Laughter
Did you notice on that Dave Barry Substack article I discussed yesterday that on the map of Florida he likens to the male reproductive system, he had labeled the body of water below it the “Gulf of Canada,” and also put a note underneath the map that said, “Source: Harvard University School of Medicine and Geography.” So funny. I hadn’t noticed the labels on my first go-round.
Also, for those interested in Barry’s history, please see this. Apparently, Barry has been writing these Substack pieces since January. I read quite a few of them last night and laughed and laughed.
Also, that piece I just linked starts like this:
When people hear that I’m starting a Substack, the question they always ask is: “Dave Barry? Isn’t he dead?”
I’m delighted to report that the answer is: Not yet! I’m still alive, and along with an estimated 85 percent of the Earth’s population, I have a Substack, which I invite you to subscribe to.
This other piece of Barry’s tapped into something that has long bothered me – secretly, because I thought it was just me. But I”m happy to see I’m not the only one who has the difficulty he describes, although I may be an extreme case. As a nightowl, many times when I’ve been in a hotel, I’ve gone to take a shower in the wee hours of the morning and spent at least an hour trying to figure the thing out before I’ve either given up or reluctantly woken my sleeping companion to help crack the code. My husband used to be very very good at that, but perhaps it’s a facility that declines with age. Barry writes:
Hotel shower controls are so complex that they could represent a serious threat to America’s national security, and yet untrained civilians who — we repeat — maybe had a couple of vodkas the night before are expected to somehow know how to operate them. …
Anyway, the good news is that I finally did figure out how to operate that particular hotel shower. Unfortunately, I’ll probably never be in that hotel again, and whatever future hotel showers I encounter will be completely different, thanks to the strict Hotel Shower Manufacturers Official Code of Ethics, which states: “No two hotel showers, even in the same hotel, shall have the same controls.” They’re working on a new wrinkle where the shower controls in your room will actually control the shower in another guest’s room, and vice versa.
Yes, it’s an exciting time for the hotel-shower industry.
I didn’t realize I’d missed Dave Barry, but apparently I did. I’m glad he’s back. We need humor these days, perhaps more than ever.
Speaking of humor, the other day I was describing to a friend the time Gerard and I ate at this restaurant near the beautiful Columbia River Gorge. The restaurant is now defunct, so I won’t be sued for libel (I don’t think) for what I’m about to write, but despite glowing reviews I can say it was probably the worst meal I’ve ever been served in a restaurant. Both Gerard and I ordered the specialty and we had high hopes:
The general rule is the smart diner never went wrong ordering the specialty of the house. And the rule holds true here, with the original chicken ‘n dumplins ($14.50). Enough food to feed two (or one, today and tomorrow), the meal starts with your choice of soup or salad and includes chicken, dumplings and green beans. The vegetables are forgettable, but the chicken is a feast of skinless dark and white meat stewed until fork-tender; the two enormous dumplings, each larger than our fist, are shot through with rich chicken flavor; and the chicken gravy, thanks to its secret ingredient, is pure umami.
It was ghastly, and it was big. Really really big, the dumplings much bigger than my fist and even considerably bigger than Gerard’s fist, and swimming in the most tasteless and gluggy gravy imaginable. The dumplings were dense as neutron stars and even more tasteless than the gravy. The whole thing was so awful I could not eat it and neither could he, and we were not picky eaters ordinarily.
All around us, people were happily chowing down with gusto, and the restaurant was full. We couldn’t understand it at all, but the upshot was that we started to laugh and became nearly helpless with laughter. When a waiter came over and asked how we liked the food, I had to pretend to be having a coughing fit. We paid and left without eating, and got into the car and laughed for about fifteen minutes before we could drive away.
After that, all it ever took for both of us to erupt into gales of laughter was to mention that restaurant.
“There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’”
“Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”
–Woody Allen, “Annie Hall” (1977)
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neo:
Well, at least you got big portions. 🙂
Those dumplings do seem disturbing something that would go in lileks catalog of forgetable foods
Chicken & dumplings is a name given to a wide variety of dishes. I often make an East Texas version I like, which is nothing like I’ve ever seen in a can or restaurant. The soup is broth, not gravy. The chicken is all dark meat if possible. The dumplings are a simple flour/salt/oil/water dough rolled out very thin like a pie crust, then cut into squares and boiled in the broth until no longer gummy. Instead of oil and water, if I can, I use the schmaltz skimmed from homemade broth, which ends up being about half fat and half water, just right for the dumplings. Obviously the dumplings must be seasoned. Vegetables are nice but optional.
Maybe this is really just a simple homemade chicken noodle recipe, if dumplings are supposed to be more like matzoh balls.
