Year: 2013

Can’t We Get An EZ-Pass For Restaurants?

Tomasky is tired of waiting for his check:

Who among my fellow Americans enjoys this ritual? You ask for the check. The waiter walks away. He brings it. He walks away again. You put your card in the little sleeve. You wait. The waiter picks it up. He walks away again. Eventually, after reciting the specialsat one table and opening a bottle of wine at another, he returns. And finally, 20 minutes after you were ready to leave, the restaurant is ready for you to leave.

Within those 20 minutes is contained not just the customer’s inconvenience, but a national crisis and disgrace. America suffers from a terrifying restaurant technology gap. Throughout much of the world, this tedious ritual has been dispensed with. At tables from London to Istanbul, from Casablanca to French Polynesia, when the diner is ready to leave, the waiter reaches for her or his handheld device, runs the credit card, hands over the receipt, and that’s it. Gone in 60 seconds.

In a follow-up, he continues to kvetch:

My little essay was a plea for the industry to introduce the hand-held credit-card machine that we find…well, basically everywhere in the world except America.

I know many of you think you know the reason, that it has to do with the difference between US and European credit cards, that chip business, which prevents fraud. But that’s bullshit. … The chip business is just an excuse. The fact is that restaurants don’t want to invest in the technology, and they don’t because Americans aren’t clamoring for it. I guess because people at the Cheesecake Factory just like to sit there and sit there after consuming those 5,000-calorie meals. The NRA (not that NRA–the National Restaurant Association!) has polled the question and found out that 52 percent of Americans would avail themselves of table-side check-out. Again, these 48 percent just confuse me to no end. Maybe now that Americans have embraced gay marriage, we can move on to restaurant efficiency.

Dino Style

When it came to sex, dinosaurs had a hard time:

The plated, spiked stegosaurs are perhaps the most perplexing paramours of all. Consider Kentrosaurus, a cousin of the more famous Stegosaurus. This armored dinosaur sported huge spikes on its lower back and hips that must have looked dangerous to males in the mood. I asked my paleontologist friend Heinrich Mallison of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin to evaluate the possibility that Kentrosaurus mated in the leg-over-back position using computer models he had previously developed to study how flexible the animal was. Mallison tested dinosaur sex positions in three dimensions and concluded that the traditional dinosaur sex position did not work for Kentrosaurus. If a male tried to throw his leg over the back of a crouching female, he would castrate himself on her sharp spikes. One hip spike in particular seemed to be placed to strike fear in the hearts of stegosaur suitors.

Recent Dish on the kinks of the animal kingdom here.

Wine In Decline

In France, of all places:

In 1980 more than half of adults were consuming wine on a near-daily basis. Today that figure has fallen to 17%. Meanwhile, the proportion of French people who never drink wine at all has doubled to 38%. In 1965, the amount of wine consumed per head of population was 160 litres a year. In 2010 that had fallen to 57 litres, and will most likely dip to no more than 30 litres in the years ahead.

Climate change is also affecting wine production around the world:

Some whites once renowned for being light and crisp are getting fatter and more floral while medium-bodied reds are morphing into heavyweight bruisers. … Water stress, temperature change, inopportune downpours and frosts are just a few of the variables that have profound effects on the balance of sugar and acidity, the ripeness of tannins, and the palette of aromas. “In Alsace (northeastern France), climate change is already a problem, because it’s changing the aromatic profile, the balance of sugar and acidity. If the consumers accept the changes, it’s not a problem. If they don’t, it is,” said Jean-Marc Touzard, a co-coordinator of ACCAF.

Sex On The Page

Julia Fierro contemplates a challenge of many novelists:

When I asked literary writers about their experience writing sex, their responses ranged from, “I am terrified of sex scenes!” to “I fear the reader will think I’m a pervert, or terrifically immature, or both.” Why do so many literary writers fear writing about sex? Why do we add to the collective anxiety by celebrating The Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Award” — the annual public humiliation and literary stoning of one published writer?

In my experience as both a writer and a teacher, this fear of writing about sex is tied to the fear of sentimentality that takes root in a writer’s formative years. Writing instructors chastise writers in class — a setting that can feel quite public — when the writer risks sentiment, which a naïve writer might mistake for emotion. Writers accrue a kind of scar tissue, blocking their ability and their confidence to imply emotion, inevitably leading to a clouding of meaning in their work.

Meanwhile, Amanda Hess wonders when erotica will be taken seriously:

Fifty Shades has only cemented erotica’s reputation as juvenile, poorly-constructed, and—perhaps most damning—totally feminine.

