Monday, March 31, 2008

 

Predicting success based upon Men’s room habits

There is surely a female equivalent to this, but a thought which has been almost in my consciousness until today, was suddenly clarified in such a manner that I feel confident enough to proclaim it here. There is no margin for error based upon sampling size (get your heads out of the gutter if the size you’re thinking of can be measured in inches!). Indeed, this is entirely unscientific, but the correlation is clear to me:

You can tell how successful a man is likely to be by his urinal habits. While mere mortals need a few seconds, or a couple anyway, for the waterworks to turn on, and a period of a few seconds at the other end of the process as the stream slows; for the man destined to be (or already) a high flyer, there is no discernable time from the moment he has unzipped until the moment his neighbour hears the tell-tale sound, and not a moment after the full torrent has ended before he is re-zipping and heading for the sinks. Do they not have little drips to shake off or are such trivialities not worthy of their attention? Either way, you will not catch them staring upwards while they await full eviction.

The thought occurs to me now that they could almost qualify for an express lane of sorts – the executive urinal: maximum stay 10 seconds.

Talking of staring upwards: Has anyone ever thought of placing advertising placards at between 7 and 8 feet up the walls on which urinals are mounted? The word subliminal somehow takes on an almost sinister meaning in this context, but potential advertisers have a truly captive audience who are desperate to focus not only their eyes, but also their attention on anything other than whoever might be standing alongside them. Had there been such an innovation before now, perhaps I would have gone through life never having had the revelation which prompted me to write this!

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Sunday, March 30, 2008

 

Brookline

I’m writing this from my new room. It is close to twice the size of the room in Quincy, but there is no communal area here. Not that I used the living room much in Quincy. The area is really nice. My apartment is up a very steep hill and is in an old building. The stove, oven and bathtub all date to the 1930’s and are lovely. The drawback is that I will sleep on a sofabed. I’m sure I will be all the happier for the comforts of my own bed on Friday and Saturday nights, although I already feel more comfortable here than I ever did in the other place.

I will be sharing the apartment with Kevin, who is a very laid back guy who is even older than me :) and Alex, who is not older than me and apparently isn’t around too often.

My commute will be shorter - theoretically, at least. The closest T stop is half a block away from the bottom of the hill, but it is the dreaded, nay infamous Green Line. I suppose I will find out soon enough if the reputation is still deserved or is by now strictly historical. At the downtown end, the stop, Government Center, is barely 3 minutes walk to the office.

I can hardly believe I am about to start my 6th week in the job!

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Ab Rocket


Any ad which can show a man with a big pot belly next to a picture of him “after only 3 days”, where he had just a little excess, must surely be suspicious. They promise a “risk-free trial for only $14.95 plus free shipping and handling.” Curious wording. How much does is actually cost!

I decided to look at their website. The picture to the left is their print ad. There are some things that just don’t add up. You cannot get any details on the 30 day money back guarantee. You have a choice of 1 payment of $99.99 or “3 payments of $33.33 in 30 days.” Forgive my pickiness, it doesn’t say 3 monthly payments, it simply says in 30 days, you make 3 payments. Hmmm. Most curious!

The website offers potential customers no way of finding out about the money back guarantee. I presume that you get back all except $14.95 if you paid in full, or if you opted for the 3 payment scheme, you just get hit up for the $14.95. Plus, of course, it will be up to you to get the package back to the seller at your expense and in working order. The ‘testimonials’ are so very obviously fake, you would have to be a fool to believe them! I suggest to those who are tempted to spend the money that the subterfuge is for a reason.

My attention also focused on another thing: Just below the Ab Rocket logo, is another bubble which proclaims this a $50 value. If it is a $50 value, why are they charging a penny shy of a hundred!

Potential buyers beware!

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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

 

National Walk to Work Day. Another brilliant concept ! Ha!

April 4th is National Walk to Work Day. The organisers, if that word isn’t too grand for those who came up with this concept, are very understanding people. For those who work too far from their home to make walking practical, they suggest that the elevator should be ditched and stairs used.

