Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Biz Travel Chuckles
The New York Times
January 31, 2006
Itineraries
The Romance of Business Travel and Other Myths
By FRANCINE PARNES
The business-travel world is full of superlatives these days. Airbus is delivering the world's biggest passenger jet, the A380; Boeing recently announced record 2005 sales and, for good measure, completed the world's longest nonstop flight, a 23-hour voyage eastward from Hong Kong to London. Atlanta's airport just wrested the title of world's busiest airport from O'Hare in Chicago, and hotels are at the highest occupancy in years, with prices to match.
But who needs industry statistics about airplane orders and hotel occupancy rates when the beleaguered business people who are sitting in the planes and sleeping in the hotels are testing another kind of boundary: the limits of humiliation, weirdness, fear and revulsion? Wouldn't you rather hear their stories? Here are some of them.
TIGHTEST SPOT Bobbie Wyatt's husband packed the bags and checked out of their Manhattan hotel before she did, leaving her with only her top. "I had nothing to wear from the waist down," said Ms. Wyatt, a public relations professional from Greenville, S.C. There were no housekeepers in the hallway to lend her a uniform, and she was too embarrassed to call the concierge and say she had no pants.
"As I sank down on the bed, my arm brushed against the fabric of an airline blanket," she said. A light bulb went off. With the sewing kit from the bathroom, she rigged up a wrap skirt and headed outside for the nearest clothing store. "I glanced up to see a half-naked cowboy playing a guitar," she recalled. "I just relaxed, realizing I fit right in." To reward herself for her ingenuity, Ms. Wyatt emerged from the shop with three outfits.
WACKIEST MOMENT The flight out of Chicago had been delayed, there were no agents in sight and the passengers at the departure gate were restless. The phone at the desk rang, and a self-styled comedian answered it, identifying himself as Joe Customer.
"Then the other phone on the wall rings, so he answers that one, saying, 'Hello, Joe Customer here,' " recalled John G. Miller, a motivational speaker from Denver, who witnessed the incident. "He quickly goes back to the first phone. Then, 'Hold on, please. I think I have your party on the other line.'
"To everyone's amazement in the gate area, he reverses the handsets and puts them together, so the two phones are touching, one right side up and one upside down."
The tension-breaker put the crowd in stitches until "some tall woman dressed in her executive-boardroom airlines uniform that has never been wrinkled comes stomping down into the gate area," he said, and demanded to know who answered the phones.
Joe meekly raised his hand. After being scolded, he apologized to his fellow passengers. He was rewarded with loud applause.
MOST REVOLTING MEAL At a business dinner in Beijing, the guests were expected to sample an assortment of duck parts served on a lazy susan, including livers, gizzards and legs. Unable to force himself to eat the feet, Neil Gussman, a magazine editor in Philadelphia, helped himself instead to seconds of fried scorpions. "I am not prone to nightmares," he said, "but that night I woke up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat after dreaming those scorpions had reassembled themselves to kill me and were walking up my throat."
MOST INFURIATING FELLOW PASSENGERS Forget packed lunches that smell like rotting fish. Richard Laermer, who runs a public relations firm in Manhattan, had to cope with fellow passengers who seized his sickbed.
Mr. Laermer had fallen violently ill on a flight from New York to Miami, and his seatmate had moved so he could lie down on three seats across. On one of his runs to the restroom, two women appropriated two of the seats, dumping his belongings onto the floor. He told a flight attendant that if they didn't move, the plane would have to make an emergency landing. "It was a hero's moment," he said, "but worth it." The bluff worked.
MOST WELCOME CURSE On a trans-Atlantic flight, Eric Yaverbaum, the president of Jericho Communications in Manhattan, opened the overhead bin and released somebody's bottle of Jack Daniels, which crashed onto a passenger. Seeing the man knocked out and lying in the aisle, streaked in blood, Mr. Yaverbaum shuddered. If this guy is an American, he thought, he will probably sue. A doctor was summoned. The man came to. Mr. Yaverbaum apologized. The victim received six stitches. Then he began to yell — in French. "I had no idea what he was saying until he started cursing in English," he said.
MOST UNWELCOME SURPRISE After being picked up at the airport in Damascus, John Denson, an international lawyer in Houston, felt something hard near his feet. It was an Uzi. He asked the driver if it was his, "and he replied that he had his own, and that one was mine, 'just in case we need it,' " Mr. Denson said. "It is amazing how little room a Mercedes has in the back seat when you're trying to avoid touching a loaded Uzi."
MOST ANNOYING INSECTS As David Greene, a London lawyer, was riding through a swamp in Uganda, several tsetse flies bit him and his driver. They closed the windows and Mr. Greene seized a newspaper to kill the insects that remained. One had landed on the driver, and he smacked it with such force that the car went into a spin and landed in a bog. As Mr. Greene pushed the vehicle out, he was bitten several more times. He had learned, he said, a hard lesson: When in tropical Africa, "keep windows shut, however hot."
WILDEST RACE WITH A RHINO Then there was the time a rhinoceros charged the taxi in which Mr. Greene was riding through a game park in Kenya. "It became a race between us and the rhino," he said. Finally, the car pulled ahead, and Mr. Greene treated the driver to a meal at a local restaurant, the Carnivore.
WILDEST RACE WITH A BUS Mr. Gussman, the magazine editor, likes to bike on his frequent trips abroad and always wears stars-and-stripes spandex jerseys. On one excursion in Hong Kong, he elicited sneers from the driver of an overcrowded bus, who in frustration at not being able to keep pace with him, tried scaring him off the road.
"He didn't like getting beaten by a bicyclist," Mr. Gussman said. "Each time at the light, he was glaring. By the third light, he was screaming up very close behind me." Fearing for his life, Mr. Gussman turned aside and let the bus pass, on the assumption, he said, "that an overloaded bus wouldn't stop any better than it would start."
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Thursday, January 26, 2006
Dog-eared bestseller
At left, John Grogan and Marley, the unruly dog that inspired a best seller.
Everyone has a favorite dog in their past (mine was Frisky), and, if they're lucky, their present as well (my favorite "adopted" dog friend right now is Sasha - as i don't own her). And of course, there will always be plenty of dog stories - this one ended up being a national best seller. Enjoy.
The New York Times
January 26, 2006
Belatedly, a Bad Dog Finds His Forte: Selling Books
By DINITIA SMITH
LOWER MILFORD TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Why this dog and no other? Why has "Marley & Me," the story of an overly friendly, wildly energetic, highly dysfunctional yellow Labrador retriever, spent the last three months on the best-seller lists, climbing to the No. 2 spot on the forthcoming New York Times hardcover nonfiction list?
"I was pretty confident the book would be big, but not this big," said John Grogan, the book's author and Marley's owner, sitting in his large brick house surrounded by fields and woods in rural Pennsylvania. So far, "Marley & Me," published by William Morrow in November, has sold close to 500,000 copies. It is now in its 20th printing, with 870,000 books in print, the publisher said.
As readers of the book know, Marley is dead, but as Mr. Grogan, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, said, "Marley's ghost is everywhere."
"Here, he was locked in here," he said, opening the basement door. He pointed to where Marley had scraped at the wall with his claws and gnawed at the door frame trying to escape. "The wood door frame was totally gone to the studs," Mr. Grogan said. ("He was an obnoxious greeter of guests," he explained later. "For the sake of our company, unless they were really, really good friends, we would lock him there so they could come over without being slobbered on.")
Then he walked over to another spot where Marley had scraped at the drywall and gnawed at the wood corner piece. "I sanded it and filled it with putty and painted it," he said.
Marley was, in a way, a dog who loved too much. He would hurl himself through screen doors to get to Mr. Grogan or his wife, Jenny Vogt. When they locked him in a metal dog crate, he separated the steel bars.
