Probably few people know about the tiny neighborhood of Little Egypt, nestled within the much larger neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. To say Little Egypt is tiny, is actually quite an understatement; it consists of one block of Steinway Street, between 28th Avenue and Astoria Blvd, excluding, of course, the two thirds of that block occupied by non-Egyptian related businesses. So, when we say that Little Egypt is a tiny neighborhood, we really mean to say that it’s a collection of seven hookah bars, three restaurants and a store that sells phone cards and Moroccan pop music.

When I first moved to Astoria, many years ago, I took frequent trips up to this block. It was right after 9-11, so the idea of exploring a predominantly Muslim area carried with it a mystique of being accepting of other cultures and taking full part in the brotherhood of humanity. Sure, those back in Georgia might fear or hate the swarthy Middle Eastern immigrants, but here I was ready to buy cigarettes in their delis and sample their cuisine. This soon stopped. Not because I wasn’t interested in promoting the brotherhood of humanity, but because traveling to Little Egypt left me feeling like a black man at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama circa 1952.

Let’s just say that these Middle Eastern men were not interested in serving white Americans, or treating them with the simple respect due a money-laden customer looking for hot falafel and kafta kebobs, or with looking me in the eye, or acknowledging my existence. Let’s just say they were about as interested in serving me some food as a laid-off Detroit auto-worker is interested in the new line of Toyotas. Dutifully, I would go up to the counter, ready with my order, only to be completely ignored. Arab men, in their over-sized Yankee jerseys and saggy jean shorts would show up after me, and would be served instantly. A few times I would just get frustrated and leave, other times I would stick to my guns and insist on being served my food, only to stand there sheepishly waiting while others came in after me, ordered, took their food and left while I still stood waiting for my lamb goodness.

Finally, and that is to say after about three months of this, I never bothered going in to those shops again. Yes, I voted with my dollars and took my business elsewhere; explored the Columbian, Brazilian, Greek and Eastern European fare to be had. It actually gave me a little satisfaction to see one dining establishment that had snuffed me, El Manara, closed one day as I walked by. And thus, for years, I ignored that block, ignored Little Egypt, and what might have been of its culinary offerings.

Until yesterday, when I was persuaded to give Kebob Café a chance. I’d probably walked by the place a thousand times, but I assumed it was like the others and never bothered to go in, try it or even give it a second chance. Yes, I was horribly, horribly wrong.

To say the Kebob Café is small is another one of those understatements, like saying the universe is ‘roomy.’ There’s enough room for about twelve people to enjoy a meal, though only for six of those to sit comfortably. Other than the size of the place, my first impression was of the smell; exotic and unearthly spices for the highs, heavy with frying meat to the lows, with just a hint of pounded dough and fruit to round out the middle. Secondly, I noticed the numerous pieces of figurative art on the walls, tucked in between antique lamps, esoteric decorations and quietly hidden iPod playing traditional Mediterranean music. Wait a second. Figurative art? Must not be too strict of Muslims I thought. This thought was seconded, voted upon and passed unanimously when the Chef came over and offered us something to drink, pointing out the numerous wines and beers he had on hand.

Barely had I begun to notice how different Kebob Café was from the run-of-the-mill places, the Chef came over, sat down with us and began to go over some of the various menu items he was preparing that night. Not through rote memory, but rather on a journey, he recited the various dishes he was capable of preparing.

Now, I’ve been to places that had the gimmick of not having a menu. Either they offer only one or two entree choices, or they force you to just kind of guess from the waitress’s speech. But, this was different. There’s no menu at the Kebob Café, because I think the Chef doesn’t like it being so clinical. He, and his helper, are the only staff, there are no waiters or busboys or dishwashers, no hostesses or line cooks. And with so few diners per seating, it’s an intimate atmosphere. So intimate in fact, that after he gave us a few options, he saw our bewilderment and stated quite plainly “I have to go prepare someone else’s meal right now, you drink your beers and then we’ll talk through this, find something you’ll like.”

After a few minutes he did come back, returned to his seat and plainly asked “What do you like?”

We rattled off a few notions and he took the bait, hook, line and sinker. Immediately, he began to prepare a meal in his head and describe it to us “First we’ll get you some falafel and some hummus, and a salad. What do you like better: beets or artichokes? Beets? Okay, we make you a beet salad with some peppers and onions- you don’t like onions, it’s okay I know the Chef, we put in some other stuff then, mix that up with a little oil and vinegar. Then you need something like a main course; you like meat, are you vegetarian? Meat, eh?”

Then, he proceeded to rattle off the numerous meats he could prepare for us delicately roasted and served over a bed of rice; a zoo, a menagerie; beer, lamb, chicken, duck, fish (of various types), rabbit, quail, yes quail, and, while I’m not certain, he may have mentioned kangaroo, bald eagle and ibex. Indeed the Chef is half of what makes Kebob Café worth visiting and returning to. Like an old Vaudevillian, you know in your heart his banter is well rehearsed, heavily practiced and that with you, it’s the fifteen thousandth time he’s done it. But it’s good, it’s professional, and he’s a master so you can’t help but appreciate it.

