I finally got around to watching the first couple episodes of The Restaurant, which I’ve been taping. Pretty good show, although it would be nice if they’d show some of the good stuff that’s certainly going on at the same time as all the bad crap that they keep showing — stuff like fires in the kitchen, a server accepting a customer’s credit card with the order to go across the street and buy some red wine and actually doing it, et cetera. Random thoughts, just in case anybody’s watching the show:

:: Unless I missed it, the New York City Health Department is never mentioned in the first few episodes. Wouldn’t they be a slight bit concerned about a restaurant that’s actually still a construction site on the day it begins serving food to people?

:: When the fire erupted in the kitchen, I was dying to see the place’s “Ansel” system get set off. This is a fire-retarding device that spews out a gargantuan amount of powdery white crap, pretty much everywhere all over the kitchen. I thankfully never had to see our system triggered in the restaurants where I worked, because when the thing discharges, the mess is such that (a) you have to shut down the restaurant immediately and (b) cleanup takes more than a day.

:: This restaurant seems to be striving for a classy Italian look, and yet serves appetizers in those red-and-white paper baskets that you get French fries in at theme parks. Weird. (This may have been because they ran out of normal servingware, or some other explanation that I missed.)

:: Servers standing around after the shift which was apparently many hours long, comparing their tips, and no one seems to have made more than $70. Ouch. In the small-town family restaurant where I once worked, on a bad day my best server would take home more than $100 in tips. For a server to do worse than that, in an expensive, fine-dining restaurant that serves alcohol, in New York City no less, is disastrous. The show implies that table-turns were nonexistent on the night in question, which definitely explains it.

:: I was hoping they’d show more of the kitchen stuff and the inevitable tension between cooks and servers.

:: I know space is at a premium in NYC buildings, but putting the kitchen downstairs so food has to be carried up and down what looks like a fairly narrow flight of stairs? Lordy!

:: I’m sure it’s an amazing coincidence that the restaurant manager that everyone hates is a Frenchman.

:: It wasn’t mentioned, but I’m sure that the kid who got demoted from server to food runner, and then broke his arm in a fall, was treated at the hospital under workman’s comp. The show didn’t mention this, probably to heighten the “poor restaurant schlub with no insurance” angle (although I haven’t watched the episode after that one yet, so I may be wrong entirely).

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I don’t do a lot of “Here’s the latest cute stuff the kid did” posting, but I like to think I’m doing right: The other night, the daughter and I watched Return of the Jedi. (We had watched The Empire Strikes Back a few weeks before.) A couple of her comments:

“How come the big ship isn’t finished?” (referring to the incomplete Death Star)

“Oh, he’s still in metal!” (referring to the first shot of the still-frozen Han Solo)

“What happened to Yoda?” (much sadness when Yoda passes)

“There are bears in this movie!” (much happiness with the Ewoks)

“Did the bear die?” (referring to the one shot during the battle when one Ewok dies, and his friend tries to awaken him)

“Where’s the part with the girl sleeping and the big bugs crawling on her blankets?” (confusing ROTJ with AOTC)

“Why did Darth Vader kill the bad guy? I thought Darth Vader was the bad guy.” (hmmmm….we’ll explain this later on)

“Hey, Yoda’s not dead!” (referring to astral-Yoda at the end)

Doin’ my duty to shape the next generation….

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Gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.” Well, I’m not Californian so my opinion matters not in the slightest, but I can’t help but recall the last prominent Republican to make that claim whilst seeking higher office….

Also, Atrios makes a funny point about something else Schwarzenegger said. (BTW, I for one am really glad Atrios has apparently re-taken the reins over at Eschaton. His collaborators were game, but they just didn’t have his style.) (Oh, Atrios’s permalinks are as buggered as mine. Scroll down to the post entitled “Arnold on Gray Davis”.)

Finally, here is Jim Rome’s take on the whole California business, which is quite similar to what he actually said on the show. (The audio version was funnier, really, but apparently to listen to the Rome Show online you have to be a paid subscriber.)

(UPDATE: The Jim Rome article is here, actually — apparently the previous link is to his current column, with each column being moved to an archived location after a new one is posted. Thanks to Sean for the update.)

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Annoyance, consternation, and hellfire!!

My permalinks are still broken, as of this writing. My only idea is to keep republishing the entire site, on a daily basis, until this is fixed. I did attempt to use Blogger’s nifty e-mail form to alert them of the problem, but the message wouldn’t send. It just kept bouncing me back, telling me that I hadn’t filled in all the required fields when in fact I had. Annoyance beyond compare. (Yeah, yeah, “ya gets what ya pays for”, and all that. Save it. I can’t afford hosting and Movable Type yet.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Still from Akira Kurosawa’s RAN.