In a world where most mainstream pornography is filmed with a male viewer in mind (and often, with guys manning the camera and the promotional machine), written erotica has been traditionally more accessible to women, who can produce it cheaply and anonymously, with few resources, no institutional support, and reduced risk of public shaming. That’s only reinforced the idea that women prefer to read their smut as opposed to watching it—and that they’re so hard up, they’ll accept whatever amateur bodice-rippers are offered to them.

The Internet has changed only some of that. Online, it’s easy to click away from traditionally feminine stuff and into “some crazy fetishes and things that are clearly not ‘girly,’ ” [Lux Alptraum, publisher and editor of the sex-centered blog Fleshbot] says. “Erotica can be Harry/Draco slash fiction. It can be aliens raping farmers. It can be whatever you want, and it doesn’t have to be in this soft purple packaging with the heaving bosoms and Fabio.” (Trust: I’ve read plotlines on Literotica.com that would not be legal to film in the United States.)

Mental Health Break

Game Theory splices together iconic game soundtracks, with a dash of Doctor Who:

2013 marks 35 years of video game music (Space Invaders, released in 1978 was the first game to feature a continuous soundtrack). So we took the opportunity to take a look back at some of our favourite examples of video game music and build a 19 track mashup, combining them with some other tracks we love.

When Will E-Readers Evolve?

Stephen Marche is disappointed by the Kindle’s lack of development:

The smartphone has become more magical every six months or so. The Kindle and various competitors compete for price point and a few little screen details and virtually nothing else. I am certainly not like Andrew Piper at Slate, who recently argued that e-reading isn’t reading at all. But on the other hand the experience of reading a book on an e-reader is significantly more irritating if you are reading for meaning. E-readers are designed for people who consume books. If you’re knocking back a thriller that you can’t put down, they’re perfect. If you’re reading a book that you have to try to understand, they’re dreadful.

Clearly the focus of their development has been to replace mass-market paperbacks. E-readers are not designed for people who interpret books. No effort has been put into design questions for serious readers, for people who try to figure out the meaning of texts. They are hard to flip back to an old section and they are still awkward for note-taking. … I’m not giving up my beloved Kindle because I’m particularly in love with paper. I’m giving it up because it fails to do what I need it to do.

Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble is giving away free Nook Simple Touch e-readers to anybody who buys a Nook HD+ tablet. Jeremy Greenfield smells desperation:

The margins on these devices are already razor-thin. The company, having sold far fewer e-readers and tablets than expected during the 2012 holiday season, is likely in need of getting rid of excess inventory. This is a very bad sign for the continued viability of the device business struggling bookseller. One digital media observer noted in a recent blog post that he saw a similar pattern of discounting and giveaways right before HP killed off its tablet business.

Dear Editor

Maria Bustillos pens a love letter:

There is nothing that can soothe such terrors like the calm and reasonable words of an editor, a professional reader, the wise and honest friend who has the wherewithal and the desire to perfect your work, and apprehend any fugitive viewpoint. The writer who doesn’t understand that a good editor’s interests are entirely aligned with his own is a big idiot, and I leave him, with all the pity in the world, to all his entirely unnecessary sufferings. …

The idea of the Creative Person dropping his wisdom down like manna upon the heads of a grateful public is, I venture to say, really dumb. At least, I’ve never met or heard of a writer of any skill at all who wasn’t far more interested in the genius of the reader than in his own. And yet the idea of the literary genius, the lone visionary unencumbered by any imperatives outside those of his own revelations, is still peddled hither and yon. But not by me! I consider it the height of lunacy. No writing can be any good at all unless people are participating in it together, reading it, and enjoying it, and with any luck quarreling with it and being interested in it and talking about it and making new things out of it.

The Real Housewives Formula

James Parker puts the TV franchise under the microscope:

There are universalities to real housewife–hood: the wincing air kisses with which they greet one another, and the cries of “You look hot!” or “You’re so skinny!”; the shifting alliances and behind-the-back bitcheries; the viperous lunch parties, with their protestations of friendship. But there are differences, too, city to real-housewife city. Atlanta has the most businesslike businesswomen; New Jersey is the most tribal, the families moving in large, noisy packs; Miami’s real housewives throw petals into the sea to rid themselves of negativity; in Beverly Hills they have psychics flush their houses. In Beverly Hills and Miami, too, the plastic surgeon plies most visibly his sinister trade: here we see the stretched eyes and the rubberized smiles, the reaction shots that show no reaction. To be a real housewife is to be in a cage match with middle age. Existence is weightless but, oh, gravity—it drags at the sagging epidermis.