The Golden Corral Hates Your Town

I’m no fan of chain restaurants, but The Golden Corral has recently crossed the line from an irritating big business to a malignant antagonist of local eateries. 

 

In a TV commercial the chain is currently airing a man orders a number of normally expensive items from a local restaurant.  The waiter is accommodating until the man says he wants everything for under ten dollars (or something close to it, I’m not sure about the exact value), at which point the waiter seemingly panics.  The thesis of this ad is that while you can get the same menu items from local restaurants, The Golden Corral will undercut their local competitors and give your cheaper food.   (I saw this commercial on TV and couldn't find it online anywhere.  If anyone can I'd love to link to it.) 

 

Like many commercials, this one was probably supposed to be funny and like many it also utterly fails in that regard.  What’s more problematic however, is that the ad characterizes local restaurants as inept, buffoonish establishments that can’t compete with chains.  This attitude brings the march of generic, mediocre food to our doorsteps as it tries to wipe out not only competing corporate restaurants, but local ones as well. 

 

In reality, local restaurants are better than chains in nearly every way.  They offer better food and usually competitive prices.  (When they’re more expensive it’s usually because they serve better food.)  On the other hand, chains like The Golden Corral have banal menus written in office suites.  How that is a good thing I'll never know.  

 

If this recent ad campaign were to completely accomplish its objective, no one would visit local restaurants any more.  In turn, local restaurants would go out of business.  Money would be siphoned away from local economies and there would be less innovation in the market place.  I don’t necessarily think The Golden Corral intended for their ad to be as malicious as it is, but then again not many people who do bad things started off trying to be bad. 

 

The ultimate result of this commercial is that The Golden Corral has cast itself as a corporate bully pushing around smaller businesses.  There’s no reason to support that behavior.  There’s no reason to endorse a company whose objectives also happen to be destructive to our communities.  In the end, there’s no reason to eat at this restaurant.

Children, Parents, and the Rest of Us

If you have children, don’t complain.  About anything.  More specifically, if you’ve chosen to have kids you also need to accept the fact that your children will probably consume the best years of your life and that you have no right to inconvenience complete strangers with them.  In other words, please stay at home. 

If this all seems a bit insensitive let me explain: my college newspaper has recently published several letters arguing about whether it’s appropriate to bring small children into public spaces.  Not surprisingly, those against bringing children to places like movie theaters have pointed out that they are noisy and disruptive to other patrons.  What is surprising, however, is that those on the other side of the issue seem to feel that their actions are justified simply because “parents sometimes like to go out and do things.”

Obviously, I side with the former, but it still always surprises me when I come across people who act like they’re doing all of us a favor by having children and we should all be accordingly sympathetic.  Don’t misunderstand: I do believe that having children can be a rewarding experience and it’s something that I look forward to doing someday.  Yet, when people choose to have kids it also seems like they should be realistic about that choice.  Obviously, that means doing fewer fun things, but it also means that a lot of people without children aren’t going to want to have you and your family around very much.  When it comes to movie theaters, restaurants, etc., I frankly don’t think children should be allowed.  Or at least, they shouldn’t be allowed during prime hours when everyone else is trying to spend a night out.  If that means parents have a harder time, so be it; that’s all part of the job.

Certainly this isn’t a black and white issue and society benefits by being accommodating.  I know, for example, that if I go see a matinee of Harry Potter there are going to be noisy kids there.  On the other hand, I would never go see a matinee of Harry Potter.  In fact, when it comes to movies, I generally try to avoid anything that could be remotely described as “family oriented” because nearly every time I go I end up paying more attention to the crying babies and talking toddlers than the actual movie.  This is particularly frustrating because there are “family oriented” movies I’d like to see.  My solution has been to go late, as I’d expect 11 PM showings of these movies to be kid-free.  Alas, that is so rarely the case.             

There are, of course, many people in the world who have children due to unfortunate circumstances: rape, teen pregnancy, faulty birth control, etc.  These are sad circumstances.  However, if the victims of these events were the only ones bringing their children to places they ought not to be, it’d be rare that we’d hear crying babies at inconvenient times.  The problem, in reality, is that there are many people who have chosen to have children who also impose their children on unsuspecting strangers.  I’m sure those children are beautiful and wonderful.  I’m sure they bring great satisfaction to their families.  I’m sure they’re the apples of their parents’ eyes.  But please, don’t force the rest of us to participate in your parenting woes.

Staying Home… For a Gender Fantasy?

