The Backbencher

The Original Taste of Breakfast in Japan

Konichi-wa! I am writing to you from Sapporo, Japan. And I am a bit dizzy because I haven’t had much to eat.

Now, I don’t care how much you say you love Japanese food. It’s a daunting prospect when you wake up jet-lagged, having survived 30 hours of travel from Grand Forks, North Dakota, and it’s time for breakfast.

Just think for a second about everything you know of Japanese food, and now think about breakfast. Kind of confusing, isn’t it? And besides, I never said I was crazy about Japanese food. I’ve certainly enjoyed many things I’ve eaten in Japanese restaurants, but, to be honest, I’ve got a palate slightly more adventurous than that of my three-year-old son, Joe. And he’s never tried a strawberry.

So I wandered out of my hotel, found a small convenience store, and walked the aisles. The only food product I was able to conclusively identify was a bag of dried octopus. Believe me, even if you’ve never seen dried octopus packaged like beef jerky, it’s the kind of thing where, you know it when you see it. Rows of suction cups on tentacles is a dead giveaway. Everything else on the shelves was utterly mysterious. Now, at one point, I thought I had identified some pretzels, but the fact that they were hanging on the peg next to the dried octopus made me think that I really had no idea what I was looking at.

I overheard a German couple talking – and I don’t know much German – but I did hear the word “Frühstück” spoken with some degree of distress. “Frühstück” means “breakfast.” And doing that translation in my head is about the highest use to which I have put my two years of college German. (Kids, take Español.)

Finally, in a corner of the store, I ran into an old friend: Tony the Tiger. He was perched, broad-shouldered and smiling, on the label of a box of “Frosties.” The color illustration depicted food that certainly looked like Frosted Flakes. So I decided to give it a go.

But now I faced a new problem: milk. After some searching, I found a refrigerated carton bearing a picture of cows in a pasture. Where I come from, that is a clear indication of something that is dairy-themed. And while almost all of the labeling was in Japanese, it did say, in English, in small little letters:

The original taste of milk.

Close enough. I snagged a carton and headed for the checkout.

I’ll note that one thing many travelers struggle with is understanding the value of foreign currency. The exchange rate in Japan is currently one yen to 0.009316 U.S. dollars. With ratios like this, it’s impossible to calculate the exact cost of items on the fly. So you have to make do with estimating. For me, the easiest, if not most accurate method of estimating, is to assume that one yen equals one dollar. The resulting figures make it seem like prices in Japan are astronomically high, but it also makes me feel insanely rich.

Walking out of the store I thought to myself: Did I just drop 475 big ones on a box of Frosted Flakes? Oh yeah, I did!

Back in my hotel room, I selected a small cup intended to hold afternoon tea, and poured in some Frosties. Then I opened the carton and sniffed the white liquid inside. It smelled like seafood.

Okay, I freaked out for a second. But then I remembered that the Japanese are passionately careful in their preparation and handling of seafood. So I took the fishy smell as an indicator of high quality, and I filled up the bowl.

Hmmm. I needed a spoon. The closest I could come on a moment's notice was the complimentary toothbrush the hotel was kind enough to provide me with. Not only did I get a belly full of delicious cereal, but my teeth felt refreshingly clean afterward.

And to think my mom said frosted breakfast cereals would give me cavities!

Bowling for Lawyers

Following up on last week’s post about Ohio’s absurd liquor laws, let me discuss some alcoholic beverage law issues from a perennial top performer in the silly state category, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I originally wrote about this in a newspaper column back when I was attending law school in 1998.

It was in that year that I found myself at Lanes-&-Games, a bowling establishment in Cambridge, Mass. I was enjoying a cold Bud Light and trying to show off my bowling prowess to classmates, silently weighing my chances of becoming a successful lawyer without learning golf.

A Lanes-&-Games employee broke my reverie by tapping me on the shoulder.

“You’re going to have to stay on the carpeted area with that,” he said, motioning to my Bud Light.

“What?” It sure didn’t sound like anything out of the bowling courtesy handbook – a book I nearly memorized as a high-school sophomore trying to dodge honest PE credit.

“State law,” he said solemnly, and then he was off to tell some more people to keep their beers off the wood.

Can’t drink beer in the bowling-alley area? Only over the carpet? How could that make any sense?

My finely tuned lawyer brain did the analysis. Every law is supposed to have a “rational basis.” So what was at work here?

Drunk people with 16-pound bowling balls can always be slightly dangerous. So could that be the justification? Well, it couldn’t be that, because making you sip your beer a few feet over wouldn’t stop that.

Hmmm. Maybe state-legislators were worried about people slipping on spilled beer as they are concentrating on their approach. But wait, it remained okay to drink non-alcoholic beverages over the wood. So it couldn’t be that either.

