AI's CWoB: YellowText

Bit of a mixed-blessing last night, sensation-seekers. I finally took the Boulevard Diner off of the list of Diners I Mean To Visit Some Day and added it to the list of Diners I Have Visited. That's good. But I liked it so much that I also copied it to the list of Diners I Mean To Visit Again Some Day...and that's bad. Bad, bad, bad. Because the Boulevard is open 24 hours a day.

Actually, they close at 3 PM on Sunday, re-opening in time for breakfast Monday morning. But this is just good business. A patron can take a seat at the counter, get comfortable, and keep asking for free refills on their coffee, but not for more than 151 hours straight. The Boulevard's owners understand that Word of Mouth is essential to the success of any commercial enterprise and that as such, it's absolutely vital to encourage their customers to leave the diner from time to time.

The Boulevard is emblematic of why people like me spend our lives chasing diners and live regret-free as a result. It's an authentic Worcester-style diner...

(Aside: When you're talking cars, you're talking Fords, Chryslers, Mercedeses, et cetera. Diners are Worcesters, O'Mahonys, or Paramounts, pre-fabbed at a factory and then shipped by rail in whole or in parts to vacant lots all across America. Worcester-style diners (distinguished by their barrel roofs, enameled-metal exteriors, and wood-paneled interiors) were all built in Worcester, Massachusetts by the Worcester Lunch Car Company. End of aside)

...and it's a very clean and well-maintained one. But it serves as a functioning, busy restaurant, not as a monument to vague nostalgia. You won't see any James Dean posters hanging anywhere and the napkin dispensers are shaped like napkin dispensers, not like tailfinned convertibles or the taunting skull of Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture.

It offers both booths and counter service. Six bucks will buy anything on the menu, they have a very good chili, and while they offer the usual Top Ten of diner food (including Breakfast Any Time), the menu includes its share of oddball cuisine that's dearly beloved by the management and flawlessly executed. So if you go to the Boulevard and you're not in the mood for the meatloaf platter or a BLT, there's also a really spiffy homemade lasagna.

I give the place 9 points out of a possible ten, with a mandatory point deducted when the proprietress failed to address me as "hon." Still, I'm fairly sure that she would have if I had entered alone instead of with a couple of friends, or if a plural form of the greeting existed. ("Hons"? "Honnen"? "Hen"? It just doesn't scan.) Other than that, the Boulevard has everything I look for in a diner.

This would be a great discovery if it were a couple of hours away, or kept traditional New England diner hours (6 AM to 2 PM). But like I said, the Boulevard almost never closes, which means that there's no point during the day or night when I couldn't conceivably jump in the car and be ordering a turkey club 45 minutes later. Let's say it's 3:10 AM and there's nothing on TV any more and I'm thinking that it's probably time I got to work. "You know what would really put my head in the game?" I realize. "A nice bowl of chili." And ignoring the can of Dinty Moore sitting in the cupboard and the editor steaming in New York, away I zoom down I-90.

That's no good. No good at all. I've often thought that if I launched a nationwide search for a new city to live in and I had to scratch my existing favorites off the list, I'd look for an industrial town. You know, the sort of place where they have to keep punching out Mini Cooper hoods and fenders around the clock, and every couple of hours another thousand people are either just starting their shift or just coming off one. I've read about such towns. During the height of the steel boom, you could get breakfast or a haircut or a lute lesson in one of them at any hour of the day or night.

Now that a component of that dream is now within reach, I realize that the best way to enhance my office productivity would be to move to one of those fierce Bible Belt towns where all the street lights are turned off at 9 PM and people Pray For Your Soul if they learn that your radio gets FM.

(Sigh.) Why do I bother? Here I am in a nice room at the Sheraton Manhattan, and Lilith refuses to acknowledge the fact that her engineers over at Apple went to considerable time, trouble, and expense to fit her with a built-in 56K modem. "Moe-dem?" she says, when I open Internet Connect and click the Connect button. "What is this...'moe-dem'...of which you speak?" If she were a woman she'd wrinkle her nose while she said it, to suggest that I know damned well why she and the modem are feuding, and if I didn't want to wind up on her ****list as well I'd better start showing a little sympathy for her side.

