Category: News

Homelessness is a problem that plagues many cities and there are so many different approaches to address the issue. Salt Lake City is trying a compassionate approach by building a tiny home village to address its homelessness problem. The city council is looking to lease eight acres of land to build 430 tiny homes as a safe place for homeless people to get on their feet.

There’s more.

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Salt Lake City isn’t just placing people into tiny homes and calling the job done. It’s also providing services and resources to help residents succeed in eventually being able to move on from the village and into permanent homes. The village is expected to cost around $13.8 million to complete and the city council voted 7 to 0 in favor of moving forward. City council member Alejandro Puy told Fox 13, “We need to do everything in our power to mitigate not only the consequences but bring good things to the westside.”

In 2020, there were 580,466 people experiencing homelessness in America, which far out numbers the amount of beds available in homeless shelters. Since there are so few beds available compared to the number needed, there are large numbers of people who are forced to sleep completely unsheltered. Depending on where someone finds themselves without a home, their treatment may be different as there’s no universal plan to address the issue.

Some cities don’t exactly embrace empathy and compassion when planning how to handle their homeless population. Several large cities in America, including New York and Philadelphia, have spent millions of dollars on what has been coined “hostile architecture.” It’s where they make park benches slanted or awkwardly divided to discourage people from sleeping there. Some places have even placed spikes and boulders under overpasses that are often used to escape the elements for people without other means of shelter.

But not all cities are attempting to make it difficult to be homeless. Columbus, Ohio, has been working to keep people off the streets in a more effective and compassionate way for nearly 40 years. In 1986, Columbus created a Community Shelter Board, which controls the funds, programs and homeless response, and in 2000 the city took it a step further by building permanent supportive housing. The Community Shelter Board also makes sure the requirements to enter their shelters are extremely lenient to make it easier for people to get the assistance they need.

Thanks to the gentle and humanitarian approach to homelessness, Columbus maintains a lower homeless population. As Salt Lake City continues to move forward with its tiny home village, it will likely follow closely in the steps of Columbus ensuring that everyone who wants a home has one.

Ending homelessness isn’t something that can happen overnight and won’t be an easy task because it’s not a straightforward issue. Seeing cities lean more heavily into understanding the root causes of homelessness and doing their part to fix it is heartwarming. For now, it’s unclear what will come next in the process for building the tiny home village, but when it’s complete, lives could be changed for generations.

I once asked if Barbie is the most important movie of 2023. I stand by my answer (“yes”), but if there’s a 1b to Barbie’s 1a, it’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third film in the Oscar-snubbed Magic Mike saga. Star Channing Tatum called it the “Super Bowl of stripper movies,” and teased that although you’ve seen him dance onstage before, you’ve never seen him “give an intimate, straight-up one-on-one lap dance.”

You’ve also never seen Salma Hayek caress Tatum’s abs — until today!

“All good things begin in Miami. #MagicMikesLastDance in theaters Valentine’s Day weekend,” Tatum wrote on Instagram, while Hayek added, “A tease of what’s to come in theaters this Valentine’s Day weekend. You’re not going to want to miss #MagicMikesLastDance.” Not that anyone was reading the text, mind you.

“The movie is sort of a fictionalized procedural on how Mike comes up with the idea of a show — and then the obstacles, of which there are many, to trying to realize his vision of what this new thing could be,” director Steven Soderbergh (who directed the first MM and produced the XXL sequel) explained, adding, “It’s a variation on All That Jazz.”

Magic Mike’s Last Dance — which was originally going to be released straight to HBO Max before common sense prevailed — comes out on February 10, 2023. Get your dollar bills ready.

SZA fans have been waiting on “Shirt” for a while now. She first performed it live in 2021 and the question since then is when it’s going to get an official release. Well, it did: Last night, the song popped up on Spotify. It appears that was a mistake, though, as the track disappeared shortly after.

This came after rumors the song was supposed to be released last Friday, October 14. SZA later addressed that during her set at the Austin City Limits festival this past weekend, saying, “That was true. But, it didn’t come out because I looked at the video, and I was stressed at one small thing in the video. But I fixed that, and it’s turned in and about to come out. That’s the truth.”

