--"He's from this country, Mexicans don't read him, so that's good enough for me."--Donald Trump
--"The one thing I didn't delete from my private server."--Hillary Clinton
--"Jimaschizzle!"--Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. (aka Snoop Dogg)
Original humor, personal rants, nuggets and snippets from columnists and essayists, and other items for your edification and amusement.
By Jim Szantor
Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations
about the absurdities of contemporary life
For the second straight year, life expectancy in America has dropped significantly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Dec. 22 announced that "life expectancy at birth for the U.S. population decreased from 77 years in 2020 to 76.4 years in 2021." In 2019, the average American could expect to live to be 79 years old. Now that number is 76.
Indigenous groups, which include American Indian and Alaska native people, have suffered the worst: Life expectancy in those communities has dropped to 65.2 years from 71.8 in 2019 compared to 76.4 in 2021 from 78.8 in 2019 for white people per Politico. The U.S. life expectancy is now the lowest it has been since 1996. Why is American health doing so poorly? Here's everything you need to know:
Why is life expectancy dropping?
The two stand-out reasons for the drop are COVID-19 and overdose deaths. The number of COVID deaths increased by 20 percent from 2020 to 2021, making it the third largest cause of death, Politico continues. Accidental deaths, which include overdose deaths, were the fourth largest cause of death.
The conditions of the pandemic, "had a magnifying effect on an already-devastating overdose crisis and exacerbated many of the stressors in society that make people more vulnerable to taking drugs," commented Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Deaths from drug overdoses increased by 16 percent in 2021 compared to 2022, clocking in at just under 107,000 casualties. This is largely attributed to the growing opioid epidemic and the rise in fentanyl usage in the U.S.
The top two contributors to American deaths were heart disease and cancer. Some of the heart disease deaths may actually be related to the coronavirus, Time reports — both because the pandemic overwhelmed understaffed hospitals, but also because a COVID infection "can damage the heart and is thought to have raised patients' risk of dying."
"It's not a good year for the data, let's put it that way," commented CDC statistician Kenneth Kochanek.
Is the U.S. doing worse or better than other countries during the pandemic?
Worse, at least compared to our peer nations. A study in August showed that eight comparable nations actually had a "bounce back" of life expectancy following the worldwide decline due to COVID-19, The Washington Post reports. These included Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and France. "With the vaccine available, and other pandemic control measures, a lot of other countries did recover," said Steven Woolf, professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Medicine.
The U.S. was among 12 other countries where life expectancy continued to drop, including Germany, Chile, Bulgaria, Greece, and Estonia, the Post continues. Some of the disparity is probably due to America's "don't tread on me" conservative political culture: "Those countries had more successful vaccination campaigns and populations that were more willing to take behavioral measures to prevent infections, such as wearing masks," notes The New York Times.
Is this just a short-term thing?
Unfortunately, no. "American life expectancy began to stagnate around 2010 — while other developed countries continued to see gains," Stat News observes. In 2018, two years before the pandemic began, The Washington Post pointed out that the U.S. was already experiencing the "longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918."
Researchers have struggled to find a silver bullet explanation for why American health has declined so precipitously. Theories that stagnating life expectancy can be attributed to obesity rates and opioid drug use "fail to explain a problem that feels broader," The New York Times reported back in 2016.Instead, the Los Angeles Times reported the next year, the problem appears to be driven by a range of factors, including "diseases linked to social and economic privation, a healthcare system with glaring gaps and blind spots, and profound psychological distress."
Why are indigenous communities hit so hard by this trend?
It can't be overstated: COVID has hit native communities with particular viciousness. "American Indians are 2.2 times more likely to die from COVID-19 and 3.2 times more likely to be hospitalized for the virus," NPR reports.
The biggest factor: poverty. One in four Native Americans lives below the poverty line, The New York Times reports. That leads to "inadequate access to health care, poor infrastructure, and crowded housing, much of it the legacy of broken government promises and centuries of bigotry." What's more, the newspaper points out, discrimination has been linked to "the erosion of mental and physical health, as has exposure to polluted air and water."
Dr. Ann Bullock, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe who formerly served at the Indian Health Services agency, summed it up for the newspaper: "This is simply what happens biologically to populations that are chronically and profoundly stressed and deprived of resources."