Of course I had a column due today, and of course I wrote it on the train over, and of course I decided to pull this wild, maverick-style maneuver whereupon I simply trust that the thing that worked fine the last time I used it will work just fine once more.

What a dope. Haven't I been using this stuff long enough to know that all personal computers are equipped with narrow-spectrum Peril Sensors that can tell when you need to do something Pretty Damned Important and thus dig in it heels at the worst possible time?

Grr. The hotel's in-room broadband connection lies there on the desk like a coiled panther biding its time before the inevitable. The hotel wants fifteen bucks for each noon-to-noon window of 'net access. I plug the cable into Lilith, restart, and I've got broadband. But I can't bring myself to do it. Fifteen bucks? To email a column that I can read over the phone in less than five minutes?

Double-grr, with a frosted "Harumph" on top for added emphasis. Tomorrow I'll be at MacExpoCreateWorldPro or whatever they're calling Macworld Expo this year. The press room will be pulsating with wireless access, no trouble there. My rhythm's all shot to hell, though. Email in the mornin', email in the evenin', email at suppertime...so long as my sleep is bracketed by the crackle of packets zapping into the ether, my sang froid remains bouncy, shiny, and manageable, like Jane Seymour's hair after she uses that conditioner she advertises.

I'm a bit of a Macintosh whiz so I knew that the solution to this problem involved taking the "D" train down to 14th Street and having Thai food in the apartment of a few geek friends. This would inevitably initiate a chain of events which would eventually result in wireless access, I believed. I was proven correct.

This is going to be a weird Expo. Whereas normally I'm double-booked through most of the show, this year I was able to cram everything into Wednesday. Whereas normally I devote one day to see the entire show, a second day to re-visit booths that require special attention, and a third for picking up anything I might have missed, I believe and hope that I can get everything done in a single day. If things work out, I'll spend Wednesday doing my Beloved Industry Figure thing and Thursday I'll be on 74th Street shopping for ninja stars or something cool like that.

Naw, I don't believe that. The lack of buzz surrounding this summer's show is entirely due to the bumper crop of mixed signals and intense vague intentions produced by Apple and the show. Would there be a show? Would Apple be involved? Would it even be "Macworld Expo" or was it going to morph into a generic technology show? Would Steve be coming in to keynote? Those are things that needed to be locked in and definitively answered six months in advance. Booth space costs megabucks and no company is going to commit to that sort of investment without knowing for sure what they're going to be buying into.

Instead, Johnny Olsen made his way through the "Let's Make A Deal" audience with an enormous box containing a year's supply of tasty Bit-O-Honey bars. Mac companies were left to decide for themselves whether MacProExpoCreateConference contained hidden riches or if really all you were getting from it was a buttload of candy that you wouldn't want to give out for Halloween, if you knew that the neighborhood kids understood and had access to egg technology.

Expo returns to Boston next year. Hopefully, the organizers will have a product that the Industry is familiar with and confident about, and the show will bounce right back. And what the hell, maybe my low expectations for CreateWorldMediaConferencePoMac are totally unfounded. Still and all, I gotta say that while I'm looking forward to dining with friends and I'm looking forward to maybe catching a show while I'm in town and I'm looking forward to taking a nice walk through Central Park and capping it off with a slice of 3,000-calorie cheesecake...I'm not looking forward to Expo.

I'm not dreading it either, mind you. But for the first time, CreateWorldProMacExpoMars is somehow incidental.

I've already had an insight that's caused me to step back and re-evaluate my pre-conceptions of this city, incidentally. I was standing on the corner when a horse took what can only be described as a Biblical-scale whizz on 7th Avenue. The scent of urine filled the air and for the first time I asked myself: "Have I been wrong about this place, all these years? Is it possible that New York's ever-present pee smell is actually animal urine, and not a tangible reminder of the native population's genetic disregard for even the most basic conventions of human co-existance?"

I mean, I've always just assumed, you know? After all, it fit with everything else I've known and understood about New York. I've had great faith in this. Natives would visit me in Boston. "I'll meet you at Faneul Hall, by the statue of Sam Adams," I would tell them. "If you get there before I do, please try to resist the urge to pee all over it."