Since SZA herself confirmed the song is in a release-ready state, even saying the video was “about to come out,” it was rumored the song would come out today, October 21.

As for SZA’s next album, there’s some uncertainty there, too, even on SZA’s end. She said in a recent interview, “I don’t even know what this album is about and what it sounds like. Which is why I had to go to the mode of what feels good to my brain and to my energy and the songs that I think are hot, I just have to go with them.” She added, “I don’t have any deadlines because, at the end of the day, when my sh*t comes out, it comes out. And if ever I lose my ability to choose, I have no problem vacating my current life and doing something different. I’m not glued to being an artist for the rest of my life or anything for that matter. I’m seeing where it takes me.”

Check out some fan reactions to the pseudo-debut of “Shirt” below.

With Marvel in its current state — having released probably their three worst movies, all in a row — now would be a great time for DC to become what it has occasionally flirted with being: the anti-Marvel. Where Marvel can feel like a movie factory, adhering to a strict formula and hiring directors mostly for their name recognition while forcing them to color within rigidly-defined lines, DC has, at least at times, seemed to allow for more creative freedom, living and dying by their latest director’s vision, for better or worse.

If the MCU put out a more consistent product at the expense of sometimes being boring, DC was at least a little weird. Their more freewheeling approach meant that sometimes we might get a total misfire like Batman V. Superman, but other times we’d get an Aquaman or a Shazam (the latter being far and away my favorite superhero movie of the last five, if not 10 years). Which brings us to Black Adam, who also wears a lightning bolt on his chest and says “Shazam” (we’ll get to that).

Released hot on the heels of a high-profile corporate shakeup at Warner Bros (shelving Batgirl and whatnot) Black Adam at first flirts intriguingly with being a genuinely anti-Marvel kind of film. It gets our hopes up juuust long enough to make it extra disappointing when they’re eventually crushed by the demands of yet another expanded universe. This has only ever worked for Marvel and even for them it’s not so great lately. Maybe stop making five-year plans and try to make one scene work first?

The film, written by at least three dudes and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, requires a lengthy prologue scene set in the ancient kingdom of Khandaq, where the darker-skinned locals have been forced, by the tyrannical colonizer Ahn-Kot, to mine for “Eternium.” This in order to create for him “the crown of Sabbac,” which would, presumably, be bad. A young Khandaqi boy tries to inspire a revolt, and just when he’s about to be executed by Ahn-Kot’s big-nosed, large-toothed henchmen (Ahn-Kot himself has extreme art bangs and no eyebrows), the council of wizards who control the universe step in to Shazam the boy into a badass superhero. Djimon Hounsou reprises his role as the lead wizard from Shazam, making Black Adam the second film in the expanded Hounsouverse (the DJEU, if you will).

This superhero becomes the champion of Khandaq, vanquishing Ahn-Kot (destroying the palace in the process) and returning to the Earth to hibernate until the people of Khandaq need him again. Fast-forward five thousand years, and Khandaq is being controlled, and once again stripped of its natural resources, by a gang of mercenaries known as the “Intergang” — who seem mostly to be British soccer hooligans in fatigues. An archaeologist named Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) worries that Intergang is getting too close to digging up the Crown of Sabbac, but when she goes to move it, she’s captured by Intergang. With her only move left, she once again summons the Shazam man, who we discover is actually named “Teth-Adam,” for reasons unclear.

Teth-Adam (The Rock) starts merc-ing bread pie eaters left and right, which seems like a pretty good thing (if a bit vengeful). But that’s when Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), the evil (ish?) government functionary from Suicide Squad, decides to send in The Justice Society on their fancy plane. They arrive saying they’ve come to “restore global stability” in Khandaq by putting a lid on this “weapon of mass destruction.”

You don’t have to be too conspiratorial to see the metaphorical value here. A deep state agency ignores 5,000 years of a middle eastern country being pillaged by colonizers, and, just when that country finally finds a champion strong enough to stop it, that agency says “no, not like that” and sends in a team of super soldiers to preserve the status quo.

