Mark LaFlamme – Fine dining and how to avoid it

Folks—

This week Mark LaFlamme discusses fine dining and how much he hates it. I can’t say that I agree with him as I enjoy going out to a nice restaurant and breaking bread with friends and relatives at that venue.

In fact, I was recently in Maui visiting two people I know who live there now and we all went together to a very fine restaurant—probably one of the best in Maui— and, according to one review, one of the finer restaurants in the country:  a place called the Lahaina Grill.

Yes, I finally made it over to Maui after a lifetime of having avoided going to it, as most people I know already have visited it.  People have told me time and again how wonderful the place is.  However, soon after I arrived there, I was left with the impression that is seemed a little like a cross between Disneyland and a banana republic.  While waiting for 45 minutes in the open air terminal for the baggage handlers to start off-loading the luggage onto the carousel, I was expecting to hear, and listened for, the sounds of real orangutans in the back and who were going to start unloading the bags.

In the SF Bay Area, and in the New York City/LI area, most drivers view something like a 60 mph speed limit as the minimum speed to drive on the road.  In Maui the maximum speed limit is 45 mph anywhere.  Frustratingly, many people drive less than 40 mph and in the left of the two available lanes on the “major” highways, so you oftentimes have to pass on the right if you want to get anywhere in reasonable time. And if there is just one lane each way, everyone can only go as fast as the slowest driver.

I think the road boulders motoring in Maui probably fall into two groups.  First, there are the older out-of-towners visiting from land-locked places like Kansas City.  (“Wow, look at those waves out there, Martha!”) .  In the second group are probably natives who just finished surfing, or are on their way to work at the airport as baggage handlers, and are thinking  “Braddah, da kine.  I’m in no hurry, mon.”

Getting back to restaurants:  “Why did the chicken cross the road?”  In my case, it was because I was in Maui meeting a friend for drinks and appetizers at a leisurely coastal restaurant.  Although not generally seen in places like San Jose or New York City, wild chickens run rampant in Maui.  One even hopped from the road, onto the open air dining area we were sitting at and ambled ominously towards the kitchen.  It almost seemed like a scene from an avian version of a Freddy Krueger film.  (“No-o-o, Henny Penny!  Don’t walk into there!”)

Although I didn’t partake of stereotypical Hawaiian dishes like poi or loco moco, I did have a wonderful dinner at Lahaina Grill, dining on a fine center cut beef filet mignon with whole grain mustard port wine demi-glace and herbed mashed potatoes béarnaise.   Although wildly expensive it was a delightful culinary experience, enhanced by the presence of two friends.  Still, when the price of dinner, dessert and wine for three people approaches the cost of the Secret Service detail escorting Trump through Mar-A-Lago during one of his many golf outings, you know that you’re at a high-end establishment.

Nonetheless, the beautiful coastal vistas all around the island is something to behold even if the tropical climate (80+ deg with high humidity) renders your hair looking like that of Little Rascals’ Buckwheat and your armpits reminiscent of the Florida Everglades.  Despite that, I hope to make another visit to that remote island in the Pacific again.

But next time when dining out there, I think I’ll try the “Poulet Tué Sur La Route Mornay” (“Roadkill Chicken with a Mornay Sauce”)—I’m sure it’s delicious, especially if they trim away the parts that taste like tire rubber.

—– Peter

Street Talk – Fine dining and how to avoid it

 

By Mark LaFlamme,  Sun Journal

 

You people with your blooming onions, your volcano bowls, your various meats on sticks.

I see you in there. You’re cracking jokes with the waitress, hitting her with soaring one-liners such as, “My name is Bob and I’ll be your customer tonight!”

You’re buttering bread, negotiating over side dishes, ordering a fifth refill of chips and salsa. You’ve got the drink menu in one hand, your phone in the other and a napkin tucked into your shirt because you’re sure it will amuse the waitress – surely she’s never seen THAT one before.

Around the table, your dinner mates are agonizing over their menus. Has anyone tried the prime rib? How are the quesadillas? Does the tuna melt come with French fries and if so, are they straight or crinkle cut?

You put down your phone just long enough to say something meaningful to one of your dinner mates, but just then the waitress is back to refill your water glasses. You forget what you were saying at once because when the waitress is near, you’ve got to get back into character and unleash more of those hilarious one-liners on her. She loves this stuff, you’re sure of it. You have her so charmed, she’ll let you get away with side dish substitutions although it’s clearly prohibited.

The room sings with the sword-fight sounds of forks, spoons and knives clanging together, an accompaniment to the ceaseless, muttering buzz of conversation from three dozen tables. Occasionally there comes uproarious laughter from a raucous group of diners or the unhappy wail of a screaming baby. Chances are good that at some point, a squadron of waiters will gather around a table to sing happy birthday to some red-faced schmuck who looks like he might throw up his fish taco from sheer embarrassment.

 “Glad it ain’t MY birthday,” you’ll mutter through a mouthful of bread.

Eventually, your waitress will come back with her little pad and paper. Everyone at the table is ready to offer up their orders, but then your floundering cousin Louis starts having a last-minute panic attack about his decisions. Does he really want the pasta fagioli? What does he really know about fagioli, anyway? Maybe the minestrone would be a safer bet. He has no idea what’s in minestrone, but it sure is fun to say.

So, the waitress wanders off, her notepad still virginal, while Louis gets his act together. Everyone has tired of trying to talk over the clamor so they all go back to their salsa-smeared phones.

Sooner or later, food will come and the food will be good. Or it will be bad. Or it will be somewhere in between and you’ll spend the rest of your dining experience poking at your entree while sneaking peaks at the food on nearby tables. Gosh, that guy’s roast lamb looks good and are those crinkle-cut fries he has on the side? You bonehead, why did you go with the chicken frittata when there was lamb to be had? What the hell IS a frittata, anyway? And why did you get peas with it instead of fries?

Diner’s remorse is rampant around your table – poor Louis looks near suicidal after giving in to the siren song of the fagioli – and a gloomy mood falls over the group. The gloom is not eased any when the waitress returns to ask how you’d like to take the check. All together? Or separately?

It’s a conundrum, all right. You were feeling generous when you first came in, but now you’re having second thoughts. Do you really want to take on an equal split when all you got was a stupid frittata and some limp peas? Separate checks would be swell. Better yet, maybe you could slip off to the restroom to powder your nose while the others work out the payment plan.

But ah, God has a way of punishing weasels like you. While you’re in the little boy’s room skipping out on the check, your hand will ever so slightly brush up against a faucet and that’s all she wrote. You’ve contracted some kind of ultra mutated super flu and . . . well, I hope you enjoyed that frittata because you’re going to see it again in about an hour. Enjoy, ya deadbeat.

And that’s your meal. And all of this noise about your dining experience was just my windy way of telling you my sad, sad truth: I don’t like eating in restaurants.

There. I’ve said it. Can you ever look at me the same way again? As far as I know, I’m the only person in the world over the age of 2 who doesn’t like dining in restaurants. I don’t like it any time, but I ESPECIALLY don’t like it when an important talk is at hand, or when I’m meeting someone for the first time.

I’ll never understand why people prefer to get acquainted with one another in a setting where much of what you do involves cramming food into your mouth and wiping stuff off your chin. First impressions mean a lot, bro, and one misplaced shred of spinach can forever alter a stranger’s perception of you. Do you really want to propose to your lady love with bits of corned beef hash stuck to the corners of your mouth?

Going out for drinks? That I perfectly understand. One can be slick and suave when all he has to do is take occasional sips from a glass and enjoy the uninhibiting glow that follows. You can be Cary Grant cool if all you have to manage is a tumbler of good bourbon and maybe one of those tiny umbrella things. Add endless rounds of food to the mix and Cary Grant becomes Jim Carrey – there’s no way you’re getting a second date, Jim, with the crusted remains of that New England fried shrimp all up in your beard like that.

When I go to a restaurant, I feel trapped: trapped by the strangers around me, trapped by the five-page menu and trapped by the endless questions of the waitress. Baked or mashed? Medium or rare? Grated or crushed? Al dente or al… — the opposite of that? I mean, come on, yo. Is this dinner or a sobriety test?

And then, when you finally make it through the dinner menu gauntlet, they’ll come back with fresh pads and start asking you about desserts. Straight or a la mode? Fudge or brownie style? With sliced strawberries or without? Permanent or henna?

Whenever those options start flying, I expect that sooner or later, they’re going to transition into hard questions about war plans and underworld things, because clearly this is a trained interrogator hovering over my table.

“We know you are working with the resistance,” the waitress will say, untucking her apron to reveal the .45 stuffed into her belt. “So, I’ll ask you one more time. Will you be having linguine this evening? Or penne? Do choose wisely, my friend.”

