danconley.net

(I had originally intended this to immediately follow The Last Piece of Pie, but then we kinda drove to DC and have been being social and whatnot.)

I had said on Twitter that I need to write more. I really enjoy it (I do so love the sound of my own voice), and it’s very easy to say ‘I’ll do that tomorrow.’ So it stood when I read Felicia Day’s blog (side note: Elizabeth and I are fairly obsessed with Dr Horrible now, and have gotten very much into The Guild as well), where she gave advice on how she started writing. One of the links was for five minute writing exercises: I can do five minutes! …at least occasionally.

I’ll hopefully be doing more in the future, but picking and choosing what seems interesting, I think. Hey, I cheat, what can I say? Also I won’t, at least at first, be able to do them daily, so it should even out.

I don’t really expect anyone to read or enjoy them: there’s another blog I read occasionally that posts snippets of fiction and I always skip over them, so no hard feelings if you don’t want to read my stupid crap. Now that anyone reads this besides Dave and tiny anyway.

(More on what this is later. Bear with me, or ignore)

She would not give him the last piece of pie.

She had given him the last piece of pie as long as she could remember. Not just pie, either: cake, too. Non-baked goods were also on the list of things she had given him over the years. Bigger pieces of lasagna, for instance. When a piece of garlic bread was burned, she took it. He got the most beautiful of everything they shared.

But no more. Years and years and fucking years of putting other people first, and she was done. There was one piece of pie left. Where did the uneven number come from? Had he eaten it while she was elsewhere, or had a guest eaten one under the guise of going to the bathroom? It was, good pie after all.

Or maybe, god knows how, the pie had been cut into seven pieces. What kind of person cuts something into an odd number of pieces? You cut a line down the center of the pie. You rotate it by 45 degrees and you cut again. Rotate, cut. Rotate, cut. That’s how you cut a goddamn pie.

Which is why she was taking this. This piece of pie was hers.

‘Is there any pie left?’ She heard him as she opened the silverware drawer.

She plopped the slice onto a small plate. The disposable pan was tossed into thr garbage; well, placed, really, but ‘tossed’ has a better ring. She placed her fork on the plate and walked towards the living room.

‘Nope.’

Recently, I got ‘tagged’ in a ‘note’ on Facebook, whatever the hell that means. I only found out about it because Facebook emailed me to that effect, and the tagger was an honest-to-god person who I have seen at some point in the past six months, not a high school acquaintance who I probably said a total of 75 words to throughout the course of four years but who still made me feel enough of a mix of guilt and nostalgia to add them when they friended me.

The note was ‘25 Things You May Not Know About Me.’ I was one of 25 tagged friends (thanks, Jill: I thought I was special) who now are supposed to compile their own lists and tag 25 more people. Apparently it’s only a pyramid scheme if money is involved. But I haven’t done one of these in a while, and I am remarkably self involved, so here we go. Feel no compulsion to make your own list, unless of course you want to.

1. I used to be nigh-obsessed with this type of meme in high school. I’d fill out as many as people sent, even if all the recipients already knew my status on Coke v. Pepsi.

2. It’s Pepsi, by the way, not that I drink much pop anymore.

3. It is pronounced pop, you know. I’ll call anyone who says otherwise a Communist or race traitor or whatever other inflammatory non-sequitur insult I can think of at the time.

4. Re: #1 When my wife was just the girl I had started dating, and I didn’t know all of the rules like ‘only hard fruit, not softened and ripened,’ I needed a gift for her. Not knowing what kind of jewelry she liked, I forwarded her one of those surveys and added ‘Gold or silver?’ I’m still probably too proud of that maneuver.

5. I think the number five is more even than two, four, six or eight.

6. That’s unrelated to the Law of Fives, but I’m a believer in that too. Exactly how much is belief and how much is tongue-in-cheek is a mystery to everyone, including me.

7. Without the game Halo I wouldn’t have my job now, though the explanation is more than I’d care to type now.

8. There is a depressing fact involving a man from Glasgow and the number three, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.

9. I love snow more than anyone else I know. They think I’m crazy and I return the favor.

10. When we got a big snowfall this past Christmas, the fact that I’m 24 and a reputable citizen and all that went out the window as I seriously considered jumping off my roof like I did when I was 16.

