Pizza Hut Memories

One mildly unremarkable news story that happened in Western New York during the period when I was on extended blogging hiatus was the closing throughout the region of a whole bunch of Pizza Hut locations, including the one where I started working back in May of 1994. There's nothing much remarkable about this; suburban Buffalo is blessed with an abundance of former Pizza Huts that are now dentist's offices, early education places, Chinese takeouts, and so on. I've avoided talking much about those years in my professional life, but now, since the restaurant where I started isn't even open anymore and since I left Pizza Hut's employ in May of 1998, more than ten years ago, I figure it's safe to describe what it was like back then.

In May of 1994 I really needed a job, since the part-time gig I had at St. Bonaventure University was no longer available. Luckily, I had a connection with the local Pizza Hut (hereafter, 'PH') management team, in the person of the girl I was dating at the time. (I'd later marry that girl, so no hard feelings that through her I ended up working at PH.) Long tale shortened, she put in a good word for me, which in addition to my Mad Job Interview Skillz, got me hired as a cook. At that time, the city of Olean, NY had two PH locations. Since I was dating one of the managers at one, I ended up at the other. Thus it began.

Olean's remaining PH location is in the "main business district", which basically means it's in "downtown" Olean. The other one was in a fairly sleepy location (at the time), and it was a much smaller, and older, facility. I'm not sure how old it was, but it was old. I'd gone to that PH as a teenager, eight or nine years earlier, with fellow members of the concert band after school concerts. In the time I lived in that town – and we moved there in 1981 - I don't ever remember a PH not being at that spot. The place was ancient, with extremely tight quarters in the "back of the house". When I started, there wasn't even a mechanical dishwasher; all dishes were washed by hand. This was, you may surmise, less than fun. That PH location finally got a dishwasher a few years later, after I had moved to the other location in town.

One funny little quirk of the place was that the big drain in the middle of the parking lot wasn't actually connected to the city's storm drainage system, so that when we got a big rain, the lot would invariably flood. This went on for years, with the company paying some local outfit to come out with some long hose and a pump to send the water into the storm drains proper, which were just past the entrance to the parking lot. Three years would go by before the company would finally authorize the work to actually connect the lot drain to the city drains. I have no idea how much the guy made who came out to pump the lot before that happened, but I'll bet it was a lot.

This drainage problem led, on one memorable occasion, to a moment of high comedy when my manager became convinced that the problem was that a pizza box had lodged over the drain cover, thus preventing the water from going down. He set out to remove the phantom pizza box. The problem was that the lot was heavily puckered toward that drain, so the water quickly reached a depth of more than a foot. Manager guy (whose name I don't even recall anymore) decided that rather than get wet, he'd walk out there in two mop buckets, one foot in each one. Unfortunately for him, Manager Guy was also a small, not-very-heavy guy, so when he moved himself – standing in his two mop buckets – far enough out into the lot, the buckets actually started to float. I'm not sure how he managed to extricate himself from that situation without falling and completely dousing himself, but watching him float in two mop buckets in the middle of our parking lot was fairly surreal.

At the time, PH had a menu item called a "Neapolitan pizza". This was one of their takes, over the years, on the foldable New York City-style crust. It was actually a decent pizza, but it went off the menu shortly after I was hired, so that was that. But we had one regular customer who was quite the pain in the arse, and he always ordered a Neapolitan. He was a cranky old guy who looked the part: old jeans and t-shirt, ball cap with the mesh back that he just kind-of perched on top of his head, and a permanent expression that made quite clear that he remembers how hard things were back in the day. Anyway, this guy would order his Neapolitan with pepperoni, and then he'd stand at the counter staring at you the entire time. Since I would always be working the "cut table" – the spot where pizzas come out of the oven, and are then cut for either boxing or placed on peels or in their pan for dine-in – he'd be staring hard at me. And then, as he realized his time was nearing, he'd start yelling at me: "Don't burn my pizza!" He'd order me to pull the bloody thing from the oven the second I could reach in there and grab it, and I'd indulge him just to get him the hell out of there. The problem there is that pulling a pizza from a conveyor-belt oven before it's completely exited results in underbaked pizza, but that was fine by this guy; he wanted his pizza to be somewhere between "yellow" and "perfect golden brown". The other problem was that on an underbaked pizza, the cheese and toppings will slide all over the place, a problem which I'm sure this guy had because he would invariably tilt the pizza box way up to a 45-degree angle on his way out the door, which had to result in all of his toppings sliding to one side. And yet, every week, there he was.

