personal – Page 19

Greatest hits: handing change

[Resurrected from my old, defunct website.]

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: when I pay for something and the clerk hands me change, and I’m handed bills first, then coins.

The best way I can think of to describe the problem is this: bills have to be manipulated with the fingers, and coins have to be held in the palm of the hand. Balancing the coins on top of the bills undermines both requirements. Before the bills can be folded and tucked into a pocket or a wallet, the coins have to be rolled off into the other hand. Sometimes the coins roll completely out of control, clattering onto the checkout counter or the floor.

If the clerk drops the coins into the palm instead, then places the bills on top, no second hand is required to stash the change. It’s easy to hold the coins in the palm while pinching the bills in half and tucking them into a shirt pocket, or into a wallet (which the other hand is now free to hold open). The same hand can then drop the coins into a pants pocket.

It seems perfectly obvious to me, and it’s all I can do not to give this lecture to every clerk who apparently hasn’t thought this through.

I am Ken lite

In yesterday’s blog post, Ken Jennings (yes, him again) reveals that in additional to everything else, he’s also a closet cartoonist. I’m a closet cartoonist!

Zoger the Vorton, episode 3, part 1, from my college newspaper, The Tartan

This brings the number of ways I’m like Ken to at least six:

We’re both software engineers;
We’re both published authors;
We’re both new(ish) dads;
We’re both e-mail quizmasters;
We’re both closet cartoonists; and
We were both in the Seattle area this week.

There are a couple of key areas in which we are not the same, such as the sizes of our respective audiences, and one of us having won millions of dollars on national TV. Although if you include the dot-com boom, we’ve both “won millions.” Now one of us has to catch up to the other by losing those millions back…

Happy birthday Star Trek

Star Trek is 40 today. Happy birthday, Star Trek! Yes, it’s longer than Alex has been around, and yes, like Alex, no one originally expected it to last anything like this long. But the similarities end there. Star Trek never curled happily by my feet or licked my face to cheer me up.

What can I say about Star Trek that hasn’t already been said many times before? Well, I do have a couple of cute personal stories from when I was a kid in the 70’s and Star Trek had not yet transformed into a cultural touchstone. (It was still the shameful secret love of closeted nerds everywhere.)

One dim memory from a summer at the Pine Knoll bungalow colony in Monticello: my friend Michael wanted to “play Star Trek,” which at that point I’d never seen. I was assigned the role of Scotty, who (Michael explained to me) kept the spaceship in working order. I got into character as best I could, complaining about broken gears and attempting to fix them, but was berated by Michael who said, “The Enterprise doesn’t have gears, it has dilithium crystals!”

A few years later, having by now seen plenty of Star Trek on TV (the original series and the animated one), my friend David and I were confirmed Trekkie nerds. My mom took us on a subway ride into Manhattan to visit a short-lived mecca for Trekkies called “The Federation Trading Post,” a store full of Trek memorabilia, which at that time was sparse and hard to find. The tiny store was itself hard to find! But once you did, you could buy phaser and communicator props, scripts of all 79 episodes and audio cassettes of some (not videocassettes — VCRs wouldn’t appear in average homes for a few more years), rubber Spock ears, all the James Blish books, etc. Most of the really cool things were not within our budget, but we did score The Starfleet Technical Manual, the Star Trek Blueprints, a couple of blank Trek-uniform shirts and the insignia patches and gold braiding to sew onto them. I got a gold “command department” shirt; David got a blue “science” one. Back at home, I asked my mom to sew on my insignia and braids, showing her the exact specifications (to the millimeter!) from the Star Trek Technical Manual. Bless her, she made it perfect. Thanks, Mom! For a short time thereafter, David and I instituted our own “Starfleet Academy” at which we would wear our “uniforms” and practice flipping each other and rolling to our feet á là Captain Kirk.

Of course I’ve long outgrown most of that, but to this day there is still a model of the Enterprise-A on my desk. It’s the most beautiful of all sci-fi spaceships.

Pointless in Seattle

Next stop, Seattle, where Danger is sending me for a one-day seminar at Microsoft on some new API with which we need to interoperate. I do not expect to get much information from attending the seminar that I can’t get from Microsoft’s printed documentation, but if it makes Microsoft feel better when their third-party developers show up to drink the Kool-Aid, fine.

The weird thing is, this is the third company I’ve worked for that has sent me on a business trip to Seattle — and I’ve never been sent on any other business trips.

I like Seattle a lot. Andrea and I almost moved there in 2000. The seminar will probably be a yawn, but at least I’ll get to see my good friends Kurt and Eva, Bay Area expatriates newly relocated to Seattle.

Brushes with greatness!

I went to elementary school at P.S. 196 in Forest Hills, NY. Among my friends there was a girl named Amy Linker. A few years after we all graduated, Amy landed a co-starring role opposite Sarah Jessica Parker in a popular TV sitcom called Square Pegs.

While Amy’s show was on the air, I attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan, where among my new friends was a girl named Cynthia Nixon. Several years later, Cynthia landed a co-starring role opposite Sarah Jessica Parker in a popular TV sitcom called Sex and the City.

What does it mean? And, which of my female college classmates will be SJP’s next TV co-star?

Brush with greatness?

Just now I clicked over to see the latest on BoingBoing when I had a strange moment of small-world zen: both of the top two entries (as I write this) contain comments from former co-workers of mine. In TSA changes laws of physics, declares ice to be liquid, commenter “Lone Locust of the Apocalypse” is my friend Spencer. (I don’t think I’m outing you by saying so, Spencer.) And Original S.S. Minnow for sale has a comment from Paul Boutin, the Internet’s man-about-town and another friend of mine.

