Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 2)

For those of you just joining, I highly recommend a visit to Part 1 of this article just to catch up: Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 1)

In this piece, I want to break down the law's language in traditional George Carlin format, pointing out that this law pretty much would ban ALL new restaurants and not just fast-food restaurants - except for a few choice words and I'll explain how any fast-food franchise can easily duck under the law because of them.

Just as a reminder, here what the law considers to be fast-food restaurants:

"any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

Well, let's start at the beginning...

"which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises": Those are the only two places you CAN consume food! AT the place and NOT AT the place! I mean ANY food location nowadays, no matter how fancy and sit-down or greasy and take-it-and-leave, gives you the option to place an order for take-out. They understand you might not have the time to eat it THERE. Or you may just prefer to eat it NOT THERE, like at HOME. Also, you might as well just say "which dispenses food" - since food is generally dispensed for consumption. That's the general idea of food - that you consume it. I suppose this means a business that dispenses food for you to WEAR would be allowed to move in? So far, this ban applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except the food-as-clothing industry).

"and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu": ALL MENUS ARE LIMITED! You're not allowed to walk into a Burger King or a P.F. Chang's or a Fogo De Chao and order up a yak salad with ostrich chutney garnish. All menus are finite, limited by the abilities of the chef, the availability of ingredients, and the personal desire of the restaurant. They don't want to include endangered animals for you to eat - that's their prerogative. The McDonald's fry cook isn't skilled enough to POACH your eggs that go on your McMuffin - tough luck, pal. It's illegal to obtain and cook human flesh for consumption - don't expect to see the phone book as an addendum to your table's menu. So far, this ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except for hypothetical hypno-restaurants that can put patrons in hypnotic trances and convince them they've eaten anything on an unlimited menu while serving them Kraft Mac & Cheese).

"items prepared in advance": Well of course they're prepared in advance - when did you plan on preparing it? In the guy's stomach? All restaurants have to prepare food before they serve it to you. If you wanted to add the stipulation "prepared in advance of ordering", there's still prep work. Any good restaurant has to save time by pre-assembling items, or even marinating meats in anticipation that someone will order it that night, or using bread that has already been baked or pre-mixed dough even. I'm incredibly skeptical that there exists a single restaurant that can make every item on its menu FROM SCRATCH and not until the order is placed and it can still be served fast enough that the customer doesn't leave, possibly mumbling, "if I wanted incredibly slow food made from scratch, I'd be at home with my wife instead of at a fancy restaurant with my mistress..." Fact of the matter is, this ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (unless all they do is raw, uncooked, unprocessed food, and at that point you might as well be foraging in the woods for sustenance and saving yourself $20 per person).

"prepared or heated quickly": I don't think there's much to say about this. If you're not preparing or heating your food at a decent pace, you shouldn't qualify as a business. It's called "the danger zone" and it's a temperature range at which bacteria can grow and multiply and infect your food. The longer food goes from storage to preparation to your mouth, the more likely you are to get sick and sue for food poisoning. ALL FOOD BUSINESSES know that and do those things in a timely fashion. Also, "quickly" is too subjective of a term - any cooking that takes shorter time to cook than "leaving it in the sun, possibly on a metal pan" can be deemed to have been cooked "quickly" by the Amish. This ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except Brother Jebediah's Sun-Cooked Meat Emporium)

Now, we finally come to "no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers", which technically seem to separate the actual restaurants from the "fast-food joints" that the law is trying to stop from opening new locations. But don't worry, McDonald's and Burger Kings, they're both easy to step around.

"no table orders": Okay, so you have to be able to take orders at a table in order to qualify as a true "restaurant"? Note that the law doesn't even say anyone has to be SITTING at a table. The table area is just the place where all orders have to be taken in order to qualify. Rather, at least ONE order has to be taken from a table to simply NOT fall into the category of "no table orders". So how do you side-step this one?

Put a table over the counters. It doesn't matter if there's one long table placed over the entire counter, or a cheap IKEA table draped right on top of each counter segment with the cash register placed on top and your McJob cashier/waitstaff standing at the "table". You can even place a small table in front of the drive-thru speaker and one in front of the pay window and pick-up window. "Thank you, please drive to the next TABLE." Voila - you're taking table orders and you can move right in with a new location!