Anyway, I started by learning how to make pizza the PH way. I have to be honest here, folks: I know that a lot of people think that PH is basically the lowest form of pizza that exists, but I've never had a problem with the PH product itself, as long as it's made correctly. I really think they've got some good food there, at least as good as any corporately-developed product can be. (Well, not always. They did have some misfires while I was there. Their take on stromboli, called simply "Boli", weren't anything to write home about; neither was the "Tripledecker", a pie that came with two thin crusts, between which was sandwiched a layer of cheese, with the sauce, regular cheese, and toppings above the upper crust. That thing was a major pain to make, you could feel your arteries hardening while you ate the thing – and that's not even bringing up the twist they introduced on the Tripledecker, the "Tripledeckeroni", which put a layer of pepperoni on top of the cheese that was inside the two crusts. Oy. As for the Boli, it wasn't very popular at all, but that's probably because they rolled that thing out at the same time they offered a special all-summer-long promotion called "Pizza and More", which meant that if you dined in and ordered anything over and above a medium with cheese, you got unlimited salad bar, breadsticks, and dessert pizza. This thing was a nightmare.)

While I worked for PH, the method of pizza making changed not once but three times. One method involved color-coded cups to measure out the ingredients, which were then layered on the pizza in a specific order; another eschewed layering in favor of tossing it all, cheese and all, into a mixing bowl and then spreading that all over the pie. I have no idea how they do it now, but I thought the system they had when I left was pretty good. That was when they switched from canned veggies to fresh ones, which is probably when I realized that while canned mushrooms taste like rubbery shit, fresh mushrooms are a gift from Heaven.

Anyhow, that little PH is closed now, leaving just one in Olean. That surprises me, a little, although Olean's probably like every other town in Upstate NY, with population slowly leaking away. However, a year or two after I was hired, the end of town where that tiny PH was located became much busier with the additions of a new Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Staples, Home Depot, a new movie theater, and so on. That the place has now closed interests me, since in terms of location, it was in a pretty good spot.

I haven't set foot in those restaurants in nearly ten years, so I have no idea if any of the people I worked with are still there. About six months into my PH career, the manager there (the skipper of the USS Mop Buckets) left to pursue other opportunities, so The Girlfriend was promoted to the job of manager. This meant that I had to transfer to the other, larger restaurant, which was also a lot busier. That was when I started training to become a shift manager, which felt like a big deal at the time. Of course, PH isn't a place that showers money on its workers, and when I eventually left PH, it was for another company that starts its dishwashers at a higher wage than what I was making at PH to run the place in the boss's stead.

But I digress. What else do I remember from my years at The Hut? Well:

I remember the craziness on every other Thursday night, because that was when the biweekly "coupon drops" hit the newspaper. Our business was heavily spiked by the coupons that ran in the paper every other week...except one week, when we all stood around at 5:00 waiting for the phone to ring. Eventually it did, when the little old lady whose phone number had been misprinted in the ad as being our phone number finally called us to see why on Earth everybody in town was calling her to order pizza. Oops.

I remember the cook who'd been with PH forever when I got hired. He lived right around the corner in a trailer park, and he had a monster crush on his next door neighbor, the "Neighbor Lady", as he called her when he talked about her, which was often. I've wondered what became of that guy, whether he was still there, and whether he had to find a way to get to the PH across town. He didn't have a car at the time, and I don't know if he even drove.

I remember a delivery driver whose forehead broke into a massive rash when he wore our ballcaps. I've never seen anything like that, before or since. He came to me and said, "Dude, I can't wear this hat. Look." He had this giant crimson stripe running right across his forehead. It was amazing to behold. There was another delivery driver who was a really bad employee; he just had trouble showing up for work, and when he was finally shown the door by management, he actually asked, "Can I go work at the other PH now?" There was a very sweet driver who was an evangelical Christian, and yet she had a pretty good sense of humor, especially with regards to the fairly salty humor the rest of us tended to display, and another evangelical Christian driver who refused to run a delivery to the local sex-toy shop when they placed an order. Drivers were a fun lot to have around, even if we were always short on them. It got quite maddening to hire a good driver, only to have them come to us a month later and tell us they needed to quit because of the wear and tear on their cars. What did they expect?

