h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Jake,

In response to my challenge, my girlfriend was in fact able to find Mallomars--boxes and boxes of Mallomars. We are currently enjoying them as always, but their appearance in the store plagues me with questions. I know that Nabisco stops producing them in March, which means that the Mallomars we are currently eating are probably about four months old. I'm okay with this. But why are they still for sale? Do stores freeze or otherwise preserve Mallomars and then ration them out so they can be sold to loyal patrons throughout the year? Or are Mallomars just unpopular at the store we go to? What's going on here?

Brian

Hello,

Sorry for my pause in messages. I was out of town in Boston at a thoroughly miserable graduation (Tufts) that showed every single way not to run a commencement. At least, I'm not the one who paid for several years of education only for that final insult.

I actually found some Mallomars at a bodega up the street. It is rather puzzling though, since it does suggest they're several months old. I think it's not so much the stores rationing them, but mainly a sign of mallomars not being the bomb at your local store. Or perhaps they've discovered some unholy way of making them year round and are testing on a few New Yorkers for any adverse side-effects. Sprouted any new ears or developed visions?

Yours,
Jake

Jake,

How did you end up at a graduation? Friends? Family? Or do you have no idea how you ended up there?

Back when I was in high school, I used to work at Cornell's graduation, messing around with the robes. This involved sorting and folding them all, then putting them into carts, preparing them to be sent off and hopefully washed for next year's graduating class. Cornell is a big school though, so this was thousands of robes. Kind of interesting. At the time, it seemed kind of surreal that the graduates would just toss off their robes and go have a good time while a bunch of poor high school kids shlepped around with robes. Of course, when it came my time to graduate, the thought was barely in my head, being the selfish git that I am.

In retrospect, however, it was interesting to see a few different graduations. Cornell's is a monstrous, impersonal affair. It takes place in a 20,000-seater football stadium. The undergrads, at least one year I saw, didn't even get to walk across the stage, on the grounds that it would take too long. The president just deemed them graduated, which seems super-chintzy enough, but then he insisted on finishing every commencement with that "may the road rise to meet you" Irish prayer ballyhoo--Cornell president Frank Rhodes, whose bid for some sort of Irish legitimacy there is tenuous at best.

About the Mallomars, my guess is that they're not popular at the store we shop at. Being where it is on 96th and Lex, the store gets an interesting mix of people: the folks from the southernmost reaches of Spanish Harlem, the yuppies who live in the high-rise apartment buildings near the river, the hospital-affiliated people (a.k.a. me), and the rich old people. I think for various reasons each of these groups rejects Mallomars as a snack.

Speaking of the grocery store, though, this brings me to one of my latest pet peeves. As you could probably guess, the grocery store is jam-packed with things and has extremely narrow aisles, which means that people are knocking things off the shelves all the time with their baskets and carts. I have noticed that those rich old people with their inflated sense of propriety not only cause the greatest landslides, and are most likely to do so, but are also the ones least likely to pick up after themselves--leaving it instead to the Puerto Rican workers at the store to do it, who are harried enough as it is. This has started to annoy me somewhat. One of these days, I plan to be that weird guy that confronts a person as he tries to sneak away: "Hey you. Yeah, I saw you knock over the orange display. Are you just going to leave that for someone else to clean, or do you feel like acting like an adult?" Grrrr.

Brian

Hello,

I'm not sure how I wound up at a graduation, especially since it seems I was chosen to give the commencement address... it's all such a blur...

Seriously though, my girlfriend's brother was graduating, so we went up there. And I learned that my alma mater's graduation does a lot of things right that I did not appreciate at the time. We all got our diplomas in person. It's possible for a smaller school, but you have to do it the right way (which Tufts did not do): force people to show up for checkin on time, line them up in alphabetical order, and don't let them leave to amble around during the ceremony. It may seem harsh, but it means everybody can know exactly when you are going to graduate and they can actually give you a diploma at the time since they know exactly where you're supposed to be. The biggest problem that Tufts had is that they held it in their Quad. It's rectangular and slopes downward. The Tufts solution: put the stage at the top of the hill and facing only towards the top part of the rectangle (where you mostly sit the graduates). So most people find themselves sitting in a position where they have no real view of anything going on (they can see the stage from the side but from way downhill if lucky). MIT tries to alleviate this by having two giant TVs showing the action, but Tufts couldn't be bothered. Bathrooms were crowded and hard to find. The ceremony was sloppy and chaotic. Oh, it was on a Sunday for some reason too.

