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review o’ the day: how to pick a restaurant for an illicit affair

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A romantic dinner at the cafeteria 

This puts me in mind of the old Tatler reviews, back when it was…interesting. Or even readable.

They’d pick a premise for their reviews, then hunt down the very best restaurants related to that premise, no matter how whacky, and I loved them for it. I may never go to La Tante Coffee, tea, or the woman in the Edwardian gown?Claire, but thanks to one of their columns I know that’s where to take someone so incredibly rich and decrepit that they can not only pay a typical worker’s month’s wages for the bill, but also cannot actually chew. I believe that roundup was called “Where to Take the Wrinklies” and the premise was that you shouldn’t make them do any unneccessary mastication, both out of courtesy to said denture-wearing wrinkly and also so they’d remember you fondly in their will.

There was also “Best restaurant ashtrays for stealing” and “best loos“. Always wanted to do a loo roundup, myself; I’m quite the Balzac of the bathroom, if you check through my old blog. Or is that the Proust of the potty? Whatever…

In any case, the Observer has sent a couple of reporters out into the wilds of London to find the best places to take that special someone who shouldn’t technically be special to you at all, you naughty thing, you.

Glamorous romancesAfter having read the whole piece a couple of times, I can only say that it appears either standards of what constitutes an actual “affair” are much, much lower in London or the restaurants are much, MUCH livelier.

Behold the title:

Has the restaurant become the new hotel bedroom?

[His side:]

From my observation, there follow nine practical commandments for naughty-noshery (no seventh commandment – work it out).

1. Beware of sod’s law. If you choose a restaurant within a three-mile radius of your place of work, it’s water-cooler gossip before the day’s out. My favourite restaurant in my home-from-home town, Los Angeles, is Citrus, on Melrose. It’s harder to find than a brothel in the Vatican City. [although it seems to me that going all the way to LA is a bit too much effort, although it is likely to get you laid; have you met any Angelinos? You needn’t even bring a partner, just pick one up on the way from the airport].

2. Following on the above prudential strategy, make up a list of restaurants with high-wall leather booths. They make for an atmosphere of intimate, padded privacy in which conversational liberties can be safely taken. Or even an under-the-table fumble. [see what I mean about lower standards? I guess we just go crazy up here in Canuckistan; terribly reserved, these Brits]

3. Affairs tend to progress through the discovery of a favourite new restaurant (recall Greene’s The End of the Affair). Tip generously from the first. You want to be fondly remembered and always given your table. Leave cash on the table (not on the card receipt) so she knows what an open-handed fellow you are (there’s no Dutch in your soul – Frog through and through). [oui; and the waiters will know immediately that you two shouldn’t be having dinner together. Anything over the standard tip, particularly an even multiple, means soembody’s got a tan line on their ring finger]

4. If you’re a budget-price (let’s be honest, ‘cheap’) cove, avoid Italian restaurants. They love clatter. And a splodge of bolognese on the shirt is a real passion killer. Indian restaurants are quiet (all that sound-absorbing flock wallpaper) but those dreary raga-loops (Punjabi girls wailing glumly about their lovers) are a downer. Indian waiters are also rather censorious and prone to the chilling side glance. Chinese restaurants serve too fast and are obviously interested only in the foreign devils’ money. Thai restaurants tend to have such exquisite waiters that you feel Shrek-like. Not good. American themed beef joints have heavy-pumping Muzak. Go French if you can afford it. [got to disagree; very difficult to do anything lively after seven courses, all of which have butter and cream in them. Not to mention that a spot on your clothing is just an incredible opportunity to double-entendre your way to nudity. Try some weird raw foodie place; there is always that reputation that wheatgrass has, and you can suggest trying it out. Seafood also good, for the same reason. Duh.]

5. Following on the above, remember it’s the conversation that gets the relationship fizzing. So even if it’s French, you don’t want one of those nouvelle cuisine places with course after course that demands a running commentary on the grub. You’re a philanderer, remember, not a food critic. [it’s “conversation” is it? What makes me think this man is a better talker than a lover?]

6. The best (budget-priced) conversation restaurants in London are those on top of Waterstone‘s in Piccadilly and the NPG in Trafalgar Square. Sumptuous views, incredibly dilatory service, dirt cheap, and surrounded by thousands of objects that raise the cultural tone well above what you have on your mind. [Well actually, proximity to getaway isn’t a bad quality, and these put unneccesary roadblocks in your way; this is why a picnic is best, because it’s already included the getaway part]

7. See the book of Deuteronomy.

8. Make a list of restaurants with good conversation pieces around the table. L’Etoile in Charlotte Street, London, for example (cinq coqs), has faded photographs of French celebrities covering its walls. Do a reconnaissance meal first, and bone up on who’s who (‘My God, Moreau was beautiful, wasn’t she?’). [oh dear. This is known among women as the “breadstick conversation.” As in, “uh, gee, we both like breadsticks. Amazing, isn’t it?” and so we return to that whole “conversation” point above. This man must be either very rich or very, very good-looking]

9. Avoid lettuce and spinach (green-tooth curse), garlic, and coarse vin rouge (black-tooth curse). [Fanny Brice said “alcohol is essential: a little for you, a lot for your entourage”]

10. Have a discreet snack before the meal to dampen the ravening appetite. You want it to be evident that you’re more interested in her than the food. In Las Vegas, the police recommend that (male) punters masturbate before going out on the town. Think about it – you want to appear cool and collected, not hot and sweaty. Just a suggestion. [I think that was Chris Elliot in There’s Something About Mary; but it’s perfectly understandable that a rich, handsome English conversationalist would confuse him with the Las Vegas Police Force]

For her (more anecdotal) take, go to the site.

