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What Is That Thing?

17 Jan

January 17, 2014

I recently had the chance to go back and read one of my old blogs, Imponderable #92: At the Carnival. This is the one where some idiot drops over $2,000 on a rigged carnival game in hopes of winning an Xbox and ends up with a stuffed banana. Reading my old blogs can be as painful for me as it can be for you, trust me, even more so, but this one just opened up a mystery for me, something I never noticed before. Here’s the picture I ran with the story.

carny_640

What’s the classy guy drinking? It is clearly a Pepsi but in a weird container, like a normal paper or wax paper cup but sealed like a milk carton on top. I went back to the original, uncropped picture and found that there was a second cup in the scene too.

carny soda crop

Dating the picture is hard. Looking at their high-class threads, this couple could be from anytime between 1969 and infinity. The prizes are a little more help. While it is hard to date the Spider-Man and Superman pictures, the Simpsons didn’t start airing until 1989 and the Dick Tracy movie came out in 1990, so I’m going to date this in the early 1990’s.

I went online to look for that odd soda container but couldn’t find anything even nearly close. The only thing in even the same realm was some even older civil defense containers of drinking water.

watercarton

Any of you ever see soda packaged that way? Because it is sealed it can’t just be something they sold empty and filled, it had to be produced by Pepsi and distributed that way. I have to admit, it does seem like a cool and cheap way to package soda, though I wonder if the soda would eventually eat through the paper, much like it is doing to our stomach linings right now.

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A Table For Six. No More, No Less. Must Be Six.

7 Jan

January 7, 2014

Saarah and I are running out of diners in Brooklyn. This one has lousy food. That one has lousy service. The other one insists on putting pork ribs in its vegetarian salad. Very frustrating! So last Friday we tried The Bridgeview Diner in Bay Ridge. It has a view of (care to guess?) the Verrazano Bridge. Had it been called the Cesspoolview Diner I never would have gone.

We were there around 9:30 and the place was nearly empty. It is divided into two sections. One, the larger, is the dining room, with tables of all sizes and booths ringing the walls. The other side has the counter and booths, no tables. The booth side was about half full, at best, and the dining room side had three tables pushed together to accommodate a party of 10 and there was also one couple in a booth. It was nearly empty. When you walk into the diner, you are in the reception area, which is in the middle of both halves. We specifically asked for a table. I am not a small man (in the pants! Sorry, sorry, had to write it. ) and sometimes a booth is a little bit of a squeeze. One day they’ll make a comfortable booth for men like me, you’ll see. Or maybe I’ll just lose a few pounds.

fat guy nachos

Anyway, the guy in the suit (Greeter? Maître d? Receptionist? What do you call the guy who seats you in a diner?) led us to a table not two feet away. Literally. Without so much as shuffling his feet he grabbed two menus off the counter and dropped them on a table right against their Christmas tree, smack dab in the middle of the floor, in the direct line of the draft from the front doors, and in the way of anyone and everyone walking in any direction. It was a bad table.

“This is a bad table,” Saarah said. Nothing gets by her.

We asked for another and he led us into the dining room, past four or five empty tables to the back. We assumed he was leading us to the last table, so we sat down. But no! We had to get up. You see, that was a table for six. And in fact, so were all the other tables. (The tables for four or two had been pushed together for the party.) Now as I said, it was nearly empty. If we took a table for six, and a party for six entered, there were five more tables for them. And if a second party of six entered, there were four more tables for them. And if the odds were defied yet again and a mind-blowing third party of six entered, there were still three more tables they could be seated at, and if, in a cosmic coincidence on the level of Godzilla sporting a tiny chapeau leveling Tokyo, a fourth party of six entered there would be yet two tables for them. And if another entered? Still another table. But no. So, with no other tables, I sat in a slightly uncomfortable booth.

We argued a bit but to no avail. The guy in the suit was adamant that those tables had to be ready in case a large party- or this case, six of them- came in.

After we were there about ten minutes, a party of three women came in and wanted a table. The guy would not give them one. One of them, with disgust dripping from her voice, asked him if he really thought a large party would come in at that hour of night and take up all the tables.

“Yes. Yes.”

He led them to a booth on the other side of the diner and that woman had a look on her face that said that she was about to leave but her friends talked her into staying.

By the time Saarah and I left, the large party had also left, the other couple had left, and the dining room was totally empty. If a party for 136 came in by God they were ready.

Saarah and I had already decided that we were never coming back to The Bridgeview Diner. Plus the fact that the French onion soup was really just chicken soup with cheese melted on top, and our waiter was really just a pimply busboy in an ill-fitting jacket who didn’t speak English (asking for cream cheese with my English muffin was a Herculean task) meant that they would not be getting a second chance.

Saarah and The Editor’s and Staff of Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride give The Bridgeview Diner two thumbs down.

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