couples – Page 10 – Hopeful Romantics

Chains of Fools Feed on Each Other With Food to Go

Once upon a time you had independent restaurants that sold good food at modest prices. You also had lousy, greasy spoons that sold bad food at modest prices. So, enter the chain restaurant. There was no gamble there. You were treated to mediocre food at modest prices. The video of the rats running all over a KFC /Taco Bell spring to mind as one of those major exceptions.

The wall-to-wall establishment of chain restaurants was kind of the middle of the road between the win-win and lose lose situation. Restaurant chains could saturate the market with advertisements. Branding was incredible. You may not get the greatest of food, but at least it was consistent. You could go into any Denny’s, Chili’s, House of Pancakes, Applebee’s, Olive Garden and get pretty much the same food as any other branch of the chain. The menus were prepared from a central office. Ingredients were the same and hardly varied.

You could go as a couple to any of the restaurant chains. You could get Chinese Food at P.F. Chang’s or even the Panda Express. You could get chicken, burgers, whatever, and you always knew that the food was prepared if not the way you wanted, then certainly the way you expected. No surprises.

So gradually the chain restaurants moved in and the independent restaurants closed down. Some of the independent restaurants, glorified in highway lore and local nostalgia, should have closed. The chain restaurants were a blessing, sort of, as kitchen conditions were regulated to certain standards. Well, sort of. There are more than a few egregious exceptions.

Now while most of the chain restaurants, with the exception of venues like Ruth’s Chris and Houston’s, are not particularly aesthetic in their ambiance, what with same-same, bright colors and far too often screaming kids, they are still a good places to take a date, run in for a quick bite and run to a movie. You may have forgotten what you ate ten minutes after eating it, but at least it won’t rumble in your stomach. That is a major plus in this day and age. And, if you are planning to have sex later that night, you will entertain less fear of the meal attacking you when you least expect it.

The cheapest viagra pills patients who get the gamma knife surgery done have a lot of scope to live further than six months of time. order viagra This is of course just speculation at this point. So, you can get it staying at home cialis 20mg no prescription easily. Men often measure their self-worth by their ability to stay strong, to protect & take care of their loved ones; so when they struggle at job, lose their job fall into drinking habit. low price cialis So now most of the modestly priced independent restaurants are gone. The chains often find themselves with little or not competition. So now they are not only are their advertising campaigns directed toward telling you what superb food they are serving. Superb and in some cases a whole lot of it. Great food. Eat it cheap. And eat more than you are supposed to. You would think by the advertising you were treating yourself to fine dining. No, you are not.

One most wonder if they threshold for fine dining has dropped so low that most chains are serving what constitutes good food. One most wonder if sheer volume of food supersedes actual quality of food. Silly me. There is little to wonder there.

So now I hear commercials where chain restaurants like Chili’s are offering take out food. They are turning their attentions to the lesser food venues, the fast food and drive-thru eateries. You can now get the same meal you ate at your table with belief in its consistence if not its culinary delight, and drag it back home. Forget the movie. You aren’t going out anyway. Not in this tough economy. That is why God created Pay-Per-View.

To hear the commercial they are, subtly speaking, in a heated duel with the types of fast food chains that actually serve crappy takeout with absolutely no expectation. Yes, the mid-prized chain restaurants are now challenging their lesser cousins for a piece of the low budget market share. The battle is on and soon will rage. It’s a bad economy out there and restaurants are hurting. Every buck won over to your side is a buck well earned. Any day I expect to see the brutally honest commercial, “My mediocre food is better than your mediocre food and it only costs a few bucks more.”

This should be an interesting battle for market share. I am sure other mid-level chains will join in. Conversely, the strategy is two fold. They are not only chasing the drive-thru but the diner that used to frequent chic little bistros and storefronts where the food is pricey and avoidable when there is a different paradigm for date night. Forget the candlelight. When you are short on money and worried about your job, run down to the shopping plaza and pick up some food.

It is convenient. As with the drive-thru’s, you can pull up to a Chili’s and just get it to go. Order it over the phone, and they will give you an exact time when to come and pick it up. Nice and hot. In bags that remind you of the dining experience you either worked to avoid or just left behind. Yum.

