Month: May 2003

I seem to have gone a while without updating my progress on Short Fiction Month, so….

:: From some critical comments I’ve seen lately, it appears that Edgar Allan Poe has fallen somewhat out-of-favor. His prose-style — very breathless and, in some cases, over-the-top — simply isn’t in style. That seems to me a pity, as I still find him enormously effective. I re-read “The Masque of the Red Death”, which I think is a small masterpiece of description. That story’s visuals are striking, and I’m a reader who tends to gloss over long passages of descriptive prose. (Mr. Mxyzptlk will no doubt recall our mutual fondness for The Yearling and its pages-upon-pages of descriptive crap….) “The Cask of Amontillado” is a story that’s escaped my notice in my previous explorations of Poe, and I’m not sure why. It’s quintessential Poe: madness and murder. I didn’t enjoy “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” quite as much, but it’s still an interesting antecedent of the detective story.

:: Cemetery Dance is quickly becoming one of my favorite magazines (now, if only I could get my own short fiction down to the length where I could start submitting to them!). It’s the best horror magazine out there right now, with regular interviews and feature articles in addition to the fiction, which isn’t always straight-out horror — they do “dark fantasy”, as well. From a recent issue I read Brian A. Hopkins’s “North”, a story of a boy’s trip to the wilderness with his father and their strange encounter there, and a slick tale by Thomas F. Monteleone called “It’s In the Bag”, which invokes the fears of airport security and reality television shows. Some months ago I gave a very negative review of one of Monteleone’s novels, so I found this story a very pleasant surprise, indeed. (By the way, fans of Stephen King should be reading Cemetery Dance, because one of their regular features is a lengthy news article about All Things King.)

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Signs of the times: at some point in the very near future, the City of Buffalo’s finances are likely to be placed in the hands of a state-appointed “Control Board”. This is basically the State of New York saying to the City of Buffalo, “Not only have you made a mess of things, but we don’t have any faith in your ability to fix things, either. So we’ll do it.”

Things are about to get pretty ugly, I think.

What strikes me as odd is that no new political leadership has emerged in Buffalo, despite years of the kind of crap that is now going to result in the State basically slapping a dunce-cap on the City’s head. The Mayor is in his third term, and in his last run for re-election he was unopposed. (There was probably a Libertarian candidate or something, but come on, now.) The County Executive is in his second term, I believe. Do economic bad times lead to a “Throw the bums out” everywhere but here?

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Here’s a restaurant pet-peeve of mine: restaurants that fail to seat parties in the order that they come in, regardless of what seating arrangements are actually available.

Listen up, restaurant seating hostesses of the world: If a party of three enters the doors at 6:10 p.m., and a party of six enters at 6:25 p.m., and a table that can seat up to six becomes available, take the party of three first. End of discussion. That’s the only way the system is going to work. If you try to keep a big table open because sooner or later a large party is going to come in, the interim period will only annoy the smaller parties you keep waiting at the door. (Of course, this is within reason. If you have a separate room or a very large table that is specifically designed for very large parties — say, ten or more — by all means, keep it for the large parties. But six? Nah. Let ’em wait. They should have left the house earlier.)

As a restaurant manager, yes, I prayed for that scenario to not actually occur: that a large party walk in and be put on a waiting-list because we seated two people at a table for six. But in nearly every case where we put the small party there, it was because there simply wasn’t anywhere else available, and it’s simply not fair to penalize customers who come in first because their party isn’t as big as the party that may or may not be on its way in the door. And I never felt comfortable asking the small parties to move, unless they were finished with their meals and only engaging in post-meal discussion. (And not really even then, frankly.)

Of course, people with large parties tend to not be the most understanding folks in the world. They often didn’t understand why a party of two or three could be told it would only be ten to fifteen minutes for a table, whereas the larger party might be told twenty to thirty. I once had a woman call the night before about the possibility of seating a party of eighteen, and I took her name and specifically told her that we did not take reservations, all seating was first-come-first-served, we couldn’t guarantee that her entire large party would be together. She said OK…and then, the next day when she actually showed up, she got haughty, insisting that she had reservations, and that the manager to whom she had spoken had promised her immediate seating. I pointed out that I was the manager to whom she had spoken, that I had said no such thing, and that she’d have to wait.

