Miscellaneous Debris – Archive

I have never been a waiter, I must confess. Never had a job at a restaurant or café or anything of the sort. But still, knowing myself, I tend to have a good memory and head for numbers. If someone told me “Take this to table #9”, I would probably know what they meant within […]

Saturday night at the New Orleans bar in downtown Seattle. The Music: A quintagenarian quintet playing JJ Cale, Sonny Rollins and various electric blues.The Beer: Good local brews at a decent price.The Place: A small and narrow bar with the stage near the entrance. Everyone quickly getting up to dance to Mustang Sally. Friendly atmosphere.The […]

I don’t know what it is about markets that appeal so much. The only words that come to mind come off awfully pretentious. Exuberant comes to mind, and lively, and organic and dynamic and then my mind just starts looking for rhymes and alliterations and I should just stop that line of reasoning. The Granville Island […]

A Chinese man, hardly any English to his name, took the bunk I originally confiscated on the flimsy claim that he was, in fact, there first. Above him, a forty-ish man in semi-ragged suits and red trousers spends his time, wearing a lapel pin passed in his family from his great-great-great-great-uncle, an aide to General […]

In Boston, we could smell it coming from street-level apartments, wafting through the windows. In Montreal, where it’s legal for medicinal purposes, you could smell it on the streets of the trendy Latin Quarter. It’s illegal to smoke anything indoors these days, but as long as you’re standing outside the pub, you might as well […]

(Sorry for the delay. Never got around to this one) In Montreal, on every fair-weathered Sunday, people congregate at the foot of Mount Royal (and isn’t it strange to have that in English, in Montreal of all places?) for the Tam Tam. As the name implies, much drumming is involved. People come around with their […]

בשלב מסוים, דברים מאבדים את המשמעות שלהם כמסומן והם נהיים לחלוטין מסמן. בשלב הזה הוא כבר קיבל קיום עצמאי משלו, ויכול כבר להיות מסומן ע”י מסמן חדש לחלוטין.  

(This entry was originally written as a comment in someone else’s blog. This may explain stylistic inconsistencies as I try to clean it up, stretch it out and generally make it more palatable than the food it describes) The following statement will shock and surprise no-one: Cheap restaurant food is extremely greasy. Seriously, if you […]