Welcome once again to another item posted from the quaint village of Nowhere. Outside my window, the peasants have just finished bringing in the alfalfa, and have begun assembling some sort of machine. One of the peasants passing by my window was carrying a piece of it and he looked like he knew what was going on so I stopped him and asked what it was all about. He slid his red tasselled cap up over his leathery forehead and then he identified the apparatus as a "Jintering Mary," first patented in Wales in 1834. Apparently, it does two things extremely well: it de-fronds the naps from the tensens of each stalk of grain, and it also throws 97% of the mid-Nineteenth-century Welsh labor force into poverty and prostitution three weeks after it's introduced into agribusiness.

And in the time it's taken me to describe all that, the final drive-belt has been levered onto the last wheel, and after the merry shriek that always accompanies the loss of a pinkie finger in the unshrouded gears of vintage farm machinery, it's up and Jintering. Rustic dances shall commence at 7 PM as scheduled; wear soft-soled shoes; bring an unmarried cousin.

I am indeed Nowhere, ie, on a train or a plane or in one of the waiting areas from which the aforementioned things depart. In this case, I'm in an Amtrak train paused at the station in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Naturally, I know Nowhere quite well. I spend so much time in transit this time of year that a letter addressed "Andy Ihnatko, No Place, Specifically" will reach me eventually. It's one thing to be in Boston, quite another thing to be in New York City. But Nowhere isn't a thing at all.

By now, you're used to my waxing poetically about train travel and so if I were to blog from a seat on an Amtrak train and failed to say "What fools these mortals be, who fly between Boston and New York," it'd be akin to Survivor performing at a county fair somewhere and not playing "Eye Of The Tiger." So let's acknowledge that while some dopes had to take a $35 cab ride to the airport, leave the city early enough to get there an hour before departure, submit to an involuntary pedicure and bikini wax at the security checkpoint, wait in lines, get strapped into a tiny seat, eat naught but three novelty-sized pretzels and a half a can of Coke, and then had to reverse the whole process after landing, I'm sitting in a First Class-type seat with my feet up on the cushion across from me. Lilith is plugged into a 120-volt outlet near the armrest. It was a $4 ten-minute ride from the Javitz Center to Penn Station, and by jumping off the train a station or two before Boston, I'll disembark just a couple of miles from my house.

Let's also mention that instead of spending 58 minutes of flying time staring at the bald spot of a passenger dozing in the fully-reclined seat in front of me, I'm spending 4 hours contemplating New England's coastline. For every abandoned mill and scrapyard and other candidate site to film the final scenes of "Terminator 2" in, there's a minor-league ballfield or a marina or an eighty-year-old drawbridge. I save a hunnerd bucks and if you start the clock in downtown New York and stop it when I kick away the newspapers from my doorstep, coming home via Amtrak only takes an hour longer than the plane.

(Still don't buy it? Check out Neil Gaiman's blog. Like me, he's a writer, unlike me he's hugely rich and famous and powerful but let's set that aside because what I'm really getting at is that like me, he goes to a huge trade show this time every year and chooses to take the train. He's super-hardcore, too. I'm just going a couple of hundred miles. Neil's going all the way from Minnesota to San Diego. But he loves it. One of the many great things about Nowhere is that as soon as someone learns you're there, they give up any hope of reaching you. So he spends a jolly couple of days in a sleeper car, actually getting work done, with no email or phone line to interrupt him.

Yes, cellphones work just fine on trains. But Neil brought aboard a doohickey that recharges your cellphone from your laptop's USB port and allows you to pack a slim little dongle instead of a bulky charger. It was a brilliant scheme, but his Windows laptop wanted no part of it...so Neil remains truly incommunicado. Given how frenzied his life becomes the moment he steps onto a convention floor (he attracts lines of fans that stretch so far that you imagine he's giving away a bowl of hot soup with every autograph), I'm guessing that this blunder was strategic in nature. End of aside.)

Speaking of taxis, my very last New York experience seemed to be stage-managed and engineered, as though the Mayor knew that this was the last chance to impress an out-of-towner who has a newspaper column. My cab dropped me off behind Penn Station. The driver popped the trunk so I could extract my rollaway, he waited for me to exit and move to the back of the trunk...and then he impatiently started to pull back into traffic. Which hardly seemed like grateful behavior, given that I'd handed him a fiver and told him to keep the forty cents' change.

