The Diary of A Simple Man

Today seems to be food day over on Askville. From a discussion about hamburgers, we ended up talking about Friendly's and how they used to serve their hamburgers on toasted white bread:

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They changed their Fribbles, too. I remember when I was a kid, my mother would take me there. I'd order a chocolate Fribble, and a long spoon. There'd usually be a few lumps of vanilla ice cream in the bottom of the glass, and I'd fish them out and eat them. Yum!

That's because the Fribbles were made with hard vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, of course. Now, unfortunately, they're just made with some soft-serve-like stuff. It's nowhere near as good, and it's boringly consistent all the way through.

I like Friendly's hot dogs, too. But I loved Brigham's ice cream and food even more. Their burgers, fries, and hot dogs were outstanding, and they had a delicious pea soup sometimes; I could literally stick a fork in it and it would stay standing up! As for their hot fudge sundaes, well, they were perfect. And I used to buy their hand-packed ice cream as a special treat; it cost twice what it did in the supermarkets, but it was three times as good.

The chain went bankrupt a few years ago. Hood makes the Brigham's ice cream that you see in supermarkets now. I don't know if any of the stores are still open; if they are, there aren't many of them.

Lots of wonderful old things are gone, or have been replaced with ersatz and homogenized out of existence.

autumn00™:0), did you ever try Newport Creamery? They're another New England ice cream/food chain, much like Friendly's and Brighams. They're based out of Newport, Rhode Island. For a while they were expanding into Massachusetts and possibly elsewhere in New England, but they almost went out of business a few years ago. They managed to hang on, fortunately.

They make excellent burgers/fries/hot dogs/etc., but what they're best known for is Awful Awfuls. Those are big, thick ice cream shakes which are a lot like the classic old Fribbles. They were almost made the state drink of Rhode Island, but lost out to coffee milk.

Newport Creamery's chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches are really memorable too. It's $10 for a pack of four, but they're totally worth it - particularly when filled with chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

God, I'm so hungry!!!

There was an amazing game that I only saw once, in the basement of a huge old hotel-mansion somewhere in upstate New York. I'm not sure if you could call it a video game, exactly. Part of it was actually a diorama, with a whole scene of little plastic trees and things. There was a little tank in the middle of the scene, and appearing on top of it was a glowing missile that seemed 3D, but also didn't seem solid. I think somehow a mirror was involved.

Anyway, enemies (planes? missiles? I don't remember, it was long ago) would shoot towards your tank from the night sky, and you'd launch your missile and try to shoot them down. The neatest thing was that you could steer the missile after you launched it. Once it blew up the target, a new missile would appear on your launcher.

I never saw that game again, and I don't remember the name of it. I don't even remember the name of the hotel. But the memory of that game has stuck in my mind for thirty years now.

And now thanks to Google I not only have been able to find the name of the game (S.A.M.I., or "Surface-to-Air Missile Interceptor") and a cheesy old ad for it with a girl in a silver lamé jumpsuit, but I've found video of it in action as well!

I was looking up New Coke on Wikipedia today, and found that the article had been vandalized; someone had inserted "fucking clown shoes" a few times in the first paragraph. By the time I looked up how to revert, though, someone had already fixed it. Go Wikipedia!

Anyway, the New Coke article was interesting, and it led me to Max Headroom's New Coke commercial on YouTube. From there I naturally progressed to Max Headroom's Paranoimia video with Art of Noise.



And while I was watching that, I was hit with a HUGE spasm of nostalgia. Music was so much cooler back then...and so were some TV shows...MTV was CERTAINLY better then, too (of course I don't watch it any more). At the time I thought that Reagan was a disaster, and destroying the country - and he was certainly laying the groundwork for it - but I never dreamed how much worse things would be in 2006.

Come to think of it, back then I had a much better social life than I have now, too. With one small red-headed exception, naturally. :D

So, in retrospect, those were good times. I'm going to listen to the video again, right now.

On Sunday the three of us went out for breakfast. Teri wanted to go to Cracker Barrel again - she always wants to - and I was resigned to it. But Sebastian is sick of Cracker Barrel too, and swung the balance to a new choice.

Nothing against Cracker Barrel, by the way; they have great food. But we've eaten there too damned often, and I wish we could go to some different places once in a while. Not that we eat out all the time...oh, you know what I mean.

Anyway, I suggested we go to IHOP - the International House of Pancakes. I hadn't been to one in years, and to be honest, I missed it. There used to be a lot more of them around, but many of them have shut down over the past twenty years. I knew there was one on Route 1, though, perhaps a forty minute drive away.

Sebastian had never been to an IHOP. Teri had only been there once, long ago.

It was a long drive, but everyone was in a good mood. When we got there I was slightly disappointed: this was the only IHOP I'd ever seen that lacked their classic "A" roof architecture. But inside was a pleasant surprise.

The place was filled with a lot of families with young children. It was extremely clean and bright, a very pleasant place. Our waitress was soft-spoken, but couldn't have been nicer (we gave her a particularly large tip).

I'd told Sebastian about the five different kinds of syrup that they had there, to get him to agree to come. There were only three syrups at the table, regular, blueberry, and strawberry, but the waitress brought us large containers of the other two flavors: boysenberry and butter pecan. Both Teri and Sebastian loved the butter pecan particularly. I tasted it, and it wasn't bad; it reminded me of some unusual candy I'd eaten as a child, although I'm not sure what.

