Monthly Archives: June 2009

According to this piece, chain restaurants will soon be including nutritional info (like calorie counts) on their menus. I am of two minds on this. I think it'll do some people a world of good to know what they're putting in their pieholes but I'm uncomfy at this being government-decreed. Some gov't intrusions into our lives seem logical and justifiable but this one…I don't know about it…

Back when I had a serious weight problem, it helped me a lot to start reading up and finding out how many calories were in things I ate. I found many situations where there would be two foods I liked equally but one would have 350 calories and the other would have 800. It was pretty easy to knock some calories out of my intake by just opting for the former.

A lot of folks really don't know. I had my Gastric Bypass Surgery at the same time 'n' place as a lady who has become an e-mail buddy. On operation day, she weighed the same as I did but she was a foot shorter…and since I had a problem, you can imagine what hers was like. As we chatted about Things We'd Tried before resorting to surgery, she said, "My problem was that I saw that the Lean Cuisine lasagna had only 320 calories and I guess I convinced myself that all lasagna, in any portion size, was low in calories." It was easy to indulge in that self-deception in restaurants where there was no label to tell her otherwise.

It really has helped me to look up the nutrition info for restaurants where I'd be dining but it isn't always easy or convenient. Most chains have it on their websites but some hide it well…or they make it more complicated to access by constructing it as an interactive game where you put certain items on a cyber-tray to get a breakdown of carbs and protein and fat grams. Obviously, it's not always possible to research in advance when you dine, either because you don't know that far ahead where you'll be eating or because non-chains (i.e., most restaurants) don't supply the data.

The proposed law only applies to chains with twenty or more outlets and that won't include many places I eat…but it'll help in some and I'm hoping it will become so standard that all eateries will stick those numbers on their bills of fare. When you're at the Olive Garden trying to decide between the Linguine alla Marinara and the Chicken Parmigiana, it might be relevant to know that one has 660 calories more than the other.

I'm curious as to how much, if at all, having that info on the menu right there under your taste buds will affect what gets ordered. Will we see the high-calorie items decline in popularity to the point where less of them are offered? Probably not. This is, after all, the nation that invented the deep-fried Twinkie and the six-buck everything-in-the-world-on-it burger at Carl's Jr. But I think it'll have some positive effect.

And still, despite that belief, I'm not sure it's the government's business to make it mandatory.

I just used this silly online test to determine the "rating" (G, PG, PG-13 or R) of this weblog. It came back "PG" due to the presence of the word "hell" once and the word "rape" twice. Aren't both those words in the Bible? Like a jillion times apiece?

I also used the test to check my website. It got a "G" because I only had one naughty word — "dyke." And this was because of a reference to Dick Van Dyke.

This is about as intelligent as the real movie ratings usually are.

Mark has deadlines like you wouldn't believe…ergo, the posting of a picture of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. This, as newcomers to this site need to know, is an ancient Internet custom that dates back to the sixteenth century. When Leonardo da Vinci was too swamped to update his weblog, he put up a painting of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. Years later, Andy Warhol began painting soup cans in hommage. Anyway, what's good enough for Lennie da Vinci is good enough for me. I won't be posting much until the current workload eases. Might be a day or so. E-mail response will be similarly degraded.

A couple of folks wrote to beg: Would I please, pretty please, tell them of the great steakhouse in Beverly Hills that is but a block from Mastro's and somewhat cheaper? Well, I wouldn't call it cheap — dinner for two can still run you $150+ — but I've been much happier at Wolfgang's Steakhouse. They have locations in New York and Waikiki with others soon to open…but I've only been to the one in Beverly Hills.

The Wolfgang who owns and operates is not Mr. Puck. It's Wolfgang Zwiener. There was some sort of legal nastiness betwixt the Wolfgangs but it has apparently gone away with no name change. Mr. Zwiener was once the head waiter at my favorite place in all the world to eat beef, Peter Luger's Steak House in Brooklyn. One tends to notice a certain similarity between the cuisines of the two establishments, including the signature steak, the thick slices of bacon as appetizers and the German Fried Potatoes, which may be the best thing any mortal has ever done with an edible tuber.