Ah well, all graduations are pretty awful. They bring out the worse in people. Also, graduation season is pretty much gouging season in Boston (did I mention BU had its graduation the same day). So I finally drove home (in a rented car) and got to curse at cabbies. A long annoying weekend.

I think you could yell at the rich types, since I hate anybody who expects "the help" to pick up after them. And at any posh shinding, I invariably find "the help" far more interesting to talk to than the other guests. Of course, you've got to avoid the slippery slope of becoming one of the old ladies who lectures me when I have the ice cream freezer open a microsecond too long.

Oh, I think I'm about to finish up the entry on Choco Marshmallow Biscuits I wrote: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A545258 Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Yours,
Jake

Your entry looks good, though you left a "t" out of Chattanooga. I know, I know, it's hard to imagine a word other than Mississippi having so many repeating letters, but that's the way the, er, cookie crumbles.

Speaking of the grocery store, I feel the same way about it as you do about the posh parties. The guys doing the shelving and moving things around seem like the most interesting bunch. The people who run it--for the record, they are Asian and I'm tempted to say Korean, though that's not based on anything in particular--appear to be a family and seem kind of stressed out most of the time, except for the lackadaisical guy who runs the deli section. The cashiers--mostly Spanish Harlem women--tend to talk to each other a lot. The shelving and moving guys, on the other hand, are all over the place. They do their job, of course, but then also seem to always be playing games of some kind. I have caught two of them wrestling in the canned foods aisle; another time I'm sure they were playing tag throughout the store. But my favorite was a game they had with the conveyor belt that brings food down from the storage facility above the ceiling. They revved the thing up as fast as it would go, and the object, as far as I could make out, was to stay on the conveyor belt as long as you could while trying to throw your buddies off it, sort of like King of the Hill. At one point there were three of them on there, just going nuts. It was fantastic.

Wow,

It sounds like working at a grocery store can be more fun than I've been led to believe by such movies as "Repo Man" or such. Or at least it's fun late at night when the soulless managers aren't around. I guess the employees at my grocery store are having some fun for themselves too, although the store is going through a strange 90 degree internal rotation under new management (things and whole shelves and registers keep moving everytime I'm there. It's very surreal.)

Yours,
Jake

Moving shelves. You're right. It's almost Kafkaesque--like sleeping with Woody Allen.

Sorry about the delay in answering. I went on vacation last week to Calfornia. My girlfriend (Stephanie) and I went with her parents to Yosemite. What a fantastic corner of the world that is. I can see why Ansel Adams took so many pictures of it. And it reminded me why I think it's good to get out of a city now and again (though I'm a country mouse at heart, so the following cockamamy (sp?) theory should be taken about as seriously as Weird Al Yankovic).

I think being in cities gives everyone in them (myself included) a false sense of the importance of their own lives and the lives of humans. It's not that everything around is man-made, and it's not the lack of obvious nature, either. It's that everything is temporary. If you live in a neighborhood for twenty years, you'll see new buildings go up and old buildings go down; you'll see people move in and people move out. Even buildings that seem like permanent fixtures don't really feel that way. Sure, the Empire State Building's been around for a while, but the old Penn Station is gone. It makes a difference that most of the old things around are about as old as your grandmother--and the older things, you can bet, have been tampered with and modified.

Being in the country--and spectacular country only underlines this point--you can't quite escape the fact that this landscape is far, far older than you are, than anyone is, than... well, you get the idea. It's as a friend of mine said when he lived on the Olympic Peninsula for a while: "some parts of it look like you're looking into a time before people ever arrived, or long after they left." There's something awesome and humbling about standing on the edge of a cliff that will remain pretty much the same all through your life, and will still be there, most likely, centuries after you're gone. It's hard to feel important next to something like that; and God knows lots of New Yorkers could use a little humility.

Sorry to get all John Muir/New Agey on you there. Won't happen again.

Hello,

Sounds nice. Funnily enough, I'm going to Northern California on vacation in two weeks, mainly the coast just north of Eureka, CA. I don't think I'll be making it to Yosemite (California's a big state), but I'll be deep in Redwood Country. And it will be very nice to get away from people, even though I'll be wandering around the home of Ewoks it seems.

