I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.

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Andrea laughed and told me how proud I must be. Clearly the indoctrination is proceeding apace!

(We’ve seen a few episodes of classic Trek, but the kids know Star Trek mainly from the animated series on DVD. They’re big fans. Jonah loves to “read” the credits aloud in every episode. [It's part reading and part recitation from memory, after asking me to read them to him about a dozen times.] “Star Trek! Created by Gene Roddenberry! Starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk! Leonard Nimoy as Mister Spock! And DeForest Kelley as Doctor McCoy!”)

Speaking of indoctrination, when I was out with Archer for a few hours over the weekend, Jonah asked Andrea to play “the capture game” with him. Yesss! My plan is still working…

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I discovered it while standing in line to buy some food at a local lunch joint, just like last time. Muttering a curse, I went back to the office unfed.

…where I found aluminum catering trays full of white rice and Chinese vegetables, left over from someone’s lunch meeting. I heaped some on a plate and headed for the stairwell back to my desk. On the way there I encountered my coworker Cid, who asked me, “Do you eat meat?” “Sure,” I said, and he handed me a take-out box of leftover Szechuan chicken! Continuing to the stairwell I began trying to fetch my security badge (to open the stairwell door) while balancing the items in my hands — when my coworker Stefan saw me coming and held the door open for me.

Now it’s just after lunch. When I discovered my missing wallet I thought, “Well, at least this will help me lose a little more weight,” since my efforts in that department have plateaued — but I’m stuffed!

Relative weight loss is easy:
just fatten up everyone else

I just hope all this good karma doesn’t mean I’m going to get busted for driving without a license on my way home tonight. I’ll have to do something nice for my co-workers tomorrow.

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When I lived in New York (now more than half a lifetime ago, egad), my two favorite varieties were “Thick Fudge Golden Cake” and “Filled Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake.” But when I went to Pittsburgh for college, those cakes could not be found anywhere; nor (as I later discovered) are they available in California. This despite the fact that many other Entenmann’s varieties are available nationwide.

As if I have nothing better to do with my time, recently I decided to investigate. The Entenmann’s website sent me to the Entenmann’s distributor for the California region, an outfit called Bimbo’s Bakeries USA in Fort Worth, Texas. (That’s the second thing I’ve run across called Bimbo’s having nothing to do with actual bimbos, which is two more than I would have expected to find if you’d asked me.) I sent a polite and eloquent letter inquiring about the unavailability of these varieties in regions other than New York.

When I was growing up, my mom was the undisputed champion of writing letters to companies, both to complain and to praise. In those good-old-days of corporate public relations, she almost never failed to receive both a polite, personalized reply and a handful of discount coupons for the company’s products, if not outright free samples. And very often, if the letter was a complaint, the company fixed the problem, e.g. by sending a refund.

These are no longer those good old days. The reply from Bimbo’s stated: “Those varieties are not available in your market.” Yeah, I know, that was kind of the point.

I was planning to look into the matter further, but (a) I do have better things to do with my time, and (b) Amazon.com started selling Entenmann’s products from Gristede’s in New York! So now I can get my old favorites again. Which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Now if only I can find good Italian ices…

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Who dumped a whole truckload of Fizzies into the swim meet?
– Dean Wormer, Animal House

(Sarah thought he was saying “feces.”)

Some time during the 1990’s I got word that Fizzies were being made again after some three decades of unavailability. I dimly remembered Fizzies from early childhood, when I used to mix up my own soft drinks with Fizzies tablets in my very own Fizzies Fountain. They were discontinued after health concerns arose regarding the sweetener they contained. When I heard about the reformulated version in the 90’s, naturally I ordered a large number of them in every flavor — which were all uniformly disgusting. I brought my stock of Fizzies tablets to work and shared them with a few not-very-enthusiastic colleagues.

Now they’re back again in a third incarnation. I got a shipment of the new ones on Tuesday (a small shipment — I learned my lesson last time) from Old Time Candy. They’re still pretty horrible, but not as vile as Fizzies Mark II were.

I can understand the many attempts to get Fizzies right. A portable way to create instant soda pop is somehow an extremely compelling idea. Unfortunately it seems that the presence of sodium bicarbonate in the recipe dooms it, flavor-wise; there’s no doubt you’re drinking flavored Alka-Seltzer. It may be that in order to really succeed, a Fizzies Mark IV tablet using real sugar might be called for, even if it is the size of a hockey puck (see below).

I regret I can’t recommend the new Fizzies, but I do recommend Old Time Candy, which has a wide selection of vintage candy from yesteryear, and good customer service.

Here is the e-mail message from 2003 in which I invited my co-workers to sample my surplus inventory of second-generation Fizzies.

Subject: “Hooray,” the scientist said

Live the legacy. Come get your very own piece of confection history from the 50’s and 60’s, briefly revived in the 90’s, now no longer available except from eBay and my desk.

