Good behavior by restaurant staff – again

I posted the other day about how an alert waiter in Colorado Springs recently prevented a woman from being victimized - by a drug placed in her drink by her date while she was away from their table. 

Yesterday I read another story about the good deeds of restaurant staff.   Details here and below the fold if the link has gone dead.

You can bet your rigatoni that I’m likely to have lunch or dinner at one of the Pulcinella Ristorante locations sometime soon.

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Hurry! Join the wrinklies class action suit now!

My Inner Snark has been having fun with a comment recently submitted to my post “Anything but Pink.”   From someone we’ll call “Minnie.”  Which is NOT what she called herself when submitting her comment, so all you real live Minnies out there who are also starting lawsuits, this is not about you, OK?

Anyway, I’ve held the comment in the moderation queue while deciding what to do with it.

I have to snicker at the vision of someone trying to get women to volunteer as plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against a cosmetic company - because they used the company’s cosmetics and now are wrinkled ugly crones.  Whose calls the company won’t take.

I wish I could say something nice, like I feel Minnie’s pain.  But I don’t.  I don’t even believe anything she writes.  With identifying information removed, here’s the comment:

Yes be afraid to use [name of brand] products. Are you looking to age 10yrs in 3 months time? You will age, wrinkle, and have blood vessels burst against your skin, if you use [name of brand] products. They are lying to you if they tell you it is natural and healthy for your skin, their product will do nothing but age you! BE AFRAID TO USE [name of brand] PRODCUTS! Now that I am old looking with wrinkles I did not have before using their product the corporation will not speak to me. Their customer care dept will do nothing for me. [name of brand] CORP DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU OR YOUR SKIN, JUST YOUR MONEY!!! Please contact me if you have had bad skin problems from using [name of brand] products. I am looking to start a class action law suit against [name of brand] for aging me and not speaking to me or trying to resolve this problem. You can contact me at ***@***.

Minnie, get your own blog if you want to drum up a lawsuit.   As you would have known if you’d read my post, I have nothing to do with any cosmetic company – except as a retail customer of a few products – and I’m keeping it that way.

Note to anyone who thinks they can ask me for Minnie’s contact info:  Nope.  I won’t give it to you.  Don’t bother me. 

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Adjusting

Thanks to Fighting Windmills for asking, I’m getting adjusted to having these braces on my teeth.  I’m even able to eat again.  No fear that The Pigout Queen here would ever fall victim to any condition that would keep her from eating for any serious length of time.  Like three hours or more.

I’m busy – working.  Really cuts into my time to sit around and goof off and write silly things on my blog.

For some reason this morning I’m thinking of recent local headlines concerning Men Behaving Badly.  And in one of the two stories, a man behaving very well indeed.  Knight-in-Shining-Armor well.  Literally rescuing a damsel from the brink of peril.

The biggest bunch of men behaving badly were young:  9 CU frat pledges who comprehensively trashed an Estes Park motel.   Assumptions are always risky, but why do I think that these guys may have felt somehow entitled to act like rock stars in a Super 8 Motel?  I’d like to think that they will face no consequences as hellish for this rampage, as looking their mamas in the eye. 

In the other story, an alert waiter spotted a man putting something into his date’s drink while the date was away from the table in the ladies’ room.  As soon as she returned to the table, the waiter brought her a new drink, took the tainted drink away, and called the cops.  The doctored drink contained Valium – not an item on the menu at Ruby Tuesday. 

The date was arrested.  Robert Lawrence Psaty, 56, has a history of abusive behavior toward women, but has managed to skate away from serious legal consequences, to the extent of being able to pass a background check to work at the state hospital.   Scary.  He met the date through a dating service.  Extra scary.  They were meeting in a public place – per the accepted wisdom of safe dating.  Mega scary.

Bless that waiter. 

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Stats

I made up a term for a condition I have in a very mild form, but just enough to notice:  numbers dyslexia.  (And no, I haven’t looked it up to see if there is such a thing recognized and named by the experts.)  The thing is, I occasionally transpose digits.  Besides generally having trouble memorizing phone numbers, street address numbers, etc. 

Before I found tax preparation software back in the mid-90′s, the IRS sent me a notice that they had corrected arithmetic errors on my tax return.  In two different years.