Fligth to Mars

Shortly before leaving California a week and a half ago to visit my family back east, I got this e-mail from my excited dad:

Subject: Fligth to Mars

…and Pa’s!

Photo credit: Bill Brent

It was a play on words (and a clever one too — you go, Dad!) and also an in-joke: “Fligth to Mars” was the misspelled name of a ride at Adventurer’s Inn, a small amusement park that used to exist in Queens when I was a boy. I didn’t realize just how little a boy I was until I read that Adventurer’s Inn was condemned in 1973, when I was just seven. I have clear memories of several visits there. Of course the condemned site remained for a long time until it was finally bulldozed, and I passed by it many more times as I got older; perhaps that’s what kept the memories fresh. Is there a sadder sight than a long-abandoned amusement park?

I think I was the one to notice the misspelling on the Fligth to Mars ride, and it’s been a catchphrase in my family ever since. The ride was your typical motorized cart traversing a funhouse on tracks. One time while on that ride, just before emerging back into daylight, I felt something smack the top of my head, hard enough to startle but not to hurt. I tried to convince my parents that a piece of wood or something had dislodged and landed on me, and I was even briefly convinced that there was a new area of flatness at the top of my skull as a result. They never believed me, and so I doubted it too — until today, when I read that Adventurer’s Inn was condemned soon thereafter!

Photo credit: Bill Brent

And look! The Batman slide! I remember that too. To a seven (or less) year old it was terribly daunting. But also tempting — it was a Batman slide! How could I not? Finally on one visit I worked up the nerve to give it a try. I got a mat on which to slide down, and I lugged it up and up the stairs in the interior of the structure. At the top, facing the maw opening onto an abyss (or so it seemed), my courage flagged and I froze. A queue of eager, bigger kids began to grow behind me and I believe I started taking some verbal abuse. Finally I turned around, feeling miserable, and began down the staircase as other kids muscled past me on their way up. At the bottom I surrendered the mat and was comforted by one or both parents, applauding me for resisting the pressure to go ahead, and assuring me that I never have to do anything I don’t want to do. I’m still sorry I never braved the Batman slide, but I think the humiliation I felt on that long climb down the stairs has been usefully instructive all my life.

Joe Costanzo lives

I had a nasty shock a few minutes ago when I found an item online saying Pittsburgh restaurateur Joe Costanzo had drowned in a boating mishap on the Ohio River.

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.

Mr. Joseph Costanzo, Jr.
The Primadonna Restaurant
801 Broadway Avenue
McKees Rocks, PA 15136

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

They colorized Jeannie!

On my first date with Andrea, way back in 1988 (“Did you hear Michael Keaton is going to play Batman?!”), we double-dated with my friend Bruce and Andrea’s roommate Katie. We spent part of the night at a bar called Monsour’s in the “Sliberty” section of Pittsburgh, drinking and dancing in their cheesy backroom disco. At one point the DJ announced a trivia contest. The first person to answer it correctly would win an LP. His question was, “In what year did I Dream of Jeannie premiere on TV?”

I had a pretty good educated guess. I knew that shows like Batman and Star Trek, both of which premiered in 1966 (which I knew because I’ve been a big fan of both and because I was born in 1966), were prominently marketed as being “In Color.” And I knew, from watching too many reruns on TV in my childhood, that the first season of I Dream of Jeannie was in black-and-white. A major studio sitcom like Jeannie would not have premiered in black-and-white at the same time that the networks were premiering their shows in color. So Jeannie premiered in 1965 or earlier — but not much earlier, because by its second year Jeannie was in color, which was still new enough in 1966 that it formed a major part of a show’s promotional campaign; and because it was descended from a line of shows in the ordinary-guy-living-with-someone-or-something-magical genre (including Mister Ed, My Favorite Martian, and Bewitched), a genre that was itself no older than the 1960’s.

So 1964 or 1965. I guessed 1965 — and I was right! I won the LP. (I forget what it was.) Andrea was duly impressed. “And today that woman is my wife.”

(Nowadays I would just google the answer under the table with my Hiptop, but back then men were men.)

Today too I have season 1, disc 1 of I Dream of Jeannie at home from Netflix. We watched a couple of episodes yesterday, and they were in color! Alas, a trivia fact with which I wooed my wife has gone down the memory hole.

At least it makes sense to colorize Jeannie, with its faux-Persian costumes, genie-magic visuals, Florida setting, and parade of Playboy-era sex kittens (on the arm of bachelor astronaut Roger Healey). And to this untrained eye the colorization looks well done. But I will never understand what possessed someone to colorize Dynamite Hands. Dynamite Hands is the first of two “features” in Movie Movie, a film that harks back to the days of seeing double features for a nickel. Dynamite Hands is an affectionate parody of every morality play ever set in a boxing ring (notably Body and Soul). It’s the “B” picture before the main attraction, Baxter’s Beauties of 1933, a Busby-Berkeley-style musical. George Burns introduces the films by saying that, back in the old days, movies were in black-and-white — “except sometimes when they sang, it came out in color.” Dynamite Hands was in black-and-white and Baxter’s Beauties was in color — only someone colorized Dynamite Hands for cable TV, making a liar of George Burns.

Idiots.

"Digital"

It has taken just a fraction of my lifetime for digital technology to totally transform many aspects of life and society, usually for the better (unless you’re one of those weirdos hoarding the world’s dwindling supply of vacuum tubes for that “warm” tube-amp sound — warm tube-amp buzz, says I).

So you might be forgiven for thinking that a “digital prostate exam” sounds like some kind of high-tech 21st-century diagnostic technique, possibly involving a full-color 3-d computer display.

But you’d be oh so wrong. Well, except for the 3-d part. All I can say is, it sure feels analog.