Why, oh why didn’t I just order the minestrone!

Mark LaFlamme– Street Talk: My eye! Adventures in fishing

Folks—

Sun Journal (Maine) humor columnist Mark LaFlamme unreels a few tales about a few ill-fated fishing trips he has taken.  After reading his column you might agree with me that he’s the angler’s equivalent of a bull in a china shop.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a seasoned or expert fisherman.  Generally, my idea of fishing involves using a fork and trying to get the last gherkin from the bottom of the jar.  However, there are some isolated instances when I have drowned a few worms in the pursuit of some piscatorial prizes.  Fortunately, in those rare cases, I have not impaled anyone with a wildly swinging hook.

I think my earliest experience with fishing dates back to when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn.  Most people don’t usually think of fishing when one thinks about the concrete jungle that is New York City, but it has over 500 miles of waterfront coastline with over 100 miles of it in Brooklyn alone.

One of the neighborhood kids often went to Canarsie Pier in Brooklyn to fish off of it and I recall maybe having done that with him once or twice when I was a mere lad.  Being that it was in New York City, my expectation was that I might land an old tire, an odd boot or perhaps even the elusive corpse of Jimmy Hoffa. My acquaintance mostly was expecting porgies or striped bass. However, I don’t recall ever having caught anything, except maybe a case of sunburn, which is just as well since the water in New York’s Jamaica Bay is not exactly pristine and pure.  While any caught fish might not be suitable for eating without first chasing it down with heavy metal chelating agents, I’m sure they would make good glow-in-the-dark night lights.

Another fishing outing involved a friend of mine and me who, during our road trip to his family’s house in Salt Lake City, stopped at a lake in nearby Idaho to cast out from the shore.  Again, I didn’t catch anything that was good eating.  The mosquitoes, which were there in abundance, however, found good eating in my arms and legs.

Then there was the time when I made my first foray into deep-sea fishing, which required the added expense of going out on a charter boat.   This was with another friend of mine off of San Simeon on the central coast of California and the target prey that day was rockfish.  In this type of fishing, you bait several spaced out hooks and unreel a couple hundred feet of line into the water.  This takes longer than you might think.  You wait an appropriate amount of time—usually the time it takes for the Charley Horse-type pain in your arms and wrist to subside—when you reel it in to see what might have gotten caught on your hooks.

In this outing, I actually caught a few rockfish.  But, because they are caught so deep and you pull them up to the surface rather quickly, they appear with their swim bladders inflated and extended out from the decompression.  It almost looks like they are sticking their tongues out at you for having the temerity to pluck them out of the Pacific.  After the fatigue of your arms and wrists abates, it’s time to rebait and go another round.  All in all, although we did leave that boat with several fish suitable for eating, I found the experience a tad boring, especially since you don’t really feel any kind of tug or pull on the line—because the line is so deep–  when you actually hook a fish.

But, on the plus side, there was beer on board, so there was some redeeming aspect to the activity.

— Peter

 

Street Talk: My eye! Adventures in fishing

By Mark LaFlamme

Sun Journal

 

So, you want to take me fishing.

Sure, we could do that, my friend. But before you set me up with worms and a bait bucket, you should probably have a talk with my old pal Keith. One-eyebrow Keith, they call him, on account of the unfortunate incident with a WildEye Spin Bait back in the day.

Or have a conversation with my former pal Royston, who walks kind of funny even today after the purely accidental mishap with the Hula Grub on the banks of the Kennebec River.

Talk to Randy about the weird, banana-shaped scar on his chin. Or to Rusty, who was the victim of the incident with the Jitterbug that was totally not my fault. It was a weird gust of wind. The sun was in my eyes. There must have been something wrong with one of those 12 or 14 Löwenbräus I drank to get through the trauma of impaling worms.

Fishing? Yeah, I’ll go fishing. It is a sport that requires calm, patience and a meditative precision, and let’s face it. That’s pretty much my wheelhouse.

You know, for the first five minutes. After that — after SIX WHOLE MINUTES OR MORE without seeing a single perch, bass or giant squid — I start getting restless. I become bored and impatient. Call me an oversized child, if you want, but I have never been one of those “it’s just nice to be outside” types who can sit on a rock for six hours staring at a bobber that doesn’t so much as twitch.

“But Mark,” said my old friend Scotty, shortly before the nasty affair with the Ugly Stik. “Fishing is all about communing with nature. It’s spiritual. It’s about connecting with the living world and finding peace, not only within the world but within yourself.”

It was a profound expression of love for the pastime and then BAM! A few seconds later, poor Scotty is facedown in the bait bucket and there is a three-pronged Rooster Tail lure sticking out of his hind parts. I don’t know what happened, I swear. I had been sitting calmly on that rock when it occurred to me that maybe the fish would be more apt to bite if I climbed a tree and cast from a high branch. I mean, that’s straight physics right there.

It would have worked, too, if not for the yellow jacket nest and the madness that followed. Long story short, Scotty ended up limping into the emergency room for a Rooster Tail extraction, and to this day his breath still smells like live bait.

Lack of patience with the rod tends to lead me to boredom-inspired convulsions of creativity, and goodness knows that’s always trouble. I’ll try casting with my left hand just to keep things interesting. I’ll splash around in the water and make fish sounds in hopes of luring prizewinners out of hiding. The things I’ve done with crankbaits are considered crimes in six U.S. states.

Have me along as a fishing companion and, at best, you’ll end up with a tangled line, busted reel, drowned tackle box and bait breath. Chances are equally good you’ll end up lacerated, impaled, contused, concussed, arrested and banned forever from lake water sports of all kinds.

My wife, who thoroughly enjoys angling, took me along once to her favorite fishing spot. I tried to enjoy it, I really did. I practiced patience and calm, and I achieved a level of meditative reflection that would have impressed the most-disciplined yogi.

You know. For the first five minutes.

ME: “I’m bored. There are no fish in this pond.”

WIFE: “We’ve only been here six minutes. Why don’t you just relax and try to. …”

ME: “Bet you I can climb this tree without any shoes on.”

WIFE: “Please don’t climb the tree. Just sit back and. …”

ME: “Hey! Is that a beaver? I think it is! I’m gonna swim out there and wrestle it!”

WIFE: “No! Put your clothes back on!”

She only got banned from that one lake, so I never understood why she got so mad about it.

Fishing is one of those things I enjoy as a concept. In my head, I see myself out there lazing on a warm rock under a summer sun. I’ve got my dungarees rolled to the knees, a blade of long grass clamped between my teeth and a hat festooned with fishing lures pulled down over my brow. In these happy daydreams, I can spend long hours becoming one with nature, and nobody gets pierced, punctured or otherwise deformed in life-altering ways.

Are the fish biting in my imagination? Who cares! Fishing is about communing with nature. About embracing the living world and connecting spiritually with the ways of our forefathers. Or something.

My old friend Rusty tried to explain it to me one time, but he’s got that missing lower lip due to the tragic incident with the hornpout.

Seriously, he only lost that one lip. I never understood why he got so mad about it.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Don’t let him near your midge nymph.

Dave Barry– Classic ’00: I ate so much on my cruise they used me for the anchor

Folks—

It’s been awhile since I posted one of my blog entries—partly out of writers block and partly out of inertia, I suppose. But here in a reprised column by Dave Barry where he describes his experience on a sea cruise.

It’s been quite some time since I have been on a sea cruise, but I was on one once, about 25 years ago, on one of those Carnival Cruises that spanned 7 days and 5 islands in the Caribbean. At the time, the Festivale, at almost 33,000 gross tons, was not one of their largest ships but it seemed pretty large to me at the time. However, I understand that current and future ships are or will be much larger, having more tonnage than even Donald Trump, with ships reaching 185,000 gross tons.

People often took these cruises to untie the tensional knots that working a full-time, 40+ hour-a-week instills in many people. Although I was much younger than I am now, I seem to recall that it seemed to take at least 3 or 4 days to get to the point where you started to feel some of the work-induced stress to melt away. Either it took that long for psychic knots that accumulated over the year to relax or maybe it just took that long to get the blood alcohol level high enough. It seemed that they pushed the colorful, fruity, umbrella-adorned rum-laced drinks a lot.

And lots of food, too.

As Dave Barry notes below, food factors heavily in cruise life, and not just during the three standard meal times. Buffet tables of food and desserts were as omnipresent as presidential tweets, and just as difficult to escape from. And those visits to the islands—in our case, St Thomas, St Maartin, Barbados, Martinique and Domenica— could add to the problem.