I probably stay an hour and a half to two hours walk from downtown Boston. I work on the 29th floor. Are these people going to provide rest and drink stops every, shall we say, 10 floors? In the absence of that, I await their thoughtful suggestion on what people should do if they both work too far from their home and too high in the sky.

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Sunday, March 23, 2008

 

Almost the perfect weekend and more bus stories

Tottenham won and Arsenal lost. That’s 2 out of three of the elements for a perfect weekend! I doubt I need to spell out the element I missed out on!

My weekend actually started early. Standish opened on Good Friday, but people were leaving early. I completed my 40 hours for the week at 2:15 – consultants are not allowed to stay after the last employee leaves, so I wanted to make sure to get my hours in early. I walked to South Station, arriving at 2:35, to find that the 2:30 bus had yet to leave and had spare seats! Towards the front, there were 2 open; one next to a very large woman and one next to a Haitian woman travelling in front of two friends.

For the first hour, the 3 talked incessantly – the one directly behind me being the loudest and the most verbose. Then each got on their phones and talked simultaneously for a while. Then the two behind me spoke for the entire rest of the journey. This isn’t really a fair assessment of what happened. The woman behind me obviously had a very interesting and full life and got louder as the journey went on. Some may think that her momentary breaks, in which her friend spoke, were because she wanted to engage her friend. My thought is that she realised if she didn’t catch her breath once in a hile, she would die.

As I was getting off, the man who had been sitting in front of me made the point of stopping me and commenting about the woman and how he had her voice in his ear for 4 hours.

The alternative to me sitting directly in front of her, would have been to sit across the aisle and next to the aforementioned rubenesque lady. Every time I looked out of the window across from me, I was aware of her eyes burning into me. I actually looked all the way back once just to confirm what I had been feeling, and I was right. Overall, I think I made the right decision!

It was so lovely to walk into my apartment before 7:30. Apart from phone calls to my mother and sister and niceties to cashiers, I didn’t speak to a soul until meeting my friend Carrie for lunch before catching the bus back today. The solitude in the comfort of my own home was absolutely blissful.

One more week in Quincy and then on to Brookline.

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Saturday, March 22, 2008

 

My sister? 53?

Was it 3 years ago already? I suppose it must have been! I was working in Lower Manhattan and just started walking to a card shop to get a birthday card for my sister Jackie’s 50th, when it just hit me. I can’t have a sister who is about to turn 50! That would mean that I’m going to turn 50 soon. Well, she did indeed turn 50, and all too quickly, I did also, shortly followed by my cousin Lorraine. But this is worse, somehow.

As I was buying yet another card for her today, I was thinking that there's something very wrong with me having a 53 year old sister and all this numbers and counting thing has just got out of hand. Not that I favour the only real alternative, you understand, but it is wrong. Somehow I can handle 50, but 53 sounds too much older to actually be right. But nobody is going to jump out of a closet and yell that we've been punk'd. There are no hidden cameras filming a great cosmic joke. This is really happening!

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High-Speed Trains: The way to go for the USA

I am aware that building a new fast-speed railway network would be extremely expensive, but I have to wonder if we can afford not to build them.

Our airports are jammed to overflowing. Airspace is bulging at the seams. Each time a plane goes into the air, thousands of gallons of fuel are burned.

I am not suggesting that it is realistic to expect people to go from New York to California by train. But what about routes like Boston/New York/D.C.; Houston/Dallas; Detroit/Chicago; San Francisco/Los Angeles? Buses take a long time; planes are always delayed and are ever more expensive and trains don’t necessarily save time over buses, even though they are certainly more costly.

If England can have had the Inter-City 125, which goes up to 125mph, for longer than 30 years and now has faster trains; if Japan and other countries can have trains that go 200mph plus, then why should it take 4 hours to go 215 miles from New York to Boston? It is pathetic, absurd and absolutely inexcusable that the supposed most advanced country in the world has trains that can barely reach 60 miles per hour!

Why would anyone bother with airport traffic and parking; security check; delays before getting on the plane; hour long taxiing on the runway and, in the case of New York, inadequate transportation from airport to City if there was a decent train with a journey time of barely more than an hour to either Boston or D.C.?

