You know how it is, you have all these unanswered questions floating about in your head, so I thought I’d round a few up and chuck them out there. Some of these may have involved actual decisions being taken in actual meetings, which is a weird thought.
1: why oh why did anybody think that anybody actually cared whether their chips were hand cut or not?
2: what exactly is the combination of smells that makes Subway smell disgusting in exactly the same way all over the world? There’s an underground bus garage in the middle of Brisbane, a pretty malodorous place as you might imagine, yet the strongest smell that greets you when you get off a bus is the Subway.
3: Who suddenly decided that raw red onion was an essential ingredient of garnish? Come to that, what’s garnish for?
4: When the road’s dug up in UK it’s called road works, right? Why, in Oz, is it called road work? (If it’s just the Aussie mania for shortening things, they aren’t trying very hard.) And why is it still road works in New Zealand?
See what I mean? These are all questions that must have answers. But in case it all seems like too much hard work, here’s some Newley.
Ooh great, a why of why thread.
– Triple cooked chips; what’s the point ?
– When did pub menus become so flaming complicated ? I am reasonably well educated, yet had a pub meal the other day and there wasn’t one item I fully understood (neither did the staff when I asked them).
There must be more but it’s early.
Garnish gets my goat as well, though it does give me the opportunity to recount the time I was in a Chicago bar, and asked for a side order of veg to go with my gargantuan burger. When it came, I got an oval platter with burger, bigs & mixture of green veg. I’ll come back with your veg, what’s this then ? Oh, that’s just garnish…
Why do pubs serve jacket potatoes and baked beans with salad on the side? Under what other circumstances would salad be served with baked beans, and does anyone ever take a forkful of hot beans and cold salad together, or does everyone do what I do and shovel all the salad down first like a mini first course?
Some cress, iceberg lettuce and slices of tomato. I love salad, but when the ‘Me Party’ sweeps to power, one of our first pieces of legislation will be the removal of these items from the nation’s plate, unless specifically asked for. The Gratuitous Salad Garnish Act 2015. . .
Well, don’t forget to include serious punishment for those who include undressed salad garnish with either toasted sandwiches or a bacon sandwich.
On the other hand those who put mayonnaise or other vile substances onto innocent salads with the consumer’s permission, thus rendering them inedible or at the very best creating an island in the middle which has to be eaten around with a surgeon’s skill, will be first against the wall.
Deep breath.
Pie.
Are casseroles with a pastry lid a pie, or should this epithet only be applied to a dish with pastry on all sides of the filling?
Stew with a hat = not pie. There should be laws about this
…is the right answer.
No, no, no, I love me garnish, me. Bit of iceberg, grated carrot, some raw red cabbage, cress,slice o’ tom. Heck, some days it’s the only 5 I get!
It’s the handful of crisps I hate!!
One of the members of a “Local Memories” group I’m in on Facebook posted a pub menu from a pub round here yesterday. It was something like 30 years old and basically had three types of toasted sandwich and some other small bar things on it. A ham and cheese toastie was 45p or thereabouts. You could also get a Rombouts Coffee.
Three types of Toasted Sandwich.
I’m guessing it was
1) Ham & Cheese
2) Ham
3) Cheese
I have an aversion to any cold food being on the same plate as hot food and thought it was generally considered a health risk anyway. Over to the doctors on the site.
Oh and shortening things – Maths in the UK,Math in the USA – why?
The Post Office in the local town of Skipdale shares its premises with a Subway. It wouldn’t have happened in the days when we had a Postmaster General.
My educated palate can discern a combination of half baked dough, crap cheese and unidentified meat products keeping warm.
Tempting, you have to admit
Getting off the plane from the UK to Newark USA – the first thing you always smell is something like Subway. Combination of dough, cheese, tomato sauce and (I think) garlic, or perhaps ‘erbs (that’s Herbs). The whole airport smells of it. I’ve noticed that the bottom floor of the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham UK smells the same in the last year or so too.
Mrs Wells was commenting on the consistently unpleasant smell of Subway outlets.
Road work coz its work on the road innit after which the road works again. Simple Mike.
Garnish is there because we ‘eat with our eyes’ as well as our mouth and nose – a bit of colour distracts you from the mass of meat and carbs on the plate, I suppose.
Here in Germany, the ‘mit Salat garniert’ always comes with a huge dollop of generic white gloop, which you might charitably describe as ‘dressing’, but would be more accurately named as ‘drowning’. Traditional German cuisine – it’s like English , only with more emphasis on cabbage.
Also, why are burgers, inevitably with hand-cut chips in a little metal bucket, now served on pieces of slate in pubs?
We want plates! http://metro.co.uk/2015/03/11/we-want-plates-the-slab-flowerpot-slate-backlash-has-begun-5097828/
Why oh why has restaurant food gone all poncey and decorative? I don’t want this:
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/b559/Gary_Friel/image.jpg1_zps2fjfb0kp.jpg
I want this:
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/b559/Gary_Friel/image.jpg1_zpsvlyko4ka.jpg
I’ll have the second one too, please.
Also, why does food have to be piled up into a precarious tower, in the middle of a stupidly large plate?
