"We are professionals, we have to dress nice, but we are paid less than kids who work at McDonald’s."

Says Tammy Williams, a woman pictured in a highly sympathetic light of the front page of the NYT today. The article is "Low Pay at Weight Watchers Stirs Protest as Stars Rake It In." You see, celebrity weight-losers like Jennifer Hudson get big money to lend their credibility to ad campaigns but ladies who hold the little meetings in their homes only make $18 each time they have people over.

Why on earth does Williams think what the stars are paid has anything to do with how much she should be paid? Those stars are selling their reputation and attaching that reputation to a product. Jennifer Hudson = Oscar-winning actress dieting. It costs money to lure someone into making a swap like that.

But more importantly, it's not obvious that the "kids" who work in fast-food restaurants don't deserve more money Williams. Nothing's stopping her from applying for a job at McDonald's. Obviously, she looks down her nose at the noisy, greasy counterwork. She seems to think what she's doing is genteel. That's part of the benefit of the job. She likes it. She can "dress nice," and not in some tacky uniform. She can remain cosseted in her home. She doesn't to  expose herself to the riff-raff that show up for cheeseburgers. That's why she's paid less.

It's absurd to whine about being an oppressed underclass while looking down on workers who do genuinely difficult jobs.

And, by the way, those "kids who work at McDonald's" are engaged in the business of making customers for Weight Watchers. Show some respect!

"The passage of right-to-work legislation in the state House and Senate may have Lansing in turmoil..."

"... but residents of Ann Arbor learned yesterday of a more immediate concern."

Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger, a staple for U of M students and townies alike, is looking for a new home...

Owner Rich Magner said a deal between the University of Michigan and the property’s owner, Patricia Shafer, means he will have to close Blimpy Burger in summer 2013. He wants to find a new location for the restaurant.

Shafer is the widow of Blimpy Burger's original founder, Jim Shafer....

Magner said the University made Shafer an offer "she couldn't refuse."

I was a University of Michigan student from fall 1969 to spring 1973, and in my last summer as a student, I worked at Krazy Jim's — with the original Jim. (I worked with Ruby. Remember Ruby?)

Here's TV's Guy Fieri visiting Krazy Jim's in 2009:



Check out the part where they grind up the meat and then make it into meatballs with an ice cream scoop. That's exactly the way it was done back in 1972. The customers say what they want in terms of the number of meatballs — e.g., a "quad" — and then the meatballs are thrown on the grill, and when they start to soften, they are slapped flat with a spatula, making a patty. I think we slapped them flatter back in 1972, and we didn't make such a messy pile of things then. You used your hands to pick up onions and pickles and so forth to top the meat, but not quite so messily. I remember a girl who didn't care enough getting fired. It was funky, but it held together.

Good luck to all. I'm glad Patricia got her money. And I'm sorry Jim is gone. I understand the "Save Blimpy Burger" ethos: "nearly 60 years on South Division Street."

My mother grew up on South Division Street — about a block south of Blimpy's. My grandparents still lived there when Blimpy's opened in the 1950s. I don't know if they ever ate there, but I like to think they did.

"Anything as perfect and simple-sounding as this motto is always in danger of becoming a cliché..."

"...  but there’s nothing like putting it in the mouths of politicians to speed up that process."

What's the point of a catchphrase? You want it to catch on and then you want to control it? Speech doesn't work like that. Words have a life of their own. Phrases are born, have their narrative arcs, and sometimes they die — that is, they come to be regarded as clichés, and then no one wants to use them anymore.

The dispute at the link is over the Mitt Romney's use of “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose" from the TV show “Friday Night Lights.”

Hey, remember when Walter Mondale appropriated "Where's the beef?" from the Wendy's commercial? Where was the outrage?

"In Romania, on moonlit nights, the peasant women used to look down into a well until they saw the reflection of the moon."

"Then they let down a pail, slowly drew up water with the moon in it and, with a spoon, drank its reflection. Looking down into the well at that moment, they could see the face of their future bridegroom."

(A quote at the end of an essay by Saul Steinberg, found in a fruitless search for a drawing I remember or misremember with "we" and "they" —or is it "Who are they?" — drawn to signify the emotion contained in those words — a search undertaken after writing "So we they are not chomping cheeseburgers simply for sensual pleasure....")