I wasn’t raised in the South, and to some extent I’m a failure as a Southerner. I despise sweet tea, and I don’t like pimento cheese. At church potluck one time someone brought a pale, very unappetizing-looking dish in a slow cooker. “What is it?” I asked. Chicken and dumplings. I passed.
But those moments of shared laughter are precious memories. I still remember my mother laughing hysterically with my aunt, something to do with a secretary bird. They laughed until their ribs hurt.
huxley:
Yes indeed. Those dumplings were the size of a large grapefruit, not a small one.
I once thought of what I think would be a good idea for a scene from a Woody Allen type movie. It goes as follows: A group of people in a restaurant are sitting around griping about how bad their meals are. The waiter comes by and asks how it’s going and they all smile and say, “Wonderful, very good!”
Shower controls in Europe are sometimes “interesting”. Used to be in England, you had to turn on the heating element to get hot water.
I hate showers that don’t have a decent curtain or door, and those that are at floor level are a real treat.
Went to my grandfather’s home town and we stopped in at a local restaurant for lunch. I ordered a soup / stew of that sort and it had a taste I had not experienced since I was about ten. I did not finish it. The proprietor was quite pleasant and tells me in the course of the conversation that the restaurant is a retirement job. His previous job had been supervising the school cafeteria.
Wow! I have actually been to Tad’s.
We used to go to the Gorge pretty regularly (Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Wa is very nice) and I can’t remember how we heard about Tad’s but we went there one time and I’m not a big chicken n dumplings person but I thought they were OK.
Too bad they are gone we haven’t been back since the lockdowns don’t know if that killed them or what. It was very busy the night we were there.
Griffin:
I figured someone in the comments would have actually been there.
I’ll say this: the setting was beautiful. It’s such a lovely area.
Neo,
Yes it was on the old scenic highway and it was a beautiful summer evening when we there. Since I saw your post I’ve been thinking how I remember nothing about the meal good or bad but I can picture the place perfectly in my mind.
Places like the Gorge remind me why I won’t leave this part of the country despite the horrific governance. So amazing.
Griffin:
Maybe you have PTSD for the food itself, and protective amnesia.
Re: Cathead biscuit
For a long time I was curious about a Southern staple, the cathead biscuit. Called such because each was the size of a … cathead … as opposed to the size of Gerard’s fist or larger.
I finally got to try one in a Southern restaurant which opened in San Francisco. The cathead is not a flaky biscuit. The outside is crisp, the inside is fluffy and good for sopping whatever juices/gravy are available.
I wish there were more Southern restaurants in the West.
Well, we’ll always have Waffle House.
neo:
Thank you for the humor. I had forgotton Dave Barry.
It has been a grim five years, hasn’t it?
In spite of all the liberal (and judicial) spitefulness President Trump has made me laugh quite often lately.
Art Deco
Hilarious!
A lot of restaurants have a slogan such as “just like Mom used to make,” which they figure will attract some business. After all, most people like the food their Moms prepared for them. I don’t think “just like your school cafeteria food” would attract much business. 🙂
One time my parents had a dinner guest from India. My mother prepared chicken and dumplings. A special treat, perhaps, as we didn’t have it a lot. I liked it. Suffice it to say that, no matter how he tried to hide it, is was apparent our Indian guest decided chicken and dumplings was not on his list of favorite foods.
Guess she should have prepared her fried chicken, which she learned to cook growing up in Oklahoma. Not many of my peers in my New England childhood had fried chicken prepared at home.
Re: School cafeteria rolls
We were in Dallas for just a year when I was 11, but the school cafeteria rolls were amazing. Kids fought to get to the front of the line when the rolls were hot, fresh out of the oven.
They only cost a nickel, but with a couple pats of butter — ambrosia!
@ Wendy – your description sounds like the dumplings my mother made, which she learned from her mother, and I suspect that the recipe went back several generations. It was one of her better dishes, along with the cherry cobbler learned ditto.
We never had vegetables in our dumpling soup, however.
The secret to the cobbler, I learned after I was married, was that Grandma
put 2 cans of cherries (or fresh cherries if we had them, but NOT cherry pie filling) in a sauce pot with a full stick of butter and a cup of sugar and boiled the mixture before putting it in the deep-dish and covering it with standard pie crust.
Another aspect, which I’ve never seen elsewhere, was to take any dough not needed for the pie-crust topping, roll it into small balls the size of walnuts, and cook them in the boiling cherries to make (ta-dah!) dumplings.
