the bowling haunts me, mr eccleston.
consider today dance party day at the tabla.
rock your body, to the break of day. OK, dance party day is over. now, another thing. video tettleton: in a slump: .480, 46 hrs, 128 RBIs through 112ish games. video eric davis has been stealing tettleton’s RBI opps. hard to get mad at eric davis, he beat cancer.
i have to go to my last day of work at the coffee shop. maybe once we get moved and i stop working 12 hour days i can really write some nonsensical gibberish here like in the olden times. ah, the olden times. they were so (poly)nice.
posting from the chicago tribune woo woo woo everybody dance
some notes, owing to being at work and also needing to do like three other things in the next six hours:
i purchased one university of chicago t-shirt with which will commence the So Long Hyde Park Tour 1999-2003. there will be nostalgia, meals at selected hyde park restaurants, and this t-shirt.
i saw masked and anonymous, which was beserk and i can’t do justice to it in a few sentences, but i can say that anyone who finds bob dylan’s sense of humor rewarding will enjoy a good deal of the movie. also if you like to see ed harris in blackface, this is the movie for you.
the video tigers are wintering for the next few days, owing to moving out related work i don’t have the juice right now.
here we are back at the shit. i am finding myself unable to devote as much time as i would like to this austere publication in recent days. the advent of a semi-regular work schedule (which will soon change) and a increasing percentage of time spent playing Ken Griffey Jr Baseball has left me without much to say to the Internet and the many souls who dwell within said Internet. well, i came up with some shit.
restaurant review #1
the shit in the basement of the italian village, somewhere in the low three digits on w. monroe (i think)
first off, there are too many restaurants here. you go in a door labeled italian village and i expected to find myself inside a restaurant called the italian village. no, no i didn’t. i found myself outside of three choices, stairs down, stairs up and another door. there were greeters in the lobby explaining how you could choose between the three things, that basement was a bar/midtempo shit with wine and some other crap and then this door lead to the original italian village which had such and such crap going for it and then upstairs was, in the words of xgau, the fagged-out masterpiece area where you could wear angular clothing and enjoy small food on big plates with other assholes. we (myself, the moms and mrs. ray, co-worker of the moms and wife of my journalism teacher from 12th grade) opted for the basement catacomb dining. imagine the count’s room from sesame street but with lots of fishtanks containing eels and other non-standard colored fish. i had the salad with chicken. it was boring and way too much balsamic vinegar was used. nothing about the place was particularly noteworthy or good. and the aisles were very narrow. how narrow were they? so narrow the waitstaff had to use airplane carts to move shit around. why am i telling everybody this: because a busboy slammed one of these carts into my leg very hard about five minutes into the meal. had my leg been in the middle of the aisle i’d understand how it happened. as it was, my leg was safely tucked underneath the table. was this an act of violence against my leg? i cannot say. i do remember thinking that my leg hurt but pretending that it didn’t so that my mother would not be a jerk to the waiter about it. whether or not this was a justifiable fear on my part i also cannot say but yes, my leg did hurt. DIAGNOSIS: nothing special, but i loved the pine nuts on the salad. i did.
restaurant review #2
Atwood cafe, in the hotel burnham, washington & state
the dining party was the same as the previous attempt at dinner, with a higher success rate. was this place good? sort of. was it once again in teh words of xgau fagged-out, yes yes it was. i had a beer and some house-made foccaccia bread which was a tad too oily for this man. then i had some delicious bbq brisket. the maple-bacon baked beers were rank. no fucking good. it could have been that my helping included an entire bay leaf and tasted like a big bay leaf as well. they should watch it with the bay leaves. what the fuck else happened: the waiter went into lascivious applebee’s bartender mode for no discernible reason, probably because my mom and mrs ray were radiating post-menopausal-ladies-on-a-expense-accounted jag* rays (or he thought they were). he made a joke about strippers when my mom ordered a strip steak and was generally reminiscent of Milo from The Last Boy Scout. ANYWAY my food was alright, although def not quite worth $22, but the motherfucking coconut macaroons: HOLY GOD-DAMN SHIT THESE ARE GOOD COOKIES, i think to myself as i eat them. then i got on the bus and went home after a hug from my mother. i successfully avoided making eye contact with anyone on the bus. WTG me.
