A reminder as to why NOT to move to Malden

Downtown Malden, with one of its sixty-zillion nail salons. SRSLY?

If you recall correctly,  Business Week magazine named Malden as the best place to raise kids in Massachusetts.  This was in 2008, and Malden sucked then.  It’s getting worse now, yet Malden flies banners all over the place squawking about this *honor*.

The truth is, the place SUCKS, and it’s not even a good place to raise PETS.  A lot of that has to do with the fact that most of the homes here are rentals, and most landlords won’t even allow pets.  yet landlords are forever bitching and moaning that they can’t find anyone to rent their units.  Well, maybe if they allowed pets, they’d have a better choice of tenants than they do now.  And pet owners are much better tenants than Section 8 people who have a zillion kids.  When they keep the pet owners out, those people go elsewhere, and the landlords have no choice to rent to whatever white trash comes along.  These are trashy people who cry poverty, yet seem to have enough money to spend on a playstation 3 and sixty-zillion games to go with it. Yet they pay NO taxes, and they dump their trash near our cans, because they don’t want to pay for the city trash bags, and would rather get US and others in trouble for putting out non-bagged trash.

If you need another good reason not to move here, check this out: Eight injured in Malden blaze last Friday; department reflects on fighting fires after budget cuts.  This house is three doors away, and it’s scary.  All the more reason to want to move, if the city feels that public safety is less important than spending money on useless crap.

Finally, let’s not forget this:  Malden Shootout Leaves 1 Dead, 2 Wounded.  Just a few blocks away from my house.  I suppose the next budget cuts will be cops.

This is a big part of why we’ll be moving to New Hampshire when our current lease is up.  Enough is enough.

Banned in Boston?

Beer served in a plastic cup at the Sam Adams Bar & Grill at Merchantsauto.com Stadium, Manchester, NH

You’ve probably heard the story about a man being killed by a shard of glass from a beer mug, as the result of a bar fight at the Landsdowne Pub in Boston.  Now, this bar is serving all drinks in plastic cups.  I don’t know what this bar is like, because I’ve never been there, but this is probably a good idea.

But now, according to an article on BeerAdvocate.com, the Boston licensing board is considering banning glass containers in ALL of the city’s bars.

It’s one thing to drink beer from plastic cups at a baseball game or other sporting event.    In addition to eliminating the risk of drunken fans throwing glass containers at players on the field, or at other fans in the stands, there are other practical reasons.  The cost of breakage would go through the roof, and make ballpark beer even more expensive than it already it.  And then they’d have to worry about washing all those glasses that don’t get broken.

Even at the Sam Adams Bar & Grill, which is located inside the NH Fisher Cats’ ballpark in Manchester, all drinks are served in plastic or paper cups.  This place has a really nice mahogany bar and all, and looks like the sort of place where you’d not expect your beer to be served in a plastic cup.  But they also allow people to take drinks out of the place and into the seating area of the ballpark.  They can’t watch every single person the whole time, so plastic all around makes the most sense.

On the other hand, I would not want to go into a nice beer bar and have my beer served in a plastic cup.  Different styles of beer are supposed to be served in different kinds of glassware; something they can’t do if they were forced to use only plastic.  Rather than give you a lesson on proper beer glassware, here’s a basic article about it from BeerAdvocate.com.  Many beer lovers have assorted glassware in their homes (we have a good collection), and we expect bartenders at better beer bars to know what beer goes in what glass.

The banning of glass would hurt these businesses.  Who is going to pay top dollar for a fine beer dinner, when all of the brews are served in plastic cups?  Beer geeks will simply go to places outside of Boston, the people who plan the beer dinners will have them at other restaurants, etc.

Also, at these higher-end establishments, people are less likely to get so drunk that they get into fights.  There is a huge difference between “beer geeks” like us, and people who go into some dive bar to get drunk on Bud Light or some other cheap, mass-produced swill.  Beer geeks enjoy the flavor of beer, we don’t drink to get so drunk that we can’t taste anything.  We’ve grown way beyond the college days of keggers and cases upon cases of Natty Light.