The history of calories and scientific eating.

Martin Bruegel takes us back to the late 1800s:

In 1888, the American chemist Wilbur O. Atwater devised a series of formulas that would help people get the most energy from the least food. Economics and physiology would be joined in what he called “the pecuniary economy of food.” Atwater pioneered a movement that came to be known as “scientific eating.”

The notion appealed to French physicians, who had been looking for ways to improve working-class health and budgets. They believed that these households spent too much on meat and alcohol. Their program of “rational eating” aimed to instruct the poor to keep food expenses within the limits of their (modest) budgets. They urged the substitution of protein-rich legumes for red meat, pasta for sausages, and sugared beverages for wine.

These reformers believed that ignorance was the problem and information the solution. Nutrition facts were put next to the items on the menu cards in factory canteens and in working-class restaurants. Scales at the entrance to eating places helped customers to monitor their weight. A menu board, listing carefully calibrated culinary options, would allow workers to assemble nutritious meals from a set of limited options.

It didn't work, except in adjusting the menu in prisons, where money was saved. People wanted their pleasures. How does that historical experience apply today — as McDonald's begins posting calorie information? Our food is already cheap, and if you're eating in a restaurant, you're not going to find anything significantly cheaper than McDonald's. That 19th century experience was about saving money, and it's that pasta and sugared drinks approach to eating that is making us fat. I bet a switch to red wine and red meat would work as a weight-loss diet for most adults who've gotten fat eating McDonald's style.

Bruegel notes the obvious: People enjoy eating and they eat what they like. You can give them more scientific information, but how can you tell them what to like?  Bruegel, who seems to be French, ends with drippy sympathy for the poor Americans who suffer in "an era of stagnant wages, dystopian politics and cultural anomie" and chomp cheeseburgers as their last best hope for pleasure. He says "we" shouldn't blame "the poor" — who are "we" and how does he know we're not poor? — but should blame our "culture that relies ever more on unhealthy foods to breathe meaning and purpose into everyday life."

So we they are not chomping cheeseburgers simply for sensual pleasure — they're searching for meaning and purpose in their paltry, crushed little lives. Let me paraphrase: If life is spiritually and economically small, there is meaning in getting physically large.

"I get communism from this ad," said Meade...

... looking at the March issue of Bike magazine and alluding to the funniest thing Isaac Mizrahi ever said on "Project Runway." ("I get communism from this dress.")



That's my snapshot — which Meade urged me to take — with the "L" in "motherland" buried in the binding. Meade and I take opposite positions on whether this is a terrible ad. He's saying a company wouldn't appropriate Nazi imagery to push a product, and Soviet communism ought to be considered equally toxic.

I observed that the ad is anti-communist, with the headline: "This ain't the motherland, comrade. You have a CHOICE." In the Soviet Union, you had no choice. In America, you have choice! And "CCCP" — normally, a way to write USSR — is redefined as "Custom Color Choice Program."

Meade says it's still wrong, citing the millions of victims of Soviet communism upon whose dead bodies you cannot construct jokes. And I was all: Hey, wait a minute! The reason you wanted me to take the photo is because your right-wing friend has a Santa Cruz bike and you wanted to needle him!"

And thus the conversation gets good enough that I end up feeling like it's bloggable, and now Meade has leveraged my interest in whatever's interesting to the point where he can now needle [unnamed friend] with this blog post.

In looking up the Isaac Mizrahi quote, I found a blogger (Tina Waltke) who had heard the quote before seeing the dress — which you can see at the first link, above — and she was wondering what makes a dress look communist. Her idea was derived from an old Wendy's ad, which basically uses the same "choice" theme that Santa Cruz is using:



Hilarious ad! Now... are we not supposed to do that with communism? I'm saying mockery is great. And we do mock Nazism too (but we never connect a product to Nazism, even to distinguish it from Nazism, the way the Santa Cruz and the Wendy's ad distinguish their product from communism).

IN THE COMMENTS: k said: "I'm pretty sure CCCP was actually USSR in Cyrillic letters. Wasn't it?" And I said: "That's what I thought too... and then I trusted Wikipedia!"

ADDED: I've corrected the original now, and Wikipedia confused me but didn't really get this wrong. I was distracted by the "disambiguation" stuff at the top of the page.