Lizzie Borden Killed Her Parents Here. Eat Hearty, But Don’t Feed the Ghosts

The house where Lizzie Borden may have killed her family is now a Bed and Breakfast lodge. This sturdy wood frame house in sturdy Fall River, Massachusetts hardly looks like a celebrated murder scene, but then so few really do. That is, until you look at them with the knowing eye. Otherwise would you know the difference? Would the people lodged in creepy, haunted houses really see and feel the ghosts if they didn’t know they were inside a creepy, haunted house?

Maybe. I remember visiting one small town and finding one house particularly, in fact, unmistakeably creepy. Nobody seemed to know anything about what may have happened there, neither my family nor the neighbors. Okay. False hunches. I was just getting ready to leave.

As luck would have it the current owner of the house pulled up in the driveway. Without much prodding her confirmed my suspicions that foul play did indeed occur in that house. A minister of some religious persuasion, deeply in debt, killed his wife for the insurance money. He had pushed her down the stairs. The house over the years was occupied by other people with new and different tragedies, from riches to rags to sagas of drugs and degradation.

But Lizzie Borden was another story. She was the O.J. Simpson of her time, among the dozens of other celebrity killers. Ironically, perhaps, Lizzie was not tried for the murder of her parents in California. Nevertheless, she was still acquitted. She then became part of mythical American macabre. There is a rhyme about her. “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”

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As to who actually committed, the murders, as with most of these high profile murder cases, theories abound. It was everyone from the housekeeper to the towns people who didn’t at all like Andrew Borden. Some think Lizzie killed him because financial disputes and property divisions. That would be a motive. It has certainly been one before. Others believe Lizzie, the spinster, may have been a little too constrained and embroiled in family dissension. She may have lashed out to save her sanity and her inheritance.

Today we would find a drug ridden and repressed Lizzie seeking to right the wrongs of an inhospitable environment, an oppressive father and abusive step-mother. Who knows? But today what remains of the story, aside fromthe legend itself, is the bed and breakfast and the ghosts who inhabit it along with the 10,000 people who pass through its doors each year. Ghosts are reported to do what ghosts are best know for. They poke and prod, open and close the draws, turn the lights on and off, move things around. In short, they scare the hell out of most of us. For a population that thinks of Pearl Harbor as ancient history, it is amazing how sex and murder can long endure.

Lizzie Borden died and left $30,000 to the animal shelter. She left another $500 so that the cemetery could tend to her father’s grave in perpetuity. Guilt or true love? It’s hard to say. Maybe a little of both. The thing is, given the times, most people were perplexed and a legend was born. Today, we know the story all too well. The difference a hundred odd years can make.

At Wal-Mart You Can Shop Till You Drop

By now most of the known world has read in the New York Daily News or elsewhere about the tragedy at a Long Island Wal-Mart, where an employer died after being trampled by a couple of hundred people. Apparently, he made the mistake of trying to hold them back and paid the price with his life. Other people were also injured and there was a controversial report that a pregnant woman miscarried.

If this episode wasn’t so tragic we could find it funny. There have been numerous comedy scenes in television episodes and feature films, comic strips, even, where overzealous shoppers trample each other in search of the ultimate bargain. The old comic strip, “Dagwood,” comes to mind. The artist had regular strips depicting women fighting each other, playing tug-of-war for bargain goods.

But the fact is it is pretty tragic. It is also very telling. It is telling on different levels. On one hand we can view this as a reflection of the bad economy where the need to save money has driven people to wait outside the doors of a department store for it’s special opening at 5:AM. Some stores even had special midnight openings. For a country that goes to bed after the Jay Leno or David Letterman monologue, it says something about the need to find a bargain.

It also says quite a lot about consumerism. I have to wonder, what are people doing out there at five A.M.? How much can you really care about buying something that you would stand there like cattle waiting for the doors to open so you could fight you way under fluorescent lighting to get something for your wife and kids, girlfriend, whatever? What does this really say about us, and the fact we cannot cure that disease, that we are consumer addicts.

Seventy percent of this economy if built on consumerism. We buy stuff. We buy a lot of stuff we don’t even need. We buy stuff to impress our friends. We buy dumb stuff, and in good economic times we pay a lot of money for overpriced, status seeking stuff that has the requisite branding. We don’t save; we spend. We buy. We don’t buy things that last, most of the time, anyway, we buy instead things that are fashionable. Things that we buy are built to be obsolete. We even buy quality cars that were built to last and trade them in because we are bored with them.