Sure, there was snorkeling in St Thomas that I did and which was enjoyable and in water so blue and clear, hikes through unspoiled lush and wooded areas of Dominica, binational history in St Maarten, snooty French-speaking waiters in Martinique and dancing in Barbados, but because Coca-Cola appears to cost more than rum in the Caribbean, a simple rum and Coke turned out to be highly fortified.

Put another way, a cruise ship guest might get on board as a passenger but there was a good chance that after one of these sea faring extravaganzas, he or she will end up leaving as cargo.

—- Peter

 

Classic ’00: I ate so much on my cruise they used me for the anchor

BY DAVE BARRY

This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, January 30, 2000

I am a hearty seafaring type of individual, so recently I spent a week faring around the sea aboard the largest cruise ship in the world that has not yet hit an iceberg. It is called the Voyager, and it weighs 140,000 tons, which is approximately the amount I ate in desserts alone.

The Voyager sails out of Miami every week carrying 3,200 passengers determined to relax or die trying. The ship has (I am not making any of this up) an ice-skating rink, a large theater, a shopping mall, a rock-climbing wall and a nine-hole miniature golf course. We have come a long way indeed from the days when the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower, which – hard as it is to imagine today – had no skating rink and only four golf holes.

While aboard the ship, we passengers engaged in a wide range of traditional cruise-ship activities, including eating breakfast, snacking, eating lunch, drinking complex rum-based beverages while lying on deck absorbing solar radiation until we glowed like exit signs, snacking some more, eating dinner, eating more snacks and passing out face-down in the pate section of the midnight buffet. Needless to say I did not attempt to climb the rock wall, which is good because the resulting disaster would have made for a chilling newspaper headline:

CRUISE SHIP EVACUATED AS MAN FALLS, EXPLODES; HUNDREDS SPATTERED BY SEMIDIGESTED SHRIMP

The only stressful part of our shipboard routine was looking at photographs of ourselves. When you’re on a cruise, photographers constantly pop up and take pictures of you; they put these on display in hopes that you’ll buy them as souvenirs. At night, my wife and I would join the throng of passengers looking through the photos, hoping to find a nice flattering shot of ourselves, and then suddenly – YIKES – we’d be confronted with this terrifying image of two bloated, bright-red sluglike bodies with our faces. Jabba and Mrs. Hutt go to sea!

When every passenger had attained roughly the same body weight as a Buick Riviera, the ship would stop at a Caribbean island, and the passengers would waddle ashore to experience the traditional local culture, by which I mean shop for European jewelry and watches. I frankly don’t know why it makes economic sense for a tourist from Montana to fly to Miami, get on a ship and sail to Jamaica for the purpose of purchasing a watch made in Switzerland, but apparently it does, because shopping is very important to cruise passengers. If these people ever get to Mars, they WILL expect to find jewelry stores.

The other thing you do when your ship is in port is take guided tours to Local Points of Interest. Under international law, every tour group must include one tourist who has the IQ of sod. In Jamaica, we toured a plantation, and our group included a woman whose brain operated on some kind of tape delay, as we see from this typical exchange between her and our guide:

GUIDE: These are banana plants, which produce bananas. You can see the bananas growing on these banana plants.

WOMAN: (in a loud voice): What kind of plants are these?

GUIDE: Banana.

WOMAN: Huh! (To her husband:) Frank, these are banana plants!

The woman repeated virtually everything the guide said to Frank. One day he will kill her with a kitchen appliance.

But I am proud to say that winner of the award for Biggest Tourist Doofus was: me. What happened was, during the tour, a man demonstrated how he could climb a coconut tree using only a small rope made from twisted banana fibers. When he came down, he showed me the rope, and I, out of politeness, pretended to be interested in it, although in fact it was, basically, a rope. The man handed it to me and suggested I might want to “take it home to the kids.” I frankly doubted that any modern Nintendo-raised American child would be thrilled by such a gift (“Look, Timmy! A rope!”). But I pretended to be grateful. Then the man told me that such ropes USUALLY sell for $15 (he did not say where), but he would let it go for $10. And so, unable to figure out how to escape, I gave him $10. I imagine the other plantation workers laughed far into the night when he told them. (“He gave you $10 for the ROPE?” ”Yes! He must be even stupider than the tape-delay woman!”)

But don’t get me wrong: I truly enjoyed the cruise. It was fun and relaxing, and it gave me a rare chance, amid all the hustle and bustle of my busy life, to pick up a substantial amount of body mass. Cruising is also romantic, so let me just say this to you couples out there: If you’re looking for a way to rekindle the flame in your relationship, I’ll sell you my rope.

© 2000, Dave Barry

 

Street Talk– Mark LaFlamme: It was the night before Christmas and I got nothing

Folks—

Happy New Year to everyone.

My original thought about the departure of 2018: “Good riddance.”

My follow up sentiment to others of “here’s hoping that 2019 is better than 2018, but that is a low bar” seemed to be echoed by a number of others that I know.

Below is a recent column by Mark LaFlamme, humor columnist at the Sun Journal, who is bemoaning his sense of loss at what he didn’t get for Christmas: displays of bad behavior and raucous brawls by Christmas shoppers that could serve as fodder for some story idea for his column. In that sense, for him, 2018 was ending on a disappointing note. (But he did have a glimmer of hope by the end of his story!)

Ignoring for the moment the chaos and dysfunction in our current administration, one thing that is emblematic of how 2018 also sucked is the knowledge that while many of us now, myself included, are back at work after the long holiday hiatus, I happen to have three friends or relatives who are now starting the new year with their first day of unemployment. And I know a whole group of people who were suddenly let go at a former employer up in Roseville (CA) who axed 50% of their nearly 500 employees less than three weeks before Christmas, so most of them are starting the new year looking for work, too.

It’s ironic, too, since recent labor statistics suggest that we’re enjoying a low level of unemployment—about 3.7% in December 2018—which is considered an acceptable level. However, “an acceptable level of unemployment” probably just means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.

So, clearly—even as early as the first week of January—there is much room for improvement for 2019. But having the year starting off inauspiciously like this might be in line with my philosophy about always making my dental appointments early in the morning: I figure if you get poked and scraped in your mouth by sharp metal objects first thing in the morning it’ll probably be the worst thing that happens to you all day so the rest of the day has to be better than that. In a similar vein (no pun intended!), perhaps starting out unemployed means that every direction is likely to be up from there?

I’ve been there before, i.e. unemployed, several times in the past so I know it’s no picnic and I truly feel for those that I know who are so affected. As Slappy White once quipped, “the trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you’re on the job.” Leslie Nielsen also observed, “doing nothing is very hard to do… you never know when you’re finished.”

Still in all, despite a disappointing start to the new year, I wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2019. And to those who that I know who are starting it unemployed, I say to them: continue to have faith and hope in your job search. In at least two occasions in the past, I started a new job during the month of January, and I changed jobs at least 4 or 5 times despite being past an age when many thought my chances of finding new employment would be dismal at best. And several of those opportunities came out of left-field or from some sudden or unexpected sources, so you might not even see where your next opportunity is coming from right now.

Not unlike that time when, as a kid, I found my pet frog– months after he escaped– dried and desiccated under one of the radiators in our apartment, or when my college friend found a pair of his underwear frozen in the freezer of our dorm suite.

But those are stories for another time.

— Peter

 

Street Talk

Posted December 25, 2018

Mark LaFlamme: It was the night before Christmas and I got nothing

Mark LaFlamme, Sun Journal

So, I was desperate for column ideas on a Monday afternoon that also happened to be Christmas Eve.

No brainer, right? I’d just head to the stores, behold the eye-bulging madness of last-minute shopping and let that column write itself.

Maybe it would be a hair-pulling, eye-gouging brawl in the toy aisle over the last Princess Cadance My Little Pony on the shelf.

Maybe it would be a young father reduced to tears by the realization that the 9-terabyte Nintendo XBox Annihilator his rug rat demanded for Christmas cost more than he makes in a month.

Perhaps a mall Santa would hit the Cutty Sark a little too hard and would go weaving into Kmart to sing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” pants-less in the lawn and garden section.

Late afternoon in the stores on Christmas Eve? Oh, yeah. That’s when holiday push becomes Yuletide shove and anything is possible. I’ve seen cantaloupes hurled like bowling balls down the checkout lanes. I’ve seen exhausted last-minute shoppers (young men with new girlfriends, mostly) curled into fetal positions in the ladies apparel section.

I’ve seen depraved acts at the produce bins, abominations in the home and bath department and drunken roundhouse kicks delivered in that weird section that offers cheese gift kits, Old Spice bathing sets and a remarkable variety of bath oil beads to the truly desperate Christmas shopper.

I’ve seen fire, my friends. I’ve seen rain. On Christmas Eve, the stores turn into scenes from “The Walking Dead,” with zombies who are out for expensive electronics, bottles of perfume and last-minute stocking stuffers instead of human flesh.

