Some things take on a life of their own.
The entire clan attended a wedding last Saturday and it was a posh affair. Incredible meal, announced course by course on a menu displayed at each place setting. Dessert was accompanied by Starbucks coffee.
My son, Justin, decided to order tea, not because he prefers tea to coffee (that would be his sister, Liz), but because he has never had a cup of Starbucks coffee. It's not that he's a rabid anti-globalization nut, as he readily acknowledges Starbucks commitment to fair trade coffee, its forays into organic coffee, and the company's rather forward thinking benefits program. (He does, however, personally blame Starbucks for the demise of Mike's Coffee, a Poway neighborhood coffee shop.) He's never had a cup of Starbucks coffee and didn't want to start last Saturday down some personal road to caffeine perdition.
And that led to a conversational riff about other "nevers". Birdmonster band mate David Klein's grandmother has never eaten anything from McDonald's. Imagine, billions and billions served and the incredible statistic that here in the U.S. one in seven people have a meal at McDonald's every day, and David's is the octogenarian poster Nana for healthy eating.
Finally, Frank Sinatra claimed that he never wore a pair of blue jeans in his life.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Surly in Chicago
Yesterday I was at Midway Airport in Chicago, flying Southwest, and I eagerly brought my good friend, Ron Penland, to PotBelly Sandwich Works for his first PotBelly submarine sandwich. What at operation! Eager, energetic members of the PotBelly staff work like musicians in a symphony to turn out hundreds of sandwiches every day. It starts with one employee asking you to shout out your order when you're about ten or fifteen down in line. By the time you reach the counter you are then asked by another employee what condiments you want on the sandwich.
Smooth, efficient and tasty. Oh, I don't want to forget the unusual selection of beverages, sugar cane sodas, IBC rootbeer, and other "not found everywhere" drinks.
All came to naught when I checked out. A rather surly young lady, who had nothing more to do that operate a cash register, significantly diminished the collected efforts of every other PotBelly employee. When I asked for a jar of hot peppers to purchase and carry home she stared at me. I repeated the request and she pointed with her chin and said "Take that one there."
"The display jar?" I asked.
"Uh-huh."
She rang me up and we exchanged a $20 and the $7.25 in change.
"May I please have a bag for the peppers?" I asked.
Again with the head point, this time to a bag on the counter. So I bagged my own peppers and sat down to eat.
Great sandwich, by the way. But there was a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste regarding the service.
As I waited for my flight I thought I would refuel with some joe. I walked in A Piece of Cake, a shop that proclaims itself to be a bakery, bar and deli. I placed my travel coffee mug on the counter and asked for a cup of regular coffee.
"Small or large?" the cashier asked.
"Whatever you need to charge to fill this up," I answered.
"We don't do that. You have to buy one of our cups."
All right, let me give this young lady the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this is some stupid corporate policy, and maybe she doesn't even agree with it. But, please, a little courtesy would have been nice.
I decided not buy any coffee at all. Why would I buy a paper cup, pour it into my mug and then throw the paper cup away? Don't we have enough garbage?
Perhaps these are minimum wage jobs. I doubt it, but in each instance, it might be the case. Unless these two paragons lose the attitude they will never rise above those entry level positions.
Smooth, efficient and tasty. Oh, I don't want to forget the unusual selection of beverages, sugar cane sodas, IBC rootbeer, and other "not found everywhere" drinks.
All came to naught when I checked out. A rather surly young lady, who had nothing more to do that operate a cash register, significantly diminished the collected efforts of every other PotBelly employee. When I asked for a jar of hot peppers to purchase and carry home she stared at me. I repeated the request and she pointed with her chin and said "Take that one there."
"The display jar?" I asked.
"Uh-huh."
She rang me up and we exchanged a $20 and the $7.25 in change.
"May I please have a bag for the peppers?" I asked.
Again with the head point, this time to a bag on the counter. So I bagged my own peppers and sat down to eat.
Great sandwich, by the way. But there was a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste regarding the service.
