"Taste of Home" Restaurant a Creepy Hit

ollowing the unexpected and largely unwelcome success of the country’s first cereal-only restaurant in Philadelphia, in which patrons can curl up in their pajamas and dine on a wide array of breakfast cereals while watching television and reading the paper, a troubling assortment of novelty theme restaurants have popped up across the country over the last year. From Albany’s “Nothing But Napkins� to Baton Rouge’s “Leftovers, Inc.�, theme restaurants are the current toast of the town, and not just Albuquerque’s “Toast Town.� Perhaps the most disturbing of these is Houston, Texas’ “Taste of Home,� an existential crisis of a theme restaurant that recreates the experience of sharing a meal with your apathetic, abusive parents using the magic of animatronics.

Inside the restaurant, patrons sit at a single huge, oversized table on giant chairs, recreating the experience of childhood dining, while a giant animatronic robot mother and father bicker bitterly over family finances. The food is, true to form, largely tasteless and occasionally burnt, depending on whether or not that night’s “show� includes one of the robot mother’s trademark boozy crying jags while food burns on the stove.

Though the restaurant’s menu is starkly limited—you’ll eat what you get and like it, according to the robot father’s genuinely menacing aside—patrons can plan their visits around their favorite entrees, since a strict meal rotation is in place due to the “family’s� tight finances and father’s inability to humble himself by asking for a raise at work. Sunday nights, diners can thrill to pork chops and apple sauce, while Monday nights are for Spam on toast and Tuesdays feature baked chicken. Wednesday is casserole night; Thursday is fish, and Friday night the restaurant orders in pizza from a local pizzeria. Saturday nights the animatronic parents are often absent, and diners have to fend for themselves among the half-empty cereal boxes and bags of flour left over in the kitchen. For that reason, the commune cannot recommend visiting “Taste of Home� on a Saturday, unless both you and your date are on a diet.

Though the experience might sound grim to some, it does serve as a strange sort of childhood therapy to others, not unlike a trip to Arby’s. And a strange sort of camaraderie does develop at the restaurant’s one large table, as patrons compare notes on what might be in the casserole and provide each other comfort when father flies into one of his dramatic, table-shaking rages. The restaurant also features the world’s only black and white big screen TV, though patrons are advised not to attempt changing the channel or questioning father’s viewing choices. But the warm, conversation-killing glow of television (usually tuned to auto racing or a boxing match) does serve to masterfully complete the restaurant’s ambiance.

Regardless of these positives, however, the commune must recommend skipping out before the meal’s dessert course, lest you find yourself stuck there half the night washing the restaurant’s giant, oversized dishes.

Readers interested in experiencing the restaurant for themselves while visiting the Houston area can call 1-555-EAT-HOME to let them know when you’ll be home for dinner, though we do strongly recommend against calling collect.

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At some time during the course of every man's life, he is asked a profound question. One which he can spend decades pondering and considering the ramifications of, swimming in the sea of possibilities that arise from such a profound query. Other times, a man is asked a whole bunch of stupid questions that take about four seconds to answer. Guess which kind of week I'm having?


Are dogs colorblind or what?

This is a very common misconception. It's actually cats that are colorblind, and penguins. While this fact is of little consequence to black and white birds living in the blank white expanse of Antarctica, it does, however, make housecats truly terrible players of Candyland and gives most an annoying preference for old B&W movies. Researchers in Minnesota actually discovered the colorblindness of cats in the 1960's when teaching the cats to drive, which ended tragically since the cats were worthless at reading traffic lights and proved too oddly-shaped to be properly restrained by seat belts in the resultant hair-raising collisions.

Dogs, on the other hand, are actually totally blind from birth. Nature has helped make up for this appalling oversight by giving dogs a happy-go-lucky nature that makes them seem like affable, clumsy simpletons rather than the utterly sightless creatures that they are. Dogs do, however, make up for their lack of sight with a highly directional sense of smell, and a radar-like sense emitting from specially-evolved testicles known as sonards.


Dude, what's up with those Easter Island heads?

Numerous theories over the years have sprouted up to explain the mysterious monolithic stone heads found on Easter Island, all of them utterly false. In actuality, the heads were part of an Easter Island homeland defense initiative in prehistoric times, aimed at creating a series of threatening stone heads that would ultimately form together into one giant robot, which would stomp the island's attackers into goo.

The project ultimately failed, however, due to the fact that actual robot technology was thousands of years away, and the stone heads were only good for pushing down hills at advancing armies. In the end, though, this hardly mattered since no outsiders even discovered Easter Island until long after its inhabitants had starved to death from offering up all their food to the stone heads, in hopes of encouraging them to "robot up" and kick some ass.


Is the Tooth Fairy totally made up, or was there ever a real one and the bitch just died at some point?