I remember working the first night that the company started running advertising on teevee for the newest thing, our "Stuffed Crust" pizza. We got absolutely killed that entire weekend. Cheese in the crust? That was a home run of an idea. What I remember most from that first night the ads ran was a family who let their snotty twelve-year old son place their order; he was such a little shit on the phone with me that his mother called us back to apologize and confirm that we hadn't tossed their order.

Prank orders were fun, too. Strangely, fake delivery orders rarely happened. There were some kids who once a month tried having ten pizzas sent someplace; I always just took the order and then ignored it. The more annoying thing was when people would place a carry-out order at my PH, and then show up at the other one to pick it up, or vice versa. The phone numbers were completely different.

Lunch buffet was usually a fun ninety minutes; we had a pretty cool crowd that included some local teachers who were all really nice people. The bad days for buffet were when there was a half-day of school, because we were walking distance from the middle school. In my experience, unsupervised middle school kids are the worst behaved of all childhood age groups. Those days were nightmarish. On one such day we knew we were going to get crushed, so I called in extra help: this old lady whom we'd hired to do nothing but carry pizzas out to the buffet. She said she'd be right in...and promptly went to her other job, at a local department store, thinking it was them and not us who'd called her in. Oy.

I remember having to call the fire department when one of our inset light fixtures in the building blew. They brought over three fire trucks for this, even though we were literally right next door to the fire department. I mean, right next door. As in, you had our building, the parking lot, and then the fire hall. I never complained about feeding those guys cheap again. (We gave then a fifty percent discount at the time.)

I remember people who genuinely didn't understand why they could call us from ten miles outside of our delivery area and expect our drivers to go to some dark parking lot just inside the delivery area and wait to make the exchange. I also remember people who would get indignant when we had a monster snow storm and we had to shut down delivery service for the night. Funniest were the Canadians who would call us for delivery to the Holiday Valley ski clubs in Ellicottville, which is twenty-five miles from Olean. One funny Canadian once said to me, when I explained that we didn't deliver at such distances, "Wouldn't you think a ski town like this would have a pizza delivery joint?" He had a fair point. I wonder if Ellicottville ever got its own pizza delivery joint?

I remember the guy who called our 1-800 number to bitch because we were closed early; our posted hours were until 10:00, and he was pissed we were closed when he showed up at 9:15. Why did we close? Because half the town, including us, was out of power when a drunk drove his car into a transformer. We were without power for more than three hours starting around dinner time. The guy who complained wasn't about to concede anything to us, not even on the point that had we opened right then and let him in, we wouldn't have been able to cook anything for him. None of that mattered, though; he was going to get his complaint in.

Great customers? We had 'em, people whose faces and, in a few cases, even names I still remember. There was the older couple who came in each and every Tuesday night around 8:30 to share a medium Supreme, and there was the lady with the incredibly bubbly and infectious smile who came in every other Thursday for a large pepperoni. We also had a very picky elderly woman who would come in for an order of breadsticks and a Diet Pepsi, but she was such a stickler for freshness that she insisted on physically witnessing the cutting of the sticks and the pouring of the Pepsi. One night I saw her walking in the door, so that's when I cut her breadsticks, just so I could hand her the box at the exact moment she arrived at the pickup window. She shook her head and said, "I'll wait for the next pan." Okey-dokey...this went on once or twice a week for months until one day she comes in and says to the other shift manager, "You guys always take good care of me, so I'd like to do something nice. How about tickets to a Sabres or Bills game?" It turned out that she was the wife of John Rigas, then-owner of the Sabres and also then-not-yet-convicted for fraud. So it was because of her that I got to watch a Bills game from the comfy confines of the former Adelphia Cable luxury suite. (The Bills lost. It was the Todd Collins era.)

