… when you’re working with those tricky decimal places!
OK, I’m just posting this because sometimes, somebody needs to publicly shamed – otherwise people will just continue to wallow in stupidity.
Mind you, I think the caller wasn’t doing the best of jobs trying to make his point, either.
You’ve got to love it when people can follow directions.
Sometimes they don’t, though, and other times they get it so wrong you think they must be doing it out of spite.
Case and point: notice exactly where this important piece of mail has been bent.
Yes, that’s right, exactly on the words, “do not bend.”
Here’s one of those “father moments” where I really feel connected with my kids.
The kids are running around being generally annoying and making roaring noises at each other.
James: I’m a baby coelophysis! Roar!!
Michelle: I’m a troodon!. Roar!
James: I’m attacking you! Roar!
James starts to run towards Michelle, imaginary claws drawn. Michelle at first runs, then stops and stands her ground.
Michelle: You can’t attack me. We’re from different geologic periods.
I started laughing so hard and I had to explain to Michelle the old proverb, “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak tree.”
Sometimes people need to learn to pull their heads out of their butts.
Personally, I’ve had to hold back this narrative of our last full day in San Diego because of how pissed off I get every time I sat down to write it. I’m just going to divorce myself from commenting on it in any detail.
The kids wanted to go to the beach. Fair enough, I’m told there’s one of those ocean things near San Diego, and in some places that sand stuff gets washed ashore. The children are not particularly strong strong swimmers in a swimming pool. In a moving body of water, they have to be considered strictly non-swimmers. A quick google looking for “best kids beach near San Diego” quickly hit upon something that sounded perfect. A beach with a man-made break water designed to make a calm, safe place for kids to go. Known as the “Children’s Pool Beach” – you couldn’t get a more perfect description of what I was looking for.
And so we went to La Jolla, where we discovered that a bunch of frickin’ seals, who apparently also think that beach is a great place to take their children thanks to the man-made breakwater, have taken residence in the area.
It seems that allowing those nasty human children on the beach (must I remind you? that was built for them) disturbs the seals. To help further the goal of breaking down the very fabric of human civilization, a group of dedicated crackpot, whack-a-loons…. (sorry, I promised not to editorialize)… concerned idiots… (nope, try again) fucktards (Yeah, that’s the word I wanted, “fucktards”) have seemingly setup a vigil to stop people from using the beach.
The city has been forced to put up official signs (I noticed the other beaches didn’t have them.) that say, in effect, “This public beach is for the public use at any time.” It has the same tone to it as the Los Angeles airport’s continual PA announcements that say, “You don’t have give money to any panhandling, religious nutjob organization begging for money in this airport at any time.” The signs are clearly in response to a chronic, ongoing problem with harassment.
You don’t have to look far to find it. The seal fucktards have erected signs all over the place, craftily worded to make it sound like you’re not allowed to go on the beach. Result of their efforts: No one was on the beach, not man nor beast, just lots of parents with their expectant children standing up at the top of the cliffs, looking longingly down on the inviting, yet stubbornly empty beach and the calm, placid waters beyond.
I have nothing against seals. I mean, what’s not to like about seals? They’re furry, cute, cuddly (until one decides to kill you) and they juggle and play the bicycle horn a lot better than I do. It’s seal fucktards I don’t care for. If a swarm of mosquitoes infested their children’s schools (assuming these people can even procreate) they’d demand them to be eliminated. (The mosquitos, not the children, although I wouldn’t put it past some of them to even get that backwards.)
If a great white shark had setup patrol in the children’s pool beach, they’d be all for getting rid of it. (Not because of the danger to children, of course, but because it might eat the seals), but apparently we can’t run the seals off from a man-made beach designed for children.
There’s a word for that kind of “conservationist”: (in addition to “fucktard”, that is) hypocrite.
And so we, and all the other parents, gave a small victory to the seal fucktards and moved on to another beach which wasn’t nearly as nice. (Bitter? I’m not bitter.)
(As an aside, I’ve done a bit of further research on this beach thing and have discovered that it’s quite a hot debate – go figure, some people have nothing better to do. They should start blogs instead. May I suggest blogs.fucktard,net? In any case, it seems the courts came to the right decision and ordered the city of San Diego to force the seals off the beach, but that’s been stalled by headline-desperate politicians, bean counters and… well, a damned stupid idea of dispersing the seals by playing recordings of dogs barking at the beach from sunrise to sunset for years to come. As I said, some serious head-from-butt-ectomies need to be performed.)
After a not-as-carefree-as-it-should-have-been day at the beach, we headed towards the Dumpling Inn, a somewhat famous local establishment serving northern chinese style dumplings, potstickers and the like. I could have eaten a couple more trays of their potstickers. They were really quite good.