What can be done?
First of all, there is some good news in the numbers. "Mortality's been a little better in 2022 than it was in 2020, so I think it's likely that we would see maybe a slight increase in life expectancy," the CDC's Robert Anderson told Reuters. But it's tough to say whether that trend will last through the end of the year: Deaths usually rise during the winter months.
Even if life expectancy rebounds slightly this year, though, many observers say the latest news means America needs to reconsider both health and economic policy as the country continues to emerge from the pandemic. The trend of shortening life spans is a societal problem, after all. "Life expectancy isn't really a prediction for a single individual," Kate Sheridan says at STAT News. "It's more like a check engine light — an indicator for the health of society as a whole."
Update Dec. 22, 2022: This piece has been updated with the latest figures from the CDC.
-- Joel Mathis, Devika Rao, The Week
Americans have ‘tip fatigue’
Tipping 20% at a sit-down restaurant
is still the standard however, consumers are less inclined to give as much for
a carry-out coffee or take-away snack.
“Part of it is tip fatigue,” says Eric
Plam, founder and CEO of Uptip. At the Sweetly Bakery & Cafe in Battle
Ground, Washington, near Portland, Oregon, customers seem to be feeling a
little less generous lately. With inflation near record highs and consumers
increasingly cashstrapped, a gratuity isn’t what it used to be.
“Since everything got more expensive,
we’ve seen a decline in tipping,” said Sweetly’s owner, Irina Sirotkina. Like
many other businesses, the bakery uses a contactless and digital payment method,
which prompts you to leave a tip when you pay. There are predetermined options
ranging from 15% to 25% for each transaction. “We encourage people to tip but
it’s not mandatory, obviously,” Sirotkina said.
Although the average transaction at Sweetly is
less than $20, which means a gratuity would be a few dollars at most, fewer
people leave anything at all. “Only around 1 in 5 people tip,” Sirotkina
estimated. Even though many Americans said they would tip more than usual once
business activities resumed after the Covid pandemic, consumer habits haven’t
changed much in the end. Tipping 20% at a sit-down restaurant is still the
standard, etiquette experts say. But there’s less consensus when it comes to a
carry-out coffee or take-away snack.
Overall, tipping has remained largely
flat at quick-service restaurants, according to Toast’s most recent restaurant
trends report. Tips average 17%, nearly unchanged from a year ago. But when it
comes to takeout, customers are tipping less--now down to 14.5%, on average,
after climbing earlier in the pandemic, the restaurant software vendor found.
Other payment software providers have also reported that these types of tips
have fallen over the last year.
For example, Toast’s rival, Square,
found that the average tip at quick-service restaurants, which includes cafes
and coffee shops, fell from 17.2% to 15.2% from March 2021 to the end of
February, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
“Part of it is tip fatigue,” said Eric
Plam, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based startup Uptip, which aims to
facilitate cashless tipping.
“During Covid, everyone was shell-shocked and
feeling generous,” Plam said. Now, “you are starting to see people pull back a
little bit,” he noted, particularly when it comes to point-of-sale tipping,
which prompts customers to tip even before they’ve received the product or service.
“This point-of-sale tipping is what people resist the most,” he said,
“compelling you to tip right there on the spot.”
However, transactions are increasingly
cashless and workers in the service industry are earning minimum or less than
minimum wage so having a method to tip is critical, Plam added. In fact, the
average wage for fast-food and counter workers is $14.34 an hour for full-time
staff and $12.14 for part-time employees-- including tips--according to the
most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A landmark bill in California aims to raise
the minimum wage to up to $22 an hour for fast-food and quick-service workers
at chains with more than 100 locations nationally. California’s current wage
floor is $15.50 an hour. President Joe Biden and many Democratic lawmakers have
pushed for a $15 hourly wage floor across the U.S. The current federal minimum
wage is $7.25 an hour and has remained unchanged since 2009.
“We are sympathetic, but it doesn’t
feel good,” Plam said of point-of-sale tipping. “Now that the pandemic is
essentially over, it's starting to shake out now,” he added. “The good news is
we’re rethinking it.
--Jessica Dickler, CNBC
Brain fog: Most misunderstood Long Covid symptom
On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was
texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of
their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It
was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the
moment when her old life contracted into her current one.