Of course, there were also the not so good customers. For the first year and a half I worked there, we had lunch buffet on Sundays, which was a colossal pain in the arse, as it lasted two hours (as opposed to the ninety minute weekday buffet) and being Sunday there wasn't much "lunch hour" business, so tables turned much more slowly. We'd fill up with church families, most of whom were all very nice, but there was one family that would insist that their two daughters were both under twelve years old, so as to get the lower price. This despite the fact that I could observe one of the girls driving, and that both were, shall we say, richly endowed for eleven year olds. I was always amazed that this family thought nothing of leaving church on a Sunday and making it their first order of business to come to PH and bear false witness in order to save a few bucks.

Sometimes we'd host childrens' birthday parties. Servers hated these because they required much more intensive attention to the party, which meant that they couldn't take many other tables while the party was there, usually resulting in lower tips. Once a party came in and took up a server for two hours, during which she did nothing but wait on that party. They left no tip at all. Our menus at the time stated a policy of charging automatic gratuities on parties of eight or more people, but upper levels of management directed us not to enforce this policy. I have never understood this; I have never yet met a server who dispute my view that large parties tend to tip less.

My coworkers were, for the most part, all nice people, with the occasional dud. I've often wondered what became of more than a few of them. I attended a couple of weddings for coworkers, and a bunch of them attended mine. A Friday morning ritual for several years was to breathlessly discuss the events on the previous night's episode of ER (this was when the show was fresh, new and good.) Oddly the Bills were never much a topic of discussion, but one guy I worked with was ecstatic when the Yankees won their first of several World Series, in 1996. Back then cell phones were new and only three or four employees had them; I was talking about movies with another employee when he asked me, "Hey, at the bottom of all the movie posters these days, what's all that stuff that says 'HTTP', colon, backslash backslash"? One guy came along who was a terrific geek, and we merrily discussed Star Wars (the Prequels were just rumored at that point) and The X-Files and such, until he left a few months later. I think he became a teacher eventually. Good on him; he'd have been a good one.

For a while, all the PH locations west of Syracuse were in one big division, but apparently there weren't enough area directors right then, so for a while, each area director was responsible for seventeen or eighteen restaurants. So when ours showed up for his monthly visit to go over numbers, he brought in all of his paperwork in a giant binder on our restaurant, sat down with my manager, and...discovered that he'd brought the books for the wrong restaurant. That was pretty funny. I was highly intimidated by that guy, for some reason. Ever since then, I've wondered why. He was, after all, just a guy.

Gradually, the Upstate New York market got chipped up as the company sold off certain markets to franchise operators. For the time I worked for PH, our restaurants were company-owned, but it wasn't long after I left that all of the WNY PH locations became franchise-operated as well. Since then, I've seen ads on teevee for lots of new products they've come out with: another attempt at a New York City crust called the "Big New Yorker"; a calzone thing apparently called a "P-Zone"; baked pasta dishes that come in big foil pans; other versions of bread sticks, and so on. I've never had any of these, although that P-Zone thing looks pretty lethal.

It was interesting to work at PH during the 1990s, when all kinds of new casual-dining restaurants, each with its own "concept", were coming along. Shortly after I started, PH acquired a chain of sub sandwich from New England called D'Angelo's, and they then started to roll these out into Western New York, mainly in the Buffalo area. I liked the D'Angelo subs a good deal, but that "concept" didn't last long, and within three years, I think, all of the PH-D'Angelo restaurants had either switched to PH's alone, or had closed altogether.

Interestingly, we didn't spend a lot of time worrying about Domino's or Little Caesar's. (Probably with good reason, since I haven't seen a Little Caesar's in years and I have no idea where the closest Dominos to me is, either.) The big competitors we always had to worry about, or were always told to worry about, were Fazoli's and Papa John's. Fazoli's was a chain of Italian fast-food eateries, like Sbarro but without the pizza. One of these opened up in Olean, right across the street from my first PH (the smaller one), right about the same time that all that other retail showed up on that end of town. It was, naturally, a really popular place for a while, and then...it wasn't. Fazoli's closed down in Olean after less than three years, if memory serves, and there isn't a single one left, that I know of, anywhere in Buffalo. As for Papa John's, we were constantly on the lookout for the major push into the Buffalo and Rochester market that they were certainly gearing up for. That major push never came. I never even saw a Papa John's until we moved to Syracuse in 2002, when we tried it for the first time. We liked it, but the place shut down two or three months after we moved there. So much for Papa John's.