Now here, HERE was a genuine, and ballsy, opportunity for DC to become the perfect anti-Marvel. Marvel’s entire project has been basically to invent a fictional supra-democratic apparatus that goes around the universe restoring stability. They always seem to know best and we can still root for them because they have, like… trauma (Black Widow) and post-modern dialogue and people who they love and with whom they have slow missionary sex on the beach (Eternals). The Avengers are basically the CIA as the CIA would like to imagine itself.

At least at first, Black Adam flirts with being a movie that asks “what if this CIA-esque agency was actually kind of ignorant about the places they hoped to ‘save,’ and ended up just causing more problems at best and maintaining systems of imperial theft at worst?”

When the Justice Society shows up to try to capture Teth-Adam (thanks to a muddy sound mix I had to hear this name at least seven times before I could make out what they were saying) the locals rightly turn on them. Buzz off, super-geeks, we like this ruthless superman killing all the mercenaries. All this was refreshing, smart, surprising to see, and at the very least seemingly ideal counter-programming. “Khandaq” ends with a Q and “the Crown of Sabbac” even evokes “Savak,” the infamous Iranian secret police who did dirty work for the Shah, who the CIA helped overthrow after Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the country’s oil.

Unfortunately, the Justice Society showing up also raises a lot of questions, which the movie is forced to answer. Questions such as… what the fuck is the Justice Society?

The Justice Society apparently consists of Hawkman (Aldis Hoge), whose powers are exactly what they sound like, Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who can grow very big, Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), who can see the future and play mind games, and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), a low-budget ass Storm who can make wind (Le Petomane did it better). At this point, rather than clearly establishing The Justice Society as a source of parody, a team of bumbling imperialist goons with a self-delusional figleaf of good intentions (which DC sometimes does pretty well with Peacemaker) and a ruthless Machiavellian leader (in the form of Waller), Black Adam instead gets caught up in all their drama.

Soon we’re off trying to find out whether Hawkman and Doctor Fate’s friendship can survive the latest battle. Is Hawkman too impulsive to be a proper hero? Is Doctor Fate too beaten down by all the possible futures he’s seen with his magic alien helmet? Hey! Who cares?! Who even are these people?

Black Adam tries to become Marvel rather than counter it, and ends up having to try to explain why Black Adam is even here, if not to destroy Intergang and send the Justice Society packing. The answers become hopelessly convoluted. At one point, Adrianna defends Black Adam by telling Hawkman, “Sometimes the world needs someone who can do what you heroes can’t. Something darker.”

What? The Justice Society aren’t the heroes, that’s the whole point! As for Black Adam being “something darker,” it’d be charitable to read this as a wry joke about having a “darker” superhero of color defending a resource-rich land from presumably “lighter” imperialists, but I don’t think that’s how they meant it. Collet-Serra and The Rock both spent their press tour calling Black Adam “the Dirty Harry of superheroes.” As if the problem with most vigilante superheroes was that they… uh… weren’t vigilante enough.

I could accuse them of wildly missing what seemed like the whole point of Black Adam (a story about a slave who breaks chains but becomes a master), but it seems more like everyone got so caught up trying to balance all these unnecessary characters and explain what the hell the Justice Society even is that Black Adam just sort of got squeezed into this awkward, convoluted role.

Or maybe a real critique of American institutions is just impossible coming from an entity so closely entwined with them.

It’s not that I especially expect my superhero movies to have coherent messages or good politics (though Black Adam does dangle that possibility, tantalizingly) it’s that Black Adam’s ambiguous function in the story feels not only un-crowd-pleasing but kind of cowardly. The demands of an expanded universe and all these cross-platform characters force the narrative to be more complex when simpler would’ve been a lot more fun.

‘Black Adam’ opens everywhere October 21st. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

The whole “top secret documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago” situation just took another bad turn for Donald Trump. According to a new report, highly classified material regarding both China and Iran was found at the residence. This news arrives on the heels of Trump’s attorneys throwing each other under the bus over who told the government what and reports that the former president allegedly instructed aides to move the documents after getting hit with an FBI subpoena.

The sensitive documents involving China and Iran were first reported by The Washington Post which, according to Rolling Stone, noted that the documents improper storage at Mar-a-Lago could “jeopardize the availability of intelligence channels, as well as the safety of intelligence agents abroad.” There were also concerns that the situation could “open up the United States to retaliation by states targeted in the operations.” In short, all bad stuff to add to the ever-growing pile.

