"What the hell is this? This is horrible. Come see this!!!"

Curious, we looked up. She was gesturing to a fellow waitress, who was taking her time. She took her time explaining it to us curious diners.

"It's a picture of the owner with Barack Obama here. And somebody attached this sign beneath it and misspelled both his name and Hillary's name. I mean, come on!!!!"

"Yeh, if you're gonna support a candidate, at least spell his or her name correctly!" Fellow Waitress said as she passed by.

"It drives me nuts," the first waitress said. "I was out at a place on Oak Street Saturday, and somebody wrote in chalk on the sidewalk in front to 'Vote for Bark Oboma'. A friend of mine was out there when this Tulane student was writing it on the pavement, and he corrected her on the 'Oboma' part, so at least she tried to chalk in an 'A' over the second 'O', but still..."

"Lemme take a look at it," the woman at the table next to me said as she slid out of her seat. I followed and saw that "Barack" was "Barak" and "Hillary" was "Hillery". Two conflicting messages were written on the envelope stuck to the wall.:

This man's Barak'n my world!
Vote Hillery!

"Oh, hey, I'll correct it!," the woman said. "You got some extra paper and a colored pen?"

"Yeah, sure!"

"Wait...never mind, I found some right here!"

More discussion followed at the sorry state of spelling and grammar as well as punctuation amongst the English speakers and proofreaders of this country. Everything from billboards to TV ads were criticized, not to mention da local paper.

"Whoops!" the woman doing the corrections said. "I need another piece of paper. I gave 'Barack' an extra 'R'. And I'm a writer, no less!"

" 'Barrack' Obama?" I hooted. "There's a pro-war candidate if I ever heard of one! Ha!"

The new sign was taped under the picture.

"Anybody want anythin' from the store?" a large man asked the diner employees.

"Yeh, a million dollars!" Fellow Waitress yelled.

I walked over to the jukebox and put on "London Calling", "I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl", and "Your Cheatin' Heart", 'cause I still had thoughts of this broad in my head. I went back to reading about urban planning and wondered if some of what I was reading about was what was ultimately causing us to lower all our standards.

And I'm not simply talking about spelling and grammar... I'm talking about the possibility of working for something better without having it usurped by "the market economy".

"That was more fun than a movie, and much cheaper!" the writer woman said to me as we were leaving the diner.

"Kind of sad, actually," I said. On many levels, was what I meant. The movies cost too damn much. The stories in most of the movies offered are such crap.

And comparing life to the movies is a sad comment on life.