Speaking of nostalgia: To market some new reality show, there’ll be a functioning automat in Grand Central today and tomorrow. Obviously I was a little young to fully appreciate automats, but I liked the retro one that was open on St. Mark’s Place a few years ago. Fried food open late for real cheap with limited human interaction; hard to top that at the end of a long night out.
In light of last night’s McDonald’s investigation, Dan Lewis passes along an archived Now I Know newsletter about a floating McDonald’s off British Columbia. While you’re there, you’ll probably want to subscribe to the newsletter.
I ate a McDonald’s cheeseburger here in Port St. Lucie and noted that it had mustard on it, as McDonald’s cheeseburgers seem to everywhere besides New York.
Curious, I searched Google and found only this post from Serious Eats, noting the same issue and asking commenters to describe the toppings on McDonald’s burgers in their region. Just about everyone from outside New York who responded said their burgers included mustard.
I asked Twitter, and @MaryL1973 suggested I contact McDonald’s. So I sent an email to everyone in the chain’s U.S. media-relations department asking why it was that New York-area McDonald’s don’t have mustard, where the dividing line is, and if there are any other regional variations on standard burger toppings.
About a half-hour later I received a statement from Jennifer Nagy, the McDonald’s Marketing Manager for the New York Metro region. It reads:
Approximately 85 percent of McDonald’s restaurants are owned and operated by independent businesspeople. As independent owners, McDonald’s franchise owners have the authority to make certain operating decisions as they relate to their McDonald’s restaurant operations. Because of regional preference, mustard is not added to the hamburgers in the New York Tri-State area, but customers are able to request mustard when ordering their favorite McDonald’s hamburger.
This reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke: “Every McDonald’s commercial ends the same way: Prices and participation may vary. I wanna open a McDonald’s and not participate in anything. I wanna be a stubborn McDonald’s owner. ‘Cheeseburgers? Nope! We got spaghetti, and blankets.'”
Anyway, there you have it: Individual franchise owners can make “certain operating decisions,” and apparently all the individual owners in the New York area have opted to serve their burgers without mustard standard. I suppose there’s some reasonable chance one guy or one group owns most of the New York-area McDonald’s and hates mustard, and that the few remaining McDonald’s not owned by that guy stopped serving mustard on burgers because too many New Yorkers complained. Something like that.
I suppose the big news here is that burgers without standard mustard are apparently a “regional preference.” I happen to like mustard on burgers (McDonald’s included), but probably not enough to request it at the drive-thru.
At Slate, Eric Nusbaum presents a photo gallery of planned but unbuilt stadiums. I still love the Tampa Bay ship thing. Wish that got built. Via Rob Iracane.
I love Twitter as a vehicle for short, decontextualized thoughts and jokes, but sometimes that 140-character restriction is a bear. Half the Mets (and almost all the media) are off to Orlando for a Grapefruit League matchup with the Braves. I had some video business to take care of here, so I’m sticking behind to hang out for the University of Michigan exhibition.
It’s a slow day here in Port St. Lucie, my mind is a bit slowed by five nights of somewhat restless hotel-room sleep (I should really start packing my own pillow on trips), and it’s Sunday morning so I assume web traffic is slow too. So here are some random thoughts that I didn’t feel like limiting to 140 characters:
– Jose Reyes seems really fond of Ike Davis, or perhaps just really fond of yelling, “I like Ike,” whenever Davis does anything. It’s almost always the exact same cadence, high-pitched and very rhythmic, and Reyes must have called it out 15 times during Davis’ batting practice session yesterday.
– I generally cringe at Italian food from chain restaurants, but Carraba’s is pretty decent. It shares a parking lot with our hotel, so it’s a convenient option for meals. Their bread, even on takeout orders, is served fresh-baked and piping hot with a side of olive oil and salty garlicky seasoning. I haven’t done the math yet but I’d estimate the place is about 30 times better than the Olive Garden.
– In some ways, many places share a parking lot with our hotel, because this part of Port St. Lucie is kind of like a huge, below-capacity parking lot. The town is spread out and remarkably easy to navigate, but even the bigger roads just seem to serve as a means of traversing a giant network of parking lots. If you knew the territory well enough you could probably drive the length of the town just snaking your way through lots. Wal-Mart, Publix, condos, movie theaters, bars, Taco Bells, everything has more than adequate parking. New Yorkers here often grumble about the area and if you’re looking for non-chain food it’s a tough haul, but it’s really not an uninteresting setting.
– D.J. Carrasco appears to be a very deft fielder.
– The movie Hall Pass is not very good. There were a few hearty laughs in there, but it does my least favorite thing that happens in comedies: It turns into melodramatic treacle when it comes time to resolve the plot. This is also why I didn’t love another Owen Wilson movie, Wedding Crashers — it was funny for the first half and then suddenly all weepy nonsense. Except unlike Wedding Crashers, the first half of Hall Pass isn’t even that funny. It takes way, way too long to establish the premise for hijinks. Also, it might set a new record for amount of times the title of the movie is spoken during the movie. Normally I am moved to clap whenever that happens, but I honestly didn’t want to seem too supportive of Hall Pass. The upside is Jason Sudeikis is reasonably funny and it has J.B. Smoove in it.