You know you can trust a chef when in the close atmosphere of their restaurant you can watch then nibbling at the food they’re cooking. Once you’ve seen them do that it’s okay that they come over to your table and pick up individual pieces of a dish and show you, with their fingers, how best to combine them. When this Chef picks up, with his bare fingers, a piece of food off the platter, dips it into the sauce for you and puts it on your plate, you’re appreciative of the suggestion.

And the food. Oh yes, this is a restaurant review, so what about the food? Kebob Café is one of those places where they bring you huge plates of various foods and while you may not be able to accurately identify what exactly the particular food item is, specifically, you don’t care. It’s just big heaps of delicious food. Our meal consisted of a beet salad (beets mixed with other things we couldn’t quite identify), a huge plate of hummus, baba ganoush, fresh apples, roasted peppers, steaming hot pita bread and various other touches, which again were not identifiable but were nonetheless delicious. To top it off, we had roast lamb, stuffed with, yes, more lamb. The inside lamb was finely chopped and mixed with walnuts, spices and again, various other bits. Did we know what they were? No. Were they good? Yes. And was it lamb stuffed inside of other lamb? Yes, and it was quite good.

Kebob Café is an excellent spot for delicious food and in a good atmosphere, cooked by a Chef who knows how to make a meal a great experience. It’s intimate, it’s good, you’ll laugh, you’ll get stuffed and, if you can get a chair, you’ll have a great evening. It’s a little pricy, but well worth it. And I recommend it, because, hey, I know the Chef.

Kebob Cafe
25-12 Steinway St., Astoria, NY 11103
N or W to Astoria Blvd.

Many users of computers, perhaps even you, the reader, have been frustrated by what is seen as a malfunctioning program or operating system. Frustrating error messages, unexpected stops, strange loops, spinning beach balls and blue screens of death make our blood pressure rise, and in extreme cases, can lead to increased slide rule and type writer sales. But, the frustrations don’t arise from malfunctioning computers. Instead the computer is actually functioning just fine. It’s just programmed at its very core to be incredibly annoying.

Everything in a computer is controlled by basic binary. Either there is electricity flowing through a circuit or there isn’t. One or off, nothing in between. So, when you give your computer a command it follows its programming and sometimes an error occurs because for the binary brain something either can be done or it can’t. There’s absolutely no grey area for these machines. There’s no process to sort of open Minesweeper or almost save a file. No, either an operation can be performed or it can’t. It’s annoying to us users when something can’t be done, because we’re human and our thinking isn’t done in binary. We have ideas like ‘sort of’ and concepts like ‘almost.’

Our brains aren’t built for tasks. They’re built for survival. Animals that are the best at improvisation tend to live longer and leave more offspring than those which live according to hard-and-fast rules. When confronted with a problem, our brains naturally attempt to solve it by any available method. Indeed, in our natural lives the only binary is that you’re either alive or dead. Nothing else is that black and white, especially not our problem solving skills. Over the millennia, the harsh reality of existence has forced us to adapt, creating the idea of the desperate, improvisational fix.

Thus, when a system, a structure or a plan starts to fail, humans tend to interrupt the failing trajectory and improvise something, anything new. And if the unplanned jury-rig isn’t as good as the original planned idea, we learn to live with it, with something that sort of works, barely works or almost works. We’ll even take pride in an ingenious solution to a problem that allows a system to barely work. We’re even happy if something is the worse possible solution, except for all the others that we’ve tried.

We’ve all had our MacGuyver moments, where radical improvisation prevented a total failure. Mine involved my old beat up VW micro-bus, a veritable fountain of improvisational repair opportunities. One day, as I was driving, the clutch cable broke, snapped in half. The clutch pedal couldn’t communicate the user’s instructions to the engine. That car was, in the common parlance, broken down. As a human, I surveyed my surrounding and found a metal guitar string which I used as a jury-rigged clutch cable, enabling the car to function again. A human can think that way. No, a guitar string is not a clutch cable, but did the car run? Let’s say it barely ran, it barely functioned and I barely got the car to a garage where a proper fix could be done. Luckily, for a human in the real world, barely is good enough.

Computers don’t understand that concept because we don’t program them to understand that. In the same scenario the computer would probably alert the user that the instructions weren’t reaching the engine. If you were lucky. It might also just give you a message that the car was not operable. And it would do the same for a software or hardware problem.

Any deviation from the standard commands and the computer will simply not be able to complete an operation. It can’t just about run Photoshop if it can’t locate the exe file. No, something either can be done or is impossible. There’s the source of our frustration; two different methods of thought, one rigid, one flexible.

In truth, an error message, or a freeze up or even a death screen actually mean the computer is operating perfectly. After all, it’s been programmed to display that error message when it encounters something that deviates from the standard process. That’s its job. It does precisely what we’ve programmed it to do. Just sometimes we don’t like what the programs tell it to do. So next time you see an error message, don’t get angry with the computer, no get angry with the people who built and programmed it. Take your frustrations out on them, with a baseball bat if necessary. Then they’ll learn to start making better machines.