We were in Czechia earlier this year, and one of the dishes we’d learned about from various guidebooks and You-Tubes was svícková, which is like chicken and biscuits, but with beef. We tried it several times, with Neo-like yuck results: giant slices of a gummy boiled bread thing (I think factory-made), with a starchy, supposedly cream gravy and a tiny sliver of meat. Obviously originally a peasant dish to stretch meat flavor as far as possible. I don’t know the origin of the Southern dish, but I wonder if it started as a Texas thing from Czech emigrants with chicken substituted?
And here I thought “dumpling” was a term of endearment…
Not many of my peers in my New England childhood had fried chicken prepared at home.
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Rustbelt kid here. My mother made lovely fried chicken. It’s about the only recipe passed down from her paternal grandmother. She offered that Southern fried chicken typically uses batters, but her grandmother’s did not. I’ve been enmeshed with upland Southerners my adult life and among the culinary notables is (a) a love of fried chicken and (b) no batter.
How about those fish patties that have the fish and cheese insane i remember those from elementary school
I didn’t realize I’d missed Dave Barry, but apparently I did. I’m glad he’s back.
I don’t think Dave Barry was gone, just that his column in the Miami Herald went behind a paywall. Now it all seems to be available again, at least via his blog:
https://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/
Apropos of nothing, reminds me of boating along the River Mayenne in northern France – each little riverside town had a free overnight mooring dock, and a restaurant or several within walking distance.
Each town also had a distinct fish dish, wine, and cheese, which we found delicious without exception. Clueless tourists that we were, we inevitably attempted to reorder the same at the next town a whole 5 km away! Sacre blue! Swine!
Conservative commentary on the Kentucky Derby: Sovereignty defeats Journalism!
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/05/04/why-the-winner-of-the-kentucky-derby-turned-into-a-viral-sensation-n2656504
Elementary school cafeteria food: square pizza or fish sticks on Fridays (lots of Polish and French-Canadian kids at that end of town). The pizza was excellent. We used to trade dessert for it.
There was/is a restaurant outside Urbana, Illinois that served the kind of food Neo and Gerard got in Oregon. Big mounds of gooey tasteless white stuff. It’s still around, so I won’t name it. The one time I went there–a friend was curious about it–it was packed and the people looked like the food. Maybe it’s a rural thing.
On Dave Barry’s column: going in through Alabama ain’t fun, but going into the bladder through the Keys is also no picnic. (I have actually driven from Alabama to Tallahassee and Wakulla Springs.)
There used to be a nondescript restaurant in the national zoo, which was just across the street from my office in Kinshasa, capital of what was then Zaire and is now Congo. I somehow doubt the restaurant still exists. Heck, I’d be surprised if the zoo still exists. Congo has been going through some really tough times for decades.
Anyway, on a totally random chance, I dropped into the restaurant for lunch one day, and an even greater chance, ordered the tiger fish á la provençale. It was so good I took my wife there for lunch a few days later, and returned often for that dish.
Provençale cuisine comes (unsurprisingly) from the Provence region of France and includes plenty of tomatoes, garlic, onions, mushrooms, olive oil and spices. Before going to that restaurant I don’t think I’d ever eaten anything Provençal, but I loved it and often had that same meal, made with fresh tiger fish from the Zaire River. I don’t remember the cook except that he was Congolese — definitely not from France.
I ended up introducing many friends to that dish in the zoo restaurant. Mmmmm! Tasty!
Dave Barry is great. The one movie based on a book he authored comes to mind. Big Trouble (2007). I enjoyed that one quite a bit.
Motel/hotel shower controls. I have a vivid memory of that happening. What in god’s name were they thinking? 15 minutes later I had water flowing at the proper temperature.
Also, rental cars. Aren’t cars supposed to be standardized? Lost in Orlando long ago one dark night… where is the switch for the interior light. I had to get out and hold the map in front of the headlights to read it.
Then in Rayleigh, in the rental car lot at night. Where is the start button for the car? I sometimes carry a little flashlight with me, but not that night. Had to open the car door to see. The button has to be near the steering column, yes?? No, it’s way the hell over to the right buried in the midst of the heating and ventilation controls!
I only visited the Columbia river gorge once. I went to Hood River, as it was a board sailing Mecca at the time. I notice sailors were rigging little sails and struggling to get under way, so I rigged a medium sized sail. Well, the wind is enormously faster out in the channel center, and I broke my fifth metacarpal. The doc at the doc-in-the-box put a plaster cast over my whole arm, and I had to drive 1,000 miles home shifting my manual transmission with my left arm. Good times!
@TommyJay — Dave Barry is great. The one movie based on a book he authored comes to mind. Big Trouble (2007) [2002]. I enjoyed that one quite a bit.
Me too!
