reason most people visit is because of the food. San Sebastián reputedly has the greatest concentration of Michelin stars outside of Paris. (Other cities have more in total--New York, for example--but they're also way, way larger.) San Sebastián also has its own crazy version of tapas called pintxos. They're like tapas on crystal meth, and the method they use in San Sebastián is to put, by my rough estimate, forty zillion bajillion pintxos right on the bar, then let you pick them up yourself and eat right there. Payment is on the honor system.*** So, obviously, the ONLY reason we chose to go to San Sebastián rather than going south to Sevilla or Valencia was for the food. And we arrived in San Sebastián either vomiting or crapping something that looked like the Potomac**** or both. For three days, the sight of food was utterly nauseating. I couldn't keep anything down other than water and bread.

This. Was. CATASTROPHIC.

I can't stress this enough. Remember how John Elway played for 15 seasons, including three in which he lost the Super Bowl by increasingly gigantic margins, and then finally and ecstatically won the Super Bowl in the most dramatic way possible? Imagine if instead, he fumbled as he was running to score the winning touchdown, blew out his knee, cost the Broncos the win, and never played another down. That was me the first three days in San Sebastián. It all culminated when we went to Arzak, a storied restaurant, a Michelin three-star and therefore literally one of the best restaurants in the known universe...and I felt like puking the entire time. By the time we got to the meat course--a hunk of beef so incomprehensibly beautiful that a healthy me would've wanted to have sex with it--I was thisclose to retching all over the table. UNREAL. I actually had to leave meat uneaten. ME! Uneaten meat! (Heh--I said "uneaten meat.")***** For me to leave meat on my plate is astoundingly improbable, like "Cubs win the World Series" improbable. And it all goes back to that goddamn pâté.

4. Booze!

Let's say you're an American in Barcelona, and you decide to visit a bar called Dry Martini because you've heard it's one of the best bars in the world. Let's say you visit said bar and order your favorite drink, a Hendrick's gin and tonic. Let's say the bartender cracks some ice in a huge glass, and garnishes it with--Pete, you'll love this--a bias-cut slice of cucumber, which is how you're supposed to serve a Hendrick's and tonic although nobody ever seems to do it. Let's say he then begins pouring in the Hendrick's.

Let's say that then, he--wait, he's still pouring the Hendrick's.

Let's say that after he's done pouring the Hendrick's--wait, he's STILL pouring the Hendrick's.

WHEN IS HE GOING TO STOP POURING THE FUCKING HENDRICK'S?!?!

See, it turns out that in Spain, when you order a mixed drink, the bartenders pour the liquor in and KEEP POURING until you bloody well tell them to stop. And they charge you the same price whether you tell them to put in the barest whisper of booze or fill the glass completely. Sadly, this information would've come in handy BEFORE I watched the bartender pour the gin until the glass was 99-hundredths full, only stopping when the BOTTLE WAS EMPTY, at which point he asked me if I still wanted MORE before noticing the Manson lamps I had going on at that point.

I'm kind of surprised I didn't see more frat boys in Spain, now that I think about it.

5. This entry is getting really excessively long.

And with that, I'm spent. More on Spain, featuring...
-porn on network TV
-gratuitous use of consonants
-unusual definitions of "first class", and
-the many ways in which I wish to execute the members of Coldplay
...in a few days.

* Which, conversely, is the worst motherfucking airport currently in existence, and you could reasonably argue that O'Hare or McCarran or Hartsfield-Jackson or some bombed out airstrip in the Middle East is worse, but only JFK reminds me of the hedge maze from The Shining, except bumbling through JFK makes you want Jack Nicholson to kill you with an axe.

** I wouldn't click on this link if you're easily grossed out. Oh, wait, you probably clicked on it before you checked the footnote, huh? My bad.

*** This is why it would never work in America. When a waiter in the U.S. forgets to put a bottle of wine on the check, approximately 1% of diners are honest enough to point it out, and actually think they "deserve" to get the bottle for free. On Sietsema's chat once, someone wrote in saying that he discovered the waiter had left an item off the check, so he pointed it out to the waiter, only to have his dining companions berate him for it and make him pay the tip by himself because, in their monkey-brained opinion, he "screwed" them. Read that sentence again. A pintxos bar here would go out of business in about negative three seconds.

**** Uh, hope you're not eating lunch.

***** I am an unrepentant meat eater, as anyone who knows me will tell you, which is why it was hysterical when PETA mailed me--to my work address, no less--the "Vegetarian Starter Kit." What's the exact opposite of "preaching to the choir"? Because that's what sending me a Vegetarian Starter Kit would be. Anyway, although I'm a carnivore, I make one concession to respecting the animal, and that is: finish the meat. The animal died because of you, so the least you can do is respect that sacrifice and finish what's in front of you. I adhere to this no matter how bad the meat in question may be; I once received a steak so overly cooked I condemned it as an abomination and not of the Lord, but I still ate the damn thing.

The Customer Always Sucks

2008-07-24T17:45:00.002-04:00

Wednesday's Post has an article about the rise of high-end coffee bars in the D.C. area. Of the approximately four people (margin of error: four) who read this blog, at least one (hey, Charlotte!) discovered it after I wrote a post about my desperate search for a decent espresso. Naturally, exactly zero of these quality coffee joints are close to where I work or live, so good on ya, D.C. Thanks a fucking lot.

Anyway, this article focuses on coffee bars that strive to serve terrific coffee, as opposed to, say, the coffee served in the Starbucks-Au Bon Pain-Caribou triangle which I inhabit, all of which serve coffee that's best described as "functional." Their coffee does just a little bit more than the bare minimum--it feeds my pathetic caffeine addiction, and tastes better than, say, something out of a metal cube at 2:00am in a random Shell station off of I-95, but is hardly what you'd call great coffee. Like, if fresh-roasted espresso in a cafe in Nice is a Ferrari, and random interstate highway gas station swill is a rusted-out Pinto, then StarBonIbou coffee is a late-model Honda Civic. Hey, I'm fine with Honda Civics. They get me where I want to go in a reasonably pleasant manner. But they ain't no Ferrari.

Now, once I determined the Post article was a big ol' cocktease because none of the goddamn places were easily accessible to me, what interested me most was an account of this guy's experience at one of the aforementioned high-end coffee joints, Murky Coffee. Long story short--he asked for a triple espresso served over ice, the Murky guy refused, saying that espresso gets ruined when you pour it over ice, he got in an argument with the staff, and left a dollar with, and I quote, "FUCK YOU AND YOUR PRECIOUS COFFEE POLICY" written on it.

I'm honestly not sure how I would react as a customer in such a situation because I've never received what people generally refer to as "snooty" or "condescending" service. Sullen, desultory service? Of course--I go to CVS all the time. Rude service? Hell yeah, and I can't wait to get back to Peter Luger Steakhouse and experience it again, because those steaks fucking rule. But snooty or condescending? Never.

This is pretty bizarre, yes, because it's not like I avoid snooty places. When you eat like me and live in a town like D.C., you're gonna visit a few of them. Despite that, I really can't remember a time when a waiter or barista or anyone in the customer service business was just flat-out disrespectful. And I have a suspicion I know why that is.

I have, however, encountered snooty and condescending behavior before, and that occurred WAY too many of the times I tried to chat up a woman.* When you try to meet women you kind of get used to them treating you like crap, even when you're a hot tamale like me. (Editor's note--the "hot tamale" thing is sarcastic.) So I know just how embarrassing, infuriating, and ultimately disheartening it feels to have someone treat you like dirt just because they've arbitrarily decided you don't deserve to be treated decently.

BUT....

In the Murky Coffee case, I can't side with the customer. I've written many times about how important it is to maintain quality and, dare I say it, a certain purity, especially when it comes to food. ESPRESSO DOESN'T GO ON ICE. KETCHUP DOESN'T GO ON A RIB-EYE. I hate it when people use the "customer is always right" defense and then accuse the establishment of snobbery. First of all, the customer isn't always right. Maybe this dickhead's next move was to go to his dry cleaner and sue them for $54 million for a pair of pants. Second, yes, it's snooty when someone who has dedicated many hours of study to perfecting espresso tries to tell you you're ordering yours incorrectly. But what do you call it when some ignoramus with no training or knowledge nevertheless insists he's "right" despite all evidence to the contrary? What do you call it when he says he's "right" because he's the customer, and servers are just slaves who should bend over and kiss his ass? Doesn't that sound a little, I dunno...SNOOTY AND CONDESCENDING?!?!?!?!

It's illuminating, for example, to check out the reader reviews on the Post's City Guide. If you pick out any establishment that's attempting to serve a higher quality of food or drink or provide a more upscale atmosphere, the reader ratings will always be low, and there will always be scads of complaints about "snootiness" and "attitude." What becomes clear after a while is this: Joe Schmoe isn't pissed off that the waitress think she's better than him. Joe Schmoe is pissed off because the waitress DOESN'T recognize that HE'S better than HER. There's a huge difference there. EVERYONE is a snob, but the people who get most infuriated by supposed snobbery are the ones who obviously think the world should accommodate their every whim, no matter how patently idiotic their whims happen to be. The people who are most offended by snobbery are the biggest snobs of all.

Why do the better establishments get judged so harshly? Because we live in a mediocre world. Chris Rock once described it like this--you take any class of thirty kids, you'll have five smart kids, five dumb kids, and the rest are in the middle. The typical person is has mediocre looks, is in mediocre shape, makes mediocre money, and is of mediocre intelligence. And nothing pisses off that typical person more than to see someone who's striving to be better than that, because that just shines a light on how mediocre s/he actually is. What's disgusting is that it's now more acceptable to tear down those who try harder than it is to actually try ourselves.

Anyway, as of this writing, the guy who freaked out at Murky got over 200 comments, mostly on his side--that is, the "Murky should be ashamed of itself" side. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that this same guy once wrote a post extolling the virtues of using McDonald's as pizza toppings. See, I complain a lot about declining standards of quality, about the inexorable encroachment of soulless, crappy chains and the "good enough to get by" mentality, and the thing is--I know I'm on the losing side. Every single day, a terrific mom-and-pop restaurant closes down and a Cheesecake Factory or Applebee's pops up in its place.

Which is why I don't understand the vitriol on the part of his supporters, the ones who want places like Murky burned to the ground. Listen, lovers of mediocrity--YOU'VE WON. You can walk down any friggin' block to get whatever crappy, attenuated version of formerly great products you want at Old Navy or Au Bon Pain or T.G.I. Friday's. You're really so selfish that you can't allow us purists--or snobs, if you prefer--the handful of quality places that are left? You have to take over the entire country like the Blob?

Well, yes, of course you do. That way everyone will eventually be EXACTLY THE SAME, and you won't have to try at all anymore.

Me, I love dives, but I also love temples of haute cuisine. I also try to respect whatever the owner and staff of any given bar/restaurant/store is trying to accomplish. The Pug on H Street is a laid-back bar that smells kind of weird; one where the bartender knows your name, you drink $3 Natty Bohs, and you can come dressed however you want. That's great. It's one of my favorite bars in the District. Komi is a fancy restaurant that cost over $350 for two people last time I went, where every plate is meticulously crafted and they describe ingredients as being "sourced" from an organic-sustainable-bioflooperiffic farm from some local idyllic paradise, and you know what? That's great too. It's one of my favorite restaurants in the District. And I love, and frankly envy, the passion of the owners of both. They both know exactly what they want their establishments to be, and they strive to accomplish it.

So if it sounds weird when I say I haven't received snooty service, it shouldn't. I just keep my expectations in line with what the place is trying to be. If I just wanted a caffeine boost but it was too hot to drink an espresso, I WOULDN'T GO TO MURKY COFFEE. I'd go to any of the bazillion places, literally steps away from Murky, that serve a bazillion-jillion iced coffee variations. For the record, I also wouldn't ask for deep-dish pizza at 2Amys, or hamburgers at a sushi restaurant, or Maker's Mark at a Mormon church. If I did want a high-quality, well-made espresso, however, I would go to Murky. And I'd thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that there are still places that care enough to make them.

For now.

*[HUGE DIGRESSION/]: I don't actually know what any of you (possibly imaginary) female readers look like, so--you'll never believe this--I've decided that the typical female reader of my blog is searingly hot, and reads my blog in a candle-lit room, on a satin-lined bed, whilst wearing a sultry gaze and some of that complicated lingerie with the thigh-high stockings with clips that I've never actually seen in person and, frankly, don't believe actually exists, as a four-inch stiletto dangles suggestively off her foot and Marvin Gaye plays in the background.

It's somewhat possible I've shared too much.

Anyway, I know that as beautiful women, y'all get hit on several thousand times a day, and I, as a member of the gender that is tasked with doing the hitting-on, have just one request: Be gentle. Remember how you felt when a boyfriend you thought you were falling for dumped you out of the blue? That's pretty much what it's like for us, every single time we approach a woman and she cruelly shoots us down just because she can. Of course, I'm not referring to the those dudes in shiny shirts using lines like "Are you from Tennessee? Because you're the only ten I see" who apparently just swam a 400-meter backstroke in a pool of Drakkar Noir; THOSE jackasses, feel free to snub. But if some guy is being nice and just isn't your type, let him down easy. If you're wondering why it's so hard to meet a good guy, it's because all the good guys out there are terrified to approach women anymore because they're sick of the humiliation. [/DIGRESSION]

The Accidental Walrus

2008-05-26T20:10:00.005-04:00

I run three times a week. This is tantamount to me saying, "I light my nose hairs on fire three times a week," because I hate running. Hate it. HATE IT. If I could get the same health benefits by letting someone smack the bejeezus out of me with a sockful of Sacajawea dollars, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Less than a heartbeat if the person smacking me was a cute woman.

The rub, of course, is the phrase "IF I could get the same health benefits." Although/because I hate it, running is the single most effective workout I've ever done. Twelve miles a week, and I sleep better, fit into my pants better, and have more energy. Twelve miles a week, and I can eat anything I want--a fact I can prove empirically, because I eat appallingly large amounts of food. Twelve miles a week, and I become bizarrely immune to injury--a couple of weeks ago I was sprinting to answer the phone (I had to buzz in the pizza guy) when the rug completely slipped underneath me, so I slammed into the hardwood floor, bashed my shin right into the corner of my coffee table...and walked away without even a bruise.

None of this changes the fact that I fucking hate running. I'm aware that many people out there actually love running and look forward to their next run the way I look forward to my next serving of bacon, and I'm not dissing them in any way; I'm just saying I'm not one of them. Running, to me, is an atrociously miserable experience that, thanks to some cosmic joke, is necessary for my continued health; it's the exercise equivalent of a rectal exam.

But I do it anyway, and the fact that I regularly do something I so utterly detest helps to explain why I often seem unsympathetic to overweight people. Here's the thing, though--it's not that I'm unsympathetic to overweight people; I'm just unsympathetic to overweight people who make tons of excuses but make little actual effort to lose the weight.

I try not to conflate "overweight" with "lazy" because I know that's not necessarily the case. At my gym, for example, I see a few people who work out religiously but could never appear on the cover of Men's Health or Shape; they just don't have the bone structure or muscle-building capacity or natural fat-burning ability to get in that type of shape without resorting to an Olympic-style regimen of constant exercise and diet. So yes, genes play a role; they establish the limits of your capacity and the rate at which you benefit from exercise and nutrition.

What pisses me off, though, is that these people are VASTLY outnumbered by the fat people who see that "genes play a role" and then distort that to mean "genes are all that matters," which then becomes "and therefore I'm just going to keep my fat ass on the couch and eat Cheetos all day, and it's not my fault I'm fat because...genes play a role." That's a slap in the face of all the people who actually try. Your genetic make-up may determine that you'll never run a four-minute mile, but it DOESN'T force you to be three hundred pounds of fat.

So it's not the moderately overweight people who engage in regular exercise who bother me; it's the grotesquely obese, 300+ pound orci. If you're THAT fat, then I'm sorry, you're just a lazy fuck, so stop bitching about how thin people roll their eyes at you when you phhhbbbllATTT next to them on the Metro.

Take, for example, what I like to call the Yoga Progression. The exercise regimen that, in theory, attracts the greatest number of hot babes is yoga. However, the high babe quotient really only applies to the ADVANCED yoga classes. The beginner yoga classes, not so much, because the beginner yoga classes are filled with the lazy misguided fatasses who are seeking a workout they think requires no effort. You never see a great big lardbutt start a workout regimen by running seven-minute miles on the treadmill; no, they go for the workouts that don't look strenuous. Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE LAZY!!! THAT'S HOW THEY GOT SO FAT!!!! The problem is, yoga only LOOKS easy, and is actually really frickin' difficult. Like, I'm quite flexible by guy standards--not only can I touch my toes, I can easily bend over and grab my ankles, a talent I will DEFINITELY regret having if I ever serve prison time--but one session of introductory yoga killed me. Anyway, after ten minutes, the fatasses realize yoga actually takes effort, and quit what will turn out to be both the first and last day of their new exercise regimen. (Then they blame their genes.)

So with beginners' yoga, a good 50% of the class consists of, let's say "rotund," participants who quickly self-select out, and each succeeding level weeds out more and more of them until you get to the advanced classes, which are a combination of really, really hot babes and bizarrely rubbery guys who look like Dhalsim from Street Fighter II.

And really, that's why you see all these random classes in any given health club. Spinning, yoga, and step aerobics are one thing, but now you have things like Cardio Hip-Hop, Aerobic Belly-Dancing, and Cardio Striptease, which, by the way, you shouldn't be allowed to take unless you pass a strict licensing process. (Same goes for wearing midriff-bearing outfits and, for guys, muscle shirts. It's a privilege, not a right.) I'm not even denying that these new workouts are effective; I'm simply saying they exist to "fool" people into working out when they otherwise wouldn't.

It's gotten to the point where you can make a fortune by manufacturing gym equipment that just makes the user LOOK like a bad-ass without requiring any, how do you say, effort. For instance, there's this machine at my gym called the Ab Solo. You do a sit-up while holding a medicine ball, and at the top of the rep you throw the ball at a net that rolls the ball back to you to repeat the process. The only problem is, the chair you're sitting on is SPRING-LOADED. It's a bad-ass ab workout in the same sense that I have an 80-inch vertical leap...if I get to jump on a goddamn trampoline. There's another ab machine that consists of a kneepad that's placed on a track that's shaped like a J. You hold the handrail and kind of, well, enjoy the ride as the kneepad swings back and forth along the track. That's a workout???? Really? What's next, Cardio Rocking Chair? Aerobic Hammock?

But you see people just going nuts on these things, grunting like 70s porn stars and generally making a spectacle of themselves to show how tough and Rocky-in-Russia they are, as they use these pathetically useless machines that raise your heartrate about as much as a jalapeno popper would.

So when a really fat person claims he works out and it's just not helping because of "genes," you'll pardon me if I'm a little skeptical. First, a lot of people claim they "exercise regularly," but they're defining "exercise regularly" as "go to the gym for the one week immediately following New Year's, then drop it entirely until the next New Year's." And second, a lot of the people who do go to the gym just do pointless exercises like the Ab Solo.

That is, if they even work out at all--a TON of people go to the gym purely to socialize, which is fine except they always seem to do it while blocking something I actually want to fucking use. A couple of months ago I wanted to do some chin-ups but some fat bastard was standing in front of it...talking on his cell phone. Well, I asked if I could work in (I was using "work in" ironically), so he moved to the side, where he continued to speak on his phone as I did three sets of chinups. Now, the standard joke here would be to say, "He's probably STILL talking on his phone, har har!" but no, I can say definitively that wasn't the case, because ten minutes later I went to do some situps and found him lying on a mat FUCKING ASLEEP.

So again, it's not that I'm being unfair to fat people. I'm just ripping on fat people who clearly have only themselves to blame. The problem is that in dealing with the obesity epidemic, we're simultaneously trying to be politically correct about it. We're scared to blame people for being obese because there's a chance it's genetic, but in 95% of cases, if a guy is obese it's his own fucking fault. We talk about "fat discrimination" as if it's the same thing as Plessy vs. Ferguson, and let me say, as an actual minority who faces real discrimination on a daily basis, it's really a pleasure to see that "Snickers-gobbling couch potato" is equated to "Non-white." We increase the width of turnstiles, rescale the size of clothes, and prescribe more pills instead of just saying, "Hey, Porkchop, maybe you want to forgo the third plate at the buffet."

And it's even gotten to the point where fat people are starting to feel comfortable arguing from a position of superiority. See a woman who wears a size four? Accuse her of being anorexic, because God knows anyone who can see her toes must have an eating disorder. Or maybe she's a chain-smoker. Or had liposuction. Or perhaps she purges? No matter what, she MUST have done it in some irresponsible way, because it's just so inconceivable that someone hits the gym and doesn't feast on Big Macs six times a week. And fat people are making these ridiculous arguments with more and more "authority" because THEY'RE THE MAJORITY, and the morbidly obese are rapidly getting to that point as well.

But hey, once 100% of the population is obese and the Chinese are regularly kicking our asses in the Olympics, at least we can say it was genetic.

Adventures in Babysitting

2008-03-17T18:05:00.002-04:00

The Rebel and I went to Westend Bistro on Saturday. Westend Bistro, like Central and Brasserie Beck before it, is one of those restaurants owned by the chef of some inexcusably expensive zillion-star place who wants a more "casual" offshoot--Westend is owned by Eric Ripert, who runs Le Bernardin in New York. Of course, when a four-star chef uses the word "casual," he means this: Instead of paying upwards of $150 per person, you pay $100 per person, which is like selling a $70,000 Porsche and bragging about whatta bargain it is because the price includes windshield wipers. The interior of the casual restaurant is just as snazzy as his more formal restaurant, except the tables don't have tablecloths. But since it's supposed to be "casual" you still see some morons from the suburbs dressed like extras from "Saved By The Bell," all dolled-down in their dirty Nike sneakers with stonewashed jeans; when The Rebel and I walked in, the first thing we saw was a fifty-something man at the bar wearing a turquoise hoody with sneakers and terrifyingly short red jogging shorts--one wrong move and he would've been popping outta the hole like Punxsutawney Phil--and this was on a Saturday evening in MARCH.

The restaurant itself was quite good, though the portions were rather small, though I should also point out that I ate at BLT Steak a few weeks ago and polished off a 22-oz ribeye AND oysters AND creamed spinach AND a side of potatoes AND one of those giant popovers AND bread with pate AND dessert and wasn't even full afterwards, so take it with a grain of salt when I say portions are small. Why, yes, I AM the same guy who bitches about fat people, why do you ask? Anyway, food-wise, I'd put Westend Bistro behind Central but ahead of Brasserie Beck, although Brasserie Beck does have that kickass Belgian beer selection, so I guess it's a bit of a Sophie's Choice there. For the record, we split the pate en croute (awesome) and rabbit rillettes (even more awesome), she had the Chesapeake Bay stew (very good), I had the flat iron steak (awesome, but small, but, you know--I consume muchly) with a side of ratatouille (very good, but not as good as Central's), and we finished it off with a caramel-cream pudding for dessert (aaaawwwwwesome).

I'm not here to review the food, though, and I'm sure you're disappointed given the intricate details I just provided of the meal. It takes some real ritin' skillz to come up with "awesome." What happened was, around the time we got our appetizers, this old couple, well into their 60s, got seated at the table next to us. First of all, the old bitch, who was wearing one of those undoubtedly expensive but stupendously ugly, overly embroidered tops with massive shoulder pads, like a female version of the Cosby sweater crossed with a Leona Helmsley power suit (I'll defer to the ladies to tell me how to properly describe an outfit that hideous), spent the entire meal staring at us like we had three heads, so that was great. In her defense, she probably was wondering why I was eating there instead of in the kitchen washing dishes with the rest of the foreigners.

But also, her husband ordered a bottle of wine, and after the waiter brought it out, presented the bottle, opened it, and poured a bit for him to taste, the old guy tasted it, and in classic snooty poser asshole fashion, made a face accompanied by the "so-so" hand motion and sent it back. NOT because the wine had gone bad or anything, but just because it wasn't his preference. So the waiter said he would bring something else, which he did, and which the old dude accepted, and it's a good thing he did because I was about to throttle him for being such a prick.

Later, I heard the old dude say to the waiter, "[That wine] is much better, and it's a great value, too. It's less than half the price of that first one."

Now...

The Rebel and I were drinking wine also, so I have a good idea about the prices of the wines at Westend. Normally when I choose a wine, I carefully consider the vineyard's reputation, take note of the vintage, and finally consider how the varietal pairs with the food we choose. Then I ignore all that and order the second-cheapest one.

In this case, the second-cheapest wine on the list was a cabernet from California for $38. The cheapest was $32. Now, the wine that the old bastard finally accepted was definitely not the same bottle as ours, and it wasn't the cheapest wine, either. So if the bottle that he accepted was, say, $50, and this bottle was "less than half the price" of the bottle he had sent back, that means he sent back a bottle that cost at least $100...FOR NO GOOD REASON. "It's not my type" is NOT a valid reason to send back a wine, for the same reason that you wouldn't get a refund for a half-eaten Almond Joy because you suddenly decided you didn't like coconut.