It's been a while since I ate Porterhouse at Peter Luger's but last time I was there, I think the steak was a wee bit better than what I get at Wolfgang's. Then again, according to Mapquest, Luger's is 2801.25 miles from my home whereas the Beverly Hills outpost of Wolfgang's is 2.42 miles. Vive, as the French say, la différence. Also, Peter Luger's doesn't take credit cards and its waitstaff prides itself on being surly and curt, whereas Wolfgang's accepts plastic and seems to actually want you to dine with them.

Best of all, the Wolfgang's webpage plays a lovely rendition of one of my favorite pieces of music: Rondo alla Turca, composed by some guy also named Wolfgang. I liked it so much on the site that I did some Internet-type sleuthing and figured out it was a recording of Mozart by the Canadian Brass, whereupon I immediately ordered the CD. Here's an Amazon link if you like it as much as I do. And if you go to Wolfgang's for meat, I hope you're as happy with the chow as I am.

Alan Colmes, the guy who used to get paid to lose debates to Sean Hannity, has been circulating the following joke which Jay Leno told on The Tonight Show, way back on September 2, 2008, right in the midst of the campaign…

Gov. Palin announced over the weekend that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before! Now he has really done it.

The premise in citing this line is to suggest that since no one scolded Leno for it, David Letterman is being held to a different, perhaps hypocritical standard when he's excoriated for his joke about how "…at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her [Sarah Palin's] daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez." Bloggers are asking, "What's the difference between the two jokes?"

There are two differences. One is that Leno's joke was unambiguously about Bristol Palin, who was seventeen and unmarried and pregnant. Letterman meant his joke to be about Bristol, and most people I'm sure took it as being about Bristol. But Palin was at the Yankee game with her 14-year-old daughter, Willow.

You can decide for yourself if Palin is just seizing upon the difference here to try and claim that Letterman was suggesting the statutory rape of Willow Palin…or if she actually believes that's what the joke meant. You could even imagine that it's what Letterman intended but I think you'd be really off-base if you did. Anyway, that's one of the differences.

The other difference is that Leno made his joke during the campaign. For Palin or her supporters to have raised a fuss then would have been to prompt more discussion of Bristol's unwed mother status at a time when they didn't want it to be more of an issue than it already was. They'd spun it, somewhat successfully, as a matter of, "Yes, well, she had this child but the young man's going to marry her so it was just a matter of this young married couple having their honeymoon a little early." A little more spotlight though and you might have had people saying…well, the kind of thing that Conservatives would have said had it been a Democratic nominee with an unwed mother in the family: "Lousy, permissive parent…can't run his/her own family so how can he/she run the country?, etc."

But now the election's over and given the polls lately, Palin doesn't have much to lose by attacking. She's already lost everyone who's going to decide she's been an irresponsible mother. So why shouldn't she lash out, especially at a guy who's told hundreds of Sarah Palin jokes in which she couldn't find a factual error? She couldn't say anything in retaliation to all of them. Why shouldn't she go after the one time Letterman left her an opening? I'm not saying she's right or anything; just that it isn't surprising she's acting outraged now.

I was posting these for a while and then I forgot but now I'm doing it again. These are photos from a newly-rediscovered stash of photographs I've taken over the years, mostly at comic conventions. Here we see Marvel inker supreme Joe Sinnott at a New York con in '75 or '76 posing with a guy (I assume it was a guy) in a homemade Thing costume. As Joe was the main inker on Fantastic Four for about three thousand years, we had to get a snapshot of him with this fellow. I love the fact that even though the Thing's face was sculpted, it seems to have the perfect expression as if to say, "Who is this odd-looking person?"

If you're following me on Facebook — not that I can fathom why anyone would do such a mad, impetuous thing — there's an easy way to do it now. Just click on over to www.facebook.com/evanier. There you will read all sorts of stuff I've posted or replied to that doesn't always show up via any other means.