11. Re: #5 I still remember the day that Gary Hoffmann (with two fucking n’s) handed me a copy of Illuminatus! that he had found at a used book store.

12. I like school, learning things and being forced to learn things. I had a bachelors by the time I was 22, a masters by 23 and am seriously considering going back in the fall for another. Whenever anyone tells me what course they’re taking, unless it’s law, medical or accounting based I generally wish I were taking it too.

13. I always wished I had skipped a grade, just because it would have proven how smart I was. Despite this, nearly all my friends growing up were a year younger.

14. On that note, I’d say I’ve made three friends since high school.

15. I was firmly in my 20s before I had seen a Sylvester Stallone movie. Now, of course, I’ve seen plenty.

16. I just coughed loudly. I don’t really think that’s interesting, but there you go.

17. I spent a few months using British spelling and grammar because I was convinced that, upon graduation, I’d be moving overseas, or at least to Canada. I’ve given up on that, but still use single quotes because I think they look nicer.

18. I’d listen to a person with an English accent read me the phone book.

19. The farthest east I’ve been is Aberdeen, but the farthest west I’ve been is… Chicago.

20. I know that 60652 is a zip code for Chicago, thanks to Scruff McGruff.

21. I don’t consider something to be lost until I’ve searched everywhere I think it might be. If I haven’t looked upstairs, and I may have taken it there at some point, it’s not lost. I just don’t know where it is.

22. I liked Wesley Crusher and don’t see why everyone hates him. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen TNG, so maybe I was missing something.

23. The Next Generation, by the way, is the best Star Trek series.

24. For some reason, I just realized that I’ve always mentally associated Jonathan Frakes with Frank Reich. I don’t know why that is. Number two, I guess.

25. In first grade I remember giving numbers personalities. Two was a young boy, three was a young girl, four was a teenage boy, five was a young man in love with six the young woman. Seven was slightly older than five and competed for six’s affection. He was a jerk. I also visualized math problems that way, ie to get to 12 seven and five had to work together to climb over a wall.

Well that was an interesting bit of introspection.

But I fear that too many people, across the nation and world, have projected their deepest hopes onto Obama. People see in him what they want to see, think that he believes in all the same things they do, and think that his agenda for the nation mirrors their own. And while I’d love to believe that Barack Obama will do all sorts of wonderful, positive things, I can’t help but remember the similar excitement, hope and belief in “change” that came with the inauguration of Bill Clinton. The Bill Clinton who bombed Iraq, Somalia, and Kosovo, cut welfare, instituted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, maintained the harsh sanctions against Iraq that may have killed half a million Iraqi children, and championed NAFTA and the WTO. One can’t help but notice that Barack Obama has stocked his cabinet with many of the same faces we saw during the Clinton administration, and I can’t help but be fairly cynical.

Please do more podcasts and writing, Jake.

When you mess up, then spend four years saying OH MY GOD WE MESSED UP, then do it again because people managed to convince you that your homophobia was more important than common sense, and then you finally, almost miraculously, manage to get it right, or at least as right as you could under the circumstances, you have not earned the right to pat yourself on the back and throw yourself a party. Even if John Hodgman says you can.

I have weird dreams. Ask me sometime about my recursive nightmare or ‘invisible pee from five feet up’ ones from my childhood, or the infamous ‘riding naked with gangster John Kerry’ of 2004.

My brain seemed to want to end the year on a ‘the hell?’ note, so I had quite a few odd ones last night:

• I was using some version of Windows, and the Show Desktop button was different. It was a circle of some sort. The stuff that sticks with you the next morning, huh?
• As Elizabeth was leaving for work (after she had actually left) I saw a spider behind our bedroom door. It was about the size of my palm and was bright orange and yellow. Spiders freak me the hell out, by the way.
• There was some sort of update to Google Analytics that let you publish a video of your stats, for some reason. But when I looked at it, it was actually a first person view of a cat from behind me, stalking and then jumping at me. I briefly wondered how Google got a camera behind me (especially when my desktop has no webcam at all) but then was too busy thinking it was awesome to care.
• I think related to the above, there was something about Dave and I running away from a cat.

