My friend Brian and I have been planning for some time now to have meet-up at one of our favorite bars, Barcade. This is not only one of the best bars in existence, but one of the best named bars out there. What else would you call an arcade that has a bar? Brian has a few names he came up with, but none are quite as good as the original.

Hence my disappointment to hear the name of the next bar the owner is opening up in my neighborhood. It's a bar with an old school bowling lane in it. Sounds brilliant to me, as the bowling lanes in New York are either exorbitantly expensive or hidden in remote parts of southern Brooklyn. But what does he call it? The Gutter. Of all the options, that is what he goes for? Heck, I can think of a better name. I will see if I can do that right now.

Other possible names for the bowling bar, The Gutter:

Whisky Lanes
The Alley
4-7 Split and Sip
The Tipping Pin
Bowled Over
The 300
Down and Out
Strike and Spare

That's all the ones I can think of right now. I'd love to hear if you have any better ideas.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Just in case any of you where wondering about the karmic status of those little flying blood-suckers, the mosquito, they remain pure evil. In the last two days, they have found a way to get into the house and they have been eating up Christy like she is a chocolate truffle. I, the mossie equivalent of a Hershey's bar, have suffered less of their wrath.

I am not sure where they are getting into the house. My current theory is that they are going though the air conditioner, which happens to be right near the head of our bed. If it is not that then they are flying though our kitchen, rumpus room and office and then sneaking though the inch-high crack underneath the bedroom door. These are the fast-moving sea level types, so I would not put it past them.

In my camping supplies, I have some mossie coils, which do the trick but warn not to use indoors. As these coils were made in China in the 1980s, I heeded their advice yesterday when I found them. But when I was woken up at four in the morning today, I just wanted the wee buggers to leave so we could get back to sleep. Poor Christy had been awake since 2 a.m. getting bitten, and by the time I was roused she was not very happy. The coil came out, and I tried to get back to sleep.

Man, those suckers stick up the place. No wonder they tell you not to light them indoors, they reek like a late night game of Texas Hold 'em. Pretty sure they did the trick, but I am going to by some citronella candles today so I never have to smoke up my bedroom to get rid of those bloodsuckers. A quick googling tells me that the quarter of coil that I burned last night was the carcinogen equivalent of a half pack of cigarettes. Well, 4 a.m. solutions tend to be very handed, but it did get the job done. The bugs did leave us alone.

Further googling led me to this little jewel.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yawn, I am tired today, thanks to a 7:30 morning visit by the local plumber. He did his tricks—for good measure, they replaced pipes underneath both of my sinks—and I can now shave in the sink again. Ah, it is the small things that make me happy.

But worry not, intrepid reader. I will happily give you a little something for you to read today. First off, I wanted to mention the very amusing site lolsecretz. If you get the joke, you probably already heard of the I Can Has A Cheeseburger cats. If you, like my girlfriend did last night, stare at this site blankly because you do not find cute animals with horrific text-message misspellings neither funny, relevant nor 'something everyone knows about,' then you have passed the geek test. Considering that I have talked about and blogged about the lol cats, last night was just anther reminder that I remain irrevocably in the geek sector.

I am not sure if this is dorky, but it probably is. I watched Letters from Iwo Jima last night. It is a very good movie that I recommend. It is damn good war movie. Paired up with it's brethren, Flags of Our Fathers, they do a great job showing the meaninglessness, futility and absurdity of war. In the American version of Iwo Jima, Eastwood brilliantly confronts hero worship, in all its powerful absurdity. Put simply, the concept of the hero is frequently abused. In the Japanese version, you get disturbing experience of having all the protagonists, which is to say the entire cast, die. War makes pawns of them all. War, my friends, is an ugly thing, no matter what side you are on.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to a beer and cheese tasting last night, and I now have a much greater respect of the humble Cheddar. Who would have thought that it could taste so fancy? My favorite was an 8-year aged wax cheese from the Carr Valley in Wisconsin. It had a pleasant crispy taste that I very much enjoyed, but am at a loss to describe. I find it hard to treat cheese like wine and discuss it's nutty or fruity flavors. For one, I am not very good at doing that with wine, and for two, the cheesiness of cheese is very distracting. Maybe I will get better if I do a couple more cheese tastings. They are free and weekly, so that's a pretty good incentive.

Alas, a food critic I may never be. It has always been hard to pin down the taste of one food in another. For example, when find myself at a wine tasting, the wine guy almost always beats me to the punch in describing whatever is 'in' a wine. Do you taste the blackberries in there? Oh yeah, that's what that is... Alas. I am not too upset about that, really, because even if I don't know what other foods I am tasting in there, I know when it tastes beautiful, and we can usually all agree on that.