"I suppose to an 8, 9 or 10-year-old that might seem like child abuse if you like cheeseburgers, French [fries] and pizza."

"He wanted to get them from behind the TV, the games and fast food."

A 45-year-old Indianapolis man is on trial, facing life in prison, after taking his 3 grandsons on a hike in the Grand Canyon.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Williams portrayed [Christopher Alan] Carlson as an active health nut who had a firm hand and wanted to show the boys the world. Like anyone after a long hike, the boys were tired, hungry and thirsty, but Carlson only allowed the boys to eat healthy food like tofu, hummus and veggie burgers, Williams said in his opening...

The 9-year-old, the youngest of the three brothers, testified that he experienced cramping, nausea and hunger during the miles-long treks.

But he also told jurors that his grandfather took the boys on many “awesome” adventurous trips. In between the two hikes, Carlson took the boys on a tour of the Hoover Dam, to rides atop the Stratosphere hotel and a Criss Angel magic show in Las Vegas, and to Disneyland in California.

Jurors smiled as the boy also spoke of trips to Mexico, Belize, Honduras and across the western United States last summer with Carlson and his two older brothers. The trips often included long hikes, swimming and fishing in the ocean and thrill rides at amusement parks.

Although investigators have said Carlson withheld food and water, the boy testified that he and his brothers were allowed to drink water most of the time and snacked on celery, carrots, tofu and low-carb hummus during the hikes.

Key words: "jurors smiled." UPDATE: The man was found guilty on March 1st. Reading about the evidence produced at trial, it is easy to see why he was convicted.

Whiteout at Culver's.

In Rochelle, Illinois. Less than 100 miles from home. Restored by cheeseburgers and onion rings, we soldier on.

UPDATE: We're safe at home in Madison.

Madison settles for $10,000 to the men who openly wore guns in at a Culver's.

The incident — in which the "Culver's Five" were arrested — occurred back in 2010 when concealed carry was still illegal, but open carry was not. The charges for "obstructing justice" were dropped and the men filed a lawsuit, which is now dropped.

Culver's, in case you don't know, is this:

Ronald Reagan "made sure I was aware of the length of time he had been 'ardent.' It was 40 minutes."

Writes Piper Laurie, who is now 79 but was 18 when the 39-year-old Reagan relieved her of her virginity. Reagan's not around to dispute the long untold tale, but Laurie says she complained that she was nevertheless unsatisfied, and Reagan told her she should see a doctor about that.

Whatever. I can't find a clip of her in that movie with Reagan — "Louisa." (She was great in "Carrie.") Reagan played her father in "Louisa," but that doesn't make it incest, you know. And he asked her mother permission to take her out on a date, he made her hamburgers, and — as noted — he was ardent for 40 minutes.

NYT "Frugal Traveler" comes to Madison.

Concentrates on biking, eating burgers, and drinking Wisconsin beer (including Leinenkugel). Following some rule of frugal traveling, he stays in the outlying town of MacFarland, and then has to bike 10 miles to get back to his room at night — after tanking up with beer. I don't quite get that. He went to some of my favorite places — Olbrich Gardens, Picnic Point, the Capitol building. But he doesn't seem to notice any protesting. In fact, there's nothing about politics at all!

"Between the Law School and the Ross School of Business you’ll find Dominick’s... which has been serving students and the area’s aging hippie population ever since the ’60s..."

From a NYT "36 Hours in Ann Arbor" piece. As an aging person who really did frequent Dominick's in the 1960s when I was a young hippie, I'm glad to know it's the first place an outsider dropping in for the essence of Ann Arbor ought to eat.

I haven't been back to Ann Arbor since the 1970s, but I spent an awful lot of time in the geographic zone around Dominick's. I didn't go to the law school, which is right there. I went to the School of Architecture and Design, which used to be right next to the law school, and I lived in East Quad for 2 years. And just over to the left is Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger. I worked there.

It's cool to see that Krazy Jim's is still around:

Now serving the 5th generation of Blimpy Addicts, we grind our own beef fresh from choice Western chuck. Then our friendly, personable staff throws the rounded balls of meat onto the grill, smashes them flat with a spatula and cooks your burger to crumbly perfection.