"food served in disposable wrapping or containers": Okay, I have to start off with the obvious jab that everything used to serve food is disposable (in the definition that everything is "able to be disposed of"). A restaurant can give you your burger on a plate, but a plate is just as disposable as a paper lining you'd find wrapped around a McDonald's cheeseburger. For the sake of argument, I will admit that one definition of "disposable" means "INTENDED to be disposed of". I guess McDonald's could just print pictures on all wrappers and containers and call them "collectible" and you can complete the set - that would insinuate that they should NOT be disposed of, but rather collected for some reason. You'd think that the real clencher here is that McDonald's food is wrapped or put into containers (while a restaurant will not wrap food it's serving to you), which means it's just fast-food that this clause affects. To be fair, any legit restaurant will let you place a to-go order and all of that food will be in disposable wrapping or containers! It doesn't say that food is ONLY served in disposable wrapping/containers, right? Which means that any restaurant willing to place a to-go order or let you take food home in a doggy-bag is going to be banned. Once more, this clause of the ban would apply to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except those snooty enough to deny you eating their food anywhere other than their restaurant).

So really, all it comes down to is whether or not you'll ever take a food order from a table. All other pieces of this "law" boil down to no food businesses at all being allowed to set up shop in South L.A. (other than those wacky/insane exceptions). Any fast-food place would be able to open up shop as long as they stick a table somewhere and let someone order from it, as I've suggested above. Frankly, the law suggests that you must hit ALL of those marks to qualify not being able to open a new location - which means that once you miss the mark on ANY (like taking orders from a table), you've got free reign in South L.A.!

Take that, Los Angeles City Council! Your law is useless and a waste of taxpayer money for all the debate and insanity that must have transpired before you foolishly signed this moratorium into effect.

Don't you agree? Have I missed anything? Can you understand how each piece of this law is vague and moronic? Was my homage to George Carlin acceptable?

Please Digg this article and join me in mocking the L.A. City Council!

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Prepregnancy

(This is in homage to George Carlin. This article was originally posted on November 29, 2006 and is being moved to this weblog.)

George Carlin had it right:

"That's another complaint of mine, too much use of this prefix pre.... It's all over the language now. pre this, pre that..... place the turkey in a preheated oven.... it's ridiculous... there are only two states an oven can possibly exist in, heated or unheated.... preheated is a meaningless fucking term... that's like pre-recorded, this program was pre-recorded, well of course it was pre-recorded, when else you gonna record it, afterwards? That’s the whole purpose of recording, to do it beforehand! Otherwise it doesn't really work does it? Pre-existing, pre-planning, pre-screening, you know what I tell these people? PRE-SUCK MY GENITAL SITUATION!"

The newest annoyance in the "Land of Pre-"? PREPREGNANCY.

While surfing through articles, I happened onto this one regarding the notion of prepregnancy and ways that women can take care of their prepregnant selves.

Just like the heated status of an oven, pregnancy is one of those boolean, dichotomous black-and-white situations: You can either be "pregnant" or "not pregnant". You don't get to be prepregnant and develop a whole new concept to scare the crap out of women.

The article itself tried to bring us some valid points, but then wound up going overboard and screwing everything up, like doing a backflip and making a midair bowel movement, completely covering itself in feces. For example, it tried to make a valid point by mentioning that by the time most women find out that they ARE pregnant - they've already done things that affect the fetus and the damage is already done. That's a completely fair point and worry, that by the time the pregnancy is discovered, it may already be too late.

And then it prepares for the backflip of going overboard by creating this new term, "prepregnancy", which apparently stands for every moment in a woman's life between menarche and menopause while the woman is not ACTUALLY pregnant. So now that we've got a loaded and vague term as the backflip, the article lets the feces fly as it gives some guidelines to follow to ensure a healthy prepregnancy, which supposedly means all throughout life while ovulating and not yet pregnant:

- "prepregnancy checkups that include screening for diabetes, H.I.V. and obesity; managing chronic medical conditions; reviewing medications that may harm a fetus; and making sure vaccinations are up to date"
- "they should abstain from smoking, alcohol and drugs"

So, their advice to the "prepregnant" is to not smoke, drink or do drugs - and to try to avoid diabetes, H.I.V. and obesity?

Yes, and it gets worse.

"It’s not like we have an injection we can give someone" to prepare her for pregnancy, said Dr. Hani Atrash, associate director for program development at the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the disease centers. "Some of the interventions, like weight management, need time to happen. You cannot quit smoking in one day."