*jag as understood by post-menopausal women with expense accounts doesn’t mean what it might for say, a heroin addict, or dylan thomas. a jag in this context might be understood to be ordering both the blueberry cobbler and the assorted cookie plate at dessert.
backlogged restaurant review
Cafe Viaggio, somewhere on taylor street in little italy.
really going out of their way to debase themselves by having only subhuman patrons. behaviors noted by the author (who wore his nice shirt): unironic smoking of cigars. loud discussion of how this one time you were jerking this guy off and something weird happened. (yes, these things happen to everybody but one) you are a 35 year old with ratty bleach blond hair and two) you are in a restaurant. also, the waitress, who was awfully cute despite her outward non-cuteness, tricked me into ordering soup with my gnocchi, which i did not want and cost me $6. it was delicious though. much better than the gnocchi, which was good, but to refer to what i said at the table, it tasted like a product i would describe as Chef Boyardee Executive Gold. what else: the meal was notable not in the restaurant, which i suppose was nice enough, but that it was the launching pad for ReedFest ‘93, in which Dave Reed was properly sent off to the front lines of Milwaukee once more. a moment of silence: yes. anyway, about the restaurant, that;s what you get for fucking picking places at random on the street in little italy. also, what’s the deal with the one block of brutal DMX-caliber projects right int he middle of taylor street? the street is going yuppieyuppieyuppieyuppieyuppieyuppieyuppie then all of sudden its ruffrydersvideokillerdogsstoopsghettoghettoghettoghetto and then it’s yuppieyuppieyuppieyuppieyuppie again. did the first mayor daley just put the shit there to piss off italians?
person review
this kid from the camp i worked at three years ago who i think i saw taking a tour of the campus this morning as i went into work
now, i was a good 45 minutes late to work this morning because i drank too much and watched the middle half of from hell and then i overslept because the cat did not wake me up as she has been instructed to do in such situations. she rarely if ever remembers to do so. anyway, i walked through the lobby of the reynolds club a good 45 minutes after i would on a normal friday morning. and as i veered to the left to avoid the seal and the tour group going through, i noticed that one of hte kids getting a tour was in fact a kid named kerry who was a holy terror three years ago. i think it was him anyway, i’d have a hard time not recognizing him because he was 1) like i said a holy terror 2) pretty funny for a eighth grader 3) owned a camoflauge sportcoat, just something i always remembered. this story doesn’t really go anywhere because i couldn’t think of anything to say other and i was really late for work and also unsure about the acceptability of interrupting the tour to find out if it was the kid. so that was interesting. i suppose what i;m getting at is that it was only a weird deviation of my daily schedule that i saw him at all, and by not saying hello, i managed to restore the flow of emotional energy to its proper rate of displacement. so when you just miss getting run over by a car later in the week, you owe me a chicken whopper. or you do get hit by that car, i owe you dinner.
well, i wrote some shit. don’t spend it all in one place.
while we’re bandying about awesome shit we found on imdb:
oh shit. check out who’s directing it, too.
i’m going to san francisco for a few days, and the only thing i could think of (besides pac bell) that i specifically wanted to do in the bay area was to go to that one place, that appears in So I Married an Axe Murderer and The Rock, the park with all the old-timey columns in it. Man do I suck at knowing what I want from life. I’m dodging work right now, big fucking surprise. METAFICTIONAL TETTLETON UPDATE: .515, 28 hrs, 84 RBI in 63 games. MAGIK!