Via Rolling Stone:

The findings are concerning to law enforcement for a variety of obvious reasons, including that Mar-a-Lago does not operate a secure storage location for classified materials. Earlier this month, reports emerged about security footage from the Palm Beach property showing an aide to the president moving boxes out of the storage room where the material had been kept. The footage allegedly shows the aid, Walt Nauta, moving materials out of the room both before and after the DOJ issued a subpoena ordering Trump to return all classified material being held at his estate. The DOJ subsequently asked Trump and his legal team to secure the storage room with a lock.

In a nutshell, there were already significant concerns that sensitive documents were already way too easily accessed at Mar-a-Lago, and now comes word that foreign intel was in the mix, which will not go over well with those countries. Nothing like going to war because a rogue president kept the classified materials next to the ball washer on the 17th green. Great stuff.

(Via Washington Post)

Taylor Swift’s new album, Midnights, is garnering a lot of attention — as a widespread, popular release, with certain songs being analyzed by eagle-eyed fans. One of these tracks is “Midnight Rain,” which finds Swift reflecting on a past relationship. The person wanted a home life, comfort, and a bride, but she wanted to be free and keep building a name for herself in pop music. Who could this be about? Her ex, Tom Hiddleston, appears to be the top suspect.

After meeting at the Met Gala in May 2016, Swift and Hiddleston, previously dubbed “HiddleSwift,” dated for three months from June through September, following her split with Calvin Harris. Swift has since been with her longtime partner, actor Joe Alwyn, but still reflects on her past relationships through the music. Case in point, the track “Getaway Car” on 2017’s Reputation has long been believed to be a Hiddleston-inspired one.

“when taylor swift writes a banger song its always tom hiddleston at the scene of the crime. i need to thank that british man for giving me midnight rain and getaway car,” one Twitter user wrote.

In “Midnight Rain,” Swift sings lines like “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name.” Hiddleston went on to get engaged to fellow actor Zawe Ashton. Additional theories about the song are Taylor Lautner or even someone from Swift’s hometown growing up prior to her becoming a pop star.

Continue scrolling for some fan reactions about Taylor Swift’s “Midnight Rain” and Tom Hiddleston’s perceived part in the song.

In case you are already thinking of what to do next summer, perhaps a trip to the UK may be an option. Especially if you consider yourself a Blink.

K-pop powerhouses BLACKPINK will make their UK festival debut by headlining British Summer Time Festival in 2023. The four-piece is set to perform on July 2, 2023 with general tickets going on sale next Thursday, October 27 at 10 a.m. BST. However, American Express cardholders have the advantage of getting their hands on tickets before general sales with an AmEx pre-sale happening right now.

According to the event site Event Travel, fans traveling to London for the concert have the option to choose from four different kinds of concert and hotel experiences — Primary, Gold Circle, VIP Diamond, and All VIP Terrace — which include a choice of overnight hotel accommodation with a complimentary breakfast, access to “extensive range of bars, food traders and toilets in the main arena,” early entry, and more.

BLACKPINK just recently kicked off their Born Pink World Tour in Seoul, South Korea last weekend (October 15 and 16) and will begin their North American leg next week (October 25) in Dallas, Texas. The K-pop quintet will make a total of 10 stops in seven cities.

Following North America, BLACKPINK will touch down in Asian cities like Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Kaohsiung, Manila and Singapore in January, March and May.

When our glorious Uproxx Life leader Steve Bramucci hit me up on Slack about writing what he described as the “Rules For Dining Without Being An Asshole” (“in time for the 2022 Fall Travel Hot List!” he demanded). I was a little lukewarm on the idea, at least at first. For one thing, I never aspired to be some kind of Mr. Manners for the internet era. Or really any era. Frankly, “probably not my thing” applied on a lot of fronts.

But the more humans I’ve witnessed become feral in this post-pandemic landscape, in which many people seem to be only just now relearning how to function in a social setting (a setting that is also overwhelmingly short-staffed, which only exacerbates the problem) the more I warmed to writing the piece. I couldn’t escape the idea that maybe, just maybe, something actually needed to be said. Especially if we were about to recommend a bunch of new restaurants.