Every once in a awhile my church’s magazine, The Ensign, will include something alarming and objectionable.  Unfortunately, the upcoming August issue includes just such an article.  Covering a short three pages, “Staying Home…Again” (by “name withheld”) relays the story of a mother’s struggle to balance child-rearing and work.  While the subject matter is timely, the point of the story—that women have an inherent responsibility to stay at home and take care of kids and accordingly should sacrifice careers to do so—isn’t simply wrong, it’s offensive. 

 

The article begins innocently enough by describing how the anonymous author was essentially forced back to work because of the economy.  While her husband ran one business she had to assume the responsibilities of a second one when they were unable to successfully sell it.  Eventually, she began to enjoy work more than being home and struggled with how to raise her children. 

 

If the first page or so paints a refreshingly complex picture of the challenges facing modern parents, the rest of the article clings to painfully outmoded gender stereotypes.  Once the author realized that she was enjoying work more than home life, she felt guilty and, more disturbingly, described herself as having “veered” from the “path.”  Things only get worse from there: she decided to pray for forgiveness for “straying so far from my divine role” and asked God to help her to want to fulfill that role and provide her with a way to do so. 

 

Throughout the article I was astounded at how little was mentioned about the husband/father.  Why wasn’t he helping raise the children?  Why was it only the woman’s job to fix dinners and attend to household duties?  Why didn’t he feel guilt about not being at home enough?  Maybe he did feel these things, but what stands out is the fact that the author never indicates her husband was shirking his responsibilities.  Instead she insinuates that her “divine role” is to be completely domestic, while his is to gallivant through the professional world having a good time.  Not surprisingly, the article ends with a return to gender stasis: the mother stays home raising the kids and the father continues to be a semi-absent figure.   

 

The problem with this article isn’t that a woman stayed home to raise kids while a man worked (both valid choices, of course, if people find fulfillment through them), but rather that the author claimed that God required her to behave in ways that were mentally and emotionally damaging. What a person (male or female) does professionally and domestically is a private decision and shouldn’t be determined by wrongheaded social proclamations on gender roles.  In this case, the author didn’t just give up work, she also sacrificed her psychological health (and, I’d argue, her spiritual health) in favor of an absurd and unsustainable fantasy about motherhood.  In the end, I can only imagine that if this story ever had a sequel, it would resemble “The Yellow Wallpaper” more than the hollow “faith promoting” rubbish that it aspires to right now.

 

Ultimately, if The Ensign’s usual emphasis on simple hagiography is understandable, its inclusion of marginalizing gender propaganda is not.  Forcing people into roles that leave them unfulfilled will not increase anyone’s well being, nor will it bring them closer to God.  (The editors also apparently missed the irony of including in the same issue articles on computer addiction and postpartum depression.)  As a practicing Mormon myself these aren’t the values that I believe in and it saddens me when a publication that has so much potential to help people instead stoops to misguided didacticism.  

Sweltering Suburbia

When my parents asked Laura and I to stay at their house in Cedar Hills and watch my younger siblings for a few days, we were excited.  Finally, we thought, we could get out of our AC-free house and cool off with modern climate control.  Unfortunately, we’ve been disappointed; my parents home actually gets hotter than ours (in Provo), and if we do choose to turn on the AC it requires massive amounts of energy just to cool it down to the mid 80s. 

Cedar Hills—like so many recently constructed housing developments—is a disaster for many reasons, but probably one of the biggest is the community’s utter disregard for energy use.

One of the biggest problems with Cedar Hills is the design of its neighborhoods.  For the most part, the small community is filled with McMansion style track homes.  Aside from the fact that these homes are ugly and poorly constructed, they’re also spaced just far enough apart to miss out on the (numerous) advantages of being close together.  For example, though they all have pathetically small yards, none of them actually shade each other (and obviously, because they don’t share any walls, heating and cooling from one home doesn’t benefit others).  The flaws in this design are painfully apparent when compared to old communities in southern Europe and the Middle East.  In that part of the world many towns have narrow lanes and closely spaced structures.  This design didn’t arise because the builders hated privacy or wanted quaint towns for future tourists; rather, they knew that closely-spaced buildings shade each other, thereby making them all cooler.  In the centuries before AC this was especially handy, but what’s even more amazing is that many of these buildings still stay cooler than a typical McMansion with its AC running at full blast.  Narrow lanes also stay cooler in the summer (and dryer in the winter) than the moronically twisting streets and superfluous culs-de-sac common in American suburbs.     