I'm sure this logic would make no sense to the old jackass, though, whom we were convinced was going to keep trying and sending back bottle after bottle until he had exhausted the entire wine selection. In fact, I like to think that the waiter brought out a much cheaper bottle because he said to himself, "I better switch to cheap wines to save money, because this fucktard is going to keep sending them back." It reminded me of the time a friend whose name I won't reveal, but let's just say it rhymes with "Yete," spent SEVEN HOURS shopping for black pants in Montreal, dismissing pair after pair--"I don't like the belt loops," "Those pockets are weird," "I don't want to pay more than $50," "I don't like flat-front pants," and let me point out here that he was specifically searching for "cool" black pants to hit the bars in, but (a) he didn't want to spend more than $50; and (b) he was looking for "cool" pants with PLEATS, which is just depressing--anyway, this took seven hours spread across two days, after which he finally bought a pair of...wait for it...black cotton Dockers. BLACK COTTON DOCKERS. You'll never believe this, but Yete's the guy who got married at 24 and lives in the suburbs.

I digress. So the decrepit jerkoff only forced the restaurant to waste one $100+ bottle of wine, which was both a relief and a surprise, but it quickly became apparent that he only did so because he didn't want to use up his supply of dickheadery too soon. Within minutes of receiving his entree he was rudely demanding more bread, by which I mean he snapped his fingers at the waiter and barked, "Gimme more bread"--for God's sakes, even PARROTS have better manners--and complaining about the food not being salty enough, because the salt shaker that was maybe two inches from his hand must've been too unwieldy or not ergonomically designed or something. And frankly, though I wonder how salty he needed his food to be given that everything I had was perfectly seasoned, I don't think it would be a huge tragedy if his dependence on salt and subsequently sky-high blood pressure caused him to keel over.

His wife was no better, as she sent back her dish because it had endives which, again, were prepared correctly; she just decided she didn't like endives. At least she didn't ask them to cut the crusts off and read her a bedtime story, although she DID later insist that her husband leave a 5% tip. The waiter, by the way, remained professional and cordial throughout, which was a minor departure from the approach I would've taken, which would've been to smack the dude upside the head with a rutabaga.

I can't speculate about what causes to behave like such assholes at restaurants, though I suspect that a lot of them actually think it looks impressive, like "I'm so important I don't have to demonstrate even rudimentary civility." There's a rather, what's the word, HUUGENORMOUSGIGANTIC flaw in that logic, but I never said these people were anything other than complete bozos. But it did get me thinking about people who work as restaurant servers. My parents now live in Southern Cal, and I visit them once or twice a year. The old joke is that all the waiters in L.A. are out-of-work actors and actresses, and there's something to that, but my question is, if you needed a side job to pay the bills while you pursued some other dream, why would you EVER decide to work in a restaurant? It seems like the most exhausting, thankless job there is, and it's not particularly well-paid. More to the point, it seems like SUCH an exhausting job that you wouldn't have the energy to do much of anything else after your shift.

I mean, I sometimes think about becoming a writer, until I come to my senses and realize that my writing style is almost perfectly unprofitable; the last time I checked, "Whiny, Needlessly Profane Vitriol" wasn't a popular genre on Amazon. Even if I decided to pursue writing full-time, though, I could NEVER do it after working a 12-hour shift carrying trays of food between a too-hot kitchen and an overly-crowded dining room, and putting up with obnoxious, phony prima donnas who can't pronounce "bruschetta" and have never performed any tasks more grueling than sending a fax. It would just be too tiring. Ironically, the BEST day job I can think of if you're trying to become an actor or whatever would be...the job I have right now! Office work! Good benefits, plenty of free time, and you sit on your ass aaaaaalll daaaay. I think I'd have a lot more energy for an audition after working on a spreadsheet than I would after having four bowls of soup spilled on my head, but that's just me.

Books, drugs, and rock & roll

2008-03-07T18:22:00.005-05:00

Three weeks ago, and with great sorrow, I went to the going-out-of-business sale at Candida's World of Books on 14th and Church. Candida's was an independently-run business that, on the face of it, occupied an almost comically unprofitable niche--they sold books related to travel, and that was it. Why not open a store selling Leap Year decorations, or perhaps a restaurant specializing in poi? Travel, I suppose, is a broader category than one might think, as Candida's sold not only travel guides and language phrasebooks, but also literary travelogues, novels written by foreign authors, and translations of American books. You could get a copy of Harry Potter und der Gefangene von Askaban, for example.

Side note here. In the original English, that book's title is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. AZkaban, with a "z." It's a proper noun. In other words, it's a name, and therefore the spelling shouldn't change, right? It's one thing if the languages in question already had their own version of the name in place--this is why we call it "Spain" but the French call it "L'Espagne"--but "Azkaban" was the sole invention of J.K. Rowling. So why is it "ASkaban," with an "s," in German? The German alphabet includes the letter "z," so that's not it. I could understand if "Azkaban" meant "child molestation" or something in German, but it doesn't. I also don't understand why Spanish speakers refer to New York as "Nueva York." IT'S A NAME NOW! The "New" is part of that name! You don't see Tony Bennett singing "I left my heart in Saint Frank," do you?

Finally, I REALLY don't understand the anglicization of Asian words and names. The former president of Korea's last name was pronounced "No." If you can read Korean, and I can, that's exactly what it should be. Naturally, in English they spelled it "Roh." Schmucks, they use a completely different alphabet!!! There's no concern about "misspelling" a name that doesn't use the same alphabet, so spell the fucking thing phonetically! It's even worse with Mandarin, where you'll see something like "Xiang" and find out it's actually pronounced "Smith." End of side note.

Anyway, I've gone to Candida's off and on over the past couple of years and always thought it was a rather precarious business idea. First of all, the existence of Amazon.com means any brick-and-mortar bookstore will always face a cheaper competitor with a far larger selection. And that's even before you consider Candida's mission to stick with one relatively small portion of book sales. I mean, when's the last time you walked into Borders or Barnes and Noble and found that the travel section was the largest section of the store? You walk into one of those stores, and the first thing you see is always either the "New arrivals" or the "Bestsellers" section. Then the biggest sections are the oh-so-specifically-named "Fiction" and "Nonfiction" sections. The travel section usually occupies one rack, which is about a tenth of the space that your average B. Dalton dedicates to pink books with Fabio on the cover.

Nevertheless, I always loved going to Candida's. Yeah, the prices were almost always higher. If I wanted to browse for books in general outside of travel-related literature, I was screwed. They didn't have a coffee shop. Basically, I had to be an idiot to give them my money.

But it didn't matter. Candida's ruled. Prior to my trip to France, I walked in there looking only for the latest Lonely Planet guide to Paris; two hours later I walked out with six books and plans to return for more. See, the problem with Borders and big-box chains in general has to do with their supposed strength, which is selection. They have everything under the sun, but on the other hand, they have everything under the sun. I can't remember the last time I walked into Borders just to browse, because there's just too much worthless crap to wade through. It's the Youtube of bookstores. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, it's almost impossible to find anything good because you have to spend so much time filtering out the contributions of the 75,000 different unemployed losers who actually thought re-enacting "Lazy Sunday" requires some kind of talent.

Most people, however, assume that an absolutely ginormous selection is a sign of a superior store. Perhaps this is a matter of taste, in the sense that some people want an intimate experience while others "need" the knowledge that anything they could possibly want is available. I can't really argue with that, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Having a gigantic selection seems to have the opposite effect you might expect. It doesn't broaden your horizons because its sheer mass requires you to actually narrow your searches just so you can get out of the damn store before it closes. From a practical standpoint, it's impossible to ever take advantage of such a huge selection, so you end up going in with a specific book in mind, then spend an extra twenty minutes simply trying to find the aisle it's in, then wait twenty minutes in line. I mean, how long do you think it would take to go aisle by aisle and merely read the titles in your typical Barnes and Noble? A week?

Contrast that with Politics and Prose, my favorite local bookstore. It ain't exactly small, but it's tiny compared to your average Borders. When I walk in there, I find myself browsing, actually browsing, through the aisles, because it's small enough where the idea of browsing doesn't become some daunting Odyssean test of perseverance and shoe cushioning.

Perhaps the best analogy would be the jukebox analogy. [Dana Carvey Grumpy Old Man voice/] In my day, jukeboxes had a small selection of songs hand-picked by the owner of said jukeboxes. Now, when you walk into a bar, they all have these fancy Internet jukeboxes which can search for, download, and play pretty much any song you could want. This means that the music coming from these jukeboxes is generally the most popular music as determined by the masses, which would be great except for one thing:

The masses are fucking retards.

Allowing the masses to select music in a bar just means that you're only going to hear the absolute most insipid, commercially-produced, focus-grouped pieces of monkey-shit songs out there. Every goddamn time I'm in a bar with one of those Internet jukeboxes, I hear that godawful "Promiscuous" song by the Nelly Furtadobot 6000, a song so utterly fucking soulless and mechanical that it sounds like it was written, produced, and performed by a particularly horny Commodore 64.

Contrast that with the jukebox at Pharmacy Bar, a bar that's such a dive, I literally didn't realize it was open the first few times I walked by because it looked like it was condemned. Realistically, it probably should be. However, Pharmacy Bar has an old jukebox filled with music actually selected by the owners, including local bands and indie bands an out-of-touch, lame-ass tool like me hasn't even heard of. But that's the beauty of it. When I walk out of Pharmacy Bar, I can be sure that I've heard at least five great new songs. When I walk out of a bar with an Internet jukebox, I can be sure I'll have that fucking "SexyBack" song trapped in my head, because about twenty-seven nimrod frat boys trying to impress twenty-seven-plus dimwitted "Lipstick Jungle" fans will have played it over and over and over and over until my head implodes.

Having a huge selection and letting the market determine the best options is great in theory, but that assumes perfect dissemination of information. More to the point, it assumes perfect use of information. Frankly, most people are too busy or too lazy or too fucking stupid and ignorant to make an informed, intelligent decision about music or literature or, really, just about anything. Most people can't even choose their pants size correctly, for God's sake. This is why I like finding small, independent purveyors--they're far more likely to make their decisions based on passion rather than pandering to the average idiot who just wants to fit in with all the other idiots. But as the closing of Candida's shows, having passion for something just doesn't cut it anymore. We're becoming more and more generic and standardized with each passing year, to the point where I'm starting to think those bad science-fiction movies got it right--eventually, we'll all be walking around in identical shimmering jumpsuits and eating entire meals in pill form. But I'm sure the selection will be huge.

The Dumbest Things I Ever Done

2008-02-06T17:07:00.000-05:00

Today the Tax on Stupidity begins a new feature, insofar as a whiny, pointless blog with maybe three readers can be said to have "features." I'm calling it "The Dumbest Things I Ever Done," and it will be an ever-increasing feature, as I continue to do dumb things as I get older. That whole line about getting "older but wiser," I now understand, is a complete myth designed to fool decrepit sagging old farts into feeling better about those unidentifiable growths on their asses. (Uh, on the zero percent chance that any hot lady readers out there were thinking of seducing me--I do not actually have an unidentifiable growth on my ass.) (It's more of an unexplained boil.)

Now, I'm not talking about stories of the "I got drunk and slept with this random girl and now I pee orange" variety, because I think such actions are more hormonally and chemically-fueled lapses in judgment rather than pure stupidity. Also, although I have a couple of doozies when it comes to making an ass of myself with women, even those aren't technically a result of my own idiocy, but rather the idiocy of others, because it turns out that even massive quantities of alcohol are not enough to overcome my overarching fear of rejection or the fact that I kinda smell like feet.

Massive quantities of alcohol did, however, lead to part one of infinity of The Dumbest Things I Ever Done, so let's get to it.

THE SETTING: Boston.

THE TIME: Soon after college.

THE CAST: Me, drunk.

It was a dark and stormy night, if by "stormy" you mean "not stormy" and by "dark" you mean "dark as nights tend to be, duh." I was living the Miller High Life as a recent college graduate. I was young, healthy--the world was my oyster!

Apparently "oyster" at that point was defined as "broke, living in a minuscule walk-up above an oft-robbed convenience store and a crappy pizzeria, subsisting on a sandwich called 'The Steak Bomb' from said pizzeria, waking up hungover every morning, and getting waaaay too excited whenever I saw an HBO movie was going to have 'N' and 'SSC.'" You know you need a girlfriend when you start scheduling your day around the 10PM showing of "Species." Still, I'd take that over being a 23-year-old married guy.

[Digression/] Although I continue to do stupid things, I've come to the conclusion that I committed the greatest concentration of inexcusably moronic schmuckosities between the ages of 17 and 25. And I bet if you looked at your life, you'd say the same thing. Yes, I did a lot of dumb things when I was a kid--the time I nearly set the house on fire after I had already almost set the house on fire once before comes to mind--but hey, I was a kid! I didn't know any better! And I've done a lot of stupid things after the age of 25, but (a) there aren't nearly as many as there were between 17 and 25, (b) the dumb things tend to be less serious, and (c) far more of my cretinous actions can be attributed to distraction, stress, etc. as opposed to me just being a fool. If you're under the age of 25, you might be intelligent, but you're not smart. In fact, you're a putz. My point is, hold off on making any major life decisions until AFTER you've turned 26. Just trust me on this. If you're thinking about getting married, having a kid, going to law school, dropping out of school to become a sherpa, tattooing your girlfriend's name on your scrotum, whatever--just wait for a few years. If they're meant to be, they'll still be options for you after you've gotten a little experience, but if you make those decisions too soon, you're stuck for life. I GUARANTEE that when you hit your late-20s and beyond, you'll look back at the 22-, 23-, 24-year-old you and think, "GOD, what a fucking doofus I was" even if you somehow emerge relatively unscathed. The key is to minimize the damage the early-20s version of you is going to do to the rest-of-your-life version of you. [/digression]

Anyway, one night I returned home after yet another session of drinking. I can't remember precisely where I was drinking--probably somewhere on Lansdowne, which was close to my apartment--but I can say with some certainty that shots of Jäger were involved, because my equally idiotic roommate Bosco always had to order shots of Jäger, and when he wasn't doing that he was ordering a drink called, I swear to Zeus, the "Mongolian Motherfucker." (Incidentally, Bosco's an MIT grad and a doctor now. See what I mean about everyone being dumb at 22?) We somehow made it home without, like, fatally colliding headfirst into the outer wall of Fenway. Bosco went to sleep, but at this time of my life, I had this weird condition where a night of drinking usually left me too wired to sleep. Yeah, I don't understand it, either.

So I turned on the TV--the massive 36-inch TV I had bought despite the fact that I was making less than $25K a year and, more importantly, that this TV was sitting in a "living room" that was literally 8 by 6 feet, so that watching it was like sitting in the first row of an IMAX theater, and I'm sorry if I keep bringing up how stupid I was at 22, but COME ON--and flipped through the channels. I can speculate, again with near perfect certainty, that I started off with Skinemax and HBO, desperately hoping for one of those awful late-night "premium" cable movies with lots of boobs. But I couldn't find one, probably because HBO was showing "Forrest Gump" for the 712th time that day, so I flipped around until I stumbled upon a commercial, or perhaps even a full-fledged informercial, for

Okay, wait, let me set this up correctly.

A commercial...

...FOR...

YOUTH GONE WILD: HEAVY METAL HITS OF THE 80'S!!!!!!!!!!!

Featuring such absolute megadeities as Twisted Sister, Poison, Ratt, and Dio. DIO!!!!! I shit you not!!!!

Now...I am an unabashed fan of bad music. But let's be absolutely precise, here--I'm not a fan of just blandly mediocre music. No Maroon 5 for me. No, I figure if you're going for greatness in any form--even when you're going to be greatly terrible--you gotta go balls to the wall, dude! I like my bad music to be stupendously, incomprehensibly horrid, and I have a slew of embarrassing CD purchases to back that up, oh my brothers. Do I have that Ricky Martin CD with "Livin' La Vida Loca" on it? Damn skippy I do, and if I stuck that on the stereo, YOU'D DANCE TO IT, don't even try to deny it. Some of the most tremendous songs of my lifetime, in my opinion, are "Detachable Penis" by King Missile, "Separate Ways" by Journey--which also doubles as the greatest video ever--and the champ of them all, "Get Low" by Lil' Jon, which might be the most utterly, fantastically irredeemable song ever written. It's a toss-up between that and Beethoven's Ninth.

So there I was, watching a commercial for this CD of fourteen crappy-beyond-belief songs. Take, for example, the chorus from one of the songs I've recently become reacquainted with thanks to Guitar Hero III, "Talk Dirty to Me" by Poison--and by the way, lemme say that Guitar Hero III is devouring and ruining my life because I'm disturbingly obsessed with it; as Beatrice was to Dante, so Guitar Hero III is to me. Anyway, the lyrics:

'Cause baby we'll be
At the drive-in
In the old man's Ford
Behind the bushes
'Til I'm screamin' for more
Down the basement
Lock the cellar door
And baby
Talk dirty to me!

Now, this song was written in 1986, not in 1955, so right off the bat, I'm wondering where the hell these guys managed to find a "drive-in" or a "cellar"; I imagine the director's cut version of this song has them sending a telegram to the apothecary. But you have to admire the nuanced, subtly metaphorical brilliance of these lyrics, don't you?

THE ANNOTATED POISON:

'Cause baby we'll be
At the drive-in
In the old man's Ford

They're fucking in his father's Ford. At the drive-in.

Behind the bushes
'Til I'm screaming for more

They're fucking behind the bushes. The wildly reckless abandon with which they're fucking has led the boy to shrilly request--nay, demand--the continuation of the aforementioned fucking.

Down the basement
Lock the cellar door

They're fucking in the basement. In the interest of privacy and, one assumes, propriety, they've locked the door.

And baby
Talk dirty to me.

They're fucking in general. The boy has un penchant for salacious repartee whilst fucking.

(Apologies to Joe Mathlete for ripping off his schtick, but c'mon--these lyrics, these ghastly, ghastly lyrics, required it.)

Anyway, as you've probably figured out, as I sat there slack-jawedly watching this commercial in all its magnificent putrescence, I had to pick up the phone and order. I mean, check out the cover--I really didn't have a choice. Now, you'll notice that I've peppered this recollection with lots of "I can speculate" and "I can state with some certainty" and other phrases that show I'm reconstructing this from memory, and a drunken memory at that. It's based on deduction and extrapolation of my typical behavior at the time. Kind of like when archaeologists take a speck of bone and figure out the dinosaur had tentacles or whatever, only with more beer and less sex.

So when I say I ordered the Youth Gone Wild: Heavy Metal Hits of the 80's CD, I'm not saying I remember actually placing the order. I just figured that out seven to ten business days later, when a box arrived for me. And ordering a crap CD when drunk, while dumb, isn't necessarily dumb enough to qualify as one of The Dumbest Things I Ever Done.

Ordering NINE COPIES of said CD, however, very much is.

NINE COPIES!!!!! Why the fuck did I feel the need to order nine copies of a CD I shouldn't have wanted in the first place? I don't have nine friends who I like enough to send a bad CD to, and more to the point, I don't have nine enemies I dislike enough to want to send a bad CD to, even if it does include such classics as "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "Cum [sic] On Feel the Noize [sic]"!!!!!!

But order them I had, and so ashamed was I of such a remarkably inexplicable act of unadulterated schmuckery that I immediately sent the nine copies back...okay, that's a lie. I HAD to send them back because I was so broke at the time that ordering nine freaking copies plus something like $3.99 for shipping and handling caused me to go over my credit limit--the hits just keep on coming--so I guess this was a rare case where blowing ludicrous amounts of money on booze left me incapable of blowing more money on worthless crap.

The moral of the story, I guess, is: Spend all of your money on booze.

Legends of the Gall, a.k.a. Restaurant Week

2008-01-29T22:35:00.001-05:00

Another Restaurant Week has come and gone, which means that jackass rubes who know nothing about cuisine and are such miserably cheap bastards that they'll only eat at a decent restaurant at a substantial discount yet expect mountainous portions and Taillevent-level service for less than what they pay for their typical T.G.I. Friday's meal of a Jack Daniel's Sampler platter and two of those godawful fluorescent margaritas--which Friday's calls "'Ritas" in a fruitless effort to gussy up their unrelenting mediocrity--will have to wait another six months to convince themselves they're doing restaurants a favor by swarming like locusts, albeit obese, rude, poorly-dressed, lousy-tipping locusts, upon said restaurants along with all the other pasty McRib enthusiasts pretending they have taste as they demand free bottles of wine because the waitstaff didn't fellate them as exuberantly as they'd hoped.

Restaurant Week, for those of you living in areas that aren't afflicted by it, is a twice-yearly promotion in which participating restaurants offer 3-course meals at a fixed price, one which is much lower than a typical meal. The most recent one in D.C. offered lunch at $20.08 and dinner at $30.08, which for many restaurants in the area is already cheaper than the average entree, let alone an entree plus appetizer and dessert. It's quite a bargain, so naturally, cheap idiot assholes have ruined it entirely.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I go to restaurants three or more times a week and obsess about food more than anyone I know. I watch way too much of the Food Network, religiously read the Dining sections of several different newspapers including those based in cities in which I don't even live, and subscribe to not one, not two, but FIVE different food-related magazines. All of my vacations revolve around food, as Pete will undoubtedly be shocked to learn, to the point where I have literally planned entire trips, including the purchase of plane tickets, only AFTER I've secured restaurant reservations in the city of choice. And I used to take advantage of Restaurant Week as much as time allowed, averaging five or six different establishments during past Restaurant Weeks.

This time? None.

It's not because of the restaurants themselves. Or more precisely, it's MOSTLY not because of the restaurants themselves. Great food is my absolute favorite thing in the world and, to me, the strongest evidence of the existence of a benevolent God. On the other hand, obnoxious asshole diners are among my most despised things in the world and perhaps the greatest evidence there is no God, because if God exists there sure as hell should be a lot more lightning bolts sauteing the dickheads who bitch at the waitress because the steak frites they ordered (well-done, naturally) didn't come with chili and cheese.

The central issue here is one of class. And don't assume this is some example of a rich snob bitching about the poor, unwashed masses, because (a) I'm not rich, and (b) I'm using "class" in the sense of "displaying taste and exhibiting good behavior," and that is entirely unrelated to wealth. (And yes, I recognize the irony of accusing others of lacking class as I carpet-bomb this discourse with profanity and vitriol. Whatever. Bite me, Jeeves.) Many of the classiest people I know are pretty low on the economic scale, and the single scuzziest dirtbag low-class piece-of-shit I've ever known had obscene amounts of money, or at least received obscene amounts of money from Daddy. Hell, if you want proof that tons of money don't translate into classiness, just walk through Georgetown on a Saturday night. A few dozen of those trust-fund punks wearing designer outfits and portaging clouds of perfume and cologne as they puke all over each other should clear up that misconception right quick.

If anything, it's the six- and seven-figure income dickheads who do the most to ruin the atmosphere at good restaurants. Like the K Street lawyers who wear $4000 Armani suits that still look like shit because they're too stupid to get the suit tailored correctly. They want to appear sophisticated and worldly, but on the other hand they're too thickheaded to understand the nuances of cuisine, but on the other other hand they're so desperate to show how refined they are that they'll bitch about anything because they've confused "pigheaded complaints" with "discerning taste." They think that nitpicking about EVERY EXCRUCIATING DETAIL shows off their gourmet taste, instead of realizing that it only broadcasts, in 20-point headline font, what complete douchebags they are.

The worst is that this has spread, like herpes, to so many other people. Now we've gotten to the point where people who almost never eat out think it's proper to bitch and moan. "I've never eaten here before and never will again, therefore, you should treat me like I've spent thousands of dollars here." What kind of retarded mentality is that? For instance, Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve are widely known as "Amateur Night." The amateurs in question aren't the restaurants themselves, but rather the backwater goobers who come out of the woodwork for their one restaurant meal a year and have absolutely no clue how to act, and therefore act like spoiled five-year-old kids at Chuck E. Cheese. And then they blame the restaurants when their evenings don't turn out perfectly.

If you read Tom Sietsema's dining chat on the Post's website, or for that matter look at any of the reader reviews in the City Guide, it quickly becomes obvious how much this entitled jackassery infests the dining public. I have two favorite examples from Sietsema's chat; one was from a guy who was on the Atkins diet, and was appalled to find that the restaurant would not accommodate his dietary preferences, as if subsisting on bacon is comparable to some sort of Hindu purification ritual. It seems that when he ordered steak, it came with a side of potatoes, which is obviously a no-no in that ludicrous diet. The chatter's complaint was that the restaurant refused to substitute his side of potatoes...WITH ANOTHER STEAK. He literally expected them to replace 50 cents worth of potatoes with an additional $25 cut of meat!!!! I can just imagine what this fool does when he uses a coupon. "Tell ya what, instead of giving me 25 cents off the bottle of aspirin, why don't you let me sell your kidney on the black market."

The second example was from a chatter who was furious that his entire party of 20+ people didn't get their meals comped when the waiter committed an unforgivable sin. In this case, that unforgivable sin was that the waiter took a picture of the party at the diner's request, but couldn't fit them all into the frame. First of all, 20+ people in the confines of a D.C. restaurant wouldn't have fit into the frame if Ansel freaking Adams was taking the picture with a goddamn shrink-ray. Second, yeah, I can see how waiters should be qualified to do absolutely everything, even things not even vaguely related to their job description. I ate at Blue Duck Tavern a couple of weeks ago and the waiter did a great job of re-grouting my bathroom tiles. I tipped him nine percent.

