Category Archives: Unclassifiable

Just to remind you: The folks who run the myth-busting website, Snopes.com, say that it's not true that eating turkey can make you drowsy. I used to think that. Then I realized that it was listening to my relatives at the dinner table that was putting me to sleep.

The Transportation Security Administration will not let you on the plane with cranberry sauce.

As several of you have informed me, the strip club in Las Vegas has discontinued its stripper-in-a-box promotion. No longer are they driving trucks up and down The Strip with bikinied women dancing for the pleasure of passers-by. This is a shame. I mean, what else is there to look at in Vegas?

A couple of folks have written in to say they're highly allergic to peanuts so it's a good thing more restaurants don't fry their french fries in peanut oil. Okay, fine. But as one who has dozens of food allergies — though not that one — I still wish a few more restaurants did their fries that way.

My friend Joe Brancatelli writes, "The best way to fry a french fry is in olive oil. You just haven't lived until you've had fries done in olive oil." I guess I haven't lived, then. So where do they do their french fries in olive oil?

I'm probably not going to write anything here about Sarah Palin's new book. It's not even out yet and the consensus seems to be that if you love her brand of politics, then every single word is sacred and that those who suggest otherwise are just trying to suppress her free speech because she's a Conservative and a woman. And if you don't like her politics, even the punctuation marks are full of lies. I don't see anyone moving very far off either position.

Lastly: Several folks have written to say there's a key difference between the two beauty pageant winners we noted who might well have parlayed scandal into lucrative careers. Unlike Carrie Prejean, they note, Vanessa Williams has demonstrated some genuine talent. Probably true…though I'm even willing to give Ms. Prejean the benefit of the doubt and admit that she might still find some place to show she can do more than parade about in a bikini and give embarrassing interviews.

The police have finally nabbed Spider-Man.

Bruce Buschel is an author who is in the process of opening a restaurant. He recently published a list in two parts of "100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do." I'd quarrel with about five of 'em…and I think the list should actually be "100 Things Restaurant Owners Either Should Never Do Or Should Tell Their Staffers Not To Do." But it's not a bad list for what it is and the comments from readers are even more interesting. I agree with the person who'd be a lot happier if restaurants would just stop playing music completely. Anyway, here's a link to Part One and here's a link to Part Two.

Tom Richmond is, as you probably know, the star caricaturist of MAD Magazine's new generation. Recently for a project, he did caricatures of every member of Congress…and as you also probably know, there's an old and glorious (almost patriotic) tradition of caricaturing our elected officials so who could object to that? Well, someone at Apple could. They reacted like he'd drawn them all nude and fornicating, which perhaps would have been more appropriate, given their frequent behavior. Read all about it.

Here's the schedule of the Valley Vegas Comic Book Festival, which is where I'll be on Saturday. It's at the Clark County Library, which is currently the only public building in Las Vegas not housing a production of Cirque du Soleil.

Thanks to a more conscious public and some sane legislation here and there, some aspects of the environment are becoming a tad more free of pollution and degradation. This is not the case with the tap water in my neighborhood. For at least five years, it's been undrinkable and now it's slowly becoming unshowerable.

Every so often, I run into someone with a mad on for environmentalists…someone who thinks they spread bogus warnings about disasters that are never going to happen and try to inconvenience people or businesses with preventing them. That's certainly so in some cases but not always. The many folks who warned us we were polluting our water supply were 100% dead-on right and the folks who insulted and mocked them were utterly wrong. We're all paying the price for not heeding that warning. There's now a $22 billion industry in this country selling bottled water…and that number doesn't even factor in what's being spent on filtration systems and Brita pitchers. I'm amazed people aren't more upset about this. But then I'm also amazed they don't do much more about high gas prices than pay them and grumble about it.

I resisted bottled water as long as I could…but when the liquid coming out of my faucets began to taste like I imagine kerosene tastes, it was time to go to the bottles.

Like most of you, I've tried just about every major brand. Happily, the one that tasted best to me was one of the cheapest — Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water. The only negative about it, apart from the fact that I have to pay for bottled water at all, is that the largest size it comes in is the one gallon container. You can't buy or have them deliver a big five gallon jug like I need to put on my water cooler. For that, I have Sparketts delivered and it's okay…but most of the time, I swill Crystal Geyser out of half-liter bottles. Cheapest place I've found to buy them is Smart and Final when they run their occasional "buy two cases, get one free" sale. In addition to any health benefits I derive from the water, I get exercise lifting those 36 bottle cartons into and out of my car.

My Crystal Geyser water comes from a spring somewhere on or about Olancha Peak, which is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Other parts of the country get Crystal Geyser H2O that comes from other sources so I'm curious as to what it tastes like. Later this year, I'll be doing some travelling and I'm going to make a point of sampling, for example, the Crystal Geyser water from Benton, Tennessee where there's a protected source adjacent to the Cherokee National Forest, which is surrounded by the historic Blue Ridge Mountains. (In case you can't tell, I'm doing some cutting 'n' pasting from the Crystal Geyser website.)

I like the Crystal Geyser product but I'm sorry I have to pay and lug around plastic bottles to have drinkable water. When people tell me now that we're doing things that are making our air unbreathable, I think I'm going to take them more seriously. I'd hate to have to carry tanks around like I'm scuba diving everywhere I go. I have a feeling even that won't make some people think the environmentalists are ever right but we need to do something.

Some of you may recall that two years ago, I had an ugly encounter with a predatory tow truck driver. I wrote about it in three parts, the last of which is here and this has prompted perhaps a hundred people, angry at similar incidents and scanning the web in search of remedies, to write me. Three or four even turned out to have been victimized by the same company that towed me.

I came to the sad conclusion at the time that nothing could be done about these practices. Apparently, a few things are now being done, as this article details.