Having mulled it over, I figured the bowling-alley staffer really didn’t know what he was talking about. It couldn’t be a state law.

I mean, no legislature could be that wacky.

Right?

Then I looked it up:

M.G.L.A. 138 § 16D: SALE OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IN BOWLING ALLEYS.

No license for the sale of alcoholic beverages shall be granted for that portion of any building or premises licensed for the purpose of bowling, or any game similar thereto regardless of its designation.

Wow. Well, maybe this was a remnant of the aftermath of prohibition. I looked to see what year the law was added.

1962.

More like the aftermath of Sputnik.

Notice the law’s ingenious drafting. The “regardless of its designation” clause would deftly defeat a clever lawyer-crafted end-around of calling the game “schmowling.”

Now, many of you may be saying to yourselves, “What about my constitutionally protected right to bowl?”

That’s an excellent question. And, believe it or not, the Commonwealth’s highest court addressed that issue.

In Marchesi v. Selectmen of Winchester, 312 Mass. 28, 30, 42 N.E.2d 817 (1942), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court observed:

It has long been recognized in this Commonwealth that the keeping of premises for a public bowling alley may be forbidden or permitted under such supervision and control as the Legislature deems appropriate and necessary to protect the public safety, health and morals, so that such a place will not become a source of annoyance and disturbance to the public or a menace to the peace and good order of a community.

Now here’s the really exciting part. After I made the above observations in my law school’s student newspaper, the Massachusetts legislature repealed the law! They took it off the books in 2000.

So I’m going to go ahead and claim credit for that one. Maybe, a couple of years from now, we’ll find out that Ohio couldn’t bear the weight of my sarcasm, and they too will clean up their act.

In the meantime, I hope you Massachusetts readers will go to a nearby bowling center, drink a beer or other alcoholic beverage seated right there at the scoring table, and toast your intrepid blogger for making a positive change in our society.

One of these days I will tell you the sad tale of how I am the unrecognized inventor of street luge.

Avoiding the Tragedy of Low Prices on Beer

One of the great benefits of living in a federal system with 50 sovereign states is that, compared to a normal country, we're 50 times as likely to create really silly laws.

I recently captured these photos of a Marathon service station in west central Ohio selling “beer and wine at state minimum prices.”

Now I’m sorry, but that is just funny. Of all the evils to protect people from, the Ohio legislature, in their infinite wisdom, has seen fit to protect the citizens of the Buckeye State from getting too much of a bargain on beer.

God forbid. Maybe they should outlaw rainbows and cute, fuzzy bunnies while they're at it.

Let me make a clarifying observation: The Ohio legislature is not protecting people from cheap beer. (Natural Light, for instance, is still legal.) They are protecting people from paying cheap prices for beer.

You can see exactly how this plays out in the next two pictures. The minimum prices are different for different beers. A “fancy” beer, Miller Genuine Draft, has a minimum price of $5.19 for a six-pack of bottles. The state allows a longneck six-pack of Busch, however, to be sold for $4.19.

That’s right, the state of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom, forces people to pay more for MGD than for Busch. I’d love to have been there during the committee hearings.

“Esteemed members of the legislature, please put down your tasters. All in favor of making Ohioans pay a buck less for Busch, please signify by stumbling over a lobbyist.”

I’d have taken more photos, but I was stopped by the store clerk. She said the owner of the store, watching on closed-circuit television, was upset. Why? He was, she said – and this is best part – worried that I might be from a competitor store. Huh? What’s a competitor going to do with that information? Undercut his prices??

The law, Ohio Administrative Code 4301:1-1-72, that dictates minimum prices on beer has a preamble explaining its purpose. One aim is to prevent sales that would “improperly stimulate purchase and consumption” of beer.

Oh, okay. That makes sense. So if a “good” beer, like Budweiser Select, were sold for $3.49 per six-pack of 16-ounce cans, then people would go crazy and drink too much. But it’s okay to charge that for Milwaukee’s Best Ice, since, presumably, the taste of “the Beast” serves as its own limit on consumption.

Another purpose of the law is to “eliminate discriminatory sales practices that threaten the survival of wholesale distributors”. That’s a good point. As we all know, a lack of state-minimum prices on beer has led to the tragic loss of beer distribution in most of the rest of the United States.

Now, some of you may think that the real purpose of the law is to eliminate competition on the basis of price. Not so. The law says that part of its purpose is to “preserve orderly competition”.

If we could only put the high-minded geniuses of the Ohio legislature in charge of college sports, we might get more orderly competition in football – for instance, a rule that mandates all teams named “Ohio State Buckeyes” start national championship games with an automatic extra 30 points. That way we could prevent “disorderly” results such as Ohio State losing in back-to-back years.

No post today

No post today, as I'm on the road, and it's hard to type and drive. Regular post coming on Monday, July 14, 2008.