For the sake of the environment (Al Gore, are you reading this?), air safety and the sanity and comfort of travellers, it is surely the only sensible path for the longer term and as I see it, inevitable. So do we start the 10-year talking process now, or do we talk about starting that process for the next 10 years…. or do we wait 10 years until we start talking about talking about it?

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

 

Changing rooms

My stay in North Quincy will come to an end on March 30th. I looked at 5 places.

I found Dorchester to be grey and dead. Although the apartment and room I looked at were nice, as was the woman doing the renting, I really disliked the neighbourhood.

Porter Square is a nice area with lots of life. I looked at a basement apartment which was a sublet – no roommate. Obviously it was more expensive, and it would have been noce to have my own place. But to be honest, it was a bit dumpy, so I passed.

I went from there to Kendall, which is the MIT campus. It’s a bit like the NYU campus in that almost everything is owned by the University, but the area has zero character in my assessment. The apartment I saw was lovely and the room also. And Darlene, who lives there, is a great lady who I know I would have got on famously with. But after seeing a place in Brookline this lunchtime, I could have moved nowhere else.

For as similar as the place is to Brooklyn in name, that is how dissimilar it is in every other respect. And this is nothing against either place. The main street is lined with lots of interesting shops. There is a feel that I will perhaps be able to describe after I have been there a short while. I will certainly post pictures to illustrate.

The apartment I will be moving into is no great shakes, although the street it is on is lovely. My room is a decent size and purely functional. There is no common area although two other guys live in the place. I will have 2-5 months in an apartment with no TV, which is fine, because I have taken to being in my room here without any. I shall have my music, correspondence, blogging, researching/surfing and perhaps, the writing project I mentioned a week or so ago but have been too busy to even think about since. But as functional as the lodging, it will be worth it to spend some time in such a great area. Brookline is definitely not a place you go home to only when your evening is over.

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9 months of milestones + party report and other news

June 3rd of last year would have been my father’s 80th birthday.
June 10th was my 50th.
December 12th was Hannah’s 18th.
March 15th was Sean’s 21st
March 16th was my cousin Lorraine’s 50th.

I had hoped to post a picture or two from my little gathering on Saturday, but I had a problem with my camera. It was in Boston. Should the question occur to anyone as to what it was doing in Boston, I would have to say, at an educated guess, really very little.

The party was nice. There were a few different people to the last one. In fact, only myself, my kids, Adrian, their mom, and my good friend Rawle were at the last one. Each of my 3 wing dings has had a different character, the only constants in all 3 being me and my kids and that each was fun.

I suppose I’ll do it all again when my mother comes in October. The way things are trending, I will be back in New York by then. I had a call a few days ago about a possible permanent job in New York City. Got another today, although he NY role quickly became a Stamford position, but although I love that part of California and it would be a great second best to be close to my family out there, I really want my next job to be where my apartment and my life are. Also, as lovely as Boston is, it isn’t about to become home.

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Saturday, March 15, 2008

 

Three weeks in Boston

When I took this contract, I was told it was for 3-6 months. That position was clarified on Thursday. I had thought it was strictly to do with the amount of work to be done, but as I’m getting into it, I can see I could keep going for a year – and that isn’t really an option, either for me, because it would basically mean I might as well move, or for the company due to budget concerns. Well, as I found out on Thursday, the initial term of 3 months will probably be extended, but that decision cannot be made for another few weeks. The manager would certainly want to keep me, but the ultimate decision will not be hers. I still feel it will go beyond 3 months though, as they were looking for something to do my job for quite some time, so nobody doubts the importance of it. It would be illogical for the bosses to cut me off so early in the process. But then again, bosses don’t always make logical decisions!

The people at Starpoint are convinced they can get me something in Boston for when this job is done. For me, it would be a backup plan, just as this was. Unless, as I joked with them, they found me a good woman in town!

Much more interesting was a call I received this week which could result in an employee job in the coming months for a company here in New York. They may not want me, of course, but the agent seems to think I am exactly what they are looking for. No way would I leave where I am now within 3 months, as the job does wonders for my resume and anyway, Starpoint have got me two jobs to date and maybe they’ll find me a third some time, so I will only do the right thing by all parties. I just feel that if I cannot be guaranteed time beyond an initial 3 months, then I am entitled to take something else then if I give them fair notice.