As I waited for my flight I thought I would refuel with some joe. I walked in A Piece of Cake, a shop that proclaims itself to be a bakery, bar and deli. I placed my travel coffee mug on the counter and asked for a cup of regular coffee.
"Small or large?" the cashier asked.
"Whatever you need to charge to fill this up," I answered.
"We don't do that. You have to buy one of our cups."
All right, let me give this young lady the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this is some stupid corporate policy, and maybe she doesn't even agree with it. But, please, a little courtesy would have been nice.
I decided not buy any coffee at all. Why would I buy a paper cup, pour it into my mug and then throw the paper cup away? Don't we have enough garbage?
Perhaps these are minimum wage jobs. I doubt it, but in each instance, it might be the case. Unless these two paragons lose the attitude they will never rise above those entry level positions.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Where the couches go to die...
At best, the concentrated Goleta neighborhood of Isla Vista is a strange community. Yards from the campus of University of California Santa Barbara, Isla Vista's population is composed of young men and women, most between the ages of 19 and 23. Most are living in their first apartment or house that didn't have mom and dad riding herd.
Think of a young adult equivalent of Escape from New York.
Pedestrians rule, motor vehicles crawl through streets teaming with students on foot and on bicycles.
And like many UC campuses and the surrounding environs there is more than a whiff of entitlement as well as the certainty of the newly educated who envision themselves saving the world from their less enlightened parents. Here's where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is embraced as gospel, where Michael Moore's biannual video rants are cheered, and where anything remotely conservative is vilified.
As it should be for this is the age for idealism and big dreams and youthful confidence.
Green? Hell, yeah! Vegetarian, vegan? Absolutely.
This year a UCSB environmental group attacked a perennial problem that occurs with the mass exodus of students at academic year end. As the houses empty tons of furniture, electronics, household goods, clothes and books are unceremoniously dumped. Garbage cans and dumpsters overflow. Couches are strewn along every street. And while this group did admirable work, creating a central clearing house for large pieces of furniture, there are still pockets of hold-outs.
As I walked Isla Vista following graduation last week, I was appalled and sickened to see a landscape that resembled a bombed-out Baghdad or a Tijuana trash site. Front yards filled with empty bottles and plastic glasses. Scorched streets littered with carbonized hardware from couches burned to "celebrate" graduation. Lawn furniture tossed from homes on Del Playa onto the beach, and most shocking, a couch floating in a kelp bed in the ocean.
If they care so much about the environment, trot out green credentials, and eschew chewing animals, why do so many of these privileged young adults think they have a free pass for the week surrounding year-end?
Think of a young adult equivalent of Escape from New York.
Pedestrians rule, motor vehicles crawl through streets teaming with students on foot and on bicycles.
And like many UC campuses and the surrounding environs there is more than a whiff of entitlement as well as the certainty of the newly educated who envision themselves saving the world from their less enlightened parents. Here's where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is embraced as gospel, where Michael Moore's biannual video rants are cheered, and where anything remotely conservative is vilified.
As it should be for this is the age for idealism and big dreams and youthful confidence.
Green? Hell, yeah! Vegetarian, vegan? Absolutely.
This year a UCSB environmental group attacked a perennial problem that occurs with the mass exodus of students at academic year end. As the houses empty tons of furniture, electronics, household goods, clothes and books are unceremoniously dumped. Garbage cans and dumpsters overflow. Couches are strewn along every street. And while this group did admirable work, creating a central clearing house for large pieces of furniture, there are still pockets of hold-outs.
As I walked Isla Vista following graduation last week, I was appalled and sickened to see a landscape that resembled a bombed-out Baghdad or a Tijuana trash site. Front yards filled with empty bottles and plastic glasses. Scorched streets littered with carbonized hardware from couches burned to "celebrate" graduation. Lawn furniture tossed from homes on Del Playa onto the beach, and most shocking, a couch floating in a kelp bed in the ocean.
If they care so much about the environment, trot out green credentials, and eschew chewing animals, why do so many of these privileged young adults think they have a free pass for the week surrounding year-end?
