Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Uptown honky tonk
Tuesday, January 4 2005
The original plan for this evening had been dinner and a movie with one of our mutual clients who has (of late) become more of a friend than a client. He's a professional adventurer who usually works for National Geographic. (He's not to be confused with another pair of friends we have, an older couple who live atop Eagle's Nest Road and whose pictures frequently grace the cover of National Geographic Magazine. ) At around seven we met him at an Uptown bar called Snapper McGee's, which Gretchen had led me to believe was something of a sports bar, but it was really more just a blue collar dive full of dart boards and unintentionally fashionable retro details. If the exact same bar were to exist in Flagstaff, Arizona, it might even be called a honky tonk. There are a lot of understated bars in Brooklyn like this, and the only thing keeping them from being considered honky tonks is their decidedly hipster clientel. That and their ecletic jukeboxes. Snapper McGee's clients wouldn't have looked out of place in a honky tonk, but while we were there its jukebox played nothing but late-1970s Rod Stewart. That was actually a good period for Rod and I was pleased to be reminded of his song "Passion," which in its day had incredible radio play but which I have not heard in twenty years. There's nothing all that great about the song except for the synths, which play my nostalgia like a Steinway. Gretchen, who is only three years younger than me, claims to have never heard the song in her life.
At the bar with our adventurer friend was one of his buddies, the editor of a local free weekly. Our adventurer friend had brought a bound edition of The Daily Planet, a free weekly he used to edit in Iowa City back in the late 70s and early 80s. (The rights to that weekly's name were eventually bought by the movie studio that produced Superman. It cost them a cool $50,000.)
Conversation quickly turned to politics, or did it only turn as far as the thorough asskicking the Home of the Brave is getting in Iraq?
When Gretchen noticed the presence of a vintage Centipede arcade game she played it until she'd made the high score list. This only took her about fifteen minutes.
For logistical reasons, the movie idea had been canceled, but our adventurer friend still wanted to eat dinner with us at the Pupuseria on Broadway. On Gretchen's suggestion, he decided to call a mutual friend of ours, Wacky Single Lady of Hurley (WaSLoH). WaSLoH showed up about a half hour after she said she would and ordered tamales because, like most people, she'd never heard of pupusas. One of several things I like about WaSLoH is that this lady knows how to drink and isn't the slightest bit shy about it. She drank two Pupuseria margaritas, and I had the feeling that these weren't her first this evening. And remember, she had to drive.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?050104

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