I have one medication that I take every day. A week or so ago, a lady from my friendly CVS Pharmacy calls and says, "I see that you're almost out of this prescription. Would you like us to renew it?" I think that's damned nice of them…keeping an eye out to make sure I have my pills. I say yes, thank you. I mean, I'm not really out of it and would have renewed it myself in plenty of time, but they've saved me going to their website and clicking on something. So why not? On Thursday, I get one of those automated robocalls from my friendly CVS Pharmacy telling me my prescription is ready for pick-up. Fine. So far, quite convenient.

Last night, I go over to my friendly CVS Pharmacy to pick up said medication and find they have two prescriptions waiting for me — the one I need and one I stopped taking months ago. They renewed it, too. I tell them of their error and they return those pills to stock and charge me for the one I need but don't really need yet. Home I go with it.

At home, I look at the bottle and the instructions say, as they always do, "Take one a day by mouth for 30 days." But it also says on the outside, "10 pills." And sure enough, inside the little vial are ten pills.

I figure I'd better get this straightened out now. I drive back to my friendly (but apparently confused) CVS Pharmacy and point this out to the friendly CVS Pharmacist. No matter how clever one is, one cannot take one pill per day by mouth for 30 days if one has but ten pills. One needs…oh, I'm so bad at math but I would guess somewhere around thirty pills. The friendly CVS Pharmacist also does the math, agrees that I'm probably right and says, "You must have only requested ten."

I assure her that, appearances to the contrary, I am not that chowderheaded. She checks the computer and determines that — aha! — they only gave me ten of the pills because that's all they had in stock. "Why then," I ask, "did I get a call saying my prescription was ready when my prescription was not ready?"

She says, "It was ready. It just didn't have the right number of pills in it." As I absorb this strange new definition of the word "ready," she checks their inventory and discovers that they now have 14 more of the pills. "Will that help you?" she asks.

Again, I do some exhaustive calculations and determine that, well, 24 pills do seem to be closer to 30 than ten. But I will still need…hmm, six more pills, perhaps? "We'll have them on Tuesday," she says. "You'll have to come back for them." This means I will have made three trips to my friendly CVS Pharmacy to pick up one prescription…a prescription which, by the way, I didn't need refilled until the week after next anyway. This does not seem all that friendly to me.

I tell you, it's enough to make a person take drugs. Or it would be if they'd give you the right amount of them.

U.S. News and World Report spotlights some restaurant chains that are in financial trouble. Obviously, a lot of that is because the economy is swan-diving all over the place…but I'd like to suggest that several of the named companies are probably in trouble because of what you get when you go into them and/or what it costs you.

You been to a Marie Callender's lately? I haven't…because the last few times, I got tasteless food that probably had been sitting in the kitchen under a heat lamp since my previous visit.

You been to a Mastro's Steakhouse lately? I haven't…because the two times I was in one, you could have bailed out General Motors with what the check came to. I wasn't paying either visit but I did see the total and felt that the steaks, though wonderful, weren't that kind of money wonderful. I don't mind paying for a great meal but I know a couple of superb steakhouses (one is a block from the Beverly Hills Mastro's) where you can get just as fine a piece o' meat for about 60% of the same tariff.

You been to a Sbarro lately? Actually, I have. Recently in an airport, it was the only option to grab a necessary bite of something before my flight and I was reminded why they have Sbarro in airports and malls. It's to make the Pizza Hut Express look good. Does anyone anywhere like that food? I've heard a lot of odd things in my life but I've never heard anyone say, "I'm in the mood for Italian. Let's go to Sbarro!"

And as for Krispy Kreme: Well, I gave up sugary delicacies of that sort some time ago…but even when I did eat things like doughnuts, Krispy Kreme always seemed too sweet to me. It was like eating birthday cake that was all frosting, no cake. Obviously, there's a market for food that is fried and loaded with sugar but just as I think there are better places to spend your beef-eating money than Mastro's, I think there are more enjoyable ways to ingest 300 calories in about four bites.