– Follow up on that: You know how in many ensemble action movies there’s that really dramatic shot of all the dudes walking while setting off on a mission, looking all badass, set to cool music? I no longer think it’s funny when comedies do that ironically. I used to, but I think it’s probably time to put that to bed. I’m still down for it in the action movies though.
– Apparently Tim Byrdak also drove up to see the space shuttle launch. I haven’t had an opportunity to ask him what he thought about it yet.
– In Orlando today, a certain Valentino Pascucci will start at DH for the Mets. He’s in Minor League camp, just making this trip with the big club, and I haven’t had a chance to meet him yet. I will soon, though, and it will probably be extremely awkward. I spoke to him on the phone back in 2008 and he seemed like a nice dude, but if he ever Googles himself he’s certain to have seen evidence of my various Pascucci campaigns. So that could be interesting.
This stuff would be funnier if it weren’t so viciously sad. I guess it’s nice that they have each other; probably it helps to have someone around as delusional as you are when you’re scrapping to stay divorced from reality.
Some entertaining nerdiness via Josh R.
The last time Paul McCartney and John Lennon ever jammed together, Stevie Wonder was there.
I watched the Space Shuttle Discovery launch yesterday from Cocoa Beach, a well-trodden strip of white sand between a narrow grid of bungalows and the Atlantic Ocean. It is 10 miles south of the Kennedy Space Center and a popular spot to witness the spectacle of liftoff for anyone unwilling or unable to brave the crowds at Space View Park.
Discovery is the most veteran of the three space shuttles still in operation. It has made 38 missions to space since its first launch in August of 1984. It has housed 246 astronauts, deployed 31 satellites and orbited the earth 5,628 times, according to the Wikipedia. It left the planet yesterday with a crew of six plus one humanoid robot, bound for the International Space Station to drop off supplies and the robot.
On the beach, the crowd stood and stared impatiently toward the north at the scheduled launch time, 4:50 p.m. No one seemed sure where exactly to look until the shuttle rocketed (literally) into view, its glowing orange plume of burning fuel trailing and leaving behind an expanding tower of white smoke.
Discovery shot up and out over the Atlantic, then ducked behind a cloud. People on the beach cheered when it emerged again, then hid behind another cloud, then poked out once more. At some point, maybe a half minute after the launch, we could hear the low rumble of ignition and then what I think was a sonic boom. Then, finally, the shuttle disappeared behind a cloud and never returned, off into space.
Space, bro. Outer space.
The crowd stood looking skyward still for a few moments after it was clear there was nothing more to see.
“Is that it?” asked a skinny teenager in a bikini.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. The astronauts will attach a storage module to the ISS, take care of some space business, then return to Earth on March 7. This is Discovery’s last mission. After it touches down, it will be grounded in a museum or stripped for parts or converted into a really sweet low-rider or sent wherever it is that old space shuttles go to die.
The remaining two shuttles are each slated for one more launch – one in April, one in June — then retirement. The current space policy calls for a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025 and a manned orbit of Mars by 2030, but they will rely on privately designed spacecrafts.
We’re not really doing this anymore. Not the way we used to, at least. And really, 2025… I mean, who knows what could come before then? Wars, locusts, zombies, whatever.
Sensing the vague gravity of the event, I stopped in a dusty souvenir shop on my way out of town to pick up something for my 3-year-old nephew, C.J.
Inside, a leathery man behind the counter in a Hawaiian shirt waxed nostalgic with a tourist.
“In the days of Gemini, they just had three pilots circling the lighthouse, giving them thumbs up when the air was clear,” he said. “Hell, John Glenn went to space with a rocket between his legs.”
“They were cowboys back then. Cowboys.”
I bought the single item in the store even remotely appropriate for a 3-year-old: a small metal windup shuttle, the only one left on a shelf half-full of fading posters. The toy is dirty, its right wing is scratched and it looks like it may have once been chewed by a dog.
The front wheel is off-kilter, so when I wind it back and let it go on my desk here, it drives in circles. It is pathetic. My nephew will like it because he’s gracious, and because he’s too young to understand how pitiful a substitute the model makes for the real thing, which transports people to space.
C.J. won’t know –- at least not until someone tells him -– that 20 years ago we read science magazines in school that promised affordable vacations to the moon by 2010, and that the whole space-exploration thing hasn’t exactly shook out the way we once imagined it would.
But that’s not a thing to lament; it’s just a thing. Space is inconceivably huge, and presumably out there somewhere floats inexplicably awesome stuff that could offer massive benefit to our society, but we’ve got no feasible way to get to it. Turns out everything else in space is really, really far away.
Thinking back to the beach yesterday, I am struck now by an amazing juxtaposition I spotted, one that didn’t seem out of the ordinary at the time: People using smartphones to snap photos of the launch.
We once assumed the most advanced 21st-century technology would deliver us outward to the stars, but our most astonishing achievements of late have turned inward, the series of tubes and everything. And we can squint now and see the ways that unprecedented acess to information and to each other can help us endeavor deeper and achieve more while navigating humanity, an expanse nearly as vast and perplexing as outer space.
Former roommate Mike’s stuff gets auto-promoted here, because it’s awesome and animation blows my mind. Mike’s working as the Animation Director on a show called Superjail this season, but this is a short he put out yesterday. It’s a bit grim perhaps, but it’s animated so that hardly counts.
Tedquarters 