bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa back in chicago

bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa back in chicago

you know, it’s taken me

you know, it’s taken me 22 years but i finally understand how people might mispronounce my last name. that said, anybody who gets my name wrong, i will deliver the elbow.

notes on Seabiscuit: a lot like The Green Mile except with a magic horse instead of a magic huge African-American gentleman. i don’t want my $8 back or anything but the whole magic horse thing (note: horse is not openly magic), it’s cheap, it’s just not my sense of humor. whatever. there was some good acting, i guess, and a completely humorless first 40 minutes gave way to what i would describe as scattered chuckling. randy newman did not bring his shit, but whatever, everybody has an off-day. if there is a take-home message from the movie, i suppose that it’s a big crap on Fitzgerald’s line about there not being second acts in American (people) lives. But magic American horses? Five acts.

notes on today’s dinner: we had hot dogs, and two kinds of potato salad, and some vegetables, and two kinds of baked beans, and cucumber salad, and something labeled as pumpkin squares for dessert. i had one hot dog, some of each kind of salad, no beans, one olive and a pumpkin square.

notes on my dad’s car: it needs gas.

things i bought today:
used copy of imperial bedroom by mr. elvis costello
used copy of all or nothing by mr. the small faces
one ticket to the 10:05 showing of recent horse film
yesterday i bought a beer at the celtic vs boca juniors match. it cost $6. my sister stole my commemorative cup. the cup was commemorating the 2000 Browns, not the game i was at. so the cup was out of date.

live once more from middleburg

live once more from middleburg heights OH 44130, watching the tribe take a crap on kyle lohse’s head.

i was going to change the name of this publication to Jody Gerut Roundtable. I may still do so. Because Jody Gerut is awesome. I’d like to spend some time talking about how Mr. Gerut is obviously the second coming of Ellis Burks. But I shan’t. Right now Rick Manning and Tom Hamilton of Fox Sports Ohio are already getting indignant about how Hideki Matsui is stealing the ROY award from Jody Gerut. Their argument, insofar as I can discern, is that Matsui is A) not really a rookie and B) anybody in the Yankees lineup with get 100 RBI as long as he isn’t Enrique Wilson. They are now bitching about how Pat Listach stole Kenny Lofton’s ROY and Bob Hamelin stole Manny’s ROY. Anyway, about the Rookie of the Year thing, fuck Matsui. That argument might be bullshit but give it to Jody. I go now.

heeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. jennifer connolly, i’ve always

heeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. jennifer connolly, i’ve always thought to myself, isn’t that good-looking. except in the rocketeer, when she had all sorts of shit going on. which means i had all sorts of shit going on and she looked exactly the same as she always did, except like plus 20 pounds, which is alright if you aske me. anyway, things i noticed about jennifer connolly while watching the hulk: she is kind of hot. and one of her front teeth is bigger than the other one, which is kind of awesome and makes her look like a rabbit. anyway, about the hulk. it’s a movie, and it was a bit too long. but ang lee had some shit going on. there are some hot wipes or fades or whatever you call it when the headlight of a car, twinkling behind bushes, loses focus and becomes the moon. there was lots of other weird visuals, tons of overlays, i guess, and a repeated and (according to me) really neat nod to comic books by breaking up the screen into three or four frames, all of which had moving footage, several of which would be moving across the screen in different directions. also, somebody finally remembered to use the comic book font in a comic book movie. and the inescapable sequel will apparently involve latin american freedom fighters. now i go to a soccer game. woo woo woo soccer.

your art cannot destroy me.

your art cannot destroy me. i went to see the hulk today. oh nolty. nolty. nolty does some shit in the hulk.

also worth noting: my dad gave me a 1985ish panasonic brand bicycle today. that means i have a bicycle.

continuing on the topic of the hulk, it was kind of dope. it was definitely, you know, the hulk, but it was also, you know, awesome. jennifer connolly: heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. heyyyyyyyyy. i’ll say more about this later.

restaurant review road toursilver spartan

restaurant review road tour
silver spartan diner
11377 bellflower court, cleveland hts ohio

i’m sure everyone here means well but my grilled chicken sandwich lacked motivation. they also took the old-timey diner thing too far. i did get to check out the frank gehry building at CWRU (by which i mean walk past). anyway, the silver spartan, get your mind right bitch.

something i’ve found to be odd:
the new cleveland botanical garden has these two giant baobob trees in the middle of the greenhouse. they’re incredibly cool and they hold the entire thing together… and they’re made out of rubber. fake rubber. isn’t having rubber plants at a botanical garden like having wooden animals at the zoo? i will have more to say on that topic later once i do some primary source work. now i am in scenic middleburg heights ohio on cleveland’s bucolic southwest side. perhaps i will go rent a movie.

back in the home of

back in the home of the brave for a limited engagement, i offer the following in the way of traveloggery.

i got to the bus station a half-hour before i expected to, and wound up buying a seat for the 2:10 to cleveland instead of the 2:40 as i had planned. saved a half-hour, i figured. no, not at all. the 2:40 bus stops in chicago, the wendy’s in fremont/angola indiana (self-announced world capital of fireworks) and then takes you directly to cleveland. the 2:10 bus stops in hammond, gary, south bend, elkhart, the wendy’s in fremont/angola, toledo, sandusky, elyria and then cleveland. that’s 2.5 hours of additional bus for the same price as the 2:40.

