Wil Wheaton writes an open letter to That Guy, the Cubs fan whose innocent thought of “Hey, a foul ball’s coming right toward me!” may end up being the most famous incident of a fan affecting a game ever.

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I am going to give this John Scalzi post a day or two to gain some steam in the comments, and then I’m going to pop some popcorn and enjoy the show. It’s gonna be a blast!

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According to Atrios, Gregg Easterbrook is in the process of issuing a standard non-apology apology (that’s what you do when you inadvertently piss people off by saying what you really think, but yet you don’t want to backtrack on what you really think). I used to be a fairly big fan of Easterbrook’s, but I think he’s losing it pretty quickly and soon he’ll be like Donald Luskin but with a gift for words.

Anyway, here’s an Esterbrook oddity I failed to note a few weeks back in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback football column. I won’t provide direct quotes, but about halfway through Easterbrook (correctly) takes my beloved Bills to task for not running the ball in short yardage situations, especially on third down. And then, six grafs later, Easterbrook chides the Bills for handing off on two consecutive plays in a short-yardage, goal-to-go situation (because running back Travis Henry has a history of fumbling). So, failing to run the ball is bad. But so is running the ball. Well, I guess all the Bills need to do is get a kicker who can make field goals from any distance up to 120 yards, so they’ll never have to either pass or run again.

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Kevin Drum reports that California restaurant owners want the minimum wage to tipped employees reduced. While I generally agree with Kevin’s assessment (that any idea that the restaurants would pass those wages on to other, non-tipped employees is laughable, and that I’m generally getting sick of the whole “Anything that makes our stock price go up is good” thing that’s infecting our business culture), I’m not sure that Kevin’s view of the income such workers make is accurate.

Now, I’m in New York and not California, so it may well be that he’s right, as far as California goes. I was shocked to see that California mandates an hourly minimum of $6.75 for tipped employees, because here in New York that figure is $2.90 an hour. That’s right, servers in New York get paid less per hour than the regular minimum wage, and they are expected to make up the difference in their tips. They are required to claim the amount of tips they make at the end of each shift, and in the event that this amount is not enough to bring their total hourly rate for the shift up to minimum ($5.25, last time I needed to know this), the restaurant is required to make up the difference.

Servers at the restaurants where I managed would occasionally try to either underclaim their tips so as to force us to pay them the difference, or at least they would complain that they weren’t making the hourly difference in the middle of the shift. Our response was this: To equal the hourly minimum in an standard, eight-hour shift, a server must be able to make all of $19 in tips, and a server who can’t make $19 in tips, in eight hours of waiting tables, is probably a server who doesn’t belong waiting tables in the first place, unless something has happened in that shift to utterly kill business for that day. How much work does this entail, then? Well, if that server waits on just one table each hour (a stretch of an assumption), and that table spends just $20 (a fairly median amount in the restaurants I worked) and tips the straight 15%, that server will make $24 in tips, which is more than the amount needed to make minimum.

Of course, that’s just cranking numbers to get to minimum. That has nothing to do with the more elusive idea of a “livable” wage, and whenever Kevin posts something about low-income workers, his comments are invariably filled with people who are under the impression that even in urban areas like Southern California one can live just fine on the minimum wage. In my restaurant experience, servers were always the highest paid employees (when you factored in tips), and in the largest volume restaurant of mine (Bob Evans, a family-style restaurant that’s big in the East, Midwest and is growing in the South), my very best servers ended up grossing more than everyone else including the General Manager. So, I rather doubt that Kevin’s on the right track when he says that “the overwhelming majority of waiters make only a few bucks an hour in tips”.

(I should note that I never worked in a restaurant where servers shared tips with bussers, cooks and dishwashers, though. I know that practice exists, but I never saw it in play.)

I always had a tough time, as a restaurant manager, reinforcing the idea with my servers that they are in control of their compensation, because my general experience was that they were not. Tipping has become something of a robotic impulse these days, and few people really seem to put thought into how much to tip when it’s time to pay the bill; they just do the 15% thing in their head (easy in New York, because all you have to do is double the sales tax, and you’ve roughly got the tip amount) and leave it at that. Large parties, though, very often seem to undertip, which is why many restaurants simply charge the gratuity up front for parties of a certain size or higher.

And servers, it must be admitted, can get a bit on the greedy side. If a customer came in and merely had a bagel and coffee, which came to something like $2.50, the server would occasionally scoff at the fifty cents the guy left behind, and they would be unmoved by my pointing out that they were tipped above the 15%. And income tax time always made for a fun period for us restaurant managers, because servers tend to be united in their belief that tip income should be tax-free. (They all believe this. They may not admit it, but believe me, they believe it.) Thus they were forever trying to figure out how to claim just enough to make the minimum and not one penny more. The IRS, though, has its own way of doing things: the dreaded “Allocated Tips” business, wherein the government assumes that a server working X hours should make $Y in tips, and if they claim less than that, the government simply taxes them on $Y anyway, often leaving the servers behind on April 15 if they ignored our warnings that this might happen. Every year, at least two servers in each restaurant I worked could be counted upon to run afoul of that little problem, and as every penny of my income was taxed as I made it, I never felt one jot of sympathy for them.

