510 Route 130 South, East Windsor, NJ 08520 609-426-9400
Day 10 Stats, The Big Fish Bistro
There seems to be a love-hate relationship with this place. You love to go, but hate waiting for your drink to be served, or at least I have been told. Or maybe if you are Eman you just love to hate the place.
Concerning the waiting times, we are talking about a restaurant with seating for 130 people and a bar area which can easily hold (and apparently was holding) another 75. The bar wait staff, while being extremely efficient, numbers two people until about 7:00 PM which then drops to single coverage. But that is OK, because the dining room now only has 75 people in it. So while most people love to hate the BF, I hate liking it.
I arrived at the place about 6:20 PM, and while walking from my car a passes by me on the access road with the driver yelling at me "SUUUUUUUUUUCK!" I am unfazed by this because it happens to me all the time to me in Robbinsville as I am a known local agitator (call the mayor's office to verify). I am informed later this was Eman and he was not yelling at me, but at the building that the houses the BF which he hates so much.
After walking in I am greeted by an already good-sized TDDoC crowd including one enthusiast demanding to know why I am "late". I'm thinking, "Late? it's not even 6:30." The barrage continues, "Uji was here at four o'clock!" Now thinking, "Uji is a trooper, we are lucky to have him." "Where have you been!?" At this point, my mind is racing, "That drink I ordered you in 1997 is still sitting on the bar. Don't give me this "you're late" crap. Come talk to me in 2018 when you life-time point total is some reasonable fraction of mine." Tamp mediates the altercation after seeing my obvious incredulity.
There are some new faces. Allie makes her first appearance. Kean is spotted drinking wine while Scugi shows him photos of Porsches and various central NJ bartenders. CSI Stu! And the more usual crowd: Mertz offers a correction to the point tallies on a napkin somehow emailed to Eman and then goes on about the evils of bowel movement discussions in the public forum. Grace makes a second appearance and flirts with regular status. The return of Goettle (and Yvette!).
I talk to Joe Chubb for the first time and the typical mutual Joe friendship develops. If we could get Joe Biden and Joe the Plumber up in here, who knows?
Crowd thins. I inform everyone that Danielle, the bartender, is the only person in the room that I actually like. This thins the crowd a little more. But now with Goettle available, the BF does not close easily. Goettle somehow get the discussion moved to Galois Fields and how they aren't fields in the sense of say a scalar or vector field. It is pointed out that since the del operator is a vector operator, the gradient of a scalar field is by definition a vector field. Then someone says that it is possible to calculate the curl of the vector field and in the case of the original scalar field we weren't sure what this means. Consider, any scalar field, F, then with the del operator, del F is the gradient of the field F. The curl is easily(?) calculated using a vector cross-product as del X del F, but the physical significance is not clear to us. At this point Goettle and I realize no one in the whole bar wants to talk with us anymore. This was understandable, but if anyone can give us some insight on the curl of the gradient of a scalar field we would be most grateful.
Danielle calls last call. Holy crap Uji is still here! Granted, the BF last call is much earlier then the NJ de facto 2AM standard, but he is still here. The chairs are going up around us. Everyone leaves, except Goettle, and poor Yvette, who has to put up with Goettle and his refusal to leave the BF. I leave and just outside on the same sidewalk as earlier am accosted by a group of Eagles and Jets fans who are employees of the Big Fish corporation and have formed some perverse Green Alliance for this weekend and taunt me on my allegiance to Big Blue.
I do like this place and I really hate that.
For reference, the del operator in cartesian coordinates, using the "inverted delta":
No comments:
Post a Comment