Unfortunately it bombed. $8.5 mil box office on $40 mil budge. “Big Trouble” had a terrorist bomb threat subplot and was scheduled tor release in 2001. Unfortunately 9-11 intervened.
Disney panicked, delayed release until 2002 and starved the film of marketing.
A shame. Maybe “Big Trouble” is a quirky comedy that doesn’t translate to the Big Screen. Maybe Dave Barry doesn’t translate to the Big Screen.
Maybe. But a lot of people like Dave Barry and “Big Trouble” is about as close as I can imagine Davy Barry’s humor in a movie.
Regarding rental cars :
Maybe it’s just me, but every car I’ve ever owned (and I’ve owned several) had the lever to open the gas tank on the floor, next to the driver’s left foot. So when I wanted to refill the tank on a car I’d rented, that’s where I looked.
It wasn’t there, so I looked on the steering column; when it wasn’t there either I looked on the dash.
After about five minutes I finally located it – on the driver’s side door. I’ve never encountered that layout on any other vehicle, before or since.
AesopFan
We still use my paternal grandmother’s—from the Midwest but of northern roots— cobbler recipe. It uses just 2 tablespoons of butter. Different strokes for different folks.
Nancy B on chicken and dumplings
No, it’s a Southern thing. But there has definitely been a Czech influence on Texas food. Where I live in TX, there are kolache shops, kolache sold frozen at HEB grocery stores, and kolache filled w hot dogs and jalapeno in Mexican bakeries.
Beer in Texas has Czech and German roots. There has been a brewery in Shiner TX for over a century. Shiner Bock is their best-known product. There is more than one Shiner song, but this is the one I first heard. The Shiner Song (John Clay).
Germans and Czechs brought polka music and instruments from Europe. Tejanos made that music their own. Appropriation? Yes. Let’s have more appropriation! Flaco Jimenez – En Vivo (1976) shows us his accordion musicianship. Tejano polka/oompah music migrated to northern Mexico. What is known as Norteño (Northern) music in Mexico is basically polka/oompah.
Chalino Sanchez- El crimen de culiacan English subtitles (23 million views in Spanish)
I think that sonnenfeld, tried to recreate the ethos of get shorty, from some years early, the get shorty sequel,(set in the hip hop world) was forgetable, maybe it wasn’t absurd enough for Miami,(maybe Michael Bay, might have captured the proper mood,
It is interesting that types of dumplings are also part of Chinese cuisine.
Thanks Neo. I haven’t read Barry in years. Perfect timing for these times.
In re hotel showers: Adam Carolla had a rant on one of his recent podcasts about this very subject.
Here’s a clip I came across on another blog’s comment section and thought you might enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz3CPzdCDws
It’s interesting that Chinese Cuisine includes types of Dumplings.
And here is the dish itself, Tad’s chicken and dumplings. Let’s see if the link works.
Re: Shower controls
My theory is that each year there is a secret contest for design students to reinvent shower controls. Hotels draw lots and the loser has to use the winning design.
My other theory is that they are secretly testing American IQs.
If you don’t like these theories, I have others.
Taking a shower is probably the most costly and risky thing you do in a hotel room, and probably causes the most wear on the physical asset.
No surprise why you are discouraged from showering – maybe you’ll do it at the gym.
You need to turn both valves like missile keys see wargames
Speaking of laughter, everyone should read Dave Barry’s piece on colonoscopies. Apparently a relation of his had colon cancer (diagnosed early) and made him get over his fear of the procedure. Barry wrote a humor piece on colonoscopies for the fearful, and it is so good that I know of at least two people who swore never to have the procedure that went right out and had it done. It is immensely funny, a public service, and good therapy for the fearful.
Apparently Tad’s closed down permanently in 2023 — a confluence of issues, including the pandemic. A shame, even though their chicken and dumplings were, uh, not as tasty as promised. Those old roadside places are dying fast now: the pandemic killed off a lot. Children don’t want to keep them going. And in some places, zoning forces them out. Andersen’s Pea Soup is gone. Nut Tree is gone.
I remember the first time I had chicken and dumplings: Girl Scout camp. Ugh. Lumps of dough with no flavor. I surreptitiously covered my lap with dozens of paper napkins, and when no counselor was looking, I dropped the one I was forced to take in my lap. When it was safe, I excused myself to use the latrine, and dropped it down the hole. Good riddance.
I have had them once since. Still tasteless gobs of mostly cooked dough. Makes matzah balls seems like a high class delicacy.
Always loved Dave’s books (“Best.State.Ever.”) & enjoyed fellow Floridian Carl Hiasson’s books too, until he developed TDS & went political. Why do these writers do that? Is it just virtue signaling for their social circle?