"It looked like the Jaws of Life had pulled it open," Mr. Grogan said. Marley flung drool on guests. He stole Ms. Vogt's underwear. He ate her jewelry. Thunderstorms gave him anxiety attacks, and then he would chew through things, mattresses, the couch.
But "Marley & Me" is not just a book about a dog. In fact, it is a love story, of Mr. Grogan and his wife, a young married couple contemplating having a family. "We were young," the book begins, irresistibly. "We were in love." Ms. Vogt was nervous about caring for a baby and thought a dog "would be good practice," Mr. Grogan writes. A breeder offered them a discount on a puppy. "The little guy's on clearance," Ms. Vogt begged her husband as Marley somersaulted into their laps, gnawed on their fingers and clawed his way up to lick their faces.
Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it "a very funny valentine to all those four-legged 'big, dopey, playful galumphs that seemed to love life with a passion not often seen in this world.' "
"It's a book with intense but narrow appeal," she continued, "strictly limited to anyone who has ever had, known or wanted a dog."
The book follows the couple through their efforts to have a child. When Ms. Vogt suffered a miscarriage, Marley seemed to mourn with her.
"His tail hung flat between his legs," Mr. Grogan writes, "the first time I could remember it not wagging whenever he was touching one of us. His eyes were turned up at her, and he whimpered softly."
When their three children did arrive, he became their guardian, delicately licking their faces and ears, allowing them to crawl all over him. The problem, Mr. Grogan writes, was not keeping Marley from hurting one of the babies, but keeping him out of the diaper pail.
After Marley died in 2003, Mr. Grogan wrote a column about him for The Inquirer and was stunned when he got 800 responses from other dog owners. He thought Marley's story might make a book and wrote a proposal; the final manuscript was sold to Morrow for $200,000.
Lisa Gallagher, William Morrow's publisher, said she began to suspect the book would do well when she noticed staff members passing it around among themselves. Morrow printed nearly 6,000 readers editions and sent them to booksellers. It also gave away copies at last June's BookExpo America, the industry trade show, in New York. In a nod to the book's tearjerker qualities, the company distributed tissue with Marley's image on it at regional bookseller meetings; it also sent Frisbees with the book's title on them to stores.
Dan Mayer, who buys pet books for Barnes & Noble, was enthusiastic about the book because, he said, it is "more of a memoir." And then there's the book's cover, a photograph of Marley as a puppy looking appealingly up at the reader. "It's really hard to walk past the cover of this book and not want to pick it up," Mr. Mayer said. Barnes & Noble chose "Marley" for its Discover program, which earns a book prominent display space in the company's stores and on its Web site, reviews in in-store brochures and often priority for advertising and author readings.
Of course, a large part of the book's appeal is that Marley was a very, very bad dog. And the book is a lesson in unconditional love. The Grogans tried obedience school, but Marley was expelled. They sent him again, and this time he came in seventh in a class of eight. The dog behind him was "a psychopathic pit bull," Mr. Grogan writes. Marley ate his own obedience certificate.
These days, Marley lies buried in an unmarked grave in the garden at the edge of the woods. The Grogans now have a successor, Gracie, who is 18 months old. She is a female Lab. Like all Labs, she is exuberant and high-spirited.
"But what she has is what Marley didn't have," Mr. Grogan said, "the ability to calm down."
"We call her the anti-Marley," Mr. Grogan said.
Here's the Offical NYT book review:
The New York Times
October 13, 2005
Books of The Times | 'Marley & Me'
Honoring the Best Bad Dog a Family Could Ever Have
By JANET MASLIN
When John Grogan and his wife traveled to Ireland, they left behind the third member of the family: Marley, their Labrador retriever. Mr. Grogan wrote a six-page "Marley memo" for the dog sitter. This document nicely captures the pet's personality.
Vitamin pill: "The best way to give it to him is to simply drop it on the floor and pretend he's not supposed to have it."
Beverages: "His jowls hold a surprising amount of water, which runs out as he walks away from the bowl."
Obeying commands: "It's best if you're standing and not crouched down when you call him." Sedatives for thunderstorm phobia: "One pill 30 minutes before the storm arrives (you'll be a weather forecaster before you know it!)"
Mr. Grogan knew the workings of Marley's mind. He makes that abundantly clear in "Marley and Me," a very funny valentine to all those four-legged "big, dopey, playful galumphs that seemed to love life with a passion not often seen in this world." It's a book with intense but narrow appeal, strictly limited to anyone who has ever had, known or wanted a dog.
"Marley and Me" tenderly follows its subject from sunrise to sunset, from the ball-of-fluff stage to the heartbreaking farewell. In every chewed-up stereo speaker, busted screen door, purloined grilled cheese sandwich and bouquet of decapitated flowers, Mr. Grogan finds more about Marley to love.
So this is a dog with a dark side. After all, the book's subtitle is "Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog." As Mr. Grogan found out when he described Marley that way in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he is a columnist, that distinction is hotly contested; one reader said her Lab, Jason, was better qualified because he once ate a whole vacuum cleaner hose. Still, Marley was a strong candidate, and the book describes his qualifications with hilarity and affection.
As newlyweds, the Grogans were naïve enough to fall for Marley, the bargain puppy in his litter, without meeting his father. All they knew was that this Lab was a purebred. "This was my first time rubbing shoulders with anything resembling high breeding, my own family included," Mr. Grogan writes.
Only later did they realize that the "frothing, mud-caked banshee" seen briefly at the breeder's house might account for half of Marley's genes. So it made sense that Junior was rambunctious from the start. "It took him just one day to discover the best thing about his new home: toilet paper," the book recalls.
For the book's purposes, the Grogans became dog parents at the perfect time: their lives are eventful over the course of this story. At first they were carefree enough to devote their full attention to Marley, to the point where Mr. Grogan had time to speculate about his dog's inner thoughts. They often appeared to be: "Go ahead! Pick it up! Drool all over it! Run!"
Things changed when the author's wife became pregnant. (The Grogans now have three children.) The dog's way of celebrating was to eat part of the pregnancy test kit. "Sorry to disappoint you, pal," Mr. Grogan told him while retrieving it, "but this is going in the scrapbook." Other items wrenched from Marley's jaws during the course of this story ("so that's where my comb went!") include a paycheck and a gold necklace. The necklace incident ended happily. Maybe you don't want to know how Mr. Grogan got it back.
Only occasionally does "Marley and Me" contrive sitcom-ready situations. It's hard to believe that the author, even in the most amorous mood, could have mistaken Marley's warm breath for his wife's until he smelled Milk-Bone biscuits. And the image of a man being slurped on a moving toboggan by a pesky dog is too cartoonishly good to be true - unless the reader realizes how much universal Lab behavior is immortalized here. When Marley lands a movie role and finds a new way to mess up his walk-on-a-leash scene in each successive take, Mr. Grogan's description has a riotously authentic ring.
Eventually a shadow falls over this story. Though the book is full of tail-thumping enthusiasm, there comes a time when Marley just can't shred the furniture any more. "I coaxed him along, calling out words of encouragement, but it was like watching a toy slowly wind down as its battery went dead," Mr. Grogan writes, about walking with Marley up a familiar hill. "Marley just did not have the oomph needed to make it to the top."
But Mr. Grogan describes even his dog's decline in terms of mischief. Though losing his hearing, Marley could (and did) still steal food from the kitchen counter; he just couldn't tell that he was about to be caught in the act. The book continues to record his antics. But it also captures the four-hanky nobility of Marley's struggling through his last days.
Mr. Grogan keeps the book agile by sticking to Marley-centric episodes and by locating a crazed bit of Marleyness in any event he describes. He admits with shame that even while reporting on the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 crash of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., he could not keep the love and loss of Marley off his mind.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Waiter, waitress !
Having worked as a waiter myself, I loved this article. This is why i leave a 20 percent tip unless the service is terrible. Enjoy.
January 25, 2006
Critic's Notebook
My Week as a Waiter
By FRANK BRUNI
IT'S 7:45 p.m., the East Coast Grill is going full tilt and I'm ready to throttle one of the six diners at Table M-8.
