Author: Shawn K. Quinn

The Space City Pinball League Pizza Disaster of 2016: Two Guys lays an egg

Okay, so in the pinball league I play in, and blog about over on skqrecordquest.com, we have a deal where we order pizza every week. Everyone chips in $5, and one person (usually the league president, Phil) takes care of the ordering and cash handling. It is usually an efficient process: everyone who paid takes a break between games when the pizza arrives, and can focus on playing pinball instead of dealing with the logistics of pizza delivery.

When I throw in the word “usually” like that, you probably can guess something is up. It didn’t happen that way this week. League play started at roughly 7:30pm, and I think the order was placed sometime before 8pm (I remember paying just before the second game of the night, but I could be off). Phil called in the order to Two Guys Pizza, which I had given a positive recommendation to because I knew they supplied pizza for another group I am part of and it was good.

Okay, so I would expect sometime around the third or fourth game, we’d have our pizza and be ready to take a break. 9pm rolls around, then 10pm. I, and others, are wondering where in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks our pizza is. The story I get is so bad, I’d swear it was straight out of a comedy movie unless I knew the people telling me.

Turns out the delivery driver finally showed up after an hour and a half when the quoted delivery time was 45 minutes. Phil mentioned this to the driver (someone said he used a profane word followed by “ridiculous” when describing the situation to the driver), and apparently not only did the driver clearly just not give a damn, he wound up refusing service and leaving with the pizza.

Phil tried again, ordering from the nearest Domino’s, and the driver arrived in 15 minutes, and I would assume was friendly. This was long after some people who had paid for pizza had to leave, but at least the few of us who were left didn’t have to go home hungry. We had players coming from all parts of town, some even from over an hour’s drive away. Many of these people I consider at least relatively acquaintances if not friends, and it really pisses me off that this happened to them.

Needless to say, I’m retracting any past recommendation I made of Two Guys, and I now recommend you trust just about anybody else to make and deliver your pizza. Product quality is completely irrelevant when the customer service is this piss-poor; there is simply no excuse for either the long delay or the attitude from the delivery driver.

I will admit I’m not the biggest fan of Domino’s, but at least they can actually deliver a decent pizza within a reasonable time frame and it has been at least 20 years since I have had Domino’s screw up an order. That’s actually quite an accomplishment given that the average pizza kitchen or pizza restaurant probably does not even stay in business anywhere close to 20 years. Just about every other pizza kitchen offering delivery that I have tried has been accurate and punctual (before or within 10 minutes of their quoted delivery time), even if the quality of the product has varied greatly. Of course, I also have a certain quality point below where I don’t care how fast the delivery driver is, but after this experience I’m willing to lower that point just a notch to “slightly below average.” As a certain candy bar advertises in their ads, I’m not me when I’m hungry, to say the least.

(I use the term “pizza kitchen” to refer to establishments without a dining room, i.e., delivery and carryout only. Some establishments are “on the edge” in that they offer very limited dining space, but clearly focus on those eating off-premises.)

So, the morals of the story:

  1. Doing your due diligence is important. Even when you are just ordering pizza. This probably could have been avoided had I looked at some of the Yelp reviews first.
  2. As much as I prefer buying local, sometimes it is better to choose the national chain in some cases.

Revisiting the infamy of Red Medicine

So some of you may remember the two blog posts I made about the Los Angeles restaurant Red Medicine. The first entry on 2011 January 2 was about the outing of S. Irene Virbila, and the second entry on 2013 April 8 (exactly three years ago today) was about the antics of the owner who decided to publish a list of names of people who decided to no-show on their reservations.

A cursory web search reveals that Red Medicine closed at the end of 2014 October, about a year and a half ago now. A quick look at Google Street View shows that as of 2015 March, some months after the closing, the signage is still intact, and Google Maps shows no other restaurant–or any other business, for that matter–has taken over the space. (More research shows that in the years before the opening of Red Medicine, the building at 8400 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA, was the home of a restaurant called The Continental.)

I have to wonder if those looking to open up a new restaurant in Beverly Hills think the building is now jinxed after some of the crazy crap the previous owner did. The article mentions, in the beginning, the restaurant using an image of Ho Chi Minh as its original logo. This is in addition to the two other noteworthy events I blogged about linked earlier.

The official statement cites the basic “new landlord, higher rent” excuse:

Red Medicine has developed a following of passionate diners over the years and we were delighted to create a unique culinary experience for each and every one of them. With new building ownership and the accompanying overhead cost increases, we have accepted an offer and plan to sell the restaurant.

However, I think there’s more to it than that. A business that is truly doing well should be able to succeed in spite of an increase in rent (assuming the new rent is still reasonable). A business that is barely getting by, will more likely have an owner willing to sell and get out before there is a chance of losing it all.

I think Red Medicine’s owner pissed off many people. From the Ho Chi Minh thing, to outing a food critic, to the clearly inappropriate broadcasting the names of diners who couldn’t make their reservations, a lot of people had at least one reason never to dine there.

To the new tenants of 8400 Wilshire Boulevard, when there are any: Don’t run your business like an idiot, and you’ll almost certainly be fine.

Looking back at the dajaz1.com case, and related issues

Some time ago, I wrote about the improper seizure of the domain dajaz1.com, which was at the time a legitimate blog (whether or not it’s about music is, of course, up to debate). I had not followed up on this story immediately after its resolution, but after finding out that the records were finally unsealed motivated me to write a somewhat belated retrospective. The actual website at dajaz1.com is of course long gone, a victim of the lengthy period of time during which it was offline (over a year).