Restaurant Week takes these impulses and magnifies them even more. You get people who rarely go out to eat, and if they do, it's at Bennigan's. So every restaurant is crowded. Then you combine them with people who eat out a lot who are suddenly getting a bargain, which means greed takes over--you offer these people discounted meals, yet for some reason, this isn't enough for them. They bitch that the servings are too small--because God knows, if there's one thing your average 300-lb. butterball needs, it's bigger servings--or that for some reason, the restaurant isn't offering the caviar appetizer, 2-lb. lobster, and chocolate souffle for thirty bucks. You know how much a three-course meal (wings, ribs, and the "triple chocolate meltdown") can cost at Applebee's? Twenty-nine bucks! THIRTY BUCKS AT A NICE RESTAURANT IS A GOOD FUCKING DEAL! Accept it gracefully and gratefully!

The common response to this is "Well, restaurants should try to give me their best stuff for the cheap price, because then I'll become a regular at their normal prices." That sounds good, but it's a load of crap. That's like saying, "I'm thinking about buying a Porsche, so to test it out I thought I'd rent a '75 Pinto for a while." If you can only afford to "test" a restaurant when they discount the price, you're sure as hell not going to become a regular when they raise the prices, you fucking liar. More to the point, if you think that a restaurant is best represented during its most crowded, amateur-filled nights, then you're a complete putz and the restaurant is better off without your business anyway; a person that dumb would probably figure out a way to eviscerate himself with a bagel.

Most people I know--the ones who aren't dickheads, at least--share the belief that everyone should work in a restaurant or in some other retail/customer service environment for a while. The idea is that spending some time in that capacity opens one's eyes to how difficult a profession it really is, and makes people more understanding when they're the customers. In short, it teaches people not to be spoiled-rotten self-centered assholes with a huge sense of entitlement. There's something to that, I think. I know only one person who disagrees, because she says that she never worked in retail. Funnily enough, she's possibly the most unpleasant woman I've ever known. Other women who know her and would never use the word "bitch" tell me, "Geez, that woman is a BITCH." And frankly, it's true. In the past I've told my friends that people should have to take a test and get licensed to do all sorts of things besides driving--like raising kids, for example, because clearly people don't know how to do it correctly. Maybe it's time we required diners to get a "Not An Asshole" card before they're allowed to go to restaurants.

Or we could just arm waiters with tasers. Dinner and a show!

...And Knowing's Half the Battle!

2008-01-04T16:11:00.001-05:00

Wait, so you're saying I should not use the urinal on the right? You're positive about this? There's nothing I can say to change your mind?

Charge of the Light of Brain

2007-12-21T12:25:00.000-05:00

So, I got promoted at work. I'm officially a manager.

YOU: Wow, that's great! Congratulations!

ME: Shut up.

I wouldn't say that moving up to management sucks; I would say it sucks comprehensively and innovatively, by which I mean it sucks in what you think is every conceivable way, and then it somehow finds an entirely unexpected and brand-spanking-new way to suck right when you think it can't suck any more. It's like waking up the morning after drinking an entire fifth of low-grade tequila mixed with Thunderbird and red dye no. 5, gingerly mincing around your place while carrying a wastebasket "just in case," and then having a Russian satellite fall out of orbit and crash into your bedroom. A friend who also recently got promoted described it like this: "I added seven thousand dollars in income but I subtracted forty thousand dollars in happiness." I happen to disagree with him; he totally forgot to mention the income increase is pre-tax.

Reason number one why management sucks: The cinnamon roll effect. Back in high school, I worked in a cinnamon roll bakery. You probably walk by these places and think, "Hmm, that smells good," but trust me, you do NOT want those things anywhere near your digestive tract. It's like the old adage about liking sausages but not wanting to see them get made; the difference is, you expect the sausage-making process to be disgusting. How disgusting can it be to make cinnamon rolls? The answer is: "Incredibly." For instance, the "icing" that we put on top--which for many of our customers was the best part, the part they specifically requested more of because they loved it so goddamn much--was essentially a crapload of confectioners' sugar from an extremely porous bag that had been sitting in a musty storage closet with an atmospheric composition that was approximately 65% airborne rat fecal particulate matter, combined with water from the same tap we used to fill the mop bucket, all mixed in a large pail that looked suspiciously like something that had been carried around the morning after drinking an entire fifth of low-grade tequila mixed with Thunderbird and red dye no. 5.

I thought my cinnamon roll days were over until I got promoted. Now, however, I get to see how everything in our division actually operates behind the scenes, which means I've now discovered that the entire operation is about as stable as a game of Jenga played by two thumbless drunks with unusually poor depth perception. If you've ever had managers whom you suspected didn't know what was going on, I've got bad news and worse news for you. The bad news is, you're right; the worse news is, NOBODY knows what's going on. If I were to paint a metaphorical version of how things truly operate in a typical office, it would look a LOT like a group of beheaded chickens playing Smear the Queer.

Reason number two: Office politics--everything you hated about eighth grade, but now with less hair! This is not an exaggeration for humorous effect--I spend at least 90% of my time dealing with the the fallout from stupid, petty power plays among the senior staff. It's fucking ludicrous. I can't get into specifics here, but I've seriously spent weeks re-doing work that was already done because someone higher up sent it back, not because it was incorrect, but rather because making us spend more time on it increased the visibility of an error THAT DIDN'T ACTUALLY EXIST, and because it prevented us from getting other work done, which was ALL part of an effort to get another higher-up in trouble. I'm not even kidding. These are the people who search for anything to complain about at a restaurant--even if they have to make something up--and then demand a comped dessert, I'm convinced of it.

I'd bet Pete's right nad that you work with at least one ass-kisser, the guy who figures out a way to take credit for everything while doing nothing. At the management level, it's not even accurate to say these people are more prevalent; it's more like the ass-kisserosity assimilates otherwise normal people and thereby exponentially increases the ass-kisser population like they're the motherfucking Borg. There's this one guy who works directly under the head of my agency; as far as I can tell, the only thing he does is look for potential issues among the divisions, then immediately scurry to his boss and fucking tattle on them like he's five goddamn years old and trying to get back at his brother for eating the last Twinkie. He must have it written into his performance plan or something; I think his official job title is "Weasel." But the real problem is that people are already so busy dealing with similar hair-pulling that the most expedient thing to do is to react in the same way. I'm scared shitless about it--not about having to deal with office politics, but about someday being a full partner in it. In a couple of years I'll send an e-mail to the director containing an unsubtle, "unintentional" dig at an imaginary flaw in someone else's performance, and at that point it'll be all over for me. Resistance is futile!

Reason number three: The Charge of the Light Brigade. I always liked that poem by Tennyson, but only recently has it become one of my favorites. It's based on the true story of 600 cavalrymen who were decimated during the Crimean War because their commander told them to head down a valley without specifying which valley, and more to the point, because their commander didn't think to say, "Oh, avoid the valley with 5,000 enemy soldiers with a shitload of guns, whom I can see but you can't because I'm on higher ground. It probably won't be a big deal." Over a third of the cavalry was either wounded or killed, though naturally, the leader who gave the order survived.

That kind of nonchalant, lazily arrogant thinking infects most offices, although obviously without such deadly consequences (well, unless the office happens to be Oval). In my office, one complaint about some of our data from one of the bigwigs led to a massive, cascading effect, where we had to redo one project, which completely screwed up three other projects, which led to us having to redo all of them, which then pushed back our progress on all the work for the coming year, and so on. The thing he was complaining about shouldn't even have been that big of a deal but the bastard wouldn't let it go because of office politics, so now, because of that one middle-school pout, thirty people are going to be in full-on panic mode for the foreseeable future. But hey, at least he cut our budget, too.

Reason number four: Your friends, and possibly you yourself, are astonishingly lazy. As part of the junior staff I was largely independent, meaning for the most part, I did my own work and my coworkers did their work. We generally didn't have to worry too much about what everyone else was doing. Now, however, I get the honor of finding out what these coworkers, who are now subordinates, actually do, and it turns out a lot of them don't do DICK. And what's really spectacular is that the people whom I remember spent the MOST time bitching about not getting promoted or not getting big enough raises or not being appreciated enough in general are the LAZIEST, DO-NOTHINGEST SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF BITCHES OF THEM ALL. The sad part is, a lot of times these are the people who get promoted and eventually become the weasels that infect the rest of us. Which leads to reason number five.

Reason number five: Lazy outbreeds competent. Why do the lazy get promoted? Well, let me start with one surprising secret--managers aren't stupid. Even the biggest shitwit moron boss you've ever had is smart, but it's a very specific kind of smart known as "the ability to finesse the system." You figure out what it takes to get promoted in your specific workplace and you do it. That's all. But the twist here is that "what it takes to get promoted" depends entirely on the management already in place. In my last job, my dickhead boss--let's just call him "Dickhead"--sexually harassed away half of the staff, including one woman whose husband had recently died from an undiagnosed heart condition, and did so little work that people came to me, a person with ten fewer years of experience, whenever they needed assistance. Well, last I heard Dickhead was in prime position to be promoted to division chief, and you know why? Because he figured out that his boss was the type who loved ass-kissers, so Dickhead kissed his ass like it was friggin' Charlize Theron covered in hot fudge.

But the point where lazy outbred competent was when a promotion came available for the junior staff and Dickhead didn't even bother to interview any of us. Instead, he gave it to another, completely unqualified woman he intended to sexually harass. This was a decision that obviously led to me quitting, and it was one I never really understood until I got into management myself, but now I get it. Dickhead HAD to hire an unqualified person; IT WAS THE SMART MOVE. Had he hired any of the infinitely more qualified people, it would've quickly become obvious that he wasn't doing any actual work. By hiring someone unqualified, he could still take the credit for all the work of the junior staff, and he didn't have to worry about getting upstaged. I'm telling you, at any given moment, the cleverest person in the world is the one working the most selfishly.

If you're in the same position, where you're doing all the work and your manager is completely incompetent, you have two choices. One is to go over your manager's head. Show your boss' boss that you're the one doing the work, so that when the time comes for a promotion, your manager will HAVE to give you the opportunity or else it'll become too obvious that shenanigans are afoot. And it has to be your boss' boss. People seem to think that if you have a reputation for doing good work, that's enough to get you promoted. That's crap. Your manager doesn't give a rat's ass if your promotion will make your branch better; your manager only cares if your promotion will make your manager look better. That's why you have to go over your manager's head; just like your manager, your manager's boss doesn't want competent people promoted to his level, but DOES want competent people promoted to the level below, because that helps HIM. You only get promoted if your promotion helps the people above you.

The other choice, frankly, is to quit, and find a job with competent management that doesn't need to resort to such tactics. I'll tell you right now that it's completely impossible to find a job where every manager is competent. For all the reasons I listed above, there are just too many factors working against it. But it is possible to find A competent manager, and that's your best bet to get ahead.

Only then will you get the opportunity to get promoted and find yourself as utterly miserable as me. Woo hoo! Reach for that brass ring!

Black Friday

2007-11-27T18:20:00.000-05:00

How was my Thanksgiving? It was fine, thanks for asking. The parents came to visit, so for the first time ever, I made an entire Thanksgiving dinner by myself. Turkey, stuffing, arugula salad with Gorgonzola and toasted pecans, green bean casserole, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, all from scratch. Even the goddamn cranberry sauce. If I were to illustrate how dinner went using the classic "Before and After" format, it would look a little like the picture to the right.

That's right, I managed to go through an entire box, TWO MOTHERFUCKING POUNDS of butter for a meal for four people. I also went through two full pints of heavy cream and four cups of salt. It was a pretty healthy feast, as you can imagine. Thanksgiving ain't Thanksgiving without the looming danger of instantaneous myocardial infarction, if you ask me. By the time I was done cooking, not only was I worried about clogging my arteries with butter, but also I was kind of worried there was so much butter residue in the air that I'd give everyone some form of butter-induced emphysema. I'm rather sure there's no such thing but I coulda been the first.

Anyway, now is the time on The Tax on Stupidity where I bitch and whine. My parents arrived on Thanksgiving night, and after I picked them up from the airport, I parked the car right on Connecticut Avenue. "Don't forget to move the car in the morning," I thought to myself. "Do NOT forget to move the car in the morning."

So I forgot to move the car in the morning. I woke up to the lovely sounds of the car being towed. I ran down, where the ~~fat meter bitch~~ parking enforcement officer was supervising the ~~grease-encrusted GED flunkee~~ guy from the towing company.

"That's my car," I said.

"Well, too late, it already be [sic] hooked up," she replied.

"But I'm right here. I'm going to pay the ticket; what's the point of towing it? That just creates more work for me and for both of you."

"You should've thought about that before you broke the law."

"Broke the law? Seriously? I overslept by, let's see, ten minutes. So in your demented worldview, oversleeping and not moving a car when there's absolutely no traffic is the same as, like, armed robbery or pedophilia? Is that how you rationalize your worthless parasitic job?" (Note--although I edited out most of the furiously inarticulate, strangled spluttering, that's actually how I talk when I'm pissed. My buddy Chi once told me I'm funniest when I'm angry. I don't know if that's true, but I'm definitely smarter when I'm blowing a gasket. I guess the blood rushing to that vein in my forehead partly goes to my brain, too.)

"You broke the law," she hollered. "You blockin' [sic] traffic during rush hour!!!"

She was right, of course. It was definitely rush hour, at 7:42am the day after Thanksgiving. I even took a picture of the logjam; see for yourself.

Anyway. For some reason, spewing vitriol about their unrelenting worthlessness and, later, about their questionable parentage, didn't convince them to stop towing the car. Apparently I have to work on what salespeople call "closing." In any event, after I helplessly watched them tow the car away, I checked the DMV website and found that I had to go down to the DMV [DUN dun duuuuuun!!!] in order to get the car back.

Which I did. I went to the DMV on C Street, walked to the cashier in room 1140 ready to pay the ticket, where they told me the ticket wasn't in the system and that I'd have to go to room 1034, so I walked to room 1034 to get the ticket in the system, where they told me I had to go BACK to room 1140 to pay the ticket, so I walked back to room 1140 to pay the ticket, where they told me they didn't know where the car had been taken so I'd have to go BACK to room 1034 to find out where I could pick up the car. Around this time I seriously suspected I was an unwitting participant in some large-scale behavioral psych experiment. Let's just say if someone had rung a bell, there was NO WAY I was going to start drooling, because I didn't want to give them the satisfaction, dammit.

Oddly enough, by this point I wasn't even pissed anymore. I was more amused than anything, and hey, it got me away from my parents--my clinically insane parents, but then again, aren't they all--for a few hours. Amused, that is, until I finally found out where the car had been towed--the Southwest waterfront! How fucking convenient! Maybe next time they can encase it in carbonite and paint secret directions on the back of the Mona Lisa.

But here's the thing--the location itself didn't piss me off. See, it turns out the car wasn't in a District impound lot. My parking violation wasn't severe enough to merit impounding, so they told me, with a straight fucking face...

...wait for it...

...that they towed the car out of courtesy to me.

THEY TOWED THE CAR OUT OF COURTESY TO ME.

OUT OF COURTESY TO ME, THE COCKSUCKERS TOWED THE MOTHERFUCKING CAR, I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD THAT'S WHAT THEY SAID.

I literally--literally--couldn't believe what I was hearing. I literally--literally--had to ask them to repeat what they were saying, because what I was hearing was the single most ludicrous thing I had ever heard. They could've told me that they towed the car because it was illegally parked on an ancient burial ground for midget lesbian unicorns, and still I wouldn't have been as shocked as when they claimed they towed it for my benefit. I couldn't decide if I should burn the building down or just admire them for having balls the size of Jovian moons.

But what could I say? They weren't the ones who towed the car. And more to the point, they weren't the ones who illegally parked it--and as lame as the violation was, I don't dispute that it was technically a legit violation--in the first place. The meter maid (that's right, I called you a meter maid; if you don't like the title, then get a real job) and the towing guy, though, actually created more work for themselves just to fuck with me and try to ruin my day. It wasn't necessary, or even profitable, for them to tow the car; they did it purely to be assholes. I assume they wanted some simple-minded form of revenge because they had to work the day after Thanksgiving, as if it's my fault they had to repeat a grade in elementary school and subsequently couldn't get a more respectable job, such as a Nigerian e-mail scammer, or fluffer on the set of a bestiality porno.

This story, I suppose, has no point. What did I learn, really? That meter maids are miserable, vindictive losers who are about as useful as anal warts, albeit a little more pus-filled? This isn't news! Ooh, wow, maybe next I can learn that boys have pee-pees and girls have hoo-has.

I did learn the secret ingredient for making a mean turkey, though. Hint: it rhymes with "zutter."

Those poor trees...

2007-11-14T08:14:00.000-05:00

I'm sick. (Nakedly obvious attempt to garner sympathy from the ladies.) It's pretty awesome. (Sarcasm.) Sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, fever--my symptoms basically sound like those Nyquil commercials from the 80s. Now, I'm not, like, incredibly sick; I'm just somewhat under the weather. One symptom, for example, is an extremely stuffy nose--I've been mouth-breathing like an out-of-shape tourist (redundant) who just walked the four blocks from the Washington Monument to the White House and is already out of breath because he has a 48-inch waist and he's unaccustomed to walking any distance longer than the ten yards from his minivan to the entrance of Applebee's. I've gone through so many tissues at this point I'm afraid I'm single-handedly responsible for clearcutting half the forests in Oregon. Also, I can't taste anything. I made pork chops for dinner last night, which in my condition tasted like unusually dense tofu even after I doused them with Sriracha.

Since I have plenty of sick leave and work is relatively calm, I took the day off. I was really torn about it. On the one hand, I hate taking sick days. Not because I love work, but because I hate those people at work who are constantly sick. You know what I mean. Every week, it seems, they're calling in with one illness or another. "I have the flu." "My back is bothering me again." "I was up all night watching the Battlestar Galactica marathon, now I'm tired." What's worst is that the people who abuse their sick leave the most are the ones who are in absolutely atrocious shape in general. You think that maybe if you took the stairs rather than riding the elevator DOWN one floor, you might not be so prone to illness? Better yet, you think if you skipped the vending machine trip for yet another bag of Fritos, the trip that necessitated the one-floor elevator ride in the first place, you might be a little less fragile? I mean, I start to feel like crap if I miss more than two workouts. So I wonder how people who don't work out at all can even figure out when they're sick. "Man, I feel lousy, but it's a different kind of lousy--better call in sick! Just in time for The View!"

On the other hand, I also hate when people come into work coughing up enough phlegm to coat the Titanic, which describes me now. (Uh, hope you're not eating lunch.) Work is tedious enough as it is without having to listen to other people's bodily functions. That's annoying even when they're not contagious. When they are contagious, then coming into work sick becomes even more of a dick move.

So yeah, I ended up taking the day off. And if anything, the fact that I hate people who are constantly taking sick days paradoxically made it easier for me to use a sick day, because you know what? Maybe THOSE people can pick up the slack for a change. Screw you, constantly sick people! Vengeance, in a comically attenuated and ultimately pointless fashion, is mine!

Other random bits of annoyance--why do we still have separate sick leave and annual leave? This is the first sick leave I've taken in, literally, years. Why? Because I take care of myself, that's why. The last time I remember being sick sick--like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna die" sick--was in 1997, when I caught some form of Klingon Demon Malaria from my jackass roommate Bosco, who both got himself sick AND helped weaken my immune system because he's the only person in history dumb enough to pick up smoking after he graduated college. Yeah, he's a doctor now. Since then I've had the occasional cold, maybe every two or three years. The last time I had a cold like this was, fortuitously enough, during the last Bills game I went to in either '04 or '05, which just HAPPENED to be in December. I remember waking up the morning of the game thinking, "Man, if I could just stay in, rest, and drink warm fluids all day, I'd be fine." Instead I did the exact opposite--tailgated in a Buffalo winter with wet socks for four hours, then watched the Bills game in frozen rain for three and half more. So that was brilliant. Anyway, my point is, most of the people I know who take care of themselves are the same way (the rarely getting sick part, not the retardedly deciding to chug beers outside during a Buffalo winter whilst ill part), so essentially, sick leave is there for people who don't take care of themselves.

Why the hell are we rewarding their self-destructive behavior with paid time off? And if you add in the number of Ferris Bueller days, then sick leave becomes a tool to reward fat-assedness AND laziness. The Rebel's old company had one good idea--they got rid of sick leave, but increased the allotment of annual leave. The extra hours meant that if you legitimately got sick, you could still take time off without cutting into vacation time you would've otherwise had. But making all leave identical also created an incentive to take care of yourself (because any sick day was by definition reducing your annual leave) and eliminated entirely the incentive to call in drunk (for the same reason).

I just looked at my timesheet and found I have nearly SEVEN HUNDRED HOURS of sick leave; what the hell am I supposed to do with that leave? I can't even donate it--there's an option to donate leave to other people who need it, for example people who need the extra leave for cancer treatment or to care for an extremely sick family member. It would be a good program, except you're only allowed to donate annual leave, not sick leave. What kind of idiotic policy is that? Why can't I just donate these eighteen weeks of leave I'm never going to use, as opposed to sacrificing the far smaller amount of annual leave I actually want?

Usually when confronted with a stupid policy, I assume it's a result of the Asshole Tax (not my term, but I don't know who came up with it). For example, the reason why you have to show ninety-five forms of ID when writing a check is because assholes out there are stealing checkbooks, and checking IDs is one way to stop it. Or, the reason why bathrooms have those automatic flushers, the ones that start flushing and splattering excreta all over you while you're still trying to finish your business, is because there are so many assholes out there who apparently can't handle flushing the toilet themselves. In general, if there's some sort of pain-in-the-ass doohickey or policy out there, the kind that makes you say, "Why the hell do I have to deal with this?" the reason is "Because some asshole's lack of consideration and overall douchebaggery made it necessary."

But the sick leave thing, I can't explain using the Asshole Tax. It seems to me that eliminating sick leave and adding it to annual leave would make it harder for assholes to abuse leave. It also seems to me that if you only allow me to donate annual leave, that would simultaneously make me less likely to donate to people who need it, and more likely to abuse my sick leave.

Wait a minute, what am I talking about? This is the Federal Government; why am I looking for logic? Now it makes more sense. This asshole is going back to sleep.

Lard: It Does a Body Good

2007-11-08T22:35:00.000-05:00

I was gonna bitch some more about Metro, which has had "minor delays" (which in Metro terms means "You’re stuck here for an hour, guaranteed or your money back! Except the money part!") every goddamn time I've tried to take it for the last two weeks. But then Wednesday's Express featured two related items that were so completely infuriating I had no choice but to switch. Item one is an article titled "Study: Extra Pounds Have Benefits" and is further fleshed out (Ha ha! Get it? "Fleshed?") in the Post itself. Item two is the poll, which asks, "Do you think Americans are too concerned about being a little overweight?"

Before fat people get out their pitchforks, let me start with one assertion: I realize it’s difficult to lose weight, especially in America. The process is relatively simple, by which I mean it’s uncomplicated--just take in fewer calories than you need--but "simple" and "easy," in this case, are entirely different. We’re bombarded by bad food options, it’s waaaay cheaper and easier to eat Doritos than it is to prepare an edible salmon dish; and if that’s not bad enough, with the exception of four or five U.S. cities (New York, D.C., Boston, Chicago, and maybe San Francisco) it’s virtually impossible to get around without piling into a car.

That said, there is, oh, say, a 20% chance that you have a brain. Everybody at this point knows what makes people fat; if you’re fat and still subsisting on a diet of Big Macs and super-sized fries and the only exercise you get is when you raise your hand to ask the waiter for more butter, then being fat is entirely your fault. You’re not being fooled into eating that deep-fried Twinkie, are you? There isn’t some food assaulter out there who, at gunpoint, forces you to down a dozen Krispy Kremes--YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GETTING YOURSELF INTO.

I mean, I talk about food all the time and obviously am not a calorie-counter. So am I one of those people with unnaturally fast metabolisms, who makes fun of fat people without knowing how hard it is to lose weight? No! I carve out time when I would much rather be doing something else, and I spend it working out! It hurts like a bitch! The difference between me and an obese person isn’t our metabolisms; the difference is that I try to suppress the strongest, most universal impulse known to humanity:

The ability and--balls--to say "It’s not my fault" even when it clearly is.

If I gain weight, I immediately blame myself. But I would bet Pete’s right nad that if you asked any obese person how he or she got that way, the answer would be some variation of "I tried everything to lose weight, but nothing works." Now, if you reversed "everything" and "nothing" in that sentence, then you’d be approaching the truth. Because the truth is, pretty much any diet and exercise plan out there can help you lose weight, so long as you stick with it. But that’s where most people fail; after New Year’s they cut back on ice cream, join a gym and go for about three days. At the end of the week they step on a scale, discover that all that effort only shaved off two pounds and that for some reason, they haven’t gone from 280 pounds to looking like Alessandra Ambrosio in one week, and decide they’ve "tried everything but nothing works."

It’s yet another symptom of our decadent, lazy society, isn’t it? Nobody wants to hear that putting in effort over a long period of time will eventually get you to your goals. Everybody wants to hear that popping a pill will help you realize your dreams in one week, with no effort. An unbelievable example of this is the new fat-loss pill Alli, which literally causes "gas with oily spotting," so in other words, people would rather shit themselves than hit the gym. Alli’s motto? "If you have the will, we have the power." I shit (ha!) you not. They actually claim that taking the easy, anal-leakage route rather than adhering to a regimen of exercise qualifies as willpower! "Do YOU have the willpower to skip the gym and eat like a pig? Then maybe YOU have the intestinal fortitude to...swallow a pill!"