We are so obsessed with buy, apparently,we don’t mind elbowing and even trampling a few people to buy more stuff. Okay, so it’s the holiday. It is a holiday in the worst economy in perhaps 100 years, and here we are buying. Hang out Santa Claus and a few pretty lights, and we kick into buying mode like so many Pavlovian Dogs.
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Of course others have a different take on the incident at Wal-Mart. Some are blaming the greedy retailers for having the temerity to open their doors in the wee hours of the morning. At least for me it is a wee hour of the morning. Some are more racist in tone and issue forth deplorable comments that the writers don’t even bother couching in more acceptable, or polite, racist content. Pretty amazing.

As for the consumerism itself, it would seem a bit obsessive to be buffeted around by crowds at pre-dawn hours, waiting for a store’s doors to open. I would think you have to be nuts, but then there were so many standing there, they couldn’t all be crazy. Just sick. Sick with what, I’m not sure. And if not sick, not real logical.

The fact when the stores are stuck with unsold merchandise, say three weeks from now, they will practically be giving it away. You can waltz in, make a better deal, and walk out without fear of getting trampled. Or if you are really smart you can wait until after the holiday when they may be paying you to take this stuff out of the store. You could buy on line and save gas and sanity, life and limb. Or you can be really, really smart and be more discriminating and not get so caught up in shopping it becomes a major distraction.

Whatever you do for the holidays, this is certainly not the way to do it. If you are that bored with your life, and your life is that stale that mobbing the front of a store, in cold weather yet, seems like a good idea, perhaps you should seriously consider ceasing to populate the earth any further. We really don’t need more people, and we certainly don’t need more shoppers.

You may see the light. Or the only lights that may penetrate the huddled masses are the twinkly lights of Holiday Season. I would say Christmas, but it really has little to do anymore with the birth of Christ, Winter Solstice or whatever else you celebrate. It is about you and how much you can shop. It is about shopping, and not really so much about the giving. You shop till you drop. Or kill someone.

No matter how you see this, there is one thing you definitely won’t see standing in the middle of a department store, either at 5 A.M. or any other time where getting frazzled and frustrated is considered part of the experience. Definitely one thing you won’t see. Me.

California Wildfires Are the Lesson We Never Learn

It is wildfire season in California. The first typically come in early to middle autumn when the land is dry as a bone and the Santa Ana Winds blow hot air to fan the flames. A spark here and the fire is started. A few burning embers caught up in the winds, and the fire spreads to catastrophic proportions. If not every year we are treated to this disaster, it is a good many years.

Later, when winter comes and the rains pour down, the burnt vegetation and barren landscape will never hold back the waters. We will have mud slides. More disaster. Sliding mud, believe me, is a horrible menace. Water running downhill can cause tremendous damage. Think of mud as dense, heavy water, and you begin to see its capability. I saw it one year roll through a house like a mucky wrecking ball. Good thing my neighbors weren’t home that day. Would have killed them, for sure.

So with the first we have the news crews. We have the stories. We have the macro stores, told from helicopters and from the fire lines, dealing with the overall intensity of the fires, where it is spreading, its percentage of containment, and the number of houses the first have destroyed. We get to see the burning hillsides, the houses bursting in flames like Maison Flambe. We see the fire fighters struggling bravely to contain and push back the surging conflagration. Every year.

And every year we also get the micro stories. The up close and personal stories. We see men adn women sharing tears, sifting through the ruins of their houses, the charred remains of their personal possessions. We see them looking for their pets, looking for what remains of family heirlooms and photos. We hear them trying to console themselves by showing gratitude for the fact that they are still alive and all the lost were the material possessions. We see these people go from a multi-million dollar house to a cot in a gymnasium shelter in twenty minutes time. Fires move quickly in the mountain and canyon areas.

It is hard not to feel sorry for them. You feel sympathetic, share at least a modicum of pain. You put yourself in their shoes. You wonder what it would be like. And while I feel the sympathy and empathy for people who have been victimized by natural disasters, I also wonder what they were thinking when they decided to build their homes there.
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I realize this is an age old question. People wonder it about those who build their house to closely to a river that is prone to flood. People wonder about trailer parks and domiciles built in the path of hurricanes and tornadoes. Sometimes you can’t help it. Sometimes the hurricane, fire, flood or tornado just takes a wrong turn and comes barreling down your boulevard.

But the fact remains many of these houses should never be built on hilltops, canyons and wooded areas where they are just inviting disaster to come for a visit. We have seen this movie enough times to realize as beautiful as it is in these places, we just can’t afford to be building there. It is stupid. It is even more stupid when the same people build and then rebuild, after a previous disaster.