If you’re a handsome and desperate column writer like myself, often you don’t even have to go into the stores to get what you’re after. Sometimes fights over parking spaces turn crowded sections of the lot into a minivan version of bumper cars. Sometimes you’ll see inappropriate behavior with shopping carts. There is often nudity, drunkenness and occasional vomiting as Christmas spirit slams into desperation and human nature goes dark.

Who among us can forget the unfortunate incident with the store mannequin and the mistletoe from 1997? I still have nightmares.

So on this Monday that was also Christmas Eve, I went to the stores with the high hopes of a freckle-faced youngster who suspects that he’s getting a mountain of loot on Christmas morning.

Instead, I was like poor Ralphie when he got the pink bunny outfit instead of a BB gun. What I found at the stores was just horribly deflating. There were so many available parking spots outside Walmart, not one round of minivan bumper cars was played. Inside the store, the aisles were not crammed with surly shoppers, the shopping carts were upright and nobody was hurling fruit.

The lines were not long. Tempers were not flaring. Even the electronics department, which normally looks like the first 20 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” around Christmastime, was unusually sedate.

“What’s going on?” I asked a man I encountered near women’s shoes. “Where are all the desperate shoppers? Where are the fights? Why isn’t Santa singing pants-less over by the garden rakes?”

The fellow looked at me like I was some crazy stranger in the women’s shoe department.

“Who goes shopping on Christmas Eve?” he said. “Just about everybody shops online now. Why go out to the stores when you can do it all from home and get two-day shipping? Ever heard of Amazon? Geesh. Now, get out of this changing room, I’m using it.”

I went to Lowe’s and Kmart and Big Lots. Same thing everywhere: just normal, non-frenzied shopping and no roundhouse kicks to be seen. I tried the grocery stores, figuring the last-minute runs for booze and Christmas dinner fixings would at least mean a small tsunami of holiday hooliganism.

Nope. Just Monday afternoon shopping with nothing much to indicate that the clock was ticking down to the hour of Santa. There was no Christmas music. There were no shrieking arguments over the last tub of French onion dip. To me, it didn’t feel like Christmas at all.

Near the checkout lanes, I encountered a woman in a Santa hat. She appeared confused and was gazing at everyone she passed in hopes of recognizing a glint of the old holiday madness she had come to love.

Our eyes met. Silent communication seemed to pass between us. Where were the panicked mobs, we wondered? Where was the insanity?

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Merry Christmas to you.”

Out in the lot, she rammed my car with her own and screamed at me to get out of her parking spot.

It was the perfect gift.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer who has always depended on the kindness of strangers. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

Dave Barry– Classic ’98: Of radio earpieces, unwashed laundry

Folks—

In this week’s reprised Dave Barry column titled “Of Radio Earpieces, Unwashed Laundry” Dave points out, among other things, the perils of being on the road too long with a suitcase full of unwashed laundry.

Going without washing my laundry too long is something I try to avoid doing. Besides, I find doing laundry takes on meditative overtones where I seem to do some of my most creative and self-reflective thinking, second only to sitting on the toilet.

This last Sunday night was, is it often is, “Laundry Eve” for me. I remember one other such laundry night when I was wondering about how many socks might be mate-less. Dryers seem to subsist on a steady diet of quarters and socks and I was envisioning a day and age when these voracious machines would finally be deprived of such fluffy fodder.

I figured that if we could get the Burlington Fabrics people together with the underarm deodorant people we could alleviate this modern-day problem. They could collaborate and create a product that one simply sprayed on their feet and that would dry to a fabric-like consistency and could be peeled off at the end of the day. It would be something I would name and market simply as (you guessed it!) “Sock-In-A-Can”. Never again would anyone worry about what to do with that lone sock that remained after some hungry dryer ate its corresponding partner.

It also dawned on me that if we could also get the Desenex people involved in this revolutionary new product we could banish foot fungus forever: Athlete’s Foot would suffer the same fate as polio and smallpox. If, during the darkened hours of early morning, you had to search for that matching sock, no longer would you have to fret about wearing unmatched socks. You’d just reach for that can labelled “BLUE” and every pair would match in hue and tint.

If a visiting friend asks to borrow a pair of socks, you’d no longer have to be concerned about the possible spread of foot fungus. You currently spray a fresh layer of antiperspirant everyday, right? (At least I hope you do!). Why not a fresh layer of sock? No longer would anyone have to darn a damn sock again.

Taking this a step further, if they made a thinner nylon version of it exclusively for women, they could call it “Stocking-In-A-Can”. Never again would a woman have to apply that stopgap measure using nail polish to prevent a budding run from propagating: every pair is guaranteed to be run-free. And if a woman goes on a gastronomic binge, she’d never have to exclaim, “Oh, no!—my thighs are too fat for my stockings!”: every pair is a sure fit.

For obvious health and technical reasons “Pantyhose-In-A-Can” is out of the question—it’s difficult to get the cotton crotch to come out of the can at precisely the right time– but the prospects for success are limitless. I can go on about this idea and about how they probably laughed at disposable diapers, bottled water and frozen dinners, too.

But, for now, I think I’ll just put a sock in it.

— Peter

 

Classic ’98: Of radio earpieces, unwashed laundry

BY DAVE BARRY

 This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, December 6, 1998

So I’m sitting in a CNN studio in Los Angeles. They have smeared makeup on my face so it will look naturally orange on television. A man named Mario has inserted an earpiece into my ear, which has me a little concerned because, not to brag, or anything, but I am the Mark McGwire of earwax production. I’m afraid that Mario will need a winch to get that thing back out of there. I’m also concerned about whether Mario cleans this earpiece between guests, and what other guests it was inserted into before me. Henry Kissinger, for example. Yuck.

The earpiece enables me to hear a voice coming from some other city. Atlanta, maybe, or New York, or possibly Addis Ababa. I’m on a book tour, and the way it works is, you go to a city, and then you go to a studio, or you get on a phone, and you talk to somebody in some OTHER city. “Never let the author talk to anybody who is in the same city as the author,” is the first rule of book tours. The second rule is, “Never give the author a chance to do his laundry.” I’ve reached the point where I’m terrified that when I go through airport security – which I sometimes do several times a day – I will be asked to open my suitcase, and it will be like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when they open the Ark of the Covenant and the horrible evil spirits come out and dissolve the Nazis, except instead it will be my undershorts that come hurtling out, shrieking, to attack the security personnel with the murderous fury of unwashed laundry that has spent way too long in a cramped airless environment with only its own disgusting self for company.

So anyway, I’m sitting there with the thing in my ear, getting ready to talk on CNN about my book. I can see on the TV monitor that former congressperson Pat Schroeder is on there, and former congressperson Elizabeth Holtzman, and some other political experts, and they’re talking about waitress moms, who have replaced soccer moms as this year’s Important Voting Bloc, the result being that for a brief period before the elections it was almost impossible to get a cup of coffee in a restaurant because the waitresses were all surrounded by TV news crews demanding to know how they felt about Bosnia.

So I’m sort of half-listening to the experts talk about waitress moms, waiting for them to finish so I can talk about my book. Suddenly, I see MY orange face on the screen, and the voice in my ear is saying, to my horror, that we’re about to hear MY views on: waitress moms. And of course I have no views on waitress moms. The issue that was actually on my mind at that moment was the risk of catching an earwax-transmitted disease from Henry Kissinger. So I pretty much just started blithering into the camera. I have very little recollection of what I actually said; I believe my basic point was that we should just turn the whole federal government over to waitress moms, because at least they can add.

The previous day I had been on a morning-TV show in San Francisco, and the other two guests were, I swear, a Siberian lynx named Oksana and a man who was billed as Eyebrow Architect Mica Klauber. Oksana mainly prowled around looking predatory, as if to say, “Try to put makeup on ME, and you can kiss your larynx goodbye.” Meanwhile, in an interview with the cheerful TV host, Eyebrow Architect Klauber was discussing, dramatically, the Do’s and Don’ts of tweezing. For example: “Don’t just tweeze straight across! That’s too much like a shrub!”

Speaking of the upper face: Several TV makeup persons told me that the big trend in California – half the population of Los Angeles has had this procedure done – is to have a plastic surgeon inject botulism toxin into your forehead. Really. The toxin paralyzes certain facial muscles, so you can’t frown, even if you try. This makes you wrinkle-free and younger-looking. Of course, it also limits you to the same range of facial expressions as a lizard; this is why, more and more, you will notice that TV and movie personalities are indicating their emotional state by waving their entire heads around, or darting out their tongues, as if to catch passing insects.