I was thumbing through the video collection at the library the other day, and I spotted a copy of Ran. I checked it out and I have thus far watched about 45 minutes of it. It’s pretty engrossing so far, and I had to force myself to shut it off last night (my plan is to watch it in installments after the kid has gone to bed), so as to not stay up until 2:30 watching the thing. The film is inspired by King Lear, and is directed by Akira Kurosawa, whose films I have never seen — despite my love of George Lucas and the fact that Kurosawa is one of Lucas’s main influences.

Unfortunately, the video copy I’m watching is an old VHS issue, with cruddy sound and pan-and-scan video. I’d forgotten how much I hate P&S. There’s one scene that really demonstrates how bad P&S is, and it’s not even one of Kurosawa’s legendary battle scenes (none of which I’ve come to yet). There is a scene where a nobleman and his wife are sitting side by side in their “throne room” (although they kneel on mats, instead of sitting on thrones — the term’s a descriptor of purpose more than of furnishing), and clearly they are occupying a single shot, which would be fine in a letterboxed format but in P&S requires annoying switching back and forth between the two. Ugh.

(Images courtesy the Japanese Cinema Studies Home Page at Cornell University.)

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Quick hits:

:: Jesse of Pandagon has an excellent refutation of part of the whole “stay married for the kids” meme (responding to a Lileks-in-creepy-judgmental-mode piece).

:: Kevin Drum has a capture of the BBC homepage when Schwarzenegger threw his hat into the ring. Check out the headline above the main headline.

:: Time for my monthly plug of Mike’s Baseball Rants. Even if you’re not totally up on baseball, his blog is worth reading for the pop-culture references alone (the best of which he seems to hoard for his takedowns of Joe Morgan). (And on a side-note, just how many more souls does John Sheurholz have to sell to Satan, anyway? Atlanta’s pitching finally, at long last, stinks, and they’re still putting up the best record in the Majors? Huh-whuh?!)

:: Words fail me.

:: Mental image of the day, courtesy of the Jim Rome Show: a California gubernatorial debate featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Larry Flynt, some porn star I’ve never heard of, and Gary Coleman. Rome noted that Coleman won’t be able to use a traditional podium, so maybe they’d get him a table like the ones in nursery schools….(I’ll see if I can’t find a link for this later on). As Rome said, “Louisiana almost electing David Duke as its Governor isn’t even as bad as this.”

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Captain, we are receiving numerous distress calls….

(Yup, it’s one of those “Is this thing publishing?” posts. Move along.)

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Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?

Lynn has a post about a few linguistic pet-peeves and such.

I have to admit that I commit the error she rails upon at the very end: When I refer to the body of work Mozart wrote in the concerto form, I say “concertos” (as opposed to “concerti”). I offer no defense other than (a) this is the way I’ve always said it; (b) I’ve seen “concertos” used by such music writers as David Dubal and Harold Schonberg; (c) well, that’s my entire defense. I hope Lynn doesn’t sic the linguo-police on me!

The musical term whose constant misuse does bug me is “crescendo”. “Crescendo” is a verb, and it describes the act of growing in volume, as in: “At the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the orchestra crescendoes to double-forte.” However, this word is often used — incorrectly — as a noun, denoting the pinnacle reached: “At the end of the first movement of the Ninth, the orchestra reaches a crescendo.” Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Lynn also points to this list of annoying errors in English, when words are either pronounced quite wrongly or used in place of the correct, similar-sounding word or homynym. A lot of these errors annoy me when I hear them (although I confess to not being overly scandalized by the “nucular” pronunciation of “nuclear”). One that I didn’t see on this list is “axe” instead of “ask”, as in, “Let me axe you a question.” Ugh!

Now, I’ve noticed in my writing that it’s easy, when I’m typing and my fingers start whipping out ahead of my brain, that I can make some of the common errors myself, and I’m always shocked to see them when I edit my manuscripts. While doing my recent edit of The Welcomer, I came across a couple of instances of “your” when I meant to use “you’re” (but thankfully, never when I meant “yore”). I also tend to type “to” when I mean “too”; this I simply chalk up to not striking the second “o” hard enough to register, and thus it is not so much an error as a physical mishap. My most common error in typing, though, is really annoying given that I’m writing a fantasy that involves a lot of equestrian-based travel: When I refer to “reins”, I invariably type “reigns” instead. I lost count of how many times I had to correct that error in the manuscript in the last few months. As Professor Higgins might say, “The reign in Speign falls meignly on the pleign.” (You may groan now.)

