Charcuterie plate

Does this look good?

What clever marketing.

I didn't ask to receive this marketing from Yelp, but I must admit it's awfully clever. They're supporting area businesses.

Yelp has my address because I used them to gripe about an awful business who mailed to my brand new apartment in a brand new building before I even moved in. We are address to them, not names, yet we are all addressed individually and charmingly as, "Dear valued neighbor." We're valued as objects for marketing. Their product is old fashioned newspaper that tells of things that happened weeks ago, they're useless for current events and oblivious to upcoming events, but loaded with advertisements. But it was the exceedingly poorly written political opinion that turned me firmly against them. I've had it. I get that crap every day, all day long, delivered by political retards. Please stop. Then again. Please stop. Then again. Please stop. Again. Please stop. Then, I asked you kindly four times to stop, this is counted as the fifth. Then again. I'm telling you six times to stop. Then. Goddamnit stop sending me your stupid shit. Then. You godoxiasamned motehx3iwdking consck?xukers stop it. I'm going to return your crap with dog poo. Finally, after ten years, That does it. You cannot be spoken to. I'll put my complaints on Yelp with each future offense. *ding* That did it .

 Everyone else is responsive to request to stop mailing. But Glendale Journal was particularly unresponsive to requests. They figure I'll move soon enough. Or die. And someone else will be their dear valued neighbor.

So now Yelp is doing the same thing. But I gave them my address so that I could complain. So I have a connection with them. I guess I'm a member. But much different from Glendale Journal, Yelp's email fliers are inspiring. They do give ideas where to go, they do alert to upcoming things in which we can participate. Everything is local and targeted. And they're literally right up our alley. Like upcoming demonstration on how to make pickles.

And each time I go, wow, that's interesting. There are so many things we can do. So many places we can visit. And all so nearby. So many places to try out. Fresh ideas all over the place.

And their tremendous wealth of material is just given to them freely. Like a backyard fruit tree ripe for the plucking. The photographs that they use are pulled from the photographs that reviewers took with their phones and uploaded to restaurant pages on Yelp. These photographs are incredibly useful to comprehension of what to expect when you go there, should you ever decide to try something new.

This is the photograph Yelp selected this time to head their flier selected from user uploads to The Truffle Table. A place nearby that I hadn't heard about. Click on the photo and you're taken to the Yelp page where this photograph is one of a hundred forty-five available user photos.

And they're all very good photos. These smart phones are teaching people how to compose a photograph. How to capture the essential, how to eliminate the distracting portions. How to frame. How to create interest.

We hear that phones are making young people dumber, while here is example of phones making young people smarter, more creative. More useful. Thank you, Youngsters. I regard you as brilliant.

This photo makes me want to go there and experience this firsthand.

And while there I hope to meet people like you.

Yelp continues to Deep Root Winery and Bistro in nearby Lodo. I click on this picture to be taken to their Yelp page and scan the rest of their photographs. A new place apparently, there are only seventeen photographs.

Bleh. 

Wine. 

I sipped some wine a few days ago. From someone else's glass. Lauded as a fine and well balanced wine with interesting and delightful notes, well-regarded by connoisseurs, and rather expensive comparatively. I let it coat my whole mouth and let its fumes go up my nose and my brain reported back, don't drink that, Kool Aid is better for you, little dummkopf. I guess I'll just never grow up to wine. It's like a child inside me, a very old child, flatly rejects it each time I try. What a little bastard. Everyone else is enjoying something I can't even have. I resent myself sometimes. 

Yelp continues. 

The Truffle Table again. We already saw them.

Cheese + Provisions. The picture looks like a party plate that they sell at the grocery. A plastic platter with divisions. The owners look like fuddy-duddies in gray company t-shirts. Come on! You're running a business over there. Class it up a little bit, would'jya?   Seventy-three photos. Looks like a boutique deli.  

Bleh, wine again. The cheese and meats selections look very good. We could buy a bunch of stuff there, random but varied across densities and intensities, things you cannot buy just anywhere, go elsewhere and buy other stuff like grapes, and cherries, and fruits and berries and salted pecans and crackers and bread, then pile it all on a platter, or on a couple of platters, and by accident end up with arrangements more artistic than any of these. It would be a good place to start, but not a good place for artistic inspiration. 

See what I mean? 

A left-brain dominated type did that. I concluded that some people just don't have an eye or a mind for arrangement. Unless it's mathematical or geometric. 

There I was assembling fresh strawberries macerated with sugar over toasted pound cake with vanilla ice cream. Then the old fellow who previously tried to describe what he wanted but couldn't identify pound cake as the structural substance suddenly arose and appeared from nowhere to assist the assembly. Yes. He was having exactly what he wanted. I managed to fulfill his desire drawn from his poor description. The last step was touching each of the fifteen plates with mint sprig. 

Being helpful, he tore off a mint leaf and placed it on a mound of ice cream flatly as if it had died there on an isolated frozen mountain top. It looked like a victim of accident, wan, depleted of energy and dead. Poor little thing. Frozen like that, and gone to mint-heaven.  I go, "Give it life. Make it look like it's growing out of the ice cream. Make it look alive." I jabbed the ice cream mound with the stem portion holding three mint leaves, like a dart, and it did look like the mint grew from the mound as a little tree. And the visual effect was TEN MILLION PERCENT different. What the hell's wrong with you? Why don't you see that? 

Oh. 

Your right-brain never was born.

Your left-brain killed it.