Yesterday I spent a few hours researching, analyzing and writing about a certain document.  Let’s call it “YDR-1395″ which isn’t its real title, I’m just trying to maintain a little professional discretion here.   I created four documents and a couple of emails, delivering my work product to the person who needed it.

I was duly thanked for my work on this.  But later, the guy sent me a polite email pointing out that the document is actually called YDR-1935. 

Which is so far my personally most embarrassing incident of numbers dyslexia.  Though Lord knows I may do something in the future to surpass it. 

Other stats are more friendly.  I noticed today that there are now exactly 500 positive (“helpful”) votes for my reviews on amazon.com (out of 551 total), and I have risen in the reviewer rankings to number 6,725.  (Or 6,729, or some nearby number – it changes at intervals I don’t understand.)  I share the ranking with several others, so it’s not as distinguished as I’d like to think.

Now if I just remember to check my bank account balance this weekend, I hope to be in a peaceful relationship with numbers for awhile.

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Ink-stained riches

I hear that the future of American newspapers is in doubt.  Which makes me sad.  As much as I love rooting around online, I also love hearing the slap of today’s local daily hitting the doorstep, and paging through the paper while sipping the day’s first cup of coffee.  And I’m even used to having slightly ink-smudged fingers afterwards.

And if we lose the Denver Post, who will bring us stories like this?  Not TV, this whole tale is a little too complicated for the average 1.9 millisecond (or whatever the time is) TV news story.  We may see some very simplified blurb about this on the tube.  But it won’t be the same. 

So thanks to the Post.  And hooray for Wray, where you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

And another reason I like the newspaper:  the daily advice columns.  In the Post, it’s Ask Amy.  Today, Amy Dickinson included this observation when handing out some relationship advice:

Love is patient, love is kind, and sometimes love leaves you in a quivering heap by the side of the road.

The perfect Quote of The Day After.

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Shakes, seeds and the pik

After 36 hours wearing them, I think that getting these braces may have been one of the worst decisions I ever made.

They hurt.  Although I can slap bits of wax on the worst poking bits for a little relief.  

And eating is pretty much unbearable.  Chewing with all those foreign objects attached to all my teeth?  Torture. 

Yesterday I was away from home all day.  At lunch I drank a smoothie because I couldn’t deal with the thought of eating.  By late afternoon I was starving.  Stopped by a favorite restaurant that makes great comfort food.  But all I could manage to consume – with difficulty – was a bit of soup and mashed potatoes.  Just had a tiny nibble of applesauce; boxed up the pot roast and brought it home. 

So I stopped by the grocery store and got things I can toss into the blender to keep body and soul together without chewing.  And also some instant oatmeal that looked nutritious. 

This morning I cooked up a bowlful of the oatmeal.  It’s OK, but I didn’t realize until I ate some, that it has little flax seeds in it.  Little seeds – and I have a mouthful of metal for them to hide in.

Thank goodness for my Water Pik.  I may never eat again unless I am at home and can immediately clean my braces afterwards with the Pik. 

I’ll be away from home all day today.  I’m taking two cold cans of SlimFast in a little cooler, and two straws.

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Never thought I’d live to see it

The pig-out queen here doesn’t want to eat.  Who would have thought?

I’m staring at my bowl of cereal and yogurt.  It’s cereal that I like, and yogurt that I like.  (I have cereal with yogurt instead of milk because my tummy likes that better.)

There’s nothing wrong with it.  I know that this modest breakfast will keep me going through a busy morning – and this one is going to be busier than usual.

But I don’t want to eat a bite of it.  I’ve just made myself eat some of it, and have to finish the last half because I’m going to have a really bad headache by lunchtime if I don’t eat it.

I’m not sick. 

I feel fine.

But I got a mouthful of metal braces yesterday.  And eating is a bloody nuisance.  Chewing stuff.  Feeling stuff getting stuck on the braces.  Having to clean my mouth within five minutes after eating anything.

It’s not just breakfast.  I had the same problem eating anything for dinner last night.

The whole business of eating with braces just sucks.

The doc said that these braces will be on for about six months. 

I could be really skinny by then.

