Dead Horses Beaten Daily

So the current sidebar drama (when we can stop fretting over the despicable budget mess) seems to be whether we should allow beer and wine to be served at the local movie theater.  I’d be fully in favor of the liquor license for the theater…if it was actually an arthouse theater like it was originally supposed to be.  In its current incarnation, I just can’t support it.

Look at the crowd at Cinema City on a typical night — it’s a much older and more mature/reserved crowd.  You’ve got to believe that this is because of the sort of movies that get screened there.  With the Criterion playing nothing but mass-market stuff nowadays –  superhero movies, Wall-E, etc.,  the serving of beer and wine just doesn’t match the demographic.

Here’s something I would propose.  What if they allowed liquor in only one theater of the cinemas, and only at movies showing after 7 or 8 p.m.?  That way they could control which movie has liquor service available, and have it only in theaters that won’t have many/any kids in attendance anyway.  Taking it a step further, If they put the bar inside the door to the theater in question, they could card people going in just like they were going to any club or bar.  Access is controlled, and the theater doesn’t become an unseemly place.  That’s something I could support.

The crowd that comes to watch the latest Vin Diesel movie isn’t one that I’d want to drink with, but the next “No Country for Old Men” would probably go nicely with a microbrew. Basically, I don’t want to sit down to watch Indiana Jones with my nine year old and be surrounded by people sucking down beers. I don’t even want to have it in the lobby where I’m buying tickets and popcorn.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I feel this way about the theater liquor issue, either — I’m no teetotaler.  Wine with dinner at a restaurant, with kids there?  Of course.  Beer at a ballpark, with kids in attendance?  All-American.  Beer at every single country area in Epcot Center, with all sorts of kids running around?  Abso-freaking-lutely, starting with a Molson in Canada and ending with a frozen Margarita as we stumble past Mexico.  But beer at the movie theater, when I’m taking my kids to see a movie?  I don’t know.  Just doesn’t seem right to me.

This past week I had occasion to buy a new piece of electronics (new GPS receiver, more on that later), so as usual, I started doing my homework. I settled on a brand and model, and then compared prices of online retailers.

Past experience dictates that you just can’t beat Amazon. They do everything right, including their prices. But there are a couple of other big discount retailers of electronics whose names come up over and over whenever you search for things like cameras or a/v equipment. Among them is Abe’s of Maine.

In this case, Abe’s beat Amazon by $10 on the GPS unit I was looking for. I thought that was cool, and figured there would be a shipping/handling fee that would make up the difference or something, so I went through the shopping cart process to see where the pinch was going to be. There was none — wow. Order placed at about 9 a.m. Score one for the little guy.

At noon, I got an email from someone at Abe’s of Maine with the blunt subject line of “ORDER.” It stated “We need to confirm some of the information on your order. Please call us at…” I assumed that they were out of stock, or maybe I had mistyped my CC info or something, so as soon as I saw the email (about 1:30) I dialed them up on my cell phone.

I was on hold for a minute or so, and then the phone was answered. After a less-than-perfunctory verification of my shipping address, the guy on the phone said “that’s a great unit you ordered, but we’ve been getting lots of reports from customers that they’re breaking early,” and then launched into trying to upsell my order on an extended warranty plan for the GPS.

Now, we all know that extended warranties on electronics are pure bank for retailers. They make something like 95% profit on them. The guy on the phone was doing his “you realllllly need this because if you have to send it in for repairs it’ll cost blah blah and the unit is only worth blah blah” bit, and I tried to get him to cut to the chase and tell me how much he was trying to upsell me, but he started talking over me to finish his diatribe on why my life wouldn’t be complete without the warranty. I started feeling my annoyance bubbling up to the rim.

I told him no thanks, and tried to verify what the shipping date and method were going to be for the order. He ignored that, and went directly into the “Are you sure you don’t want it?” “Yes I’m sure” “Are you really sure?” “Yes” “really sure? I’ll knock five dollars off the price…” line of conversation.

In short: I freaked. Hardcore. In fact, just thinking about it now for the sake of recording this is making me a little pissed off. How DARE this bunch of jerks make ME call THEM so they could have the opportunity to scrape a few more of my dollars out of my wallet? When I was doing them the favor of giving them my business, they had the audacity to make me burn minutes off my cell phone plan, and put me on hold, and act like they’re doing me a favor by doing it?

In reality, if their ‘extended warranty’ was cheap enough, and was presented as an option on their site during the checkout process, I might have risen to the bait. The cost of the warranty was another 15% of the total unit’s price. Don’t call me up after the fact to try and drop that on me. Moreover, don’t make me call you and try to drop that on me.