Split infinitives don’t offend me, but I’m coming to loathe adverbs — thanks, Mr. King — so I’m conflicted on that score. Ending sentences with prepositions, though, annoys me to no end. Sometimes it can’t be avoided without sounding even worse, though: witness Churchill’s famous statement, “This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.” This tradeoff strikes me as perfectly fair: languages are human creations, and nothing we ever create is perfect because we aren’t.

Finally, I have to admit that I’m less of a stickler for specific definitions of words than a lot of people I know. Someone (I think it was Neil Gaiman, but I’m not sure) once wrote: “I can accept that language evolves and words change meaning, but as a writer, when a word that had a specific meaning loses that meaning, I lose a tool.” I sympathize, but only to a point. As far as I am concerned, “decimate” no longer means “to destroy one tenth of”; likewise, “impact” as a verb can mean for one object to forceably strike another. (The OED backs me up on that last point, actually.) I don’t like slovenly English, but I don’t think it should be on an ivory pedestal, either — eternal and unchanging. Metaphorically, I like to think of language as a well-tended garden: not static, but also not overridden with ugly weeds and outgrowths beyond the boundaries and tangles.

(OK, one more note: no subset of English angers me more than the Godawful crap you see in the business world, where horrific phrases like “maximize our profit outcomes” and other wondrous feats of nebulous verbosity, often consisting of pages-upon-pages of nauseating passive-voice crap are flung about like manna from Heaven. And what really scares me is the business-types who not only write like that, but talk like that. The purpose of language is to communicate, not to make business people sound important.)

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Bass Pro Stores are apparently the best thing in the world for outdoor types and people into fishing and water stuff, so much so that these huge stores become tourist attractions in themselves. Individually designed to reflect their surroundings, these stores become big draws for people miles away. And Buffalo was in the running to land the first one in the Northeast United States. The idea was to put the new Bass Pro store in the currently vacant Memorial Auditorium (the former home of the Sabres), thus creating some new retail space in downtown Buffalo that would actually attract people to spend money.

But, Buffalo couldn’t come up with a plan to make it work, and they are too entranced at the idea of having a damned casino in downtown or on the waterfront (along with an 18-hole golf course, just a peachy idea for an urban waterfront), so they allowed the Bass Pro store idea to fall by the wayside. Now it’s going to be built in Auburn, which is about twenty miles from Syracuse.

Way to go, Buffalo. Never go with a good idea when a bad idea will do, at twice the price.

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Governor Schwarzenegger.

OK, I guess it doesn’t sound too bad. And hell, it kind of sounds better to me than “Governor Pataki”. (Pataki hasn’t been a disaster of Gray Davis proportions — hell, he hasn’t really been that bad, really. I’m not terribly impressed with his record in WNY, which basically consists of showing up for photo-ops every time some big project that never actually gets built is announced. I’m just being snarky today.)

I didn’t watch the entire Jay Leno thing, but I’m guessing that the interview wasn’t particularly big on specifics, as in just what Schwarzenegger’s ideas on resolving the California budget crunch might be. I did see the usual bit of “I won’t be beholden to special interests” folderol, which is always nonsense; it’s generally more accurate to say, “I won’t be beholden to my opponent‘s special interests”, but this is almost a required claim for people running for office these days. I also laughed when he said, “I’m rich, I’ve got lots of money, so I can’t be bought.” This was quite the applause line, but I was thinking, “Yeah, because none of the filthy rich people in Congress or any other elective office have ever been bought.”

Some people are snarking a bit about if he’s “qualified” to be Governor. I’ve never really been one to get hung up on who is and who is not “qualified” to hold high office, because there have been “well-qualified” persons who were disastrous when they got into high office, and we’ve had distinguished Presidents and such who were not that experienced when they ascended. If Schwarzenegger has ideas that appeal to Californians, fine. The only thing that worries me is that he’ll get elected on some kind of hip, celebrity, out-of-left-field appeal instead of his ideas, rather like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota in 1998. But then, Ventura also had the “third-party” thing going on, the “I’m going to tell both parties to stick it!” attitude that seems to be occasionally growing in appeal these days, whereas Schwarzenegger is a true-believing Republican.

I’m still a bit fuzzy on the whole recall thing in the first place. My view tends to be, “You voted Davis in, so you live with it until he comes up again.” I’m a bit wary of the precedent being set, where we can recall any official at any time merely because some bumps in the road come along. On the flip side of that — “You voted the guy in, you’ve got to live with him until his term’s up” — NPR’s Talk of the Nation did a show on the recall yesterday, and one commentator made an interesting point: she suggested that people who didn’t bother to vote in 2002 should not be allowed to participate in any recall. That makes a bit of sense to me.

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