Super Tuesday

I endorsed Biden, and he folded.

I leeeaned towards Edwards, and he folded.

"Stop!" they urged me. "Stop before you kill all the candidates."

Friends, today is election day in California.

I have voted.

I have connected the lines on my Democratic Party of Riverside County absentee ballot and staked my claim in the city's, the county's, the state's, and the country's future.

Enough of the suspense.

After much careful thought, soul searching, and deliberation, I have voted for . . .

. . .

. . .

"Yes." The number of roosters one may own in the city should be limited to seven.

Upon news of my vote, several prominent roosters have left the city.

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The Waiter Chronicles Survey: The Test

If you live in Riverside County and work in a job where you handle food, you have to get a Food Handler's Card. Getting this card means trekking down to the local environmental health office and paying $18 to take a 50 question multiple choice test. You're only allowed to miss 15 questions if you are to pass.

And if you are troubled, dear citizen, by the thought that some of the men and women handling the food you're eating are only about 70% clear on what will make you sick and what won't, let the sheer difficulty of that test put your fears to rest.

Eh-hem.

Test takers are given a short booklet to study before they start penciling in the bubbles. Feeling confident, I flipped through the first few pages of it, then declared myself ready to be examined. I was more ready than I knew.

If this test is a measurement of the need-to-know involved in food service, then it appears that little more is needed than a basic grasp of English and a healthy appreciation for sarcasm. Because, while a few of the questions pertain to details--the temperature at which food grows bacteria, for example--most of them are mind-numbingly ridiculous.

Here's an example (and I paraphrase):

Cockroaches and rodents like to feed
a. when the manager is not around
b. when they're stressed
c. when it is dark and quiet
d. on Mondays and Thursdays

(Duh. Everybody knows the answer is "a," with a postscript, "depending on the manager.")

It got so bad at one point that I actually looked around the room to see if other test takers were as amused as I was. I also suspected I might be the unwitting subject of a hidden camera prank. Nope. My colleagues were all furrowing their brows and engaging the exam with full seriousness.

You will be relieved to know that I am now the proud possessor of a Riverside County Food Handler's Card. That's right, when it comes ot roaches, mice, flies, and rotting food, I'm bonafide.

So here's the survey: submit your best multiple choice answer option "e" for the question about mice and rodents. The actual answers will be hard to beat, I know, but give it a shot. Because the best answer wins its author an Honorary Riverside County Food Handler's Certification.

May the Food Handler's Force be with you.

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The Waiter Chronicles (part 3)

Broken glass count: 2.

Ahhhh . . .

Today is a double shift, so I worked lunch and I have to go back in an hour and a half. Nothing broken, no humiliating mistakes today--so far.

The owner of this restaurant has me torn. One minute his Italian accent and machismo is hilarious and endearing, the next minute he's demeaning. I'm not worried about staying on his good side as an employee at all; he's an adult, and I'm adult, so we're peers. I'm just trying to figure out if spending this time in his employ is making me a better person or a bitter one (hat tip: Alan Wang).

I stopped at the Maxi Foods on my walk home just now for some tortilla chips. When I came out of the store there were cop cars speeding down the street toward my apartment. I got within a block from home, and the whole street was full of police cars, fire trucks, and an ambulance. There was a helicopter circling overheard and police officers with handguns drawn surrounding a house not 100 yards from my front door. Some kind of shooting had taken place, and the shooter was still in the house and armed.

I stared for a moment, but then was shaken out of it by the officer on the porch of the house next door. He was squatting with an M4 rifle and he said to me and the other lookers on, "You guys better get back a bit. We're not hiding here with big guns for nothing."

That was all I needed. I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way home. Don't they know I have another shift in less than two hours? I got to get off my feet, eat some chips and guacamole, check my email to see if that editor is going to publish my article, and watch an episode of 30 Rock.

Can somebody tell that helicopter to keep it down?

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The LA Times on Riverside's Free WiFi

The Press Enterprise wrote it on Monday. The Times wrote it on Wednesday. The actual launch was on Tuesday. Take your pick.

Here's the best part of the Times story, a quote from a downtown coffeeshop owner:

"It makes the city kind of cool and cutting-edge. I think a lot of other cities are going to be really jealous."

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City-Wide WiFi

The city of Riverside is launching a city-wide wireless internet network tomorrow. The network is run by AT&T, and has been under a "test" period in certain neighborhoods for several weeks now. The Press Enterprise has a piece about it here. Here's the money quote:

AT&T and its partner, MetroFi, will own and operate the Riverside network. MetroFi is supplying the free service, which is supported by advertising. AT and T is providing a higher-speed service for which customers must buy a $7.99 day pass or $15.99 weekly pass.

