Awesome NYC view from Garret Mountain in Paterson. (Taken with Instagram at Garret Mountain Reservation)
Someone needs to do a “Shit People in Minneapolis Say.”
“Fuck it, it’s cold.”
“Hey, isn’t that Joe Mauer?”
“Hey, isn’t that Atmosphere?”
“Hey, isn’t that Dessa?”
“You going to board game night tonight?”
“Fuck it, it’s cold.”
“I don’t care if it’s 15 out, I’m biking to work.”
“God, I’m SO over Uptown.”
“God, I’m SO over Northeast.”
“What do you mean you won’t pick me up in North?”
“Fuck it, it’s cold.”
“Doesn’t Parasole own that place?”
“Doesn’t Mark Dayton own that place?”
“Doesn’t Garrison Keillor own that place?”
“Do you like Matt Smith or David Tennant better?”
“You going to the Doomtree show?”
“You going to the Bon Iver show?”
“You going to the Cloud Cult show?”
“Gonna be 40 tomorrow… let’s have a porch party.”
“Fuck it, it’s cold.”
“We’re number 1 for hipsters!”
“We’re number 1 for gays!”
“We’re number 1 for biking!”
“We’re number 1 for hotdish!”
“Why would I ever go to St. Paul?”
“Fucking Delta.”
“Fucking Best Buy.”
“Fucking Vikings.”
“Fucking Twins.”
“Y’know, I just really love having four seasons.”
“I swear to God this is my last winter. Next year I’m moving to Portland.”
“Didn’t I see that guy on OKCupid?”
“Didn’t I see that guy on FetLife?”
“Didn’t I see that guy on Grindr?”
“Can I have a Nordeast?”
“Can I have a Surly Bender?”
“Fuck it, it’s cold.”
From my friend mariadiaz:
Reading the blogs of 21 year old really attractive hipsters who ride bikes and pretend to eat a lot of food and drink ironic beverages and have that affected tone that everyone who was raised on facebook seems to have makes me feel so old and insecure and gross.
…me, I felt like an old fart this weekend when I actually admitted to myself that I’d rather live in Park Slope than Williamsburg.
The internet has given me so many more ways than I ever thought possible to convince myself that everyone else in the world is having more sex than I am.
After spending a couple of hours digging around YouTube yesterday, I posed a question to my friends on Google+ and Facebook about just what it is that makes Aspies (people with Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism) love The Price is Right so much. I got a variety of interesting responses, but I think I’ve been able to come up with my own explanation:
1) It’s a huuuuuuuuge body of work (6000+ episodes, more than all series of Star Trek, Doctor Who, The Simpsons, Buffy, and BSG combined). It’s also an extremely detail-oriented show with quite a lot of “moving parts.” Consequently, there’s a lot of stuff for Aspie brains to feast on: thousands of prizes and their prices, 80+ different pricing games (and the order in which those games are played), music cues, small set changes, hairstyle changes, even differences in the announcer’s spiel at the start of the show. Just like if we’re reading the phonebook or a street atlas, Aspies will never get bored classifying and cataloguing every detail of the show. All of this has led to one hell of a Price is Right fandom on the Internet, centered around golden-road.net, the unofficial fan forum. Many TPIR fans have uploaded their VHS recordings of old episodes (what young Aspie didn’t record TPIR every day to watch after coming home from school?), with the result that there are now upwards of 100 episodes from the Barker era available in their entirety and for free on YouTube. Bob Barker and some of TPIR’s staff have expressed admiration for the TPIR superfans at least since the early 1990s, calling them “Loyal Friends and True” and welcoming them to attend tapings. A couple of them have even gone on to work on the show. You can see the results of the devotion of the “Loyal Friends and True,” and their sheer Aspie-ness, in the “Price is Right Timeline” hosted over on golden-road.net (http://golden-road.net/faq/index.php/The_Price_Is_Right_Timeline). This 118,000 word document has chronicled every event and change in the history of the show, week by week. If you want to know exactly when the asterisks on the Showcase podiums changed color for the first time, you had better believe that information will be there.
2) In addition to being both vast and highly detailed, The Price is Right is also super-logical and highly routine. Its structure (six items up for bids, six pricing games, two Showcase Showdowns, one Showcase) hasn’t changed at all since 1975, and there have been only two hosts and four permanent announcers since the show’s debut in 1972. TPIR has a legendary consistency that feels very comfortable to the Aspie’s mind. Somewhat characteristically, TPIR fans have been highly resistant to any changes that the show has made, and have reacted with fervor to make Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” proud. Angry comments on golden-road.net have followed even the smallest changes on the show, especially when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker as host and producer Roger Dobkowitz (known to be very sympathetic to the hardcore fanbase) was fired in 2008. Numerous changes have followed during Drew’s tenure as host, nearly all of which have riled up the Loyal Friends and True. In nearly every show recap on golden-road.net, at least one fan complains about something minor on the show that he doesn’t like—this could be anything from Drew flubbing a pricing-game explanation to a slightly different font used on the Plinko board—and threatens to stop watching the show for good. (Of course, he’s back on the forum with another recap the very next day.) Sometimes the complaining can be insufferable, but it speaks to a very Aspie desire for the show not to change, for the routine to stay the same, and for The Price is Right to always be The Price is Right of our childhood.
