Poisoned by the Red Tide

I got sick eating at a seafood restaurant on Pier 39.

For those not in the know, Pier 39 is a tourist concentration camp on the Northeast corner of San Francisco where your welcoming attitude to foreigners goes to die. It gets trampled under the boots of a million camera-clicking French, Filipino and Japanese people who want nothing more than to get in your way.

It's because of places like this that all the small-towners who visit big cities like New York, Paris and SF leave with the impression that cities are packed shoulder to shoulder with seething masses of loud and quite possibly homosexual people. In reality, the problem is the out-of-towners themselves who feed the tourist trap with their money and turn it into an inescapable hell-hole of tacky businesses and shady restaurants.

The restaurant I went to was called Fisherman's Grotto, a nice-looking if huge restaurant packed behind a fake fish market and next to some falling-apart docks. It may be because I ordered 2 pints of beer within the first 10 minutes of my stay, but the food didn't seem bad. The only thing memorable about it was the price, which was enormous and unwarrented. Such is the way of Pier 39.

The first symptom I had was a night-long bout of physics-defying gassiness. My intestines, sensing the parasitic corruption, attempted to convert all the solids of my meal into gaseous form so that I might release them harmlessly into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the poisons were able to re-enter my system through my nose and lungs and allowed them to infect my brain more easily.

I was unable to sleep until 4 AM despite going to bed at about 11 PM. My nervous system jacked itself up to keep me from slipping into a fatal coma so I could do nothing but writhe around and vent deadly vapors while feeling my intestines deflate and re-inflate.

This morning I woke up with the feeling that my brain was lifting off from the inside of my skull to parts unknown. I felt ambivalent towards everything, including my vision blurring and my ears ringing at random intervals.

After my bowel decided to jettison everything in a last-ditch attempt to keep me alive, I decided to go jogging to sweat out the remaining toxins. While I was running I had the interesting sensation that I couldn't feel anything but my face. I had to clap my hands together to prove they still existed.

All in all, totally worth it. A little Red Tide is nothing to be afraid of when you're hungry for bottom-feeders. Next time I'm trying the crab.

Whole Number Prices

I got the 2 fish sandwiches from Jack Box for $3. In California, this comes out to $3.25 with state taxes. This is totally convenient. It's a couple bills and quarter. This is a "whole number price", a food cost that allows you to use whole units of currency and get back whole units of currency.

Dimes, nickels, and pennies are worthless. People hate them, shopkeepers hate them, bank tellers hate them. Why is a whole unit price better than a decimal one? Because it allows people to make transactions without fucking around with these little peapod coins. Take for example this other thing I got at Jack's Box for $2.99, which comes out to $3.24 with tax. That is shit. Now you have to fumble with all sorts of metallic coinage that will be ultimately destined for coinstar.

Food vendors in the United States should adjust their prices so that the payment is a whole number after tax. In my area sales tax is 8.25%. Why not just set a $1 item to 92 cents rather than making people pay you $1.08? Would it really hurt restaurants that much to do this?
...
Then they invented money cards, which everyone switched to except for fugitives of the law, xenophobes, and the chinese.

Frozen Yogurt Boom

I've been seeing a lot of Frozen Yogurt shops in California lately. We're talking about stores devoted entirely to serving "fro-yo" made from the same fermented cultures as conventional Yoplait. Frozen yogurt is the new fad. It is cheap and easy to manufacture, in-line with health food culture, individually customizable with different toppings, and like many fermented foods, has a unique taste. The food business model has found a winner. But this isn't going to be like the fruit smoothie fad of 1998 or the pearl milk tea frenzy back in 2001. Each frozen yogurt franchise has a different system going for them.


YogurtLand in Cupertino serves a variety of fruity flavors and sells by the ounce (30 cents/oz), giving you an incentive to chose light weight toppings. The place is usually inundated with Asian high school kids, and the workers are all super fobs.


Swirl, near UC Davis, uses unpasturized yogurt with high levels of live culture, which is supposed to increases its authenticity and nutritional value. This outlet is only 2 blocks away from another shop called "Yogurt Shack", and is within walking distance of "Yolo Berry Yogurt", a new yogurt place that hasn't opened yet.


Red Mango and Pinkberry are two well established yogurt chains founded by Koreans and based in SoCal. Much like pearl tea places, they have a stamp card that gets you a free cup of frozen yogurt after 10 or so purchases. Because they are upscale, fashion minded, and generally more expensive, I don't know much about them, although I think it's pretty interesting that both titles are potent for sexual innuendo. I mean, "Pinkberry"? That's probably a code word in Vegas.