Ha. I remember when Jim used to grind up a huge vat of meat and we stood around in the walk-in refrigerator using ice cream scoops to transform it into those meatballs. Krazy Jim's didn't make it into the NYT's recommended 36 hours. Who knows why? Some kind of rule against greasy food?

"It's nothing like the way we know it in our community. If you're going to appropriate a dish we treasure, at least get it right."

An Atlantic City chef attacks the International House of Pancakes for serving chicken and waffles.

[Carl Redding] says he learned to make chicken and waffles where most food historians agree it was created 60-plus years ago, at the now-departed Wells Restaurant on Seventh Ave. between 132nd and 133rd Sts.

"When I worked for the Rev. Sharpton, he used to meet Betty Shabazz [Malcolm X's widow] there," says Redding. "They'd meet and I'd sit by myself just luxuriating in the chicken and waffles. It's something everyone uptown knows and likes."

Are there serious issues of authenticity to talk about or is this just a chef who's figured out how to promote his restaurant? The IHOP representative says that "because IHOP has more than 1,500 locations, it can introduce more people to chicken and waffles, 'and maybe some of them will make their way to Redding's... Next time I'm in Atlantic City, I'd like to go there myself.'"

Do fast food restaurants get people interested in a particular dish in a way that leads them to look for better versions of the same food? Or do people develop a taste for the fast-food version and reject the original form of the food? For example, maybe people like a McDonald's hamburger and don't even want a full-scale, old-fashioned hamburger anymore. To them the McDonald's hamburger is the real thing, and they're put off by this bizarre monstrosity served at... wherever hamburgers used to come from. Krazy Jim's!

So maybe Redding must take action:

He'll set up at noon in front of the IHOP on Black Horse Pike in Mays Landing, N.J., to cook and hand out free portions of chicken and waffles, Redding's-style.

Redding stresses, by the way, that IHOP doesn't normally ruffle his feathers. "I eat there," he says. "I love their T-bone steak with pancake breakfast."

Aw, come on. Handing out free food in front of somebody else's restaurant? Is that fair? There's this quasi-civil-rights flavor to this protest that's a bit absurd. Is he saying that white people have their meat-and-breakfast-starch dish and black people have theirs? IHOP can do steak and pancakes but not chicken and waffles?! 

Enough of these squabbles. Let's eat french toast and ham.

The best cheeseburger in NYC is at the Corner Bistro.

This interests me for 2 reasons:

1. In the late 1970s, we lived in the apartment building across the street from the Corner Bistro. From my window on the third floor of what is still called "The Rembrandt," I watched people going in and out of the good old Corner Bistro. It had good cheeseburgers.

2. Why doesn't the best cheeseburger in NYC have a good tomato on it? From 1,000 miles away, I can see that the Corner Bistro puts one of those things on its burger that I'd get my hands messed up pulling out. I don't even use the word "tomato" for that.

IN THE COMMENTS: Richard Lawrence Cohen, the other half of the "we" referred to in point #1, says:

The burgers were thick with high-quality beef, but slow-grilled, which didn't thrill me, and if you ordered rare you wouldn't get it rare. But the atmosphere was homegrown urban hip, with knife-gouged wooden tables, and customers who were longtime Villagers perpetually anxious about their media deals and their love lives. A holdover from the Dylan Thomas era (he'd drunk his last set of eighteen whiskies in another burger bar, a couple of blocks away), and great eavesdropping. The silent, bland owner, short and wide with balding red hair and what might conceivably have been interpreted as a fractional smile, was a reassuring enigma, lovingly rolling down his awning and sweeping the front sidewalk every morning. And then there was the psychotic psychiatrist who lived and worked next door.

"The iconography of the hamburger is crucial to fitness magazines..."

"... with grotesque double-patty pile-ups and surreal towers of lettuce leaves variously signing repulsion and signifying obsession. In this month's Shape, a male model is jamming one sloppy sandwich into himself whole, without chewing or even swallowing, for the sake of promoting a story titled 'Sex, Beer, and Burgers: Why Guys Are Healthier Than You Think.' This is one of those numbers about embracing male desires: Eat a bigger lunch. Drink bottled beer as a matter of portion control. Masturbate more frequently in order to release "feel-good hormones including endorphins and oxytocin," they quote an Ivy League gynecologist, the science classing up the matter."

A paragraph in an article about various fitness magazines forced me to copy it and paste it here.