I haven't been to the other places cited in the article…but I wonder how much of their current financial downturn is the economy (people aren't dining out or aren't going shopping in the areas where the restaurants are situated) and how many of them are mainly suffering from lack of quality. It could also be — and probably is — both: With money as tight as it is, consumers are getting fussier about where they consume. I just hope the lesson some chains learn is that while you can go out of business because the economy stinks, you can also go away because your food does.

We really, really liked the special musical material that Neil Patrick Harris did under the credits on last Sunday's Tony Awards broadcast. We embedded a video here and wondered about how many alternate lyrics its writers had prepared. In this article, the New York Times reveals how the medley came to be included and offers up a few lines that didn't make it. Thanks, Bob Elisberg, for telling me about this.

Regaring the current dust-up between David Letterman and Sarah Palin the first point I'd make is that to some extent, both are probably exploiting it to bolster their popularity with their respective audiences. One of the reasons I don't think Governor Palin is ever going to go on to higher office — or to even be in serious contention for higher office — is that she's really good at firing up the Hannity/Rush crowd and really bad at winning the respect of anyone else. In fact, to some extent, her appeal to the Hannity/Rush crowd seems based on how much she's mocked and (according to her spin) underestimated by anyone outside the fringe right.

Dave was right to semi-apologize for the jokes in question. They were easy, sleazy jokes, quite unworthy of him, and he should have just said so and moved on. Instead, he milked it for a seven-minute desk spot. That's not a way to dial this thing down. It's an invite to keep it up and running.

There's an old saying that in politics, it can be great to be the target of an outrage. It gives you an opening to hurl mud but to do so from a position of self-defense so you can say, "He started it!" No doubt Ms. Palin was bothered by Letterman's jests but I also think she and her spouse are deliberately misinterpreting them as being about their 14-year-old, as opposed to their pregnant-outta-wedlock daughter, so they have more to be incensed about. It's like Obama's awkward remark about putting lipstick on a pig. No one with an I.Q. over 9 thought he was trying to say "Sarah Palin is a pig" but it was probably a good campaign strategy to try and put him on the defensive as if he had. Politicians in this country and their staffs spend a lot of time studying their opponents' words and trying to find an interpretation other than what was intended.

I will admit that I come to this from the standpoint of someone who (a) makes his living writing comedy and thinks most complaints about bad taste humor are from folks who are way too thin-skinned and/or trying to spin it to their advantage, and (b) has a pretty low opinion of Sarah Palin, especially as someone who levels with the public. I also (c) think that when you keep trotting out your kids as props to boost your candidacy or sell your social agenda, you're culpable to some degree when folks fire back at you and your children get caught in the crossfire.

Mainly though, (d) I've been around David Letterman enough to know he has a spotless reputation as a gentleman with the ladies. Like I said, I didn't think much of the material under discussion but for sheer tastelessness, the hands-down winner in this spat is a comment from a Palin spokesperson who said, "It would be wise to keep Willow [Palin's 14-year-old daughter] away from David Letterman" — a comment Palin stood by this morning in an interview with Matt Lauer. So we make the jump from Dave making a joke about one daughter to…well, you know, Dave just might try to molest her younger sister. That's a bit of a leap. Palin's the one trying to make this about statutory rape.

Palin declined Letterman's offer to go on his show because, she said, she didn't want to boost his ratings. She's right that she would have, and that might be reason enough to decline. I suspect however she said no because two things would happen if she did go on. One would be that Letterman would make a humble apology and she'd look bad if she didn't accept it…and then she'd lose this as an issue to flog. "Her people" like the idea that she's a foe of those liberal East Coast showbiz types and will cheer her for her stance. And also if she went on Dave's show, she'd be annhililated. He's sharper than anyone who's ever been in his guest chair and when you give him the Home Court Advantage of being able to set the agenda and play to an audience full of Dave fans, he's unbeatable.

For another, not dissimilar view of this whole brouhaha, read Kate Harding. I read her after I wrote the above and she makes some good points about this, too.