Anyway, this article in the Post claims that being up to twenty-five pounds overweight provides protection against emphysema, pneumonia, and some injuries and infections. And this may surprise you, but I have no problem with the results of that study. IF, that is, you take a close look at the details. Specifically, the detail best described by Katherine Flegal, the scientist who ran the study for the CDC: "You may not just have more fat. You may have more lean mass--more bone and muscle. If you are in an adverse situation, that could be good for you."

Okay, why didn’t they make this distinction BEFORE the study? I’m sure anyone reading this has a muscular friend with six-pack abs, the guy everyone describes as "buff." I GUARANTEE you that if you measured his BMI, he’d qualify as "overweight." A 6’1" man weighing 217 pounds has a body-mass index of 28.6, which is classified as "overweight." And if you meet a man of those dimensions, there’s a good chance he’s pretty fat...but there’s also a chance he’s Adrian Peterson, running back for the Vikings.

So again, I don’t have a problem with the results of the study; I have a problem with the conclusions that fat people are going to take away from the study. It starts with the moderately pudgy and definitely unhealthy guy who’ll decide he’s perfectly okay as-is "because the study said so," when in fact the real reason is, "because I’ll accept any logic that lets me be lazy." But the study doesn’t apply to him; it applies to the healthy, muscular guy whose high BMI is a just an artifact of imprecise definitions! Worse, this then trickles to the really huge bastards out there, most of whom have convinced themselves that they’re just a little heftier than average. And in this day and age, where the average American is a flesh-colored hippo, THAT MIGHT BE TRUE, but unfortunately, a "little heftier than the average American" is still a giant tub o' gristle. The study will become another weapon for the "apologists for fatasses" movement that’s been gaining steam solely because there are so many fatasses out there, and everyone’s eager to grab a share of such a vast (ha!) market. Any time the media can find a study that tells overweight people it’s okay to be overweight, they cling to that story like a fat guy clings to his funnel cake and talent for rationalization. The easiest way to make money is to tell people you can fix their flaws with a pill; the second easiest way is to tell them they aren’t flaws at all.

This leads me to that poll in the Express. "Do you think Americans are too concerned about being a little overweight?" A LITTLE overweight? Americans are just a LITTLE, TEENSY-WEENSY BIT OVERWEIGHT?!?! Are you fucking KIDDING me?!?! According to the CDC, if you walk down the average street, there’s a 66% chance you’ll see an overweight person--acknowledging that "overweight" might not really mean "overweight"--and a 33% chance that you’ll encounter people whom, in centuries past, Hannibal would’ve saddled and ridden into battle against the Romans. This percentage rises to approximately two hundred if you walk near the National Zoo; at this point you can see larger and hairier specimens walking down Connecticut Avenue than you can in the Great Ape House. The main difference is that your average gorilla has enough sense to leave the Dale Earnhardt tank-top in the closet.

True story: when I finally flew back to Buffalo a couple of weeks ago despite USAirways’ best efforts to keep me from doing so, I flew on a Canadair Regional Jet. The Canadair Regional Jet is one of those jalopies that are so frickin’ miniscule you have to walk on the runway and climb up stairs into the plane, like it’s the 1930s and Humphrey Bogart is telling you to get on or you’ll regret it soon and for the rest of your life. I didn’t look at the thing as I was boarding because I was afraid I’d discover it was powered by geese, and when I did board, I found the seats somehow managed to be noticeably smaller than typical economy-class seats. That alone is a pretty astonishing statement, kind of like saying "he is noticeably dumber than the other Real World cast members." I shoehorned myself into my aisle seat and was happy to find the window seat empty (there were only two seats on each side of the aisle in this tin can). My happiness quickly dissipated, though, as I saw a heroically obese Ravens fan walking down the aisle.

Oh God, don’t put him in the seat next to me, don’t put him in the seat next to me....

"Uh, I’m in the seat next to you."

Thanks a lot, God!

So after asking for a seat belt extender, the U.S.S. Ravens Fan plopped down into his seat. The effect was like trying to shove a fully-inflated life raft down a garbage disposal. To his credit, the guy was apologetic about it--which didn’t change the fact he was a lardass, but at least he wasn’t like one of those lardasses on the Metro who feels he "deserves" to use your arm as a shelf for his cellulite--and at that point, I just had to know. "Dude, how big are you?" I asked.

"Five-ten, 395," he replied.

FIVE-TEN, THREE HUNDRED NINETY-FIVE POUNDS?!?!? So in other words, he was the same height as my brother, only if my brother SWALLOWED HIS WIFE, HER MAID OF HONOR, AND THEIR TWO DOGS. Also, I think this guy uses "three ninety-five" in the same way clearly middle-aged women use the number "twenty-nine," because he had to be over four bills, easy. Whether or not the number was accurate, he wasn’t a sleek 395; I've seen Jello pudding pops with more muscle mass.

My point is, it isn’t just that most Americans are overweight; it’s that way too many Americans are flabbergastingly (not a word) obese, by which I mean you see some of these people and it’s literally impossible to understand how they let themselves get to that point. Going back to the stats: 66% of Americans are overweight, and 33% of Americans are obese, so what I want to know is, of the 33% who are overweight but not obese, how many of them are thisclose to waddling into obese territory? Those numbers are based on strict delineations of body-mass index; how many of that 33% would qualify as obese if they put on another pound or so? It HAS to be a hell of a lot, because even in a relatively thin city like D.C., I think to myself, "Great googly-moogly, that’s one obese motherfucker" dozens of times a day.

And again, most of the issue with the poll is probably the phrasing; those few Americans who are really and truly just a little overweight probably do spend too much time worrying about the last few pounds. But the way the question is structured makes it sound like Americans, as a whole, are just a little overweight. Wrong! A ton (ha!) of Americans are ponderous, planetary-orbit-affecting humpbacks, and clearly don’t spend enough time worrying about it because if they did, they wouldn’t BE ponderous, planetary-orbit-affecting humpbacks. So I just want to know what the hell it'll take for these people to realize they need to change? I mean, the first time you need assistance to stand up after crapping--isn’t that a pretty good indication you should cut down on the Snickers?

I guess it just proves how powerful denial really is. So thanks for that ambiguous, woefully incomplete study, CDC. Keep telling us to stay fat. God knows we really need the encouragement.

Free crap!

2007-10-26T09:49:00.000-04:00

Obviously, I'm a food snob. Actually, what am I talking about? I'm a snob in general. It's that damn liberal media and their Godless Commie agenda, they're warping my mind, I tells ya, they really curdle my cream! (I love old-timey phrases, such as saying "rip-roarin'" and calling women I like "doll"--some women may get offended even though I mean no offense, but then they wouldn't be women I like, so problem solved. Consequently, I really like making up old-timey soundin' phrases. Therefore "curdle my cream" = get me riled up. Copyright G-man 2007. Unless someone already made that up).

Where was I? Right--food snob. I'm one of those stuck-up jackasses who goes to a steakhouse and secretly judges other people if they order a filet mignon instead of the bone-in rib-eye. And if they order it any temperature over medium-rare, I roll my eyes and sigh loudly, the way you would if you were stuck in line at the post office behind some simian who's taking twenty minutes because he thinks Citibank will actually care if they receive his late, soon-to-bounce mininum credit card payment with a freaking Spiderman stamp on it.

So what I want to know is, what causes the neural reaction where I drop all my food-snob tendencies when the food is free? I'm not talking about free food at a party, where the host has clearly put a lot of effort into it and you should be grateful for it. No, I'm talking about the free garbage that's constantly floating around my office, which I eat--the correct term would be "vacuum"--with the speed and desperation of Kobayashi after a night of schmokin' weed.

Case in point--at work we hosted an all-day conference, filled with economists and stat-heads, so you know that was friggin' Mardi Gras in a can. First of all, because of this conference, I had to wear a suit on a Friday. Friday's my day to let it all hang out, dammit! Hawaiian shirts, moldy sneakers, sweatpants with "Squeeze Here" written on the ass! My point is, I don't like wearing suits on a Friday, even though I look totally hot in one. (Ha ha, ladies! Tried to find a picture to see if I was telling the truth, right? No pictures of me on this blog, right? You'll never know that--I mean, if--I'm lying. That's the beauty of the Interwebs and its tubes.)

So anyway, my co-worker stopped by to let me know that because of the conference, the agency had sprung for breakfast and coffee. I was half-dead before then but immediately meerkatted up when she mentioned Free! Food! And! Coffee! and sprinted down the stairs five-at-a-time to the conference room, where I discovered bagels, pastries, and coffee from...Au Bon Pain.

I wasn't a big fan of Au Bon Pain before I went to France, and now that I have been to France, it's readily apparent how much of an insult the name "Au Bon Pain" is. In France a croissant has a flaky, impossibly light crust that virtually explodes the instant your teeth touch it, yielding to an interior of sixteen distinct, velvety, buttery layers that melt in your mouth. At Au Bon Pain a "croissant" is a stale pointy roll made with Grade F-triple-minus butter. It's not exactly what you would call the same.

Au Bon Pain doesn't even vaguely compare to a real French boulangerie; it's like naming some lame-ass suburbanite soccer-mom SUV the "Tribeca." And in all likelihood, the best way to describe the discrepancy probably isn't too far from the truth: Au Bon Pain is a French boulangerie after it's been interpreted by an American who spent way too little time in France, and who then copied, dumbed-down, Americanized, focus-grouped with fat tasteless losers from an easily-overlooked red state, dumbed-down further, mechanized and "streamlined" by removing the most important steps, and finally flash-froze the whole mess for easy shipping. The most accurate name for the place is really "Gin-u-wine Imitation French Bread-like Product Heere."

So you may have gathered I'm not a big Au Bon Pain fan. Yet confronted with their crap at the conference, free, I shoveled that shit into my cavernous maw and chugged their special brand of black ass-water until I swelled up like Violet Beauregarde. What the hell is wrong with me? I mean, besides my unrelenting list of character flaws. Why would I shove all this crap down my throat when I wasn't particularly hungry, and I KNEW it was food I would never voluntarily purchase? At no point during the massacre did I think, "Mmm, this stuff is gooooood." Precisely the opposite; I was literally thinking, "Why the hell am I eating all this? This shit is bad for me, I'm gonna hate feeling full, and the food sucks ass."

Economists have done research on consumption patterns in similar situations--one study found that when two groups sat down to eat pizza, the group that was told the pizza was all-you-can-eat would consume way more than the group that wasn't, even if the amount of pizza available was the same. Another study found that if you offered free popcorn at a movie, the people who were given bigger tubs would eat far more than the people who were given small tubs. And this was BAD popcorn, too, and even more amusingly, when the people who got the bigger tubs were told what happened, they STILL insisted that they "didn't fall for those tricks." Dude, you JUST DID.

Those two experiments really provide three separate reasons why obesity is so prevalent here--first, there's the natural human instinct to eat as much as is available in one of the few countries where food is excessively available; second, there's the American impulse to make sure you git yer money's worth and therefore shove even more in; and third, and possibly most important, there's the limitless American ability to deny one's flaws even when presented with irrefutable evidence they exist.

And obviously, I'm a grade-A moron because I know all this, yet I still imitate a black hole whenever I'm given the chance. This is why I avoid caramel. Not because I don't like it, oh no. Precisely the opposite. I love caramel so much that the only way I stop eating it is if the supply disappears. Doesn't matter how much it is. One Brach's? One serving! A half-pound bag of fleur de sel caramels from Kingsbury Chocolates? One serving! A tanker truck full of caramel that has overturned on the highway, spilling out onto freshly paved asphalt, mixing with dirt and tire residue? One serving! This is why I could never live in Argentina with its damn dulce de leche; hell, after the one week I spent there last year I was positive I had given myself some form of super-diabetes, like Type Ultra-Delta-Force Diabetes. And the only way to counteract all the dulce de leche I ate was to eat, uh, tons of cheese and steak.

Yup, it's official: Life is a losing battle against my own stupidity.

Mirror, mirror

2007-10-24T09:48:00.000-04:00

The folks at Travel + Leisure magazine have released the 2007 version of what I like to call "The Most Worthless Survey in the World," also known as "America's Favorite Cities 2007." See, I work with surveys all the time--by which I mean it's literally my freaking JOB to work with surveys all the time. So trust me when I say that one should take any survey, and this one in particular, with an enormous, big-as-the-world's-largest-ball-of-twine grain of salt.

Reason one: surveys, and especially opinion surveys, go on the assumption that people have perfect memories, which is absolutely ludicrous. That's like going on the assumption that people can spontaneously sprout angel wings. Most people in this country can't even remember to floss; their brains have completely congealed thanks to the few things they DO remember (their favorite Extra Value meal at McDonald's, air-times for The Biggest Loser, and to lie about how they "used to be in shape in high school"). Yet they're supposed to remember enough to assign a one to five rating in 63 separate categories for 25 different cities? What that means is that when some doofus is faced with this survey, his responses rely not so much on his ability to recall every detail of a city, but rather his ability to do the one thing at which idiots tend to excel--namely, to belch out their ignorant, arrogant prejudices and biases, and act like they're a statement of fact. Kind of like what I do on this blog, actually, and we know how much THAT'S worth.

Reason two: surveys purport to represent the general population. This may be true--emphasize MAY--in cases where survey responses are required. But in a voluntary opinion poll? You're just getting the opinions of people who have absolutely nothing better to do. I'm pretty sure this angle has been played over and over again, but it's true. Let's move on.

Reason three: THIS particular survey not only didn't represent the general population, it specifically got its data from the single most worthless group of people in the universe: fat American tourists. I can hardly think of a swath of society whose opinion matters less to me. Well, except maybe Focus on the Family. Fuck you, Dobson.

For all those reasons, it's funny to see where D.C. fell in The Most Worthless Survey in the World 2007. Full disclosure--my relationship with D.C. could most accurately described as "like/hate." I don't love it here; offer me an adequately-paid job in New York and I'd be there yesterday. But I don't completely despise it, either. Therefore, I have to dispute two specific results of TMWSitW 2007.

One result said that out of 25 ranked cities, D.C. residents were second-to-last in attractiveness, better only than Philadelphia's. I don't necessarily argue with the notion that Miami and San Diego, the top two, have the most attractive people (although the fact that Minneapolis was ranked higher than New York in this category is so retardedly preposterous it makes me wonder if they did the math wrong, and is reason alone to dismiss this survey as an Exxon Valdez-load of shit). And I'm not claiming that D.C. could pass for one of those interchangeable teen dramas on the CW network. However, this is clearly an example of the Confounding of Local vs. Tourist Precept I mentioned a year ago. I live near the National Zoo and that asshole Tai Shan--thanks for bringing all the tourists and their goddamn strollers to my front door; seriously, that's great, you panda dick--and I work near McPherson Square. When I'm home I wade through herds of tourists; when I'm heading to work I see mainly locals. Guess which locale has the better-looking people? Tourists nowadays, holy HELL, they're like a freak show. One of these days I'm going to see the Bearded Lady and Lizardman walking out of the Baskin-Robbins on Connecticut Ave, I just know it.

I spoke to this girl a couple of years ago who, at the time, was living in Paris. She had grown up in Atlanta. She told me about a trip she took to New York, and was surprised because she expected the people there to be a lot more stylish. Turns out the only part of New York she'd actually visited was Times Square. Well, duuuuuh! Every New Yorker I know avoids Times Square like it's infected with Explosive Herpes; it's entirely overrun by tourists like they're Brood XIII cicadas. Saying New Yorkers aren't stylish because of the people in Times Square would be like voting for Bush over Gore because of the Lewinsky scandal.

Oh, wait.

(By the way, all of you who voted for Bush over Gore because, for some reason, you blamed Gore for the Lewinsky scandal? Thanks for that. Really worked out well. Not only should you be stripped of your right to vote, you should be stripped of your right to procreate. That's my new philosophy: inexcusable stupidity should be rewarded with castration by jagged, Everclear-drenched spoon. Imbeciles.)

The second part I dispute is the Friendliness ranking, where D.C. ranked 23rd. Again, I don't dispute that people are unfriendly here--I'm looking at you, asshole lawyers on K Street who think it's okay to run over pedestrians as you type e-mails on your Blackberries instead of watching the road. But like in France, if we're mean to tourists, it's because tourists are utter pricks.

Absolutely true story that I totally wish I were making up: a couple of years ago, I was on the Orange line, heading home after work. I had managed to get a seat, but since it was rush hour the train was soon packed, including an absolutely gigantic high-school tourist group. At the next stop, a very old lady with a cane--she was eighty-five, at least--got on. Naturally, nobody offered her a seat, including the two tourist punks who were sitting in the handicapped-priority seats, so I offered her mine, which she gratefully accepted.

So I stood up, but before she could sit down, this pimply teenage tourist fuck darted past her and into the seat. I wish I were kidding. The teacher or chaperone or whatever who was with the group didn't even say anything. I'm not exaggerating when I say I have never wanted to murder anyone so badly in my life. Although I don't think "murder" is the correct term--can I use "justifiably homicide" as a verb? See, this is where our legal system is screwed up--in a truly fair and just world, I would've been allowed to pummel that little shit until he was bleeding out his ears. That wasn't an option, however, so I took the other one, which was to bellow, in measured, elegant, near-Victorian patois:

"STAND YOUR FUCKING ASS UP RIGHT NOW BEFORE I BREAK BOTH YOUR MOTHERFUCKING ARMS."

Which he did, allowing the lady to sit down, which was fortunate for both of us--for him, because I was seriously about to kill him, and for me, because me no likey going to prison. And I'd be willing to bet that he went home and reinvented that story to make him sound like the victim. My point is, though, that although that was obviously an extreme case, that kind of ridiculously inconsiderate prick behavior is rampant among tourists. I like to believe that I try to be nice to tourists, and I like to believe that most people here are the same way, but too many tourists just make it reeeeeally hard to do so.

I keep telling myself I need to stop complaining about tourists all the time, because it's not like they're reading this blog--I use too many multi-syllabic words. Oh, well. Next time: pictures of hot French chicks!

No, not really.

Come Rot in an Airport with me

2007-10-23T11:15:00.000-04:00

This is an actual letter I sent to USAirways today:

On Friday, October 19th, I was supposed to fly on flight 1931 from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and then on flight 1272 from Philadelphia to Buffalo. Note I use the auxiliary verb "supposed to" as opposed to just saying "I flew" because I never made it on the flight. Since flight 1931 was delayed for two hours, I had to rebook for the next day.

I realize that such delays are sometimes unavoidable. The stupendously incompetent customer service USAirways exhibited that day, however, most definitely wasn't. I arrived at BWI to find the line of at least 100 people at the ticket counter snaking all the way through the dividers and spilling into the main terminal because you had canceled the flights to LaGuardia. Even better, the self-serve check-in lanes weren't working. And, apparently because USAirways wanted to provide premium, top-notch stupidity (suggested USAirways motto: "USAirways--Simply the worst!"), you only had three ticket agents actually behind the counter. That's brilliant; I NEVER would've thought to put only three people to work on a Friday night when there was a cancellation on one of the most heavily traveled routes in the country. I guess that's one way of keeping costs down, huh? Maybe next you can try flying without fuel, or replacing your pilots with Tickle Me Elmo dolls.

Allow me to further note that NO ONE knew the flight to LaGuardia had been canceled because none of the ticket agents bothered to announce it. The only reason we found out was because a skycap--the only USAirways employee to demonstrate neural activity that day--came over in an effort to reduce the line and told us about the canceled flight. Maybe, perhaps, it would have been a good idea to tell the dozens of people in a non-moving line exactly WHY they were decomposing in a non-moving line? That's just a crazy plan you may want to consider for next time.

After waiting for thirty minutes without moving, I finally went through the skycap and got to the gate, only to find that the flight to Philadelphia was delayed and that I'd miss my connection. ANOTHER thing nobody had bothered to mention (alternate suggested motto: "Ignorance is bliss"). This wouldn't have been such an issue except the gate agents then told us that if we needed to rebook, we had to exit BACK OUT THROUGH SECURITY and return to the VERY SAME ticket counter that was already overrun by the people heading to LaGuardia that you had screwed over. WHY COULDN'T THE GATE AGENTS HANDLE THE REBOOKING?!?!? IS REBOOKING SOME SORT OF PRECIOUS CLASSIFIED DATA YOU REFUSE TO TEACH YOUR EMPLOYEES?!?!?!? (Editor's note--this still boggles my mind. Apparently at USAirways, the knowledge of rebooking is reserved for some hallowed inner circle of learned elders, doled out like dukedoms, tenth-degree black belts, or the Lord Xenu level in Scientology.)

Obviously, I didn't bother to wait in the now even-longer line and called your customer "service" line--I assume you use the word "service" ironically, by the way--where I was told that they could put me on a flight leaving from Reagan National airport, but that I'd have to pay the full fare. Of COURSE I owed you more money at that point! I can see how you were rendering a special service there, by making me waste four hours of my life in Baltimore, forcing me to scramble for transportation from Baltimore to Arlington, and then getting me to my destination late. It was super-duper generous of you, really. For some reason I turned down that charitable offer of yours and tried to re-book for the next day, only your agent couldn't figure out how to do it because my return flight was through Continental (who provided terrific service, by the way--you should try it some time). So she then had me call CONTINENTAL to rebook a USAIRWAYS FLIGHT. That makes perfect sense to me. That's why I always have my dry cleaning done at McDonald's. So rebooking over the phone only took another hour, and when I was done the line still hadn't moved. Good job!

Needless to say, I won't be flying USAirways ever again. Given that your flights always seem to be the most expensive in the area, and that you now charge 50,000 frequent flyer miles for domestic flights (although I see you occasionally offer 25,000 mile "Mileage Savers," as if charging the industry-standard rate as opposed to DOUBLING the charge is some kind of sweet bargain), it's not like I, or anyone I know, ever really flies USAirways anyway. Instead of saying "I'm flying on USAirways," we say "I have to fly USAirways," which is an important distinction I doubt any of your employees can grasp, because you all act like you're doing us a favor by providing pathetic service. For people I know, you're the airline of last resort, only flown if every other option, including donkey-drawn cart, is already gone. Congratulations.

Looking forward to your next bankruptcy filing,

G-man

The World According to Metro

2007-10-15T11:11:00.000-04:00

Metro is debating a fare hike right now to avoid "significant service reductions," which is hilarious for the same reason it was hilarious when the NHL went on strike. I bitched about Metro last year; if I thought anyone ever read this, I'd almost think Metro took it as a challenge. Not as a challenge to make things better, but rather as a challenge to make things worse. Metro should just change its name to Comcast and get it over with.

Their current plan is to increase fares more for suburban riders than for riders from the District. (Metro's original plan featured a bizarre collection of fares apparently derived from a game of Plinko. It applied charges depending on whether or not you rode from the suburbs, and whether or not you got off at one of the busier downtown stops, and whether or not your name totaled more than 100 if you assigned each letter a numeric value using Ralphie's Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring from A Christmas Story. The current plan is somewhat simpler.)

Now, I don't generally like the suburbs specifically because I grew up in one, and economically speaking, it makes more sense to charge suburban riders more because they do create more strain on the Metro system in terms of maintenance, both because the suburbs account for more riders and because the tracks out to the suburbs are longer, often above-ground and more susceptible to the weather. HOWEVER, this doesn't justify a greater-than-normal fare increase for suburban riders, because there's more to consider than just the cost of maintenance. You can't suddenly charge suburban riders a shitload more because that will force them to drive rather than Metro in, which is environmentally unsound. And even if you hate environmentalism, and want to accuse me of being a hippie nutjob who should just go back to wearing hemp underpants and listening to the Dead, you HAVE to admit that more drivers would just make D.C. traffic even more of a clusterfuck than it is now, which we don't need no matter what your political beliefs are. So bumping up the fares for the suburbs doesn't work.

My plan is simple. Add a surcharge for paper farecards. I don't know what the numbers look like, exactly, so I don't know what the surcharge would have to be, but charging a few bucks to use the paper farecards has plenty of advantages:

1. It doesn't create an incentive to drive. This is good for the environment and won't worsen traffic.

2. It doesn't burden one jurisdiction more than the others. You don't get charged more just because you live in NoVA or work at Farragut.

3. It speeds up Metro itself. More people would buy a SmarTrip card, which is faster than paper farecards. And that's just when everything goes smoothly; I'm not even counting the times you have to wait behind some shitwit rube who can't figure out where to put the card, and then can't figure out which direction to put the card in even though the card-reader clearly and unmistakeably tells you to put the magnetic strip to the right, and then can't figure out that you need to pull the card out. Man, can you imagine how much difficulty these people have during sex? And yet they all have, like, nine kids.

4. It shifts the burden to idiots and/or tourists. The only people who would get charged more in this situation are those people who use the paper farecards rather than SmarTrip cards. Which means (a) tourists, and (b) locals who still don't have SmarTrip. And if you ARE a local who uses Metro every day and you don't have a SmarTrip card, then congratulations, you're a fucking moron. You deserve to get charged more.

I suppose number 4 is the most controversial because tourists might bitch about getting charged more. Well, first of all, you could buy a SmarTrip card yourself. They only cost five bucks. Try planning ahead, putz. And SPARE ME these claims about how tourists help local business and we should all kneel down and blow them because of it. Gee, thanks for clogging up our free museums and tipping seven percent at the Olive Garden. That really juices the D.C. economy. Trust me, a couple of extra bucks for a Metro card are nothing compared to how much you're getting ripped off for that panda T-shirt.