She once worked in artificial
intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs
into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her
memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities— buying food,
making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world —what
she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans,
imagining”—is gone.
The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “It
affects every area of my life.”
For more than 900 days, while other
long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really
lifted. Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the
most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the
University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It
wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the
coronavirus pandemic first began.
But 20 to 30 percent of patients
report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85
percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict
people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And
it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.
Long-haulers with brain fog say that
it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical
professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded
thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue.
For Davis, it has been distinct from
and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is not psychosomatic and involves
real changes to the structure and chemistry of the brain. It is not a mood disorder:
“If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no
basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna
Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.
And despite its nebulous name, brain
fog is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. At its core,
Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set
of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in
mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when
they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything
involving concentration, multitasking, and planning—that is, almost everything
important—becomes absurdly arduous.
“It raises what are unconscious processes for
healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a
writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me. For example, Robertson’s brain
often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”:
“I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog
stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en
route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of
a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it
once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her
calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her
inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an
object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too
complicated.
Memory suffers, too, but in a
different way from degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s. The memories are
there, but with executive function malfunctioning, the brain neither chooses
the important things to store nor retrieves that information efficiently.
Davis, who is part of the Patient-Led
Research Collaborative, can remember facts from scientific papers, but not
events. When she thinks of her loved ones, or her old life, they feel distant.
“Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore,” she
said. “It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.”
Most people with brain fog are not so
severely affected, and gradually improve with time. But even when people
recover enough to work, they can struggle with minds that are less nimble than
before. “We’re used to driving a sports car, and now we are left with a
jalopy,” Vázquez said. In some professions, a jalopy won’t cut it. “I’ve had
surgeons who can’t go back to surgery, because they need their executive
function,” Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a rehabilitation specialist at UT Health
San Antonio, told me.
Robertson, meanwhile, was studying
theoretical physics in college when she first got sick, and her fog occluded a
career path that was once brightly lit. “I used to sparkle, like I could pull
these things together and start to see how the universe works,” she told me.
“I’ve never been able to access that sensation again, and I miss it, every day,
like an ache.”
That loss of identity was as
disruptive as the physical aspects of the disease, which “I always thought I
could deal with … if I could just think properly,” Robertson said. “This is the
thing that’s destabilized me most.”
Robertson predicted that the pandemic would
trigger a wave of cognitive impairment in March 2020. Her brain fog began two
decades earlier, likely with a different viral illness, but she developed the
same executive-function impairments that long-haulers experience, which then
worsened when she got COVID last year. That specific constellation of problems
also befalls many people living with HIV, epileptics after seizures, cancer
patients experiencing so-called chemo brain, and people with several complex
chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia. It’s part of the diagnostic criteria
for myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, or
ME/CFS—a condition that Davis and many other long-haulers now have.
Brain fog existed well before COVID,
affecting many people whose conditions were stigmatized, dismissed, or
neglected. “For all of those years, people just treated it like it’s not worth
researching,” Robertson told me. “So many of us were told, Oh, it’s just a bit
of a depression.” Several clinicians I spoke with argued that the term brain
fog makes the condition sound like a temporary inconvenience and deprives
patients of the legitimacy that more medicalized language like cognitive
impairment would bestow.
But Aparna Nair, a historian of disability at
the University of Oklahoma, noted that disability communities have used the
term for decades, and there are many other reasons behind brain fog’s dismissal
beyond terminology. (A surfeit of syllables didn’t stop fibromyalgia and
myalgic encephalomyelitis from being trivialized.) For example, Hellmuth noted
that in her field of cognitive neurology, “virtually all the infrastructure and
teaching” centers on degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which rogue
proteins afflict elderly brains.
Few researchers know that viruses can cause
cognitive disorders in younger people, so few study their effects. “As a
result, no one learns about it in medical school,” Hellmuth said. And because
“there’s not a lot of humility in medicine, people end up blaming patients
instead of looking for answers,” she said. People with brain fog also excel at
hiding it: None of the long-haulers I’ve interviewed sounded cognitively
impaired. But at times when her speech is obviously sluggish, “nobody except my
husband and mother see me,” Robertson said.