I am looking for another room as I’m not overly comfortable in my current situation. Robyn is a nice person and may just read this blog, so I’ll not go into details. North Quincy is closed when I get back from the office. There are a couple of food places and a choice of more, plus two supermarkets, if I walk 15 minutes, but the streets are dead. I have no problem with living on a quiet street, but I want to be able to walk to where there are people and there is some sign of life. I don’t like working, then going home and feeling that whether I want it to be so or not, the evening is done. I’m told I’d like Cambridge, so that is my main point of focus.

As I write this, I am waiting for Fresh Direct to deliver the food I will be preparing for Sean’s 21st birthday party. Although it is after noon, it is no surprise to me, nor should it be to anyone else who knows him, that he is still sound asleep.

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Saturday, March 08, 2008

 

The Chinatown Bus - Lucky Star

Including my round trip to find my lodgings, I have now done 3 round trips to Boston on Lucky Star. Four of my journeys, those not taking place after work on a Friday, have been very pleasant and incredible value for $15 – less for students. My Friday journeys however, have had me considering alternate means of travel to get home to Brooklyn.

On Friday, the buses are packed out. Not surprisingly, a huge percentage of the passengers are students. Most of these talk among themselves or study. They might occasionally get a little loud, but are really no problem. On the bus yesterday, however, were 3 girls who looked 18 but acted 12. The guy sitting next to me theorized that this was their first time on a bus, to which I added, “Without mummy or daddy”.

They acted as if they were alone, instead of on a bus with perhaps 2 empty spaces. Everything was at the tops of their voices. Fake laughing, which grates the hell out of me and people should get over when they’re older than maybe 4; singing pop songs; clapping and generally not giving a shit about anyone else. Even with music in my ears, they were loud. Apparently, at least one person said something to them during the journey, which they ignored. I couldn’t hold my tongue anymore near the end of the journey. I saw the look on the face of the poor woman sitting in front of them and told her I felt sorry for her. And then my anger took over and I raised my voice so that the children could hear: “…acting like they’re the only damned people on the bus….” I didn’t say much. The girl who I could see looked shocked. A couple of people towards the rear of the bus clapped! There was silence for the duration.

The man next to me turned out to be alright, but I wasn’t too thrilled by him earlier in the journey. He could only sit with his legs very wide apart, which for me has no place in public transportation. And the twice he briefly slept, he snored!

But he was better than my neighbour from a week earlier. My apologies to any seriously overweight person who reads this, but you will be aware you aren’t the most popular seat mates in cramped areas. When the largest woman I have seen for some while passed by my seat, I confess to feeling relieved. But moments later she was back, asking if she could sit next to me. Of course I said that she could. And somehow, she was actually the more comfortable of my two Friday seat-mates to share with.

Her problem was that she seemed to need to kill time by calling everyone in her cell phone contacts list. And she made no attempt to keep her end of the conversations private, get louder as each conversation continued and with each successive call. There is etiquette on buses to keep calls to a minimum as they irritate those around you. And I don’t feel comfortable talking when in such close proximity with others; so my sensibility fits in with the protocol.

After two bad Fridays, I decided to check out Peter Pan Buses. Booking online is $8 more – they claim that the fare is $20, but they add $3 for the annoyingly named convenience charge. (Buying at the gate avoids the bogus charge but costs rather more.) I would have done it, but they say you must be on the bus an hour before departure. I shall make inquiries as to whether they stick with this.

Home on week one at 11:55pm, I decided to work extra hours earlier in the week so as to leave early on Fridays from now on. Yesterday, I walked in at 10:15pm. It isn’t ideal, as I must leave here early to mid afternoon on Sundays, so don’t have long at home. But the joy of my own privacy; my own couch; my own bed; being around my things in my own lovely apartment, make it absolutely worth it.

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Monday, March 03, 2008

 

Spam from Online pharmacies

Warning: If you are easily offended, skip this entry!