Boysenberry tasted like the syrup you squirt onto sno-cones.

Sebastian got sausage, scrambled eggs, and five silver dollar pancakes so he could try all the syrups to his heart's content. Teri got funnel cakes, hash browns, and eggs.

I got chocolate chip pancakes, of course. IHOP's chocolate chip pancakes are different; they use a chocolate pancake batter with chocolate chips. More chocolate chips are put on top of the hot pancakes, so they melt exquisitely, and the whole thing is covered with whipped cream. The whipped cream soaks into the hot pancakes and is just incredible. The chocolate flavor isn't too intense or sweet, believe it or not.

(If you're wondering, I only lost a pound over the weekend. But it was worth it.)

I'd feared that they'd have changed the recipe for chocolate chip pancakes since I'd been there last, but they hadn't.

Anyway, we had a great time, and we'll definitely go back.

The night before I was trying to get Sebastian to sleep. So instead of reading him a book or two, as I usually do, I told him a story about when I was a kid; he really likes to hear about that stuff.

I told him how my parents used to take me to Howard Johnson's on all-you-can-eat spaghetti night. Howard Johnson's had three foods that I absolutely loved:

One was a chocolate lollipop. It wasn't hard candy, though; it was actually chocolate. A clever combination of white and dark chocolate was used to make a picture, in chocolate, of an old-fashioned sailing ship or a windmill or that sort of thing. The work was quite delicate, and looked rather like scrimshaw.

Another thing I remember strongly was their ice cream. After dinner I'd get chocolate ice cream in a metal dish; the ice cream itself was good, but what made it special was a windmill-shaped sugar cookie that was stuck on the side of it. I remember that the ice cream itself was kind of odd. As a kid, I'd take one spoonful, and then smooth the hollow with the back of my spoon; then I'd use the edge of the spoon to sort of skim another layer of ice cream off of the hollow. The ice cream would actually crinkle. Sometimes I'd even dip my spoon in water to make the ice cream extra smooth. Alternated with tiny bites of the sugar cookie, it was almost too much fun.

Lastly, at the register they had candy bars - but not the regular kind that you see at every store. Actually, I've heard that there used to be a much richer variety of candy bars in the old days, but that the big candy companies bought up all the small ones and discontinued a lot of local favorites throughout the country.

The candy that I loved was chocolate-covered fudge bars. There were two pieces in each one.

Anyway, I managed to talk him to sleep, and a little later I went and looked up Howard Johnson's, just to see how the chain was doing. But the Howard Johnson's website was strictly about hotels. No matter how I searched, the only thing I could find that related to food was the breakfasts served in their hotels - and those didn't seem to be restaurants. So I Googled, and found a fan site for the restaurants.

To my amazement, there are only four left in the world.

First, I'd like to wish a very happy birthday to unquietsoul5, and many happy returns.

Second...I took a walk through the past on Saturday with Sebastian, and I'd like to remember it.

I've told him a lot about my maternal grandparents. Unfortunately I don't really remember my paternal grandparents; they died when I was quite young. But I've told him a lot about Ma and Hyrig, and their house in West Roxbury.

We had a lot of fun in that house. Kids could run all around the house through the hallway, and we did, often. Particularly during large family get-togethers, which happened often. We'd listen to Armenian music, eat Armenian food, and me and my brother and sister and my cousins would run around like crazy. Sometimes we went down to the basement, which was pretty much finished with carpets; my grandfather kept a lot of oriental rugs down there, too. They had shelves with tons of canned foods, as do (did) many people who survived the Great Depression.

The place was magical. On the second floor the roof made the ceiling slope in on the sides; two small doors in the sides of the two bedrooms led to crawlspaces in the attic. The house was filled with all sorts of unusual and interesting things. And I only regret that I can't capture the smell of the place.

Not to mention the wonderful things that my grandmother cooked.

The house was sold in the 1990s, by the way. I was living there at the time; I stayed with my grandmother after I graduated from college. All in all, I lived there at least six months or more.

I've told Sebastian a lot about that time. And when I went up with him this Saturday, he told me that he wanted to see it; that he was going to live there when he grew up, and I'd be living there with him.

We go near West Roxbury on the way to Brookline, so I said "what the hell!" and went up a road that I hadn't been on in a decade. I found Joyce Kilmer Lane quite easily, but had to call my mother to make sure that I had the house number right; I knew that I was looking at the right house, but it looked impossibly small. And it couldn't have been that I'd grown since I'd last seen it; after all, I lived there for six months or more when I was in my twenties, and if anything I've shrunk since then.

But that was the house, for sure. I took a couple of photos while Sebastian watched; I had to explain to him that we couldn't go in, which bothered him a little (it bothered me, too).

Then...I was in a nostalgic mood. We weren't far from an old bakery that's a favorite of my family, Hanley's. Parking was a real pain, but eventually I managed to find a spot at the nearby commuter rail.

Stepping in was like stepping back into my childhood...or even further back, into the forties. Apart from the modern clothes that the girls bhind the counter were wearing, the whole place could have been lifted bodily from fifty years ago and transported there overnight.

We got four muffins and three half-moons, and took them over to my parents' place. They were just as good as I remembered.

I have to remember not to wait so long before I go there again...