I don’t know about you, but I would never have this procedure done. If I were a spy, and the enemy captured me, and they said, “Tell us what you know, or we will INJECT BOTULISM TOXIN IN YOUR FACE!” I would be talking faster than Richard Simmons on amphetamines. Yet Californians are PAYING for it.

Speaking of weird, I had a fascinating conversation with three guys on radio station KLBJ-FM in Austin, Texas. (Naturally, in accordance with Book Tour Rules, I was not IN Austin, Texas, when I talked with them; I was in Chicago.) These three guys – Dale Dudley, Brother Hezekiah and Jeff “Yetti” Gish – all swallowed dimes, and then had their listeners bet on who would be the first radio personality to have his dime emerge from the end that he does not talk into the microphone with. They even brought a mobile X-ray machine into the radio studio so they could find out who was leading. This is definitely a guy thing; women view this type of competition as incredibly stupid. Then again, women tweeze.

Me, I would never swallow a dime for any reason, unless it was specifically listed on my book-tour schedule. I do whatever they tell me to, in hopes that some day they’ll let me go home, see my family, get some rest, and – above all – call the bomb-disposal unit to take care of my suitcase.

©1998 Dave Barry

Dave Barry– Classic ’98: The eye of the storm

Folks—

As many of you know, humor columnist Dave Barry has lived in Florida for decades.  In this 1998 column that he recently reprised, he relates his experiences with dealing with common problems that plagues that state:  hanging chads, corrupt politicians, drug trade-fueled shootings, bugs large enough to saddle up, and legions of terrible elderly drivers.

No, actually, what I’m referring to is hurricanes—but those other things make Florida an interesting place to live, too.  Dave Barry points out how the people in this weird state get even weirder in the face of an upcoming hurricane—and Dave Barry is not immune to that weirdness himself.  But weirdness is not just limited to those denizens of The Sunshine State– there is enough insanity to go around elsewhere in the country.

Take, for instance, a recent situation that I encountered.

Although I’m not currently romantically involved with anyone at the time, I have a number of “gal pals” that I sometimes catch up with for some events or dinner, etc.   Some I have met from various social or networking circles, and some possibly even briefly dated long ago. I had suggested getting together for dinner with one such friend not too long ago.  She suggested San Pedro Square in downtown San Jose because they have music and, in her words, “many foods to choose from.”  Sounds great, I said, so she suggested 7pm.

I got there a little before 7pm and sat at the Market Bar nursing a glass of wine as I waited.  A few minutes before our appointed time she texted that she was “heading out” and suggested that I eat in the meantime but I replied saying that I would wait until she arrived.  When she finally showed up at 7:30, she mildly admonished me for not having gotten an outdoor table since they all fill up quickly for the music.

“I was waiting to have dinner with you– what looks good to you for dinner?” I asked her.  She replied, “Oh, I don’t like to eat past 6pm! You have dinner and I’ll just get some dessert.” That’s a little like making a date to go play miniature golf together and then, while at the counter renting a club and balls, she says something like, “Oh, I hurt myself last week so I can’t lift my arm.  You just play.”

Something similar happened when we went to a concert a few weeks prior.  When we discussed where to get a bite to eat a day or two before the concert, she told me in no uncertain terms why she doesn’t like to eat at the venue because they are so expensive there, so getting something off-site beforehand would be a better idea.  However, when it came to the day of the concert, she suggested that I should “get something to eat beforehand” off-site since she had already eaten.  Apparently, when she was extolling the virtues of buying dinner off-site, she was mostly speaking philosophically– not exactly a “rebel without a cause”, insomuch as a “rebel without an appetite.”

So when me told me that she wasn’t planning to have dinner, too, this most recent time—after her sounding irritated that I didn’t get a table by the band outside—I said to her, “This is the second time you have done this to me:  meet for dinner and not have dinner.”

She made a 180-degree turn and, without a word, darted away from me—no doubt hiding from the shame and embarrassment she was likely feeling from her being half an hour late and then pulling this quick switcheroo on me.  No, of course, I’m just kidding—she just left.

I was a little surprised that I wasn’t angry by this. Actually, I found myself smiling a little from the weirdness of it, so I got something to take out and headed home.  But I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised– when we dated briefly, about eight or more years ago– this is the same person who also yelled at me for buying the wrong size souvenir T-shirt for her when I came back from visiting the NYC area, which I also wrote about a few years ago.

As you can see, it doesn’t necessarily take a hurricane to make people act irrationally, and you don’t even have to live in Florida.  Of course, there may be some other extenuating circumstances that I am not aware of that might make me eat my words here.

But I don’t like to eat words after 6pm, so that would have to be earlier in the day.

— Peter

 

Six-year-old Jonathan Lopez rests as his mom and brother shop for supplies ahead of Hurricane Georges. CANDACE BARBOT MIAMI HERALD FILE

Classic ’98: The eye of the storm

By DAVE BARRY

This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, November 8, 1998

No doubt you’ve been waiting to hear about my harrowing experiences during Hurricane Georges. The worst moment came when my body was being tossed around violently, attacked by savage, uncontrollable forces of terrifying power. This happened in the supermarket two days before Georges arrived.

Going to the supermarket is a tradition for us hurricane veterans in the Miami area. When we hear that a hurricane is coming, we calmly and efficiently implement our Hurricane Preparation Plan, which is: (1) Panic; and (2) Buy random stuff.

One thing we always buy is bleach. Even if we already have — and many of us do — 25 bottles of bleach at home, we buy more. We have no idea why; we never actually use it. Maybe we secretly believe that the hurricane is afraid of bleach. Or maybe Clorox hires actors to go to supermarkets, posing as hurricane veterans and loudly remarking, “After Hurricane Andrew, the thing that saved our lives was bleach!” Whatever the cause, there’s always a desperate, shoving mob in the bleach aisle, and if you’re lucky enough to actually get a bottle, you must guard your shopping cart with firearms (which, in Miami, are sold in the firearms aisle).

Once you have your bleach, you race frantically around the supermarket buying a massive supply of Emergency Hurricane Food, defined as “food that you will never actually consume, even if the alternative is to eat your sofa.” You find yourself fighting with people for the last dust-covered can of Del Monte Lima Beans With Prune Parts in Hearty Clam Broth. During this phase, the supermarket employees often play pranks on the shoppers (“I put out a dozen cans labeled `Sheep Vomit,’ and they were gone in SECONDS!”).

The supermarket frenzy is one of the most dangerous times in any hurricane. I was almost struck by an elderly woman pushing a shopping cart containing bleach and at least 7,000 pounds of cat food at a sustained velocity of 28 miles per hour (the National Weather Service defines this as a “Category 4 Shopper”).

Finally I made it home, where I implemented the next phase of the Hurricane Preparation Plan: watching the TV weather experts demonstrate, using meteorological science and state-of-the-art satellite and computer technology, that they have no idea what is going on. They stand in front of their giant, complex weather maps and say things like: “. . . the path that the hurricane will take depends on whether this system here moves any closer to this system over here, which would cause this other system to become jealous of this system, which is secretly having an affair with this system, unaware that this system here is the illegitimate child of this system and the gardener, Raoul. On the other hand, if THIS system . . .”

The irony was, I knew exactly where the hurricane was going. It had nothing to do with so-called “meteorology”: It had to do with my hurricane shutters. Hurricane shutters are metal panels that many residents of hurricane zones keep in their garages under a protective blanket of dead spiders. These panels are scientifically engineered such that, if you fasten them correctly to all your windows, you will have long bleeding gashes on both hands. Also you will guarantee that the hurricane will not come. A hurricane can, using its eye, see whether you have your shutters up, and if you do, it will go somewhere else, emitting powerful gusting chuckles.

Ordinarily, I would have had my shutters up, thereby keeping Georges away, but as it happens, this year I ordered new shutters (the edges of the old ones were getting dull). As Georges was forming, workmen (1) took away all my old shutters and (2) piled new shutters and hardware all around my house. This presented Georges with a rare opportunity: Not only could it destroy my house; it could destroy my house by whacking it to pieces with my new hurricane shutters . So Georges aimed straight for my house. If the weather experts had known, they could have just said, “Hurricane Georges is currently at latitude X and longitude Y, and it is going to Dave Barry’s house.”

Fortunately, I happen to be a pretty handy “do-it-yourselfer,” so rather than leave the new shutters lying on the ground, I was able, using my natural mechanical ability, to beg the workmen to put them up. So they did, and Georges immediately swerved away. (I sincerely apologize to the people it hit, but at that point, I was no longer steering.)