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Clutter and change and letting things slide

I mentioned here the other day that I’ve realized I pretty much hate almost all of my furniture.  I didn’t say so then, but the sad truth is, I’ve Allowed Things to Slide around the condo.  As Garrison Keillor explained in his recent newspaper column, they are at present working hard at cleaning over at his house because:

We are decent God-fearing people who somehow have Allowed Things To Slide and now we live among piles of books and paper, reams of driftage on the kitchen counter, boxes of mementos of a misspent life. Another month and we might go over the brink and become wild-eyed eccentrics living in rooms with narrow passages between the piles, cooking on a hotplate in the bathtub, the house reeking of cat dung.

At the Keillor house, they are having a fine time throwing out things.  At the condo, lately I’ve been having a fine time ignoring most of the mess while reading books, working on the computer to create the invoice which will get me paid for last month’s work, spending time with friends, and taking the trusty old Subaru in for its 105,000 mile mega-service.  To be fair, I’ve kept up with the laundry, and the kitchen and bathrooms are clean and presentable. 

Good old Garrison also explains I think why so many voters are excited about Senator Obama’s candidacy for the presidential nomination:

If the Democrats run on anger and the urge to pay back the God, Guns & Capital Gains Party, they’re likely to lose. Move on.  That’s my problem with Senator Clinton: If she becomes president, must we relive Renaissance Weekends and New Age narcissism, and then do we also get the return of Kenneth Starr and the Mellon man?

Heck, I’m a little excited too.  Although I sincerely believe that Senator Clinton is the better qualified candidate. 

Full column is below the fold if this link doesn’t work.

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Not the most tactful shopping suggestion

If you shop at amazon.com you may have noticed that the friendly folks there always suggest a second product you could buy along with the item you are looking at. 

If you’re looking at a book, amazon.com will often suggest another book by the same author, or on the same subject.  If you’re browsing a software product, you may be offered a user guide for the program. 

I’ve gotten so used to that “better together” thing on amazon pages that I rarely pay attention to it.  But today, I was stopped cold by the “better together” suggestion I saw when scrolling down this product page. 

Click on the image on the right here to see what I mean.

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Smile

I used to hate it back in high school, when I would be walking down the hall between classes or something and somebody, usually a guy, would look at me and bark “Smile!” like it was an order or something.  Like maybe I wasn’t providing the proper high school background crowd scene for his damn day. 

Not that I mind smiling.  Not at all.  What I have always minded is doing stuff on command.  Personal stuff like smiling or reading a novel or eating vegetables. 

My smile hasn’t aged well, though I started off in life with fairly straight teeth.   I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled when I was in my late 20′s - in one glorious intravenous-Valium buffered sitting.  This provided lots of room at the back of my mouth for all my teeth to hang out in.  But instead, the top ones in particular gradually crowded their way to the front, and that moved the front ones out of line in all directions. 

I KNOW already that I’m going to get old – if I’m lucky.  But I refuse to look like an elderly rabbit.  So 14 months ago I signed up for teeth-straightening with a local orthodontist.  Using the Invisalign system.  Which is a very interesting confluence of computer-assisted technology and orthodontic expertise. 

Sadly, a couple of my upper teeth aren’t moving with the rest of them, and after talking it over with my doc, I’m going to finish up the straightening in regular braces.  Yes, a semi-retired person in good old metal braces.  After cringing a little at that idea, I’ve gotten over myself.  I’m bloody pleased and grateful to have my own teeth, not to mention fully functioning limbs and major organs.

Today we got started on the braces.  The doc inserted rubber band thingies between some of my teeth to create space.  

Next week I get metal stuff glued to several of my teeth and the fun begins for real.  But only for six months or so, and it’s all paid for now.  So I’m smiling.

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W00t

Fightingwindmills asked a very good question yesterday:  what’s the origin of “woot” – also spelled “w00t”?

After fooling around with irreverent responses to her question, I decided to act like the responsible educated adult I play in real life.   And look it up.

The Urban Dictionary has several pages of definitions of Woot/W00t.  The top one says:

Woot originated as a hacker term for root (or administrative) access to a computer. However, with the term as [sic] coincides with the gamer term, “w00t”.

“w00t”was originally [a truncated] expression common among players of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game for “Wow, loot!” Thus the term passed into the net-culture where it thrived in video game communities and lost its original meaning and is used simply as a term of excitement.