Today, PH still exists in this area, although their footprint is even smaller than it once was. When I worked there, I attended a meeting once that was led by our "Ops Director" (two levels of management above store manager), and he told us in a spiel about business planning that the Buffalo market is hard for national pizza chains because in this city, nearly every street corner has a mom-and-pop pizza place on it. That much is certainly true. I know, off the top of my head, of six pizza joints (Nino's, Capelli's, Papa Geno's, Pizza4U, Roz's, and Ricotta Pizza) within a mile of my apartment, and we live out in the 'burbs. My nearest PH is five or six miles distant. There is a PH about fifteen minutes away that apparently has some kind of "Italian Bistro" theme going on, and another that's about a twenty minute drive away (fairly close as the bird flies, but impossible to get to without traversing heavily-trafficked suburban streets) that calls itself "Wing Street". (I have zero idea what that means, outside of my supposition that it involves chicken wings in some way.)

So, that's what it was generally like to work at PH for four years in the 1990s. It wasn't a great job and it didn't lead me to any particularly fantastic heights, but I did have a lot of fun and learn some stuff about working for a living. Not a bad use of four years when I didn't much know what I wanted out of life.

Another gift!

What a pretty tea cup!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

The Wife gave me this super-cool tea cup. Under that lid it's got its own infuser. Very cool! I'm becoming more of a tea drinker.

(A few more views on the Flickr photostream.)

My gifts

My fashionable Christmas, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Here I am, wearing the winter coat the Wife gave me, and looking at my new watch. Which the Wife gave me.

For the first time ever, she gave me more than I gave her. This means that her birthday is gonna rock. Oh yes.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Well...I got nothin'. Sorry, folks. But hey, an NFL team went 0-16. That's pretty weird. 16-0 one year, 0-16 the next. What is up with that?

Anyway, hopefully more weirdness next week.

Unidentified Earth #52

OK, the general consensus on UI's 49 and 50 is that I may have taken too perverse a pleasure in coming up with tough ones. I'm still not giving up the game, but more hints: the building seen in UI 49 is used for exterior shots on one of my favorite network teevee programs. (But the building is not located in the city where the show takes place.) Identifying the show earns partial credit, but actually coming up with the name of the building (yes, you can use Google, and how would I know, anyway?) gets full credit.

UI 50, on the other hand, may have been seen by people who have visited Walt Disney World. No more than that.

As for UI 51, everybody's right: that there is the famed opera house in Sydney, Australia.

And now for what I'm sure is another easy one:



Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!

A New Low

Yesterday I had one of those "When you think you've seen it all..." moments. I got a Spam e-mail from someone whose method of sending out their messages was to utilize the contact information left by people who sign the online guestbooks for people who have died.

There are times when I don't understand people. Who would think of harvesting a bereavement memorial site for contact info for Spam purposes???

The Rising of the Hunter

Snagged from APoD, Orion and Canis Major rising over ancient ruins in Turkey:



Merry Christmas to my readers, and thank you.

Ugly guy alert....

UPDATE: Hi, Reddit folk! Feel free to hang around. (But you should know that the quote in the picture over there is not mine. I have never written or thought any such thing. I'm weird, but I'm not Messianic about it.)

Erin hit me with this:

1. Take a picture of yourself.. riiiiiight.. NOW!
2. DO NOT change your clothes. DO NOT fix your hair.. Just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.
5. Tag 10 people to do this!

Well, I'm not going to tag anyone; go ahead if you're so inclined. But here's what I look like with no helpful editing at all:



Well...yeesh. Thank God I was clothed.

(I apologize for the mental image I have just inflicted upon my readers...but no, I don't make a habit of websurfing in the buff, as it were. But so much for weaning this blog of the overalls....)

Mr. President, your shirt, please.

Because I like pictures of Presidents looking non-Presidential, here's a slideshow of shirtless Presidents. I had no idea that Reagan had that much of a gut, and while Bill Clinton shirtless isn't much to look at, Hillary Clinton in a bathing suit looks just fine. That is all.

New boss, same as the old boss....