Also: big 1984 produkts welcome to J. Harvey Oswald, owner/proprietor of Pure Sugar. Everybody go nuts.
first off: can i get a receipt for my diehard kelly holcomb support dating to the sunday night game against baltimore last fall, the one drove that couch to tears, the one that left me sitting on my mantle and supressing a few tears of my own? because without that receipt no one is going to give me the respect and money i deserve for seeing through time, when the browns become the first super bowl champion quarterbacked by a guy with a girl’s name. not including brett which is multisex or terry bradshaw’s work with the steelers. anyway HOLCOMB FOR LIFE and i’ll be signing autographs from 10-4 tomorrow afternoon at the second floor coffee shop, 5696 s university ave chicago il 60637. $5 photos $10 jerseys.
why salonica is awesome: OK, the trick to approaching the goodness of salonica as a restaurant is looking past the food, which is fair to middlin, occassionally dipping into bad, and almost exclusively unhealthy, no matter what you order. the magick of the default setting lies in the fact that it is the default setting. some people have said, pete, if you hadn’t lived at 57th and blackstone, you would not give two shits about the salonica. that’s most certainly not true. i have been to the salonica three times since i moved after an initial decontamination month in which i would not visit out of fear that my heart would break. and it is still A-OK. i thought long and hard about this the other day: the salonica is the restaurant at which i feel most comfortable eating alone. it is near other things that make me happy. it is better than florian. it is somewhat cheap if you know the score. the wait staff is (mostly) awesome. for instance, yesterday, i was brought a second diet coke before the first one was empty. also, they’re quick, and they have a semi-intuitive feel for when it’s appropriate to bring the check or not bring the check. they tolerate indecisiveness. i was granted a bread basket despite the fact that all i ordered was a salad and a diet coke. don’t these all sound like good things? anyway, the things that are OK to eat at salonica are the following: CHX PARM sandwich, chkn on a pita, the club house sandwich, the open faced hot turkey sandwich, the monte cristo, the ham & cheese cold or hot, the patty melt, the gyros sandwich or platter, nick’s delight, pancakes, most of the club breakfasts, the steak and eggs, and all kind of milkshakes. all soups are delicious with the exception of french onion and the cream of broccoli. the egg lemon and the navy bean are tied for king of souptown. there it is. i could bare more of my heart as regards the salonica but i feel that this is an airtight case. my sister enjoys salonica. i have had many important conversations at salonica. i have made friends and impressed people at salonica. i have smoked and not smoked and read and done college homework and watched my dad have a hot meat loaf sandwich at salonica. every member of my nuclear family has dined at salonica. every person i have ever dated has dined there (keeping in mind that includes one person). i ate at salonica before and after i had a gall bladder. my grandmother, my stepmom, my aunt and others have dined at salonica. my first son will be named salonica. i ate at salonica before i saw elvis costello give an amazing concert. i ate at salonica the next day, as i recall. i ate at salonica on sept 10 2001, with eugene and hannah and kyle, and on sept 11 with moacir and kovas and some kid i didn’t know. i also ate at noodles etc on sept 11 but only after i indulged in the use of narcotic drugs, thus crippling my dining judgement. i threw baseballs at the roof of salonica. i ate at salonica after the night when the CLR broke everything. i ate at salonica after my last night working for the maroon, with ben and yoshi and whet and andy m. and possibly others. that night i recorded a score of 45000 on snood only to have the computer crash and erase it. officially, that never happened but it doesn’t matter, the people who were there remember. the same thing goes for the salonica i guess. except it did officially happen as much as a restaurant can. and it’s not closing or anything. but my time in hyde park is? fuck this shit, i’m playing video games.
i am writing under duress here, since ben is a nazi shithead. big nazi shithead. well well well. worth noting is that this man has watched Fletch twice in the last sixteen hours. and the tigers reign of terror over the defunct AL east: 33-12. tettleton: .540, 63 rbis, 18 hrs.
NOW, let me tell you about the time ben adams tried to write an authoritative guide to hyde park restaurants. it was about this time last year, and ben adams claimed that the med was the best restaurant in hyde park, and i believe he also claimed that edwardo’s natural pizza was a good place to eat, and kikuya was highlighted for its garbage green tea ice cream. in short, ben adams did not know what he was talking about. fast forward one year later, and this maniac, otherwise a normal retarded nazi homophobe (also gay) man, is trying to tell me, pete beatty, the architect of modern hyde park restaurant criticism, that i don’t know what i’m talking about, that the med is one of the best restaurants in hyde park, that giordano’s is great and awesome, and some other retarded and stupid shit in addition. HERE WE GO.