Ah, romance!

how not to lay off

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Gilt City Beggar 

Well you’d kinda think it went without saying that when you fire people, you shouldn’t lead them to believe you’ve just consigned them to a life of dumpster-diving and peeing on shredded newsprint.

Even if you have.

But apparently Northwest Airlines is as clueless when it comes to layoff PR as United is at that whole bigotry thang. The Smoking Gun reports on the handy-dandy pamphlet NWA handed its outgoing workers, to enable them to make the transition from productive worker to presumably Thunderbird-soused binners as smoothly as possible:

In a remarkable bit of corporate insensitivity, Northwest Airlines brass gave workers it is laying off a booklet offering “101 Ways To Save Money,” including “don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash” and “ask your doctor for samples of prescriptions.” The booklet was included in a layoff packet recently given to dozens of pink-slipped workers in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas…

Along with the dumpster diving suggestion, Northwest recommended shorter showers, thrift store shopping, and getting “hand-me-down clothes and toys for your kids from friends and relatives.” Not to mention “grow your own vegetables and herbs” and “use old newspapers for cat litter.”

The whole document is on TSG‘s website here. Hey, what are you gonna do when Family Circle isn’t around to cover this lifestyle tip stuff anymore?

Praying Beggar

niggaknow segway

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Segway...nerd chariot of the gods

NiggaKnow Technology has reviewed the latest from Segway, with predictably hair-on-the-walls results. And I say more power to them; the Segway is a self-indulgent, expensive, purposeless piece of turdblossom whose only justification for existence is the undeniable fact that some people are just too damn rich and lazy to operate their own feet. The moment it was announced I pronounced it DOA, and in this I have been proven right. It’s been on PR life support ever since, while Dean Kamen has been holed up, frantically trying to produce something that either A) improves the world we live in or B) entertains enough people that they forgive him the relentless Segway hype. Perhaps a robot that runs on recycled plastic and costs five dollars to build and employs people in Katrina-devastated territory and Darfur might about do it, but only if it could also pratfall on command like Chevy Chase.

Let’s go to the Motherfucking Transcript, shall we?Segway geezer

Segway got a new line of they faggot nerd bikes that will allow white people to bend side to side when they decide they want to turn left or right. That’s it, that’s the big motherfucking innovation. White people twisting they selves on a straight up gay scooter with they silly ass helmets on trying to take they ass to work so they can tell they bosses how much they love all they motherfucking stupid suggestions and ideas for 12 like hours, skip lunch, and get fatter eating 15,000 calories worth of oreos in they motherfucking cubicles. That shit ain’t new, The real Segway news come into play when you look at they site.

But where’s the race angle?

So I read about they new pillow biting ass nerd chariots and went to they site. I’m like 15 pages deep in white motherfucker marketing bullshit and I notice that they trying to correct the mistakes of the past by actually popping some black people up on they bitch made brochure looking site. How many? Two, and they even got security guard uniforms.

NiggaKnow Segway

This motherfucker right here got that real white agenda illustrated to the ultimate. Not only do they got another black security guard, in a motherfucking empty secluded ass parking deck, on one them faggot nerd bikes.. but the nigga is PEEPING OUT on a motherfucking MINIVAN.

I mean what the fuck kind of white deception bullshit is that? How the fuck you gonna tell me that niggas be casing motherfucking MINI-VANS while rolling on one of those nerd bikes. I mean that shit is motherfucking boganza, but for some god damn reason it makes sense in they little white heads. I mean, if a nigga gonna roll on that faggot ass 5 grand nerd bike, then they may as well be chopping mini-vans. Its like Segway telling motherfuckers that black people down with quilting bees and motherfucking ovaltine when they could take time out they busy schedule of robbing Chevettes and Volvos.

Segway polo. Have these people no pride?

Hunting and Gathering: The Only

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from the Archive:

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Have I told you about shopping for food in my neighborhood? Of course I have, and here I go again, but this time we will have no naked people (haven’t had any in quite some time, but nevermind) we will have no Italians. We will have diner burgers. And where will we have them? At the Ovaltine Cafe and Vic’s Cafe and we will have a good Yuppie bouillabaisse at the Cook Studio Cafe. In fact, I think I will go have one right now to refresh my memory and also check out all the hot uniforms at lunchtime, subsequent to which I will update the blog.