(People will often lie to get their way in restaurants, like the family that would come in for Sunday buffet and claim that their two daughters were both under twelve, so as to get the cheaper kid’s price…despite the fact that both daughters had, shall we say, blossomed nicely, and one had even driven the family van into the parking lot. I don’t know too many twelve-year-olds with learner’s permits. These people would look me in the eye and say these things…and since it was Sunday and they were invariably nicely dressed, I have to assume they’d come from church. Imagine that: lying through your teeth at the first stop upon leaving church on Sunday.)

So, look, seating hostesses: unless your restaurant actually takes reservations, then first-come, first served means precisely that. (Unless, of course, you’re in one of those Disney World restaurants with that insane “Priority Seating” system. Do they still do that?)

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As long as I’m ragging on Blogger, I might as well pick on them for being bad writers, too. I’ve been checking out status.blogger.com, and my jaw dropped at the awfulness of the first sentence of this post.

Writers of the world: Whenever someone says, “Anybody can write, so why should I pay you to do it for me?” use this sentence to refute them. The ability to concatenate words into grammatically correct patterns is not synonymous with the ability to write.

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As Samwise Gamgee would say, “Well, I’m back.”

It turns out that it’s a good thing I decided to take a hiatus for this past weekend, because it turned out that a billing snafu with my ISP (the same snafu that resulted in the template here being whacked out for the last few days) couldn’t be resolved until yesterday, even though I discovered said snafu on Friday. I went to call my ISP’s billing department to clear the matter up at 3:30 on Friday afternoon, only to find out that they were already closed for the holiday weekend. Not that I’d have posted anything here, but I would have at least been able to fix the appearance, or attempt to do so, as I tried yesterday only to discover that templates apparently aren’t loading the way they should. Oh well.

So, I was actually totally off-line between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning. And it was actually kind-of nice. I got a lot more work done, even with having company in that span (a very good friend we haven’t seen in two years). Of course, now I have to catch up on everybody’s blog entries from that span, but worse things could happen, I suppose.

(Oh, and a note to any of you who may be in management with service companies: If you’re going to run different hours on the days preceding holiday weekends, a good service procedure might be to actually let your customers know about this. You know, good service. It’s that thing all managers pay reverent lip-service to, and yet so many seem to allow to vanish like a slice of bread thrown into the midst of a flock of hungry ducks when the chips are down.)

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This is another test-post, with no content to speak of.

(But attentive readers of AICN and of Byzantium’s Shores should expect one of my patented geek-eruptions in the near future….)

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This is a test. Normal posting is still planned to resume tomorrow. Quiver, mere mortals.

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Hmmmm….generally I’ve been of the view that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, my remains should be either donated to science, launched into space, or cremated and scattered on the Skywalker Ranch. (No, George doesn’t know about it. I’m thinking, just mix me into some water, make a whole bunch of water balloons with the mixture, and lob them over the fence.)

But now I’m wondering if I need to reconsider my position on burial — especially if this place has plots available….

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Jane Galt‘s said a few things lately (here and, more recently, here) about the tendency of political opposition to get really whacko with respect to the people actually in power. I guess I can sort-of see her point, but by and large, there’s no way that Democratic insanity with respect to President Bush comes anywhere near the insanity we saw directed by Republicans at President Clinton. I’d say more, but Oliver Willis has it covered.

Well, just one more thing: I find it interesting that, judging by the comments in the latter post linked above, conservatives tend to judge a liberal’s sanity by how conservative they are willing to be or appear. But then, this seems to merely illustrate what Jane says in the former post linked above; and for that matter, I’d like to know just what constitutes, then, a “sane” criticism of the President.

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At some point yesterday, May 2003 became my second-highest month ever, in terms of hits. That’s pretty cool. (To beat April, I’d have to get a big mention from someone higher up. But such mentions are hard to predict.)

Having made that due notice, the family and I are expecting company this weekend. Since that would make posting light, and since weekends tend to be my slowest periods (in both my posting and my hit-count), and since I’m pretty tired the last few days and still have a ton of work to do on other projects, I’m going to go on hiatus until next Wednesday. While I’m recharging the batteries, visit any or all of the sites on the sidebar and tell them who sent you, so they link back to me, little devils that they are.

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