Tiki Road Trip II - Where Is the TIPSY scale?

I finally located a place to buy TRT II: The Thor Store.
I was pleased at the greater heft- 70 pages longer than Volume I, and about the additional listings of places in Hawaii and California.

But, what happened to the TIPSY scale and the classifications? Such are my favorite aspect of TRT I. I miss the evaluation of what places are considered to be neo-tiki, classic tiki bar, fine dinning or a tiki mecca.

Also, the use of that style tiki in TRT I made me acquire quite a few of those style mugs on Ebay as if they were good enough for TikiBars, they were good enough for me.

Yeah, but is your copy signed by JT himself? :P

Aloha, SoccerTiki:

The first, but not the second.
Another reason why Vol. I is my sentimental favorite.

Within the circle of the TCers, the TIPSY factor is still my favorite way to quickly relate a place's noteworthyness.

You got that straight brudah

Ah, tikis are fine and everything else, but frankly, I am more impressed with good looking women.

On 2007-11-14 15:46, telescopes wrote:
Ah, tikis are fine and everything else, but frankly, I am more impressed with good looking women.

Go to Trader Vic's Lounge. You will have both a relatively high TIPSY scale and attractive women.

Wellllll......

Truth be told, I personally disliked the TiPSY Factor rankings in TRT 1.

Santa Monica Press basically pressured me to come up with the TiPSY Factor rankings.

For the second book, I had enough say-so to argue against that feature.

Although I use the term "TiPSY Factor" freely and often in text and in conversation, I didn't like reducing it to a single number that might be seen by some people as constituting the total worth of a certain establishment.

Consider that the TiPSY Factor rankings in TRT 1 were just meant to express the tiki vibe or tiki decor, and didn't take into account food, drinks, show, history, etc. That is explained in the introduction of TRT 1, but I think that maybe a lot of people didn't read that part, and just assumed that the TiPSY Factor indicated the total worth of the various places ranked. So, it was misleading.

In general, I don't like quantifying everything that makes a Tiki place great (or not great) into a simple '5' or '1.642'. There are too many variables to consider.

I think that if you read the text of any entry that is more than a few sentences long, you get a feel for the vibe, the decor, the entertainment, the history, the food, the drinks, whatever it is that makes the place relevant. I think that saying "the drinks are great, the food stinks, the TiPSY factor is amazing with many real Oceanic carvings, the building's architecture is astounding, it opened in 1956, and I adore the floor show" is much more valuable than just giving the place a ranking of three (or however many) tikis.

And there was a logistical issue:
Something that didn't really work with TRT 1 was placing all of the 'major' locations (with TiPSY rankings and all) first within any given state, and then listing the 'minor' locations after the major ones. This time I just listed them all in strict alpha-order.
Much easier to find things this way, much less confusing.
BUT - then I would have to have done TiPSY ratings for either ALL of the locations in the book, or NONE of them.
I chose the later for the reasons outlined above, and also because there are some minor locations that are listed, but which I haven't personally made it to. I didn't feel comfortable assigning a TiPSY ranking to a place I haven't set foot into.

So basically, for ALL of these many reasons, it made a lot of sense to jettison that 'feature'.

As for the classifications, they were just too narrow to be useful anymore.

There are just too many hybrids of the various categories, and places where boundaries are blurred.

Again, I think that reading the text for each entry gives you an idea what to expect. I made an effort to include a sentence or phrase in most of the reviews that provides the information formerly provided in shorthand as a 'classification'.

Also, as a side note, I thought that the use of the word 'mecca' might be better off excized from the book altogether - you'll notice that it is almost entirely gone from the text. Careful readers may also notice that I was extremely careful about using hated mass-media tiki buzzwords like 'kitsch' and 'tacky' in the new edition.

NOW....

There are a lot of improvements in the book that I think make it a real step up from the first one.

Just one example is that I lobbied hard to put the 'closed' locations on a grey pages instead of white ones, and then went to putting hotels and motels on a tapa-background page to make everything more clearly defined.

There are many more examples.

I hope that after you get used to TRT 2 and USE it for a while, you'll come to believe that it is a stronger work in every possible way.

I believe it is.

Finally, on a lighter note -- (telescopes!) -- I was also surprised to find out that SMP thought that having more gratuitous wahine pinups in the book would be a benefit, so I needed no arm-twisting to comply with that directive!

Points well taken, but for Vol. III, I want the TIPSY scale and the "Tiki Mecca" designation restored. Yes, the Pin-ups can stay as well.