Today is Thursday

So are these things supposed to convey a sense of continuity -- "Dear reader, it's Thursday, and wow it's been a busy two weeks since the holidays and hey, happy New Year!" -- or is it cool to just pop in and scratch out some notes like marker on a public bathroom wall?

Were the Internet indeed a public bathroom, the "blogosphere" would certainly be the handicapped stall at the end of the row.

Meanwhile, it's Thursday, and it's been a busy two weeks, and Thursdays are really early days on the ol' Wrigley front, and I'm sleepy. I've been writing actual code lately (as opposed to doing my much-beloved secretarial and monkey work), which feels pretty good in an academic-justify-your-existence kind of way. I've also been eating candy like it's my job, which it kind of is, so I guess that's ok, too.

Seriously, though, I got some boxes of candy from Wrigley right around when I got back from Maine, including several boxes of Orbit. This is important, because I decided to quit smoking on New Years and now chew approximately 20 sticks of gum a day, at about 2 minutes per stick. Coincidence? Highly doubtful.

Also, I don't know what the etymology of "cold turkey" is, but...oh, wait -- wiki: Cold Turkey. Also, it is damn sweet that wikipedia exists, and that Google exists, and that both are such pervasive tools as to have become verbs, and that if you use Google for a phrase you need a definition on, it will more than likely point you at wikipedia. Only by the grace on the Internet is it completely legitimate to say, "Well I Googled it, but Google just pointed me at wiki, so I guess I could have just wikied it in the first place."

***

Went to Faneuil Hall with some heads for bar trivia the other night; nice bar, outskirts of the plaza. Too bad the start times listed on the trivia site and the bar itself showed a two-hour discrepancy, and too bad we showed up on the late side of it. So too bad we were in Faneuil with no reason to be there and ended up going to this empty wanna-be sports bar called The Tap. Why do I mention this? Because The Tap is in a long row of bars where someday, someone (maybe you!) might be walking and thinking, "Wow, so many bars, and which one should I patronize?" In the event of such a query, I advise skipping The Tap. Decent food, decent service, but horribly overpriced for the quality on both counts. Looks like a place where you should be able to snag a $10 pitcher. Not so much. Also the fries were soggy and the onion rings verily burst with room-temperature fryer grease. Note: if you are getting people drunk and you have a kitchen where 50% of your output is fried, do everyone a favor and make sure your fryer is hot and that you don't plate the fried stuff 10 minutes before you plop a crappy $9 club sandwich on the plate and trot it out to the table.

Really though, the nail in the coffin (checkpleasethankyougoodnight-style) came from a two-man band with which the bar was trying to attract patrons through the open door. We left halfway through their first song, a cover of Otis Redding's (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, handled exclusively in the way-out-of-tune register and quite possibly transposed into an extremely depressing minor key. As we departed, the singer (who looked like an ugly rendition on something stupid) was whistling his way through the bridge and the bar was almost completely empty.