My wife and I took a few days off this week and we decided to give the new Bobby Flay Burger Palace in Eatontown, NJ a quick try because my wife and I both think Bobby Flay comes across as a jerk on TV but his food is usually pretty darn good.

We drove down to Monmouth Mall and got to Bobby’s Burger Palace around 2pm on a weekday. We had no idea what to expect so we showed up with empty stomachs and high expectations based on our previous experiences at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill, which offers some phenomenal and unique dishes. We were a little curious to see if Bobby’s Burgers would be the same.

The line to get into the place was out the door even on a chilly afternoon and at first we figured we’d be standing for a while, but once we got inside the doorway we learned the first little secret to Bobby’s Burger Palace: it’s small. Really small. Though it looks large from the outside this “burger palace” really was more like a “burger joint.” I know Bobby Flay is short, but he’d have to stand about 12 inches off the ground to think of this little place as a “palace.”

The Bobby’s Burger Palace in Eatontown is not much bigger than a standard McDonald’s. This would, unfortunately, not be the last time we’d invoke the image of McDonald’s when talking about BBP. The line to the cash register was only about 25 feet long, so when we got in the door we saw that there were really only about five or six parties ahead of us, all looking up and down the large menu boards on the side.

The menu at Bobby’s Burger Palace is limited, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are 10 different burgers to choose from, a couple sandwiches and salad options, two types of grilled cheese, a few fry options, about seven milkshake options and a few sodas. That’s about it.

You can “crunchify” any burger for free. Crunchify is Bobby’s Flay term for “putting potato chips on it.” And if you don’t like beef you can get any of the burger offerings made with a grilled chicken breast, a turkey burger or “topless” which means no bun.

We dutifully waited in line and my wife got an L.A. Burger, while I went for a three cheese grilled cheese. We split a vanilla milkshake, an order of sweet potato fries and an order of onion rings, mostly out of curiosity. We were given a little plastic number tent like those the ones you remember from the 1970’s. After a few minutes of waiting two seats opened up and my wife and I were two chairs facing each other amidst a bunch of strangers.

Bobby Flay wants you to sit with some strangers and eat this.

This was our second real surprise: communal dining. There are no individual tables, just long stretch tables where you sit in comfy stools that are bolted to the floor with a bunch of people you probably don’t really want to be that close to. My wife and I were crowded between people with winter coats and jabbing arms and loud nasally voices all of whom had apparently bathed in cologne. Ahh, New Jersey.

Some of the tables were curved and some were angled at such a way as to actually take up even more space than they had to. This is, I suppose, “hip” and “cool” to some people, but judging from the conversations around us it seemed kinda stupid. That’s the second secret of Bobby’s Burger Palace: by limiting the number of seats in the place and making the cashier line short it ALWAYS looks busy and makes people think, “Oh, this must be worth it.” Limiting supply is a great way to artificially increase demand.

Our food came out in about 10 minutes, but all was not well. Our sweet potato fries were cold, our onion rings just lukewarm and we didn’t have our milkshake. There aren’t really waiters at Bobby’s Burger Palace, but there are a lot of employees cleaning up tables, bringing food out and doing waitery things. At the Eatontown BBP the number of tattoos and piercings on the waitstaff far outnumbered those in the general population and the mostly older suburban clientele. One of these waiter-type people immediately appeared and asked how everything was. I mentioned my lack of a milkshake and she immediately apologized and went to look for it. Meanwhile I had noticed people that were behind us in line getting their orders, including milkshakes, as well.

Our waiter person appeared again and said the milkshake would be out in a moment and actually used the phrase, “It was a computer glitch. Those darn computers!” Umm, yeah. I’m sure human error had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, we ate.

The food was good. That’s about it. Good.

Just good.

Not great. Not amazing. Not worth waiting more than 10 minutes for. Not unique. Just… kinda okay. The sweet potato fries, other than being cold, were passable. I could almost see the “RESTAURANT BULK FOOD FROZEN SWEET POTATO FRIES” label stamped on them. The onion rings were slightly better, being made of large onion rounds and not just thinly sliced rings. The portions were just right. Next to us was a little carousel of dipping sauces such as ketchup, “burger sauce” (steak sauce), jalapeno sauce and some sort of smoky ketchup. We squirted each sauce on the plate and dipped and tasted. Again, it was flavorful but it was hardly cutting-edge or particularly wonderful.

My wife’s burger was pretty good, but nothing that a good diner wouldn’t offer for about the same price. Bobby’s Burger Palace only cooks burgers to medium, so you’re out of luck if you like it any other way. My Grilled Cheese Deluxe included several different cheeses, including goat cheese, as well as tomato and bacon. It was a thin sandwich but it was creamy and crunchy and it worked well.

Our milkshake finally arrived and we both tried it. It tasted exactly like all the other vanilla milkshakes in the world and they all taste almost like, yes, a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake. Again, there was nothing out of the ordinary or even exciting about this milkshake other than the fact that it came in a glass that was smaller than the sodas and it came out a little bit late.

We left Bobby’s Burger Palace feeling as though we’d gotten a decent diner meal in a strange setting. Most of the burgers are around $7.50 or so and the fries ring in around $3.00 and the milkshake pinged us for $5.00.

Overall it was a good place to get a burger but no better than any other restaurant in the United States. If you like sitting with strangers, like average food and you can’t stand the idea of not eating at a FoodTV chef’s vanity project restaurant, then give it a shot. If, however, you’re hungry and want to relax I suggest you go for a burger just about anywhere else.

Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill is damn fine eating.

Bobby Flay’s Burger Palace is just good eating, dammit.