The stigma that long-haulers
experience also motivates them to present as normal in social situations or
doctor appointments, which compounds the mistaken sense that they’re less
impaired than they claim—and can be debilitatingly draining. “They’ll do what
is asked of them when you’re testing them, and your results will say they were
normal,” David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount
Sinai, told me. “It’s only if you check in on them two days later that you’ll
see you’ve wrecked them for a week.”
“We also don’t have the right tools
for measuring brain fog,” Putrino said. Doctors often use the Montreal
Cognitive Assessment, which was designed to uncover extreme mental problems in
elderly people with dementia, and “isn’t validated for anyone under age 55,”
Hellmuth told me. Even a person with severe brain fog can ace it. More
sophisticated tests exist, but they still compare people with the population
average rather than their previous baseline. “A high-functioning person with a
decline in their abilities who falls within the normal range is told they don’t
have a problem,” Hellmuth said. This pattern exists for many long-COVID
symptoms: Doctors order inappropriate or overly simplistic tests, whose
negative results are used to discredit patients’ genuine symptoms.
It doesn’t help that brain fog (and long COVID
more generally) disproportionately affects women, who have a long history of
being labeled as emotional or hysterical by the medical establishment. But
every patient with brain fog “tells me the exact same story of
executive-function symptoms,” Hellmuth said. “If people were making this up,
the clinical narrative wouldn’t be the same.”
--Ed Yong, The Atlantic
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trade’
THE
ONION MANIFESTO
By Jim Szantor
Some
people do not cry when onions are peeled, chopped sliced or diced. Others cry when they are merely mentioned or even
implied. What is it about the allium
cepa that causes it to be de rigueur in recipes, seemingly mandatory
at McDonald’s and compulsory in casseroles?
What
magical properties accrue to this vile vegetable of the hollow, tubular leaves
and edible, rounded bulb? What culinary clout does it hold? Do onions cure
cancer, prevent baldness or remove unsightly age spots? Are they a surefire
Covid killer?
Were
onions served at the Last Supper? Does Taylor
Swift eat them?
Some
answers, assertions and affirmations in a moment. First, though, a position
paper of sorts on the plight of one who must make his way as a consumer in an
onion-obsessed world.
If the
onion does to you all the things it does to someone who cannot stand, bear,
countenance, abide or otherwise tolerate its taste, you know what it is:
--To sit
down to a meal anywhere and find the main dish (not to mention the appetizer, soup
or salad) loaded with the loathsome ingredient.
How to negotiate this culinary minefield politely if not furtively
without offending the hostess? How to
suppress the whimpering and retching attendant to the ordeal?
--To wait
endlessly—punitively—at fast-food establishments that package the item with
other, more respectable and comestible condiments. Kudos to the franchises that make the onion
an option; a pox on those that operate under the assumption that those little
white, chopped interlopers will be loved and consumed with relish by all.
--To grab
eagerly for a new entrée in the supermarket’s frozen food section, only to
recoil when it is discovered that onions--dehydrated, flaked, powdered or
fuel-injected--are part of the bargain, take it or leave it. (In the finest of
print, of course.)
It is a
mystery why the onions are so omnipresent in the gustatory scheme of things,
when to some they are slimy if boiled, repugnant if raw and palatable only if
fried to a crisp—to such a crisp, that is, that only the crisp, and not the actual
onion essence, is tasted. (Full
disclosure: I recall quite fondly the Onion Straws served by a New Orleans
eatery, a close encounter I have yet to live down, there being is a living
witness.)
The true
enemy of the onion feels not only persecuted but also triumphant when able to
detect the faintest evidence of its flavoring.
Cook a beef stew with boiled onions in a mesh bag and remove them prior
to serving? The congenital onion-hater can tell. That’s because the onion has little
subtlety, is totally devoid of finesse.
It always lingers near the scene of the crime, fouling the breath and
otherwise making its ingestion hard to forget.
But this seasoned onion adversary survives each close encounter, his
palate and olfactory glands able to detect its unpleasant properties
everywhere.
It could
be argued that eating a hamburger with onions is—dare I say it?—an antisocial
act. My hamburger with tomato and
pickles flies under the radar, even in close quarters. Someone eating one loaded with onions in
whatever form? He or she is, in effect,
broadcasting with appallingly broad bandwidth, callously indifferent to the
consequences!
