Monthly Archives: November 2011

So here's something that annoys me and I bet it annoys you if you notice it…which you should and perhaps you will after reading this. This afternoon, Carolyn and I took my mother and one friend out for a lovely Thanksgiving Dinner Buffet…and you should know that this was at a very nice, upscale hotel. The staff, with the possible exception of one manager I'll get to, could not have been more gracious and helpful. The food was superb, including arguably the best mashed potatoes I ever had in life. The price may seem a little steep but if you saw what we got, you'd understand.

When the check came, I gave it a fast glance and they'd charged us for…well, here. I'll let you read the bill yourself, courtesy of my scanner…

See? Two regular dinners @ $65 each…two senior dinners @ $45 apiece. I slapped a nice, well-earned tip on top of this, gave them my American Express card and we were off.

On the way out, we passed a sign for the buffet and I noticed it said that the price for seniors was $35. Puzzled, I checked my copy of the bill and just as I remembered, it said we'd been charged $45. I scurried back to our table, picked up the little folder in which I'd left the restaurant's copy and tracked down the manager. "Oops," he said. "I'll fix that." And he disappeared for a few minutes with the paperwork, then returned and presented me with a new charge slip to total and sign…

I asked him, "Is everyone today being charged $45 for the dinner you advertise for $35?" He assured me no, it was just an error by the server who totalled up our check. I'm skeptical. I don't think they make their servers type in the amount each time. I think they just hit keys that say "adult" and "senior" and then a computer fills in pre-programmed amounts. I think everyone before me today who got a senior meal paid $10 more than the advertised price. And I'm wondering about the folks after.

Years ago at a jazz club in Hollywood, I had a similar incident. I noticed that the price I'd been charged for a bowl of soup was two bucks more than the price on the menu. I brought this to the server's attention and she apologized and redid the bookkeeping. On the way out, I found the manager and raised the matter with him. He was pretty brusque about the whole matter, apologizing for the error on my bill but refusing to discuss whether their computer was still overcharging others. It would not have surprised me if the higher price was intentional and the keypad had some sort of "override" feature so they could charge the proper amount to someone who caught the overage.

I didn't pursue the matter at the hotel restaurant today…and given the demeanor of the two managers, I'm more inclined to think it was a mistake this afternoon and the hotel guy was worried I'd make trouble for him somehow. Suppose he'd said to me, "You're right…we've been overcharging old people all day. Apart from making sure it's fixed immediately, what do you want me to do?" I have no idea how I could have replied to that. Give the extra money paid to charity? Have someone track the affected people down and send them refunds? The latter probably could be done for some since a phone number was taken when you made your reservation…but I don't think I'd expect anyone to go to all that effort to correct a mistake. Though it would be nice.

Anyway, I guess the moral of this story is to watch out for this kind of thing. I also had it happen to me once at a gas station where the price on the pump was a buck a gallon higher than the price at the sign. In that case, I just thought the discrepancy was premature. The way fuel costs were rising then, the price on the pump wasn't really wrong. Within the hour, that's probably how much the gas would have been.

So I'm in a Ralphs Market a week or so ago, just before 2 AM. 2 AM is when markets out here have to stop selling alcohol…a curfew which has never affected my life since I've never purchased or even tasted such beverages. I'm in line with my little shopping cart full of buns and cat food and canned soup and peanut butter and Thomas's English Muffins. By the way, Thomas's English Muffins are great with peanut butter on them…but you probably know that.

Only one checkout counter is open at this hour and I'm third in line. Fifth in line is a guy with spiked blue hair and about a half-dozen facial piercings. He is probably just old enough to buy the large quantities of liquor he has in his cart…and it's 1:59 AM. Realizing that there's more than one minute of ringing-up and bagging ahead of him, he yells to the checker, "Hey, I'll be able to buy these, right?"

She says, "No, not unless I ring them up before 2 AM."

He asks with more volume than necessary, "Can you open another checkout aisle?"

She says, "I'm the only one here who's allowed to run a register. Sorry."

The fellow winces in visible pain and agony. "Well, I was here before 2. How am I supposed to do this? I'm not leaving without what I came in to buy."