I agree that nature is rather awe-inspiring. We tend to just not comprehend the large time scales the rest of the universe goes by, especially here in America, where we tend to demolish our history. As Eddie Izzard said, "We've restored this hotel to what it looked like over 50 years ago... No! Surely not! Nobody was alive back then!" (Okay, I guess my delivery loses something). You can get a similar shock in Europe sometimes in old cities. In London, I drank in a place that's been a pub for longer than the US has been a country. That's rather freaky too, although it's not on the same timescale as geology.

Yours,
Jake

Hello,

I'm leaving tomorrow for the wilds of Northern California. I'll let you know how it goes, but I'm sure it will be awe-inspiring beautiful, perhaps even more than the I'm-slightly-lost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-in-the-Appalachian-mountains way I'm used to. On a related note, the new Lord of the Rings trailer makes New Zealand look incredibly gorgeous. In any case, it will be good to leave this city behind for a while, especially since my apartment building failed some sort of fire inspection last night and they've shut off the gas and hot water. I do so very much love old Tenement buildings.

I was informed by my parents that one of the themes of the annual folk life festival that's held on the Smithsonian Mall this year is New York State (and City). Not only did they get to walk inside of a water tower, but they proudly informed me they ate a bialy. It's nice to see how the indoctrination of the rest of the country is proceeding according to plan.

Two fun words I've learned recently
omphaloskepsis - the art of contemplating one's own navel
deipnosophist - someone skilled at dinner table conversation
for some reason, both make me think of people here in New Yawk.

Take care and try not to roast in the heat, and have fun at more gigs I am also unable to attend (I'll be on the left coast). I imagine you're almost at the point of wondering if I'm actually a real person or just a brain in a vat or computer program running somewhere.

Yours,
Jake

Jake,

Actually, at one point I had this image of you immobilized in a chair by metal restraints, hooked up to an IV and catheter, your arms positioned just so you could type on a keyboard bolted to a frame suspended from the ceiling. Of course, if you're going on vacation to Northern California, I guess I must be slightly off.

Have fun on vacation! Let me know how things are when you get back.

Brian

Actually, that's just about it. Except that instead of a keyboard (having my arms free is a danger to the attendents), I have to use a pencil I've gripped between my teeth. I've gotten rather good at pecking the answers out. And I'm not going to California, it's all just part of the pathological lying I engage in to explain why I'm not really often available for such things. Or so you could believe.

Nah, I'm really going tomorrow. See you around.

Oh yeah, by the way--I agree completely about the trailer to the Lord of the Rings. My girlfriend Steph has actually been to New Zealand, and confirms that it is indeed as pretty as the trailer makes it out to be.

We saw the latest trailer for LOTR because we went to see A.I. this weekend. Weird movie. The plot can be neatly divided into three parts, which almost have to be judged separately from one another. The first and second parts are really, really good; the third part is... well, I don't want to sound unkind, but it was so absurd to me, and yet begging so much to be taken seriously, that laughing at it would have been like laughing at a kid who shows you something he has painted. It was just silly--and totally off from the other two parts, which were equally disjointed but way cooler. I have the feeling that Kubrick's story was essentially the first two parts, and the third part was all Speilberg--but that's just hypothesis. Anyway.

Hello,

I too saw AI this last weekend (as well as the new Tom Tykwer pic. I watch a lot of movies), and I'm in total agreement. My advice to the uninitiated was to run for the exits as soon as they heard the phrase "2000 years later" so as to save themself the sheer agony of Spielberg's profound insecurity about ending a picture on a downer note. As I commented to my friends at the time, Spielberg's worried as much about being a real director as the little kid wanted to be a boy. Otherwise, the first two thirds of the movie were good, but that kid always gives me the creeps because he actually is a little robot. I really liked Jude Law and felt the middle part was the best because he was in it (and future movies are boring if they only take place in somebody's apartment). And of course, the Teddy bear was incredibly cute and somewhat funny.

Now, I'm off to write a gripping Sci-fi epic that only takes place within the confines of someone's apartment. That would throw people for a loop.