Whether or not I agree or identify with the content that is/was on dajaz1.com is immaterial. I still consider it absolutely outrageous that this was allowed to happen in the US, with (as far as I know) zero compensation paid to the owners of the domain for the time they were unable to use it. On a popular website, a year’s worth of advertising revenue can easily pay for not only the website itself but a good chunk of the personal expenses of the owners, and in some cases quite a bit more than that, to the point where the owner need not have a real “9 to 5” type of job.

There is no getting around it: the government basically robbed the domain’s owners, and then over a year later, said “oops, we slipped” and gave the domain back. By then, of course, dajaz1.com’s original audience was long gone and the domain was effectively worthless. It’s not unlike stealing a car (for the sake of argument, an exotic like a Lamborghini) and letting it sit somewhere in the sun for around a year without driving it, before giving it back to its rightful owners; sure, they have the car back. But how much is it going to cost to get it running again? How much value have the rightful owners lost?

It’s the same here. When dajaz1.com is up and running again, it will be a huge undertaking to rebuild the site to what it was. This would have been the case even if the website’s owners had been able to do so the moment they got the domain back.

Anyhow, on to other related matters. Three years ago today (on 2013-04-05), the documents related to the dajaz1.com seizure were unsealed. Some time after that, The Electronic Frontier Foundation published the documents from the dajaz1.com case for everyone to look over. I have made these documents available on BitTorrent as well, mainly for ease of downloading. I have also prepared a new page on BitTorrent for those new to it, with recommendations on software and configuration, as I expect to be making documentation related to other posts available this way as well.

(Sidenote: Originally when I downloaded the files from EFF.org, they all came up inside the browser and I had to save them individually. I didn’t realize the PDF link next to each one allowed saving to disk easily for offline viewing. I am keeping the torrent online though, just in case some might prefer that method.)

Finally, notice I said when dajaz1.com is up and running again? I looked at what was there just out of curiosity, and I found this:

Dajaz1.com is being relaunched 05-1-2016

Just on principle, this is good news. Once the site is back online, the good guys will have finally won this one.

[Edit 2023-10-13: Update BitTorrent magnet link to reflect new hybrid (v1/v2) torrent]

Revisiting dirty hockey play: aftermath of the Raffi Torres suspension

Shortly after the incident occurred, I wrote a piece about the Raffi Torres suspension for an illegal and dangerous hit in preseason play on Jakob Silfverberg of the Anaheim Ducks.

I looked up what happened to Torres since then. It’s not much of a suprise, really. He was assigned to the AHL affiliate the San Jose Barracuda on a conditioning loan, and then traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs along with two draft picks in exchange for two players, Roman Polak and Nick Spaling. According to Rotoworld, Torres is done for the season after undergoing a medical procedure possibly related to his past knee injuries.

I don’t wish injury or illness on anyone. That isn’t who I am today. But the facts speak for themselves, and it is rather oddly fitting that a player who has engaged in reckless hits that have injured other players in the past is now missing time himself due to injuries, and now will have missed two entire regular seasons due to a combination of injuries and suspensions. Call it karma, fate, poetic justice, or whatever you want.

While Torres did play six games in the AHL before hanging it up for the season, it’s quite possible that nasty hit on Jakob Silfverberg will be Torres’s last NHL appearance. My hope is that players new to the NHL get a chance to learn from Torres’s mistakes, and what happens when one keeps disregarding the rules and the safety of other players, and thus acquires a reputation as a habitually dangerous player.

Walmart’s taxing experience in Puerto Rico

As the New York Times recently reported, a Federal judge has ruled the tax that Puerto Rico levied on Walmart was unlawful. Walmart argued that the tax totaled more than 100 percent of its profits.

From the article:

The judge, José Antonio Fusté of the United States District Court in Puerto Rico, said in his opinion on Monday that it gave him no pleasure to throw out the tax, considering the commonwealth’s dire financial condition. But he said it was unlawful and that Puerto Rico’s crisis was not an excuse “to take revenue that it’s not entitled to, to pay for essential services.”

The new tax was more than triple the old rate, he said, “designed to capture Walmart Puerto Rico, the biggest fish in the pond.”

It also gives me no pleasure to at least partially concur Walmart’s side in this dispute. It’s unrealistic to take the entirety of a business’s profits and expect them to continue operating in your jurisdiction. Puerto Rico is kind of an unusual case: it’s a US territory, but not an actual US state, at least not yet. I don’t know if it’s accurate to say it’s somewhat like a country within a country, but that’s the best description I can come up with. (It does have its own Internet TLD of .pr if that says anything.)

I am no fan of Walmart. I don’t shop there at all, even when the alternative is doing without until another retailer opens up shortly after daybreak. To me, their reputation is a store that sells “cheap crap” and on top of this, pays their employees poverty wages that the rest of us wind up subsidizing with our taxes. As I have blogged previously, the obscene pay their CEO gets doesn’t exactly help their case in my eyes, either.

But the alternative to Walmart prevailing in this lawsuit is even worse. It would basically give Puerto Rico’s government free reign to raise taxes at will, even to the extent of taking over 100% of a company’s profits. That’s a recipe for disaster; Puerto Rico would be shooting itself in the foot by doing this.

So, I applaud the judge for ruling in Walmart’s favor. It was the only sane thing to do.