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Once again hurricanes are in the headlines and once again I have a morbid and unnatural fascination not with the storms themselves but with how the media chooses to report on them. I imagine reporters are given “Hurricane Stories” in the same way that privates in the Army are given “latrine duty.” Both jobs are doled out as the ultimate punishment for bad performance.

What the experts predict Florida will look like after every hurricane.

“Ted, as the Editor-in-Chief of this news organization I’ve noticed that your stories have not been very newsworthy. In the past three months you have not once mentioned computer hackers breaking into your home, celebrity divorces or Lindsay Lohan’s breasts!”

“But, sir, all I cover is the Weekly Farm Report.”

“And if you can’t find a way to mention Jessica Simpson’s rump, then I’m not interested. I’m sorry, Ted, but I’m going to have to give you another assignment.”

“What… but… Oh, God! No, sir, I’m sorry! I promise I’ll find some way to bring Britney Spears into the local hog trading market watch! It will be easy!”

“Sorry, Ted, it’s too late for that. I need you to go to Florida and… cover a hurricane.”

“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!…”

So poor Ted gets shipped off the Florida where he is given three specific tasks:

1. Go to a hurricane shelter and interview someone whose IQ is three points higher than his shoe size.

“Umm…wow.. I’m on TV! My name is Stanley Wabash, Jr….and I haven’t seen a hurricane like this for at least three weeks. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I just lost my job at the local Wal-Mart after I was caught sniffin the women’s shoes, I have seven kids and eight dogs to feed and the trailer just ain’t going to be the same without a roof. Just hopin’ my meth lab and dog-fighting ring survives this gosh-darn storm… Can I saw gosh-darn on TV?”

2. Interview a local scientist about the storm, being sure to include the worst case scenario as though it will inevitably happen.

“And as these charts and cool computer graphics demonstrate, you can expect most of the southern United States to be under a hundred feet of water by noon. And that’s when things will get really bad because by early evening we expect at least one, maybe two, meteors to come crashing down through the hurricane and flatten Disney World during their annual Orphans are Fun celebration. So if you haven’t been drowned by the rain then you’ll definitely be crushed or burned to a crisp by the explosion.”

3. Walk around outside during the hurricane while screaming into the microphone about how strong the wind is.

“As you can see by the way I’m cold, drenched and half-dead, this is a really wild storm. Everyone in the city has been evacuated and told to stay indoors, so only the truly mentally incompetent people among the population would be out here, in all this rain and wind while holding a bunch of electrical equipment like microphones and cameras. Hey, look, there’s a truck being pick up by the storm and blowing right towa-AAAUGGGHHhhhhh…..”

None of this news coverage is actually helping anyone in the storm. All those people are doing one of two things: they’re either huddled in concrete buildings without any power and eating meals consisting of granola bars and cans of warm soda or they are sitting around the pool of a hotel three hundred miles away drinking Mai-Thais and figuring out how many home theater systems and Rolex watches they can safely claim on their insurance forms.

Hurricane coverage has become nothing more than reality TV on a grand scale where the bulk of the television audience can sit back and smugly announce: “Well, they got what they deserved. Serves them right for living there. Hey, Hon, we have any more Cheese Doodles?”

The sad truth is that all the major “news” organizations treat tragedies like this as a great opportunity to gain viewers and sell commercials and I’m not going to feed into this vicious cycle anymore. I’m going to turn off the news when it begins to get too exploitive and I’m going to do the one thing I can do to help victims of tragedies: I’m going to pay more attention to Lindsay Lohan’s breasts.

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I’ve had the dreaded Windows Vista for exactly a year now and I just had my first real “issue” with the OS. It was the dreaded Windows Vista “USB Device Not Recognized” error that seemed to appear after a quick power blip in my home.

For those of you not familiar with the famous Windows Vista USB Device Not Recognized error, I’ll give you a quick synopsis: you are using Windows Vista and minding your own business when suddenly a little pop-up message appears and tell you, surprise! you have a “USB Device Not Recognized!” There’s an annoying little bell that rings and you click on the stupid pop-up bubble and get.. well… nothing.

At least for me I saw nothing. And here’s the problem: you can’t find anything wrong so you can’t actually fix anything. Windows Vista doesn’t tell you which USB device is not recognized, which USB port has the problem or what it thinks is happening. The error message “USB Device Not Recognized” is just about completely meaningless. But every 30 seconds the bubble pops up again with that annoying little bell.

So I did what I do whenever I hear a discouraging sound coming from my car engine: I turned up the volume on my iTunes and promptly forgot about the message. Eventually I got smart and just turned the Windows Alert sound off.

After a few days the error was still popping up and though I couldn’t hear the bell, the bubble was troubling me. Other people have spent hours searching through documentation and reloading Windows Vista from scratch and downloading USB drivers. I am far too lazy to do that anymore, so I just went searching on the internet for the stupidest most implausibly easy solution I could find.

And it worked.

The solution is simple:

Still have problems? Try the 100% Guaranteed ErrorSmart for free!

1. Unplug (not just turn off) you PC.
2. Unplug all your USB devices from your PC (and, heck, any power supplies as well)
3. Wait 30 minutes or more.
4. Plug in your essential USB devices (keyboard, mouse).
5. Plug in your PC, turn it on.
6. Pop in the rest of your USB devices.

Ta-da, your Windows Vista USB Device Not Recognized Error is solved. This worked for me. I actually did it once without unplugging the USB devices and the problem went away for about three days and then appeared again. I did it again, taking out all my USB devices and I’ve been going for a couple weeks now with no problem.

I thought about trying to sell some sort of wacky device that would help you pull the plug out of your computer, much like my iPad invention for fixing that dreaded sad iPod icon. But then I realized: I’m too lazy for that, too.

Instead you can just thank me with large unmarked bills.

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