Shake the Planet

We are -- as all good people are -- Dodgers fans, and so we go to Dodgers games at Chavez Ravine (the history of which I am intentionally not thinking about), and we root, root, root the home team, and if they don't win it's a shame, and then we go get milkshakes.



I can't tell you how we started doing this -- other than a vague sense that there should always be milkshakes -- but I do know that any time a game ends, we take the Academy exit, turn onto Stadium Way, and then merge with Riverside. A couple of miles down the road, at the intersection with Fletcher, there's Rick's.

Rick's is... an institution. That's a polite way of saying it's got three and a half stars on Yelp. I've never actually eaten their food, but the shakes are good and it's got a greasy-spoon charm and they're open after games and it is an institution.

During the pandemic, they put "SPAGHETTI IS BACK" on their marquee, and it went viral, because we were all kind of nuts in 2021.

Yesterday, as a buddy and I were driving-through to get milkshakes -- Dodgers: 12, Marlins: 7, in a game that had more bad fielding than I've seen before in my life, combined -- the sign had this:



(Yes, I know it's a bad photo. My windshield was so dirty, the phone focused on that instead of the actual sign. Leave me alone.)

It said, "HAPPY BDAY CRASHOVERRIDE". Which, no, it couldn't possibly have.

"Crash Override" is the hero from the much-beloved and genuinely bad 1995 nerd movie "Hackers," which posits that technically proficient people look like Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie in their mid-20s.

How? Why? What?

Maybe it was the release date? No, "Hackers" came out on September 15. Miller's birthday? No, that's November 15. Maybe they filmed some of the movie at Rick's? No, it was shot in New York. Maybe they meant "HAPPY BIDET CRASHOVERRIDE"? I don't know.

And so I committed the smallest act of journalism possible, which should qualify me for a Pulitzer given how things are going: I called the restaurant.

I said, "This is a weird question, but I came by last night after the game and saw the marquee said 'HAPPY BDAY CRASHOVERRIDE' and I was wondering if you knew why?"

And the poor woman who happened to be standing closest to the phone when it rang said: "I don't know. The customers write stuff down and we put it up and we don't know what it means." Which, I admit, is disappointing and leaves me with no ending to this story.

Good milkshakes, though.


 




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