Some friends and I played pub quiz tonight. Our team name: We’re Waving Right Now. Whenever the announcer listed off scores and read our team name, we waved.
Genius! I’m telling you: Interactive, innovative genius. That’s some out-of-the-box shit right there. We won third place, which means we got free Common Ground t-shirts. Because we’re innovative geniuses.
On Friday afternoon, some co-workers and I gathered at a dive bar called TC’s Lounge for after-work drinks. We’d been talking about doing regular Friday drinks for a while, and thought, considering its quietness and proximity to our office, TC’s Lounge would be the perfect regular spot. And it would be, if it weren’t run by an asshole.
We sat in the back, and moved two tables together to accomidate us all. We were there for two and a half hours, from 4 p.m. to 6:30, and ordered four pitchers of beer. We chatted. We laughed. We filled the jukebox. We were, at times, perhaps the only people giving that place business. And when we were done, we got up to leave and ran smack into a 60-something man with his arms crossed, who was short and stocky and bald and very upset.
“What, you’re going to leave the place like that?” he said, clearly pissed and somewhat yelling. “You don’t put things back where they belong?”
We looked behind us. There were the two tables, still next to each other, with some empty glasses and pitchers on them. Pretty standard sight for any bar. I’ve walked away from many such scenes. Tables get moved around in bars. That’s what they’re there for. So, uh: What’s the problem?
We asked: “What?”
“You put things back where you found them,” he ordered.
“Are you kidding?” one of my co-workers said.
“No,” he said. And he wasn’t.
Two of my co-workers went to move the tables apart. “Thank you,” the bald man said in the most condescending way those two words can be spoken, as if he were teaching us a lesson. And then again: “Thank you.”
I was standing next to the bald man at this point, and I thought he needed a lesson of his own. Something about running a smart business. Or not driving away customers. Or not being a dick. I settled on this: ”And you’re welcome for all the money we just spent on beer.”
“Don’t pull that shit on me!” he snapped. “Don’t you pull that shit on me! This is a family business.”
How I weep for his family.
He kept yelling at us, so we all just turned around and left. “We’ll be taking our business elsewhere,” one of my colleagues said as we walked out the door.
And we will. TC’s, don’t pull that shit on me.
I got waxed. I got plucked. I got lots of expensive haircuts. And then I did amazingly silly photo shoot (see above, one of the shots that didn’t make the final cut), all for a story I did about local men’s salons in this month’s Boston mag.
Update: Matty in the Morning brought me in to talk about men’s pampering. The audio is here.
(Spotted by my parents, who were just in Italy.)
This sign spotted at the theater I went to see The Incredible Hulk at tonight. (It beat the purple pants off the last one.)
In her latest On Language column — er, uh, in her The Word column, in which she actually cites William Safire as a source — Globe language scribe Jan Freeman posed an interesting question. I tried responding to her directly, but the e-mail bounced twice, so I’m giving up and just posting it here. First, Jan:
IF, WHETHER, OR NOT? Grammar Girl, the popular usage podcaster, offers “quick and dirty” usage advice, most of it reliably mainstream. But her recent treatment of whether and if has me stumped.
In my experience, the only real problem in the “whether/if” department is that overzealous editors sometimes delete an obligatory “or not.” But Grammar Girl sees another potential problem. She claims these sentences have different meanings:
Squiggly didn’t know whether Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday.
Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday.
I don’t see it, but I’d like to know if readers do (without the aid of Grammar Girl); please send explanations (or exclamations!) to freeman@globe.com.
To which I say: I’ve never heard of Grammar Girl, but I’m semi-siding with her on this one.
Squiggly didn’t know whether Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday. This seems to mean that Aardvark will arrive on either Friday or Saturday. The “whether” implies that these are the only two possible outcomes, and that one will come true.
Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday. This seems to mean that Aardvark may arrive on Friday or Saturday, or maybe Sunday, or Monday. The “if” suggests that “Friday or Saturday” is one, joint outcome — an arrival on one of these days — but in the context of the sentence, it’s unclear if Aardvark will arrive on one of those days. It’s equal to saying, “Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark will arrive.”
This is tricky, though, because I don’t think the whether/if split in meaning would be as clear if the sentence included only one potential outcome. For example:
Squiggly didn’t know whether Aardvark would arrive.
Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive.
Those two mean the same thing, because there’s only one outcome presented, and the suggestion from both “whether” and “if” is that this one outcome may not be achieved. Which, I suppose, means I don’t know whether or if I’m right at all.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep, or I’m grumpy from the record-breaking heat Boston’s about to endure, but I heard a story on NPR this morning that caused me to fire off an angry letter to the editor. It was this:
Larry Abramson’s story today, “School Devoted to Traditional Teaching, Values,” sounded deluded, and borderline delusional. He visited a public school in the heart of an evangelical community, and found, not to my surprise, that the community there has hijacked public funds and created a public school that functions as a church. In Abramson’s story, we hear a teacher promote abstinence, and we hear about students who drank alcohol—normal teenage behavior—being sent away for spiritual retreats. However, we never heard Abramson raise a question about this, or interview an independent advocate for the separation of church and state.
Abramson’s story was instead so fawning, and so full of praise, that he should be embarrassed for its naiveté. Without irony or examination, he used the phase “traditional values”—a phrase that evangelicals use to falsely portray social conservatives as something foundational—as a casual descriptor of the school. And although he mentioned that most students are from the evangelical community, he did not discuss how that community has clearly shaped the social and religious agenda of this school.
Classical Academy would have made for an interesting NPR story—but not because it’s supposedly churning out upstanding citizens. Abramson should have used it as part of an inquiry into how the constitutional and American walls between church and state crumble when evangelicals gain control of government money. These people have no business running a school; the result, a church disguised as a school, speaks for itself.
But I loved the ones I did get. This kid’s going places.
As I walked by a guy who was talking on his cellphone yesterday, I caught this fragment of conversation:
“What do you mean?”
Pause.
“What do I dislike? Um. Uh. Things I don’t like.”