Protest Registered at the Menu
Clare Briggs
Clare Briggs is a famous cartoonist who lived from 1875 to 1930. Poems by Wilbur Nesbitt.
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ste·ve·dore
/ˈstēvəˌdôr/
noun
a person employed, or a contractor engaged, at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships.Report
I’m sure I’ve heard this word before. Probably season 2 of The Wire.Report
Baked potatoes three times last month…
Anyway, I recently read a story written by a guy who was one of the Waze guys who stayed with Google for seven years after getting acquired. The story had this section in it:
All that to say: Yes, he’s doing a gag in the strip. But Briggs either witnessed this conversation in person or was told it by a guy who witnessed the conversation.Report
Hypothesis – these are weekly gatherings, so the same thing three times a month is a lot, in that they appear about 75% of the time.Report
I suppose that that might not be so bad a complaint then…
I mean, Maribou and I have baked potatoes every Friday for lunch. Early on in “Safe/r at Home”, I said that we should do something fun to mark the week ending and, tah-dah, I picked “baked potatoes on Friday”.
So we have baked potatoes four times a month. (Sometimes *FIVE*!)
But if it’s a weekly meeting, I suppose I could see complaining about it.
(What’s the “ham and beef on the same menu” complaint?)Report
No idea. Curiously per this document (page 54 of the PDF, page 48 of the doc itself) in the decade of the 1910s, ham was more expensive than beef pound for pound. (Now the typical retail price for ham is usually half the price for beef) (though the spread of beef prices across cuts is substantial, the most expensive typical 4 to 5 times the price of the cheapest)
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0300_1922.pdf
(I was going into this internet rabbit hole with the notion that perhaps their cost was substantially different, maybe an order of magnitude, but that’s not the case. Ham was about 20-25% pricier)Report
The only other thing I can think of at the moment is that these supper clubs (I think) were a way of the upper middle class trying to replicate some of the quality of life and positional goods only available to the actual upper class, and the menu offering of ‘ham and beef’ is too plain?
Wait, maybe one more thing – are we parsing that sentence correctly? Is the complaint perhaps that the lunch menu is the same as the dinner menu?Report
On one level, I want to say that the gag is “crazy entitled people will find something to complain about!”
I got transferred to a new team a few years back and was meeting with my new teammates and I thought that a great icebreaker would be a couple dozen of the fancy schmancy donuts from the fancy schmancy donut store.
One of my new teammates grabbed a donut and said “next time, bring breakfast burritos from Monica’s.”
And now I tell that story about him whenever stuff like this comes up.Report
40-some years ago there was a strange little place in a bad part of Austin, TX with one thing on the menu: t-bone steak, green beans with onion and pepper, baked potato, ice tea plain or sweet. No service, just the cashier and the cafeteria-style line where you got your food. The price was ridiculously low. The quality of the food was surprisingly good given the setting.Report
And there’s the Gary Larson version: “Oh boy! Dog food again!”
I suppose that says more about inter-species differences than anything (Says the woman who eats yogurt every day for lunch)Report
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