1. Wear a blue work shirt, khaki pants and old, beat up sneakers.
2. Accessorize with a fanny pack, a fake mustache and glasses.
3. Affect a nasal voice with slight sibilance.
4. Talk about auto parts a lot.
5. Make the “Okay” gesture with your thumb and fingers while you say “Gotcha there.”
6. Pretend to really enjoy saying the phrase “What do you think, file the pink. What do you do, staple the blue.”
7. Complain about Ted. Call Ted a moron.
8. Mention the NJ Nets and how great their next season will be.
9. Tell that story about the time you got a free Whopper because you were “persistent.”
10. Mention that “The clock’s still on the wall” every time someone checks the time. Snigger.

There have always been people who compare Lincoln and Kennedy, that is to say the United States Presidents Abraham Tiberius Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy rather than the Lincoln automobile or John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, U.S.A. These two presidents are most famous for being dead, or rather for their method of dying, that is to say that both chose assassination as their means of exiting this mortal coil. Really they did not choose to be assassinated, but rather their assassins (Charles Guiteau and Gavrilo Princeps respectively) choose to murder them. Most interesting is that these two men, A.T. Lincoln and J.F. Kennedy, died at drastically different times of the day.

In 1865, Abraham Lincoln Jr. chose to attend a film called “Our American Cousin” at the prestigious Ford Theatre in our nation’s capital. As he sat enjoying himself and the company of his irrepressibly awful wife Mary Todd, assassin Mark David Chapman fired a bullet into the president while shouting “Mulus vinum non amat!” Lincoln was taken elsewhere where he died at around 10:15 p.m. that evening.

Over two hundred years later, John F. Fitzgerald Kennedy was traveling through the Dallas, Texas city of Austin when he was struck by a bullet fired by Charlotte Corday from a conveniently located book suppository. After being taken to a hospital, doctors removed his brain and he died at 1:25 p.m.

This is an interesting contrast. While both presidents were murdered by assassins who used bullet firing weapons, they died at separate times. Think about it; people die all the time and while that’s sad it’s best to realize that you will also died. It’s important to remember that you will die one day, probably one day soon. If you spend a lot of time wrestling alligators then your death will probably come really quickly, especially if you’ve never been properly trained in alligator handling. I have never been trained.

The fact of the matter is that I have determined that Sunday night around 10:00 p.m. is the best time of all to die.

Who wants to die in the morning? You’ve just gotten up and have barely had chance to enjoy your coffee and newspaper when the Reaper so rudely interrupts. And besides, you had your whole day ahead of you; the drycleaners, work, a trip to the arcade and maybe some mint-chocolate-chip ice cream for a little treat. It doesn’t matter that these weren’t good plans, they were still your plans. Just because it wasn’t a sangria brunch with the Queen or hang-gliding with Alan Alda doesn’t mean your plans meant nothing. They were still your plans and you had planned on doing them. Now they’re all shot because you’re dead. It’s so disappointing.

It’s better to died in the late evening. By then the day is pretty much over, it’s winding down. There’s nothing good on TV, just the news at 10 and then reruns of old sitcoms after that. Maybe you can catch a MacGuyver or something on cable, but for the most part all you have to look forward to at that point is maybe some reading, a trip to the bathroom and then unconciousness. And that’s the point; late at night you’re already ready for unconciousness. You’re tired, you want to rest and what’s the best rest of all? That’s right, the peace of the grave.

As for the day of the week; Sunday is the best by far. The weekdays are all about work, the weekends are the real fun. Why end your life on say, a Friday when the weekend is before you? Best to end it on Sunday when the fun of the weekend is over and all you have to look forward to is more of the same old office. It’d be terrible to end it on a Saturday night too, because Saturday night is the best for going out and besides I like to get up and watch that pet keeping show on Sunday mornings. The weekdays are just weekdays. Monday through Thursday…who cares? Sure, there’s some interesting television on I guess, but there’s nothing too special.

And I cannot stress this enough; do not die during high school. Do whatever you can to survive until you graduate. What, do you have terminal cancer? I don’t care, just keep breathing. What, did you just crash your car on Dead Man’s Curve? Yeah, wait for the ambulance, don’t give up yet junior. The worst thing about dying in high school is that you never get to live past high school. Life gets way better after high school. Wait, change that; the real worst thing about dying in high school is that they do that stupid year book spread about you and some dork writes a poem about flowers or the seasons or some other damn thing. Yeah, survive high school.

I would say that the best time to day is probably the Sunday after your 60th birthday, at around 10:00 p.m. That way you get to miss work and those annoying years where you lack bladder control. Sixty years are plenty for life. Hey, plenty more than Lincoln Fitzgerald or Abe Kennedy ever got.

Death should be something special, and like all big events you shouldn’t take it for granted.