There are a few constants in the universe I used to be able to count on: death, taxes, the humor of Lewis Black, the speed of light, the propensity of people to be morons and the fact that whatever line I get in at the supermarket checkout will automatically turn into the slowest-moving one. Now, IHOP has gone and shaken the foundation of my belief structure by changing their menu. There's a nice shiny new IHOP in Los Angeles that just opened a few months ago. It's open 24 hours a day! It's even nicely decorated, has its own parking lot (which is key, considering its location) and has some of the cleanest bathrooms I've ever seen in a restaurant. I should've known something was up right there when I stepped into this kinder, gentler, thousand-points-of-light IHOP. They've changed the menu. They've changed the menu. To the point where a lot of their old favorite dishes are gone or they've been re-engineered beyond recognition. Oh sure, some of them are still there, but can you honestly see a late-20something guy saying to his waiter, "Uh, yes, I'll have the Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n' Fruity, please"? I had a tradition that was born in college where every time I went to IHOP, I'd order chocolate chip pancakes. It stemmed from the fact that whenever I went to IHOP in college, all of the people I went with inevitably ended up ordering that, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about and ended up participating in the ritual. And I'll admit that the chocolate chip pancakes were good -- warm buttermilk pancakes with chocolate chips cooked into them that were all melty and permeated the pancakes. Slather on two of the four jars of syrup on the table, and you're ready to go. Mmm mmm good. But now the chocolate chip pancakes are just regular pancakes with a handful of chocolate chips sprinkled on post-cooking. Where's the fun in that? If I wanted that, I could do it myself. But cooking the chocolate chips into the pancakes was mysterious and awesome to the point where I wanted them to do it because I wasn't sure if I could do it right. [sigh] Yet another part of my past, mowed over by so-called "progress."