Of course, this doesn't address why the hell Metro is running a deficit in the first place. First, let me restate my opinion that hiring a dude from L.A.--that's LOS ANGELES, where commuting is about as efficient and painless as an unanesthetized vasectomy performed by a lemon-soaked monkey--as the general manager of public transportation is fucking brilliant. Note to Metro: Just because the NFL chose to put the Super Bowl in Detroit that year doesn't mean you had to top it with a choice that was even more colossally retarded. Despite what's been going on for the past seven years, we aren't staging a competition for "America's Dumbest Ass-Backwards Decision!"

As far as I can tell, Metro has more riders, fewer trains that actually, what's the word, work, and already cut service. And by the way, Metro describing what they provide as "service" only cheapens the word to the extent where it means practically the opposite. It's like using "refreshing" in conjunction with "Miller Lite" or "Mission" in conjunction with "Accomplished." For example, when ridership increased on the Orange line, Metro's solution was to add longer trains but run fewer of them during rush hour. Are they insane? The single biggest problem with the Orange line and, really, every Metro line is that tons of people crowd into the station waiting way too long for trains they can't fit on because of all the people who've shoehorned their way on in earlier stops because they, in turn, know they're going to have to wait frickin' forever for the next train to show up. Adding a couple of extra cars doesn't help nearly as much as increasing the frequency of the trains; and it totally fucks things up if you're enough of a schmuck to reduce the frequency of the trains.

IF METRO RAN AN AIRLINE: Hmm, the number of passengers is increasing on the D.C. to New York route. I know! We'll eliminate all flights except one, and cram all the passengers into ONE GIANT PLANE.

Also, when a train breaks down--which they do on an hourly basis, it seems--Metro doesn't run another train to compensate. They just offload the offending train, as people continue to pile into the stations, and then expect the subsequent trains (which are running at Metro's 9-minute intervals, ingeniously designed to guarantee you'll get a faceful of strangers' armpits) to pick up the slack.

IF METRO ENCOUNTERED A BROKEN TOILET: Uh-oh, this toilet isn't flushing. I could use the next one, but wait! I'll just keep shitting in this one and eventually it'll force its way through.

And I love the fancy new cars they've rolled out recently, which are virtually identical to the old cars except they (1) eliminated the handicapped-priority seats, (2) tossed in a couple more handrails, and (3) plastered giant stickers on the windows bragging about these rilly rilly totally revolutionary new cars. I've never seen such fanfare over such a pathetically incremental improvement; it's like if BMW rolled out a $200 million ad campaign to tout their slightly larger cupholders. Listen, if you really expect the cars themselves to reduce overcrowding, then you have to completely redesign them to resemble New York's subway cars--wider doors and more of them; fewer seats, running along the walls and NOT in rows, because rows create a hassle when the person in the window needs to get out AND take up way more room; and eliminate those partitions next to the doors because there's already enough of a bottleneck created by those Neanderthals who don't have enough brain cells to not block the exits. I remember reading some comments on the Post's website from people who objected to NY-style subway cars because they were too "impersonal"--FUCK YOU, and go back to Mayberry.

And we haven't even GOTTEN to the buses. Sweet merciful crap, the buses. Next time, maybe.

They call it "Le" Big Mac

2007-10-09T15:00:00.000-04:00

So. I've been taking French classes at the Alliance Française, on the grounds that clearly, the best time to bone up on your French is two weeks AFTER you've LEFT FRANCE. I'm an absolute, utter imbecile, just so we're clear.

Pointless digression--I haven't slept much since Monday because Dick Jauron is a fucking moron. Yet I'm simultaneously wired because I also chugged a quadruple espresso. I'm curious to see what kind of post my sleepy-buzzed state produces; it's like in college when I'd wake up hungover and wonder what the girl from the previous night actually looked like without beer goggles. Although in my case, that answer was invariably "Nothing, because you came home alone again, loser!" Anyway, I got the espresso from Caribou Coffee this time, which is yet another chain, and whose espresso is, well, about the same as Starbucks'. I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and just get a damn espresso machine. Fortunately, we're due to get our raises in a month or so. Allow me to note that although I'm not what you would call rich, I'm wildly overpaid for the amount of time I spend, whaddyacallit, working. Therefore I'm hoping to go from wildly overpaid to thunderously, egregiously overpaid this year, solely so I can buy a damn espresso machine. < /digression >

Now, while I was in France, my French was acceptable enough to ask vaguely coherent questions, order food/drink, and understand basic responses. Problem was, if a French person responded with any type of follow-up question or, how you say, vocabulary, I was screwed.

ME: J'aimerais le magret du canard, s'il vous plait.
TOTALLY FOXY FRENCH CHICK: Oui. Est-ce que zpbtlqwir 9-er [meow] , monsieur? Je pense que shamalama ding-dong.

Note this is purely a commentary on my own stupidity and possible onset of senility. I took six years of French starting in sixth grade up through junior year in high school. Then, senior year, either my high school didn't offer AP French (somewhat unlikely) or I was too dumb to register for it (exceedingly likely). By the time I got to college and thought about taking French again, I'd forgotten a good chunk, so that when I took the French placement exam I did so poorly I only got into French 102. This vexed me. "I took six years and that only gets me into French 102? Forget it, then."

So I didn't take French in college, and basically decided to let those six years of language training fade away to virtually nothing. I had to cram before my trip to get my French back to "unusually dull-witted first-grader" level. Again, I'm a complete dunderhead. Because it's not like speaking another language is a useful skill or anything, right?

Well, according to 80% of the American tourists abroad, that's exactly right. Speak the local language? Why bother? I've been thinking I need to start publishing an Ugly American's Phrasebook; it's an absolutely gigantic and completely unserved market. There are plenty of French phrasebooks with entries like this:

Do you speak English? Parlez-vous anglais?
Where is the restroom? Où sont les toilettes?

When in fact, the typical idiot tourist would be perfectly happy with entries like this:

Do you speak English? Do you speak English?
Where is the restroom? DO.... YOU.... SPEAK.... ENG-A-LISH!?!?!?!?

Obviously, I don't expect travelers/tourists/Ugly Americans to be fluent in every language of every country they could conceivably visit--I certainly wasn't--but c'mon! At least make an effort! And not only did most Americans not even make an effort to speak French--not even a "merci," for Chrissakes--these jackasses actually seemed proud of their ignorance. As in, "I'm an Amurrican! I only speak English! Other languages are beneath me!"

Basically, these pinheads act like those people who don't own televisions and make a big ol' frickin' deal about it like they're bloody Thoreau. "Of course I don't own a television. How can you tolerate that drivel? I suppose I simply have far better endeavors to undertake than you do. Now you'll have to pardon me as I read Kierkegaard whilst listening to Philip Glass as I commune with the dolphins." The difference is that while you can reasonably make the claim that television is a time-waster and that we should really find better things to do than gape at a screen all day (with the notable exception of Knight Rider, of course), you can't say the same thing about learning another language, because it's an EMINENTLY USEFUL SKILL. Being proud of your ignorance of the language of the country you're visiting is like bragging that you don't know how to swim. It doesn't matter how "beneath you" you think it is; nobody's going to be impressed when you have to wear waterwings because you were too fucking lazy to learn the doggy paddle.

And that right there is what gave birth to the stereotype of French rudeness. (The refusing-to-speak-French thing, not the doggy-paddle thing.) Some pasty wildebeest wearing a Hawaiian shirt and fanny pack would waddle up to a Frenchman and make a spectacularly asinine demand, like "Hey, you--where's the nearest TGI Friday's at?" In English, or some vague approximation of it, of course. The Frenchman would say, exasperated, that he didn't know what TGI Friday's was, and the tourist would lumber away grumbling about how it was Totally True, the French are rude.

Of course, I'm sure these tourists are completely understanding when they're in America and encounter someone whose English is less than perfect. If they weren't, they'd be hypocrites, right?

I was actually impressed by the restraint shown by most native French people. In D.C., when tourist putzes behave the way most fatass tourists were acting in Paris, I openly mess with them. When they slam their strollers into my knees and then rudely demand a restaurant recommendation like I'm their goddamn concierge, I point them to the crappiest, health-code-failingest shithole within a ten-block radius and then put them on the wrong Metrobus. If a tourist is actually considerate and polite, then I give him/her good advice. And then I buy a Powerball ticket because it's clearly an unusual day.

True story--at the airport when we were headed back home, I was in line at a cafe in the international terminal. There were a couple of guys in front of me wearing MIT hats and shirts with Greek letters. Frat boys, woo-hoo! You just know they'll be cool! The line moved slowly, mostly because the geniuses in line kept asking for, like, jelly donuts or whatever the hell it is that suburban lardasses wearing elastic-banded jeans eat for breakfast. Finally the two guys got to the front of the line and asked the employee to point them to, and I quote, "like, a McDonald's or Burger King." WE WERE WAITING FOR A FLIGHT BACK TO AMERICA!!!! THEY COULDN'T WAIT A FEW HOURS?!?!?

The employee told them there were no McDonald'ses in the vicinity and finally convinced them to order a couple of the sandwiches he had, which they did with the enthusiasm of a guy getting a colonoscopy. I got my food and sat at the table next to them, watching as they gingerly picked through their food. After they finished and left, I noticed they had cut the crusts off of their sandwiches. I'm not even joking.

I think that for most people, traveling isn't a method of expanding horizons and learning new things so much as it is an item on a checklist to brag about to their identical robot neighbors in their bland, cookie-cutter subdivisions. Which is idiotic. You get a couple of weeks a year for vacation. That's it. You can either spend it relaxing (on a beach somewhere, or even at home), partying (in Vegas, for example), or exploring (like in France). Well, if you're going to spend it exploring--which is almost never relaxing--then why the hell wouldn't you make the most out of the opportunity and step outside your comfort zone? What's the point of spending all that money to go to another country if you're just going to pretend you're back in Shady Pines or whatever the name of your miserable suburban development/hell is? Are you really so obsessed with sticking it to Tyler and Madison next door because they bought a bigger SUV that you have to go and ruin another country?

If you're going to travel, that's fine, but you know what? Try tossing the occasional "s'il vous plait" around. Don't eat your meals at American chains. Try buying pants that AREN'T Dockers, (ahem, PETE). If you don't want to do any of these things, if you expect people in entirely different countries to fundamentally change themselves to accommodate your ignorance, then you'd better shut the fuck up when someone comes to the U.S. and doesn't speak perfect English. And HELL YES the French are going to be rude to you, because you deserve it.

He races cars, too?!?

2007-10-04T10:03:00.000-04:00

Follow-up to the last post. The last couple of mornings I finally caved in and ordered a double espresso at Starbucks, even though there was a long-ass line. Call me wannabe Eurotrash if you want; I'll be the wannabe Eurotrash who actually enjoys his drink.

Also, I know that frequenting Starbucks in general eliminates any coffee cred I might have, but again, I work near the White House and K Street, which ain't exactly a hotbed for small independent business. There isn't a hell of a lot of demand for Ninth Street Espresso in an environment where Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylor have stores right down the street, if you catch my drift. So to respond to lacochran's admittedly valid comment to the last post: Yeah, I GO to Starbucks, because the other options are to either (a) go to Au Bon Pain, which is even worse, (b) spend $300 and up on an espresso machine and then get up earlier in the morning to make it, or (c) go without coffee, which is patently ridiculous. But I "support" Starbucks in the same sense that I "support" Comcast or the DC Metro; because the other options are worse.

So here's a plea: If anyone finds a GOOD, independent coffee shop in the vicinity of 15th and L, I implore you, let me know.

But here's the thing--at this Starbucks, as at most other Starbucks I've seen, the people working the espresso machine will start taking orders from the people in line, before they get to the cash register. Contrast this with Au Bon Pain right across the street, where you wait in line, get to the register, put in your order, wait for the cashier to figure out how to work the register, wait for the cashier to mosey on over to the coffee machine or whatever to get your order, wait for the cashier to hunt down a lid for your cup because for some damn reason they hide the lids like they're fucking Horcruxes, and then finally "enjoy" your cold, weak, sour coffee approximately nine hours after you walked in. Time to go home!

Anyway, there's an interesting phenomenon at Starbucks; when you combine the speed of Starbucks espresso guys with their clientèle's asinine orders that sound like something out of the first scene of Macbeth, the result is a situation where most people get their drinks BEFORE they even make it to the cashier.

I call this "drafting," in honor of my buddy Pete, who's a big fan of Jeff Gordon because he's handsome and a cereal box model. Drafting in NASCAR is when you closely follow another car to reduce wind drag; drafting at Starbucks is when you closely follow someone's stupid-ass Byzantine order to reduce queue drag. Keep in mind I get all of my NASCAR knowledge from that Tom Cruise race-car movie Shafts of Thunder or whatever the hell it was called. It's that movie where Tom Cruise is a cocky talented hot-shot, experiences tragedy he struggles to recover from, and only succeeds with the love of a good woman. You know, that one.*

Anyway, this post has no point, other than to (a) beg for someone to find me a good coffee shop near my work, (b) embarrass Pete, and (c) exercise my love of creating stupid terms for even stupider situations.

* I can't remember if the Tom Cruise thing was something I noticed myself, or heard from friends, or heard somewhere else. In any event, there's a 95% chance I stole that joke. What, you want integrity? I just TOLD you I go to Starbucks!

Hawnh hawnh HAWNH!

2007-10-03T09:43:00.000-04:00

Just got back from France. What's there to say about France that hasn't been said a million times? They do a lot of things really, really right there (food, public transportation, women's legs) and, conversely, do a lot of things really, really retardedly wrong there (Sundays, highways, utilities). The rant of the day, though, is about how much better their coffee is. Go to pretty much any place in either Europe or South America and ask for a coffee in whatever the local language is, and you get what, in the United States, would be called an espresso. (Or "expresso" if you're a slack-jawed dimwit.) If you want some milk or cream, you gotta say something like "cafe creme" in France, or "cafe con leche" in Buenos Aires. And that's basically it for your options; not a Frappuccino in sight.

I know that there are approximately two people who read this worthless blog, and therefore I can state with some authority that precisely 50% of you know exactly what I'm talking about, and the other 50% is Pete. So bear with me here. In D.C., both where I work and where I live, finding a place that just serves one or two types of coffee is virtually impossible. If a place serves coffee, then by definition it also serves all manner of cappuccinos, lattes, mochas, cafe au laits, molestos, doofuccinos, etc. Order just regular coffee at these places and you get a "drip," or, as this French babe once told me, "the black water" (pronounced, of course, "ze black wah-TAIR" and you'll pardon me because my eyes just started glazing over a bit there thinking of French babes with ze accents).

Now, I drink a fair amount of coffee, in roughly the same sense and quantity that I breathe a fair amount of air. I probably go through 32 ounces, a cool two pints, a good four cups, of ze black wah-TAIR every day. I make a bunch in the morning using one of them French (sorry, Freedom for those of you who say "expresso") presses because I like my ze black wah-TAIR strong. I don't own an espresso machine and never order espressos when I'm in a coffee shop because the coffee shops usually have long lines, and I hate to be the jackass slowing the line down.

But the thing is, espresso is better than coffee. Like, the SAT analogy would go:

espresso : coffee :: Halle Berry : Marion Barry

That's even compared to the Freedom press coffee that I specifically make myself so it'll taste stronger. Espresso actually tastes like coffee, which is why the poseurs in coffee shops never order them, for the same reason most idiots at a bar would rather order a Cosmopolitan than a Martini. But people who actually like coffee can't order them, either, because it sounds just like one of those frou-frou candy drinks that might as well have cartoon characters on the cups. End result is that espresso, the original coffee drink, gets almost no space on a typical coffee shop menu. There'll be yoooge lists of sickeningly sweet coffee bastardizations, and one tiny line that reads "Espresso: Single or Double."

Which brings me to my point. You go to a cafe in Paris, you sit down, you order un cafe, and within a couple of minutes the waiter brings you an espresso. In a real cup, made of porcelain. You sip the cafe. The cafe is rich, powerful, delicious. You're sitting outside, of course, so you watch hot French broads walk by in their stiletto heels and skinny jeans; if you avoid the touristy areas you probably won't see gnarly hammer-toes or a double-chin all day. Life is sweet.

Fast-forward to this morning. I'd already drank my black water, which just didn't cut it, so I finally caved and went to Starbucks, waiting until after the morning rush. There was only one chick in line ahead of me, thankfully. Unlike a lot of the boneheads who often frequent this particular Starbucks (I work near the White House, so the area tends to be yokelicious), this girl knew exactly what she wanted, which was, I shit you not, a:

"Grande soy no-foam double-pump half-shot upside-down caramel latte macchiato."

I almost fell over when I heard that one. Short of asking for a Kobe rib-eye well-done, I can't think of a more ludicrous order. And the Starbucks guy shot that out in less than two minutes. Some may say this is proof of American efficiency, that they were able to produce such a Goldberg-ian contraption in under two minutes.

But I asked the dude what, exactly, that crazy dame had ordered, and he explained that it was steamed soy milk with extra caramel and half as much espresso. Basically, she ordered caramel milk. WHY EVEN BOTHER?!?! YOU CLEARLY DON'T LIKE COFFEE!!!! Just get some of that ungodly awful Silk soy milk crap, melt a Brach's in it, and be done with it!

The irony is, people think of this as being as sign of sophistication, as if masking the true flavor of food requires some sort of elegance. Wrong! It shows exactly the opposite--you're either a pussy, or a schmuck, or both! If you really like and understand Scotch, you don't mix it into Jello shots; if you really like and understand prime rib, you don't order it topped with cheese; and if you really like and understand coffee, you don't order a grande soy no-foam double-pump half-shot upside-down caramel latte macchiato!

Things like this, actually, seemed to be an even greater source of amusement to the Europeans I talked to than Britney Spears news or our current administration. By "this" I mean the Cheesecake Factorization of food--take something perfect on its own, make twice as quickly with a tenth of the flavor, and make up for the flavor by slathering on "toppings." For example, I expected the food in France to be amazing, and it was--in fact, if I'd only had very good food it would've been a disappointment. The real revelation, though, was the bread. Baguettes, croissants, you name it--the bread there was so good it needed absolutely no accompaniment. But the Ugly Americans stood out because they'd ask for butter and spackle it on. They'd ask for coffee, receive an espresso, look at it dubiously, ask for "just a regular coffee" in Louder, Slower English, and when that arrived they'd ask for extra milk and sugar. This idea that you should hide the flavor of whatever you're eating is so far a uniquely American phenomenon, and it's gotta be the result of all the chains looking for all the cheapest, easy-to-prepare ingredients. But the phenomenon is spreading; I saw several McDonald's in France; and hell, Hooters is in Buenos Aires.

So thanks, Ray Kroc! Burn in hell.

Listmania

2007-08-09T09:42:00.000-04:00

When I'm walking through a door and a woman is behind me, I hold the door open for her. And no, not just for the hot ones; for all of them. Dudes, on the other hand, are on their own. Anyway, if I have to pull the door open I'll hold it open and let the woman pass through first; if I have to push I'll go first, then hold the door open until she passes through.

Now, focusing on that second situation: if the roles are reversed and someone is pushing through a door and holding it open for me, is it not common courtesy, as I'm passing through the door, to reach out and take over the door-holding duties so the other person isn't stuck standing there like an idiot as I waddle through? Yet it's increasingly common, in that second situation, for the woman to just stroll through, forcing me to hold the door open the entire time as if I'm her fucking butler, oftentimes not even bothering to thank me.

This is one of many pet peeves. Yeah, I know it's only a few seconds. That's not the point; it's the presumption and lack of consideration at the other end. By now I've accepted that people in general are back-stabbing weasels. I know this. But have we really reached a point where, if you're showing me a little kindness, my response is to impose even more and, on top of that, act like you owe it to me and not even thank you?

Well, yeah, of course. We reached that point, pissed all over it, then got offended that it objected. Without further ado, here's a list of stuff that isn't illegal, but nonetheless are dick moves that people do all the time:

1. Honk and hold a car horn for several seconds just to be extra obnoxious and self-righteous.

2. Alternatively, honk in retaliation when you're clearly the person who fucked up.

3. Pour excess coffee into the trash can to make room for cream and sugar. You DO realize that someone has to eventually carry that garbage bag, the one that will now be leaking garbage-soaked coffee all over their pants, to the dumpster, right? It's not enough that they make minimum wage serving arrogant pricks like you; you gotta soak them in garbage water, too? Fucking DRINK the excess coffee, asshole! If you can't handle one sip of coffee without cream and sugar, THEN DON'T DRINK COFFEE BECAUSE YOU CLEARLY DON'T LIKE IT.

4. Leave your trash at the table of a fast-food restaurant, or at the cream and sugar station at a coffee shop, even though the trash can is right there.

5. Make reservations at a packed restaurant, then show up an hour late or not at all without calling to cancel.

6. Linger for excessive amounts of time at something other people are waiting to use, be it a restaurant table, bench press at the gym, whatever.

7. Buy a tough-to-find item you have absolutely no intention of using with the express purpose of selling it for exorbitant rates to someone who actually wants it. Oh, God, how I hate these people. I can't think of anything that better illustrates what a bunch of lazy, self-entitled, coattail-riding bastards we are now. Let's see--you don't want the product. You had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with creating the product; in fact you don't possess a modicum of the ability or intelligence necessary to do so. Therefore you clearly don't deserve to profit off of it, any more than you deserve to ask someone for his paycheck "just because." Yet not only do you feel entitled to a profit you don't deserve, you're extorting this profit from someone just like you!!! You're not sticking it to a corporation; you're fucking someone out of his hard-earned money! You know that asshole bouncer who won't let you into the club unless you give him $20, even after you've paid the cover charge? The one everyone hates? YOU'RE EVEN WORSE THAN THE ASSHOLE BOUNCER. At least the bouncer occasionally boots out drunks.

8. Bring screaming brats...anywhere public. This is an old and tiresome debate with parents who apparently think the world "owes" them something just because they figured out how to fuck without birth control. Simple fact: bringing a brat you know could start screaming at any time is EXACTLY the same as if I were to bring a drunk friend I know could start screaming at any time. If it's inappropriate for me to bring the drunk friend, it's inappropriate for you to bring the brat. Period.

Note I don't include all kids in this. I love to see well-behaved kids in restaurants. It gives me hope for the future. But of course, these kids are always speaking French; you almost never see a well-behaved American kid. That's evidence of three things--first, we're lazy. We don't raise our kids correctly anymore. Second, we're selfish. We take our poorly raised brats all over the place with no consideration for anyone else. Third, we're hypocrites. We get offended and accuse everyone ELSE of being selfish when they don't like having to deal with OUR brats.

Ugh. All right. I gotta stop before I blow a gasket.

WAAAA-SABIII!

2007-07-16T15:21:00.000-04:00

The following statement is not an oxymoron:

When it comes to food, I'm a purist and I love innovation.

It's the "purist" part that seems contradictory; nowadays most equate "purist" with "traditionalist", which in turn most equate with "curmudgeon" as represented by Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man sketch on SNL. And a curmudgeon, almost by definition, despises innovation. Neither the "purist = traditionalist" nor the "traditionalist = curmudgeon" equations work, though, which throws the whole syllogism into whack. By "purist" I just mean that in a lot of cases, there is a right way to do something, and a lot of other ways that just fuck it up.

Take martinis, for example. A martini contains gin and vermouth, and either an olive or a lemon twist as a garnish. Garnish it with a cocktail onion and it's a Gibson. That's fucking it. A martini is NOT just any drink served in a martini class, and does NOT contain vodka, Apple Pucker, that godawful Godiva booze, or any other sickly-sweet 30-proof abomination whose purpose is to make the drink palatable for some juvenile Prada-knockoff-wearing skank searching for an inhibition reducer that allows her, later in the night when she's got her heels by her ears in the twin bed of a frat-boy loser she just met, to can convince herself she's still classy because she "favors martinis."

But in no way does insisting that a martini contains only gin and vermouth mean that you can't enjoy innovation. If you come up with a truly great, original cocktail, and it just happens to work in a martini glass best, then that's terrific; just don't call it a martini! Hell, if it's truly a great drink, I don't understand why you'd want to call it a martini--wouldn't you want your wonderfully original creation to have an equally wonderfully original name, instead of slapping it with a moniker that implies it's just a bastardized imitation?

Really, it's just a symptom of how lazy we've become. It's easier to remember that the shitty-ass green or red or brown drink in the triangle-y glass is called a ______ Martini, so we do it. God forbid we should expend any more brain cells than absolutely necessary; those are reserved for American Idol.

Now, recently the New York Times' Dining section printed an article about how big restaurant chains adapt innovations in cuisine for their customers. The Eat'n Park chain, for example, tried to introduce wasabi-encrusted salmon. 'Cause nothing evokes Japanese sensibilities, that kind of Zen spiritualism, more than the name "Eat'n Park." Another example was how Panera, a large bakery cafe chain based in St. Louis, "discovered" Meyer lemons. The chain went through a long product development process, which I assume involved lots of focus groups and consultants billing $600 an hour while talking about "leveraging synergies", before releasing a salad with Meyer lemon that would be acceptable to its clientele of fat suburban soccer moms who eat at Panera rather than Subway for the same reason they drive SUVs instead of minivans--it's the same crap, it just seems cooler.

Anyway, the gist of the article bothered me, and not just because I don't like the idea of having something in common with fat suburban soccer moms (the "eating new stuff" part, not the "Panera/SUV" part). What bothered me was reflected in another NYT article from last month (unfortunately, it's no longer available for free online) about the shortage of tuna. Long story short, it's practically impossible to get top-quality tuna anymore. There's less of the really good stuff, most of which goes to the top sushi restaurants in Japan, leaving practically nothing left over for other restaurants even if they're willing to pay the astronomical prices. Even Komi, an astoundingly good restaurant here in D.C., doesn't bother with tuna because they can't justify the cost of the third-best grade of tuna available.