He wants me to describe the monkfish special. For the fourth time. I hoarsely oblige, but when I return yet again to my riff on the apricot lager mustard, which comes right before my oratorical ode to the maple pecan mashed sweet potatoes, his attention flags and he starts to talk to a friend.
Does he mistake me for a recorded message, paused and played with the push of a button? Doesn't he know I have other tables to serve?
I need to go over and massage the mood at R-5, where one of the two diners has a suspiciously shallow pool of broth in her bouillabaisse, perhaps because I spilled some of it near M-2.
And I need to redeem myself with the two diners at X-9, who quizzed me about what the restaurant had on tap and received a blank stare in response. I'm supposed to remember the beers? Along with everything about the monkfish, these oddly coded table references, more than 10 wines by the glass and the provenance of the house oysters?
I had no idea.
I usually spend my nights on the other side of the table, not only asking the questions and making the demands but also judging and, I concede, taking caustic little mental notes. And it's been 20 years since I walked in a waiter's shoes, something I did for only six months.
But last week I traded places and swapped perspectives, a critic joining the criticized, to get a taste of what servers go through and what we put them through, of how they see and survive us. My ally was Chris Schlesinger, a well-known cook and author who owns the East Coast Grill, in Cambridge, Mass., and has no business interests in New York. So that my presence in the restaurant wouldn't become public knowledge, he introduced me to his staff as a freelance writer named Gavin doing a behind-the-scenes article to be placed in a major publication.
In some ways this restaurant, which opened in 1985 and specializes in fresh seafood and barbecue, was an easy assignment. Its service ethic is casual, so I didn't have to sweat many niceties. Its food is terrific, so diners don't complain all that much.
But its pace can be frenetic, and servers have little room to maneuver among 100 or so tightly spaced seats.
From Monday through Saturday, I worked the dinner shift, showing up by 3:30 and usually staying past 11. I took care of just a few diners at first and many more as the week progressed.
And I learned that for servers in a restaurant as busy as the East Coast Grill, waiting tables isn't a job. It's a back-straining, brain-addling, sanity-rattling siege.
Monday
Pop Quiz and Chop Chop
Every day at 4 p.m., the servers take a pop quiz. This afternoon's questions include ones on how the restaurant acquires its oysters and the color, texture and taste of mahi-mahi.
Before and after the quiz they tackle chores: moving furniture, hauling tubs of ice from the basement, folding napkins. I pitch in by chopping limes into quarters and lemons into eighths. I chop and chop. My fingers go slightly numb.
The servers range in age from their early 20's to their late 40's. Some go to school or hold other jobs on the side. Many would like to do less physically demanding work. All would like to earn more money.
If they put in a full schedule of four prime shifts a week, they might make $45,000 a year before taxes. Almost all of it is from tips. They wonder if diners realize that.
Bryan, a young server with whom I'm training, brings me up to speed on the crazy things diners do. They let their children run rampant, a peril to the children as well as the servers. They assume that the first table they are shown to is undesirable and insist on a different one, even if it's demonstrably less appealing. They decline to read what's in front of them and want to hear all their options. Servers disparagingly call this a "menu tour."
I acquire a new vocabulary. To "verbalize the funny" is to tell the kitchen about a special request. "Campers" are people who linger forever at tables. "Verbal tippers" are people who offer extravagant praise in lieu of 20 percent.
The doors open at 5:30 and soon two women are seated at L-3. They interrogate Bryan at great length about the monkfish, which, in changing preparations, will be a special all week long. He delivers a monkfish exegesis; they seem rapt.
They order the mahi-mahi and the swordfish.
"It's amazing," Bryan tells me, "how unadventurous people are."
How unpredictable, too. During a later stretch, Bryan has a man and a woman at L-3 and two men at L-4. The tables are adjacent and the diners receive the same degree of attention. The men at L-4 leave $85 for a check of $72 - a tip of about 18 percent.
L-3's check is $58, and Bryan sees the man put down a stack of bills. Then, as the man gets up from the table, the woman shakes her head and removes $5. The remaining tip is $4, or about 7 percent.
Tuesday
Ice, Ice Baby
I'm shadowing Tina, who has worked at the East Coast Grill for decades and seen it all. She is handling the same section Bryan did. She offers a psychological profile of a woman sitting alone at L-3, who declared the chocolate torte too rich and announced, only after draining her margarita, that it had too much ice.
"Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed," Tina says.
Some people are worse. Arthur, a young server who is fairly new to the restaurant, recalls a man who walked in and announced that he had a reservation, a statement Arthur distrusted. The East Coast Grill doesn't take reservations.
Arthur tried to finesse the situation by saying he was unaware of the reservation but hadn't worked over the previous three days.
"You haven't worked in three days?" the man said, according to Arthur's recollection. "You're going to go far in life!"
At about 9:30, a half-hour before the kitchen stops accepting orders, I take my first table, two women and a man. I ask them if they want to know about the half-dozen specials.
"We want to know everything," the man says.
The statement is like a death knell. I mention the monkfish, but forget to say that it comes with a sweet shrimp and mango salsa. I mention the fried scallops, and I'm supposed to say they're from New Bedford, Mass. But that detail eludes me, so I stammer, "Um, they're not heavily breaded or anything." They seem puzzled by my vagueness and poised to hear more. I've got nothing left.
What unnerves me most is trying to gauge their mood. Sometimes they smile when I circle back to check on them. Sometimes they glare.
In addition to dexterity, poise and a good memory, a server apparently needs to be able to read minds.
Wednesday
Who Really Needs a Drink?
I'm under Jess's wing. She's young, funny and generous with her encouragement. That final quality turns out to be crucial, because after I greet four diners at M-7, I'm informed that one of them has an affiliation with the Culinary Institute of America.
As I walk toward them with a bowl of house pickles, which is the East Coast Grill's equivalent of a bread basket, my hand shakes and several pickles roll under their table. I can't tell if they notice.
But I can tell they don't trust me. I'm tentative as I recite the specials, and I ask one of them if he wants another Diet Coke. He's drinking beer. They all look at me as if I'm a moron.
Jess tells me that enthusiasm is more important than definitive knowledge, that many diners simply want a server to help them get excited about something.
"You've got to fake it until you make it," she says.
I take her pep talk to heart, perhaps too much so. I handle three men at M-6, one of whom asks, "Between the pulled pork platter and the pork spareribs, which would you do?"
I tell him I'd change course and head toward the pork chop.
"It's that good?" he says.
"It's amazing," I say. I've never had it, but I've seen it. It's big, and so is he.
He later tells me, "Dude, you so steered me right on that pork chop."
I serve four young women at M-9. They order, among other dishes, the "wings of mass destruction." Per the restaurant's script, I warn them away from it, pronouncing it too hot to handle. They press on and survive.
One of them later wonders aloud whether to have the superhot "martini from hell," made with peppered Absolut. I didn't even know it was on the menu before she mentioned it.
"Why worry?" I say. "With those wings, you climbed Everest. The martini's like a bunny slope."
She orders it and drinks it and she and her friends leave a 22 percent tip (which, like all the tips I receive, will be given to the other servers). The three men at M-6 leave 20 percent.
Have I become a service God?
Thursday
I'm Really Allergic to Tips ...
Divinity must wait.
It's on this night that I spill bouillabaisse, confront my limited beer knowledge and silently curse Mr. Monkfish at M-8. I move up to an evening-long total of eight tables comprising 20 diners; on Wednesday I served five tables and 17 diners.
I encounter firsthand an annoyance that other servers have told me about: the diner who claims an allergy that doesn't really exist. A woman at X-10, which is a table for two, or a "two top," repeatedly sends me to the kitchen for information on the sugar content of various rubs, relishes and sauces.