For the remainder of the hurricane, I watched the TV coverage, which consisted mainly of TV reporters in bright yellow rain slickers going into evacuation zones and asking the residents, in highly judgmental tones, why they did not evacuate. Just once, I wanted to hear a resident answer: “Hey, I’m here because I LIVE here. What’s YOUR excuse, Hairspray Boy?”

Anyway, I’m glad hurricane season is almost over. And I decided that I’m not going to wait until the “last minute” to get ready for the next season. That’s right: I have already bleached my shutters.

©1998 Dave Barry

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article215174290.html#storylink=cpy

 

Dave Barry– Classic ’98: It’s a guy thing

Folks—

“New” jeans at Macy’s

The so-called “Battle Between the Sexes” is a topic that has often been written about, joked about or depicted in movies and TV shows. For those familiar with Dave Barry’s work, this is a topic that is frequent fodder for his humorous musings. This reprised column of his from 1998 is one such example of that.

In this column, he highlights the differences in the way men and women do housekeeping. What might make sense to a guy as it relates to domestic tasks often makes no sense to women. I think I can relate to some differences on how men and women view certain things—maybe not so much as it relates to housekeeping, but certainly as it relates to clothes shopping and fashion.

I say this because after I recently ruined one of my favorite pair of jeans from a belt that, inexplicably, bled and stained it beyond redemption, I stopped over at a local Target to find a replacement pair of jeans. My task was simple: find a comparable pair of generic jeans of similar style, fit and color. Hey, it’s just a regular pair of blue jeans—how hard can that be?

It turns out it was harder than I thought. Almost every similarly styled pair of jeans had tears, holes, rub worn areas, or frayed edges (and usually only one leg frayed!). At first I thought perhaps I had stumbled upon a couple of pairs that slipped by “Inspector 5” or were some irregulars that somehow got mixed in, but then I realized that all of them we like that. The weather has been warm—maybe the store had been infested with steroid-juiced mutant moths?

Frustrated, I left empty handed and decided to walk over to Macy’s that was just the next block down. I found exactly the same thing there, too: jeans with all manner of wear and holes being sold as new. I asked the sales girl if this was the new trend—selling “pre-damaged” jeans. I told her that I will likely damage the jeans myself over time eventually, so I didn’t really need any “help” from manufacturers in that regard—did they have any jeans didn’t look like rejects from Goodwill? She shrugged and looked at me as if I had just asked her the same question in Greek. Apparently, she didn’t think such jeans were odd or unusual.

I can almost anticipate the reactions to my column and they will likely be divided along gender lines. Most guys will probably understand my consternation and will nod their heads in agreement while many women will likely think “Geez, he has the fashion sense of Larry the Cable Guy!”

Even more appalling were the prices they were asking. One pair of jeans, complete with worn thighs, tears and holes, had a selling price of $50!!

Where does this trend of “pre-damaged” products end? Buying a brand new car that has “strategically placed” dents and rust holes on the car body? Maybe a new iPhone X with a cracked display? Will I start seeing “pre-bitten” apples in the produce section of Safeway? Wherever this trend ends, I have to hand it to whoever first dreamt up the idea of selling tattered clothes in the guise of “high fashion”. I am thinking now that maybe I was too hasty in tossing aside my belt dye stained pants– I am willing to sell them for the bargain price of $40 to someone who is looking to start a new fashion trend.

Holes and tears are extra.

— Peter

 

Classic ’98: It’s a guy thing

BY DAVE BARRY

June 28, 2018 02:02 PM

 This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, October 11, 1998

Today’s Topic Is: Domestic Tips From Guys

Guys do not get enough credit for being domestic. This is because the people who give OUT the credits for being domestic are — not to generalize or anything — women.

Women tend to believe that domestic things should be done in a certain way, defined as “not the way guys do them.” I have a perfect example of this type of thinking in the form of a letter I received from a woman named Karen in Portland, Ore., who does not approve of the way her fiancé handles his dirty dishes. Here’s how he handles them: He puts them in the refrigerator.

Now I can hear you women asking: “Why?” But I bet most guys immediately grasped the reason, which is: If you put dirty dishes in the sink, after a couple of days they get moldy; whereas in the cold, airtight environment of the refrigerator, mold takes much longer to develop. Karen says her fiancé does not actually wash the dishes “until (a) he runs out of dishes; or (b) his refrigerator gets full.” Fortunately, he has a lot of room in the refrigerator, because, Karen states, “he hates to go grocery shopping.” She also notes, for the record, that “he has a dishwasher that works perfectly fine.”

“I’m wondering,” Karen wrote, “if we should just ask for an extra refrigerator for a wedding gift.”

My feeling is, no. It makes far more sense to get a freezer. Not only will a freezer hold a lot more dirty dishes than a refrigerator, but, thanks to the lower temperature, these dishes can remain relatively mold-free in there forever. This will leave Karen’s guy with more time for other domestic chores, such as laundering his underwear in the dishwasher, unless that is where he keeps his canned goods.

Speaking of which, what this nation needs is an Institute of Guy Domestic Research, where guy scientists wearing white laboratory coats stained with Cheez Whiz would conduct experiments to answer household questions that concern guys, such as: If you leave your used underwear in the freezer for a week, is that as good as laundering it? Or should you also splash a little Old Spice on it, just to be safe?

But getting back to my main point: Guys are sometimes accused of not having a domestic “flair” just because they tend to accessorize a room with used pizza boxes. But there are examples of guys coming up with decorative “touches” that Martha Stewart would never conceive of even with the aid of world-class narcotics.

For example, I have here a fascinating newspaper article sent in by alert pastor Pete Beckstrand of the Zion and Franklin Lutheran Churches of Viroqua, Wis. This article, which I swear I am not making up, is from the Sept. 26, 1996, edition of — get ready for an excellent newspaper name — the Vernon County Broadcaster. It concerns a local resident named Mervin Langve who, according to the article, “discovered a slice of toast in an old-time toaster baked by his mother; thus, as the article states, “Mervin determined that the toast is 36 years old.”

I am telling you right now what a woman would have done if she had found a piece of toast older than all three Hanson brothers combined, and even older than some Christmas fruitcakes: She would, using tongs, throw the toast away, then throw the tongs away, then get out her industrial disinfectant and violently scrub the entire house as well as several neighboring houses. But that is not what Mervin Langve did. According to the Vernon Country Broadcaster, he “mounted this piece of toast on a breadboard he now has hanging in his kitchen.” The Vernon County Broadcaster states that it makes for “a very attractive keepsake.”

I called Mr. Langve, and he told me that the toast is still on his wall and looking as good as ever, despite the fact that he has never put any kind of preservative on it.

I asked him if visitors think his wall decoration is unusual.

“They sure do,” he said. “They can’t hardly believe it.”

I bet they can’t. And I happen to think that — despite the fact that this entire story has been ignored by so-called major newspapers such as the so-called New York Times — Mervin Langve has broken important new interior-decor ground with the concept of wall-mounted heirloom foods. Think of the possibilities! (“. . . and on this wall is the actual meal that Uncle Walter was eating when he passed away; you can see his forehead impression in the mashed potatoes.”)

So let’s not say that guys are not domestic, OK? When we see a guy who makes drapes by nailing trash bags over his windows, let’s remember that he might have a legitimate domestic reason, such as that he ran out of duct tape. Let’s be fair; let’s be open-minded. And above all, let’s remember to let our underwear thaw before we put it on.

©1998 Dave Barry

 

Dave Barry– Classic ’98: Take a bow, and another, and another

Folks—

In this week’s Dave Barry article, he relates his experiences in Japan which, based on my personal experience there, is not just a foreign country—it’s a very foreign country.  As Dave demonstrates, not everything is as it seems there or even as it seems anywhere else.  However, Japanese citizens do seem to go out of their way to be polite to strangers, especially to visitors.  (See Dave’s article for another example.)

When I was with a group of coworkers many years ago involved in a technology exchange with a Japanese partner company, we were typing up operating specs and documents in the hotel suites after each business day. Before long we ran out of the fan-folded computer paper for our dot-matrix printers—the kind with the holes along the sides and was fed by sprocket wheels– so I set out looking for more.

I went to a local department store and asked for computer paper.  “Computer paper?” the clerk asked.  I said “yes” and he steered me towards pads of coding sheets.  “No, no.  Computer paper for printers” and I pantomimed and crudely drew a picture of what I was looking for.  The clerk and an associate spoke fast and excitedly with each other in Japanese until the clerk tried to tell me– including with wild gestures–  where to get it, but I didn’t quite understand.

When he realized that I was looking at him as if he had just handed me a jar of warm sputum, he darted away from me like a bat out of hell but signaling me to follow him.  Like an Olympic track event, he ran down two flights of steps, through the department floor and out the front of the store—with me struggling to keep up with him.  With both of us now standing outside the store and on the street, the clerk pointed to a tall building about a block or so away and cheerfully and proudly proclaimed “Computer paper!”

