Dining gripe
What do restaurantgoers complain about most?
Q: The most frequent complaint diners have about restaurants is not the service, the crowds, or even the food. What then?
A: The noise level. Julia Belluz, in her article “Why restaurants become so loud — and how to fight back” on www.vox.com, posits some reasons why high noise levels are so common:
1. Wall, ceiling and floor coverings, which are both attractive and sound-absorbing tend to be expensive.
2. Modern restaurants often cultivate an industrial minimalist look, with “brick or concrete walls, bare tables and floors, high ceilings and exposed ducts,” turning them into noise traps.
3. “Some spaces — like former churches — will always be noisy when filled with people.”
4. And, of course, no one wants to walk into a mausoleum. Noise can equate to spirited discussion, good times and increased liquor sales.
But, says Gail Richard, past president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: “Loud restaurants aren’t just irksome; they’re a public health threat, especially for the people who work at or regularly patronize them. Being exposed to noise levels above 70 and 80 decibels, which many restaurants boast these days, causes hearing loss over time.”
Q: On one rainy, foggy day in October 2006, Austria’s A2 roadway experienced a multiple-kilometer traffic jam. Though the weather factored into it, what was the main cause of the backup? Think rare, at that.
A: Forty dead birds were strewn on the road, looking “as if they had just fallen from the sky,” says Dan Lewis on his Now I Know website. No, they weren’t sick. In fact, they were drunk. According to Discover magazine, one Vienna veterinary authority reported: “The birds’ livers showed so much damage from drinking that ‘they looked like they were chronic alcoholics.’” And how did the birds get so snookered? Fermented berries, a favorite of the birds. In that October season of freezing and thawing with enhanced berry fermentation, Lewis says, “the drunk birds had flown way too low, smashing into the ground, car windows, and everything else with fatal results.” Fortunately for the drivers on the road, no injuries were reported.
Q: Nature offers up a spectacular array of life, from the grand to the minuscule. In this latter category, what’s a truly remarkable specimen and ferocious survivor?
A: It’s the tardigrade, a pudgy eight-legged waddler, 1,000 species strong, with some so small “they could be padding about on the period at the end of this sentence,” says Dan Egan in his book “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.” As zooplankton expert Rudi Stickler puts it: “The earth might be teeming with indomitable beasts, but nothing — not the polar bear, not the crocodile, not the anaconda — matches the ferocity of the microscopic tardigrade when it comes to doing whatever it takes to survive,” in temperatures from that of an oven broiler to weather hundreds of degrees below zero.
European researchers went so far as to put a platoon of slumbering tardigrades on a rocket, blasted them into space and left them in an open satellite compartment for 10 days exposed to the frigid, cosmically radiated heavens. Yet, when these “tardinauts” were brought back to earth, they woke up and walked around. (By contrast, a human will survive only a few seconds in the vacuum of the universe.)
Concludes Egan, “Not all the tardigrades survived, but among those that did were a group robust enough to have perfectly healthy offspring.”
Send questions to brothers Bill and Rich Sones at sbtcolumn@gmail.com.