Yours,
Jake

Steph and I agree with you: the movie should have ended with the kid and the bear trapped in the little ship there, pinned under the Wonder Wheel, with the headlights on the Fairy; and if Spielberg really wanted to tack on some happy note at the end, maybe he could have put some hallucinatory claptrap at the end where we see that the robot, desires frustrated, has learned to dream or some other such nonsense. We agreed that as soon we heard the voiceover, we should have left the theater.

Obviously, Spielberg should have called the three of us before decided how to end his movie.

How was "The Princess and the Warrior?"

Hello,

Yeah, that was the agreement among us and most of the groaning audience in the theater. It's true he could've made it cheerier without all that crap by just having the robot dream as the lights faded, etc. But I think he's too alien-happy (although I realize they were probably just future robots who just didn't know people) to take that route. But I'm glad at least they didn't zap him with a human-making ray as I was really starting to fear. And I'm really amazed at how well they built the World Trade Center. Never mind the bombing, those towers survived the ocean AND a global ice age. Now, that's impressive.

The Princess and the Warrior was actually pretty good, but I'm a sucker for his work. He doesn't really use very complex dialogue (I was able to keep up with my rudimentary german without reading many of the subtitles), but he does make for some interesting scenarios, shots, and emotional nuances. Yes, he's characters aren't the most rational (Franka Potente becomes obsessed with this guy who saves her from an accident), but who is really? I liked it, even the ending which some critics disliked. But I also would've liked anything decent to wash the taste of that last third of AI out of my mind. Uh oh, we have the makings of a regular movie review column here. But it's a bit of a dry spell for me until Ghost World and Hedwig come out.

Yours,
Jake

One more thing, did you have to resist the urge to shout "They did it! They finally did it! Damn you all to hell!" (ala the original Planet of the Apes) when you saw the World Trade Center submerged in water? Or maybe that was just me...

Actually, a part of me was digging on the whole submerged-Manhattan shtick because it reminded me of those great movies like Hell Comes to Frogtown or Escape from New York--you know, those post-apocalyptic movies that involve a Forbidden Zone of some kind ("No Humans Allowed!"). Except that, in this case, someone had poured millions of dollars into it. I love it when people do that.

I'll check out The Princess and the Warrior. I haven't seen Winter Sleepers, but like the rest of the planet, I did see Run Lola Run and thought it was fantastic. It's probably one of my favorite movies, actually, and for the kinds of reasons that make me want to see more of his stuff. Any director with the guts to put Charles Ives's music in a movie (and then put a techno beat under it--something Ives would have approved of) is okay by me. Though part of me is annoyed because, in the Greatest Movie Ever Made (which I will write and direct for the paltry sum of four billion dollars), "The Unanswered Question" figures heavily in the soundtrack. Oh well.

Steph and I are really psyched to see Hedwig. We saw a trailer for that (before "With a Friend Like Harry..." which I think is overrated) that had us in stitches. But really, I just want to see a really good movie in the theater sometime soon. I don't want current Hollywood to force me to rent my Casablanca-Dead Alive double feature all over again.

Well, I'm shocked you've actually seen "Hell Comes to Frogtown." And I thought I was the only one to have scoped out some of these trashy examples of Rowdy Roddy Piper's acting abilities. Of course, "They Live" is a better example of the normally bekilted one's manly style. And I'll admit it's inspired to mix Casablanca and Dead Alive in a feature screening (stranger than the Evil Dead, Army of Darkness marathons we used to do every Ash Wednesday). In any case, it sounds like you have the esoteric tastes to make you one of Kim's favorite customers. Next, you'll be renting things like "Straight to Hell", "Destroy All Monsters", or the "Killer Shrews" from the weirder shelves.

I adore "Run Lola Run" myself, but I will warn you that the new film is a lot quieter (after all, she was running almost the entire damn time in the first), but it's got the old team together (actors, director, soundtrack) so it's another good effort. And yes, I want to see Hedwig. I actually saw the off-off-Broadway show twice (on cheap seats), so I'm interested to see how well they translate it to the big screen. And it's nice to see the whole rock edifice skewered every once in a while.

There's also something silly about a robot manufacturer being based in a robot-free zone (kinda like a nuclear reactor in the heart of nuclear-free Cambridge, MA), so that made me chuckle. And the fact that Manhattan was considered the End of the World for people in NJ made it even more funny.