Why oh why are roadworks on the railway called Improvements? This leads to the baffling announcement that “This delay was caused by improvements.” Also, “The late arrival of this train is due to its late departure” is an undeniably true statement, but not a very helpful one.
Which reminds me of what train announcers do in Italy, and brilliantly recounted in Italian Ways, they will seriously go into a great detail about a train service detailing all the stops, type of train (all the information you could possibly need) and then state that this service is not operating today. Just brilliant, unless you happen to be travelling on the day in question.
Thanks Dodger. I’m a big fan of Tim Parks but I hadn’t heard of Italian Ways.
Anyone who hasn’t read Italian Neighbours and A Season with Verona really ought to.
I’d be interested to hear what @gary makes of him.
You may find that “An Italian Education” is also worth a punt.
There’s a coincidence! Am reading Italian Railways at the moment and really enjoying it. I think Parks tends to be best when he’s examining Italy via the ostensible (is that the right word?) examination of something else. As with football in A Season With Verona (one of the best books about Italy that I’ve read). He’s talking about football and the Verona club, but offers so much insight into the country, culture and national mentality. Whereas when he’s actually talking directly about Italy, as with Italian Neighbours, I don’t find him more prone to generalisation and nowhere near as perceptive.
Oops, that should read “i find him more prone to generalisation”. Lack of edit feature, I curse you!
But give Italian Ways (not “Railways”) a spin, KFD. Excellent read, tis.
Yep, good point. He is one of the best current writers on Italy. I would also add in Cara Massimina and Mimi’s Ghost about the murderous English language teacher in Italy. His descriptions of Italian family life made me both cringe and smile with familiarity. He’s also good to go and hear talk if you get the chance.
Oh yes, I absolutely loved Cara Massimina! I didn’t like Mimi’s Ghost so much, as by that time the protagonist was rich and so his frustrations and method of solving them weren’t as understandable or as funny.
I’d love to meet the guy. He used to do the same job I do (‘lettore’ in an Italian university) and his book Europa is about the struggle for justice for our category that I’ve been embroiled in for the last thirty years.
Ha. Just recognised you, Sti…..
You should have known me from my supple and flexible back, Twang!
I feel proud.
The Subway smell issue is easily solved. They need to merge with Lush and open jointly branded shops. The two smells will cancel each other out leaving the whole world in a whiffy equilibrium.
They can call them Slushway.
All the subways round our way smell of urine and contain dried up pools of sick. Or have I missed the point?
Much the same sensation, I think…
Chunky Chips? That’s just a lazy chef who can’t be bothered to cut them up, and an excuse to give smaller portions.
Why oh why don’t Apple fix that bug in iTunes where it splits up perfectly happy albums into multiple versions with two or three tracks each. In fact they’ve removed some of the grouping functionality which used to do it. As the supposed ace designers, why isn’t there a “make into one album” menu option to fix it? They have, however, removed the ability to copy/paste album artwork and replaced it with the requirement to actually download the artwork and import it. Don’t get me started on why oh why iMovie is so user unfriendly. Why oh why are Apple so bad at software?
Yes, I’ve actually been thinking about thinking about looking for an iTunes alternative recently. Haven’t got round to it, though – I seem to listen to Spotify more at the moment, which has its own annoyances.
Meanwhile, in other news, they’ve put Trent Reznor in charge of revamping iTunes: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/26/apple-itunes-relaunch-trent-reznor-beats-music
What can possibly go wrong?
I’ve had that album splitting thing with a few albums and managed to sort it out by making sure all tracks have exactly the same info (especially “album artist”). I find the artwork real easy too. Just google the cover and drag it straight in. My iTunes/iPod is a thing of incredibly well-organised beauty that would give even the most OCD music lover nothing to complain about.
(And I love iMovie!)
Don’t have a Subway in the row of shops up the road from me.
But we do have an Indian, a Chinese and a KFC.
The smell from the Indian is a veritable joy, the Chinese similarly , but the niff emanating from KFC – do they ever clean their oil? The pong fills the air like a noxious fog
Hmm…I pass a Subway every day an it smells lovely, like pizza.
Do Swedish Subways’ use better cheese or something?
I too suffer from the ‘split album syndrome’ with ITunes even when all the information is exactly the same.
All was more or less hunky dory until a couple of updates ago when lo and behold bloody iTunes decided I would prefer certain albums split up into bite sized chunks. Consequently I rarely use it anymore and put everything into cloud storage which works as it should do.
Artwork is easily fixed though.
http://www.thxbye.de/mac/things-to-check-when-itunes-is-splitting-up-your-albums.html
Thanks Gary. I’ll have a play around with it but my patience with it is in short supply. As I wrote I find cloud storage considerably more efficient nowadays. It costs me twenty quid a year but it is worth every penny.
I’ve done all that. I have albums I bought off the bloody ITunes Store which it has then split up. It is corrupting the tags which is crap. As for artwork, you used to be able to copy the cover on Google and paste it in. took a second. now you have to download it and import it. How are you dragging it in?
On my macbook I just drag the artwork directly from the google image result site straight onto the album artwork box (opened via ‘get info’).
Yes an alternative is the best option. Apple are incapable of fixing it so some decent software alternative is the best solution.