"It's a hamburger wedged between two grilled cheese sandwiches."

1 of the 10 worst fast food products of 2010. And it's not the only grilled cheese-based one. There's also a grilled cheese sandwich with 4 fried mozzarella sticks inside.

"A 62-year-old woman visiting a local Culver's sees several restaurant patrons with guns on holsters in plain view."

She thought it was an appropriate time to call the police. She didn't understand Wisconsin. It was time to calmly scarf your butter burger.

Caught in a rainstorm, ducking into a small-town libraray, I read the Utne Reader yesterday.

I used to subscribe back in the 80s, when I loved it. But what is it now? I found the cover pretty amusing:



I can't find a bigger picture of that at the site. Too bad! They should show it off. It's funny — Obama biting into a sloppy cheeseburger and cringing as the angry Michelle waves a bunch of carrots much like wives in old comic strips used to wield rolling pins. And you know what it means when a First Lady gets after the President to eat carrots.

Of course, the article inside isn't critical of Michelle Obama and her eat-your-vegetables shtick. It's critical of Obama, but not because he eats cheeseburgers, because he "loves up industrial agriculture." We're supposed to identify with the angry woman swinging her lo-cal phallic symbols at her man. (At least they aren't cut up phallic symbols like the ones Hillary famously foisted on Bill.) The cheeseburger Obama prefers — like the onion rings Bill Clinton preferred — is a symbol, a symbol of what he loves. In Obama's case, according to the article, it's agribusiness. He "loves up" agribusiness, that big sloppy, gooey cheeseburger.

It's Utne Reader, that magazine for aging lefties, and the article assumes you're into the anti-business agenda. The magazine assumes you'll identify with Michelle and her vegetables and is oblivious to the possible revulsion you might feel to the angry face they've given her. You're supposed to think:  Yes, Obama, come back to your lefty roots. (Note: Carrots are roots.) Your policies need to kick big business in the ass and embrace the local and sustainable and holistic.

But I didn't get that far into the magazine. The library was closing and the rainstorm was ending, and we needed to get back to the Glacial Drumlin Trail. I only had time to read: 1.  a letter from the editor by a subscriber who was sending back an issue of the magazine because it had Sarah Palin on the cover and she didn't want to look at that ever ever ever (though presumably the articles inside assailed the Alaskan), 2. "On Being Fat and Running: Abandoning insecurity for a full life," by Brenton Dickieson, from Geez, and "Sentenced to Life: A man ages in prison and outlives society’s fears," by Kenneth E. Hartman, from Notre Dame. But none of those things are accessible on line, so I can't send Utne Reader some traffic and set up some discussion about that here.

The Hartman article is a reprint, and — unlike the Geez reprint about running while fat — the original is on line, so you can read it.

Prison is a young man’s world, a world of physical violence and posturing, a world of brute strength and primal, unfocused rage. It is not a place to grow old, although more and more of us are doing just that: growing old in prison.

But Utne Reader is not a young man's world — or a young woman's world. It feels like an old person's place. I felt too young for it... and I'm old. Or it's for those other aging Americans... the lefties.  I see these people in Madison all the time. Do they feel left behind? Do you think the day will come when "lefty" will seem to mean left behind?

IN THE COMMENTS: lemondog has a way to get to an enlargement of the cover. Here's a closeup screen grab that shows Michelle's face:



The artist is Jason Seiler. Nice work. I notice the cigarette over the ear now. Ha.

Using lemondog's method, I can get to that letter about Sarah Palin. If you page forward in the magazine, you'll find it. You can see the cover that upset the poor woman so. She complains:

When the media gives air space, page space, and cover space (albeit in jest or irony) to crazies such as Palin, they are complicit in her plan to lend credence to the climate of ignorance, sensationalism, and just downright muddled thinking that is passed off as a national discourse these days — and which she is one of the most visible muddlers.

Jeez, the mere image of Sarah Palin unleashes hysteria.

AND: The image of Michelle Obama drives other people nuts. Women's faces. They're so provocative.

At the Special Touch Café...

... you can get tattoos, fireworks, and more. We didn't get any fireworks or tattoos. Not today, anyway. We did get some dinner at Culvers, though.

"Haven't had a burger in a while. Lunch with Obama at Ray's Hell Burger."

Dmitry Medvedev tweeted.