As for why I should be the one to say it, well, didn’t I just say the world is overwhelmingly short-staffed? But seriously, folks… It’s true that I have spent stints working both in restaurant kitchens and as a server (both admittedly fairly brief), so I do know a little about what I’m saying here. I have some anecdotes from which to draw. I genuinely enjoyed working in restaurants. There are times when I wish I still did, that my entire generation hadn’t been incepted almost since birth with the idea that the service industry was somehow degrading and an unsuitable place for overachievers (a sense of self inculcated in many of us in similar ways). Compared with the capriciousness of modern corporate culture, the idea of receiving compensation for providing sustenance seems gloriously straightforward.

Yes, the idea of service work in my mind probably benefits from the nostalgic glow, and from being unsullied by the realities of long hours, low pay, and dealing with annoying assholes all day. This leads me to my next bullet point in why I’m writing this: I’ve seen too many versions of this written by longtime wait staff who have arguably been in the trenches a little too long and have become, perhaps, overly jaded. I’ve read a lot of these where the “advice” can largely be boiled down to variations on “stop bothering me.” On the one hand, I get it. All jobs suck and “leave me alone” is the universal condition, right up there with “please hang out with me.” That being said, it doesn’t always add up to salient advice when people are literally paying for your service.

Hopefully, I can provide a nice mix of insider and outsider perspectives here. Suffice to say, everyone has their own unspoken Rules of Restaurant Conduct. There are many like it but this one is mine…

Don’t Just Sit Down, This Isn’t ‘Nam, There Are Rules

Thankfully, I never worked in a place where the rules of seating were unclear (is this a bar or a fast casual joint where it’s first-come, first-served? Or is it a restaurant where you check in with a host?), but I’ve seen it happen. Woof, what a nightmare. Always a painful sight to see an 18-year-old host trying to herd half drunk and increasingly hangry moms and dads back into something resembling a line.

Sadly, I don’t know that there’s any one fool-proof test for understanding what type of joint you’re in but please do give it your best shot. Look around to see if there seems to be a host stand, or if people are ordering at the bar/register. If it’s the former, check in with the dang hostess.

Don’t just sit down, you’re screwing it up! You’re screwing everything up!

Read The Menu

This writer for Food and Wine really seemed to be on one about menus. It seems… a bit much. But yes, read the menu. I don’t personally think it’s asking too much for the server to know which beers are on tap (this isn’t always on the menu and taps change), nor do I consider it a faux pas to ask the server something like “what’s good here?”

Lots of places have some dishes that they’re really good at and other dishes they keep on the menu because people order them a lot (in an ideal world there’d be no separation between these categories, but we don’t live in that world) and I don’t think it’s impolite to ask. That being said, understand that servers generally have a lot of other shit to do and people to take care of so don’t keep them too long or expect them to perform for you. One or two questions maximum, and don’t make them wait for your side conversations to end before you acknowledge them.

Be polite. Be brief. Be normal!

Substitutions

It is perfectly acceptable to ASK for substitutions — “Can I have this sandwich but with that meat, can I have this entrée but with that side,” and so forth.

It is not acceptable to ASSUME substitutions.

You’re asking the restaurant to make an exception for you. Treat it as such, and ask for it that way. As in, NOT “I’ll take this entreé with that app as my side” and whatnot.

As always, (and admittedly if this was universal I wouldn’t be writing this article) apply common sense. The busier the restaurant seems to be, with the fewer people working, the more annoying that substitution request is going to be. Not every place is In-N-Out or Starbucks, where part of their brand is having secret menus and treating every customer like a special little flower or a singularly unique lamprey.

Also, understand what a “substitution” actually is. A substitution is combining components that you see on the menu, making small alterations to dishes and ingredients that are already there, and/or omitting certain ingredients because you have a food allergy or whatever (food allergies are very real, but for the love of God don’t claim to be allergic to something you merely dislike, you ruin it for everyone).