But when I ask her whether her allergy is to refined sugar only or to natural sugars as well, she hems, haws and downgrades her condition to a blood sugar concern, which apparently doesn't extend to the sparkling wine she is drinking.
She orders the sirloin skewers, requesting that their marginally sweet accouterments be put on a separate plate, away from her beef but available to her boyfriend. He rolls his eyes.
Pinging from table to table, I repeatedly forget to ask diners whether they want their tuna rare or medium and whether they want their margaritas up or on the rocks. I occasionally forget to put all the relevant information - prices, special requests, time of submission - on my ordering tickets.
At least everyone at M-8, including Mr. Monkfish, seems content. As I talk to one of the women in the group, another server noisily drops a plate bound for a nearby table. A rib-eye steak special skids to a halt at the woman's feet.
"Is that the cowboy?" she says, using the special's advertised name. "That looks really good!"
About an hour later M-8's spirits aren't so high. They're motioning for me, and it's a scary kind of motioning. The two credit cards I've returned to them aren't the ones they gave me.
One of my last tables is a couple at X-1. They take a bossy tone with me, so when the woman asks if it's possible to get the coconut shrimp in the pu pu platter á la carte, I automatically apologize and say that it's not.
It turns out that I'm right. (I guiltily check a few minutes later.) It also turns out that servers make such independent decisions and proclamations, based on the way diners have treated them, all the time.
Friday
Do Not Jump the Shark
Apparently everything up to now has been child's play. Business will double tonight. People will stand three deep at the bar, closing lanes of traffic between the kitchen and some of the tables.
"Like a shark," Chris Schlesinger tells us, "you've got to keep moving or you die."
My chaperone is Christa, who's as down to earth and supportive as Jess. She's supposed to watch and inevitably rescue me as I try to tackle an entire section of five tables, each of which will have at least two seatings, or "turns."
By 7:30, all of these tables are occupied, and all have different needs at the same time. One man wants to know his tequila choices. I just learned the beers that afternoon.
Another man wants directions to a jazz club. Someone else wants me to instruct the kitchen to take the tuna in one dish and prepare it like the mahi-mahi in another. That's a funny I'll have to verbalize, a few extra seconds I can't spare.
I've developed a cough. It threatens to erupt as I talk to three diners at M-6. Big problem. I obviously can't cough into my hand, which touches their plates, but I can't cough into the air either. I press my lips together as my chest heaves. I feel as if I'm suffocating.
The kitchen accepts orders at least until 10:30 on Fridays and Saturdays. I'm dealing with diners until 11. By then I've been on my feet for more than six hours.
Over the course of the night I have surrendered only two tables and six diners to Christa. I have taken care of 11 tables and 32 diners myself. Except I haven't, not really. When my tables needed more water, Christa often got it. When they needed new silverware, she fetched it, because I never noticed.
Truth be told, I wasn't so good about napkin replacement either.
Saturday
Feeding the Hordes
My last chance. My last test. The restaurant ended up serving 267 diners on Friday night. It will serve 346 tonight.
Between 5:30 and 5:50, I get five tables, each of which needs to be given water, pickles, a recitation of the specials and whatever coddling I can muster.
The couple at one table want a prolonged menu tour. I'm toast.
Once again I try to tackle an entire section, seven tables in all. Dave is my minder. He tells me to make clear to diners that they need to be patient.
"If you don't control the dynamic, they will," he says.
I don't control the dynamic. Around 6:30 I ask him to take over a table I've started. As some diners leave and new ones take their places, I ask him to take over a few more tables.
I deliver a second vodka on the rocks with a splash of Kahlúa to a woman at L-9. Before I can even put it down, she barks, "There's too much Kahlúa in that!" Nice to know you, too, ma'am.
I do some things right. I point a couple at L-6 toward the tuna taco, because by now I've tasted it and I know it's fantastic. They love it and tell me they love me, a verbal tip supplemented by 17 percent. The next couple at L-6 barely talk to me, seek and receive much less care and leave a tip of over 50 percent. Go figure.
I do many things wrong. I fail to wipe away crumbs. I don't write the time on one ticket. I write M-12 instead of L-12 on another, creating a table that doesn't exist.
Around 8:45, my shirt damp with perspiration, I hide for five minutes in a service corridor, where I dip into the staff's stash of chocolate bars. Then I suck on a wedge of lemon, a little trick I learned from Bryan, to freshen my breath.
By the end of the night I've served a total of 15 tables comprising 38 people. Some of these people were delightful, and most tipped well, keeping my weeklong average - for a comparatively light load of tables - at about 18 percent.
Some weren't so great. They supported an observation that Dave made about restaurants being an unflattering prism for human behavior.
"People are hungry, and then they're drinking," he noted. "Two of the worst states that people can be in."
I recall a young woman at a six-top who bounced in her seat as she said, in a loud singsong voice: "Where's our sangria? Where's our sangria?" Her sangria was on the way, although she didn't seem to need it, and the bouncing wasn't going to make it come any faster.
Around 11:30 all the servers are treated to a shot of tequila. I drink mine instantly. I'm exhausted. I'll still feel worn out two days later, when I chat briefly on the telephone with Jess, Christa and Dave, who by that point know the full truth about me.
"I think you got a good sense," Dave says.
I think so, too, if he's talking about trying to be fluent in the menu and the food, calm in the face of chaos, patient in the presence of rudeness, available when diners want that, invisible when they don't.
It's a lot, and I should remember that. But I'd still like frequent water refills. And a martini from hell. Straight up.
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Monday, January 23, 2006
You lookin' at me ?
This piece is not only outrageously funny -but also OH SO TRUE. Perhaps that's part of what makes it so damn funny. This writer has discovered one of the great economic engines in the world.
the undercover economist
The Mystery of the Rude Waiter
Why my favorite restaurant employs such a churlish lout.
By Tim Harford
I don't want to complain, but my favorite lunchtime haunt has the rudest waiter I've ever encountered—and I don't think it's an accident.
The restaurant is famous for its superb, sophisticated Italian cooking and it prices accordingly. A romantic meal for two will cost you around $150, plus the price of your selection from a wine list of biblical proportions. Even if you pick the cheapest main course on the lunch menu and sip water, this frugal lunch for one will set you back $15.
Or, you could sit at the bar or one of the tables in the bar area. The food is still superb: You can fill up on rich, soft pork meatballs nestling on pillows of light polenta for about $8. The veal ragu is rich but you don't have to be, because this perfect spaghetti is half the price of a pasta dish in the main restaurant.
It sounds too good to be true, but I'm afraid that there is a catch. To get to the food, you have to get past the barman who takes your orders, a man more Bond villain than busboy. To walk into that bar is to laugh in the face of fear.
The barman welcomes me with all the warmth of the Transylvanian butler in B movies. He drops menus on my table with a sneer as I try, pathetically, to sound grateful. He repeatedly ignores my attempts to order. As he walks past, my companion whispers that he picked his tattoos up in a Russian prison. I think she's putting me on, but I can't be sure.
It's possible, of course, that this man is in the wrong job by accident, and when the restaurant owner reads this column and works out that it's about his restaurant, "Igor" will be fired. I'm not convinced at all. I think Igor is all part of the plan. One food critic described a previous bartender as acting like she just got back from a tax audit. (She must be a different bartender: There is no way Igor was ever a "she".) "Venomous" is obviously in the job description.
Why would a restaurant deliberately sabotage the dining experience? A restaurant with a good reputation and a brilliant chef acquires some degree of power to name its prices. With that power comes the temptation to try to separate out customers and charge a high price to the expense-account lobbyists and a cheaper price to me and my friends. A nice idea, but trying to charge different prices for the same product is not easy. Something must be done to keep the lobbyists in the full-priced restaurant, and that something is Igor.
This sounds odd, but it's not really so unusual. Think of Adobe's Photoshop Elements, a product that is often described as a stripped-down version of the image-processing software Photoshop. It doesn't cost Adobe any more to ship a Photoshop CD than to ship an Elements CD, and stripping out those extra features was surely an additional expense.