We finished the day staying close to the hotel and a Cinderella carriage ride around the Seaport Village, which Michelle really wanted to do. Well, how could a father refuse his little princess such a small thing?
It was goodbye to the 3-star Woodfin today and hello to the 4-star Omni San Diego. I’ll relate more about the ultimate Priceline experience later, suffice it to say the Omni is a nicer hotel, right next to the Gaslamp district and the convention center – for less money per night.
We got out of the Woodfin by 8:15AM, knowing full well that we couldn’t check into the Omni until after 3:00PM. As the Omni is near the zoo, today’s main destination, we decided to see if we could leave our luggage at the hotel until check-in time. The idea of leaving all our luggage in the parking lot at Balboa Park all day didn’t sit well with me. However, we were in luck as the Omni checked us in early and we were in our room by 9:00AM.
This was followed by a better part of the day at the San Diego Zoo, which is, entirely consistent with their worldwide reputation, still one of the best in the world. Although, being that the Wild Animal Park we saw yesterday is their breeding program facility – there’s a lot of duplication between the two. I was well and truly “zooed out” by the end of the visit.
A recent change to the park rules prevented us from brining our own food, so we decided to get out shortly after 1:00PM to get (another) late lunch.
By 2:00 we’d arrived at the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop. This was a restaurant that was within walking distance of our hotel back a few years ago, but we never went there. Largely because it seemed so weird and was an almost complete non-entity on the internet. We couldn’t figure out what the place really was. Was it nothing but chicken pot pies? Or was it something else? or something more?
This time, although they still seem to eschew joining the internet era, we were able to determine that there’d be food for everyone in the family and we decided to give it a try.
What an interesting place! it’s been a San Diego fixture for over 70 years – yes, seventy years. Their menu hasn’t changed much, either. Prices are up, but still very cheap compared to other San Diego restaurants. Rather than being an emporium of dozens of different chicken pies, they have only one: Chicken, turkey and gravy in a pie. They also serve other old-style family restaurant staples, like chicken-fried steak, chicken noodle soup, mashed potatoes and various homemade (dessert) pies. Nothing spectacular, but good, solid, filing and cheap.
After lunch it was back to Balboa park and the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center. The kids had a blast at the science center. It’s tiny compared to the science center in Phoenix but oh-so-much superior in every way that matters. With a floor filed with hands on experiments that emphasize doing rather than reading, it was more like a playground, which children enjoying themselves everywhere. it was clearly very popular with the locals.
I’ve documented my gripes about the Phoenix Science Center before, and this just re-affirms them in my mind. What really was driven home to me was that I’ve never been a big fan of science fairs. Most science fair projects that I’ve seen consist largely of one of those three-piece folded bits of foam-core board, with artwork, perhaps a few charts photos,narrative, maybe a button and light or two or a plant in a dish. It is precisely what you’d expect of a 10-year-old putting together a presentation. What I’ve realized about the Phoenix Science Center is that most of the exhibits are exactly at that level – they’re just professionally constructed. Since many of them are supplied by “sponsors” of the museum, I can’t help but wonder if these exhibits literally are just science fair exhibits from the sponsors’ employees’ children’s projects that have been re-built by the sponsor.
Perhaps you might think the “playful” exhibits aren’t educational enough? Let me respond by saying that more than once I heard both my children and others’ children playing with one of the exhibits and using the phrase that tells me they are a complete success: “How does it do that?” That’s what I want from a science center – to fire the curiosity and inspire the desire to inquire… (ouch, that was a bit overdone on the alliteration, wasn’t it?)
Back at the hotel, we decided that one night simply wasn’t enough and we used Priceline to try to extend our stay at the Omni another day. Although we couldn’t get $75 for another night, we got $96 and that was good enough for us to book it for another night.
Yelp and the iPhone lead us to The Kebob Shop for dinner which was within walking distance of the hotel and delicious!
Day three brought us to the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park.
Which constitutes a lot of walking and driving around looking at animals. ’nuff said.
Afterwards we explored the area, bought some “fresh” california produce from a roadside stand and stopped at Famer Boys Hamburgers, for a decent, if unremarkable late lunch.
That put us, unfortunately, at what is commonly called “an inopportune time” to be crossing town: rush hour.
We dodged into a nearby mall to kill some time. What we found was an Apple Store. Inside, I discovered that they had released a “Mac/iPhoto” edition of the EyeFi Wireless SD card, which not only uploads your photos wirelessly to you computer, but geotags them using the skyhook method. It’s a little expensive for a 2GB SD card, but I decided (after having spent last evening manually geotagging yesterday’s photos) that it might be a valuable addition to our vacation enjoyment.