Does every male of a certain age get bombarded with Spam emails looking to sell them little blue pills? At least 2 of these escape my Spam filter every day. Today there were 5 of them:

‘Agrrrh, stop it making me a fool’ sent by jean claude
“This is for you, Andrew!Your dick doesn't get up again?YOU CAN change your life!”

‘Finally You found he way?’ sent by michelle Armagh
“I've found it, Andrew!Your cock says no to all your tryings and you are tired of it?YOU CAN prevent it from ruining your life!We help you.”

‘Tremendous force and volume’ sent by SarahHessLO
“How about ejaculating with tremendous force and volume?”

‘Great discounts for online pharmacy, VISA and MC accepted’ sent by Dorothy Wilson
‘Cialis Soft Tabs. Good for you. Good for her.”

‘Obviously You got it to work?’ sent by jan
“Your dick says no to his job and you are tired of it?YOU CAN stop Disfunction”

I don’t usually look at them at all, simply deleting them unopened. It just struck me though, that maybe a little cautionary email might be in order.

Of the 93 emails that didn’t make it through my spam blocker, another 16 were trying to sell me ‘men’s meds’. At least that many were trying to sell me weight loss meds and replace my thinning hair, several wanted to give me car loans, one wanted to give me a mortgage, people were offering loans and a few more one-offs, like an invite to view a web cam. Not a single one offered to make me larger!

How many people responded to some business opportunity and started flooding the web with this nonsense? I wonder if they realise yet that the only person making any money is the one who sold them the right to ‘make their millions’ selling guaranteed popular products!

I never, and I mean never buy anything from people who spam me. But if I were to buy from one of them, could anyone be in any doubt as to who it would be from? Does anyone buy from the pathetic losers who send the nonsense emails, whatever they are trying to sell?

Incidentally, I also got an email titled 24 hours, which I presumed to be a 2/3 strength version of Cialis. But it turned out to be from Hillary Clinton’s campaign asking if I could work their phones in Brooklyn for 3 hours this evening. (Had I been n Brooklyn, I would have done it.)

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Sunday, March 02, 2008

 

First week in Boston – My lodgings

My room is OK. I won’t lie in order to make it sound better than it is. I miss the freedom of my own apartment. I miss the comfort that comes from knowing that everything around me is mine. But being realistic, by the time I get my first pay this coming weekend, it will have been 6 weeks since I last credited my bank account. I wasn’t actually due to be paid until March 21st, but Starpoint kindly agreed to give me one of the two weeks pay due then, two weeks early. (In case anyone is wondering how that works, in the world of Consulting, you usually get paid late, and in the case of Starpoint, the lag is two weeks).

The cost of short-term leases of studio apartments is at least double of what I’m paying as a lodger, and the money saved will come in very handy re-padding my very sad bank account, which only held out this far because 3 creditors and my ex-wife all gave me a temporary pass on my February payments. Fortunately, my pay as a Consultant will be rather higher than it was as an employee, so I can get back on level footing within a month and regain a cushion shortly thereafter.

I chose the wrong week to move into my lodging. It is an old house, and work being done on the bathroom has proven considerably more complicated that Robyn, the landlady, had anticipated. I had been given the OK to have a bath of Monday night, but the man working on the bathroom floor was no plumber, and all the bath water ended up in the kitchen, below, when I pulled the plug. Good thing it was a shallow bath!

So when I returned from work on Tuesday, not only was there a hole still in the bathroom floor, now there was also a hole in the kitchen ceiling! Everything that had been on the counter-space by the sink was now on the living-room table. A plumber came in to sort out the mess.

As of an email I received on Saturday, the floor-man came back to relay the floor, but the pipes all broke. So another plumber tore up the floor and re-did the pipes. With any luck by tomorrow at the latest, the bathroom will be completed and there will once again be two toilets and sinks in the house instead of just the downstairs one which we have been confined to since my arrival.

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First week in Boston – Writing

The bathroom saga hasn’t been the only problem to plague Robyn’s house. Her Internet cut out on Tuesday evening and as of Thursday, even though she spent some while on the phone with various Comcast technicians, the problems had not been resolved. I was actually able o locate a weak signal from a nearby unprotected network on Thursday, so wasn’t entirely cut off that day. I can only hope that it has been corrected by now. My one day without Internet, and two with limited access, had me writing a piece that had been much on my mind in recent weeks.