Intel introduced two versions of the old 486 computer chip; the cheaper version was the expensive version with some extra work done on the chip to reduce its speed. IBM's LaserWriter E, a low-end laser printer, turned out to be exactly the same piece of equipment as their high-end LaserWriter—except that there was an additional chip in the cheaper version to slow it down.
Beyond the high-tech industries, consider multipacks in the big box supermarkets. A manufacturer produces a gigantic pack of 12 four-liter bottles of lemonade at a higher price: It must hire a professional packaging company to bundle them together. As with Intel, IBM, and Adobe, the inferior product costs more to produce. The payoff is simple: It enables retailers to target price increases at shoppers who prefer something easier to carry, even if it is more expensive. And, of course, I have already reported on Starbucks' "short cappuccino," a cheap product so superior to everything else the company sells that they are obliged to obscure its very existence.
A lot of people find all this outrageous, but I'm not sure the alternatives are better. IBM could have specifically designed a low-end printer rather than crippling the high-end one, but that would have been more expensive and would have helped nobody. Or IBM could have slashed prices to business customers despite finding willing buyers at high prices, but this seems beyond the call of duty for a profit-making company. Or IBM could have passed up the opportunity to serve low-end customers altogether. That would have been no better.
In the end, the problem is not the funny pricing tricks but the market power that makes them possible. The solution to that is competition: Customers can, after all, always vote with their feet, and buy a different printer or eat lunch at a different restaurant.
One day I shall have an expense account, and I shall dine in the main restaurant where, no doubt, the maitre d' looks like Pierce Brosnan and sylphlike waitresses will give me massages. Until then, I will eat great food at low prices, and Igor will keep the lobbyists away.
The Undercover Economist appears on Saturdays in the Financial Times Magazine.
Tim Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. His latest book is The Undercover Economist.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2134489/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Grinding Coffee
left: from left - From left: Mazzer Mini ($429); Bodum Antigua ($69.99); Solis Maestro Plus ($149); Rancilio Rocky ($295).If you have fallen into the habit of buying new-fangled gadgets that do everything (such as these pictured), it's a sign from God that you have too much disposable income and haven't yet found a worthy charity. Repent. But enjoy this humorous article first.
January 19, 2006
Online Shopper
Establishing Some Ground Rules
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
THE coffee situation at my house got out of control gradually.
Somehow my husband and I have become the sort of full-blown extremists who argue over the finer points of milk-steaming techniques and who polish the chrome on our ridiculously shiny espresso maker as lovingly as firefighters buff a fancy new hook-and-ladder.
So when a fuse recently blew out on our old-fashioned Riviera Baby Lusso, we panicked and rushed it in for the sort of emergency tuneup more commonly associated with a finicky Italian sports car than a small kitchen appliance.
In the subsequent weeks, a bleak wasteland of coffee shop cappuccinos in cardboard cups, we realized that we would have to come up with a backup plan for the next time the Baby Riv went on the fritz.
My husband suggested buying a second machine. But a fact-finding mission to a local Williams-Sonoma store thoroughly confused us. New-fangled machines looked boxy, and the jargon was too esoteric even for fanatics like us. Some machines relied on special "state-of-the-art coffee capsule systems." Others had sensor pads to display messages in seven languages. Or manual dual frothers. Something called a Jura Capressa Impressa S9 Avantegarde cost $2,399.
I came home with a severe headache.
Thankfully, the Internet cured it. There I stumbled across a caffeine lover's nirvana, an encyclopedic site called Coffeegeek.com. It listed hundreds of reviews of espresso machines, grinders and accessories. A comprehensive milk-frothing guide offered tips that start at the cow. ("The feed of the cow, the type of the cow, the state of lactation etc.," would result in subtle yet potentially noticeable changes in the foam's quality.)
By the time I got to the espresso glossary, which defined a portafilter sneeze as "the instant release of pressure in the brewhead," which occurs on pump and piston machine that doesn't have a pressure release system, I knew that here I would find the definitive answer to any coffee query.
I phoned Mark Prince, the site's founder and most prolific reviewer, to learn which espresso machine I should buy as a backup. But he promptly persuaded me to buy a grinder instead.
"A good grinder is far more important, but people always skimp on it," Mr. Prince said. "I've made far better espresso with a $300 grinder and a $250 espresso machine than with a $50 grinder and a $2,000 espresso machine."
Who was I to argue with someone so passionate about coffee that he left his native Ottawa in search of cafe culture? In 1992 he stumbled into a Starbucks in Vancouver. "I still remember the day," he said. "I'd never heard of Starbucks before, and I'm walking down West Broadway, and there were two locations across the street from each other. I'm still here."
Mr. Prince so believes in the restorative power of a good cup that when his Web design firm lost all its customers after the Sept. 11 attacks, he put his staff to work building an informational coffee site in the fall of 2001.
"In a period of five days our company lost all our contracts." he said. "We had enough money to pay salaries for a couple of months, so I came up with a make-work project. We launched Coffeegeek.com on Dec. 18, and our little site has gone from having a hundred hits a day to half a million visitors a month."
"What's so important about having the right grinder?" I asked.
"When you grind beans, within the first minute they lose roughly 80 percent of the CO2 stored inside, and CO2 is one of the major flavor transporters between coffee and the cup," Mr. Prince said. "The CO2 released inside of ground coffee will carry the oils and aromatics right inside the cup."
If the beans are properly ground, that is.
"I've had terrible, cheap grinders in the past," I said. "They all broke and now we buy ground beans."
I heard a sharp intake of breath.
"Never buy ground beans," Mr. Prince said, maintaining a level tone. "I can recommend good grinders at different price points."
When he says he has tested a grinder, he means he has tortured it for months. He is currently scrutinizing KitchenAid's Proline grinder and has produced a preliminary review: "Taking apart the front assembly of the grinder (and the manual is very helpful in describing how to do this), you see the interior features an auger that transports whole beans to the vertically stacked 57-mm flat burrs. The ground coffee falls straight down a hole into the grinds catcher. It's a very intriguing design that should leave almost no ground coffee between uses."
His grinder recommendations (be warned, most of these are counter-space hogs):
The Bodum Antigua ($69.99 at Wholelattelove.com) is the cheapest grinder he recommends, better-suited to grinding for a press pot because "the grind is too inconsistent for espresso."
Solis makes three good grinders at higher prices, including the Maestro Classic ($99 at Kitchen-universe.com and "a good all-around grinder to even use for espresso"), the Maestro Plus ($149 at aabreecoffee.com and "a little better built, with a weighted base and with more grind settings") and the Baratza Virtuoso ($199 at 1st-line.com, it has "a DC motor for better torque and a much beefier burr set").
The Rancilio Rocky is "legendary in terms of home espresso grinders, one of the first consumer-built grinders that uses commercial parts," he said. "It's like buying a Viking stove for your home." It costs $295 at 1stincoffee.com.
The Mazzer Mini is "the epitome of home espresso grinders, looks beautiful, built like a tank and has a stepless grind adjustment that no other brand offers at that price point." It costs $429 at 1st-line.com.
Given our affectations, my husband and I probably would have gravitated immediately to the Mazzer Mini even if Mr. Prince had not described it, after "a very long-term evaluation," as "the best possible grinder for home espresso." A tape measure determined the Mini would fit under our cupboards with half an inch of headroom to spare.
After ordering the grinder from 1st-line.com (free two-day shipping is standard), I ordered Black Cat espresso beans from Intelligentsiacoffee.com, which ships beans right after they have been roasted. How did I choose Black Cat over other fine choices at sites like Terroircoffee.com and Espressovivace.com? Black Cat is the bean Mr. Prince uses in testing.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com
###
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Give up keys Gma
This guy is very funny. Read carefully. Notice nuanced remarks. Laugh. Repeat.
human nature
Cough Up the Keys, Grandma
How to get old people off the road.