(Typically, when I’m out and planning on geotagging, as was did today, I take my Garmin GPS and run it all day while I’m out and about. When I offload the pictures at the end of the day, I use HoudahGeo to synchronize the GPS track log and geotag all my photos. It works pretty well, but it would still be better if the photos were tagged as they were taken.)
We got back to the hotel room and I tried to setup the EyeFi card. That’s where the problems began.
The EyeFi card doesn’t quite work the way I expected. I had assumed (somewhat incorrectly) that the device communicated wirelessly with your computer, but rather it’s a device attached to your wireless network. Perhaps if I explain the setup the problem will become more obvious. I’ll stress here that the problem wasn’t with the EyeFi card, but with the resources I had available to me and my hopes of getting the card working for the rest of the trip.
The Woodfin San Diego, that we’re staying at, has wired internet in the rooms, for which they charge $6 a day. Yesterday, I signed up for two days’ worth, since we’ll be leaving tomorrow early. I thought I’d be clever (I’ve done this before) and I brought my Airport Express, which I connected to the wired network, and then connected to with my MacBook. As with most of these places, upon first use of the web you’re presented with the hotels terms and conditions plus, in this case, the ability to purchase internet access. I had expected that this would properly activate the internet for any device (such as my iPhone as well as my MacBook) over the wireless network, but it didn’t work out that way. Only the MacBook was authorized. A pity, but not a real problem – or so I thought. I continued to use the Airport Express because it was more convenient to be able to haul the computer around.
Along come the EyeFi card.
The EyeFi comes with a card reader (required for setup and handy, since I didn’t bring one with me). You plug the card and reader into the Mac and you load the software that is embedded on the SD card. The EyeFi software fires up on the Mac, you register an account with them (over the internet) and then you’re ready to initialize the card.
Problem: The card cannot be initialized without reaching their servers over the net, and it must do so wirelessly through your network, not using the computer’s pre-existing connection to EyeFi’s servers. This cannot be done on networks that force you to an agreement page, so I was stuck.
Next bright idea: I’d switch my MacBook to using the wired connection and then share my internet over the MacBook’s wireless. I’d then reconfigure the EyeFi setup to use the shared network instead of the Airport Express. That didn’t fly because the hotel network recognized the MacBook over the wired connection to be a different machine and forced me to pay for more internet, which I’m not going to do.
My hopes of using the EyeFi tomorrow are dashed, but hopefully the “complimentary” internet at the Omni will allow me to set it up just in time for our return drive to Phoenix.
For dinner we went to a strange little place called Jollibee, a Philippine-based fast food chain that specializes in hamburgers, fried chicken, spaghetti and a local rice/shrimp dish.
Irene ate some of James’ spaghetti and nostalgically said it tasted “…just like spaghetti did when I was growing up (in Taiwan)”. The fried chicken also had a familiar, “back home” taste to her. I was impressed, it was easily the hottest, most spicy fried chicken I’ve ever had. Curious place, and it was frequented by quite a few people who looked to be Filipinos. Pity they don’t have any in Arizona.
Ah, our memories from childhood! Oh, you youngsters don’t remember the days before microwave ovens, or before Domino’s Pizza and Pizza Hut had expanded out and dominated the entire country.
In those old days, there were one or two Pizza Huts in town – the old kind, with no delivery and a table-top video game in every store. We rarely went there when we were home, they were the poorest of the bunch, but we frequented them when we’d travel across the western United States. There was always one in most any town of any size. Just one, mind you. They hadn’t yet expanded to gargantuan proportions.
There was Pizza Inn, which I don’t remember well, but their motto was, “For pizza out, there’s Pizza Inn.”
There was Village Inn Pizza, with their distinctive A-Frame buildings. Completely incongruous in the Arizona desert, but several of the buildings still survive and are immediately recognizable to those of us who remember them.
Finally, there was Shakey’s Pizza Parlour. Of all the places, Shakey’s was my favorite, with their dark restaurants, long dark communal wooden tables, stained glass windows and those ridiculous red-striped shirts and straw hats that the employees had to wear. It was not the best pizza to be had, but it was consistent, good and, at lunch time, there was a great all-you-could-eat buffet with pizza, fried chicken and spaghetti. The only downside was that, back in those days, no one had ever heard of “free refills” on drinks, so you had to purchase a pitcher of soda to last through the meal – which could, if you were a growing boy like me, last 2 hours.
I don’t know when the last Shakey’s Pizza closed in Tucson, but I think it was about 1982. I used to go there for lunch during high school, but they were gone after I returned home from college for the summer. I’ve not had a Shakey’s pizza for at least 27 years.