What's the cause of the tuna shortage? It's the midwestification of sushi. Now that sushi has become so ubiquitous that you can find it on the shelves of a Kroger in Akron, there are too many people eating tuna and not enough tuna to go around. Which means that thanks to Mom jeans-wearing phonies who can't tell the difference between grade 1++ o-toro and a wad of prechewed Bubblicious, you pretty much have to fly to Tokyo to get great tuna now.

And as the big chains continue to expand their menus so all the identically-clad Coldplay listeners in the 'burbs can pretend they're on the cutting edge as they drive the three blocks to the mall to buy another pair of size-38 Haggar slacks, it's going to get harder and harder to find the top-quality stuff. And that's the real kicker. It's bad enough that the good stuff is getting scarcer, it's bad enough that what little good stuff is available is skyrocketing in price--but the absolute travesty here is that this is occurring because of people who can't tell the fucking difference.

Take, for example, this comment from the Post's Dining chat last week:

Columbia, Md.: Why do you, and some chefs, think that I have to let them tell me how well done I want my meat? I guess chefs think I am messing up their cooking if I have my meat medium well. Well tough, I am the one paying and if I choose not to eat raw meat that is my decision. Chefs please get over yourself. I don't care how much better you think rare meat is, I'm not going to like to eat raw meat so all your so-called excellent decisions do nothing for me. Give me my meat the way I order it please.

Again, I'm a purist, so I eat my steak rare. If it's a chewier cut, then medium-rare to break down the tendons a little more. It's not my "preference," it's fucking correct--it's NOT a matter of taste. Tom Sietsema, the dining critic who hosts the chat, responded to that schmuck much more graciously than I would have, saying that yes, the guy should get his meat the way he ordered it. My response would've been, "Prime beef is expensive and in short supply. Every time some dumbfuck rube like you orders his steak medium or more, that's one less steak that could've gone to someone who'd actually appreciate it, which both lowers the supply and raises prices. Instead of wasting beef and the restaurant's time and space because you want to play dress-up with the adults--which, by the way, usually involves something nicer than the stonewashed jeans and dirty six-year-old sneakers you're probably sporting--why not just stay home and gnaw on your cheap Naugahyde couch for an hour? There's plenty of that around, and a culinary retard like you won't be able to tell the difference."

A related experience cropped up when I took the Rebel out for her birthday last month. We went to minibar, a restaurant owned by Jose Andres, one of Ferran Adria's prize students. It was an amazing meal involving what I'd have to call "food wizardry"--like a "mojito" served as a solid lozenge that exploded when you put it in your mouth, or a drop of olive oil suspended in an edible globe of spun sugar. But the story here isn't the meal; the story is the crucible I had to get through to get the damn reservation. The restaurant has only six seats with two seatings per night, for a total of twelve seats. So to get a seat, precisely one month before you want to eat, you call at 9 am. I called at 9:00am and one second and got a busy signal, which persisted until I finally got through at 9:07 am, and by that time not only were all the seats booked up, the wait list already had several names. Finally, three days before her birthday, the restaurant called up and said two seats had opened up, so we got the reservation...but only after I supplied a credit card number to hold it, then gave them an e-mail address, which they used to send me a "reservation form" asking about dietary restrictions, which in turn I had to fill out and fax back to them.

Now, even with all that, I didn't mind because like I said, the meal was a hell of an experience. BUT, after we were done, we spoke with the chefs a little bit. They mentioned that the previous night, a group of six people had come in, and throughout the entire meal couldn't be less interested in what they were eating. The chef would say, "This is sea urchin roe topped with a hibiscus foam," and they'd be like, "Eh, whatever," and swallow it with no affect whatsoever. Clearly they were just hitting the top-ten list of restaurants in D.C. one-by-one, not because they wanted to eat at great restaurants but because they wanted to be able to say they ate at great restaurants. It was strictly about the bragging rights. So it's thanks to poser assholes like them who want to one-up their poser friends that people who really appreciate the effort can barely get a seat.

Well, that just sucks. I can't understand people who don't have any interest in true innovation, nor can I understand people who don't enjoy properly-done food or drink or whatever. If we start to abandon those ideals, if we surrender to the thick part of the bell curve inhabited by people too lazy to care about standards OR innovation and rationalize it by saying it's all a "matter of taste," you know what happens? Quality disappears. Originality disappears. We're left with the world of Harrison Bergeron, because the simple fact is that "popular", "top-selling", and "easy" have absolutely nothing to do with greatness.

Mightier than the sword

2007-05-31T14:10:00.000-04:00

So I was at Bistrot du Coin, a pretty good casual restaurant in Dupont Circle. By "casual" I mean it's a cool place to grab decent steak frites and a hoppy Belgian ale but doesn't require you to dress up; I don't mean "casual" as in Chuck E. Cheese or some bar where people are breaking pool cues over each others' heads. I went up to the restroom and, while in there, noticed that somebody had scrawled some nonsense on the walls. This surprised me because again, it's a reasonably nice place, but then I figured it wasn't exactly a white tablecloth place, and there was Belgian ale in the house.

Anyway, someone had written stuff on the wall, which leads me to a hypothesis, one that I'm almost certain is true: If you're writing something on a restroom wall, you reeeeaaally haven't done anything worthwhile with your life.

I can't imagine what you hope to accomplish by writing on a restroom wall. Or any wall, really, unless you're marking a spot to hammer a nail into. My favorite example was from a Port-A-Potty I used at an outdoor party before the Orioles home opener--I won't quote it, but let's just say it suggested that all members of certain groups of people should be killed. What's the thought process there? "I'm an utter waste of a person and blame others for it, but I'm too much of a coward to say so out loud, so how do I best make my mark on the world...A-HA! PORT-A-POTTY! The urinal's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king!" Even better, some other geniuses had added supportive comments to the original message, as if they thought, "Yes, man whose opinion is so worthless it is actually scribbled on a vessel of excretion--I agree with you enough to also scrawl on a shitbox! Together we'll change the world, one piss-covered toilet at a time!"

Anyway, I'm not here to argue that such people are useless because it's too easy a stance, like saying I don't support drinking mercury or that I'm a part of the anti-goatfucking lobby. People are fuckwits, people are jackasses, yadda yadda yadda, none of this is news. But there is one thing about this phenomenon that truly mystifies me, namely:

How do these people happen to have a pen on them in the first place?

If I'm not at home or at the office, there is a 100% chance I don't have a pen on me, even in those cases where I'm definitely going to need one. For example, when I'm preparing to go to the DMV, I spend excessive time quadruple-checking that I have my passport, old license, birth certificate, copy of utility bill, pictures of dead pets, autographed first edition of favorite book, denatured sperm sample, and whatever else those assholes require just so I can update my address...but I never remember to bring a pen, which is equally necessary because for some brilliant reason the DMV never has a SINGLE MOTHERFUCKING PEN even though every goddamn transaction at the DMV, up to and including covering your mouth if you cough, requires you to complete seventeen multicolored forms in mahogany ink with an extra-fine nib made of 100% Kazakh rhodium. And don't forget to press hard.

I suspect most people are the same way--when you leave your place, your thought process is some variation of "Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Cell phone? Check," and then you're out the door, having forgotten entirely to zip up your fly. Yet people so fantastically moronic that they write on restroom walls, these missing links, you're telling me that THEY have the presence of mind to say to themselves, "Oh, yeah, best bring a pen so I can leave my musings on a commode"?

Clearly they brought a pen, because there's the proof, right there on the wall. It just seems so unlikely a thing for a brainless schmuck to randomly have on him. It'd be like if I turned to a stranger on the subway and said, "Excuse me, do you have a lemon zester I could borrow?" and he replied, "Of course! I carry it next to my Etch-A-Sketch just in case." And even if they do bring a pen, they still have to remember to bring it with them when they go to the restroom, which means writing on the wall is premeditated, which means these people actually look forward to exposing their stupidity for the world--or, more accurately, a completely random sample of maybe a few dozen people who are literally standing around with their dicks in their hands--to see.

Truth is, the only people I ever see who carry pens around with them are those old dudes from Europe with the tweed suits, perfectly coiffed beards and spectacles. You know, the guys who have that Old World, old school style going for them, who actually think to have things like handkerchiefs available should a young lass need comforting, and who always have an expensive Montblanc pen with them because they still send out handwritten thank you notes on personalized stationery. So I guess the logical conclusion is, next time you meet a 75-year-old bloke from London, there's a good chance that he's just finished writing "Here I sit/brokenhearted/tried to shit/but only farted" on the loo.

Livin' in a Crack House

2007-05-24T13:38:00.000-04:00

I moved to D.C. in the summer of 2000. It's remarkable how much the city has changed in those seven years. For instance, soon after I moved here I was driving towards the I-395 ramp at 3rd and Mass near Chinatown. As I waited at a light, I looked around and thought, "Man, this is the gheeeeeee-ttooooo." Homeless people everywhere. Buildings that looked like they were about to fall over. One building in particular looked like a crack house.

Just a few years later I was LIVING in that crack house; the entire area had been revitalized to the point that the former crack house was now a swanky, rebuilt apartment complex complete with gym and rooftop pool. And one year after that? I had to move out of the damn place because it had gotten too expensive. After my initial lease expired the bastards tried to raise my already ludicrous rent by an additional $300 a month--that's not a typo--and since they weren't offering lobster dinners or Guinness showers with the increase, I had to leave.

It was just in time, too, because now, six or seven years after I thought of that area as the ghetto, I once again find the Chinatown area to be undesirable, but for a completely different reason. The Seventh St. corridor is Chain Store Central--Urban Outfitters next to Aveda next to Ann Taylor Loft next to Bed Bath & Beyond--so, I mean, what's the point of even going? You can find any of those stores in a sufficiently large suburban mall. And yet Seventh is always packed with people--not just tourists, but people from the suburbs and a pretty large contingent of people who live in the District.

Gentrification always follows a pattern, which the Post noted recently--once an area becomes interesting, there's a phase when it accumulates more and more cool stuff and then WHAM comes the tipping point, where the big national chains notice, decide to cash in, and start taking over. And then all of the sudden the little cafe you love even though--no, BECAUSE--it's dingy and not at all polished, disappears because it can't afford the rent and a fucking California Tortilla comes in to serve its Doogie-fied brand of Sux-Mex to the Dockers-wearing lameasses who read in Redbook that it's located in a "hip" area. The telling quote from the Post story is that chains see "a chance to associate their stores with the cachet of a funky neighborhood." Which also describes what gentrification does to the clientele--a bunch of minivan-driving dorks come in from the 'burbs to pretend they're still "hip" and add to the problem. Moral of the story: Dockers-wearing lameasses ruin everything.

This pattern has repeated itself all over the country. Hell, SoHo is about three years away from accepting Disney Dollars as payment. A lot of people love gentrification (PETE!) because they figure it means more safety and more money. These people totally miss the point and probably prefer a Michael McDonald cover to the Motown original; they don't realize that "authenticity with soul and a little bit of danger" trumps "safe, generic, and familiar." I don't care how much safety and money we're talking; a world with the same four stores on every block is bad for the same reason you wouldn't eat plain white bread dipped in water for every meal. Well, unless you married your high-school sweetheart, in which case you pretty much do already.

Which brings me back to my trip to Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is one of those cities that shows income disparity in shocking detail. It's the kind of place where you can walk down a wide sparkling clean boulevard in Recoleta crammed with luxury shops and a Rolls every ten feet, then hop in a cab and, ten minutes later, see entire city blocks where people are living in houses literally made from discarded sheet metal held in place with twine.

One of the neighborhoods of BA I visited was Puerto Madero. Geographically you couldn't ask for a better location; it sits right on the two banks bordering a stretch of the Rio de la Plata. But for whatever reason, the area at one point was abandoned and decrepit, until a massive [DUM DUM dum] gentrification effort began in the 1990s.

So The Rebel and I checked out Puerto Madero; we started at one end and followed the river to the other, then crossed the river and went back on the other bank. Right off the bat, we found a gelato place (once again, Argentinean gelato=awesomest fucking stuff on the planet) and then found a parrilla that we decided we'd hit for dinner (once again, Argentinean steak=awesomester fucking stuff on the planet).

And so we moved on to explore some more before coming back for the steak, at which point we stumbled upon...

...I still can't believe it, six months after the fact...

...a HOOTERS.

I shit you not. A goddamn Argentine Hooters! Whereupon I suffered one of the great existential quandaries of my life, to wit: I, self-professed hater of the proliferation of chains, clearly couldn't justify traveling to a whole 'nother hemisphere just to go to Hooters, no matter how idiotically high-larious such a move would be.

On the other hand, given what I knew about South American values and South American women, could I justify NOT going in? Wouldn't it definitely be the greatest Hooters iteration of all time?

Then again, given South American ideals, wouldn't a more appropriate chain be called "Buns"?

And how does one say "crappy fake Buffalo wings" in Spanish, anyway?

Ultimately the little angel on one shoulder barely beat out the little devil on the other, so we didn't go to the goddamn Argentine Hooters, but I can't say it was because my nobler, chain-hating instincts won. I just really wanted another steak. Also, to not have The Rebel squirt hot sauce into my eyes for staring at Argentinean broads in Hooters uniforms. That factored in a bit, too.

It became obvious it was the correct decision, though, because a little farther down the street we found a motherfucking T.G.I. Friday's. At this point I wondered if the names even translated--is the average porteno aware that "Thank God it's Friday" is a cliche in English, or that "hooters" means "tits"? Or is it the same as when I get Ethiopian food at Dukem, which, for all I know, means "gonads in ass juice" in Amharic?

More importantly, we realized at this point that we'd just walked by a block that we could've found anywhere. Seventh St. in D.C. (which, yes, has a Hooters). Maple Road in Amherst. Lambert Road in Brea. And when that becomes the norm, when you can go anywhere in the world and find the same stuff that you would a couple of blocks from your house, then not only do you lose the incentive to travel, you lose the incentive to seek out anything new. It's one thing to reduce poverty and crime in a given area; it's another thing entirely to remove its soul. Because if nothing is new and every day becomes the same as the last, then, well, what's the point?

MILFs and Youtube

2007-03-19T19:37:00.000-04:00

For years I thought I invented the word "shat." As in, the past tense of shit. I was bored one day--don't even remember when--and suddenly decided that if "sat" was the past tense of "sit", then logically, "shat" was the past tense of "shit." When I'd use my newfound word in conversation people would look at me oddly, which, to my dumb ass, meant they'd never heard it before and therefore served as proof that it was an all-new word. Then I started seeing it all over the place and couldn't figure out if it was because the word already existed or if my little invention was spreading. It wasn't until I saw "shat" in On The Road, published before my birth, that I realized just how much of an idiot I am. I can't remember exactly when I read Kerouac for the first time but I do know it was way too early for anyone to unearth his own idiocy.

Have I a point? Yes, indeed. There are a couple of broads who work out at my gym who like to wear very, very tight and revealing spandex--the one dame takes it to the limit by wearing the spandex shorts/halter top combo--but unfortunately, these ladies are pushing fifty. And I don't care what kind of shape you're in or what gender you happen to be, but any age with a five in the tens-digit is strictly Cover Up And Be Ashamed Of Your Body time.*

The thing is, if you were to see these matrons from afar, you might say to yourself, in the French way, "Haw haw haaawwww...very nice!" It's only when you get within fifteen feet that you realize, as with The Simpsons or Marv Levy, that the best days are gone and not coming back.

But the point is that once upon a time there were "best days" for these ladies and that, in their prime, they probably brightened up the place nicely. Frankly, in the NAAFA era, there's an appalling dearth of attractive people at any age, so what few people we have who either are or once were in that hallowed group deserve some sort of recognition for their contribution to society. Because at the current rate, there won't be any of them left outside of downtown Manhattan or West Hollywood. So I coined a neologism for the once but not future lookers, and hope to someday be recognized as the father of the phrase:

U2B - pronounced "Youtube" - a specimen of either gender who Used 2 Be hot. One who, despite the ravages of time, clearly once was quite attractive.

The U2B is related to but distinct from the MILF, in that the MILF is someone who is still holding it together whereas the U2B is past that phase. At the same time, the U2B doesn't refer to just anyone who used to be hot; you still have to be able to see the underpinnings of their once-hotness. I've heard from much older people that Betty White was a stone babe back in the day; I find this idea completely horrifying. Betty White is not a U2B; maybe thirty years ago she was, but she ain't anymore. Sharon Stone is a good example of a U2B; nobody wanted to see her get naked in Basic Instinct 2 but you can still tell she's the same woman that everyone wanted to see naked in Basic Instinct the first.

I wish I had some artistic talent so that I could draw up an analogue of that one diagram of the progression of human evolution, but the sequence goes:

Jailbait -> Hottie -> MILF -> U2B -> so old as to be unrecognizable.

Now, I know I didn't invent the phrase "shat" but a quick Google search shows that "U2B" doesn't have the definition I've given it (although it is listed as Leet for Youtube and is also some sort of protein complex). Which means there's a decent chance that I'm the first to use it in this sense. So, go forth and spread the Gospel of U2B and remember: you heard it here first.

Probably not a good idea to use it with your wife, though, Pete.

*Aside: [Stepping onto the soapbox.] To be completely honest, it's probably Cover Up And Be Ashamed Of Your Body time even if you're in your twenties. I'm directing this comment to all you guys who like to prance around the locker room naked--WHAT makes you think anyone wants to see your hairy, flabby balls flailing around like a speedbag in a Detroit boxing club? I don't even want to see 95% of women naked, let alone some fatass dude with eczema. Some of you schmucks even put on your shirt, tie and jacket BEFORE putting on your underwear--WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?!? COVER YOUR GODDAMN SCROTUM FIRST!!!!

Bad to the Bone

2007-02-15T10:01:00.000-05:00

Man, I'm bored. I'm at work, I'm bored, and I still have seven hours to go. I can't get any work done because I need to check in with other people first, people who of course are not here because of the massive, two-inch snowstorm that has completely stonewalled the District, which is fucking ludicrous. Yesterday, I walked back from the gym--which closed at 2 PM because of "weather" conditions--and noticed that nearly half of the stores on L Street were shuttered. Most of the school districts in the area are closed as well. The federal government is on "unscheduled leave" today, which means if you can't make into work--because it's like Antarctica out there, what with the two inches of snow--you can call in and use vacation time without prior approval.

For me, the biggest problem is that every time you walk to an intersection, your feet get soaked because they don't know how to plow here and there's a five-foot wide puddle of black slush at every corner. I can't remember if this was ever a problem in Buffalo because I can't remember walking more than a block in Buffalo--everyone drove everywhere, which was also ludicrous, but at least they places they drove to were actually open for business.

Scratch that, I do remember walking more than a block in Buffalo--when I was there last November. Pete and I were headed to a Sabres game, and we parked off Chippewa, maybe ten blocks from the arena. Pete was telling me about a recent trip to New York to visit our friend Bosco, also known as "the inspiration for CSI: NY." So we walked to the intersection of Chippewa and Franklin, and paused briefly. Pete noticed there was no traffic, and crossed the street without waiting for the "Walk" sign. When we got to the other side, he turned to me and said, in the most smug, self-satisfied voice you've ever heard, "I learned that in New York."

Referring to the jaywalking. He was completely serious. That's Pete for you, though--rebel without a cause. We should send him to Iraq; he'd scare those insurgents straight through his sheer badassedness. "You think you know pain? I jaywalk, motherfucker! You ain't never seen the likes of me!"

Hey, somebody else finally showed up to work. Time to finish the crap I need to do. If I can summon half the courage Pete does while crossing a completely empty street, I'll be just fine indeed. G.I. Joooooooe!

Armageddon Update...

2007-02-13T14:45:00.000-05:00

Two things to add to the last post. First, in today's Washington Post Express, there's a typo on page three. A caption for a photo of the real snowstorm in Oswego, NY mistakenly reads "Upstate New York received nearly 12 inches of snow in the past 10 days." This is comical not only because it was actually 12 FEET, but also because the copy editor, being a D.C. area resident--a Hokie or a Terp, perhaps--probably looked it over and thought, "Twelve inches! Holy crap, that's a lot of snow!" and gave it the green light.

Secondly, we just got the rest of the day off. Unbelievable. I'll always take a day off but this is shameful.

Armageddon and other long words

2007-02-13T09:42:00.000-05:00

The dirges began over the weekend, as the local news reported that SNOW! was COMING! TO! D.C.! The snow was several days off, but that didn't prevent all the local concealer palettes from breathlessly counting down the minutes as if a comet were about to crash into the Lincoln Memorial.

[Overly dramatic, immediate aftermath of 9/11-like music]
Closeted Fox 5 news anchor Will Thomas: Weep, brothers and sisters, for the reckoning we have dreaded lo these many years is nigh. Yes, my darlings, a tempest the likes of which can only be the handiwork of Satan, or possibly Iceman, even now stalks the metro area; fully two inches are expected to lash our fair city come Tuesday. Though it be only Saturday, 'tis not too premature to panic and prepare for the worst. What can you do in the face of this implacable foe? Live, dammit, LIVE! Do not go gentle into that good night! Also, start hoarding bottled water!

Last night (Monday) after work, I went to the grocery store like I always do to get my food for the week. Well, I'm an idiot. Thanks to all the Chickens Little who freak out at the suggestion of precipitation, the supermarket was slammed. At one point I was looking for a bottle of Sriracha, and found the International aisle completely blocked; it turned out the International section also includes the tea section, and people were loading up on boxes of Earl Grey to ward off the weapons-grade hypothermia that surely awaited them. When I finally got into line to pay--the lines at that point extended into the aisles--I noticed the lady in front of me had packed her cart with non-perishable items, including SIX of those gallon jugs of bottled water. The kicker was that she then refused to put the bags back into the cart herself; she made the cashier (who was a teenage girl half the size of the lady in question) put the bags into the cart for her.

While waiting for the train this morning, I overheard a LOT of people who were furious because for some reason, the fascists in charge didn't give them a paid day off. You know, because of the inch of snow. First of all, I had to wait for seven trains to pass by because the K Street jackasses who normally drive into work--the guys who were wearing Bluetooth earpieces--decided they couldn't drive in the snow/garnish and took the train instead. It was an ideal combination, mixing the intestinal fortitude of D.C. residents in wintertime with the quietly competent efficiency of the Metro system; we haven't seen such a perfect union since obese people started wearing Lycra. Second, these people seriously expected a day off?!? To, what, spend quality time with the family before the impending Gotterdammerung? It was ONE INCH of snow.

Actual list of schools either closed or closing early, from the Post:
Anne Arundel County, Calvert County, Charles County, Frederick County, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, Arlington County, Fairfax County, Falls Church County, Fauquier County, Loudon County, Manassas City, Prince William County, Stafford County.

See, it's not so much that people in D.C. don't like cold weather. During the summer, when it's 400% humidity and fish in the Potomac are bursting into flame, I'm just as miserable as a lot of people are with the weather now. But you don't see me putting on diapers and waiting for the world to breast-feed me until the weather gets better, and I don't go into a berserker rage because I'm still expected to show up to work. You know what I do when snow starts to fall? I tilt my head down a little so it doesn't get into my eyes. I know it sounds insanely onerous, like a Navy SEAL training session, but please don't call me a hero. Courage like that takes years to develop, but with plenty of positive reinforcement and God on your side, someday, you too can handle tilting your head.

By the way, the picture above is an Actual Unretouched Photo of my street this morning. Don't rub your eyes; I didn't accidentally take a photo of a blank sheet of paper. That's the blizzard we had to deal with here. Hey, at least we don't have to worry about wildfires.

Rated S for Screw You

2007-02-08T09:24:00.000-05:00

After Lost last night, I caught a little bit of the local news, and they did one of those "To Catch A Predator"-style features about stores that sell violent video games to underage kids. In summary, the news team sent a bunch of 12-year old kids to various stores, had them pick out games that were [throaty movie-preview "In a world..." voice] Rated "M" For Mature [/voice] and were Shocked! and Appalled! that about half of the stores let them buy the games without a hassle.

I absolutely hate it when local news hacks do these features. First of all, it's entrapment. You didn't catch an evil-doer in the midst of his nefarious deeds; you targeted a perfectly normal guy who--like everybody else in the universe--just wants to get through his boring-ass workday with the smallest amount of grief possible. The difference between catching a predator and busting a game-store cashier should be obvious because it's entirely contained in the word "predator." A predator is one who actively seeks a victim. How the hell does this describe a game-store cashier who just sits there, waiting for a customer to voluntarily approach the counter? Do you seriously think the guy woke up in the morning thinking, "I can't wait to corrupt the minds of young boys by selling them inappropriate video games"? If you want to catch a predator, how about you expose, oh, say, a group of people who spring a trap on an unsuspecting cashier and crucify the poor bastard just for DOING HIS FUCKING JOB. Now that's a predator. Ironic, ain't it? And what's even worse with this particular feature is that not only was the news team guilty of entrapment, it was guilty of entrapment for something that ISN'T ILLEGAL. There is NO LAW that says you can't sell a video game, no matter how violent, to a kid. It's protected by a little thing called the First Amendment. News teams should be aware of it because it's the very same thing that allows sanctimonious fuckstains like them to produce bullshit features about imaginary crimes.