She says, "Well, maybe these people will let you go ahead of them."

Now remember: He is #5 in the line. I am #3. The checker is almost done ringing up #1 but it still has to be bagged and paid-for. Customer-in-line #4, having heard the exchange, waves the fellow to go on ahead…I also allow him to pass me…

Customer-in-line #2 is an older man who reminds me of Johnny Carson's back-up bandleader, Tommy Newsom. He has placed on the conveyor belt a bottle of water, a container of Ibuprofen, a dozen eggs and a bag of Doritos. He says no.

The pierced gent doesn't believe what he's hearing. "What do you mean, no?"

"Just what I said. No. You may not go ahead of me." My iPhone say it's 1:59 and as we all know, iPhones (like Big Clocks) are never wrong. I hear the following exchange…and throughout, I'm also hearing the sound of the countdown in the Fort Knox scene in Goldfinger ticking down…

"What's your problem, man?"

"Problem? I don't have any problem. You're the one with the problem. I'm going to be able to make my purchases with no problem."

"Hey, they [meaning the other customer and me] let me go ahead."

"That's very nice of them."

"But you aren't going to be that nice."

"It sure looks that way."

At this point, the booze-buyer begins cussing and calling Tommy Newsom names, none of them flattering. Then he puts his bottles on the conveyor belt ahead of Tommy's items and tries to force his way ahead of the man, shoving him aside. I say, "Whoa. If you're going to be like that, I rescind my invitation to go ahead of me." Customer #5 says, "Me, too."

The checker, who has finished with Customer #1 and sent him on his way, tells the pierced fellow, "I'm sorry. If they won't let you go ahead, I can't ring you up out of sequence." Then she glances at her watch, picks up the phone by the cash register and says into it, so it's heard throughout the store, "Attention, customers. It is now 2 AM so we can accept no further purchase of alcoholic beverages."

The pierced guy looks stunned. "You're not going to let me buy these?"

She says, "I'm sorry, sir. It's the law."

"But I was here before 2 AM. It's not my fault there were people ahead of me."

The checker says — and I suspect she may be fibbing about this but maybe not — "The scanner will not even allow me to ring up your purchases after 2 AM. It recognizes the price codes and locks out these items so the store can't be accused of violating the law."

For a second there, I think he's going to just grab up the big bottle of Wild Turkey and run out. Instead, he just tells everyone what we can do to ourselves and storms from the store. There is a moment of awkward tension which is broken by me asking, "What's the cut-off time to buy Thomas's English Muffins?"

Everyone laughs and the checker moves the bottles of liquor over to the adjoining counter to get them out of the way. Customer #4 turns to Customer #2 and asks, "Why didn't you just let him go through?"

Tommy Newsom answers, "I would have but he didn't ask and he didn't say 'please.'"

Happy Today. Since half the Internet seems to be linking to the infamous Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, I won't. But I did in this post back in 2008. If you yearn to once again see one of the funniest episodes of one of the funniest sitcoms, be my guest.

One especially impressive thing about it: Very few TV situation comedies ever do an installment this memorable and when they do, they usually do it in their fourth or fifth seasons when the show really, really has its act together. "Chuckles Bites the Dust," for instance, was in Year Six of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But WKRP did its most-remembered episode the seventh week it was on the air. Over to you, Les.

I haven't written about TiVo here for a long time…amazing because of how important my TiVo has been to me. I was the first person I knew to own one and I can't tell you how much it improved my life. At last, I could watch TV the way I wanted to watch it which was when I wanted to. I knew how to set a VCR to record things when I was out and I did it but it was nowhere near as convenient as TiVo. The big difference is that now I record everything I might want to watch and then I can pick and choose what to watch and in what order and I can pause a show in mid-viewing and…well, you know how liberating that can be.

I'm still using very old Series 2 TiVos here because I get my video signal via DirecTV and TiVo has not made a really good model that interfaces with DirecTV. They've been saying for years they were about to but no such machine has materialized.

That may be about to change. The TiVo Overlords have been saying they'd have a good high-def TiVo for DirecTV out by the end of 2011 and no one believed them. We'd heard that before and we all knew that around August or so, they'd move the date and say, "Next year for sure." But here it is, the day before Thanksgiving…and TiVo is still saying it'll be out by the end of '11. That gives one hope.

