Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Tag: leather bound (Page 1 of 2)

What soda? Diet Coke bubbles up.

It was bound to happen.

Diet Coke

Movin' on up. Diet Coke.

My wife delighted in pointing out that I found it impossible to drive past a QuikTrip store without stopping for a bottle of Diet Coke. Hey. I had a thirst.

I don’t do that so much anymore, but it’s mostly because I don’t have so many children-related driving expeditions.

My soft drink conversion came during the early days of dieting, a lifelong battle that saw me switch from regular sugar-based drinks to low calorie counterparts. Pepsi had been my carbonated choice, but Diet Pepsi? Sorry, could not do that.

I never liked Coke. At a young age, I had already become such a connoisseur of soda that I could rattle off the subtle differences in half a dozen brands. Diet Coke lost the harsh and stinging quality of its sugary predecessor.

The low-cal version has overtaken Pepsi as the #2 selling soft drink. The official numbers are expected out Thursday, but indications are that Pepsi has lost its easy chair among the nation’s couch potatoes.

Proud as I am to be a difference-maker, there are other factors that led to the change. Soft drink sales are down overall (I told you I didn’t drive as much), and the sales of various other beverages cut back the Pepsi market share, along with that of top-selling Coke. Number one just didn’t lose as much.

So, raise your can of Red Bull and celebrate, and let the sodas battle for top-ranking drink. It’s a soda fountain of youth.

Sure’n I recall a fain eve full o’ St. Paddy.

The night was party-perfect and I was helping host one of the bigger celebrations in Tulsa. It was Eire-crazy, enough so that we had to post an Irishman at the front door. There was a line outside.

St. Pat's hats

For the US Irish: a BIG day.

A man and his daughter worked their way to the front, and Robbie says in his fain Dublin brogue, “Aye, the fire marshall says we’re full-up.”

“I see you are,” the man answered. “I’m the fire marshall.”

I was summoned immediately, the words “fire marshall” shouted into my ear over the blaring Irish music. Yikes, I thought, in an adopted Irish brogue. I ran to the front.

Well, ‘ran’ is an overstatement. I leaned and elbowed my way through the human-carwash to where Robbie stood. The man in front of the podium introduced himself and said he was happy to see that we were limiting entry.

The way he said it made it clear that – in his scanning of our happy crowd – we were clearly over capacity. I hadn’t counted but I figured it was a cinch we were. As fire marshall, the man had the option of marching everyone outside and then counting the re-entry until our maximum seating capacity was reached.

He didn’t.

He leaned in and said to me, “My daughter has never been to a St. Patrick’s Day celebration before. I thought we’d try your corned beef.”

I was nodding my head and smiling like a fool.

“If you can find us a table,” he continued, “we can eat a quick meal and you can get back to your little party.”

I told him I’d be back to escort him there presently.

Seating had been a premium since before noon, and those standing about were eyeing potential tables like Irish-vultures. Amazingly, I found a group just starting to push back their chairs.

I grabbed a waitress and had her stake a claim while motioning for another to quickly come clear away the dishes. Another run through the robo-wash and I directed the fire marshall and guest to their sparkling spot.

St. Paddy’s Day continued uninterrupted: the Irish music blared, the bagpipers paraded, the green beer poured, and corned beef was consumed.

I covered the cost of the meal. It was the least I could do. He realized we were trying to do the best we could in a crazy situation. After a smile and wink, the fire marshall went out the door.

I hope his daughter enjoyed her first St. Paddy’s. It was quite the party for us.

A decade later, I think about donning the kilt and finding a celebration… but the bad knee won’t hold up standing too long, and the workday Friday begins at the usual hour.

The restaurant business is a tough way to make a living, about as tough as profiting from book sales.

But there are days I miss the raucous, happy bleeting of bagpipers making their way through my establishment.

Paper or Plastic?

The young man wanted a leather book. One with an old world feel and the quiet scent of a college library. He wanted to cut the pages out.

As he walked in the store, he carried a small box, which he promply opened to display his wife’s Christmas gift, a new Apple iPad. His intention, he explained, was to buy a nice leather book that he could hollow out as a case for his wife to hold while reading.

The iPad

Electronic reading: the iPad

My heart breaks a little with each disfiguring of a book, but I sold him a couple of tooled leather hardbacks of a size that would accomodate the electronic reader. The extra book was to cut on as practice. Ouch.

I have contended that books will survive because a percentage of readers enjoy the feel and texture of the printed page. It never occurred to me that paper and plastic could coexist. A quick internet search revealed a number of leather-book style cases already on the market at under $40.

Even as I reluctantly sold the volumes to the young man, I imagined he would do a good job creating an in-book space for the iPad, and his wife would be pleased – not only with the new-fangled electronic book reader-do-everything-iPad – but with her husband’s creativity as well.

Half paper, half electronic. Sort of like cyborg half-man, half-robot. The science-fiction titles she downloads should be a natural, and how ironic is it that the leather bound volumes to be hollowed are both history books, about the Old West?

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