President-elect Obama has not appointed to his cabinet nearly enough long-haired guys who spend their days wearing overalls and wishing the world would learn to love George Lucas again. I can't imagine I'd be filibustered in my quest for Senate confirmation as Secretary of Geekery.

(Anyone who utters any phrase of the form "Obama has not appointed enough _____ people to his cabinet" needs to shut up.)

Sentential Links #152

This will be the final edition of Sentential Links FOREVER!!! Or, for this year. Get 'em while they're hot!

:: That's why I don't date horses. They lie. (See, I don't date horses because they're big and they eat oats and, well, they're horses. I never get to the stage of a relationship with a horse where honesty becomes a factor.)

:: We always had fun when we were working on Next Generation, but when Majel was on the set, it was a party. (BTW, did anybody ever wonder about Christine Chapel's reaction to learning of Spock's death? Was she still in love with him by then? And then what about her reaction to learning that he'd been regenerated?)

:: I might like it. I might not. But I am going to taste it completely, and then make up my mind AFTER I see what it is all about, not make up my mind going in. (New book-club blog, featuring Belladonna, among others. Good luck! And take the benefit of my experience: don't try to inaugurate your new group-read blog with The Brothers Karamazov.)

:: Has anybody ever traced the history of human characters in short cartoons? I specifically mean the use of humans as supporting characters in cartoons that are about anthropomorphic animal characters. (I confess, I never thought about it much....)

:: I know it's trite to say it, but some of the most important things you can give your kids aren't THINGS.

:: I'm a firm believer that people can and will make a religion out of anything. Small and large gods are invented every day. I know a guy who's made a minor religion out of tea.

:: I guess I will have a lot of time to save my pennies for this, since it hasn't been released yet and we don't even own a Blu-Ray plyer, but one can dream of the day I can watch every drop of sweat roll down Viggo's gorgeous face.

:: Related thought: For a group that tends to pride itself on toughness, this is a lot of whining.

OK, folks, that's about it for Sentential Links until 2009. Excelsior!

(But stick around, I'm not doing a blog-stoppage or anything. Just no Sentential Links for a week.)

Unidentified Earth 51

I dunno, folks, is there any interest in me continuing this series? I didn't do one last week, but there are no guesses at all for the last two installments, UI 49 (for which one might want to follow some evidence) or UI 50 (for which one might require the services of an engineer with lots of, oh, imagination).

Anyway, here's one that really ought to be pretty easy:



Where are we? Rot-13 the guesses....

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Not a whole lot going on weird this week. I'm losing my touch....

:: Letterman's Top Ten George W. Bush Moments:



Number Four is my favorite. Remember, the guys at Powerline still think this guy is Teh Genius.

:: The Periodic Table of Awesome. Sure, I could quibble a bit, but since they replaced "Bob Saget" the other day with "Samuel L. Jackson" (whose element symbol is, of course, Mf), I'm happy. (Bob Saget? Awesome? Come on now!)

I don't remember where I saw this linked, because I forgot to bookmark it and only found it again by Googling.

That's all, I guess.

People who quote movies should be boiled in oil.

UPDATED with some correct guesses!

I've just seen a movie quote quiz-thing over at Erin's blog. The idea is simple: you pick 15 movies or so, give a quote from each one (IMDb is good for this), and challenge your readers to identify the movies. As the quotes get identified, I'll strike through them. I can't pass this up, now can I? Why, no! So here we go (and just to make it slightly harder, there are no quotes from any Star Wars movie here):

1. We grew up in peacetime!

2. You're as crazy as your mama! Goes to show it's in the genes. (JFK, guessed by SamuraiFrog)

3. The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? Hmmm? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it; very different when, when you, when you have to do it with your own hands. (Amadeus, guessed by Charlie.

