Question Of The Week: Why Order Pasta At A Restaurant?

Just think about simple pasta dishes here. The food cost for a restaurant making pasta is negligible, but they charge $15 or so for the finished product. Unless you're after one of the more elaborate shapes, pasta is easy to make at home. If the restaurant uses dried pasta, it's an even more pressing question. The marginal difference between good store brands and the stuff from Sysco can be measured in fractions. So tedious creations, tricky sauces and those the old fashioned pasta course aside, it almost seems like a waste of money, doesn't it?

Report from last week, in which we asked if children should be allowed in bars:

Man, readers came down on both sides and bang on the middle, as well. Andrea, who posed the question in the first place, stands on the 'no' side because, as she puts it, "I'm tired of getting the stink eye from parents who decide to sit near me at a drinking establishment and then huff and puff when I light up a cigarette in front of their spawn. And more often than not, children are not properly supervised, which means they're running around and shouting, putting cocktails and sanity at risk. If I wanted to get drunk at Chuck E Cheese, I'd bring a flask and park it in front of the Rockafire."

Fair enough--and we decided, by consensus, that if we had to go to Chuck E. Cheese, we'd need a few drinks.

Others, like David and Jesse, sent parameters (no dance clubs for kids, for example, and a handle on kids' behavior). As Mike from GP explains, "if the kids between 8 and 12 don't know how to behave among adults, we don't want the parents there either."

So no resolution to this one. We'll finish with a couple comments we liked for reasons unto ourselves. The first, from the ever wise luniz, suggested kids would benefit the bar scene because "somebody's gotta wash glasses and keep the floor clean." Our favorite, however, is from someone called precious. To wit:

"As usual an Obamabot has to get in a negative dig at the only country where he can both attempt to write a column ( and presumably be paid) and collect welfare."

Funny, but writers in plenty other countries write columns and can collect some form of unemployment when necessary. The negative dig? We said "prudish Americans" think there's something evil about the practice. Note we didn't say "all Americans," just the prudish ones.

Talk radio does some damage, doesn't it?