I had thought them dead and gone until 2001 when I was planning a trip to Japan. I was looking through a Lonely Planet guidebook and, there, to my utter astonishment, on one of their maps of Tokyo was Shakey’s Pizza. I checked more maps and found more. I used the Internet and learned that Shakey’s wasn’t gone, just withdrawn back to their original areas back east and, strangely, some overseas markets.
I thought, “how excellent! When I’m in Tokyo, I can find one and try it!”
I made a slight tactical error. Just before leaving, a new edition of Lonely Planet Japan was released. Wanting the most up-to-date information possible, I bought it and packed the new edition without ever looking in it, leaving my old edition behind. The authors had chosen to remove Shakey’s Pizza from the maps, and, in the grindingly convoluted streets of Tokyo, and only going by what I could remember, I was never able to find Shakey’s.
Fast forward to 2009. I knew that as I passed through Yuma, the last Round Table Pizza in Arizona awaited me. (Round Table came in just a few years before Shakey’s disappeared.) I also knew that, at one time, there was still even a Village Inn Pizza in Yuma. That got me thinking perhaps Shakey’s still existed in Yuma or California, and with iPhone 3GS in hand, I was quickly rewarded with the information I sought: The do exist in California. (The bastards! Still, I can’t blame them, Phoenix is the city where restaurants come to die and Tucson isn’t much better.) Further, one is not far from LegoLand.
We arrived to grumblings from the kids, “Why are we having pizza again?”
I’d be lying if I said they were impressed with my explanation of the importance of childhood memories, but fortunately, I don’t need their agreement to set the agenda.
Inside Shakey’s was nothing like I remember. Long dark tables had been replaced with booths and ordinary single family tables. The lighting was good, and there were big screen TVs broadcasting sports all around the place. The employees now wore black with baseball caps rather than the old-time straw hat regalia.
Not everything was dissimilar, you still ordered at the counter, but even that had been updated. They had the most overly complicated table number system I’ve ever seen. Patrons were handed a number, much as you might just put on your table so the server knows where to bring the food, but this number has a complex series of punched holes in it, much like a hollerith card (there’s a term I never thought I’d get to use again in conversation!) At each table was an electronic beer signaling device – that’s the best way I can describe it.
The number was slid into the main orifice on the beer signaler, which caused the beer service light to momentarily light up – clearly priming the device and transmitting a coded signal back to the front desk telling them where each patron in.,
The card doesn’t remain in the main orifice, but has to be pulled out and then placed in one of the side orifices. Beer can later be requested by pressing the button on the device.
Beer is the obvious example, since that is what they use to describe the operation with. Presumably anything could be requested in this way, but since Shakey’s is an order-and-pay-first restaurant, one wonders what the practicality of this system is. It’s not as if I decided to order a second pizza I’d hesitate to get up and order at the front counter.
But what about the pizza?
Ah, I’m glad you asked.
It’s funny how first products can influence our tastes for our entire lives, isn’t it? Certainly, Shakey’s isn’t a pizza that will be in the running for best in the world, but I was very fond of it as a kid.
We know from years of research that, if there are different styles of something, people tend to like their first. For me, my grandmothers fried chicken will always be the benchmark that other fried chicken is compared to. For others it might be Kentucky Fried Chicken. It often depends on what you had first.
I had completely forgotten what Shakey’s Pizza tasted like, and I barely expected it to taste the same after all these years. Who knows how many iterations of “new and improved” it has gone through?
None, I think.
My first bite was an amazing experience. The flavors of my childhood flooded back with such strength I was taken aback. I think, had this been a blind taste test, I could have told you it was Shakey’s. I didn’t remember it until I tasted it and then it tasted exactly as I remembered it. (I’ll concede that there’s plenty of room for error in that equation.)
It’s an oddly bitter cheese, with a slightly too sweet sauce. It had a bubbly, almost-but-not-quite flakey crust. It was a joy. I couldn’t dream of reviewing it because my memories would betray me.
9:02 AM
24 Km from home
Less than 20 minutes into a 6 hour drive.
James says, “Are we almost there yet?”
Can you believe that the BBC would have the audacity to show a new trailer for Waters of Mars at the San Diego Comic Con – which is, I might point out, in the flippin’ United States – and then post the damned thing to their website and make it UK-only?
That’s over-the-line – and also totally ineffectual. Here it is:
Oh, and John Simm is back as the Master.
My hopes have been dashed. I don’t know why I ever had them.
This preview of the new Prisoner… movie, mini-series… whatever… has just come out of ComicCon.
Ummm… I hope it’s better than this 10-minute trailer makes it look.