I defeated the dark sorcerer! Woot!”

“woot! i r teh flagmastar!” (Think Tribes)

“Woot, I pwnzed this dude’s boxen!’

My fuddy-duddy old self was sad to see the garbled syntax in the second sentence, and that “truncated” was misspelled and preceded by “an.”  Back when mastodons roamed the earth and dirt was young and you could buy nickel Cokes at the drugstore fountain counter, I was taught that dictionaries are created by the world’s pickiest fussiest most precise and inexhaustibly thorough wordsmiths.  Dictionaries, I learned, are the last books in the universe in which typographical errors, misspellings, or grammatical mistakes could be found.

To which my spontaneous INFP self responds, the Urban Dictionary is a wiki thing, an organic social creation.  Mistakes happen.  And English is a living language, always changing.  So chill out and switch to decaf already, ’cause you know you love technology and the innernets and email and digital photography and all that stuff we didn’t have back then.

Even though the domesticated mastodons were kind of sweet, and handy as pack animals.

W00t!!

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Reports from the cultural front

Last night I had dinner with friends at the new Limelight Supper Club.  I had salmon; the meal was good and the service almost too enthusiastic – no doubt a reaction to a recent newspaper column slamming the Kevin Taylor restaurants, including the Limelight, for shoddy service. 

The Limelight’s just opened in a space formerly occupied by a lackluster restaurant, and we hope the new operation keeps up to its current standards.  It’s right there in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, steps away from the DCPA, the Ellie,  the Buell Theatre, and Boettcher.

After dinner, we saw Our House, one of three new plays now showing at the Denver Center.  “New” means just that:  world premiere.  The Denver Center commissioned all three plays.   

I’ve had DCPA season tickets for years now, and this is so far the most powerful, memorable season-kickoff lineup they’ve had.  All three plays are winners, and I’m hoping the rest of the season can keep up this pace.

Our House – reviewed here - is playwright Theresa Rebeck’s brutal, dark, hilarious satire of reality TV and its effects on the people who watch it.  As the Denver Post reviewer says:

What distinguishes “Our House” from lesser pop-culture satires is the writer’s sharp, unapologetic anger. One can imagine Rebeck writing this pointed diatribe in an inspired fury, skewering random targets like reality TV, media mergers, gun control and more. “Our House” is an absurd play, but it’s not a farce. It’s too close to real for that. Instead it’s a mind-bending activity that will send departing theatergoers off with synapses firing like so many sniper’s bullets.

That’s not to say “Our House,” now in its world premiere staging by the Denver Center Theatre Company, is fully satisfying just yet. It’s ferociously performed and ideologically compelling from start to lickety-split finish. But it’s also at times contradictory and always intentionally messy.   . . .

But Rebeck doesn’t want you to love her play. She wants you to listen to what it has to say — if you can tear yourself away from “Celebrity Apprentice” long enough to hear it.

Rebeck’s unabashed triumph is her creation of two utterly original and somehow alluring lowlifes. There’s Merv, a St. Louis grad student and TV-obsessed narcissist who has reclined his way into $4,000 of debt, creating a powder keg of antagonism with a roommate who calls a house meeting to vote on his eviction (a brilliant machination that harkens “Big Brother”).

And there’s Wes (Danny Mastrogiorgio), the network boss obsessed with Jennifer (Molly Ward), an ambitious anchor beauty who pronounces “Shiite” as “shyte.” Wes plucks her from his news division to host a reality show because, sadly, it’ll give her greater exposure (they’re mercilessly patterned after real-life married CBS power couple Les Moonves and news anchor/”Big Brother” host Julie Chen).

Presented in a single 90-minute act, Our House was a little messy, a little shocking, horrendously funny in spots, and utterly fascinating.  Although I’ve never watched any of the broadcast networks’ “reality” shows and barely recognized Julie Chen’s name, I surely thought twice about grabbing the remote to turn on the tube when I got home last night.

I liked Plainsong the best of the three new contenders.  The Denver Post’s theater critic also liked it, four stars worth.  As an earlier Post story notes, it’s:

 [T]he Denver Center Theatre Company’s massive world-premiere stage adaptation [by Eric Schmiedl] of [Kent] Haruf’s best-selling novel, a sweeping panorama about an unremarkable, fictional cattle-ranching town on the plains east of Denver.