My quick bark of "HEYYY!!!" and violent slaps of the still-flopping trunk were quickly joined by the auhoritative BLOOOP! of a police siren behind me. The cab tilted to a stop, I turned around, spotted a smiling cop, flashed him a grateful wave, heaved out my luggage, and headed down the sidewalk.

Then I noticed that the cop had pulled the driver over. New York City Transit Police. He seemed to have a serious chat with the man to explain that every hick, Okie, hillbilly, coalcracker, and yes, even out-of-town goobers like him are to be treated like Ambassadors from their cities of origin, and if taxi drivers are under the impression that every last tourism and convention dollar isn't absolutely vital to this great City's ability to maintain services and resources for its citizens, well, sir, then...

(Of course, that's just what I imagined was going on. I'm also aware that New York police are absolutely, totally not under orders to write up as many tickets as they possibly can, to make up for the city's deep revenue shortfalls. The Mayor's Office came out with a statement on it and everything. Citizens who were ticketed for sitting on a railing while waiting for a bus, or for using a baby stroller outside of a crosswalk, or operating a Jintering Mary on borough property between the Feast of the Ascension and Leavening Day, well, those people offer a dissenting opinion.)

Almost time to go to the club car and get a snack. Yet another advantage of rail travel: you have a drink and a sandwich when you're damned ready for a drink and a sandwich, and not before.

I hate it when I play straight into the hands of a giant, soulless international media conglomerate. "Let's cut a special half-hour edition of 'Queer Eye For The Straight Guy' and run it once on Thursday night," NBC thought. "We'll nab a lot of viewers who otherwise wouldn't tune in to Bravo to check it out." I bet they even arranged for my remote to be just out of reach, too, so that I'd have absolutely no alternative but to watch it after "Will And Grace." So I saw it and I liked it enough that later on, I added it to my TiVO list so I could see the real thing on cable. Who owns Bravo? NBC. And who's one of TiVO's majority investors? NBC again. Bastards!

I've just seen my first full, hourlong episode and I'm afraid to admit that yes, this TiVO Season Pass shall stand for the foreseeable future. I never would have imagined it, honestly. For one, it seems like every time I turn on the TV these days, I see a suburbanite open her eyes and shriek "Oh...my god!!!" in reaction to a guest bedroom that's had one layer of Tacky sanded off and a fresh new coat of Chintzy slapped on. And every time I see that, I'm one step closer to buying that handgun and seeing if Elvis might have had the right idea.

(I thought that "Monster House" would be an exception. But I found that they'd jettisoned the single most attractive element of its inspiration, "Monster Garage": the showcasing of a half-dozen skilled professionals who are damned-near geniuses in their specific fields. It's fascinating to watch someone machine a block of raw aluminum into the perfect solution to a mechanical problem, relying on intuition, experience, and an impressive piece of high-energy apparatus similar to the sort of thing that a movie villain would use to make James Bond talk. But "Monster House"? Sure, every team has a skilled carpenter or a plumber who's seen and done it all, but my lasting impression is of someone who's too busy flashing the goat and waggling his tongue at the camera to notice that they're about to Skilsaw through a live power conduit.

Which admittedly presents a far more accurate picture of home-renovation than what you see on "This Old House," but it's not what I'm shopping for in a TV show. End of aside.)

My other reservation about "Queer Eye" was the same as anyone else's. Five gay guys descend upon a straight guy, to shape him up vis a vis fashion, decor, food, and culture? Isn't that, I dunno...a breathtakingly stupid reinforcement of a useless and destructive stereotype? Why not black guys who get a white guy to stop being so uptight? No, wait; that was a Queen Latifah movie. And an Eddie Griffin movie. And a Whoopi Goldberg movie. And a Chris Rock movie. And...

But then I remembered that there is indeed such a thing as an Italian grandmother who's a sensational cook, or a single man in his thirties who has a clear opinion regarding whether or not Batman could beat Captain America in a fight. And to be honest, the five titular queers cover the spectrum of the gay men I know. There's the guy who looks and acts like he came straight out of a Mel Brooks movie. There's the guy who you only find out about when you offer to fix him up with your girlfriend's sister. And there's every example in between.

