The Backbencher

Spree-fueled Spree Spree Leaves Dad Tasteless

Menards home improvement store
(Photo by Huw Williams.)

My wife and kids are away. I've been staying busy and eating right. At Menards, I bought a movie-theater-sized box of Spree – it was only $1. I was excited about this, because previously, I'd only seen Spree come in comparatively small rolls.

Last night, watching television, I consumed the whole box - or at least everything that was in it save the few Spree I found on the floor this morning that must have missed my mouth.

Now I know: Spree should not be eaten in such a large quantity in such a small amount of time. 

This morning, I woke up with much of my tongue apparently destroyed. I grabbed a Diet Coke only to discover, to my disgust, that it tasted like a diet beverage – you know, one from back in the 1970s, before the advent of modern scientific food additives. I can only conclude that all of my tonguebuds in charge of tasting leading-edge artificial sweeteners have now been wiped out. 

I don't know how long it will be before I am able to properly perceive processed foods. It may be a while. Meanwhile, all I can feel over vast areas of my tongue is a slight tinkling pain sensation.

Clearly, while my family is away, I need to do a better job shopping for food at Menards.

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.

Talkin' Sports Over Some Law-Firm Beers

In my post last week, I explained how, as a law-firm associate, I was assailed every year in my annual review for the “complicated color system” of tape flags that I used in a document review during my first year as an associate. te.

You know what’s particularly unfair about being singled out for that? Lawyers are always making things more complicated than necessary. It’s part of the culture.

For instance, one large L.A. law firm I know uses important-sounding covert-government-style abbreviations for everything, especially the firm committees. The policy committee, and this is completely true, is “POLCOM.” The litigation steering committee is "LITCOM." And the committee for food and beverage, no joke, is called “EDPOT,” for “edibles and potables.”

Hearing a person I know from this law firm talk about firm governance is like listening to a Tom Clancy book-on-tape. That is, to borrow some book-jacket language, it is “a chillingly authentic heart-pounding supercharged thrill-ride!” When this lawyer talks, it is as if YOU ARE THERE, right in the room where the decisions are being made …

And then SECPOLCOM entered the room, pointing to the CRT, indicating the EDPOT scenarios. “I recommend positioning our Amstel Lights to the left of the Heinekens.”

You may have noticed that Amstel Lights and Heinekens are a universal constant at law firms. From New York to Los Angeles, and every law firm in between, when it’s time to serve beer, it’s Heinekens and Amstel Lights. You know I am right. Oh, firms like to pretend they are different from one another, but they all answer the beer question the same way.

Why is it always Heinekens and Amstel Lights? I’ll tell you why — it’s because they are the safe beers. They taste like domestics, but they are just foreign enough to say, “We’re sophisticated.”

The truth hurts, I know. But lawyers are the most risk averse of professionals. No law firm would dare serve Miller Lite. Casual Fridays caused enough of an uproar. But serving a Budweiser, that'll never happen.

The law itself is a risk-averse profession. When times are good, or when times are bad, people need lawyers. It’s a safe bet, career wise.

That’s why lawyers like to talk about sports. An interest in sports is a safe bet. It shows you are culturally connected to the mainstream. But since George F. Will wrote a book about baseball, it’s not inconsistent with being a discerning high-brow.

Lawyers love to burst out with observations such as, “They’re playing Warner too close to the net to make the option effective against that passing defense, especially when you factor in the infield-fly rule.”

This caused me considerable stress during my law-firm days. I love sports, but I was prone, for example, to forgo watching SportsCenter and keeping track of player statistics when my own hours-per-night sleep stat was hitting 2.5, 2.6 — or thereabouts.

Now sure, sleep’s not that much fun when you spend the whole time having nightmares in which you are frantically trying to figure out what to do with a document that has a blue tape flag in the upper right corner. But at least some sleep is necessary, otherwise you’re liable to burst into a meeting saying, “I like pudding!”

And if you do that, you’d sure as heck better like pudding alright. Because that’s what you’ll be talking about with the REVCOM every year for the next several years. Don’t ask how I know.…