Some requests are NOT really substitutions. This brings me to my next heading:

Don’t Just Invent A Brand New Dish And Ask The Restaurant To Prepare It

Even working as a server for the relatively brief period I did (all thankfully before “the feral era,” though it could be bad even then), I was shocked at how often this happened. Someone, usually an older woman with too much plastic surgery (sorry, it’s true) would scan the menu for a while, then sort of frown a little and ask some question in an overly casual tone that belied its bizarre nature.

“Can I just have, like, some grilled veggies or something?”

I mean… in the sense that a server can go ask the kitchen staff if they will prepare your idea for a dish, and the kitchen staff may even agree to prepare said dish, yes. But there’s also an extremely high chance that whatever you invented, conveyed to the server, which was then described to the kitchen staff second-hand and then prepared, is not going to be as good as the things on the menu that have been conceived, tested, prepped for, and practiced countless times.

I remember a specific instance of a customer inventing a dish, then saying to me, after it came out, almost conspiratorially, “…This isn’t very good.”

Yep. I hear ya, pal. That’s why it isn’t on the menu.

Sending Back Food

I know, this is a whole can of worms, and frankly I’m wary of even broaching the subject. But because this is such a frequent topic of debate, and because we’re already here, it simply must be addressed. I have friends who steadfastly refuse to send back food under any circumstances. My podcasting partner Matt Lieb, for instance, will never send any food back ever, partly because he was once dining with his dad when his dad sent back soup at the Museum of Tolerance.

I understand that some people have been so traumatized by witnessing or being associated with Nightmare Customers that they will overcorrect in order not to be one. That’s both fine and good.

…However. There are certain situations in which I would argue that it’s not only acceptable, but maybe even preferable, to send back food. If your response to a bad dish is to choke it down, leave the server a crappy tip and then vent your bile in a negative review on Yelp or TripAdvisor or whatever, you lose whatever stoic martyr points you thought you were building up by not saying anything. (*Captain Phillips Voice*) Look at me. You are the asshole now.

Hopefully, that’s an extreme situation and most people don’t need to hear that doing that is bad. But there are times when a dish is just wrong, flawed, or botched on a level that, I would argue, you should send it back. We probably need to clarify here that judging whether a dish is send-back worthy requires common sense. I’m talking about a dish that’s clearly an outlier, where the rest of the dishes are good and it’s not just a bad restaurant. And understand that it’s not Chopped and you are not Scott fucking Conant. Sending back a steak you ordered medium rare because it’s actually medium, or a broken emulsion in a sauce or something slightly underseasoned or too oniony or whatever probably doesn’t rise to the level of send-back worthy. But if you can search your soul, and know that you’re not just being a picky asshole, that they actually did fuck something up beyond recognition, and a dish is just not at all what was described and/or not really edible… yes, it’s okay, and even preferable to send it back.

IF, that is, you can do it in a non-asshole way. To wit…

1. You don’t need to make a big show of saying how much the thing sucked. You’re not on trial here, people send back food all the time, so don’t be pre-defensive. Treat the server like the blameless middleman they probably are. If there’s a hair in your food (which has honestly never really bothered me unless the hair was really long or especially pube-like) it’s highly doubtful the server had anything to do with it — that’s a kitchen/expediter issue. Telling the server “Hey, sorry, this wasn’t very good,” should suffice.
2. At that point, the ball is in the server’s court on how to proceed, there isn’t any way to get around that. Every once in a while, you may get one who reacts as if you’ve personally shamed them, which is… unfortunate. Please, just treat your job like a job. We could write a whole separate server-centric version of this on how not to act when someone sends something back or says an order is wrong, but suffice it to say, there’s a limit to how much you as a diner have any control over that.
3. Generally, restaurants will try to make it right and either fix the thing that was bad/wrong or get you something else, for no additional charge (unless the other thing costs more, in which case you might have to, and should expect to, pay the difference). If you want something different, it’s helpful to know what that is before you send back the original thing.
4. If you don’t want the dish fixed or substituted, it’s okay to ask if they’ll take it off the bill, as long as you don’t assume it. Most times they will. And when you do this, be sure to add back in the price of that comped entree to the total when you’re calculating the tip. This is an unspoken agreement between cool server (who shouldn’t question you too much or treat you badly over sending something back) and cool diner (who can chalk up one bad or botched dish to an honest mistake, and still pays everyone for their time). Tip the server (and hopefully whoever they’re tipping out to) for the work they’re doing even if it’s not reflected in the bottom line. (Yes, the economics of what servers make vs. what cooks and kitchen staff do is deeply f*cked here in the USA, but you’re not going to resolve that in one dinner, so just don’t be a dick).