I also hate these features because the guys they bust are always the ones who are lowest on the totem pole and have enough problems as it is without some helmet-haired jackass coming in to tell them what scum they are. If I'm making minimum wage and some kid wants to buy Grand Theft Auto, you expect me to lecture him on moral responsibility and then let the punk yell at me because "the customer is always right"? For five fucking twenty-five an hour? Really? And now, since WJLA was kind enough to show the cashiers' faces, the cashiers will either (a) get fired, and have to deal with the stigma of being the kind of people who can't hold onto a minimum-wage job, or (b) get harassed by overbearing parents who think it's the world's fault that their kids are such assholes.

And I think that's what bugs me most about these features, because they're usually some variation on how Some Stranger is trying to fuck with your kids. Your kid spends too much time playing Doom? Clearly, it's the store's fault for letting him buy it. Your kid smokes pot? Gosh, why aren't the schools doing more to get rid of drugs? It's just another example of how parents have abdicated all responsibility for the shittiness of their parenting. God forbid you should, oh, I don't know, not give your kids the money to buy stuff you don't want them to buy, or even more absurdly, teach them the values you want them to learn. It's much easier to blame someone else for your fuckups. It's much easier to let someone else do your job for you.

There's an online chat hosted by the restaurant critic of the Post, and every once in a while someone will write in about a dinner that was disrupted by someone else's screaming unruly brats, which inevitably leads to some self-righteous parent complaining about how child-free (note I use "child-free" rather than "childless," in the same sense one is "tumor-free" rather than "tumorless") people should be more "accepting" and "open-minded" of her runt's ridiculous behavior, as if letting a 2-year-old careen around shouting at the top of his lungs in an expensive restaurant is the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks in Montgomery. The prevailing attitude is, "If my kid is evil, obnoxious bitchspawn, it's not my responsibility to fix it; it's your responsibility to learn to deal with it."

Well, if you don't want to discipline your children, but at the same time you don't want them exposed to Adult Themes and Content, there's only one choice. We'll just have to completely segregate Kid-appropriate stuff from everything else. Build entire malls filled with only Gap Kids, Toys Backwards-R Us, and CD racks consisting solely of Raffi and Barney discs. While we're at it, let's make it illegal for kids to be in any restaurant other than Chuck E. Cheese or McDonald's, because in other restaurants the littluns might be exposed to foul or, even worse, possibly foreign language, right? And heck, on an airplane a kid might see someone drinking alcohol, so let's create KidAir, and make children and their parents fly on it while child-free adults get their own airlines.

Actually, let's stick fat people and people with bad breath on KidAir, too.

That new car smell

2007-01-04T10:05:00.000-05:00

During the holiday season I was out of town four out of five weekends, which gets annoying after a while. Thankfully, this past weekend turned into a surprise four-day weekend because of New Year's and the day off we Federal government workers got when the Curse of Pete struck a former president. And it occurs to me now that the Curse of Pete requires some explanation, lest I get my friend arrested and sent to a secret CIA prison in Saudi Arabia.

Let me start off by saying I love Pete like a brother. More than my brother in some ways, who, as I've mentioned before, is a bastard. But we're both guys, and as guys I feel it's a holy covenant that we give each other as much shit as possible. I just do it more, and better, because Pete's also a dingus who's way too nice. It must be his San Francisco upbringing.

Pete, as I've mentioned before, got married when he was eighteen. Okay, in reality he was twenty-four, but the broad he shackled himself to was the only one he ever dated, he started dating her right after high school, and most importantly, he pretty much decided he was going to marry her as soon as they met. This is obviously an eye-poppingly brilliant idea with no downside whatsoever. It's like deciding to buy a car, and walking into exactly one car dealership--an exceedingly small car dealership that sells cars that have only been within a five-mile radius of your home. And you decide to buy the car right after you get your license when you know absolutely nothing about cars and can barely work the pump without prematurely squirting gas all over the place. And then you cover your eyes and randomly buy the first car you bump into that doesn't have a "SOLD" sticker on it. And then when the salesman asks if you want to test-drive it, or any other car for that matter, you say "Nope, and I don't care what it will eventually cost me or what kind of shape it's in, just give it to me." And you decide to drive that car, even if it's a '75 Chevy Caprice with a $900,000 price tag, for the REST OF YOUR LIFE, with absolutely no hope of ever driving another car. So even if a sexy little 2007 Aston Martin Vanquish, the perfect combination of curvy yet svelte, comes along just begging to be driven, not only have you voluntarily forbidden yourself from driving it, you probably can't even look at it because the Caprice will get jealous and won't let you drive it anymore, which is somehow bad even though you've been sick of driving it for years because the front bumper is sagging, it's now one of the fattest cars on the road and, to complete the metaphor, the damn thing absolutely refuses to suck your cock.

Where was I? Right--the Curse. Okay, so ALMOST PRECISELY when Pete proposed to his woman during the holiday season of '97-'98, famous people started dying like it was the latest trend, like Scientology or ransacking the Third World for children. Chris Farley was the first to go, right before Pete actually proposed but practically the same SECOND he bought the ring. Then, right around the time the wedding plans were heating up, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa died in the same week.

So the Curse of Pete was born. Pete parted with his freedom with more eagerness and alacrity than most people part with the urine in a beer-besotted bladder at halftime. He's like Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, all desperate to keep himself in prison. But Pete didn't relinquish his independence without a price. No, verily, a terrible tax did he levy on the world in exchange for his liberty. With every piece of himself he gave up, people died. In the summer of 2003, Buddy Hackett, Bob Hope, Buddy Ebsen, Barry White, and Gregory Hines all died in a six-week span; one week later Pete told us the woman was pregnant, which at that point was so blandly predictable he should've followed it up with "...and I'm wearing Dockers." And yes, you read that right--Barry White, the Walrus of Love, died when Pete started having kids. That's Stunningly Obvious Symbolism 101 right there. The only way Pete will top that is if his wife gets pregnant at the same time the Washington Monument collapses and pool cues around the world suddenly turn into rope.

In the past couple of weeks the Curse of Pete has struck James Brown and Gerald Ford, which is a little more than normal but not out of the ordinary. It's more an indication of greater-than-normal annoyance (you know, like just being a married guy with kids) than of any life-altering event. I've got my eyes open, though. Once the wife pumps out twins and makes Pete get a minivan, you'd best find yourself a bomb shelter.

My Brother the Bastard

2006-12-29T15:18:00.000-05:00

I have a bizarre and alarming proclivity for nearly manslaughtering (not a word) celebrities. The first time, in aught-5, I was ingeniously walking backwards on Central Park South, pointing out the Time Warner Center to The Rebel, and when I turned around I nearly trampled a young woman who turned out to be Julia Stiles. It wasn't the speed that would've been deadly so much as our relative difference in body mass, because the broad is tiny.

The second time, earlier this year, was at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas. I had just cashed in my meager winnings at the cage, then turned around with my head down as I counted all the Washington and Lincolns, and promptly almost rammed headfirst into an old dude in a seersucker suit who turned out to be Dennis Hopper. It wasn't the speed that would've been deadly so much as our relative difference in body mass, because the dude is tiny. That incident was extra disturbing because (a) my favorite memory of Dennis is that totally awesome scene in True Romance when he knows Christopher Walken is going to kill him so he tells Walken his ancestors were intimate with Moors (not his words) which generally makes Dennis the biggest badass ever, and at no point during that scene did I think he'd turn out to be a midget; (b) Dennis Hopper has a lot of liver spots, to the point where he looks like a pixelated avatar on an Apple IIe game; and (c) despite this he was still walking around with a very hot, very not-his-age girl. Oh, and also (d) he was trailed by a bodyguard roughly the same dimensions as a Sub-Zero refrigerator who probably would've had a bone to pick with me (my femur, for instance) had I crushed his bodyguardee.

I've had a few other celebrity sightings, which I consider to be unusually frequent given that I've never lived in a celebrity-intensive area. D.C. gets plenty of politicians--I once saw Joe "Joe-mentum" Lieberman walking around Cleveland Park--but politicians aren't celebrities, really. It's not like you see nubile young girls asking John Boehner to sign their tits. But all this is just a way of saying my brother is a bastard.

I say this because despite my nearly trampling two separate celebrities, he had a celebrity encounter that I can never hope to top. He works a white-collar job in Southern California for a large retail clothing chain. First of all, at his company Christmas raffle they gave away Rose Bowl tickets, a Playstation 3, and a plasma-screen TV, among other things. At my job I got a $5 gift card to Au Bon Pain. Then again, I get a paid day off for frickin' Columbus Day, so I can't really complain.

But what really curdles my cream (took me a while to come up with an appropriately inane phrase there) was his celebrity encounter. It seems one of the company's models came in the other day, along with her father...

...sit down if you're not already...

...have smelling salts ready...

DAVID HASSLEHOFF.

That's right, Michael Knight himself. I find this oddly fortuitous given that a story about the Hoff was what introduced me to the Rosie O'Donnell racism story that has since been overshadowed by...her feud with Trump. Hmm. Yeah. Racism, not so big an issue, but a bitchfight between two C-list celebrities? Ratings gold. Anyway, according to my brother, the Hoff isn't one of those celebrities who tries to fade into the woodwork. The Hoff was "on" the entire time he was there, making loud jokes, singing, horsing around, basically making sure everyone knew that David Fucking Hasslehoff was in the hizzouse.

Now, Hasslehoff is clearly a god. This isn't really up for debate so let's just move on. I was a little kid in the 80s so I remember the sheer transcendent splendor that was Knight Rider--many a day did I wish for a black leather jacket (denied by the parents), a Hoff 'fro (denied genetically, so in a way, denied by the parents), and a black Trans Am with all sorts of devices that would've proven entirely useless in real life, complete with flagrantly homosexual AI.

And then, once that show got canceled, Hasslehoff struck again with Baywatch, just in time for high school and college. Let me speak for all men and say that when you're a male of high school and college age, you're pretty much in constant danger of dehydration. And forget about finding any spare lotion. Hasslehoff even managed to get Pamela Anderson on the show when she was in her mid-twenties and still in her prime, before the Motley Crue guy gave her a spritz of Hep C and she started resembling Admiral Ackbar in Return of the Jedi.

Anyway, my brother's celebrity encounter is one I can never hope to top now that Rick James is dead. I don't really have a point in all this other than to wallow in my own worthlessness. So let's just leave with more proof of Hasslehoff's awesomaciousness.

Open Letter from Chop Suey

2006-12-18T11:52:00.000-05:00

Just got back from Buffalo, and as usual, once I got settled in I took a quick look at the Post's website to see what I missed during the typical Bills weekend of beer, deep-fry, football, and not much else. The Post website has a gossip blog called Celebritology which I normally don't read, except when it has an intriguing headline like "The Hoff--Haute or Not?" Well, if it's about Hasslehoff, I have to read it. It's rule number 725 in life, right behind "Always order the menu item with n' in its name."

Buried at the end of that same post I found out I'm a week late to the Rosie O'Donnell brouhaha, where, while talking about Danny DeVito's drunken appearance on that View mess she's on, she said, "...in China it's like: 'Ching chong, ching chong. Danny DeVito, ching chong, chong, chong. Drunk. 'The View.' Ching chong."

First things first--cutting edge comedy. Brilliant. Oscar Wilde-esque. Like putting on blackface in the 50s. I never would've come up with something so incisive and witty. I mean, she took a simple observation about Danny DeVito being drunk on her crap-ass show, and turned it into an existential rumination on the metaphysical essence of humanity itself, that essence being...

...wait for thunderclaps and the sundering of clouds by a single dazzling beacon of pure immaculate light...

...Chinese sounds different.

Well, some members of the Asian community weren't happy about this. One thing about us slant-eyes; some of us react to unprovoked bigotry with consternation. It's a serious genetic flaw and something we Asians should really work on.

Not me, though. I'm glad Rosie said what she said. Somebody needed to tell us that no matter what we accomplish, we're still dirty foreign bastards who speak a gibberish language (defined as anything other than the English spoken in her hometown, the cynosure of cultivated vernacular: Bayside, Queens). And I was heartened even more to read a studied, logical and, of course, grammatically nuanced explanation on her blog:

i (sic) wasnt (sic) mocking
thats (sic) my best impression
accents r (sic) tough
on the whole (also, sic on the random line breaks throughout)

See? Accents r tough. When she said "ching chong," she wasn't using it in the same sense as some ignorant nine-year-old remedial student; she was struggling with diphthongs. It happens. Get over it.

But still, members of the Asian community weren't happy with that apology. So a spokesman, Cindy Berger, put what should've been the final nail in this overly-PC coffin:

She's a comedian in addition to being a talk show co-host. I certainly hope that one day they will be able to grasp her humor.

"I certainly hope that one day they will BE ABLE TO GRASP her humor." Now, if that isn't the Platonic ideal of a contrite, pentient apology, I don't know what is. If you feel insulted, it's clearly because you're too stupid to understand her humor. I know I feel better.

In any event, for Rosie O'Donnell's sake and the sakes of all people who want to be able to make unfunny racist comments with no repercussions, I hope this all blows over. As most of her fans have been saying, this is just another case of political correctness gone awry. Kramer went off on a tirade about blacks and Mel Gibson went off on the Jews, and you never heard a thing about it, right? It shouldn't be any different for us Asians, because we're the most insignificant of all.

You've come a long way, baby

2006-12-08T09:13:00.000-05:00

Today's Post mentions the smoking ban that takes effect next January 2nd. Earlier this year, D.C. banned smoking in restaurants; next year, the ban expands to bars and pretty much every indoor public area. When the media first reported the smoking ban had passed, I read a bunch of reactions on the Post's website. The most brilliant came from the people who said, "Now I can afford to go out again since I won't have to pay for dry cleaning!" You've got to be kidding me. First of all, if your broke ass can't afford dry cleaning, then you shouldn't be going out. Second, if you're such an OCD case that you can't stand the smell of a little smoke in the clothes you wear to go out and drink, then seriously, keep you and your Dockers at home and drink Riunite on ice with the rest of the suburbanites. You probably can't afford to fill your Sienna with gas for the drive into the District, anyway, and I've heard enough stories about lawnmowers and cervical dilation. Thanks, though.

My favorite argument, though, came from a guy who was against the ban. I'm paraphrasing, but his spiel was "You say I'm infringing on your rights by smoking; well, you're infringing on my rights by not letting me smoke." Although I'm pretty sure he reversed "your" and "you're." Now that's got to be the most idiotic, self-serving logic I've ever heard. It's basically "We have equal claim here, so...let's just give it to me." Plus, the difference here is that it's not a case of equal claim. In one case, at least two people get fucked over; in the other, maybe one does. Sorry, but two > one.

I'm slightly in favor of the ban, but I wish it weren't necessary. I'm not a smoker, but in bars I don't care if someone lights up next to me unless he's purposely blowing smoke in my face to start a fight or something. Which happens more often than you might think--last year, I met The Rebel and one of her friends at a bar. A dude in his late 30s walked in, sat right next to me and lit up. This was a little weird since there were a ton of empty seats and he could've lit up anywhere else, but I figured he didn't want to sit in Siberia. Plus, in virtually any situation with open seating, I too choose to sit near hot chicks (not only are The Rebel and her friend babes, but one's blonde and the other brunette, so, y'know, different strokes) even if one of them has their doofus boyfriend next to her.

So, the dude began chain-smoking and reading some papers from work. He kept to himself and didn't talk to us. After twenty minutes or so, I sneezed because it was allergy season. I sensed the dude next to me moving a bit, but didn't think much of it. A couple of minutes later I needed another beer, turned to get the bartender's attention...and noticed the smoker, who hadn't moved since right after I sneezed, was glaring furiously at me, and just hoping that I would do something so he could take a swing at me. At first I thought, "What the fuck is your problem?" but then the series of events clicked into place.

Smoker sits down and lights up.
Guy sitting next to dude sneezes.
Smoker interprets sneeze as one of those obnoxious "I don't want to ask you to not smoke, so I'll make a big display of how much it is bothering me instead" type moves.
Smoker takes offense.

And this is where I start to have a problem. How the hell did he decide that HE had a right to get pissed? Let's leave aside the fact that I wasn't even sneezing because of the smoke; if you're infringing on someone's personal space, HE HAS THE RIGHT TO REACT. It's not even like I made a big production--no eye-rolling, no loud sighing, just a SNEEZE IN THE MIDDLE OF MOTHERFUCKING ALLERGY SEASON.

See, I have one and only one personal axiom, and that is:

You should be able to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't bother anyone else.

That extends to anything. Hey, if you want to shoot heroin, that's fine. Just do it in the comfort of your own home. Fuck a light socket for all I care; as long as it doesn't short out the electrical grid, the only person you're bothering is yourself, so how is it any of my business? It ain't. I don't care. Do as you please.

The problem with this view is that people are SUCH FUCKING ASSHOLES, and are so completely egocentric, that not only do they do dickheaded things, they actually get self-righteous and hugely pissed if you dare to not roll over and accept those dickheaded things. The average person totally believes the first half of my axiom and totally ignores the second.

For instance, at least once a day I witness the following transaction: Car A--usually an SUV--cuts off Car B in traffic, nearly causing a crash. Car B honks. Car A then honks in retaliation, even though he was utterly in the wrong, leading to an audio-tennis match of honks as they continue down the street. It's completely ridiculous. If you fuck up, then you should at least feel bad about it. If you have no reaction you're already into asswipe territory. And deep in the realm of 100% Shitwad Behavior is to act like the VICTIM and get pissed at the person you just fucked over.

So when it comes to the smoking ban, it's correct that people should be allowed to smoke if they want, even though it's bad for them. Same thing with the trans-fat ban in New York--hey, you want to grow yourself a prize-winning giant ass, that's your business. But the reason these bans are necessary is because you're being a prick about it. You don't limit it to yourself; you blow smoke wherever you please, or you've eaten so many fries that you're using the person next to you as a flab-rest. You're being disingenuous if you say you're against the smoking ban because of personal rights. You're against it because of your rights, not everyone else's. You're against the ban because you want to be able to smoke wherever and, as for other people, fuck them. And if you deny that, then think of how you'd react if someone sat next to you at a bar after eating a jar of pickles, then decided to belch in your face for the rest of the night. IT'S THE SAME THING.

That's why I say I wish we didn't need the ban. Maybe if people weren't such cockstains all the time, a guy could light up a Camel in a bar and not bother anyone else because he, miracle of miracles, didn't blow the smoke at other people, and the non-smokers, miracle of miracles, didn't hassle him about smoking just to feel better about themselves. But that will never happen, because as long as there are privileges, there will be people who love to abuse those privileges. I suppose you could say it's a good thing that we've reduced the most serious problems to the point where we can focus on minor annoyances. But it's probably more a sign that as serious problems decline, people will become bigger assholes to compensate.

Steakalicious

2006-12-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

Continuing on with the Buenos Aires theme. It was steaktastic. Steak for breakfast. Steak for lunch. Steak for dinner. Steak at 11PM. Which IS dinner, there. Supposedly four meals a day is common in Argentina, which is brilliant because I've always wondered if any culture adopted Hobbit eating habits (time off for second breakfast and elevensies should be mandated by law, in my view).

And yet, compared to the U.S., there were still far fewer fuckin' fat folks feverishly frolicking, forsooth. This is not to say that everyone in BA is gorgeous, which I mention because everything I read about BA prior to the trip said that walking through BA was like walking through a modeling shoot. Hell, at one point we actually DID walk through a modeling shoot, in San Telmo. But just because people are thinner than Americans doesn't mean they're good-looking; it just means they're thinner than the fattest people on Earth. Try telling that to the (most likely obese) Americans who wrote those articles I read, though. To an obese person, anyone thin is by definition a model and anorexic.

Anyway, I was expecting to see a parade of Carolina Ardohains (unusual) and to be the ugliest person around (less unusual), but that wasn't the case. Don't get me wrong; there were plenty of remarkably good-looking people in Buenos Aires. At one point, one of the most blisteringly hot women I've ever seen in person was next to me on a train, which is always fun when your girlfriend is standing on the other side and you don't feel like getting kicked in the nuts. Overall, though, the attractiveness quotient of BA was good, but it's not like BA blew New York, Montreal, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, etc. out of the water. However, it's also possible that the "Confounding of Local vs. Tourist" precept was in effect.

Confounding of Local vs. Tourist Precept: When judging the attractiveness of the people in a city, it's always important to distinguish between the locals and the tourists of said city. For instance, if you walk around areas of New York where you see fewer tourists--Alphabet City or the meatpacking district, for example--you see a neverending array of attractive people. Contrast that with Times Square, which is overrun by tourists and looks like a Farscape convention.

So I can't be sure if Buenos Aires seemed less attractive than I expected because I was looking at a bunch of tourists. It's tough to tell because my usual method of identifying tourists--look for people in XXXL NASCAR gear with out-of-town accents--was useless in a town where most of the tourists were South American.

But let's get back to the steak. Our first night we went to a steakhouse (I think it's called "parrilla", although that might refer to the grill) near our hotel; we weren't expecting much since we only chose it for its proximity. Well, we walked in and the first thing we saw was a giant charcoal pit with, basically, a bonfire and these huge cuts of meat cooking over it, including what appeared to be an entire calf spread-eagled on a pair of spits. I have one rule of thumb when it comes to steakhouses--if it doesn't make a PETA member cry, it ain't shit.

I ordered a provoleta, which is a thick slab of provolone cheese that they cook right on the grill. It's topped with some oil and oregano and gets a beautiful char on it. Then they top it with chimichurri, a garlic and herb sauce. It's fucking awesome. We have to make it at the next Warrior's Feast.*

Then the steaks arrived. This particular restaurant brought the steaks out on a contraption that was basically a miniature grill--it had a slotted dish placed over a shallow bowl holding the charcoal briquettes. Now that I think about it, I suppose I should've waited ten minutes to let my T-bone rest since it essentially came right off the fire, but the thing looked so good I tore into it with the patience and etiquette you'd normally associate with explosive diarrhea.

Here's the sickening part: The final bill for the appetizers, two steaks, side dishes, and a bottle of wine was...thirty-three bucks.

Prices like that were standard at most of the restaurants we visited. Our priciest meal was at La Brigada, a place I saw mentioned countless times as being one of, if not the best steakhouse in Buenos Aires. There, our meal of appetizers, salads, two steaks, desserts, and a bottle of the most expensive wine we had during our trip totaled seventy dollars. That's what a single steak runs you at Peter Luger. And unlike Peter Luger, La Brigada had menus made of cowhide. By "cowhide" I don't just mean it was leather, nor do I mean it was raw cowskin--I mean it STILL HAD THE COW'S FUR ON IT. That DEFINITELY passes the PETA Test.

The only problem we noticed with food was underseasoning. Either Americans add too much salt to everything or Argentineans don't add enough; I'm not sure which it is. The chimichurri usually rendered salt unnecessary, so I assume that's part of it.

Final thing on food--Argentinean gelato, or "helado", is bloody amazing. Take the best ice cream you've ever had. Concentrate the flavor about a thousandfold. Make it the consistency of butter. That ice cream you've just created in your head is still ass juice compared to Argentinean gelato. And yes, I've had Graeter's and Ted Drewes. Compared to Argentinean gelato, they're anal leakage, I tell you.

Good God, I just drooled a little on my keyboard.

* Warrior's Feast, noun. A meal featuring a grill; what is commonly and inaccurately referred to as a "barbecue." The name is a reference to the Klingons, a warrior race on Star Trek, and is a hysterically disingenuous attempt to hide what a bunch of dorks my friends and I are.

Boca! Boca!

2006-12-01T09:56:00.000-05:00

The single coolest thing the Rebel and I did in Buenos Aires was go to an Argentinean soccer game. (I would call it "football" but it's not like this thing is required reading in the U.K.--or even voluntary reading anywhere, for that matter--and it's confusing in the U.S.) So we went to the Boca Juniors-Colon match at Boca's home stadium, La Bombonera. The Boca Juniors are one of the most popular teams as well as the current champions; I think my friend Pete, who's lived his entire life in Michigan and Buffalo, has never been to San Francisco, yet coincidentally became a "diehard" 49er fan right around, oh, Super Bowl XIX or so, probably just became a lifelong Boca fan.

Now, I've seen Red Sox-Yankees at Fenway, I've seen Michigan-Ohio State at the Big House, I've seen Bills-Dolphins at Rich Stadium back when those games actually meant something, and yes, I've seen SEC football. Boca-Colon (which is NOT a big rivalry game) at La Bombonera made those games look like pinochle night at a nursing home for deaf-mutes.

I used to be just as apathetic towards soccer as any typical American until I went to Ibiza during the Euro Cup in 2000. There was this little dive bar near our hotel where all the Dutch fans went to watch the games, and watching the games with them was my soccer epiphany. I'm of the opinion that if you can't enjoy soccer after watching a high-stakes game with true fans, then either (a) you're incurably close-minded, or (b) you just don't like sports. The Dutch fans were ten times more passionate than even the craziest SEC football fans, but more importantly, they were there to have fun. Combine the two and that's the best of what sports has to offer. And it helps that European and South American soccer fans tend to include a lot of reeeeeaally hot women. I remember meeting this one Dutch girl after Holland had crushed Yugoslavia 6-1; she was a dead ringer for Virginie Ledoyen and spoke four languages. Let's just say I don't expect to encounter that at the Bills game this weekend.

I digress. We went to the Boca game with a company that specializes in taking foreigners to soccer games; the company sends an interpreter, drives you to and from the game, and provides tickets. It's a little pricier but we didn't feel like making our way to La Boca (one of the sketchier neighborhoods in BA) by ourselves and I sure as hell didn't think I could negotiate with a scalper--I speak this rare dialect of Spanish known as "Retard Spanish." So they herded all the members of these tour groups into a bar next to the stadium; it's pretty much the only time English was the majority language spoken in Argentina and definitely the only time I had to pay more than a dollar for a beer.

