Crooks.net

Photo taken with my Canon DSLR, moved to my iPad with the camera connection kit, processed with Photogene, and uploaded to Posterous.

I use Google Voice as my main cell phone number.  When a call goes to voice mail, Google does its best to turn it into text that it then emails to me.  They know it won’t be perfect given the crappy line quality of most phones and untrained speech recognition, but generally it’s plenty good enough to get an idea of what the caller wanted, and then I can listen to the actual message if need be.

Yesterday I was left a message from some robot call for a politician.  (They were actually calling our home phone which was down due to our cable being knocked out by a storm, so our Internet phone system rolled the call over to my cell phone.)  It was such a great translation I now want to run all politicians through the Google Voice filter:

And I would like to, my friends call me ice tea. I’m running for state order because I want to stand up to levels were bankrupting our country. I’m going to be indoors by Joe the plumber 029 for life. User you’d like to live and hundreds of other conservative leaders throughout the state of Missouri. I promised that if elected state water. I wake up every morning looking to root out waste fraud and abuse in our state government. So, please remember allies of want Tuesday August of 3rd Republican primary for state auditor. For more information on the campaign or to donate, please go to eyes it for order dot com. That I C E T F O R water dot com. This message was paid for by eyes of the order wingman Treasurer.

I dream of becoming wingman Treasurer someday.

If you’re really curious, here’s the actual message:  

  
Download now or listen on posterous

a0c7a9119851f017db68148ac21da9af13879a0c.mp3 (91 KB)

They remodeled an old theater in the Power & Light District and it’s quite nice and clean inside.

But we weren’t there for just any old movie, we were there for our first experience in a Cinema Suite!

There are 3 Cinema Suites. 1 is large (pictured below) and the other two are small, holding about 18 people. We were in one of the small ones to see Get Him To The Greek.

(Get Him To The Greek mini review: a high-production value Porkies-level movie. It had some funny moments, but they were far overwhelmed by the unneeded immense push to be as crude as possible. Then it seems like they realized they had to do something to try to wrap up the story, so they spent 2 minutes trying to turn it into a feel-good thing and totally failed.)

The Cinema Suite is filled with very nice easy chairs that recline. I felt that I couldn’t quite sit up straight as much as I wanted to at times, but in general it was not a problem because the movie screen was at an oddly high level. It worked okay since I was leaning back, but if I were to go again I’d sit in the back (3rd) row instead of the middle row. You pick your reserved seats when you buy your tickets.

The chairs are in groups of 2 with a thick arm in-between that we discovered afterward actually raises to make something akin to a loveseat. On the other side of each chair is a wide shelf where the menus and ketchup live, and which provides plenty of room for a bottle of beer, your phone, and more. Just remember that you are sharing this shelf with the person on the other side.

Tickets for a movie in a Cinema Suite are $25. But that’s not as bad as it sounds. $10 of that is for the actual movie (a price I find very reasonable for the venue) and the other $15 is credit toward your food and drink purchase. It’s like paying a cover charge, in a way.

When you’re ready to order anything, there’s a button next to your chair that lights up when you push it. We were told by the friendly waiter that the buttons have a timer on them and that if they don’t respond fast enough they get in trouble. I think it was less than 30 seconds for anyone to show up the times we pushed our button.

They provide a decent selection of beers, both draft and bottle, including some fancy big Boulevard bottles. There’s also wine, and I believe you are also able to get mixed drinks. There are appetizers, a selection of burgers and sandwiches, a few side choices, and desserts. You can also order typical movie food like popcorn (unlimited refills) and candy.

The food is expensive. $10 for a hamburger, for example. $8 for mac & cheese. $9 appetizers. (The menu can be found online here although it’s a tad out of date.)

We were first to arrive and the waiter showed up after we pressed the button and was very friendly, talking to us for a while. She had brought with her two small (very small, like a styrofoam cup size but in fancy metal buckets) containers of popcorn. That was actually a nice start.

We decided to live it up and order Nacho Waffle Fries as a starter. We wanted to give our entire order to the waiter up front, but she was hesitant about this, explaining that they start making the food as soon as she electronically sends it in from her little electronic menu pad. But then she decided she could put a hold on things so it would be okay. We were quite clear that we wanted the appetizer first and the entrees second, and not everything all at once. She said this would be no problem.

Dad ordered the Nacho Waffle Fries and a Reuben. I ordered the Pendergast Burger. We both ordered a beer. Before long someone brought out our beers. Then the movie started. The screen was beautiful and clear, and larger than I expected having experienced a venue similar to this at the theater on The Plaza.

During the previews the first round of food came out. Unfortunately it consisted of my burger and the waffle nachos we were supposed to split. Each chair has a little swivel table attached to it, but it’s not big enough for more than one plate. There was no way to easily split the nachos, and I didn’t want my burger to get cold anyway. True to their word, Dad did not get all his food at once, but it didn’t quite come out the way we planned and had explained. We persevered.

The food is okay. It’s certainly not worth the cost, but it’s not terrible. They give you plenty of waffle fries, which were pretty good, with your sandwich. Don’t order a side to go with an entree!

After a while I finished my burger and we both finished the nachos (but mostly Dad). I started to wonder where Dad’s Reuben was and I leaned over and suggested he push his call button. 30 seconds later someone showed up and after being told the situation she cleared our plates and was very quickly back with the Reuben (which Dad said was good).

We had thought about doing dessert, but there was no way we could possibly eat anymore food.

Toward the end of the movie a server discreetly slipped the bills onto everyone’s tables. It’s a little hard to see in there, but it’s manageable. One important thing to remember is those $15 vouchers!!! They don’t remind you and they don’t want them until it’s time to pay the bill. It would be very easy to forget to use them. I did the usual sticking in of the credit card and waiting for the server to make another trip to bring back the credit slip. A quick signature and it was all taken care of. This is all handled while the movie is playing, but the aisles are so big and it’s all done very quietly so that it’s not really annoying.

The movie ended and our evening was over. It was a fun, different experience, but now that I’ve been I would do things a little differently. Next time before arriving I will eat a light meal with whoever I go with (hopefully Terry!) somewhere other than the theater. Then at the movie we will just get drinks and dessert, which the $15 should nicely just about cover. Maybe we’ll even get some popcorn. I will also target the back row, which will put us up at a higher level for the screen which should be quite a bit better. The room is cozy enough that the back row is definitely not too far away at all.

I recommend the experience, but it’s not a cheap one.

And now it takes me 3 times as long to find that app I haven’t used in a while and can’t remember the name of. Naming of folders is turning out to be rather impotent. Despite this, I still really like having folders.