Sometimes, I think with my fingers; by which I mean that I have thoughts in my head, but typing them helps focus them and can bring out things I didn’t know were there. Ultimately, it brings various thoughts together far more coherently. I had to write about my still recent break-up. To say I am ambivalent only starts to do justice to the mixed feelings I have had both before and since finding out that my ex has a new boyfriend. Writing it was a good exercise, as I feel far more resolved for seeing all of my feelings in one place as opposed to thinking different things at different times. That is all I will say here.

What I found when I was writing this, was that I was anxious to get back to it when I was forced to break off for trivial things like sleep and work. And I now see that I can make something very good come of my exile from New York and living in a shared house. I have had an outline for a book in my head for some years now. I am going to set about writing down this outline. The project of turning it from an outline to a book will be huge and I am not yet convinced that I have the discipline I will need to devote evenings to this project for perhaps two years. The subject matter will require some research. As well as making a complex plot actually read believably, I need to convince myself that I can make the style I want to write it in actually work. It is ambitious, to say the least. It certainly isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that this is the last I will ever write of my plan. But I am suddenly bitten by the writing bug, and must seize both the mood and opportunity to give it a shot.

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First week in Boston – Downtown and Quincy

I don’t feel lost when I go a couple of blocks from the office now and am venturing slightly farther afield during my lunch breaks. On Friday, I went with Matt, who is an Intern 4 months younger than Sean, and a friend of his, to Wagamama. It is one of my favourite restaurants in London, which I first discovered in Dublin. Boston has the only two locations in the United States. They have priced it similarly to London. Over there, the prices are considered very reasonable. Over here, they seem a little steep! But the food is so delicious that it was a treat for me – a taste and feel of home.

The feel of Boston is just so much more relaxed than New York, and there aren’t the walls around people that can feel so impenetrable in New York, even though the people there are certainly considerably more friendly than some outsiders would have you believe.

Quincy really does seem like a place you go home to. Few people walk. There’s an area with some shops and a really nice feel three long blocks from where I’m staying, but where I am it is all quiet blocks of middle class housing.

I have noticed that there are a far larger percentage of College Students wherever I go than in New York. I have seen more text books opened on trains and buses these last two weeks in any year in the Big Apple. Definitely different. Definitely a lovely place. But I still really appreciated being home for he weekend.

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Fast Food wars: McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s

Fast Food wars: McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s
I had not been to any of these venerable institutions in the 3 years since my return to these shores, and rarely for some years before that. In my bus driving days back in England, if I was on the late shift where my meal break was at 10pm, there weren’t too many choices, so I did occasionally get a spicy bean burger with a side salad to substitute for the fries.

But when I decided to choose Micky D’s over a sandwich place while unexpectedly having to wait an hour in South Station when I came here to look at rooms a couple of weeks ago, I found that there is no spicy bean burger here, nor the option of getting a healthy side instead of fries. So rather than eat the shit burger (see ‘Dangerous Science’ entry from April 2007), I decided on crispy chicken and fries. I can best describe the chicken as tasting like fish, but less so. It was a thin, dry cutlet which entirely derived its flavour from the oil the batter is fried in. The fries clearly miss the flavour imparted by the trans fats they used to fry them in, as they too were flavourless.

The following Thursday, on day two of the job seminar related below, nine of us went to Wendy’s. I had chili with onions, a plain baked potato into which I spooned much of the chili and a side salad. Very tasty and very cheap.

A mere 3 days later, I completed the set, so to speak, when the bus to Boston stopped at Burger King. I had the Big Fish and fries. The fish was more fishy than McDonald’s Chicken sandwich, was was still rather bland. The fries were considerably better than those of their primary competition.

For me, by far the best of the three was Wendy’s and McDonald’s was the worst. I can’t help thinking of how many people eat in these places almost every day, and hope that they at least eat real food sometimes. Certainly, if they consider this to be good food and not just cheap grub, I feel sorry for them!

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