Love that word, blog. Blog, blog, BLOG! cool…

Back from lunch. Alas, Cook Studio Cafe closes at 2, just before I got there; story of my life, born a month late and trying unsuccessfully to catch up ever since. Went to mosey down to the Ovaltine or Vic’s but felt guilty I was ducking my work, so decided to eat closer to where I had to work today. Somehow that made me feel less irresponsible.

Ended up at the Only, The Only Seafood Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in Vancouver. It’s in a hellish stretch of Hastings amid pawn shops, storefronts that have been boarded up for twenty years, and really last-chance social agencies. The Only has been there since the early part of the last century, 1912 to be exact, and is now run by a nice Chinese couple. They got a very nice writeup last week in Malcolm Parry’s social column.

If you are one of the sorryass losers who goes to a seafood restaurant and orders beef you are SOL here, bud. There is nothing, I mean nothing, NOTHING on the menu but seafood. Halibut and chips, cod and chips, oysters fried raw stewed two ways, clams, mussels and/or chips. And there is nobody here except almost-geezers with ballcaps on their heads and windbreakers on their backs who all look like they just came in from a round of golf or maybe a suburban barbeque. As soon as you sit down the woman shoves half a loaf of bread and a platter of butterpats at you, along with a half-quart of water in the kind of glass that can take a bullet and remain standing.

It was the most expensive lunch I’ve had on the Downtown EastSide, which is to say that it came to $10 with the tip and pop. But then, my oyster pepper stew (half order) was yummy, and so thick with oysters that it really should be called Bowl-O-Sters With Some Tomato Sauce. There were three fragments of vegimatter, God knows what it was, but there was about a half-pound of oysters, all cut up. You know, when you cut them up like that they look kind of like jelly rolls with tentacles on one side and it gets you to wondering what all the different colours are made up of. A friend of mine went to high school out here and they made her dissect clams, oysters and mussels and now she can’t eat shellfish anymore because she looks at it and knows what’s the liver, what’s the pulmonary apparatus…I’m glad I went to school in Ontario and I’m glad I don’t eat at restaurants that serve fetal pigs or frogs, though I’ve heard some very expensive ones do.

But about the stew: never mind what it looked like, it was nice and peppery, with the true dinery flavour of Campbell’s Tomato Soup hiding in there somewhere underneath the tsunami wave of pepper. Yummylicious. And this is definitely a place you can dunk, so it was Dunk City for my lunch and I got through most of the bread.

The place is filled with mirrors: one long one running the length of the left-hand wall, and one huge, got-to-be-expensive one that makes up the back wall, about 8’x15′ or so. I’d be very surprised if it weren’t one of those that you can see through from behind. The kitchen is along the right-hand wall, behind a half-wall, and the counter comes out from there and makes two loops to the left. There are no tables. Ceiling is way up there, maybe 20′, and covered with either Lincrusta or a real old pressed tin ceiling. Very Edwardian. Along the top of the left-hand wall above the mirror runs a very sixties mural of fishing, all in pastel marine greens and oranges, like the sort of thing Toni Onley might have done in Grade Nine.

Adding to the atmosphere are the snippets of conversation, screams, and shouts coming through the completely clouded-over front windows. It’s like flipping though channels if only cop shows, Alfred Hitchcock, and Permanent Midnight are on tv. Ever seen Da Vinci’s Inquest? This is the kind of conversation that preceeds the arrival of the coroner. And the nice thing is: it’s OUTSIDE!

Secrets of Hezbollah’s Success

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Stolen from Ben Heine:

Hezbollah's winning the peace

1) Organizational Improvements

The central secret to Hezbollah‘s success is that it trained its guerrillas to make decisions autonomously at the small group level. (…) The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah‘s aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.

2) Hybrid Methods

Ancillary to the improvements in organizational design, Hezbollah also demonstrated its ability to supercharge antiquated conventional tactics with off-the-shelf technology to create weapons systems and hybrid tactics attuned to defeating Israeli military systems. We can expect to see this behaviour accelerate among non-state groups as readily available commercial technology continues its pace of radical improvement.

3)Extracting an Economic Toll

Hezbollah‘s success against Israel codifies two strategic methods that global guerrillas emulate. The first is the value of strategic coercion through economic attrition. Ongoing disruption of the Israeli economy through rocket attacks attaches a quantifiable strategic cost to the conflict. (…) Israel has been forced into an aggressive air campaign to accelerate progress on the ground against missile launch sites and interdict resupply of new missiles from Syria. This air campaign has backfired due to the asymmetry of targets, in that Israeli air strikes have alienated the Lebanese government and increased the moral cohesion of its foes.

4)Leveraging force protection and an aversion to casualties

A second strategic method is to trade territory for the blood of professional soldiers and delay. The intent is demonstrated by Hezbollah‘s dispersal of small units across a wide geographic area. This clearly shows Hezbollah‘s willingness to trade ground for the lives of Israeli soldiers and time. It succeeds by leveraging the aversion to casualties and dedication to force protection found in modern Western militaries (these men are professionally educated and therefore considered too valuable for use as cannon fodder).

Source : http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com
John Robb is the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism.