23rd March 2004, early evening | Comments (34)
Tucson, Arizona, USA ~ April, 2002.
Ordering food is always an event in America, or so it seems to me. I’ve always tripped through life on the understanding that menus indicate the food combinations and prices that an establishment offers. In the States however a menu seems to just be a starting point — a list of words and letters which can be combined into any mix of dishes that the customer desires.
Yeah, gimmie the Eggs Benedict, but I wanna swap the actual eggs for a plate of tacos with a side of sage and olive sauce. Actually, gimmie the sauce on the tacos and put some meatballs on the side instead of the english muffin. What kinda dairy products do you have? Are they low in phospho-plurocryptonite? That gives me phlegm…
And it’s not just the customers. This morning, at Frank’s, our waitress haggled with Molly, because she hated making toast:
I’ll do you a side of bacon instead of the toast, and I’ll waive the 25 cents charge.
Yeah? I don’t know if I want bacon, it’s got a lot of salt in it. Do you have low-sodium bacon?
We have low sodium bacon but it has a higher than average Serlium content for this time of year, at this height above sea-level.
Hmm, no. How about extra mushrooms instead of the bacon?
How many extra mushrooms? Equivalent by volume or weight?
Weight.
You’re on. God I hate makin’ toast.
My meal came with two eggs. I asked for one fried and one poached. The waitress said no.
We rang up for pizza tonight. I wanted a plain old Meat Pizza, but because I’m allergic to a few things I needed to ask for it without the tomato puree on. Molly wasn’t sure the pizza place could cope with that:
Well, I’ll try, but don’t hold your breath… Yeah, hello? Captain America’s Pizzas? Right I wanna order two small pizzas. On the first one… let’s see, hmm no, I don’t really like anything on the menu, so I’ll tell you what, can you make me one with a slightly puffy base, but I want it done with wholemeal low-fat yiddish flour and unsalted beaver-butter, then gimme 4 cheeses… What? Which ones? Um, Japanese Sage Darby, Pol le Veq, Czech sheep’s milk, and Norweigan Jarlsburg. Then I want salami, how do you serve that? Diced? OK give me shredded salami, some mushrooms from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and some baked guava halves as well… Oh yeah and ’erbs. Got that? Right, and for the second one… Well, ha, I don’t know if you’re gonna be able to do this, but this is what he wants…
Jump up to the start of the post ↑
The image displayed above is a 1600 pixel-wide panoramic view from the top of my parents’ house in Dorset, England. The system uses an XML weather feed from their local airbase to provide an up-to-the-minute graphical representation of the current weather, moon, and daylight conditions at their house. It's pretty cool, really.
You can read more about the panorama, and how it was created, in the Colophon; or you can select an option from below and view detailed weather information for Dorset, or for San Francisco (where I currently live).