The bottom line is that it's a good show and a solid hour's worth of entertainment. I'm opposed to barbaric dictators, but if Saddam Hussein came out of hiding carrying a tray full of warm, crispy bacon and was willing to share, I'd greet him with enthusiasm. The same sort of principle applies here; thus I intend to watch the show more or less as frequently as TiVO locates new episodes.

One observation, though: the producers sure knew what they were doing when they decided to only use men for their makeovers. You know how a typical hour of "Queer Eye For The Straight Gal" would go?

00:01'20" to 00:02'00" — Fashion guy pulls a pair of orange clogs out of subject's closet, asks "Oh my God...are you expecting a visit from Suzanne Pleshette, dear?"

00:02'05" to 00:59'59" — Queer Guys and production crew beg and plead subject to stop sobbing, unlock door, and come out of bathroom.

As I write this I'm watching "Entertainment Tonight." Sylvester Stallone is talking about how much Bob Hope meant to him, both personally and through Hope's legacy as an entertainer and humanitarian. He concludes his very sincere testimonial by showing an appropriate level of astonishment that this one man achieved so much success in so many areas over so many decades. Sly is dressed casually, in a tee shirt and jeans. Over his shoulder you can see Mr. T in his "Rocky III" costume, warming up on the heavy bag.

I mean, the news industry had a pretty comfortable lead-time on this story. Anyone who wondered why every network, newspaper and magazine covered Hope's 100th birthday as though it were Jesus Christ arriving in Times Square to see "Hairspray" and maybe get a little cheesecake should show some sympathy. Imagine, investing all that time and creativity preparing a eulogy for an 84-year-old (90-year-old, 96-year-old...) comedian, and then wondering if you yourself would live long enough to see it actually run? You can forgive these people for jumping on the excuse.

(It's 8:00 PM and "Entertainment Tonight" transitions to NBC prime-time. How important and influential was Bob Hope? So much that NBC felt they should actually delay "Fear Factor" for two minutes out of respect. "The world is a better place, and a happier place, because Bob Hope is in it," says Johnny Carson (in a clip from Hope's Kennedy Center Honors induction), and without any transition whatsoever we're looking at a truck flying through a wall of exploding gasoline and a weepy lady eating a slug.

I think it was the FCC who insisted that the network cease using the slogan "Our Pride Is Showing." Commercial communications satellites simply don't have enough bandwidth to carry that much irony.)

It's impossible to hold an American passport and not comment on how phenomenal Bob Hope was, of course. I think the main reason why he was so beloved was because he spent 80 years doing just about everything you can do in the field of entertainment. As a kid, I thought he was a real dud, and no wonder: I really only knew him through his Eighties NBC specials. But the first time I saw "Road To Morocco" I lost no time in moving him over to the "Genius" list. I'm sure that other people think the "Road" movies are cheap, hammy, production-line junk food but were turned around the first time they heard a tape of his radio show. Or they were put off by his (apparent) conservative politics but had to admire his unwavering support of folks in the armed services.

So it's all over with now, anyway. Every year or two, there'd be a report that Hope had died. The most famous one came from some luckless Congressman whose aide spotted something on the Internet and sent him scrambling to the House chambers, still combing his hair for the cameras, to be the first to read it into the public record. The reaction from Hope's publicist was always exactly the same: "Bob had a good laugh about it and then enjoyed his favorite dessert, chocolate-chip ice cream." This seemed to invite one of two possible conclusions. Either (a) Bob Hope spends every given moment of every given day eating ice cream, or (b) he's beyond being aware of what happens around him...so there's a boilerplate press release standing by for whenever someone needs a response for the record.

And during the 100th birthday hoopla, accounts of his health varied, from "He's definitely limited by the effects of extreme old age but all things considered, he's still sharp" to "He's been reduced to a collection of nervously-monitored vital signs." I hope the truth was something closer to the former. Folks with eulogies and testimonials and an eagerness to offer them should do so while the subject's still alive. It's pleasant to imagine that Bob Hope spent his 100th birthday hearing the world say exactly how it felt about him.

Mark Evanier points out that The New York Times' obituary of Bob Hope was written by Vincent Canby...who died almost three years ago.