for the epicurious: i had the 99-cent chicken turds and a baked potato at the wendy’s. they didn’t put sour cream on my shit. i was about to complain but i didn’t want to get my eyeball sucked out and eaten by the hideous leather-skinned nazi bitch working the counter. she was not reinforcing wendy’s “we’ll always be dave’s place” branding message unless dave thomas was made out cat guts and swore at babies constantly. since that time i had key lime pie flavored yogurt and some sunflower seeds.

things i experience on the bus: the baby across the aisle from me was wearing a bib that said in childish writing “MY FAVORITE WEBSITE WWW.GRANDMA.COM.” i thought that was awesome. also, the baby’s actual legal name was Triangle. when the driver was giving him his little baby ticket he asked for his name to write down and his name was Triangle.

everybody peep on THIS SHIT.

if i might interject some

if i might interject some shit, i would interject a completely earnest vote for “it’s gonna be alright” by ween as the saddest most beautifullest song ever recorded, with “lucky old sun” by ray charles taking honorable mention.

Real quick before anybody sees

Real quick before anybody sees us
I guess I got food poisoning this weekend? It was actually awesome. Just don’t eat the liver dumpling soup at the brauhaus. So yeah, I was fucked up and feverish all day on Sunday and it was aweomse. And last night I went to see MR. VICTOR MARTINEZ. The Creator was 0-0 with one BB, pinch hitting for Tim “I kill you” Laker in the ninth and walking on five pitches. Victor watched Flash Gordon burn down John McDonald and Travis Hafner and the game was over, Indians lose 3-4. the at bat music for Victorio Martinez was a lovely organ rendition of the beef-it’s-what’s-for-dinner song by aaron copland. Nancy Faust the organist, well done.

Notes from US Cell:
In the fourth inning, during the Sox-o-Gram proceedings, a sox-o-gram was displayed that read “INFANT JESUS OF PRAGUE.” Does anybody know what that means? Was it his birthday?

Everybody go register at party poker. or don’t since it might require spending money. i’m getting on the mothefucking bus tomorrow and taking my shit back home for a weekend in whcih i plan to see one football game (celtic vs boca juniors) and one or more baseball games (my choices are twins or tigers. i think i should go see the tigers to say i saw dmitri young before his knees when, more for my grandkids than for myself.) i proposed to ben earlier that we have a contest who can see the most baseball games ths season. he’s at ten, i’m at seven. now, it seems that every game i go to for the rest of the season ben will probably come with me… except this weekend in cleveland and my (rescheduled) shit in CA, when i’ll see the fucking brewers (now that blows) at pac bell and the world champion anaheim bitchsticks vs. scott hatteberg at oakland/alameda county mausoleum. this could get close. there are so many other thigns i should be doing right now. to paraphrase tom berenger,

I have more important shit to do. Like packing for Cleveland.

Not having a job blows

Not having a job blows goats. I have proof.

restaurant review #3094
chicago brauhaus
4732 n. lincoln

the brauhaus was twirling some chris bosio-esque junk, as i had expected it might twirl. chris bosio was never much to look at, but he got the job done, and served up the pitching equivalent of hearty german-american cuisine and polka music on the mound for several second-division american league clubs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. the brauhaus serves up the culinary equivalent of 88 mph fastballs. but chris bosio did not feature a winsome waitress who captured the hearts of two members of our dining party, simply by being kind of hot and vaguely sheepish about the entire enterprise of waitressing qua being hot. i guessed that her name was tina only to be told that tina was a trashy name, the kind of name that our beautiful waitress would never have. the answer, as we discovered on the check, was kate, which was praised by all as a good name for a pretty waitress to have. i had the bavarian meatballs with german fried potatoes in a powerhouse white caper sauce. for starters i had the liver dumpling (?) soup, which was just a big node of liver, presumably, submerged in an oily broth. normally we love that sort of thing but it was one child-fist-sized hunk of meat too many for me on the day, since i had two more coming. there were old people dancing to polka music. i had several diet cokes with my meal. kind of expensive, at least for meatballs. pretzel-flavored bread remains one of the greatest innovations of all time, if anyone was wondering, right behind the pretzel-flavored chicken served at the great lakes brewery restaurant in cleveland. if you like pretzels and you like chicken, imagine how good pretzel-flavored chicken is. the possibilities are endless, you realize.

restaurant review #3093
tango miel
2346 w. fullerton (address is likely wrong)
this restaurant sure felt like it was just someone’s house with a few extra tables. the live music was fairly pleasant, one of two ladies with guitar as characterized by sam,* and it would have been pleasant ambient noise had they not been six feet behind us and somewhat insistent on playing their ditties while we ate. but i didn’t give a shit because my food was fucking hypnotic. it was a giant fucking slab of lightly breaded chicken with a sheet of ham covering it, with “queso” (argentine for cheese) melted on top. the last time i had a dish with the boldness to combine chicken with ham was when nick and i went to a cuban restaurant in bucktown for no reason at all last summer to celebrate the fact that i had a car for six weeks. but tango miel gave me a manhole-cover sized hunk of chicken, all of which was shielded from me by its protective ham vest, which itself was swaddled in melted cheese. fuck i ate a lot of meat. then i celebrated by getting plowed in the non-smoking room at jimmy’s. that is all.

if anybody has a recipe for pretzel flavored chicken please send it to me.

* the spanish-language version of “piano man” notwithstanding. that was the low point of the set, i would say. although it was a pretty faithful rendition. except for the spanish thing.