On the other hand, massive flooding in Thailand has crippled the production of computer harddisks. That's where most of them are made and there's a brief (one hopes) shortage of them. That may be what kicks the new TiVo over to 2012.

I'd been considering ditching DirecTV, going to cable and buying the new TiVo Premiere Elite which has four tuners. You can record four shows at once or watch one and record three. You can also program it via an iPhone app and easily transfer recorded shows to your iPhone or iPad and there are many features. It works only with digital cable — no satellite dishes, no roof antennas — and it also won't work with AT&T U-Verse, a service that I don't have but spend my life declining. (There are more people in this world trying to get me to switch to AT&T U-Verse than there are fighting crime, healing the sick and defending our nation.) But I held off on the Premiere Elite because I recklessly believed that like Godot, the DirecTV TiVo was coming and I didn't want to switch, then realize I should have waited.

Will it show before the next time they drop the ball in Times Square? If it does, will it be what I crave? Stay tuned…and you may want to take a Season Pass for this topic because it may go on for a while.

On the advice of my splendid dentist, I use an oscillating toothbrush — the kind where a round brush spins around to scrub all those embedded pieces of sparerib from between your molars. It's a great tool but you have to replace the brush heads often.

I am just back from a drugstore where I went to buy some. A package containing three replacement heads was $29.95. I was about to buy one when I noticed that a brand new oscillating toothbrush, which comes with four of the exact same heads, was on sale for $23.95.

Last Sunday, I watched a valuable special that just debuted on the National Geographic Channel — The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination. It's two hours of videotape, film and some audio from 11/22/63, including footage they say has never been broadcast. Unlike most documentaries about the tragedy, it is not (a) an attempt to prove some scenario of how John F. Kennedy was murdered or (b) a self-congratulatory treatise on what a great job the press did of rising to the challenge of covering the events of that world-changing day.

For some reason, they are not rerunning this today or all month or anything. They ran it twice on Sunday evening, along with a special I haven't watched yet that falls into category (a) as it offers digitally-enhanced imagery from the Zapruder film.

Having read and heard so much about the assassination, I'm drawn like a moth to this kind of thing. I'm not sure why. It's not like any new revelations are likely at this date. Still, it is history.

For a few years in the late sixties/early seventies, I was way too interested in that case and who "really" dunnit. I read books. I attended a few lectures. I even went to one seminar of assassophiles, every one of whom had at least one firm, inarguable explanation of some well-peopled conspiracy that had offed JFK. Some of them had several mutually-exclusive theories and the firm conviction that all were correct.

In that hall there must have been a hundred different explanations of how Kennedy was killed. Everyone was adamant theirs was The Answer, though they respected everyone else's as long as it wasn't that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired the fatal bullet. That was the only one that was off the table, afforded not the slightest consideration by people who seemed willing to consider anything else. If you'd said, "I think rabid penguins ran in and bit Kennedy while bats that Vivian Vance had outfitted with laser beams took care of Governor Connally," everyone there would have said, "In our search for the truth, we can't rule anything out." But one guy with a rifle was science-fiction…and all it proved was that you were among the mindless masses who'd brainlessly accept whatever "those in power" wanted the sheep to believe.

I eventually came to believe that that one guy with the rifle was the most likely explanation…and that the "Conspiracy Buffs" were too invested in conspiracies to ever admit the solution had been right there before their eyes all along. But I also came to believe it was one of those topics that you should never waste your time or energy debating with anyone else. Don't write me to tell me that in 1974, your cousin remembered having been there that day and spotting zombies on the grassy knoll with assault weapons. Not interested. If you do want to hear the case for Oswald the Lone Nut, go read Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And don't let its 1,648 pages intimidate you. If you skip over all the parts where Bugliosi explains how smart he is, it's about 300. And the whole thing is a lot more manageable, as some books are, on Kindle.

I'll try and alert you if I see the National Geographic Channel special turning up again. It was a pretty good portrait of Dallas at the time and of how everyone reacted to that world-altering tragedy. The news media did grow up a little that day and so did we all…not always for the better.