So this goes out to all my homies at Abe’s of Maine: Up Yours. You may be from my favorite state in the union (though judging by the accent of the guy in your call center, you’ve gotten a bit too big for your britches I think), but you’ll never get my business. I’m always willing to do business with whoever is willing to earn my business. But I’ll never be abused by someone just for the pleasure of spending my money with them. That’s the DMV’s job, not the electronics dealer.

Don’t shop at Abe’s of Maine.

~~~~~

Aftermath: After making the guy on the phone cancel my order (”Are you sure you want to cancel?” “Yes I’m sure.” “I’ll knock five dollars off your shipping and handling…” “Cancel it, NOW.”), I leapt straight back into the loving embrace of Amazon.com. Sure, the unit was $10 more there. But s/h was HALF of the other place. Overnight. I ordered my gps at about 2:00, and I was unboxing it at 12:00 the very next day. If anyone from Abe’s happens to read this, you should take note: THAT is how you do business. Leave the “half-assed teenager trying to peddle warranties” crap to the sixteen year olds on the floor at Best Buy.

Don’t forget to be loyal to our old haunts. I’m talking specifically about the tried and true places that have been here and have been awesome and have paved the way for all the new places to have an established customer base the minute they open their doors in this town. Granted, most of the old places are just as hard to get a table at as they ever were. But there’s this one…

We’re big Thai food fans in my house. We get takeout probably once a week (on average). Our default takeout spot has always been Siam (on Park Rd), for reasons of excellent food and remarkably friendly proprietors. The last few months I’ve been disturbed, though — every time I go there for takeout, the place has been a ghost town. Note that I’m not in a position to speak authoritatively on this matter, but it seems less frequented than it was in the past. I sincerely hope that it’s just my imagination.

So here’s what I’m asking: Go eat a dinner at Siam. If you used to go there and you’ve been venturing elsewhere, go back. The food’s just as good as newly-hip Hot Basil (better, in my honest opinion). The prices are better, and you can get a table without a reservation.

A couple of anecdotes: One time I was getting my takeout and the lady who works the dining room stopped me, and tucked another container into my bag. “Shrimp rolls,” she said, “just something extra for you to try.” Another time my wife went in to do the pickup, and the man who runs the restaurant very apologetically greeted her by saying that her order would be another couple of minutes. He didn’t like the way the crab rangoon looked, they weren’t full enough, so he made the kitchen remake them for our order. These are people who make you happy to give them your business.

I hope you’ll consider throwing a takeout order their way. It’s too damn hot to cook tonight anyway, right?

I just noticed that it’s been a full month since my last little update.  Oops!

So, what’s been going on? In the last month, I:

• went to Disney World; had a great time
• have been working like a monkey with a RedBull IV drip
• have been enjoying the West Hartford Youth Baseball League season as it kicks off
• have learned to hate the very existence of not one, but both of my cars.  Nothing new there, I hate cars as it is, but my hate has reached a new plane of existence, making it a noteworthy (blogworthy) achievement.

Anyway, things are (hopefully) leveling out now.  Back to business as usual.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hartford: Cinema City is the city’s primary ‘art’ movie theater…the place you have to go to see films that aren’t in wide release. There’s also Cinestudio (Trinity College) and the Criterion in West Hartford, but Cinema City still seems to get the best new indie/artsy-fartsy releases, from what I’ve seen. Cinema City also happens to be located in the absolute ass-end of nowhere. Its closest neighbor is a sewage treatment plant, and the brightest lights in its neighborhood are at the porno superstore up the street. Basically what I’m saying is that if I’m going to Cinema City, it’s for a movie that I really want to see.

I really didn’t think that In Bruges was going to be good enough to warrant the trip out to the Mad Maxville neighborhood of Hartford. First of all, Colin Farrell is a bit of a twat, one of those actors for whom you can name more of the rehab clinics he’s stayed at than movies he’s starred in. And the trailer for the movie looked ok, but more like a Netflix movie than something to see in the theater.

Anyway, I was coerced into going, and I’m very glad I was. This movie is worth all the hype that it’s been getting. One measure of a good movie: you walk out of the theater feeling like you just saw something new, something you haven’t seen several permutations of before. Another measure: you’re still thinking about it more than a day later. In Bruges passed on both counts.

Duma Key (audible.com)
by Stephen King
read by John Slattery

After a life-changing accident, Edgar Freemantle gains a window to the supernatural.