This brings up a point: if a writer wants to make sure that his or her family is taken care of in the case of their untimely death, buying life insurance might not be the best solution. Better to simply lay in a thick, rich cache of celebrity obituaries, which the surviving spouse can sell to newspapers and magazines over the next ten to thirty years.

Print it, staple it to the back of the will, and there you go: if the kid winds up with crooked teeth, the orthodontist bill is covered. An obit of an Olsen Twin can easily serve either Mary-Kate or Ashley, so that's a particularly good investment of time. Plus, if you supply an alternative lead paragraph it can cover the possibility of a helicopter crash or something, and potentially earn the spouse a twofer. See, it's all about planning ahead and being a responsible husband or wife.

Ahhhhhh. My car is set up just the way I like it. Outside, it looks like your basic beater car, the make and model of choice for (a) people who work out of their house and don't really see the point of taking out a $30,000 note on a spiff set of wheels, or (b) people who are unaware that they're about to be on an episode of "Cops." But inside, you'll find:

2) ...Interfaced to a PowerBook Titanium, running a custom-made GPS "dashboard" app;

#6 is neither here nor there, of course, but the rest is a testimonial to my commitment to a certain lifestyle. It's not always this bad. I'm evaluating satellite radios for an upcoming column, I've only got the Garmin for about another week before it has to go back, the PowerBook is just testing this new app I've written, and the IR controller was something I bodged together late at night because it sounded like a cool idea. It also occurred to me that in a worst-case scenario, being able to demonstrate the ability to control this mess without taking my hands off the wheel or my eyes off the road could make the difference between getting a written warning for failure to stop at a yellow light and getting cuffed and driven to the station house for Reckless Endangerment With A Motor Vehicle.

(You laugh. But my GPS box got me out of a speeding ticket once. "Was I really?" I said to the nice patrolman, when he told me how fast I was going. "Well, I'm not surprised. The speedometer on this old car is way off, so I usually have to go by the calculated speed reading on my satellite navigation system," I explained, nodding towards the box on the dash.

The car was truly a rolling salute to oxidation, and this was some years ago, when nobody had seen a Global Positioning System device. So when he craned his head inside the car and said "That thing talks to satellites?" I knew it was just a matter of time. "Well, it doesn't exactly talk to them," i began. "It's actually an ELF-band receiver that interprets streaming telemetry from a constellation of 24 geosynchronous satellites, tracking as many as 12 channels simultaneously. See this screen here? Each black bar represents a different bird. So long as the box can 'see' three satellites, it can determine my latitude and longitude; simple algebra dictates that if it's locked onto a fourth, it can also pop out my altitude. Now, because I've established a system of waypoints..."

Annnnd about ten minutes later — following an explanation of "Selective Availability" and the difference in accuracy between civilian and military-grade receivers — the officer had forgotten why he had pulled me over in the first place. "These aren't the droids we're looking for," he said, as he blinked hard and replaced his sunglasses. "Move along."

Of course, this current configuration is a different story. It's hard to have five different computer screens around you in the front seat and then say "Why, no, officer...I was paying extremely close attention to that traffic light as I approached the intersection." Particularly if you're simultanously mumbling a quiet prayer to God that he wasn't watching you a few minutes ago, when you had your left knee on the steering wheel so you could use both hands to debug a piece of balky code.

The overall effect is just what I've intended. I want to drive the Millennium Falcon. She may not look like much...but she's got it where it counts, kid.

Looking at the motley network of wires and buttons and displays, though, I confess that it probably resembles Doc Brown's time-travelling DeLorean more than the most famous Corellian freighter in the galaxy...

Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

Tuesday, July 1 2:59 PM • Another Diner Off The List

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Thursday, July 17 3:01 AM • Macworld Expo Day One: Nothing to see here...

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Saturday, July 19 9:20 PM • CLACKITYclickityCLACKITYclickityCLACKITY...

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Sunday, July 27 3:52 AM • Would they approve of a Monty Python shirt and cargo shorts?

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Monday, July 28 9:05 PM • Hope and Crosby, Together Again

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Tuesday, July 29 3:54 PM • Bob Hope Wins Again!

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Thursday, July 31 4:40 AM • It Ain't Like Dustin' Crops, Boy...

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