You mean there's no instant fix for smoking or an instant way to lose weight? HOW CAN THIS BE? By the way, I think Dr. Hani Atrash should change her title to "associate director for common-sense development at the National Center of the Blatantly Obvious".

In an attempt to wipe off the feces that the article decided to spray all over itself, it tries to bring up another valid point that indeed half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned. Teengers especially, but many others are sexually active and do not PLAN to get pregnant. Mostly because they don't WANT to be pregnant. Which means that when a not-100% protection method winds up proving its not-100% quality - the pregnancy is considered to be "unplanned".

The article then stretches out to get ready for another backflip, and takes to the air as it suggests that EVERY young person create a "reproductive life plan". Well, apparently "don't get her pregnant" and "don't get pregnant" aren't acceptable plans now. So what kind of plan did the article have in mind? Well, it goes on and says: "rising obesity rates and the tendency to postpone motherhood mean far more women are overweight when they become pregnant and thus are more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes or prediabetes, which complicate pregnancy."

Their plan suggestion involves "not being overweight".

So now, women not only have the regular superficial worries about being overweight to worry about, but let's tack on an extra helping of worry with "but what happens if I get pregnant" to go with it. As if the worries of pregnancy, childbirth and parents weren't enough regarding the whole thing - now there's a bonus for being overweight all by itself.

Oh, and for those women who bother to take prepregnancy seriously from a medical standpoint, the article goes on to state: "While doctors have been recommending preconception care for many years, it has never really caught on. Only one in six health care providers said they had provided preconception care to patients, one study found, and most health plans do not cover it. Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor, often only covers women after they are pregnant."

WOMAN: "Hello, Mr. HMO Agent, I'd like to have more medical care and tests and doctor visits plase."
HMO AGENT: "Why are you requesting these additional services?"
WOMAN: "Well, I'm prepregnant. I could be pregnant sometime and I need to make sure to stay healthy while prepregnant."
HMO AGENT: "Wait, so you're not pregnant?"
WOMAN: "No, I'm prepregnant, but pregnancy could happen someday and I need extra medical attention before that happens."

*insert maniacal laughter and rejection from HMO AGENT*

Wow, who didn't see that one coming? Where's that doctor from the National Center of the Blatantly Obvious? Oh, apparently she's on a panel of experts, judging by my last feces-conjuring quote I plan on using from the article. It's regarding the role of men in the whole prepregnancy "reproductive life plan":

"(Men should be wary of exposures to toxins that cause birth defects and should avoid sexually transmitted diseases, experts say.)"

Wait, I'm NOT supposed to expose myself to toxins? I'm supposed to AVOID sexually-transmitted diseases?? WHY DIDN'T THE EXPERTS TELL ME SOONER???

"Waiter! I'd like to cancel my order of Lead Paint Chip and Syphillis Chow Mein! The experts say I shouldn't be eating that!"

Reading this article kind of made my day, giving me some laughs at the idiocy and about the sheer stupidity of humanity as a whole. I also shed many tears while reading this article - some out of afforementioned laughter, but just as many out of weeping for both the English language with another unplanned bastard "pre-" baby as well as the poor excuse for scare-tactics that seems to be targeting sexually-active dumbasses who possibly somehow don't know any better.

It's a sad day when such blatant common-sense can actually pass as a "new study" and "newsworthy findings". Humans must really suck if THESE are the kinds of warnings we need flying around in an attempt to EDUCATE people who somehow DON'T know this stuff already.

What do you think? Read more!

George Carlin Has Died

There are no words to describe this grief, even though he's constantly suggested at least seven of them...

http://www.etonline.com/news/2008/06/62841/index.html

ET breaks the news that comedian George Carlin has died from heart failure. The man who made famous the "seven words you can never say on television" passed away at 5:55 p.m. Sunday at Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica, his longtime publicist said. He was 71.

Carlin, who has had several heart attacks and a history of cardiac issues, went into the hospital this afternoon after complaining of heart problems.

Carlin has more than 20 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, numerous TV and movie roles, and three best-selling books to his credit. Last year, he celebrated his 50th year in show business, and he had just finished his last HBO special in March, "It's Bad for Ya."

"Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it stands. Thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as it is in heaven. Give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail. Crown thy good into temptation, but deliver us from the twilight. Amen."

"Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck."

We'll miss you, George. Read more!