jhlurie

Okay I have to ask... how the heck do you turn a chinese restaurant into a Shoprite? [beavis mode]Heh, heh. tommy said "Little Fairy". [/beavis mode]

I feel so much like a simpleton, since all I usually do is fold the wrapper into kind of a bent "M" shape, with the legs of the M tucked in a bit to give the middle some elevation.

Jason, how profound! Maybe M&M's could use "Ebony and Ivory" as the jingle for their new product!! It's not like the black and white are permanent. Although apparently we have to watch "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve" to find out the rest (good lord... why ELSE would you want to watch that show?) Ebony & Ivory was a Paul McCartney song, not a Michael Jackson song. And the "ebony" part of the singing was Stevie Wonder.

The white color is no doubt still artificial.

Hey, do you think that quality bagels are still being produced in Flushing? I travel there a lot for dim sum and other Chinese/Malaysian eats. I'd love to know if there are any bagel jewels hiding around out there. It's funny since I joked about Flushing being "the ghetto" (it's not by any means), that I'd think that the only "real" bagels left might be in some even more remote outpost like Flatbush or something. Then again, Fat Guy says there are little places still squirreled all around, so maybe not.

Unfortunately the same has not occured to me. For some weeks after the list went into effect this happened to me, but I've noticed that the number of unwelcomed calls from "authorized" parties has increased. Who are these "authorized" parties you may ask? Well, apparently ANYONE who you do business with in any capacity (phone companies, banks, utility companies, mortgage companies, and many others) have an exemption to call you to pimp ancillary services. MCI, for example, who I use ONLY for long distance, calls me to tell me to switch my local service at least twice a week, despite the fact that I've gone as far as talking to a supervisor to tell them to stop calling me. Really, I'm about 50% convinced now to abandon all phones except my cell phone. Even with minimal long distance and local plans (which I hardly ever use), really all I have the land line for is emergencies and dead cell phone battery time. I'm basically throwing money out just keeping them around. Now as to mealtimes... I suppose its different when you're married with kids and such. I know that when I'm in that circumstance--with extended family, I mean--we ignore the phone or at most tell people to call back. At home, when I don't have company? I'm stupid enough to usually let my dinner get cold.

Monkey is my new hero, which is why the little fellow now has his own topic! Carry on with talk of alternate methods of queso production, and/or advice to get Foodie and his block of Velveeta past those pesky security fellows. If you have other non-Velveeta/Queso specific stories of battles with airport security, we've got a place for that now too.

Yes. We did. And since the other version of this topic got plenty of responses, I don't think we need a duplication. Although to keep things in perspective, the other topic did start out as simply an inquiry about buying Velveeta in the UK--it only diverted into the airport security aspect later on. So let's focus on the last line of Foodie's post: If you want to continue the Velveeta/Queso specific advice, go do so in that other thread. If you have other tales of "smuggling" food though airports, past overly suspicious post-9/11 security, and across borders, by all means discuss it here. I'm also removing the Velveeta reference from the topic subtitle to reflect this, and I slightly changed the title of the other topic to make it more inclusive of alternate methods of getting Velveeta into the UK.

Might be one in the outer boroughs somewhere. Or god forbid New Jersey!

Do you really? What did people use before Velveeta? BTW: this is really cute. "Monkey" uses Velveeta!

Another test: If you drop your bagel on the table from a height of... let's say... a foot... how loud is the "thunk" it makes when it hits?' Hint: You should be able to hear it from the next room.

Okay, both you East side and West side Jews are snobs. My relatives got bounced right to the Bronx and Queens respectively. Okay, I'll be honest, I'm not sure exactly where my Great-grandparents landed off the boat, but they'd all abandoned Manhattan by the 1920's. My most recent (er... 20 year old) clear memories of Queens bagels (and I'm talking Whitestone and Flushing--you know... the ghetto --not the hoity-toity areas like Great Neck) was that they were always the firm chewy kind, and that's what I ate for my whole childhood. I have to wonder how and when things changed, because plenty of people my age and my approximate ethnic background (never mind the goyim) just don't get it.

Malapropism? The man just got hungry in the middle of his speech and wanted one of those famous German jelly donuts his staff had told him about! He was comparing himself to one to convey how much he wanted one!

Maybe you should try these. Or you could scroll down a bit on this site and find out that you are not wrong after all. For what it's worth I agree with that columnist. How you hold a utensil means zero as long as the food gets to your mouth in a dignified and clean manner. This is a piece of etiquette I never quite understood why people got a bug up their butt about. I actually understand being strict with silverware setting much more, since the pattern of that has a logical significance. And the "sporks" at that other link? Wow. Do people use sporks at home these days? It occurs to me that in my house more often we were too busy eating to talk. I'm just kidding... but this is one part of the dinner table ritual we probably weren't as strict on as many others, and it might have been to our detriment as far as family cohesion and communication go. I add the following "question" to our informal poll. In addition to the issues of whether your own "training" as a kid still affects how you act in restaurants as an adult, and whether you currently use a dinner table for the same (or different) reasons, what about dinner conversation? How much does this vary among us? Is this part of that same "training" for children or something else entirely?