…even though some of these things aren’t Americanisms at all. Deplane (no. 5) is used in both countries and predates commercial air travel. Scotch-Irish (no. 13) is a perfectly acceptable genealogical term that means something decidedly different than Scots-Irish. And “where’s it at?” is acceptable in a variety of English dialects both here and across the pond, since the “can’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule is a load of crap anyway.
British English speakers are apt to dismiss any lexical feature they don’t like as an Americanism. White speakers of American English often do the same thing, but blame it on African-Americans, on politicians they don’t like, or on regional dialect. It seems curmudgeonly and wrongheaded to oppose language change, but everyone does it, even me—and I studied sociolinguistics in undergrad and am a firm believer in the danger of language prescriptivism and of trying to inhibit languages from evolving. Personally, what gets me is the use of obfuscatory business-speak and psychobabble. Issues instead of problems. Core competencies instead of skills. Leverage instead of use, as a verb. Interface. Touch base. Solutions.
Even worse are the cutesy diminutives appearing everywhere: veggie, rezzie (reservation), sammie, EVOO, yummo/yummers, fro-yo, sesh (session), rela (relationship), adorbs, jeals/jelly (jealous), preggers, bestie, hubby, ciggie. You all sound like a bunch of children. Not everything has to be cute all the time.
…and let’s not forget about good ol’-fashioned hyperbole. Orgasmic, foodgasm, amazing, cooked to perfection, transcendent, abundant, special, beautiful. Love where you just intend to like or enjoy. Hate where something moderately irks you. You call it expressive; I call it gushy. It’s a variation on the “euphemism treadmill” by which toilet became bathroom became restroom. Mark my words, by the time I’m 50 it’s going to be called something even more circumlocutory. How are we going to express actual intensity if all of our “intense” words have been reappropriated for routine feelings of slight pleasure and discomfort?
Meanwhile, if you live in a place with distinctive regional dialect words (and everyone does, unless you live in one of those placeless places like Phoenix, McKinney, or Cape Coral that sprang up out of nowhere in the post-TV 20th century), keep using them and celebrating them, in the face of late capitalism’s intent to have us all speaking a bland flavorless mouth-mush. Minnesotans, don’t be embarrassed by hotdish, rubber binder, or gray duck. Bostonians, keep saying wicked and frappe and rotary over the protests of New Yorkers (who should themselves be proud of stoop and bodega and stand on line). And northern Californians, say hella, no matter how much it annoys your SoCal neighbors.
I was incredulous when I first heard the rumors, but it looks like they’re true: Steak ‘n Shake is coming to New York City, with a location in Midtown Manhattan right next door to the Ed Sullivan Theater. Just like when I heard the Neely’s Bar-B-Q Upper East Side opening announcement that I discussed five months ago, I should be ecstatic, but I’m not. It’s just more poaching of regional specialties to swell heads in the City of Big Egos. It was bad enough finding Garrett Popcorn on 34th Street just weeks after Macy’s muscled its way into Chicago and wiped out Marshall Field’s. What’s next, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard at Grand Central Station? Voodoo Doughnut at Columbus Circle? Something definitely gets lost along the way when my favorite regional treats become little more than brand names in the middle of Big Apple touristland.
Also, this announcement confirms what I’ve long thought to be the case: that Sardar Biglari, the 80s-style corporate raider who acquired Steak ‘n Shake in a hostile takeover in 2008, has turned this beloved Midwestern institution into a silly caricature. Biglari has closed locations and cut hours, especially in small towns across the Midwest where Steak ‘n Shake was the only non-fast-food establishment open past 10pm. At the same time, he’s been opening up locations that seem like little more than publicity stunts, including the one in NYC and one inside a Las Vegas casino. He took the headquarters out of the Midwest and plopped them down in San Antonio, Texas, a city that didn’t get its first SnS until earlier this year. He’s taken some of the choice off the menu (gone are the more interesting shake combinations, as well as the customizable dinner platters) and given in to gimmicky food trends by introducing “steak franks” (ordinary hot dogs), dry, flavorless miniburgers, and a ridiculous thick-cut bacon that overpowers the classic steakburger. He even ripped off Culver’s by adding a “Wisconsin Buttery Steakburger” to the menu. Soft drinks, which used to be served in real glassware, now come in hulking green plastic Coca-Cola-branded tumblers, while a junior-size milkshake comes in a humiliatingly cutesy plastic kiddie cup. To top it all off, a creepy, cultish picture of a smiling Biglari now greets you at the entrance to every restaurant, and there are rumors that the real china and table service will soon be dropped in favor of a “Five Guys”-type counter service format. Bah humbug.
Biglari’s clumsy retooling of Steak ‘n Shake, along with his opening of locations in such theme-parkish locations as Midtown Manhattan and Vegas, has diluted my once-warm memories of the place. For me, Steak ‘n Shake will always be a road-trip classic; it’s the bright light beckoning off the freeway around dinnertime, the feeling that hits after three states’ worth of cornfields and billboards for Indian casinos, when you’re fueled only by beef jerky and energy drink and your favorite playlist interspersed with NPR and you could probably go a hundred or so more miles before you collapse onto the bed at the Comfort Inn in Cape Girardeau. Sitting amongst the $15 margaritas, T-shirt vendors, and neck-craning tourists of Midtown Manhattan, it’s just… out of its element.