4. Sherif, is there not one thing in your life that is worth losing everything for? (The Wind and the Lion, guessed by SamuraiFrog)

5. I have been known on occasion to howl at the moon.

6. That's enough, Baron. Turn it off. No one's impressed with your cheesy light show, okay?

7. If you ever get tired of going steady with somebody that ain't around, I'm up for grabs. (American Graffiti, guessed by Aaron)

8. We had a nice couple of minutes together. She threatened me, I patronized her. Didn't have anything to eat, but I thought there was a connection. (The American President, guessed by Charlie)

9. I can't fight it anymore. I ran away from you once. I can't do it again. Oh, I don't know what's right any longer. You have to think for both of us. For all of us. (Casablanca, guessed by Aaron)

10. "People"? I ain't "people." I am a - "a shimmering, glowing star in the cinema firmament." (Singin' in the Rain, guessed by Will Duquette)

11. When you first entered the restaurant, I thought you were handsome... and then, of course, you spoke. (As Good As It Gets, guessed by Aaron)

12. I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up, OK?

13. We didn't choose this place! We didn't choose these people! They were invited! (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, guessed by SamuraiFrog)

14. Never take it seriously, you never get hurt. Never get hurt, you can always have fun. And if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit all your friends.

15. Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think? (Serenity, guessed by Aaron)

There they are. What movies are they from?

A poll!

Time for a quick poll of my readers, all eight of you! A co-worker asked me this question a while back, probably while I was on hiatus, and he was totally baffled as to why I would answer the way I did. So here it is, and you can all answer in comments:

Pirates or Ninjas?

Let's hear it!

Ummm...hey, Buffalo?

Exactly when did our collective reaction to a forecast of a lot of snow go from this....



to this....



?????????????????????

A little while ago, I was tagged by SamuraiFrog with the "Story Meme", which goes like this: a story is given to you in part, you continue it a bit, and then you pass it on to some other folks. Here's where we stand so far:

Part the First:

The bus was more crowded than usual. It was bitterly cold outside, and I hadn't prepared for it. I noticed that a fair number of the riders were dressed curiously. As I glanced around, I stretched my feet and kicked up against a large, heavy cardboard box laying under the seat in front of me.

SamuraiFrog then continues the tale:

I looked around for the box's owner. Across the aisle from me, a pretty girl flashed me a smile and cocked her head. She was motioning toward the box. Encouraging me. Sliding the box back towards me, I opened it and was immediately confused. Inside was a plastic rain poncho, a police baton, and a Donald Duck mask. I looked around and saw that several people were wearing plastic rain ponchos. I looked back over at the pretty girl. "You're ready for this, right?" she asked me. "They wouldn't have sent you if you weren't ready."

And now I step up:

I shook my head as I folded the box closed again, and when I looked up at the girl, I chuckled. "They didn't send me," I said. "You're really out of your depth if you think that they send me anywhere. I send them places." I pushed the box over to her with my foot. "And Donald Duck? Really? I'm a Daffy man. If you knew anything about me, you'd know that."

The girl's eyes flashed momentarily, and then she smiled. It was the kind of smile that nice people see when it's the last thing they see in this world, just before the person smiling that smile pulls the trigger on the gun that's aimed at their forehead. "You're not a Daffy man," she said. "Not even close. You can think you are all you want, but we're not about what you think you are. We're about what you really are. And you were so close, really; a one-in-three chance of picking the false prop. No, the mask is real, and you'll be putting it on soon enough, Boy-O."

"And the poncho?" I asked.

"If you're lucky."

I nodded then, understanding. "So the police baton is the fake, huh."

"No, that's real too. That's why your 'They don't send me, I send them' bit just then was so lame that I almost got off the bus right then and there, which I'd have prefaced by kicking you in your smallish groin. If you knew anything about them, you'd know that they don't mess with fakes."

Now I smiled. "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"Sure," she said. "Whatever. Just shut up and put on the mask. You're gonna be our getaway driver."

"OK," I said as I grabbed the box back, opened it, and took out the Donald Duck mask. Sure, I'll wear this. She's right that I'm not a Daffy man after all, but what she doesn't know is that I hate ducks, all of 'em, every last one. Donald my ass. That's what I thought. What I said was, "How's this?"

The girl sighed. "They sure can pick 'em. Here. Do not lose this." She handed me something from the pocket of her jacket, wrapped in paper. She was acting like it was the Holy Grail or something, and I suppose it was, because when I unwrapped it, what was in my hands was ____.

So, what did she give him> Tell us, Steph, Nettl, Jayme, Tosy and Cosh, Paul, and Simon! You're all it!

UPDATE: I wrote this and scheduled it to appear today...and then discovered that Roger has tagged me with this same thing, although his version of the tale has gone in a different direction, obviously. Hmmmm!!!