I think the difference is that here we are specifically linking the idea of dinner table manners to the "fate" of children's eating habits going forward, as well as polling who does and does not currently use dinner tables. This topic is kind of a bridge between the "babies" topic and the one you linked to, and I suggest that if people want to dwell on either extreme (childhood experiences or restaurant decorum) they go to those suggested threads. Otherwise, here's the place to be.

Interesting idea--this link between the decline in Dining Room/Table use and the misbehavior alluded to in the babies in restaurants thread. tommy, of course, is his own child, so eating at the TV should be just fine. I kind of disagree with the statement about no wrong and right, although it's certainly not our job to sit and judge each other. If we are talking about the theoretical idea that there is a link between training kids in manners at a dining room table and eating behavior of those children in general, then clearly there is a right thing to do--own and use a dining room table. "Right" in the sense that one leads to the other, and assuming that this is a priority to a parent it's the proper procedure to get kids "trained" in that way--not "right" in the sense that someone must do this to be a good person or good parent. If it comes down to a personal choice of using one or not when those things don't apply... the idea of imposing a judgement is certainly silly. Heck, I don't even own a dining room table (my apartment is too small), but then again I don't have kids. And even in the case when kids are involved we certainly aren't talking about an all or nothing proposal. My parents, who did a lot of things I still scratch my head at, did one thing undisputably right. We ate dinner in the dining room at least once every week (usually twice), in the kitchen most other meals, and only in front of the TV if it was a late dinner or something special was on. Even still, I can't hold a fork right though, so in some ways they were very relaxed.

From my recollection, law like this doesn't necessarily apply to minors in the same way. A lot of conditions are applied against minors which might be considered discrimination for adults. Disclaimer: also not a lawyer, but one will no doubt be around real soon.

It's not the heating element. It's the metal wire cage that closes over the toast (or in this case the bag).

And ultimately an "experiment" should cover things. Nobody, not even the manufacturer I think, is trying to persuade us that you should really be making omelettes and sesame crusted ahi in these things. Well, maybe by having a recipe contest for free bags they aren't trying to dissuade that, but really their emphasis seems to be on the efficient toasting of bread and bread-related concoctions. And the holes in your photo do indeed look similar to the ones which eventually appeared in mine from getting caught on the way out of the toaster. I can see the same parallel folds and rips. It just took a lot longer with me--they started as folds and abrasions and developed into holes.

I know this is somewhat off topic (bad forum host, bad!), but I can't resist stating that as I predicted earlier in this thread, when I went to Return of the King tonight, there were indeed several noisy crying babies present. For a 3 1/2 hour long VERY noisy film (not to mention scary, if some of the babies were closer to toddler-hood and actually watching). But getting this back to discussion actually occuring in this topic, this is all part of the fact that, in reality, very few people have as much common sense as we'd like, and when you get 100 or more people together in a restaurant or movie theater, regardless of economic level, statistically chances are that you will wind up with two or three dumbasses, as well as the poor babies they've dragged along for the ride. In other words, people are not going to self-regulate in large groups, at least not without mob-rule and clubs and torches and stuff, and that would be really bad for the babies involved. Hey, reality may make me seem a cynic, but its really just reality. Then again, I'm still assuming 97 or 98 non-dumbasses out of that 100, so is that really all that negative?

Yes, but I'm not sure that even in NYC,which we all know these days is heralded as one of the safest big cities in the world, that it's a good idea to physically seperate yourself from your child. While we can argue about the propriety of taking the child inside, there is another opion--don't go to that restaurant. The problem is that the nice little Danish lady fell back on her own learned behavior. The real question for me would be whether or not the cops and DCFS people, after hearing her explanation understood that. And the person who called the cops likely assumed the child was abandoned or something (I'm assuming the kid sat there for a while), but was in too much of a hurry to go inside the restaurant and ask. Not perfect behavior, but not monstrous.

Okay, here's my theory. The hole did NOT get burned through--it got abraded through (although one cycle is amazing for that). The bags rub up against or caught in the the metal trap pieces which come together in an expandible toaster slot to hold things in place--expecially when you overstuff the bags and they barely fit down the toaster slot in the first place. For me, it took maybe thirty to forty uses for this to happen. The bag is still useable, but not leak proof. Also the heating is a bit more uneven, although not that radically changed.

One wonders what he'd do with Tamales.

Heh. Methinks someone protests their ignorance about El Bulli a bit too much. Obviously you've thought this all out.

"Brown liquor" makes it all sound so sordid.