By the "Tooth Fairy," I'm assuming you don't mean the fictional serial killer or the famous gay dentist from Toledo, but rather the magical little flying woman who eats your children's teeth and bribes them with hush money tucked under their pillows. This Tooth Fairy, you'll be surprised to learn, never actually existed. You moron. In truth, she was invented by parents tired of keeping track of the literally hundreds of tooth-disposal superstitions that existed up until the 1920's, including but not limited to feeding teeth to mice, throwing them over the house, baking them in pancakes, burying them in hopes of growing a profitable tooth tree, smoking teeth in a pipe, carving them into funny tooth action figures, leaving them on a teacher's chair like a thumbtack, or sticking them up your nose.

The invention of the Tooth Fairy left parents with only one implausible story to remember and justify, and left some irresponsible parents with the option of terrifying their children into obedience by telling them that if they misbehaved, the Tooth Fairy would come while they were sleeping and eat their fucking eyeballs out.

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To kick things off with a bang, and also give you a taste of my own personal pain, I'd like to start off this column with a slice of reader email I received recently.

"Yo yo yo Griswaaaaaaaasssup Dreck my man! Shit baby! Anyway, dude, the Internet? Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Whatup wit dat?"

Now that I have your sympathy and perhaps your piqued interest, let's dig the morsel of inquiry from the verbal turd above.

Nearly everyone, and at least half of the commune staff, knows what the Internet is. But how many really know how it works? Is it all techno mumbo-jumbo too daunting to penetrate, or just wicked voodoo best left alone? Thankfully for curious minds and Internet columnists who've already spent ten minutes on this column, it's neither.

The Internet was started in 1961 when a teenager named Frank Shultz in Flatbush, NY covertly connected his homemade computer to his neighbor Darcy Stanley's homemade computer in order to send the world's first Internet virus, which consisted of the following code:

10 PRINT "DARCY ISA SLUT"
20 GOTO 10


In response, Stanley sent Shultz the world's first spam, a message detailing the modern miracle of penis enlargement through the revolutionary technique of shooting yourself in the head. From these humble beginnings the Internet grew into several larger computers in Shultz's bedroom, which were connected to the homemade computers of several of Shultz's friends for the purpose of downloading brief text descriptions of pornography.

At this point the scientific community took an interest in Shultz's network, and appropriated the technology for their own purposes, namely sending science geek jokes and chain letters back and forth to each other. Thanks to a particularly popular joke about an amino acid, a Mexican and a Polack, the network eventually grew to include thousands of computers nationwide.

Things stayed about like this for a very long time, until the 90's, when computer manufacturers were maligning the fact that people stopped buying home computers just because they were only good for playing solitaire and pretending to balance your checkbook with Quicken. Some genius realized that people would buy more computers if there were some way they could be beamed faux-inspirational quotes and other heartwarming Chicken Soup for the Soul bullshit on a daily basis, so they developed the modem. A modem is a device that translates computer information into teenage slang so it can be sent over phone lines. Thanks to this breakthrough, five new computers were sold.

But before long retailers and scam artists everywhere discovered that Americans would pay to get kicked in the face as long as it had a .com attached and they got a box in the mail, and the real Internet was born. The thrill of getting a box in the mail has fueled economic growth in America since the beginning of time, and the online age was to be no different.

As for the nitty gritty of how it all works, the concept behind the Internet is that your computer is connected to your neighbor's computer, which is connected to his neighbor's computer, and so on and so forth until you get to the local computer geek's house, where there are big computers connected to the homes of larger and larger geeks until you get to central command. This is why the Internet is often slow and crappy, if one of your neighbors is playing Quake or running an analysis of where his life went wrong it can bog down your shit for real.

At central command there are a bunch of guys who sit around and monitor everything, laugh at your poor email grammar and the fact that you visit spankspock.com thirty times a day, distribute Xerox copies of really embarrassing stuff and generally just make sure everything keeps on truckin'. This is where the string of computers is actually connected to the Internet, which is a big metal thing that looks like the ghost containment unit thing from Ghostbusters. Nobody's sure what exactly goes on inside that thing.

Today the Internet is an indispensable part of modern life, providing us with news, sports scores, bad blind dates and solutions to modern problems like what does the girl from One Hour Photo look like naked. Some wonder how we lived before the Internet, and the answer is we didn't. We thought we did, but what the hell did we know? Back then we had to get all our information from books, which is a little like getting your news from popular music. And you had to jog down to the library every time you found unlabeled prescription medication under the couch or wanted to know what happened to the cast of Goonies. You may call that living, but it sounds an awful lot like Cast Away to me.

Who played Tom Hanks' fiancée in that movie? I bet she looks good naked.

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