The
onion’s raison d’etre?
According
to noted chef Jean Banchet of Le Francaise in the Chicago suburb of Wheeling’s fabled
Restaurant Row, “Onions add a lot of flavor, a unique flavor, to soups, sauces
and salads.” He prefers cooked over raw,
though, and opts for the shallot, an onion cousin, for fish and bordelaise
sauce.
The onion,
in the allium giganteum genus, is a real attention-getter, both in the
garden and in cut flower arrangements. It
is one, however, that even Mr. Anti-Onion can appreciate, for this flowery
version is not to be eaten.
But the
more common garden variety is one that a former colleague, Chicago Tribune food
editor Joanne Will, says “is worth crying over.”
“Onions
not only enrich other flavors but they make a statement of their own. Just think of some of the things onionophiles
would have to give up: deeply browned and caramelized sweet onion soup, boiled
baby onions saturated with cream sauce (a must with Thanksgiving turkey),
crisply delicious, battered onion rings.”
To a
close and cherished associate (one who has prepared this author’s meals for
53-plus years), the onion is an ingredient both pleasurable and problematic. To cater to her husband’s unfathomable oddity,
meal preparation is fraught with strategies, dodges, reluctant omissions and,
sometimes, downright deceit. In short, to keep peace in the family, she has to
keep the onions out of the crock pot.
There are
untold hardships for one who was born unequal in that his tase buds are out of
step with the rest of humanity’s. The
onion, in its ubiquity, has made coping more cumbersome, ordering more odious
and tasting more tentative for the afflicted.
Unquestionably, the onion is an affront, an imposition, equally
detestable, whether served by gracious hostesses, celebrated chefs or sullen
countermen.
But if
you are among the majority who cannot live without onions, by all means indulge
and enjoy. This is only an open admission
of an aberration, a venting of a lifelong loathing, not a produce section
polemic. Some of my best friends buy,
cook eat and even grow them. But they’ve never grown on me.
Until the
onion makes the headlines (remember the Great Potato Famine, the cranberry
scare of 1959, Red Dye No. 2 and other periodic pantry-related panics), it will
be the same old story for those who can’t stand them, those who dream of the
day when restaurant signs and menus everywhere will contain these words:
No smoking, no substitutions, no onions.
BY JIM SZANTOR
The chili could be
malicious and downright unforgiving. The
omelets sometimes look like yellow Play-Doh flecked with foreign bodies. The coffee isn’t strong enough to defend
itself, and the waitress puts the plates down with an offhand finality. Breakfast served any time. Eggs any style. The soup? It’s navy bean.
It’s easy to put down the greasy spoon, that
ubiquitous testament to the tacky and the Tums.
But by whatever name—luncheonette, diner, café, grill, coffee shop,
ptomaine parlor—it used to account for 40-50 percent of the eat-out dollar,
according to industry sources. Now? Not so much, as changing tastes and the sweep
of urban renewal have relegated it into a virtual museum piece--a slow-food
square peg in a round hole of a fast-food, instant-everything, drive-through
and highly hyphenated universe. Some things just sort of happen, with no grand
design or Machiavellian malice aforethought.
But the greasy spoon was a slice of Americana
that clung to the fork with nary a nod to fad or fashion. There were no vegetarian plates, as meat and
potatoes carried the day and the night and the mortgage. The Serv-Naps filed out of their countertop
compartments as the daily duet of eat-and-runs and lingerers played their way
through an unconducted arrangement. The
beef was “govt.-inspected”—but did it pass?
There was a counter-top jukebox selector, with some pop, some country,
some rock but definitely no Rachmaninoff.
You know the
place. Everyone, whether through
happenstance, resignation or momentary indifference has ended up at one of
these Edward Hopper-esque establishments, clutching a greasy knife or fork. How
the spoon, which generally just stirred the coffee, got left holding the bag is
a mysteryforever lost in the mists of time.
Whatever their
culinary merits, one could develop an irrational affection for the emporiums of
this genre. And they were more than
eating places. Sociologically they could
be an over-the-counter salve for the tattered psyches of the urban disenfranchised,
who hoped they wouldn’t close on Christmas and trap them in their cheap hotel
rooms. They were sort of halfway hash
house social clubs, with no membership list but plenty of dues, where the help
was as transient as the trade.