That the service is supported by advertising isn't good, and there's no way I'll ever pay $16 for a week's worth of it. Still, it's pretty cool.

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Finding Your Alternative News Weekly

Among other important facts one must collect upon arriving to live in a new locale, there is the matter of the alternative news weekly. These papers are a noxious blend of valuable community information and unadulterated smut. You can do a lot worse than the free alt weekly for finding the best cheap eats in your part of town or a solid live music venue. When I lived in Kansas City, The Pitch Weekly was my go-to-guy when I wanted to find some place off the beaten path.

And while the Pitch was not-too-recently added to entourage of alternative news weeklies owned by The New Times, resulting in a noticeable downturn in the smut and just as noticeable up tick in national advertising, there are no New Times publications in the Inland Empire. There's one in Los Angeles, but not here. Here it's Southland Publishing, Inc. that runs that show, including, most importantly, Inland Empire Weekly.

Yesterday we had our first exposure to IE weekly, and it didn't disappoint. Here is a return to the pre-conglomerate levels of half-page, half-naked ads for "personal" services. And here is the exhaustive, angry journalism so savored by those who, as they say, read it for the articles.

The cover story for this week, written by David Silva, is about the city of Riverside's use of Eminant Domain suits to acquire property for developers. It's a classic piece of advocacy journalism, delicious to read as a sort of guilty pleasure. The villain in the story is Riverside City Council member Dom Betro, the man practically marching low-income families out of their homes in the middle of the night to have a strip mall in place by morning. Here's the money quote:

First a quotation of Betro:

First of all, we have gone as far as we can possibly go to say that we in the city of Riverside will not take a privately owned residence under any circumstance. You need to separate that out, the private home, which is what most citizens are concerned about. We passed a resolution of necessity—we have about 20 properties that we passed a resolution of necessity on. We said we want this property; we want to enter into negotiations with the owners. If the negotiations fail, we'll go into court to get it. Every single one of those has sold. We have not had to go to court to enact an eminent domain decision. We do not have one property that has been taken as a result of legal court action.

Then Silva's editorial addition:

Respectfully to Mr. Betro—who at least had the courage to return our call—but that's absolute bullshit.

That, my friends, is what you read the alt weekly for. Silva goes on to rebut Betro's "Betrospeak," but in a manner that didn't really convince this newbie reader. But the value in the IE Weekly and papers like it is not its ability to coerce and persuade readers. It's the ability to put community issues on the map and to inform the citizenry of the players involved in a way that the dailies don't do as well.

For example, through the article I learned about a website dedicated to opposing the city's Eminent Domain efforts. The publisher of the site hosts protests around town in a gorilla costume. Now, when I see that spectacle, I'll know what's going on.

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Fireworks, Inland Empire Style

A couple of days ago our neighbor invited us out to the parking lot of our apartment complex for fireworks. We had to balance that against an earlier invitation, one from the ladies at Calvary church to go to their church parking lot. That's what people in Riverside do: gather in parking lots and watch the fireworks display atop Mount Rubidoux.

We decided to stay home and join our neighbors. Well, a few of our neighbors and about twenty relatives of a specific neighbor. Somebody made a bowl of popcorn to pass around, and people sat in their lawn chairs, "oohing" and "aahing" at the display. It was all very neighborly and almost, even, communal.

Then the display ended with a grand finale and people started setting off their own fireworks. In our parking lot. Feet from our car. Even now, preparing to go to bed, Black Cats and Bottle Rockets are popping and screeching outside our door.

As of 9:52 pm, though, no fires have been reported. We'll sleep with our fingers crossed.

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The Bottom of A Black, Black Hole

The guy I handed my application to was white and pot-bellied, not unlike the pigs his restaurant smokes. His grey hair stood in a ridiculous two-inch spike pattern, and his thick wire-rimmed glasses kept sliding down his nose from the sweat. It was 110 degrees in the Inland Empire today, and I had walked all over downtown Riverside, ducking into coffeeshops and restaurants with the standard inquiry.

But I'm done with all that now. I'm done because this manager, in his striped short-sleeved shirt, looked over my application and suggested I could start as a busser. He looked at the front and the back of his restaurant's poorly copied application, saw my masters degree, saw the salary of my last job, and suggested that I could work for him bussing tables.

I offered that I had waiter experience, grandly overstating what it is to work in Princeton Seminary's private dining room. "Yeah," he said. "But we're high volume." The six people presently patronizing his establishment cast no little doubt on that assertion, but to point that out would have been foolish. So I thanked him for his time and stepped outside.

I think I'm done with this. I'm still waiting to hear from a handful of places, but this is a very bad use of my time, and it's making me miserable.

Next plan of attack: get a copy of Writer's Market 2007 and start working on my freelance writing career.

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