It turns out he was right—I was able to find what I was looking for there, but I was quite impressed how helpful he was.  If this had happened in the SF or NYC, likely the clerk would have grunted “don’t have that” while nonchalantly shrugging, before proceeding to slink away for his doobie and Cheetos break.

But for as polite the Japanese are, they are not averse to saying “no”.  Except, they don’t actually use the word “no” as it is deemed to be too blunt or too abrupt a word.  When we were there we had to learn some of the lesser-known alternative expressions to understand their meaning.  For those who might have to do business in Japan, here are some common translations:

“We’ll evaluate it”                                       =            “No”
“We have to discuss with our team”        =            “No”
“Is this important?”                                     =            “No”
“We’ve never seen this problem.”           =            “No”
“It is possible.”                                             =            “No”
“Yes”                                                              =            “No”

I hope you found this quick guide helpful.

—- Peter

Classic ’98: Take a bow, and another, and another

By DAVE BARRY

NAGANO, JAPAN

This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, February 15, 1998.

Two scenes from the Mysterious East:

Scene One: A few of us were looking for dinner fairly late in downtown Nagano, and we came to a little restaurant. It looked open — we could see men inside — but there was a sign on the door saying, in English: “CLOSED.”

We were about to walk away when one of the men came running over to the door and waved us inside. As we entered, we pointed to the “CLOSED” sign and looked puzzled. Frowning, the man took the sign off the door and carried it over to the counter, where he and two other men discussed it, heatedly, for at least five minutes. They got out a book, looked something up, looked at the sign again, and became even more excited. Since they were speaking Japanese, we had no idea what they were saying, but I assume it was something along the lines of, “So THAT’S why we haven’t been getting any foreigners in here!” Then the man took the sign back over to the door and hung it up so that the “OPEN” side was facing out.

About a half-hour later, as we were leaving, another group of westerners started to enter; the man went running over to block the door, waving his arms to indicate that the restaurant was closed. As we left, he locked the door. The sign facing out, of course, still said: “OPEN.”

Scene Two: I broke my reading glasses, so I took them to an optometrist’s shop and showed them to the optometrist while making the international gesture for “I have broken these reading glasses.”

He studied them for a moment. “Trouble!” he said. “Five minutes! Please waiting!”

So I sat in the little waiting area and watched Japanese television, which was showing some kind of quiz show that should be called Name That Tuber! There was a genial talkative male host, a female co-host whose sole function was to smile, a plate holding some unusual rootlike vegetables, and four contestants who apparently were trying to identify them. There was much discussion as the camera showed closeups of the vegetables, and then the host would hold up a sign with a piece of paper covering it, and then he would dramatically remove the paper, and there, on the sign, would be — Japanese writing! So I have no idea what was going on, although everybody on the show seemed to be amazed.

At one point the optometrist came running — not walking; running — into the waiting area to say: “More five minutes, sorry please!”

I nodded energetically to indicate this was fine with me. I was really getting into Name That Tuber!

The next TV show was a drama featuring a man dressed as a Japanese gangster. First he killed two other gangsters on the street. Then he went into a bakery. I assumed he was going to kill, or at least rob, the woman behind the counter, but instead they started laughing, and then they started — I swear — making cookies. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how this show came out, because the optometrist came sprinting back with my reading glasses, which were fixed.

“Sorry!” he said, apparently feeling terrible about having taken 20 whole minutes of my time. I pulled out my wallet to pay him, and he became very agitated.

“Service!” he said, making a zero with his thumb and forefinger to indicate how much I owed. Then, apparently feeling that I was not getting a good enough deal for the zero I was paying him, he gave me a little cloth for cleaning my glasses and (Why not?) a Coca-Cola bumper sticker.

So I gave him the only gift-type item I had, which was a cheap souvenir pin from a Japanese telephone company. This caused him to sprint to the back of the shop and come back with a much nicer pin for me. There clearly was no way I was going to win: If I gave him anything else, he might have made me take one of his kidneys. So I bowed to him, and he bowed to me, and I bowed back, and he bowed back, and gradually, backing and bowing, I got out of the store, freeing the poor man to make an actual living.

What do we learn from these stories? We learn that, in the Mysterious East, “business” does not always mean “money”; and that what is closed may be open, while what is open may be closed; and that gangsters sometimes like to bake.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article202883224.html#emlnl=Dave_Barry_Newsletter#storylink=cpy

Dave Barry– Classic ’98: Today’s topic is The Art of Cooking

Folks—

This is a two-fer week, with another Dave Barry column.

This week, Dave Barry talks about cooking.  Given the personality he projects, this seems a little odd and out of character—sort of like having Donald Trump discussing the virtues of humility.

But in his column Dave makes some mention about the hazards of cooking.  I am inclined to agree with him here.  In fact, national safety statistics suggest that over 150,000 accidents happen in the kitchen each year.  To make matters worse, we—and I mean mostly us guys—have to eat them.

When I was in college and living in the dorm, I was getting accustomed to cooking using a hot plate.  The problem with a hot plate is that between the time you turn it on and it actually gets hot enough to cook, you could have run out and had a colonoscopy.  So, during one weekend when I was visiting home, I tried to make some pudding on my mom’s gas stove.

Gas heat goes from zero to “oh-my-God-it’s-burning” in like 1.5 seconds, so in the couple of minutes that I started it and turned away, the pudding burned and emitted a foul and acrid odor that filled the kitchen faster than a flatulent fat man in an elevator.  The plus side of this kitchen accident was that I inadvertently discovered a new synthetic tough, tarry substance that could be used for sealing holes in a ship’s hull.

But I have also experienced other kitchen accidents that were not my fault at all.

Another time when I was living in the dorms, one of the guys living in my suite was partying one evening with a friend of his.  They noticed my recorder—which is an inexpensive instrument that resembles a fife—sitting in the room.  My suitemate hid it into the toaster oven and, with a giggle, told his friend to remind him to remove it later.  However, with the level of intoxicants in their system, they could scarcely have remembered if they were wearing underwear under their jeans.

As you might have guessed, there all through the night the recorder remained in the cold toaster oven.  The next morning, with the previous evening’s hijinks unbeknownst to me, I plugged in what I thought was the hot plate but, because the cords were crossed, the toaster oven turned on.  It didn’t take much time before I was surprised with a heaping helping of Recordre Flambé— the laminated wood on fire and crackling and the mouthpiece a melted puddle of plastic. Naturally, this was not something I was interested in having for breakfast but, in fairness, it still was more culinarily appealing than most airplane food.

So, I hope you enjoy Dave Barry’s amusing column, perhaps even while you’re preparing some culinary delight.  But please be careful when working in the kitchen and avoid any similar type mishaps there.

But if you can’t avoid that, please know that Recordre Flambé pairs well with a side of Roasted Maracas and a nice Sauvignon Blanc.

— Peter

 

AP File Photo

Classic ’98: Today’s topic is The Art of Cooking

BY DAVE BARRY

 (This Dave Barry column was originally published Jan. 11, 1998.)

Cooking was invented in prehistoric times, when a primitive tribe had a lucky accident. The tribe had killed an animal and was going to eat it raw, when a tribe member named Woog tripped and dropped it into the fire. At first, the other tribe members were angry at Woog, but then, as the aroma of burning meat filled the air, they had an idea. So they ate Woog raw.

Yes, cooking can be hazardous. I learned this lesson from a dramatic true incident that occurred in my childhood. My family was at home, waiting for company to arrive; my mom was cooking one of her specialties, creamed chipped beef, in a double boiler. There was a knock at the door, and we all went to the living room to greet our company, which was fortunate because at exactly the instant we opened the door, the double boiler exploded violently, sending what seemed like thousands of gallons of creamed chipped beef flying in all directions with tremendous force. I believe that if there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, one day their astronomers will detect traces of this particular entree spreading out across the cosmos at nearly the speed of light, and they will, by extrapolating backward, calculate that a cataclysmic Big Beef Bang took place on Earth in 1958.

The point is that, as a safety precaution, you should never cook anything, including toast, without wearing a welding helmet. Also, you should choose a recipe that is appropriate for the individuals who will be eating it. For example, you do not need to make an elaborate dish if the individuals are dogs. A dog will eat pretty much anything; one major reason why there are no restaurants for dogs is that the customers would eat the menus. So a dog will happily eat the same recipe forever. You can feed a dog “kibble,” which is actually compressed dirt, every single day for 13 years, and the dog will consider you to be the greatest cook in world history. It will lick the ground you walk on.