By William Saletan
Cities are inviting old people to trade in their cars for rides. The car buys you an account, from which you draw each time you call in for a ride. Rationales: 1) Old drivers are even more accident-prone than teenagers. 2) They don't use their cars much anyway. 3) Friends and family can add to their accounts by donating rides or money. 4) Old folks like to spend from their accounts instead of begging friends or family. (For additional ways to limit accidents among older drivers, click here; for Human Nature's take on raising the retirement age, click here.)
A California school district canceled its philosophy course on creationism. The course was widely seen as an end run around last month's court ruling that intelligent design couldn't be taught as science. Civil libertarians sued anyway, and the district folded. Plaintiffs' spin: Separation of church and state is vindicated. District's spin: We couldn't afford a legal fight. Discovery Institute's spin: The district screwed up by teaching old-fashioned creationism, not intelligent design. Course designer's obtuse non-spin: "This is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach." (For Human Nature's previous update on the case, click here.)
Having a TV in your bedroom means you get only half as much sex. A study of 523 Italian couples found that those with a TV had sex four times a month; those without a TV had sex eight times a month. Among people older than 50, TV reduced the average frequency of sex from seven times a month to 1.5. The study did not make clear whether 1) putting a TV in your bedroom makes you have less sex or 2) having less sex makes you put a TV in your bedroom.
A clinic says it has trained dogs to smell lung cancer on your breath with 99 percent accuracy—and to smell breast cancer with 88 percent accuracy. That's more accurate than high-tech tests. Explanation: 1) Tumors release tiny amounts of telltale chemicals. 2) Dogs can smell such tiny amounts. 3) Dogs have previously been trained to smell cancer on people's skin or bladder cancer in their urine. Scientists say the results are too good to be true, so they're waiting for an independent study to replicate them. (For Slate's take on bomb-sniffing dogs, click here. For an update on bomb-sniffing wasps, click here.)
Scientists claim to have cleared the Donner Party of cannibalism. Using CSI methods, they examined bone remains and found that 1) the Donner family camp was at a different site from the camp where cannibalism demonstrably occurred, and 2) there's no evidence of cannibalism at the Donner site. Skeptics' replies: 1) Maybe they ate the meat but didn't get to the bones. 2) The evidence shows they were desperate enough to eat shoelaces, rodents, and their dog. 3) Even if they didn't eat each other, the other families did. (For confirmed cases of cannibalism last year, click here and here.)
DNA testing vindicated the death-penalty system. Virginia's governor ordered the test because critics thought it would expose the nation's first execution of a provably innocent man. Instead, the test confirmed the murderer's guilt. Reactions from death-penalty opponents: 1) Keep testing, and eventually we'll prove an innocent man has been executed. 2) It's wrong to kill even if you've got the right man. 3) We can't believe this murderer conned us into using him as our test case by swearing his innocence to the end.
A survey suggests we're losing our aversion to fatness. Two decades ago, most Americans said overweight people were less attractive than other people. Now only 24 percent say so. Theories: 1) More of us are fat, so we don't want to judge others or feel bad about ourselves. 2) More of us are fat, so our perception of what counts as fat has shifted. 3) More of us are politically correct, so we've learned not to tell pollsters how ugly we think fat people are. 4) Our views about the aesthetics of plumpness have changed in past centuries and will change again.
A judge ruled that fetuses don't count toward carpool lane quotas. An Arizona woman, having been ticketed for driving alone in an HOV lane, pointed out to the judge that Arizona law counts the fetus as a person when calculating the number of victims in violent crimes against pregnant women. As evidence, she brought photos of her son, who was born two weeks after the incident. The director of Arizona Right to Life supported her claim. The ticketing officer says it's not the first time he's heard this argument. The judge rejected it, explaining that the purpose of HOV laws is "to fill empty space in a vehicle," and the womb doesn't count. (For Slate's take on counting fetuses as victims in violent crimes, click here.)
Lions are hunting humans in southern Africa. In Tanzania, annual attacks are up from 40 a decade ago to 100 today; 70 percent are lethal. One lion purportedly ate 40 people. Reasons: 1) People are sleeping outdoors to guard their crops against bush pigs. 2) Lions following the bush pigs find the humans and discover they're tasty. 3) "Once they discover that they can eat people they get quite bold. They are even breaking into people's houses and pulling them out." Experts' advice to locals: Build your outhouses closer to your homes. Lesson to Americans and Australians: Stop whining about shark attacks. (For Slate's take on shark lovers, click here.)
Latest Human Nature columns: 1) Teachers who have sex with boys. 2) Coercing women to experiment on their eggs. 3) The future of creationism. 4) Our creepy genetic experiment on dogs. 5) The pope's anti-gay tendencies. 6) Does Alito treat women like girls? 7) Bill Bennett's racial determinism. 8) The mainstreaming of anal sex.
William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2134380/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
human nature
Cough Up the Keys, Grandma
How to get old people off the road.
By William Saletan
Cities are inviting old people to trade in their cars for rides. The car buys you an account, from which you draw each time you call in for a ride. Rationales: 1) Old drivers are even more accident-prone than teenagers. 2) They don't use their cars much anyway. 3) Friends and family can add to their accounts by donating rides or money. 4) Old folks like to spend from their accounts instead of begging friends or family. (For additional ways to limit accidents among older drivers, click here; for Human Nature's take on raising the retirement age, click here.)
A California school district canceled its philosophy course on creationism. The course was widely seen as an end run around last month's court ruling that intelligent design couldn't be taught as science. Civil libertarians sued anyway, and the district folded. Plaintiffs' spin: Separation of church and state is vindicated. District's spin: We couldn't afford a legal fight. Discovery Institute's spin: The district screwed up by teaching old-fashioned creationism, not intelligent design. Course designer's obtuse non-spin: "This is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach." (For Human Nature's previous update on the case, click here.)
Having a TV in your bedroom means you get only half as much sex. A study of 523 Italian couples found that those with a TV had sex four times a month; those without a TV had sex eight times a month. Among people older than 50, TV reduced the average frequency of sex from seven times a month to 1.5. The study did not make clear whether 1) putting a TV in your bedroom makes you have less sex or 2) having less sex makes you put a TV in your bedroom.
A clinic says it has trained dogs to smell lung cancer on your breath with 99 percent accuracy—and to smell breast cancer with 88 percent accuracy. That's more accurate than high-tech tests. Explanation: 1) Tumors release tiny amounts of telltale chemicals. 2) Dogs can smell such tiny amounts. 3) Dogs have previously been trained to smell cancer on people's skin or bladder cancer in their urine. Scientists say the results are too good to be true, so they're waiting for an independent study to replicate them. (For Slate's take on bomb-sniffing dogs, click here. For an update on bomb-sniffing wasps, click here.)
Scientists claim to have cleared the Donner Party of cannibalism. Using CSI methods, they examined bone remains and found that 1) the Donner family camp was at a different site from the camp where cannibalism demonstrably occurred, and 2) there's no evidence of cannibalism at the Donner site. Skeptics' replies: 1) Maybe they ate the meat but didn't get to the bones. 2) The evidence shows they were desperate enough to eat shoelaces, rodents, and their dog. 3) Even if they didn't eat each other, the other families did. (For confirmed cases of cannibalism last year, click here and here.)
DNA testing vindicated the death-penalty system. Virginia's governor ordered the test because critics thought it would expose the nation's first execution of a provably innocent man. Instead, the test confirmed the murderer's guilt. Reactions from death-penalty opponents: 1) Keep testing, and eventually we'll prove an innocent man has been executed. 2) It's wrong to kill even if you've got the right man. 3) We can't believe this murderer conned us into using him as our test case by swearing his innocence to the end.