One last note: One of Kevin’s commenters scoffs at the idea of paying servers too much, asking, “How much do you need to pay unskilled labor?” I really loathe the idea that servers are “unskilled”. Managing a section of dining room, seeing that the customers there receive the correct items in timely fashion and insuring that their experience in the restaurant is a pleasant one, requires a great deal of skill. No, it’s not surgery or writing computer code, but it’s a skill, and believe me, not everyone has it, not by a damned sight. Those people carrying the trays in the restaurants aren’t unskilled schlubs, they are people, and dammit, they should be treated and viewed accordingly.

* A myth exists that the word “tips” is actually an acronym for this phrase. This is false.

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Every month or two I remind readers of FilmWise, which is a wonderful movie-quiz and trivia site. They have some new ones up now, including a difficult “narration” quiz (in which bits of narration are given from movies that have narrators) and a wonderful visual quiz in which the contestant must identify films being parodied on The Simpsons. Go there, now.

(If you’re a new reader and you weren’t around last time I mentioned FilmWise, be warned: there are time wasters galore here.)

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Well, another long-suffering bunch of baseball fans will go right on suffering, and their suffering is probably worse than that of the Cubs fans, because it’s not like the Red Sox are “lovable losers”. Being perpetual losers is bad, but year after year after year of being competitive, of almost winning, is probably worse. Until the other night, Cubs fans really didn’t have a Bucky Dent figure in their lore; Sox fans now have another one (Aaron Boone). Of course, real baseball people know that it was actually the decision to leave Pedro Martinez in the game that played the larger role, and that means that both long-suffering ballclubs made their exits this year partly by virtue of their managers’ leaving the starters in too late.

Anyway, to the metaphor in my title. Remember that “Looney Tunes” cartoon in which Daffy Duck is to star, but every time he tries to get into the role of the cartoon, the animator’s brush comes along and repaints the background, or what Daffy’s wearing, or Daffy’s body itself, driving him completely to distraction? And at the end of the cartoon, the animator is revealed to be none other than Bugs Bunny, who winks at us and says, “Ain’t I a stinker?”

Well, if baseball’s a big Looney Tunes cartoon, then the baseball gods are the animators, and the Cubs and Red Sox are Elmer Fudd (who never really has a chance at nabbing Bugs) and Wile E. Coyote (who always has some new scheme that he’s convinced will work this time). That’s the easiest way I can explain it. Fudd’s just a bumbling guy, who once in a very long while might get Bugs Bunny into the dinner pot, but Bugs always figures out a way out. Wile E. Coyote, on the other hand, quite often has the Roadrunner almost dead to rights, but then something insanely improbable (or impossible) happens, leaving him in the dust again.

Those were two great series, though. I can’t see the World Series living up to either LCS, even if it goes seven games.

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SDB revisits one of his favorite tricks, the old bait-and-switch blog entry, in which he talks at length about something and then jolts over to relating this seemingly innocuous topic to US foreign policy and war stuff. Here we have over 3,300 words that start out talking about sports and baseball and the immortal wisdom of Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra, and nearly two-thirds of the way through this missive we get to, you guessed it, the latest pain-in-the-ass thing done by the UN and France.

I’m getting better, though. Bait-and-switch blogging used to catch me by surprise, but I was able to detect the transition in SDB’s post this time. It came with this graf:

“But there’s a long distance between what’s possible and what’s practical. There’s a long distance between what’s possible (i.e. what’s not impossible) and what is probable. In life we have to operate at the level of the practical and probable; pursuit of vanishingly small possibilities is one of the ways to virtually guarantee failure.”

I didn’t need to scroll any farther down than that before the “Danger, Will Robinson!” voice started screaming….

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Over at AICN there’s a bit about a King Arthur movie that’s filming now, appropriately titled, King Arthur. It’s pretty amusing to read the comments and all the Talk Back stuff, because many of these folks are completely unaware of any way of treating the Arthur story outside of the Sir Thomas Malory-and-T.H.White way of doing it. To the extent that Arthur is a historical figure at all, he’s most likely a warlord from post-Roman Britain, not some King who ruled a glittering castle in the High Middle Ages. Harry Knowles is really revealing his lack of knowledge here (“This has nothing to do with the Knights of the Round Table!” he exclaims in breathless stupor), and a lot of his TalkBackers are charging in to follow. Well, at least some of them are. In some of the posts you can almost detect some thought processes going on, beneath the insistent profanity and typical Net-board oneupmanship that is so common to the TalkBacks. But even then you’ll find people joyfully calling a movie that isn’t even done shooting yet a “piece of shit”.