Those who drink to get drunk do not only not care what their beer is served in, they also do not care what beer they drink, as long as it’s cheap and there is plenty of it.  So the places that cater to such a clientele should, by all means, eliminate serving anything in glass.  But they should also be paying more attention to patrons who’ve had too much, and shut them off as necessary.  This not just because of potential bar fights, but for the safety of the general public.  You would not want someone to get so drunk that they cannot safely drive home.  Even the better beer bars should be paying attention; they would not likely serve somebody endless glasses of some 9.0% ABV double IPA.  As much as I personally love beers like this, I might have one serving at the beer bar, and then switch over to something with a lower ABV (alcohol by volume).

Hopefully, the owners of beer bars and brewpubs in Boston will speak out against this stupid law, and it will never be passed.  Let the bar and restaurant owners decide what to do, according to what would be best for them.  But don’t put people out of business over an issue which is not applicable to their establishment.

Opinion – The Massachusetts Bottle Bill

So now, Massachusetts wants to expand their current “bottle bill” by including containers other beverages, such as water, juice, iced tea, etc.  Right now, only containers of soda and beer come with a five-cent deposit, to be refunded upon return of said containers.  Story here.

My opinion?  Not only is this a bad idea, but I wish they’d do away with the whole bottle bill.  It’s nothing but a time-consuming annoyance that is completely unnecessary.  If more cities and towns would encourage recycling, then people could just put these containers out in their recycling bin once a week, and have them taken away.  See?  You can recycle without it taking up too much time and hassle.

Most stores that are convenient to us have bottle/can return machines, as shown here.  You just stick the containers in one by one, and when you are done, you push a button, and they give you a receipt, kind of like one that comes out of one of those Epson tm-t88iv receipt machines. You take it to a cashier in the store and they give you your money. Simple, huh?  But not so fast…

Every single time I have tried to use one of these things, I am pushed and shoved by other people trying to use them, you’d think it was Fort Knox, the way they go crazy and can’t wait their turn to use the machines.  It’s absolutely insane!

There are two Kappy’s stores near us that have a redemption counter, and for the most part, those are easier to deal with than the machines.  But sometimes there are lines, and often, even if there is no line, you have to wait for someone to come and take your stuff.  They do not have a dedicated container redemption person, usually it’s one of the cashiers who comes over and takes care of it, when s/he is not busy ringing up customers.  And the fact is, the most convenient times for us to return anything would be evenings and weekends, when Kappy’s and similar stores are the busiest.  So there you have the time-consuming part!

So, you may ask, why don’t we just put them into the recycling bin and let homeless/poor people take them if they want them?  After all, there are a LOT of people in our town who go around with carts that they stole from Stop & Shop and pick through people’s garbage looking for deposit containers.

Because they can’t just be satisfied picking through the recycling bins, that’s why?  They have to rip through every single garbage bag looking for more, and they often leave a mess.  And now that we have a Pay-As-You-Throw program here, we have to pay up to $2 per trash bag.  If the bags are all ripped up, the trash collectors won’t take them, we have to put the trash into another $2 bag and hope that it won’t get ripped up again by the time the garbage truck comes back next week.  And anything that is strewn on the ground, WE have to clean up.  More time-consuming crap!  By not putting out ANYTHING that might be worth money, we’ve managed to keep these people away from our trash.

Up in New Hampshire, they do not have a bottle bill.  People just put their beer and soda containers into their recycling bins, they get picked up, end of story.  No skeevy people picking through the trash and making a mess.  Another good reason to move there.

When  we go up there for a weekend of Fisher Cats ball games, we always buy beer to drink in the hotel room, and we buy it in New Hampshire.  We always leave the empties in the room, in the beer box they came in, when we leave, because if we bring them home, we’ll have no choice but to put them into our recycling.  And since they LOOK like deposit bottles, they will attract the undesirables.  However, they will not work in the machines here, they have a special bar code on them saying that they came from NH.  But the hotel we always stay at has a restaurant/bar downstairs that serves bottled beer.  So they have big recycling barrels somewhere.  They can just dump our bottles into that.  And yes, I do leave a decent tip for housekeeping for this service.  I also don’t want to put them in the trash at home, because of Pay-As-You-Throw, it can get very expensive.