There is a new-to-me store wine store near Union Square that has the best wine selling trick I have seen. They group their wines by food. All you have to do is pop in with some sort of idea of what you'll be eating that night, and voila -- they have a wine for you. Beef, pork, takeout, Mexican, kosher, environmentally-friendly, cheap, and so on. It is all there, ready for you to grab and run. If they only lived closer to my house.

All this talk has gotten me thinking about dinner and the fact I need to get something for Christy and me to eat. Perhaps there is time yet to make it to the wine store... that is unless I stick with the great beer I bought last night. Off to the store I go.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My bathroom sink is clogged. This is annoying to me. I have gone through two bottles of dangerous chemicals, and all they have done is make the problem worse. Come to think of, it I have used three bottles of the Drano and it's competitors, but the last two only seemed to make the problem worse. They must have broken apart the junk in the top of the pipes only to have all that hair and gunk lodge further down at a bigger, stronger clot. I am afraid to put any more chemicals, lest I end up melting the pipes.

It is time for the Snake!

For those of you lucky to never have one used on your plumbing, the snake works pretty much like the things that are used to clean flutes and saxophones, except that they are much longer and more bristly. I actually tried to rig up my own snake, as I happen to have a flute cleaner in my toolbox (God knows how that got in there). I couldn't get it far enough in there to hit the clog, and I almost got it caught in the S-curve when i pulled it out—that would have been hard to explain.

I'll leave it to the experts this time. My landlord lives on the first floor, so I'll have her sort it out. She is probably on a first name basis with the local plumber. I would actually love to have a Snake, as I am bound to have this problem again. If I was still living at my old place, which had no landlord per se, I would be going to the pluming store this afternoon.

Way back in the day when I lived in Texas, they had to replace my pipes in my front yard. They tore up my entire driveway with a backhoe when they swapped out the clogged PVC pipes. It was pretty drastic. Today's clog is nothing compared to that, knock on wood.

I just want my sink back so I do not have to shave out of kitchen pots any more.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For today's posting, I was planning to write about the hobo I saw collapsed on the street—I called 911 and the ambulance picked him up. He should be fine, but it was scary to see him like that. It was reassuring that emergency services got right over to him.

But today, of course, is not about 911 calls, but the 9/11 of six years ago.

How quick time flies. I awoke this morning and turned on the radio to be reminded that it is the big anniversary of that insane day six years ago. It is not something I think about often, as for one, I have moved on, and for two, it is not something I enjoy thinking about. In the past six years, the world has changed and so have I. If you were to ask me then if I would have traveled to the other side of the world for a girl, I would have laughed in your face. I would have also laughed in your face if you told be that America would be entrenched in what looks to become a decade-long engagement smack dab in the middle of the Middle East. Funny how things work out, eh?

I am not here today to stir up arguments about Iraq. If you want to hear that opinion, I will be happy to post my two cents some other day. I am writing today to think back six years ago, when a telephone call from my roommate work me up and told me the news. I had just recently moved to New York, and I was planning on job searching that day. There I was sitting on the roof in my Crown Heights apartment, with a guy who was going to be installing flat screen TVs in one of the towers, yet decided not to work that day. We sat there and tried to sort out if they where going to fall, until it was clear that both of them had dropped.

There I was walking out of my apartment, not knowing what to do other than to walk towards the East River. I picked up a slightly burnt piece of letterhead, but I dropped it, feeling it tasteless and unverifiable. It was a beautiful day to be outside. Nobody knew what to do, but we were all ready to help in any way we could. A hasid had parked his van and was giving everyone free bottles of water. There were the stores, open to let people use their toilets. There were the people who where dusted and walking home. There was the same conversation happening in every cell phone, the same conversation happening between every person. There was the smoke and there was the smell. There was New York, out there to help New York.

What a day, what a day. Well, that is about enough commemoration for me today.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent my labor day weekend canoeing in the Adirondacks with some friends of mine. It was great to get upstate for a while, as that so rarely happens. Fingers crossed, I will have some pictures of us in the wilderness soon. I did not bring my camera, but there were others who did.

There was not much hardship, so there are not many good stories to tell you about the trip. That is one thing to keep in mind while camping, that the worse it is, the better are the stories. Our two trips up and down Leach Creek brought only one blood sucking friend, much to the disappointment of Cara, one my fellow paddlers. There was a screeching midnight attack by an owl who feasted on a chimpmunk in our camp. I have a vision of this silent bird swooping down to get its prey, screeching as it gets close so as to stop the mouse in its tracks. That's what you get for eating human food, little guy.

I am a bit sore from canoeing and portaging, sunburnt as well, but it was a great trip. Pretty soon it will be too cold to go camping up there, so this may be the last outdoor trip for a while. There is still one more trip up north I have planned, the fall leaf and thrift tour. Tree watching and thrifting, one heck of a way to spend a weekend.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)