part I of the winter break marathon

Well I'm back bitches, and I can upload pictures just fine from here in Bloomington, so here is that post from a while back. I will post many other posts here where I typically post my posts over the next couple hours/days. They will be awesome.

TV is good and TV is bad. When I'm away from Bloomington I literally inhale the television. Well, not literally, because the TV is far to big to physically take into my lungs, but I think you know what I mean: I watch a lot of it. I've watched Platoon, Goodfellas, Lost, Sopranos, lots of Six Feet Under, Flight of the Phoenix, some Warren Miller, Troy, In Good Company, The Day After Tomorrow (lots of Dennis Quaid I guess), currently some movie about a dude with cancer which is good but sad, and a cool show on model rocketry and shit loads of other crap I can't remember. Either way, it's more or less good to just turn off your brain and be amused. That Day After Tomorrow movie was absolute shit, but I'll be honest, I enjoyed watching it.

On the other hand, I find myself wanting to conform to what I see on TV. That's bad I think, because it's not clear that how people act on TV is the right way for me to act. So I guess it's good I don't watch it all the time and try to live a little bit from inside. But then again it's impossible to wall yourself off from outside and even if it was possible it would probably be impossible, what with everybody having to be raised and all. Anyway, I just think TV is not always the best kind of influence. It isn't real. At all.

And TV takes away from blogging. It's funny how blogging is just something to do, like TV.

SO...break started when I met up with my friend from college, Tracy, at her really nice apartment in Pittsburgh. We went to the Sharp Edge, a great beer bar. Look at this picture. Tracy, draft Rodenbach and Grottenbier? It doesn't get much better than that. She's cute.



Then I went down to the Plucky One's house at 3 in the am. He was supposed to get off work at 3 but didn't get off until 8:30am, but then we started drinking. We were hammered by 10:30 and made a big steak and eggs breakfast. R has a big TV. And oh yeah, I watched Coming to American too.



Then R went to work at 3am and the next morning I hit the very snowy roads. It was very snowy and a really shady drive. One of the worst I've ever had. Probably second to a drive back around 1999 up in Elk county in my rear wheel drive Dodge pickup. That was actually really scary, but only like an hour of bad driving. Last week it was like 3 hours of bad driving.



Then I went to north Jersey to my Dad's place with my Mom. We went to the City the next day and saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway. We had really great seats. Like 5 rows back right in the center. We also went to the New York Historical Society for the slavery in New York exhibit. It was interesting. They tried to really play up the role of slavery in building up New York and the impression I got was that they were trying to say that "Yankee land" wasn't much better than dixie land, so to speak. While the north wasn't exactly innocent, I think it's important to realize the vast difference in scope between the north and the south. Slavery was never conducted on the same scope in the north as it was in the south. I just wish there was more comparison between slavery in New York and, say, Virginia, Louisiana, or South Carolina. CLICK FOR BIGGER.




We also went to Lincoln Center so my folks could pick up tickets to some other show. CLICK FOR BIGGER.







Then we went to Henri Mills-Knapp's place of employment, Beacon restaurant in midtown. It was fucking good. Henri is the sommelier there. Pretty sweet job. Then Mills-Knapp and I went out and got absolutely fucking hammered. And I fell down the stairs at the Blind Tiger and knocked the wind out of myself and really fucked my back up. It was awesome.

We also went to this really cool bar right down the street from the Blind Tiger called Employees Only. It's apparently a really exclusive place, top 10 bars in the city or something. It's made to look like a Psychic's place. There's this woman reading tarot cards in the window, but inside it's a really swanky speakeasy type old-timey bar where all the bartenders have moustaches and wear all white apron get ups. Apparently the Bush twins hang out there. Anyway, we got to hang out with Ryan's Columbia Physicist friend, his hot French friend and her hot friend and one of their Canadian friends who really liked me because I knew where Saskatoon was. Although he was chewing apple Skoal and spitting into a martini glass. It was classy. Here's Ryan with the French girl, through drunken, blurry glasses, who liked my French swearing...ah POITON! CLICK FOR BIGGER.



Ryan's physicist friend Alex.



This girl was really cooperative with the posing. I have a bunch of good shots of her but this is the best one. That's my double Jack Daniels in her hand. She needed something to pose with. CLICK FOR BIGGER.



Ryan and that girl.



Here's Ryan's St. Thomas born, Sri Lankan by descent, Australian raised roomate in East Harlem. He's cool to me, but a real dick to other people. He was passed the fuck out.



My last day there I went to the Natural History Museum for the Darwin exhibit. It was cool, but crowded and I wanted to touch everything and they kept yelling at me for taking pictures. "You know you're not allowed to take pictures right?" "If I knew, would I be taking them douchebag?" Haha...then I would go take more pictures.

Before those pictures, I got a cool picture of GG Simpson from a video about paleontology where he tries to define what life is, oddly enough. It was cool. He was a pretty funny guy.



OK...a pretty famous sketch by Darwin's friend Fox about beatling.



Darwin's rock hammer from pre-Beagle and maybe during Beagle too.



Some of the Beagle notebooks.



I think this is notebook B where the first "tree of life" diagram we know of was drawn.



Makin' pancakes in Harlem, fallin' down the stairs, fallin' down the stairs, fallin' down the stairs. AWESOME.