To me, this is preferable to staying silent once a dish reaches a certain level of bad or botched. And if I’m the restaurant owner or manager, I’d rather comp an entrée and keep a customer than have them pay for it and leave vowing never to return, or telling their friends how much my place sucks. It’s also just good information to have. If the same dish comes back a few times, it’s probably time to 86 that dish until you can figure out what’s wrong with it. If I’m the owner or manager, I’d want to know if something isn’t up to standard. It also helps some future diner to not to get stuck with a dish they don’t want either.

Of course, in saying all of these perfectly reasonable things, there’s always the danger of empowering the most unreasonable among us. So, again, apply common sense. There is a level at which playing “fantasy restaurant owner” turns you into a scold or a snitch. Don’t go overboard! Be! Normal!

Tipping

Oh good, another can of worms. I’ll try not to get too deep into the weeds here, but I think it’s possible to acknowledge simultaneously that the incentives involved in, and the entire economics of, tipping are really not good, AND that going to restaurants makes you a participant in that system whether you like it or not. At which point welching on money service workers are counting on to live makes you a piece of shit. Tipping is part of eating out. If you’re eating out, you tip. It’s also worth noting that tips usually aren’t just for servers. They usually get shared between an entire ecosystem of service staff — bartenders, runners, bussers, etc.

For me, it’s only on the rarest occasions when I don’t give 20%. You’d have to be not only bad at the job but actively mean to me. For one thing, a bad tip punishes a bunch of people that maybe/probably didn’t have anything to do with your bad experience.

That being said I don’t think giving less than that, or having 18% instead of 20 as a benchmark necessarily makes you a scumbag. Ditto tipping less on takeout orders (I think it’s acceptable to give less than 20, but also that you should give something, though I don’t pretend to know what the ideal number is, let alone which places it should apply to).

If you regularly give 15% or less in tips, sadly, I think you are a scumbag. Don’t eat out if you can’t pay service industry folks for their work. And for tourists from other places — don’t you dare try pretending that you didn’t know tipping was a thing here. Any cursory glance at a guide book or passing familiarity with American media would’ve clued you in. We’re onto your tricks, no one’s buying that shit for a second. We already envy you for your presumably robust social safety nets, don’t make it worse.

Don’t Squat On The Table

Listen, I’d love it if we were a little more like the French and some of the other Euros when it comes to being more leisurely about meals and turning it into more of a built-in, semi-sacrosanct leisure period of the day (maybe not a lot more like them, I don’t have two hours to spend at the dinner table). But again, the service staff is working for tips. Don’t rush or get anxious about it, but if you’re looking to throw back a few and you’re not in a pub-type situation, probably pay the bill and move it to the bar. The restaurant could use that table.

When In Doubt, Be Normal

Please?

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.

Gorillaz played a show in Georgia on Wednesday night, where lead singer Damon Albarn donned… a truly unique piece of headwear to perform “Tomorrow Comes Today.” As fans on social media pointed out, he put on a squid-shaped hat that (for some reason) also featured a picture of Danny DeVito.

The hat originally belonged to a fan and concert attendee whose brother Kyle wore the hat before managing to get it up to Albarn on stage during the show. “I went to the #gorillaz concert and my brother Kyle wore this squid hat with Danny Devitos face on it. Damon managed to get it and wear it. Today is a good day,” the user wrote. This was also confirmed by a Reddit thread about the show.

Before wearing the hat, Albarn and DeVito don’t seem to connect to one another. Albarn also hasn’t commented on squids in the past. He has, however, made some comments about Taylor Swift, who has a new album out today.

According to NME, Gorillaz were joined by Earthgang, Bootie Brown, and Fatoumata as support. The band’s first North American tour since 2018 comes to a close this weekend on October 23, with a show in Florida. Read some other fan reactions to Albarn’s DeVito squid hat present below.

Gorillaz is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.