I myself am just barely old enough to have some dim, fond memories of Fizzies from very early childhood, but be warned: after ordering a quantity of new improved Fizzies in a variety of flavors a few years ago, I tried one but couldn’t bring myself to try any of the other flavors, the first one was that vile.

Here’s an excerpt from the comically (and now, in retrospect, ironically) cheerful “Fizzies Story,” formerly at http://www.fizzies.com/fizstory.htm:

Fizzies were invented by Emerson Drug Company. The idea derived from scientists working with chemical formulas similar to “Bromo Seltzer” and wondering if a fun, fruit flavored drink could be developed the same way. “Wouldn’t it be grand if we could drop a tablet in a glass of water and have an instant soda pop?”

After long hard work, they finally figured out how to combine the right combinations of fruit flavoring, sweetener, citric acid and sodium bicarbonate (a substance that is much like baking soda) into a magical tablet that when dropped into water, turned water into an instant sparkling, effervescent fruit drink!

“Hooray,” the scientist said. “Let’s hurry and share this with others!” So in July of 1957, just in time for the hot, summer weather, Fizzies was born and appeared in various local supermarkets.

[...]

Fizzies continued to grow in the national and international markets until 1968, many times exceeding Kool-aid in sales and popularity!

But in this same year, one of the ingredients called Cyclamates, an artificial sweetener, was banned in the United States, causing hundreds of food products to be pulled from grocery shelves all across America. At that time, it was believed that products that contained this ingredient were not good for you. Once this problem arose, the scientists who had been so happy to put sparkling smiles on thousands of children’s faces, decided to voluntarily pull Fizzies from all store shelves until they were able to find a better way to sweeten them. This was important, because sugar could not be used. If Fizzies were made with real sugar, a single tablet would have to be about the size of a hockey puck!

Then one day, a group of “Baby Boomers,” who were children when Fizzies was popular and fondly remembered the fun they had with Fizzies, began a six year quest to return Fizzies to the market. Their mission? To fix the sweetener problem.

These Boomers, who had enjoyed the sparkling smiles Fizzies gave them as children, worked extra long hours for many years, but their work paid off.

Once the original formula was purchased, scientists and chemists worked around the clock until one day… HOORAY!!! The new Fizzies was developed!

It’s clear that a lack of marketing might resulted in Fizzies’ latest disappearance. Here’s the much more interesting paranoid conspiracy that resulted in Fizzies’ first demise (from http://www.acsh.org/press/editorials/sweetener082699.html):

On Oct. 18 1969, holding a can of Tab, I watched Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch tell the nation that because the sweetener posed a risk of cancer it would be banned. Just a few days before, I had seen a Food and Drug Administration scientist on television holding up deformed, sickly chicks that had been injected with cyclamates. At the time I was pursuing a doctoral degree in public health and knew that no sweeteners or other food additives had ever been cited as a possible factor in cancer causation. Why all this attention for a phantom risk? Why were we banning safe, useful products under the guise of cancer prevention? I have pursued an answer to those questions ever since.

[...]

FDA scientist Jacqueline Verrett appeared on the “NBC Nightly News” with her cyclamate-injected, malformed chicks. (She did not mention that injections of salt, water or even air would probably have had the same effect.) A few days later the manufacturer of cyclamates, Abbott Laboratories, released a study showing that eight out of 240 rats fed a mixture of saccharin and cyclamates–at levels equivalent to humans ingesting 350 cans of diet soda per day–developed bladder tumors. Finch announced the ban shortly thereafter.

[...]

An editorial in the international medical journal Lancet noted that “never have so many pathologists been summoned to opine on so few lesions from so humble a species as the laboratory rat.” The journal Nature warned that “it would be all too easy for public apprehension to be raised to the pitch where a fever of vegetarian faddism drives everything but mothers’ milk from the market,” adding in another editorial that the evidence against cyclamates was “about as solid as candy floss.”

[Cyclamates inventor] Sveda’s obituaries said he was not bitter about the banning of cyclamates, but in fact he was. He claimed that the original FDA decision was based on a combination of bad science and “sugar politics” (he thought the sugar industry was behind the health charges against cyclamates). He accused the FDA of a “massive coverup of elemental blunders,” and believed that the American public was due an apology for withholding an alternative to sugar.

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It’s a far cry from where I was in the mid-90’s, when I toyed with the idea of becoming a vegetarian. That began when my doctor advised eating less red meat, and around the same time Andrea berated me for ordering veal at a restaurant, citing the plight of veal calves. This led to a discussion of the strange hypocrisy of some people who avoid eating charismatic animals like cute little lambs but do eat animals with less personal charm, such as chickens. I wanted a more scientific way to cut out red meat (including veal, for Andrea’s sake) that didn’t remove all meat from my diet. I finally settled on a taxonomic “class” as the dividing line: mammals. Eating mammals bad; eating non-mammals OK.