Thursday, June 7, 2007
What's up with all the TVs?
Everywhere you go you are assaulted by televisions. In the waiting lounge at the airport...televisions. At the athletic club...televisions (and usually duelling televisions set to different stations at max volume.) In a bar or restaurant...televisions.
I'll give you the sports bar or the themed restaurant. You expect to have twenty TVs cracking out every baseball/football/basketball game airing at that moment and perhaps even some of the fringe "sports" like poker. (When did poker exactly become a sport?)
But to walk into a high-end restaurant and find TVs sprinkled around to compete with decent conversation and a bit of, God forbid, silence.
There's a thread of thought that you can't go anywhere on this planet and not hear something. In other words, no true silence. There is no Bose noise cancelling, Get Smart cone-of-silence, noise-free zone anywhere.
But the electronic noise is overwhelming. Cellphones with their seemingly infinite number of rings that include Justin Timberlake songs, hand-held video games chirping, beeping, exploding away, those friggin' aforementioned TVs, the pulsing rap music escaping from the open windows of a pimped-out Honda civic, and the white noise hum of music leaking out from the iPod headphones.
Increasingly you have to plan to escape the noise of the modern day.
I like to choose my noise. Moving water on a stream. The woods at the beginning of the day with the first drumming of grouse, a woodpecker, the gobble of a turkey. Elk bugling in the fall. Wind soughing through the trees. The crackling of a fire and the din of millions of tree frogs. Rain on a tin roof.
I'll give you the sports bar or the themed restaurant. You expect to have twenty TVs cracking out every baseball/football/basketball game airing at that moment and perhaps even some of the fringe "sports" like poker. (When did poker exactly become a sport?)
But to walk into a high-end restaurant and find TVs sprinkled around to compete with decent conversation and a bit of, God forbid, silence.
There's a thread of thought that you can't go anywhere on this planet and not hear something. In other words, no true silence. There is no Bose noise cancelling, Get Smart cone-of-silence, noise-free zone anywhere.
But the electronic noise is overwhelming. Cellphones with their seemingly infinite number of rings that include Justin Timberlake songs, hand-held video games chirping, beeping, exploding away, those friggin' aforementioned TVs, the pulsing rap music escaping from the open windows of a pimped-out Honda civic, and the white noise hum of music leaking out from the iPod headphones.
Increasingly you have to plan to escape the noise of the modern day.
I like to choose my noise. Moving water on a stream. The woods at the beginning of the day with the first drumming of grouse, a woodpecker, the gobble of a turkey. Elk bugling in the fall. Wind soughing through the trees. The crackling of a fire and the din of millions of tree frogs. Rain on a tin roof.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
The Son Also Rises
A tip of the hat to my son, Justin.
On Sunday afternoon, while enjoying a cigar in the backyard, I finished the fifth Michael Malone novel I have read in the last year and a half. The Justin and Cuddy mysteries are quite enjoyable, but the two other novels I have read by Malone have been masterpieces.
So here is my unequivocal recommendation to buy and read Foolscap, or The Stages of Love. Initially set in the world of academia, nestled in a small North Carolina town, Theo Ryan (the half-Jewish, half-Irish son of a pair of inveterate stage troopers) is a tenured professor befriended by America's living treasure playwright, Joshua Ford Rexford. Peopled by Malone's normal cast of slightly off-plumb characters, the book is a laugh out loud (or LOL for you text messaging fools and e-mail emoticon freaks) funny romp.
While I haven't quite figured out how he wrote a very passable paper in high school on John le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy without cracking the cover, I take comfort in Justin's reading habits and his recent recommendations.
Now, kid, maybe you should read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
On Sunday afternoon, while enjoying a cigar in the backyard, I finished the fifth Michael Malone novel I have read in the last year and a half. The Justin and Cuddy mysteries are quite enjoyable, but the two other novels I have read by Malone have been masterpieces.