Toward the unknown region

Condolences to Jen, whose grandmother has passed.

The universe is a spherical region seven hundred and five meters in diameter.

That's my favorite "Computer Voice" line from Star Trek: The Next Generation, given in response to Dr. Crusher's query: "Computer, here's a question you shouldn't be able to answer: What is the nature of the Universe?"

Anyway, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the actress who played the Computer Voice as well as Nurse Christine Chapel, Number One, and Lwaxana Troi in various Trek series, has died. A shame.

Really Sorta!

I'm not sure if I've encountered a more ungainly movie title than Definitely, Maybe. I suppose Love Actually is a contender. And like that film, somewhere in the screenplay to Definitely, Maybe those very words are spoken, giving the strange title a bit of context that kinda-sorta makes sense. Really. Sorta. (Hey, there's a title: Really Sorta!)

Unsurprisingly then, Definitely, Maybe comes from some of the same filmmakers responsible for Love Actually, and it's the same genre of movie: it's a mushy romantic comedy with a plot that's as old as the hills freshened up a bit through the use of some nifty narrative trickery. It doesn't rise to the level of Love Actually (which is one of my favorite movies ever), but it's got quite a bit of quirky charm going for it.

So, what's Definitely, Maybe about? Well, it tells the tale of the proverbial lonely guy who can't figure out who he's supposed to be with. However, it doesn't start out being about that, using some misdirection to make us think it's about something else. A man named Will, working in an ad agency in New York, receives his final divorce papers, which puts him in the mood to finally tell his daughter Maya (who is one of the cuter movie kids I've seen recently, by the way) the story of how he met her mother (the woman he is about to divorce). However, he decides that in the course of telling her the story, he will change the names of the women involved, and that she therefore has to try and pick out which one is actually her mother.

So it's set up as kind of a "love mystery", in a way. Will, it turns out, has in his life had three "great loves", and each is a "contender" for turning out to be Maya's mother. There's "Emily", Will's college sweetheart; there's "Summer", the journalism grad student Will meets in the course of working for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign; and there's "April", the copy-girl in Bill Clinton's New York office. These women come and go into and out of Will's life for various reasons, and at times he's truly in love with each one (or that's how he tells the tale), so we're kept as in the dark as Maya as to who her mother will turn out to be.

(Yes, this framing device is not dissimilar to the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother. An idea's an idea, folks.)

As the movie progresses deeper into Will's travails of love, it slowly dawns on Maya that obviously her mother can't be the one true love of her father's life, since he's divorcing her. Who can it really be, then? Well, by the time Maya's realizing this herself, we're realizing already just who Will really belongs with in the first place. The answer's pretty conventional by romantic comedy standards, especially when Will buys a certain meaningful gift for one of his three lady loves. Still, the movie does a pretty good job of at least making it seem as if Will's future with this particular lady is hopeless, pretty much right up until the very last scene.

A lot of the film's humor stems from poking fun at how things have changed in so short a time since the early 1990s. At one point, Will is handed one of those gigantic first-generation cell phones, the ones that could only be carried around if one was wearing Batman's belt; at another, the Bill Clinton campaign staff is sitting around watching the news, and Bryant Gumble interviews the owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush, and someone scoffs, "This guy better plan on spending the rest of his life in baseball." Or later on, when someone's job security depends on getting some information off the Internet immediately...and in the middle of New York City, they have to wait for the posh hotel's dial-up connection to kick in.

Acting-wise, the movie's not any great shakes, but everybody gets the job done. Rachel Weisz ("Summer") is probably the biggest name among the leads, but my favorite of the women was Isla Fisher as "April". (It's the long red hair, obviously.) Ryan Reynolds's first impression as Will is pretty bland, but he grew on me in the course of the movie. Everybody's good looking, but not so good looking that it's distracting. Kevin Kline has a cameo as a pompous-ass college professor that's worth watching for. If the performances aren't great, they're not distracting, either. The music is a combination of nicely selected pop songs and earnest "romantic comedy" music (heavy on the piano).

Like I said, this is nothing more than a well-made mushy romantic comedy. If that's not your genre, then for the love of God, stay away from this movie. But I enjoyed it.