The situation is similar with guys. Guys generally like to find a recipe that works for them and stick with it. For example, I know a sportswriter named Bob who, to my knowledge, has never in his life cooked anything except Stouffer’s frozen French bread pizza. This is all he has in his freezer. If he hosted a Thanksgiving dinner, he’d serve a large Stouffer’s French bread pizza, stuffed with smaller Stouffer’s French bread pizzas. At the Stouffer’s factory, they probably have a whole department devoted exclusively to Bob, called “The Department of Bob,” which monitors Bob’s pizza consumption and has a fleet of loaded resupply trucks ready to roll when he runs low.

If you’re not cooking for guys or dogs, you should use a more elaborate “gourmet” type of recipe, which you can find in magazines such as Bon Appetit (literal translation: “Chow Down”). The problem here is that the people who are creating these recipes are also snorking down cooking wine by the gallon, and after a while they start making up words. Take “fennel.”

There is no such thing as “fennel,” yet many of your gourmet recipes call for it. Other examples of imaginary ingredients are “shallots,” “capers” and “arugula.” So what frequently happens when you try to make a gourmet recipe is, you’re progressing briskly through the steps, and suddenly you come across an instruction that the gourmet chef obviously dreamed up moments before passing out facedown in the bearnaise sauce, such as, “Carmelize eight minced hamouti kleebers into a reduction of blanched free-range whelk corneas.”

Thus, to be a successful cook, you need to learn how to adapt gourmet recipes to the “real world” by making substitutions. For example, recently I was looking through the December issue of Bon Appetit, and I found a recipe called “Sweet Potato Soup with Lobster and Orange Creme Fraiche.” I was very interested in making this recipe; the problem was that some of the ingredients, such as ”leeks,” were obviously imaginary, whereas others, such as lobster, were members of the cockroach family. No problem! I simply looked around my kitchen for appropriate substitute ingredients, and I was able to adapt the Bon Appetit recipe to meet my specific needs, as follows:

SWEET POTATO SOUP WITH LOBSTER AND ORANGE CREME FRAICHE

1. In a medium room, remove wrappers from eight miniature Three Musketeers bars left over from Halloween.
2. Eat bars.
3. Feed wrappers to dog.

With a little ingenuity, you can achieve results very much like this in your own kitchen. I bet that when word of your culinary prowess gets around, people will be flocking to your door! Let’s hope they’re bringing pizza.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article1927688.html#emlnl=Dave_Barry_Newsletter#storylink=cpy

 

Dave Barry– Classic ’98: Keeping abreast of the news

Folks—

Some of the reprised columns from Dave Barry I find to be something of a bust so, as to not look too much like a boob in forwarding them, I just rack them up as just more columns best left unforwarded. However, this means that I wind up leaving material stacked up and with me experiencing an uncomfortable writing hiatus. This week’s column, however, seemed humorous enough to forward, so I can let out a heaving sigh of relief that I finally have something I can write about.

In it, Dave discusses the rampant problem of women wearing improperly sized bras. Dave’s column was written before the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson Superbowl half-time show debacle that caused a societal meltdown back in 2004 and which led to a whole host of disasters that year: Zuckerberg launching Facebook, Ken Jennings finally losing on “Jeopardy”, the final show of “Friends” being aired, and the re-election of Bush/Chaney. But that is not to say that Dave doesn’t bring up a few good points.

Even though Dave’s column was published in 1998, it seems, in fact, that the matter of ill-fitting bras is still a problem. According to a recent (2017) column published, experts estimate that almost 80% of all women are wearing ill-fitting bras. This leaves me with an unsettling thought.   What’s next– a federally funded study about the improper sizing of men’s underwear? I fear the term “tighty-whities” might be more apropos than I realize.

One thing missed by Dave Barry in his column, is the problem of swelling and exploding inflatable bras worn by women on airplanes that experienced sudden cabin depressurization. While I’m not sure if this is a real problem or not— Snopes.com seems to be somewhat noncommittal about the veracity of this claim– but it does seem to add new meaning to the travel expression “California or Bust”.

Perhaps these revelations and statistics give some women hope. If you suspect a similar problem, then there is good advice available to redress the matter. If you’re one of those, however, that feels none of this applies to you, you can take comfort in that as well.

Put another way, if you are one that believes a cup is half filled or one that believes a cup is half empty, you’re neither an optimist nor a pessimist: you just have the wrong sized bra on.

— Peter

Brassieres on display at a retailer in Beijing, China KRT FILE PHOTO

Classic ’98: Keeping abreast of the news

BY DAVE BARRY

This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, January 25 1998.

Recently, one of our local TV news shows in Miami did a special investigative report on — I swear — brassiere sizes. The station promoted this report relentlessly for several days. Every few minutes, you would hear an announcer’s voice saying, with an urgency appropriate for imminent nuclear attack: ”ARE YOU WEARING THE WRONG BRA SIZE?” You would have thought that women were dropping dead in the street by the thousands as a result of improperly sized brassieres. I was becoming genuinely concerned about this problem, despite the fact that, except on very special occasions involving schnapps, I don’t even ”wear” a brassiere.

Unfortunately, although I saw dozens of promotions for this special investigative report, I never saw the report itself. I assumed that the message would be: ”Wear the right size brassiere!” My editor, Tom Shroder, who has a keen interest in the issues, did watch the report, and he told me that it explored the troubling question of “women wearing brassieres that were tragically about 10 sizes too small for their breasts, which left said breasts with no other choice but to spill, tragically, out of the brassiere cups into the camera lens.”

But my point here is not directly related to brassieres, although it is a lot of fun to use the word ”brassiere” in a newspaper column, brassiere brassiere brassiere.

My point is that, pound for pound, the most dramatic and entertaining programming on television is your local TV news shows. Their only serious competition is the cable channel that, 24 hours a day, features the TV Evangelists With Hairdos The Size Of Adult Yaks.

If you don’t receive the Big-Haired Evangelists channel, you need to march right down to your cable company and throw rocks through the windows until you get it, because these people are way more entertaining than any space alien you will ever see on “Star Trek.”

My favorite is a woman with a gigantic mound of hair colored exactly the same designer shade as Bazooka brand bubble gum. Perhaps this fact explains why, almost every time I tune in, this woman is weeping. Her tear ducts must be as big as volleyballs. Using the standard evangelical measurement of Gallons of Weepage Per Broadcast (GWPB), this woman could very well be threatening the seemingly unbreakable records set back in the glorious ’80s by Hall-of-Famer Tammy Faye Bakker. I would pay serious money to see a Weep-Off between these two great performers.

But as entertaining as these shows are, their message tends to be somewhat repetitive (”God loves you! So send us money!”). Whereas on your local TV news shows, they’re always surprising you with dramatic new issues that you should be nervous about. Often these involve ordinary consumer items that, when subjected to the scrutiny of a TV news investigative report, mutate into deadly hazards. (John R. Gambling, of radio station WOR in New York, has a wonderful collection of promotions for these TV news reports, including one wherein the announcer says: “TONIGHT AT 6: YOUR DRY CLEANING CAN KILL YOU!!”)

A while back, one of our Miami TV news shows — I think it was different from the one that warned us about improperly fitted brassieres brassieres brassieres — did a dramatic, heavily promoted investigative report on: frozen yogurt. This report, which seemed at least as long as ”Alien Resurrection,” but scarier, investigated the possibility of deadly bacteria in our frozen-yogurt supply. If I understood the report correctly, there have never been any cases of any actual person actually being harmed by local frozen yogurt, but that seemed like a minor technicality. The point was: IT COULD HAPPEN! THE YOGURT OF DEATH!!

The way I have dealt with this menace is by taking the medical precaution of never eating frozen yogurt without first putting large quantities of chocolate fudge on it, on the scientific theory that the bacteria will eat the fudge and become too fat to do anything inside my body except sit around and belch. But I would not know to do this if it were not for local TV news.

I also would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. Sometimes, to make sure I understand the point, they come right out and tell me, at the end of each story, whether it was ”tragic” or “nice.”

FIRST PERSONALITY: What a tragic story, Bob.

SECOND PERSONALITY: Uh … no, it wasn’t.

FIRST PERSONALITY: It wasn’t?

SECOND PERSONALITY: No. That was the story about dogs playing mah-jongg.

FIRST PERSONALITY: Whoops! I had it confused with the story about the plane crashing into the orphanage! Ha ha!

SECOND PERSONALITY: Ha ha! Coming up, we’ll have part four of our special investigative report: “Formica: Silent Killer In Your Kitchen.”

Well, I see we’ve run out of time, so that’s all for this week’s column.

Remember to be nervous about everything. And now for these words: brassiere brassiere brassiere.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article1927875.html#emlnl=Dave_Barry_Newsletter#storylink=cpy