I ran across a picture of Clifton’s Cafeteria in a book called California crazy and beyond: roadside vernacular architecture, by Jim Heimann. It was a fantastical cliff face and forest affair in the middle of an LA street. It opened in the Depression offering pay-what-you-can meals and free food for the destitute.

In looking for more information about Cliftons, it turns out it’s still there! They mention that a few changes have been made: replacing the organ and organist with a moose (I didn’t realize they were equivalent), singing waiters and canaries with Muzak (again, not really equivalent in my book) and artificial plants with real (OK, that’s cool). But they still offer the guarantee: “Dine Free Unless Delighted!”

Update: more information can be gleaned from items in the Los Angeles Public Library’s Menu Collection by searching for “Clifton’s.”

The Road, McCarthy. Yes. Since this was the first Cormac McCarthy book I read, I had imagined that the setting—which is to say, the implied event that brought the story about—had affected the style. The movie ad would go something like this:

In a world with punctuation gone mad: apostrophes only before esses (“wouldnt”, “couldnt”, “two day’s time”), and quotation marks have been lost. where people and objects rest within the floor (regardless of the floor’s condition) and sometimes within other objects, but sometimes atop similar objects (“in a … sofa” “on the bed”).

But it turns out McCarthy has chosen to write that way all the time. Oy. Clearly his style is beyond my meager powers to grasp, so I shan’t be reading any more of it.
Its own merits are decent, though it was really a genre work written (I imagine) by someone who disdains genre, and was therefore unwilling to thoroughly commit to it. The August 2007 issue of Fortean Times contains a review with which I largely sympathize, expressing surprise that this work has been praised by a community that rejects the genre that the work most represents (the reviewer has a different genre in mind from the one that I classed the work within, but I nevertheless believe it’s a parallel argument to mine).

The article is entertaining in an awful reducing humans to a cartoon type of way, but the best part is this: “Ms. Looney, a certified reality therapist”

Hooray!

So we went to Anaheim recently to visit the mouse (this entry has been in draft state for almost exactly two years—and here I thought I was behind on my book reviews!—so some of it was written while the trip was fresh in my mind, but most of it was thrown together based on some scribbled notes). Here are a variety of observations:

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Those Germans, always coming up with le mot juste:
Vorne Kurz, Hinten Lang = a mullet
Arschgeweih =“Ass-Antlers,” a tatoo near the bottom of the spine

Despite the assurances of the book Der Struwwelpeter, your cats will neither warn you against using matches nor cry after you are burned to ash.

So I’m watching At the Circus, starring the Marx Brothers. Groucho makes a joke about not having seen Chico since he stopped taking Scott’s Emulsion. Wondering what that is, I look in up on the intertubes. Well, it’s a brand of cod liver oil, still available, but not in the US, made by GlaxoSmithkline. And browsing through the list of their various worldwide brands, I also find Granufink, a German pill made from pumpkin seeds, “used to strengthen the function of the bladder and help treat prostrate disorders.” Hey! I’m prostrate right now, but I just thought it was related to watching movies on a Saturday afternoon!

A German-language podcast of a building a crane. More of those podcasts here.

Read it before it vanishes forever: the TSA blog with open comments! Someone read an article about Web 2.0, and somebody’s bum will be canned when they realize that being open with complaints may mean having to actually be accountable for them rather than just restating policy (or “policy”, you must read the comments, you absolutely must!).

Some favorites so far: the elderly couple with replacement joints who are made to sit in a low chair with no arms (and no help in getting up from said chairs) to be repeatedly wanded despite having documentation about their replacement joints, the several military people who get searched on every flight, the person complaining about having their wallets searched (!!), the flight attendant with a background check to have the job in the first place who gets searched every time at a particular airport… and those were just comments on one post!

You don’t need to know what happened, but it was unpleasant. You don’t need to know where it happened, but it was nowhere near here. All you need to know is:
“The child’s mother was working on a computer in another part of the library.”

Like Pop-Tarts says, children should be supervised.