For a while, I was saving empty Sam Adams beer bottles, to use for bottling my own home-brewed beer.  These bottles do not have screw-top grooves on top, and can be capped using the bottle-capping tool that commonly comes with most home-brewing equipment kits.  I saved far more than I’ll ever need for making the typical five-gallon batch, we have a ton of them in our storage area, more than enough to allow for the inevitable breakage.  But now we have more than enough, no more room, we have to get rid of them somehow.

In our town, there is no limit as to how much we can put out each week for recycling.  This is a very good thing.  I think that a state law that would require people to put out more stuff for recycling would go a lot further than any bottle bill in keeping the streets clean and helping the environment.  Then there’d be no homeless people and such ripping open residential trash bags and leaving a mess.

As for people who buy a can of soda or a bottle of water at the store – why not put recycling containers next to regular trash containers on street corners, to make it easy for people to dispose of the containers?

Most working people are under serious time constraints.  But anyone, no matter how busy, can throw all of their empties into a bin and stick it out on the curb.  It only takes a couple of minutes, anyone has time for that.  It’s time for the bottle bill to go bye-bye.

Bob’s Clam Hut to be Featured on Diners, Drive-ins & Dives

Yes!  It’s true!  Guy Fieri and the crew from the hit Food Network show, Diners, Drive-ins & Dives were recently in Kittery, Maine, taping at Bob’s Clam Hut!  Complete with his little red convertible!  And there is photographic proof – I snagged this pic from Bob’s Facebook page, you can see the entire album from the taping HERE.  And here’s a local news story.

Bob’s is the quintessential New England clam shack.  First opened in 1956, it has grown quite a bit over the years.  It now includes an indoor dining room, which is heated, so Bob’s is open year-round.  You can visit their website to see pictures of how the restaurant has changed over the years.

This is the sort of place where you place your order at the window, look for a place to sit, and then wait for your number to be called, and you pick up your food at another window.  A fixture at Bob’s is “Lillian’s Window” – Lillian has been taking orders at the Clam Hut since 1986, and is a beloved presence there.  She’s a very sweet lady, she has served us many times over the years.

Naturally, you go to Bob’s mostly for their famous fried clams.  Fried seafood can be tricky, if you overcook it by as much as a minute or two, you end up something with the texture and chewability of rubber bands.  But Bob’s gets it right; their fried clams, as well as other fried seafood, are always cooked to perfection.

Bob’s also makes a fine lobster roll, which came in second in NECN’s viewer-voted “Baby You’re The Best” poll for Best Lobster Roll.  They also recently took first place “Judge’s Choice” at the Prescott Park Chowder Festival in nearby Portsmouth, NH, for their classic New England clam chowder.  If you’re not in the area to sample this chowder for yourself, fear not.  The recipe is posted on Bob’s website.

No word yet on when the DDD episode featuring Bob’s will air…so keep an eye out for it!

Another warning about online hotel reservations

I posted the other day about why you should not use third-party websites to book hotel rooms.  Today, WBZ-TV News is warning people about an online scam that is affecting vacationers on the Cape.  Story:  Cape Inn Losing Business In Online Scam.

Apparently, people who wanted to reserve rooms at the Orleans Inn through a third-party website were being duped.  Rather than being given a room at this beautiful hotel (they showed some footage of what it looks like inside), they were put in a cheap motel up the street.  The scam website was telling people that the cheap motel was a “sister property” of the Orleans Inn, which is absolutely not true.

Here is the scam website :  http://www.cape.cod.hotelguide.net.  I’m not going to give them a free link; if you want to visit that site, copy and paste.  And whatever you do, please do not use them.  If they are doing this with the Orleans Inn, they are likely doing this in relation to other properties, as well.  If you would like to stay at the Orleans Inn, their website is:  http://www.orleansinn.com.  I’m making this one clickable because it is the real deal.  You can either make a reservation through their reservation software, or just call them on the phone.

I’m guessing that the people who run that scam site own the cheap motel, and are diverting business from the Orleans Inn to themselves.  Not cool.

This looks like a very pretty place, I know I’d be angry if I tried to book a room here and was put in some cheap motel.  They do weddings there, and of course, if you want to have a wedding there, you’ll speak with someone over the phone to make the arrangements.  They seem to provide everything…food, lodging, wedding favors, etc., and of course, gorgeous scenery.

Anyway, just another warning about third-party hotel websites!