Related to the macro-community issues in Cedar Hills, each structure experiences an array of individual problems.  For example, even if something was shading my parents’ home, its floor plan would still make cooling nearly impossible.  The home has three floors and each one is always a drastically different temperature because there is almost no airflow.  This means that to get the ground floor comfortable the basement ends up being cold but the upstairs is still too warm.  If this problem was confined to my parents’ home it wouldn’t be much of an issue.  Instead however, vast numbers of relatively new homes are inefficient energy hogs.  In turn, they cost their owners more money and negatively impact the environment.

The American dream seems to include an almost obsessive drive to own a home.  Unfortunately, this drive has produced communities with long-term energy consumption problems (in addition to simply being eyesores).  Hopefully the contraction of the housing market will force developers to reconsider building cheap, environmentally unsound homes.  

Attack of the Killer Allusions!

About a week ago Laura and I saw Monsters versus Aliens.  As fans of vintage sci-fi, the experience was a rewarding one; nearly every scene included some allusion (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) to an old 50s or 60s B movie.  

 

After the movie ended, however, I had to wonder: are allusions, by themselves, entertaining?  The producers of Monsters versus Aliens are betting so, and to some extent I have to agree with them.  The movie opened at number one and has since made well over $300,000,000.  More importantly, like being a part of an inside joke, I enjoyed recognizing the visual references to The Blob and The Thing From Another World, among others.

 

Still, I can’t imagine that re-watching the film would be very rewarding.  Yes I’ve seen Dr. Strangelove.  Yes, I’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  And, yes I like those movies.  But why refer back to them?  Are the filmmakers trying to raise any thematic questions by alluding?  What would happen to the story if the reference were cut?  (In the case of Close Encounters, the movie would only lose a strange scene that highlights Stephen Colbert.)  In the end it actually seems like the plethora of references and allusions were included merely for their own sake, as if the filmmakers wanted to show off their vast knowledge of film history.  Of course it’s great that they have that knowledge, but ultimately who cares?   

 

To be fair, Monsters versus Aliens had a likable, if uneven and somewhat choppy, story.  In this sense it was at least as entertaining as other recent entries into the genre of allusion-laden CG films.  Others, like the Shrek franchise, seem to have devolved into banal pop culture pastiches based on the (mistaken) idea that allusions are the only thing a movie needs to be engaging.

 

In the end then, what’s the point of constantly alluding to older, more venerated movies?  Whereas a film like Enchanted seems to be both an homage and a deconstruction of its genre, Monsters versus Aliens and other recent animated movies simply flaunt their cinematic lineage.  In turn, these movies come off as fairly shallow, especially when compared to just about everything made by Pixar.  Finally, then, if CG filmmakers started worrying less about being cheeky and more about conveying a story, they might produce more films that are memorable and genuinely profound.  

Travel/Vacation

Why travel?

 

As I see it, people usually do one of two things: “take vacations” or “travel.”  While these two expressions are often used interchangeably, they actually imply very different kinds of activity.  First, the word “vacation” comes from the late Middle English/Old French word “vacare” which means to be unoccupied (so “vacation” shares roots with words like “vacate” and “vacancy”).  Of course, while we’re not speaking Middle English any more, “vacation” still preserves some of its original meaning; it implies an emptying out, not a filling up.

 

This meaning of the word is problematic for me in a couple of ways.  First, it focuses on the place of origin as opposed to the destination.  In that light, cultural immersion becomes difficult because activities are engaged in simply because they aren't at home.  Second, however, “vacationing” is essentially a negative phrase.  It emphasizes absence, and constantly reminds the vacationer that she or he exists in relationship to a lack of something.  Thus, even if the word connotes positively for most people, it still signifies emptiness.  Yet another problem with the phrase “taking a vacation” is that it reveals an underlying selfishness; you don’t “give” a vacation, or “learn” a vacation.  Instead, “taking” suggests personal gain without any particular responsibility.  

 

If “vacation” isn’t quite a satisfactory way to describe the trips we take, “travel” might be a better fit.  Surprisingly perhaps, “travel” actually comes to us through Middle English from the word “travail.”  Of course this root then implies hardship, toil, and work.  While most people would want to avoid these adjectives when describing their trips, they also facilitate a greater payoff.  If, for example, I “take” something, I get that thing.  On the other hand if I “toil” or “travail” for something, I've gain both the thing as well as the valuable experience I had while getting it.  In other words, travailing is harder than “taking” or “vacating,” but also provides more fulfilling experiences. 