I stuck to this for the better part of a year, and now look how far back I’ve slid.

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But I did hear the incredible SCREEEE of cicadas, and I ate a Knish Nosh knish, two New York summer attractions to which I had overlooked looking forward. And I don’t have the words to describe the trippy pleasure of watching one’s kids playing in one’s own childhood playground.

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Watching the melting ice cream collecting around Jonah’s fist as he gripped his cone, and decorating a rather larger irregular shape on Archer beginning above his nose and ending below his navel, I harked back to my own childhood. When I ate an ice cream cone, even as a very young boy, job number one was always to prevent any ice cream from melting onto my hand. Even one drop was too much. Actually eating the ice cream was no more than a side effect of keeping it off my fingers. I was unerring in my ability assiduously to lick around the sides of the cone in the most threatening spots. Only rarely did a drip begin to course down toward my hand, but it was always spotted and licked away. I was the only kid like that. Everyone else got messy and never seemed to mind. The very thought of that happening to me would have been enough to make me throw my cone aside if I wasn’t sure I could keep the ice cream in check. I wonder what that says about me. Weird.

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O cruel fate! To go in a few short years from the top of his profession to a failed run for local office to jail time on charges of tax evasion and finally to a watery grave.

But as I read the news item about the drowning victim, I became confused. It said he was 38 years old, two years younger than me. There’s no way he was 19 when I first dined in his award-winning restaurant, The Primadonna, in 1987. After quite a bit of clicking around to sort it out, I discovered that the victim was a different Pittsburgh restaurateur named Joe Costanzo.

I had been hunting for news about “my” Joe Costanzo when I ran across the drowning story. The last I heard of him, he had pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was facing some jail time. Apparently he’d cooked the books of his restaurant in order to cover the expenses of his failed candidacy for some local office. He’d been forced to sell The Primadonna and then had been pinched for the crime.

I was a great Joe Costanzo fan. I still am. His crime might have spoiled it for me, but around the time of his guilty plea he issued a public mea culpa that took full responsibility and expressed genuine regret. It’s too bad that such a thing is as rare and noteworthy as it is, but with it he retained my respect.

Here’s a letter I sent to him in happier times — July 1999.

Dear Mr. Costanzo,

Some of what you’re about to read I told you in person last week when I and several friends dined at your restaurant. But I felt it appropriate to tell you again in a more tangible and thorough form.

In the late 1980’s I had just graduated from Carnegie Mellon and had begun my professional career working for the university. Eager to spend my new salary, I seized upon an early glowing newspaper review of The Primadonna. Not knowing exactly where McKees Rocks was, and having no idea how to find Broadway Avenue once I got there, I nevertheless hopped in my car with a sense of adventure and eventually made my way to the finest Italian meal I’d ever had.

Now, that’s no idle boast. Before coming to Pittsburgh for college, I lived in New York City, home to numerous authentic Italian restaurants, and I enjoyed lots of them. Indeed, good Italian food was one of several things I missed about New York when I moved to Pittsburgh. But finding The Primadonna did more than fill a void — for me, it raised the bar.

For a few short years, I was a frequent visitor to your establishment, and I took pleasure in introducing dozens of different friends and relatives to your superb cuisine and unequaled hospitality. Then, alas, in 1992 I took a job in the San Francisco area.

Last week was my first visit to Pittsburgh in seven years, and I made a beeline for The Primadonna. For in those seven years, despite San Francisco’s (otherwise well-deserved) reputation for being home to many of the world’s best restaurants, an exhaustive search failed to turn up even one Italian eatery that offered the faintest shadow of Primadonna’s wonderful hearty food and jovial atmosphere. Everything’s either a pizza joint, or nouvelle, or pretentious, or — worst of all — all three.

(The closest I came in my search was three hours from San Francisco. North Lake Tahoe has a family-owned restaurant called Lanza’s that is hearty and jovial, though not nearly as accomplished in the kitchen as your talented staff.)

To tell the truth, I was a little nervous last week on arriving at The Primadonna for the first time in so long. After treasuring my Primadonna memories for seven years, and after seven years of anticipating another meal there, how could it possibly live up to my expectations? But I needn’t have worried. Everything was fantastic — just the way I remembered, if not better.

After my meal, I shook your hand and told you some of what you’ve just read. Although by now you must be well-accustomed to lavish praise of your restaurant, you seemed genuinely moved by my testimonial. You remembered me from those early days and thanked me with a bottle of salad dressing. Thanks for that touching gesture, but more importantly, thanks for the wonderful times I’ve had at The Primadonna and the ones still to come.

I was pleased to see that your business is thriving and wish you unending success. It won’t be seven years before my next visit to Pittsburgh, and you can be sure that The Primadonna again will be my first stop.

Affectionately,
Bob Glickstein

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