But two hours before the game, from inside a bar across the street, you could still hear these insane bastards in the stadium screaming like cats in a washing machine. They were all singing Boca songs along with the band--and when I say "band", I mean just some regular fans who managed to get an entire drum AND horn section into the stadium. And when I say "songs", I mean that for a good four hours, they went through an entire compilation of Boca-related songs without repeats; these dudes had a bigger repertoire than Prince. And a lot of these songs included the phrase "tu madre", which--heh. Awesome. Hypothesis--in any language, the phrase "your mother" almost always leads to trouble.

We went into the stadium about an hour before the game; La Bombonera is one of the great venues in sports, but in terms of modern conveniences it makes Fenway look like the Starship Enterprise. Just solid concrete with peeling paint, and stairs so steep you expect to see squirrels crawling up them to store their nuts for the winter.

This means two things, though--first, you feel like you're practically on top of the action no matter where you sit. We were two rows from the top of the stadium yet I'm reasonably sure I could've spit on the referee's head. Next time, maybe. Second, all of the sound gets funneled and concentrated, and then it bounces off the concrete walls. These fans could've made themselves heard in outer space; in that stadium I thought my head would explode.

A few minutes before the game started the fans upped the volume even more--and then, slowly, the fans pulled an absolutely gigantic flag over themselves. This thing was right on top of the fans and covered practically an entire section of the stadium (see picture above); it had "JUGADOR NO. 12" (in other words, "Twelfth Man") and the phrase "Podrán imitarnos, pero igualarnos jamás", which I believe translates to "You can imitate us, but never be equal to us." They don't just talk shit about the quality of the other team, they talk shit about the quality of the other team's FANS. Good stuff.

Speaking of the other team's fans, they occupied a little section in the upper deck. There were only a couple hundred of them but they managed to be pretty damn loud, too. They were also surrounded, by my count, by NINETY policemen. My main concerns when going to a Nationals game are (1) "Do I have enough money for beer?" and (2) "Will it be too hot for jeans?" I have to say that (3) "Will my armed escort be sufficiently numerous?" never factored into the equation.

Anyway, Boca ended up winning 4-1. After every goal, the fans at ground level in the goal sections, which are standing-room only, sprinted towards the fence separating them from the field and starting moshing like they just lost their virginity in a threesome with Angelina Jolie and Jessica Alba. Hell, they were so ecstatic some people probably WERE losing their virginity after every goal. People sang and chanted so loudly you half expected some old guy to fly down from Miami and ask them to keep it down a bit. Even after the game, a substantial part of the crowd stayed in the stadium to celebrate and party more. I couldn't blame them. It was an incredible time all around, why let the end of the game stop it?

Then again, they probably had some free time since the game ended around 7PM and there were still three hours until dinner time, because they eat late in Buenos Aires. More on that later.

French Fries and Old Bay

2006-11-30T12:08:00.000-05:00

Edited on 7/17/07. I wasn't really happy with the definitions of the three types of tourists, and then I read a quote from Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky" which brought my deficiencies into fine relief. The quote goes: "He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler...Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home."

I'm not a big fan of tourists, which seems like a dickheaded and hypocritical thing to say ("We're all tourists sometimes," you say), but let me explain. Not only do I live in D.C., I live just a couple of blocks from the National Zoo and its fucking pandas. And when I say I don't like tourists, I'm referring to a specific subset of tourists, and that subset consists of the type of people that you hate, too, so don't judge me yet.

Basically, there are three types of tourists:

The Traveler (or Traveller). The Travel(l)er is one who blends in with the place he's visiting. Hence the extra "l" if he happens to be in a place that uses British rather than American spelling. He dresses as if he respects the culture. He at least tries to speak the local language. He eats the food. He never, ever bitches at a local for doing things differently from how the Travel(l)er does in his hometown, because maybe, just maybe, there are different ways of doing things.

The Tourist, a.k.a. the Suburban Dork. The Tourist doesn't dress terribly, exactly, but he still sticks out. In America he's the guy who thinks khakis and a blue button-down are a really super-hip outfit. He carries a phrasebook rather than trying to learn the language. He has a camera around his neck and might just be wearing a fanny pack. If he needs clothes he avoids all the local stores and goes to the nearest Gap. He'll try local food, but only whatever most closely resembles a burger.

The Ugly American. The Ugly American is the opposite of the Traveler; he's the one helping to ruin the reputation of Americans abroad. He's pasty, fat, and dresses like he just cleaned the gutters. He speaks exactly two languages--American (not just English), and Louder, Slower American. He complains about food that doesn't look like Burger King's and mocks any locally sold item that you can't find at Target. He looks down on all foreign culture even though he himself represents the bunions of American society.

The last group, and to a lesser extent the second group, are the tourists I hate. They're precisely the tourists you see at the Zoo every day; white trash idiots pushing those strollers that hold two kids side-by-side who don't give a rat's ass if they ram you in the knees; groups of middle-school punks who throw their Wendy's wrappers on the ground as if the city employs an army of maids to pick up after them; families of four wearing denim shorts who manage to take up as much room as possible both individually (by each being the size of a typical marine mammal) and collectively (by walking in a row so as to take up the entire sidewalk). You hate these people, too, because the one overarching attribute of all of them is the complete lack of consideration for anyone else. If someone wants to travel, that's entirely fine, but how about making a little room on the street so the people who live there can actually get to work? People expect hospitality, okay, but part of that little social contract is to not bitch just because the fries come with Old Bay instead of Heinz. It isn't the mere fact of being a tourist that's the problem. The problem is being the type of person who acts like as much of an ass as possible while still expecting Four Seasons treatment from everyone else.

I mention all of this not only because I live in an area infested by the worst kind of tourists, but also because I just went to Buenos Aires and was shocked by how much I didn't see this behavior there. There were a lot of tourists there, sure, but there were practically no Ugly Americans, and very few Americans in general. Most of the tourists came from other Spanish-speaking countries--I saw a lot of passports from Chile and Spain--and the few Americans I encountered were generally the type who tried to speak the language and blend in.

Of course, there were exceptions. On the flight back there was an American couple who found a way to whine about everything, including the location of the seats because, get this, they didn't have a good view of the airplane's movie screen. It was a red-eye flight, so anyone with a sputter of cortical activity would realize the best move was to sleep, yet these fuckwits were bitching because they wouldn't have a good view of, I shit you not, Bewitched and Coach Carter. Then they got annoyed because they were having trouble explaining this to the flight attendants (this was on Aerolineas Argentinas, by the way, not Larry The Cable Guy Airlines), which was ridiculous because it was an Argentine crew and the couple's complaint didn't make sense in any language (a better view of Bewitched?!?! Really?) The Rebel was distressed to realize that the couple was from Atlanta, because it's never fun to have to fight Southern redneck stereotypes and then have a couple of jackass Bulldawgs fans do everything to reinforce those stereotypes.

In another case, we were walking down Avenida 9 de Julio, and nearly got mowed down by a couple apparently from Wisconsin. They were the largest people I saw in Buenos Aires, and might've been the largest things ever to travel in Argentina, and that's including the three-masted vessels the Spanish sailed on when they came to colonize the place. This couple was also loudly bitching about how nobody spoke English and practically trampling everyone in their way. The real beauty of these two, though, was that the dude was wearing cut-off jean shorts and a Harley Davidson shirt from Milwaukee; the woman was wearing a quadruple-XL "Hard Rock Buenos Aires" shirt, which is either incomprehensibly pathetic or the most singularly brilliant display of studied irony in history (I'm gonna guess the former); and they each were carrying a bag from...

...wait for it...

... McDonald's. In Buenos Aires. McDonald's!!!! Fuck. Ing. Awe. Some.

But those two were the only instances of Ugly Americanism I witnessed. One interesting thing I noticed is that the Suburban Dork look is apparently universal; for example, despite the perception that Europeans are always stylish, I saw a few Spaniards who looked like they came off the set of one of those "I'm gellin' like a felon" commercials. They generally weren't from the big cities, though, so apparently "Suburban Dork" applies regardless of nationality.

But the point is, after six days in Buenos Aires I saw fewer instances of dickhead tourist behavior than I saw, literally, while I was carrying my suitcase back from the subway to my apartment in D.C. I figure it has something to do with how easy we have it in the States. If you can afford to travel, you're generally pretty well-off, and in the U.S. "pretty well-off" means the worst thing you typically have to deal with is being put on hold for too long while ordering window treatments from IKEA. We're spoiled rotten, and it shows.

Bowled peanuts

2006-11-16T09:39:00.000-05:00

So I read another article from the Post, this time about the cultural divide between Northern Virginia (consisting of mostly liberal transplants from out-of-state) and the rest of Virginia (just the good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm, beats all you ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born). I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this mainly because I'm a blindingly arrogant Yankee know-it-all. (This is true, by the way. I phrased it to sound ironic, but ironically, it's the truth, so it's ironic squared.) But in addition to me being from the North, my girlfriend--the non-inflatable one, anyway--is an honest-to-goodness Dixie girl from South Carolina. The first time we met she referred to me as a Yankee, so I call her The Rebel.

We visited The Rebel's parents in South Carolina last October, and while we were there we went to the USC-Vanderbilt game. (Did you know that in the South, "USC" refers only to the University of South Carolina?!? It's true!) So we were tailgating outside Williams-Brice Stadium, and The Rebel told me, "We might should git you some bowled peanuts."

"'Bowled' peanuts?" I asked, confused. We'd been dating a while at that point, though, so my automatic Rebel-to-Yankee translator kicked in. "She must mean bold peanuts, like maybe they're spicy or super-large or something," I thought. "Sure, let's get some bold peanuts," I said.

We went to a concession stand and The Rebel bought a bag of bold peanuts. Only they weren't bold. They were pretty much the same size as other peanuts, but instead of being roasted, they were soggy. I ate one--wasn't spicy at all, just considerably more salty than a roasted peanut. "So, uh, what makes these 'bold', exactly?" I asked.

Now The Rebel looked confused. "What do you mean? They're bowled. You bowl them."

Finally I looked at the sign on the concession stand, which said

BOILED PEANUTS - $3.

"Wait, boiled peanuts? That's what you've been saying this entire time? Boy-ul?" I said, utterly in shock.

"That's what Ah said! Bowl! Bowled peanuts!"

Long pause. Then I started laughing, which The Rebel didn't appreciate. She probably appreciated it even less when I asked, "So, how would you say, 'I bawled when a bald bull boldly boiled my bowling ball'?"

Here's the thing, though. That tailgate, that game, and that entire trip--including the boiled peanuts, by the way, which were delicious--were all a complete blast. For instance, you know how some stadiums are multi-purpose, whereas others--baseball stadiums, for example--are just for one sport? I think Williams-Brice was designed specifically for tailgating, and then they threw in a football field for the hell of it. The "USC" Gamecocks aren't exactly a football powerhouse, but that was one hell of a tailgate--and for reference, lemme say that the tailgate we throw for Bills games features an actual professional chef, so I know from tailgating.

All this is my way of saying I just don't understand why liking A means you have to despise B. Why is there something wrong with enjoying the tasting menu at Restaurant Eve AND loving the smoked half-chicken at the Loveless Cafe? I bitch about a lot of things, but the one thing at the heart of all of it is that I hate laziness. Not laziness as in "I don't feel like doing laundry right now," but rather "Why should I make any effort to make the most of this life." I think we need a tax on stupidity because I hate intellectual laziness. I think fat people who abuse handicapped access doors should be denied health insurance because I hate physical laziness. And whether you're a city dweller who refuses to eat grits or a good ol' boy who can't imagine trying sushi, you're guilty of cultural laziness. Either way, it reflects a fundamental lack of curiosity about life and it's something I just don't understand.

Anyway, I have a hankerin' for some biscuits n' gravy washed down with a Montelpulciano, so you'll have to excuse me.

Flying carpets for all

2006-11-14T16:19:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post today has an article about the new general manager of the D.C. Metro system, John Catoe Jr. He replaces the interim manager, Dan Tangherlini, who's taking the number two position in Mayor Fenty's incoming administration. I find this fascinating because I had no idea that D.C. Metro actually had a human leader; I had assumed it was run by a thousand monkeys whacking away on a thousand typewriters.

Also, after the thunderously incompetent fashion in which the Metro has been run recently, I can't believe anyone would offer Tangherlini a high-ranking position. Then again, he DID get an offer from a D.C. mayor. Still, either Fenty is actually Marion Barry in disguise, or he gets to work on a flying carpet, because riding Metro now is like passing a kidney stone. For example, yesterday a train broke down on the Red line around 6 P.M., so you know that worked out well. Naturally, with a train out of service in the heart of rush hour, Metro decided the best option was to run fewer trains at longer intervals--always keep 'em on their toes, that's Metro's motto. I got to Farragut North a little after 6; the next train didn't mosey on up until maybe 6:15. This thing was packed so tight that the women on board were in danger of conceiving. That didn't stop people from trying to get on, of course. One thing about D.C.--no matter how bad the situation gets, somebody always tries to make it worse.

The next train showed up maybe seven minutes later, during which time people were still coming into the station. You couldn't have fit a lubed Yorkshire terrier on this train if you stapled it to the ceiling. And again, people tried to get on. But what's most offensive about the whole situation is that Metro made no attempt to let people know there was a problem before they had paid and gotten into the station. Why not stick a sign in front of the turnstiles that mentions a delay? You can spend weeks choosing the voice for the "Doors closing" announcement but you can't install a sign that says, "Metro is an utter clusterfuck right now"? IT'S NOT LIKE THAT SIGN WOULD GO UNUSED.

I used to live in Arlington and take the Orange line into the District for work; anyone with a similar commute is already groaning. Thanks to all the McCondos and Cheesecake Factories they're building out there, ridership has increased dramatically. So on weekday mornings, Metro runs its trains using the following schedule--train 1 arrives, train 2 is right on its heels, and train 3...shows up EIGHT minutes later. Fucking brilliant. I gotta assume the guy who came up with that schedule likes to drink his morning coffee with Splenda and cream-colored lead paint. Eventually, Metro figured out that the Orange line was constipated. It only took them three years to notice; I imagine someone used lots of shiny objects and Baby Einstein DVDs. And their solution? They changed a couple of trains to less-reliable 8-car trains and REDUCED the number of trains by two. In other words, they made a minor adjustment to length and reduced duration and frequency, which is a combination that wouldn't even work in porn.

It's not just that Metro runs like well-oiled crutches; it's the confluence of degrading service, increasing fares, and wasted money that pisses me off. You can get away with two out of the three, but NOT all three; hell, even the Federal government usually only screws up two. So if you're going to have shitty service and raise fares, that's one thing. But instead of blowing money on giant yellow stickers that politely ask the tourists not to block the escalators, spend it on things that will actually help. Like cattle prods for those idiots who park their double-strollers in front of the doors, or chairs that automatically collapse when some 400-lb. Wal-mart greeter from Nebraska tries to take up two seats.

But hey, the new guy previously worked for the L.A. Transportation Authority, so I'm sure it'll work out, L.A. being a commuter's orgasmic paradise and all.

Do Not Go Gentle...

2006-10-25T09:11:00.000-04:00

After the Crocodile Hunter got hisself kilt by a stingray, a friend of mine made the point that hey, at least he went out doing what he loved. We should all be so lucky. Me, I want to die while naked lingerie models feed me a massive bucket of wings as the Bills win the Super Bowl. My buddy Pete, who got married at twenty-four to the only girl he ever dated, just wants to die while watching Return Of The Jedi with his wife and kid out of town.

I mention this because as I walked to work this morning, I almost got run over by a dude riding a Segway. He was even wearing a helmet with a little rearview mirror attached to it, which I thought was a jaunty, insouciant touch that gave the ensemble a certain je ne sais quoi. And it would've proven useful had he wanted to merge and another Segway was in his blind spot, or if a cop on a unicycle wanted to pull him over for speeding. In any event, he almost flattened me, which would've been the Worst. Obituary. Ever.

Man Dies In Tragic Segway Hit-And-Run

Or,

Man Segway'ed Into That Good Night

I suppose there are worse, or in this case, lamer, ways to go. You could die in a drag queen stampede, for example. But getting run over by some fat-ass who blew thousands of dollars on a contraption whose main purpose is to do something you can already do, only (1) .0000005% faster, and (2) 1,000,000% more lazily, really would not have made my day. It would've been like dying in a freak remote control accident.

I think that when you're that lazy, you're telegraphing to the world that you just don't give a shit anymore. For example, the building where I used to work had six floors. I was constantly amazed by how many people used the elevator to go DOWN one floor, from the second to the first floor, which was doubly bad because there was also an escalator from the second floor to the first floor. These people were so fucking inert, they couldn't handle standing on an escalator for twenty seconds when the elevator only required them to stand for ten. And walking down the stairs? Feh. Only for the peasants.

The building where I work now has those handicapped access doors, where you push a button and the doors swing open for you. It's absurd how many non-handicapped (I won't say "perfectly healthy" because that's clearly not the case) people use that button. I mean, it takes a WHILE for those doors to open, so you're actually wasting time by using the handicapped access doors when you could just, you know, pull for a half-second.

It's perfectly within your rights to be a great big whale, of course. Two hundred million people in this country are doing it right now. But if you're going to intentionally do it, that means I have to pay for it, in the form of higher insurance premiums, which is crap. I think that if you're going to do something that you know is hurting yourself, that's okay, but boom, you get no health insurance. If a guy sets his house on fire--even if it's an accident--no insurance company will cover it because it's his own damn fault. Why should it be any different if you decide you're going to pad your fat by using the elevator, waiting for an automatic door, or riding a Segway?

The thing is, people in this country are so massively (ha!) self-entitled and quick to divert blame that they'd never accept that logic. A CBS poll last year found that most people identify themselves as not overweight; another study found that 3/4ths of obese people claim they eat a healthy diet while 40% claim they exercise regularly. Buuuulllllshiiiiiit. Eating a salad with four kinds of cheese and drenching it in bacon dressing once a month does not constitute a "healthy diet", and waddling on a treadmill at 1.5 mph for fifteen minutes on January 2nd doesn't constitute regular exercise. I made the joke that I want to die while eating wings, but that's the point--I recognize that shoving wings down my throat is a recipe for death. I don't do it all the time. People talk about how hard it is to stay in shape and how it must be all genetic--well, it certainly is unusual that the most diverse country in the world just HAPPENS to have the greatest concentration of people with this defective fatness gene, huh? It can't POSSIBLY be your own fault when you can blame DNA.

Everyone also complains about how hard it is to stay in shape, but...it really isn't. It's hard to look like Brad Pitt or Jessica Alba, sure, but the obese act like if you can't reach that standard, you might as well go for the exact opposite. Yes, it's difficult to look like a Greek sculpture, but on the other hand, it's really, remarkably easy to not look like Falstaff. You don't have to eat a vegan diet or exercise sixteen hours a day; maybe it's enough to just to ditch that Double Gulp, or walk rather than Segway, or NOT eat that third Big Mac.

It actually irritates me that McDonald's doesn't Super-Size anymore. It seems paradoxical for me to say this, but it's not, because it's not the restaurant's fault that people have no self-control. On those rare occasions when I go to McDonald's, I want that giant box of fries. But the key word here is "rare"--I haven't been in a Mickey D's in two years, and if I were dumb enough to go every week and Super-Size every meal, I wouldn't blame them when I got fat. That would be like smoking a pack a day for twenty years and then blaming the tobacco company when my dumb ass got cancer.

Oh, wait.

The Tax on Stupidity

2006-09-26T11:24:00.000-04:00

The other day I was walking towards one of the busier intersections here in D.C. A motorist got a green light (not a left arrow), started turning left, and apparently decided he was going the wrong way. I know this because Jimmie Jackass there decided to SLAM ON HIS BRAKES IN THE MIDDLE OF A BUSY INTERSECTION with several cars behind him and a bunch more coming from the other direction. His daughter was in the passenger seat, yelling "GO! DON'T JUST STOP!" as he almost got plowed from two sides. Now, if you live in D.C. or any major city, let me answer the two questions that immediately popped into your mind: Yes, he was a tourist (out-of-state plates), and yes, he was driving a minivan. In all fairness, though, the Dale Earnhardt #3 bumper sticker gave the thing some pizzazz--really pulled the look together. Anyway, as I watched this shaved monkey nearly get himself killed, it reminded me of something I've thought about for a long time.

We need a tax on stupidity.

Forget the flat tax, or the consumption tax, or whatever tax you care to name. Generally speaking, an ideal tax system is one that adheres to the three Fs--funding, fairness and feasibility. The tax on stupidity meets all three requirements.

Of course, sticking with the Rule of Three, you should keep three things in mind. One, I'm drawing on my memory of a grad school taxation class I took a good seven years ago. Two, the professor of said class once published a paper in which he claimed that people postpone their own deaths to avoid paying estate taxes. "Junior needs more money for that second yacht! Out, damned tumor! Must...LIVE!" And three, I'm pretty sure I got a B minus in that class which, in grad school, is what everyone gets. One could, oh, say, spend an entire semester downing $1.50 Miller Lite pitchers at Rick's and replaying the Protoss level in Starcraft while attending a grand total of two classes and still score a B minus. Then again, I never said a tax on stupidity wouldn't cost me.

Anyway, if you go through the three requirements of a good tax system, it's easy to see how well a tax on stupidity would work. Funding, the ability to create sufficient revenue, would obviously not be a problem; this is a country that screwed up the 2000 election because thousands of people hadn't yet mastered the art of poking holes into paper. Really, the only thing that might possibly generate more revenue is a fat tax, which is another thing I used to tell people we needed until the bastards at Esquire beat me to it. But the major advantage a stupidity tax has over a fat tax is political--Congress could pass a tax on stupidity because people never think of themselves as stupid. As with sex and poker, when it comes to smarts, most people secretly believe they're in the top quartile even if they don't know what "quartile" means. Contrast that with fatness--most fat people will admit that they're fat. Oh, sure, they might deny that they're unattractive ("I'm curvy! I'm a real person!") and they'll DEFINITELY deny that being fat is their fault ("It's all genetic--hey, all-you-can-eat buffet! Sweet! I wonder if they deliver?") but they won't argue with what the scale says, and they'd never agree to a tax that would so clearly punish them. Whereas your typical person could lose a game of checkers to a dyslexic papaya and he'd still say, "I'm street smart. My kindergarten teacher used to say I finger-painted at a third-grade level."

Fairness, the second requirement, is also easily met. People always complain about the fairness of the tax system--specifically, it's only fair if everybody else pays. If you listen to some people, the problem with current tax laws is that it "penalizes success," where "success" is defined as "having lots of money regardless of who actually earned it," which--okay, yeah, I can see how K-Fed totally deserves a tax break. Wouldn't want to create a disincentive for him to pump out more hits like "PopoZao." So in that respect, the tax on stupidity is superior to any other tax system around. It shatters the completely false assumption that someone who's rich must have succeeded through talent or hard work, but at the same time, it doesn't penalize those who actually did succeed through talent or hard work. So a guy like Jeffrey Sachs would have more money to devote to ending poverty, while K-Fed would have to pay more in taxes than he can count. Okay, fine, bad example--more than you can count.

Now, feasibility, as in ease of administration, seems like the sticking point. How do you assign a number to intelligence? IQ and standardized tests obviously don't measure intelligence--or more accurately, people with low IQs who do poorly on standardized tests claim they don't measure intelligence. And then they try to cook frozen pizzas in their VCRs. Whoa! Kidding! Seriously, though, even if we were to assume that a low IQ means that you're not intelligent, a high IQ doesn't guarantee that you are. One of my best friends always scores well on IQ tests and the like; said friend also once went to Vegas, sat down at a blackjack table, and tried to hit on twenty-one. And let's just say that coming from him, it didn't surprise me one bit. Still, determining a given person's stupidity really isn't that difficult. If you've ever been on an escalator with lots of people and thought it would be a super terrific idea to just stop and hang out at the top of it so everyone crashes into you, then guess what, you're an idiot. Enjoy that 40% tax rate. If you jabber loudly on your cell phone on the train about what Caitlin was like wearing and ohmyGawd like did you like see how Jordan was like totally checking you out, then perhaps it's time to bump up the withholding on your T.J. Maxx paycheck. And if you bring your screaming brats into a four-star restaurant and let them roll around everyone else's tables on those fucking sneakers with built-in wheels, then not only should the government take 90% of your middle-manager's income, it should also neuter you with a corkscrew drenched in Dave's Insanity sauce.

Really, though, the true beauty of a tax on stupidity has nothing to do with funding, fairness, or feasibility. The true beauty is that it would actually create an incentive to not be stupid. If you knew you could save yourself a few grand each year just by picking up a damn atlas so you could finally locate Canada on a map, you'd do it, wouldn't you? We fancy-pants economists call this a positive externality--a benefit that affects others not directly involved in a given transaction. Can you imagine how wonderful life would be? Think of how nice it would be if you never had to worry about spending an extra ten minutes at the toll booth because some jackoff decided to ask the toll collector for directions to "Steve's house." Think of a world where supermarket tabloids go out of business because the chowderheads who read them have to spend all their cash on taxes. Think of a world where you've never heard of Paris Hilton.

Convinced yet? Good! Go petition your Congressperson. I'll be here watching TRL.