So here is my unequivocal recommendation to buy and read Foolscap, or The Stages of Love. Initially set in the world of academia, nestled in a small North Carolina town, Theo Ryan (the half-Jewish, half-Irish son of a pair of inveterate stage troopers) is a tenured professor befriended by America's living treasure playwright, Joshua Ford Rexford. Peopled by Malone's normal cast of slightly off-plumb characters, the book is a laugh out loud (or LOL for you text messaging fools and e-mail emoticon freaks) funny romp.
While I haven't quite figured out how he wrote a very passable paper in high school on John le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy without cracking the cover, I take comfort in Justin's reading habits and his recent recommendations.
Now, kid, maybe you should read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Survival of the Fittest
As I near my 54th birthday, I am reminded of author Jim Harrison's observation that "as I get older I find that I have a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms."
Other than the National Basketball Association, my interest in professional sports has waned to nearly nil. I relented last season and watched the San Diego Chargers crash and burn in their playoff game and the Chicago Bears succumb in the Super Bowl; but other than those two games I watched no NFL games.
Baseball...yawn city. I reluctantly went to a Padres game, more to hang with a buddy than to watch the game. In fact, dinner and the cigar were the highlights of the evening.
And these are teams that contend...that at least have a shot at winning it all. What about the poor wretches (I am a recovering Chicago Cubs fan) who support the perennial bottom dwellers of their respective professional sports leagues?
For the owners there is little incentive to dump millions into their teams. What with salary caps, TV contracts and revenue sharing, professional sports and Cuba remain the last bastions of socialism. As for the players on these teams, they seem to be suffering from Jimmy Carter's 1980's malaise.
A remedy? Relegation.
In the professional soccer (football) leagues of Europe teams are not guaranteed a berth at the highest level of the beautiful game. If the team finishes in one of the bottom spots the entire team is relegated to the next level. In England that means being relegated from the English Premeire league into the Championship League. Falter there and the team can be sent down to League One. The teams earn their way back into the higher levels by finishing at the top of their new leagues. Relegation and promotion. Redemption in sports.
Imagine an NBA team, rather than inventing injuries to star players in order to improve chances of scoring the top lottery pick, scrambling to stay out of the last four positions because that would mean relegation to the D League. Or the Washington Nationals (or better yet the New York Yankees) suddenly becoming a AAA ballclub. You might seem some hustle, some interest, and more importantly, consequences for "stinkin' up the joint."
Impractical? Yeah. But a guy can dream, right?
Other than the National Basketball Association, my interest in professional sports has waned to nearly nil. I relented last season and watched the San Diego Chargers crash and burn in their playoff game and the Chicago Bears succumb in the Super Bowl; but other than those two games I watched no NFL games.
Baseball...yawn city. I reluctantly went to a Padres game, more to hang with a buddy than to watch the game. In fact, dinner and the cigar were the highlights of the evening.
And these are teams that contend...that at least have a shot at winning it all. What about the poor wretches (I am a recovering Chicago Cubs fan) who support the perennial bottom dwellers of their respective professional sports leagues?
For the owners there is little incentive to dump millions into their teams. What with salary caps, TV contracts and revenue sharing, professional sports and Cuba remain the last bastions of socialism. As for the players on these teams, they seem to be suffering from Jimmy Carter's 1980's malaise.
A remedy? Relegation.
In the professional soccer (football) leagues of Europe teams are not guaranteed a berth at the highest level of the beautiful game. If the team finishes in one of the bottom spots the entire team is relegated to the next level. In England that means being relegated from the English Premeire league into the Championship League. Falter there and the team can be sent down to League One. The teams earn their way back into the higher levels by finishing at the top of their new leagues. Relegation and promotion. Redemption in sports.
Imagine an NBA team, rather than inventing injuries to star players in order to improve chances of scoring the top lottery pick, scrambling to stay out of the last four positions because that would mean relegation to the D League. Or the Washington Nationals (or better yet the New York Yankees) suddenly becoming a AAA ballclub. You might seem some hustle, some interest, and more importantly, consequences for "stinkin' up the joint."
Impractical? Yeah. But a guy can dream, right?
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