Wired for Sound, but Plugged Out

Party-goers who attend a lot of fancy banquets are used to finding clever little lagniappes and door prizes at their places at the dinner tables. And those who go out often probably have a junk drawer stuffed with miniature liquor bottles, shampoo samples, promotional cassettes, souvenir matchbooks and Barbie-size vials of horrid fragrances.

But at this year’s Bay Area Music Awards, held March 6 at the San Francisco Civic, guests found something new under their napkins: a pair of earplugs.

Seems that those on the rock scene are getting careful about their hearing; when the after-dinner rock bands began to jam, the formally dressed guests jammed plugs into their ears and sat back to enjoy the entertainment. Talk about the Aging of Aquarius.

Different Job Description

Life in L.A. can be perilous at times, but it seem as if this fact is being exploited more and more. While perusing the classified ads in the L.A. Weekly recently, we came across one wooing people for service-industry jobs in pastoral Ojai. “One of the most gorgeous drives to work anywhere. Mountain Resort needs: full-time restaurant mgr. and phone reservation clerks.” What caught our eye was the headline. It read: “Tired of Being Shot At?”

The Urge to Merge

When the caffeine urge rears its ugly head (which it does quite often here at Social Climes), we can sometimes be found satisfying our java cravings at Starbucks. One advantage to waiting in line for coffee is hearing the employees calling out the zillions of coffee drink permutations: “Double tall capp, half caff, nonfat, extra foam!”

It’s no wonder the coffee servers have come up with their own shorthand. Our favorite was the moniker for a decaf cappuccino with nonfat milk. It’s called a “Why Bother?”