Some of these motley
establishments were actually respectable—sometimes good—and do not deserve to
be painted in such tawdry tones. Almost
always locally owned, they were probably more consistent at their level than
some tonier “destination dining” spots and had a more devoted clientele, who
prided themselves on being regulars, never had to state their orders and were
probably as good as the National Guard should someone get surly with the
waitress. Perhaps the key to their fate
is how many such places are opening these days, not how many are closing.
But while there’s
time, the eyes above the menu survey the scene and laugh and marvel at a few
things:
--The waitress
always looks like she is glad they sre out of whatever they are out of.
--The catsup bottle
says “restaurant pack,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
--The busboy is a
strong man--a bit too strong—but he didn’t shower up with Irish Spring.
--There’s a
fill-up-the-sugar-container fetish that is hard to fathom. Today’s two fingers’ worth on top of yesterday’s
two fingers’ worth. The sugar at the
bottom was refined in 1952.
--The “chef” has
more tattoos than specialties and thinks “Guide Michelin” plays for the
Montreal Canadiens.
--The cream pies and
such are kept at a tongue-numbing 33 degrees.
--The sandwich
plates are larger than they need to be, but the dinner plates. . . .
--The cashier/owner
always seems to be eating ice cream out of a coffee cup on a stool near the
cash register.
--They honor the
“law” that says coleslaw shall be served in flimsy paper or plastic cups and in
minute amounts.
--The spaghetti
always comes with “rich meat sauce.”
--The menu always
has an item or two that no one has ever ordered. Who orders Red Snapper in places like this?
--If you want
something to go, you have to stand in a special place, probably so they won’t
confuse you with people who prefer to eat standing up with their hands in their
pockets.
--The floor is
usually brown-and-yellow tile squares, in accordance with the Seedy Restaurant
Color Scheme Act of 1942.
--Some old guy
always comes in about 10 p.m. and orders a bowl of bran cereal.
---The menu is a
Sargasso Sea of misspelled names and fanciful if not fraudulent
descriptions. From the Broiler. From the Sea.
But never From the Freezer.
--The server never
fills in all those bureaucratic squares at the top of the “guest check” and writes
diagonally across the lined form. What’s
more, she has a Ph.D. in abbreviations.
--One of the
customers always looks like he is doing his income tax at one of the tables.
--Somebody always
walks by the window and waves in just before he disappears.
--You’re the only
one at the counter, and some guy walks in and sits right next to you.
--The french-fried
shrimp comes with enough cocktail sauce to cover about two pieces.
--The table’s wobble
is always half-corrected with a dirty folded napkin or three.
--The clock is
always stopped at something like 2:42.
--The Muzak is
always playing something like “Never on Sunday” or “Nom Domenticar.”
--The cook flip-slides the plates across the high stainless-steel
counter, and they always stop short, as if equipped with disk brakes.
--The cashier always
puts your change down on a spikey rubber thing that looks like an oversized
scalp massager.
****************************************************************************
In the early morning
lull, after the midnight rush hour subsides, the buzz of the fluorescent now
equals the sizzle of the grill as the beat cop walks in and sinks into the
house booth.
“Say,
where’s Sally? She off tonight?”
“Nah, she quit. Went back with her old man.”
“Oh . . . . Say, you
got any a that meat loaf left. Haven’t
eaten all day.”
“Nah, meat loaf’s
out. All’s I got left is thueringer.”
“Thueringer,
huh. Well . . . gimme a piece of that
blueberry.”
(Illustration: Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” 1942)
Forecast Follies (or . . . "Here's Jim with the Weather")
Mark Twain famously said, ”Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
And since reports of Mr. Twain’s death were not highly exaggerated, I’d like to fill in for him and address something we apparently can’t do anything about, either—the nonsensical, downright insulting barrage of verbiage issuing forth daily from what used to be called TV “weathermen” (and they were all of that gender back in the day) but are now known as “meteorologists,” as if space rocks were an omnipresent factor in our lives. As in, “60 percent chance of precipitation by daybreak, with 0.000001 percent chance of meteor collision.” (Meteor showers do occur, but usually are not perilous enough to cancel your picnic plans. They have yet to be seen in the Bus Stop Forecasts or the Car Wash Advisories that “humanize” these bloated segments.)