Here’s a picture from the new film (from this site):

Anyway — and I’m just rambling on a bit here, really, ’cause it’s Friday — Knowles says that John Boorman’s Excalibur is the definitive Arthurian movie. I can’t agree, inasmuch as there simply hasn’t been a definitive Arthur movie yet. And I’m not really sure there ever can be, unless someone were to do it Peter Jackson-style with a trilogy of big-budget three-hour films. This is because the Arthurian legend — the “Matter of Britain” — isn’t a single story. It’s a collection of stories, with no real “set” starting point and no real “central” story thread. Sure, overall it’s the story of King Arthur’s rise and the subsequent fall of his realm, but it’s not clear what’s essential there. Is the Grail Quest a central part of the story? Maybe it is, but the problem there is that Arthur himself never goes on the Quest, so you’d have a significant chunk of the story where Arthur’s not around at all. Why did Camelot fall? The easy answer is because of Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, but even then problems arise: some versions of the story don’t even include Lancelot (he was not even present in the earliest versions of the story), you still have to decide if Mordred (Arthur’s bastard son) plays a role, et cetera. And then one has to decide whether to use Arthur’s killing of the children, which might not play so well in Peoria.

The Arthurian story, then, needs to be changed significantly — at the risk of seeming terribly incomplete — or condensed drastically, if it’s to work in a single two or three-hour film. The latter approach was taken by Boorman in Excalibur, a film which is admirable for its production values (Boorman gets the visual feel just about perfect) but one that I’ve always found rather antiseptic and unsatisfying. The film always feels to me like a re-enactment of a sacred drama, curiously unemotional. I don’t mean to imply that I don’t like the film, because I do — I even own the DVD — but it’s not definitive by any stretch. It’s got a lot of faults, including the use of excerpts from Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Orff’s Carmina Burana in the score, which I find terribly distracting.

The former approach — making wholesale changes to the Arthur story — was taken by the producers of First Knight, in which Sean Connery is Arthur, Richard Gere (!) is Lancelot, and Julia Ormond (whatever happened to her, anyway?) is Guinevere. Here, the focus is almost entirely on the love-triangle, with no fantastical element at all. No Grail, no Merlin, no Mordred (we get an evil guy named “Malagant”). Again, we get a very unsatisfying film that seems to reduce the Arthur story to something smaller than we feel it should be. I did like how they attempted to make Lancelot into not a “perfect” character brought down by the foul temptress Guinevere, but a flawed guy who tries — and fails — to rise above his appetites. But Gere is never quite convincing, and the film just cuts too many corners. (The score, by Jerry Goldsmith, is in my mind the most overrated film score of the last ten years. Film score fans seem unanimous in thinking it’s a classic score, but to my ears it’s bombast marked by endless repetition of a single theme.)

Then, there’s Camelot, the Lerner-and-Loewe musical based on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which is — well, it’s pretty close to unwatchable. I like Richard Harris as Arthur, and the songs really are wonderful, but all the other actors are lousy. (Except the guy who plays Pellinore; that guy’s golden.)

For my money, the best Arthurian film is the television miniseries Merlin, in which Sam Neill plays the great wizard. Here, too, changes are made that some might find cloying, but they mostly worked, in my opinion. The story focuses, as expected, on Merlin, so a lot of the Arthurian details are either left out (no Grail) or reduced in importance, and the film’s magical stuff seems partly out-of-place in the Celtic-Britain Arthurian mythos. But I do like this film, a great deal. (BTW: if you choose to investigate Merlin, get the DVD and not the VHS release. The VHS version is actually condensed, with a significant chunk of material excised for the tape’s running time concerns.)

A few years ago there was a TV version of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, but I haven’t seen it. It sports a wonderful score, though, by Lee Holdridge. And of course it’s doubtful that any Arthurian movie made can ever totally escape the long shadow of this film.

(By the way, that guy playing Arthur in the movie Knowles is railing about is Clive Owen, who is rumored to be favored for the next James Bond.)

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Here is an article that suggests ways to arrange one’s refrigerator so as to encourage healthy eating habits. All good ideas, I guess, but I laugh at the suggestion that you need to pay attention to what’s at “eye level”. I guess this makes sense if you have a tall fridge with the freezer on one side and the fridge on the other, but if you’re like me and you have a freezer-on-top fridge — and that’s the only kind of fridge we’ve ever had — the advice to put stuff at eye level means that I should plan on gnawing ice cubes for a snack. Doesn’t work.

Anyway, I pretty much find that if I have unhealthy stuff around, it doesn’t matter where I put it in relation to the healthy stuff. I’m gonna eat the unhealthy stuff first, pure and simple. The trick is to not buy unhealthy stuff. At least, that’s the way it works for me.

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I’m really not trying to rub it in, but this photo really sums it up, in my mind: the crushing sadness combined with the disbelief that it’s over. I wonder how many people at Wrigley had to be ordered out of the stadium once it was done.

(The photo links the ESPN.com column by Jayson Stark where I found it.)

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