Happy new year, internets.

All of my posts are essentially ‘Yeah, I’m not posting, because all of my time is going towards Gaming Shenanigans and Beer-O-Vision,’ aren’t they? Well, uh, sorry, because this one is no different.

This post is actually entirely useless except as a guinea pig one, a glorified lorem ipsum, because I’m testing a new theme for BOV. If the site looks different, either I’m still in the testing process or I forgot to change it back. I’m lazy, you see.

This post needs a third paragraph, just because. Beer is good. The end.

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”

— Abraham Lincoln

He may have suspended habeas corpus, but he sure had a way with words.

The issue, as I see it, is that the people aren’t getting ‘the real facts.’ What they’re being given is presented as truth and as such they take it. I’m a firm disbeliever in the whole ‘liberal media’ nonsense, but I do wholeheartedly believe that we as a nation are being done a disservice by neutered journalism.

Which is, I suppose, where the beer comes in.

In about an hour I’m going to go pick Elizabeth up and start driving to Boston. We’ll be there for a week, and it should be a lot of fun.

My coworker Brie just asked me if I was ready to become a Red Sox fan. I told her that being a fan of baseball is pointless: it’s like being a proponent of red paint instead of green paint because the red dries faster. Whether or not it does is irrelevant, because at the end of the day you’re still watching paint dry.

It should be noted that posting this is ill advised, as I’ll be meeting with a fan of red paint tomorrow and I’m pretty sure he can kick my ass.

If there are two things I love, it’s How I Met Your Mother and beer.

Allow me to rephrase before I get smacked when I get home: if there are two things I love besides my wife, it’s How I Met Your Mother and beer.

So during last night’s episode, involving the best burger in NYC, Elizabeth declared that she wanted a burger. Immediately. I wasn’t wearing pants at the time (which was also covered in the episode, giving me yet another reason to love it) and so I promised that we’d go out to the place that had the best burger tonight. Then I set out to find where it was we were going.

Libraryman to the rescue!

The winner, by a hair, as far as I can tell is Grover’s. It gets the Yahoo local vote, one from a local blogger, something called Yelp, foodry.com and — most importantly for someone concerned with authority — the immediate vote of my boss. The issue is that it’s about half an hour from our house and has a tendency to be packed: thinking back, we tried to go here once but gave up when the place was so full we had trouble even getting our name on the board. We’ll need to check it out, but not tonight (especially because I have to be done in time to film something for Beer-O-Vision). Also, for the record, it’s cash only (which isn’t a mark against it, but is good to know going in).

Coming in second, depending on who you ask, is Sterling Place. We love Sterling Place: great food, great beer, down the street from us. As such, it was nice to see it getting recognition as the best from e:strip, Buffalo Homecoming, Buffalo Rising, Buffalo Spree and Bill Rapaport’s Restaurant Guide (with a review for Grover’s saying that Sterling is better). I’ve gotten a burger here once, but generally we come for the amazing fish fry on Fridays. Looks like we need to reconsider our orders, or at least go on non-Fridays. Also cash only, and the burgers can take up to 90 minutes depending on their crowd, but they’re very up front with both. Have another beer while you wait.

Third place came Vizzi’s, which is also fairly close. Though it won the top spot from the Buffalo News (the article itself doesn’t seem to be available, unless you have access to Lexis-Nexis like I do), my visit was marred by their poor beer selection (and from a bar, no less!). A waitress should never say ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you if we have it’ unless the list is long and/or esoteric, and as Vizzi’s highlights are Sam Adams and Yuengling (in bottles; the best draft selection they have is Labatt’s)… the burger was good, at least. Cole’s also got quite a few mentions (including another from Yelp), and I’ve been meaning to check out their beer selection, but that will have to wait for another time.

I feel like a fool for not having realized that one of the city’s best burgers is sitting in the same kitchen next to our favorite fish fry, but there you have it! We’ll be heading to Sterling Place tonight, but will have to choose a weekday we aren’t busy to take the trip to Grover’s and finally see what the fuss is about.

It’s also worth noting that the locals on Twitter were absolutely useless in the compilation of this data.