The weather portions (there are usually two—a fairly brief “teaser” early on and later, the Big Production) of most TV newscasts are, first of all, way too long (and coupled with all those time-wasting teasers about “what’s coming up,” leave precious little time for what we actually tune in for—news). We don’t need to know where the Alberta Clipper fizzled, that an El Nino is in mid-formation or that a front in central Montana caused a “dusting” in northern Iowa. And as for those “pockets of snow” we were supposed to get last night, I looked in mine and, blessedly, found none. But the station has paid serious coin for all of the glitzy graphics and radar capabilities, and by God, they are going to be used, if even just to show us what the rainfall looks like in downtown Racine “right at this very moment.” Gripping.
And then
there is the universal, comically contrived “personalization” factor, apparently
de rigueur on all stations. It’s never “Thursday’s forecast,” it’s (ahem), “the
forecast for your Thursday . . . .”
One can only envision the rapturous glow viewers must feel when luxuriating
in the warmth of that gratuitous pronoun! (As if that forecast applies only to
you, no one else. Ah, exclusivity.)
If one were to awaken from a 30-year coma, he or she would probably be mystified not only by cellphones, laptops and GPS devices but also by the existence of a curious phenomenon known as The Weather Channel: All weather, all the time--a nonstop barrage of jargon, gaudy graphics and arcane factoids. How did we ever exist without it? When it’s a slow weather day (and in this day of acute climate change, there’s always a crisis on the front burner somewhere), footage of past calamities will fill the bill for weather junkies or the aficionados of disaster porn.
Those with (ahem) backgrounds as editors find the nightly weather segments to be cringefests in the extreme. Temps don’t just drop into the 20s, they “drop down,” as if “dropping up” were a physical possibility. Is snow or rain in the forecast? No, we’ll have “snow showers” or “rain showers.” And it’s never just “sun”; it’s “sunshine,” as if that extra syllable ramps up the warmth. These folks never pass up an opportunity to gild the lily, because we’re often told of the possibility of “rain events” or “snow events,” which leads me, at least, to wonder if I will need a ticket, if there will be guest speakers and if refreshments will be served. (Spotty Showers? That was my clown name back in the day, a story to be told when the Vernal Equinox rolls around. Which this year, in the Northern Hemisphere, will be at 10:33 a.m. CST on March 20. Mark your calendar.)
But my pique rises to fever pitch in winter, when we’re often told during our seven-month layered-look season to “bundle up,” as if we lifelong Midwesterners have no prior experience with winter weather--as if we had all just parachuted in from Jamaica in our underwear and had no idea on how to adorn ourselves in these brutal climes. We don’t need to be told how to dress when icicles form—we’ve been there, done that—and resent the insinuation. One of the local weather wordsmiths hails from San Diego, and he’s telling us what to wear? Outrageous. I’d like to send him back to sunny California on his surfboard or his skateboard, preferably when the barometric pressure equals the dew point and, optimally, on a jet stream.
More and more women are seen these days holding forth during TV weather segments, and they have proven themselves every bit the equal of the men—long-winded and grammatically challenged. Positive role models apparently are non-existent; the often-parodied “weather bunnies” are blessedly a thing of the past (their anatomical attributes far outweighed their academic credentials), and the first exemplary female trailblazer with any gravitas has yet to be found.
So please, Mr., Mrs. or Ms. Meteorologist, do us all a favor: Stop behaving as if you are getting paid by the word, spare me the details about weather phenomena that have no bearing on our locale and, most of all, stop insulting our intelligence. Chill out, stick to the weather and let us worry about our wardrobes. Failing that, my fondest wish is that I could take all of you, get you all bundled up and sent to the Sahara. There’s a 99.99 percent chance that you won’t need an umbrella or have to worry about a lake effect, a polar vortex or banal banter with the anchor desk.
And now here’s Al with the Sports.
--Jim Szantor
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Soloist Jim Szantor as lead alto David Bixler gives the cutoff on the final chord.
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Part of the evening's program.
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