Tampa Bay Rants and Raves is a weekly airing of national and local politics, sports, lifestyles and nostalgia items from a very politically incorrect viewpoint. As always, beware - some of what is printed here should not be taken literally.

Singing the restaurant blues

As we’ve noted in this space before, your Humble Blogger and Saintly Wife dine out quite frequently. It is one of the few indulgences we allow ourselves. We tend to frequent the same restaurants often – good food, reasonable prices, friendships we’ve established with other diners and wonderful wait staffs – almost like family. Here is a list of three restaurants where you will never find us - Black Pearl, The Living Room and Sonder Social. The owners of these three dining establishments have chosen to attach a 20 percent service fee to each meal. This is incredibly wrong on two fronts. While 20 percent (or more) is fair for good to excellent service, there are those rare times where the service simply doesn’t rate anything more than the standard 15% tip. More egregious is the restaurants’ cutting servers’ pay by almost 900%. – from $8.00 to the dollar an hour we were making when we started working in the early 1960s. The owners can spin this anyway they like, but it’s just a dodge to get around minimum wage requirements. One last note, if you cannot afford to tip your server in proportion to their service, you probably should eat at home, but certainly not the three restaurants listed above.

Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

Was there ever a more admired woman in this world than Queen Elizabeth II? With a tear, we say goodbye to the woman who ruled Great Britain most of every living persons’ life.

Senator Elizabeth Warren says that Joe Biden’s $300 billion student loan giveaway is “very popular”. Yes, very popular with deadbeats – not so much with responsible Americans.

You knew this was coming – as more and more employees continue to work from home, commercial office buildings are struggling to find tenants with some falling into foreclosure.

What if we did Presidents like we do hurricanes? The next one up would be a name beginning with D, followed by I and Q. (There are nine letters in all that have not been the beginning letter in a President’s name, the most curious being S which is such a common letter).

Answer: Richard Nixon (and yes, we know there are many punchlines here). The question is who is the last President to have more than one Vice-President during his term of office?

The 5:05 Newsletter reports: The Biden administration is offering to trade convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to Russia in exchange for Paul Whelan who was convicted of espionage, WNBA star Brittney Griner … and a spy to be named later. Reportedly the swap is being delayed because Bout has a “No Trade” Clause.

This week in 1893(September13) , the first gasoline-powered car debuts in Springfield, Mass.

Sports, media and other stuff:

Coming soon to golden arches near you? It’s a chicken Big Mac now being test marketed in Miami and a few other locations. McDonald’s folks are pretty optimistic about the new sandwich.

Sports Factoid: The Dodgers, Yankees, Phillies, Mets and Padres each have payrolls larger than Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Oakland and Baltimore combined.

The Mets are a lock for the playoffs and quite possibly the Eastern Division Championship. The reason for their success can be explained in two words – Buck Showalter who finally stabilized things after about five years of their dugout being a clown college.

You’ve followed baseball a long time when you remember you only saw uniform numbers like 65, 77 and 83 in spring training.

Idle thought: We don’t know why we hang on to it, but we still have a token for the Sand Key Bridge from back when it was a toll bridge.

You’ve lived in the Bay Area (or anywhere else) for a long time if you remember the windows of car dealers being papered over about this time of year in anticipation of the unveiling of that year’s new models – when all new models were released in the Fall.

The language barrier

We tire of constantly reading the phrase (Such and such a Hispanic/Oriental MLB superstar) said such and such through an interpreter. Making a minimum of $700,000 a year and having November through mid-February off, one would think these ballplayers would have the cash and the time to invest in Rosetta Stone or hire a tutor. We might understand a rookie struggling with the language along with all else he needs to deal with in the majors, but to see a guy who has been in the show for 3-4 years still relying on an interpreter is ridiculous. In other nations, Germany comes to mind, you must be able to speak the language in order to hold a job. Things need to change – and all of this shouldn’t fall on the player, Major League Baseball needs to step up and help its players to be comfortable in the country where they spend over half the year.

NEXT UP: Here’s Johnny; The Kapok Tree; Politicians for life

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