 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all trips be grueling exercises in voluntourism.  That kind of trip has its place and probably accomplishes a lot of good, but even leisure trips have opportunities for rewarding travail.  Sometimes it'll be intellectual travail (visiting an art museum), linguistic travail (struggling through a foreign language), emotional travail (visiting a concentration camp or war memorial), etc.  The point is however, that on every trip a traveler can either challenge her/himself, or give up and take an easier path (like going on a cruise or sticking entirely with guided tours, etc.).  What’s more, in most cases trying to travail through new experience is going to provide insights into the culture that can’t be acquired any other way.  

 

Ultimately, “traveling” seems to convey a sense of toiling toward cultural immersion and personal enlightenment.  “Vacationing,” on the other hand, just means getting out of the house and snapping a few pictures to post on Facebook.  Though it’s unlikely that anyone will ever fall completely in one camp or the other, if the goal of a trip is anything more than momentary stimulation, I suggest we start talking about traveling more often than vacating. 

Men’s Fashion Tip For July

If you live anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere summer is now in full swing.  That means it's time for less clothing, lighter colors, and a more relaxed look.  While that’s probably not news to most men, what may be surprising is that July and August are not designated as two months for looking like a douche.   

 

First, I’ve always felt that the hot summer months are the hardest to dress for.  Warmer weather means fewer layers, which means that A) even fully clothed, the body is more visible, which for most of us is a mixed blessing at best, and B) clothes are what they are (in other words, you can’t use a classy scarf to dress up some grubby shirt—in the summer its just going to be a grubby shirt).  Still, the summer offers a bounty of fashion possibilities, even if they do require some creativity and awareness of common faux pas.  Try taking a holistic approach to your look as you balance comfort with flattering clothes that tell the world what you want to be saying.     

 

Specifically, for this month’s fashion tip it might be most useful to concentrate on the lower body.  While most upper body clothing can go over well (or very badly, depending) in the summer or any other season, July is the month for shorts.  Unfortunately, however, most guys have hairy, spindly legs that, depending on your ethnicity, may also be astonishingly white.  (At least, that’s what my legs look like after a long cold winter.)  While one of the best things you can do for your legs is to exercise and tone them, the second most important thing is wear flattering shorts.  Given the recent popularity of guys slim/skinny jeans, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing more and more slim/skinny shorts this summer (and next) as men begin cutting them off.  Given that a sleek look is also still relatively fashionable, this is probably a safer bet than, say, khaki cargo shorts from several years ago.  (Quick tip: just don’t wear khaki.)  Indeed even if you aren’t Michael Phelps or Lance Armstrong, avoid shorts that are too baggy and hide your figure; unlike many women, men’s narrow hips can actually be emphasized by tighter clothing to make even heavier guys look slimmer.  On the other hand, shorts that are too baggy can make a guy look thick and out of shape, even if he’s relatively fit. 

 

When it comes to the kind of shorts you wear, I’d suggest avoiding cargo shorts altogether.  Like everything, this point is a matter of taste, but I know that I got my first pair of cargo shorts in 1997 which means they were probably out of style at least eight or nine years ago.  If you have a bunch of little things to carry around maybe you need them, but I can’t say I’ve met many people who use the extra pockets enough to warrant looking so passé.  What’s more, most cargo shorts I’ve seen simply aren’t flattering.  They hit at awkward places (like the middle of the knee, which is a terrible place for shorts to hit), and are almost always too baggy.  Wear them camping if you must, but when you return to civilization put on civilized clothing. 

 

The other big area for summer fashion is the foot/ankle area.  For many men, this is an area with great potential: low cut socks (or no socks at all), can flatter slim ankles and, consequently, make calves look more athletic.  If you don’t have great ankles however, avoid some of the more obvious summer shoe/ankle mistakes.  For example, if you wear tall socks with shorts, bring a sense of irony to the outfit.  Get socks with a retro stripe somewhere on them or that are atypically tall.  In any case what you cannot do is simply wear the same socks you’ve been using all winter with long pants.  Short socks with low cut shoes will probably be more flattering than tall ones, but if you go that route be aware that it’s a fashion statement.  If you aren’t wearing socks at all, you’re probably in good shape too (just deodorize your shoes now and then).  (I’m not going to get into sandals here, but certainly there is a lot of potential there.  Just don’t do obviously stupid things with them.) 

 

Finally, as I said in June, for a little money you can look a lot better.  Summer is great because less clothing means even less money.  And remember, your clothes really are a statement.  There is no fashion neutrality.