A survey suggests we're losing our aversion to fatness. Two decades ago, most Americans said overweight people were less attractive than other people. Now only 24 percent say so. Theories: 1) More of us are fat, so we don't want to judge others or feel bad about ourselves. 2) More of us are fat, so our perception of what counts as fat has shifted. 3) More of us are politically correct, so we've learned not to tell pollsters how ugly we think fat people are. 4) Our views about the aesthetics of plumpness have changed in past centuries and will change again.
A judge ruled that fetuses don't count toward carpool lane quotas. An Arizona woman, having been ticketed for driving alone in an HOV lane, pointed out to the judge that Arizona law counts the fetus as a person when calculating the number of victims in violent crimes against pregnant women. As evidence, she brought photos of her son, who was born two weeks after the incident. The director of Arizona Right to Life supported her claim. The ticketing officer says it's not the first time he's heard this argument. The judge rejected it, explaining that the purpose of HOV laws is "to fill empty space in a vehicle," and the womb doesn't count. (For Slate's take on counting fetuses as victims in violent crimes, click here.)
Lions are hunting humans in southern Africa. In Tanzania, annual attacks are up from 40 a decade ago to 100 today; 70 percent are lethal. One lion purportedly ate 40 people. Reasons: 1) People are sleeping outdoors to guard their crops against bush pigs. 2) Lions following the bush pigs find the humans and discover they're tasty. 3) "Once they discover that they can eat people they get quite bold. They are even breaking into people's houses and pulling them out." Experts' advice to locals: Build your outhouses closer to your homes. Lesson to Americans and Australians: Stop whining about shark attacks. (For Slate's take on shark lovers, click here.)
Latest Human Nature columns: 1) Teachers who have sex with boys. 2) Coercing women to experiment on their eggs. 3) The future of creationism. 4) Our creepy genetic experiment on dogs. 5) The pope's anti-gay tendencies. 6) Does Alito treat women like girls? 7) Bill Bennett's racial determinism. 8) The mainstreaming of anal sex.
William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2134380/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Friday, January 13, 2006
Writing wrongs
The New York Times
January 11, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
A Million Little Corrections
By TIM CARVELL
IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions and elisions in my best-selling memoir, "A Brief History of Tim." In the wake of the recent revelations about the work of J T Leroy and James Frey, it seems inevitable that some of my small mistakes will come to light, and so I feel duty-bound to be upfront and honest with you. Plus, I hear that reporters have been sniffing around.
I feel that none of the slight liberties I took in writing my memoir really affect the overall work, but nonetheless, you should know a few things:
I am not, in fact, black.
Nor am I, to the best of my knowledge, a woman. Anything in my book that suggests otherwise is the result of a typographical error. That this error was compounded by my decision to pose for my author photo and bookstore appearances in drag and blackface is, I will acknowledge, unfortunate.
The portions of my book dealing with Depression-era Ireland are, I have been reliably informed, copied verbatim from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I can only conclude that I accidentally confused my manuscript with my notes for my memoir in which I copied large portions of other writers' works, just to see how they were structured. In hindsight, the fact that I was born 40 years after the Depression should have been a tip-off.
My parents are both alive; any reference to my being orphaned at age 12 was meant to be strictly metaphorical.
Furthermore, my parents and their lawyers would like it known that neither they, nor any other member of my family, ever beat and/or had sex with me. I thought it was clear that those parts of the book were meant as a joke. (That's what the emoticons were for.)
In writing a narrative, it is sometimes necessary to compress or combine certain incidents for dramatic effect. I did much the same thing in the chapter of my book dealing with my prison term, although in reverse: in the interest of dramatic clarity, I expanded my 1993 arrest for jaywalking into a seven-year stint in Sing Sing for manslaughter.
Okay, it wasn't so much a jaywalking "arrest" as a ticket.
Fine, it was a stern warning. Happy now?
The death of my older brother, my ensuing severe depression and subsequent emotional breakthrough with the help of a caring psychotherapist did not happen to me, but rather to Timothy Hutton in the film "Ordinary People," which I saw at a very impressionable age, and which I could have sworn happened to me.
Ditto for the part about accidentally hacking into Norad and being saved from causing a global thermonuclear war, with an assist from Dabney Coleman. That was "WarGames."
Really, the fact that I could remember his name only as "Dabney Coleman" should have given me pause.
And, finally, since people are getting all "fact-checky" on me, I should just confess that my life did not, in fact, shatter into a million little pieces. I just went back and recounted. It was six pieces. Consider it a rounding error.
Tim Carvell is a writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."
###
January 11, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
A Million Little Corrections
By TIM CARVELL
IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions and elisions in my best-selling memoir, "A Brief History of Tim." In the wake of the recent revelations about the work of J T Leroy and James Frey, it seems inevitable that some of my small mistakes will come to light, and so I feel duty-bound to be upfront and honest with you. Plus, I hear that reporters have been sniffing around.
I feel that none of the slight liberties I took in writing my memoir really affect the overall work, but nonetheless, you should know a few things:
I am not, in fact, black.
Nor am I, to the best of my knowledge, a woman. Anything in my book that suggests otherwise is the result of a typographical error. That this error was compounded by my decision to pose for my author photo and bookstore appearances in drag and blackface is, I will acknowledge, unfortunate.
The portions of my book dealing with Depression-era Ireland are, I have been reliably informed, copied verbatim from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I can only conclude that I accidentally confused my manuscript with my notes for my memoir in which I copied large portions of other writers' works, just to see how they were structured. In hindsight, the fact that I was born 40 years after the Depression should have been a tip-off.
My parents are both alive; any reference to my being orphaned at age 12 was meant to be strictly metaphorical.
Furthermore, my parents and their lawyers would like it known that neither they, nor any other member of my family, ever beat and/or had sex with me. I thought it was clear that those parts of the book were meant as a joke. (That's what the emoticons were for.)
In writing a narrative, it is sometimes necessary to compress or combine certain incidents for dramatic effect. I did much the same thing in the chapter of my book dealing with my prison term, although in reverse: in the interest of dramatic clarity, I expanded my 1993 arrest for jaywalking into a seven-year stint in Sing Sing for manslaughter.
Okay, it wasn't so much a jaywalking "arrest" as a ticket.
Fine, it was a stern warning. Happy now?
The death of my older brother, my ensuing severe depression and subsequent emotional breakthrough with the help of a caring psychotherapist did not happen to me, but rather to Timothy Hutton in the film "Ordinary People," which I saw at a very impressionable age, and which I could have sworn happened to me.
Ditto for the part about accidentally hacking into Norad and being saved from causing a global thermonuclear war, with an assist from Dabney Coleman. That was "WarGames."
Really, the fact that I could remember his name only as "Dabney Coleman" should have given me pause.
And, finally, since people are getting all "fact-checky" on me, I should just confess that my life did not, in fact, shatter into a million little pieces. I just went back and recounted. It was six pieces. Consider it a rounding error.
Tim Carvell is a writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."
###
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Better Body
The New York Times
January 12, 2006
Fitness
A Better Body in 64 Payments
By STEVE FRIEDMAN
HERE'S how an infomercial works: One day life is good, and I'm munching on a sugar-coated, low-fat blueberry Pop-Tart in front of my television at 1:30 a.m., weeping quietly at Tony and Maria's first meeting in "West Side Story" because I know that staggering pain and death await them and all of humanity.
Between that moment and dawn's early light, for 20 minutes I remember only dimly, I stare slack-jawed at a television advertisement for a Bowflex home-exercise machine.
A few days later, five small-coffin-size cardboard boxes are crammed into my one-bedroom apartment, cutting off some of my favorite television viewing angles, tripping me on my late night sorties to fetch Fig Newtons from the fridge, unsettling me so much that I'm forced to add a pint of reduced-fat frozen yogurt to my Pop-Tarts, to soothe my nerves.
I call my friend Jack to complain. I do this because I blame him for my predicament. Jack is a voice-over actor who works out at a health club every morning and eats oatmeal for lunch.