I know, you live there, you love the view, it’s so romantic, the great whatever, but it seems like it is my tax dollars that are bailing you out. It is me who has to smell or the charring that is exacerbated by the housing developments. Days of foul smoke and smoky stench. Yes, it would be there anyway, but it would never be the disaster it is if the houses weren’t part of the equation. It would just be burning woods, canyons, the natural cycle where fires eliminate the surplus vegetation.

This is a lousy economy. It doesn’t have to be made worse by stupid planning and development. We do not have to build on every square inch of the natural landscape. We don’t have to transpose the natural landscape with an ugly housing development that is destined to be destroyed by wildfires. And in a time when neither federal government or state government has the money to maintain what mediocre civic services we already have, we really don’t need to be shelling out money via emergency funding so homeowners can indulge themselves in places they don’t belong.

I believe the first time there is a disaster, the government helps you out. The second time, if you persist on living where you shouldn’t be building, you had better have adequate insurance or be prepared to be on your own when the disaster strikes. Sure, the fire fighters will be noble and try to save you, your pets, and your house. But if they can’t, then it is up to you to pick up the tab. If you can’t pick up the tab, if insurance rates are so dear that you can’t afford homeowners’ insurance, then be prepared to suffer mightily. Be prepared to suffer financially. Be prepared to move elsewhere. Instead of where you don’t belong.

CSI Is Just Another TV Show In Los Angeles

The public sure loves its true crime stories. The public also loves television shows that approximate true crime, like CSI, which most know stands for Crime Scene Investigation. The CBS Television Network programs CSI in a number of cities. The cities range from New York, Las Vegas, Miami, but not Los Angeles.

The show is produced from Los Angeles, but any producer who chooses to approximate a true crime cop show, using LA as the background, better move the bar that much further from fact toward fiction. The same my hold true for New York, Miami and the other cities where the show is located as well. The intrepid cops who solve these difficult cases my in reality be confronting the hardships and obstacles found in the Los Angeles labs.

In Los Angeles, cases are severely backlogged, there is gross mismanagement and alleged lack of supervision in the divisions responsible for both the fingerprint samples and the DNA. There is a stuff shortage, a misplacement of specimens. Court cases are backlogged and trials are often delayed. There are inaccuracies and errors. Critics claims the LA Police Department has no plan as to how to rectify this grievous series of foul ups.

The century old wonder of the fingerprint is somewhat of a fallacy. The crime scene unit investigators are only able to recover fingerprints from any one of the 2,400 annual crimes scenes about 60% of the time. And then when the files, or fingerprints, are misplaced, the adeptness and fortitude we admire on on CSI, the TV Show is lost in CSI, the reality.

As far as DNA is concerned, there are about seven thousand cases where the specimens are backlogged. To be kind the Lab personnel is extremely understaffed. The City lacks the money and he people to conduct what most would deem truly efficient investigations. With forthcoming budget cuts, the rather dire conditions that have been reported in the Los Angeles Times among other places, may not be getting any better.

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I realize that it is tough to be a cop. It is tough to be a police lab technician in a large city where despite all reverie that violent crime has gone down there is still plenty to go around. Yes, it’s tough to be a cop and it is tough to be the lab technician. But it’s a lot tougher to be a crime victim.

Crime victims expect justice. They should get it. Often they don’t. Los Angeles has seen more than a few cases where hte obviously guilty were set free. In some cases they were free to do it again. But with crime victims there is a need to believe in some criminal and societal code. A moral and ethical code where the powers that be will do their very best to bring the criminal to justice.

Increasingly, we see their very best is lacking. Their very best isn’t even good. So when you are a victim of rape and you are looking for justice, for some form of retribution that will at least in some small way alleviate the shock and terror you have experienced, along with injury to body and psyche, you expect to encounter the long arm of the law and not delays and excuses.

Which makes this all worse I fear is that with the economic downturn crime and unemployment are among the few things that will rise. People get desperate and even the more restrained and less violent of criminals may be prompted to commit violent criminal acts. The streets will be more dangerous, and the criminals will know by the time the labs get around to retrieving their DNA and fingerprint samples they could possibly die of old age.

After the collapse of our economy , for those of you who can’t experience one more shock and disillusionment, keep your eyes on CSI. It’s a better world on your flat screen TV.