 . . . While “Plainsong” is an ultimately uplifting story about family, Haruf writes unflinchingly about harsher realities of small-town life, such as drunkenness, sexual abuse, adultery, violence and depression.

News of the novel didn’t reach me under whatever rock I was living beneath, back when it was a bestseller, so I haven’t yet read it.  A friend said that’s probably best, because my experience of the play wasn’t colored by my memory of the novel.  Thank goodness, I also missed the soppy Hallmark TV adaption of the novel, which Haruf said embodied every single thing he told the producers to avoid.  Yeesh.

I liked the play so much I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.  And if you don’t know how easily I get restless sitting in a theatre, you have no idea what a tribute that is. 

The third new play is Lydia, which will probably be the most controversial play in this trio.  By turns lyrical and brutal, realistic and mystical, it may have been the most thought-provoking for me.  It had the most hard-to-watch moments.  The play built skillfully to the climax but then, I thought, the playwright (Octavio Solis) failed to bring it as adeptly to a close. 

Finally, on the book front, Patti Thorn at the Rocky published a thoughtful analysis of Our Mayor’s “One Book, One Denver” program which got off to a so-so start four years ago and has lost ground since then.  Thorn writes:

Maybe you remember my recent column, headlined “One Book final event one snoozer.”

In it, I recapped what has to rank as one of the more dreadful evenings of recent memory: Sitting in a dark, cold high school auditorium, listening to author Nick Arvin read from his World War II novel to the unfortunate accompaniment of an electric guitar approximating the sound of bombs going off.

It was part of Denver’s 2007 community reading program, One Book, One Denver. And I have to admit, I was embarrassed for the city. The event was ill-conceived, poorly executed and uninspiring.

Far worse was the underlying sense, amid the discordant guitar riffs and drowned-out prose, that One Book, One Denver itself was bombing. Only 100 others joined me that night, a paltry showing if you consider the main author event has attracted as many as 800 in past years.

Indeed, the community reading series designed to encourage all Denverites to read and discuss the same book hit a participation low in 2007. Record-keeping has been irregular at best, but city staffers estimate that book sales and library circulation totalled around 16,000 in the program’s first year in 2004. This time, they plummeted to less than 5,000.

Any further drop and One Book, One Denver is in danger of earning the label one local writer gave it in jest: One Book, One Reader.

She interviewed the manager of the program in Seattle, which started the first citywide reading program, and compares key aspects of the two programs.  Bottom line:  Denver’s program is committee-driven, inconsistent, a victim of political correctness and fatally flawed by trying to be all things to all readers of all ages. 

OK, enough of this writing about culture.  The Super Bowl’s about to start.  Not that I really care which team wins.  And I may wait to change channels until this BBC America documentary that I have on, “My Big Breasts and Me,” is over.

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Getting down to basics

A few weeks ago I finally realized what’s wrong with my condo.  Why I don’t feel happy when I’ve finished cleaning and tidying the rooms.

I don’t like my furniture.  I do like the large oriental area rug in my living room that cost more than a month’s salary two years ago.  I have some bits of art that I enjoy living with.   But I keep thinking, are there any pieces of actual furniture that I might really mourn if I came home to find the place cleaned out by thieves?  And coming up blank.  OK, except for the two clean-lined 1960′s modern walnut bedroom pieces – double dresser and chest of drawers – that I bought at a secondhand store and stripped of gunky varnish.  And my cute little CD cabinet.

Otherwise?  If I ever move more than ten miles away?  I’ll leave it all behind without an eyelash flicker.

I think it’s time I found my own style.  I think I was developing one many years ago, but haven’t worked at it in a long time. 

This could be fun. 

It could also cost a boatload of money.

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Done.

Thank you, TurboTax.

It is 11:05 a.m. on February 2, 2008. 

I have just completed, printed, copied and signed my 2007 federal and state income tax returns. 

Because I’m getting refunds, they will be in the mail later today.

Sometimes, I just adore technology.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that for nine months last year, I was retired and had time to sort and organize my records.  So that when my last W-2 and 1099s arrived in the mail, I had all the information I needed to sit down and crank up TurboTax.

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