A few days earlier we had been sitting at a Greek diner in the middle of the afternoon, because for the last five years neither of us has had what Jack calls "a no-win contract with the Man" and others refer to as "steady jobs."
We had been chatting about Venezuelan-style populism, Britney Spears and male-pattern hair loss. I was snacking on a cheeseburger and milkshake.
"You're Shamu," Jack said. "Don't you think you'd be happier if you'd eat like a human being instead of a tree sloth and start working out every so often?"
"I think tree sloths are vegetarians," I said.
"Who cares what tree sloths are? You're a whale! You've got to do something!"
But what? My knees are arthritic, so I can't play basketball or jog anymore. The pool at my fitness club is always crowded. It's too cold for bicycling. Sit-ups? On my hardwood floors? Why not just ask for serious spinal injury and months, if not years, of excruciating and expensive rehab.
And then I saw the Bowflex infomercial. "Pumped arms. Ripped abs. Legs of steel," it said. "Twelve pounds of muscle in six weeks," and "Results are easy, with just one simple workout, 20 minutes a day, three times a week." All for $25 a month.
Bowflex spent $16 million for paid programming on national cable channels in 2005, more than any other company spent on a piece of home exercise equipment, according to the Infomercial Monitoring Service.
I can understand why. Its message is clear and life affirming, potent and simple. I have heard similar exhortations from evangelists over the years and, more recently, from a girlfriend right before she dumped me. To wit: just because I'm an overweight, lazy, greedy, at times selfish, overeating, occasionally self-loathing and chronically underearning daydreamer, doesn't mean I'm beyond salvation.
Redemption is as easy as surrendering my will and a little cash to a higher power. Or springing for flowers and shaving more often and taking Katharine to a nice restaurant every once in a while. Or, in the case of the Bowflex, simply punching a few buttons on my telephone.
A week and a half later, after I have realized that assembling the Bowflex Xtreme 2 requires an advanced degree in biomechanics, after I have called the Bowflex folks to send someone over to put the thing together for me, and after I have learned that assembly costs an extra $200 or so that the infomercials don't mention, I open the owner's manual and fitness guide, searching for the easy-to-follow map to a world where no one will call me Shamu.
Instead, on the first page, I find this: "Please take your time to read through the entire manual before attempting to use your Bowflex Xtreme 2 home gym. You should understand how to properly set up and perform each exercise before you do so using Power Rod resistance." Slight problem: The manual is 69 pages. There are 75 different exercises. I feel a mood coming on. I fetch a few Pop-Tarts.
This isn't fair. One Bowflex magazine ad promised me "rock-hard abs, a sculpted chest, and powerful arms" as a result of exercising "just 20 minutes a day, three days a week." It didn't say anything about hours spent memorizing "success tips." And it certainly didn't mention the "Bowflex Xtreme 2 Body Leanness Program," which I found on Page 55, where I learn that "for maximum fat loss," I ought to stick to a daily diet of 1,500 calories. If I could stick to a 1,500-calorie diet, would I be sharing my living quarters with a machine that is nearly seven feet tall and looks like a mechanical octopus? I take out my fury on a pint of peanut butter cup ice cream, which I have stored for just such an emergency.
I wake the next morning filled with resolve and anticipation. I do three sets of bench presses, then seated shoulder presses, lat pull-downs and biceps curls. Afterward I am sweating a little, grunting and feeling extraordinarily fit.
"Behold the new me," I say to Jack, whom I have invited over to admire the Bowflex Xtreme 2. Jack inspects the resistance rod technology.
"I see you have it set on 'girl,' " he says.
The booklet offers seven training regimens, ranging from the 20-minute, three-day-a-week "better body workout" to the six-day-a-week, hourlong "body building" plan. I choose "advanced general conditioning," which means exercising 35 to 45 minutes, four days a week. On those days I also spend 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer at the gym. At the end of a week I have taken my belt in a notch. After two weeks I have lost five pounds. I don't wheeze quite as much on my trips for Fig Newtons. Also I now use bowflex as a participle.
"What are you up to tonight?" Jack asks one afternoon at the diner, where we are mulling over Villanova's prospects in the forthcoming college basketball season, the heavy toll globalization exacts on the poor and who is a better dancer, Christina Aguilera or Shakira.
"Not much," I say. "I'm just going to grab a salad, maybe watch a little TV, then do some bowflexin." I drop the g because I think it makes me sound more muscular.
In the middle of Week 3, when I look in the mirror, my arms are bigger and my chest and shoulders are more defined. I refer to my arms as guns now, as casually as possible and at the slightest opportunity.
"How have you been?" a magazine editor I used to date asks me when I run into her on the street one day.
"Not bad," I reply. "But the guns are kinda sore."
She frowns, pursing her lips.
"Probably because I've been doing so much bowflexin," I say.
She steps back.
I scream during my crossover high rear delt rows. (Don't ask.) I grow a goatee, which I think is slimming. I start slipping the word engorged into conversation.
"Don't you think," Jack asks one day over our afternoon coffee, "that December's a little late in the year to be wearing nothing but a T-shirt?"
"The guns need to breathe," I say.
"What is wrong with you?"
"Nothing. I'm getting healthy. And speaking of health, do you have any idea how many calories are packed into a bowl of oatmeal? Maybe you ought to think about that."
"I miss the old you," Jack says. "Plus you're never going to last on that thing."
But I do. I last, and I thrive. I have worked out with free weights before, and on Cybex machines and Universal equipment. I find the Bowflex Xtreme 2 a perfectly satisfactory alternative, solid and challenging. (So do legions of Bowflex users I encountered online, who seem to find success with the Bowflex in direct proportion to how much they use it.)
Virtually every exercise I have ever done with weights, or on a machine in a gym, I can do on my Bowflex. And the power rod resistance turns out to be a rather ingenious way that the Bowflex brains have figured out to simulate weight by pulling against heavy plastic rods. So what if I have a mechanical octopus as a roommate? It's working.
True, the heavy-duty plastic mat that the Bowflex is supposed to sit upon is an "accessory" that is an additional $99. True, the "satisfaction guarantee" refund offer would entail my disassembling the Bowflex Xtreme 2, packing it into its original boxes and paying for its shipment back to Bowflex. True, the manufacturer recalled more than one million devices in 2004 after reports of broken seats and collapsed benches on its Ultimate and Power Pro models. True, the Bowflex Xtreme 2 costs $1,599.
True, when a woman I'm dating discovers that I have ordered a machine advertised on an infomercial, she says, "I don't know what your mother did to you and I don't want to know, but don't call me anymore." True, the infomercial universe is filled with companies selling belts that promise to melt away pounds while you're lounging on a couch, miracle diets that will make you slender while you're slumped at your desk and other goofy sounding, if not fraudulent, gizmos and gimcracks. Can something called a Bowflex that comes from that same universe possibly be legit?
"As long as you stress the musculature in a similar manner, it doesn't matter if you're using a Bowflex or free weights or a similar device," said Glenn A. Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia.
"The bottom line is they all work if you use them," Dr. Gaesser said, "But there's a caveat with the machines that make promises. If you work out 20 minutes, three times a week, yes, there will be a new body. But don't think it will look like a body builder or Lance Armstrong."
Keith Cinea, the senior education coordinator for the National Strength and Conditioning Association, said a better physique was part of a package deal. "It's resistance training, aerobic conditioning and your diet," he said. "Especially if you're looking at the body transformation they mention in their sales pitch, with just the machine, no, it won't work."
It won't? I need to change my diet, maybe even increase time on the elliptical trainer? This disappoints me. This makes me sad. I feel a mood coming. But I do not grab for a pint of ice cream, or reach for a box of Pop-Tarts. Those sad, fatty days are over. Shamu doesn't live here anymore.
There's no room, not in my apartment. For this I salute the Bowflex Xtreme 2. As I salute, I check the mirror. The guns? Totally engorged.
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