The book:  A fun and scary story told in the King’s classic Master-Storyteller style.  We get glimpses of lots of King trademark themes and styles here, including a few nods to Lovecraft, and my favorite King-ism — the ability to take a perfectly mundane object, situation, or happening, and make it incredibly creepy.  My only complaint was that it felt a bit drawn out and plodding at times.  Understandably, it’s the setting and story that almost demand the book’s pacing, and it wasn’t horribly slow (I never felt like giving up on it), but still, the audiobook felt like it could have been a few hours shorter.  Don’t take that as a non-recommendation, though — this is still a quality King book that won’t disappoint fans of his work (and that includes me).

The narration:  I’ve come to expect nothing but excellent readers in Stephen King’s audiobooks, and John Slattery didn’t disappoint.  He did an excellent job with this book.  One thing that I found interesting:  Having listened to King himself read his On Writing book, Slattery’s voice has a similar quality in cadence and tone, to King’s.  It gave his reading of King’s words a great deal of credibility.

In summary:  it’s a new Stephen King novel…do I need to say more?

Background links:  here and here and here. In a nutshell, for an upcoming Battlefield series release, EA is going to make players pay money to get all the guns available in the game.  This is more-or-less a first for this genre of video games.

I expect this sort of model to become the rule in all types of PC gaming rather than the exception.  Look at MMO’s, look at many of the XBOX Live games, they have a nice model where they don’t just sell the disc that the game comes on and never see another dime for it.  They put out games that become long-lived revenue streams via downloadable content or subscription fees.  It’s a much better return on their development dollar investment that FPS and RTS games on the PC have no way of matching.  If anything, I’m surprised that it took a big corporate entity like EA so long to come up with this idea.

Will it suck?  Depends on how conservative the downloadable weapons are, spec-wise, and whether they offer any real benefit over the standard ones.  I know that as a very casual gamer and old guy, I really didn’t like the initial experience of trying to jump into Call of Duty 4 and getting beaten up by kiddies who had bigger and better guns and perks based on the sheer number of hours they had logged in-game.  I’d have easily dropped another $10-$20 to make myself feel like I was on more of a level playing field with them at the start of the experience.

If nothing else, consider this another big ‘gong’ noise from the prolonged death-knell of PC gaming.  Like it or not, the gaming world is going [ok, has gone] console.  Best start working out your aiming thumbs.

It isn’t just about drinking.

St. Patrick’s Day serves to remind us of why we don’t see very many Irish restaurants out there.

I don’t know who does ‘Garfield minus Garfield,’ but it’s the best thing to come along since sliced Joe Mathlete.

It’s no mean feat to take smarmy crap and turn it into greatness.  And given the sheer multitude of horrible Garfield strips, we should have an ample supply of entertainment for quite some time.

We just noticed the other day that a Bose store is going to be opening up right next to Moe’s. This brought on the inevitable question of whether or not Bose employees will greet customers with a hearty “WELcome to BOOOSE!”* Also, will Blue Back be able to land any other rhyming businesses? Stay tuned.

Bose is kind of a lame store to have opening at Blue Back, imo. I mean, is there a single yuppie or boomer left out there who doesn’t already have a bose wave cd player with patented soundwave technology? Either way, I always preferred Cambridge Soundworks’ gear.

(*if you haven’t been to Moe’s yet, as soon as you walk through the door, the counter staff quite obnoxiously, er, I mean, endearingly — shouts “welcome to MOOOOOE’s!” at you.) 

*****

On a different note, can’t you f-ing morons please keep your dogs OFF of our kids’ athletic fields? In the space of about two days, I’ve seen people letting their dogs run on the Norfeldt field (on the blvd) and today, on the brand new little league fields on Asylum.

Where are your brains? Even assuming that you’re responsible dog owners and you pick up after them, are you going to guarantee that you don’t leave any crap behind for my kid to run or slide or pick up a ball that’s just rolled through? Like there aren’t enough other fields and green spaces for you to run your dog on? You have to go out of your way to bring them out onto our ball fields? Geez.

This isn’t just me being a bitter asshole, either. There was an unfortunate incident during a youth football game a couple of years back…I’ll spare you the details.

*****

The Quiznos in the Marshall’s/Blockbuster plaza is the most expensive one I’ve ever been to, by an average margin of about $2 for any size of sandwich. Crazy. Also, they didn’t have their oven turned up high enough last night, and my sandwich wasn’t ‘toasty’ at all. It was more ‘lukewarm like it had sat out in a hot car for a couple of hours.’ Gross. God I miss Congress Rotisserie.

*****

Occurred to me yesterday: there are hardly any gas stations in certain parts of town. Namely, down the Boulevard by Stop & Shop/Mountain Rd./Sedgwick area. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I just noticed it yesterday when my leaky tire suddenly decided to cross the line between “a little slack” and “hey look at the idiot driving around on a flat tire.”

And in case you haven’t noticed, the Cumberland Farms up Park Rd across from Plan B is the cheapest gas station in town by a pretty fair margin, most weeks. Worth waiting in the lines that are always there, in my opinion.