Acceptable things to eat in Hyde Park, based on US Agricultural Surveys:
Salonica
Rajun Cajun
Maravilla’s
U-Mart Subs*
Cedar’s of Lebanon
The Nile
Piccolo Mondo
La Petite Folie (theoretically)
The Snail
that is all. do i have to explain myself? now there are assorted problems with all these places, such as that piccolo mondo has WAY WAY too many old people and the waiters wear unattractive green polo shirts. terrible shirts. anyway, what i meant and you are all obvious IDIOTS. and having laundry inside your apartment is NOT THAT COOL. it only saves like $15 a month and what if y ou have a laundry room, uh. fuck all of you i am done arguing and i hate you guys. go to hell.
DISCLAIMER: THIS POST DOES NOT MAKE SENSE AND IS FURTHER ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT OBSCURE BASEBALL-RELATED SHIT
I'm coming out swinging here so look out. One, name change. As stated earlier, there has been some meaningful playing of Ken Griffey Jr Baseball in my home in recent days. I started a season with the 1993/4 Detroit Tigers. An overview of this pilgrim's progress:
The fake video Tigers are struggling a bit, considering their cartoonish offensive output. More than half of my lineup is batting over .500 and L Essrog (nee C Calloway, nee Cecil Fielder) is hitting over .600. great, yeah, fake stats, this is why the internet is bad for america. anyway, to get the fake stats part out of the way, pitching staff is struggling, tigers are a crapulent 12-7 (would be 13-7, a fuse blew in the middle of a cakewalk over the royals.)
back to the name change: my catcher is R. King (originally B King, who could be BB or Ben E.) but is in reality Mr. Mickey Tettleton. so there's the logic. since this blog powered past kirt marwaring and north america loves doug mirabelli to beomce the foremost hyde park-based obscure late 90s catcher-themed cahier in operation today (after an initial dalliance with civil war themes), i had limited choices with the renaming but it is after all Limited Edition, as advertised. aside: the whole catcher themed blog thing, it's weird, isn't it? does this happen other places? is there an andy allanson blog? what about damon berryhill? HOLY SHIT TENTH AVENUE FREEZEOUT IS ON THE RADIO. AIEEEEEEEE! anyway, i have this weird fear that my entire world is going to turn into the book My Steve Sax Connection except not even focused on steve sax, and without the child abuse to ground the drama, and without the withering internal monologue for comic relief. anybody who wants to be my friend has to read the steve sax book now.
incidentally, don't think you're not going to get out of this blog without hearing about the civil war A LOT. just for starters: Logan Square, a neighborhood of Chicago's near northwest side that i am considering moving to, is named after General John A. Logan. he commanded the Union troops at the battle of Atlanta, depicted in Hollywood's Gone with the Wind as just a giant fire and a bunch of dead dudes. which i presume to be accurate.
holy shit this post makes no sense at all. i'm a bit hungover, i had a coffee and a diet coke, and a disgusting egg sandwich from dunkies. my brain is in emergency vent mode. this is terrifying.
suggested reading:
here is a picture of mickey, our new godhead. i have always though mr. tettleton was a handsome man, although in this picture he looks like a dumbass.
someone else beat me to this, apparently. good pictures section, especially the voyeur shots of tettleton drinking water at a card show.
holy shit there are nice posters here. check out the fucking Julio Franco King of Swing poster. some small part of my brain is aroused by this.
i could spend weeks catalogging (spelling?) the awesome shit here but i'll limit myself to this, keep things Tiger-themed for the day: TIGER BOMB! Who the fuck are they trying to fool? Sure, Tony Clark looked like he might be good for five minutes in the mid 1990s, but Brian L. Hunter? Brian A. Hunter was always superior. That reminds me of the Mlicki vs Milacki vs Bielecki debate of the other day. shit.
Actual things: I got a haircut, i did laundry, wiry cat is the smartest cat in the world. i taught her that good listeners make a lot of eye contact.
looks like somebody walked into the goddamn beartrap of the restaurants of hyde park again. obviously i’ve got some opinions to share here. but right now i have more important things to take care of. worth mentioning: my skills at ken griffey baseball are all the fucking way back. yeah, that;s right cardarelli. i’ll bury you. more on restaurants later. i think i have some more shit to do, like write something. fuck. goddamn it
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